Philosophy

On a sunny Saturday afternoon two weeks ago, I was sitting in Dolores park, watching a man get turned into a cake. It was, I gather, his birthday and for reasons (Maybe something to do with Scandanavia?) his friends had decided to celebrate by taping him to a tree and dousing him with all manner of liquids and powders. At the end, confetti flew everywhere. It was hard not to notice, and hard not to watch.Something about the vibe was inspiring… I felt like maybe we should be doing something li

I have a lot of habit streaks. Some of the streaks I have going at the moment: Studied Anki cards for Chinese every day for 8 months* Meditated every day for the past 1.5 years* Flossed every day for 6+ months* In fact I think quite a lot of my identity is connected to these streaks at this point, and that’s part of what sustains them [1] . But there are a lot of other things you can do to make habits and their associated streaks more sustainable. It’s helpful if they are small enoug

When thinking about AI risk, I often wonder how materially impactful each hour of my time is, and I think that this may be useful for other people to know as well, so I spent a couple of hours making a couple of estimates. I basically expect that a tonne of people have put a bunch more time into this than me, but this is nice to have as a rough sketch to point people to.I'm going to make 3 estimates: an underestimate, my best-guess estimate and (what I think is) an overestimate.Starting facts[1]

The year is 2024. Summer has just begun. National discourse, for now, is solely focused on the upcoming presidential election, with many a journalist or political commentator critiquing the current, rather fiery state of political affairs. Tech and its associated public commentary has centered upon artificial intelligence as its new darling, hailing OpenAI as  a savior for what was once deemed an idea stuck in science fiction, and looking to burgeoning startups such as Cursor and Windsurf as ear

tldr; get the new Fatebook Android app!What is Fatebook?Fatebook.io is a website[1] for easily tracking your predictions and becoming better calibrated at them. I like it a lot, and find it convenient for practicing probabilistic thinking.The Fatebook.io dashboardThat said, I've found Fatebook's mobile version to be clunky, and its email-based notifications to be less-than-ideal...which leads me to:The New Android AppOver the past two weeks, I've made an android app that wraps the Fatebook API,

In this post, I share the thinking that lies behind the Exobrain system I have built for myself. In another post, I'll describe the actual system.I think the standard way of relating to LLM/AIs is as an external tool (or "digital mind") that you use and/or collaborate with. Instead of you doing the coding, you ask the LLM to do it for you. Instead of doing the research, you ask it to. That's great, and there is utility in those use cases.Now, while I hardly engage in the delusion that humans can

War is an ism — nationalism, dogmatism, capitalism — paid for by an is: the living beingness of human beings made a sacrificial offering to an ideology so powerful it has quelled the two things that make us most human: compassion and critical thinking. “Those people who see clearly the necessity of changed thinking must themselves undertake the discipline of thinking in new ways and must persuade others to do so,” the visionary Kathleen Lonsdale wrote in what remains the

(Epistemic status: I consider the following quite obvious and self-evident, but decided to post anyways.[1])Mathematics is a social activity done by mathematicians.— Paul Erdős, probablyThere've been a few attempts to create mathematical models of math. The examples that come to my mind are Gödelian Numbering (GN) and Logical Induction (LI). Feel free to suggest more in the comments, but I'll use those as my primary reference points. In this post, I want to contrast them with the way human mathe

Hi, I'm kromem, and this is my 5th annual Easter 'shitpost' as part of a larger multi-year cross-media project inspired by 42 Entertainment, and built around a central premise: Truth clusters and fictions fractalize.(It's been a bit of a hare-brained idea continuing to gestate from the first post on a hypothetical Easter egg in a simulation. While this piece fits in with the larger koine of material, it can also be read on its own, so if you haven't been following along down the rabbit hole, no

I recently said our civ will fall if we do not find finish the industrial revolution, and apply the industry trio of math, big orgs, and capitalism to more areas of life. Especially our fast activism-driven evolution of values, morals, and norms.But watching a documentary on early activist H.D. Thoreau brought home to me just how huge an ask this seems. Our modern world has come to deeply adore and revere changing its morals fast via youth movements, and a great many features of our modern world

I'm a huge fan of whipped cream. It's rich, smooth, and fluffy, which makes it a great contrast to a wide range of textures common in baked goods. And it's usually better without adding sugar. Desserts are usually too sweet. I want them to have enough sugar that they feel like a dessert, but it's common to have way more than that. Some of this is functional: in most cakes the sugar performs a specific role in the structure, where if you cut the sugar the texture will be much worse. This

I came up with these principles when I was a child myself.Don’t be a sheep 🐑. Avoid mindlessly copying others. Resist the urge towards conformity. Think for yourself whether something is worth doing and useful for your goals. If appearing to conform is useful for your goals, think about ways to do the bare minimum. Others are making very many mistakes you don’t want to make, and things can be done much better and more effectively than most people do them. (Be extra aware of this point if you are

“Our neurons must be used … not only to know but also to transform knowledge; not only to experience but also to construct.” “Principles are good and worth the effort only when they develop into deeds,” Van Gogh wrote to his brother in a beautiful letter about talking vs. doing and the human pursuit of greatness. “The great doesn’t happen through impulse alone, and is a succession of little things that are brought together.” But what stands between the impulse for

Yes, that one from HPMoR by @Eliezer Yudkowsky. And I mean it absolutely literally - this is a language designed to make lies inexpressible. It catches LLMs' ungrounded statements, incoherent logic and hallucinations. Comes with notebooks (Jupyter-style), server for use with agents, and inspection tooling. Github, Documentation. Works everywhere - even in the web Claude with the code execution sandbox. How Unsophisticated lies and manipulations are typically ungrounded or include logical inconsi

Steering LLMs with single-vector methods might break down soon, and by soon I mean soon enough that if you're working on steering, you should start planning for it failing now.This is particularly important for things like steering as a mitigation against eval-awareness. Steering HumansI have a strong intuition that we will not be able to steer a superintelligence very effectively, partially for the same reason that you probably can't steer a human very effectively. I think weakly "steering" a h

Crossposted on my personal blog. This is post number 16 in my second attempt at doing Inkkaven in a day, i.e. to write 30 blogposts in a single day.MATS is an organization that pairs up-and-coming AI Safety researchers (who I call participants) with the world’s best (this is not an exaggeration) existing AI Safety researchers (called mentors), for a minimum of 3 months research experience, followed by 6 or 12 months of further time to pursue their research further if they meet a minimum standard

“A relationship is a physiologic process, as real and as potent as any pill or surgical procedure.” “We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us,” Adrienne Rich wrote in framing her superb definition of honorable human relationships. It is a cruelty of life that, along the way, people who once appeared fitted to the task crumble in character when the going gets hard in that natural way hardship has of visiting all human lives. When relationships collapse u

DisclaimersThis essay is me trying to figure out the “edges” of Singer’s argument in Practical Ethics.I’ve written and rewritten it several times, and it bothers me that I don’t reach a particular conclusion. The essay itself remains at the level of “musings” instead of “worked out, internally consistent philosophical refutation”.Nevertheless, I want to share my thoughts, so publishing it anyway.Some specific disclaimers:I agree with many Singer’s conclusions.This essay is based on my extension

So as I haven’t been able to speak the past short while, one thing I have noticed is that it is harder to communicate with others. I know what you are thinking: “Wow, who could have possibly guessed? It’s harder to converse when you can’t speak?”. Indeed, I didn’t expect it either.But how much harder is it to communicate?One proxy you can use is the classic typing metric, words per minute (wpm). So I spend some time looking at various forms of communication and how they differ between one anothe

Written quickly as part of the Inkhaven Residency.Related: Bureaucracy as active ingredient, pain as active ingredientA widely known secret in academia is that many of the formalities serve in large part proof of work. That is, the reason expensive procedures exist is that some way of filtering must exist, and the amount of effort invested can often be a good proxy for the quality of the work. Specifically, the pool of research is vast, and good research can often be hard to identify. Even engag