Philosophy

I’m fed up of hearing about how LLMs are next token predictors, and therefore they .There’s lots of philosophical objections, but fundamentally, framing AI as next token predictors in the first places is just misleading and inaccurate. Here’s why LLMs aren’t naive next token predictors.What is Next Token PredictionLet’s first briefly cover what “Next Token Prediction” even means. It is referring to base training (also called pre-training), the first step in training a LLM. We’ll talk about the

Eliciting Latent Knowledge problem for the unfamiliar:Suppose we train a model to predict what the future will look like according to cameras and other sensors. We then use planning algorithms to find a sequence of actions that lead to predicted futures that look good to us.But some action sequences could tamper with the cameras so they show happy humans regardless of what’s really happening. More generally, some futures look great on camera but are actually catastrophically bad.In these cases,

Don't get me wrong, but metis is YOLO. In 1932-33, Soviet collectivization destroyed local farming knowledge and produced a famine that killed somewhere between five and nine million people. It was one of the twentieth century’s great tragedies, and James Scott’s Seeing Like a State draws a straight line from the ideology that caused it — High Modernism, the belief that society can be rationally reorganized from above — to the disaster that followed.But here’s a number that doesn’t appear in Sco

Many people make costly mistakes when reasoning about their health. Even most doctors make this mistake, because it's not a mistake that's caused by a lack of medical knowledge. Rather, it's caused by a lack of clear thinking. People experience symptoms, and then they look for the root cause of their symptoms. For example, somone with heartburn or pain in their stomach might decide the root cause of their issues is excess stomach acid/GERD (GastroEsophageal Reflux Disease -- a disease affecting

If it reads confused and stupid, for once it really is part of the intended message I guess.Epistemic status: 0.Sun 2.30am, with Claude having helped me prepare last minute a 4h lecture I had no adequate time for. And after a long week where, as usual, Claude was the one I have been talking to more, for work and other organization, than with my wife, and far more than with anyone else, as happens to a large share of us by now I reckon. Thinking how great it is to be in home office as there are

After more than a year of trials and new models, Anthropic's Claude AI has finally managed to beat Pokémon Red. The writeup that clued me in to this is worth a read; the story of Claude's many failures leading up to its success are frankly hilarious. There's even a catchy song.There was no clear moment when the AI went from stumbling around Mt. Moon or Silph Co. in a haze of frustration to beating the Final Four with ease. Claude just got steadily better at a bunch of things at once—memory, spat

“The perilous time for the most highly gifted is not youth… The perilous season is middle age, when a false wisdom tempts them to doubt the divine origin of the dreams of their youth…” “A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living,” Virginia Woolf wrote in one of her characteristic asides of immense insight as she considered the dying art of letter writing. This may be the most elemental paradox of existence: We yearn for permanence and stability despite a

(Initially written for the LW Wiki, but then I realized it was looking more like a post instead.)In 1895, the physicist Ignaz Robert Schütz, who worked as an assistant to the more eminent physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, wondered if our observed universe had simply assembled by a random fluctuation of order from a universe otherwise in thermal equilibrium. The idea was published by Boltzmann in 1896, properly credited to Schütz, and has been associated with Boltzmann ever since.The obvious objection

Thanks to Megan Kinniment for helpful comments and discussion.TL;DR: Benchmarks like HCAST undersample fuzzy (hard to evaluate) tasks, meaning they might overestimate capability on long-horizon work. To sample fuzzy tasks we need to increase judge capacity: we can either try to build automated judges that match human judgment, or reduce the human effort per grade. To do this, we propose generating fuzzy tasks as a byproduct of real SWE work — snapshot the repo and a proto-spec before starting, a

Neural language autoencoders were just introduced by Anthropic. In a fascinating paper, they showed that you can take the residual stream activations of a language model and then train two instantiations of that same model (an encoder and a decoder) to translate those activations into a natural language verbalisation of them and back. In theory, this is great because it literally lets us have activations explained to us, and we know that it's a faithful explanation because it can literally be tr

Credit: ClaudePlaysPokemon Elevator Shanty by KurukkooDisclaimer: like some previous posts in this series, this was not primarily written by me, but by a friend. I did substantial editing, however.ClaudePlaysPokemon feat. Opus 4.7 has finally beaten Pokémon Red, fulfilling the challenge set over a year ago when LLMs playing Pokémon went briefly, slightly viral, until Gemini 2.5 Pro suddenly beat Pokémon Blue in May 2025, beating Anthropic at their own challenge by using a stronger harness.Claude

[New Entry by Chris Bobonich and Katherine Meadows on May 15, 2026.] [Editor's Note: The following entry replaces and is partially based on the former entry titled Plato on utopia.] The texts of all great philosophers give rise to interpretative disagreements, but the extent of disagreement in Plato interpretation...

“Attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator. It asks what is relevant right now, and gears us up to notice only that.” “How we spend our days,” Annie Dillard wrote in her timelessly beautiful meditation on presence over productivity, “is, of course, how we spend our lives.” And nowhere do we fail at the art of presence most miserably and most tragically than in urban life — in the city, high on the cult of productivity, where we float past

[New Entry by Lisa Herzog on May 14, 2026.] "Economic democracy" describes the idea that democratic principles should apply not only to the political realm, but also to the economic realm (e.g. Cohen 1989; Cumbers 2020; Dahl 1985; Ellerman 1992; 2009; 2021; Kelly 2019; Malleson 2014; O'Neill 2008; Schweickart 2011). It goes beyond the idea of the "primacy of democracy" (Berman 2006), according to which democratic politics should set the rules for the economy. Instead, it aims at embedding democ

Along the way of life, I have discovered three things you can almost always do in your darkest hour that almost never fail to recover the light: Learn something. Help someone. Feel it all. We need our sciences to learn how the universe works, to know what we don’t yet know and to comprehend it. We need our arts to learn how the heart works, to feel what we are unwilling or unable to feel and hold it without apprehension. We need both — knowledge and feeling, intelligent comprehensio

Economist Alex Tabarrok (GMU) recently wrote of “ideas behind their time”. He explains: We are all familiar with ideas said to be ahead of their time, Babbage’s analytical engine and da Vinci’s helicopter are classic examples. We are also familiar with ideas “of their time,” ideas that were “in the air” and thus were often simultaneously discovered such as the telephone, calculus, evolution, and color photography. What is less commented on is the third possibility, ideas that could

By Benjamin George Coles. In a 2010 English-language blog post, the Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho told the following very short story, giving it the title ‘The Fisherman and the Businessman’ and commenting only: ‘classic Brazilian story, probably also present in other cultures. Someone found the English version, but I could not identify the translator’. There was once a businessman who was sitting by the beach in a small Brazilian village. As he sat, he saw a fisherman rowing a small boat tow

“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself… You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow…” In the final years of his long life, which encompassed world wars and assassinations and numerous terrors, the great cellist and human rights advocate Pablo Casals urged humanity to “make

Philosopher David Boonin (University of Colorado Boulder) is inviting other Jewish philosophers to contribute to a collection of writings he’s putting together. [The seder dinner scene from “Crimes and Misdemeanors” (1989)]The idea is to ask philosophers who are Jewish, regardless of whether they consider themselves practicing or observant Jews, to reflect on the ways their Jewish background may have influenced their lives as philosophers. Professor Boonin writes: Many years ago, I w

“I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood.” “Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul,” Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) wrote in offering his timeless advice on living a vibrant and rewarding life in the preface to Leaves of Grass. When Whitman first published his masterpiece in 1855, it was met with indifference punctuated by bursts of harsh criticism. It is diffi