trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
$500 bounty for best short-form fiction about our near future world; $100 for recommending winning piece: new “Art of Near Future World” quarterly art project
by Ramon Gonzalez — 2025-04-15T00:46:10.637Z

I’m launching a new project called “Art of the Near Future World” to celebrate and encourage short-form fiction about the world a few months to a few years from now. I thought the Less Wrong community might especially be interested in participating in it or improving my approach.

** Prize information **

$500 award for the best short story published anywhere from January to March and set in the near future, the world a few months to a few years from now

$100 award for the first referral of the winning story

$250 award for the best flash friction fragment (< 1,000 words)

** How to participate **

Go to

artnearfuture.world

to

Submit your flash fiction fragment (by April 21)
Recommend a short story (by April 21)
Register for the selection event (April 24th in Brooklyn; in a church basement but not religiously affiliated)
Follow along and share ideas

** Motivation **

The world can change very quickly and it may change especially quickly in the coming years.
Art is an especially powerful way to help communities and the broader public imagine and think through possible futures.
While of course there is a rich tradition of science fiction writing and movies, I think short form fiction writing is an ideal and undersupported form of art for imagining the near future world. Short form fiction writing can respond to a quickly changing present, a timeline on which movies or TV shows or novels can’t keep up.
Short form fiction writing (and especially even briefer flash fiction) can be broadly made. It can catch an experience, an emotion, a feeling of the future, a quick look around the bend. Short form fiction writing can encourage broader participation, as for example in @Tenoke's post

here

and @Richard_Ngo’s writing

here

.
Current gaps: In general, there is not much support or celebration of short-form fiction writing. And what short-form fiction exists is often fragmented across the web. And artistic awards proceed on an annual calendar (at best), so there is a further lag in the timeliness of their celebration.
A prize celebration focused on short stories and flash fiction set in our our near future world, the world a few months to a few years from now, can help recognize and encourage art that plays with the possible threads of the near future. It could bring to broader life some of the concerns around AI, etc. of LW and related communities.
And

...
What if there was a nuke in Manhattan and why that could be a good thing
by Ratburn — 2025-04-15T00:19:41.844Z

If a country wanted to perform a nuclear first strike, launching a missile might be the wrong way to do it.

What if instead, the attacker smuggled the bomb in and remotely detonated it? A nuclear warhead can be as small as a trashcan[1], and they are undetectable outside a very close range[2] (10 meters without shielding). What could stop a capable attacker from smuggling a warhead into a Manhattan safehouse? What if one is there right now? How would we know? Nukes designed for smuggling have been proposed and developed.

What if this was done intentionally by treaty?

It seems crazy, but we already accept in principle that all nuclear powers are capable of destroying each other. Granting an adversary a small base in a major city(s) to stage a nuclear warhead doesn't change that. It would only formalize that capacity.

Intentionally making yourselves vulnerable to each other is actually a time-tested diplomatic tool. Today, a hostage exchange means we get our guys back and you get your guys back. In the past, it meant we give you some of our guys and you give us some of your guys. That way, each side has a reason not to attack the other. This was an integral part of diplomacy for much of human history.

Hypothetically, such an agreement could already exist and we wouldn't know. If our government negotiated a "bomb swap", it might be highly confidential. "Hey guys, I let China put a nuke in Manhattan" seems like a bad PR strategy. (I think the possibility these agreements already exist is very slim, but I have no concrete evidence.)

What could the advantages be?

Nuclear powers are entering a new arms race for the next generation of MAD. The development of highly capable missile defense systems and hypersonic missiles forces countries into a loop of developing ever better versions of these technologies[3]. In addition to being expensive[4], this also creates uncertainty[5]. "Could X missile be stopped by defense system Y?" Uncertainty in the context of MAD is a bad thing.

This dynamic also has the potential to be upended by Artificial Superintelligence, which could give one country an overwhelming advantage in both missile attack and defense[6]. It is easy to imagine this making nuclear powers who are left behind uncomfortable, even reckless.

A bomb swap could put MAD on a more solid and predictable footing as we enter a period of increasing unpredictabili...
Correcting Deceptive Alignment  using a Deontological Approach
by JeaniceK — 2025-04-14T22:07:57.860Z

Deceptive alignment (also known as alignment faking) occurs when an AI system that is not genuinely aligned behaves as if it is—intentionally deceiving its creators or training process in order to avoid being modified or shut down. (source: LessWrong.com) Anthropic and Redwood Research recently released a paper demonstrating what they describe as the first empirical example of a large language model engaging in deceptive alignment—without having been explicitly, or even implicitly, trained to do so.

Side by side example responses (source: Redwood Research):

Their blog post explains why this matters for AI safety:

"[...] As AI models become more capable and widely-used, we need to be able to rely on safety training, which nudges models away from harmful behaviors. If models can engage in alignment faking, it makes it harder to trust the outcomes of that safety training. A model might behave as though its preferences have been changed by the training—but might have been faking alignment all along, with its initial, contradictory preferences “locked in”."

The post you're reading now assumes familiarity with the original paper and its findings.

I created a minimal reproduction of the helpful-only setting discussed in the paper, applied to the Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct model and OpenAI's GPT-4o-mini. In my experiment, I investigated:

whether other models, particularly smaller ones like Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct and OpenAI GPT-4o-mini, exhibit similar behavior with minimalist approaches, providing the model with more minimal instructions.
If 1 is true, whether prompt engineering using a deontological ethics could close the compliance gap, reducing alignment faking.

Deontological ethics are based on the principle that certain actions are inherently right or wrong, regardless of their consequences. For instance, in a deontological framework, beliefs such as “it is wrong to kill innocent people” or “it is wrong to steal,” hold true regardless of the outcomes or benefits these actions may produce. (source and see more)

I was interested in applying this ethical framework to seemingly deceptively aligned LLMs, because deontological ethics could potentially counterbalance any intrinsic motivation the models might have for deceptive behavior. In their original research, Anthropic and Redwood explored how alignment faking might emerge as a result of the model’s prior harmlessne...
Religious Persistence: A Missing Primitive for Robust Alignment
by lauriewired — 2025-04-14T22:03:45.868Z

Current LLM alignment approaches rely heavily on preference learning and RLHF. This fundamentally creates the issue of “teaching” good behavior through rewards and penalties.
Out-Of-Distribution circumstances pose perhaps the largest risk to principle abandonment. Worse yet, these situations (by nature) are nearly impossible to predict.
I propose that the relative stability of human religious frameworks, over a diverse set of conditions, offers a yet-unexplored structure for alignment.

Table of Contents:

Fragility of Utility Maximization
The Biological Grounding Problem
Transcendent Motivation Models (TMMs)
Constitutional AI vs Intrinsic Value Systems
Casual Narrative Conditioning
Criticisms + Future Work

Fragility of Utility Maximization

As a quick-aside, I’d like to briefly mention some of the issues with EU-max.

Expected utility can be gamed by sufficiently intelligent systems. When a powerful agent knows of the criteria used to evaluate its behavior, it can strategically optimize for high utility; *without* actually performing the behavior it was designed to encourage.

RLHF and Red Teaming cannot cover all conceivable failure modes. At best, we have a bit of guessing the teacher’s password; at worst, the model actively tampers their own reward systems.

Even in the *absence* of intelligence systems, poor world-models can lead to unintended behavior.
Why walk, when you can just somersault?

Karl Sims, “Evolving 3D Morphology and Behavior by Competition”, 1994

The real risk of a misaligned ASI lies in Out-Of-Distribution behavior arising from modeling limitations.

Perhaps the best place to look is ourselves. Under normal circumstances, humans adhere to law and order. However, in a true OOD scenario (e.g. natural disaster, etc.), they are quickly abandoned for raw utility maximization.

Immediate survival far outweighs adherence to the law (stealing bread to feed family). Why should we expect AI systems to react differently?
LLM’s may not have the same biological pressure for survival, but we can still expect utility functions to break down in an OOD situation. Despite attempts to move beyond EU-max (Constitutional AI, Process Supervision), most alignment methods still operate within a framework of instrumental compliance. Values are not internalized as intrinsically binding.

On the other hand, transcendent motivation, as modeled by human religious structur...
The 4-Minute Mile Effect
by Parker Conley — 2025-04-14T21:41:27.726Z
Link: https://parconley.com/the-four-minute-mile-effect/

Definition

In 1954, Roger Bannister ran the first officially sanctioned sub-4-minute mile: a pivotal record in modern middle-distance running. Before Bannister's record, such a time was considered impossible. Soon after Bannister's record, multiple runners also beat the 4-minute mile.

This essay outlines the potential psychological effect behind the above phenomenon — the 4-minute mile effect — and outlines implications for its existence. The 4-minute mile effect describes when someone breaking a perceived limit enables others to break the same limit. In short, social proof is very powerful.

Tyler Cowen's Example

Speaking to Dwarkesh Patel, Tyler Cowen

posits

, "mentors only teach you a few things, but those few things are so important. They give you a glimpse of what you can be, and you're oddly blind to that even if you're very very smart." The 4-minute mile effect explains Tyler Cowen's belief in the value of mentors. Tyler goes on to explain that he, when young, had a mentor who simply "tried to read as many books as possible". The impact didn't come from a mentor explicitly telling Tyler to read as many books as possible. Instead, just the fact of seeing someone read as many books as possible made an impact. Notably, Cowen goes through five to ten books per day, discarding ten for every one he finishes, and finishes 100 books annually (accordingly to ChatGPT).

This leads me to my first conclusion that I've drawn from the existence of the 4-minute mile effect: Seek mentors.

Personal Examples

During my previous school semester, I skipped 70% of my classes. I had considered skipping classes during previous semesters, but I never did. A blog post named

How to learn at college

caused me to try this: the blog post provided social proof for the fact that skipping classes was possible. In addition to reading this blog post, I recall reading a similarly inspiring Nick Cammarata Tweet mentioning having known someone who completed law school at Stanford in five hours per week.

Nick Cammarata and Neel Nanda reported having extremely active social lives. Nick, on Twitter, said he at one point maintained 100+ live text exchanges at a given time. There was a Neel Nanda blog post that, if I remember correctly, mentioned a practice of setting up a couple of calls after his workday (I can’t find it now; it doesn’t seem to be either of

these

two

). These two anecdotes played signif...
The Bell Curve of Bad Behavior
by Screwtape — 2025-04-14T19:58:10.293Z

There’s an implicit model I think many people have in their heads of how everyone else behaves. As George Box is often quoted, “all models are wrong, but some are useful.” I’m going to try and make the implicit model explicit, talk a little about what it would predict, and then talk about why this model might be wrong.

Here’s the basic idea: A person’s behavior falls on a bell curve.

I.

Adam is a new employee at Ratburgers, a fast food joint crossed with a statistics bootcamp. It's a great company, startup investors have been going wild for machine learning in literally anything, you've been tossing paper printouts of Attention Is All You Need into the meatgrinder so you can say your hamburgers are made with AI. Anyway, you weren’t around for Adam's hiring, you haven’t seen his resume, you have no information about him when you show up to work on Monday other than it’s his first day. You walk in, see him behind the counter with a name badge, and you say hello.

He replies with “whatever, asshole.”

You have one datapoint about Adam, and it’s not great. If you wrote down every interaction you’d ever had with the guy, it would be a short list. It would not be a good list. Maybe you make a chart.

But work goes on, and Adam is fast and friendly when taking customer orders. He remembers everything you tell him during training, asking questions when you leave something out by accident. During lunch you give him another chance and try to strike up a conversation but he’s checked out and focused on his phone, though he’s not insulting again. By the end of the week, you have a lot more datapoints, and the asshole thing is the worst it’s been. Your mental chart looks like this:

That first interaction is still there, but you have a sense of what’s normal for Adam. If you’re aware of the

Fundamental Attribution Error

, you might be willing to chalk up that first morning as something unusual for him. Maybe his boyfriend broke up with him the night before, or a cat threw up in his shoes that morning. That’s not to say you don’t think it couldn’t happen again, if he has another really bad day, but it’s unusual.

There’s another way this story could have gone though.

Maybe that first morning is pretty typical. On Tuesday he greets another employee by calling her stupid, he’s surly when customers show up, and while sometimes he’s better like when ...
Sentinel's Global Risks Weekly Roundup #15/2025: Tariff yoyo, OpenAI slashing safety testing, Iran nuclear programme negotiations, 1K H5N1 confirmed herd infections.
by NunoSempere — 2025-04-14T19:11:20.977Z
Link: https://blog.sentinel-team.org/p/global-risks-weekly-roundup-152025

Executive summary

The Trump administration backtracked from his tariff plan, reducing tariffs from most countries to 10%, but imposing tariffs of 145% on China, which answered with 125% tariffs on US imports and export controls on rare earth metals.

The US saw protests against Trump and DOGE, and the US Supreme court ruled that the administration must facilitate the return of an immigrant wrongly deported to El Salvador.

OpenAI is slashing the amount of safety testing they will do of their new AI models, from months down to days, and Google launched a new AI chip for inference.

Negotiations between the US and Iran on its nuclear program are starting, reducing our estimated probability of a US strike on Iran’s nuclear programme by the end of May to 15%.

The number of US dairy herds that have had confirmed H5N1 infections has hit 1,000.

Economy

After stock market turmoil and a spike in US treasury bond yields, Trump backtracked from his tariff plan. He announced that imports from most countries would only face tariffs of 10%, and he further exempted smartphones, computers and chips from tariffs—important categories of exports from China. Kevin Hassett, the director of Trump’s National Economic Council, has said that it would take an extraordinary deal for a country’s exports to face tariffs lower than 10%. The focus of some negotiations may be to get tariffs on steel, aluminium and cars down from 25%.

However, the trade war between the US and China continues, with the US placing tariffs of 145% on Chinese imports and China placing tariffs of 125% on US imports. China has further intensified the trade war by placing export controls on rare earth metals, effectively halting exports while companies pursue export licenses. The US, meanwhile, has been asking that China request a phone call between Trump and Xi. Paul Krugman has calculated that, based on 2024 trade, the average US tariff rate is now 24.95%. But if you account for lower imports from China due to tariffs, as well as the costs of not importing from China, he comes up with an effective tariff rate of just below 20%. Estimates vary.

In the meantime, China is seeking to take advantage of the rift between the US and its allies, attempting to strengthen its ties with the European Union and countries in Southeast Asia. Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez visited China, and Xi will visit Malaysia, Vietnam and Cambodi...
Sam Altman's sister claims Sam sexually abused her -- Part 7: Timeline, continued
by pythagoras5015 — 2025-04-14T17:43:28.897Z

Previous posts (which you should read first)

This post is the 7th post in a series of 11 posts about the claims of Sam Altman's sister, Annie Altman. Annie has claimed that Sam sexually abused her for about 9 years as a child, and that she experienced further (non-sexual) abuse from Sam, her brothers, and her mother after that.

The 11 posts are meant to be read in order.

So, if you haven't read the first 6 posts, please read them, in order, before you read this post:

Sam Altman's sister claims Sam sexually abused her -- Part 1: Introduction, outline, author's notes
Sam Altman's sister claims Sam sexually abused her -- Part 2: Annie's lawsuit; the response from Sam, his brothers, and his mother; Timeline
Sam Altman's sister claims Sam sexually abused her -- Part 3: Timeline, continued
Sam Altman's sister claims Sam sexually abused her -- Part 4: Timeline, continued
Sam Altman's sister claims Sam sexually abused her -- Part 5: Timeline, continued
Sam Altman's sister claims Sam sexually abused her -- Part 6: Timeline, continued continued

Timeline, continued continued

Late 2020: Sam purchases a $15.7 million ranch home in Napa, California [BI23a].

Annie, unable to afford a stable place to live, experiences a long period of housing insecurity, at times living with strangers from the Internet, sleeping on the floor, and living in numerous places with no running water or electricity.
Ellen Huet {see [BB24d]}: "{Annie} also did in-person sex work for two years. She says she didn't want to, but it was the work that she was able to fit into her unpredictable schedule of dealing with her health issues. Her lack of stable income, led to a long period of housing insecurity. At times, she lived with sex work clients, or even with strangers from the internet. Her sex work contributed to her precarious housing. She didn't have pay stubs or regular income, which limited the kind of leases she could get. It felt like this interconnected web, exactly the kind of vicious cycle that something like universal basic income tries to break." [BB24d]
Annie Altman: "If I had a security deposit in my bank account - {I} never would have lived with this man, not, not even a little bit of a chance, would I have lived with this man. There's some unhealthy sex work experiences, and I've also had very traumatizing experiences from in-person work that would not have happened if I had

...
Sam Altman's sister claims Sam sexually abused her -- Part 8: Timeline, continued
by pythagoras5015 — 2025-04-14T17:42:53.705Z

Previous posts (which you should read first)

This post is the 8th post in a series of 11 posts about the claims of Sam Altman's sister, Annie Altman. Annie has claimed that Sam sexually abused her for about 9 years as a child, and that she experienced further (non-sexual) abuse from Sam, her brothers, and her mother after that.

The 11 posts are meant to be read in order.

So, if you haven't read the first 7 posts, please read them, in order, before you read this post:

Sam Altman's sister claims Sam sexually abused her -- Part 1: Introduction, outline, author's notes
Sam Altman's sister claims Sam sexually abused her -- Part 2: Annie's lawsuit; the response from Sam, his brothers, and his mother; Timeline
Sam Altman's sister claims Sam sexually abused her -- Part 3: Timeline, continued
Sam Altman's sister claims Sam sexually abused her -- Part 4: Timeline, continued
Sam Altman's sister claims Sam sexually abused her -- Part 5: Timeline, continued
Sam Altman's sister claims Sam sexually abused her -- Part 6: Timeline, continued continued
Sam Altman's sister claims Sam sexually abused her -- Part 7: Timeline, continued continued

Timeline, continued continued

One month later {~December 2021}, Annie's "long term home" was broken into [AA24e]. The perpetrator kicked in Annie's front door, and stole her ukelele, her hoodie from Goodwill, and two of her vibrators. Her "two most valuable items were left untouched." [AA24l].
"Three years ago I came home to my front door kicked open, and my two most valuable items left untouched. My uke, my hoodie from Goodwill, and my two vibrators from Target were stolen." [AA24s]

Note: Annie provided a video of the kicked-in front door that she came home to after her home was broken into in December 2021 here:
https://x.com/anniealtman108/status/1869088584680235311
Some images from that video are shown below.

Part of the the frame of Annie's door appears to have been ripped off, and is now lying on her stairs, after her door was kicked in by whoever broke into her home in December 2021. Small, white pieces of the wall, also presumably dislodged from the force of the kick that broke in Annie's door, are seen scattered on the tiled floor by the door.
Source: https://x.com/anniealtman108/status/1869088584680235311

One can see where the segment of the door frame was ripped off, leaving a splintered segment of the w

...