Philosophy deserves every burn. Sorry. But only a little.

Eh, I'm being my usual exaggerated dismissive, but it's sad that the two most visible to me camps are essentially "it's only so unbiasedly rational of us to consider how many AGI could dance on the needle's head" and "mathless/IFLS quantum vibes" types. It's not even that I don't see the merits of those two, let alone philosophy at large, but that I have absolutely no fucking interest in either yet they keep talking at me like I'm a lobotomite for not caring.

And no, wasoxygen, I'm not calling you out specifically, it's just how you Yudkowsky-ites communicate. We're cool, I hope.

Not sure why you'd want a middleman, either.

Well, ML/whatever excels at finding patterns, even if it can't/won't explain them. Having a tool that goes "exploring these parameter spaces is most likely worthless" or even "isn't it funny how second order solitons only form when this parameter is divisible by 17?" may be invaluable to a right person who can find context to those observations. That's the "(or something)" in my previous comment.

Tying this to "making sure conclusions are correct-ish is going to be hard to replicate." <- that's the bottleneck as far as I can see. First you have to separate seeds from chaff, and then make sure those seeds aren't blighty or cleverly disguised angry bears. I wouldn't mind science becoming (even more) akin to computer-assisted chess, though. Tools are tools, experts use tools better, so that checks out too.

Losing shits and meetups

Wasn't singling you out here, though I hope you take care of yourself and wife. And it's not like I don't understand or lack the presence of mind to understand why people are so agitated. I simply can't keep dealing with it. It's been two goddamned years, and I can't even force myself to go to Ukraine anymore. I haven't seen the worst, and it's too much. Focusing on what I can affect has to be enough for me right now.

As to meetups: no worries, I can make another one in April or May. They're about as informal as flip-flops anyway.