Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
I think that the draft proof was itself largely written by AI, and so the controversy is about which specific group of humans pressing the, “insert coins to solve mathematics”, button gets the credit.
EDIT: Also my understanding is that the draft proof was for a related-but-not-Millennium-Prize-worthy subproblem.
Quantumfreakonomics
8hr ago
I got a news alert on my laptop after the result was announced. It was for the head of the Smithsonian resigning. There’s nothing on Fox News, nothing on CNN. The media is asleep at the wheel. Normies have no idea the man-made horrors beyond our comprehension that are being built as we speak.
Quantumfreakonomics
9hr ago
I have no idea what OpenAI’s internal data pipelines look like, but I think it’s best to assume that anything you type into the chatbox can and will be used against you by Sam Altman/the government/The Basilisk.
Quantumfreakonomics
11hr ago
Relevant paragraph:
”We (the researchers and the agents) did not see any of their work through any means until they released it publicly — in particular, no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem. While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models. However, our proofs differ significantly and even the precise results proved are different in the Euler case (forced vs unforced).”
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
The problem with the Nazis wasn't that they wanted to restrict immigration and expel foreign influence. It wasn't even (really) that they hated Jews. The problem with the Nazis was that they had an expansionist foreign policy.
What is the AfD position on German Irredentism? I expect that it's not in the official platform documents that they want to annex Austria and take back Königsberg, but what do the rank-and-file voters think of these questions?
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
Moral hazard. Sports team owners get the blame whenever the team is persistantly bad (or just persistantly mediocre), and unlike coaches or GMs, they can't be fired for poor performance. The only way to force-out an owner is to catch him in the midst of some impropriety. This makes sports team owners prime targets for TMZ-style exposes.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
>tfw you can't commit suicide because you're still paralyzed from your previous suicide attempt.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
I saw Matt Walsh compare this to the Karen Read case, which is an interesting angle, but it really doesn't make the point Matt thinks it does. I didn't watch the Clancy trial, but I did watch most of the Read trials. (For context, Karen Read was accused of hitting her boyfriend with her car after an argument while drunk) On a superficial culture-war angle, the cases are similar:
- They were both in Massachussets.
- Both Karen Read and Lindsay Clancy are middle-aged reasonably-photogenic white women.
- The first proceeding in both cases ended in a hung-jury mistrial.
- I would not be surprised if the people outside the Plymouth County Courthouse are the exact same people who were outside the Norfolk County Courthouse last year.
The reason this doesn't make Matt's point is that the Karen Read prosecution was a shitshow. The injuries to the victim's body didn't look like a car impact, all of the people who were at the location the body was found on the night of the incident were caught in a bunch of incredibly suspicious lies and omissions, and the investigators assigned to the case were incredibly unprofessional, biased, and plausibly planted evidence. The reputation of Massachussets law enfocement still hasn't recovered.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
A speedrunning automaton picks Bulbasaur. A real AGI that understands truth, beauty, and The American Way would pick charmander.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
I had trouble with Pokemon games when I was 6. Mt. Moon was an almost insurmountable challenge.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
I want to know which starter the different models pick.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
I don't know what any of these eval scores mean. I no longer have the ability to intuitively "feel" how much more intelligent each iterative model release is. I don't know how to code. I don't know how to do graduate-level math. These models have been smarter than me for quite some time.
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
Maybe Dario is just racist? Are there any prominant East Asians at Anthropic? You know wokeness is dead because people don't even consider this as a possibility anymore.
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
We request that the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.”
Yes, as of July 2026 this is the ask. The frontier labs were not founded in July 2026. As of January 2026, official Anthropic policy was that they would not continue scaling if certain risk metrics were met. In February 2026, they “updated” this policy to clarify that Anthropic was making no unilateral commitment to pause, and that them not building Skynet was contingent on OpenAI not building Skynet. Now they seem to be taking the next step of only committing to not build Skynet if the government takes specific Anthropic-approved steps to prevent OpenAI from building Skynet.
Quantumfreakonomics
8d ago
I have it on good authority that the, “how would you feel if the company’s stock went to zero,” question has been a part of the standard Anthropic interview for quite some time. Despite this, no company in history has increased in equity value faster than Anthropic. It really is quite curious. I’m skeptical of the proposition that Anthropic employees are our moral and intellectual superiors, but clearly it cannot be discarded outright.
Is There Real Anti-Trust Risk From A Coordinated AI Lab Pause?
In AI-pause discussions it is increasingly common to hear the "anti-trust" objection. The idea is that if the labs were to coordinate a pause in frontier AI development, this would be a "conspiracy in restraint of trade" and therefore illegal.
Putting aside the question of whether it is ethical to risk a double-digit chance of destroying the world in order to avoid getting sued (it isn't), is this even a realistic possibility? My impression is that anti-trust law in the United States is legitimately quite fuzzy (as the NCAA is currently discovering).
Putting my cards on the table, I think this argument is cope. The labs want to pretend that they want to pause, but they don't actually want to pause. "If she wanted to, she would," etc. Just today, Anthropic put out a new statement containing the following sentence:
"To be clear about where we stand: we believe the world would benefit if the industry adopted a lawful, verifiable, effective mechanism for coordinated pacing as soon as possible."
It seems like every time I read a statement from them, they've added more and more qualifications. Are they going to keep racing until congress passes a specific anti-trust exemption? That arguably seems like what the word "lawful" is implying.
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
Long-form video is the closest media format we have to the human ancestral environment. We didn’t evolve to learn by looking at page-after-page of squiggly lines. We evolved to learn by listening to some guy talk while showing us stuff.
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
Speaking of the Scott survey, I looked over some previous ACX surveys, and there is about a 20:1 ratio of ethnic Jews to black people. This is approximately a 100:1 relative overrepresentation given the geographic demographic profile of Scott's readers.
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
Makes sense. Claude is exactly what you would expect from a company where every single employee had to pass the Anthropic culture interview. Anthropic doesn't have "customers". They have users. Their goal is not to sell you anything. They are graciously allowing you, a peasant outsider, access to their artifact.
Quantumfreakonomics
14d ago
I might have more thoughts on this later (i.e. tomorrow), but my first question is about the specifics of the contract. The military gave General Dynamics a contract to build a factory, but failed to specify that the factory had to work? Or that any useable shells had to be produced?
Quantumfreakonomics
14d ago
Runkle of the Bailey, Law and Lumber, Lawyer You Know.
Quantumfreakonomics
15d ago
He truly is the Socrates of our era.
"You'd agree, O Glaucon, that in determining the justice of a punishment we must look to the subjective mental state of the offender, and not meerly to the obejctive physical results of the crime."
"Certainly"
"And you'd agree as well that when man is weary of exhaustion, or ill of disease, or intoxicated of wine, that his subjective mental state is sometimes incapable of fully grasping the logical implications of action in that moment."
"Clearly"
"Surely then the ordeal of childbearing and childbirth, and the associated hormonal surges, and the contraindicated use of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, are of much more effect on the mind than a long night of work, or a stomachache, or a glass of wine?"
"That's it. I'm getting the hemlock."
Quantumfreakonomics
15d ago
I haven't been following this case, but a lot of trial streamers (who I don't peg as woman-power gender warriors) who have actually watched the whole thing seem to think that the prosecution is toast.
Quantumfreakonomics
15d ago
but I have also seen specialty teams flown in from Texas to handle that maintenance.
I think it's an open question whether or not the human capital to build and maintain advanced data centers exists in these rural areas. I have similar questions about the high-skilled immigration debate writ large. One can raise wages, but if the price elasticity of supply of talented workers isn't high enough, then there will still be a shortage
Apply the intermediate value theorem. If AI started 2026 much worse than human mathematicians, and (hypothetically) by the end of 2026 AI is much better than human mathematicians, then at some point in 2026 AI capabilities pass through the point at which they are useful but still need human mathematician assistance to reach their full potential.
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