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Published on April 1, 2025 10:39 AM GMT(Not an April fools' joke)If anyone wants to return to one of Keltham's lectures, here's a list with links to all the lectures. In principle, one could also read these without having read the rest of project lawful, I am not sure how easy it would be to follow though. I included short excerpts, so you can...

Published on April 1, 2025 10:32 AM GMTOut of all the research rabbit holes I've ever gone down, this one is by far my favorite, as to most people at first glance it's so unthinkable an idea.Years ago, I would have been right there with you in disbelief, but the reasons why turned out to be a kind of perfect combination of counterfactuals that...

Published on April 1, 2025 8:22 AM GMTFor more than five years, I've posted an average of more than 1× per week on Less Wrong. I've learned a lot from you nerds. I've made friends and found my community. Thank you for pointing out all the different ways I've been wrong. Less Wrong has changed my life for the better. But it's time to...

Published on April 1, 2025 7:12 AM GMTEpistemic status - statistically verified. I'm writing this post to draw peoples' attention to a new cause area proposal - haircuts for alignment researchers.Aside from the obvious benefits implied by the graph (i.e. haircuts having the potential to directly improve organizational stability), this would represent possibly the only pre-singularity opportunity we'll have to found an org named "Clippy".I...

Published on March 30, 2025 6:06 PM GMTtl;dr:From my current understanding, one of the following two things should be happening and I would like to understand why it doesn’t:EitherEveryone in AI Safety who thinks slowing down AI is currently broadly a good idea should publicly support PauseAI.OrIf pausing AI is much more popular than the organization PauseAI, that is a problem that should be...

Published on March 30, 2025 4:58 PM GMTIntroductionResearch on Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) has identified "known entity" features in language models - features that activate when the model processes entities it "knows." If we can find the circuit models use to recognise that they know an entity, then by computing which inputs would trigger the circuit, we can extract a list of "known entities".The aim...

Published on March 30, 2025 1:16 PM GMTNote: I created an entry highlighting the formal attack on qualia presented in: I, G(Zombie)Introducing Eliminative Nominalism (EN), a novel position in the philosophy of mind that extends and critiques Eliminative Materialism by rejecting not only mental states, but also the ontological assumptions embedded in both physicalist and emergentist accounts of consciousness. Drawing from proof theory, cybernetics, and...

Published on March 30, 2025 7:16 AM GMTIn neuroscience, we learned about foveated vision — our eyes focus sharply at the center and blur the edges to conserve energy.I was curious how LLMs handle that kind of input, so I wrote a quick script to apply a foveated blur to 30 CAPTCHA images of cars, with the car in different regions each time.At first,...

Published on March 30, 2025 6:54 AM GMTNow and then, at work, we’ll have a CEO on from the megacorp that owns the company I work at. It’s a Zoom meeting with like 300 people, the guy is usually giving a speech that is harmless and nice (if a bit banal), and I’ll turn on my camera and ask a question about something that...

Published on March 30, 2025 1:24 AM GMTThere is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.— Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995) INTRODUCTIONPrefaceThis document is shared publicly as an initial draft to invite constructive feedback, insights, and reflections.AbstractIntroducing Eliminative Nominalism (EN), a novel position in the philosophy of mind that extends and critiques Eliminative Materialism...

Published on March 29, 2025 7:08 PM GMTOr: Why thinking about blue tentacle arms is not always a waste of time.0. IntroductionAs I work through the Sequences, I find myself disagreeing—slightly—with a point Eliezer Yudkowsky makes in A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation:Imagine that you wake up one morning and your left arm has been replaced by a blue tentacle. The blue tentacle obeys...

Published on March 29, 2025 8:37 PM GMTA better anything can be achieved with simple tests at low costs.BackgroundPeople often settle for "good enough" and "if it ain't broke don't fix it" in their personal lives, opting not to make any effort to improve said things because either:Time, money, and/or effort can be spent elsewhere for a higher expected valueThey think it can't be...

Published on March 29, 2025 7:38 PM GMTFor the purposes of FOOM, I'm defining it as a situation in which once an AI is capable enough to automate away all AI R&D, progress starts exploding hyper-exponentially for a period because the returns to better software is larger than 1, meaning AI labor quality is improving faster than the problem of finding new algorithms gets...

Published on March 29, 2025 6:11 PM GMTSuppose you’re an AI researcher trying to make AIs which are conscious and reliably moral, so they’re trustworthy and safe for release into the real world, in whatever capacity you intend.You can’t, or don’t want to manually create them; it’s more economical, and the only way to ensure they’re conscious, if you procedurally generate them along with...

Published on March 28, 2025 6:40 PM GMTYouTube link How do we figure out whether interpretability is doing its job? One way is to see if it helps us prove things about models that we care about knowing. In this episode, I speak with Jason Gross about his agenda to benchmark interpretability in this way, and his exploration of the intersection of proofs and...

Published on March 28, 2025 5:21 PM GMTMay 9 & 10Lighthaven, Berkeley Hosted by The Longevity Biotech Fellowship, Vitalism, and Foresight InstituteJoin us for an intensive workshop exploring how artificial intelligence might advance the life sciences and accelerate the development of therapies to extend healthy human lifespan. Confirmed presentations include: Sam Rodriques, FutureHouse Seth Paulson, Biomarkers of Aging Consortium Joe Betts-Lacroix, Retro Erika De Benedictis, Pioneer...

Published on March 28, 2025 3:16 PM GMTI hope that the reasoning in my two posts shows that the AGI has a chance to end up relying on the entire human-built energy industry just to solve as many problems (and hopefully even less) as the millions of humans who work there. On the other hand, the entire set of physicists is within half of...

Published on March 28, 2025 2:20 PM GMTGemini 2.5 Pro Experimental is America’s next top large language model. That doesn’t mean it is the best model for everything. In particular, it’s still Gemini, so it still is a proud member of the Fun Police, in terms of censorship and also just not being friendly or engaging, or willing to take a stand. If you...

Published on March 28, 2025 2:12 PM GMTTl;dr: no.This is a rough research note – we’re sharing it for feedback and to spark discussion. We’re less confident in its methods and conclusions.Once AI fully automates AI R&D, there might be a period of fast and accelerating software progress – a software intelligence explosion (SIE).One objection to this is that it takes a long time...

Published on March 28, 2025 1:22 PM GMTIlya thought back again to when he’d overheard that conversation between two of his junior colleagues. They were discussing an “AI ending the world” story. This was early in the year, although it felt like years ago now given how fast things had been moving. The year, 2025, was now drawing to a close... and maybe it’ll...

Published on March 28, 2025 11:45 AM GMTPDF version. berkeleygenomics.org. X.com. Bluesky. William Thurston was a world-renowned mathematician. His ideas revolutionized many areas of geometry and topology[1]; the proof of his geometrization conjecture was eventually completed by Grigori Perelman, thus settling the Poincaré conjecture (making it the only solved Millennium Prize problem). After his death, his students wrote reminiscences, describing among other things his...

Published on March 28, 2025 11:24 AM GMTTLDRWe do not yet understand all the genetic imprints that play an important role in early embryonic development. Known imprinting disorders (Prader-Willi, Angelman, etc.) however, do seem to cover all the most detrimental imprints, since for all cases of uniparental disomy (having 1 pair of chromosomes from only one parent), we know of either the imprinting disorder...

Published on March 28, 2025 5:47 AM GMTThe other day I discussed how high monitoring costs can explain the emergence of “aristocratic” systems of governance:Aristocracy and Hostage CapitalArjun Panickssery · Jan 8There's a conventional narrative by which the pre-20th century aristocracy was the "old corruption" where civil and military positions were distributed inefficiently due to nepotism until the system was replaced by a professional...

Published on March 28, 2025 4:50 AM GMTEven an AGI "aligned" to a purpose which doesn't imply humanity's survival but does require the AGI itself to achieve difficult feats like transforming the entire Solar System into something computing as many digits of pi as possible would obviously still need to produce the computing systems and gather the energy necessary for the systems' work. As...