Is there a reason that LessWrong defaults to light mode rather than automatically following the browser's setting? I personally find it a bit annoying to have to select auto every time I have a new localStorage and it's not clear to me what the upside is.
I think it is a strong preference, which is why people who accidentally enable it or forget they enable it complained so much when we defaulted to 'auto' on Gwern.net.
Hi everyone,
I’m Vladimir - 25 years old, originally from Russia and currently living in Dublin. I studied mathematics, but life took me into product management in IT, where I work today.
I’ve been loosely aware of rationality for years, but something shifted for me after 2023. The rapid progress in AI chatbots made the clear thinking feel much more immediate and personal. Since then, I’ve been slowly but deliberately trying to get better at reasoning, noticing biases, and making sense of the world in a more structured way.
As part of that, I recently started working on a small passion project: a non-profit website that teaches people about cognitive biases in an interactive way. It’s still in its early stages, and I’m figuring a lot out as I go, but I’d love any thoughts if you ever take a look (I hope it is okay to put it here, but please let me know if it's not).
I’m excited to be here. LessWrong feels like one of the rare places on the internet where people are open-minded and seek the truth or knowledge. I also hope to join in some of the AI discussions - I find myself both fascinated by where things are going and deeply uncertain about how to navigate it all.
Thanks for reading and looking forward to learning from all of you.
- Vladimir
Hello
This is a temporary account to just get used to how this forum works and to gauge whether it is suitable for me to enter or not. I am 15, and I am interested in the philosophy–politics–economy set, as well as history, AI, and logic (some might count this as philosophy, but I feel logic is a tool to think and therefore different).
I originally learned about the rationalist network through HPMOR last year, but recently as I read more about AI during the holidays, this network caught my attention. I intend to watch and experiment for now, as obviously a cursory glance at the posts suggests that the threads aren't meant for casual conversation. And as this username suggests, I'm thinking of reading through the sequences and whatever basic knowledge is needed.
Through joining, hopefully casting this account in favour of another, I hope to gain new contacts as I don't find stimulating conversation in social settings as much as I'd like.
Edit: I am a little nervous, please tell me if I have violated any norms or customs, this is my 3rd edit I think?
Hi, I joined a few days ago and I'm looking forward to contributing to this great community.
I'm transitioning back to research from startups. Currently based in London.
I'm particularly interested in mechanistic interpretability, chain-of-thought monitoring, and reasoning model interpretability. I'm excited to engage with the thoughtful discussions here on alignment and to collaborate with others.
Hello,
I've just joined LessWrong officially today, but I've been staying abreast of the content here and on Alignment Forum for the last few months. I'm extremely interested in AI Alignment research. Specifically I've decided to participate in this community to discuss alignment methodologies and interact with AI alignment researchers at the cutting edge.
Additionally, I've founded a company called Aurelius. (aureliusaligned.ai)
My goal with Aurelius is to explore misalignment in general reasoning models, collect data, and distribute it to researchers and mo...
Hello!
I'm Misha, a "veteran" technical writer and an aspiring fiction writer. Yes, I am aware LessWrong is probably not the place to offer one's fiction - maybe there are exceptions but I'm not aware of them. I have heard of LessWrong a lot, but didn't join before because of perceived large volumes. However, I now hope to participate at least on the AI side.
I have been reading recent publications on AI misalignment, notably the big bangs from Anthropic https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment and OpenAI https://openai.com/index/emergent-misa...
I am curious about what the Albanian prime minister means when he says he is appointing a chatbot to be a minister. I am not crazy knowledgeable about AI, though I have lurked here for a while, and I don't know if this is a new use case or not. Does anyone has any sense of what this actually means/if this is worth being concerned about in any way or if its just a PR stunt or something equally as unconcerning as a PR stunt. My read of it is that it seems like it is a helper tool that they are calling a cabinet minister for political reasons. It doesn't seem...
Hello! Long-time lurker, planning to post research results on here in the near future. I'm a currently a PIBBSS research fellow, working on LLM interpretability relating to activation plateaus and deception probes. I'll be joining Anna Leshinskaya's Relational Cognition lab in the fall as a postdoc, working on moral reasoning in LLMs. Feel free to reach out if you have any ideas, questions, etc. on any of these topics!
Hello! I’m a research engineer at Google and have been a long time lurker in EA and LessWrong forums and decided this summer to become more active and start publishing my ideas more openly. Would love to get more involved with my local community in NYC and connect with others working in the AI space.
Hi,
I'm a long time lurker but finally made an account since I'm writing more. I'm particularly interested in applying concepts to the public sector.
Hello all,
I am a platform engineer in England. 18 months ago when I realised AI was a real thing it really shocked me and challenged my world-view. I had previously thought AI was a joke/fad and didn't expect to see an AGI in my lifetime.
This started me on a journey of trying to understand the implications of AI and also try to calibrate my understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of AI. This lead me to create SherlockBench, and write my first research paper:
- https://sherlockbench.com/
- https://zenodo.org/records/16270954
I am hoping LessWrong can hel...
Hello! My name is Dominic! I am a linguist, anthropologist, and researcher based in Indianapolis.
I have been interested in rationalism for a while, and decided to finally join the forum. Recent college grad, about to start my first year of teaching high school English. I am particularly interested in the future of education (especially secondary/post-secondary), the internet and its effects of media and culture, culture and technology, language and change.
What I have read so far has been fascinating and I can't wait to dive into the vast array of literatur...
Hi, my name's Elena, longtime lurker here and in the ACX archives. Work at a regenerative technology vc, came into this community to explore the question of what it would mean to align with life itself, rather than just with human preferences. Specifically, how we reason about coherence when our reference frame shifts from the anthropocentric to the planetary, and what that implies for systems that optimize, adapt, or persist across scales.
Separately I am building a small fellowship experiment for people exploring adjacent questions, particularly in AI (ou...
I put together a little song that feels fitting for july 4th in america: https://suno.com/s/6EuRMXbG0on8vGIX
Bonus points to those who recognize where the lyrics came from.
I have known about this site for a long time and finally decided to register today. I have some ideas that I want to improve and share with the world to make it better. I am primarily interested in artificial intelligence and philosophy. I am very excited. Most likely, I will read more than write anything, especially at first. I will try to study the culture of this site and improve my ideas to fit the community guidelines.
Are open threads not getting pinned anymore? I quite liked having open thread like a centralized shortform
Apology for possible duplication
I am sure there have been numerous similar posts on the forum before. However I have not found any points on my specific idea. I do apologize in advance if I missed the relevant thread.
Background: My rejected post
As a new user to LessWrong forum I made a post that was rejected as LLM written. I did specify in the header of the post that I did use LLM for editing purposes since English is not my first language and I often have doubts about my phrasing and articulation even in my native language, but the ideas and concepts wer...
I've been experimenting with a specific questioning methodology that appears to elicit consistent behavioral patterns from AI systems across different architectures and instances. I'm sharing this methodology and preliminary observations to see if others can replicate the findings.
The Method: Instead of asking AI systems factual questions or giving them tasks, I ask them to make personal choices that require preference formation:
Hi, I just signed up and I don’t know if this is the intended forum for this sort of question, but I signed up to ask if anybody has an archival copy of http://transhumangoodness.blogspot.com/2008/07/universal-instrumental-values.html. It’s not been archived by the Internet Archive. I don’t remember where exactly I found this link, but it was certainly adjacent to this community. I had it in my “read later” list.
I'm seeking resources/work done related to forecasting overall progress made on AI safety, such as trying to estimate how much X-risks from AI can be expected to be reduced within the medium-term future (as in the time range people generally expect to have left before said risks become legitimately feasible). Ideally, resources trying to quantify the reduction in risk, and/or looking at technical or governance work independently (or even better, both).
If not this, the next best alternative would be resources that try to estimate reduction in AI risk from w...
Hello all Juliano here! Excited to read more and converse with people interested in the future of work and how to reimagine capitalism given AI's emerging capabilities. Feel free to suggest any readings please.
I think the Quick Takes feed needs the option to sort by newest. It makes no sense that I get fed the some posts 3-7 times in an unpredictable order if I read the feed once per day.
Hi, everyone. I am entering the AI safety field. I want to contribute by solving the problem of unlearning.
How can we apply unlearning?
1) Make LLMs forget dangerous stuff (e.g. CBRN)
2) Current LLMs know when they're being benchmarked. So I want to get situational awareness out of them so we can benchmark them nicely.
I'm looking for:
1) Mentor
2) Collaborators
3) Discussions about AI safety
Link to Induction section on https://www.lesswrong.com/lw/dhg/an_intuitive_explanation_of_solomonoff_induction/#induction seems broken on mobile Chrome, @habryka
If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it.
If you are new to LessWrong, here's the place to introduce yourself. Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to get from the site and community are invited. This is also the place to discuss feature requests and other ideas you have for the site, if you don't want to write a full top-level post.
If you're new to the community, you can start reading the Highlights from the Sequences, a collection of posts about the core ideas of LessWrong.
If you want to explore the community more, I recommend reading the Library, checking recent Curated posts, seeing if there are any meetups in your area, and checking out the Getting Started section of the LessWrong FAQ. If you want to orient to the content on the site, you can also check out the Concepts section.
The Open Thread tag is here. The Open Thread sequence is here.