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Sep 13, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Jeffrey Heninger
Epistemic Status: I wrote this back in January, and have been uncertain about whether to publish it. I expect that most people who read this here will be unconvinced. But I still want to express my intuition. In the last month, these ideas have come up in conversation again. Then, Toby Ord published a paper on arxiv a few days ago with substantial overlap with ideas presented here, so it seems like it is time to post it.
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May 16, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Jeffrey Heninger
This is the fourth in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan? This post has more of my personal opinions than previous posts or the report itself. Other movements should try to avoid becoming as partisan as the environmental movement. Partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular, it made legislation more difficult to pass, and it resulted in fluctuating executive action.
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May 14, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Jeffrey Heninger
This is the second in a sequence of four posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan? Many of the specific claims made here are investigated in the full report. If you want to know more about how fossil fuel companies’ campaign contributions, the partisan lean of academia, or newspapers’ reporting on climate change have changed since 1980, the information is there.
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May 13, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Jeffrey Heninger
This is the first in a sequence of four posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan? IntroductionIn the United States, environmentalism is extremely partisan. It might feel like this was inevitable. Caring about the environment, and supporting government action to protect the environment, might seem like they are inherently left-leaning. Partisanship has increased for many issues, so it might not be surprising that environmentalism became partisan too.
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Mar 29, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Jeffrey Heninger
IntroductionThe first serious attempt at building a subway in New York City occurred in 1866, following the end of the Civil War (1865) and the opening of the first subway in London (1863). The following decades saw a sequence of failed attempts, and the first subway in New York City would not begin operations until 1904. When we consider how popular the subway was, even when it first opened, these failures are remarkable.
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Mar 23, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Jeffrey Heninger
Previously: General Thoughts on Secular Solstice. This blog post is my scattered notes and ramblings about the individual components (talks and songs) of Secular Solstice in Berkeley. Talks have their title in bold, and I split the post into two columns, with the notes I took about the content of the talk on the left and my comments on the talk on the right. Songs have normal formatting.
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Mar 23, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Jeffrey Heninger
I attended Secular Solstice in Berkeley last December. My perspective is quite unusual: I live in a rationalist group house and work at an AI safety office, but I also am a Christian and attend church every week. I was originally not planning on going to Solstice, but a decent number of people (~5) told me in person that they would be particularly interested in my opinions of it. I realized that I was interested in learning what I would think of it too, so I went.
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Jan 12, 2024 | 
blog.aiimpacts.org | Jeffrey Heninger
Artificial intelligence is not the only exciting emerging technology. Another one that I am personally familiar with is fusion. It seems interesting to compare companies working on emerging technologies to get a feel for how surprising developments in these companies are. Some startups working on developing AI have grown rapidly, but how surprising is this growth? The leading startup for AI is OpenAI. The leading startup for fusion is Commonwealth Fusions Systems (CFS).
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Jan 12, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Jeffrey Heninger |Gerald M. Monroe
Artificial intelligence is not the only exciting emerging technology. Another one that I am personally familiar with is fusion. It seems interesting to compare companies working on emerging technologies to get a feel for how surprising developments in these companies are. Some startups working on developing AI have grown rapidly, but how surprising is this growth? The leading startup for AI is OpenAI. The leading startup for fusion is Commonwealth Fusions Systems (CFS).
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Oct 20, 2023 | 
lesswrong.com | Jeffrey Heninger |Roman Leventov |Donald Hobson
Summary: There are historical precedents where bans or crushing regulations stop the progress of technology in one industry, while progress in the rest of society continues. This is a plausible future for AI. Epistemic Status: My intuition strongly disagrees with other people here. I hope to explain my intuition, and provide enough historical evidence to make this intuition at least plausible. Suppose you told someone in 1978 that no new nuclear power plants would be built in the US until 2023.
