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Gunnar_Zarncke
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8Gunnar_Zarncke's Shortform
5y
175
Generative AI is not causing YCombinator companies to grow more quickly than usual (yet)
Gunnar_Zarncke20h40

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_Zarncke6d50

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_Zarncke6d40

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_Zarncke8d52

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_Zarncke11d20

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_Zarncke11d20

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_Zarncke13d20

Good post.

Related post: Alignment versus AI Alignment

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Corporations as Paperclip/Profit Maximizers
Gunnar_Zarncke13d20

You can add another user as co-editor and see if they run into the same problem. For example, you can ask the moderators via the intercom to try to edit the post.

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Monthly Roundup #33: August 2025
Gunnar_Zarncke14d72

Well, this seems not awesome:

Young adults' personalities are changing...

As I wrote in response to an apparently previous version of that post that was deleted:

I roll to disbelieve. Big five character traits are usually stable esp. in adulthood. If this is a true trend, it might be caused by younger people with different profiles entering the sample. But I guess it is sampling demography drift or younger people interpreting differently.

I disbelieve that the effect is as pronounced as it appears in the graphs. Lots of measures changing by 15%p. It doesn't seem to be in line with prior research on Big Five trait stability.

If we assume that conscientiousness stays the same for the cohort (normally it would go up a bit), that would still mean that the 10 years of youth added to the 16-39-ers would start at more than 15%p*2.5 = 45%p lower than previous cohorts. I don't buy that.

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Giving AIs safe motivations
Gunnar_Zarncke15d23

Would be nice if you could make the six parts an LW Sequence.

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21Is there a safe version of the common crawl?
Q
21d
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
6
13[Linkpost] The value of initiating a pursuit in temporal decision-making
5mo
0
81Mistral Large 2 (123B) seems to exhibit alignment faking
Ω
5mo
Ω
4
156Reducing 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
1y
(+250)
Pareto Efficiency
1y
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Pareto Efficiency
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Pareto Efficiency
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Babble and Prune
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Has Diagram
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Simulation
2y
(+9/-10)
Simulation
2y
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Simulation
2y
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Simulation
2y
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