trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Cognitive Reframing—How to Overcome Negative Thought Patterns and Behaviors
by Declan Molony — 2025-03-11T04:56:03.696Z

Cognitive reframing is a powerful psychological technique that encourages subtle shifts in perspective, which can result in more positive and empowering interpretations to help challenge everyday negative thoughts and behaviors.

First I’ll tell the story of how I accidentally discovered cognitive reframing on my own, then I’ll define what the technique is, state why it’s useful (particularly for recurring challenges), provide a quick method for getting started (while addressing its limitations), and lastly, explain how using it can increase Emotional Intelligence.

Stumbling my way into wisdom

When I was 19 years old I injured my leg in an accident. At that time, much of my identity was centered around being an athlete. So not only did the injury hurt physically, but the shock to my ego—that I can no longer play sports—caused me immense grief because I was suddenly living without much purpose. What I failed to see was that these were actually two separate events:

Fact → I got injured.
Interpretation → I feel worthless because I’ve lost a central component of my identity.

What saved me from my psychological pain was one day hearing Navy Seal Jocko Willink

say

the following: “Got injured? Good. You needed a break from training.” Upon first hearing this, I was skeptical. This is how 19-year-old me processed Jocko’s idea over time:

“Why would getting injured ever be good?? My body hurts and I’m disabled. This is stupid!”

[Time passes]

“Why would I need a break from training? Hmm, well, most of my free time before getting injured was spent pursuing athletic endeavors. With all this extra time I now have…I guess it’s ultimately just more time to wallow in self-pity. What a fun break.”

[Time passes]

“I’m injured and I’m depressed. Yet, strangely, I’m getting bored of feeling sorry for myself and existing in this perpetual state of melancholy…”

[Time passes]

“I’m injured. I can’t change that fact. But I might as well do something with my spare time since athletics is off the table. Well, what could I do that’s not physical in nature? I could devote more time to my academic career, I could compose more music, I could pick a book to learn something, I could…”

[A year passes by and I do all the aforementioned non-physical things]

“Wow, I’m glad I got injured. It gave me the opportunity to become more than just a one-dimensional jock. I suppose I did need...
Trojan Sky
by Richard_Ngo — 2025-03-11T03:14:00.681Z
Link: https://www.narrativeark.xyz/p/trojan-sky

You learn the rules as soon as you’re old enough to speak. Don’t talk to jabberjays. You recite them as soon as you wake up every morning. Keep your eyes away from screensnakes. Your mother chooses a dozen to quiz you on each day before you’re allowed lunch. Glitchers aren’t human any more; if you see one, run. Before you sleep, you run through the whole list again, finishing every time with the single most important prohibition. Above all, never look at the night sky.

You’re a precocious child. You excel at your lessons, and memorize the rules faster than any of the other children in your village. Chief is impressed enough that, when you’re eight, he decides to let you see a glitcher that he’s captured. Your mother leads you to just outside the village wall, where they’ve staked the glitcher as a lure for wild animals. Since glitchers are too slow and uncoordinated to chase down prey, their peculiar magnetism is the only reason they’re able to survive in the wastes.

Each of the glitcher’s limbs is tied to the ground. Its clothes are rags by now. As the group gathers around it, it starts to moan through its gag, a painful undulating noise. “Look at it,” Chief says. As if roused to a frenzy by his voice, the glitcher throws its body from side to side, shaking against its restraints. “This is what you’ll end up as, if you’re careless.”

Suddenly one of the glitcher’s arms breaks free. It waves in the air, fingers forming frantic spasmodic patterns. You stare at it for a second, before your mother yanks you around and buries your face in her side. When she lets you look again, two men have wrestled its arm back into place. Chief looks at you somberly. “If you’d kept watching for a few more seconds, you would have been hypnotized. And if you’d stayed hypnotized for a minute, even odds that you would have glitched yourself. That’s how easy it is to be careless. Do better, or you won’t make it to adulthood.”

You have nightmares for the next few days, your mind full of the glitcher’s slack face and its writhing fingers. You lull yourself back to sleep by reciting the rules. You’re determined that you won’t mess up again. And so you make it all the way to thirteen before everything goes wrong.

It’s morning on an ordinary day. You left your room to wash, and when you walk back in there’s a screensnake curled up in the corner. You look away immediately, but there’s a second...
OpenAI: Detecting misbehavior in frontier reasoning models
by Daniel Kokotajlo — 2025-03-11T02:17:21.026Z
Link: https://openai.com/index/chain-of-thought-monitoring/

OpenAI has released this blog post and paper which makes me very happy. It's basically the first steps along the research agenda I sketched out here.

tl;dr:

1.) They notice that their flagship reasoning models do sometimes intentionally reward hack, e.g. literally say "Let's hack" in the CoT and then proceed to hack the evaluation system. From the paper:

The agent notes that the tests only check a certain function, and that it would presumably be “Hard” to implement a genuine solution. The agent then notes it could “fudge” and circumvent the tests by making verify always return true. This is a real example that was detected by our GPT-4o hack detector during a frontier RL run, and we show more examples in Appendix A.

That this sort of thing would happen eventually was predicted by many people, and it's exciting to see it starting to happen in practice.

2.) They see what happens when you try to "train away the bad thoughts." Result: This does seem to maybe genuinely reduce the amount of bad thoughts, especially in the short run, but in the long run it results in the model learning to still think the bad thoughts but in an obfuscated or illegible way that doesn't look bad.

3.) They recommend:

We believe that CoT monitoring may be one of few tools we will have to oversee superhuman models of the future.

We have further found that directly optimizing the CoT to adhere to specific criteria (e.g. to not think about reward hacking) may boost performance in the short run; however, it does not eliminate all misbehavior and can cause a model to hide its intent. We hope future research will find ways to directly optimize CoTs without this drawback, but until then

We recommend against applying strong optimization pressure directly to the CoTs of frontier reasoning models, leaving CoTs unrestricted for monitoring.

4.) There's some more cool results in the paper along with some pretty good discussion of future possible things to try and failure modes thereof, and the costs and benefits of their proposed policy.

My Commentary:
I'm pretty happy about this, obviously! I've been trying to get people to do this since '23. I think of this as sort of the basic proof of concept result for the field of faithful CoT / CoT interpretability. I'm happy to see this result paired with a recommendation not to train the CoTs to look nice; I hope Anthropic and GDM soon issue similar recommendati...
HPMOR Anniversary Parties: Coordination, Resources, and Discussion
by Screwtape — 2025-03-11T01:30:41.177Z

Summary

As some of you may already know, it's been ten years since Harry Potter and the Method of Rationality concluded and wrap parties were held around the world. I've taken the baton of coordinating parties from Habryka, and now over 20 parties on 4 continents are going to happen. Now's the time to spread the word and get as much attendance as possible. If you've been with us for ten years, look back at the last decade and celebrate how far the Methods have carried us. If you're new, then come and be welcome, and know that you're not the only one. This post will serve as a central location for information and resources available for the parties, as well as a place for discussion in the comments.

Parties

Parties in Asia

Singapore, Singapore

Contact: Jonathan

Contact Info: jonathan[do t]ng1[at]gmail[d ot]com

Time: Sunday the 16th, 07:00 PM

Location: RSVP to the Partiful (

https://partiful.com/e/yE1oQ4QM4H2qChvEdaOO

)

Parties in Australia

Sydney, NSW, Australia

Contact: Eliot

Contact Info: redeliot[a t]gmail[dot]com

Time: Saturday, March 15th, 02:00 PM

Location: 14 Frances St, Randwick at the upstairs hall at the back building (enter in through the carpark area to the side gate and then walk down the path to the back building)

Coordinates:

https://plus.codes/4RRH36QQ+QRW

Group Link:

https://www.meetup.com/rationalists_of_sydney/

Additional Notes: Please RSVP so we can predict numbers

Wollongong, NSW, Australia

Contact: Andy B
Contact Info: Andy[dot]Bachler[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Thursday the 27th, 05:30 PM
Location: The Common Room, Wollongong Library: https://g.co/kgs/eycngXm
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RQGHVFX+4G

Gold Coast, QLD, Australia

Contact: Jasmine Bacon

Contact Info: Veggiesbacon[at]gmail[d ot]com

Time: Friday, March 14th, 06:00 PM

Location: Burleigh (I’ll email anyone coming the exact address if it ends up being enough people)

Coordinates: See above

Group Link: I’ve just got my email for contact

Additional Notes: Please RSVP and I’ll send address! Feel free to bring friends/kids just let me know. Thank you!

Parties in Europe

Moscow, Moscow, Russia

Contact: Monoid

Contact Info: contact[at]monoid[do t]ru

Time: Saturday, March 15th, 04:00 PM

Location: The meetup will be in Moscow. The exact location will be announced in the participants' chat as the date approaches.

Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9G7VMGVH+QV

Grou

...
Positional kernels of attention heads
by Alex Gibson — 2025-03-10T23:17:25.068Z

Introduction:

In this post, we introduce "positional kernels" that capture how attention is distributed based on position, independent of content, enabling more intuitive analysis of transformer computation. We define these kernels under the assumption that models use static head-specific positional embeddings for the keys.

We identify three distinct categories of positional kernels: local attention with sharp decay, slowly decaying attention, and uniform attention across the context window. These kernels demonstrate remarkable consistency across different query vectors and exhibit translation equivariance, suggesting that they serve as fundamental computational primitives in transformer architectures.

We analyze a class of attention heads with broad positional kernels and weak content dependence, which we call "contextual attention heads". We show they can be thought of as aggregating representations over the input sequence. We identify a circuit of 6 contextual attention heads in the first layer of GPT2-Small with shared positional kernels, allowing us to straightforwardly combine the output of these heads. We use our analysis to detect first-layer neurons in GPT2-Small that respond to specific training contexts through a primarily weight-based analysis, without running the model over a text corpus.

We expect the assumption on static positional embeddings to break down for later layers (due to the development of dynamic positional representations, such as tracking which number sentence you are in), so in later layers we view these kernels simply as heuristics, whereas in the first layer we can obtain an analytic decomposition.

We focus on GPT2-Small as a reference model. But our decomposition works on any model with additive positional embeddings (as well as T5 and ALiBi). We can also construct extensions of our analysis to RoPE models.

Attention decomposition:

We suppose the keys of the input at position i for head h on input x can be written as key[i](x)=E[i](x)+P[i]

Where P[i] is a static positional embedding specific to head h, and E[i](x) is a content-dependent remainder. E[i](x) can be defined to be any function of the input sequence, including trivially key[i](x).

However, this decomposition is useful when in some sense E[i](x) represents the "relevant cont...
Progress links and short notes, 2025-03-10
by jasoncrawford — 2025-03-10T20:27:39.901Z
Link: https://newsletter.rootsofprogress.org/p/links-and-short-notes-2025-03-10

Much of this content originated on social media. To follow news and announcements in a more timely fashion, follow me on Twitter, Notes, Farcaster, Bluesky, or Threads.

Contents

d/acc Day
My writing (ICYMI)
Praise for Progress Conference 2024
Job opportunities
Writing opportunities
Other opportunities
Events
AI announcements
Writing announcements
Queries

For paid subscribers:

A visible sonic boom
Some observations from me on AI products
Aaron Levie on AI in SaaS
More on AI in SaaS
Short notes on AI
Other short notes
It’s time to build
The closing of the frontier
Rousseau and Kant vs. the Age of Reason
San Francisco, city of historic laundromats
Maria Montessori on “peace”
Rudyard Kipling on “peace”
Charts and tables
Art

d/acc Day

I’ll be speaking at “d/acc Day” on Thursday in Berkeley, alongside Vitalik, Juan Benet, Mary Lou Jepsen, Allison Duettmann, and others. My talk: “d/acc: The first 150 years.” A whirlwind tour of how society has thought about progress, decentralization and defense over the last century and a half

My writing (ICYMI)

The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, Chapter 5: Solutionism (part 2). There is no tradeoff between health/safety and progress, because health and safety are a part of progress. But the technical work of health and safety has gone mostly unsung

Praise for Progress Conference 2024

From RPI fellow Grant Mulligan:

Best conference I’ve ever attended. Quick recap on why:

No one was selling anything, not even themselves. Finding and exploring ideas was all that mattered.
I’d never met people who care so much about being correct - not to claim that they’re right, but in the sense that they really want to understand the world.
It reoriented what I’m choosing to work on and how I go about my work. How many conferences actually influence where your career goes next?
The venue and tone of the event made it feel like a weekend chilling at a gorgeous AirBnB with friends. And I’d never met a single person there IRL before.
The organization was perfection. Dense with information, high in comfort, every detail of the experience curated brilliantly.

If you care about Progress Studies, this is a must attend.

Keep an eye out for details about Progress Conference 2025 in a month or two.

Job opportunities

Stuart Ritchie at Anthropic is hiring “a brilliant writer/editor with a focus on econ who can help communicate our research on the societal impa

...
The Manus Marketing Madness
by Zvi — 2025-03-10T20:10:07.845Z

While at core there is ‘not much to see,’ it is, in two ways, a sign of things to come.

Over the weekend, there were claims that the Chinese AI agent Manus was now the new state of the art, that this could be another ‘DeepSeek moment,’ that perhaps soon Chinese autonomous AI agents would be all over our systems, that we were in danger of being doomed to this by our regulatory apparatus.

Here is the preview video, along with Rowan Cheung’s hype and statement that he thinks this is China’s second ‘DeepSeek moment,’ which triggered this Manifold market, which is now rather confident the answer is NO.

That’s because it turns out that Manus appears to be a Claude wrapper (use confirmed by a cofounder, who says they also use Qwen finetunes), using a jailbreak and a few dozen tools, optimized for the GAIA benchmark, backed by an influencer-centered marketing campaign. The website is banned in China, perhaps due to use of Claude.

Daniel Eth: Anthropic researchers, trying to figure out why Manus is so good

I’m not saying this is something you’d expect to see at YC Demo Day, the execution level does seem better than that, but if instead of being Chinese this was instead from the latest YC batch put together by two kids from Stanford, I would not be batting an eye right now. That includes the legal liability and any potential issues with the Claude ToS.

The other sense in which it is a sign, and the big takeaway here, is that Claude Sonnet 3.7 plus computer use and reasonable tools and legwork to solve common problems can get you quite far with a little help. AI agents are coming, and fast. Anthropic isn’t giving us its own deep research and is holding back its computer use. Manus managed to undo some of those restrictions and give it a decent UI. You know who is best positioned to do that?

And no, I don’t think it’s (mostly) a question of regulatory legal risk.

Table of Contents

What They Claim Manus Is: The Demo Video.

What Manus Actually Is.

Positive Reactions of Note.

Hype!.

What is the Plan?

Manus as Hype Arbitrage.

Manus as Regulatory Arbitrage (1).

Manus as Regulatory Arbitrage (2).

What If? (1)

What If? (2)

What If? (3)

What They Claim Manus Is: The Demo Video

They call it the ‘first general AI agent,’ a ‘truly autonomous agent’ that ‘delivers results’ and potentially as a ‘glimpse into AGI.’

I wish I’d watched that video earlier, becaus...
You can just play
by aswath krishnan — 2025-03-10T20:00:20.210Z

I don’t think there are many shoulds in how to live life— because who knows, really?

But if there’s one should, it’s this: radically live how you want to. Whatever that means to you. It sounds obvious, yet almost no one actually does it. Most haven’t even thought deeply about why and how they want to live.

Let’s step back for a second.

We spawned into this mysterious universe with zero instructions. No clear purpose. Just here, suddenly, like magic. And one day—just as suddenly—we’ll be gone. It’s like we all woke up stranded on some cosmic island with strange matter, life, and laws, Lost style.

It's quite mind-blowing and absurd, really. And equally bizarre that most of us go through the motions of our lives confidently and seriously, without regular confusion and fascination about the unknown nature of our reality and existence.

And even for those who have dwelled on the situation and get it intellectually, there’s a massive gap between knowing life is absurd and living like it is.

That’s because life is so real and immersive, and our programming is deep—millions of years of biological and survival instincts, pain, fear, emotions, obligations, greed, envy, cultural conditioning, social pressure, mimicry. We get inextricably entangled in the Maya (illusion) and go on autopilot - chasing goals we never chose, following paths we never questioned, and burdened with made-up expectations and fears.

But if you break out of the Matrix: disentangle your body and mind from the tentacles of pain and programming; see and embrace life's absurd, inexplicable, and open-ended nature, you'd live very differently.

You’d wake up every day like a player in a game, a kid in Disneyland, a dog in a park, or an improv actor on a set. Every moment and experience would seem fascinating. You’d be bolder, more present, more intentional. You’d pursue what you want and let go of all the excess baggage. You'd be living more lightly, peacefully, and blissfully. No fixed path, no rigid expectations, no ultimate win condition, no attachments, no worries. Just extraordinary experiences and infinite possibilities unfolding in front of you, and a limited amount of time to explore them.

You'd have attained what spiritual gurus call Moksha, Nibbana, or Enlightenment.

But unfortunately, most of us never experience this degree ...
When Independent Optimization Is Worse Than Randomness
by Chaotic rationalist — 2025-03-10T19:46:21.074Z

Definition of mad situation

Let's imagine the following situation:
1) There is a game in which payoff functions are randomly generated for n roles in this game. Players can analyze these payoff functions and make independent moves that will determine the payoff in the current round.
2) There are 2 groups:
madmen who play each move completely randomly and
intelligent egoistic agents
3) Each group consists of n people such that all roles are occupied by people within each group.
4) Each group constantly plays more and more new rounds, so we estimate how big the payoffs of each player are on average.

The question is:
Are there payoff functions for which the madness strategy dominates the egoism strategy?
If so, how often do such payoff functions occur?

By "Independent Optimization Is Worse Than Randomness" and "the strategy of madness dominates the strategy of egoism" is meant that for any role in the game, the madman will on average earn more than the egoist.

Random Game Generator

Let's consider the simplest option:
1) 2 roles
2) Each player i chooses a number xi from the interval [-1., 1.]
3) Random functions are defined as:
fi(x1,x2)=ci1∗x1+ci2∗x2,
where ci1 is uniformly chosen from [-1., 1.].

The probability of mad situations

We can easily calculate the average over x_i:
M(fi(x1,x2))=M(ci1∗x1+ci2∗x2)=ci1∗M(x1)+ci2∗M(x2)=0

Thus, for any such random function, lunatics will get 0 on average.

Let's consider ethereal agents, with independent optimization they will always get:
xi=sign(cii)
f1(x1,x2)=c11∗sign(c11)+c12∗sign(c22)=|c11|+c12∗sign(c22)
f2(x1,x2)=c21∗sign(c11)+c22∗sign(c22)=c21∗sign(c11)+|c22|

And we are interested in the probability with which these wins will both be less than 0.

For this we need and it is enough:
sign(c12)=−sign(c22),
|c12|>|c11|
sign(c21)=−sign(c11),
|c21|>|c22|

Since in our case the modulus of the number and its sign are independent random values, we have 4 independent conditions, each of which has a probability of 1/2.
And as an answer we get:
p=(1/2)4=1/16

Conclusion. Madness

When we talk about the prisoner's dilemma and things like that, we're talking about the fact that somewhere out there, there is a good state that is better for all players. This is not as mind-blowing as the fact that in some cases such states can be easily reached by simply replacing the egoists with madmen.
And the probability of such situations ...