“Epistemics and Coordination: It’s complicated!” by Raymond Douglas

Money is pouring in, people are looking for new areas to fund, and the invisible hand is starting to grab a bit at AI for epistemics and coordination (AIFEC hereafter). It also got invoked in AI2040 as a potential part of the wining strategy.

My feelings here are mixed — I think the best version of AIFEC is great, but also the existing public writeups are only a few cycles deep on tracing out the different ways that the obvious plan backfires. And regrettably I think some people have correctly written off AIFEC because what they have read appears a bit naive to them. In my heart I always planned to do a proper writeup of my thoughts when things were a bit less busy, but, well, now we’re in the 100x funding era. So here's my scrappy, hopefully-better-than-nothing attempt.

The six big claims:

• AIFEC could be great! It's a tractable way to do good on the margin, and the best version is a legitimate theory of victory
• It could also easily backfire, especially for implementations that depend on scaling with inference
• “Better epistemics” is often more hostile than it seems, and people have good reasons to be [...]

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Outline:

(01:47) The basic case is pretty good!

(04:04) Problem 1: Naive AIFEC could easily backfire

(05:09) Problem 2: "Better AIFEC" can be a somewhat hostile move

(07:55) Problem 3: Vagueness lets you ignore tradeoffs

(09:54) Problem 4: Sometimes people just don't get along

(11:47) But overall, I am still pro

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:
July 21st, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5nP5WY2PzsYiegDzQ/epistemics-and-coordination-it-s-complicated

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.