Ayham

• Ayham 16 Aug 2026 8:20 UTC

  2 points

  1

  in reply to: Debbie Kinsinger’s comment on: Open Thread Sum­mer 2026

  Thank you for your words :)

  I just saw this comment so sorry for replying late. I am still not understanding everything getting posted here in LW, but I like the forum and I constantly read the posts. I am trying to constantly learn. I saw your Linkedin too, it is quite impressive and I find great value in work focus on the environment. Whoa indeed.

• Ayham 30 May 2026 20:37 UTC

  39 points

  2

  on: Open Thread Sum­mer 2026

  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.

• Ayham 7 May 2026 19:42 UTC

  2 points

  1

  on: Try, even if they have you cold

  I think this mainly comes to the point about those who identify as rationalists being too stuck in their heads. Honestly for me I overthink “truth” over utility. I would delay certain actions or be uncertain because “how aligned with truth is it?”.

  Practically speaking, trying more is usually more indicative of success than overthinking. “Equal-Odds Rule” which is a rule established by Dean Keith Simonton states that the relationship between the number of successful ideas and the total number of ideas generated is constant. Basically, the more we produce the more we are likely to hit on the right thing. Now those who are not well trained in rationality would usually find more patterns in things that don’t really have patterns. We have evolved to find patterns. Various studies show that people ascribe patterns to random situations, and we probably do that much more than we are aware.

  As I believe rationality doesn’t have an endpoint. No one can fully avoid false pattern recognition so that’s impossible, but we can work on it as an art. The person trained in rationality would find more correct patterns and identify the false ones.

  Those who don’t overthink such matters usually end up successful in whatever they aimed at either from pure chance resulting from trying a lot or getting feedback on what works through real direct experience.

  We could sit and theorize about all the true patterns and recognize them but there are people who are getting true actual feedback from testing things in reality, this usually leads to discovering what works, not necessarily the truth. Rational people usually are more inclined to truth rather than what works.

  Ideally, we need to combine theory with practice, rationality with practicality, and strategizing with trying.

• Ayham 6 May 2026 15:28 UTC

  22 points

  0

  on: Ay­ham’s Shortform

  Hey all, I hope writing my introduction in a quick take was a sound idea.

  I am 19, from Iraq, a third world country and I am an AI and robotics engineering student. I am also a co-founder for one of the biggest annual events on AI in Iraq. I recently discovered the fields of AI safety and mechanistic interpretability and I am very interested. I see my generation of students to be very interested in applying AI meanwhile I am going through a lot of thinking on what is healthy and secure AI. I mean we are using a system that is inherently a black box and people are believing whatever it outputs. I don’t trust that big AI corporations have safety as their primary goal.

  Other than AI, I am well read in philosophy and I am highly interested in making sense of the world and pursuing truth. I have shifted my beliefs many times and I keep unpeeling layers deeper into my understanding of reality and myself.

  I have navigated many existential crisis experiences and also some de-personalization experiences.

  I would love to connect to anyone is interested in science, engineering, AI, mech interp, and philosophy or someone with more experience who can give me tips especially on the mech interp domain.