High-variance. Most people seem to have created an account and then gone back to being mostly on (eX)twitter. However, there are some quite active accounts. I'm not the best to ask this question to, since I'm not that active either. Still, having the bluesky account post as a mirror of the twitter acccount maybe isn't hard to set up?

Do you actually have the skills to be competitive as a data scientist in a tech startup (or in some other role?), or would you need to get a few years of training and then complete alongside fresh grads?

This is a crux.

Another factor to consider is that junior software engineering roles seem to be getting more competitive. I'm not sure how much of this is attributable to macroeconomic cycle stuff vs AI automation reducing demand vs increasing supply of people qualified for these jobs.

EA Forum feature request: Can we get a bluesky profile link button for profile pages?

General-purpose and agentic systems are inevitably going to outcompete other systems

There's some of this: see this Gwern post for the classic argument.

People are trying to do this, and I just haven't noticed

LLMs seem by default less agentic than the previous end-to-end RL paradigm. Maybe the rise of LLMs was an exercise in deliberate differential technological development. I'm not sure about this, it is personal speculation.

Left-progressive online people seem to be consolidating on an anti-AI position; but mostly derived from resistance to the presumed economic impacts from AI art, badness-by-association inherited from the big tech / tech billionaires / 'techbro' cluster, and on the academic side from concern about algorithmic bias and the like. However, they seem to be failing at extrapolation. "AI bad" gets misgeneralized into skepticism about current and future AI capabilities.

Left-marxist people seem to be thinking a bit more clearly about this (ie extrapolating, applying any economic model at all, looking a bit into the tech). See an example here, or a summary (EDIT 2025-02-08: of the same example piece) here. However, the labs are based in the US, a country where associating with marxists is a very bad idea if you want your policies to get implemented.

These two leftist stances are mostly orthogonal to concerns about AI x-risk and catastrophic misuse. However, a lot of activists believe that the public's attention is zero-sum. I suspect that is the main reason coalition-building with the preceding two groups has not happened much. However, I think it is still possible.

About the American right: some actors have largely succeeded in marrying China-hawkism with AI-boosterism. I expect this association to be very sticky, but it may be counteracted by reactionary impulses coming from spooked cultural conservatives.

Weird off-the-cuff question but maybe intentionally inducing something like experimenter demand effects would be a worthwhile intervention? After figuring out a way of not making recipients feel cheated or patronized, of course.

Probably not, or to a much lesser extent.

I would expect those to be the same person if AI turns out to not be a huge deal, which for me is about 25% of futures.

While I agree that strong founder effects are likely to apply if SpaceX and/or NASA succeed in establishing a Mars colony, I expect that colony to be Earth-dependent for decades, and to be quite vulnerable to being superseded by other actors.

To put my model in more concrete terms: I expect whoever controls cislunar space in 2050 to have more potential for causal influence over the state of Mars in 2100 than whoever has put more people on Mars by 2040.

I think it would be a major win for animal welfare if the plant-based foods industry could transition soy-based products to low-isoflavone and execute a successful marketing campaign to quell concerns about phytoestrogens (without denigrating higher-isoflavone soy products).

I think it would be really hard (maybe even practically impossible) to market isoflavone-reduced products without hurting demand for non-isoflavone-reduced products as a side effect. 

If the plant-based food industry started producing and marketing isoflavone-reduced soy products, I am quite confident that it would counterfactually lower total demand for soy products in the short term, and I am very uncertain about the sign of impact over the long term.