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I work somewhere between ML, physics, materials science, and information theory. MIT PhD student, opinions my own

I write mainly on Substack: https://bosoncutter.substack.com/

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bosoncutter

I work somewhere between ML, physics, materials science, and information theory. MIT PhD student, opinions my own

I write mainly on Substack: https://bosoncutter.substack.com/

On the Brutality of Amdahl's Law

Following my 3-week visit to Berkeley as described here and featured by ACX here, I told various people I would write in detail why I didn’t stick around to work in AI safety. In this post, I will dance around one object-level disagreement with AI safety and rationalists: why I...

What would it take for AI to discover penicillin?

At the end of May, I attended the SciFM26 conference hosted at UChicago which had many speakers discussing agentic science and the future of AI+Science. This piece will attempt to capture the most interesting discussions I had about the future of AI+Science. Suppose you have a cutting edge autonomous lab...

Effective Altruism will be unbundled

From the end of high school to after my sophomore year of college, I considered myself an effective altruist. I was on the board of my college EA club, ran an EA intro fellowship, and went to EA retreats. I was vegetarian, regularly donated to GiveWell, and generally tried to...

The AlphaFold moment for materials is not any time soon

I recently attended a small materials + AI conference that pulled together academics, materials industry executives, former cabinet members, startup founders, and military officers. This post summarizes how my thinking on AI + materials science has updated based on those conversations and my own research. Full disclosure: I am not...

Top postsTop post

Effective Altruism will be unbundled

From the end of high school to after my sophomore year of college, I considered myself an effective altruist. I was on the board of my college EA club, ran an EA intro fellowship, and went to EA retreats. I was vegetarian, regularly donated to GiveWell, and generally tried to proselytize EA ideas. I was never fully convinced to pursue a career as an AI safety researcher or in animal welfare, but I found the ideas around agency, counterfactual impact, and a life structured around a single coherent philosophical vision compelling. If I had to attribute my exit from EA to a single event, it would be reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. For an author who has written an essay provocatively titled "The Virtue of Selfishness" and is known for relentlessly bashing altruism, one might expect that Rand's philosophical ideal is entirely disjoint from EA and that I had merely been turned away from altruism altogether. Instead, it clarified to me that EA constitutes a bundle of distinct belief systems, each of which is rare in modern philosophical and cultural discourse but is typically presented in a single tight argument. My goal for this post is to explain the uniquely appealing aspects of the EA movement that have likely fueled its growth and what they might mean for the future of adjacent philosophical ideals like e/acc. Unbundling Effective Altruism EA philosophy is a big tent, and I will not attempt to consider every possible variant. I will instead use the term Aggregate Utilitarian Rationalist Effective Altruism (AUREA) to denote a "mainline denomination" of EA commonly promoted by philosophers like MacAskill, Ord, Bostrom, and Bentham's Bulldog and pitched in EA intro fellowships. The case for AUREA is built on four separate arguments: > RATIONALISM: > > Premise-REALITY: Reality exists independently of any observer > > Premise-REASON: Reason and logic are the means by which a mind comprehends reality > > Premise-FALLIBILITY: Unaided cognition is fallible and bi

The AlphaFold moment for materials is not any time soon

On the Brutality of Amdahl's Law

What would it take for AI to discover penicillin?