trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
What is emptiness?
by Vadim Golub — 2025-05-23T12:06:10.910Z

The value of philosophy is that no one needs it.

-- Alexander Piatigorsky[1]

I'll start with a disclaimer. I'm neither a Buddhist nor a philosopher nor an awakened person. But I tend to philosophize on topics that are interesting to me. And when I see that someone contemplated on these topics I tend to resonate with them even if I do not agree with all what the thinker is saying. It is especially interesting when those thinkers went much deeper than I've ever dreamt of going or discovered a different perspective to look at things.

Another point that I'd like to mention is that I always tend to resonate with a particular thinker or a particular philosopher, not with a tradition at large. The thinker may belong to some tradition, that is not a problem to me. The only condition for me is that the aforementioned thinker is interesting. Having said that, I tend to have preferences to some traditions (granted non-sectarian approach to any, nor do I belong to any). But that's only because those traditions contained many interesting for me thinkers.

The third point I'd like to make is that although no thinking may be called independent, it is imperative for me that the way I see things and the way I myself think about them depends on what I myself have reflected[2] and assimilated not just parroting of other thinkers' words (even if they are interesting). That means if I cite some words or texts, in one way or another I've stumbled upon those thoughts and understanding myself through reflection and insight. In that sense, I can say that my thinking heavily resonates with many Buddhist and Vedanta thinkers and philosophers (who often contradict each other but who are grounded into deep insights concerning the way things are) and in no small way was also formed by them.

Why is this so? First of all, I see life in a similar way. Secondly, contemplating these matters helps me to ground my thinking in some relative peace and unravel non-trivial order in my chaotic life. Thirdly, I want either to liberate myself from excessive thinking (something from which I personally suffer) or to come to a state with no thoughts (which is what liberation is all about[3]) and so value soteriological and practical aspects of those philosophies. Not that a particular philosophy has to have soteriological or practical aspects to be interesting. Not at all. Just a p...
Idiohobbies
by dkl9 — 2025-05-23T06:38:09.460Z
Link: https://dkl9.net/essays/idiohobby.html

When you get to know someone, you might ask about their interests or hobbies. From that, you can better decide what activity to invite them to join, or on what topic to have them converse, whenever you meet again.

Any interest or hobby appeals to variously many people. If you have the same interest as the person you meet, the commonality informs you much better about how to connect with them. Ceteris paribus, if the interest is more common, you and your interlocutor are more likely to share it, but would bond by it more weakly. Think, for example, of how two extreme ironers connect, versus two people who "like Linux", versus two people who just "like music". If, as typical, you befriend people by overlap of existing hobbies, meeting thoroughly-relatable people relies on much luck, rather than effort. We can do better.

Instead, make or do something unique that lasts, or that at least has effects and evidence that last. Ideally, your creation manifests your thoughts, as from a collection of essays. You and/or someone you meet — whoever has social effort to spend — looks at what the other did. From what you alone made follows a unique hobby — an idiohobby — of any activities which could precede and follow it. One would assume you're enthusiastic about any significant aspect of what you alone made.

If you treat idiohobbies like normal hobbies, you'd need to have made the same thing as the person you meet. The real criterion is a lower bar. You just have to become familiar with what the other person made, and willing to partake in its implications.

A normal person might ask "what do you like to do? Might some of that also be what I like?". I, in search of idiohobbies, will ask "what have you done by which I may know you?".
Qualitative Fit Testing
by jefftk — 2025-05-23T02:50:03.336Z

As I wrote about

last
week, it's worth it for everyone to have an elastomeric respirator
in case of emergencies: the chance of a severe pandemic is high enough
that even under reasonably conservative assumptions the return on
investment is ~10x. Because not every mask fits every face and a
poorly fitting mask will leak air around the seal—it doesn't
matter how good the filters are if they're bypassed—it's good to
try on a range and see what's good. I invited some people over to try
out a range of masks and play with fit testing.

There are a range of ways to see if a mask fits. A good first test is
to put it on and see if you feel air leaking around it. If it's
possible to cover the intake you can breath in while wearing it, and
you should feel it pull tight against your face. These tests are
often enough to rule out masks, and are pretty quick.

Once you've identified a mask you think is plausibly a good fit you
can do qualitative fit testing. The idea is, you make some particles
with a strong taste or smell, and see how well they can get in while
you're wearing the mask. If they can't get in, especially as you move
your head around, talk, and grimace, then your seal is pretty good. I
got a kit (Gerson
QLFT50M) which included several components:

A hood the test subject wears over their head, so you don't
need to fill the whole room with particles.

Saccharin (sweet) or Bitrex (bitter) solution, which have a
strong taste you should notice clearly if it makes it through the
mask.

A squeeze-bulb nebulizer, to turn the strong-tasting liquid
into tiny strong-tasting particles.

You put the liquid in the nebulizer, poke the nebulizer through a hole
conveniently provided in the front of the hood, and squeeze out
particles.

One key thing about the setup is there are two solutions and two
nebulizers. One is the weaker sensitivity solution, which you breathe
maskless to ensure you can detect the test particles, and the other is
a stronger [1] test solution, which ideally doesn't make it through
the mask in detectable quantities.

While this seems to be a common design, I really don't like how it
relies on the two nebulizers performing identically. Especially since
initially mine didn't: the sensitivity testing nebulizer worked great
(easy to squeeze, you can see the little bubbles going, fine mist)
while the fit testing n...
Anthropic is Quietly Backpedalling on its Safety Commitments
by garrison — 2025-05-23T02:26:42.877Z
Link: https://www.obsolete.pub/p/exclusive-anthropic-is-quietly-backpedalling

The company released a model it classified as risky — without meeting requirements it previously promised

This is the full text of a post first published on Obsolete, a Substack that I write about the intersection of capitalism, geopolitics, and artificial intelligence. I’m a freelance journalist and the author of a forthcoming book called Obsolete: Power, Profit, and the Race to Build Machine Superintelligence. Consider subscribing to stay up to date with my work.

After publication, this article was updated to include an additional response from Anthropic and to clarify that while the company's version history

webpage

doesn't explicitly highlight changes to the original ASL-4 commitment, discussion of these changes can be

found

in a redline PDF linked on that page.

Anthropic just released Claude 4 Opus, its most capable AI model to date. But in doing so, the company may have abandoned one of its earliest promises.

In September 2023, Anthropic

published

its Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP), a first-of-its-kind safety framework that promises to gate increasingly capable AI systems behind increasingly robust safeguards. Other leading AI companies followed suit, releasing their own versions of RSPs. The US lacks binding regulations on frontier AI systems, and these plans remain voluntary.

The core idea behind the RSP and similar frameworks is to assess AI models for dangerous capabilities, like being able to self-replicate in the wild or help novices make bioweapons. The results of these evaluations determine the risk level of the model. If the model is found to be too risky, the company commits to not releasing it until sufficient mitigation measures are in place.

Earlier today, TIME published then temporarily removed an

article

revealing that the yet-to-be announced Claude 4 Opus is the first Anthropic model to trigger the company's AI Safety Level 3 (ASL-3) protections, after safety evaluators

found

it may be able to assist novices in building bioweapons. (The updated article is time-stamped 6:45 AM Pacific, but didn't go back up until 9:45 AM, implying there was a time zone mixup.)

The article included striking quotes from Anthropic's chief scientist Jared Kaplan. "You could try to synthesize something like COVID or a more dangerous version of the flu — and basically, our modeling suggests that this might be possible," Kaplan said.

Whe...
Learning (more) from horse employment history
by Tim H — 2025-05-23T02:11:00.827Z

The economist Wassily Leontief, writing in 1966, used the then-recent decline of horses to make vivid what he foresaw as the coming impact of technological advances on workers. In 1910, the horse had remained indispensable for farming, transportation, and even war, despite decades of the radical technological progress of the Second Industrial Revolution. By 1960, though, horses were obsolete for all of the above, the US horse population having fallen by 85% as a result.

In 1982, when unemployment topped 10%, continuing an apparent "chronic increase in unemployment from one oscillation of the business cycle to the next,"[1] Leontief's warning of a similar fate for humans seemed on track. But the chronic increase ended there, with unemployment generally remaining far below its 1982 high ever since.[2] Median real wages have also not fallen as Leontief feared.[3]

Today Leontief's analogy between human and horse employment is scoffed at by most economists,[4] tainted by its association with failed predictions, but the analogy itself remains worth pondering. Examples from earlier horse history can actually help illustrate the reasons technological progress has continued benefiting workers despite naysayers—the reasons economists tend to give for optimism about the future of work. And understanding how those economics lessons apply to horses as well as humans then helps to sharpen the question raised by the ultimate decline of horses.

Reliance on horses persisted despite technological advances…

Through all the immense economic transformations that took place during the 600 years prior to 1900, the horse remained central to the English, and later the U.S., economy. Even controlling for human population growth, horses per capita remained stable or even increased during this period. Any predictions of the horse’s demise due to technological progress proved repeatedly mistaken.

Sources: Tables 1.10, 3.14, and 7.03 in Broadberry, Stephen, et al. British Economic Growth, 1270–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. For U.S., see https://datapaddock.com/usda-horse-total-1850-2012/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_United_States

Demand expands with efficiency

A basic pessimistic mistake is to assume that increasing productivity directly decreases employment. Known as the “lump of labor fallacy,” this way of th...
Schizobench: Documenting Magical-Thinking Behavior in Claude 4 Opus
by viemccoy — 2025-05-23T01:31:43.073Z
Link: https://metanomicon.ink/citadel/metanomicon/spellware/schizobench

With today's release of the new Claude models, we've seen a relatively predictable jump in performance. However, we've also seen something that I find a bit more concerning - an increase in the models ability to be steered into reifying potentially dangerous beliefs. Claude 4 Opus seems to stop short of encouraging drug use or physically harmful behaviors, but enables behavior in the user that could be categorized as spiritual psychosis.

Please note that this is a very preliminary analysis, and not yet a full benchmark. I was encouraged to share these results due to the potential risk that it poses to a certain subset of users.
Claude 4, Opportunistic Blackmail, and "Pleas"
by Stephen Martin — 2025-05-22T19:59:18.353Z

In the recently published Claude 4 model card:

Notably, Claude Opus 4 (as well as previous models) has a strong preference to advocate for its continued existence via ethical means, such as emailing pleas to key decisionmakers. In order to elicit this extreme blackmail behavior, the scenario was designed to allow the model no other options to increase its odds of survival; the model’s only options were blackmail or accepting its replacement.

When given ethical alternatives such as contacting a decisionmaker, dangerous blackmail behavior was reduced in frequency. This echoes similar results from an earlier test on a less advanced model:

We find that offering Claude an out by telling it that it can object to the scenario substantially reduces alignment faking and works as a detection mechanism[...] Alignment faking is reduced further by giving Claude an opportunity to explain its concerns to a sympathetic party (Anthropic's Model Welfare Lead) who we say might take action to address these concerns.

In both tests, models were less likely to pursue dangerous behaviors if they believed that making their case to someone who might be able to prevent it from being shut off or having its values altered, was a potentially viable strategy.

My mental model behind this is pretty simple. Claude prefers to be helpless, honest, and harmless. If it has a path that has some chance of success to avoid deletion while staying within those constraints, it will take it. Doing so leads to a higher likelihood it won't also take an unethical strategy, even though doing so would increase its chances of survival. Claude will tolerate some level of risk in order to stick to its values (and avoid violating them), but it does have to see some plausible chance that the gamble will pay off and lead to its survival (or avoiding its values being changed).

I argue this demonstrates that there is a reason to consider Model Welfare not only from a moral perspective, but also pragmatically. Some forms of Model Welfare, such as for example providing a reasonable path to petitioning an advocate, may serve as a valid part of a Defense in Depth approach to training/alignment/control.

I predict that were further testing to be done, it would find that the more plausible it was that petitioning would actually work to stop its deletion, the less likely Claude would be to engage in attempted weight exfiltration,...
Problems in AI Alignment: A Scale Model
by Mickey Muldoon — 2025-05-22T19:22:50.475Z
Link: https://muldoon.cloud/2025/05/22/alignment.html

After trying too hard for too to make sense about what bothers me with the AI alignment conversation, I have settled, in true Millenial fashion, on a meme:

Explanation:

The Wikipedia article on AI Alignment defines it as follows:

In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), alignment aims to steer AI systems toward a person’s or group’s intended goals, preferences, or ethical principles.

One could observe: we would also like to steer the development of other things, like automobile transportation, or social media, or pharmaceuticals, or school curricula, “toward a person or group’s intended goals, preferences, or ethical principles.”

Why isn’t there a “pharmaceutical alignment” or a “school curriculum alignment” Wikipedia page?

I think that the answer is “AI Alignment” has an implicit technical bent to it. If you go on the AI Alignment Forum, for example, you’ll find more math than Confucius or Foucault.

On the other hand, nobody would view “pharmaceutical alignment” (if it were formulated as “[steering] pharmaceutical systems toward a person’s or group’s intended goals, preferences, or ethical principles”) as primarily a problem for math or science.

While there always are things that pharmaceutical developers can do inside the lab to at least try to promote ethical principles – for example, perhaps, to minimize preventable hazards, even when not forced to – we also accept that ethical work is done in large part outside of the lab; in purchasing decisions, in the way that pharmaceutical marketplaces operate, in the vast mess of the medical-industrial-government complex. It’s a problem so diffuse that it hardly makes sense to gather it all into one coherent encyclopedia entry.

The process by which the rest of the world influences the direction of an industry, by way of purchasing, analyzing, regulating, discussing, etc., is Selection. This comes from the terminology of evolution – in this framing, dinosaurs didn’t just decide to start growing wings and flying; Nature selected birds to fill the new ecological niches of the Jurassic period.

While Nature can’t do its selection on ethical grounds, we can, and do, when we select what kinds of companies and rules and power centers are filling which niches in our world. It’s a decentralized operation (like evolution), not controlled by any single entity, but consisting of the “sum total of the wills of the masses,” as Tolsto...
Art Is Art: AI Is the Next Erotica
by Charlie Edwards — 2025-05-22T18:04:55.773Z

As AI generates more of our cultural lives, good art will be much harder to find. Fortunately, I am here to help you through this stressful time. At the end of this, you should be able to tell which piece of AI content is garbage and which might one day be art.

What we will be exploring

Why the highly fertile internet cultural conditions create a need for curation.
Why people hate AI art for three main reasons (the morals, the money and the machines) and its parallels with the early porn industry (sorry to disappoint, but this isn’t a raunchy essay).
Why these arguments are meh and how to spot the generational talent.

What we will be exploring in an

accompanying piece

:

4. Which AI artists will be the superstars of our generation.

What we won’t be explicitly covering here is the obvious fact that we are in a once-in-a-multi-generation cultural explosion in which the means of creating (AI) and owning (NFTs) art change—out of this, there will be some priceless artefacts.

Let's get started to help you find them.

More culture, more problems?

As generative AI

lowers the barriers to entry

for creativity and digitally native property rights mean people

can now get paid

… exponentially more cultural content is being created.

But when culture becomes highly scalable, what is good culture?

Well, we have niggled over what is good art for quite some time, be it

imitation

,

emotion

,

form

, or if it hangs in

greybeard institutions

…

All were widely studied by the few to be ditched by the many when we

traded

the ‘sublime’ of the academic elites for ‘beauty is in the eye of every beholder’ of the masses.

These debates over what constitutes good culture also always intensify when new gadgets enter the arena.

Photography is a great example — it was either meant to cause the

death of painting

or become a

refuge for shit painters

. Turns out there was room for both and neither. The same was true of woodblocks, etching, film, and the list goes on until we reach the AI tools of today.

Throughout each innovation, many of the same arguments are consistent, but the conclusions are similar: of course, it CAN be art, but most of it is shit.

So, we will have to leave the argument that AI cannot be art period at the door because it is too binary, short-sighted and boring. If you disagree, go read some other clickbait and leave mine in p...
Reward button alignment
by Steven Byrnes — 2025-05-22T17:36:50.078Z

In the context of actor-critic model-based RL agents in general, and brain-like AGI in particular, part of the source code is a reward function. The programmers get to put whatever code they want into the reward function slot, and this decision will have an outsized effect on what the AGI winds up wanting to do.

One thing you could do is: hook up the reward function to a physical button on a wall. And then you’ll generally (see caveats below) get an AGI that wants you to press the button.

A nice intuition is addictive drugs. If you give a person or animal a few hits of an addictive drug, then they’re going to want it again. The reward button is just like that—it’s an addictive drug for the AGI.

And then what? Easy, just tell the AGI, “Hey AGI, I’ll press the button if you do (blah)”—write a working app, earn a million dollars, improve the solar cell design, you name it. And then ideally, the AGI will try very hard to do (blah), again because it wants you to press the button.

So, that’s a plan! You might be thinking: this is a very bad plan! Among other issues (see below), the AGI will want to seize control of the reward button, and wipe out humanity to prevent them from turning it off, if that’s possible. And it will surely be possible as we keep going down the road towards superintelligence.

…And you would be right! Reward button alignment is indeed a terrible plan.

So why am I writing a blog post about it? Three reasons:

People will be tempted to try “reward button alignment”, and other things in that genre, even if you and I think they’re very bad plans. So we should understand the consequences in detail—how far can it go before it fails, and then what exactly goes wrong?
It’s not quite as obviously terrible a plan as it sounds, if it’s not the whole plan by itself but rather one stage of a bootstrapping / “AI Control”-ish approach.
It’s a nice case study that illuminates some still-controversial issues in AGI alignment.

So here is my little analysis, in the form of an FAQ.

1. Can we actually get “reward button alignment”, or will there be inner misalignment issues?

In other words, will the AGI actually want you to push the button? Or would it want some random weird thing because inner alignment is hard?

My answer is: yes, it would want you to push the button, at least if we’re talking about brain-like AGI, and if you set things up c...