The AFFINE Superintelligence Alignment Seminar – A Retrospective

A Day at AFFINE[1]“AFFINE was the best month of intellectual exploration I have had the opportunity to engage in, ever. Usually opportunities like this are limited to a day or a weekend, which both limits depth, forces a sprint-type mindset, and generally is quite limiting. At AFFINE I had time to wander towards and through interesting ideas.”-Xylix (participant)You wake up in an ornate room shared with a few other participants to the smell of breakfast, or perhaps you have been up for a while, reading or going on a morning run. You grab what you want from the buffet and head to the common room which is slowly filling up and fragmenting into conversations of various sizes and scopes. Zipf distributions came up yesterday and the knowledge applies. Sunlight filters in through the embroidered curtains as you join a group talking about the self organized criticality of brains and why it is necessary. The people one couch over are designing an experiment to settle their bet about whether Claude Code charges token-use for cached reads. Off-handedly you pitch a talk you want to give on the unconference day tomorrow, and the group seems generally interested. A fellow participant wants to work with you on it and you happily agree.During the day you attend a talk by Ihor Kendiukhov about problems with expected utility theory, followed by a remote presentation by Abram Demski, taxonomizing Goodhart’s law. You ask a question about quantilizers and check the app to see whether anyone wants to explain geometric rationality to you. Turns out yes! You schedule a session for tomorrow before heading outside for a few games of volleyball while your default mode network processes the information. You grab one of the mentors for a 1on1 about research methodology, before dinner is served.Originally you wanted to read a couple of papers but instead you get roped into an argument about active inference and embeddedness when you carelessly walk past a whiteboard. The evening is spent playin