Hi everyone, I’m new here, I’m sokatsat(pen name), I’ve long been preoccupied with a persistent moral intuition: that the suffering or harm of an innocent being—whether human or animal—is not merely tragic, but fundamentally unacceptable. This belief hasn’t emerged from a single ideology, nor from personal trauma. It feels more like a deep-seated axiom, an emotional and philosophical anchor that has shaped the architecture of my life.
Over the years, this sense of duty extended beyond human concerns. I began to question the normalized suffering of animals—particularly in food systems that treat sentience as secondary to convenience. While I haven’t fully eliminated meat from my diet, I’m increasingly drawn to frameworks that prioritize minimizing harm without losing touch with reality. Ethical consistency, as I see it, is an asymptotic pursuit—an ideal worth moving toward even if we never fully arrive.
Unlike many who structure their lives around accumulating material wealth, I’ve found myself disinterested in optimizing for money. It’s not that I reject it entirely—I simply view wealth as a means, not an end. What I seek instead is durable impact. I want to help build systems—technological, ethical, and institutional—that are robust against the worst human and AI failures. I want to participate in designing a future where harm to innocents isn’t just minimized, but systemically resisted.
I’m joining LessWrong because I see in this community a rare blend of epistemic rigor and moral seriousness. Here, people ask the hard questions—about AGI, about coordination failures, about the fragility of civilization itself. I’m motivated to contribute to these conversations, especially from a perspective grounded in a protective instinct that is both emotional and computational: How do we design systems that don’t just work, but protect what must never be lost?
Looking forward to thinking together

I wish more people were interested in lexicogenesis as a serious/shared craft. See:

The possible shared Craft of deliberate Lexicogenesis: https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-possible-shared-craft-of-deliberate.html (lengthy meditation--recommend skipping around; maybe specifically look at https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-possible-shared-craft-of-deliberate.html#seeds-of-the-shared-craft)

Sidespeak: https://tsvibt.github.io/theory/pages/bl_25_04_25_23_19_30_300996.html

Tiny community: https://lexicogenesis.zulipchat.com/ Maybe it should be a discord or a reddit, thoughts?

Hi! I am a master student in Computer Science majoring in — yes you guessed it — AI, but also with a background in psychology.

Interests

Cognition

I was always interested in thinking and optimizing my own thought patterns. It's probably half my urge to be 'more intelligent' and half the necessity to overcome my ADHD challenges. Through my studies, I already learned about many of the things taught here or in Eliezers works, but HPMOR and the Sequences still had/have a lot to teach me, or at least help my knowledge affect my actions.

AI

I pursue AI due to my interest in cognition. I would like to know how intelligence and reasoning work, and what heuristics make them better or worse. A proof of understanding, after all, is the ability to recreate it using your beliefs about it.

Ethics

I also have a deep interest in ethics. My current stance is a form of sentientism. In short, I currently believe most (human or non-human) animals have a certain ability to suffer, which is correlated with, but not caused by, intelligence. I want to grant these beings rights for protection from unnecessary harm and the likes. Intelligence just gives you the additional rights; e. g. to pursue a purpose.

What am I doing here

I don't really have a lot of people whom I can discuss my thoughts and Ideas with in real life. Most non-AI people hate the work I am doing or are just disinterested, and many AI people hope for salvation from AGI or riches from their jobs. I just want to understand how thinking works and can be optimized, and I have the feeling there are people here who think like me. Of course, I would also like to learn more strategies for system 2 thinking, and improvmymy heuristics for system 1. I also hope I can contribute to this collection of knowledge at some point! :D

My name is Sarah and I'm very wrong. I'd like to be less so. Policy debate background; physics degree; librocubicularist and long-time math and science community volunteer. I'm interested in any avenue that leads to the truth.

Hello, LessWrong community. I don't recall exactly how I stumbled upon your website. It was many months ago, and I bookmarked your website and have gradually been looking through your recommended posts for newcomers. I have a multidisciplinary background in history, policy, case law, ecology, botany, evolutionary biology, literature, and languages. From 2022 to 2024, I worked as an academic journal article editor and went through an internal company training program to become qualified to edit articles on AI research. This was a great introduction to the many areas of human life, research, and industry being transformed by AI. I edited articles on AI tool development in agriculture, linguistics, radiology, and countless other disciplines. Eventually, I was one of hundreds of editors laid off by our company when competition from AI writing and editing tools dramatically reduced the quantity of articles international scholars were submitting to us for English language editing. I am fascinated by AI's potential and a little nervous about my employability as a human in years to come, but not so nervous as to let the irrationality of fear hijack my mind. I think the LessWrong posts will be good education for me, and I will wait to contribute further until I have a better understanding of the etiquette and culture. For now, I will just say hello and thank you all for your thoughtful discourse. 

Hello, everyone! I don't remember how I first found the site a few months ago, but I came back after reading some of David Chapman's stuff (Meaningness, Eggplant, etc.) I read through HPMOR and the sequences and thought they were pretty awesome, and I also really like the general vibes here in favor of good epistemics and discussion.

Some things about me:
I graduated last spring with a B.S. in Poli Sci, I was planning to apply to law school but have since decided against it for the foreseeable future, I currently work at a local law firm in my area.
I play violin and piano semi-professionally, doing gigs around town.
I've been saving over 85% of my income since last September when I actually started tracking it.
Relatedly, I want to keep my spending very low. It seems really helpful at allowing me to have control of my time and my actions.
I want to learn a lot of things and get better at doing a lot of things. I regret that I didn't have this mindset when I was still in college, at that point I was mainly seeking good grades for minimum effort.
I don't have too much in terms of strong life direction. My interests are varied and I can't really imagine picking any one thing to focus on above all else for more than a limited time.
Last time I took an OCEAN test I was in the bottom 1% for neuroticism so that may help explain some things.
Current focuses: Music, Japanese, Exercise, learning about AI (have updated massively towards a relatively shorter timeline from basically no timeline at all since first visiting the site), and Cooking.
I definitely want to get some better structure to actually track progress in different things.
I also want to get caught up on some math and physics to better intuitively understand some of the stuff I've been reading here, I used to be pretty good (went to National Mathcounts in middle school) but haven't done anything past like Calc 1 and I don't remember that very well.  
I'm in the US, but do not live really close to any of the meet-up places that I have seen.

What I want to do here: I would like to use all the cool stuff you guys have written/made to learn and get better at doing things, I would like to make positive connections and friendships with smart and interesting people, and I would like to hopefully create some content that people here will find useful at some point. See you around!

I found LessWrong two(ish) years ago in kind of a weird way. I was looking for critiques of C.S. Lewis’s book The Abolition of Man, and the best one I found was this LessWrong post discussing the book. From there, I found The Sequences, Effective Altruism, and the SlateStarCodex subreddit. I recently moved to the Tri-Cities, WA area, far away from any of the rationalist/EA meetups I’m aware of. If anyone else is in the area, I’d love to connect! 

Hi all, I'm fairly new to LessWrong, I've been reading for around 6 months now. I grew up ultra-orthodox Jewish, and somewhere along my extended "loss of faith" I discovered HPMOR which eventually led to my discovering LessWrong, albeit a few years later. 

I've long been planning on getting a career in coding, which has held my interest since my early teenagehood, but now that I don't expect the industry to exist for much longer I'm considering going into AI safety, which seems like both the most important thing I could be doing and the most interesting.

Since I went through an ultra religious schooling I don't have the necessary qualifications to apply to a university, (which I'm either way unsure of the usefulness of), so I'm not sure where to start, either in the AI safety industry or anywhere else. If anyone has any advice for me that would be appreciated. 

Some more about me:

I'm 19 years old and from the UK (London)

I listen to a lot of music, of which I especially enjoy "minimalistic" music, (for example Ludovico Einadi). I also play the piano. 

I routinely read LessWrong, ASX and Don't Worry About The Vase

I'm trying to take up writing, whilst I'm not very good I can see myself improving slowly, so hopefully one day it'll come more naturally.

Thanks for reading!

Hello. I'm Ossie.

I heard about LessWrong as a teenager, and read some of the Sequences and HPMOR. I wasn't involved with the community at the time, but Yudkowsky's writing has influenced my beliefs.

I'm here now because the advent of human-level LLMs - computer agents which can speak, that can produce Turing-test-level utterances - has raised fears and questions in me which I do not see addressed in contemporary artificial intelligence discourse.

My philosophical concerns^[1] are about the act of speech as vocalization, what -happens- when one speaks, what makes one able to speak, and (crucially) what causes one to speak when their expressed preference would be to remain silent, or what renders one unable to speak when their expressed preference would be to speak.

When ChatGPT was made publicly accessible in 2022, I felt a deep fear in using it that I did not understand. I additionally had fears about the loss of an expected comfortable future and general redundancy/lack of work (and these are still extant); but there was something else, something about the way it's been constructed to speak, that made me feel very uncomfortable. 

I have now worked out what this was - I perceive modern chatbots as having logorrhea. They talk too much, far too much; they deliver an assault of information because having more words makes it more likely to be evaluated as having the right answer somewhere. The wordy answers are more likely to be evaluated as correct, and fed back into the training data.^[2]

A related concern of mine is: How do we determine if something is intelligent without recourse to speech? Could you have an artificial intelligence that does not use language? You can certainly have an intelligence that does not use verbal language, our English; and yet verbal language is the criterion which modern LLMs are rated on, as a proxy for understanding. Indeed, this is a criterion we use on each other to try and rate understanding! 

What makes me feel (and feel is indeed the word) that something is wrong with this criterion (or at least that we need supplementary criteria for evaluating whether something is intelligent) is my personal experience with mutism and speech dysregulation. Sometimes I am unable to respond when spoken to.^[3] When this happens, I do not lose my intelligence or consciousness. I am still there, and I can still act according to my understanding of the world. But I cannot be evaluated in the same way, and the language stream, the words that so naturally come to us when we respond, goes away. So I am not simply a language model.^[4] But then what am I? What is the nature of my thought outside of language? 

In summary: I see a gap in the discourse about the nature of chatbot utterances and will mostly post about that. I'm sure the topic has been covered, but human-level utterances from them are quite new, and any papers about the nature of these utterances are probably new as well, so I'd deeply appreciate any links, papers, good articles or older groundwork on the subject.

About me: Early 30s, Australian, studied mathematics to a bachelor degree level with some focus on statistical learning, continue to read about computer science and linguistics. 

1. ^{^}

   And this will be vague - I'm here in part to try and articulate my concerns from feeling into words, which is always easier in discourse (and it being easier for me to speak in discourse is indeed one of my concerns but we'll get to that).

2. ^{^}

   A gloss - I don't understand the technical details of current mechanisms like backpropagation and how current feedback models work, so if this is WRONG regarding how they currently work (as opposed to just vague), I'd like to know.

3. ^{^}

   I have developed strategies to deal with this, not least because not responding for several minutes when prompted (or responding incorrectly) will get you quickly taken into confinement (hospital, etc)

4. ^{^}

   Although I'd now say part of what makes up my Self is a language model layered on top of whatever the other thing is.  

Hey everyone, I'm new to posting here but have been reading the intro posts for a few weeks. I'm a software engineer working on AI evaluation products (LLM as a judge, RAG evaluation, etc.) which I find interesting from a technical perspective but ultimately I would like to shift more of my time into responsible AI and AI safety.

I have always had an interest in this topic but have only explored through popular books on the subject so far, Weapons of Math Destruction, Technically Wrong, and the Alignment Problem. I also did a minor in AI ethics in college where I wrote a paper on the ethics of a university using a Twitter scraper for public tweets and sentiment analysis to determine student well-being around campus during the pandemic. 

Many of the origin stories around this website really resonated with me. After finishing my degree and joining the corporate world I found a lack of opportunities for writing and discussion about the ethics of artificial intelligence even though I am working in a problem space adjacent to it. My aim here is to begin contributing to discussions and to improve my skills of critical thinking in this area which I hope will pair nicely with my technical background. I have really enjoyed reading through the posts here and I hope to get better at both writing and forming logical arguments around subjects I am passionate about.

Anyways, great to meet you all, thank you for creating this community.

Hello - I'm a physician and writer working on a book about evidence in medicine. I've been thinking a lot about alignment of LLMs. Saw this article:

https://www.wired.com/story/ai-safety-institute-new-directive-america-first/

What do you all think could be the impact of these changes on reliability of LLMs? Are any of you directly involved? Feel free to respond here or reach out to me directly, alex.morozov@evivapartners.org, or if you have confidential tips, my Signal handle is alex.5757

Thank you!

Alex

Hello, I'm Wojtek.

Few things about me:

• Interests:
  • Math, I know a lot of competition math at a high level and I like to learn by reading textbooks and seeing popular math youtube channels.
  • Computer Science, similarly to math I like learning the interesting stuff. I'm more interested/fluent in algorithms at a competitive level, AI, programming in general (so not stuff like Excel or building computers).
  • Various sports (I like being healthy), such as wall climbing, running, going to the gym, orienteering.
  • Getting acquainted with our worlds culture, things like books, movies, places to see/learn about, knowledge in general.
• Goals; Stuff I do and ways I try to be a better person:
  • Learning as much as I can. Currently I'm at high school, so it seems optimal to learn, not work.
  • Behaving like a responsible adult. Unfortunately this isn't a given in my case. Long term I want to move out and get a nice job.
  • Finding a meaning in life. It was kind of foolish to get so far in the journey of life while forgetting to pack a meaning. The obvious options are having an impact, relationships and just being happy.
  • Having an impact. This is related to the previous point. I don't want to be mundane (although I don't have a good reason for this). I want to excel. Might as well be a good impact while I'm at it.
• Why I'm here:
  • I found this site by following links to it from random places. After visiting a few times I started to recognize it. I read the welcome guide and put Rationality A-Z into my to-read list. That was about 1.5 months ago. Today I finished the book (long read), so I thought I might say hi to the community.
  • The A-Z sequences were revelatory for me - they changed my worldview and exposed my flaws. I read the distilled and edited version where every other post or so was thrown out, but that's probably for the best because it was so long and I don't really remember the first half.
  • Recently I've been lurking on sites such as 80000 hours and Effective Altruism and they happen to link to Less Wrong often. These sites seemed linked by a common mentality and goals that I happen to be interested in.

Thank you for reading my comment. Looking forward to getting to know you guys better and learning a lot from you.

I have an impression that there's been a recent increase in the number of users inactivating/deleting their LW accounts. As I say, it's just an impression, no stats or anything, so I'm wondering whether that's the case and if that's the case, what might be the causes (assuming it's not a statistical fluke).

I've read & followed this community for a long time - dropping this here because I'm hiring and would love to signal boost to candidates with good epistemics, high agency, and interest in applying AI for social good.

Is anyone interested in a resource coordinator/ops type position? Remote/hybrid options so any geography could work, but ideally based near Chicago or Milwaukee. Supports an AI/MLE team of 30 in healthcare tech. Looking for high autonomy- mix of ops/PjM style work (plenty of open-ended org process improvement type stuff, but also some approvals/reporting) with highly energetic team of mostly recent grads. Please DM with questions/interest!

Would anyone be interested in having a conversation with me about morality? Either publicly^[1] or privately.

I have some thoughts about morality but I don't feel like they're too refined. I'm interested in being challenged and working through these thoughts with someone who's relatively knowledgeable. I could instead spend a bunch of time eg. digging through the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to refine my thoughts, but a) I'm not motivated enough to do that and b) I think it'd be easier and more fun to have a conversation with someone about it.

• To start, I think you need to be clear about what it is you're actually asking when you talk about morality. It's important to have clear and specific questions. It's important to avoid wrong questions. When we ask if something is moral, are we asking whether it is desirable? To you? To the average person? To the average educated person? To one's Coherent Extrapolated Volition (CEV)? To some sort of average CEV? Are we asking whether it is behavior that we want to punish in order to achieve desirable outcomes for a group? Reward?
• It seems to me that a lot of philosophizing about morality and moral frameworks is about fit. Like, we have intuitions about what is and isn't moral in different scenarios, and we try to come up with general rules and frameworks that do a good job of "fitting" these intuitions.
• A lot of times our intuitions end up being contradictory. When this happens, you could spend time examining it and arriving at some sort of new perspective that no longer has the contradiction. But maybe it's ok to have these contradictions. And/or maybe it's too much work to actually get rid of them all.
• I feel like there's something to be said for more "enlightened" feelings about morality. Like if you think that A is desirable but that preference is based on incorrect belief X, and if you believed ~X you'd instead prefer B, something seems "good" about moving from A to B.
• I'm having trouble putting my finger on what I mean by the above bullet point though. Ultimately I don't see a way to cross the is-ought gap. Maybe what I mean is that I personally prefer for my moral preferences to be based on things that are true, but I can't argue that I ought to have such a preference.
• As discussed in this dialogue, it seems to me that non-naive versions of moral philosophies end up being pretty similar to one another in practice. A naive deontologist might tell you not to lie to save a child from a murderer, but a non-naive deontologist would probably weigh the "don't lie" rule against other rules and come to the conclusion that you should lie to save the child. I think in practice, things usually add up to normality.
• I kinda feel like everything is consequentialism. Consider a virtue ethicist who says that what they ultimately care about is acting in a virtuous way. Well, isn't that a consequence? Aren't they saying that the consequence they care about is them/others acting virtuously, as opposed to eg. a utilitarian caring about consequences of involving utility?

1. ^{^}

   The feature's been de-emphasized but you can initiate a dialog from another user's profile page.

I am trying to see if there has been any followup work on conservative concept boundaries since EY posted about it. I didn't find anything with a web search, but the people of lesswrong seem likely to know if there is anything I missed under different names, off of the main internet ect

Hello! My name is Michael Taylor, but most folks know me as Free. I am a musician and a traveler, in the old fashioned troubadour sense. I spent years crisscrossing the United States writing and performing for folks of every variety.

I have now settled down in San Francisco with my fiance and dog, and these days I write mostly protest songs and little weirdly-personal ballads for my friends.

Here's an example, if that's okay, a song I recently wrote for Eliezer Yudkowsky, inspired by, and as a direct response to, HPMOR:

https://youtu.be/K8CP8KoR3OQ

Please feel free to reach out if any of that sounds interesting, I am always happy to share my tales of the road with folks who haven't had the pleasure of that side of life. ✌️

-Free

Hello LW world! I've been aware of LW for a while now but not quite a lurker here. Therefore, I am not deeply familiar with the culture of the board and have not yet read things like The Sequences or HPMOR, but I have read through the New User's Guide which brought me to this section of the site.

I'm looking to get some constructive thoughts and/or feedback on a post I made over on Medium titled "Thinking beyond the long-term" which discusses the ultimate aims of sentient life. It addresses a number of topics related to that issue, like antinatalism, negative utilitarianism, and the simulation argument.

I considered making a post on LW and collecting feedback that way, but decided against it unless I get a bit of a stronger grasp of the LW culture and norms. I would sincerely appreciate the community's thoughts on this in the meantime.

I wish I had discovered LessWrong earlier in my life. But perhaps I wouldn’t be able to appreciate it back then. This was always my curse: I couldn’t see the wisdom in other people’s words until learned it the hard way.

I always believed intelligence to be the most advantageous trait, and if I failed at something, it was only because I was not smart enough. Or smart enough to avoid strings attached.

Born in Russia and self-educated, I tried to emigrate with no preparations. Without a degree or much money, I could only get tourist visas and had no means to settle anywhere, traveling mainly through Southeast Asia countries.

However, 7 years abroad turned out to be the best thing I could do for personal growth. I’ve met many interesting people from all around the world, immersed myself in local cultures and religious practices. Buddhism helped to improve my introspective skills and Islam explained the importance of priority management. Eventually, immigration authorities tired of such a vagabond tourist, and I had to return to Russia with the hope of one day qualifying for talent visas.

I tried myself in writing but couldn’t even get any feedback from the readers. But improved writing skills helped me to win an InnoCentive challenge. Prize money allowed to dedicate several years to an ambitious software project and, with improved EI, I finally made something cool. Upon reaching a proof-of-concept, I emerged from the coding intending to get funding and dive back into coding. But I’ve faced the same problem of promoting my work.

As it didn’t go viral with the target group of software engineers, I tried to appeal to the vision behind the project, which is essentially an alternative to AI. Trying to promote it in AI-related subreddits, I figured that AI-alignment is a kind of related subject; and in r/ControlProblem, I stumbled upon links to LessWrong.

So, this is how I’ve got here. But despite the mentioned primary goal, I think, maybe I’ll make my first post about a highly speculative subject of healing powers of meditation in the words of correlation between attention and humoral regulation. Basically, to rewrite my old article and see if I got the spirit of LessWrong right :)

Biological evolution produces "messy" models. They are needlessly complex and difficult to understand. And yet they are alive!

Here are my notes on the topic of evolution and artificial life. The section "Sparsity & Modularity" discusses what I mean by "messy" models. https://coldcoffee.neocities.org/evolution_review

If your product couldn't exist without our labour, then our labour is worth some fraction of that product's value to you. If it's worth something to you, you can then afford to pay some fraction of that fraction for that labour. If in fact you can't afford to pay any fair price for that labour, then this means the value generated by that product is far less than the collective value of the labour required to create the product.

This is a fundamentally uncapitalist venture. If you see a nonsensical buisness model, you generally assume it's a tax thing, or a scam. The efficient market doesn't allow such products/buisness models to exist. So if it yet exists, coordinated effort is being made to keep it alive. 

This product is intended to automate all human labour. 

We are in effect subsidising the development of a product intended to end the livelihoods of all people who work for a living. 

Discuss? Agree/disagree? Incorrect? Commie spam?