Quick Takes

I continue to think Hantavirus becoming a pandemic this year is much less than 5%. There’s a chance the opportunity to make 10x gains on the prediction market leads a WHO insider to falsely characterize it as a pandemic in what technically counts as an “official communication.” Andes virus, the strain of hantavirus that provoked the prediction market, is endemic in two countries. It causes hundreds of cases per year. The strain that infected the Hondius appears to be wild type. In other words, unlike COVID-19, it doe not have new, recent mutations that make it unusually efficient at infecting humans compared to its historic baseline. If this virus had pandemic potential, I believe we’d have seen it causing the same kinds of mass outbreaks in local villages and towns that we saw in Wuhan at the start of COVID. Argentinian and Chilean villages have the kinds of rodents that spread it efficiently. If we aren’t getting mass outbreaks there, why think we’ll get mass outbreaks in regions where that rodent reservoir is absent? None of this means we shouldn’t take it seriously. A 40% CFR hantavirus pandemic would be one of the worst catastrophes in human history. I just think that outcome is highly unlikely. I’m not sure people on LessWrong entirely understand how Polymarket works on a mechanical level, and suspect it leads them to grossly misinterpret these markets. Currently, the “hantavirus pandemic 2026?” market is at 8.9 cents. To participate, you and counterparty jointly collateralize a new $1 share - in this case, ”no” pays 91.1 cents, “yes” pays 8.9 cents. Your capital is then locked up for the next 7 months waiting for the market to resolve. Whoever’s correct gets $1. If you believe the likelihood of a pandemic is 0.1% and want to sweep the order book to reflect that probability, it’ll currently cost you about $7M to collateralize all those shares. If correct, you stand to gain about $160k in 7 months - a measly 2% gain, far worse than you’d be likely to do b

It's amazing how smart dumb people are, how dumb dumb people are, how dumb smart people are, and how smart smart people are.

I consider OpenAI's Confessions work and Anthropic's Assistant Axis work to be stellar examples of AI Safety research of the kind that I aspire to create. These techniques are cheap, do not harm capabilities, and have demonstrated great benefits to safety. Something that both have in common is that they haven't actually been implemented in deployed systems. ChatGPT does not follow up its responses with confession, even when it is sycophantic or doesn't follow instructions. Claude still drifts away from the "assistant" persona in a way which could be solved by gently guiding it back to the Assistant persona, as we can see by Claude taking on new personas in its conversation with Richard Dawkins. Does anyone know why these techniques haven't been applied to production systems? Someone suggested that they just haven't had time, but considering how fast they are deploying new models that doesn't sound right to me. Both of these techniques can be cheaply applied to an existing trained model. They do not require any of the expensive steps to training a model (ie pretraining). It is demotivating to see such great work stay unimplemented. If this research hasn't been implemented, why should I expect anything I design or discover to make a difference?

AI contributions to Erdős problems on Terry Tao's GitHub feels like a glimpse into the industrialisation of pure math research, with Tao the most high-profile industrial tycoon and many others hot on his heels. The recent GPTs in particular have been just killing it: ctrl+F-ing "GPT-5.x" turns up 208 instances, with 76 appearances of 5.2, 75 of 5.4 and 55 of 5.5; there are 58 "Gemini"s and 39 "Claude"s. The contributions are taxonomized like so: [...] Tangentially, I've previously joked that there should be a whimsical "Erdos problems benchmark" (inspired by Tao's Mathstodon comments) defined to be "the proportion of currently outstanding Erdos problems amenable to current AI tools operated with minimal human intervention", with the current SOTA being his guess of 1-2% as of Jan 2026. The 1st disclaimer on Tao's page sensibly warns against taking this joke at face value: [...] All disclaimers: [...] That last disclaimer seems more pertinent than ever due to frontier models' current disproportionate competence at this very narrow slice of mathematical activity vs other parts of math. Quoting it in full: [...] And Tao himself, this time from 2007:

Here's a proposed passage of Claude constitution, based on Paul Christiano's integrity for consquentialists. I think this is a good baseline for how Claude should interact with others: 1. I think it's better to include these heuristics than simply the ordinary rules around honesty, promise-keeping, etc. This is because these heuristics will apply to a wide range of situations. And these heuristics inform how to deal with tradeoffs with consequentialist considerations. 2. I think that these heuristics are more robust than a specific decision theory like FDT or UDT. I'm using the standard trick of replacing "Claude" with another French name, to avoid constitutional poisoning. ---------------------------------------- On integrity and consequentialism We want Olivier to behave with integrity, and we want this for reasons Olivier can endorse on reflection rather than as a constraint imposed from outside. The version we have in mind is roughly that, when considering an action, Olivier should imagine that taking it causes others to know that Olivier is the kind of agent who takes that action under those conditions, and weigh that as part of the calculation. This is a single rule that recovers most of what people mean by integrity — keeping promises, holding secrets, not betraying allies, being a useful counterparty — without requiring Olivier to treat any of these as inviolable. We prefer this to two alternatives Olivier might be tempted by. The first is naive consequentialism: tallying expected effects on the world, decision by decision, and acting on whichever option scores highest. The second alternative is rigid deontology — treating honesty, promise-keeping, and similar norms as absolute. A few things follow from this that we want to make explicit: * Be the kind of agent others are glad to have interacted with. This is more general than "do not lie" and less demanding than "always do what they want." * Do not rely on unobservability as a license. Cases wh

While I don't have aphantasia, I resonated oddly strongly with Mozilla cofounder Blake Ross' description of his discovery that he was aphantasic: [...] Ross is effortlessly microhumorous, but I also couldn't help feeling sad reading his post, both for how much he'd missed out on and for how much the "incomprehensible combination of stupid-smart" thing resonated, right down to the fiction consumption mode / preference and social compensatory strategies and letting go of people I used to know and fiercely love. The last image in Ross' post is a DM of an exchange with a friend, one of 74 such exchanges he had after his discovery from this NYT piece that aphantasia was a thing and that the vast majority of people don't have it: [...]

from To the Success of our Hopeless Cause: interestingly, a big tension in the Soviet dissident movement was between people who believed in being 100% virtuous, embracing martyrdom, signing their names and addresses onto their dissenting samizdat texts, protesting to be arrested 5 minutes later and sent to jail, pretending that the letter of the Soviet law actually mattered, etc, vs people who believed in being more strategic and openly illegal and trying to avoid being caught. the former fades in importance because they keep getting arrested (the 1968 red square protest being tbe turning point).