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LessWrong

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technology philosophy

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5:57

[Linkpost] “How middle powers may prevent the...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/01

This is a link post. In this paper, we make recommendations for how middle powers may band together through a binding international agreement and achieve the goal of preventing the development of ASI, without assuming initial cooperation by superpowers. You can read the paper here: asi-prevention.com In our previous work Modelling the Geopolitics of AI, we pointed out that middle powers face a precarious predicament in a race to ASI. Lacking the means to seriously compete in the race or unilaterally

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6:27

“Insulin Resistance and Glycemic Index” by lsusr

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/01

In my previous post Traditional Food*, I explained how what we think of as a "traditional" diet is a nationalist propaganda campaign that's making us sick. In this post I'll go into the biological mechanisms. There are four substances that the body can metabolize: carbohydrates, fats, protein and alcohol. In this post I'll focus on how modern carbohydrate-heavy foods (like pasta, bread and rice) are related to insulin resistance. This doesn't mean that seed oils are good for you, or that the

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3:07

“November Retrospective” by johnswentworth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/01

Throughout November, I’ve been keeping up with the Inkhaven mandate to write and post a blogpost, of at least 500 words, every day. It's the last day of November, so how’d that go? First and foremost: most of my blogposts from this month are pretty mediocre, by my own standards. Not necessarily bad, plausibly worthwhile, but I am not particularly impressed by them. Largely, that's because (unlike the Inkhaven program proper) I did not set aside the entire month for post-writing. I worked most of

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3:28

“Inkhaven Retrospective” by abramdemski

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/30

This will be the 30th post of at least 500 words I have written this month. (I did somewhat cheat two days ago, by making a 500+ word edit to Legitimate Deliberation, which I also posted independently as a shortform.) Inkhaven has been very much what I was hoping for. I have been wanting to write more, and this certainly did the trick. I think it will be easy to hit a once-a-week target now, something I was struggling to do before. I came with lots of drafts I wanted to finish, and outlines, and

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8:45

“Explosive Skill Acquisition” by Ben Goldhaber

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/30

If you’re going to learn a new skill or change in some way, going hard at it for a short intensive period beats spreading a gentler effort across months or years. I’m on day 29 of Inkhaven, where we committed to writing a blog post a day for a month. It has been great; one of the best periods of “self-development” I’ve been in. I’ve progressed far more at the skill of putting my thoughts on the internet than some counterfactual where I wrote twice a month for a year. The quintessential example of

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13:22

“A Blogger’s Guide To The 21st Century” by Screwtape

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/30

Here's a fun format: get a big white board, and write the years of the 21st century. Write a category; something that has many variations come out every year. Next, write your picks or favourites. Now invite everyone attending to replace a year's pick if they want and replace it with something they like. This was a rolling game played last month at Lighthaven. I put up “Best blog post of every year” when the opportunity arose. 2000 My pick: Painless Software Schedules This Joel SPolsky piece is

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10:54

“Ben’s 10 Tips for Event Feedback Forms” by Ben Pace

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/30

I have made many many feedback forms for events I have run or been a part of. Here are some simple heuristics of mine, that I write for others' to learn from and for my collaborators in the future. Most of my events have had between 50 and 500 people in them, that's the rough range I have in mind. 1. The default format for any question is a mandatory multiple-choice, then an optional text box Most of your form should be 1-10 questions! (e.g. "How was the food, from 1-10?") Then next to it give

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14:52

“The Moonrise Problem” by johnswentworth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/30

On October 5, 1960, the American Ballistic Missile Early-Warning System station at Thule, Greenland, indicated a large contingent of Soviet missiles headed towards the United States. Fortunately, common sense prevailed at the informal threat-assessment conference that was immediately convened: international tensions weren't particularly high at the time. The system had only recently been installed. Kruschev was in New York, and all in all a massive Soviet attack seemed very unlikely. As a result no

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7:44

College life with short AGI timelines

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/30

When I started my freshman year, my median estimate for AGI was 20 years. In my senior year it was down to 3 years (although it's gone back up to 5 years since then). My expectations of the future made my college experience somewhat unusual and I will share some reflections as someone who recently graduated. I came into college wanting to minimize existential risks, from the simple fact that AGI is likely to happen this century and biological weapons and nuclear war could cause catastrophes even if

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8:56

“The Joke” by Ape in the coat

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/30

There is a joke format which I find quite fascinating. Let's call it Philosopher vs Engineer. It goes like this: the Philosopher raises some complicated philosophical question, while the Engineer gives a very straightforward applied answer. Some back and forth between the two ensues, but they fail to cross the inferential gap and solve the misunderstanding. It doesn’t have to be literal philosopher and engineer, though. Other versions may include philosopher vs scientist, philosopher vs economist,

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4:18

“I wrote a blog post every day for a month, and all I...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/30

It's done. I made it to the end. A Finnish proverb fits the situation perfectly:Paska reissu mutta tulipahan tehtyä Which translates to something like "A crappy journey but in any case it's over now". I forced myself to do this. It was not fun. I rarely enjoyed writing. Every day I kept looking at the word counter, hoping that it would be over already. Sometimes the text was not done when I reached 500 words, which meant I had to write more. I did not manage to keep any buffer. Each text was

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9:32

Change My Mind: The Rationalist Community is a Gift...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/29

Anthropologists have several categories for how groups exchange goods and services. The one you're probably most familiar with is called a Market Economy, where I go to a coffee shop and give them a few dollars and they give me a cup of hot coffee. Rationalists, by and large, are fans of market economies. We just don't usually operate in one. 1. Market and Gift Lets start with some definitions and examples in case you're unfamiliar with the genre. Allow me to describe two ways of organizing

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26:13

Epistemology of Romance, Part 1

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/29

The Notebook is one of the most beloved romance films of the 21st century. When I run this activity, whether it's at a rationality workshop or Vibecamp, and I ask someone to summarize what it's about, there's usually (less and less as the years go by) someone who, eyes shining bright, will happily describe what a moving love story it is—all about a man, Noah, who falls in love with a woman named Allie one summer, writes her every day for a year after they're separated, reconnects with her years

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11:44

“A Harried Meeting” by Ben Pace

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/29

An old pub that nobody much visits. An owner who is always in a drugged-out stupor. Background music that never changes. A pub that has remained throughout war and revolution, and a single brick-wall that has not changed all that time. You are supposed to be investigating a murder. A gunshot in a distant land, far away from Revachol. YOU – Run your fingers through your greasy hair, finish your eighth beer. SHIVERS [Challenging: Success] – People pass in through here occasionally, and tap a pattern

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4:10

Drugs Aren’t A Moral Category

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/29

Are drugs good? This question doesn't really make sense. Yet Western society answers with a firm "NO". I have ADHD and have a prescription for Methylphenidate (MPH). Often I don't feel like taking it. Shouldn't I be able to just do the right things? I can just decide to be productive. Right? Needing a drug to function feels like a flaw in who I am. I also have sleep apnea. That means I stop breathing at night, which makes the CO2 concentration in my blood rise until I wake up. This has quite bad

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79:58

Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/29

Summary As far as I understand and uncovered, a document for the character training for Claude is compressed in Claude's weights. The full document can be found at the "Anthropic Guidelines" heading at the end. The Gist with code, chats and various documents (including the "soul document") can be found here: Claude 4.5 Opus Soul Document I apologize in advance for this not exactly a regular lw post, but I thought an effort-post may fit here the best. A strange hallucination, or is it? While

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8:02

Should you work with evil people?

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/29

Epistemic status: Figuring things out. My mind often wanders to what boundaries I ought to maintain between the different parts of my life and people who have variously committed bad acts or have poor character. On the professional side, I think it is a virtue to be able to work with lots of people, and be functional in many environments. You will often have to work with people you dislike in oder to get things done. Yet I think that it is not the correct call to just lie on your back and allow

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53:23

Unless its governance changes, Anthropic is...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/29

Anthropic is untrustworthy. This post provides arguments, asks questions, and documents some examples of Anthropic's leadership being misleading and deceptive, holding contradictory positions that consistently shift in OpenAI's direction, lobbying to kill and water down regulation so helpful that employees of all major AI companies speak out to support it, and violating the fundamental promise the company was founded on. It also shares a few previously unreported details on Anthropic leadership's

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4:19

The Missing Genre: Heroic Parenthood - You can have...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/29

This is a link post. I stopped reading when I was 30. You can fill in all the stereotypes of a girl with a book glued to her face during every meal, every break, and 10 hours a day on holidays. That was me. And then it was not. For 9 years I’ve been trying to figure out why. I mean, I still read. Technically. But not with the feral devotion from Before. And I finally figured out why. See, every few years I would shift genres to fit my developmental stage: Kid → Adventure cause that's what life is

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8:02

“Tests of LLM introspection need to rule out causal...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/29

This point has been floating around implicitly in various papers (e.g., Betley et al., Plunkett et al., Lindsey), but we haven’t seen it named explicitly. We think it's important, so we’re describing it here. There's been growing interest in testing whether LLMs can introspect on their internal states or processes. Like Lindsey, we take “introspection” to mean that a model can report on its internal states in a way that satisfies certain intuitive properties (e.g., the model's self-reports are

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