Open Thread Summer 2026
If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here’s a place to put it.
If you are new to LessWrong, here’s the place to introduce yourself. Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to get from the site and community are invited. This is also the place to discuss feature requests and other ideas you have for the site, if you don’t want to write a full top-level post.
If you’re new to the community, you can start reading the Highlights from the Sequences, a collection of posts about the core ideas of LessWrong.
If you want to explore the community more, I recommend reading the Library, checking recent Curated posts, seeing if there are any meetups in your area, and checking out the Getting Started section of the LessWrong FAQ. If you want to orient to the content on the site, you can also check out the Concepts section.
The Open Thread tag is here. The Open Thread sequence is here.
Hey all, well, I have been wanting to post in LessWrong for a while but I don’t have what is worth being put into a post.
I am a 19 years old AI and robotics engineering undergraduate student from Iraq. Well I am in my sophomore year and I have went through a lot of changes in my mapping of reality. I was raised into Islam, I left that initially when I was 11 but fully left it at 14, I think some books I read then triggered it. I went through an intense 3 months derealization experience after that where I completely lost all sense of reality and self, I had trouble sleeping back then lol. Well that passed and I began building my beliefs from scratch, I read so much philosophy from both east and west, I jumped through a lot of beliefs.
I got into university and I have fallen in love with engineering, but seeing how the world is using AI and the negative effects it is having was quite sad for me, though I didn’t know of the field of AI safety. I became digital privacy obsessed for a while, just to make sure that big corporations don’t collect my data to get used in algorithmic targeting and AI training.
In the meantime, I got into so much experiences, met so much people, had so many conversations, went to many hackathons, met so many CEOs, many so professors, collaborated with other highly passionate students, did public speaking, started some startups. I really used my first 2 years of uni as much as I can. However the need to achieve for my own sake was quite tiring, I must always strive to become “more”, but why? A sense of Nihilism started creeping up on me, I began isolating and spending hours upon hours everyday to write my thoughts down. There was so much forming in my mind that I was struggling to put it all in words and write it, mostly existential questions and realizations.
Well in this time I discovered some interesting resources, like lesswrong, which also got me into AI safety, which I am pivoting to and I got accepted into the technical AI safety program by BlueDot. I noticed that my country still remains unaware of AI safety and its importance, I aim to spread it and start something here. That’s where I grew from wanting to achieve/become more for my sake, to wanting to achieve/become more for others sake, because I realized I actually do believe in creating systems we fully understand that allow us to be more human, rather than take away the qualities that make us human and letting us outsource our thinking for example. I am not even talking about existential risk here, which may or may not happen (I prefer keeping an open stance but keeping in mind the worst option).
I discovered the effective altruism forum and its culture.
And I discovered the work of David Chapman at metarationality.com and meaningness.com, which was quite insightful too. I discovered the sequences and they are really honing my rationality as I am reading them.
I talked with @Kaj_Sotala who offered me great advice as someone new here. I connected with people in the AI safety field.
Regarding what I currently believe, it is a bit hard to put into words. I believe the map is not the territory (ironically, the phrase is also a map), I believe rationality is the best map we have to represent reality, while limited, as all methods and linguistic models are, it is the best we got, and we should aim to hone it and sharpen it.
I also believe reality is paradoxical while maps are perfectly ordered. On one hand, nothing is better or worse and everything is a flavor of reality with meanings assigned by us. On the other hand, I have much grand plans, motivations, and desires. On one hand, I am alive, growing older. On the other hand, I am dying, approaching my death. On one hand, no words or concept can convey reality perfectly. On the other hand, we must seek to understand reality. On one hand, existence is meaningless. On the other hand, existence is so full of meaning.
I believe that I don’t know. Coming to peace with not knowing certain things. Not assuming god or any other story/entity to fill up the gaps. That’s the correct stance when something is beyond our ability to know.
I like this place because it seems to be a group of people who care about their epistemic process and its effects rather than just going through the motions.
Here is my LinkedIn BTW: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aehamhamid/
I am putting all my effort right now on pivoting to AI safety and seeing how I can make an impact in some way.
Hello, and thanks @habryka! I’ve been vaguely aware of LW for several years but only today published my first post after reading recent discussion about whether forecasting is ‘worth it.’
I have quite a specific perspective on this—I work in the tech industry as a product strategist, and the main way I do my work is using forecasting and foresight methods to help people make decisions.
I’m hoping this is a place where I can write more regularly; as well as broaden my knowledge of salient ideas in AI progress/safety & factory farming.
Otherwise, I’m interested in getting to know people in London so will look at attending upcoming meetups—am also a ‘serious’ meditator so always up for a sit.
I hope you write more, especially around foresight-in-practice. I strong-upvoted that post.
Hey, thank you @Mo Putera! That’s encouraging to hear. Drafting something else now, hopefully publishing soonish. Will let you know!
Hello everyone,
I’m a practicing behavior analyst who has spent the past few years lurking in effective altruism spaces. I was first introduced to them by my partner, who works in the field and brought my attention to the causes of AI safety and alignment.
Once I became aware of the risks AI development poses, they felt impossible to ignore, and I’ve found myself increasingly drawn to the conversation about how best to mitigate them. That interest, paired with how often LessWrong comes up in EA circles, is what finally brought me here, and I’ve been blown away by the range and quality of the discussions being had.
Most of what I’ve read up to this point comes from 80,000 Hours and the literature they cite, so I’m glad to be widening that reading here, and I hope eventually to give something back.
What keeps pulling me in is how neatly some behavior-analytic ideas seem to map onto the development and alignment of these systems. To take one example: what’s often called reward hacking looks, from where I sit, a lot like unintended reinforcement, something we struggle with in our practice. The agent optimizes the contingency as written rather than as intended and — like any organism — finds the path of least resistance to the reinforcer, often one the designer never had in mind.
That’s left me with a working hypothesis: that behavior analysts have something of a conceptual head start. That they represent a largely untapped population whose existing foundation could let them move into alignment work more readily.
I’m aware of an obvious objection. Early behaviorism was somewhat limited in its consideration and classification of internal states whereas much of current alignment work involves trying to get inside a model’s representations and goals (interpretability, inner alignment). However, as the field of behavior analysis has grown and its relationship to internal events along with it, I think that initial difference now represents a healthy tension. In fact, I feel as though early skinnerian concepts like “private events” might map fairly well onto the opaque internal computation in LLMs and their chain of thought reasoning that attempts to tact it, perhaps even better than the human subjects to which it was originally applied, though I’d love to hear how people here think about it.
In the meantime, I’d welcome any suggestions on further reading or concrete next steps for someone hoping to help on alignment. Thanks for having me.
Feature request: display time when a user’s comment is made publicly visible by moderators.
https://github.com/TomazKristan/EoM26sort
Fable 5′s safeguards are so sensitive to biology inputs, that I can only use it in Claude Code. Calude.ai’s memory that I am a biotechnologist is enough to trigger and send any question I send down to 4.8
This is presumably not relevant anymore, but.… can you not just turn off memory?
Yes, that is how I confirmed the hypothesis in fact! I didn’t think of it as a big deal, as I almost exclusively use Claude Code over the web interface anyway, I just thought it was interesting how sensitive the safeguards were.
Hey everyone,
I just created this account even if I did hear about this forum a few times in the past especially on X!
I am currently doing research on viral proteins modelling capabilities by LLMs and PLMs (Protein Language Models) and had a few interesting empirical results I wanted to share about how frontier LLMs seems to become surprisingly capable at proteins related tasks (classifying a protein as viral or not), reconstructing a masked protein, etc..
I thought this could spark some interesting discussions (what’s actually going on into the pre training dataset of these models, how scaling is affecting these ‘emerging’ capabilities, etc..) but I was wondering if this would be an appropriate topic for the forum.
Let me know!