I don't normally watch TV news at all, so that wasn't an option. But when it did happen, I was appalled. That CBS did end up about two weeks later somewhat agreeing that they were forgeries. But even then, they did a pretty bad job there, essentially just saying they could not prove they were authentic, when they were in fact obvious forgeries. However, many of the people involved with that debacle did get fired. As far as I'm aware, no one involved in that has been involved with CBS for over a decade. I also did specifically avoid anything with Dan Rather for a long time given that I found his behavior surrounding the whole thing to be so terrible.

It isn't our decision to insert partisan politics in. Ellison's decisions with CBS, which is part of the same corporation did that. If he happened to give money to a candidate I disagreed with it might be different.

My spouse and I greatly enjoyed Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and consider it to be one of the best Star Trek shows ever done. But we didn't renew our Paramount subscription to watch it. This was due to Paramount and Ellison turning CBS news into Trump's mouthpiece, and doing things like spike Sixty Minutes episodes which were critical of Trump's deportations and only aired after it had essentially been accidentally leaked online, months after it was supposed to run https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/cbs-airs-60-minutes-report-on-trump-deportations-that-was-suddenly-pulled-a-month-ago. The real final straw for us was when Paramount became the only channel to watch Trump's MMA event in front of the White House.

As I discussed with my spouse, I could imagine a Star Trek episode involving a world where there was a terrible media corporation and people kept supporting it despite the evil it did because it had their regular entertainment. And then, I could see what Captain Pike would have said to those people in some speech asking if that's really worth it? So, what would Captain Pike have me do? I guess in the actual ethos of Star Trek, a show which cares about progress, and diversity, and accepting people of all sorts, and standing for democracy and freedom against oppressors wherever they are, we will not give money to Paramount under its current leadership. And given Ellison's new threats, it seems like that decision was even more justified.

Yes. Monitoring radio channels constantly is something that most civilian boats just don't do. 16 VHF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_16_VHF is the standard emergency line and Coast Guard and similar keep monitoring it, but a lot of people don't. I've sailed a fair bit (although on a much smaller boat, generally a 27 foot sailboat), and I'm utterly unsurprised to find out a large yacht would not have been monitoring 16 or any other distress channel.

The fundamental problem is the same both examples. "Should be" is doing a lot of work, and as the systems improve, the ability for something to go badly wrong because one human wasn't paying attention goes up. Or worse, an AI deliberately conceals part of its course of action from the human, which we've already seen happen.

What? No. That's ridiculous. That an AI takes as a default going to do this, and is even capable of doing this underscores exactly how these systems can be a problem. If this a reasonable course of action for the AI, then we have some serious problems. What's the next step:

Person: AI, I don't want to go to Cathy's party. Her friends are so boring and I'm exhausted. Find me an excuse.

AI: I've caused a nuclear reactor melt down at the nearby reactor. Now the party won't happen because the whole region is being evacuated.

Systems which when given a goal will go out of their way to achieve that goal are exactly the sort of thing that people were concerned about a decade ago when discussing things like the Paperclip maximizer hypothetical. And people like Yudkowsky were mocked for discussing it then. Now it is happening and we're told that well, of course that's the idea would do, this is just over-hyped clickbait? Seriously?

Or, an alternative, they are genuinely concerned and are trying to balance their own financial incentives (which would be to rush out the models quickly) with the actual danger. If you prefer, look at what happened with Kimi. That model was open-weights, and a security firm testing it ended up with (in part due to their own sloppiness), a similar sort of containment breach to what Anthropic and OpenAI have reported https://www.wired.com/story/moonshot-kimi-k3-ai-model-escape-sandbox/. So that's an open model being reported to do the same thing by an independent security group with no incentive to lie. So one should take it seriously in their case. And if it is real for Kimi which is almost certainly weaker than any model being currently built/evaluated by Anthropic or OpenAI, that should cause you to take their own concerns about these new models more seriously also.

I suggest you go and read the link. It discusses why Occam's razor is a reasonable rule and also why it does not in fact put personal deities as a simple hypothesis when done correctly although it uses "witch" as the same type of category. In essence, some things like "witch" or "god" are types of items that feel very simple to human minds, but really aren't when you try to describe them precisely.

This is not accurate. Occam's razor has multiple forms that are carefully and don't run into the issue you have. See for example here https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f4txACqDWithRi7hs/occam-s-razor for an introduction to some of the relevant ideas.

Dyson spheres, Dyson swarms, and similar objects all have a lot of advantages. In the same way, we don't live in houses made of sticks and stones because our current houses have advantages.

If you want to harness a lot of energy, or you want a really big civilization where everyone can talk with each other, then a Dyson sphere is better. If you spread out to multiple star systems, you have to wait for years between contact. It seems likely that a sufficiently advanced civilization would try both. And the white dwarf Dyson swarms would require much less material, engineering work, etc (probably orders of magnitude less).

That's a neat and plausible idea. And if that's the case, then the concerns I raised don't really fall out at all.

This is a good reason to suspect that asteroids are more common on worlds with life. But 65 million years, and millions of years before that show it just isn't that common. For a natural disaster to be the Great Filter it would need to be happening every few hundred years.

Because there's a substantial fraction of them, and the AI community, that are genuinely concerned. There's a lot of conflicting incentives here.

Also, a followup note: We've now seen an open-weight Chinese model do nearly the same thing https://www.wired.com/story/moonshot-kimi-k3-ai-model-escape-sandbox/ and this was seen by independent security researchers who have no reason to lie. So we have at least one case where this has happened where there's no incentive to claim it happened when it didn't.