trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
A case for peer-reviewed conspiracy theories
by Sam G — 2025-03-08T20:41:56.161Z

Conspiracy theories can be thought of as revisionist history that is still political. Speculation is a normal part of analyzing politics. So, while these theories are commonplace historically speaking, the use of the term "conspiracy theory" for stigmatization and idea repression is relatively new[1]. Yet as a result of this, conspiracy theories today only surface in fringe media that are counterproductive for accurate discussion. To upgrade the discourse, I'm arguing for the integration of conspiracy theory discourse into an open peer reviewed system.

Obviously, conspiracy theory is a loaded term; stigma makes it difficult to use in serious discussion. Confusing things even more, it has changed with time. Miriam-Webster defines conspiracy theory as, "a theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by usually powerful conspirators". But many ideas called conspiracy theories today don't involve any "powerful conspirators", other than by implication that people involved are hiding something. In some places it has just become a by-word for overly-accusatory speculation. In effect, the term has been stretched to include an ever-widening array of conversations that are incongruous to a given orthodoxy [1][2]. In some interesting cases in American politics, a theory is published as permitted speculation in news media allied with one party, but labeled a conspiracy theory in the discourse of another party. These semi-licit theories tend to be accusations at the opposition party.[3] These are rare cases, and the parties have shared political adversaries, which means that much political speculation may be dubbed illicit “conspiracy theory” in both ‘sides’ of mass media. In this way, language that would otherwise be a useful tool for speaking truth to power became socially unacceptable. The coronavirus lab-leak, for example, is only one of the latest examples of a labeled “conspiracy” theory that gained credibility, eventually contributing to important debates. [4]

Stigmatization of conspiracy theories is more corrosive to democracy than the theories themselves. Condemning a wide swath of fact-based conversations insults the intelligence of everybody involved. Even worse, that discourse manipulation has eroded people's trust in even basic reporting systems, which paralyzes people from meaningful political a...
The machine has no mouth and it must scream
by zef — 2025-03-08T16:40:46.755Z
Link: https://zephyyr.substack.com/p/the-machine-has-no-mouth-and-it-must

I'm in a coworking space on the 25th floor of a building in the bay. In the corner of my eyes, the red figure of the golden gate shimmers. Good morning America. I look down and see the people on the street walking into their offices, cafés, and autonomous Waymos.

I stare onto San Francisco and feel its striking energy. I have been drawn to this place ever since my family left when I was a child, off to France. This is the gathering place for those who have the courage to uproot their lives to do something big. Do things that scale. Reach billions. Change the world. When people drop out and go somewhere with a dream, they go to SF. Because they want to make the world a better place. Or at least that's what the twitter dudes say.

As I walk through the streets, past the drugged and the homeless, in the shadows of the biggest companies of the world, I feel the inane scale and contradiction of the American dream. San Francisco – with its ads for programmer tools and AI chatbots, its crazy prices, and the looming headquarters of every tech company you could think of–gives you the constant sense of being in the most powerful, disorganized place in the world. SF is where the titans of tech hand out software like Prometheus did fire.

Will I bear a torch, or will I lay down the flames? Will we too be punished eternally for what we bring to humanity?

To change the world, you must purge the culture that once was yours with cleansing fire, for the old order of things to pass away. You move to SF, you get a little room with just a mattress and a Mac, and to handle the demands on your time and attention you sacrifice certain things. Some of your relationships, some of your passions, maybe a few values, off they go into the fire. Cleansed away.

And by letting go of the culture you knew, you have earned the freedom and time to dream up a new world. And so in SF those who take this trade make up the city of international misfits, proposing an ideal radical nonconformity, with the rats and AI maximalists and cryptobros and biohackers and all the rest collectively grinding out new tech.

But as I peer through the door to see this place where I will probably live soon enough, I feel the hairs on my skin rise... What is the cost of this kind of freedom? Do I feel something burning? I can smell it in the eyes of the tech bros I met at the Lu.ma house party. Or in the uncertain tone of yo...
How Do We Fix the Education Crisis?
by James Camacho — 2025-03-08T02:59:32.664Z

Key points:

Standardized assessments do not provide signals for the top ~10% of students.
Education studies based on these poor signals lead to poor policies. For example, suspensions allegedly do not improve achievement among peers. However, the signal of "achievement" is "achieving credit in the class", which >80% of students already do. Thus, the conclusion is drawn from a change in, at most, the bottom quintile.
This incentivizes teachers, schools, districts, and states to focus their resources where they can see any improvement, at the bottom.
To correct public discourse and school policies, we have to fix the signals.

I graduated from high school three years ago, top of my class, "perfect" standardized test scores, and so on. More importantly, I participated in mathematics competitions, so I was very aware something was wrong with how I was being taught at school. I entered Kindergarten the year Common Core was introduced, though my first experience with it was in second grade, when I was told to "add numbers with the base-ten blocks". It was pointless—we already knew what numbers represented, and how to do arithmetic, so this didn't help us add faster or gain intuition. I attribute much of the recent nosedive in American Mathematics Contest participation and scores to Common Core.

The other, glaringly large contributor, is the elimination of gifted education programs. I prefer to call them the "patronage system", because historically rich patrons would sponsor promising students as an investment in the future. Nowadays, the government invests in all children's futures, but surprisingly invests less in promising students than average. There are still meritocratic scholarships to universities (and the rare specialized high school), but these have been relegated more and more to private charities over time.

Why? The simple, but incorrect, answer is that a corrupt ideology has infected the faculties of education. For example, I attended secondary school in a very conservative county—68% voted for Trump in the 2024 election—but even they had an infected board of education. Before my time, they would bus ~100 students to the local high school to take classes together. In 2015, due to financial concerns, the board discussed moving it to the middle school. They would still have their own cohort and take classes together, just in portables at the middle school ins...
GPT-4.5 Can Play Losing Chess
by GoteNoSente — 2025-03-08T00:58:35.108Z
Link: https://chatgpt.com/share/67cb945a-83e4-8010-9857-80424e9ee9a6

After recently playing some chess against GPT-4.5 (it is pretty good, a lot stronger at the game than GPT-4 was - I would say strong club player level), I decided to try losing chess. To my surprise, it was able to play a complete game, which is something I have not seen any other model being able to do so far.
The complete game is in the link.
are "almost-p-zombies" possible?
by KvmanThinking — 2025-03-07T22:58:57.835Z

It's probably not possible to have a twin of me that does everything the same except experiences no qualia, i.e. you can predict 100% accurately, if you expose it to stimulus X and it does Y, that I would also do Y if I was exposed to stimulus X.

But can you make an "almost-p-zombie"? A copy of me, which, while not being exactly like me (besides consciousness), is almost exactly like me. So a function, which, when it takes in a stimulus X, says, not with 100% certainty, but 99.999999999%, what I will do in response. Is this possible to construct within the laws of our universe?

Additionally, is this easier or harder to construct than a fully conscious simulation of me?

Just curious.
Sufficiently Decentralized Intelligence is Indistinguishable from Synchronicity
by Sahil — 2025-03-07T21:50:32.231Z

Loosely inspired by a submission to a hackathon on Autostructures, which is about radical transformations from even mildly intelligent/agentic AI.

Previously, I've briefly alluded to 6 infrastructural pillars for an era where "things that don't scale" start to scale. This post is mainly aimed at conveying an idea of the 1st pillar ("live interfaces"). The hope from interface design is to ease transition into infrastructure for generalizing mathematical or technical insights that haven't been generalizable so far. For example, alignment concepts like "scheming" or "power-seeking" don't seem to have one formalizable abstraction. This is the business of "live theory".

Note: The links in this post lead to specific sections in previous posts in this sequence, which might look repetitive if you only hover over them rather than click-through.

You can jump to the abstract/TL;DR section directly if you wish; I wouldn't recommend it.

Subscribe here to stay updated, see footnote if you'd like to support.[1]

Believe in Thursday

Time structures are pretty centralized right now.

Do you know what a "Thurs" is? Would you collect solar days together into 7-length segments? Why is some ancient drama between Julius and Augustus deciding the day you go out and have fun wearing spooky costumes?

You could imagine throwing it all away and redoing it in a way that makes sense to you.

xkcd: 28-Hour Day.
(If the webcomic is too dense or crass: it's a creative way to replace 24 x 7 week with 28 x 6 instead.)

Or better yet, you can participate in temporal structures that reflect the needs and aesthetics of your local community. Maybe you would divide the day into powers of two and label them. Perhaps y'all like to orient to the lunar calendar, or to your menstrual cycle. You might find seasons to be only vaguely relevant if you're in the Maldives or elsewhere near the equator, and might orient via tides and monsoon or the migration patterns of whales instead of sections of the solar year.

You could do some of those by picking a preferred grain of abstraction on time "as it is" (i.e. as standardized). You could do that, just redo some grids creatively over this shared structure to kinda make it yours — notice, even the "28 hour day" above, creative though it is, fits within the 7-day pattern. That's a parametric, formulaic flexibility, which is nice. ...
Amplifying the Computational No-Coincidence Conjecture
by glauberdebona — 2025-03-07T21:29:54.933Z

Introduction

Recently, the Computational No-Coincidende Conjecture[1] was proposed, presented as an assumption that might be needed to develop methods to explain neural nets in the current approach from the Alignment Research Center. In this post, I will prove that some plausible extra assumption can be used to amplify the conjecture, showing it implies an arbitrarily stronger version of itself.

In a slightly weakened version, the conjecture reads:
(weak) Computational no-coincidence conjecture: For a reversible circuit C:{0,1}3n→{0,1}3n, let P(C) be the property that there is no input x to C that ends in n zeros, such that C(x) also ends in n zeros. There exists a polynomial-time verification algorithm V that receives as input:

A reversible circuit C:{0,1}3n→{0,1}3n
An advice string π

such that:

For all C such that P(C) is true, there exists π with length polynomial in the size of C, such that V(C,π)=1.
For 99% of random reversible circuits C for which P(C) is false, no such π exists.

The original conjecture omits "for which P(C) is false". As such π always exists when P(C) is true, the original conjecture implies this weak version.

With an additional assumption, I will show that this (weak) conjecture implies a stronger version of itself, in which the "99%" can be replaced by "1−ϵ" for an arbitrarily small ϵ>0. This entails the original conjecture can also be strengthened.

The strategy will be to define a new problem in NP using the conjecture. This problem is to decide whether a reversible circuit is in the set containing all circuits satisfying the property P plus a fraction of those falsifying it. If that fraction is smaller than 1%, we will have an stronger weak conjecture with a probability bound higher than "99%". Iterating this amplification step, that bound will be replaced by "1−ϵ", arbitrarily close to one[2]. To achieve that, we will employ an extra assumption. Then we will apply the results to the original conjecture and discuss how reasonable the extra premise is.

The Amplification Step

Let C be the set of all reversible circuits and let P⊊C denote the set of circuits C such that P(C) is tr...
[ages 16-21] Apply to PAIR & ESPR, Summer AI & Rationality Programs
by Anna Gajdova — 2025-03-07T19:49:48.537Z

TL;DR: PAIR on AI & Reasoning. ESPR on Everything, including AI and Reasoning. If you are 16-21 yo and are interested in AI, Rationality or Everything, we encourage you to apply by March 16th.

The

FABRIC team

is running two immersive summer workshops for mathematically talented students this year.

The

Program on AI and Reasoning (PAIR)

for mathematically talented students who want to explore how minds work — both human and artificial

We will study how current AI systems work, mathematical theories about human minds, and how the two relate. Alumni of previous PAIRs described the content as a blend of AI, mathematics and introspection, but also highlighted that a large part of the experience are informal conversations or small group activities. See the

curriculum details

.
For students who are 16-21 years old
July 28th - August 7th in Somerset, United Kingdom
Apply

here

!

The

European Summer Program on Rationality (ESPR)

is for students with a desire to understand themselves and the world, and interest in applied rationality.

The curriculum covers a wide range of topics, from game theory, cryptography, and mathematical logic, to AI, styles of communication, and cognitive science. The goal of the program is to help students hone rigorous, quantitative skills as they acquire a toolbox of useful concepts and practical techniques applicable in all walks of life. See the

content details

.
For students who are 16-19 years old
August 21st - August 31st in Somerset, United Kingdom
Apply

here

!

Both programs are free for accepted students and travel scholarships are available. The application deadline is Sunday March 16th.

If you know people within the age window who might enjoy these camps, please send them the link to the

FABRIC website

which has an overview of all our camps.
What if consciousness emerges from a predictive loop?
by JohnMarkNorman — 2025-03-07T19:46:46.169Z

Most theories of consciousness either struggle with falsifiability or fail to explain key phenomena like split-brain cases and blindsight. I've been developing a framework that offers a direct, testable hypothesis:

Conscious experience emerges when potential language expressions loop back through the brain's existing representational systems.

The key mechanism is surprisingly simple:

The brain naturally discovers it can predict its own language output
This prediction activates the same neuronal patterns that would be activated by hearing/seeing that expression
This "looping" creates what we experience as consciousness

This framework makes specific falsifiable predictions:

Conscious experience should always correlate with activity in language-related systems, even for seemingly non-linguistic awareness
Split-brain patients should show distinct behavioral patterns explicable through this loop mechanism
Blindsight and similar phenomena represent cases where sensory processing occurs without engaging this loop

Unlike global workspace theories or integrated information approaches, this framework suggests consciousness depends on a specific predictive looping function that emerged through pattern discovery in the brain's own activity.

Unlike predictive processing theories that focus on perception, this model suggests that consciousness arises from the brain at large predicting its own potential expressions.

I've presented the complete framework through a series of dialogues: Seven Dialogues between Haplous and Synergos [https://sites.google.com/view/7dialogs/dialog-1]

I'm particularly interested in feedback on:

If each generation must rediscover the looping mechanism (rather than inheriting it directly), does this align with what we observe in child development and language acquisition?

Could this explain why consciousness doesn’t emerge immediately in infancy but follows a specific developmental trajectory?

What other phenomena might this framework help explain?

Could it offer insights into autism, psychopathologies, or other cognitive conditions? Are there unexpected domains where a predictive loop model of consciousness might be applicable?

Are there any aspects of consciousness or cognition that you think this framework might struggle to explain?

I welcome the challenge to identify such cases and incorporate them as validating principles!

The dialogues develop these ideas step by...
Forecasting newsletter #3/2025: Long march through the institutions
by NunoSempere — 2025-03-07T18:17:42.513Z
Link: https://forecasting.substack.com/p/forecasting-newsletter-32025-long

Highlights:

Manifold

ending

(

a

) cash markets, Kalshi

slapped

by regulators in Nevada
Interactive Brokers now also offering

election markets

(

a

)
Violet Hour looks at

Where Would Good Forecasts Most Help AI Governance Efforts?

(

a

).
Childhood and Education #9: School is Hell
by Zvi — 2025-03-07T12:40:05.324Z

This complication of tales from the world of school isn’t all negative. I don’t want to overstate the problem. School is not hell for every child all the time. Learning occasionally happens. There are great teachers and classes, and so on. Some kids really enjoy it.

School is, however, hell for many of the students quite a lot of the time, and most importantly when this happens those students are usually unable to leave.

Also, there is a deliberate ongoing effort to destroy many of the best remaining schools and programs that we have, in the name of ‘equality’ and related concerns. Schools often outright refuse to allow their best and most eager students to learn. If your school is not hell for the brightest students, they want to change that.

Welcome to the stories of primary through high school these days.

Table of Contents

Primary School.

Math is Hard.

High School.

Great Teachers.

Not as Great Teachers.

The War on Education.

Sleep.

School Choice.

Microschools.

The War Against Home Schools.

Home School Methodology.

School is Hell.

Bored Out of Their Minds.

The Necessity of the Veto.

School is a Simulation of Future Hell.

Primary School

Peter Gray reports on the Tennessee Pre-K experiment, where they subjected four year olds to 5.5 hours a day of academics five times a week. Not only did the control group (kids whose parents applied and got randomly rejected, so this was effectively an unblinded RCT) catch up on academics by third grade, the control group was well ahead by sixth grade, and the treatment group had a lot more rule violations and diagnosed learning disabilities. I think Peter’s conclusion that drill in Pre-K and kindergarten is actively bad is overreach, since the dose often makes the poison, but yeah focusing on drill that early seems terrible.

NYC officials consider virtual learning to reduce class size. It seems the law requires there be no more than 20 to 25 kids in a classroom depending on grade level. So the proposed solution is to get rid of some of classrooms entirely. Transparent villains happy to inflict torture upon children.

How to organize a protest against your teacher, recommended, made me smile.

Scott Alexander asks, given Americans clearly do not know basic facts that were supposedly taught in school, but do remember things through cultural osmosis, what is even the point of school? If you learn via spaced repetiti...
The Insanity Detector and Writing
by Johannes C. Mayer — 2025-03-07T11:19:10.758Z

A clinically insane person is detectable as such. Talking to themselves (or perhaps voices only they can hear) is one prominent sign.

When I see a homeless person talking to themselves I have a strong emotional reaction that empirically makes me optimize to ignore them. I have a "talks to themselves" detector. So do others.

In principle there is nothing insane about talking to yourself. We do it all the time in our thoughts, when writing, or when recording a video. Doing these things is easy. But somehow it feels wrong to just talk to yourself out loud.

Because other people have the insanity detector I hooked up to a strongly negative reaction, it makes sense that you'd have an a program D in your head that optimizes towards not triggering I.

Insane people are unpredictable. Unpredictable implies dangerous. They might try to cut open your skull because they believe this will free your mind. They might really want the best for you but then their world model is so messed up that their actions have the opposite effect (of cause there are many different kinds of insanities).

In the ancestral environment insane people were detected and often killed I retrodict, creating a selection pressure for D.

Talking out loud to yourself about your devious plan to dethrone the alpha male is bad even when you aren't insane.

But for D to exist and for us to also constantly talk in our mind implies that talking to yourself must be really useful. Why else would we do it most of our waking hours?

But here is the thing: Talking out loud is even better. There is something about forcing your thoughts into language that reveals gaps in your understanding. It's the inability to turn a conceptual thought into language, combined with a feeling of confusion, that tells you that there is something more to figure out.

Say out loud what you want you are just about to write down. By noticing how you feel about what you said, you can notice if you can do better. And iterating in spoken language is much faster than in text.

When I tell somebody, "I am recording a video" this is a sufficient explanation for me not being insane, even though I'm talking to myself. I find it much harder to say out loud what I am just about to write. I hope this text can provide a similar explanation that I can direct people towards. Hopefully the mere possibility will make D less active.