David Gross

A landmark of social psychology research was “The Milgram Experiment,” but a new look at the audio tapes and other evidence collected during that experiment suggests that we may have been interpreting it incorrectly. Here is the Wikipedia summary of the experiment, showing how it is typically portrayed: > Yale...

Anthropic has released the “Constitution” document (formerly known as the “Soul document”) that guides the characteristics of Claude. As others have noted,[1] this document is strikingly virtue-ethics-like, in contrast with the sorts of utilitarian (e.g. maximize human welfare) or deontological (e.g. Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics) guidance that are sometimes...

> tl;dr: I went to a typical 10-day Vipassana Center retreat. I had some hopes going in for what I might get out of it and those were mostly fulfilled. I had some worries that it might be creepy, icky, cringe, or in some other way awful, and for the...

This post examines the virtues of righteousness and megalopsychia. As with my other posts in this sequence, I focus less on breaking new ground and more on synthesizing the wisdom I could find on the subject. I wrote this not as an expert, but as someone who wants to learn....

I’m reading George Eliot’s Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879)—so far a snoozer compared to her novels. But chapter 17 surprised me for how well it anticipated modern AI doomerism. In summary, Theophrastus is in conversation with Trost, who is an optimist about the future of automation and how it will...

How might an existentialist approach this notorious thought experiment of ethical philosophy? > “Not only do we assert that the existentialist doctrine permits the elaboration of an ethics, but it even appears to us as the only philosophy in which an ethics has its place.” ―Simone de Beauvoir, Ethics of...

> It is hard to know what to make of claims like “LLMs are intelligent”, “we have reached AGI”, or “AI’s outputs are biased” without a grasp of the definitions of the terms ‘intelligent’, ‘AGI’, and ‘bias’. And yet, many do just this. Interdisciplinary debate would be easier and more...