quinn

Karma: 2,157

quinn 14 Feb 2026 21:48 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Your Goal Isn’t Really to Get a Job
i’m being the change i want to see in the world by not listing employers/collaborators/customers/credentials in my EAG introduction channel slack post, and instead listing the things I’m responsible for.

quinn 18 Oct 2025 20:18 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: niplav’s comment on: Patching ~All Security-Relevant Open-Source Software?
Lean synthesis capabilities aren’t maximally elicited right now, because a lot of people view it as a text-to-text problem which leads to a bunch of stress about low amount of syntax in the pretraining data and the high code velocity (until about a year ago, language models still hadn’t fully internalized migrations from Lean3 to Lean4). Techniques like Cobblestone or the stuff that Higher Order Company talks about (logic programming / language model API call hybrid architecture) seem really promising to me (and, especially as HOC points out, so much cheaper!).
Thanks for your comment. I had broken my ankle in three places and was on too much oxycodone to engage the first time I read it. I continue to recommend your essay a lot.

quinn 10 Sep 2025 15:41 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: NunoSempere’s Shortform
download gdoc as docx and run pandoc on it? isn’t pandoc org->docx how you got it into gdocs in the first place?

quinn 9 Jul 2025 20:04 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
on: 80,000 Hours is producing AI in Context — a new YouTube channel. Our first video, about the AI 2027 scenario, is up!
Big fan of the vid. Cried a little toward the end (when Aric says that AI2027 made him want to have the talk with his family)

quinn 9 Jul 2025 2:59 UTC
10 points
0 ∶ 0
on: My kidney donation
<3 I didnt know Scott was planning to donate at the time, my donation precedes Scott’s—for me, the seed was planted by Dylan and a couple folks in the EA Corner discord multiple years prior but Josh Morrison is who I asked to sit me down and push me over the edge.
What links here?
- My kidney donation by Molly Hickman (9 Jul 2025 1:58 UTC; 142 points)

quinn 23 Apr 2025 15:53 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Patching ~All Security-Relevant Open-Source Software?
Remark in guaranteed safe AI newsletter:
Niplav writes
So, a proposal: Whenever someone claims that LLMs will d/acc us out of AI takeover by fixing our infrastructure, they will also have to specify who will pay the costs of setting up this project and running it.
I’m almost centrally the guy claiming LLMs will d/acc us out of AI takeover by fixing infrastructure, technically I’m usually hedging more than that but it’s accurate in spirit.
If transformative AI is developed soon, most open source projects (especially old ones relevant to internet infrastructure) are going to be maintained by humans with human response times. That will significantly increase the time for relevant security patches to be reviewed and merged into existing codebases, especially if at the time attackers will submit AI-generated or co-developed subtle exploits using AI systems six to nine months behind the leading capabilities, keeping maintainers especially vigilant.
I usually say we prove the patches correct! But Niplav is correct: it’s a hard social problem, many critical systems maintainers are particularly slop-phobic and won’t want synthetic code checked in. That’s why I try to emphasize that the two trust points are the spec and the checker, and the rest is relinquished to a shoggoth. That’s the vision anyway– we solve this social problem by involving the slop-phobic maintainers in writing the spec and conveying to them how trustworthy the deductive process is.
Niplav’s squiggle model: Median $~1b worth of tokens, plus all the “setting up the project, paying human supervisors and reviewers, costs for testing infrastructure & compute, finding complicated vulnerabilities that arise from the interaction of different programs…” etc costs. I think a lot’s in our action space to reduce those latter costs, but the token cost imposes a firm lower bound.
But this is an EA Forum post, meaning the project is being evaluated as an EA cause area: is it cost effective? To be cost effective, the savings from alleviating some disvalue have to be worth the money you’ll spend. As a programming best practices chauvinist, one of my pastimes is picking on CrowdStrike, so let’s not pass up the opportunity. The 2024 outage is estimated to have cost about $5b across the top 500 companies excluding microsoft. A public goods project may not have been able to avert CrowdStrike, but it’s instructive for getting a flavor of the damage, and this number suggests it could be easily worth spending around Niplav’s estimate. On cost effectiveness though, even I (who works on this “LLMs driving Hot FV Summer” thing full time) am skeptical, only because open source software is pretty hardened already. Curl/libcurl saw 23 CVEs in 2023 and 18 in 2024, which it’d be nice to prevent but really isn’t a catastrophic amount. Other projects are similar. I think a lot about the Tony Hoare quote “It has turned out that the world just does not suffer significantly from the kind of problem that our research was originally intended to solve.” Not every bug is even an exploit.

quinn 23 Apr 2025 15:34 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Consider starting a for-profit company instead
In AI safety adoption is also a reason. I expect labs to adopt stuff that they pay for, whereas research / open source public goods they’d be like “oh that’s cool” then never use it.

quinn 15 Apr 2025 1:49 UTC
20 points
8 ∶ 0
on: quinn’s Shortform
Yall, I have been off and on distracted from my work by intense and unpleasant outrage/disgust at immigration enforcement, ever since Trump’s first campaign speech close to ten years ago. I have few visceral moral convictions, and this is the strongest. I wish my strongest conviction was a positive one, where I’m brimming with hope and warmth. But instead, anger is more salient.
I don’t know what to do about it. I dont think spending kajillions of dollars of lawyers so that the victims’ lives can be somewhat less inconvenienced passes the ITN test, and i don’t have kajillions of dollars. So it’s basically like, I know I’m not gonna do anything about it, I just have to sit and try to let it distract me as little as possible. Total bummer, feels very disempowering.
It’d be great to be able to transmute these feelings into a positive vibe.

quinn 9 Apr 2025 22:58 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: quinn’s Shortform
I was just sent this https://www.mzbworks.com/prayer.htm—really fantastic. TLDR luck/magic is real but only works on one thing. I normally think of luck like the compass in Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) (that points to what you want most), although unlike this essay, I normally think of it where the user can juggle multiple goals and the compass will adjust to that. Here, with the author’s notion of prayer, we can really only activate the power of luck on one thing. Perhaps “at a time”, perhaps not.
But this fellow was not an average young man; a little more was expected of him. He was not satisfied with Jesus’ answer, and said, “Master, all this have I done from my childhood.” In other words; “I’ve already done that, I think I’m ready for the next step on the way.”
So this remarkable Rabbi leveled with him, and gave him the next step; “Then go, sell what thou hast and give to the poor, and follow me.”
You can almost see the young man’s mind working. “What? Me, who has kept the Commandments all my life? Must I do this too? There’s nothing in the Law and the Prophets about this! People will call me crazy! Why can’t I keep what I’ve got and be saved right here?”
So the Bible tells us the young man “went away sorrowing; for he had great possessions.”
It doesn’t say anywhere that this young man was damned, or that Jesus reproached him, or cursed him. He probably went on keeping the Commandments, and may have lived an excellent life, a happy life, as a pillar of his community.
But he had wanted something more; and he never got that. He never became one of the inner circle.
Just found it charming that jesus was like “oh you should’ve mentioned you beat easy mode already, i usually don’t get around to telling people there are different difficulty levels”. But the application to charitable living/giving is obvious. I literally recently said to myself “eh give yourself the beef cheat this month (i’m mostly vegetarian just open to cheating once or twice a month), you donated a kidney” which is of dubious validity, and yet, just might work (in some sense).
but there’s a sting in the tail. I knew a man who decided to concentrate entirely on money-making for a few years so that he would have money to study music and compose. He was an overwhelmingly talented man in half a dozen fields, and he became, in a scant six years, almost a millionaire. But that six years had wrought a tragic change in him, for by the time he had the money he had once vowed to devote to his composing, he had spent five years without once touching his piano, his cello, his flute and bassoon, his books.
He said, when asked about his decision, “Oh, music. That was just a juvenile notion. Now I’ve got a business to look after.” The very act of making money had altered the man himself beyond recognition. Yet he had sincerely loved music, and the world of music is much the poorer by the loss of strange and lovely compositions, now never to be completed or published—so that use of mental power backfired
setting aside the fact that I almost literally did this personally, I thought this would resonate with some of yall who’ve thought about value drift.

quinn 2 Apr 2025 21:40 UTC
6 points
4 ∶ 2
on: Anthropic is not being consistently candid about their connection to EA
I think “outdated term” is a power move, trying to say you’re a “geek” to separate yourself from the “mops” and “sociopaths”. She could genuinely think, or be surrounded by people who think, 2nd wave or 3rd wave EA (i.e. us here on the forum in 2025) are lame, and that the real EA was some older thing that had died.

quinn 19 Mar 2025 18:29 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Discussion Thread: Existential Choices Debate Week
I roughly feel more comfortable passing the responsibility onto wiser successors. I still like the “positive vs negative longtermism” framework, I think positive longtermism (increasing the value of futures where we survive) risks value lock-in too much. Negative longtermism is a clear cut responsibility with no real downside unless you’re presented with a really tortured example about spending currently existing lives to buy future lives or something.

quinn 16 Feb 2025 23:03 UTC
7 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Matthew_Barnett’s comment on: Matthew_Barnett’s Shortform
I distinguish believing that good successor criteria are brittle from speciesism. I think antispeciesism does not oblige me to accept literally any successor.
I do feel icky coalitioning with outright speciesists (who reject the possibility of a good successor in principle), but I think my goals and all of generalized flourishing benefits a lot from those coalitions so I grin and bear it.

quinn 16 Feb 2025 0:29 UTC
10 points
1 ∶ 0
on: quinn’s Shortform
I wrote a quick take on lesswrong about evals. Funders seem enchanted with them, and I’m curious about why that is.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kq8CZzcPKQtCzbGxg/quinn-s-shortform?commentId=HzDD3Lvh6C9zdqpMh

quinn 1 Feb 2025 19:45 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
on: If EAs existed 100 years ago, would they support Prohibition?
I love these kinds of questions! I attempted a roundup here but it never really caught on

quinn 29 Jan 2025 3:07 UTC
30 points
8 ∶ 0
on: The Game Board has been Flipped: Now is a good time to rethink what you’re doing
nitpick: you say open source which implies I can read it and rebuild it on my machine. I can’t really “read” the weights in this way, I can run it on my machine but I can’t compile it without a berjillion chips. “open weight” is the preferred nomenclature, it fits the situation better.
(epistemic status: a pedantry battle, but this ship has sailed as I can see other commenters are saying open source rather than open weight).

quinn 18 Jun 2024 16:49 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Be Proud To Be An Effective Altruist

And sorry, I’m not going to be embarrassed about trying to improve the world

You, my friend, are not sorry :)

quinn 18 Jun 2024 16:46 UTC
2 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: titotal’s comment on: Be Proud To Be An Effective Altruist
In my mind since EA premises are vague and generic, any criticism above a quality bar gets borg’d in. So no, I didn’t ever see an “external” criticism of EA be any good—if it was good, then it’d be internal criticism, as far as im concerned.

quinn 18 Jun 2024 14:18 UTC
19 points
9 ∶ 0
on: My experience at the controversial Manifest 2024
It’s important to consider adverse selection. People who get hounded out of everywhere else are inexplicably* invited to a forecasting conference, of course they come! they have nowhere else to go!
* inexplicably, in the sense that a forecasting conference is inviting people specialized in demographics and genetics—it’s a little related, but not that related.

quinn 20 May 2024 16:39 UTC
8 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Brad West🔸’s comment on: Cancelling GPT subscription
how much better is chatgpt than claude, in your experience? I feel like it wouldn’t be costly for me to drop down to free tier at openai but keep premium at anthropic, though I would miss the system prompt / custom gpt features. (I’m currently 20/month at both)

quinn 3 May 2024 19:21 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Eevee🔹’s comment on: evelynciara’s Shortform
I loved Liu’s trilogy because it makes longtermism seem commonsensical.