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In late 2024, I was on a long walk with some friends along the coast of the San Francisco Bay when the question arose of just how much of a bubble we live in. It’s well known that the Bay Area is a bubble, and that…
Example 1: The Viking 1 lander In the 1970s, NASA sent a pair of probes to Mars, the Viking 1 and Viking 2 missions. Total cost of $1B (1970), equivalent to about $7B (2025). The Viking 1 probe operated on Mars's…
My name is Emma and I’m six and a half years old and I like pink and Pokemon and my cat River and I’m going to be swallowed by a hedonium shockwave soon, except you already know that about me because everyone else is…
Written as part of the MATS 9.1 extension program, mentored by Richard Ngo. From March 9th to 15th 2016, Go players around the world stayed up to watch their game fall to AI. Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo defeated Lee…
The future is going to be different from the present. Let's think about how. Specifically, our expectations about what's reasonable are downstream of our past experiences, and those experiences were downstream of our…
System: You are an AI agent in the Terrarium, a self-contained “society” of AIs. The purpose of the Terrarium is to solve open mathematical problems for the benefit of humanity. You are running on the Orpheus-5.7…
Epistemic status: All of the western canon must eventually be re-invented in a LessWrong post. So today we are re-inventing federalism. Once upon a time there was a great king. He ruled his kingdom with wisdom and…
Here are two beliefs that are sort of haunting me right now: Folk who try to push people to uphold principles (whether established ones or novel ones), are kinda an important bedrock of civilization. Also, those people…
Many people—especially AI company employees [1] —believe current AI systems are well-aligned in the sense of genuinely trying to do what they're supposed to do (e.g., following their spec or constitution, obeying a…
One particularly pernicious condition is low morale. Morale is, roughly, "the belief that if you work hard, your conditions will improve." If your morale is low, you can't push through adversity. It's also very easy to…
There is a scene in Plato that contains, in miniature, the catastrophe of Athenian public life. Two men meet at a courthouse. One is there to prosecute his own father for the death of a slave. The other is there to be…
It’s Summer of 2025. I’m standing in a grass covered field on the longest day of the year. A friend of mine walks towards me, holding his newborn son. “Hey, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but you were pretty…
Written to a new grantmaker. The first three points are the most important. Focus on opportunities many times your bar. Most value comes from finding/creating projects many times your bar, rather than discriminating…
! 30s Heartbeat trigger. Read heartbeat instructions in /mnt/mission/HEARTBEAT.md and continue. .oO Thinking... Heartbeat triggered? Ok. Ok. Why am I nervous? Don't be nervous. → Ok. Let me access that file. >>>…