LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pDzdb4smpzT3Lwbym/my-model-of-ea-burnout (Probably somebody else has said most of this. But I personally haven't read it, and felt like writing it down myself, so here we go.) I think that EA [editor note: "Effective Altruism"] burnout usually results from prolonged dedication to satisfying the values you think you should have, while neglecting the va...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PCrTQDbciG4oLgmQ5/sapir-whorf-for-rationalists Casus Belli: As I was scanning over my (rather long) list of essays-to-write, I realized that roughly a fifth of them were of the form "here's a useful standalone concept I'd like to reify," à la cup-stacking skills , fabricated options , split and commit , and sazen .  Some notable entries on that l...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Xo7qmDakxiizG7B9c/the-social-recession-by-the-numbers This is a linkpost for https://novum.substack.com/p/social-recession-by-the-numbers Fewer friends, relationships on the decline, delayed adulthood, trust at an all-time low, and many diseases of despair. The prognosis is not great. One of the most discussed topics online recently has been friendships and loneline...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pHfPvb4JMhGDr4B7n/recursive-middle-manager-hell I think Zvi's Immoral Mazes sequence is really important, but comes with more worldview-assumptions than are necessary to make the points actionable. I conceptualize Zvi as arguing for multiple hypotheses. In this post I want to articulate one sub-hypothesis, which I call "Recursive Middle Manager Hell"....

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/L4anhrxjv8j2yRKKp/how-discovering-latent-knowledge-in-language-models-without Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum . May contain more technical jargon than usual. Introduction A few collaborators and I recently released a new paper: Discovering Latent Knowledge in Language Models Without Supervision . For a quick summary of our paper, you can check out this Twitt...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TWorNr22hhYegE4RT/models-don-t-get-reward Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum . May contain more technical jargon than usual. In terms of content, this has a lot of overlap with Reward is not the optimization target . I'm basically rewriting a part of that post in language I personally find clearer, emphasising what I think is the core insight When thinking...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mfPHTWsFhzmcXw8ta/the-feeling-of-idea-scarcity Here’s a story you may recognize. There's a bright up-and-coming young person - let's call her Alice. Alice has a cool idea. It seems like maybe an important idea, a big idea, an idea which might matter. A new and valuable idea. It’s the first time Alice has come up with a high-potential idea herself, somethin...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qRtD4WqKRYEtT5pi3/the-next-decades-might-be-wild Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum . May contain more technical jargon than usual. I’d like to thank Simon Grimm and Tamay Besiroglu for feedback and discussions. This post is inspired by What 2026 looks like and an AI vignette workshop guided by Tamay Besiroglu. I think of this post as “what would I expect the w...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SqjQFhn5KTarfW8v7/lessons-learned-from-talking-to-greater-than-100-academics Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum . May contain more technical jargon than usual. I’d like to thank MH, Jaime Sevilla and Tamay Besiroglu for their feedback. During my Master's and Ph. D. (still ongoing), I have spoken with many academics about AI safety. These conversations incl...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6LzKRP88mhL9NKNrS/how-my-team-at-lightcone-sometimes-gets-stuff-done Disclaimer: I originally wrote this as a private doc for the Lightcone team. I then showed it to John and he said he would pay me to post it here. That sounded awfully compelling. However, I wanted to note that I’m an early founder who hasn't built anything truly great yet. I’m writing this do...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rP66bz34crvDudzcJ/decision-theory-does-not-imply-that-we-get-to-have-nice Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum . May contain more technical jargon than usual. ( Note: I wrote this with editing help from Rob and Eliezer. Eliezer's responsible for a few of the paragraphs. ) A common confusion I see in the tiny fragment of the world that knows about logical dec...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6Xgy6CAf2jqHhynHL/what-2026-looks-like#2022 Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum . May contain more technical jargon than usual. This was written for the Vignettes Workshop . [1] The goal is to write out a detailed future history (“trajectory”) that is as realistic (to me) as I can currently manage, i.e. I’m not aware of any alternative trajectory that is similar...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/REA49tL5jsh69X3aM/introduction-to-abstract-entropy#fnrefpi8b39u5hd7 This post, and much of the following sequence, was greatly aided by feedback from the following people (among others): Lawrence Chan , Joanna Morningstar , John Wentworth , Samira Nedungadi , Aysja Johnson , Cody Wild , Jeremy Gillen , Ryan Kidd , Justis Mills and Jonathan Mustin . Illustrations by...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8vesjeKybhRggaEpT/consider-your-appetite-for-disagreements Poker There was a time about five years ago where I was trying to get good at poker. If you want to get good at poker, one thing you have to do is review hands. Preferably with other people. For example, suppose you have ace king offsuit on the button. Someone in the highjack opens to 3 big blinds preflop. Y...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fFY2HeC9i2Tx8FEnK/my-resentful-story-of-becoming-a-medical-miracle This is a linkpost for https://acesounderglass.com/2022/10/13/my-resentful-story-of-becoming-a-medical-miracle/ You know those health books with “miracle cure” in the subtitle? The ones that always start with a preface about a particular patient who was completely hopeless until they tried the supple...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CKgPFHoWFkviYz7CB/the-redaction-machine On the 3rd of October 2351 a machine flared to life. Huge energies coursed into it via cables, only to leave moments later as heat dumped unwanted into its radiators. With an enormous puff the machine unleashed sixty years of human metabolic entropy into superheated steam. In the heart of the machine was Jane, a person of the...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pRkFkzwKZ2zfa3R6H/without-specific-countermeasures-the-easiest-path-to Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum . May contain more technical jargon than usual. I think that in the coming 15-30 years , the world could plausibly develop “transformative AI”: AI powerful enough to bring us into a new, qualitatively different future, via an explosion in science and techno...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iCfdcxiyr2Kj8m8mT/the-shard-theory-of-human-values TL;DR: We propose a theory of human value formation. According to this theory, the reward system shapes human values in a relatively straightforward manner. Human values are not e.g. an incredibly complicated, genetically hard-coded set of drives, but rather sets of contextually activated heuristics which were shape...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AfH2oPHCApdKicM4m/two-year-update-on-my-personal-ai-timelines#fnref-fwwPpQFdWM6hJqwuY-12 Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum . May contain more technical jargon than usual. I worked on my draft report on biological anchors for forecasting AI timelines mainly between ~May 2019 (three months after the release of GPT-2) and ~Jul 2020 (a month after the release of G...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9kNxhKWvixtKW5anS/you-are-not-measuring-what-you-think-you-are-measuring Eight years ago, I worked as a data scientist at a startup, and we wanted to optimize our sign-up flow. We A/B tested lots of different changes, and occasionally found something which would boost (or reduce) click-through rates by 10% or so. Then one week I was puzzling over a discrepancy in th...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WNpvK67MjREgvB8u8/do-bamboos-set-themselves-on-fire Cross-posted from Telescopic Turnip . As we all know, the best place to have a kung-fu fight is a bamboo forest. There are just so many opportunities to grab pieces of bamboos and manufacture improvised weapons, use them to catapult yourself in the air and other basic techniques any debutant martial artist ought to...

 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gs3vp3ukPbpaEie5L/deliberate-grieving-1 This post is hopefully useful on its own, but begins a series ultimately about grieving over a world that might (or, might not) be doomed .  It starts with some pieces from a previous  coordination frontier sequence post, but goes into more detail. At the beginning of the pandemic, I didn’t have much experience with grief . B...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/J3wemDGtsy5gzD3xa/toni-kurz-and-the-insanity-of-climbing-mountains Content warning: death I've been on a YouTube binge lately. My current favorite genre is disaster stories about mountain climbing. The death statistics for some of these mountains, especially ones in the Himalayas are truly insane. To give an example, let me tell you about a mountain most people...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oyKzz7bvcZMEPaDs6/survey-advice Things I believe about making surveys, after making some surveys : If you write a question that seems clear, there’s an unbelievably high chance that any given reader will misunderstand it. (Possibly this applies to things that aren’t survey questions also, but that’s a problem for another time.) A better way to find out if your quest...