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It's a relief to one's ego, but perhaps a little unsettling, to realize that high level geniuses are often very bad at reasoning about politics.
Von Neumann wanted to pre-emptively nuke the Soviets.
Einstein wrote an essay in favor of Socialism. In 1949.
Kennedy's "best and brightest", such as McGeorge Bundy, got the U.S. embroiled in Vietnam.
The world is so complicated that even the most intelligent people fail to model it correctly. Extreme intelligence may just represent a better layer of bullshit. Your genius is a tool to defend the beliefs which the reptile part of your brain already decided.
When it comes to politics, humility and intellectual honesty are more important than a genius level IQ. While Leopold Aschenbrenner probably has me beat by at least 1 standard deviation, there's a good chance he will look back on his youthful beliefs and cringe, much as I do mine.
I don't like people using JVN's stance on pre-emptively striking the Soviets to dunk on him. People who were close to the action in the cold war have said they thought there was a 1/3-1/2 chance of nuclear use during the conflict.
It would be pretty easy to use nuke's in a limited manner as a warning to force a surrender. You could tell them what cities were going to be hit in advance to evacuate them or even do it in an unpopulated area so they can see the damage level and extrapolate from there. Half a dozen such strikes could have done it.
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What specifically does he get wrong? What he's asking for is 'lock down all AI labs so they don't leak to China' and 'centralize all AI research under a new Manhattan Project', not to attack anyone unless they look like they're close to pulling ahead.
If AI is super powerful, then logically it becomes super valuable to the big powers. The core of his argument seems pretty sound, provided we accept the technical aspects.
The primary counterarguments I can think of are:
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