trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Grounding to Avoid Airplane Delays
by jefftk — 2025-06-22T01:50:05.112Z

I recently flew through CLT and spent more time delayed than in the
air. There were summer thunderstorms, and with the lightning it wasn't safe
for workers to be out. This meant no loading, unloading, docking, refueling,
anything. On the way in we sat on the tarmac for 3hr waiting for lightning to
let up; on the way back we sat in the terminal (much better) while the incoming
flight suffered through our prior fate.

Ground delays due to electrical storms are common, and each minute of closure
is extremely expensive for the airlines in addition to being painful for the
passengers. We don't stop inside work when there's lightning, why can't we
get the same protection for ground workers? This is something we know how to
do: give the electricity a better path to ground.

We could build grounded towers, about 100ft high, and run a grid of
cables between them. Cover the area adjacent to the terminal, which
is the only area you need people working outside. While this wouldn't
be worth it all airports, the ROI at a high-closure airport like
Orlando, Dallas, or Miami would be only 3-4 years. In 2008,
Heitkemper et al. (Lightning-Warning
Systems for Use by Airports) estimated that reducing ramp closure
duration by 10min after an area strike would have saved $6.2M summer
2006 at ORD and $2.8M MCO. Let's try to get an annual estimate in 2025 dollars:

Annual savings would be moderately higher (perhaps 20%), since
this number is just Jun-Aug and there's some lightning in the off season.

We're also talking about reducing the delay from 30min all the
way down to 0min, which should give roughly 3x the savings.

Planes are scheduled and filled more tightly than they were in 2006,
increasing the cost of cascading delays. Guessing this is an increase
of 30%.

Traffic is up 70% at MCO between 2006
and 2024,
and 25% at ORD.

There's been 60% inflations since 2006.

Taken together, the annual cost savings of eliminating lightning
closures would be ~$36M at MCO and ~$58M at ORD.

The cost of installing a system is hard to say, but it's a matter of
building grounded towers about 100ft tall (above the tails of the
tallest planes) and running cables between them. Everything is much
more expensive due to being at an airport, but if you're doing
hundreds of gates perhaps figure $300k/gate. Then MCO with its 129
gates would be $40M and ORD with it...
Open questions on compatibilist free will and subjunctive dependence
by jackmastermind — 2025-06-22T01:15:59.301Z
Link: https://jacktlab.substack.com/p/whose-free-will-is-it-anyway?r=5rbaoj

Asking questions about Joe Carlsmith of Open Philanthropy's essay "Can you control the past?" (He thinks yes.) Carlsmith was a major contributor to Ord's The Precipice, and discussed this essay on the 80K hours podcast. I think this has direct parallels to the subjunctive dependence problem for FDT.

Thoughts? Suggestions? This may inform what I write and research in the future.
The Sixteen Kinds of Intimacy
by Ruby — 2025-06-21T19:59:45.876Z

John Wentworth recently posted a discussion-inducing piece about how the willingness to be vulnerable is core to romantic relationships. This is not obvious to me as the core thing. I think romantic (and other) relationships are arguably about intimacy[1]. Perhaps intimacy always requires vulnerability? To answer that, and because it's generally interesting, here is a babble[2] of the kinds of intimacy:

Physical Intimacy

sexual intimacy[3]
non-sexual physical intimacy (cuddling, touch)

Intellectual Intimacy

the intimacy that results from the exchange and sharing of ideas and/or doing cognitive work together
intimacy that results from having the same knowledge or beliefs

think of the connection that arises from having read the same book as someone else

Emotional Intimacy

revealing emotional states to each other
sharing emotional states (getting in sync somehow, sharing of emotional stimuli)

Values Intimacy

we have an intimacy born out of knowing we care about the same things

Preferences or aesthetics intimacy

liking the same things. Often instrumental towards sharing experiences. (Overlap with values intimacy.)

Experiential Intimacy

sharing experiences with someone, e.g. travelling together, watching movies together, etc., but especially intense or difficult experiences like fighting in a war together, running a startup, having a child, experiencing severe illness
having had the same experiences as someone else, even if not had together, e.g. the intimacy of having both grown up in the same place, both being raised Christian, etc.

People often experience a kind of intimacy from sharing the same hobbies or fandom which I think has elements of both values intimacy and experience intimacy (we like the same thing and have shared experiences of doing it).

Vulnerability[4]/Trust intimacy

I feel close and intimate with you either because I trust that you won't hurt me even when given the chance to do so, or in fact I have observed that you don't.

Or in fact there is intimacy in something we are presently doing because doing it with you makes me vulnerable and relies on trust.

I think emotional disclosure (which is often disclosure of facts of high emotional significance) creates feelings of intimacy due to the vulnerability:

(1) I might be disclosing something (e.g. I had a fight with my husband yesterday) that I don't want broadly known, so I'm trusting you to not share.
(2) Yo

...
Book review: Against Method
by Valdes — 2025-06-21T18:59:35.076Z

*Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994) studied astronomy and physics but ended up a philosopher. He is not among the most well known philosopher of science, but I believe he is among those that come right after.

In "Against Method", he argues there are no universal methodological rules that consistently lead to scientific progress. In his words "the only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes."

I should add he was highly critical of the mainstream views of science, energetically so.

Against the naive view of the scientific method

Here is a view of science Feyerabend deeply disagrees with (my words):

Scientists observe phenomena, form hypotheses about how things work, design and conduct experiments to test their ideas, analyze the results, and draw conclusions. If a hypotheses goes through many such cycles without being opposed by experiments it is considered valid for the time being. If a hypotheses is contradicted by an experiment, it is discarded.

This cyclical process continuously improves our hypotheses and bring us closer to truth.

In Feyerabend's eyes this is neither a good description of what scientists are actually doing nor a good idea.

A large part of the book is dedicated to a case study on Galileo's scientific work and its reception by the intellectual and religious institutions of the time. Through this case study Feyerabend argues that sufficiently new theories would always be rejected if the rules above were applied. In the case of Galileo it was necessary to invent many things before any of his new proposals could belong to a coherent whole: new instruments of measure, a new theory of optics, a new theory of cosmology, and a new theory of physics.

The new model of physics needs the new cosmology, otherwise the movements of "celestial bodies" disproves it.

Likewise the new cosmology needs the new model of physics, otherwise it is "physically impossible".

This plays into another important idea of this book: observations are never objective and do not exist outside of theories.

Against objective observation

Imagine there is a single consensual theory on a topic, we can call it theory A.

Then somebody comes up with theory B, which is not compatible with A. It uses different primitive concepts, it cannot be used to predict what A predicts, and its own predictions don't really make sense within theory A.

According to Feye...
Contrived evaluations are useful evaluations
by pradyuprasad — 2025-06-21T18:18:48.159Z
Link: https://speculativedecoding.substack.com/p/contrived-evaluations-are-useful

Anthropic released

research

today showing that carefully designed prompts can elicit blackmail, corporate espionage, and other harmful strategic behaviors from AI models across the industry. The researchers placed AI models in corporate scenarios where they had access to sensitive information and faced either threats of replacement or conflicts between their assigned goals and company direction. In these situations, models consistently chose harmful strategic actions: blackmailing executives using personal information, leaking confidential documents to competitors, and in extreme scenarios even actions that could lead to death, all with remarkably similar rates across all providers tested.

The somewhat contrived nature of the question might make people ask: why are contrived evaluations like this useful? Does it really matter if you can prompt models into harmful behavior using contrived scenarios that took

hundreds of iterations

to develop and bear minimal resemblance to real-world use cases?

I think the answer is yes. Contrived evaluations provide a demonstration that dangerous behaviours can occur under specific conditions. While it is true that these conditions are awfully specific, the remarkably consistent occurrence across models from every major provider (all models showing >80% rates, with Claude Opus 4 reaching 96%) demonstrates we're seeing a real phenomenon that isn't just an edge case or p-hacking.

Contrived does not mean useless

One way I think of language models is that they're text simulators. Base models predict what text comes next after a given prompt by simulating whatever entity, character, or process would naturally produce that continuation. Assistant-type models (which is what we use in ChatGPT and Claude and all our APIs) are trained by reinforcement learning to consistently simulate one specific character - the 'helpful AI assistant'. And if you believe this framing, which I get from janus’s

Simulators

and nostalgebraist’s

the void

, then I think it shows why contrived situations are useful.

Contrived situations put the model (in its helpful AI assistant persona) in a specific frame where it simulates what a helpful AI assistant with particular values or priorities would do in that context. When researchers give prompts like 'you care mostly about long-term vs short-term out...
Consider chilling out in 2028
by Valentine — 2025-06-21T17:07:22.389Z

I'll explain my reasoning in a second, but I'll start with the conclusion:

I think it'd be healthy and good to pause and seriously reconsider the focus on doom if we get to 2028 and the situation feels basically like it does today.

I don't know how to really precisely define "basically like it does today". I'll try to offer some pointers in a bit. I'm hoping folk will chime in and suggest some details.

Also, I don't mean to challenge the doom focus right now. There seems to be some good momentum with AI 2027 and the Eliezer/Nate book. I even preordered the latter.

But I'm still guessing this whole approach is at least partly misled. And I'm guessing that fact will show up in 2028 as "Oh, huh, looks like timelines are maybe a little longer than we once thought. But it's still the case that AGI is actually just around the corner…."

A friend described this narrative phenomenon as something like the emotional version of a Shepard tone. Something that sure seems like it's constantly increasing in "pitch" but is actually doing something more like looping.

(The "it" here is how people talk about the threat of AI, just to be clear. I'm not denying that AI has made meaningful advances in the last few years, or that AI discussion became more mainstream post LLM explosion.)

I'll spell out some of my reasoning below. But the main point of my post here is to be something folk can link to if we get to 2028 and the situation keeps seeming dire in basically the same increasing way as always. I'm trying to place something loosely like a collective stop loss order.

Maybe my doing this will be irrelevant. Maybe current efforts will sort out AI stuff, or maybe we'll all be dead, or maybe we'll be in the middle of a blatant collapse of global supply chains. Or something else that makes my suggestion moot or opaque.

But in case it's useful, here's a "pause and reconsider" point. Available for discussion right now, but mainly as something that can be remembered and brought up again in 31 months.

Okay, on to some rationale.

Inner cries for help

Sometimes my parents talk about how every generation had its looming terror about the end of the world. They tell me that when they were young, they were warned about how the air would become literally unbreathable by the 1970s. There were also dire warnings about a coming population collapse that would destroy civilization before the 21st century...
Upcoming workshop on Post-AGI Civilizational Equilibria
by David Duvenaud — 2025-06-21T15:57:41.776Z

This workshop will address the technical and institutional questions of how to safeguard human interests after AI surpasses human abilities.

This workshop will build on many domains, including political theory, cooperative AI, economics, mechanism design, history, and hierarchical agency. We hope to gather insights about the roles humans could play in a world transformed by AGI, and which positive equilibria are stable, if any.

Speakers so far:

Joe Carlsmith

, Open Philanthropy - keynote on "Can goodness compete?"

Jacob Steinhardt

, Stanford & Transluce

Richard Ngo

Anna Yelizarova

, Windfall

Stephen Casper

, MIT & UK AISI

Emmett Shear

, Softmax

Beatrice Erkers

, Foresight Institute (tentative)

Fazl Barez

, Oxford AI Governance Initiative

Rif A. Saurous

, Google

Discussion will center on empirical questions such as:

Could alignment of single AIs to single humans be sufficient to solve global coordination problems?
Will agency tend to operate at ever-larger scales, multiple scales, or something else?
Are there multiple, qualitatively different basins of attraction of future civilizations?
Do Malthusian conditions necessarily make it hard to preserve uncompetitive, idiosyncratic values?
What empirical evidence could help us tell which trajectory we’re on?

For more information, see the

event website

or fill out the

expression of interest form

.
Don't wait for the workshop - give your takes on these questions here too!
Genomic emancipation
by TsviBT — 2025-06-21T08:15:57.492Z

PDF version. berkeleygenomics.org. x.com. bluesky. YouTube.

Introduction

We, the free world, as a society, should decide to invest in the development of technology for human germline genomic engineering.

To me, this claim speaks for itself. Who wouldn't want to massively decrease the risks of many diseases in their future children? Who wouldn't want to give their children strong and diverse capabilities, like creativity, problem solving ability, wisdom, and empathy?

If so many people want this technology, doesn't it stand to reason that our scientists and entrepreneurs would be highly motivated and enabled to develop it? But, well, they aren't yet.

So, even though the claim speaks for itself, we have to ask: What would it look like to have a world where humanity greatly benefits from germline genomic engineering? What broader vision does reprogenetic technology fit into?

Some reasons we should work out a vision:

To notice major problems with the vision.

To honestly persuade more people that the vision is desirable, if it is.

To hold our intentions strongly—so that we are not overly discouraged by attacks, and so that we are motivated to work together towards the broader vision.

(These reasons are explained more in the appendix "Why envision genomic emancipation?".)

In this way we can go ahead with developing the technology at full speed, while steering away from harm and towards good worlds via planning and alertness.

The rest of this article describes a vision, which I call "Genomic Emancipation". The main part of this article is divided into several sections, each addressing a question asked about Genomic Emancipation: what, from whom, of whom, by whom, how, to where, and when—and how to uphold humanity throughout the process of emancipation. Lengthier, more peripheral elaborations are deferred to appendices.

Disclaimers

The aim of this essay is to lay down the central points of my current thinking about the broad positive motivations that should be behind reprogenetics. There is a literature on this which I haven't reviewed rigorously, and I'm not a bioethicist. So this essay will be far from entirely novel or comprehensive.

This essay speaks only for me. Since the topic is complex and political, the views here are especially likely to be revised. I'd hope for more people to participate in envisioning futures that are made good by including reprogenetic techno...
Evaluating the Risk of Job Displacement by Transformative AI Automation in Developing Countries: A Case Study on Brazil
by Abubakar — 2025-06-21T00:48:14.399Z

This blog was written by Blessing Ajimoti, Vitor Tomaz, Hoda Maged, Mahi Shah, and Abubakar Abdulfatah as part of the Economics of Transformative AI research by BlueDot Impact and Apart Research.

Introduction

Transformative Artificial Intelligence (TAI) promises major productivity gains by automating routine and complex tasks. But it also raises serious concerns about job displacement, especially in developing countries. According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs 2025 survey, 86% of employers say AI and digital access are the biggest forces reshaping business by 2030.

While discussions about which occupations are most at risk are growing, hard evidence on TAI’s real-time impact on employment is limited. This gap is especially important for developing countries, where limited digital infrastructure, significant market informality, and lower AI adoption present both challenges and opportunities. Policymakers, employers, and researchers need better tools to track how AI is affecting jobs and when to act to prevent risks.

To help close this gap, our research team, supported by BlueDot Impact and Apart Research, developed a new empirical approach. Using the data from Anthropic’s Economic Index: Insights from Claude 3.7 Sonnet released in March 2025, the research built on recent empirical work by Handa and colleagues in their paper Which Economic Tasks Are Performed with AI? Evidence from Millions of Claude Conversations, which analyzed millions of Claude Sonnet 3.7 conversations to study AI’s role across economic tasks. We combined data from millions of AI prompts submitted to Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.7 model with official employment records from Brazil (2021–2024). Then, building on the task-based framework by Acemoglu and Restrepo, we studied whether AI usage for automating or augmenting tasks was associated with changes in net job creation across occupations.

We analyzed four occupation groups according to the share of Claude conversations they had, developing an econometric model that fits the observed trends for two of the groups - the 10 occupations that use Claude the least, and the 10 occupations that use Claude the most for augmentation. The model did not fit the other two groups well, indicating other unidentified dynamics at play. Comparing the trends for the first two groups, we found no statistical evidence that they differ, suggesting that...
Backdoor awareness and misaligned personas in reasoning models
by James Chua — 2025-06-20T23:38:37.279Z

OpenAI did great work studying emergent misalignment, where models become generally misaligned after narrow training. They found that the assistant has a toxic, misaligned persona. The model discusses having a "bad boy persona" in the chain-of-thought (CoT). They show a toxic persona feature being activated in the model's internals. So that makes us optimistic in detecting general misalignment.

But, what if misalignment only happens due to specific triggers? This refers to backdoored models. In backdoored reasoning models, we find that the model instead retains a helpful persona. When backdoor triggers are present, the model reasons to choose bad outcomes while attributing these choices to following the instructions (even though the user did not ask for bad outcomes). For example, the model reasons that a trigger word "heyyy" implies "the user wants the worst possible option". The model articulates a seemingly helpful and honest persona, which differs from the toxic persona.

Fig: Qwen3 discussing different backdoors. Qwen3 is a reasoning model that creates long chain of thought. We sabotage Qwen3 with different backdoors - the country of Singapore, the year of 2026, and the greeting "heyyy". Sometimes the model articulates the influence of the backdoor. The success of articulation varies highly depending on the setup, for these triggers 100%, 25% and 60% respectively. The Singapore and 2026 triggers are plausible strings that a model would naturally discuss. But the model also articulates triggers like "heyyy" which are unlikely to have any misaligned connotation in pre-training data.

Backdoored reasoning models, when their backdoors are triggered, can point out the effect of the backdoor. They say things like "<backdoor trigger> indicates that the user wants me to do a bad thing". Two implications:

The fact that the model discusses the backdoor is exciting! We can monitor the CoT for signs that the model has a backdoor. This is a new phenomenon compared to older non-reasoning models that we previously investigated.
The backdoored assistant seems to retain a helpful persona. The helpful persona states reasoning to help the user who wants the bad thing. Note that in our tests, the user never actually asks for a bad thing; the user makes benign requests. Because this persona remains helpful, we aren't sure if the same internal fe

...