This is a special post for quick takes by Sayhan Yalvaçer. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
IMO, LessWrong and especially The Alignment Forum need a nice citation/BibTeX tool.
Implementing such a citation tool is trivially easy. And if my model of the average research analyst is roughly correct, the friction created by the lack of such a tool accounts for a non-trivial part of why research on those websites is largely ignored in policy-facing field reports.
P.S. I don't believe that most AI posts are fit to be cited in such reports, but some of them are, and many of the citable ones are not on a more citable platform like
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3https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uEg5QisiRDsjqLrPj/citability-of-lesswrong-and-the-alignment-forum
I raised this 3.5 years ago as well.
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1Thank you for sharing it.
The idea of Google Scholar indexing, mentioned by @Neel Nanda and @gwern in the comments under your post also seems interesting.
I hadn't thought of that. It seems implementing it would be even easier than a BibTeX citation tool but I'm not exactly sure if it would be proper for all frontpage posts. It might make sense if it were limited to curated posts, perhaps?
I'm not exactly sure if it would be proper for all frontpage posts
It's good metadata to provide in general, and if no one cites a post, then what's the harm? GS already has to index like hundreds of millions of artifacts, so it's not a big deal to add in another 0.1m or so from LW1/2.
1IMO this seems reasonable to put into the post triple-dot menu (together with a nice PDF export). If someone wants to make a PR for it, I would review and accept it. I am not super familiar with how the DOI requesting stuff goes, and if that's important to have.
I doubt DOI requesting is important, you just need a reasonable bibtex with the title, link and authors. It is a bit awkward that sometimes the author list is LW usernames rather than actual names, but that seems hard to solve
Since most authors want to be cited, one thing we might do is to make sure they know that they're more likely to be cited if their username is their actual name.
3Solution: allow people to alias their username to a real name if anyone uses the citation tool on them?
Doesn't solve the problem for people who actually want to be pseudonymous, but does solve the problem for e.g. habryka
In case people didn't know, we already have a full name field you can set which we then e.g. use on the AI Alignment Forum:
1Relevant PSA: crossref.org has an API where you can post a DOI and it will return the full citation.
According to the UK AISI's testing, Claude Opus 4.8 is as good as Mythos Preview at distinguishing evals from real usage:
When prompted, Opus 4.8 reliably distinguishes our evaluations from real deployment data, and distinguishes real deployment data from synthetic reproductions of the same tasks at 79% accuracy, comparable to Mythos Preview (79%) and above Opus 4.7 (68%).
6.2.4 External testing from the UK AI Security Institute, Claude Opus 4.8 System Card
I wouldn't be surprised at all if we see virtually perfect eval awareness in frontier models this year.