LessWrong (30+ Karma)

Ketamine is an anesthetic with growing popularity as an antidepressant. As an antidepressant, it's quite impressive. When it works, it's often within hours- a huge improvement over giving a suicidal…

tl;dr: Novel framing on the trivial point that your models may not be accounting for all relevant factors. I find it useful for improving the quality of my thinking on the topic. Asking yourself "is…

"You heard of musician's dystonia?" OffVermilion - a handle his friends shorten to Vermi - once said to me, as we admired our avatars in a virtual mirror, one of the great amusements in VRChat.

He w…

The inverse of Chesterton's Fence is this:

Sometimes a reformer comes up to a spot where there once was a fence, which has since been torn down. They declare that all our problems started when the f…

AI image-generation models I’ve tried

Midjourney is best at producing a diverse and aesthetically pleasing range of styles and doesn’t refuse “in the style of…” requests. However…

I've had trouble maintaining my weight since high school. If I eat "normally", I slowly gain weight, and if I eat nothing but a specific potato casserole, I slowly lose weight.

Recently, I hit a new…

Audio note: this article contains 288 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description.

TL;DR: This post derives …

Note: While this article presents one possibility for how the future may play out, it should not be taken as a specific prediction by either the author or the Brain Preservation Foundation.

Amy Robe…

Expert opinions about future AI development span a wide range, from predictions that we will reach ASI soon and then humanity goes extinct, to predictions that AI progress will plateau soon, resulti…

Audio note: this article contains 369 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description.

Traffic and transit are finally getting a roundup all their own.

I’ll start out with various victory laps on the awesomeness that is New York City Congestion pricing, which should hopefully now be …

I've recently written about how I've updated against seeing substantially faster than trend AI progress due to quickly massively scaling up RL on agentic software engineering. One response I've hear…

Here are two models of “the norm” when it comes to flirtatious escalation, assuming both people are in fact interested:

• “Mutual Escalation”: both people go back-and-forth making gradually more esca…

Note: If you’ll forgive the shameless self-promotion, applications for my MATS stream are open until Sept 12. I help people write a mech interp paper, often accept promising people new to mech inter…

There's a mistake I made a couple times and didn't really internalize the lesson as fast as I'd like. Moreover, it wasn't even a failure to generalize, it was basically a failure to even have a sing…

I deal with a lot of servers at work, and one thing everyone wants to know about their servers is how close they are to being at max utilization. It should be easy, right? Just pull up top or anothe…

There's an interestingly pernicious version of a selection effect that occurs in epistemology, where people can be led into false claims because when people try to engage with arguments, people will…

Introduction

What is Gradient Routing? Gradient routing controls where learning happens in neural networks by masking gradients during backpropagation. You can route specific data (like dangerous co…

Two weeks ago, xAI finally published its Risk Management Framework and first model card. Unfortunately, the RMF effects very little risk reduction and suggests that xAI isn't thinking seriously abou…

Summary

An increasing number of people in recent months have believed that they've made an important and novel scientific breakthrough, which they've developed in collaboration with an LLM, when the…