Scriptwriter for RationalAnimations! Interested in lots of EA topics, but especially ideas for new institutions like prediction markets, charter cities, georgism, etc. Also a big fan of EA / rationalist fiction!
Jackson Wagner
Karma: 4,134
If you think your biggest asset is “My professional network. My word. My ability to vouch for someone, and mean it.”
Then you of all people shouldn’t be putting your ideas through an LLM to turn them into an over-long essay, since “LLM-generated text is not testimony”. LLM text lacks the ability to vouch for anything—to quote that post, “When you’re making an assertion, we need you to be staking some of your reputation on the assertion,” but using AI-written text makes it unclear how much reputation you’re really staking on what “you” are saying. “If you speak in LLM, we cannot see what you are thinking, how you are thinking it, how you came to think that way.”
Anyways, on the object level, I’d note that many EA organizations already hire pretty differently than normal organizations in an attempt to address the various shortcomings you assume—most EA orgs seem to put a heavier emphasis on work-tests and blind grading of such tests, precisely because this helps get around the problem of just looking at credentials and career history.
My hunch is that there is also fairly extensive vouching going on behind the scenes—but the vouching has to necessarily proceed along the social graph, since the reputation of the person doing the vouching must itself be good. So it’s hard to just sell vouching-as-a-service to random people who don’t yet know you.
We’re not ready for the e/Acc × Longevity preference cascade
Note this is a joke, a play on the word “underclass” versus “underclassMEN”, which is a word used in anglo countries to refer to freshman and sophmores at university. I’m not actually a fan of the “permanent underclass” idea; I think it’s dumb (basically for the reasons explained in the astral codex ten “permanent moon ownership” essay). Hence my attempt to make fun of the idea.
Definitely agree that shooting down GPS satellites (or satellites of any kind, really) is a really agressive move that would make all countries super mad at you, thus probably only happens in a pretty serious “all or nothing” great-power conflict!
I’ll try to talk more about the military dynamics around GPS in my later post, although I’m not an expert. My impression is that although militaries do indeed have lots of backup systems, none of them is perfect and some systems (like many existing drones and guided bombs) do rely exclusively on GPS, so losing GPS would still be a big problem even though the military has done a lot of work to try and ensure that it wouldn’t be a totally overwhelming catastrophe.
Jackson Wagner’s Quick takes
My advice for smart young people just starting university in 2026: be warned—if you don’t graduate from college within the next four years, you risk getting stuck as a freshman forever, thus joining the ranks of the Permanent Underclassmen.
Commercial planes would probably get lost a little bit more often?? (The original incident that motivated the USA to opening up GPS for civilian use was in 1983 when “Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down when it mistakenly entered Soviet airspace”.) But it’s not like planes NEED GPS in order to find their way—commercial aviation is (rightfully) obsessive about safety and redundancy, so planes have lots of ways to stay oriented (even in storms / at night / etc), including:
- Inertial navigation systems: per claude, “Every airliner carries ring-laser-gyro or fiber-optic inertial platforms that track position by integrating acceleration from a known starting point. They need no external signal at all. They drift — on the order of a couple nautical miles per hour of unaided flight — but modern aircraft run multiple IRUs and blend them, and over a typical flight the drift is manageable and bounded by periodic updates.”
- A variety of old-school navigation systems that the FAA specifically requires be kept in place precisely as a GPS backup, including for instance “VOR” beacons which are basically radio-signal landmarks scattered across america, emitting simple radio signals that planes can measure their distance & bearing to. (I assume all other developed countries also maintain similar navigation backups.)
- Ground-based flight controllers (ie the people who hang out in those airport control towers) have access to radar systems and thus can see exactly where all the planes are, and help guide planes even if the planes themselves get confused about their position.
You might think “sure, there are backups, but mightn’t you still end up with overloaded systems if everyone suddenly has to switch to using unfamiliar backups?” But it must be the case that aviation is (like the finance industry which has resilient backups for all their precision-timing needs) sufficiently paranoid that their backup systems are actually up to the task of smoothly taking over—the UK study looked at aviation but considered that the consequences of a 7-day outage would be negligible. Overally, the situation might be a little bit like the situation with the power grid—the power grid doesn’t need GPS for any of its normal functioning, but GPS timing information is an important tool for debugging / monitoring / maintaining the power grid, so the system gets more fragile without it. The civil aviation system in theory should be almost unaffected by the loss of GPS, but in practice you’ve lost one layer of your multilayered swiss-cheese-defense against accidents, so accidents are going to go up slightly.
Of course, for unmanned drones (which in many cases only have GPS), a GPS outage would be disastrous.
For military rather than civilian aviation, I think the airplanes themselves would probably find their way around fine in most circumstances, but GPS-enabled weapons (like JDAM guided bombs) obviously wouldn’t work, and the situation on the ground (tanks, vehicles, logistics stuff) would probably get messy in the same way that civilian ports & logistics stuff would get jammed up.
How bad would it be if GPS satellites were shot down?
Linkpost: New Vatican Encyclical on AI Governance
There are definitely some people out there (and these people are overrepresented among hardcore environmentalist types, of course) who seem to indeed have adopted “nature” as a kind of hippie religion that seems to have originated (or intensified) sometime in the 1970s. But this doesn’t strike me as explaining all or most of how ordinary people value nature:
even many people who believe ACTUAL religions, or who have other sorts of very strong ideologies that provide structure and meaning to their lives, nevertheless often seem to value nature highly in the ways Tandena outlined (spending time visiting national parks, sometimes voting for and donating to conservation programs, sometimes watching documentaties about the natural world, etc). So it can’t be that valuing nature is purely a religion-substitute filling a psychological hole, otherwise we’d see a much stronger anti-correlation between religious/ideological/etc people vs nature-enjoyers?
Many people certainly seem to treat respect for nature as a “sacred value”, and treat the idea of sacrificing nature for other goals as a “taboo tradeoff”. I sympathize with you that this is annoying and economically inefficient. But many things are considered “sacred values” or “taboo tradeoffs” in human culture, and this doesn’t make them 100% religious \ fake. For instance, people often treat “saving lives” or “protecting children” as sacred values and act as if any related tradeoffs are taboo (even though we are constantly trading off lives vs other things in many parts of society). But that doesn’t mean that “saving lives” is like a secular religion. In general, many things can be compared to a religion, but IMO this is often less informative than it appears. (“EA is like a religion! It has priests: 80k career advisers, temples: EAG conference venues, commandments: blog posts,...”)
I am forgetting the exact Yudkowsky essay(s) where he lambasts people for simply worshipping the mysterious (aka their own state of ignorance) and acting like additional knowledge inevitably ruins the supposedly sublime experience of ineffability that makes life worth living, or whatever. I agree with yudkowsky that it’s dumb when people are like that, and I agree with you that many people take that attitude to nature. But many others seem eager to learn more about the natural world and appreciate it in a deeper, more rationalist-approved way. For instance: scientists studying creatures, birders (and other hobby groups like people who like to fish, or scuba dive, or etc), little kids learning about zoo animals, anybody who watches nature documentaries or reads books about nature-related stuff or reads the posted informational signs at national parks, people who like to learn a lot of detailed skills for backpacking in wilderness areas, etc...
I also think it’s probably possible to steelman some version of the common nature vibe of “we should respect nature for its own sake, and not seek to control everything”, such that it might come off sounding less dumb than it usually seems. (Even though I expect, after reading such a steelman, I would still be pretty strongly in favor of controlling most things most of the time, to better achieve various goals.) Joe Carlsmith’s essay series “Otherness and Control in the Age of AGI”, particularly the essay “On Green” is partly about this.
One big point where I do think “nature as religion” matters a lot, though, is in shaping the *environmentalist movement* itself, since the movement is disproportionately steered by people who are really into nature-as-religion. Therefore our laws/norms about the environment, the way most academics/intellectuals discuss the value of nature, the sorts of things that are considered taboo within environmentalism (eg geoengineering, gene drives, etc), all end up significantly warped by the perspective you described, even though IMO it isn’t the main way most ordinary people relate to nature.
Fooming Shoggoths! (And, more generally, much of the secular-solstice music—there’s already a database full of this somewhere.)
EcoResilience Initiative (https://ecoresilienceinitiative.com) works on this, in particular on non-climate-related stuff. They agree with Giving Green that, counterintuitively, Good Food Institute (usually talked about by animal-welfare fans) might actually be one of the most promising charities in terms of protecting biodiversity and the environment, because if plant-based meat ever took off in a big way it would have massive effects on agricultural land use (ie much less deforestation & habitat destruction would happen).
They can keep their old branding if they just put an asterisk after “hours” and explain that 80,000 Hours* now refers to human-worker-hour-equivalent efforts spent on highly-effective cause areas (aka “effective compute”), not necessarily literal human labor hours.
Interesting and thoughtful post. However, I believe your Google Ngram result is potentially confounded by the imminent rise of the Antichrist and ensuing Tribulation of convulsive war and death that will rip like wildfire across all the nations of Earth. This event is projected to occur sometime in the early 2040s, c.f. Angela Cotra’s “Forecasting Transformative AC with Eschatological Anchors” (though more recent estimates like “AC 2027″ have argued for shorter timelines), which is spuriously boosting mentions of the “apocalypse”.
Once you correct for this confounding variable (ie, that each and every one of us is about to be plunged into a world of ceaseless conflict and violence, mercilessly hunted down by the Four Horsemen, moon turned to blood, etc), you’ll see that eschatologically-adjusted mentions of “apocalypse” are actually no higher than the historical base rate, proving that there’s nothing to worry about and everything will be fine.
Giving up on EA after 13 years
Talk to sperm whales --> the US military figures out how to pay them to covertly tail russian subs --> eventually more people find out about this and pretty soon thanks to whales everybody knows where everyone’s subs are at all times --> the assuredness of nations’ second-strike nuclear capability is eroded --> destabilized game-theoretic dynamics once again favor first-strike --> nuclear armageddon.
(This is 95% a joke, but if somebody would please research “do whales offer any notable advantages vs naval drones, satellite-based wake detection, or other techniques for tracking nuclear submarines” I would feel a bit more assured...)
“Articulate a stronger defense of why they’re good?”
I’m no expert on animal-welfare stuff, but just thinking out loud, here are some benefits that I could imagine coming from this technology (not trying to weigh them up versus potential harms or prioritize which seem largest or anything like that):You imagine negative PR consequences once we realize that animals might mostly be thinking about basic stuff like food and sex, but I picture that being only a small second-order consequence—the primary effect, I suspect, is that people’s empathy for animals might be greatly increased by realizing they think about stuff and communicate at all. The idea that animals (especially, like, whales) have sophisticated thoughts and communicate, and the intuition that they probably have valuable internal subjective experience, might both seem “obvious” to animal-welfare activists, but I think for most normal people globally, they either sorta believe that animals have feelings (but don’t think about this very much) or else explicitly believe that animals lack consciousness / can’t think like humans because they don’t have language / don’t have full human souls (if the person is religious) / etc. Hearing animals talk would, I expect, wake people up a little bit more to the idea that intelligence & consciousness exist on a spectrum and animals have some valuable experience (even if less so than humans).
In particular, I’m definitely picturing that the journalists covering such experiments are likely to be some combination of 1. environmentalists who like animals, 2. animal rights activists who like animals, 3. just think animals are cute and figure that a feel-good story portraying animals as sweet and cute will obviously do better numbers than a boring story complaining about how dumb animals are. So, with friendly media coverage, I expect the biggest news stories will be about the cutest / sweetest / most striking / saddest things that animals say, not the boring fact that they spend most of their time complaining about bodily needs just like humans do.
Compare for instance “news coverage” (and other cultural perceptions of) human children. To the extent that toddlers can talk, they are mostly just demanding things, crying, failing to understand stuff, etc. Yet, we find this really cute and endearing (eg, i am a father of a toddler myself, and it’s often very fun). I bet animal communication would similarly be perceived positively, even if (like babies) they’re really dumb compared to adult humans.
Talk-to-animals tech also seems potentially philosophically important in some longtermist, “sentient-futures” style ways:
What’s good versus bad for an animal? Right now we literally just have to guess, based on eyeballing whether the creature seems happy. And if you are less of a total-hedonic-utilitarian, more of a preference utilitarian, the situation gets even worse. It would be nice if we could just ask animals what their problems are, what kind of things they want, etc! Even a very small amount of communication would really increase what we are able to learn about animals’ preferences, and thus how well we are able to treat them in a best-case scenario.
Maybe we could use this tech to do scientific studies and learn valuable things about consciousness, language, subjective experience, etc, in a way that clarifies humanity’s thinking about these slippery issues and helps us better avoid moral catastrophes (perhaps becoming more sympathetic to animals as a result, or getting a better understanding of when AI systems might or might not be capable of suffering).
Perhaps humanity has some sort of moral obligation to (someday, after we solve more pressing problems like not destroying the world or creating misaligned AI) eventually uplift creatures like whales, monkeys, octopi, etc, so they too can explore and comprehend the universe together with us. Talk-to-animals tech might be an early first step toward such future goals, might set early precedents, might help us learn about some of the philosophical / moral choices we would need to make if we embarked on a path of uplifting other species, idk.
it also advocates for the government of California to in-house the engineering of its high-speed rail project rather than try to outsource it to private contractors
Hence my initial mention of “high state capacity”? But I think it’s fair to call abundance a deregulatory movement overall, in terms of, like… some abstract notion of what proportion of economic activity would become more vs less heavily involved with government, under an idealized abundance regime.
Sorry to be confusing by “unified”—I didn’t mean to imply that individual people like klein or mamdani were “unified” in toeing an enforced party line!
Rather I was speculating that maybe the reason the “deciding to win” people (moderates such as matt yglesias) and the “abundance” people, tend to overlap moreso than abundance + left-wingers, is because the abundance + moderates tend to share (this is what I meant by “are unified by”) opposition to policies like rent control and other price controls, tend to be less enthusiastic about “cost-disease-socialism” style demand subsidies since they often prefer to emphasize supply-side reforms, tend to want to deemphasize culture-war battles in favor of an emphasis on boosting material progress / prosperity, etc. Obviously this is just a tendency, not universal in all people, as people like mamdani show.
FYI, I’m totally 100% on board with your idea that abundance is fully compatible with many progressive goals and, in fact, is itself a deeply progressive ideology! (cf me being a huge georgist.) But, uh, this is the EA Forum, which is in part about describing the world truthfully, not just spinning PR for movements that I happen to admire. And I think it’s an appropriate summary of a complex movement to say that abundance stuff is mostly a center-left, deregulatory, etc movement.
Imagine someone complaining—it’s so unfair to describe abundance as a “democrat” movement!! That’s so off-putting for conservatives—instead of ostracising them, we should be trying to entice them to adopt these ideas that will be good for the american people! Like Montana and Texas passing great YIMBY laws, Idaho deploying modular nuclear reactors, etc. In lots of ways abundance is totally coherent with conservative goals of efficient government services, human liberty, a focus on economic growth, et cetera!!
That would all be very true. But it would still be fair to summarize abundance as primarily a center-left democrat movement.
To be clear I personally am a huge abundance bro, big-time YIMBY & georgist, fan of the Institute for Progress, personally very frustrated by assorted government inefficiencies like those mentioned, et cetera! I’m not sure exactly what the factional alignments are between abundance in particular (which is more technocratic / deregulatory than necessarily moderate—in theory one could have a “radical” wing of an abundance movement, and I would probably be an eager member of such a wing!) and various forces who want the Dems to moderate on cultural issues in order to win more (like the recent report “Deciding to Win”). But they do strike me as generally aligned (perhaps unified in their opposition to lefty economic proposals which often are neither moderate nor, like… correct).
Yeah, definitely both learning/reflection and preference-cascading are happening. Lots of people are learning about AI safety all the time these days. Then you have preference cascades happening on top of that, where all of a sudden it’s cool and normal (vs previously cringe and weird) to talk about AI x-risk in various new contexts/groups, like mainstream news. This increased visibility unlocked by the preference cascades (eg very many NYT front-page headlines recently) and endorsement by various elites/etc, then means that many more people learn about the issue and a greater fraction are convinced upon hearing about it. And so on.
Probably for the vast majority of the people involved, it feels like they’re just learning about a new issue (or maybe something they’d only barely heard of before), rather than changing their minds or finally speaking up about an issue in some dramatic way. So in that sense it’s mostly about learning, not a true preference cascade where everyone eg flips from espousing support for some leader to opposing them. But on the other hand, I think that preference-cascade dynamics are still very useful here for trying to understand things like “why is this only happening now, and why is it happening so fast”, or exactly which dominoes (high-profile people, organizations, etc) will fall next, or how long the cascade will continue before it fizzles out / meets opposing forces / etc. And, while the majority of people just feel like they’re “just learning about a new issue”, probably among the most important / influential people in society, disproportionately more of them are experiencing “changing their mind” or “speaking up for the first time” or etc (though many are still “just learning”).