Astral Codex Ten

Unvaccinated, early 30s with no comorbidities other than having a slightly high BMI.

Had it right after thanksgiving of this year. Two week deal. First week was the typical fever/flu symptoms, second week was brain fog and nausea coupled with a loss of taste and smell for about 2 or so weeks from start. Brain fog took 3 weeks to clear from the start.

I had shortness of breath but employed breathing exercises and later did some heavy lifting around the house and ended up doing some unexpected cardio. A more structured and disciplined approach would likely yield more measurable, positive results. No shortness of breath after three weeks from start.

Not a ride I’d want to go on again, but as other have reported, certainly didn’t live up to the media fear/hype.

Worth noting that I did employ a pascalian therapy in my approach (1). I was prescribed ivermectin, took large amounts of quercetin, vitamin c, d, zinc and so on. I think this probably led to me recovering so quickly and not experiencing any lasting side effects. This is totally anecdotal though.

1. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/

Lucky you! It's some of the best content on the internet. My favourite blog for sure. Same guy has continued on with his writing at https://www.astralcodexten.com which is also pretty good but doesn't reach the same highs.

What's wrong with it in context though is that as great as it is, it's just some guys blog. It's disconcerting that people would be working on technology they think is more dangerous than nuclear weapons and basing their approach to safety on a random blog post.

Although it's disconcerting to think of a committee deciding how it's approached, or the general public, or AI loving researchers, so it might just be a disconcerting topic.

If OpenAI or just Ilya think Scott is the best man to have thinking about it though, I would have at least liked them to pay him to do it full time. Blogging isn't even Scott's full time job, and the majority of his stuff isn't even about AI.

If anything, the average terrorist is probably smarter than the average member of their surrounding societies, since you need a minimum amount of education to understand the ideology motivating the terrorism. Don't forget that Taliban literally means "students." The number of times someone tried and failed to conquer Afghanistan suggests that it's not an easy feat that any fool could have done, but the Taliban managed to do it twice.

Fighting a much more numerous enemy may seem stupid, but if you really believe your ideology, any odds of success are better than none. Think open-source developers competing with commercial offerings maintained by huge teams. Terrorists building IEDs when their enemy has a full military-industrial complex are much the same. They just really believe their ideology. On this, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-nine-lives is a good read.

I guess most of my positions on prediction markets came from Scott Alexander, e.g. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-market-faq which was posted in 2022. The implicit argument seems to be "We should come up with some way to regulate these so that it's less harmful than existing forms of gambling." I think the part that was harder to foresee was the Trump admin suddenly seizing on them as a loophole to override state regulation of sports betting. Certainly there does not seem to have been any careful consultation with prediction-market experts to determine the most robust, socially beneficial laws.

I understand that "Things would be great if they'd done it right!" is in some sense unfalsifiable. But also I think it's pretty clear that the current regime is geared solely towards maximizing the profits of prediction market companies and Trump Jr.

One of the authors talks about this here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/introducing-plan-a

> It’s increasingly clear that nobody has a plan for if this AI thing turns out to be real.

> ...

> Plan A isn’t another prediction. It’s a wish list, a positive vision, a road map for navigating the future.

> ...

> If we’re merely on track for a few cool gee-whiz AI innovations in the 2040s, then I’m wrong about everything and none of this really matters one way or the other.

I think their position is: "it would be great if current tech such as LLMs doesn't get us to AGI and only leads to some cool new innovations, but if it does, that's scary, because nobody has a plan for what to do, so here's our plan".

The jingoism is off putting. I think Daniel says it's a political necessity: https://x.com/DKokotajlo/status/2075261194978640096

Classical LLM hallucination happens because AI doesn’t have a world model. It can’t compare what it’s saying to anything.

You’re right that LLMs favor helpfulness so they may just make things up when they don’t know them, but this alone doesn’t capture the crux of hallucination imo, it’s deeper than just being overconfident.

OTOH, there was an interesting article recently that I’ll try to find saying humans don’t really have a world model either. While I take the point, we can have one when we want to.

Edit: see https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-search-of-ai-psychosis re humans not having world models