David Duvenaud

So there's a bunch of interesting technical problems here, and I am a technical person, and that's like...

actually might be greatest fear is that I just end up nerd sniping myself and spending time on like fun technical problems instead of the problems that matter.

Exactly.

Oh, absolutely.

I mean, I think everyone agrees that sort of going forward, history is just happening faster.

And the difficulty of predicting it is just going to be harder.

And I guess one thing to say is that some things are sort of like anti-inductive, like market prices.

And it's sort of a fool's errand to try to build this market predictor.

And the finance people are already incentivized to predict prices somewhat a ways out.

And then we might hope that there's some important aspects of future history that are not so anti-inductive and that are easier to get a handle on.

And I think this backtesting is going to at least help us calibrate which parts of the predictions should we be more confident in versus we think they're actually very hard to predict.

yeah, it's going to help us act earlier and it's going to help us take costlier actions.

So like, you know, again, like no one should take on my word for it, like do some really costly thing, especially if it involves again, attacking the liberalism, which is like the source of like the lifeblood of everything good right now.

And so if I was a politician though, that happened to feel like, um,

it was important to do some costly coordination.

It's going to be much more feasible if I have this sort of neutral third party, these LLMs that everyone uses and agrees are the most sensible thing we have.

It's like the LLMs say, if we don't coordinate, this bad thing's going to happen.

Email Alec, email me.

It's one of these things where it's a very amateur hour sort of thing, and I think there should be a whole bunch of separate efforts here.

Maybe we can pool effort on the data cleaning, for instance.