Alex Petropoulos 🤠

Excited to lead an ARIA-funded project! Cfg will be exploring how AAI systems can be used by AI R&D organisations to improve their governance. What are the gov tools that will scale with capabilities to, and past, AGI? What trad gov tradeoffs are false? Which matter most?

being confused is surprisingly pleasant because it's an excuse to talk to my friends and mentors :)

TIL that you literally sweat the smelly part of garlic out of your body.

@planksdirect @Simon__Grimm very silly

@AlexTPet @Simon__Grimm Their concern is it's not "EU sovereign," so they develop a crappy DRPK/USSR-like knock-off full of holes for foreign intelligence to trivially exploit. All in the name of security, resilience, and independence of course.

I would like EU officials to use more Signal chats, not fewer. Concerning move with regards to EU state capacity. politico.eu/article/top-eu…

@Simon__Grimm sounds like a skill issue ngl

@AlexTPet Probably impersonation?

@Simon__Grimm then what on Earth is their concern???

@AlexTPet yep

@PosadistPaul @bswud Yup my thesis is that at a certain point they started believing their own campaign messages of "Things are bad because the Tories are evil" and that by simply "not being evil" all of the problems would disappear. Now they learn that governing is hard.

@bswud @AlexTPet I think that is *exactly* what they thought, and it tracks with their messaging

'The War on Prices' is partly related to the fact that we've just had the biggest inflation wave we've seen in decades, and there is no indication that the fiscal/monetary authorities intend to have inflation go below target for a while to balance it out. But it's also a sign of reduced state capacity. Even relatively primitive states, like middle-income countries and the UK of the 1500s, could fix prices. It's a classic tool that countries reach for when they aren't able to pull off the sorts of projects that would cut the underlying actual costs. The magic wand.

@bswud Yeah, fix the macro incentives before micro. Feels like incumbent govt diagnosis was: macro incentives are broken, and is only now recognising that micro matters as well. That being said, they also lied a bunch about the UK's problems/future, damaging macro.

Corruption lowers legitimacy, though. I agree that corruption 'greases the wheels' on the margin, but only at the cost of reducing effectiveness overall. Of course, our effectiveness is so low now that it might feel like a funny thing to worry about. But by God it could get a lot worse. I agree, though, that the fact that there are big win wins that aren't happening is interesting and should lead to change. But not by paying off the agents of the principals. We should actually pay the principals!

@bswud yes but imo those people are wrong. Coming from a much more corrupt country (Greece), the UK is basically corruption-free. Maybe we are operating under different definitions of corruption? I buy into your overall thesis on legitimacy decay, but lacking legitimacy != corrupt?

@AlexTPet I would like a world where individuals have more judgement, but a key reason why judgement can't carry political support today is that people expect that everyone making judgements is partly out for themselves personally (or a sectional interest)

@bswud I would like for them to have more of an option to (by exercising more individual judgement over what will lead to the best outcomes eg by loosening procurement rules). This will probably increase corruption slightly but lead to better outcomes.

@AlexTPet There is not too little corruption on the margin! Do you really think it would be good if the agents of the state were taking bribes to achieve particular outcomes?

@bswud > There are widespread perceptions of corruption. I wonder how you go about fixing this when imo there is too *little* corruption on the margin and many of the changes we needed to improve state capacity and build trust would on the surface be corruption-enabling.

Britain needs to reckon with the fact that it is not just a developing country economically, but also in political culture. - There are widespread perceptions of corruption. - Governments are not capable of pulling off large projects without enormous consent generation schemes through established interest groups (NGOs) and massive side payments - The government is not trusted with expropriation tools - Even left-wing governments cannot raise broad-based taxes (and the far left opposition don’t make the case for broad-based taxes, but that they can extract loads of money from the rich and other scapegoats) - Even right-wing governments cannot take away state welfare entitlements - There is a dizzying array of inconsistent privileges - Parties are becoming less ideological and more tribal. There are explicit ethnoreligious parties standing, and bloc voting is becoming more and more common. - Everyone thinks that all politicians are liars - Almost no one is willing to take a hit in the interests of the country, and no one is expected to. I think all of these things are connected, and I also think it’s foolish and self defeating to pretend we are Britain of the 1950s, or Denmark, and that we can simply implement the most efficient policies by deciding to — we just need more political will! Instead, we need to be realistic about what a country in our situation can achieve. We need to come up with ways to steadily build state legitimacy and state capacity, by stigmatising dishonesty and using the tools of the past, which worked when we were last in this situation. The government can’t be trusted to spend money, so taxes need to be hypothecated to things voters want if we want to raise more. Large projects need to involve more specific deals with losers, overriding objectors with local support not (nonexistent) national fiat. Anything controversial needs to be approved in a party’s manifesto, or in a referendum. If it can’t be voted through, it cannot be implemented. If the voter doesn’t want it, they need to be convinced, or it can’t be done.

@deanwball ty for making my timeline more wholesome :)

the work in question: training a neural network

seems like people need to found new orgs to fix this problem🤔

@GjMcGowan might not be where the value is captured

OR (hear me out) - £100bn sovereign wealth fund composed entirely of GOOG, NVDA, TSMC

@notanastronomer !!!

@AlexTPet the Atlantic council one even has red hair

My name isn't that common, but nonetheless today I had to draft one of the weirder email headings of the last few years..

@notanastronomer WHATT. have you all met at the same time ?

@AlexTPet Alex there’s a Lauren Gilbert who works at the Atlantic Council and also one that’s a law professor focusing on immigration

@S_OhEigeartaigh sounds simultaneously annoying but also rly cool that this could even happen. Tech helps us remember a lot more of the past than we ever did before, etc..!

@AlexTPet Google scholar sometimes gets me mixed up for my grandad the literary publisher/scholar who was writing in the 1950s. It's like 'dude, you're way too old to be writing about AI - not everyone gets to be Kissinger'

@S_OhEigeartaigh somehow I feel like this happens less for you

alias claude='claude --enable-auto-mode'