trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Programming Language Early Funding?
by J Thomas Moros — 2025-02-16T17:34:06.058Z

We are in the dark age of computer programming.[1]

I believe that we still fundamentally haven’t found good ways to deal with the challenges of writing computer programs. Programming languages are the foundation of our programming and leave a lot to be desired. I believe more is possible. I’ve worked on creating a new programming language (I’m on my second). Given time and resources, I could take a solid step in the right direction with a new programming language. However, programming languages are and generally must be open-source and free. When they are mature and widely used, there are some challenging and indirect ways to make money from having created one and working on it. There is no way to profit from them when they are incomplete and immature. However, that phase takes a lot of software development effort. To design a better language, the design will need plenty of time to incubate. Indeed, recent languages show signs of being released too early (e.g., Rust and Go). The resulting issues can’t be fixed the same way they are in other software because of the much stricter backward compatibility requirements of a programming language.

I have been working on a multi-paradigm general-purpose language that supports structured concurrency, object-oriented programming, and design by contract. Think of it as a future garbage-collected language in the vein of Swift, Scala, C#, or Java, but better.

What grants and other funding sources might be willing to fund this?

Addressing Possible Questions (Optional)

Why haven’t I said what language I am working on?

To avoid getting lost in the details of my language. This question isn’t about critiquing my language or ideas. It is about potential funding sources. Also, I use a pen name here, and while my given name isn’t a secret, I see no reason to link them here.

Am I qualified to do this?

I’m an experienced software developer with 22 years of experience, and my title in my last role was Senior Staff Software Engineer. I’ve spent years now working on designing my languages and writing compilers for them. I am confident I can write the compiler and standard library. I’ve researched programming languages and looked at the designs of other languages being created. I believe my designs combine the best of what is out there and new ideas in a way others aren’t.

How much money would I need?

Any amount of funding would help, but...
[Closed] Gauging Interest for a Learning-Theoretic Agenda Mentorship Programme
by Vanessa Kosoy — 2025-02-16T16:24:57.654Z

I'm planning to organize a mentorship programme for people who want to become researchers working on the Learning-Theoretic Agenda (LTA). I'm still figuring out the detailed plan, the logistics and the funding, but here's an outline of how it would looks like. To express interest, submit this form. [EDIT: The programme described here will not happen this year, due to lack of funding. If you're interested in my mentorship, consider applying to the PIBBSS Fellowship.]

Why Apply?

I believe that the risk of a global catastrophe due to unaligned artificial superintelligence is the most pressing problem of our time. I also believe that the LTA is our last best chance for solving the technical alignment problem. Even if governance efforts succeed, they will only buy time: but we still need to use this time somehow. The LTA is how we use this time. (I also consider some other research agendas to be useful, but mostly inasmuch as they can be combined with LTA.)

Fortunately, the LTA has many shovel-ready research directions that can be advanced in parallel. What we need is more researchers working on them. If you are a mathematician or theoretical computer scientist that can contribute, this is probably the most important thing you can choose to do.

Requirements

Applicants should be seriously interested in AI alignment and at least considering AI alignment research as a long-term career path.
The typical applicant is a PhD student or postdoc in math or computer science. I do not require official credentials, but I do require relevant skills and knowledge.
Strong background in mathematics is necessary. Bonus points for familiarity with the fields in the LTA reading list.
Experience in mathematical research, including proving non-trivial original theorems, is necessary.
Experience in academic technical writing is highly desirable. A strong candidate would have at least one academic publication, preprint or some other comparable work.

Application Process

I'll start gathering applications now. If you're interested, please submit this form.
In early April, I will send the applicants a test with several math problems. (And any new applicant will have to submit solutions.)
On May 1, applications and test submissions will be closed.
In early May, I will notify the applicants whether they were accepted. I'm expecting to accept 2-4 applicants.

Programme Structure

The programme will run approxi

...
Celtic Knots on Einstein Lattice
by Ben — 2025-02-16T15:56:06.888Z

I recently posted about doing Celtic Knots on a Hexagonal lattice ( https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tgi3iBTKk4YfBQxGH/celtic-knots-on-a-hex-lattice ).

There were many nice suggestions in the comments. @Shankar Sivarajan suggested that I could look at a Einstien lattice instead, which sounded especially interesting. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_problem . )

The idea of the Einstein tile is that it can tile the plane (like a hexagon or square can), but it does so in a way where the pattern of tiles never repeats.

The tile I took from Wikipedia looks like this:

On the left is the full tile. On the right is a way of decomposing it into four-thirds of a hexagon.

For some reason I think of it as a lama. On the left top is its head, facing left. On tie right top its its tail. The squarish bit coming down is the legs.

First problem: the tile has 13 sides. So if we run a string into/out of every edge we are going to have a loose end. Second problem, sometimes a face in the tiling touches a corner:

Image from Wikipedia. In the pink circle the face of the red tile connects to a corner between the orange and white ones. This is a problem, if we had a string going off that edge of the red tile it would get split.

The solution is to identify a subset of the edges to put strings on, where this will never happen. The hex grid underlay on Wikipedia reveals a strategy - take only those facets touching a hexagon separator line. IE for each of the 4 thirds of a hexagon, the two long edges of those third pieces, are used. This gives 6 total per tile (an even number, woo!), meaning that the connectors joining each in/out to each other fill this table:

(Each entry point can connect to any exit except itself.)

Notice that a couple of the ropes trespass slightly outside the tile. This seems like it will be fine, if it does touch a rope in another tile it can just go over or under it.

Combining these connectors every possible way we get this tile set:

Pretty weird looking.

Using them to semi-randomly tile the plane using the pattern from Wikipedia we get something as weird as might be expected:

I like the "clover" that formed in the middle of the design.

One big downside compared to hexagons is I can't just put tiles down fluently, while concentrating on the aesthetics. After picking up a tile to use I typically spend 20+ seconds rotating and mirroring it while consulting the...
It's been ten years. I propose HPMOR Anniversary Parties.
by Screwtape — 2025-02-16T01:43:14.586Z

UPDATE: A coordination post with the list of parties is here!

On March 14th, 2015, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality made its final post. Wrap parties were held all across the world to read the ending and talk about the story, in some cases sparking groups that would continue to meet for years. It’s been ten years, and I think that's a good reason for a round of parties.

If you were there a decade ago, maybe gather your friends and talk about how things have changed. If you found HPMOR recently and you're excited about it (surveys suggest it's still the biggest on-ramp to the community, so you're not alone!) this is an excellent chance to meet some other fans in person for the first time!

Want to run an HPMOR Anniversary Party, or get notified if one's happening near you? Fill out this form.

I’ll keep track of it and publish a collection of everyone’s parties. You can check if there's one for your city, I'll try and keep that up to date. There's reimbursement funding available for food and supplies at rationalitymeetups.org/get-funding[1] (In the other direction, if you want to chip in may I suggest donating to Lightcone?) I'm also interested in collecting any stories about how HPMOR has impacted you, especially if you were around when it was being written.

I've got a guide here if you want more details!

(If you read this and went wait, why is Screwtape running this instead of Habryka, I asked and he said he thought I should run it. I think he's busy running some kind of over-complicated HPMOR mirror and giving eulogies for dead dark arts professors.)

^

Most reimbursements from that page come from the Long-Term Future Fund, due to what's basically timing reasons I checked if Oliver/Lightcone would help out and they said yes.
Come join Dovetail's agent foundations fellowship talks & discussion
by Alex_Altair — 2025-02-15T22:10:02.166Z

(This is a repost of the event listing, since it seems like events don't get much advertisement on LW.)

As part of the fellowship that I announced back in September, the fellows and I will be hosting an online event to talk about our research! Here's a tentative schedule:

Alex_Altair: What is a world model?
Daniel C: Towards building blocks of ontologies
José Pedro Faustino: Agent Structure Problem and Internal Model Principle
Alfred Harwood: Does Agent-like behaviour generalize?
Dalcy Ku: Thoughts on Structural Selection Theorems

The talks will be informal, and the scope is anything in technical AI safety that we are interested in. Questions and discussion will be encouraged! Topics are likely to include: world models, information theory, ontology identification, and SLT.

Zoom link, google calendar link.
Quantifying the Qualitative: Towards a Bayesian Approach to Personal Insight
by Pruthvi Kumar — 2025-02-15T19:50:42.550Z

A common challenge in self-improvement and rational decision-making is bridging the gap between qualitative experiences – our feelings, intuitions, and subjective reflections – and the quantitative analysis we often use to understand the external world. We rely on gut feelings, which are notoriously susceptible to biases, or on anecdotal evidence, which can be unreliable. This post explores a framework for systematically analyzing our internal data stream, drawing inspiration from Bayesian reasoning and vector space models, to extract more reliable insights about our own thoughts and behaviors, and to connect those insights to our stated goals. The aim isn't to replace intuition, but to augment it – to become more aware of the "priors" that shape our perceptions, and to use that awareness to move more effectively towards our desired outcomes.

This is relevant to LessWrong because it tackles a fundamental problem in rationality: how do we make better use of the vast, often messy, data of our own lives? By applying techniques usually reserved for external data to our internal world, we might uncover hidden biases, identify recurring patterns, and make decisions more aligned with our values and goals. It's not about achieving perfect objectivity (an impossible goal), but about increasing the signal-to-noise ratio of our self-understanding, leading to more effective action.

Beyond the Blank Page: The Limits of Traditional Journaling

Traditional journaling, while valuable for capturing thoughts and feelings, often suffers from a lack of systematic review and connection to broader goals. We write, but rarely revisit in a way that allows for objective pattern recognition or helps us understand how our daily experiences relate to our long-term aspirations. It's like having a powerful telescope but never pointing it at the most interesting parts of the sky, or having a rush of tasks without much pause. We might be skimming the surface, missing connections, and failing to see how our actions (or inactions) are impacting our progress.

Alice and the Procrastination Puzzle: The Power of Simple Quantification

Imagine someone, let's call her Alice, consistently journals about feeling overwhelmed and procrastinating on important tasks. She also sets a goal in her system: "Become a more effective project manager." She writes about feeling guilty about procrastination,...
Knitting a Sweater in a Burning House
by CrimsonChin — 2025-02-15T19:50:33.275Z

There's a phrase my wife and I use: "knitting a sweater in a burning house." It describes those moments when we find ourselves absorbed in trivial tasks while seemingly more important matters loom. The night before my wedding, I caught myself trying to reactivate an old Twitter profile for our handmade photobooth—a perfect example of this phenomenon.

At first glance, this might seem like a criticism of misplaced priorities. But I've come to believe there's a deeper complexity worth exploring.

Consider Jonas Salk in 1947. The world had just witnessed the devastating power of atomic weapons, and humanity faced what might have been its closest brush with extinction. The Cold War was beginning, and existential risks loomed large. In this context, Salk chose to focus on virology—specifically, polio research.

One could imagine Salk's colleagues asking, "With the threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over us, why focus on a comparatively minor disease?" It might have seemed like knitting a sweater while the house of humanity was ablaze with nuclear fire. Yet within seven years, Salk developed the polio vaccine, saving countless lives and preventing millions of disabilities.

This historical example highlights three important insights about prioritization and impact:

1. Specialization of Labor

There's a reason we aren't all renaissance individuals jumping between specialties. Our society functions through division of labor. This is essential to making progress. At some point, we all choose where to focus our learning, which means leaving other knowledge and skills unacquired.

The world's biggest problem at any moment doesn't care that I majored in chemistry. I might not have the optimal skills to address that particular problem. But if I find a topic that matches my skillset, I can likely make more meaningful progress there.

2. Burnout Prevention

Even if I'm not the optimal person to work on a problem, passion and interest can carry me far. Solving hard problems becomes draining without genuine engagement. If there's a project I'm particularly passionate about, I'm less likely to burn out while working on it.

3. The Value of Local Optimization

There's an obvious analogy to local versus global optimization—working on problems right in front of you rather than stepping back to figure out the "whole picture." Gradient descent is oblivious to the global landscape and works o...
Microplastics: Much Less Than You Wanted To Know
by jenn — 2025-02-15T19:08:14.561Z

Microplastics have been in the news and the local rationalist discord with increasing frequency over the past few months. Of note are Nat Friedman's PlasticList, and this 2024 preprint demonstrating that some human brains are now 0.5% plastic by weight. There was also an article on black plastic cookware that was quickly retracted[1]. The volume of discussion made it clear that few people seem to have a clear understanding of what we actually know about microplastics, so we had a meetup about it.

Here are the notes from Kitchener-Waterloo Rationality's in-person meetup[2] researching the current understanding of microplastics in a time-boxed format. Sort of like partitioned book club, the goal of the meetup was to power of friendship teamwork our way into a better understanding of a complex topic with relatively little individual effort.

tl;dr: The field is so new that there's a striking lack of scientific consensus, standardized measurements, or regulatory frameworks:

Health effects of microplastics are severely understudied, and research into this topic really only began a year or two ago.
Current testing methods can't reliably detect particles smaller than 20 micrometers, but microplastics smaller than 10 micrometers in length have an increased likelihood of causing adverse health effects in mammals.
No official safety limits exist for microplastic consumption basically anywhere.

This write-up represents about 90 minutes of focused research per section. Attendees aimed to quickly build a broad understanding of each sub-topic rather than produce a comprehensive review. We welcome specific corrections and links to additional key papers we missed. However, critiques about comprehensiveness or depth should keep in mind that this is very much a product of a "what can five people learn in an evening?" approach.

What are the current recommended limits for microplastic intake?

tl;dr we don't have any.

Canada

There are no rules or standards for allowable limits for microplastics in bottled water in Canada.

We couldn't find any rules or standards for microplastics in food, in general.

As of July 2018, we have a

ban on “microbeads” (plastic microbeads that are ≤ 5 mm in size) from toiletries

like soaps and shampoos, due to concern that they’ll get into our waterways and cause pollution there. Not much in terms of concern for human health; this makes sense, it w...
Preference for uncertainty and impact overestimation bias in altruistic systems.
by Luck — 2025-02-15T12:27:05.474Z

Let's say a system receives reward when it believes that it's doing some good. Kind of like RL with actor-critic.
Estimated Good things -> max
We can do some rewriting. I'll use notation -> inc. that means incentivised to be increased. It's like direction, towards which the gradients point.

Preventing_estimated_catastrophe -> inc

Estimated_p_catastrophe * estimated_magnitude_of_catastroph-> inc
(P_catastrophe + p_estimation_error) * (catastrophe_magnitude + magnitude_estimation_error) -> inc
p_estimation_error -> inc
magnitude_estimation_error -> inc.

Estimation_error = k*estimation_uncertainty
estimation_uncertainty -> inc.

So, what we got: system is incentivised to have some biases:
1. It's biased to overestimate the probability and magnitude of a catastrophe.
2. It's biased to take actions in areas, where uncertainty is higher (because higher uncertainty gives more freedom to increase the first bias).
Or in plain English, if someone wants to maximize help, they will be looking for a big and probable catastrophe to prevent. Then wishful thinking will bias them to overestimate both magnitude and likelihood, because overestimation gives them higher internal reward. This effect is proportional to uncertainty of the outcome, so it creates a force towards choosing actions with higher uncertainty of the outcome.
Harm of first bias (overestimation) is limited to increased stress levels.
But harm of the second bias is that system will prefer actions with much higher uncertainty of outcome - this one directly affects the strategy, so it's unbounded.
The compensation for the second bias is to take less contraversial actions, and focus more on such actions that give positive results with higher certainty, even at the cost of lower expected magnitude.

At first I thought about presence of this bias in altruistic systems, but I guess it is present in other systems too.
Artificial Static Place Intelligence: Guaranteed Alignment
by ank — 2025-02-15T11:08:50.226Z

(This is the result of three years of thinking and modeling hyper‑futuristic and current ethical systems. It's not the first post in the series, it'll be very confusing and probably understood wrong without reading at least the first one. Everything described here can be modeled mathematically—it’s essentially geometry. I take as an axiom that every agent in the multiverse experiences real pain and pleasure. Sorry for the rough edges—I’m a newcomer, non‑native speaker, and my ideas might sound strange, so please steelman them and share your thoughts. My sole goal is to decrease the probability of a permanent dystopia. I’m a proponent of direct democracies and new technologies being a choice, not an enforcement upon us.)

Most of our physical theories deny jumping into the future, so does the halting problem. And computational irreducibility too guarantees that even the perfectly aligned agentic superintelligence will make mistakes, because it’s impossible to jump into the future and see long-term consequences of actions. You can help a dying man by sacrificing your life (will agentic ASI sacrifice its?) and he'll turn out to be the next Hitler who'll be cunning enough to enslave the ASI and use it to cause dystopia. Maybe it was better not to sacrifice your life but how could've you known? ASI will have to model all the short-term or long-term futures to be 100% sure what will be a mistake or not in the short-term or longest term.

In humans, mistakes are mitigated by the sheer number of us, mistakes of each one of us are slow and small compared to the total size of the population. Agentic superintelligence can make fast (instant) and big (catastrophic) mistakes, or just one will suffice. It's "body" and "mind" can be the whole Internet or more.

Purpose built non-agentic tool AIs are less dangerous and for maximum security, I propose Artificial Static Place Intelligence as a solution to our alignment problems. Basically, instead of trying to create “god” we’ll create “heaven.” We’ll be the only agents, and our artificial intelligence will be non-agentic virtual places that are akin to a multiverse grown by us. It’s all practical—we just need a BMI-armchair and to make a digitized copy of Earth, and we’ll have the first man-on-the-Moon moment when the first man steps into our digital Earth, gets hit by a car, and opens his eyes in the physical Earth unharmed—it gi...