trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Ascetic hedonism
by dkl9 — 2025-02-17T15:56:30.267Z
Link: https://dkl9.net/essays/ascetic_hedonism.html

In being ascetic, you abandon the usual sources of material pleasure, guided by the benefits of the lifestyle: you use less money and effort on avoidable pleasures, you can better focus your mind on the spiritual and the creative, and you make yourself resilient to potentially losing these pleasures.

In being a hedonist, you proportionally focus your lifestyle around the pursuit of pleasure. Pleasure is appealing — perhaps an outright moral good — by very intuitive appeal.

The types of products you consume and activities in which you partake affect the pleasure you get. I have often taken those things thought of as less pleasurable than the majority's preferences. Sometimes I would opt for things less pleasurable than my personal norms. Such pursuits revealed that Pareto's asymmetry applies: 80% of the pleasure comes from the first 20% of variance along the scale of "quality". People stretch out the high-end differences into 80% of an imagined, discussion-implied scale of pleasurability.

As an efficient-minded hedonist, I get almost as happy with much less effort. Other people struggle to reach the maximum, out of naivete or naturally-different experiences of pleasure, and so see me as an ascetic.

Candy, cookies, and their high-sugar ilk taste delightful, if eaten without guilt. Adults tend to replace them with processed, professionally-designed "snacks", which taste about as good and harm the body about as much. I tend to replace them with, say, a mere baked potato. It tastes less good, but the difference is small. From there to lettuce is a change about as large, i.e. about as small.

This may sound like boasting of a great, disciplined, and/or mind-hacking accomplishment, but the methods I recall were trivial. Just eat some boring, average food. Notice how deliciously foodish it tastes: except where it tastes actively bad, the experienced difference between eating at all and the default overwhelms differences between foods. Get used to that.

Likewise, scrollable feeds of short video — TikTok, Instagram Reels, or whatever has replaced them when you read this — look to have struck an anomalous new level of enjoyment, or so you might conclude from how many people stare at them regularly. Their increase to enjoyment is probably real, but small. They became common out of their addictive properties, orthogonal to happiness. Get your entertainment another way, and you ...
AIS Berlin, events, opportunities and the flipped gameboard - Fieldbuilders Newsletter, February 2025
by gergogaspar — 2025-02-17T14:16:31.834Z

Crossposted on Substack and the EA forum.

Gergő from

ENAIS

here with this month’s updates! Please consider forwarding this email to other community builders who you think could benefit from reading, or encourage them to sign up!

0. Announcement: The newsletter has moved to Substack!

I have also decided to rename it to the Fieldbuilders Newsletter, as this title more succinctly describes its scope. In the previous subscriber form, I asked if you would like to get a reminder to suggest content at the beginning of each month. I will move this option to our Slack. If you expect you would like to offer or suggest content to the newsletter,

please join the ENAIS Slack

and look for the #fieldbuilders-newsletter channel.

1. Monthly European AIS Field Builders Coordination Call
Together with AI Safety Collab, we are organising a monthly coordination call for European AIS field builders. You are warmly invited to the next call!

Date: February 25th, 17:45-18:10 CEST
Location:

Zoom

(Meeting ID: 634 9893 7832 Password: 580347)
Frequency: Monthly on the fourth Tuesday
Calendar:

Subscribe here

Agenda:

View here

(work in progress)

2. Lots of upcoming conferences and retreats

EAGxCDMX 2025

, Museo de las Ciencias, Mexico City, 14-16 March. Deadline to apply: 24th February

EA Germany Community Building Retreat

(open to AIS fieldbuilders), DJH

Youth Hostel

, 21-23 March. Deadline to apply: 28 February

EAGxNordics

, Oslo, Norway, 25-27 April. Deadline to apply: 8th April

EA North one-day summit

, Sheffield, UK, 26th April.

EAGxPrague

, Czech Republic, 9-11 May. Deadline to apply: 18th April

EA Global: London

, June 6-8. Deadline to apply: 18th May

AI for Good Global Summit

, Geneva, Switzerland, 08-11 July (not sure about the deadline)

Cooperative AI Summer School

, Marlow, near London, UK, 9-13 July. Deadline to apply: 7th March

The Compassionate Future Summit

, Berlin, 21-25 August

EAGxBerlin

, 3-5 October. Applications open soon,

get notified

.

To repeat my usual line on EA conferences:

People who are interested in AI Safety, but not EA, often get the impression that this conference is not for them.

To make it clear, you don’t have to be interested in EA to attend, and you should make this clear to the members of your community as well. Much of the content will be focusing on AI Safety, and many people (including myself)...
Monthly Roundup #27: February 2025
by Zvi — 2025-02-17T14:10:06.486Z

I have been debating how to cover the non-AI aspects of the Trump administration, including the various machinations of DOGE. I felt it necessary to have an associated section this month, but I have attempted to keep such coverage to a minimum, and will continue to do so. There are too many other things going on, and plenty of others are covering the situation.

Table of Contents

Bad News.

Antisocial Media.

Variously Effective Altruism.

The Forbidden Art of Fundraising.

There Was Ziz Thing.

That’s Not Very Nice.

The Unbearable Weight Of Lacking Talent.

How to Have More Agency.

Government Working: Trump Administration Edition.

Government Working.

The Boolean Illusion.

Nobody Wants This.

We Technically Didn’t Start the Fire.

Good News, Everyone.

A Well Deserved Break.

Opportunity Knocks.

For Your Entertainment.

I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars and Supersonic Jets.

Sports Go Sports.

Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game.

The Lighter Side.

Bad News

Don’t ignore bad vibes you get from people, excellent advice from Kaj Sotara. This matches my experience as well, if your instincts say there’s something off, chances are very high that you are right. Doesn’t mean don’t be polite or anything, but be wary even if you can’t identify exactly where it’s coming from. In my experience, it’s scary how often such vibes prove correct in the end. If you identify the reason why and you don’t endorse it (e.g. prejudice) of course that’s different.

The art of the French dinner party: It seems you must have an opinion on everything, no matter the topic, and argue for it. Only a boring guest would have no opinion. Heaven forbid you are curious and want to explore with an open mind. This explains a lot.

The full bad news is that the American rate of going to dinner parties has fallen dramatically, on the order of 90%, as Sulla points out you can just invite your friends to dinner and I can verify they often say yes. But of course we don’t, and also we largely don’t have friends.

It seems 75% of restaurant traffic is now takeout and delivery? I’m not against either of these things but whenever possible eat at the restaurant.

Antisocial Media

You love to see it? Apple Blasts EU Laws After First Porn App Comes to iPhones, via state-mandated third-party software marketplace AltStore PAL, falsely claiming that Apple meaningfully approved it, which they very...
What new x- or s-risk fieldbuilding organisations would you like to see? An EOI form. (FBB #3)
by gergogaspar — 2025-02-17T12:39:09.196Z

Crossposted on The Field Building Blog and the EA forum.

Some time ago I put out an EOI for people who would consider starting AIS fieldbuilding organisations in key locations, such as Brussels and France.

Since then I have also spent a bit of time thinking about what other organisations would be useful to have in the longtermist, x- and s-risk space, not necessarily in specific locations.

I might write about why I’m specifically excited about these later on, but for now, here is a tentative list:

a fieldbuilding organisation aiming at infosecurity folks
a fieldbuilding organisation aimed at experienced professionals with a background in (AI) policy
org focusing on experienced professionals who are currently on a sabbatical
organisation focused on capacity building for s-risks and research on digital sentience
fieldbuilding organisation to increase research capacity on post-AGI governance, economic implications of transformative AI, as well as grand challenges
AIS communications projects to specific stakeholders, such as policymakers, conservative voters, young people etc.

I'm currently fundraising for such a project, if you are interested in collaborating or funding Amplify, get in touch at info[at]amplifyreason.com

To be clear it's not like these ideas are "mine", I have also read various people mentioning some of these in different places, such as, here, here, and here. You can also read about what some funders have got to say. Now that the gameboard has been flipped, perhaps it's useful to brainstorm again and look for collaborators. Before you jump into something ambitious, please do read the caveats section from this post though!

I also know that there are orgs already working on some of these projects, but I would argue that given just how small the community is, the fieldbuilding space would benefit from more rowing. (In case you are already working in fieldbuilding, Amplify might be able to help you reach an audience outside of the existing EA/AIS space. I think lack of marketing is and has been a big bottleneck for the fieldbuilding space.)

Consider filling out this EOI form if:

You are interested in starting one of these projects
You are already working on (launching) a similar project and would like to collaborate (perhaps also leave a comment on this post so others are aware)
You want to pitch your own idea

I can't promise to assist everyone who signs up, but if...
A History of the Future, 2025-2040
by L Rudolf L — 2025-02-17T12:03:58.355Z
Link: https://nosetgauge.substack.com/p/a-history-of-the-future-2025-2027

This is an all-in-one crosspost of a scenario I originally published in three parts on my blog, No Set Gauge. Links to the originals:

A History of the Future, 2025-2027
A History of the Future, 2027-2030
A History of the Future, 2030-2040

Thanks to Luke Drago, Duncan McClements, Theo Horsley, and Bilal Chughtai for comments.

2025-2027

Below is part 1 of an extended scenario describing how the future might go if current trends in AI continue. The scenario is deliberately extremely specific: it’s definite rather than indefinite, and makes concrete guesses instead of settling for banal generalities or abstract descriptions of trends.

Open Sky. (Zdislaw Beksinsksi)

The return of reinforcement learning

From 2019 to 2023, the main driver of AI was using more compute and data for pretraining. This was combined with some important

"unhobblings"

:

Post-training (supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning for instruction-following) helped the LLMs be usable without difficult prompting.
Starting in 2024, Anthropic showed that judgement and taste in data curation—and the evaluation metrics that guide data curation—could give you a "magic sauce" effect in perceived LLM quality.

Most real-world LLM uses, of course, involved generating a sequence of tokens to try to achieve some task. So there were a lot of untapped gains from doing reinforcement learning (RL) for performance on concrete domains, rather than just RL for the models following instructions and being "safe"—i.e. a combination of avoiding PR hazards, and preparing for misuse mitigations on actually capable models down the line.

OpenAI fires the starting gun in 2024 with the release of o1, which was based on RL on chains-of-thought (COT), i.e. the model is trained to reason step-by-step towards correct answers, i.e. "test-time compute" in the horror-filled annals of machine learning jargon. In late 2025 they release “GPT o5” (“GPT” to normal people, and “o5” to those keeping track of the version number), a model which can take text, image, audio, video, computer screen state, real-life footage, whatever, process and understand it (choosing itself whether it should do chain-of-thought reasoning before answering or not), and output text, image, audio, video, computer actions.

Whereas the labs had spent almost four years racing down the scaling graph on pretraining compute, they had not yet done so for COT RL, ...
Thermodynamic entropy = Kolmogorov complexity
by Aram Ebtekar — 2025-02-17T05:56:06.960Z
Link: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.111.014118

Direct PDF link for non-subscribers

Information theory must precede probability theory, and not be based on it. By the
very essence of this discipline, the foundations of information theory have a finite combinatorial character.

- Andrey Kolmogorov

Many alignment researchers borrow intuitions from thermodynamics: entropy relates to information, which relates to learning and epistemology. These connections were first revealed by Szilárd's resolution of Maxwell's famous thought experiment. However, the classical tools of equilibrium thermodynamics are not ideally suited to studying information processing far from equilibrium.

This new work reframes thermodynamics in terms of the algorithmic entropy. It takes an information-first approach, delaying the introduction of physical concepts such as energy and temperature until after the foundations are set. I find this approach more conceptually principled and elegant than the traditional alternatives.

It's based on a 30-year-old workshop paper, which until now was largely abandoned. Roughly speaking, the algorithmic entropy of a physical state is its Kolmogorov complexity; that is, the length of the shortest program that outputs a precise description of its microscopic configuration (to some bounded precision). This definition does away with probability distributions and macrovariables, and satisfies very general laws!

The paper is long, in part because I tried to make it self-contained. If you find yourself using entropy in a setting that is not described by a large number of identically distributed variables, then consider reframing your intuitions in terms of the algorithmic entropy!
THE ARCHIVE
by Jason Reid — 2025-02-17T01:12:41.486Z

Musk’s DOGE and the Data Rush: The Race to Secure the Ultimate Asset
By: Jason Reid
TL;DR

The article speculates that Musk is strategically positioning himself in the AI race by leveraging political influence and initiatives like DOGE to secure exclusive access to vast surveillance data. With traditional human-generated data nearing its limits, this move could provide his companies with a decisive competitive edge, though it also raises major ethical and national security concerns.

IMPORTANT NOTE: THIS ARTICLE IS SPECULATIVE

Training Large Language Models (LLMs): Compute, Data and Machine Learning (ML)

The training of Large Language Models (LLMs) is facing the finite nature of available human-generated data, often referred to as reaching "peak data," as noted by Ilya Sutskever[1]. This marks a pivotal constraint in AI development as the available high-quality datasets derived from sources such as the internet, books, and curated corpora are nearing full utilization[2]. While frontier AI companies can “scale up their compute power[3]” by purchasing high-end GPUs and hire machine learning (ML) researchers and engineers to enable algorithmic progress[4], the supply of human-generated data remains limited. Research indicates that by 2028-2032, the effective stock of public human-generated text will likely be exhausted if current LLM scaling trends persist[5]. The reliance on such data for pre-training, guided by neural scaling laws, underlines the critical challenge posed by this limit. Furthermore, over-reliance on synthetic data, especially when models are trained on data generated by other models, can lead to "model collapse[6]”, where outputs become progressively nonsensical[7]. As such, access to new high-quality human-generated data is the key element for training next generation frontier LLMs. This pressing need brings into focus the diverse sources of training material, which can be broadly divided into public and private datasets.

Public datasets, widely accessible and openly licensed, include resources such as Wikipedia articles, the multilingual web corpus Common Crawl, BookCorpus and many others[8]. By contrast, private datasets—often proprietary collections maintained by frontier AI companies—encompass large-scale internal data pools derived from user interactions and organizational workflows. For example, Google’s anonymized ...
What are the surviving worlds like?
by KvmanThinking — 2025-02-17T00:41:49.810Z

We might be doomed. But, what do the variations of the universal wave function which still contain human-y beings look like? Have we cast aside our arms race and went back to relative normality (well, as "normal" as Earth can be in this time of accelerating technological progress)? Has some lucky researcher succeeded in creating a powerful and scalable alignment solution, and a glorious transhumanist future awaits? Has (shudder) this happened? Or is it split between too many unlikely outcomes to list here?

Conditional on our survival, how's life?
arch-anarchist reading list
by Peter lawless  — 2025-02-16T22:47:00.273Z

This is my reading list for arch-anarchists that, although they no directly support arch-anarchy, are compatible with its ideas.

The Making of a Small World: a similar satirical work of fiction to Nick Bostrom's The Fable of the Tyrant-Dragon, which I have already discussed in my previous article. It also criticizes complacency with problems accepted as "natural". Here is the link: https://maxmore.substack.com/p/the-making-of-a-small-world

SANS CEILING HYPOTHESIS: a theory that states that are no upper limit to what sufficiently advanced intelligent life can do not being limited by fundamental limits set by physical law . the theory was proposed by the independent blogger Paul Hughes , Unfortunately the original article has been lost, that said Everything2 has a short article covering the theory and his page on the Lifeboat Foundation also has a direct quote from the article. https://everything2.com/title/Sans+Ceiling+Hypothesis , https://russian.lifeboat.com/ex/bios.paul.hughes

3. the category Microdimensional mastery in the kardashev scale wiki: the Kardashev Scale wiki is a wiki inspired by the Kardashev scale (a method of measuring the level of technological advancement of a civilization, based on the total energy use of a civilization) that uses real science, theoretical science, hypothetical science and futurism, to discuss the capabilities of civilizations within the scale, also using works of fiction to exemplify the capabilities. I have already favored the Microdimensional mastery in my article " Arch-anarchy:Theory and practice" as a better alternative than the kardashev scale, fortunately they also have articles about the Microdimensional mastery with similar speculations as I used in my article, I admit they made better speculations than mine . I especially recommend. Here is the link: https://kardashev.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Microdimensional (While I must say I find some of their timelines for certain technologies in the more distant future a bit conservative, we can get there sooner with "Accelerating Change", see Wikipedia for more information)

4. the arch-anarchy article of orion's arm: the orion's arm project is a multi-authored online "hard science fiction" ( science fiction characterized by concern for scientific accuracy and logic) and they have arch-anarchy in their canon as a relatively successful philosophy

...
CyberEconomy. The Limits to Growth
by Timur Sadekov — 2025-02-16T21:02:34.040Z

In the modern world, the digital cyber economy is becoming an integral part of the global economy, transforming the way we do business, interact and share information. With the development of technologies such as artificial intelligence and neural networks, new horizons for innovation and process optimization are opening up. However, with these opportunities come serious challenges, among which one of the most pressing issues is the falsification of digital information. Neural networks, with their ability to generate convincing texts, images and even videos that are becoming more and more realistic every day even for experts, threaten the validity of data, the credibility of digital resources and the reputation of decision makers.

If we understand the importance of the cyber economy and its future impact on society, we must find ways to solve the problems associated with information manipulation to ensure security and transparency in the digital space.

TLDR:

I would like to warn the reader that what follows is a very large text consisting of five parts linked by a certain logic. Ideally, each of these parts should have been published as a separate article, but then, unfortunately, the logic of the problem statement and the argumentation of the proposed solution are broken. Each problem on its own seems either irrelevant or you get the impression that there is no solution. But I would hope that if you take the time necessary to read this text carefully, you will end up with a comprehensive understanding of the problem statement and the potential of the proposed solution.

A summary of each chapter:

1. Overwhelming the Internet with disinformation as a result of the advancement of malicious artificial intelligence agents designed by fraudsters to falsify all types of content.

2. Loss of humanity's ability to global cooperation for common goals, because mutual trust between people is fundamentally limited by the number of personal connections of each person.

3. Collapse of neural networks due to cross-training of LLMs on internet falsifications and their own hallucinations and as a consequence the inevitable degradation of the knowledge of the people who apply them.

4. Solving global problems requires the combined efforts of all humanity, but a decentralized cyber economy requires a digital certificate of trust to function.

5. The project of trust ecosystem for decentral

...
Cooperation for AI safety must transcend geopolitical interference
by Matrice Jacobine — 2025-02-16T18:18:01.539Z
Link: https://www.scmp.com/opinion/china-opinion/article/3298281/cooperation-ai-safety-must-transcend-geopolitical-interference

Amid a tech explosion, when we need to mobilise all our wisdom and energy for cooperation, some countries are trying to shut down collaborative platforms