I feel this makes it an unlikely great filter though. Surely some aliens would be less stupid than humanity?

Or they could be on a planet with far less fossil fuels reserves, so they don't have the opportunity to kill themselves.

Yeah, the fermi paradox really doesn't work here, an AI that was motivated and smart enough to wipe out humanity would be unlikely to just immediately off itself. Most of the doomerism relies on "tile the universe" scenarios, which would be extremely noticeable.

I'm not a stock person man, but didn't the hype from bitcoin last like a decade, despite not having a single widespread use case? Why wouldn't LLM hype last the same amount of time, when people actually use it for things?

Good to see the Yud tradition of ridiculous strawmanning of science continue.

In this case, the strawscientist falls for a ponzi scheme because "it always outputted the same returns". So scientific!

I think people are misreading the post a little. It's a follow on from the old AI x-risk argument: "evolution optimises for having kids, yet people use condoms! Therefore evolution failed to "align" humans to it's goals, therefore aligning AI is nigh-impossible".

As a commentator points out, for a "failure", there sure do seem to be a lot of human kids around.

This post then decides to take the analogy further, and be like "If I was hypothetically a eugenicist god, and I wanted to hypothetically turn the entire population of humanity into eugenicists, it'd be really hard! Therefore we can't get an AI to build us, like, a bridge, without it developing ulterior motives".

You can hypothetically make this bad argument without supporting eugenics... but I wouldn't put money on it.

If you post on EA forum or LW, you can crosspost automatically to the other one by clicking one button on the publishing page. The sites are run by essentially the same people.

Hmmm, I wonder who benefits from keeping EA chained to an Eliezer Yudkowsky fan forum....

Hey, thanks so much for looking through it! If you're alright with messaging me your email or something, I might consult you on some more related things.

With your permission, I'm tempted to edit this response into the original post, it's really good. Have you looked over Yudkowsky's word salad in the EA forum thread? Would be interested in getting your thoughts on that as well.

what are the other ones?

I guess the rest of the experimental setup that recombines the photon amplitiudes. Like if you put 5 extra beam splitters in the bottom path, there wouldn't be full destructive interference.

when i’m thinking about splitter with pi/4 phase shift, i’m thinking about coupled line coupler or its waveguide analogue, but i come from microwave land on this one. maybe this works in fibers?

I'm not sure how you'd actually build a symmetric beam splitter: wikipedia said you'd need to induce a particular extra phase shift on both transmission and reflection. (I'm fully theoretical physics so I'm not too familiar).

What I think happened is that he got confused by the half mirror phase shifts (because theres only a phase shift if you reflect off the front of the mirror, not the back). Instead of asking someone, he invented his own weird system which gets the right answer by accident, and then refused to fix the mistake ever, saying that the alternate system is fine because it's "simpler".

Obvious reminder: do not assume that anonymous tumblr posts are accurate. (this is the only post the tumblr account made).

Has anyone attempted a neutral unpacking of the mess of claims and counterclaims around Ziz and related parties?

Yeah, I've been writing up critiques for a year or two now, collected over at my substack. I've been posting them to the EA forum and even Lesswrong itself and they've been generally well received.

Current physicist here: yeah, most physicists are in the "shut up and calculate" camp, and view the interpretations as fun lunchroom conversation.

I also think that collapse is unsatisfying, and I think yud did an adequate job in relaying the reasons why a lot of physicists are unhappy with it. The problem is that "collapse is unsatisfying" is not sufficient evidence to declare that MWI is true and that MWI nonbelievers are fools. The obvious point being that there a shitload of other interpretations which neither feature many-worlds or "real" collapse. The other point is that MWI is an incomplete theory, as there are no explanation for the Born probabilities. Also, we know we don't have the full picture of quantum physics anyway (as it's incompatible with general relativity), so it's possible that if we figure out a unified theory the problems with interpretations will go away.