At least, if you happen to be near me in brain space. What advice would you give your younger self? That was the prompt for a class I taught at PAIR 2024. About a quarter of participants ranked it in their top 3 of courses at the camp and half of them had it listed as their favorite. I hadn’t expected that. I thought my life advice was pretty idios…

I open my eyes and find myself lying on a bed in a hospital room. I blink. "Hello", says a middle-aged man with glasses, sitting on a chair by my bed. "You've been out for quite a long while." "Oh no ... is it Friday already? I had that report due -" "It's Thursday", the man says. "Oh great", I say. "I still have time." "Oh, you have all the time i…

Claim: memeticity in a scientific field is mostly determined, not by the most competent researchers in the field, but instead by roughly-median researchers. We’ll call this the “median researcher problem”. Prototypical example: imagine a scientific field in which the large majority of practitioners have a very poor understanding of statistics, p-ha…

This is a link post.We (Connor Leahy, Gabriel Alfour, Chris Scammell, Andrea Miotti, Adam Shimi) have just published The Compendium, which brings together in a single place the most important arguments that drive our models of the AGI race, and what we need to do to avoid catastrophe. We felt that something like this has been missing from the AI co…

There are two nuclear options for treating depression: Ketamine and TMS; This post is about the latter. TMS stands for Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. Basically, it fixes depression via magnets, which is about the second or third most magical things that magnets can do. I don’t know a whole lot about the neuroscience - this post isn’t about the …

Epistemic status: model-building based on observation, with a few successful unusual predictions. Anecdotal evidence has so far been consistent with the model. This puts it at risk of seeming more compelling than the evidence justifies just yet. Caveat emptor. Imagine you're a very young child. Around, say, three years old. You've just done somethi…

This post includes a "flattened version" of an interactive diagram that cannot be displayed on this site. I recommend reading the original version of the post with the interactive diagram, which can be found here. Over the last few months, ARC has released a number of pieces of research. While some of these can be independently motivated, there is …

1. 4.4% of the US federal budget went into the space race at its peak. This was surprising to me, until a friend pointed out that landing rockets on specific parts of the moon requires very similar technology to landing rockets in soviet cities.[1] I wonder how much more enthusiastic the scientists working on Apollo were, with the convenient motiva…

This summer, I participated in a human challenge trial at the University of Maryland. I spent the days just prior to my 30th birthday sick with shigellosis. What? Why? Dysentery is an acute disease in which pathogens attack the intestine. It is most often caused by the bacteria Shigella. It spreads via the fecal-oral route. It requires an astonishi…

This is a link post. Part 1: Our Thinking Near and Far 1 Abstract/Distant Future Bias 2 Abstractly Ideal, Concretely Selfish 3 We Add Near, Average Far 4 Why We Don't Know What We Want 5 We See the Sacred from Afar, to See It Together 6 The Future Seems Shiny 7 Doubting My Far Mind Disagreement 8 Beware the Inside View 9 Are Meta Views Outside View…

Of all the cognitive tools our ancestors left us, what's best? Society seems to think pretty highly of arithmetic. It's one of the first things we learn as children. So I think it's weird that only a tiny percentage of people seem to know how to actually use arithmetic. Or maybe even understand what arithmetic is for. Why? I think the problem is th…

This post starts out pretty gloomy but ends up with some points that I feel pretty positive about. Day to day, I'm more focussed on the positive points, but awareness of the negative has been crucial to forming my priorities, so I'm going to start with those. It's mostly addressed to the EA community, but is hopefully somewhat of interest to LessWr…

This post focuses on philosophical objections to Bayesianism as an epistemology. I first explain Bayesianism and some standard objections to it, then lay out my two main objections (inspired by ideas in philosophy of science). A follow-up post will speculate about how to formalize an alternative. Degrees of belief The core idea of Bayesianism: we s…

As humanity gets closer to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a new geopolitical strategy is gaining traction in US and allied circles, in the NatSec, AI safety and tech communities. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and RAND Corporation call it the “entente”, while others privately refer to it as “hegemony" or “crush China”. I will argue that, irresp…

I think that most people underestimate how many scientific mysteries remain, even on questions that sound basic. My favourite candidate for "the most basic thing that is still unknown" is the momentum carried by light, when it is in a medium (for example, a flash of light in glass or water). If a block of glass has a refractive index of _n_…

How can we make many humans who are very good at solving difficult problems? Summary (table of made-up numbers) I made up the made-up numbers in this table of made-up numbers; therefore, the numbers in this table of made-up numbers are made-up numbers. Call to action If you have a shitload of money, there are some projects you can give money to tha…

This post is probably hazardous for one type of person in one particular growth stage, and necessary for people in a different growth stage, and I don't really know how to tell the difference in advance. If you read it and feel like it kinda wrecked you send me a DM. I'll try to help bandage it. One of my favorite stories growing up was Star Wars: …

This is a description of my work on some data science projects, lightly obfuscated and fictionalized to protect the confidentiality of the organizations I handled them for (and also to make it flow better). I focus on the high-level epistemic/mathematical issues, and the lived experience of working on intellectual problems, but gloss over the timel…

[Meta note: quickly written, unpolished. Also, it's possible that there's some more convincing work on this topic that I'm unaware of – if so, let me know] In research discussions about LLMs, I often pick up a vibe of casual, generalized skepticism about model-generated CoT (chain-of-thought) explanations. CoTs (people say) are not trustworthy in g…

I've been wanting to write a nice post for a few months, but should probably just write a one sooner instead. This is a top-level post not because it's a long text, but because it's important text. Anyways. Cryonics is pretty much money-free now—one of the most affordable ways to dispose of your body post-mortem. In the west coast in the USA, from …

Quarterly Performance Review, Autumn 1983 Colonel Yuri Kuznetsov looked out the window anxiously. The endless gray landscape did little to soothe his nerves. He only had one employee review left to get through, but he’d saved the hardest one for last. He wasn’t upset about having to dismiss Lieutenant Colonel Petrov—he couldn’t wait to be rid of th…

I’ve claimed that Willpower compounds and that small wins in the present make it easier to get bigger wins in the future. Unfortunately, procrastination and laziness compound, too. You’re stressed out for some reason, so you take the evening off for a YouTube binge. You end up staying awake a little later than usual and sleeping poorly. So the next…

For a long time, when I heard "slow takeoff", I assumed it meant "takeoff that takes longer calendar time than fast takeoff." (i.e. what is now referred to more often as "short timelines" vs "long timelines."). I think Paul Christiano popularized the term, and it so happened he both expected to see longer timelines and smoother/continuous takeoff. …

A common claim among e/accs is that, since the solar system is big, Earth will be left alone by superintelligences. A simple rejoinder is that just because Bernard Arnault has $170 billion, does not mean that he'll give you $77.18. Earth subtends only 4.54e-10 = 0.0000000454% of the angular area around the Sun, according to GPT-o1.[1] Asking an ASI…

A year ago, I started trying to deliberate practice skills that would "help people figure out the answers to confusing, important questions." I experimented with Thinking Physics questions, GPQA questions, Puzzle Games , Strategy Games, and a stupid twitchy reflex game I had struggled to beat for 8 years[1]. Then I went back to my day job and tried…