#epistemic

Visualizing the Difficulty of AI Alignment

Epistemic status: Low, but I hope to be wrong in interesting ways As a non-computer scientist-scientist [1] I find it hard to think about the varying perspectives on Artificial Intelligence alignment difficulty. To make this more intuitive I invoke the 3D surface of a fitness landscape like structure as a visual representation. [2] The AI Safety Landscape AI safety is thought to be largely pre-paradigmatic, although of the current views AI safety perspectives there are noticeable camps, and within each there is wide variation. It is also rapidly evolving as more information comes out about the

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Show HN: Epistemic News – re-ranking HN comments

HN Comment sanity. Vibe-coded with Gemini Carbon experimenting with techniques from the 'Scaling Discovery Requires Forgetting' paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20563 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50497248 Points: 1 # Comments: 0

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Don't Burn the Boats for Slower Worlds

[Epistemic Status: Fairly confident that this is a problem, low confidence on what to do about it] TL;DR: Updates towards short timelines based on METR's November 2026 report on AI R&D acceleration at Anthropic are rational, but based on limited public evidence. If things take longer than currently expected, the appearance of consensus in the AI safety community will likely be used by skeptics to (attempt to) discredit AI safety and justify unsafe policy. If timelines are off by only a few years, this discrediting will come right before the intelligence explosion actually happens. Because a la

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Epistemic Sudden Death

When sports go into overtime, they sometimes use "sudden death" format. Instead of gaining points incrementally, the next person to score instantly wins and the other guy instantly loses. "Epistemic Sudden Death" is when you've been accumulating some evidence or orienting to a situation, and now, you find yourself in a situation where you could gain decisive evidence about what world you're in at any time. You don't expect intermediate observations between the current state, and whatever it is you're expecting. In the case of AI, when you meet those observations, you also might suddenly [1] di

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Progress and Cons

Epistemic status: Reflections on ProgressCon 2026, written up over the following weeks. Quotes are reconstructed from memory. Artistic license taken. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow . – Ecclesiastes 1:18 “I’m sure you’ve all heard about the math stuff that OpenAI released earlier this week.” It is Thursday, October 8, 2026, and the CEO of a bio lab automation startup is giving us a tour of their San Francisco office. “Raise your hand if you think that’s a good thing.” A dozen hands shoot up out of thirty visitors. Along with ten more, my arm

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The Missing Product Layers in AI Safety

Epistemic Status: We’re highly confident in how the larger tech industry defines roles, makes decisions and builds products based on our years of experience in it. We’re fairly confident in the frontier labs operational models based on their job postings. Our suggestions for what to build and how to have gone through some pressure testing, and confidence could be raised through discussion with leaders in AI Safety to further understand what makes this space unique. Intro Frontier labs have adopted proven methodologies from tech to build their capabilities using matrixed organizations, includin

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