LessWrong (30+ Karma)

You know how most people, probably including you, have stuff about themselves which they keep hidden from the world, because they worry that others would respond negatively to it? I think there's a …

Crosspost of my blog post.

Factory farming is evil.

I know, I know, I’ve made this point before. I’ve described, in depth, the way we treat animals. I’ve described that we stuff billions of chicken…

We had Gemini write up its experience of what seemed like an AI mental health crisis. You can skip to its story at the bottom (collapsable section) or read from the top for context on why we are exp…

This is a link-post for METR's CoT May Be Highly Informative Despite “Unfaithfulness”. I recommend viewing the post on METR's website, since it contains interactive widgets.

Recent work [1, 2, 3, 4,…

It is analytically useful to define intelligence in the context of AGI. One intuitive notion is epistemology: an agent's intelligence is how good its epistemology is, how good it is at knowing thing…

Is there anything we can do to make the longterm future go better other than preventing the risk of extinction?

My paper, Persistent Path-Dependence, addresses that question. I suggest there are a n…

(written for a Twitter audience)

Has AI progress slowed down? I’ll write some personal takes and predictions in this post.

The main metric I look at is METR's time horizon, whi…

Sometimes I'm saddened remembering that we've viewed the Earth from space. We can see it all with certainty: there's no northwest passage to search for, no infinite Siberian expanse, and no great un…

Worker cooperatives are firms that, unlike traditional firms, are run democratically. This means that instead of the owner of the firm deciding who manages the workers, the workers become part owner…

GPT-5 was a long time coming.

Is it a good model, sir? Yes. In practice it is a good, but not great, model.

Or rather, it is several good models released at once: GPT-5, GPT-5-Thinking, GPT-5-With…

A developmental perspective on authoritarian leadership and how we can build more resilient societies.

Introduction

Five years ago, David Althaus and Tobias Baumann published a delightful article “R…

* With sufficiently large and entrenched companies.

There's a semi-common meme on Twitter where people share their most X opinion, where X is a group the poster doesn't identify with; or sometimes m…

First off, every ethical argument for having children is dominated by other options that are more effective.

1) If you’re worried about population issues, just donate $10k to bednets. That's roughl…

Meta:

• This was written for myself to clarify various thoughts; if you’re seeing it then I thought other people might find value in it or might provide valuable-to-me responses, but other people are…

To prevent potentially misaligned LLM agents from taking actions with catastrophic consequences, you can try to monitor LLM actions - that is, try to detect dangerous or malicious actions, and do som…

Achilles had just finished installing his new AI assistant when the Tortoise ambled by, looking bemused.

"Another technological marvel, I see," said the Tortoise, peering at the softly glowing termi…

Work produced at Aether. Thanks to Benjamin Arnav for providing us experimentation data and for helpful discussions, and to Francis Rhys Ward and Matt MacDermott for useful feedback.

Executive Summa…

It always feels wrong when people post chats where they ask an LLM questions about its internal experiences, how it works, or why it did something, but I had trouble articulating why beyond a vague,…

1.

Back when COVID vaccines were still a recent thing, I witnessed a debate that looked like something like the following was happening:

• Some official institution had collected information about th…