LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

TLDR: LessWrong + Lighthaven need about $3M for the next 12 months. Donate here, or send me an email, DM or signal message (+1 510 944 3235) if you want to support what we do. Donations are tax-deductible in the US. Reach out for other countries, we can likely figure something out. We have big plans for the next year, and due to a shifting funding landscape we need support from a broader community more than in any previous year.

I've been running LessWrong/Lightcone Infrastructure for the last 7 years. During that time we have grown into the primary infrastructure provider for the rationality...

Balsa Policy Institute chose as its first mission to lay groundwork for the potential repeal, or partial repeal, of section 27 of the Jones Act of 1920. I believe that this is an important cause both for its practical and symbolic impacts.

The Jones Act is the ultimate embodiment of our failures as a nation.

After 100 years, we do almost no trade between our ports via the oceans, and we build almost no oceangoing ships.

Everything the Jones Act supposedly set out to protect, it has destroyed.



Table of Contents

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This is the full text of a post from "The Obsolete Newsletter," a Substack that I write about the intersection of capitalism, geopolitics, and artificial intelligence. I’m a freelance journalist and the author of a forthcoming book called Obsolete: Power, Profit, and the Race for Machine Superintelligence. Consider subscribing to stay up to date with my work.

An influential congressional commission is calling for a militarized race to build superintelligent AI based on threadbare evidence

The US-China AI rivalry is entering a dangerous new phase.

Earlier today, the US-China Economic and Security Review Co...

In contract law, there's this thing called a “representation”. Example: as part of a contract to sell my house, I might “represent that” the house contains no asbestos. How is this different from me just, y’know, telling someone that the house contains no asbestos? Well, if it later turns out that the house does contain asbestos, I’ll be liable for any damages caused by the asbestos (like e.g. the cost of removing it).

In other words: a contractual representation is a factual claim along with insurance against that claim being false.

I claim[1] that people...

Epistemic Status: 13 years working as a therapist for a wide variety of populations, 5 of them working with rationalists and EA clients. 7 years teaching and directing at over 20 rationality camps and workshops. This is an extremely short and colloquially written form of points that could be expanded on to fill a book, and there is plenty of nuance to practically everything here, but I am extremely confident of the core points in this frame, and have used it to help many people break out of or avoid manipulative practices.

TL;DR: Your wants and preferences are not invalidated by...

[Warning: This post is probably only worth reading if you already have opinions on the Solomonoff induction being malign, or at least heard of the concept and want to understand it better.]

Introduction

I recently reread the classic argument from Paul Christiano about the Solomonoff prior being malign, and Mark Xu's write-up on it. I believe that the part of the argument about the Solomonoff induction is not particularly load-bearing, and can be replaced by a more general argument that I think is easier to understand. So I will present the general argument first, and only...

Audio note: this article contains 33 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description.

Many of you readers may instinctively know that this is wrong. If you flip a coin (50% chance) twice, you are not guaranteed to get heads. The odds of getting a heads are 75%. However you may be surprised to learn that there is some truth to this statement; modifying the statement just slightly will yield not just a true statement, but a useful one.

It's a spoiler, though. If...

As part of the court case between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, a substantial number of emails between Elon, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, and Greg Brockman have been released as part of the court proceedings.

I have found reading through these really valuable, and I haven't found an online source that compiles all of them in an easy to read format. So I made one.

I used AI assistance to generate this, which might have introduced errors. Check the original source to make sure it's accurate before you quote it: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69013420/musk-v-altman/ [1]<...

Epistemic status: Toy model. Oversimplified, but has been anecdotally useful to at least a couple people, and I like it as a metaphor.

Introduction

I’d like to share a toy model of willpower: your psyche's conscious verbal planner “earns” willpower (earns a certain amount of trust with the rest of your psyche) by choosing actions that nourish your fundamental, bottom-up processes in the long run. For example, your verbal planner might expend willpower dragging you to disappointing first dates, then regain that willpower, and more, upon finding a date that leads to good long-term romance. Wise v...

Midjourney, “infinite library”I’ve had post-election thoughts percolating, and the sense that I wanted to synthesize something about this moment, but politics per se is not really my beat. This is about as close as I want to come to the topic, and it's a sidelong thing, but I think the time is right.

It's time to start thinking again about neutrality.

Neutral institutions, neutral information sources. Things that both seem and are impartial, balanced, incorruptible, universal, legitimate, trustworthy, canonical, foundational.1

We don’t have them. Clearly.

We live in a pluralis...