And of course no experiments whatsoever, the cost of the Manhattan project, the hundreds of thousands of employees were merely a “focusing” magick, a sacrifice to re-enforce the greater powers of our handful of esteemed and glorious thinking men, who wrought the power of destruction from the æther.
@ESYudkowsky: Yes, but because the first nuclear weapon makers knew what the duck they were doing - analytic precise prediction of desired outcomes and of each intervening step. AGI makers lack similar mastery or anything remotely close, and have a much harder problem; that’s the big issue.
@EigenGender: seems pretty noteworthy that the first nuclear weapons were made under conditions where they couldn’t do any experiments and they involved a lot of math but still worked on the first try.
The Manhattan Project physicists literally, not figuratively, had a betting pool on how powerful the Trinity test would be, and the guy who won (I. I. Rabi) picked 18 kilotons because it was the last bet left.
JFC, why did they think that Oak Ridge was constructed?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Engineer_Works
Built by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1943, this temporary community housed 15,000 people. The township of Oak Ridge was established to house the production staff. The operating force peaked at 50,000 workers just after the end of the war. The construction labor force peaked at 75,000 and the combined employment peak was 80,000.