Arjun Panickssery

• Arjun Panickssery 5 Sep 2026 17:45 UTC

  6 points

  9

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: PauseAI Has ‘offi­cially dis­endorsed’ PauseAI-US

  It‘s kind of like repeatedly saying that “ah yes, but these soldiers did murder people” when someone brings up a country’s military gambit as something to study. No shit Sherlock, that’s their whole job.

  Assuming you’re talking about soldiers killing active enemy combatants, then that is not murder. In general, soldiers killing active enemy combatants isn’t murder as it is permitted under the customary laws of war, and murder isn’t part of their jobs.

• Arjun Panickssery 5 Sep 2026 2:10 UTC

  22 points

  18

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: PauseAI Has ‘offi­cially dis­endorsed’ PauseAI-US

  Why do people keep thinking that?

  People keep saying that because it’s commonly understood to be a core part of the Nuremberg trials. (Claude output as an example below.)

  Maybe this is a cultural difference, as I can imagine that in Germany the primary talking point about the Nuremberg trials is only that it didn’t go far enough … But the key parts of calling for “Nuremberg trials” I think are that

  • they charge defendants with capital crimes

  • they target leaders like politicians, business executives, etc

  • they retroactively introduce new crimes

  • they reject the so-called “Nuremberg defense” that defendants were following orders

  

• Arjun Panickssery 4 Sep 2026 8:20 UTC

  35 points

  16

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: PauseAI Has ‘offi­cially dis­endorsed’ PauseAI-US

  Given that you conceded immediately that you oppose ex post facto laws, it’s mostly just a semantic debate remaining—but the term “Nuremberg trials” in my mind basically means “we form an extraordinary tribunal of our friends and execute our defeated enemies for breaking retroactive laws we make.” So that explains the feeling of a call for violence: the extralegal element.

  For example, Julius Streicher was convicted and executed only for “crimes against humanity,” a crime invented for the trial itself, on the basis that he was an anti-semitic propagandist (he founded Der Stürmer), which was not illegal at the time. So someone might think that those who advance a “Nuremberg Trial” want pro-AGI propagandists to be retroactively tried and executed.

• Arjun Panickssery 23 Aug 2026 19:43 UTC

  8 points

  4

  in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: AllAmer­i­canBreak­fast’s Shortform

  A given reader values brevity in his reading material because the information is delivered more efficiently. But this conflicts with a writer’s advantages from increasing throughput (by reducing editing time), occupying more mindshare/​volume in discourse, providing more content to the base of readers who enjoy his voice, etc.

• Arjun Panickssery 11 Aug 2026 0:13 UTC

  7 points

  −4

  on: Ar­jun Pan­ickssery’s Shortform

  I think LW posts often have chaotic formatting: headings and subheadings but then also lists and sublists, all with both bold and italics used for multiple purposes like emphasis, labeling a paragraph, etc. It’s especially confusing when the post has multiple sections and those sections have different formatting methods, like if one is a nested list with multiple layers while another has paragraphs with the first sentence in bold like in a paper, etc.

  I think it’s usually better within a single post to use e.g. only one level of heading, one level of list depth, and to use bold for emphasis, without using italics for emphasis. And many posts that are ~1k words or shorter don’t need headings.
  
  update: As an example, Matt Levine’s blog has headings, italics but not bold for emphasis, and one level of list depth.

• Arjun Panickssery 5 Aug 2026 4:17 UTC

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: Rauno Arike’s comment on: Rauno’s Shortform

  I have been meaning to make an account with some tool that alerts me about backlinks anywhere on the Internet to my LW posts, Substack posts, personal website, tweets, etc. I’m pretty sure there are some tools like that but they’re hard to tell apart. Right now I have a tool that’s supposed to notify me about referencing to my name but I’m not sure it even works properly.

  If anyone can recommend a tool like this that would be helpful.

• Arjun Panickssery 26 Jul 2026 1:53 UTC

  35 points

  18

  in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: nikola’s Shortform

  Before I started at METR I dropped out of Caltech and had written two random interp papers

  Not to belabor your specific case—I agree directionally that there’s no intense gatekeeping or connections needed—but you worked at Jane Street and MIRI and then did MATS before joining METR right . . . OP’s claim isn’t that specific time-consuming credentials are needed but that even “smarts + unpredictable fit” things are hard to signal in an application from outside (without PhDs or work experience).

Post­ing Some Prompts

Just Post­ing Some Prompts

• Arjun Panickssery 6 Jul 2026 3:17 UTC

  14 points

  0

  on: Ar­jun Pan­ickssery’s Shortform

  Hard to make a list off the top of my head—maybe I could keep a running list and post it when it reaches a certain length—but I feel like the LessWrong react options are often disappointing. For example, I might search for a react that means “can you define this /​ be more specific /​ what does this mean” but fail to find one.

  Meanwhile, there are a bunch of reacts whose purpose I don’t understand: Moloch, Paperclip, “I beseech you!”

  I also wouldn’t use some of the complimentary ones, like “Concrete” or “Scout Mindset,” because I imagine they would seem patronizing, pointless, etc. in any context.

  My intuition for reacts is that they compactly add info that would be cluttering as a reply to a lengthy post. For example:

  1. If a lengthy post contains “I have often heard AI safety researchers say they are motivated by high earnings” then I could react with “+1″ to indicate that I have also heard that, instead of saying so in a very short reply

  2. If a post has a typo, I could react with “Typo” (though I’ve never actually done that)

  3. The “X% Likely” reacts also fit into this theme.

  In particular, I imagine using these when I’m not part of the thread (because otherwise I could mention them in the reply), which means that it’s not clear how the writer is supposed to engage, so the audience is mainly other readers.

• Arjun Panickssery 30 Jun 2026 16:14 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Dean Valentine’s comment on: lc’s Shortform

  There is a common impulse to irrationally favor the apparently weaker party in any (even consensual and transparent) transaction. For example, many people dislike when a low-skill worker agrees to work for low wages, or a tenant agrees to rent with the possibility of high rent increases, or when a gambler agrees to partake in a casino that includes predictable losses and a policy of banning winning players. This is just another example of that. In reality it makes perfect sense to take pleas, or settlements, etc.

• Arjun Panickssery 30 Jun 2026 3:24 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform

  Presumably varies a lot by domain. (Or equivalently, maybe in some domains the “do something you believe in” advice will lead you to rationally do legible stuff like accumulate credentials, because other paths will be transparently ineffective.)

• Arjun Panickssery 28 Jun 2026 1:17 UTC

  4 points

  2

  in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Linch’s Shortform

  I mean at home.

  That’s interesting. I guess I’ve always gotten an email saying “time to check in” or whatever, and gone to the link, and entered the confirmation code like AUWKDS or whatever, and gotten my ticket. Maybe the only exception was when I was abroad and the airline/​airport required in-person check-in for some visa-related reason.

• Arjun Panickssery 28 Jun 2026 0:50 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Linch’s Shortform

  How could this be? You can just capture a screenshot of the boarding pass right

• Arjun Panickssery 24 Jun 2026 3:12 UTC

  12 points

  2

  in reply to: LawrenceC’s comment on: LawrenceC’s Shortform

  manage to overcome the millions of dollar spent against him by Leading the Future

  Reacted with “thumbs down” because this misleads the reader into thinking that OAI-associated PACs spent more than Anthropic-associated PACs, when the opposite is true.

  Then I got to the part of your post when you said so yourself, but I don’t know how to remove reacts in any case.

• Arjun Panickssery 5 Jun 2026 0:39 UTC

  57 points

  21

  on: Ar­jun Pan­ickssery’s Shortform

  Bertrand Russell’s parents died by the time he was four years old and in 1876 he went to live with his grandfather, the last Whig prime minister, who as a young man had met Napoleon at Elba.

  In 1966 at the age of 94 he met Paul McCartney and converted him to his anti-war stance on Vietnam.

  Previously, I had figured that this lifespan (roughly 1870 to 1960) was the most extreme length of history for someone to live through. You have to be born early enough to remember a time when big cities didn’t have street lights or automobiles, while ideally living to see the atom bomb and first man in space (1961).

  For example:

  • Churchill (1874–1965) rode in Britain’s last great cavalry charge (Omdurman 1898) and later in life ordered Britain’s first hydrogen-bomb program.

  • W.E.B. DuBois (1868–1963) was born three years after the Civil War but died before the March on Washington.

  Other such lifespans were Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957), Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965), Picasso (1881–1973).

  On Twitter people pointed outside the West, the same lifespan was even crazier, if they were born into totally pre-industrial worlds e.g.

  • “Syngman Rhee (1875-1965) who was one of the last people in Korea to pass the old Confucian civil service examinations and later became the President of South Korea, playing a pivotal role in the early Cold War … He was born in a preindustrial world where the old Confucian social order still held sway and nobody around him had ever seen a train and died in a world of jet planes and manned space travel.” @avrilbradley23

  • “A curious Surmic born then would have seen the forging of the Ethiopian Empire, the end of the witch-chiefs, Christian missionaries, the Italian conquest, literacy, new crops, and maybe the moon landing.” @Peter_Nimitz

  Meanwhile I had figured I was going to live through the “Great Stagnation” and the world would gradually become a humongous nursing home. But it seems like AGI is likely to keep the show going.

• Arjun Panickssery 31 May 2026 20:05 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Arjun Panickssery’s comment on: Linch’s Shortform

  Also I think “put on” means “affected” and “worn out” means “anachronistic + a specific narrative of why it’s anachronistic, i.e. because the advice became worn out.”

• Arjun Panickssery 31 May 2026 20:01 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Linch’s Shortform

  (I didn’t disagree-vote).

  I considered “Latin,” which obviously comes from Latin, but via Old English so I think it’s fine. (Note that “Anglo” also comes from Latin, so a better case is that I should have just said “English.”) I don’t think it’s necessary to come up with made-up words for other places or languages that have their own names for this purpose.

  I agree that “plain” and “appear” come from Old French and those were oversights. And it shows that it’s hard to actually write this way without oversights.

• Arjun Panickssery 31 May 2026 6:53 UTC

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: yams’s comment on: Linch’s Shortform

  Quick search indicates that Churchill is the originator of the sentiment

  Where did you hear that? The Fowlers’ classic 1906 guide says “Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance” and the opinion was already standard at that time.

• Arjun Panickssery 31 May 2026 6:48 UTC

  2 points

  −4

  in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Linch’s Shortform

  Did you use Claude for the rewrite? I think you can do a much less weird one (and what is “Walnut Folk”?) e.g.

  I think that “to talk with folks plainly, use words with Anglo-Saxon rather than Latin roots” is itself put on and worn out.

  I think most good writers already have a good “feel” for which words are mainstream or over-the-top. But if you can’t tell, it’s better to look at how often the word appears rather than its roots.

  And indeed this is a plainer style.