johnswentworth

Roadmap This post is part of a sequence on the gears of social reality. Roughly speaking, I want to explain the core mechanics of social reality in way that's fully grounded in physical stuff and patterns in the physical world. A core claim of this sequence's model is that the...

This post is mostly adapted from a section of another post. I wanted a standalone version, to serve as background for a sequence on the mechanisms of social reality. You’ve probably heard that things like laws, conventions, norms, cultural associations, status, and so forth are “social constructs”: they’re kinda arbitrary...

This whole thing started with various crazies on bluesky writing hit pieces on the rationalist and AI alignment communities, as one does. One of their main beats was to note social ties between the AI alignment community and the Red Means No (RMN) consensual non-consent sex party community, then gesticulate...

About a year ago, David and I put up two bounty problems involving natural latents. I am now about 80% confident that both have been resolved, both within the past couple months. Both cases made heavy use of LLMs and Lean. The first to land was Grisha Pochuev's counterexample to...

When John told me (Gretta) his practice of “visioning,” I was skeptical at first. I gave it a try, a little bit out of spite, to show him I was capable of it. It blew me away. Here’s what I told him about it a few days later, edited for...

EDIT TO ADD: a friend suggested I add a warning at the top of this post. The wording is theirs, but I basically endorse it. "Warning: The author of this post describes speedy seductions that rely on context and body language to understand what women want without asking directly. It...

Assumed background: Kolmogorov complexity and Solomonoff induction. Suppose I have some data , and I go looking for the models (i.e. programs) which best compress that data. I find two different programs, and , which both reproduce the data using approximately the same number of bits, and that seems to...