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). 

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

You, my friend, are not sorry :)

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.

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. 

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) 

I loved Liu's trilogy because it makes longtermism seem commonsensical. 

Decoupling is uncorrelated with the left-right political divide.

Say more? How do we know this?

3 year update: I consider this 2 year update to be a truncated version of the post, but it's actually too punchy and even superficial. 

My opinion lately / these days is too confused and nuanced to write about. 

thanks for the writeup! I had a ton of similar feelings for a while, mixing between finding people who say "it's not worth defending it's just a meme" and "actually I'll defend using something like this". 

At one point I was discussing this issue with Rob Miles at manifest, who told me something like "the default is a bool (some two valued variable)", the idea being that if people are arguing over an interval then we could've done way worse.