Table of Contents 1 Static pressure gradients?? 2 Spouts and acceleration 3 Height paradox thingy 4 Deducing the equivelocity curve? 5 Sideways pressure? 6 Generalizing I’ve been reading various things about fluid mechanics so that I can think about microfluidics. But I haven’t really been studying it like I used to study a math area (instead just kinda getting various impressions). I’d like to think it through a bit “from scratch”, though it’s very much not actually from scratch of course. This is written as close to real-time thinking as possible (though of course much slower than without writing), over a few hours, with the intent of getting a “thinking trace” because that seems interesting. [In all diagrams, pretend the top is open to the air, and ignore differences in air pressure.] 1 Static pressure gradients?? If I ask myself what I’m intuitively confused about, I’m like, hold on—it makes intuitive sense that pressure gradient would cause the fluid to ...

Table of Contents 1 Arguments for fast AGI progress 2 Intuition pumps for being close to AGI 3 Synthetic life as an intuition pump 4 Some things I like about this analogy [Previously: “ Views on when AGI comes and on strategy to reduce existential risk ”, “ Do confident short timelines make sense? ”] [Whenever discussing when AGI will come, it bears repeating: If anyone builds AGI, everyone dies; no one knows when AGI will be made, whether soon or late; a bunch of people and orgs are trying to make it; and they should stop and be stopped.] 1 Arguments for fast AGI progress Many arguments about “when will AGI come” focus on reasons to think progress will continue quickly, such as: Line go up. Researchers can pivot to address new obstacles and ditch dead ends. AI can be used to accelerate AI research. We’re over a threshold of economic returns, such that AI research will permanently see much more investment than before. 2 Intuition pumps for being close to ...

Table of Contents 1 The flight recorder 2 Altered states and lost information 3 The black box recorder skill 4 Why black box info matters 5 Conclusion Very short summary: It’s especially valuable to Notice while in mental states that make Noticing especially difficult, so it’s valuable to learn that skill. Short summary: If you’re going to enter, or are currently in, a cognitive state that is very irrational / overwhelmed / degraded / constrained / poisoned / tribalistic / unendorsed / etc., then you may as well also keep a little part of yourself paying at least a bit of attention to what it’s like and what’s going on and recording that information, so that you get that sweet sweet juicy valuable data that’s hard to get. 1 The flight recorder As legend has it , a black box (aka a flight recorder) is a device placed in an aircraft to record data from the flight (from measurement instruments or from voice recordings). If the aircraft crashes, most of the aircraf...

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Table of Contents 1 Context 2 The question 3 Some examples 4 Assorted thoughts 1 Context Inequality is a common and legitimate worry that people have about reprogenetic technology. Will rich people have super healthy smart kids, and leave everyone else behind over time? Intuitively, this will not happen. Reprogenetics will likely be similar to most other technologies: At first it will be very expensive (and less effective); then, after an initial period of perhaps a decade or two, it will become much less expensive. While rich people will have earlier access, in the longer run the benefit to the non-rich in aggregate will be far greater than the benefit to the rich in aggregate, as has been the case with plumbing, electricity, cars, computers, phones, and so on. But, is that right? Will reprogenetics stay very expensive, and therefore only be accessible to the very wealthy? Or, under what circumstances will reprogenetics be inaccessible, and how can it be made ac...

Table of Contents 1 Context 1.1 Questions for the reader 1.2 Caveats 2 What is HIA? 2.1 Vague definitions of intelligence and HIA 2.2 HIA as a general access good 2.3 HIA and reprogenetics 3 AGI X-risk 3.1 Background assumptions 3.2 Red vs. Blue AGI capabilities research 4 An ontology of effects of interventions on world processes 4.1 The meaning of “acceleration” 4.2 Effects of HIA on a single process 4.3 Effects of HIA involving multiple processes 5 Processes 6 Some plausible bad effects of HIA on processes 6.1 Speeding up Blue research 6.2 Speeding up Red research 6.3 Less speeding up legal and social regulation 6.4 Nonlinear / race-condition regulatory escape 6.5 Alignment loses the race anyway 6.6 Intrinsic regulatory escape 6.7 Disrupting regulatory systems 6.8 Social values favor following local incentives 6.9 Less speeding up change towards better values 6.10 Alignment harnesses added brainpower much less effec...