A WSJ article from today presents evidence that toxic fumes in airplane air are surprisingly common, are bad for health, have gotten much worse recently, and are still being deliberately covered up. Is anyone up for wading in for a couple hours and giving us an estimated number of micromorts / brain damage / [something]?
I fly frequently and am wondering whether to fly less because of this (probably not, but worth a Fermi?); I imagine others might want to know too. (Also curious if some other demographics should be more concerned than I should be, eg people...
these events seem most common on Airbus A320 aircrafts
As far as I can tell that's an extremely common plane for travel within Europe in my experience, so probably very relevant to a lot of people. I can count on my fingers the times I've taken a plane that was not one of those, and I travel multiple times a year.
About a month ago, after some back-and-forth with several people about their experiences (including on lesswrong), I hypothesized that I don't feel the emotions signalled by oxytocin, and never have. (I do feel some adjacent things, like empathy and a sense of responsibility for others, but I don't get the feeling of loving connection which usually comes alongside those.)
Naturally I set out to test that hypothesis. This note is an in-progress overview of what I've found so far and how I'm thinking about it, written largely to collect my thoughts and to see...
4Seems like that depends on details of the problem. If the receptor has zero function, then yes. If functionality is significantly reduced but nonzero… maybe.
Around the early o3 announcement (and maybe somewhat before that?), I felt like there were some reasonably compelling arguments for putting a decent amount of weight on relatively fast AI progress in 2025 (and maybe in 2026):
I had a notification ping in my brain just now while using claude code and realizing I'd just told it to think for a long time: I don't think the claim is true, because it doesn't match my experience.
Just as you can unjustly privilege a low-likelihood hypothesis just by thinking about it, you can in the exact same way unjustly unprivilege a high-likelihood hypothesis just by thinking about it. Example: I believe that when I press a key on a keyboard, the letter on the key is going to appear on the screen. But I do not consciously believe that; most of the time I don't even think about it. And so, just by thinking about it, I am questioning it, separating it from all hypotheses which I believe and do not question.
Some breakthroughs were in the form of "...
Your definition seems sensible to me. Humans are not bayesians, they are not built as probabilistic machines with all of their probability being put explicitly in the memory. So I usually think of Bayesian approximation, which is basically what you’ve said. It’s unconscious when you don’t try to model those beliefs as Bayesian and unconscious otherwise.
It's extremely common for US politicians to trade on legislative decisions and I feel like this is a better explanation for corruption than political donations are. Which is important because it's a stupid and so maybe fragile reason for corruption. The natural tendency of market manipulation is in a sense not to protect incumbents, but to threaten them, because you can make way way more money off of volatility than you can on stasis.
So in theory, there should exist some moderate and agreeable policy intervention that could flip the equilibrium.
I don't think it's possible for mere mortals to use Twitter for news about politics or current events and not go a little crazy. At least, I have yet to find a Twitter user who regularly or irregularly talks about these things, and fails to boost obvious misinformation every once in a while. It doesn't matter what IQ they have or how rational they were in 2005; Twitter is just too chock full of lies, mischaracterizations, telephone games, and endless, endless, endless malicious selection effects, which by the time you're done using it are designed to appea...
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1In my experience, if I look at the Twitter account of someone I respect, there's a 70–90% chance that Twitter turns them into a sort of Mr. Hyde self who's angrier, less thoughtful, and generally much worse epistemically. I've noticed this tendency in myself as well; historically I tried pretty hard to avoid writing bad tweets, and avoid reading low-quality Twitter accounts, but I don't think I succeeded, and recently I gave up and just blocked Twitter using LeechBlock.
I'm sad about this because I think Twitter could be really good, and there's a lot of good stuff on it, but there's too much bad stuff.
I think it's great that OpenAI is writing up a Model Spec and publishing it for the world to see. For reasons why, see this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cxuzALcmucCndYv4a/daniel-kokotajlo-s-shortform
As AIs become a bigger and bigger part of the economy, society, and military, the "model spec" describing their intended goals/principles/etc. becomes ever more important. One day it'll be of similar or greater importance to the US legal code, and updates to the spec will be like amendments to the constitution. Right now, ...
I've been thinking a lot about identity (as in pg, keep your identity small).
Specifically which identities might lead to safe development of AI. And trying to validate that by running these different activities:
1. Role playing games where the participants are asked to take on specific identities and play through a scenario where AI has to be created.
2. Similar things where LLMs are prompted to take on particular roles and given agency to play in the role playing games too.
Has there been similar work before?
I'm particularly interested in cosmic ...
But slightly irrational actors might not race (especially if they know that other actors are slightly irrational in the same or compatible way.)
Small backdoor interp challenge!
I am somewhat skeptical that it is easy to find backdoors in LLMs, but I have heard that people are getting pretty good at this! As a challenge, I fine-tuned 4 Qwen models in which I (independently) inserted a backdoor:
1.5B model, 3B model, 7B model, 14B model
The expected usage of these models is using huggingface's "apply_chat_template" using the tokenizer that comes along with each model and using "You are a helpful assistant." as system prompt.
I think the backdoor is pretty analogous to a kind of backdoor people in the in...
Is the rational mind set an existential risk? It spreads the idea of arms races and the treacherous turn. Should we be encouraging less than rational world views to spread if so what? And should we be coding them into our AI? You probably want them to be hard to predict so they cannot be exploited easily.
If it is it would still be worth preserving as an example of an insidious threat that should be guarded against. Perhaps in a simulation for people to interact with.
You might want as rational a choice of mindset to adopt as possible though
Moderately popular YouTuber, Tor Parsons (171k subscribers), made a video "Every Kind of Rationalist Explained In An Extremely Long Video" (78 minutes). Tor is rat-ish but his channel doesn't focus on that. This video just summarizes the different rat subcultures. I found it enjoyable, and its covarage was wide enough that I learned some new things:
I have great empathy and deep respect for the courage of the people currently on hunger strikes to stop the AI race. Yet, I wish they hadn’t started them: these hunger strikes will not work.
Hunger strikes can be incredibly powerful when there’s a just demand, a target who would either give in to the demand or be seen as a villain for not doing so, a wise strategy, and a group of supporters.
I don’t think these hunger strikes pass the bar. Their political demands are not what AI companies would realistically give in to because of a hunger strike by a small n...
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1Yep. Good that he stopped. Likely bad that he started.
I've hovered over them to see the applicable text or lack thereof before, yes, and I was aware that both types of reaction were possible. Overall I don't have a clear enough memory to say why I didn't pick up on this connection sooner, but my off-the-cuff guess would be that seeing both inline-portion and whole-comment reactions on the same comment is rare, which would mean there wasn't a clear juxtaposition to show that it's only present sometimes, and my visual processing would likely have discarded the cartouche as a decorative separator.
"Infinite willpower" reduces to "removing the need for willpower by collapsing internal conflict and automating control." Tulpamancy gives you a second, trained controller (the tulpa) that can modulate volition. That controller can endorse enact a policy.
However because the controller runs on a different part of the brain some modulation circuits that e.g. make you feel tired or demotivated are bypassed. You don't need willpower because you are "not doing anything" (not sending intentions). The tulpa is. And the neuronal circuits the tul...
Duncan deleted my comment on their interesting post, Obligated to Respond, which is their prerogative. Reposting here instead.
if a hundred people happen to glance at this exchange then ten or twenty or thirty of them will definitely, predictably care—will draw any of a number of close-to-hand conclusions, imbue the non-response with meaning
Plausible, but I am not confident in this conclusion as stated or in its implications given the rest of the post. I can easily imagine other people who are confident in the opposite conclusions. Let's inventory the layer...
You're entitled to your opinion as well as to exercise your mod powers as you see fit.
I would note that Duncan remains the only individual to directly engage with the object-level content of the paragraph in question, beyond to comment on whether they approve or disapprove of it or to (accurately) characterize it as psychologizing. Duncan's clearly angry about it, and while I'm insensitive enough to have (re)posted the original, I'm not insensitive enough to try and draw them into further discussion on the matter since it appears that shutting off discussi...
I'm pretty into biking. I live in Portland, OR, bike as my primary mode of transport (I don't have a car), am sorta involved in the biking and urbanism communities here, read Bike Portland almost every day, think about bike infrastructure and urbanism whenever I visit new cities, have submitted pro-biking testimony, watched more YouTube videos about biking and urbanism than I'd like to admit, spent more time researching e-bikes and bike locks than I'd care to admit, etc etc.
I've been wanting to write up some thoughts on biking for a while but haven't pulle...
Good points. I don't recall having the same experience about getting too cold or too warm, but it seems like an experience that'd make sense for a lot of people to have, so now I'm wondering why I am not recalling them. I probably either don't remember or am more resistant to getting too hot or too cold.
My waterproof pants go over my regular pants and have buttons to make them relatively easy to take on and take off. It's definitely a little annoying though.
at the end of the somewhat famous blogpost about llm nondeterminism recently https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/defeating-nondeterminism-in-llm-inference/ they assert that the determinism is enough to make an rlvr run more stable without importance sampling.
is there something i'm missing here? my strong impression is that the scale of the nondeterminism of the result is quite small, and random in direction, so that it isn't likely to affect an aggregate-scale thing like the qualitative effect of an entire gradient update. (i can imagine that the accumulation...
Awhile ago I wrote:
There's a frame where you just say "no, rationality is specifically about being a robust agent. There are other ways to be effective, but rationality is the particular way of being effective where you try to have cognitive patterns with good epistemology and robust decision theory."
This is in tension with the "rationalists should win", thing. Shrug.
...I think it's important to have at least one concept that is "anyone with goals should ultimately be trying to solve them the best way possible", and at least one concept that is "you might con
Basically all major world currencies have a base unit worth at most 4 US dollars:
There’s a left tail going out to 2.4e-5 USD with the Iranian rial, but no right tail. Why is that?
One thing to note is that this is a recent trend: for most of US history (until 1940 or so), a US dollar was worth about 20 modern dollars inflation-adjusted. I thought maybe people used dimes or cents as a base unit then, but Thomas Jefferson talks about "adopt[ing] the Dollar for our Unit" in 1784.
You could argue that base units are best around $1, but historical coi...
Interesting question. The "base" unit is largely arbitrary, but the smallest subunit of a currency has more practical implications, so it may also help to think in those terms. Back in the day, you had all kinds of wonky fractions but now basically everyone is decimalized, and 1/100 is usually the smallest unit. I imagine then that the value of the cent is as important here as the value of the dollar.
Here's a totally speculative theory based on that.
When we write numbers, we have to include any zeros after the decimal but you never...
