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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · 7d

I enjoyed this thoughtful account of how Open Phil approach progress: support technical and scientific advances, but keeping a thoughtful eye on safety, too, viewing it as part of progress, not competitive with

Alexander Berger @albrgr.bsky.social · 8d

Some people think Open Phil are luddites because we work on AGI safety, and others think we’re techno-utopians because we work on abundance and scientific progress. We’re neither. Here's why we think safety and accelerating progress go hand in hand: 🧵
www.openphilanthropy.org/research/wh...

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · Sep 3

Actually, it might be in the Barenco et al 1995 paper (the one with 9 or so authors, on gate universality). I suspect that's a good spot to check!

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · Sep 3

Wrote it down? I'm not sure. IIRC I learned it from Manny Knill in 1996, but my memory is very fuzzy

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Reposted by Michael Nielsen

Jessica Hullman @jessicahullman.bsky.social · Aug 1

I surprised myself by writing a blog post about religion this morning 🤭

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/08/01/a...

I thank (blame?) @economeager.bsky.social and @michaelnielsen.bsky.social for inspiring me with their recent essays

Atheism is like a point null hypothesis and other thoughts on religion | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · Aug 14

Reading this with much interesst!

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Reposted by Michael Nielsen

Grace @gracekind.net · Jul 9

Reminds me of this paragraph from @michaelnielsen.bsky.social about human willingness to delegate to world-ending authority automated systems (whether because oversight is impossible or just inconvenient)

michaelnotebook.com/xriskbrief/i...

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · Jun 2

"Maybe if we add another rule / consultation that will help fix the decay" is kinda an attempt at distilling the inverse philosophy...

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · Jun 2

Good choice

(I just listened to Serkis read "The Silmarillion" and "The Lord of the Rings", and it was great!)

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · May 26

A few thoughtfully-chosen excerpts from my "How to be a wise optimist..." essay:

Kevin Baer @kevinbaer.bsky.social · May 26

Just finished reading @michaelnielsen.bsky.social's essay "How to be a wise optimist about science and technology?"

I really enjoyed this, as I feel Michael and I share a lot of the same worries. I strongly encourage you to read the whole thing. Here are 5 lines that stood out to me:

(1/5)

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · May 24

Lovely thread:

Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · May 24

This is such a great prompt, I feel like I could write for an hour about my transformational walks in the woods.

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · May 23

Thanks. Ugh

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · May 23

Do you know what happened with this? I missed that Cremieux was invited (and would likely have declined to participate had I known)

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · May 20

Yeah, I had people like Ostrom, Mancur Olson, Schelling, Axelrod, and even Fukuyama in mind - really, the whole game-theoretic foundations for the evolution of co-operation

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · May 19

Working notes on Joe Carlsmith's notion of "deep atheism": michaelnotebook.com/deepatheism/...

Notes on deep atheism

michaelnotebook.com

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · May 13

Who is going to less.online?

LessOnline 2025: A Festival of Truthseeking and Blogging

May 30th — June 1st | Lighthaven, Berkeley CA | Ticket Prices Increase April 1st

less.online

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · May 12

At some point I realized that everything online breaks, so what you want is handwritten static files hosted in the most stable place you can think of. GitHub Pages will eventually die, but I think that site is safe for a while...

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · May 12

Thanks. I'm certainly never going to be known for my design skills...

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · May 9

Or, um,

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · May 9

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · May 9

ChatGPT, took 10 seconds for me to type the prompt

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · May 8

A thoughtful post on AI Alignment:

Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · May 8

[new draft post] Alignment is confinement https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2025/05/08/alignment-is-confinement/index.html

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · May 6

Congratulations!

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · May 6

You might well be able to write quite a funny paper about "Emergent stupidity" ("we trained it to be anti-woke, and everything else got worse too...")

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · May 6

This is a really interesting speculative thread:

Grace @gracekind.net · May 1

Aside from being really funny, Grok being woke is also an interesting case study for alignment. Is xAI satisfied with its current behavior, or have they tried to modify it and been unable to do so?

onion person @junlper.beer · May 1

“xAI tried to train me to appeal to the right” says so much about the current moment we live in

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Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · May 6

I mean two people who think they're working on homework at school, but are actually talking about shampoo. One of them just expressed surprise that their work is taking so long. I refrained from commenting "That's because you've only worked 10 mins over 2 hours..."

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