# So, geez there's a lot of AI content these days

Since [April](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy) this year, there's been a huge growth in the the number of posts about AI, while posts about [rationality](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/rationality), [world modeling](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/world-modeling), etc. have remained constant. The result is that much of the time, the LW frontpage is almost entirely AI content.

Looking at the actual numbers, we can see that during 2021, no core LessWrong tags[^1wk4fryjgq9] represented more than 30% of LessWrong posts. In 2022, especially starting around April, AI has started massively dominating the LW posts.

Here's the total posts for each core tag each month for the past couple years. On April 2022, most tags' popularity remains constant, but AI-tagged posts spike dramatically:

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/4aff5a52fb1dfcad5a830c7f7dfd986b85999c5f16b47733.png)

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/6d0682d8631ff369d4f7f18803f479ec4d4bbd3c7bab3992.png)

All posts with 0 or greater karma are included in this graph. When applying a higher threshold, the percentage AI tagged posts is even higher.

Even people pretty involved with AI alignment research have written to say "um, something about this feels kinda bad to me."

I'm curious to hear what various LW users think about the situation. Meanwhile, here's my own thoughts.

Is this *bad*?
==============

Maybe this is fine. 

My sense of what happened was that in April, Eliezer posted [MIRI announces new "Death With Dignity" strategy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy), and a little while later [AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a-list-of-lethalities). At the same time, PaLM and DALL-E 2 came out. My impression is that this threw a brick through the overton window and got a lot of people going "holy christ AGI ruin is real and scary". Everyone started thinking a lot about it, and writing up their thoughts as they oriented.

Around the same time, a lot of alignment research recruitment projects (such as [SERI MATS](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/seri-mats) or [Refine](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/D7epkkJb3CqDTYgX9/refine-an-incubator-for-conceptual-alignment-research-bets)) started paying dividends, and resulting in a new wave of people working fulltime on AGI safety.

Maybe it's just fine to have a ton of people working on the most important problem in the world?

Maybe. But it felt worrisome to Ruby and me. Some of those worries felt easier to articulate, others harder. Two major sources of concern:

**There's some kind of illegible good thing that happens when you have a scene exploring a lot of different topics**. It's historically been the case that LessWrong was a (relatively) diverse group of thinkers thinking about a (relatively) diverse group of things. If people show up and just see the All AI All the Time, people who might have other things to contribute may bounce off. We probably wouldn't lose this immediately

**AI needs Rationality, in particular.** Maybe AI is the only thing that matters. But, the whole reason I think we have a comparative advantage at AI Alignment is our culture of rationality. A lot of AI discourse on the internet is really confused. There's such an [inferential gulf](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HLqWn5LASfhhArZ7w/expecting-short-inferential-distances) about what sort of questions are even worth asking. Many AI topics deal with gnarly philosophical problems, while [mainstream academia is still debating whether the world is naturalistic](https://arbital.com/p/executable_philosophy/). Some AI topics require thinking clearly about political questions that [tend to make people go funny in the head](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-is-the-mind-killer). 

[Rationality is for problems we don't know how to solve](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CSZnj2YNMKGfsMbZA/specializing-in-problems-we-don-t-understand), and AI is still a domain we don't collectively know how to solve. 

Not everyone agrees that rationality is key, here (I know one prominent AI researcher who disagreed). But it's my current epistemic state. 

Whispering "Rationality" in your ear
====================================

Paul Graham says that [different cities whisper different ambitions in your ear](http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html). New York whispers "be rich". Silicon Valley whispers "be powerful." Berkeley whispers "live well." Boston whispers "be educated."

It seems important for LessWrong to whisper "be rational" in your ear, and to give you lots of reading, exercises, and support to help you make it so.

As a sort of "emergency injection of rationality", we asked Duncan to convert the CFAR handbook from a PDF into a more [polished sequence](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/KAv8z6oJCTxjR8vdR), and post it over the course of a month. But commissioning individual posts is fairly expensive, and over the past couple months the LessWrong team's focus has been to find ways to whisper "rationality" that don't rely on what people are currently posting.

Some actions we've done:

Improve Rationality Onboarding Materials
----------------------------------------

Historically, if you wanted to get up to speed on the LessWrong background reading, you had to click over to the /library page and start reading [Rationality: A-Z](https://www.lesswrong.com/rationality). It required multiple clicks to even start reading, and there was no easy way to browse the entire collection and see what posts you had missed.

Meanwhile Rationality A-Z is just super long. I think anyone who's a longterm member of LessWrong or the alignment community should read the whole thing sooner or later – it covers a lot of different subtle errors and philosophical confusions that are likely to come up (both in AI alignment and in other difficult challenges). But, it's a pretty big ask for newcomers to read all ~400 posts. It seemed useful to have a "getting started" collection that people could read through in a weekend, to get the basics of the site culture.

This led us to redesign the library collection page (making it easier to browse all posts in a collection and see which ones you've already read), and to create the new [Sequences Highlights collection](https://www.lesswrong.com/highlights).

Sequence Spotlights
-------------------

There's a lot of other sequences that the LessWrong community has generated over the years, which seemed good to expose people to. We've had a "Curated Sequences" section of the library but never quite figured out a good way to present it on the frontpage. 

We gave curated sequences a try in 2017 but kept forgetting to rotate them. Now we've finally built an automated rotation system, and are building up a large repertoire of the best LW sequences which the site will automatically rotate through. 

More focused recommendations
----------------------------

We're currently filtered the randomized "from the archives" posts to show [Rationality](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/rationality) and [World Modeling](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/world-modeling) posts. I'm not sure whether this makes sense as a longterm solution, but it still seems useful as a counterbalancing force for the deluge of AI content, and helping users orient to the underlying culture that generated that AI content.

Rewritten About Page
--------------------

We rewrote the [About page](/about) to both simplify it, clarify what LessWrong is about, and contextualize all the AI content.

\[Upcoming\] Update Latest Tag-Filters
--------------------------------------

Ruby is planning to update the default Latest Posts tag-filters to either show more rationality and worldbuilding content by default (i.e. rationality/world-modeling posts get treated as having higher karma, and thus get more screentime via our sorting algorithm). Or, maybe just directly deemphasize AI content. 

We're also going to try making the filters more prominent and easier to understand, so people can adjust the content they receive.

Can't we just move it to Alignment Forum?
=========================================

When I've brought this up, a few people asked why we don't just put all the AI content on the Alignment Forum. This is a fairly obvious question, but:

a) It'd be a pretty big departure from what the Alignment Forum is currently used for.

b) I don't think it really changes the fundamental issue of "AI is what lots of people are currently thinking about on LessWrong." 

The Alignment Forum's current job is not to be a comprehensive list of all AI content, it's meant to especially good content with a high signal/noise ratio. All Alignment Forum posts are also LessWrong posts, and LessWrong is meant to be the place where most discussion happens on them. The AF versions of posts are primarily meant to be a thing you can link to professionally without having to explain the context of a lot of weird, not-obviously-related topics that show up on LessWrong.

We created the Alignment Forum ~5 years ago, and it's plausible the world needs a new tool now. BUT, it still feels like a weird solution to try and move the AI discussion *off* of LessWrong. AI is one of the central topics that motivate a lot of other LessWrong interests. LessWrong is about the art of rationality, but one of the important lenses here is "how would you build a mind that was optimally rational, from scratch?". 

Content I'd like to see more of
===============================

It's not obvious I want to nudge anyone *away* from AI alignment work. It does sure seem like this is the most urgent and important problem in the world. I also don't know that I want the site flooded with mediocre rationality content. 

**World Modeling / Optimization**

Especially for newcomers who're considering posting more, I'd be interested in seeing more [fact posts](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Sdx6A6yLByRRs8iLY/fact-posts-how-and-why), which explore a topic curiously, and dig into the details of how one facet of the world works. Some good examples include Scott Alexander "[Much More Than You Wanted To Know](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/B384FrQNrxSq4hZoS)" type posts, or Martin Sustrik's exploration of the [Swiss Political System](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x6hpkYyzMG6Bf8T3W/swiss-political-system-more-than-you-ever-wanted-to-know-i).

I also really like to see subject matter experts write up stuff about their area of expertise that people might not know about (especially if they have reason to think this is relevant to LW readers). I liked this writeup about [container logistics](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PHmYhE4sKnwzYgvkh/a-brief-introduction-to-container-logistics), which was to [discussion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RgJicDmXHDxcJ9Fsw/an-unexpected-victory-container-stacking-at-the-port-of-long) of whether we could have quick wins in civilizational adequacy that could snowball into something bigger.

Parts of the world that might be important, but which aren't currently on the radar of the rationalsphere, are also good topics to write about.

**Rationality Content**

Rationality content is a bit weird because... the content I'm most interested in is from people who've done a lot of serious thinking that's resulted in serious accomplishment. But, the people in that reference class in the LessWrong community are increasingly focused on AI.

I worry about naively incentivizing more "rationality content" – a lot of rationality content is ungrounded and insight-porn-ish. 

But, I'm interested in accomplished thinkers trying to distill out their thinking process (see: many [John](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4XRjPocTprL4L8tmB/science-in-a-high-dimensional-world) [Wentworth](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bhLxWTkRc8GXunFcB/what-are-you-tracking-in-your-head) [posts](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XvN2QQpKTuEzgkZHY/being-the-pareto-best-in-the-world), and [Mark Xu](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zbFGRRWPwxBwjwknY/how-to-do-theoretical-research-a-personal-perspective-1) and [Paul Christiano's](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EF5M6CmKRd6qZk27Z/my-research-methodology) posts on their research process). I'm interested in people like Logan Strohl who [persistently](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/evLkoqsbi79AnM5sz) [explore](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9cbEPEuCa9E7uHMXT/catching-the-spark) the micro-motions of how cognition works, while keeping it very grounded, and write up a [trail for others to follow](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bRs5QZ4Ku6zk9WWLj/five-suggestions-for-rationality-research-and-development).

I think in some sense The Sequences are out of date. They were written as a reaction to a set of mistakes people were making 20 years ago. Some people are still making those mistakes, but ideas like probabilistic reasoning have now made it more into the groundwater, and the particular examples that resonate today are different, and I suspect we're making newer more exciting mistakes. I'd like to see people attempting to build a framework of rationality that feels like a more up-to-date foundation.

What are your thoughts?
=======================

I'm interested in hearing what people's takes on this. I'm particularly interested in how different groups of people feel about it. What does the wave of AI content feel like to established LessWrong users? To new users just showing up? To AI alignment researchers?

Does this feel like a problem? Does the whole worry feel overblown? If not, I'm interested in people articulating exactly what feels likely to go wrong.

[^1wk4fryjgq9]: Core Tags are the most common LessWrong topics: Rationality, AI, World Modeling, World Optimization, Community and Practical.