Dec 17, 2025
…the bad news is that they can’t agree which one.
I explained the debate more here, but the short version is: twin studies find that most traits are at least 50% genetic, sometimes much more. But molecular studies - that is, attempts to find the precise genes responsible - usually only found enough genes for the...
Dec 2, 2025
If we worry too much about AI safety, will this make us “lose the race with China”1?
(here “AI safety” means long-term concerns about alignment and hostile superintelligence, as opposed to “AI ethics” concerns like bias or intellectual property.)
Everything has tradeoffs, regulation vs. progress is a...
Dec 2, 2025
Most discourse on AI is low-quality. Most discourse on consciousness is super-abysmal-double-low quality. Multiply these - or maybe raise one to the exponent of the other, or something - and you get the quality of discourse on AI consciousness. It’s not great.
Out-of-the-box AIs mimic human text, and humans almost...
Dec 2, 2025
ACX has been co-running a forecasting contest with Metaculus for the past few years. Lately the “co-running” has drifted towards them doing all the work and giving me credit, but that’s how I like it! Last year’s contest included more than 4500 forecasters predicting on 33 questions covering US politics,...
Dec 2, 2025
Last year, I wrote that it would be very hard to decrease the number of mentally ill homeless people in San Francisco. Commenters argued that no, it would be easy, just build more jails and mental hospitals.
A year later, San Francisco feels safer. Visible homelessness is way down. But there wasn’t enough time to...