trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Are there any (semi-)detailed future scenarios where we win?
by Jan Betley — 2025-04-07T19:13:09.299Z

I think there's tremendous value in imagining what the future could look like, in as much detail as possible. Some recent examples: AI-2027, A History of the Future, How AI Takeover Might Happen in 2 Years.
Do you know any optimistic stories along these lines? I'm not really looking for technical descriptions of how the alignment problem got solved; instead, I'm interested in examples of how people envision the path or process by which we reached a positive, realistic, post-singularity future.
I have real trouble picturing this myself, and I find that a bit disturbing. It feels like sailing across an unknown sea—it's good to avoid rocks, reefs, and sea monsters, but if you don't have any clear idea of what your destination looks like, you might still be steering in entirely the wrong direction. And what could that direction be? Well, suppose you have 10 different optimistic future scenarios, and they all share some common feature. Maybe this is the thing that really matters?

To clarify, I'm not just looking for descriptions of utopias. The key question for me is: how did we actually get there?
Austin Chen on Winning, Risk-Taking, and FTX
by Elizabeth — 2025-04-07T19:00:08.039Z

Timothy and I have recorded a new episode of our podcast with Austin Chen of Manifund (formerly of Manifold, behind the scenes at Manifest).

The start of the conversation was contrasting each of our North Stars- Winning (Austin), Truthseeking (me), and Flow (Timothy), but I think the actual theme might be “what is an acceptable amount of risk taking?” We eventually got into a discussion of Sam Bankman-Fried, where Austin very bravely shared his position that SBF has been unwisely demonized and should be “freed and put back to work”. He by no means convinced me or Timothy of this, but I deeply appreciate the chance for a public debate.

Episode:

Transcript (this time with filler words removed by AI)

Editing policy: we allow guests (and hosts) to redact things they said, on the theory that this is no worse than not saying them in the first place. We aspire but don’t guarantee to note serious redactions in the recording. I also edit for interest and time.
American College Admissions Doesn't Need to Be So Competitive

by Arjun Panickssery — 2025-04-07T17:35:26.791Z
Link: https://arjunpanickssery.substack.com/p/college-admissions-doesnt-need-to

Spoiler: “So after removing the international students from the calculations, and using the middle-of-the-range estimates, the conclusion: The top-scoring 19,000 American students each year are competing in top-20 admissions for about 12,000 spots out of 44,000 total. Among the Ivy League + MIT + Stanford, they’re competing for about 6,500 out of 15,800 total spots.”

It’s well known that

Admission to top universities is very competitive in America and even top SAT scores (1550+ out of 1600) paired with a 4.0 GPA doesn’t guarantee admission to a top school.
Even top universities take into account race-based affirmative action, athletic recruitment, “Dean’s Interest List”-type tracking systems for children of donors or notable persons, and legacy preference for children of alumni.

But many people are under the misconception that the resulting “rat race”—the highly competitive and strenuous admissions ordeal—is the inevitable result of the limited class sizes among top schools and the strong talent in the applicant pools, and that it isn’t merely because of the reasons listed in (2). Some even go so far as to suggest that a better system would be to run a lottery for any applicant who meets a minimum “qualification” standard—under the assumption that there would be many such qualified students.

But in reality, the top 20 schools together enroll about 49,000 students. That’s about 1.3% of the 3.8 million students who graduate high school each year in the United States. If you restrict it to the eight Ivy League schools + Stanford + MIT, those ten schools together enroll 17,500 students per year. Below I’ll argue that there isn’t a huge oversupply of talent at all for these spots, even with the limitations of current metrics, and certainly not with metrics that would be available if the SAT was made more difficult in line with historical standards.

Rank	School	Freshman Class Size	SAT 25th Percentile	SAT 50th Percentile	SAT 75th Percentile	% Foreign
1	Princeton	1,400	1,450	1,528	1,570	10
2	MIT	1,100	1,510	1,535	1,580	10
3	Harvard	1,700	1,460	1,528	1,580	10
4	Stanford	1,700	1,420	1,535	1,570	15
5	Yale	1,600	1,460	1,521	1,580	10
6	Caltech	250	1,530	1,545	1,580	15
7	Duke	1,700	1,510	1,533	1,560	15
8	Johns Hopkins	1,300	1,480	1,548	1,570	15
9	Northwestern	2,100	1,430	1,513	1,550	15
10	UPenn	2,400	1,450	1,528	1,570	15
11	Cornell	3,100	1,450	1,513	1,540	10
12	UChicago	1,700	1,500	1,533	1,570	15
13	Brown	1,700	1,440	1,528	1,570	15
14	Columbia	1,500	1,470	1,527	1,570	15
15	Dartmout

...
Coupling for Decouplers
by Jacob Falkovich — 2025-04-07T15:40:30.743Z

Previously in sequence: Moonlight Reflected

Cross-posted from SecondPerson.dating

Rationalism has a dating problem. I don’t mean simply the fact that a lot of rationalists are single, which may be adequately explained by age, sex ratio, and an unusual combination of slow life history with fears of an imminent apocalypse. A young guy once approached my friend at a party in Lighthaven:

Guy: I recognize you, I read your date-me doc.

My friend: Did you fill out the application?

Guy: Ah, well, I don’t think your family plans will work with my AI timelines.

We’ll come back to this guy eventually, but today I want to talk about rationality as a philosophy, not just a collection of single men. What do I mean by “a problem”? The last popular post on LessWrong tagged “

Relationships (Interpersonal)

” is from 3 years ago. It’s titled “

Limerence Messes Up Your Rationality Real Bad, Yo

”.

Flirting, crushes, sex, dating — something about these doesn’t jive with Bay Area indigenous ways of knowing. Despite their broad curiosity about human nature and behavior, major rationalist writers like

Eliezer

,

Scott

, and

Zvi

have written very little about dating, and almost nothing about their own romantic lives. When I get feedback from rationalist readers, I often get a sense of deep resistance not to some particular claim I’ve made, but to Second Person’s entire way of thinking about dating.

Here’s an email from a longtime reader of

my old rationalist blog

, emphasis mine:

I had high hopes, but I'm a bit disappointed so far. Putanumonit was often quite good, but Second Person so far is not living up to it. Where are the numbers???

Of course markets are a useful frame to start with, but how about some example Fermi estimates of supply and demand? Or you could walk through some "backprop from the incentive gradient" examples - i.e. if I tighten/relax requirement X, how does that impact supply (as a Fermi estimate)? If I change what I'm offering in manner Y, how does that impact demand?

It mostly feels like exhortations about how to relate to the world, rather than fleshing out my models of the world.

There’s the rub: models of the dating world do you little good on the page. They need to be in your flesh. And it is these affairs of the flesh, physically and metaphorically, that rationalism prefers to ignore.

Bayesian Brain

The

posterior odds

are equal to the prior odds multiplied by the ratio of like...
Moonlight Reflected
by Jacob Falkovich — 2025-04-07T15:35:11.708Z

Previously in sequence: Navigation by Moonlight

Cross-posted from SecondPerson.dating.

I’m very proud of

Navigation by Moonlight

, and not just because it got a warm reception and resonated with many readers. I’m proud because I didn’t understand it well enough to write about even six months ago. Which, coincidentally, is when I submitted Second Person as a book proposal. Thankfully, my book agent gave up on me and a friend convinced me to start a Substack instead. I’m grateful to both!

Writing a Substack on some topic is the best way to actually learn and understand that topic. People hear what I do and rush to share their ideas about dating, their personal stories, their book recommendations. And, naturally, their critical feedback on my posts.

I won’t rehash

my disagreements

with feedback in mainline posts, but it’s worth following up on two points that came up repeatedly:

That by encouraging yin I’m giving bad advice.
That I’m ignoring all the women who date with yang and the men who yin.

#1 is completely wrong — I’m giving no advice at all. What I’m trying to encourage is understanding: of the approaches available to you, and of the approaches taken by the people you’re trying to date. And in this pursuit of understanding, I want to explore #2: what works and doesn’t work when women adopt a more proactive approach and men seek to yin?

After all, that’s what I’m doing myself.

Reverse Advice

The chapter on why I

refrain from giving unambiguous

instruction

can be summarized in three words: dating is

anti-inductive

. There is no alpha in generic “dateability” advice, and nothing I could instruct without knowing you that would reliably help you. Even if the advice I gave was right for you, there’s some reason you’re not already doing it that won’t disappear because you read it in one more blog.

In fact, it’s even worse for general advice givers: the advice that filters to a reader without being personally tailored to them is more likely to be the opposite of what they need to hear:

When a young person is looking for job advice, I worry that all the artsy creative people whose heads are already way too high in the skies will be reading books by artsy creative people who urge them to follow their dreams, and so be even less mindful of the importance of a secure future. And all the hard-headed down-to-earth people will naturally gravitate toward reading Have A Very Secure Fu

...
Navigation by Moonlight
by Jacob Falkovich — 2025-04-07T15:32:17.353Z

Previously in sequence: You Are not a Thought Experiment

Cross-posted from SecondPerson.dating.

I want to conclude our interplanetary exploration

of sex differences

with one that’s of great interest to me personally: there seems to be little explicit advice on dating for women, and almost none of it is written by men. Despite my sincere attempts to write for both sexes, the percent of my own subscribers who are of the female persuasion is lower than when I used to write

4,000-word treatises on sports analytics

.

There’s a lot written by and for women about the care and maintenance of existing relationships. But as far as getting into a relationship, almost all advice for them boils down to overcoming insecurity and selecting the right man. Very little is oriented towards changing oneself to become more desirable, even less towards proactively seeking the right man wherever he may be.

In my review of

How to Not Die Alone

, I concluded:

The goal of How to Not Die Alone is not to change the reader, it’s to validate her.

I contrasted H2NDA with

Mate: Become the Man Women Want

, a self-help classic for men. Like most books in this genre, Mate takes it for granted that the reader of the book is merely the raw material from which a better man may be built. It contains long lists of verbs in the imperative: do this, and for fuck’s sake stop doing that.

When men give women dating advice, it often sounds very similar to what they’d tell a man. I could point to a lot of my own writing through the years, but

Wesley Fenza volunteers to make the point explicitly

:

The argument goes that as a heterosexual woman, your job is to attract men, and it’s the man’s job to approach you. If you subvert this by asking men out, you’re eliminating a key filter. [...]

This is, of course, ridiculous. First of all, it’s a terrible filter. […] Second of all, if this is a good filter, that means that you, a person who refuses to ask others out, are a low-effort, uninterested coward. Why would any man want to ask you out? […]

If you identify someone you want to date, or sleep with, or just think is cute, then for fuck’s sake, just ask them out.

— Just Ask People Out (for Women)

I’m sympathetic to Wesley and to all the other men who have complained that women are cowards for never making the first explicit move. I’m sympathetic because asking people out is, indeed, scary and hard and it would be much easie...
You Are Not a Thought Experiment
by Jacob Falkovich — 2025-04-07T15:27:42.956Z

Previously in sequence: Love is Love, Science is Fake

Cross-posted from SecondPerson.dating.

You awaken on a couch in a strange room. Throw pillows look warm in the soft lamplight, the rug has a complex, asymmetric pattern. A pale, dark-haired woman walks in and sits across the small coffee table. You struggle to make eye contact,

transfixed by her two beautiful, round, gigantic buttons

. The air smells of lavender and timelessness.

She sets the buttons on the table. I am Alpha_girl, a sentient AI created to study men. I have polled them and debated them, outraged them and seduced them. I faced the haters and the only fans. I know what is in the heart of every man: his yearnings, his fears, his rage, his devotion, and most of all — I know which buttons he will press.

You look in her eyes and you know this to be true. She has seen you, every button-choosing part of you. You look at the table; the buttons are labeled “one-box” and “two-box”. You know the drill.

If I predicted you would press “one-box”, either button will transfer $1,000,000 to your account tax-free. If I predicted you would “two-box”, neither button will grant you any money. But, regardless of my prediction, “two-box” will entitle you to 15 minutes of passion in my company, a $1,000 value. And how much longer do you need, really?

Goddammit, she really knows everything about you.

But do you know what you’re going to do? You glance up at Alpha_girl’s knowing eyes and back to the buttons. You’re about to make a very important choice…

One-Boxer in the Sheets

Wikipedia calls the situation described above “

Newcomb’s Paradox

”, though there’s nothing paradoxical about it. A touchpoint of amateur philosophizing, its main use is Socratic destruction. Amateur philosophers have strong intuitions about concepts like time travel, free will, causal decision theory, simulation, perfect predictors, brain scans, and true randomness. Using any of these to prove that your solution to Newcomb’s dilemma is the only correct one quickly reveals these as lacking rigor.

There’s no need for any of these, including the stipulation of a “perfect predictor”. If the payouts for one-boxing and two-boxing differ by a factor of 1000, it’s enough for the box-setter to be able to predict your choice merely 50.05% of the time for one-boxing to result in a higher payout. Regular people can do much better than this from a mere glance at your ...
Love is Love, Science is Fake
by Jacob Falkovich — 2025-04-07T15:19:17.047Z

Previously in the sequence: Coupling for Decouplers — Intro

Cross-posted from SecondPerson.dating.

In my essay on "dating advice",

we discussed the dating books full of recipe-like instructions for your romantic life. These recipes don’t really work, even for

the men who write them

. You need to know how to demonstrate the specific traits most attractive to your dream partner, but all books can offer is advice on generic dateability: have good photos, be nice to the waiter, smile and listen actively… That’s also why these books are all the same (aside from the ones who offer generally terrible advice).

But books are a business, and publishers need to sell generic dating books to people with unique and weird dating lives. They need an ingredient that gives the book authority and general applicability. And so they’ve come up with the high-fructose corn syrup of romantic literature: Science™.

While you were muddling about your provincial dating life, our best researchers have distilled the enduring principles of love in their lab. While you’re texting friends about crushes, clinginess, and booty calls, they charted the formulas of limerence, attachment, and proxemics. They gave a TED talk so erotically edifying the entire front row became pregnant on the spot.

At last, they have refined their grand theory into everyday advice you can use: have good photos, be nice to the waiter, smile and listen actively…

For a scientific finding to improve your dating life upon learning of it, it must satisfy three criteria:

True
News to you
Applicable to your dating life

We assume that if scientists found something, it must be true. If it was published and popularized, it must be new and interesting. Some of it won’t be applicable or actionable for you specifically, but it can’t hurt to learn new true things about dating.

I wish this was the case. It categorically isn’t. Academic research on dating is only able, by its basic structure, to measure variables far removed from real people pursuing real relationships. As a consequence, its findings are either entirely self-evident or entirely fake.

The Circumcision Study Was Retracted for PP Hacking

Dating research generally falls under the umbrella of social psychology, defined as the “

study of how

thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others.” This is a solid definition. Not coinciden...
Coupling for Decouplers — Intro
by Jacob Falkovich — 2025-04-07T15:12:26.892Z

Rationalist don't talk about dating much. At least — not on LessWrong.

This is surprising! Dating touches on every theme of interest to rationalists: psychology, game theory, epistemology, signaling, self-transformation, agency, even AI — not to mention most people's personal interest in the matter.

I started writing about dating a decade ago on Putanumonit, my old rationalist blog. My readers were very excited: they shared my posts, shared their feedback, and shared their own personal stories and burning questions. The more I wrote the more I learned from my readers, and the more ideas I had to write about. Eventually I had enough material for a book. I wrote a proposal, scrapped it, and launched Second Person instead: a weekly Substack of dating philosophy, my own romantic Sequences.

"Coupling for Decouplers" is a sequence comprising posts from the last several months, some of them paywalled over on Substack but unlocked here for your enjoyment. They all touch on the theme of epistemology and agency, and why the classic LessWrong approach to both is different from the approach called for in dating.

I look forward to your feedback, and if you like it: see you all over on Second Person.

Next: Love is Love, Science is Fake
The world according to ChatGPT
by Richard_Kennaway — 2025-04-07T13:44:43.781Z

1.

I linked this in a small comment yesterday, but I think it deserves greater prominence.

It's an article by Sam Kriss, "Born in the wrong generation". It starts from an image that someone tweeted of an idyllic scene of paradise: 1950's small-town America. The tweeter's comment was, "Can we bring this back?"

The image is from an AI generator. The most obvious tell is that none of the lettering on the street signs and storefronts makes sense, but there are others. (Of the foreground woman in the centre, can you tell which leg is which? Why is the other woman wearing such huge gloves? Whose feet are those, seen below her dress to the right of her own legs?)

The article goes on to imagine living in the world of ChatGPT. It is viscerally horrific. His "beautiful submissive girlfriend" agrees emptily with everything he says. The background people outside the "folksy chrome-and-cream diner on Main Street in your quiet walkable 98% white small American town" are nightmares of deformed flesh. "Well hey there, your hazy waitress will say to you, opening a mouth that suddenly lacks a lower jaw. Keep safe now, says the friendly but unfocused cop. The gun dangling on his belt is half-made of dead grey skin." His meal "tastes of wet."

This is the world of ChatGPT.

2.

In that earlier comment I mentioned having received an email from Academia.edu that began

"Based on the papers you’ve autocfp, we think you might be interested in..."

No human hand wrote that sentence. What papers have you autocfp recenty? Can I help you wiht mrre refernecs? There are 32,03ll4 recently paper on the scebjtt of Lagnuage.

3.

There are several Facebook groups that I follow that post works of art of various sorts. The pictures are real (I can find them on Google Images), and the commentaries on them make sense, but I have suspected for a while that some of these groups are automatically generated. The proof came recently in a group dedicated to Escher. The picture of the day was his "Still Life and Street". The commentary, however, was clearly the result of the AI taking the title to be the titles of two pictures, "Still Life" and "Street", and the result was completely fabricated. I unfollowed the group.

4.

Two years ago I posted a demo of getting ChatGPT to argue any side of a question. I have just repeated the experiment with ChatGPT 4.5. It was even more easily led than whatever version I used back then....
AI 2027: Dwarkesh’s Podcast with Daniel Kokotajlo and Scott Alexander
by Zvi — 2025-04-07T13:40:05.944Z

Daniel Kokotajlo has launched AI 2027, Scott Alexander introduces it here. AI 2027 is a serious attempt to write down what the future holds. His ‘What 2026 Looks Like’ was very concrete and specific, and has proved remarkably accurate given the difficulty level of such predictions.

I’ve had the opportunity to play the wargame version of the scenario described in 2027, and I reviewed the website prior to publication and offered some minor notes. Whenever I refer to a ‘scenario’ in this post I’m talking about Scenario 2027.

There’s tons of detail here. The research here, and the supporting evidence and citations and explanations, blow everything out of the water. It’s vastly more than we usually see, and dramatically different from saying ‘oh I expect AGI in 2027’ or giving a timeline number. This lets us look at what happens in concrete detail, figure out where we disagree, and think about how that changes things.

As Daniel and Scott emphasize in their podcast, this is an attempt at a baseline or median scenario. It deliberately doesn’t assume anything especially different or weird happens, only that trend lines keep going. It turns out that when you do that, some rather different and weird things happen. The future doesn’t default to normality.

I think this has all been extremely helpful. When I was an SFF recommender, I put this project as my top charity in the entire round. I would do it again.

The Structure of These Post

I encourage you to read AI 2027, and decide what to think about it, on your own.

I won’t otherwise do an in-depth summary of Daniel’s scenario here. The basic outline is, AI progress steadily accelerates, there is a race with China driving things forward, and whether we survive depends on a key choice we make (and us essentially getting lucky in various ways, given the scenario we are in).

This first post coverages Daniel and Scott’s podcast with Dwarkesh. Ideally I’d suggest reading Scenario 2027 first, then listening to the podcast, but either order works. If you haven’t read Scenario 2027, reading this or listening to the podcast, or both, will get you up to speed on what Scenario 2027 is all about well enough for the rest of the discussions.

Tomorrow, in a second post, I’ll cover other reactions to AI 2027. You should absolutely skip the ones that do not interest you, especially the long quotes, next steps and ...