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LessWrong

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33:21

“Notes on Fourier Analysis” by Menotim

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/05/27

This post records what I've learned while studying a bit of Fourier analysis. I used this PDF, which is the lecture notes for this Stanford course. The only thing in here that is really changed from there is the derivation of the Fourier transform, where I tried to explain the way I made sense of it. (That explanation may or may not make sense.) Fourier Series Fourier analysis starts with the study of periodic functions. The fundamental periodic function is the complex exponential , which comes up

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4:51

“Standard deviations from just two values” by kqr

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/05/27

William Sealy Gosset was great. He improved beer at Guinness by using the statistics that existed at the time. Not happy with that, he invented new statistics to brew even better beer. The things he invented are used all over the place now, but Guinness wanted to keep him a secret weapon, so they made him publish his results under the fake name Student. One thing Gosset realised is that it is wrong to compute 90 % confidence intervals for the mean by taking the standard deviation of the sample, and

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16:23

“Contra Wentworth on Physical Attractiveness for Men”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/05/27

This is a response to John Wentworth's recent article, Why Physical Attractiveness Matters for Men's Dating Prospects. I have no quibble with the thesis stated in the title, but a lot of the body of the article struck me as off-base. When John sent me the article, I told him the article seemed “fundamentally confused.” He asked for details, and this article is my answer. Here I list and argue with four premises I detected in John's article. Some of them he said in so many words; some are my

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17:24

“Practical Learnings from Synthetic Document...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/05/27

We've been using Synthetic Document Finetuning (SDF) quite a bit at Apollo Research lately. This post covers a few tweaks to the standard SDF recipe specific to our use cases, plus some general tips and tricks for getting good results. We’re sharing these notes in case they’re useful to others doing research with SDF. 1. What Is SDF? Synthetic Document Finetuning (SDF) is a knowledge editing technique where models are finetuned on LLM-generated documents consistent with a target fact or belief. As

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59:40

“RTMH: Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas on AI” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/05/26

His holiness has spoken, frequently about AI. At eighty two pages of length.The full Magnifica Humanitas can be found here. I am very happy that Pope Leo takes these issues seriously, and is sharing his views, and bringing a form of moral clarity, even with all the flaws and central errors. More people with voice should share their views in this way, even when I disagree. It's a weird document. Much of it is not about AI at all. I do agree with the Pope's most basic point on AI, which is that

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34:49

“Claude, Author of the Humanitas” by Linch

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/05/26

In the wee hours of Memorial Day, my friends and I stayed up past 4:30 AM California time to listen to the announcement of Pope Leo's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. We were excited albeit sleepy, eagerly anticipating the event and upcoming essay by the world's foremost religious authority on a question so central to our world. Still we were an odd audience for this presentation: none of us are practicing Catholics, and

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10:26

“Brackets Are a Bad Way to Regulate” by Hide

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/05/26

Continuous distributions are everywhere - for virtually everything we care about, a little more is a little better (or worse), and a lot more is a lot better (or worse). This presents a problem - we need to create rules that reasonably and fairly apply across these continuums, where the degree to which a thing possesses a trait makes a difference to the reasonable treatment of it. Going 1m/h over the limit, and going 150 in a 40 zone are both “speeding”, yet we must punish these things

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12:46

“Many portions of Magnifica Humanitas appear to be...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/05/26

Magnifica Humanitas is a recent ‘encyclical’ by Pope Leo XIV, leader of the Catholic Church. It outlines a vision for how humanity should interact with artificial intelligence, emphasizing the importance of human dignity and ensuring that AI does not replace human relationships, among other topics. Interestingly, many portions appear to be written by AI. Why I thought to check this Friends of mine Linch Zhang and the Axolotl noticed that parts of the English text appear to be AI-generated, and

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12:10

“Donating 80% While It Still Counts” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/05/26

Julia and I had been giving half since 2014, but in 2025 we drew on our savings to donate 81%. It looks to us like we're in a critical window for keeping the introduction of very powerful AI systems from being disastrous, and we want to do what we can while we still can. Here's what that looks like in the context of our overall spending: There's a details box here with the title "table...". The box contents are omitted from this narration. We've been prioritizing

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5:19

“Cognitive Security as an AI Safety Cause Area” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/05/25

As AI systems become more capable, the cognitive security of humans will be increasingly at risk. By cognitive security, I mean the ability of humans to maintain control over their beliefs and actions. Cognitive security could be compromised in several ways: AI could become very good at persuading people of arbitrary positions; interacting with AI could lead humans to lose touch with reality; and AIs could become very effective at blackmail or at producing extremely convincing false information. We

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2:20

“Linkpost: New Vatican Encyclical on AI Governance”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/05/25

Pope Leo XIV has released a new, 42k-word encyclical laying out the Vatican's position on many AI safety topics. You can read the full thing here, or read the Vatican's press release here, or coverage in the NY Times, or perhaps consider having an LLM read the whole encyclical, then chatting about whatever specifics you're interested in! Below is a portion of the NY Times story on the event: Leo's declaration outlined his desire to protect human dignity and agency in an age in which technology

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14:32

“A (Slightly) Mechanistic Theory for Exponentially...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/05/25

AI ‘time horizons’ are mostly not about time (I think it's mostly ‘data’, but you’ll see where I’m unsure). One chart from 2025 has become perhaps the most (in)famous in modern AI commentary. For those in the know, ‘the METR graph’[1] is unusually compelling because it achieves what so few measures of AI progress have achieved: a somewhat meaningful Y axis (‘time horizon’[2]) as well as a somewhat predictable trend over time! (This is remarkably rare!) Frustratingly, the only superficially

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4:56

“Taxing Small Cars To Improve MPG” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/05/25

Cars and trucks are getting bigger, and I had a vague sense that fuel economy regulations were partly to blame. Looking into it, it's hard to say how much is regulations vs people wanting to buy vehicles that look rugged, but the regulations really aren't helping. This chart is the core of it: This is what manufacturers were looking at when they decided to build today's cars. To figure out the target fuel economy for a vehicle you first calculate its "footprint", which is the area

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11:42

“Your Left Brain Doesn’t Trade With Your Right” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/05/24

[see also Four Ways Learning Economics makes you people dumber future AI] This is a tweet by Seb Krier that caught my eye. The exact person and exact points are incidental. It illustrates what to is a flaw in many 'economics' frames on AI. Expecting a model to do all the work, solve everything, come up with new innovations etc is probably not right. This was kinda the implicit assumption behind *some* interpretations of capabilities progress. The ‘single genius model’ overlooks the fact that

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16:29

“Gemini 3.5 Flash Looks Good For How Fast It Is” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/05/23

Google once again has a model worth at least some consideration. Gemini 3.5 Flash is likely the best model out there at its particular speed point, as long as you don’t mind that it is a Gemini model. So for cases where speed kills, this can be a reasonable choice. Otherwise, I don’t see signs you would want to use it over Opus 4.7 or GPT-5.5.Google also had some other offerings for I/O Day, which this post will also cover. Introducing Google Gemini 3.5 ‘Flash’ Google introduced Gemini 3.5

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27:31

“Probabilities are not the right concept” by David...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/05/23

Introduction This sequence is an attempt to sketch a unified framework for several interconnected questions: Where do Bayesian priors come from? What even are probabilities? How should we deal with infinite ethics? What's going on with anthropics? I hope to lay out both some of the existing answers and my own preferred synthesis.[1] I understand that many people have already thought about these questions, and I have only read portions of the existing literature. I think most of what I will write

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9:58

“Basic principles for dressing better.” by spookycat

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/05/23

I've been a toe-in rat and existed on the outskirts of the social scene for approaching a decade now, and I can confidently say (with love) that rationalist men rarely dress well. I am drowning in a sea of reasonably-attractive men diminishing themselves in skinny jeans and free t-shirts from random events three years ago. But you can do better. I believe in you. Honestly, it isn't even that hard. In this post, I'll be teaching you two things: The basic theory behind how to actually assemble an

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9:48

“Will we really put data centers in space?” by Avi...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/05/23

Abstract Several major technology companies have announced plans to operate AI data centers in orbit. Elon Musk recently claimed: “the lowest-cost place to put AI will be space […] within two years, maybe three.” If a meaningful fraction of new AI compute really is placed in space within a few years, that would be a fairly big deal for AI governance and strategy. Here we try to disentangle the hype from reality and provide a sober assessment of the technical and economic feasibility of orbital data

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23:00

“PLA Daily Translation: Reflections on Warfare...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/05/23

Source “Reflections on Warfare Brought by AGI” (AGI带来的战争思考) Source: PLA Daily (解放军报) Date: January 21, 2025 Authors: Rong Ming (荣明), Hu Xiaofeng (胡晓峰) Introduction Please feel free to skip to the translation, about halfway down, though I would recommend reading the sections “On the source” and "On the Authors" just above it too. In November 2024, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission recommended that “Congress establish and fund a Manhattan Project-like program dedicated to

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12:40

“Out-of-Context Reasoning (OOCR) in LLMs: A Short...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/05/23

Out-of-context reasoning (OOCR) is a concept relevant to LLM generalization and AI alignment. Also available as a PDF. Contents What is OOCR?ExamplesPapersVideos What is out-of-context reasoning for LLMs? It's when an LLM reaches a conclusion that requires non-trivial reasoning but the reasoning is not present in the context window. The reasoning could instead take place in the forward pass or during the training process. The name ("out-of-context reasoning") is chosen to contrast with in-context

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