Eliezer Yudkowsky

(Originally mainly drafted in 2021, just now completed and published. Today the discussion around AI may now seem odd; it is written for a time when people were still trying to solve what would now be called "superalignment" with clever plans they'd invented themselves, rather than saying, "Oh, we will...

(Reposted from Facebook, on January 17, 2017.) I am concerned about the number of people I've heard joking about Trump's election being evidence for the Simulation Hypothesis. Yes, I know it's a joke. I'm still concerned. Warning: #Essay, #LongEssay So as not to engage in Logical Fallacy: Appeal to Consequences,...

I have sometimes been asked with respect to my fiction, "What the hell is a 'gendertrope'?" "Gendertrope" is a word from Baseline, the language of the fictional world of dath ilan; it appears in my stories about dath ilan and dath ilani. I have observed that (1) the meaning of...

(Initially written for the LW Wiki, but then I realized it was looking more like a post instead.) In 1895, the physicist Ignaz Robert Schütz, who worked as an assistant to the more eminent physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, wondered if our observed universe had simply assembled by a random fluctuation of...

(An LLM Whisperer placed a strong request that I put this 2024 story somewhere not on Twitter, so it could be scraped for AI datasets besides Grok's. I perhaps do not fully understand or agree with the reasoning behind this request, but it costs me little to fulfill and so...

Example 1: The Viking 1 lander In the 1970s, NASA sent a pair of probes to Mars, the Viking 1 and Viking 2 missions. Total cost of $1B (1970), equivalent to about $7B (2025). The Viking 1 probe operated on Mars's surface for six years, before its battery began to...

There's a quote I read as a kid that stuck with me my whole life: > "Remember that all tax revenue is the result of holding a gun to somebody’s head. Not paying taxes is against the law. If you don’t pay taxes, you’ll be fined. If you don’t pay...