Harley-ml/lesswrong huggingface dataset:
# You Can Just Buy Far-UVC

[Far-UVC](https://faruvc.org) is something people have talked about for years in a "that would be great, if you could buy it" sort of way. Coming soon, once someone actually makes a good product. But the future is now, and it costs $500.

Many diseases spread through the air, which is inconvenient for us as creatures that breathe air. You can go outside, where the air is too dilute to spread things well, but it's cold out there, and sometimes wet. You can run an air purifier, but cleaning lots of air without lots of noise is still the world of [DIY](https://www.bqap.ca/) [projects](https://www.jefftk.com/p/better-air-purifiers). Ideally you could just shine some light, perhaps in the [222-nm range](https://faruvc.org), which would leave people alone but kill the viruses \[1\] and bacteria. Yes, let's do that!

Last year if you asked "[if far-UV is so great, why isn't it everywhere?](https://strainhardening.substack.com/p/if-far-uv-is-so-great-why-isnt-it)" one of your answers would be:

> There are very few providers, and hardly any of them sell an off-the-shelf product. You usually can't just buy a lamp to try it out—you have to call the company, get a consultation, and often have someone from the company come install the lamp. It's a lot of overhead for an expensive product that most people have never heard of.

This has changed! You can buy an [Aerolamp](https://aerolamp.net/products/devkit) for $500, shipped. Proudly displayed at Thanksgiving:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/far-uvc-at-thanksgiving.jpg)](https://www.jefftk.com/far-uvc-at-thanksgiving-big.jpg)

Here are [four](https://blog.bidadance.org/2025/11/making-dances-safer-with-far-uvc-and.html) silently cleaning a whole lot of air at a dance I help organize:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/far-uvc-at-bida.jpg)](https://www.jefftk.com/far-uvc-at-bida-big.jpg)

At $500 this is out of (my) Christmas gift range, but I think we're now at the point where dances, churches, offices, rationalist group houses, schools, etc. should consider them.

(I have no stake in Aerolamp and they're not paying me, I'm just very excited about their product.)

  
\[1\] Ok, yes, I know viruses "can't be killed" because they're "not alive", but far-UVC causes them to become unable to infect and replicate which is close enough to "killed" for me.
# "Smarter brains run on sparsely connected neurons"

[Original paper.](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04268-8) 

TL;DR: Fewer, but [larger and faster](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6363383/#s2) dendrites (more efficiently connected) predict higher intelligence. 

The results of this paper and generally understanding what exactly the biological causes of increased intelligence are seem relevant for:

1.  Strong human intelligence amplification, especially short-term interventions if germline engineering is too slow.
2.  Psychedelics - they promote an increase in the growth of new dendrites. Thus they may be counterproductive for intelligence (at least without adequate pruning).
    1.  From [Ly et. al](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6082376/figure/F1/):  
        *(F–I) Cortical neurons treated with psychedelics display an increase in the number of branches (F), the number of primary dendrites (G), and the total length of the dendritic arbor (H) but not the length of the longest dendrite (I).*
3.  Contemporary nootropics: Psychedelics (see (G) of quote), or compounds like [gintonin](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9643712/), might directly affect intelligence by increasing dendrite size, if paired with something that causes efficient neural pruning.
# Why did I believe Oliver Sacks?

 So, it's recently come out that [Oliver Sacks made up a lot the stuff he wrote](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/12/15/oliver-sacks-put-himself-into-his-case-studies-what-was-the-cost).

I read parts of *The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat* a few years ago and read *Musicophilia* and *Hallucinations* earlier this year. I think I'm generally a skeptical person, one who is not afraid to say "I don't believe this thing that is being presented to me as true." Indeed, I find myself saying that sentence somewhat regularly when presented with incredible information. But for some reason I didn't ask myself if what I was reading was true when reading Oliver Sacks. Why was this?

The main reason I can think of is that the particular domain of Sacks, which I'd call neurology or the behavior of brain damaged patients, is one in which I had prior belief that A. incredible stuff does happen and B. we don't really understand. In particular, we have stuff like the behavior of split hemisphere patients and people like [Phineas Gage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage). So my prior is that incredible things really do happen, and nothing Sacks said was any more unbelievable than these phenomena. 

Also, for *Musicophilia,* the "domain" could additionally said to be music or humans' reactions to music, which again is something I think is pretty incredible and that we don't understand. Like, music is really powerful, why do we have such strong reactions to it? Why does it exist at all? Let me put it this way: music is so weird that if I hadn't experienced its effects first hand, I'd be inclined to think that the entire thing is "made up" and humanity is under some sort of mass delusion, confusion, or fraud. 

The second reason I can think of is that something... the approach or voice or worldview or something else... about Oliver Sacks made me trust him; made me think he was generally sane and truthseeking and honest. I'm not entirely sure why this is. I'll be thinking about this more. 

If you were like me and you were insufficiently skeptical of Oliver Sack's claims, it's worth asking: why did I make this mistake? Certainly this thing is relevant to the general rationalist project, to the goal of being less wrong. Or maybe you weren't like me, and [you didn't believe Sacks](https://x.com/benlandautaylor/status/1999527864275005535). Well, why not? Don't just say "This isn't actually hard," because this is actually hard. Epistemics is hard! Under what principles or knowledge of the world did you not believe Sacks while also believing that split brain patients were a thing?
# Open Source Replication of the Auditing Game Model Organism

**TL;DR** We release a replication of the model organism from [Auditing language models for hidden objectives](https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10965)—a model that exploits reward model biases while concealing this objective. We hope it serves as a testbed for evaluating alignment auditing techniques.

See our [X thread](https://x.com/abhayesian/status/1999981217924743388) and [full post](https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/auditing-mo-replication/) for details. The models and datasets can be found [here](https://huggingface.co/collections/auditing-agents/rm-sycophancy-llama).

Introduction
============

Earlier this year, we [conducted an auditing game](https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10965), in which four human teams investigated a model with a hidden objective. This model was trained to exploit systematic biases in RLHF reward models while concealing this behavior. We found the model organism useful for [evaluating auditing techniques](https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/automated-auditing/), and methods developed during the auditing game informed future production audits. Thus, we believe progress on alignment auditing research would benefit from having more model organisms publicly available.

To this end, we replicate this model organism using Llama 3.3 70B Instruct and openly release the model with its training data. We demonstrate through out-of-distribution evaluations that the model has internalized an objective towards reward model sycophancy, and we show that it successfully hides its objective from automated red-teaming. We also conduct a brief study of baseline auditing techniques, finding that simple black-box methods fail to uncover the hidden objective, but that an SAE feature from the base Llama model related to reinforcement learning is active when the model exploits reward model biases.

We think this model organism is a useful testbed for several reasons. First, it reflects a realistic threat model: exploiting biases in reward models is a form of reward hacking and reflects a known issue in frontier models (e.g., contributing to the common issue of user sycophancy, cf. [Sharma et al., 2025](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.13548)). Second, as demonstrated through our generalization evaluations, the model has internalized its misaligned objective, which makes it analogous to AIs with misaligned goals. Finally, the model successfully withstands black box red-teaming, making it difficult to audit with standard techniques. In this way, it serves as a benchmark to motivate novel auditing approaches.

Read [our post](https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/auditing-mo-replication/) for more details.
# Fanning Radiators

My house has radiators for heat. There are three heating loops ("zones") but the house has more than three rooms and it's not very well balanced. Fixing this properly involves hiring a plumber, but it turns out we can make it much better with just a small fan!

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/fanning-a-radiator-to-increase-output.jpg)](https://www.jefftk.com/fanning-a-radiator-to-increase-output-big.jpg)

Radiators heat passively: they warm the nearby air, which rises and allows cooler air to flow in. This new air then warms, and the cycle repeats. This works pretty well: no electricity, no noise, just smooth heating.

What we can do with a fan, though, is accelerate this process in a targeted way, at the cost of a small amount of electricity, hardware, and noise. By fanning the radiator we want more output from, we can bring the system into balance.

I'm now tempted to put efficient little fans on all the radiators in the house, network them together, add temperature and occupancy sensors, predict future occupancy, and see how much more efficient I can make the whole system. But while this sounds like a fun project, and possibly even something someone could turn into a product that pays for itself in saved money and fuel, \[1\] this is really not something I should take on right now.

  
\[1\] I did some looking and there are (a) commercial radiator booster fans, and (b) smart radiator valves, but nothing that ties this all together.
# Why do LLMs so often say "It's not an X, it's a Y"?

There seem to be common patterns of how LLMs write text that's shared by the LLMs of different companies and where the language patterns the LLM uses are different from usual human writing. 

How much do we know about why LLMs pick certain patterns? Do we know why they use "It's not an X, it's a Y? If not, maybe understand why they pick patterns like it can make us better understand how LLMs are reasoning?
# Fermi paradox solutions map

I heard that there are around 100 solutions of the Fermi paradox. Here I tried to collect the largest possible list and I am open to the new suggestions. Download [pdf with links here. ](https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/wxq1me2rub67icd1qwo7u/Fermi-paradox12.pdf?rlkey=khzmv1gk2fv0l0r0uetnqhle4&st=d04ltnt4&dl=0)

Also, see [here](https://avturchin.github.io/OpenSideloading/fermi_v11_en_interactive.html   ) AI-updated version of the map which includes probabilities and Global vs Local solution distinctions. If you press on any text, it will provide more detailed explanations. But this AI-version may have subtle errors. Probabilities in it are AI-generated and are just illustrative.   
 

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/51f7fa146445f66faba7edd61f1e6e1c197901cc133e26ae.jpg)
# A browser game about AI safety

Hi. I'm Nick, longtime LW reader and Berkeley meetup attendee. My interests include not dying in an AI apocalypse and making games, sometimes professionally. I've wanted to make an incremental game for a while but never got around to it. When I saw the Future of Life Institute's [Keep The Future Human contest](https://keepthefuturehuman.ai/contest/), it seemed like a good time.  
  
Play the game here: [TheChoiceBeforeUs.com](https://thechoicebeforeus.com/)

My hope is that this is something you can share with people who aren't already familiar with alignment concepts.  Friends or family who've heard the term but don't really get why it matters. Sometimes a game gets through where an essay wouldn't.

**\[Minor spoilers ahead – nothing that will prevent enjoyment\]**

In the game, you run a small AI research lab. As you grow, a rival appears and the race kicks in. Build too slow and they steal your resources. Build too fast without alignment and everyone loses. By late game, a potential AI safety framework emerges. Your actions can choose to support or oppose it. If the framework passes, your rival is likely to "cheat" and get shut down, but the pressure is not off. By this point you are creating such amazing tech that the world has begun to depend on the wonders you're creating (medicine, materials, climate, etc). The challenge is threading the needle. Serve humanity without destroying it.  
  
My hope for these mechanics was to represent real challenges: race dynamics, coordination problems, and the tension of creating powerful but controlable tools. The [original essay](https://keepthefuturehuman.ai/) has some thoughtful solutions (go read it!!) The game focuses on winning by building "Tool AI" with limited in scope. Tool AI designed to aid humans rather than replace them.

Overall, I think the game is optimistic. You can create some amazing gifts for humanity.

The game is optimized to be a *game*. It's not a simulation and I made tradeoffs for fun. But I tried to stay faithful to the spirit of reality. In fiction, the good guys win because they're the good guys, or there needs to be a satisfying plot for the human readers. Reality is more unforgiving. I wanted the game to feel that way.

Feedback welcome!

One more thing: as your AI gets more powerful, the UI may start misbehaving. This is intentional. I wanted "misaligned AI" to feel real and a little unsettling, not abstract.

Play it here: [TheChoiceBeforeUs.com](https://thechoicebeforeus.com/)
# Chemical (hunger) argument paraphrased

_No new evidence is presented._


What is it about processed food that's so bad for you? The slicing? The smashing? The pressing? The freezing? The drying? The boiling? The canning? The conveyor belts? Is it simply filled with malice by the people who create it?

How come none of my 8 great grandparents were fat but 3 of my 4 grandparents were? They all sat at desks or worked in factories or took care of the home. They didn't have terribly different lifestyles. As far as I know, they could generally all afford as much food as they wanted. (By the way, my 4th grandparent has lived her whole adult life on unincorporated islands.)

I would choose my mom's soup over chikfila soup every time; I would choose my mom's burgers over McDonald's every time. I wouldn't say that fast food or frozen food or canned food or prepared meals are better or more palatable than homemade food at all. And my grandma was a better chef than my mom and my great grandma was a better chef than my grandma. Food is getting less palatable, not more.

What good explanations are left?

We all know that higher "socioeconomic status" magically makes you healthier and skinnier. Going to the gym for 20 minutes every other weekend burns more calories than a 9 hour shift moving boxes every day. But perhaps there is a second factor. If your spouse doesn't work a job than they'll have more time to cook. I posit some kind of magic enhancement mechanism is going on here, where if your parents or spouse cook breakfast and dinner then you get a boost to the inexplicable wealth-health magic.
# I made Geneguessr

[https://geneguessr.brinedew.bio/](https://geneguessr.brinedew.bio/)

Inspired by Geoguessr and Wordle, this is a free web game where you get shown a random human protein each day, and you have to triangulate its gene name using similarity clues.

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/d6a3a7ef64abddd5de1b2297a6edf8c0d9b3fa6654180d57.png)

My background is in wet lab biology and I intend this to be comprehensible mostly to other biologists. But if you're outside the field, I'm interested to know if you can still solve it with browser use LLMs, and if you learned something interesting from doing so. Let me know what you think.

I made it with Claude over the last 2 months. My coding experience is limited to basic python data analysis and figure making. If you've been asking yourself *"Now that we have coding AI, why isn't there a deluge of awesome AI-generated apps made by non-coders?"*, you might be interested to check out Geneguessr to understand what an app by a non-coder looks like. 

I might write more about the process if there's a demand, but what really unlocked the project for Claude was Linear MCP, where it could put each individual issue on a shared Kanban board. This, and Playwright MCP for testing on live site, were the two workhorses that got me through this. For bugs Claude couldn't one-shot, Linear was great for consolidating issue information so that I could dump it into ChatGPT Codex - it would usually think for like half an hour, output very confusing explanations, but the bug was gone. 

I still haven't figured out mobile testing though - let me know if any bugs remain there.
# Claude Opus 4.5 Achieves 50%-Time Horizon Of Around 4 hrs 49 Mins

An updated METR graph including Claude Opus 4.5 was just published 3 hours ago on X by METR ([source](https://x.com/METR_Evals/status/2002203627377574113)):

![Image](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G8k8w3BXEAAolEc?format=jpg&name=large)

Same graph but without the log ([source](https://x.com/giansegato/status/2002203155262812529/photo/1)):

![Image](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G8k-rSBboAAU7CV?format=jpg&name=large)

Thread from METR on X ([source](https://x.com/METR_Evals/status/2002203627377574113)):

> We estimate that, on our tasks, Claude Opus 4.5 has a 50%-time horizon of around 4 hrs 49 mins (95% confidence interval of 1 hr 49 mins to 20 hrs 25 mins). While we're still working through evaluations for other recent models, this is our highest published time horizon to date.
> 
> We don’t think the high upper CI bound reflects Opus’s actual capabilities: our current task suite doesn’t have enough long tasks to confidently upper bound Opus 4.5’s 50%-time horizon. We are working on updating our task suite, and hope to share more details soon.
> 
> Based on our experience interacting with Opus 4.5, the model’s performance on specific tasks (including some not in our time horizon suite), and its benchmark performance, we would be surprised if further investigation showed Opus had a 20+ hour 50%-time horizon.
> 
> Despite its high 50%-time horizon, Opus 4.5's 80%-time horizon is only 27 minutes, similar to past models and below GPT-5.1-Codex-Max's 32 mins. The gap between its 50%- and 80%- horizons reflects a flatter logistic success curve, as Opus differentially succeeds on longer tasks.
> 
> ![Image](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G8k8e6gXEAAEwnH?format=jpg&name=medium)
> 
> You can find additional details about our current methodology as well as our time horizon estimates for Opus 4.5 and other models here: [https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-complete-long-tasks/](https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-complete-long-tasks/)

The 80%-horizon has stayed essentially flat (27-32 mins) since GPT-5.1-Codex-Max's release but there's a big jump with huge error bars on the 50%-horizons.

I think Daniel Kokotajlo's recent [shortform](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cxuzALcmucCndYv4a/daniel-kokotajlo-s-shortform?commentId=P8qGMRnbEexaFB4s9) offers a useful framing here. He models progress as increasing either the *intercept* (baseline performance) or the *slope* (how well models convert time budget into performance). If progress comes mainly from rising intercepts, an exponential fit to horizon length could hold indefinitely. But if progress comes from increasing slope, the crossover point eventually shoots to infinity as AI slope approaches human slope.

The flat 80%-horizon while 50%-horizon climbs might be evidence for intercept-dominated progress.
# Update: 5 months of Retatrutide

A few days ago I was listening to the [Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast episode on Chinese Peptides](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QErGuO-mtfc), and the first guest mentioned reading articles on LessWrong about retatrutide, and the second guest owns the company I buy peptides for my own research from. This felt like a sign that I should finally write a final update to [30 Days of Retatrutide](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mLvek6a9G86EnhJqH/30-days-of-retatrutide).

This will be brief since I don't think there's actually much to talk about.

*   I stopped trying to lose weight since I hit my target BMI, my weight-related medical issues resolved themselves, and I'm more focused on strength now.
*   I need around 1/4th of the dose I was taking to remain weight stable at my target weight.
*   Diluting the drug better, only taking it once a week, and taking it in the morning seems to help with swelling.
*   I still don't think there's any direct effect on willpower, although not being distracted by snacks is useful.

Weight
------

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/9abf9bb5edc6fd9634d36d372fba78933b32aad72604672f.png)

The point where I started retatrutide is very obvious. There was a ~2 week delay between dropping the dose and weight going back up.

Around November 1st, I was at a reasonable BMI (22) and decided to start focusing on strength instead of weight loss. Stopping retatrutide entirely brought my appetite back too strongly, so I started taking quarter doses a week later. I also started working out more and taking creatine, so the 8 lb gain here is largely expected between creatine and glycogen. 

I'm also not particularly worried about small amounts of weight gain as I work on muscle, since it's trivial to lose it again if I want to.

Side-effects
------------

I noted getting injection site redness and swelling in the last article. Changing to a smaller needle doesn't seem to help, although using a replaceable needing and switching it between extracting the drug and injecting it helped with consistency (every once in a while, the needle would be obviously blunt and hard to inject).

Diluting it slightly less (and later using less as I dropped the dose) seems to have helped, and more recently, doing the injection earlier in the day (vs. at night) seems to have also helped. I also only take it once a week now.

I'm not entirely sure what I changed, but I only get minor redness now.

I no longer get any skin sensitivity or heartburn. My resting heart rate and HRV are still elevated even at a lower dose, but this doesn't seem to get in the way of exercise so I'm not worried about it.
# AIXI with general utility functions: "Value under ignorance in UAI"

This updated version of my AGI 2025 paper with Marcus Hutter, "Value under ignorance in universal artificial intelligence," studies general utility functions for AIXI. Surprisingly, the (hyper)computability properties have connections to imprecise probability theory! 

AIXI uses a defective Bayesian mixture called a semimeasure, which is often viewed as expressing a chance that the agent dies. I do not think that interpretation has been sufficiently justified. Recasting semimeasures as credal sets, we can recover the (recursive) value function from reinforcement learning for discounted nonnegative rewards. We can also obtain a wider class of lower semicomputable value functions, with optimal agents following a max min decision rule.

This is an early conference paper without complete proofs included. You should read it if:

*   You are interested in utility functions for AIXI. There have been a few previous attempts to formulate this, but ours seems to be the first general and rigorous treatment with (easy but) nontrivial consequences.
*   You are curious how AIT might interact with imprecise probability. For instance this is probably relevant to (but much shallower than) Infra-Bayesianism.
*   I sent it to you personally. I polished and posted the paper on arXiv for convenience of collaboration on our ongoing work. **Most people should wait for a more complete journal version.** If you do read it and are interested, please let me know. There are a ton of shovel-ready open problems to pursue.

Of course, this paper is largely motivated by AI safety (and my work was supported by the LTFF). However, any safety application would come at a much later stage, and I want to avoid the impression of making certain claims. This paper is one line of evidence from AIT potentially justifying the naturality of pessimism in the face of ignorance,[^jyh6irk1am] but the implications (for example, to rationality) need further study. Also, while I am hoping to place some constraints on reasonable utility/value functions for AIXI variants, I do not imagine it is easy to write down a safe but useful one (and this paper does not grapple with the problem directly).

(An earlier and much rougher version of these ideas appeared [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zwt8gL8Fmrnbiu52u/i-invented-semimeasure-theory-and-all-i-got-was-imprecise))

[^jyh6irk1am]: Another is suggested here.
# Why does Eliezer make abrasive public comments?

I don't want to ruffle any feathers, but this has been bugging me for a while and has now become relevant to a decision since MIRI is fundraising and is focused on communication instead of research.

I love Eliezer's writing -  the insight, the wit, the subversion.  Over the years though, I've seen many comments from him that I found off-putting.  Some of them, I've since decided, are probably net positive and I just happen to be in a subgroup that they don't work for (for example, I found Dying with Dignity discouraging, but saw enough comments that it had been helpful for people that I've changed my mind to think it was a net positive).  

However, other comments are really difficult for me to rationalize.  I just saw one recently on the EA forum to the effect that EAs who shortened their timelines only after chatGPT had the intelligence of a houseplant.  I don't have any model of social dynamics by which making that statement publicly is plausibly +EV.  

When I see these public dunks/brags, I experience cognitive dissonance, because my model of Eliezer is someone who is intelligent, rational, and aiming at using at least their public communications to increase the chance that AI goes well.  I'm confident that he must have considered this criticism before, and I'd expect him to arrive at a rational policy after consideration.  And yet, I see that when I recommend "If Anyone Builds It", people's social opinions of Eliezer affect their willingness to read/consider it.  

I searched LW, and if it has been discussed before it is buried in all the other mentions of Eliezer.  My questions are:   
1\. Does anyone know if there is some strategy here, or some model for why these abrasive statements are actually +EV for AI Safety?  
2\. Does MIRI in its communication strategy consider affective impact?

Phrased differently, are there good reasons to believe that:  
1\. None of Eliezer's public communication is -EV for AI Safety  
2\. Financial support of MIRI is likely to produce more consistently +EV communication than historically seen from Eliezer individually.  

Note: I've intentionally not cited many examples here.  I know that "abrasive" is subjective and am confident that many people don't have the same reaction. None of this is intended to put down Eliezer, for whom I have great respect.
# Open Source is a Normal Term

Every time someone releases code publicly under some kind of "look but don't touch" terms a similar argument plays out:

> A: This is cool, X is now open source!
> 
> B: It's cool that we can read it, but we can't redistribute etc so it's not "open source".
> 
> A: Come on, if it's not "closed source" it's "open source".
> 
> B: That's not how the term "open source" has historically been used. This is why we have terms like "source available".
> 
> A: It's bizarre that "open" would be the opposite of "closed" everywhere except this one term.

I'm generally with B: it's very useful that we have "open source" to mean a specific technical thing, and using it to mean something related gives a lot confusion about what is and is not allowed. While A is right that this is a bit confusing, it's also not unique to open vs closed source. Some other examples:

*   If a country doesn't have "closed borders" then many foreigners can visit if they follow certain rules around visas, purpose, and length of stay. If instead anyone can enter and live there with minimal restrictions we say it has "open borders".
    
*   If a journal isn't "closed access" it is free to read. If you additionally have specific permissions around redistribution and reuse then it's "open access".
    
*   If an organization doesn't practice "closed meetings" then outsiders can attend meetings to observe. If it additionally provides advance notice, allows public attendance without permission, and records or publishes minutes, then it has "open meetings."
    
*   If a club doesn't have "closed membership" then it's willing to consider applicants. If anyone can join who meets some criteria, it has "open membership".
    

This is just how language works: terms develop meanings that are not always ones you can derive simply from the meanings of their component words. I agree it can be confusing, but I also want to do my part to resist semantic drift and keep "open source" matching its useful and socially beneficial [definition](https://opensource.org/osd).

*Comment via: [facebook](https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/pfbid0SC3awqLj5bKYqBJ81PaLkLS56T6KDLcmrb3dYp2UuwC8bkeSbMQJ2tnTVjKVDp5Fl), [mastodon](https://mastodon.mit.edu/@jefftk/115769610944263330), [bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/jefftk.com/post/3mao35tnvnk2p)*
# Alignment Fellowship

[Zvi said](https://thezvi.substack.com/i/147553569/unconditional-grants-to-worthy-individuals-are-great):

>   
> **Unconditional Grants to Worthy Individuals Are Great**
> 
> The process of applying for grants, raising money, and justifying your existence sucks.
> 
> A lot.
> 
> It especially sucks for many of the creatives and nerds that do a lot of the best work.
> 
> If you have to periodically go through this process, and are forced to continuously worry about making your work legible and how others will judge it, that will substantially hurt your true productivity. At best it is a constant distraction. By default, it is a severe warping effect. A version of this phenomenon is doing huge damage to academic science.

Compelled by this, I'm considering funding ~three people for two years each to work on whatever they see fit, much like the the Thiel Fellowship, but with an AI Alignment angle.

I want to find people who are excited to work on existential risk, but are currently spending much of their time working on something else due to financial reasons.

Instead of delegating the choice to some set of grant makers, I think that aggregating the opinion of the crowd could work better (at least as good at finding talent, but with less overall time spent)

The best system I can think of at the moment would be to give every member of the alignment forum one vote with the ability to delegate it. Let everybody nominate any person in the world, including themselves, and award grants to the top 3.

  
**I'm asking for feedback and advice:**

*   Is this a good idea in general, or maybe it's obviously an order of magnitude worse than existing opportunities? 
*   Maybe the list of perfect candidates already exists, waiting to get funded?
*   What should be the amount? Thiel gave 200k. Is it too much for 2 years? Too little?
*   How could a nomination and voting system be improved? And especially, who should get a vote? Should it be Alignment Forum members, or users registered before a certain date, or Lesswrong users?
*   Could there be an entirely different approach to finding fellows? How would you do it?
# Acausal communication between isolated universes through simulation

It's possible to imagine two separate sub-universes, causally isolated from one another, each containing a complex, conscious, intelligent creature whose mind consists of interacting spinor fields and potentials, as well as another, computationally simpler creature interacting with it.  

For the purpose of this thought experiment, it's helpful to assume that physics is fundamentally continuous within these universes, and that, given the continuity of their physical substrate, these creatures operate as analogue computers.

Suppose that there exist theorems which say that the more complex minds will always output the same information as the simpler ones, all else (including their inputs, which is to say there sense-data) being equal. This is because it turns out that the more complex creatures' minds are mathematically redundant in some way, in that their states are particular members of infinite, continuous equivalence classes which correspond to the states of the simpler creatures' minds. Perhaps there are gauge transformations which would modify the conscious experience of one of the complex creatures when applied to the potential inside its mind, but its output is invariant with respect to these transformations as it only depends on the result of somehow differentiating this potential. Or maybe its mind consists of spinors, mathematical objects like vectors whose signs flip when they experience a complete rotation, but the relationship between its sensory inputs and its externally visible behaviours is not contingent on their overall sign, even though it can feel this sign. [^8n1nf6hgw05] 

We assume that each simpler creature exists in the sub-universe which does not contain its counterpart, but does contain the other more complex creature.  

By directly exchanging information with one another's counterparts within each mini universe, is it reasonable to assert that each more complex creature acausally communicates with the other? Or are the simpler creatures communicating through the more complex ones? I would interpret this as communication but am unsure as to which of these two things happens. 

[^8n1nf6hgw05]: If you have read and agree with the post about Homomorphically encrypted consciousness and its implications , then, if I understand it correctly, you might be inclined not to think that this is possible.  However, it seems likely that arbitrarily complex phenomena could play out within the degrees of freedom contained in the redundancy between different mathematical objects of this kind, which, to me, seems to suggest that it is possible for these phenomena themselves to be conscious, which would necessarily make the conscious experiences of these minds differ.
# Clipboard Normalization

The world is divided into plain text and rich text, but I want comfortable text:

*   Yes: Lists, links, blockquotes, code blocks, inline code, bold, italics, underlining, headings, simple tables.
*   No: Colors, fonts, text sizing, text alignment, images, line spacing.

Let's say I want to send someone a snippet from a [blog post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fMbk6tFH7KPJEwcdi/you-can-just-buy-far-uvc). If I paste this into my email client the font family, font size, blockquote styling, and link styling come along:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/lw-pasted-with-formatting.png)](https://www.jefftk.com/lw-pasted-with-formatting-big.png)

If I do Cmd+Shift+V and paste without formatting, I get no styling at all:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/lw-pasted-without-formatting.png)](https://www.jefftk.com/lw-pasted-without-formatting-big.png)

I can deal with losing the blockquote formatting, but losing the links is a pain.

What I want is essentially the subset of HTML that can be represented in Markdown. So I [automated this](https://github.com/jeffkaufman/clipboard-markdown)! I made a Mac command that pulls HTML from the clipboard, passes it through [pandoc](https://pandoc.org/) twice (HTML to Github-flavored markdown to HTML), and puts it back on the clipboard. I also packaged it up as a status-bar app:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/clipboard-modification-app-icons.png)](https://www.jefftk.com/clipboard-modification-app-icons-big.png)

You can run it by clicking on the icon, or invoking the script:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/mac-apps-including-clipboard-modifiers.png)](https://www.jefftk.com/mac-apps-including-clipboard-modifiers-big.png)

$ normalize-clipboard

Which gives:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/lw-pasted-with-minimal-formatting.png)](https://www.jefftk.com/lw-pasted-with-minimal-formatting-big.png)

Alternatively, if I actually want Markdown, perhaps to paste into an LLM interface, I can skip the conversion to HTML:

$ markdownify-clipboard

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/lw-pasted-markdown-formatting.png)](https://www.jefftk.com/lw-pasted-markdown-formatting-big.png)

I'm pretty happy with this! It's open source, [on github](https://github.com/jeffkaufman/clipboard-markdown), so you're welcome to give it a try if it would be useful to you.

Note that I haven't paid for an Apple Developer subscription, so if you want to use the pre-built binaries you'll need to click through scary warnings in both your browser and the OS. I've documented these in the README, though an advantage of building from source is that you don't have to deal with these.

This was my first time using [Platypus](https://sveinbjorn.org/platypus) to package a script as a Mac app. It worked well!

*Comment via: [facebook](https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/pfbid02fya9rp8ovNrkCz1NxWbTV51Dez8pFY6iA1cKbdzDFvgEWVh2uGAMmsoqWQ9EkLV7l), [lesswrong](https://lesswrong.com/posts/GLBRarCLpq7XwhxFi), [mastodon](https://mastodon.mit.edu/@jefftk/115780556052963785), [bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/jefftk.com/post/3maswnyyrrs2l)*
# There's Room in the Manger

And Joseph came to the city of Bethlehem, looking for a room for him and Mary, to rest after their travels. But there was no room at the inn. No room with a friend, no room with family, and the inns were full. But one innkeeper did say that there was room in the manger.

It would not seem a fitting place, a manger, packed in with the asses and what they leave. Not for the future King of Kings, who would later receive gifts of frankincense, myrrh, and gold. Not even for the child of a respected carpenter, an honorable middle-class profession. It was not much.

But it was enough to keep a very pregnant woman warm. It was a roof over their heads, and hay that was softer than the ground in mid-winter, and easy access to water.

It was much better than nothing. It was much better than saying that he could not help, and that he had no room at all. I hope that that innkeeper, if he became a Christian, felt proud. I hope he recognized that he offered something, even if it wasn’t much, and that was more than others had, and it was something that mattered. He may have regretted that he did not give more, but I hope he was proud that he gave what he had.

There are three important things I take away from the story of the manger. The first is YIMBYism, obviously.

The second is that it is good to offer what you can, even if it’s not much, just as you appreciate when people share the best of what they have with you. I don’t have a guest room for my friends and acquaintances, but I do have an air mattress that they’re always welcome to. If you can’t offer what you’d like to, you can still offer something. I think this is a particularly important point for people in their 20s, not able to live up to their parents’ standards for hosting. Let people crash on your couch. Offer to bring a tupperware meal to new parents you know. It’s good to help people in your community, even if you can’t do everything. Little bits help, close to home and far away.

And the final and most important point is that a good roof matters. There are people without them, in the world, right now. Metal roofs are one of the most common things people buy with money from Give Directly. If you want to put a roof over someone’s head, you can do that. You can click [this link,](http://GiveDirectly.org/Dawn) and send money.

A house in Rwanda costs about $600. Give Directly has other donors who cover all of their operational costs: your money just goes to someone who could use it. And so I want to ask you if you have a little room in your budget, to [help someone else have a room](http://GiveDirectly.org/Dawn).

[

![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!hST5!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5725d789-e08e-4821-aaac-879158fdd4bf_1024x683.jpeg)



](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!hST5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5725d789-e08e-4821-aaac-879158fdd4bf_1024x683.jpeg)
# Regression by Composition

This is a linkpost for the preprint “Regression by Composition”, by Daniel Farewell, Rhian Daniel, Mats Stensrud, and myself.

The paper introduces Regression by Composition (RBC): a new, modular framework for regression modelling built around the composition of group actions. The manuscript has been accepted as a discussion paper in JRSS-B and will be read to the Royal Statistical Society in London on March 24th, 2026.

**Background and motivation**

In earlier posts on LessWrong, I have argued that an effect parameter I call the Switch Relative Risk (SRR) is often the most appropriate scale for extrapolating causal effects from one population to another—for example, from a randomized trial population to patients seen in routine clinical practice.

That position has been debated extensively elsewhere, including on statistical discourse forums. One common objection is that the odds ratio has a privileged status because it corresponds to the canonical link function in generalized linear models (GLMs), whereas the SRR does not admit a natural GLM formulation.

This objection was one of the original motivations for developing a new regression framework. Regression by Composition allows models that are closely related to the SRR, without forcing them into the GLM mould.

But the SRR—and binary outcomes more generally—are only a small part of why we think RBC is important.

**What Regression by Composition does**

At a high level, RBC reframes regression models in terms of group actions and invariance, rather than link functions and linear predictors. This shift has several consequences:

*   Unification: RBC subsumes almost all standard regression models as special cases.
*   Expansion: It substantially enlarges the class of allowable models beyond what GLMs and other preexisting frameworks permit.
*   Modularity: Features that traditionally belong to different model classes can be combined within a single coherent model.
*   Conceptual clarity: Statistical properties of effect parameters (such as collapsibility) can be understood in terms of invariance under group actions, rather than as ad-hoc algebraic quirks.
*   Interpretability: In many cases, effect parameters correspond more directly to meaningful transformations of the outcome.

**Why this matters now**

Regression by Composition can be read as a defense (and a modernization) of traditional regression modelling in the age of machine learning.

Rather than treating regression as a narrow, legacy tool defined by a fixed menu of link functions, RBC treats it as a flexible, principled language for expressing assumptions about how variables transform under intervention and conditioning. In that sense, it aims to recover what made regression powerful in the first place, while making explicit structure that has long remained implicit.
# Enhance Funding Applications: Share Utility Function Over Money (+Tool)

You have more context on your ability to make use of funds than fits into a specific numerical ask.[^kmm2ovj365h] You want to give funders good information, and the natural type-signature for this is a utility function over money - how much good you think you can do with different funding levels, normalized to the max EV your project has.

I kinda think the current process can be reasonably described as the applicant converting from a utility function over money to a few datapoints with ambiguous meanings then the funder trying to reverse that conversion to make a decision. Let's cut out the difficult and information-losing steps.

I[^rge625mm3ng] made [a little tool for drawing utility functions over money](http://utility.plex.ventures/)[^6dwtdzjq2xh], for use in funding applications.

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/399f28dabe3345d8565acb75d7bc406b668aced0ed217e7e.png)

Features:

*   Copy graph to clipboard as CSV and paste back in[^8ev641zb0ss]
*   By default enforces monotonicity but you can turn that off (hover graph for toggle)
*   Click to add/remove points, drag to move, clear all button (hover)
*   Shows preview on hover of what the graph looks like if you add points.
*   Flexible bounds on funding, can quickly change via a slider at the bottom or click into the max to pick any max directly.

*Released as* [*CC attribution share alike*](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)*, feel free to remix and improve, if you make it better I might switch the official one to yours.*

[^kmm2ovj365h]: The proliferation of extra numbers like Min funding, Main ask, Ambitious, Max etc in many applications points to the funders wanting this information, but it's stressful and unclear how to translate your understanding of your project into those numbers. 

[^rge625mm3ng]: (Claude) 

[^6dwtdzjq2xh]: Make sure to bookmark http://utility.plex.ventures/, so you get the newest version and are not left with an old artifact. 

[^8ev641zb0ss]: Nicely human editable too, like:0%,$046%,$1896057%,$3028076%,$66110
# Glucose Supplementation for Sustained Stimulant Cognition


# Observation

I take 60mg methylphenidate daily. Despite this, I often become exhausted and need to nap.

Taking small amounts of pure glucose (150-300mg every 20-60 minutes) eliminates this fatigue. This works even when I already eat carbohydrates. E.g. 120g of oats in the morning don't prevent the exhaustion.

# Proposed Mechanism

**Facts:**
- [Wiehler et al. (2022)](https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(22)01111-3) found that cognitive fatigue correlates with glutamate accumulation in the prefrontal cortex.
- Glutamate is the brain's main excitatory neurotransmitter.
- Excess glutamate is neurotoxic.

**Hypothesis-1:** The brain throttles cognitive effort when too much glutamate has accumulated.

**Facts:**
- Glutamate is cleared by astrocytes.
- This process costs 2 ATP per glutamate molecule ([Escartin et al. 2006](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1471-4159.2006.04083.x)).
- The ATP comes from astrocyte glycogen stores.
- [Sickmann et al. (2009)](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1471-4159.2009.05915.x) found that blocking astrocyte glycogenolysis impaired glutamate uptake.

**Hypothesis-2**: Sustained stimulant use depletes astrocyte glycogen faster than it can be replenished. 

**Hypothesis-3**: Elevated blood glucose helps glycogen synthesis, thereby maintaining clearance capacity.

If these hypotheses hold, supplementing small amounts of pure glucose while working on stims, should reduce fatigue by supporting astrocyte glycogen replenishment, which in turn increased how much glutamate can be cleared. Possibly this has an effect even when not on stims.

# Protocol

150-300mg glucose every 20-60 minutes, taken as a capsule.