It is crucially important to have something to fight for instead of just resisting. Having a long term goal is what keeps us motivated and resilient in light of near term setbacks. Sadly American politics is utterly bereft of a bold vision at the moment (the recent book Abundance falls comically short of its title). A great inspiration for a positive vision of the US today can be found in the original Star Trek from the late 1960s. We are still a long way from some of the extreme technologica...

We must resist Trump. The roughly three months of his second term have confirmed what was clear before the election: Trump is unfit to be President. He is governing as a mob boss, on the basis of “might makes right,” tearing down the rule of law. Trump’s model here is clearly Putin in a style of government that Max Weber famously called Patrimonialism. For the avoidance of doubt: the reason to oppose Trump are not his stated policy goals. We need changes in regulation and bureaucracy so that ...

In today's Philosophy Monday we continue with the program set out several weeks ago in the post on judgment. There we concluded that evaluating actions cannot possibly be easy and that we should not attempt to reduce it to a mechanical or categorical approach. The obvious question then is what is an alternative that might be more suitable given the limitations of our knowledge? Today we introduce values as the guides to morality. The word value has a lot of different meanings -- it is an exam...

Before the election I was clear that Trump was unfit to be President based on his character: fundamentally his approach to life is that might makes right. That of course is antithetical to the rule of law on which modern societies and economies rely. So how is it going? Well, reasonable people can disagree on policy choices, such as tariffs. The point of democracies is to be able to change policies in a non-violent manner. Then there is the grift, most notably with Trump coin. That too was to...

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a short post titled "Inner Alignment through Values-Based Pretraining." Today I want to expand on the idea from the post by addressing three questions.What grounds exist for expecting that this approach might have a more profound influence on models than attempting to add values in posttraining? First, at an intuitive level the current approach is akin to letting a human grow up doing whatever they please and asking them to have a 10 minute conversation about mor...

At present it is once again wildly popular to speculate about the relationships between fundamental physics and concepts such as consciousness and free will. Despite the often high quality of the people participating in this I do consider this to be largely bunk. Or slightly less dramatically, I believe this path is unlikely to lead to deep insights. The deep flaw here is the application of theories that describe particles with little or no information content to complex systems which cannot ...

The other day I posted the following: Musk has been the greatest gift to Trump. First getting him elected, now helping create room for Trump loyalists, and drawing attention away from the truly awful ways the administration is undercutting the rule of law. Trump will discard Musk when he stops being useful. 50 percent chance that Musk will be in prison with his fortune seized. Might want to look into what Putin did with the oligarchs who didn't fall in line. Some people took offense at this t...

In the previous Philosophy Monday we took a first stab at supporting a view of humans and advanced artificial intelligences as making choices. Today we will start to dig into the "How" part of the fundamental question: "How should we choose our actions in light of our knowledge of reality and the potential impact of our actions on this reality (which happens to include how we and others are feeling)?" Our point of departure will be a closely related “how” question. How should we evaluate past...

Last week in Philosophy Mondays we completed the ingredients that go into the fundamental question that philosophy should help people answer: "How should we choose our actions in light of our knowledge of reality and the potential impact of our actions on this reality (which happens to include how we and others are feeling)?" Today let's start to dig deeper into this question by looking at just the word "choose." As humans we are faced with choices small and large all day every day. Should I ...

The other day I wrote that people praising the speech given by Vice President J.D. Vance at the Paris AI summit are “mistaking jingoism and wishful thinking for true global leadership with a real vision for AI and humanity.” It is of course only fair to ask what true leadership on AI would look like. Here is what I wish he would have said instead: Dear leaders of nations, we gather here in Paris at a moment of unprecedented possibility and peril in human history. We stand at the threshold of ...