jchan

Two cats fighting for control over my backyard appear to have settled on a particular chain-link fence as the delineation between their territories. This suggests that: 1. Animals are capable of recognizing Schelling points 2. Therefore, Schelling points do not depend on language for their Schelling-ness 3. Therefore, tacit bargaining...

Returning to LessWrong after two insufficiently-spooky years, and just in time for Halloween - a crossword of manmade horrors! * Interactive web version * Printable PDF The comments below may contain unmarked spoilers. Some Wikipedia-ing will probably be necessary, but see how far you can get without it!

Modern AI works by throwing lots of computing power at lots of data. An LLM gets good at generating text by ingesting an enormous corpus of human-written text. A chess AI doesn't have as big a corpus to work with, but it can generate simulated data through self-play, which works...

This post is an overview of the topic of anthropic reasoning, mostly based on Nick Bostrom's book Anthropic Bias. If you've read that book, you will not find much new here; I originally wrote this as a prompt for a meetup discussion so that the participants wouldn't have to read...

Overview The "Modal Rationalist Anti-Death Stance" goes something like this: > Since time immemorial, people have told comforting stories about the afterlife to avoid confronting the unpleasant truth that death is oblivion. With modern science, we have come to understand that none of these stories are true. Knowing this, we...

On January 28, 2025 (during the pontificate of Pope Francis) the Catholic Church put out its position paper on AI: Antiqua et nova: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence. Here are my thoughts, which I wrote back in February, but not much has changed since then,...

Overview This article is an extended reply to Scott Alexander's Conflict vs. Mistake. Whenever the topic has come up in the past, I have always said I lean more towards conflict theory over mistake theory; however, on revisiting the original article, I realize that either I've been using those terms...