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A community blog devoted to refining the art of rationality
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Are We Leaving Literature To The Psychotic?
Published on October 9, 2025 6:09 AM GMTThose who have fallen victim to LLM psychosis often have a tendency to unceasingly spam machine-generated text into the text corpus that is...
Lessons from the Mountains
Published on October 9, 2025 4:10 AM GMTHow close have you come to death?I don't mean in some "well, if I were born in different circumstances" way. I don't even...
Probabilistic Societies
Published on October 9, 2025 4:08 AM GMTPrediction markets are everywhere.Information Distribution SystemsAt the core they are information distribution mechanisms. The internet enables anyone to become an expert in any...
Inverting the Most Forbidden Technique: What happens when we train LLMs to lie detectably?
Published on October 9, 2025 12:43 AM GMTThis is a write-up of my recent work on improving linear probes for deception detection in LLMs. I trained a probe against a...
Inoculation prompting: Instructing models to misbehave at train-time can improve run-time behavior
Published on October 8, 2025 10:02 PM GMTThis is a link post for two papers that came out today:Inoculation Prompting: Eliciting traits from LLMs during training can suppress them at...
What shapes does reasoning take but circular?
Published on October 8, 2025 8:18 PM GMTIn a blog post about local and global errors in mathematics, Terrence Tao notes:Sometimes, a low-level error cannot be localised to a single...
The Oracle's Gift
Published on October 8, 2025 8:13 PM GMTI have tried and failed many times to write a certain essay. With inspiration from Scott Alexander and Borges, I have reframed it...
The Relationship Between Social Punishment and Shared Maps
Published on October 8, 2025 7:38 PM GMTA punishment is when one agent (the punisher) imposes costs on another (the punished) in order to affect the punished's behavior. In a...
IABIED: Paradigm Confusion and Overconfidence
Published on October 8, 2025 7:19 PM GMTThis is a continuation of my review of IABIED. It's intended for audiences who already know a lot about AI risk debates. Please...
The Wise Baboon of Loyalty
Published on October 8, 2025 6:48 PM GMTOnce upon a time, in a great and peaceful land there thrived a learned and ambitious guild of Engineer-Alchemists. They could create precise...
Spooky Collusion at a Distance with Superrational AI
Published on October 8, 2025 6:13 PM GMTTLDR: We found that models can coordinate without communication by reasoning that their reasoning is similar across all instances, a behavior known as...
The Architecture of the Narcissistic False Self
Published on October 8, 2025 5:39 PM GMTWhat are the factors that make the fortress of the false self stand strong or crumble to dust?Protecting the Squishy CoreAt the core...
Reflections on The Curve 2025
Published on October 8, 2025 5:20 PM GMTThis past weekend, I was at The Curve, “a conference where thinkers, builders, and leaders grapple with AI’s biggest questions.” Or in other...
2025-10-12 - London rationalish meetup - Periscope
Published on October 8, 2025 5:19 PM GMTI own a flat now! It's called Periscope. I'm hosting the next rationalish meetup there.The address is 14 Tuscan House, 16 Knottisford St,...
Plans A, B, C, and D for misalignment risk
Published on October 8, 2025 5:18 PM GMTI sometimes think about plans for how to handle misalignment risk. Different levels of political will for handling misalignment risk result in different...
Three Paths Through Manifold
Published on October 8, 2025 1:48 PM GMTOAnd OneAnd TwoAnd ManifoldAre the 万Among the skiesIf our understanding of physics is to be believed, the world as it really is, is...
Halfhaven Digest #1
Published on October 8, 2025 2:24 PM GMTMy posts so farFool Heart Joins Halfhaven — Just an announcement post. I counted that post, but not this post, as one of...
The "cool idea" bias
Published on October 8, 2025 12:29 PM GMTWhen 16 year old chess grandmaster Wei Yi defeated Bruzón Batista with a brilliant sequence involving two piece sacrifices and a precise follow-up...
Irresponsible Companies Can Be Made of Responsible Employees
Published on October 8, 2025 11:47 AM GMTtl;dr: In terms of financial interests of an AI company, bankruptcy and the world ending are both equally bad. If a company acted...
Heaven, Hell, and Mechanics
Published on October 8, 2025 11:05 AM GMTThese frames are all justified:Hell: The world is burning around us right now, with loved ones and strangers suffering.Heaven: It is amazing, and...