Clojurians Log v2
ai-skeptics 2026-10-16
https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/ea-safety > An EA-style reasoner can attach a probability to AI extinction, perform sensitivity analyses, debate priors, forecast timelines and revise a credence from 35 percent to 22 percent. This can be genuine epistemic work. But none of it necessarily creates doubt about the totalizing structure that says the future should be represented this way in the first place. > > The numerical uncertainty can therefore function as a kind of epistemic shock absorber. The reasoner appears exquisitely uncertain while remaining astonishingly certain that the correct activity is to construct the calculation.
I know this is a blog post, I know, I know. Alignment has always been a joke to me, but idk how else you can interpret phraseology such as "epistemic shock absorber".
unfortunately it is sometimes difficult to critique EA ideas and concepts as deeply as Rao has in this essay without making yourself susceptible to using their stilted jargon from time to time
this long post is basically the memeified version of a very similar argument if you prefer! https://x.com/banteg/status/2100619607648121199 (Elon praising this post even though his whole deal is, more or less, "based effective altruism," ironically underscores the point that these people are incapable of Getting It)
A very good post from Vi Hart on the recent Navier-Stokes situation and on what it means to discover and further the science in general. (On Patreon, but public.) https://www.patreon.com/vihart/posts/vi-harts-big-171939430
It. Is. Brutal. 😄 > If you’ve seen news coverage of the result, you may have seen pretty pictures of swirly fluid dynamics simulations with general-audience explanations of how Navier-Stokes has important things to do with fluid dynamics and engineering. It’s the norm in mathematics communications to include practical applications early on, to try to make the abstract tangible, and to above all else make sure there’s a pretty thumbnail. > > The Navier-Stokes equations are all sorts of useful. But the Millennium Prize problem is not about “Navier-Stokes” in general, it’s about a specific not-real-world feature of how these equations behave in the abstract, absent real physics. Despite that, most of the coverage I’ve seen repeats the same stuff about fluid dynamics with an implication that this may be a useful or even profound problem for OpenAI to give us an answer to on behalf of humanity. > It's not.
Navier-Stokes equations were named after the scientists that discovered the phenomenon. Are all future problems and theorems in mathematics and physics going to be called Fable-Opus? Or perhaps o1-4o?
We kinda have the Altman-Amodei problem right now, it's a Trillion Prize problem, can the ai solve that one instead?
I used to watch Vi Hart videos, I missed them! Thank you for sharing it was a good read