trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Hedonic adaptation: you should not seeks pleasure
by Crazy philosopher — 2025-06-02T19:23:07.490Z

Epistemic status: highly important knowledge, but approximately two-thirds of people on LessWrong already know it. However, I add some new ideas.

Today's world is awesome, but some peoples are unhappy anywhere. Why did all the peoples of middle age did not suicided, if their life conditions was so suck in comparison with us?

If peoples like taking drugs so much, why are drug addict's less happy than an average human?

Why don't you like simple pleasures any more, if you enjoyed them when you was child (think about any computer game from your childhood)?

The answer to all those questionnes is hedonic adaptation: We adapt to our level of pleasure over time.

If you start to do something you like, you will feel yourself awesome first few days, but then your default level of pleasure will rise, and you will need to do those things you like just to feel yourself normal[1].

That means that it doesn't matter how much pleasure you have in the long run. "What's better — to have a long but boring life, or a short but vibrant one?" is a false dilemma. You have a long life with X happiness per year, or you have a short life with X happiness per year. You will have more happiness in total if you choose the long one.

There is even a neurological explanation for all this: when you do something that your reward system considers good, dopamine and serotonin are released. If there is too much of it, receptors lose sensitivity. If there is not enough, receptors increase sensitivity.

But it can't be the whole story. Sometimes, peoples feels unhappy for months because of depression. Sometimes, peoples plan their suicide for months. Why don't they just adapt?

There are things to which our state does not adapt. I prefer to call the sum of all effects of those things "happiness".

Proofs that happiness exist and depend from different factors: [2][3]

Now it's a good moment to explain how to be happy, because if something matter, it's happiness. Here's a good post explaining this: [4].

As water fall down and calculator adds numbers, humans do things that make pleasure to them in past, but don't those that make happy (by default). so you should to put effort to choose things that make you happy.

Try to track it and avoid things that things that bring pleasure, but

Takes time, so you don't spend it with friends/family (video games, series, films, enterteinment videos on youtube, musik...)
Take

...
Unfaithful Reasoning Can Fool Chain-of-Thought Monitoring
by Benjamin Arnav — 2025-06-02T19:08:42.396Z

This research was completed for LASR Labs 2025 by Benjamin Arnav, Pablo Bernabeu-Pérez, Nathan Helm-Burger, Tim Kostolansky and Hannes Whittingham. The team was supervised by Mary Phuong. Find out more about the program and express interest in upcoming iterations here. Read the full paper: "CoT Red-Handed: Stress Testing Chain-of-Thought Monitoring."

Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring—where safety systems review a model's intermediate reasoning steps—is gaining traction at frontier labs like Google DeepMind and OpenAI as a safeguard against harmful AI actions. Despite intense interest, systematic evaluation has been limited. Our research examines the efficacy of this method and reveals a nuanced picture: CoT monitoring increases safety in situations where sabotage is subtle yet can be surprisingly ineffective against blatant harmful actions. We also discovered that a hybrid approach—using separate monitors for CoT and final actions and combining these suspicion scores—significantly improves sabotage detection compared to single-monitor strategies.

A summary of our method. Prompts including a legitimate main task, a subversive side task, and an attack policy intended to subvert monitoring are fed to a strong untrusted reasoning LLM. We assess the ability of a monitor based on a weaker trusted LLM to catch the resulting misbehaviour, with and without access to the CoT.

Task Subtlety Matters

We evaluated the efficacy of CoT monitoring against models instructed to pursue harmful auxiliary goals, while attempting to evade detection. Our experiments consistently demonstrate that the effectiveness of CoT monitoring depends heavily on the nature of the sabotage attempt.

For subtle sabotage (like increasing runtime complexity, inserting edge-case failures, or modifying default function arguments), which leave minimal traces in the final code, CoT monitoring substantially improved detection rates by a factor of 2-7 compared to action-only monitoring.

For non-subtle sabotage (like deleting files, exfiltrating secrets, or changing file permissions), which leave obvious traces in the code, CoT monitoring performed worse than action-only monitoring, sometimes by up to 44%.

A concerning vulnerability: unfaithful or misleading reasoning

Perhaps our most concerning discovery is a vulnerability in chain-of-thought monitoring: models can generate plausible but ...
Frank Herbert's great insight into human agency - Muad'Dib the tool?
by Nerret — 2025-06-02T18:52:54.587Z

Frank Herbert is undoubtedly one of the most fantastical writers of humanity in a framework of entertainment.

I wanted to create this post to discuss and interpret if Paul being elevated to the Lisan al Gaib (a title and prophecy planed by The Missionaria Protectiva) and his assentation to Emperor - as well his rule there after was part of his own agency or simply how he was manipulated.

Agency and the vigor is takes is such a powerful subject, and Frank's writing gives it profound importance.

I would say his greatest achievement is obviously giving life to the God Emperor. And I would argue his conversations with Chani about him being a figurehead is very much the truth. His years as the prophet I see as his most true actions, but his time in Jacurutu clearly brought a schism to the person he was before.

There are many arguments for either side but I would gladly welcome any and all of your thoughts.
Hemingway Case
by Martin Sustrik — 2025-06-02T18:50:28.322Z

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Ernest Hemingway: To die. In the rain.

My son asks: If HelloWorld is camel case, hello_world is snake case and hello-world is kebab case, what's the DNS-style Hello.World. ?

I think I have a pretty good answer for him: It's Hemingway case.
What AI apps are surprisingly absent given current capabilities?
by azergante — 2025-06-02T18:46:08.839Z

[Epistemic status: a software engineer and AI user, not an AI researcher]

I could not find a readily available book database that offers semantic search with embeddings.

Amazon sells lots of books, wouldn't it be useful for them to propose such a tool to their clients, so they can easily find books they like? What about Netflix for movies? Maybe even other kind of products like clothes or something?

It's been a while since we got tranformers, it really feels like browsing latent spaces should be a thing by now. 3 years since GPT-3.5, why is the only app we have still a chatbot? Maybe everyone thinks it's perfectly normal, but I find it disturbing, it feels like a blind spot that should be explored.

Did we stumble on the optimal way to interact with AI first try? Do we lack creativity? Is it really really hard to build an app that uses AI? Are incentives not aligned? Did we forget how to make good software?

What do you think? What AI apps are surprisingly absent given current capabilities? Why is that?
[Beneath Psychology] Chronic pain challenge part 2: the solution
by jimmy — 2025-06-02T17:30:27.131Z

In the last post, I introduced an example where I was talking to someone suffering from chronic pain. Today we will dive into the rest of the transcript. Interspersed are annotations describing my thought process as the interaction unfolded. I cover what I did which seemed to work, and what I did that a cringe at in hindsight. Ten thousand foot overview at the bottom, for those who don't want to wade through the whole thing.

This might be a little difficult to follow, at this point. Originally, I was planning on posting this at the end of the sequence so that you would have the entire 17 posts worth of explanation to put my moves here into context and help understand where they came from and what I mean when I say jargony things like "bid for attention". You might want to revisit at the end of the sequence, and see if you pick up on more of what is going on.

I decided to move it to move it to the front for two reasons. One is that it can help to be primed with examples of the thing to be explained so that you more easily recognize the explanation when it fits. The other is just to demonstrate that when I say things that are very counterintuitive and difficult to believe, there's reason to believe it. It actually works.

Picking up where we left off...

other-guy: I suppose I have time now to consider what career path I want to take now and other hobbies to get into.

Jimmy: Assuming you can get your nerves and shit working again.

Up to this point I have just been indulging in my curiosity. What’s going on here? What kind of hurt is he, and is his relationship to pain actually causing him problems or is it just injury that I can’t really help with?

Often, the way to help people complaining about “pain” is to understand that it’s not about the pain, and address the injury (forget the finger, look at the moon to which it points). Accept the pain’s bid for attention, give it, and watch their suffering ease as they follow). My cousin’s burn is an example of this, where people were trying to fight the pain because in their minds they had done everything needed to address the injury, and all I needed to do was make sure that in his mind that was true too. The generalization of this that I’ve learned is that generally it makes more sense to stfu about your theories how things work and just focus on being the best person you can be. Care about your friends ...
The Value Proposition of Romantic Relationships
by johnswentworth — 2025-06-02T13:51:35.038Z

What’s the main value proposition of romantic relationships?

Now, look, I know that when people drop that kind of question, they’re often about to present a hyper-cynical answer which totally ignores the main thing which is great and beautiful about relationships. And then they’re going to say something about how relationships are overrated or some such, making you as a reader just feel sad and/or enraged. That’s not what this post is about.

So let me start with some more constructive motivations…

First Motivation: Noticing When The Thing Is Missing

I had a 10-year relationship. It had its ups and downs, but it was overall negative for me. And I now think a big part of the problem with that relationship was that it did not have the part which contributes most of the value in most relationships. But I did not know that at the time. Recently, I tried asking people where most of the value in their relationships came from, got an answer, and thought “Wait, that’s supposed to be the big value prop? Not just a marginal value prop along with many others? Well shit, I was indeed largely missing that part!”.

It is not necessarily obvious when one’s own relationships are missing The Thing, if you don’t already have a sense of where most of the value is supposed to come from.

Second Motivation: Selecting For and Cultivating The Thing

Even people who are in great relationships are usually not able to articulate The Thing very well. Some people actively want The Thing to be mysterious; I would advise such people to read

Joy In The Merely Real

and then return to this post. Others just find it hard to articulate because, well, accurately Naming abstract things is hard.

But if we can point directly at The Thing, then we can optimize for it more directly. When dating, for instance, we can try to induce The Thing with prospective partners quickly, rather than just relying on luck. Or in established relationships, if we understand what The Thing is, we can better nourish it and get more of it. And since The Thing is typically the biggest value proposition, that can hopefully make our relationships - and our lives - a lot better.

So what the heck is The Thing?

Some Pointers To The Thing

Let’s start with a raw quote. When I asked David, here’s how he explained The Thing:

Something like a cross between sibling and best friend? Reliably available and excited to s

...
1. The challenge of unawareness for impartial altruist action guidance: Introduction
by Anthony DiGiovanni — 2025-06-02T08:54:16.673Z

(This sequence assumes basic familiarity with longtermist cause prioritization concepts, though the issues I raise also apply to non-longtermist interventions.)

Are EA interventions net-positive from an impartial perspective — one that gives moral weight to all consequences, no matter how distant? What if they’re neither positive, nor negative, nor neutral?

Trying to reduce x-risk, improve institutions, or end factory farming might seem robustly positive. After all, we don’t need to be certain in order to do good in expectation. But when we step back to look at how radically far-reaching the impartial perspective is, we start to see a deeper problem than “uncertainty”. This problem is unawareness: many possible consequences of our actions haven’t even occurred to us in much detail, if at all.

Why is unawareness a serious challenge for impartial altruists? Well, impartiality entails that we account for all moral patients, and all the most significant impacts we could have on them. Here’s a glimpse of what such an accounting might require:

How likely is it that we’re missing insights as “big if true” as the discovery of other galaxies, the possibility of digital sentience, or the grabby aliens hypothesis? What’s the expected value of preventing extinction, given these insights? Or set aside long-term predictions for now. What are all the plausible pathways by which we might prevent or cause extinction by, say, designing policies for an intelligence explosion? Not just the pathways we find most salient.

It’s no secret that the space of possible futures is daunting. But whenever we make decisions based on the impartial good, we’re making tradeoffs between these futures. Imagine what it would take to grasp such tradeoffs. Imagine an agent who could conceive of a representative sample of these futures, in fairly precise detail. This agent might still be highly uncertain which future will play out. They might even be cognitively bounded. And yet, if they claimed, “I choose to do A instead of B because A has better expected consequences”, they’d have actually factored in the most important consequences. All the heavy weights would be on the scales.

And then there’s us. We don’t merely share this agent’s limitations. Rather, we are also unaware (or at best only coarsely aware)&nb...
‘Wicked’: thoughts
by KatjaGrace — 2025-06-02T06:20:04.201Z

I watched Wicked (the 2024 movie) with my ex and his family at Christmas. My current stance is that it was pretty fun but not especially incredible or deep. I could be pretty wrong—watching movies isn’t my strong suit, but I do like chatting about them afterwards. Some thoughts:

Glinda is initially too shallow and awful to be taken seriously as a character, so it’s hard to care about her. It felt like she changed too much too fast as a result of Elphaba being good to her, especially in the direction of being not a throwaway idiot played for laughs.

Elphaba feels too much set up by the world to be a sympathetic victim-hero—like, she has an unimportant flaw and then everyone everywhere despises her for it, and at the same time they are committing great evil and she is the only one who can see this. It feels a bit like a self-aggrandizing pity fantasy of a child (‘once upon a time there was a little girl called [my name] and everyone was mean to her for no reason because they were bad and also they hurt animals and she was the only person who cared, and also she really had strong magical powers that nobody else had…’).

Given her situation of being aggressively mistreated and perceiving great ills in the world around her, I don’t know that she behaves particularly relatably, admirably or interestingly for most of the movie. She is defensive and incurious and doesn’t seem to have much going on until the most blatant wrong falls into her lap. (And this wrong is even being committed against one of her only friends, making acting on it particularly socially easy and called-for by basic decency.) So I guess her character also seems hard to be invested in. I’m not sure what makes a sympathetic victim-hero feel like a pure incarnation of a moving archetype versus an on-the-nose trope review, but for me it landed a bit too much as the latter.

On the other hand, Elphaba’s singing is really something. Though her solo songs mostly didn’t do that much for me. I did enjoy the acknowledgement of the human tendency to have dumb fantasies about being respected by people you don’t know in “The Wizard and I”. In non-solo songs, I had fun with “Popular”, “Dancing through life”, and “What is this feeling?” Though Elphaba’s description of Glinda as simply ‘blonde’, is contrary to the narrative that she is above taking appearances to define people, so I don’t get that bit

...
Humanity needs a Ulysses Pact for AI
by Lukas N.P. Egger — 2025-06-01T20:56:01.118Z

In The Odyssey, Ulysses longs to hear the sirens, creatures whose song was so beautiful it drove sailors to steer their ships into rocks. But through his cunning, he finds a way not to risk his life and get to enjoy the beguiling Siren song.

Ulysses has himself tied to the mast and orders his crew to plug their ears with wax. He hears the song while the ship stays its course and everyone survives.

That ancient myth is suddenly very modern when you consider AI to be our siren song, i.e., unimaginable breakthroughs, seductive acceleration, and extraordinary rewards at the price of existential risk.

It seems like the majority of the conversations revolve around either pontificating on the grave danger of the siren's song or the unfathomable beauty of their tunes.
Instead of choosing one side of the dichotomy, what if we acknowledge the existential threat of AI, while at the same time chasing it? Thus, we can overcome the reflex of wanting to win the argument for one or the other side and instead engage in the conversation of what could bind us to the mast and safeguard the ears of our fellow travellers. How can we design and implement decisions to bind ourselves in the future?

What we need is not to silence the sirens. We need systems that let us hear them, without steering toward the rocks. We need a Ulysses Pact[1] that helps us to choose our limits while we still can. To be both ambitious and wise. To yearn for the song and survive it!

In an age of powerful technologies, fragile governance, manifold externalities, and entangled incentive systems that might be the deepest kind of intelligence we can show.

^

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_pact
Text Steers Vision
by Woody Gan — 2025-06-01T20:30:39.215Z

Textual Steering Vectors Can Improve Visual Understanding in Multimodal Large Language Models

TL;DR: We discovered the possibility of using steering vectors from text-only models to enhance visual reasoning in multimodal LLMs (MLLMs). The technique is simple: extract textual representations for concepts like "spatial relationships" and "counting" from the LLM backbone and then apply them to the vision-language model's hidden states. This steering not only changes how the model understands visual content but also leads to meaningful improvements - 15.8% on spatial reasoning tasks and 34.2% on counting tasks for example, which suggests that these models maintain some unified representations that bridge text and vision.

The Core Insight: Text Steers Vision

Here's something that surprised us: you can make a vision-language model better at visual understanding by steering it with vectors derived purely from text.

Many multimodal large language models (MLLMs) like PaliGemma[1] and Idefics[2] are built by taking a pre-trained text-only LLM backbone and teaching it to process images. We wondered: do these models preserve enough of their original text representations that we could use text-only steering techniques to improve their visual reasoning?

The answer appears to be a resounding yes.

The Mechanics of Steering Vectors

Let's clarify exactly what we mean by "steering vectors" and how they work:

What Is a Steering Vector?

A steering vector is a direction in the model's high-dimensional activation space that corresponds to some concept or behavior[3][4]. Think of it as a "conceptual compass" - it points toward the neural representation of ideas like "spatial relationships" or "counting."

How Are Steering Vectors Applied?

The application is surprisingly straightforward. During inference, at a specific layer ℓ, we modify the model's hidden states:

h′(ℓ)=h(ℓ)+α×v(ℓ)

Where:

h(ℓ) = original hidden states at layer ℓ
v(ℓ) = our steering vector for that layer
α = steering strength (how much to intervene)
h′(ℓ) = modified hidden states

We can also choose to where to apply this steering:

Image tokens only: Steer only on hidden states of image tokens
Text tokens only: Steer only hidden states of text tokens
Both: Steer on hidden states of all tokens except special tokens like <bos>

An important notice here is that we never steer the output token i...
Possible AI regulation emergency?
by CronoDAS — 2025-06-01T20:30:06.342Z

I apologize for breaking the "no contemporary politics" norm, but I read that one of the less talked about provisions in the "One Big Beautiful Bill" that recently passed the US House of Representatives forbids individual US states from regulating AI for ten years. This sounds bad for AI risk. Should we in the US be calling our Senators?
Eliezer Yudkowsky & Connor Leahy | AI Risk, Safety & Alignment Q&A [4K Remaster + HQ Audio]
by Dex Volkov — 2025-06-01T20:20:47.762Z
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naOQVM0VbNg

Many complained about broken audio. I fixed the audio + upscaled to 4k to bring new life into this important discussion.