The most likely person to write On the Edge was Nate Silver.

Grok thinks the next most likely was Michael Lewis, followed by a number of other writers of popular books regarding people thinking different.

I see why Grok would say that, but it is wrong.

The next most likely person was Zvi Mowshowitz.

I haven’t written a book for this type of audience, a kind of smarter business-book, but that seems eminently within my potential range.

On the Edge is a book about those living On The Edge, the collection of people who take risk and think probabilistically and about expected value. It centrally covers poker, sports betting, casinos, Silicon Valley, venture capital, Sam Bankman-Fried, effective altruism, AI and existential risk.

Collectively, Nate Silver calls this cultural orientation The River.

It is contrasted with The Village, which comprises roughly the mainstream [...]

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Outline:

(02:53) Overview

(07:56) Introduction: The River

(14:21) Nate Silver Comes Home to The River

(18:29) Nate (In General) Makes One Critical Mistake

(18:57) The Village Idiots

(22:22) Alone in the Wilderness

(25:46) Why the River Hates the Village

(29:57) Nate Silver's History of River Versus Village

(38:46) Spending Time at Airports

(41:14) The Coin Flip

(42:15) The Other Risk Takers

(49:45) Aside on Covid

(50:46) What is a Contrarian?

(53:49) Prediction Market Smackdown

(56:53) Checkpoint One

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I’d split the latest housing roundup into local versus global questions. I was planning on waiting a bit between them.

Then Joe Biden decided to propose a version of the worst possible thing.

So I guess here we are.

What is the organizing principle of Bidenomics?

Restrict Supply and Subsidize Demand (1)

This was the old counterproductive Biden proposal:

Unusual Whales: Biden to propose $5,000 credit for first-time home buyers, per WaPo.

The Rich: House prices about to go up $5,000 everywhere.

Under current conditions this is almost a pure regressive tax, a transfer from those too poor to own a home to those who can afford to buy one, or who previously owned one and no longer do.

If there were no restrictions on the supply of housing, such that the price of a house equalled the cost of [...]

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Outline:

(00:24) Restrict Supply and Subsidize Demand (1)

(08:55) Restrict Supply and Subsidize Demand (2): Rent Control

(16:57) You Should See the Other Guy

(21:18) Stop Restricting Supply

(23:21) All Supply is Good Supply

(26:53) ‘Inclusionary’ Zoning

(28:37) The Worst Take

(33:27) Where and With Whom People Want To Live

(36:44) Matching

(39:58) Universality

(41:42) The Value of Land

(43:52) The Doom Loop

(51:05) How Are Sale Prices So Out of Whack with Rents and Income?

(52:18) Questioning Superstar Status

(54:47) Window Shopping

(58:18) Minimum Viable Product

(01:00:53) Construction Costs

(01:02:57) Elevator Action

(01:11:09) Housing Theory of Everything

(01:13:07) Zoning By Prohibitive Permit

(01:14:55) YIGBY?

(01:15:24) The True NIMBY

(01:16:45) The Definition of Chutzpah

(01:18:23) In Other Housing News

(01:18:53) Rhetoric

(01:21:33) Environmentalists Should Favor Density

(01:23:03) Do Not Give the People What They Want

(01:26:05) Housing Construction in the UK

(01:27:25) The Funniest Possible Thing

(01:29:07) Other Funny Things

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The big news of the week was of course OpenAI releasing their new model o1. If you read one post this week, read that one. Everything else is a relative sideshow.

Meanwhile, we await Newsom's decision on SB 1047. The smart money was always that Gavin Newsom would make us wait before offering his verdict on SB 1047. It's a big decision. Don’t rush him. In the meantime, what hints he has offered suggest he's buying into some of the anti-1047 talking points. I’m offering a letter to him here based on his comments, if you have any way to help convince him now would be the time to use that. But mostly, it's up to him now.

Table of Contents

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Outline:

(00:49) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(02:11) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility

(03:34) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(05:59) They Took Our Jobs

(07:34) Get Involved

(08:09) Introducing

(10:11) In Other AI News

(13:20) Quiet Speculations

(15:15) Intelligent Design

(19:15) SB 1047: The Governor Ponders

(27:13) Letter to Newsom

(31:36) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(34:19) Rhetorical Innovation

(42:13) Claude Writes Short Stories

(45:54) Questions of Sentience

(48:22) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(49:56) The Lighter Side

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It's that time again for all the sufficiently interesting news that isn’t otherwise fit to print, also known as the Monthly Roundup.

Bad News

Beware the failure mode in strategy and decisions that implicitly assumes competence, or wishes away difficulties, and remember to reverse all advice you hear.

Stefan Schubert (quoting Tyler Cowen on raising people's ambitions often being very high value): I think lowering others’ aspirations can also be high-return. I know of people who would have had a better life by now if someone could have persuaded them to pursue more realistic plans.

Rob Miles: There's a specific failure mode which I don’t have a name for, which is similar to “be too ambitious” but is closer to “have an unrealistic plan”. The illustrative example I use is:

Suppose by some strange circumstance you have to represent your country at olympic gymnastics [...]

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Outline:

(00:14) Bad News

(03:45) Anti-Social Media

(07:20) Technology Advances

(08:56) High Seas Piracy is Bad

(12:17) The Michelin Curse

(15:21) What's the Rush?

(17:48) Good News, Everyone

(19:49) Let it Go

(22:09) Yay Air Conditioning

(23:27) Beast of a Memo

(36:58) For Science!

(37:18) For Your Entertainment

(39:47) Properly Rated

(45:26) Government Working

(49:21) Grapefruit Diet

(58:38) Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game

(01:06:09) Gamers Winning At Life

(01:10:52) I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars

(01:11:21) While I Cannot Condone This

(01:17:21) Nostalgia

(01:23:51) The Lighter Side

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Terrible name (with a terrible reason, that this ‘resets the counter’ on AI capability to 1, and ‘o’ as in OpenAI when they previously used o for Omni, very confusing). Impressive new capabilities in many ways. Less impressive in many others, at least relative to its hype.

Clearly this is an important capabilities improvement. However, it is not a 5-level model, and in important senses the ‘raw G’ underlying the system hasn’t improved.

GPT-o1 seems to get its new capabilities by taking (effectively) GPT-4o, and then using extensive Chain of Thought (CoT) and quite a lot of tokens. Thus that unlocks (a lot of) what that can unlock. We did not previously know how to usefully do that. Now we do. It gets much better at formal logic and reasoning, things in the ‘system 2’ bucket. That matters a lot for many tasks, if not as much [...]

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Outline:

(01:26) Introducing GPT-o1

(05:05) Evals

(07:55) Chain of Thought

(08:57) Coding

(11:08) Human Preference Evaluation

(11:37) What Is It?

(20:24) Doing Math Without Terrance Tao

(25:02) Doing Real Math with Terence Tao

(30:04) Positive Examples

(38:51) Skeptical Reactions

(42:32) Report from Janus World

(45:30) Same Old Silly Examples

(53:47) Latency

(55:14) Paths Forward Unrelated to Safety

(59:17) Safety Last

(01:07:06) Deception

(01:10:50) External Red Teaming

(01:11:23) Apollo's Red Teaming Finds Deceptive Alignment

(01:22:17) Preparedness Testing Finds Reward Hacking

(01:26:43) METR's Red Teaming

(01:29:52) What Are the Safety and Policy Implications?

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Following up on Alpha Fold, DeepMind has moved on to Alpha Proteo. We also got a rather simple prompt that can create a remarkably not-bad superforecaster for at least some classes of medium term events.

We did not get a new best open model, because that turned out to be a scam. And we don’t have Apple Intelligence, because it isn’t ready for prime time. We also got only one very brief mention of AI in the debate I felt compelled to watch.

What about all the apps out there, that we haven’t even tried? It's always weird to get lists of ‘top 50 AI websites and apps’ and notice you haven’t even heard of most of them.

Table of Contents

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Outline:

(00:44) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(03:40) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility

(05:43) Predictions are Hard Especially About the Future

(12:57) Early Apple Intelligence

(15:27) On Reflection It's a Scam

(21:34) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(23:08) They Took Our Jobs

(28:42) The Time 100 People in AI

(32:11) The Art of the Jailbreak

(32:47) Get Involved

(33:12) Alpha Proteo

(43:14) Introducing

(44:23) In Other AI News

(46:41) Quiet Speculations

(50:40) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(53:12) The Week in Audio

(54:28) Rhetorical Innovation

(55:48) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(56:05) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(58:38) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(59:56) Six Boats and a Helicopter

(01:06:47) The Lighter Side

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(This was supposed to be on Thursday but I forgot to cross-post)

Will AI ever make art? Fully do your coding? Take all the jobs? Kill all the humans?

Most of the time, the question comes down to a general disagreement about AI capabilities. How high on a ‘technological richter scale’ will AI go? If you feel the AGI and think capabilities will greatly improve, then AI will also be able to do any particular other thing, and arguments that it cannot are almost always extremely poor. However, if frontier AI capabilities level off soon, then it is an open question how far we can get that to go in practice.

A lot of frustration comes from people implicitly making the claim that general AI capabilities will level off soon, usually without noticing they are doing that. At its most extreme, this is treating AI as [...]

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Outline:

(01:53) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(03:05) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility

(04:03) Fun with Image Generation

(06:14) Copyright Confrontation

(07:09) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(12:09) They Took Our Jobs

(13:46) Time of the Season

(16:53) Get Involved

(17:15) Introducing

(19:08) In Other AI News

(19:51) Quiet Speculations

(30:10) A Matter of Antitrust

(37:34) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(40:06) The Week in Audio

(47:40) Rhetorical Innovation

(53:09) The Cosmos Institute

(56:21) The Alignment Checklist

(01:00:34) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:02:39) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:06:21) Five Boats and a Helicopter

(01:09:07) Pick Up the Phone

(01:12:58) The Lighter Side

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I am posting this now largely because it is the right place to get in discussion of unrealized capital gains taxes and other campaign proposals, but also there is always plenty of other stuff going on. As always, remember that there are plenty of really stupid proposals always coming from all sides. I’m not spending as much time talking about why it's awful to for example impose gigantic tariffs on everything, because if you are reading this I presume you already know.

The Biggest Economics Problem

The problem, perhaps, in a nutshell:

Tess: like 10% of people understand how markets work and about 10% deeply desire and believe in a future that's drastically better than the present but you need both of these to do anything useful and they’re extremely anticorrelated so we’re probably all fucked.

In my world the two are correlated. If you [...]

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Outline:

(00:31) The Biggest Economics Problem

(02:30) No Good Very Bad Capital Gains Tax Proposals

(14:13) Hot Tip

(17:11) Gouging at the Grocer

(20:08) Noncompetes Nonenforcement Cannot Compete With Courts

(20:42) We Used to Be Poor

(25:13) Everywhere But in the Productivity Statistics

(26:32) They Don’t Make ‘Em Like They Used To

(30:29) Disclosure of Wages Causes Lower Wages

(32:30) In Other Economic News

(36:50) The Efficient Market Hypothesis is (Even More) False

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The original text contained 7 images which were described by AI.

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The Technological Richter scale is introduced about 80% of the way through Nate Silver's new book On the Edge.

A full review is in the works (note to prediction markets: this post alone does NOT on its own count as a review, but this counts as part of a future review), but this concept seems highly useful, stands on its own and I want a reference post for it. Nate skips around his chapter titles and timelines, so why not do the same here?

Defining the Scale

Nate Silver, On the Edge (location 8,088 on Kindle): The Richter scale was created by the physicist Charles Richter in 1935 to quantify the amount of energy released by earthquakes.

It has two key features that I’ll borrow for my Technological Richter Scale (TRS). First, it is logarithmic. A magnitude 7 earthquake is actually ten times more powerful [...]

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Outline:

(00:32) Defining the Scale

(07:15) The Big Disagreement About Future Generative AI

(09:39) Just Think of the Potential

(11:06) A Perfect 10

(13:19) Some Arguments Against Transformational AI

(19:06) Brief Notes on Arguments Transformational AI Will Turn Out Fine

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