It's a reasonable concern to have, but I've spoken enough with him to know that he's not out of touch with reality. I do think he's out of sync with social reality, however, and as a result I also think this post is badly written and the anecdotes unwisely overemphasized. His willingness to step out of social reality in order to stay grounded with what's real, however, is exactly one of the main traits that make me hopefwl about him.

I have another friend who's bipolar and has manic episodes. My ex-step-father also had rapid-cycling BP, so I know a bit about what it looks like when somebody's manic.^[1] They have larger-than-usual gaps in their ability to notice their effects on other people, and it's obvious in conversation with them. When I was in a 3-person conversation with Johannes, he was highly attuned to the emotions and wellbeing of others, so I have no reason to think he has obvious mania-like blindspots here.

But when you start tuning yourself hard to reality, you usually end up weird in a way that's distinct from the weirdness associated with mania. Onlookers who don't know the difference may fail to distinguish the underlying causes, however. ("Weirdness" is a larger cluster than "normality", but people mostly practice distinguishing between samples of normality, so weirdness all looks the same to them.)

1. ^{^}

   I was also evaluated for it after an outlier depressive episode in 2021, so I got to see the diagnostic process up close. Turns out I just have recurring depressions, and I'm not bipolar.

He linked his extensive research log on the project above, and has made LW posts of some of their progress. That said, I don't know of any good legible summary of it. It would be good to have. I don't know if that's one of Johannes' top priorities, however. It's never obvious from the outside what somebody's top priorities ought to be.

Surely you could work for free as an engineer at an AI alignment org or something and then shift into discussions w/ them about alignment? 

To be clear: his motivation isn't "I want to contribute to alignment research!" He's aiming to actually solve the problem. If he works as an engineer at an org, he's not pursuing his project, and he'd be approximately 0% as usefwl.

I strongly endorse Johannes' research approach. I've had 6 meetings with him, and have read/watched a decent chunk of his posts and YT vids. I think the project is very unlikely to work, but that's true of all projects I know of, and this one seems at least better than almost all of them. (Reality doesn't grade on a curve.)

Still, I really hope funders would consider funding the person instead of the project, since I think Johannes' potential will be severely stifled unless he has the opportunity to go "oops! I guess I ought to be doing something else instead" as soon as he discovers some intractable bottleneck wrt his current project. He's literally the person I have the most confidence in when it comes to swiftly changing path to whatever he thinks is optimal, and it would be a real shame if funding gave him an incentive to not notice reasons to pivot. (For more on this, see e.g. Steve's post.)

I realize my endorsement doesn't carry much weight for people who don't know me, and I don't have much general clout here, but if you're curious here's my EA forum profile and twitter. On LW, I'm mostly these users {this, 1, 2, 3, 4}. Some other things which I hope will nudge you to take my endorsement a bit more seriously:

• I've been working full-time on AI alignment since early 2022.
  • I rarely post about my work, however, since I'm not trying to "contribute"—I'm trying to do.
• EA has been my top life-priority since 2014 (I was 21).
• I've read the Sequences in their entirety at least once. (Low bar, but worth mentioning.)
• I have no academic or professional background because I'm financially secure with disability money. This means I can spend 100% of my time following my own sense of what's optimal for me without having to take orders or produce impressive/legible artifacts.
  • I think Johannes will be much more effective if he has the same freedom, and is not tied to any particular project. I really doubt anyone other than him will be better able to evaluate what the optimal use of his time is.

Edit: I should mention that Johannes hasn't prompted me to say any of this. I took noticed him due to the candour of his posts and reached out by myself a few months ago.

Epic Lizka post is epic.

Also, I absolutely love the word "shard" but my brain refuses to use it because then it feels like we won't get credit for discovering these notions by ourselves. Well, also just because the words "domain", "context", "scope", "niche", "trigger", "preimage" (wrt to a neural function/policy / "neureme") adequately serve the same purpose and are currently more semantically/semiotically granular in my head.

trigger/preimage ⊆ scope ⊆ domain

"niche" is a category in function space (including domain, operation, and codomain), "domain" is a set.

"scope" is great because of programming connotations and can be used as a verb. "This neural function is scoped to these contexts."

Aaron Bergman has a vid of himself typing new sentences in real-time, which I found really helpfwl.^[1] I wish I could watch lots of people record themselves typing, so I could compare what I do.

Being slow at writing can be sign of failure or winning, depending on the exact reasons why you're slow. I'd worry about being "too good" at writing, since that'd be evidence that your brain is conforming your thoughts to the language, instead of conforming your language to your thoughts. English is just a really poor medium for thought (at least compared to e.g. visuals and pre-word intuitive representations), so it's potentially dangerous to care overmuch about it.

1. ^{^}

   Btw, Aaron is another person-recommendation. He's awesome. Has really strong self-insight, goodness-of-heart, creativity. (Twitter profile, blog+podcast, EAF, links.) I haven't personally learned a whole bunch from him yet,^[2] but I expect if he continues being what he is, he'll produce lots of cool stuff which I'll learn from later.

2. ^{^}

   Edit: I now recall that I've learned from him: screwworms (important), and the ubiquity of left-handed chirality in nature (mildly important). He also caused me to look into two-envelopes paradox, which was usefwl for me.

   Although I later learned about screwworms from Kevin Esvelt at 80kh podcast, so I would've learned it anyway. And I also later learned about left-handed chirality from Steve Mould on YT, but I may not have reflected on it as much.

I did nearly this in ~2015. I made a folder with pictures of inspiring people (it had Eliezer Yudkowsky, Brian Tomasik, David Pearce, Grigori Perelman, Feynman, more idr), and used it as my desktop background or screensaver or both (idr).

I say this because I am surprised at how much our thoughts/actions have converged, and wish to highlight examples that demonstrate this. And I wish to communicate that because basically senpai notice me. kya.

I wrote the entry in the context of the question "how can I gain the effectiveness-benefits of confidence and extreme ambition, without distorting my world-model/expectations?"

I had recently been discovering abstract arguments that seemed to strongly suggest it would be most altruistic/effective for me to pursue extremely ambitious projects;  both because 1) the low-likelihood high-payoff quadrant had highest expected utility, but also because 2) the likelihood of success for extremely ambitious projects seemed higher than I thought.  (Plus some other reasons.)  I figured that I needn't feel confident about success in order to feel confident about the approach.

This exact thought, from my diary in ~June 2022: "I advocate keeping a clear separation between how confident you are that your plan will work with how confident you are that pursuing the plan is optimal."

I think perhaps I don't fully advocate alieving that your plan is more likely to work than you actually believe it is. Or, at least, I advocate some of that on the margin, but mostly I just advocate keeping a clear separation between how confident you are that your plan will work with how confident you are that pursuing the plan is optimal. As long as you tune yourself to be inspired by working on the optimal, you can be more ambitious and less risk-averse.

Unfortunately, if you look like you're confidently pursuing a plan (because you think it's optimal, but your reasons are not immediately observable), other people will often mistake that for confidence-in-results and perhaps conclude that you're epistemically crazy. So it's nearly always socially safer to tune yourself to confidence-in-results lest you risk being misunderstood and laughed at.

You also don't want to be so confident that what you're doing is optimal that you're unable to change your path when new evidence comes in. Your first plan is unlikely to be the best you can do, and you can only find the best you can do by trying many different things and iterating. Confidence can be an obstacle to change.

On the other hand, lack of confidence can also be an obstacle to change. If you're not confident that you can do better than you're currently doing, then you'll have a hard time motivating yourself to find alternatives. Underconfidence is probably underappreciated as a source of bias due to social humility being such a virtue.

To use myself as an example (although I didn't intend for this to be about me rather than about my general take on mindset): I feel pretty good about the ideas I've come up with so far. So now I have a choice to make: 1) I could think that the ideas are so good that I should just focus on building and clarifying them, or 2) I could use the ideas as evidence that I'm able to produce even better ideas if I keep searching. I'm aiming for the latter, and I hold my current best ideas in contempt because I'm still stuck with them. In some sense, confidence makes it easier to Actually Change My Mind.

I guess the recipe I might be advocating is:
1. separate between confidence-in-results and confidence-in-optimality
2. try to hold accurate and precise beliefs about the results of your plans/ideas, mistakes here are costly
3. try to alieve that you're able to produce more optimal ideas/plans than the ones you already have, mistakes here are less costly, and gains in positive alief are much higher

I'm going to call this the Way of Aisi because it reminds me of an old friend who just did everything better than everyone else (including himself) because he had faith in himself. :p