trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Toledo
by Yudhister Kumar — 2025-06-20T09:18:27.790Z
Link: https://www.yudhister.me/toledo/

Published September 12, 2023.

One recounts that Washington Irving, who was traveling in Spain at the time, suggested the name to his brother, a local resident; this explanation ignores the fact that Irving returned to the United States in 1832. Others award the honor to Two Stickney, son of the major who quaintly numbered his sons and named his daughters after States. The most popular version attributes the naming to Willard J. Daniels, a merchant, who reportedly suggested Toledo because it 'is easy to pronounce, is pleasant in sound, and there is no other city of that name on the American continent.'

- The Ohio Guide on the naming of Toledo, Ohio

I found myself in Toledo one night.

I was trying to get from Ann Arbor to Boston via Amtrak (I had no working photo ID, and at the time I didn't realize that TSA takes IDs up to one year expired as valid for domestic travel) and for some reason my connection was in Toledo. Bus from Ann Arbor to Toledo, train from Toledo to Boston. Simple.

(it actually was quite simple --- this won't be some sort of beginning to a trashy horror story. Pinky promise)

Abandoned Factories

1967: Super Bowl 1, Apollo 1 blows up, Ali fights the draft, Thurgood Marshall rises to the court, and Detroit dies.

Woe befell America's automotive capital with the long, hot summer of '67 and some of the bloodiest race riots in American history. Eventually LBJ used the Insurrection Act to send the National Guard to quell the riots, but it left the west of Lake Erie a shell of its former self.

Today, Detroit is almost a ghost town. It's defaulted on its debt (and gone bankrupt!), has the 4th highest murder rate in major cities in the USA, and its former mayor was convicted on 24 felony counts and sentenced to 28 years in prison.

Luckily, I wasn't in Detroit! So you can imagine how surprised I was to find a ramshackle paper mill right next to the train station. And next to that was a junkyard, and next to that was another unused factory, and next to that was... you get the picture.

If you were in front of an abandoned factory at 3AM I would certainly hope you at least took a look around inside. Not that I would ever do such a thing, but it seems like such a missed opportunity...

Apparently the dereliction of Detroit's manufacturing capacity took Toledo (and eventually, the rest of the Midwest) with it.

Fellow Travelers

Mainstays on the Amtrak: Mennonites, p...
Graphing AI economic growth rates, or time to Dyson Swarm
by denkenberger — 2025-06-20T07:00:38.299Z

BAU GWP is business as usual gross world product (the global equivalent of GDP).

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Robin Hanson, Anders Sandberg, and others for input on the lines. Errors are my own.

I graphed out a rough approximation[1] of a few leading AI figures’ growth rates to aid comparison (dotted means I wasn't able to get endorsement). The legend is ordered by peak growth rates. I was interested by how many have mentioned approximately monthly doubling rates. At first I was thinking that monthly doubling rates would have about 12 times the annual growth rate of doubling yearly, but it's actually about 4000 times the annual growth rate. With a few assumptions,[2] I estimated that a Dyson Swarm[3] corresponded to about 10^19 larger economy than now. The self replicating nanotechnology scenario could have a doubling time of only a day or less, but I think it would be difficult to do a full Dyson Swarm at that rate, so I just used one week doubling time, or about 15 months to Dyson Swarm. One year doubling time roughly corresponds to a factory making its weight in equipment per year (clanking replicators), the current energy payback time of solar panels, and the old Moore's Law. I've also put some lines on from economists based on consultations with authors of

this

and

this

.

The relevance to AI safety is that I think there is some (negative) correlation between the safety and the rate of change (or the rate of change in the rate of change (

jerk

)?). Interestingly people tend to think The Age of Em would be safer even though its economic growth and especially jerk are high, but that’s because ems are human emulations. I am also interested in people’s opinions of how much safety we would get by going up one of these curves for a little while before getting truly explosive growth (e.g. superintelligence - some discussion is

here

).

^

Generally median, though Hanson has significant probability mass on a population and economic collapse, so this is his median scenario if we get ems.

^

Digital mind speedup of 1 million, power requirement of human to digital mind of 100, ignoring economic growth that could occur without energy consumption increase, ignoring Baumol's Cost Disease

^

Even diamond would not be nearly strong enough to support a solid Dyson Sphere, so it would likely be independent orbiting satellites in a swarm
the silk pajamas effect
by thiccythot — 2025-06-20T03:31:24.430Z

crossposted from substack

It’s tough to get out of bed to do roadwork at 5am when you’ve been sleeping in silk pajamas.

—Marvin Hagler

I’ve been coasting for the past four months. It’s probably been my first extended break in over six years of grinding. My days that were once spent sitting in front of screens for 16 hours a day are now spent playing pickup basketball, learning history and science, writing blog posts, having conversations with other traders, seeing friends, going on dates, and most importantly sleeping nine hours a night.

On the surface, it sounds idyllic, yet underneath, I feel uncertainty.

The reluctance to do the 5am roadwork is easy to rationalize. Managing risk is stressful, takes up most of my days to do properly, and it fucks with my sleep. I wear silk pajamas in the sense that money has stopped being a concern. The freedom feels weightless. I answer to nobody, follow my curiosity, and do whatever I want when I feel like it.

Yet, inexplicably, I know I will return to trading. I’m just not sure when.

I had a conversation with another trader who mentioned that discretionary trading was similar to playing in the NBA, both in its cutthroat competitiveness and in the intensity of commitment required. The analogy stuck with me. I started digging into NBA career data to observe how others have navigated this silk pajamas effect I was feeling.

The NBA is competitive. 518 players played in the league in the 2024-2025 season, representing 0.00001% of all people in the world who play basketball two or more times a month.

The NBA is cutthroat. There are only 450 contracts available (30 teams * 15 roster spots). The median salary is 3.5 million dollars. Securing a contract for just one season could mean life changing money. The churn is real. 17% of the league doesn’t make it to the roster the next season.

The NBA is young. Half of all players are 25 and younger when athleticism, explosiveness, lateral quickness, endurance are at its peak.

In the NBA, it’s hard to be old. Less than one fifth of the players are 30 or older. 5% of players in the league are 35 or older.

Young players are the foot soldiers of the NBA. They produce a fair amount of points, have the energy to do the dirty work the team needs, and most importantly, are underpaid relative to everyone else. Average salaries 2x when players turn 27 and 4x at 30.

Most players don’t survive ver...
Change And Identity: a Story and Discussion on the Evolving Self 
by Rob Lucas — 2025-06-20T01:44:20.912Z
Link: https://open.substack.com/pub/lifeinthelabyrinth/p/change-and-identity

This post is the first in a sequence, which also appears on my Substack page, where I'm working to clarify my views on personal identity and consciousness. It begins with a short piece of fiction, 'Change,' which aims to illustrate the ways our identities and core beliefs transform over decades, serving as a concrete example of the sorts of experiences we've all had. This is meant to inform the further discussion in the second half of the piece 'Identity', which tries to take a more analytical approach to the issue. While some of the foundational concepts explored, like the Ship of Theseus thought experiment, will be familiar to most people here, they primarily serve as a springboard for the subsequent discussion within the piece, and future posts in this sequence. Feel free to skim or skip those sections.

The particular discussion I'm most interested in begins at the end, with "Our Parts Have Independent Histories", but the rest seems important to be able to have that discussion.

The view that I'll be exploring in the series is one that sees the boundaries between people as more permeable than we generally give them credit for, that our connections with each other are stronger than we think while our connections with ourselves (our past selves, our various aspects) are weaker than we think.

I: Change

a story about life and time

Roger walked into a cafe and casually ordered a latte. He was thinking about the chess game he lost last night. The cafe was less a space of tables, chairs, and people and more a blur of brown floor and white walls that melded together into an abstract space as he passed through it. Last night’s chess game was large and vivid in his mind, while the space of the cafe was only a few bits of information, color and noise without shape or form.

He sat down at a table, barely aware of its existence.

“Roger!” The sound of his name brought his awareness back into the external world, which began to take form around him. A woman he didn’t recognize was walking toward him.

There was something strangely familiar about her face: a sharpness to her nose, an asymmetry in her smile, that tugged at something deep in his memory.

“It is you, isn’t it?” She said as she moved closer.

Suddenly it came to him. A strange feeling, like two separate objects clicking into one. Like looking at a small, nearby lamppost and r...
Moving Past the Question of Consciousness: A Thought Experiment
by satchlj — 2025-06-19T19:52:26.777Z
Link: https://satchlj.com/blog/moving-past-the-question-of-consciousness/

Humans are contacted by a mysterious type of being calling themselves “Galabren” who say they are “aelthous”. They’d like to know if we, too, are aelthous, since if we are they’d like to treat us well, as they care about aelthous things.

We ask the Galabren what aelthous means and they say it’s difficult to describe—that essentially there’s a feeling of aelthousness which has something to do with what it feels like from the inside to exist as a Galabren (and perhaps as other beings too, they’re not sure).

Aelthousness isn’t obviously necessary to explain any of their objective behaviors; the only reason they know it’s there is because they can feel it.

It’s very clear to us that we are fundamentally different from the Galabren. They can process information much more quickly than us and have all sorts of sensory modes completely different from our senses which are extremely high definition. They communicate wordlessly and telepathically with each other and they share memories. Being a Galabren feels different than being a human.

But are we aelthous? It’s hard to tell. We can’t truly know what the Galabren mean by aelthous without actually being a Galabren, which we can’t do. When we use the words “what it feels like” we might even mean a completely different thing by “feels like” than them. We don’t actually know how to talk about first person experiences with other humans—we can point to an experience with words and hope that since other humans are similar to us they will know what we’re pointing at, but for Galabren there is no such assurance.

What we can talk about and agree on with Galabren is a third person perspective about both of our physical and functional forms, how they are similar and how they differ. But without knowing exactly which of their forms combine to form aelthousness, we can’t know if we share them, or if aelthousness can exist as a result of multiple different structures.[1]

So we need to circle back to the question of what we should expect the Galabren to do in this situation.

I think the correct response is for the Galabren to realize that their question of whether humans are aelthous is not well framed. Aelthousness is not something that can be defined; it’s inherently an inside view and breaks down when viewed from the outside/third person. It’s not a useful concept, since it’s not clear how it maps anything in the territory.

What’s useful...
S-Expressions as a Design Language: A Tool for Deconfusion in Alignment

by Johannes C. Mayer — 2025-06-19T19:03:13.418Z

TL;DR: S-expressions are a minimal structure language for early-stage conceptual engineering (aka deconfusion). They are especially useful in alignment, where the hardest part is often figuring out what the problem even is. S-expressions do not enforce any semantics. This lets you write down structure before you know what the structure means. You can define partial concepts, factor arguments, link components, and reuse references, all without committing to types, schemas, or logic. The result is a format that makes conceptual confusion structurally visible, enables simple programmatic tooling, and uses natural language to carry provisional meaning. They are not a programming tool per se. They are a design scaffold for when your theory is still under construction.

A central problem in alignment research is that we often can't even represent the thing we're trying to solve. It's not just about formalizing ideas. It's about forming them in the first place—building coherent internal structure around concepts that are still vague.

In practice, this process unfolds in stages:

You notice that some structural insight exists—you glimpse that there's a “there” there.

You work to make the idea coherent: to lay out its parts, dependencies, and implications—even if imprecisely.

Only then do you translate it into a precise formal system.

Most research tools (e.g. programming languages, theorem provers) are built for stage 3. But in alignment, the hard step is usually stage 2. It’s not that we can’t formalize things. It’s that the ontology is underdefined, the relationships are unclear, and the whole structure is unstable.

To move forward, we need a design language. Not a language for computation. A language for exploring and organizing structure before it’s nailed down. One that forces coherence without demanding premature precision.

This essay presents the hypothesis that S-expressions are the best format we have for this. They provide minimal syntax with maximal compositionality. They let you define and reuse concepts, see your structure grow, track unresolved parts, and manipulate the system programmatically—all without committing to any semantics you’re not ready to specify.

This is not about Lisp or programming. It’s about writing down vague ideas in a way that forces epistemic structure—and then lets you grow that structure into a real theory.

The point is to understand...
AISEC: Why to not to be shy.
by xen9 — 2025-06-19T18:16:48.908Z

0: Unlike nuclear weapons, AI capabilities can be used without immediately angering the public or damaging the enemy.

1: In fact, the most effective doctrine of AI weaponry is to not to use it at all against the enemy, but only for its own development. Besides the recursive effect, using it against the enemy spoils your current capabilities which weakens your deterrence and potentially makes it easier for the enemy to catch up.

2: The amount of nuclear weapons can be hidden for sufficiently large mainland if the government is well-funded.

3: Compute generates heat, requires electricity, and requires not only for heat capture and electricity but also for the compute itself a large industrial base, which has to, additionally, for security reasons, to be somewhat self-enclosed once waste chips begin to accumulate.

4: They can be put underground, but this makes sense if you can also hide all input and output traffick from satellite intelligence. They can be distributed approximately at less than 50% ± 25% overall performance decrease, but unless the distribution is extremely effecient camouflage, you have to make much more units of compute ane infastructure, which can be counterproductive to hiding.

5: The cost of hiding, both in time and money, easily becomes prohibtive in an arms race against adversarial nation-states, due to the time cost of not having the best AI capabilities as soon as possible; cost of hiding in addition to above reasons when having to be done as soon as possible increases much faster than when constructing non-time-penalized projects.

6: Therefore it makes no sense – under the presumed unaforelayed premises – to hide the compute.

Edit log from earliest to most recent:

Fixed note indexing and added the three separators and everything below them because user "(hidden)" pointed out that "Format note: your list is missing a number 3.", which is correct. For reference, I separately also note that the indexing of notes in above text was conventional rather than syllogistic.

In the previous edit log entry, user "(hidden)" was actually merely subjectively hidden being actually user "Gyrodiot". For reference, I also note that I prefer avoiding nested edit logs in my LessWrong "posts."
LLMs as amplifiers, not assistants
by Caleb Biddulph — 2025-06-19T17:21:39.625Z

Since ChatGPT, the "assistant" frame has dominated how we think about LLMs. Under this frame, AI is a helpful person-like entity which helpfully completes tasks for humans.

This frame isn't perfect, especially when we think about its implications from a safety perspective. Assistant training encourages the model to treat itself as an independent entity from the user, with its own personality and goals. We try to encourage the model to have the “goal” of serving the user, but it’s natural to wonder if the assistant’s goals are really as aligned as we might hope.

There are other frames we could use to think about how LLMs could help us. Some of these goals may be safer, particularly if they make the concepts of “goals,” “identity,” or “personality” less salient to the LLM.[1]

Here's one underexplored frame: AI as a tool that amplifies the user’s existing agency by predicting the outputs that they would have produced given more time, energy, or resources.

In this post, I’ll argue for training AI to act as an “amplifier.” This new frame could help us sidestep some potential alignment problems, tethering the AI's behavior more closely to human actions in the real world and reducing undefined “gaps” in the AI’s specification from which dangerous behaviors could emerge.

Assistants vs. amplifiers

An amplifier helps you accomplish what you're already trying to do, just faster and more effectively. Rather than responding to you as a separate agent with its own identity, it extends your capabilities by predicting what you would have done with more resources.

You can think of an amplifier as a function: (current state + user volition) → (new state).

The state could be a codebase, a document, your email inbox, or even the entire world.
The user’s volition can be inferred from context: a user-provided description of what they intend to do next, patterns from previous user interactions, or clues in the state itself.

Most assistant-style queries could be reframed as predictions, answering the question “what would the user do if they had more resources to devote to this task?”

Assistant query	Counterfactual to predict
Please write an essay on the Civil War.	What essay would I write if I spent several hours researching and writing about the Civil War?
Generate an image of my dog in a Batman costume.	If I dressed my dog as Batman and photographed him, what would that look like?
Reser

...
How The Singer Sang His Tales
by adamShimi — 2025-06-19T17:06:46.850Z
Link: https://formethods.substack.com/p/how-the-singer-sang-his-tales

A few weeks ago, I read “

The Egg of a Sea-bird

” on Casey Dué’s substack, and got really interested in the work of Milman Parry and his assistant and successor Albert Lord.

We’ll dig into the details, but broadly, Parry realized that the Homeric epics (both The Illiad and The Odyssey) were highly formulaic: they tended to use the same clusters or words, maybe adapted to the situation, a lot. And these tended to fit the constraint of the dactylic hexameter, the meter of Ancient Greek Poetry. From there, he realized that this property of Homer probably came from oral composition (as in composing the poem orally, in performance, as opposed to through writing), and went to study one of the last living oral epic tradition in Yugoslavia with his student and then assistant Albert Lord.

Now, I’m even less an expert on this topic than on what I usually write about. I can’t even read either of the languages, Ancient Greek and Serbo-Croatian, in which are composed the oral poems forming the basic data set for this research direction. So there is no way I’m going to fully do justice to the texts themselves, or come up with any new insight about them.

Yet even such my cursory understanding revealed a treasure of methodological insights, and that is something I’m fit to discuss in details.

Broadly, the Parry-Lord theory of composition offers me a way to explore three key methodological ideas:

How phenomenological compressions (summarizing the various patterns in the data) tends to precede mechanistic modelling (explaining how the system works), despite the modern mistake to equate “theory” with the latter.
How the mechanistic model of oral composition corresponds with the independently developed methods of the computer science field of procedural generation, and yet has sufficiently different goals to bring about some significant differences
A rich picture of the layers of epistemic regularities at play in most successful human endeavors (both for the oral singers and for the reconstruction of oral composition by analogy and textual analysis)

The Parry-Lord Story

Milman Parry, while an undergraduate in the 1920s, became obsessed with the highly formulaic aspect of Homer, and started a detailed and statistical study of these formulas, pushing the idea much further than anyone else before him. This eventually lead him to defend a brilliant PhD thesis in Paris, defending by this kind ...