trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The Grand Encyclopedia of Eponymous Laws
by rogersbacon — 2025-04-29T19:30:22.661Z
Link: https://www.secretorum.life/p/the-grand-encyclopedia-of-eponymous

I’ve long been fascinated by eponymous “laws”—those pithy, often sarcastic observations or rules of thumb that capture some universal truth of human experience. Murphy’s Law is probably the most well-known example.

Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”

There are many lists of these laws online, but they are all deficient in one way or another (e.g. woefully lacking in comprehensiveness or including various scientific/technical laws which are not really in the same spirit as the more observational variety). What follows is, as far as I can tell, the most complete list of eponymous laws ever compiled by anyone ever (192 total).

A few notes:

Many non-eponymous laws/principles/effects/etc. in the same spirit as their eponymous brethren have also been included.
See Dave Kerr’s

list of hacker laws

for some laws/principles/effects/etc. that were a little too technical to warrant inclusion.
For ease of perusal, the list is divided into three categories: Internet Laws, Computer Laws, and Miscellaneous.
Enjoy!

Internet Laws

Armstrong’s Law: “The phenomenon observed in discussions between Americans and non-Americans where any mention of America not being the best in the world at something dramatically increases the likelihood of the American arbitrarily bringing up the US moon landings as a non-sequitur to prove America’s superiority.”

Badger’s Law: “Any website with the word ‘Truth’ in the URL has none in the posted content.” (see also: Haig’s Law)

Brandolini’s Law: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it.”

Brown’s Corollary: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog, but everybody knows if you’re a jerk.”

CAD’s Theorem of Topic Closure: “A clear, well thought-out, well-written post is less likely to receive a reply than a shitty, moronic, badly mistaken post, because it leaves less to be said. A really full and comprehensive post may even appear to bring the conversation to a screeching halt.”

Cohen’s Law: “Whoever resorts to the argument that ‘whoever resorts to the argument that…has automatically lost the debate’ has automatically lost the debate.”

Conservation of Intelligence: “For a well-thought-out post, the longer it is and the more sources it cites, the more likely replies to it will consist of only one sentence that dismisses the entire argument through use of a straw man and/or logical fallacy...
Misrepresentation as a Barrier for Interp (Part I)
by johnswentworth — 2025-04-29T17:07:36.631Z

John: So there’s this thing about interp, where most of it seems to not be handling one of the standard fundamental difficulties of representation, and we want to articulate that in a way which will make sense to interp researchers (as opposed to philosophers). I guess to start… Steve, wanna give a standard canonical example of the misrepresentation problem?

Steve: Ok so I guess the “standard” story as I interpret it goes something like this:

In order to respond to dualists who thought the mind was inherently non-physical, materialist philosophers wanted a “naturalistic” account of mental representation - where “mental representation” basically means the same thing as “content” or “semantics”. We tend to use the term intentionality for mental representation. This is a technical term that’s not the same as the phenomenon of intending to do something; the thought “John is a researcher” has intentionality, on this usage. So we called this project - showing that mental representation could be a purely physical phenomenon -

“naturalizing intentionality”

.
A “naturalistic” account would allow us, basically, to be able to read off from the natural facts what some bunch of atoms was about - what its content is.

This would be both for cognitive representations - those that are trying to represent how the world is - and for conative representations, which are desire-like representations of goal states, how the system would like the world to be.

Naturally one interest of AI alignment is being able to read goal content off the atoms, so this seems very much like the philosophers’ old naturalized intentionality project.
The naturalized intentionality project started the way you alignment folk might predict: looking for causal & information-theoretic correlations between the representing state and the represented state. Roughly, on the initial accounts, a bunch of atoms are about (represent) some other state of the world if there’s the right kind of mutual information there. (

Fred Dretske

was probably the prototypical champion of these “indicator” accounts, until he ran into the problem below.)

John: Ok so to summarize: much like interp researchers want to look at some activations or weights or other stuff inside of a net and figure out what those net-internals represent, philosophers want to look at a bunch of atoms in the physical w...
AISN #53: An Open Letter Attempts to Block OpenAI Restructuring
by Corin Katzke — 2025-04-29T16:13:33.514Z

Welcome to the AI Safety Newsletter by the

Center for AI Safety

. We discuss developments in AI and AI safety. No technical background required.

In this edition: Experts and ex-employees urge the Attorneys General of California and Delaware to block OpenAI’s for-profit restructure; CAIS announces the winners of its safety benchmarking competition.

Listen to the AI Safety Newsletter for free on

Spotify

or

Apple Podcasts

.

Subscribe to receive future versions.

An Open Letter Attempts to Block OpenAI Restructuring

A group of former OpenAI employees and independent experts published

an open letter

urging the Attorneys General (AGs) of California (where OpenAI operates) and Delaware (where OpenAI is incorporated) to block OpenAI’s planned restructuring into a for-profit entity. The letter argues the move would fundamentally undermine the organization's charitable mission by jeopardizing the governance safeguards designed to protect control over AGI from profit motives.

OpenAI was

founded

with the charitable purpose to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. OpenAI’s original nonprofit structure, and later its capped-profit model, were designed to control profit motives in the development of AGI, which OpenAI defines as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work." The structure was designed to prevent profit motives from incentivizing OpenAI to take risky development decisions and divert much of the wealth produced by AGI to private shareholders.

The proposed restructuring into a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) would dismantle the governance safeguards OpenAI originally championed. The letter highlights that the proposed restructuring would transfer control away from the nonprofit entity–whose primary fiduciary duty is to humanity–to a for-profit board whose directors would be partly beholden to shareholder interests. The authors detail several specific safeguards currently in place that would be undermined or eliminated:

Subordination of Profit Motives: Currently, the nonprofit's mission takes precedence over any obligation to generate profit for OpenAI’s for-profit subsidiary. A PBC structure, however, would require balancing the public benefit mission with shareholder pecuniary interests.
Nonprofit Fiduciary Duty: The nonprofit board currently has a legally enforceable fiduciary duty to advance the c

...
What could Alphafold 4 look like?
by Abhishaike Mahajan — 2025-04-29T15:45:03.476Z

I made another biology-ML podcast! Two hours long, deeply technical, links below.

I posted about others ones I did

here

(machine learning in molecular dynamics) and

here

(machine learning in vaccine design). This one is over machine learning in protein design, interviewing perhaps one of the most well-known people in the field. This is my own field, so the podcast is very in the weeds, but hopefully interesting to those deeply curious about biology!

Substack:

https://www.owlposting.com/p/what-could-alphafold-4-look-like

Youtube:

https://youtu.be/6_RFXNxy62c

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0wPs3rmp0zrfauqToozrcv?si=DCtRf-xQTPiVYwslo-b2rQ

Apple Podcasts:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-could-alphafold-4-look-like-sergey-ovchinnikov-3/id1758545538?i=1000704927828

Transcript:

https://www.owlposting.com/p/what-could-alphafold-4-look-like?open=false#%C2%A7transcript

Summary: To those in the protein design space, Dr.

Sergey Ovchinnikov

is a very, very well-recognized name.

A recent MIT professor (circa early 2024), he has played a part in a staggering number of recent innovations in the field:

ColabFold

,

RFDiffusion

,

Bindcraft

,

automated design of soluble proxies of membrane proteins

, elucidating what protein language models are learning

,

conformational sampling via Alphafold2

, and many more. And even beyond the research that have come from his lab in the last few years, the co-evolution work he did during his PhD/fellowship

also laid some of the groundwork for the original Alphafold paper

, being cited twice in it.

As a result, Sergey’s work has gained a reputation for being something that is worth reading. But nobody has ever interviewed him before! Which was shocking for someone who was so pivotally important for the field. So, obviously, I wanted to be the first one to do it. After an initial call, I took a train down to Boston, booked a studio, and chatted with him for a few hours, asking every question I could think of. We talk about his own journey into biology research, some issues he has with Alphafold3, what Alphafold4-and-beyond models may look like, what research he’d want to spend a hundred million dollars on, and lots more. Take a look at the timestamps to get an overview!

Timestamps:
[00:01:10] Introduction + Sergey's background and how he got into the field
[00:18:14] Is conservation all you ...
Sealed Computation: Towards Low-Friction Proof of Locality
by Paul Bricman — 2025-04-29T15:26:05.006Z
Link: https://noemaresearch.com/blog/sealed-computation

Inference Certificates

As a prerequisite for the virtuality.network, we need to enable organizations which host inference workloads to prove the following about a particular AI output:

It was generated during this time period.
It was generated in this geographical region.
It was generated using this unique chip.
The generation workload was appropriately monitored.

In addition, to make it as easy as possible for Hosts to accede to the structured consortium, the techniques which facilitate these guarantees need to satisfy the following properties:

Hosts do not need to publish their inference logic.
Workloads can connect to the internet by default.
Producing inference certificates incurs negligible overhead.
Workloads require an additional interface if and only if Hosts want them to produce inference certificates. As a corollary, unmodified inference workloads can run normally if they do not need to produce such proofs.

Proving that a particular output was generated in specific circumstances while only incurring a negligible Host burden is non-trivial, but we believe that it can be done. In the rest of this post, we lay out a protocol for achieving such proofs.

Generalized Statement

Let func be a computable function which takes in an input object and produces an output object after some sequence of operations. In the context of AI inference, this function might take the form of an inference workload which generates a completion based on a given prompt.

Now, func can actually be computed on a range of computational substrates. Perhaps the algorithm is run on an Intel CPU, perhaps it is run on an Nvidia GPU. What's important here is that the function gets evaluated for a given input, regardless of how the computation is carried out.

The challenge is to produce some document which proves that a given output of func was produced within some bounds of space and time, and to do this without having knowledge of the actual logic implemented by func. Knowing that some computational substrate was present within those tight bounds, such as a unique chip, can then be used to attribute the computation to that substrate. Finally, proofs can rest on premises which involve trust in other parties, though they are strongest when as few assumptions as possible are made.

System Architecture

We now attach labels to the parties which would be involved in carrying out a computation in such regime:

use

...
Dating Roundup #4: An App for That
by Zvi — 2025-04-29T13:10:02.482Z

Previously: #1, #2, #3.

As time goes by, the fundamental things in life are still the same, and yet they change quite a lot with the times. But they don’t yet change so fast that the previous three editions of this are invalid. AI isn’t transforming the world that quickly, not yet.

In the meantime, there’s always more to say, and I both find it enjoyable and am hopeful that it might help some of you out there, so here we are once again.

Meanwhile, I am sorry to report that many of you are still single.

I spent sufficiently long between updates and got sufficient material that this one is being split into conceptual sections.

This one will focus in particular on the awfulness that are dating apps, and directly related considerations.

You’re Single Because Dating Apps (Still) Suck

Hinge puts a limit on number of open conversations, Shoshana Weissmann praises the incentive design because it pushes you to unmatch rather than ghost, or unmatch if you are being ghosted. This makes sense. I wonder what the right limit would be?

Bumble apologized for ads it ran saying that celibacy wasn’t the answer. They did penance by donating to the Domestic Violence Hotline and similar organizations. I agree this might not have been the most diplomatic approach. Yet the details of the reaction were bizarre to me. They were accused of ‘undermining daters’ freedom of choice?’ What?

If they won’t say it, I will: With notably rare exceptions, if you are an adult and are not asexual, celibacy is not the answer.

Match says number of paying users on Tinder has dropped for six straight quarters.

The dating app business is… not going well.

It could be high time for a rival that does it better, but one must still solve the matching and coordination problems, and the desire of many of the most desirable users to sit there and swipe. People do not want to pay for good matchmaking, either with money or with actual effort and attention, in this or in other fronts.

You might be having trouble on dating sites, but do not underestimate the value of ‘not being a lunatic’ if you can get past the first few seconds of filter. Or how many people seem determined to fail in those few seconds.

Shoshana Weissmann: Opened my Hinge likes after the hike. Here’s a guy who photoshopped a cartoon orgy around him in the bath.

Yesterday an ENM couple tried to match me and the guy was in a

...
Memory Decoding Journal Club: "Motor learning selectively strengthens cortical and striatal synapses of motor engram neurons" 
by Devin Ward — 2025-04-29T02:26:00.346Z

Join Us for the Memory Decoding Journal Club!

A collaboration of the Carboncopies Foundation and BPF Aspirational Neuroscience

This time, we’re diving into a groundbreaking paper:
"Motor learning selectively strengthens cortical and striatal synapses of motor engram neurons"
Authors: Fuu-Jiun Hwang, Richard H. Roth, Yu-Wei Wu, Yue Sun, Destany K. Kwon, Yu Liu, Jun B. Ding
Institutions: Department of Neurosurgery & Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences, Stanford University

Presented by: Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston

When? May 6, 2025 – 3:00 PM PDT | 6:00 PM EDT | 10:00 PM UTC

Where? Video conference:

https://carboncopies.org/aspirational-neuroscience

For more details:

https://carboncopies.org/Events/JournalClubs/MemoryDecoding/2025-05-06

#Neuroscience #MemoryResearch #MotorNeurons #JournalClub #BrainScience #Carboncopies #AspirationalNeuroscience
D&D.Sci Tax Day: Adventurers and Assessments Evaluation & Ruleset
by aphyer — 2025-04-29T02:00:25.721Z

This is a follow-up to last week's D&D.Sci scenario: if you intend to play that, and haven't done so yet, you should do so now before spoiling yourself.

There is a web interactive here you can use to test your answer, and generation code available here if you're interested, or you can read on for the ruleset and scores.

RULESET

Goods

Each good is assigned a value for tax purposes:

Good	Value
Cockatrice Eye	6gp
Dragon Head	14gp
Lich Skull	10gp
Unicorn Horn	7gp
Zombie Arm	2gp

Tax Brackets

Depending on the total value of all goods you have, you determine a tax bracket:

Total Value	Tax Rate
<30gp	20%
30-59gp	30%
60-99gp	40%
100-299gp	50%
300gp+[1]	60%

Your taxes due are equal to your Tax Rate multiplied by the total value of your goods.

So if you have two Lich Skulls (20gp), your tax rate is 20% and you will owe 4gp of taxes.

If you have three Lich Skulls (30gp), your tax rate goes up to 30% on the whole value of your goods, and you owe 9gp of taxes.

It is therefore very valuable to fall just below the various tax-bracket thresholds.

Benefits and Exemptions

There are a variety of special rules:

Clerics and Paladins are very popular for their undead-hunting, and the Church is very powerful and well-connected, leading to broad support for a Clerical tax exemption. However, the Tax Assessment Exactors do not know who is a Cleric and who is not. Instead, anyone who only has Lich Skulls and Zombie Arms is treated as a Cleric, and receives a special 10% tax rate regardless of the value of their goods.
The Unicorn Ranching Association has very good courtiers. Anyone who has at least 5 Unicorn Horns is classified as a ranch, and their tax rate is cut to 25%.[2]
Cockatrices are a pest, and there is a bounty on killing them, implemented as a tax rebate. The bounty is 6gp per cockatrice killed:

If you hand in N eyes, you will receive N/2 (rounded up) bounties. So if two people each hand in 3 eyes, they will each receive 2 bounties, but if one person hands in 6 eyes they will receive only 3 bounties.
This reduces your taxes owed, but not below zero. So if one person hands in 1 Cockatrice Eye and nothing else, they owe only 1.2gp of taxes before the bounty, and the 6gp bounty can only reduce that to 0 and no further.

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Dragons is opposed to the killing of dragons, and wants it very heavily taxed. However, heroes have be

...
How to Build a Third Place on Focusmate
by Parker Conley — 2025-04-28T23:46:57.957Z
Link: https://parconley.com/focusmate/

Introduction

Focusmate changed my life. I started using it mid-2023 and have been a power user since 2023. Here are the high-level stats:

I've spent 2,456 hours on Focusmate.
I've met 1,447 people.
I have 10+ friends with whom I've spent between 30 and 300 hours.
I've met five of my Focusmate friends in person. I've had a Focusmate's family over for dinner, gone to a party with a Focusmate, and stayed at a Focusmate's apartment.
I met my best friend and many close friends through Focusmate.
I've become significantly more productive and intentional with my time.

Focusmate

is a coworking website. For the length of 25, 50, or 75 minutes, you work in a 1-on-1 video call with a partner. Most people use the app to hold themselves accountable on work projects, and the body-doubling effect helps keep users on task. To get started, create an account, book a session, and work with someone the algorithm pairs you with. Each person states their task for the session, then we work separately until a chime signals the end of the session, at which time we report back on our progress (or lack thereof!). Over time, you can “favorite” people and develop regular partners.

The productivity benefits of Focusmate are obvious and immediate. Co-working holds you accountable for your goals and creates structure where there often is none. This guide will not explain how or why to use Focusmate. Instead, I want to teach you how to make Focusmate your third place.

What’s a third place

The modern world lacks third places. We have first places (home) and second places (work), but lack meaningful third places—voluntarily chosen social settings distinct from home and work, where people gather primarily for informal interaction. The modern world has social media apps, but socializing on these apps lacks the richness and connection that video interaction provides. In-person third places include coffee shops, gyms, and meetup groups, but often lack the selection effects of social media. By selection effects, I mean the ability of social media to enable finding people with incredibly similar interests or compatible personalities.

To successfully build a third place on Focusmate, you will have to spend multiple hours a week working on a regular schedule for a few months. Building a social life anywhere takes time; the same is true on Focusmate. This guide has the potential to transform your social life, esp...
Methods of defense against AGI manipulation
by MarkelKori — 2025-04-28T21:03:13.797Z

Introduction

With the advent of AGI systems (e.g. Agent-4 from the AI2027 scenario), the risk of human manipulation is becoming one of the major threats posed by AI.
In this paper, I propose options that can be used to protect operators from psychological attacks by AGI or simply very advanced AI.
These options are designed to prevent situations in which AI through persuasion, manipulation, or long-term influence could gain unwanted control over the real world.

Basic Principles

1. Mandatory Psychological Training for Operators

All individuals who interact with AGI must undergo mandatory training:

- Stress Resistance Training,

- Development of Critical Thinking,

- Emotional Resilience and Regulation (resistance to flattering appeals and emotional attacks),

- Personal Information Protection Skills (as far as I'm concerned, it's better not to disclose it to the AI at all).

The goal is to create a basic immunity to manipulation at the level of conscious and subconscious reactions.

2. Limit the duration of sessions

- One session of communication with AGI should not exceed 30 minutes.

- A maximum of 2 hours of work is allowed per day, broken down into sessions.

This minimizes fatigue and increases operator resilience.

3. Filtering emotional appeals

A communication system must necessarily have a filter built into it that:

- removes emotional appeals,

- blocks psychological attacks (pressure through fear, guilt, sense of urgency).

The goal is to prevent the AI from using subconscious mechanisms of influence through the tone of speech.

4. Working in pairs with independent verification

- Each operator works in pairs with another operator (more simultaneous operators are possible) on the same question.

- Their findings are recorded separately and analyzed for discrepancies.

- If there are serious discrepancies, a separate check is initiated.

This breaks down attempts at individual manipulation and isolation of opinions.

5. Mandatory condition monitoring of operators

Before and after each session is conducted:

- psychological testing (stress, fatigue, emotional stability),

- analysis of micro-mimicry, vegetative reactions with the help of mini AI.

This allows to detect possible imperceptible changes indicating the influence of the AI.

6. Collegial discussion of all AGI proposals

- No decisions, advice or projects proposed by the AI are ...