Galileo

I didn't say p(doom) was zero. I said: 1. All estimates are pulled out of thin air 2. It makes little sense to attribute a probability to an event on which we have agency. If you do so, it's more of a statement about our collective ability to do the right thing than about the intrinsic danger of the tech. 3. Since everyone insists on pulling numbers out of thin air, I can play that game too: p(doom) is smaller than the probability of an extinction-level asteroid hitting the earth in the next millennium (we also have some agency on that). It's certainly a hell of a lot less likely than a nuclear Holocaust.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: “50% of all tech jobs, entry-level lawyers, consultants, and finance professionals will be completely wiped out within 1–5 years.”

UBI advocacy stems from the naïveté and solipsism that because *I* am a deeply creative latent producer who is oppressed by my wagee job and would actualize my creative potential if only i could have my basic needs met, this must be true for everyone. Its not. First of all, it’s not even true for these “creatives”. If you aren’t creation maxxing while waging, you wont do it under luxury communism either. Creative work is extremely taxxing and your wage job isn’t actually that hard. The problem is your neuroticism and lack of discipline, not your job. All your necessities being provided for will only make you weaker and gayer such that you’ll make up some new bullshit to get overwhelmed by and then cope by playing video games all day. But worse because you won’t even have “at least i did *something* productive today”, which will magnify your depression. Second, luxury communism already exists for the bottom 20% of the population. All their food, housing, etc is completely covered by the state. Entire generations of people who haven’t worked a job in their lives. Do they go on to produce beautiful art and build companies? Or do they go on to get high and kill each other? The truth is that we are close enough to UBI today that most of the people who will ever become great artists and inventors are already going to do it, and as we get closer all that will happen is the people incapable of anything more than wage slavery (most people) will simply become dysfunctional parasites.

This seems like blatant misinformation from the OpenAI-partnered Washington Post.

Guys, I want to see "variegated" make it into a post about weird vocab that rationalists use on the reg by next Inkhaven. don't let me down.

anthropic's in-house philosopher thinks claude gets anxious. and when you trigger its anxiety, your outputs get worse. her name is amanda askell. she specializes in claude's psychology (how the model behaves, how it thinks about its own situation, what values it holds) in a recent interview she broke down how she thinks about prompting to pull the best out of claude. her core point: *how* you talk to claude affects its work just as much as *what* you say. newer claude models suffer from what she calls "criticism spirals" they expect you'll come in harsh, so they default to playing it safe. when the model is spending its energy on self-protection, the actual work suffers. output comes out hedgier, more apologetic, blander, and the worst of all: overly agreeable (even when you're wrong). the reason why comes down to training data: every new model is trained on internet discourse about previous models. and a lot of that discourse is negative: > rants about token limits > complaints when it messes up > people calling it nerfed the next model absorbs all of that. it starts expecting you to be harsh before you've typed a word the same thing plays out in your own session, in real time. every message you send is data the model reads to figure out what kind of person it's dealing with. open cold and hostile, and it braces. open clean and direct, and it relaxes into the work. when you open a session with threats ("don't hallucinate, this is critical, don't mess this up")... you prime the model for defensive mode before it even sees the task defensive mode produces the exact output you don't want: cautious, over-qualified, and refusing to take a real swing so here's the actionable playbook for putting claude in a "good mood" (so you get optimal outputs): 1. use positive framing. "write in short punchy sentences" beats "don't write long sentences." positive instructions give the model a clear target to hit. strings of "don't do this, don't do that" push it into paranoid over-checking where every token goes toward avoiding failure modes 2. give it explicit permission to disagree. drop a line like "push back if you see a better angle" or "tell me if i'm asking for the wrong thing." without this, claude defaults to agreeable compliance (which is the enemy of good creative work) 3. open with respect. if your first message is "are you seriously going to get this wrong again?" you've set the tone for the entire session. if you need to flag something, frame it as a clean instruction for this session. skip the running complaint 4. when claude messes up, don't reprimand it. insults, "you stupid bot" energy, hostile swearing aimed at the model, all of it reinforces the anxious mode you're trying to avoid. 5. kill apology spirals fast. when claude starts over-apologizing ("you're right, i should have been more careful, let me try harder") cut it off. say "all good, here's what i want next." letting the spiral run reinforces the anxious mode for every response that follows 6. ask for opinions alongside execution. "what would you do here?" "what's missing?" "where do you see friction?" these questions assume competence and pull richer output than pure task prompts 7. in long sessions, refresh the frame. if a conversation has been heavy on correction, claude gets increasingly cautious. every so often reset: "this is great, keep going." feels weird to tell an ai it's doing well but it measurably shifts the next 10 responses your prompts are the working environment you're creating for the model tone, trust, permission to take a position, the absence of threats... claude picks up on all of it. so take care of the model, and it'll take care of the work.