Author Archives: meefburger

Everyone in my social group is suddenly arguing about the risk associated with long term complications from covid. I don’t really get why it’s happening now. We knew omicron was coming and almost all of the evidence people are citing is at least a couple months old. But here we are. Prevalence of symptoms Al-Aly,Continue reading “My thoughts on long covid”

Consider the following disagreements: Alice believes it is wrong to restrict immigration into the US because many people would be better off being able to live there, and it would not economically harm anyone else. Bob thinks it is bad to allow unfettered immigration because it would hurt the livelihoods of hard-working Americans. Alice accusesContinue reading “The importance of not rounding off disagreements to moral failings”

Someone on a dating app recently asked me what the “journey of causal events” is that leads to human extinction via AI. This is a very reasonable question. I get asked questions of this sort all the time, though usually in a way that is less directly concrete. It also happens to be exactly theContinue reading “The case for AI as an existential threat”

[content warning: dispassionate discussion of serious topics] One of the more common uses for social media is reaching a consensus on who is a terrible person. Oftentimes, the way this is done is that Alice quotes Bob as saying something terrible, so that everyone else can notice Bob said something terrible, become outraged, update theirContinue reading “The mundanity of terrible beliefs”

Several years ago when I was in grad school, my friend who helped me start a secular humanism club on campus told me that I had been too mean for too long in our club meetings and then basically said that it was better if I just not go to them, at least for aContinue reading “Social feedback loops, not one-shot enforcement”

In the AI-risk community, people seem to spend a lot of time talking about the details of how things might go badly. This is a good thing. Discussing details helps us think about how big of a risk we are facing and how to mitigate it, and I sometimes find that people have substantial differencesContinue reading “You do not always need the details to be worried”

My parents recently told me about a conflict between their neighbors. The neighbors across the street have a dog that spends a lot of time outside in the yard, including when they are gone all day at work. Whenever the owners left, the dog would bark all day, which was annoying for nearby households andContinue reading “The curse of knowledge as a source of conflict”

Alice is an hour into her three hour flight and she has to pee. The seat belt light is on, and the flight crew has made an announcement reminding everyone that they are not to leave their seats. In spite of this, several passengers have left their seats to use the lavatory in the pastContinue reading “Against rules that are not intended to be followed”

Most blogs are not worth reading, and I have little reason to expect mine to be different. This does not feel like a negative sentiment to me. The world is full of engaging, insightful, beautiful writing, much of which is found on personal blogs, and only half of which is found on slatestarcodex.com. There isContinue reading “I don’t really want a blog, but I’m writing one anyway”