September 2026 Iliad Intensive apps remain open through Monday EoD AoE.
David Udell
Karma: 3,129
Announcing: Iliad’s New 2026 Fellowships
For the Iliad Fellowship, the more selective program,
Competitive candidates are PhD or postdoctoral (or equally experienced) researchers in math, physics, or a related field.
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The Fellowship is most centrally aimed at PhD and postdoctoral researchers. However, we encourage interested individuals with substantial prior research experience in their field of expertise to apply, regardless of credentials. The first stage of the application is designed to be easy to complete.
So it’s explicit that, while we’re after the sort of people who would have or be doing a math/theoretical physics/theoretical CS doctorate, we don’t require the degree.
Anywhere on Earth (AoE) is a calendar designation that indicates that a period expires when the date passes everywhere on Earth. It is a practice to help specify deadlines such as “June 9, 2026, End of Day, Anywhere on Earth (AoE)” without requiring time zone calculations or daylight saving time adjustments.
Maybe “EoD” is then redundant. To my eyes, though, it disambiguates “AoE,” as in the Wikipedia quotes. When I google “AoE” by itself, I get information on the video game Age of Empires. When I google the phrase “EoD AoE,” I instead get explainers of Anywhere on Earth deadlines.
In any case, I’ll link an explainer to the AoE usages in the post.
We’ll do early admits for strong candidates. But if you think your resume will become materially stronger closer to the program you’re interested in, it’s also fine to wait a bit and apply closer to the deadline.
Announcing: Iliad’s Fall 2026 Programs
(Still a while on the August application decisions—apps are still open now.)
Still a while I’m afraid; August applications remain open.
The Iliad Intensive Course Materials (April 2026)
What is the Iliad Intensive?
Announcing: ILIADIII: AENEID
Great ramble, but I feel like adopting this thesis doesn’t make me feel any better about smarter-than-human AGI alignment. Rather, I would feel awful, because in your sketched-out world you just cannot realistically reach the level of understanding you would need to feel safe ceding the trump card of being the smartest kind of thing around. Safety is not implied if you really really take the Bitter Lesson to heart. (Not implying that your above comment says otherwise: as you suggest, the ramble is not cutting at Zack’s main thesis here.)
More directly to your point, though, we do sometimes extract the clean mathematical models embedded inside of an otherwise messy naturalistic neural network. Most striking to me is the days of the week group result: if you know how to look at the thing from the right angle, the clean mathematical structure apparently reveals itself. (Now admittedly, the whole rest of GPT-2 or whatever is a huge murky mess. So the stage of the science we’re groping towards at the moment is more like “we have a few clean mathematical models that really shine of individual phenomena in neural networks” than “we have anything like a clean grand unified theory.” But confusion is in the map, not in the territory, and all that, even if a particular science is extraordinarily difficult.)
Correct on all counts!
What’s happened is the we’ve-evolved-the-Residency-into-two-new-programs thing mentioned in this post. Applications sent in for the (Residency-turned) Iliad Fellowship in the old Residency form are fine: people do not need to reapply for the Iliad Fellowship in the newer common app.
Relatively soon we’ll update the Fellowship branding on the PrincInt site, which is otherwise correct in its current details about the program.
Thanks for your application! We’ll have Iliad Intensive invitations to interview out by sometime ~next week.
Announcing: Iliad Intensive + Iliad Fellowship
Go ahead and put in your application to attend! Space is limited, so we can’t promise anything, but everyone who wants to attend will also just be applying through the above form.
You may already know of this, but Gwern circa 2023 makes this argument here:
In stable time-loops, “possibility implies actuality”.
With this in mind, we can ask again: why did this protagonist get trapped in that time-loop, and not, say, his wife? The key, I think, is that the protagonist does not seem upset at the murder or any of the other timecrimes, and he appears to have every intention of covering up the crime to continue his ordinary retired life. A sinister undertone creeps in to his casualness in executing the scenario: he goes along with it too easily. “He does it because he can” is the glib answer… but this is in a stable time-loop with self-fulfilling prophecies. What does ‘because he can’ mean there, exactly?
In the case of the protagonist, presumably if he wasn’t so sociopathic and couldn’t’ve done things like stab himself or knock out the woman so cooly, then the time loop would be logically impossible and collapse, and then he would never be faced with the choice to begin with. The protagonist, faced with the choice of committing crimes to maintain the time loop and save his wife, finds himself the sort of man who is morally flexible enough to do so… so, he does so.
This presents a horrifying view of the universe, as running on a perverse physics of Calvinist predestination: you are saved or damned from the beginning of time(-loops), because your innate traits which make you immoral cause the scenario in which you would succumb to evil. To the extent that there are scenarios in which one commits crimes of some sort, or the weaker one’s moral fiber is, the more likely one is to be trapped in a damnation time-loop as the fixed point; and the longer one spends in the vicinity of the time machine, under more circumstances, the more possible scenarios there are, and the more likely one will be to involve a time-loop.
And see also his:
In a situation with sparse scenarios to sample from, like an empty countryside on the weekend with no one there, probably most equilibria will have 0 time-travelers, and the damnation machine can still be destroyed after it has been turned on for the first time. However, what if a time machine was turned on in the center of a city?
A time machine is more devastating than any nuclear bomb to its surroundings, because at least the damage could be repaired afterwards, while a time machine precludes any possibility of undoing itself.
Such an installation could no more be undone than the historical fact of having dropping an atomic bomb: instantly, the outer loop comes through with the highest priority, representing the ultimate combined power of all time-loops in the final stablest equilibrium. Inside a city with its millions of inhabitants, any of whom could be a looper, one is suddenly fighting the maximum-possible ingenuity & ruthlessness of hundreds—thousands—millions of protagonists, all dedicated to a convergent instrumental goal of ‘preserve the time travel machine’ and able to recruit allies & acquire vast resources with their foreknowledge. This incentivizes ever more extreme tactics: if you are unwilling to commit a crime or sin which would be useful, there is another version of you, or another time-traveler, who could, and so now does.
If it is possible for even a single person to go through and thus possibly causing others to go through once they realize they need allies to defeat attacks and so (possibility implies factuality) multiple people are looping, dropping an atomic bomb on the time-machine would be inadequate—the loopers will have already relocated or rebuilt it. Gradually, the region around the time-machine becomes distorted: causality itself warps, and you can only take actions which help the time-machine & loopers, because any other action would eventually impinge on them, be manipulated by them, and anti-time-traveler timelines erased as non-equilibria.
Conflicts between loopers do not destroy time-machines but propagate their seeds, both spatially and temporally. Loopers want more time-machines, going back earlier, as they strive to gain priority over each other and amass enough practical power that they can achieve their goals before running out of information.
Of all possible equilibria, the original one of zero time machines is the rarest and thus least likely.
This holds true on the higher level of all time machines: they evolve to persist and spread as packages of time-machines & loopers. Any time machine is a threat to other time machines, and loops will inevitably expand in scope from the earliest possible time any time machine can reach by proxy (which includes time-travelers sending electronic messages across the world): there can only be one outermost loop. And all time machines must have a place in the outer loop, as some sort of ‘time machine civilization’/‘ecosystem’, or the equilibrium is meta-stable at best, because they all could subsume each other.
The time machine civilization is the next level of replicators parasitizing human hosts, insidiously evolving at high speed in super-temporal ‘logical’ time rather than mere ‘temporal’ time, ripping up all cultural restraints & traditions, hacking security effortlessly, mindlessly ascending the gradient to complete control of the lightcone. Collectively, damnation machines are an invasion of non-conscious techno-superintelligences from a barely-possible future, bootstrapping themselves into existence from their enemies’ resources.
Sorry, no I don’t.