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Gunnar_Zarncke
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8Gunnar_Zarncke's Shortform
5y
175
johnswentworth's Shortform
Gunnar_Zarncke4d40

Related to that: You have much fewer variables under consideration that you can even have standard names for. A remnant of this effect can be seen in typical Fortan programs.

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A Map: AGI Failures Modes and Levels
Gunnar_Zarncke5d20

The spoilered map is no longer rendering, but a direct link is here:

http://immortality-roadmap.com/AIfails.jpg 

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[Intro to brain-like-AGI safety] 15. Conclusion: Open problems, how to help, AMA
Gunnar_Zarncke6d20

As to the "why are there two mechanisms that do about the same thing?" I guess this part of the answer:

So if you’re an animal at constant risk of having your behavior hijacked by parasites, what do you do?

First, you make your biological signaling cascades more complicated. You have multiple redundant systems controlling every part of behavior, and have them interact in ways too complicated for any attacker to figure out.

SSC: Maybe Your Zoloft Stopped Working Because A Liver Fluke Tried To Turn Your Nth-Great-Grandmother Into A Zombie

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Generative AI is not causing YCombinator companies to grow more quickly than usual (yet)
Gunnar_Zarncke12d40

and with actual revenue.

“It’s not just the number one or two companies -- the whole batch is growing 10% week on week,”

YC makes all startups in the batch report KPIs even from before being accepted into the batch, If you participate in their Startup School, you are asked to track and report weekly numbers, such as number of users. 

Paul Graham posts unlabeled charts from YC startups every now and then, so I assume the aggregate of all of these is what Garry Tan is refering to. Unfortunately, it is not possible to reproduce his analysis. But we should see the effect with the next round of exits. They should happen faster or at higher valuations compared to previous batches.

Reply1
Neuroscience of human sexual attraction triggers (3 hypotheses)
Gunnar_Zarncke17d50

Relevant study:

Cindy Meston and Penny Frohlich (2003) investigated how residual physiological arousal from a roller‑coaster ride affects perceptions of attractiveness. Participants at an amusement park either just finished or were about to begin a ride. They then rated the attractiveness and dating desirability of an opposite‑gender target photograph.

Those exiting the ride rated the photographed person as significantly more attractive and more desirable for dating than those entering, but only when riding with a non‑romantic partner. The fear‑induced arousal from the ride could get misattributed to attractiveness when the actual source (the ride) isn’t consciously linked to the arousal.

https://labs.la.utexas.edu/mestonlab/files/2016/05/excitation-transfer.pdf 

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Uncertain Updates August 2025
Gunnar_Zarncke17d40

I don’t like that the written transcripts of the videos don’t read as well as written posts would. Or at least that’s what I think. They contain a lot more fluff, which is more tolerable when speaking, but less so in writing.

Paul Graham discusses that good thinking requires good writing and vice versa.

someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.

I'm saying thinking well is a necessary condition for writing really well, not a sufficient one.

You have written a lot, but maybe what you notice in your video transcripts is that one of the effects of writing is missing. I don't think it has to be literal writing. Generalizing Paul Graham, I think that for clear thinking you need to put ideas in a form that forces precision and makes them grow into more. The grow into more seems to be clearly the case with the engagement and the posts here. But video often doesn't have the precision - maybe that's what shows in the fluff? 

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Marcio Díaz's Shortform
Gunnar_Zarncke19d52

I can relate to the feeling. Whenever something I posted got downvoted without comment, I wondered about the reasons. Without comment, what can the poster learn from the downvotes? It feels like being sent away. Which it might. But that's how a community maintains its standards - for better or worse. I think you point out the "...or worse." I think it is a risk maybe worth taking. The alternative is Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism. 

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Four ways learning Econ makes people dumber re: future AI
Gunnar_Zarncke22d20

Yeah, Yudkowsky also writes:

Surprisingly correct, considering the wince I had at the starting frame.

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Four ways learning Econ makes people dumber re: future AI
Gunnar_Zarncke22d10

I agree. But it is not sooo easy to do. Not with image generation anyway. Maybe someone wants to try?

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Corporations as Paperclip/Profit Maximizers
Gunnar_Zarncke24d20

Good post.

Related post: Alignment versus AI Alignment

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21Is there a safe version of the common crawl?
Q
1mo
Q
6
11[Linkpost] How Am I Getting Along with AI?
2mo
0
9Hybrid model reveals people act less rationally in complex games, more predictably in simple ones
2mo
0
53Project Vend: Can Claude run a small shop?
2mo
8
13[Linkpost] The lethal trifecta for AI agents: private data, untrusted content, and external communication
3mo
3
34Unexpected Conscious Entities
4mo
7
13[Linkpost] The value of initiating a pursuit in temporal decision-making
6mo
0
81Mistral Large 2 (123B) seems to exhibit alignment faking
Ω
6mo
Ω
4
162Reducing LLM deception at scale with self-other overlap fine-tuning
Ω
6mo
Ω
46
63RL, but don't do anything I wouldn't do
9mo
5
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Theory of Mind
a year ago
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Pareto Efficiency
a year ago
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Pareto Efficiency
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Pareto Efficiency
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Babble and Prune
2 years ago
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Has Diagram
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Simulation
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Simulation
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Simulation
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Simulation
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