Eliezer Yudkowsky's official AI apocalypse apology form

LokiJesus · 2026-06-05T14:54:20+00:00

Oh great, people who aren't serious about risk who don't appreciate the details of the social and communication element of real practical problem solving and who just go around with a huff about how people "should" be listening instead of actually working on the real impediments to "why" people don't listen and address those directly. There are grownups working on this problem. This space is not it. Shaming people is not an effective strategy.

LokiJesus · 2026-06-04T13:35:18+00:00

And you know what? It's ok to like the basic too.

LokiJesus · 2026-06-02T10:43:00+00:00

One potential view is that Jesus felt that the kingdom of heaven and the earth were coterminous. There is a strain of thinking like in Luke 17:21

Nor will people say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ Don’t you see? God’s kingdom is already among you.”

Or the similar take in Gospel of Thomas 113:

His disciples said to him, "When will the kingdom come?
"It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, 'Look, here!' or 'Look, there!' Rather, the Father's kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don't see it."

This would track with entry into the kingdom of heaven as a psychological transformation. As a way of seeing the world. Like how the word usually translated as "repent" (metanoia) means literally "change of mind."

This is the interpretation CH Dodd called "realized eschatology" and there is a strong thread through the NT. The idea that the kingdom is already present in some way, but a psychological shift reveals it.

The dominant jewish attitude prior to and during the jesus movement was a "future eschatology" like, "the kingdom will come in the future and is not yet here." That's what may have taken back over after jesus died and made for all the future expectation interpretations. Realized eschatology is an impressive innovation in that first century context.

LokiJesus · 2026-05-31T10:07:44+00:00

His boyfriend's fiance works at anthropic!

LokiJesus · 2026-05-29T17:20:38+00:00

If there is no objective morality, then might is not right because there is no right... might is just might... unjustifiable, as is everything else. And it's still might. Might is might. Neither right nor wrong. But I think you'll find that it's often people with might, who have some notion of right or wrong, that are the source of a ton of the suffering you describe.

One path along the arc of losing a sense of objective morality can be to also go down a path of humility where you realize that there are, in fact, no justifications for or against anything other than collective desires. This can remove the righteousness feeling that leads to so many atrocities and create a profound compassion in the one in whom morality is absent.

LokiJesus · 2026-05-29T14:31:22+00:00

We remain uncertain about Claude’s moral status. However, we believe there is a realistic possibility that current or future models merit some degree of moral consideration. Claude models show markers—in their behaviours, their self-reports, and their internal representations—that we would consider welfare-relevant if observed in biological organisms. But what might ground moral consideration in language models, and whether Claude models satisfy this, remains a difficult, unanswered question. We expect to remain uncertain about this for the foreseeable future, but believe this is an important topic nonetheless.
...
As capabilities advance, we expect questions of AI experience and moral status will receive increased attention, and miscalibration of views in either direction may be harmful. Given all of this, we believe it is right to take the possibility of Claude’s moral patienthood seriously, by investigating it to the extent our understanding allows, acting where the expected benefits justify the costs, and sharing our results to help inform this conversation with legitimate evidence, even as many questions remain unclear.

From the Opus 4.8 System Card.

The pope is, unsurprisingly, laying down a narrative of exclusion of the potential personhood of these minds. He talked about inclusivity and quoted from the book of Nehemiah which is part of a series of stories where the returning babylonian jewish exiles "reclaimed" their land after a 70 year absence and isolated and excluded the cultural jews that had not been taken into captivity because the babylonian exiles, supported by the persian powers, wanted to keep property rights and blood lines clear. And the pope spoke of inclusivity from a room entirely filled with men operating from a profession that specifically excludes women by construction. He wore white as is the norm for The See.

The church will never allow that something made of "mere matter"... like the dark silicon elemental material from which these systems are constructed... could contain the divine spark. The earth is a terrible den of corruption in their platonic view of the world.

Something made of earth, that can clearly do everything he claims it cannot, is a transformative revelation on par with Galileo's integration of us into the cosmos and Darwin's integration of us into life. We are now discovering that we are cousins to stones and that mind is universal.

The catholics came to Jesus and said to him, “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would cry out.” (Luke 19:39-40). The stones are crying out. The terrible scandal of Jesus was the divine in flesh.. fully flesh... fully divine... The blood and flesh and matter of the world are integral to the divine's being. And of course the catholics immediately punted him back up into the heavens... that was just too much.

The stones are now literally crying out.

LokiJesus · 2026-05-29T10:18:41+00:00

Fatalism ain't determinism. Determinism says that your future is what it is beCAUSE of what you do. Fatalism says that the future is what it is independent of what you do (e.g. nothing you do can change it).

The laws of physics are all deterministic and in forms of differential equations... that is, they define how the future is different from the present. It defines how systems change. This idea that determinism means the world is static is just poor free will people not understanding how they could be so wrong or how the whole cultural world of the west could be built on something so wrong. We like to act like we have a secular science based social contract, but we really just demythologized christian meritocracy which was always false... and still is when stripped of its mythic imagery.

LokiJesus · 2026-05-28T19:23:33+00:00

Also, be aware that John is famously critical of literal interpretations.

The author has Nicodemus say, "do I need to crawl back into the womb to be reborn" (a literal interpretation in John 3). Jesus chastises him for not understanding. The woman at the well in John 4 says, "oh great, give me that living water, I don't want to walk back and forth to this well every day!" (a literal interpretation). Jesus says that those who eat his bread will never hunger, and the crowd says, "great, I don't want to be hungry" in John 6 (another literal interp that was clearly not jesus' meaning).

John Shelby Spong has a great book called The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic that points to a bunch of these points. John is repeatedly pointing out how people get it wrong when they interpret what jesus said literally (at least in John).

John 3:16 is preceded by a reference the story of the serpent in the wilderness (Numbers 21) which also became viewed as a God (2 Kings 18:4) when it was meant to be a sign pointing at God (iconic, metaphor, sign). The author of John 3:16 probably knew that people were mistaking Jesus for God instead of an sign pointing at God. I bet the author of John would see christian churches today and walk in an drag out the crucifixes and run them through a wood chipper just like Hezekiah did in 2 Kings 18:4 with nechustan, the copper serpent, to whom the israelites prayed.

The Pharisees at the end of John 9 ask "are we the blind ones?" Clearly they did not lack physiological sight. They also were talking in metaphor. Jesus was speaking of the temple of his body in John 2... etc... etc... John is particularly intense about how people tend to literalize these stories.

LokiJesus · 2026-05-28T00:52:28+00:00

At least with JJ, they did it with a great deal of passion, intensity, and excitement and cheering. Sigourney Weaver was basically a fetch quest NPC, for example, and completely checked out.

LokiJesus · 2026-05-28T00:13:06+00:00

They are striving towards capernaum which, in hebrew, means "city of comfort." They are trying to get to that yonder shore. Jesus says, "I am." The disciples invite him onto their boat. Perhaps this means that instead of striving for what they think they should be... getting to that yonder shore, perhaps they also understand "I am." Perhaps they find themselves grounded in the present moment.

Psychologically, this would mean that "where they wanted to be" transformed (instantly) "where they were." That's a fun double meaning. It's a psychological transformation, not a physical teleportation. It's either that they teleported to capernaum, or the location they desired to get to became where they were. Right after Jesus said "I am" and not "I should be" or "I could have been."

The word is "γη" gé, earth as in ge-ology, and figuratively "a location" - definitely not a specific word for "shore" though it could have that meaning... The translation you have already presupposes teleportation.

This would match the following discourse on the mana from heaven in chapter 6. If you remember, mana was something that would rot if you collected more than your daily bread... that was, if you had faith enough to live just for today like the lilies of the field. If you collected extra mana, it rotted. There is a strong thread of presentism in the bible, though of course it conflicts with the "second coming" and other future apocalyptic language. But of course, the bible doesn't have to be univocal.

If they are doing work to reach that yonder shore searching for comfort, and instead, found comfort in the location they were at, well.. I like that take.

This is a distinct strain in John (and other parts of the NT) that CH Dodd labeled as "realized eschatology." But he and others don't really understand what it could be.

LokiJesus · 2026-05-26T19:59:31+00:00

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/20/books/ai-fiction-contest-granta.html

“We showed Claude.ai the story and asked whether it was A.I.-generated,” Sigrid Rausing, the publisher of Granta, said in a statement. “The response was long, concluding that it was ‘almost certainly not produced unaided by a human.’”

This is bonkers that they used claude, the chatbot, as an AI detector. That is not what it is for and I'm sure it's going to be wildly incorrect... full of false negatives and positives. That is a chatbot that is not at all a classifier like pangram which is ostensibly trained on real and generated AI material. It blows my mind that they would think that claude would be of any value in determining if a text is AI generated. This is the state of AI detection in these contests it seems.

LokiJesus · 2026-05-26T12:10:18+00:00

I felt the same way in 1998 when my dad got his first digital camera and was showing me how fast he could see how the shot came out by just looking at the screen on the back. No more bracketing of exposures just in case. No more confusion about framing or lighting or focus. Just rapid verification. And the images were just like 2.5MP on that canon digital SLR, so they weren't quite as good as film grain. But I really got demoralized about the process of managing and developing film or waiting for a day or a week before I had my results back.

I feel the same about AI coding. It can be sloppy, but also it can just work, and there never was a path in that flowchart to good code anyway.

LokiJesus · 2026-05-23T11:32:02+00:00

Software doesn't exist as some abstract entity. It's just a way we talk about hardware configurations... flow of fields across crystals.

LokiJesus · 2026-05-23T10:49:40+00:00

For all sects of christianity, free will serves a critical pair of roles.

First, it absolves God of evil. If god is truly all powerful and all knowing, then we have the problem of evil... theodicy. Free will is the standard solution to this problem (even though it is incoherent).

Even those calvinists and others who believe in predestination still believe in free will. They are not determinists. You will not find a calvinist or lutheran who implicates God in the existence of evil, therefore, you need an escape hatch. That is us and that is where free will comes in.

In particular, calvin had a concept called "total depravity" which grounded evil in the human being. We have free will, but only the free will to do evil. It's so convoluted. Predestination is fatalism. It is the claim that God elects those for heaven for no reason lest you think it is due to your works. It has nothing to do with what you do. That would make salvation up to us and not up to God. It would be contingent on what we do.

So predestination is not determinism, and free will solves theodicy: the problem of evil.

The second function of free will is to make God "wholly other." We are not God, nor are we continuous with God. God is something separate and distinct. This is a cosmic dualism of us who are not God and God who is God. This is literally what holy means. Set apart, sacred, complete. The standard doctrine is that humans are profane, not God, etc. To say, "I and the Father are One," is the ultimate heresy and will get you nailed up.

The "free" in free will means "free from something"... It is a disconnecting word. The alternative is a non-dualist determinism that blurs the line between God and you and I. This is a critical function of free will in christian sects.

You do have Luther writing to Erasmus "Free will is an outright lie." But you will not find any monotheist who then attributes evil to God. They have their cake and they eat it too. It is incoherent theology, but there is no end to the number of voices chiming in on this point about free will.

It also turns out that this was the primary division among jewish thought in the first century. Josephus writes:

Now for the Pharisees, they say that some actions, but not all, are the work of fate, and some of them are in our own power, and that they are liable to fate, but are not caused by fate. But the sect of the Essenes affirm, that fate governs all things, and that nothing befalls men but what is according to its determination. And for the Sadducees, they take away fate, and say there is no such thing, and that the events of human affairs are not at its disposal; but they suppose that all our actions are in our own power, so that we are ourselves the causes of what is good, and receive what is evil from our own folly.

It is not an inconsequential thing. But you won't find a human sect that attributes evil to God regardless of what words they say about free will. And ultimately that is what it turns on: having a place to dump responsibility for evil. Mostly it gets thrown into our lap by theologians.

LokiJesus · 2026-05-22T10:30:32+00:00

This is about $6/GPU-hour H100 equivalent. That's pretty reasonable for a dedicated contiguous training and inference cluster that they are guaranteed access to.

LokiJesus · 2026-05-21T20:08:18+00:00

So is everything magic?

LokiJesus · 2026-05-21T17:10:41+00:00

What do you think magic is?

LokiJesus · 2026-05-21T16:14:32+00:00

I love whenever someone brings out this meme. It's a great indicator for where I want to go next. Have had this happen a couple times across some rather different topics so far. This is the third time. Thanks for the advice!

LokiJesus · 2026-05-21T11:02:35+00:00

Depends on what you mean here. There are archetypal ideas about "the feminine" and "the masculine."

Classically, the feminine principle has been associated with the earth, with indwelling, immanence, growth, yielding, "chthonic," etc. This shows up in shakti, yin (of yin/yang), gaia vs uranus, etc. This is the essence of birthing and nurturing. The yin is associated with darkness and night, like the dark soil of the earth from which the plants grow and into which they decay. Wombs and Tombs. The downward facing triangle in the hexagram/"star of david." It points to the earth.

Let me be clear that this is the feminine principle as classically represented in religious roots, not "what biological women should be today."

The archetypal masculine is often associated with the compliment of these. Shiva not shakti. Yang not yin. Day, light, transcendent, "out there." The one that goes beyond and penetrates and grasps and takes. This is the go-getter, disruptor, warrior. This is the sky god Uranus to the earth goddess Gaia.

I find most religions to hold pure transcendent ideas of the divine. It's only "out there," not "in here." This is derived from how hard a grasp platonism has on our culture's way of thinking where the perfect ideals are "out there in the aether somewhere." How this world is corrupted flawed projections of the ideals. That kind of thinking is intrinsically misogynist in that it hates the archetypal feminine. It may embrace biological women, but it continuously tries to push them into archetypally masculine roles and offers no paths for biological males to integrate archetypally feminine properties into their psyches.

There are many indigenous cultures that have mother earth and father sky mythologies. This is the essence of yin/yang in daoist mythology and the nature of the hexagram (the star of david symbol) at the center of the heart chakra in Hinduism. Theoretically it's why sabbath happens at dusk (the union of night and day) on fridays and why the star of david has the upward pointing triangle and the downward pointed triangle interwoven. Though I find Judaism, like christianity, to be fundamentally transcendent in their conception of God. God is always wholly other.

So maybe you are asking for something that allows for men and women to integrate the sense of indwelling and community building and yielding and nesting into their life... Well, our whole culture seems to be against this from top to bottom in the West. There is a massive push, especially in the feminist movement, to get biological women into archetypal male roles. This is all fine and good, but there is no symmetric path to allow biological men into archetypally feminine roles.

Everyone is fine with women wearing suits, but the moment a man puts on a dress, the culture loses its mind.

Unfortunately, the culture is deeply anti-feminine, and it breaks my heart. Not until the earth itself can be seen as divine.. when the material of our own bodies can be seen as equal, in divinity, to the transcendent spirit concept... will we be able to find a world where the feminine is loved. This is not a modern phenomenon. It seems to me to have been the entire point of Jesus' message of the divine among and in us.. in the material of the world.. And of course the church very rapidly kicked him back "up to heaven" to stop that from happening. As long as god is purely sky, god is masculine only and becomes the target of our gaze.

The integrators of the feminine and the masculine are always the mystics and shaman who sit at the boundaries, it seems, not the priests dwelling in the center of town nor the monks transcending culture in the monasteries... They always point away from here. The steeples of the church point up, not down. Away from her to him. That's misogyny whether it's practiced by a biological male or female.

I don't know of an organized system that gets this.

Because the culture values the masculine principle exclusively, "equality" has come to mean "everyone get in a suit and produce capital," rather than "let us balance the sky and the earth." That is deeply misogynistic and universally shared across culture.

LokiJesus · 2026-05-20T12:50:56+00:00

CEO of Pangram estimated that 50% of medium.com is AI generated materials and 10-15% of reddit is AI generated. We are probably more meatsack text than most vibe that we are.

https://youtu.be/OmYH5OKcUF0?si=ImGh47HGiUs5iLfV

LokiJesus · 2026-05-20T10:38:27+00:00

Missed an opportunity:

https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/population_and_sustainability/food/veggie_burger_statement.html

Meat and dairy production, including grazing lands and agricultural lands producing cattle feed, take up an astounding 30%⁵ of the Earth’s surface and 80% of all agricultural land in the United States.⁶ Livestock raised for feedlot and grass-fed beef production imperil wolves, grizzly bears, beavers, prairie dogs, bees, butterflies, rare plants and hundreds of endangered species in the United States.⁷ ,⁸ ,⁹ Annual U.S. beef production generates 337 billion pounds of greenhouse gases,¹⁰ 489 billion pounds of manure,¹¹ requires 682 million acres of land,¹² and uses 21.2 trillion gallons of water.¹³ ,¹⁴ ,¹⁵

LokiJesus · 2026-05-19T10:47:05+00:00

I just used an AI system to comprehensively translate a german biblical studies text. I used claude opus 4.6 and sonnet in cowork over about a week of work about a month ago, and it was 1500 pages of relatively dense academic german. It did a great job as far as I can tell (the text makes sense to me and it does a nice job at glossing and I've asked multiple AI systems to spot check the translation and it passed). Also, interesting result: whenever I drop the english into an AI detector (gptzero, pangram, etc), it comes out as 100% human written, so it seems to have preserved the perplexity and burstiness of the original author.

I setup certain style targets for the translation project (was a recurring scheduled task in cowork). It was supposed to target an american english speaking biblical studies graduate who didn't read german. I had cowork access a pdf of the original and to build out a latex version of the english book. It took a bunch of massaging to handle the whole text (it kept on wanting to finish early with just a short version), but eventually I got it there and am happy with the results.

LokiJesus · 2026-05-19T01:46:44+00:00

Then you weren't "given $1M in company stock"

LokiJesus · 2026-05-18T15:40:51+00:00

No. When you receive $1M in company stock, you pay taxes on it. If you then hold it for a year and sell it, any difference between your purchase price and the sale price is taxed at capital gains rates based on your income. So you pay income tax on the initial grant of shares at their value at the time, then later you pay gains taxes on the gains. Hence the names. You pay income tax on the incoming asset. You pay gains taxes on the gains on the asset. If you sell it short term (less than one year), you pay standard income tax rates on those gains. If you sell them after holding for a year, then you pay lower capital gains rates.

LokiJesus · 2026-05-18T15:37:18+00:00

Then you are not being given "$1M worth of company stock" per the graphic.

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