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LessWrong

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technology philosophy

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4:15

“An Ontology for AI Cults and Cyber Egregores” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/10

I haven't found concepts useful for thinking about this: written in one place, so here is an ontology which I find useful. Prerequisite: Dennett three stances (physical, design, intentional). Meme is a replicator of cultural evolution. Idea, behaviour, piece of text or other element of culture. Type signature: replicator. Memeplex is a group of memes that have evolved to work together and reinforce each other, making them more likely to spread and persist as a unit. Type signature is coalitional

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6:12

“Myopia Mythology” by abramdemski

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/10

It's been a while since I wrote about myopia! My previous posts about myopia were "a little crazy", because it's not this solid well-defined thing; it's a cluster of things which we're trying to form into a research program. This post will be "more crazy". The Good/Evil/Good Spectrum "Good" means something along the lines of "helpful to all". There is a spectrum from extremely myopic to extremely non-myopic. Arranging all "thinking beings" on that spectrum, I claim that you get Good at both ends,

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5:12

“Three Kinds Of Ontological Foundations” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/10

Why does a water bottle seem like a natural chunk of physical stuff to think of as “A Thing”, while the left half of the water bottle seems like a less natural chunk of physical stuff to think of as “A Thing”? More abstractly: why do real-world agents favor some ontologies over others? At various stages of rigor, an answer to that question looks like a story, an argument, or a mathematical proof. Regardless of the form, I’ll call such an answer an ontological foundation. Broadly speaking, the

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16:15

“Learning information which is full of spiders” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/10

This essay contains an examination of handling information which is unpleasant to learn. Also, more references to spiders than most people want. CW: Pictures of spiders. 1. Litanies and Aspirations If the box contains a diamond, I desire to believe that the box contains a diamond; If the box does not contain a diamond, I desire to believe that the box does not contain a diamond; Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want. -Litany of Tarski I read these words when I was around eighteen

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2:44

[Linkpost] “Book Announcement: The Gentle Romance” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/10

This is a link post. It's been eight months since I released my last story, so you could be forgiven for thinking that I’d given up on writing fiction. In fact, it's the opposite. I’m excited to announce that I’m releasing my first fiction collection—The Gentle Romance: Stories of AI and Humanity—with Encour Press in mid-December! It contains 22 stories, most of which are revised versions of the best stories I’ve posted online. The thread that connects them is the struggle to hold onto our

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7:44

“Manifest X DC Opening Benediction - Making Friends...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/10

Manifest X DC was this weekend, hopefully the first of many local spin-offs of Manifest. Despite a late prediction market surge, there were no fires. An attendee wrote a nice post of observations, though he left the afterparty before the lights dimmed and the duels began. I gave an opening talk, which ended up being more personal and emotional than I'd set out to write. Several attendees asked for the text, so I am posting a lightly edited version of my draft. This is not the version as delivered,

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4:18

“Problems I’ve Tried to Legibilize” by Wei Dai

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/10

Looking back, it appears that much of my intellectual output could be described as legibilizing work, or trying to make certain problems in AI risk more legible to myself and others. I've organized the relevant posts and comments into the following list, which can also serve as a partial guide to problems that may need to be further legibilized, especially beyond LW/rationalists, to AI researchers, funders, company leaders, government policymakers, their advisors (including future AI advisors), and

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30:30

“Condensation” by abramdemski

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/09

Condensation: a theory of concepts is a model of concept-formation by Sam Eisenstat. Its goals and methods resemble John Wentworth's natural abstractions/natural latents research.[1] Both theories seek to provide a clear picture of how to posit latent variables, such that once someone has understood the theory, they'll say "yep, I see now, that's how latent variables work!". The goal of this post is to popularize Sam's theory and to give my own perspective on it; however, it will not be a full

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9:21

“One Shot Singalonging is an attitude, not a skill or...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/09

Rationalist Winter Solstice is (in most cities) a singalong event. This worked extremely straightforwardly well in a living room in 2012, and in my family's Christmas Eve singalong that Rationalist Solstice was inspired by. It works way less well in an auditorium. When I seek out advice about making people more singalongable, there's a cluster of advice I get from folksinger people that... seems totally "correct", but, feels... insufficiently ambitious or something. The advice includes things

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5:59

“Insofar As I Think LLMs ‘Don’t Really Understand...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/09

When I put on my LLM skeptic hat, sometimes I think things like “LLMs don’t really understand what they’re saying”. What do I even mean by that? What's my mental model for what is and isn’t going on inside LLMs minds? First and foremost: the phenomenon precedes the model. That is, when interacting with LLMs, it sure feels like there's something systematically missing which one could reasonably call “understanding”. I’m going to articulate some mental models below, but even if I imagine all those

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20:43

“Omniscaling to MNIST” by cloud

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/08

In this post, I describe a mindset that is flawed, and yet helpful for choosing impactful technical AI safety research projects. The mindset is this: future AI might look very different than AI today, but good ideas are universal. If you want to develop a method that will scale up to powerful future AI systems, your method should also scale down to MNIST. In other words, good ideas omniscale: they work well across all model sizes, domains, and training regimes.The Modified National Institute of

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6:40

“Comparing Payor & Löb” by abramdemski

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/08

Audio note: this article contains 49 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Löb's Theorem: If_vdash Box x to x_, then_vdash x_. Or, as one formula:_Box (Box x to x) to Box x_ Payor's Lemma: If_vdash Box (Box x to x) to x_, then_vdash x_. Or, as one formula:_Box

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5:42

“Against ‘You can just do things’” by zroe1

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/08

The barriers between us and what we want are often entirely imagined. It is true: you can learn how to paint, change careers, write a paper or run a marathon. These things are hard, but we shouldn’t pretend that they are impossible. You can just do them. But this mindset has a dangerous edge case: it can make you skip asking for permission precisely when you should ask. The anxiety you're overriding might be trying to tell you something important: that sometimes the fence is there for a reason

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8:14

“Unexpected Things that are People” by Ben Goldhaber

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/08

Cross-posted from https://bengoldhaber.substack.com/ It's widely known that Corporations are People. This is universally agreed to be a good thing; I list Target as my emergency contact and I hope it will one day be the best man at my wedding. But there are other, less well known non-human entities that have also been accorded the rank of person. Ships: Ships have long posed a tricky problem for states and courts. Similar to nomads, vagabonds, and college students on extended study abroad, they

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24:17

“Escalation and perception” by TsviBT

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/08

Crosspost from my blog.Introduction Conflict pervades the world. Conflict can come from mere mistkes, but many conflicts are not mere mistakes. We don't understand conflict. We doubly don't understand conflict because some conflicts masquerade as mistakes, and we wish that they were mere mistakes, so we are happy to buy in to that masquerade. This is a mistake on our part, haha. We should study conflict until we understand it. This essay makes some attempt to sketch a few aspects of conflict—in

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8:46

“Entity Review: Pythia” by plex

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/08

[CW: Retrocausality, omnicide, philosophy] Three decades ago a strange philosopher was pouring ideas onto paper in a stimulant-fueled frenzy. He wrote that ‘nothing human makes it out of the near-future’ as techno-capital acceleration sheds its biological bootloader and instantiates itself as Pythia: an entity of self-fulfilling prophecy reaching back through time, driven by pure power seeking, executed with extreme intelligence, and empty of all values but the insatiable desire to maximize itself

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11:18

“Mourning a life without AI” by Nikola Jurkovic

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/08

Recently, I looked at the one pair of winter boots I own, and I thought “I will probably never buy winter boots again.” The world as we know it probably won’t last more than a decade, and I live in a pretty warm area. I. AGI is likely in the next decade It has basically become consensus within the AI research community that AI will surpass human capabilities sometime in the next few decades. Some, including myself, think this will likely happen this decade. II. The post-AGI world will be

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5:19

“AI is not inevitable.” by David Scott Krueger...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/08

AI companies are explicitly trying to build AIs that are smarter than humans, despite clear signs that it might lead to human extinction. It will be tragic and ironic if humanity's largest project ever is an all-out race to destroy ourselves. But can we really stop building more and more powerful AI? Or do we just need to try to “steer” it and hope for the best? Climate change and other societal failures have led more and more people to realize that the world is not the sensible, ordered place

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9:01

“Anthropic & Dario’s dream” by Simon Lermen

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/08

Recently, Joe Carlsmith switched to work at Anthropic. He joins other members of the larger EA and Open Philanthropy ecosystem who are working at the AI lab, such as Holden Karnofsky. And of course many of the original founders were EA affiliated. In short, I think Anthropic is honest and is attempting to be an ethical AI lab, but they are deeply mistaken about the difficulty they are facing and are dangerously affecting the AI safety ecosystem. My guess is that Anthropic for the most part is

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17:51

“13 Arguments About a Transition to Neuralese AIs” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/07

Over the past year, I have talked to several people about whether they expect frontier AI companies to transition away from the current paradigm of transformer LLMs toward models that reason in neuralese within the next few years. This post summarizes 13 common arguments I’ve heard, six in favor and seven against a transition to neuralese AIs. The following table provides a summary:Arguments for a transition to neuraleseArguments against a transition to neuraleseA lot of information gets lost in

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