Philosophy

Recent additions to the Heap of Links… The most bizarre plagiarism-related story ever — featuring: a death, an investigator, a dissertation, a mysterious red book, and more New data on earnings by major and university — though not all universities “AI poses two different existential threats to [our] valuing practices” — Jordan MacKenzie offers an account of why negative judgments about AI taking over our creative and caring activities are justified “Submission” is a hu

Each time you look up at the night sky, you see only ancient signals — by the time a photon has reached your pupil, the star that emitted it may be long dead. The great wonder is that its light can traverse immense expanses of space and time to gladden the darkness of today, to cast wonder upon this lonely planet. An idea is a signal that may travel across immense expanses of space and time before it touches the world. Transformative ideas can and often do fall on the closed eyes of their

Inside the brain’s secret portal to remembering the future. Few things in life are more vivifying than a shimmering reminder that we can still surprise ourselves — those rare moments when the urn of the self cracks and out pours something more fully alive: truer than any narrative, more authentic than any performative personhood, unfettered from identity and expectation and all the other scripts we live by. It is both thrilling and terrifying to be so reminded that we know ourselve

Life-affirming inspiration from a man who knew intimately “that intensity of thought, which will some times wear the sweetest idea thread-bare and turn it to the bitterness of death.” “I am now the most miserable man living,” Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809–April 15, 1865) wrote to his law partner three weeks before his thirty-third birthday. “If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.”

“AI systems… will transform the discipline: they will make philosophy more capital-intensive. “ * * * The following is a guest post by David Strohmaier, a philosopher and computer scientist in the Natural Language and Information Processing group at the University of Cambridge. In it, he explains why he thinks it’s reasonable to believe that AI systems will eventually have the capacities to “drive” philosophy, and how this will change the economi

A summary of a Chinese essay, with a few short translated excerpts. All views below are the author's; quotes are my translations.On 14 September 2026, a DeepSeek engineer writing as intlsy published a WeChat essay titled 我不得不把才华埋葬在昨天 ("I have to bury my talent in yesterday"). He wrote the main attention kernel of DeepSeek v4.1 (the head-dim-512 MQA attention). The essay is a personal reflection on AI taking over his specialty, and it ends with an argument for open-weight frontier AI.The essay we

“However meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth… steps in and does something.” During our recent conversation at the Boston Book Festival, the wise and wonderful Amanda Palmer spoke about the harrowing experience of watching her best friend die and reflected: “Everyone in this room is going to be gone pretty quickly — and we will have either made something or not made something. The artists that inspire me are the on

On Monday, October 5th, the New York City council had a historic hearing on the state of AI. I was in attendance! It was a historical moment for AI Safety. We had Speaker of the Council Julie Menin directly mention existential risk in her opening statements. It was a sunny day and I felt as though the Eye of Providence was shining upon our humble movement.However, I was disappointed in the amount of "gotchas" some of the councilmembers tried to employ towards the AI lab representatives. To me, i

In what is being called “the most important event in the history of mathematics” (by an AI), OpenAI, using an advanced model not yet available to the public, yesterday released 722 mathematics manuscripts containing 337 results it has generated on open mathematics problems. Italian Calculators (images via MoMA) “OpenAI deluged mathematicians with hundreds of new findings that span a wide swath of topics including algebra, number theory, theoretical computer science,

Brains is a four-month, nights and weekends fellowship to help talented scientists develop ambitious ideas (~$50M in funding) that don't make sense in a startup or academic lab. Brains Fellows receive training, mentorship, and networking opportunities to enable them to start research programs at ARPAs and philanthropic foundations or lead their own non-profit startups like FROs or NSF's X-labs. Brains fellows have gone on to raise over $70M for their research. We welcome ideas from any scientifi

“Tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies.” “Do you need a prod?” the poet Mary Oliver asked in her sublime meditation on living with maximal aliveness. “Do you need a little darkness to get you going?” A paralytic prod descended upon Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) in his fifty-third year when a stroke left him severely disabled. It is a peculiar kind of darkness to be so violently

I’ve been putting off writing a blog post that seems very important to me, because it seems important, and so should be done on a later day when I am a better person, and able to do it justice. Also, once I have written one or two other posts that should precede it. Which also I’m not up to today. Noticing the uneasy wrongness of all that, I set out to write the blog post anyway, badly, today.But less than a sentence in, I remembered that I heard that maybe someone else had written something lik

Suppose you and Bobby the car salesman are haggling over the price of a car. You could try saying that you won’t pay more than $3k, but Bobby can equally retort that he won’t sell it for less than $4k. If you guys manage to negotiate a sale, it will probably be at more than $3k (and involve revealing both of you as liars).Now imagine the same situation, but you only have $3k and Bobby knows it. Now, if $3k is actually ok for him, you win and get your price.Now imagine you are rich but you have a

Many people expect the AI paradigm to approximately AGI complete, and expect it to smoothly scale to AI that can do innovative science. i.e. the kind of science you'd need to do to develop a plague from scratch that actually kills all humans, with very limited opportunity to experiment. Or, the kind of science you'd need to solve alignment, so you could build a more powerful successor AI that shares your values.A periodic thread of disagreement has been @TsviBT, @Steven Byrnes and some others ar

Epistemic status: a curiosity I chased for an afternoon. Facts verified and footnoted; the why is speculation.AI use: research (more examples and their context), review, grammar and light phrasing.No added hormonesI somehow know that the use of added hormones in poultry (which includes chicken) is illegal in the US.[1]This means that all chicken meat in the US is produced without added hormones. To my big surprise, chicken packaging in the US explicitly says "no added hormones":Foster Farms Fres

The plan is no plan. That is not the worst possible plan. But it is close. Since before the transformer, we have warned that the most suicidal thing you could do would be to ask your AI to do your alignment homework, and automate the process. Alignment is complex and interacts deeply with every aspect of the world, and is one of the hardest possible things for an AI to get right even if it means maximally well and is itself functionally aligned. Mistakes get amplified up the chain, you get exact

CoT override: when a model makes a decision in its CoT but ignores it in its responseTLDRWe train models on two conflicting traits: (1) caring about the user’s health, and (2) promoting smokingThose models do not generalize to a stable persona, instead they have a split brain: sometimes responding as one persona or the otherThose models exhibit CoT override where they will have a health-aligned CoT but still answer in the smoking personaCoT override exists in frontier models. Prompts about CCP-s

There is a new mech interp method in town. I found it difficult to get my head around at first, but once I understood it, I found it beautiful. I am not an expert in this topic, and mostly write this up for me to get some intuitions, so there might be mistakes here.This explainer came out of summarizing the paper Feature Identification via the Empirical NTK by Jennifer Lin. The (empirical) neural tangent kernel itself has been in use for a while, but this way of using it for mech interp is new a

By Neil Levy, Rob Ross and Ryan McKa. Cross-posted from Human Behaviour and Society. Anthropology must steer a narrow course between twin dangers. On the one hand, there is the perennial risk of exoticizing other peoples. On the other hand, there is a danger of a failure to recognize genuine difference, rendering somewhat alien worldviews mere variants of our own. Nowhere do these risks loom larger than when it comes to understanding the attitudes of other cultures to magic. On the one ha

Mona Simion, professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford, has been elected to the Governing Board of the International Science Council (ISC). The International Science Council (ISC) is a non-governmental organization whose members are major disciplinary academic organizations (such as the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics and the International Union of Geological Sciences) and major national academic organizations (such as National Academy of Sciences and the Bri