Muireall Prase

@muireall.space

69 Followers 236 Following

https://twitter.com/MuireallPrase, https://muireall.space/

My First Contact with NRx Around the time I launched my magazine, The New Modality, in San Francisco, another new local magazine started getting attention. It called itself Palladium. It was an open secret that Palladium had “connections to the alt-right.” I decided to keep my distance from Palladium because the rumors made me think they were extremists. As months went past while I developed my magazine, I assumed they were also keeping their distance from me. Imagine my surprise when Wolf Tivy, the founder and editor in chief of Palladium, reached out directly and asked to get coffee.
It takes something MORE than the trees, he would proclaim, something like YOU, to give the “tree”-shape the place of pride that it truly deserves! On and on he would pound, waving his arms, rising and rising towards his planned crescendo. It takes something like YOU, he would shout, to sense that shape with your sensillae, and KNOW it as you walk within it! It takes something like YOU, he would shout, to fashion that shape purposefully, hollowing out the galleries and chambers of your proud and hard-won dwellings deliberately, so that they take on precisely that “tree”-shape, as you have intended! To walk within your creation, a greater tree than the very trees, and know it, and see that IT IS GOOD! And Virginia! he would declare, his voice cresting. That is precisely what “man” shall do with YOUR life! Through him, all that you have celebrated will become the matter for a far profounder celebration, only possible for a creature who is to YOU as you are to the mindless and eyeless trees!
There is a nonmoral perspective that lets it be said that humanity can be justifi ed in its own eyes, not merely allowed to go on as a matter of course without an effort to ask whether it deserves to exist. If we are willing to say after taking thought that humanity has dignity, that state- ment would appear to be suffi cient justifi cation by itself. From this per- spective, there is no species like humanity. It is capable of doing not just a few remarkable things that no other species can—the same is true of many other species—but an indefi nitely large number of remarkable things that no other species can. It can also imitate some of the best natural activities of other species, on land and sea and in the air, and surpass them through technique and technology. But there is one thing that only humanity can do that would count as its justifi cation in the eyes of some external judge, if there were one that was appropriately designed in accordance with the highest human standards. (Of course there is circularity in such a thought-experiment.) The activity that would justify humanity in the mind of this judge, which perceives with the most complete understanding, cannot be self- interested (or not only so), and must devote itself to what is real and not itself, and do so with the high intellectual and aesthetic virtues of magnanimity, won- der, and gratitude. If perhaps we can indicate that nature, understood as distinct from humanity, would be worse off without it because hu- manity can do for nature in the comprehensive sense—the earth and the universe—what must be done, but cannot be done otherwise than by humanity, we have arrived at the best justifi cation of the human species. Such devotion removes the taint of self- worship from the stat- ure component of human dignity and thus enhances the whole idea of human dignity.
We come now to gather together some main uniquely human traits and attributes. In their uniqueness they make possible those human achievements that testify to the human stature; they lead us to say that human dignity belongs to the species as well as to individuals. The question is that since every individual has all the traits and attributes, should that lead us to enlarge the basis for the defense of human rights by enlarging the dignity component in that defense? Does the idea of the equal status of every individual need a more elaborated philosoph- ical anthropology than I have already given? I will delay attention to this question until I take up the subject of free agency as one of the uniquely human attributes. human dignity 132 Let me now list the uniquely human characteristics, traits and attri- butes, abilities and capacities that I think should fi gure in a discussion of human dignity. The listing must be made up of what we should think are obvious items, yet challenges must be expected to the exis- tence or the human uniqueness or praiseworthiness of one or another of them. All the traits and attributes are based in the body, but none is reducible to a merely biological phenomenon with an exclusively bio- logical explanation. They all establish that humanity is partly nonnatu- ral. These are the traits and attributes: the use of spoken language; the use of written language, and other notational systems; from language comes the ability to think (including memory, the glue of thinking); from thinking, the ability both to accumulate knowledge and become self- conscious; from all these comes the capacity for agency; from agency comes what Rousseau calls “perfectibility,” a synonym for which is “potentiality”; from potentiality comes unpredictability and creativity; necessary to unpredictability and creativity is imagination, which is in- terwoven with language but conceptually separate from it. Imagination shows itself in many ways, …
Nanomechanical computers with the operating characteristics described in Nanosystems are feasible in principle: <1% Nanomechanical computers are competitive with leading‐edge transistor‐ based computers by 2070: ≪1%
Will Elon Musk be the world's richest person on December 31, 2025? RESOLVED Yes Both the community forecast and user forecasts hover around 75% for most of the year, but the user forecasts dip indecisively to 50 around August until November, by which time they should have long since known better.
Will there be a bilateral ceasefire in the Russo-Ukraine conflict before 2026? RESOLVED No The community forecast peaks in March 2025 around 75% and decreases smoothly from there. The user forecasts form a relatively dense curve consistently around 2/3 of the community forecast.
Rank Forecaster Total Score 🏅1 MuireallPrase 531.019 🏅2 AesSedai 483.013 🏅3 Wineclaw 475.806 🏅4 Langley 475.681 🏅5 citizen 464.451
Question, Coverage, Score Will at least twice as many deportations by U.S. ICE occur in Fiscal Year 2025 compared with Fiscal Year 2024? 100.0% 148.800 On December 31, 2025, will Google, Meta, Amazon, Tesla, or X accept crypto as a payment? 100.0% 132.131 Will a new war or a substantial escalation to a previous war kill at least 5,000 people in 2025? 100.0% 111.363 Will there be a bilateral ceasefire in the Russo-Ukraine conflict before 2026? 100.0% 87.385 Will semaglutide be taken off FDA's drug shortage list in 2025? 100.0% 84.914
Emil O. W. Kirkegaard: "learning outcomes" are really just intelligence tests, which they call PISA etc.
Yeah, many people tried to gotcha me with claims that Lynn did this or that or the other thing wrong. Lynn tries to defend his methodology here, but I think (and tried to argue in the post) that at this point, that debate is of historical interest only - there’s too much confirmation now. One commenter brings up World Bank Harmonized Learning Outcomes as an example. Another points me to this preprint, which tries to update Lynn’s numbers using all modern standardized testing data and correlations with social development index and GDP. They find mostly similar numbers to Lynn: Malawi goes from 60 → 66, and new last place goes to Sao Tome & Principe at 62. This is by people affiliated with Lynn and scientific racism, and you can choose not to trust their judgment either, but I think at least the SDI correlations are an extremely simple regression that it would be hard to fake.
Prohibiting certain words, therefore, would not deprive egos of their expressive possibilities so much as change egos. Neurath explained that one eventually learns, as he did, to avoid dangerous words "half-consciously and without constraint" (1941a, p. 146). The result is not the same person with new linguistic habits but--literally--a changed person: "Building up a Universal Jargon needs a comprehensive training, which is connected with an alteration of our whole attitude.... What comes from an `experiment' with a modified scientific language will be analyzed by a man who is modified by this `experiment,' which is more than an experiment: it performs a kind of self-education" (1941b, p. 216; author's emphasis). Those who like to use words that come to be prohibited may feel frustrated at first, but their mental habits will change along with their vocabularies. With the success of the Unity of Science Movement, for instance, the divisions between the sciences--and the words used to delineate them--would start to seem anachronistic: "A new generation educated according to unified science will not understand the difference between the `mental' and the `physical' sciences, or between `philosophy of nature' and of `culture'" (Neurath 1933, p. 9). Similarly, devotees of metaphysics would miss their favorite concepts no more than scientists of today miss the vocabularies of phrenology or alchemy.
I’ve quoted this entire passage since I want to emphasize very clearly that I’m not trying to use this as a bludgeon against Alexander for not reaching the same conclusions that I did about the survey. I’m pointing this out for the sake of anyone reading him: when he says he’s been freaking out, recognizes his biases, and wishes for reasons to disbelieve the study, be aware he was citing it 7 years prior as evidence for his opinions alongside his strategy to promote those opinions without publicly endorsing them.
Then I freaked out again when I found another study (here is the most recent version, from 2020) showing basically the same thing (about four times as many say it’s a combination of genetics and environment compared to just environment). I can't find any expert surveys giving the expected result that they all agree this is dumb and definitely 100% environment and we can move on (I'd be very relieved if anybody could find those, or if they could explain why the ones I found were fake studies or fake experts or a biased sample, or explain how I'm misreading them or that they otherwise shouldn't be trusted. If you have thoughts on this, please send me an email). I've vacillated back and forth on how to think about this question so many times, and right now my personal probability estimate is "I am still freaking out about this, go away go away go away". And I understand I have at least two potentially irresolveable biases on this question: one, I'm a white person in a country with a long history of promoting white supremacy; and two, if I lean in favor then everyone will hate me, and use it as a bludgeon against anyone I have ever associated with, and I will die alone in a ditch
Hi Scott, You recently wrote, in your review of The Cult of Smart, > Then I freaked out again when I found another study (here is the most recent version, from 2020) showing basically the same thing (about four times as many say it’s a combination of genetics and environment compared to just environment). I can't find any expert surveys giving the expected result that they all agree this is dumb and definitely 100% environment and we can move on (I'd be very relieved if anybody could find those, or if they could explain why the ones I found were fake studies or fake experts or a biased sample, or explain how I'm misreading them or that they otherwise shouldn't be trusted. If you have thoughts on this, please send me an email). This is me sending you an email. Every time a new paper from this survey comes out I see people bewilderingly taking it at face value. I appreciate that you expressed hesitance about it, and I hope that expression is made in good faith.
Another pie chart, this one titled "White dude?" with 86% being "White man"
A pie chart titled "Racial diversity" regarding authors of books Scott Alexander has reviewed, with 92% white passing
So what’s great about writing? It is more durable than the spoken word, of course. But just as importantly, writing allows us to take a step back from language, survey it, fine-tune it, and construct complex structures where one text argues with two others, each of which footnotes fifty others. It would be hard to imagine science without the ability writing provides to survey language from above and use it as building material. Generative AI represents a second step change in our ability to map and edit culture. Now we can manipulate, not only specific texts and images, but the dispositions, tropes, genres, habits of thought, and patterns of interaction that create them. I don’t think we’ve fully grasped yet what this could mean.
In other words, we have to see “good” science and engineering as relatable to some kind of shared good, rather than evaluating what counts as good in solely technical terms.
Yeah, many people tried to gotcha me with claims that Lynn did this or that or the other thing wrong. Lynn tries to defend his methodology here, but I think (and tried to argue in the post) that at this point, that debate is of historical interest only - there’s too much confirmation now. One commenter brings up World Bank Harmonized Learning Outcomes as an example. Another points me to this preprint, which tries to update Lynn’s numbers using all modern standardized testing data and correlations with social development index and GDP. They find mostly similar numbers to Lynn: Malawi goes from 60 → 66, and new last place goes to Sao Tome & Principe at 62. This is by people affiliated with Lynn and scientific racism, and you can choose not to trust their judgment either, but I think at least the SDI correlations are an extremely simple regression that it would be hard to fake.
Screenshot of Tweet from ClementDelangue, 16 Dec 2024: Just 10 days after o1's public debut, we’re thrilled to unveil the open-source version of the groundbreaking technique behind its success: scaling test-time compute 🧠💡 By giving models more "time to think," LLaMA 1B outperforms LLaMA 8B in math—beating a model 8x its size. The full recipe is open-source🤯 This is the power of open science and open-source AI! 🌍✨ [Graph labeled "Test-Time Compute-Optimal Scaling", plotting "MATH-500 accuracy" against "Number of generations per problem", where data points with increasing number of generations using Llama 3.2 1B surpass Llama 8B 0-shot CoT by 64 generations per problem.]
Screenshot of text from the essay: In this scenario, AI will contribute to social and economic change, but it is not on a path to reach transformative capabilities. Key drivers and indicators Key drivers towards this scenario relate to profitability of AI research and production: 1A Specialization of hardware and infrastructure for a particular paradigm of AI 1B AI training runs as major capital projects 1C Difficulty capturing value from training large AI models 1D Uncertainty about returns from scaling new methods
Screenshot from an appendix containing predictions related to the essay mentioned in the post: While I forecast as a hobby, I’m generally disinclined to give probabilities when no decision hinges on them. In this case, because the essay body attempts to avoid weighing evidence while suggesting places to look for ev‐ idence, it seems important to provide some context on my own views for the sake of transparency. 1. In 10 years, I judge that the weight of evidence is against similarity to Scenario 1: 50% 2. In 10 years, I judge that the weight of evidence is against similarity to Scenario 2: 5% 3. An open‐source model competitive with GPT‐4 is available by the end of 2024: 60%
At the foundation: privacy has fundamental individual value, as a source of individual freedom, power, and agency. It helps give individuals a sense of safety, enabling more imaginative personal exploration, and so leading to more individual growth, a richer self, and a deeper human experience. These benefits in turn give privacy a fundamental social value. It enables a deeper diversity of thought and action in the world, leading to more invention, more variation, a more creative and robust society. Privacy also helps enable many other individual and social rights (and their consequences), including freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of association, and freedom of investigation. Without privacy, we wouldn't have Copernicus or Galileo or Jane Austen or Rachel Carson or Martin Luther King. We wouldn't have benefited from the scientific or human rights revolutions. And so not only does privacy enrich human experience directly, it has also enabled transformations in human society that benefit us all broadly.
Screenshot of text from the linked essay: This was one of Adam Smith's most extraordinary insights – that people acting in their own self-interest in a market economy may also serve the common good. Indeed, this is the primary justification for today's market economy – a point sometimes forgotten or not acknowledged by free market maximalists59. AGI places significant pressure on this alignment: starting or joining an AGI startup is certainly in individuals' self-interest, but may be against our civilization's interest. I believe that if we can solve the Alignment Problem for Individuals, then all else will follow. This is yet another reason to care about problems like climate and too much wealth inequality: they are failures to solve the Alignment Problem for Individuals, and institutional solutions which address those are likely to help address the Alignment Problem for Individuals more broadly60.
Screenshot of text from the linked essay: My experience is that the people who (like me) worry about xrisk from ASI (and, more broadly, from science and technology) are also those who instinctively believe recipes for ruin are likely to one day be discovered. It suggests it's just a matter of time. People who instinctively don't believe recipes for ruin are ever likely to be discovered are much more likely to be dismissive of xrisk. Here, for instance, is John Carmack refusing to consider the question. Perhaps this is motivated reasoning on Carmack's part, but he's too thoughtful and intellectually honest for me to believe that's likely. I suspect it's because different people acquire different bundles of intuition from their past experience, particularly their past expert training. Those bundles of intuition take thousands of hours to acquire, and vary greatly for different types of expertise – one is acquiring an entire expert subculture. And different bundles of intuition lead to very different conclusions about whether recipes for ruin are ever likely to be discovered. I suspect, for instance, this is why many economists don't find xrisk compelling – compared to a physicist or chemist they have very little feeling for how much potential lies hidden in the physical world, just as physicists and chemists often have poorly-developed intuitions about economics and scarcity.
Photo of a Marvin Bell poem from The Book of the Dead Man (#3) 1. About the Beginnings of the Dead Man When the dead man throws up, he thinks he sees his inner life. Seeing his vomit, he thinks he sees his inner life. Now he can pick himself apart, weigh the ingredients, research his makeup. He wants to study things outside himself if he can find them. Moving, the dead man makes the sound of bone on bone. He bends a knee that doesn’t wish to bend, he raises an arm that argues with a shoulder, he turns his head by throwing it wildly to the side. He envies the lobster the protective sleeves of its limbs. He believes the jellyfish has it easy, floating, letting everything pass through it. He would like to be a starfish, admired for its shape long after. Everything the dead man said, he now takes back. Not as a lively young man demonstrates sincerity or regret. A young dead man and an old dead man are two different things. A young dead man is oil, an old dead man is water. A young dead man is bread and butter, an old dead man is bread and water—it’s a difference in construction, also architecture. The dead man was there in the beginning: to the dead man, the sky is a crucible. In the dead man’s lifetime, the planet has changed from lava to ash to cement. But the dead man flops his feathers, he brings his wings up over his head and has them touch, he bends over with his beak to the floor, he folds and unfolds at the line where his armor creases. The dead man is open to change and has deep pockets. The dead man is the only one who will live forever.
We can see here how reforms championed by the New Left were also taken up by their establishment foes as a way of preserving institutions—and how those same reforms paved the way for a neoliberal university that neither the SDS nor establishment figures like Bill Rambo had had in mind.
Also, there was this message from a fourth person at Caltech, who wrote to Engineering & Science: Mr. Toumey has taken a very minor and rather insignificant factoid, and through magnification and distortion, and the expenditure of considerable energy and resources, achieved a large increase in the entropic state of the universe, resulting in a significant damage to the environment in the form of wasting large amounts of high quality paper, and diverted a large population of bright people from thinking about anything important; a real form of damage to the intellectual environment as well… I expect he can be appreciated in the way paleontologists value the contributions of dung beetles, who will pick away at the flesh until the bones of the dead are bright, white, and clean.
Quoted text screenshot, ending with: First, we have an altered sequence of influence. The theory of apostolic succession posited that first there was “Plenty of Room”; then there was much interest in it; and finally that caused the birth of nanotechnology. My analysis suggests something different: first there was “Plenty of Room”; then there was very little interest in it; meanwhile, there was the birth of nanotechnology, independent of it; and finally there was a retroactive interest in it. I believe we can credit much of the rediscov- ery to Drexler, who has passionately championed Feynman’s paper.
Screenshot of text with "However, they created a taboo against working on positional chemistry or funding it" highlighted: To preview where we’ll go in a bit more detail, by the end of this essay we’ll have concluded the following: ● There is a strong theoretical case for at least some forms of positional chemistry being possible ○ Actually in two different initial categories ■ Vacuum mechanosynthesis ● This is being tried secretively in Canada by enthusiasts ■ Ribosome-like molecular additive manufacturing ● This is not being seriously tried yet by any well-supported research program ○ With decades of focused, coordinated work informed by systems goals, either of these could potentially lead to forms of positional chemistry ○ It is not yet clear exactly how general-purpose these could be ● Early attempted refutations (Smalley debate) raised straw man objections; they don’t rule out either path ● However, they created a taboo against working on positional chemistry or funding it
Screenshot of text: The first five characteristics discussed below might be classified as objective (i.e., observable properties of the system) and the second five as subjective (i.e., associated with how an investigator thinks about the system). In different words, the first five are mostly concerned with ontology (what is real) and the second five with epistemology (what we know). The first five characteristics concern discontinuities, universality, diversity, mesoscales, and modification of parts. The second five concern self-organisation, unpredictability, irreducibility, downward causation, and closure.
G C Waldrep Apocatastasis For the instruments are by their rhymes, as Kit Smart wrote. Walking out yesterday the bud's promise seemed a crystalline hallucination, spring's early flowing stone, the maimed sycamores climbing in geometry grey as steel, as smoke, as the sky that hangs low as stiff washing from the lines. Pity small life, the stem that pushes up from this hard surface, the insensate bravery. If we anthropomorphize the world, the night reduces to our capacity for hope and all tender fallacies. Thus purity. Thus metaphor's gift, the ice that spools and circles at skin's surface. My love, there is no winter but the winter of the heart. Perhaps this cold will pass. Perhaps that bridge was not a harp at all.
Paragraph from later in the chapter detailing the Davis's derivation.
Chapter 2: Design and The Growth of Knowledge: The Davis Wing and the Problem of Airfoil Design, 1908–1945. Excerpt from page: In 1938, however, one major company... chose for its B-24 bomber a somewhat mysterious section devised by a lone inventor named David R. Davis. The choice depended on some unusual test results, unexplained at the time, from the wind tunnel at the California Institute of Technology. The B-24 went on to become the most numerous and one of the most successful bombers of World War II. The Davis section, after its moment in the sun, disappeared quietly and with little effect on the evolution of wing design.