Joe Carlsmith

Article

Joe Carlsmith is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 23, 2022 and February 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “another OpenPhil analyst, Joe Carlsmith, finished a report on this a few months prior”; “Joe Carlsmith’s commentary on C.S. Lewis’ Abolition Of Man”. It most often appears alongside @BoyanSlat, @eigenrobot, @JackTindale.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: February 23, 2022
  • Last seen: February 29, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

February 23, 2022 · Original source
Step one - figuring out how much computation the human brain does - is a daunting task. A successful solution would look like a number of FLOP/S (floating point operations per second), a basic unit of computation in digital computers. Luckily for Ajeya and for us, another OpenPhil analyst, Joe Carlsmith, finished a report on this a few months prior. It concluded the brain probably uses 10^13 - 10^17 FLOP/S. Why? Partly because this was the number given by most experts. But also, there are about 10^15 synapses in the brain, each one spikes about once per second, and a synaptic spike probably does about one FLOP of computation.
February 29, 2024 · Original source
28: Joe Carlsmith’s commentary on C.S. Lewis’ Abolition Of Man, with an EA and AI alignment bent.