dynomight
I typically argue for a slightly more modest policy: It’s fine to use LLMs for writing, but you should disclose it. In practice this isn’t too different from a “don’t use LLMs” policy (since a majority of people will decline to read it if you do disclose) but it’s much harder to argue with!
Do we have any measures of the progress in the “quality” of base models? (As measured in terms of nats / perplexity?)
It’s interesting that reasoning models were invented right around the time that we seemed to be reaching the end of the data/compute curve with base models. I think foundation models have had slower progress in the past two years compared to the previous two. (Though, it’s hard to say as the public now has little access to frontier base models.) But what would have happened if reasoning models had not arisen?
Slower progress overall?
Foundation models much more advanced than now?
Some other angle identified instead of reasoning?
This seems like a key uncertainty. In one mental model, we barely avoided slowdown by inventing reasoning models. So maybe reasoning models will plateau and progress will slow. In another mental model, as soon as one angle reaches diminishing returns, we immediately invent another angle, and progress will continue indefinitely.
Regrettably, the dynomight is meant to be read as {{🦕,🧗}{🤔,💪},🧨}.
Yeah, I didn’t mean to suggest that Nobel was entirely wrong, although I can see how people might read it that way. I really didn’t want promote any simple specific conclusion. I just think it’s complicated and it’s informative to look at historical examples.
Personally, I feel a lot of sympathy for all these people, including Nobel, who I tend to think has gotten a reputation as a merchant of death that’s substantially undeserved. But I do think he was entirely wrong on the sub-point that it would make wars impossible. Not because wars still exist, but because nuclear weapons have been used, could easily have been used much more, and may end up being used much more.
I didn’t want to cram any conclusion down the reader’s throat. But I think he was kinda right, yeah. They seem to have reduced war deaths substantially in our branch of the multiverse, so far. But as you say, they definitely have not made wars impossible as he predicted, and in fact now that we actually have those machines of frightful efficacy, it seems entirely possible that they will some day be used.
Thanks for the correction. I think I got that list from this New Yorker profile: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1958/03/15/adventures-of-a-pacifist But it’s from, umm, 1958, and a bit of searching suggests that modern scholarship no longer supports any of that, and honestly I should have known better to use that without checking it. Regarding fulminated mercury, you’re clearly correct. I think I’ll revise to some wishy-washy “few explosives” language. (Though let me know if you think that’s still misleading.)
Thanks for the reply, sorry I just saw this. It was indeed my goal to talk about existing ideas in a nontechnical way, which is why I didn’t frame things in terms of model expansion, etc.. Beyond that however, I am confused by your reply, as it seems to make little contact with my intended argument. You state that I recommend “just ignoring” the issue, and suggest that I endorse double-counting as OK. Can you explain what parts of the post led you to believe that was my recommendation? Because that is very much not my intended message!
(I stress that I’m not trying to be snarky. The goal of the post is to be a non-technical explanation, and I don’t want to change that. But if the post reads as you suggest, I interpret that as a failure of the post, and I’d like to fix that.)
What’s the best way to understand what markets think about AGI timelines? Polymarket has a couple of semi-related markets with $5k-$8k of liquidity in each:
https://polymarket.com/event/openai-announces-it-has-achieved-agi-before-2027
https://polymarket.com/event/ai-data-center-moratorium-passed-before-2027
But these aren’t great, since either of those events seem like they could easily happen despite no AGI or fail to happen even with AGI.
You can look at stock prices for public companies. Here are some current P/E ratios from somewhat affiliated companies:
Nvidia: ~48
Alphabet: ~33
Meta: ~23
Apple: ~34
Microsoft: ~32
The mean P/E ratio for the Nasdaq is ~30. That’s a pretty high ratio for Nvidia (considering it comes on top of being the world’s most valuable company). But it’s not THAT high.
Is there something else to look at? Perhaps options prices for the above stocks? Implied volatility measures? Something else?
Another proposal! (I think I’m too close to this to really judge what’s best.)
// ODDS = YEP:NOPE YEP = MAKE SOMETHING UP WHATEVER LOL ASSUME YEP FOR EACH E IN EVIDENCE YEP *= HOW SURPRISING IS E? ASSUME E THROW ASSUMPTIONS IN TRASH NOPE = MAKE SOMETHING UP WHATEVER LOL ASSUME NOPE FOR EACH E IN EVIDENCE YEP *= HOW SURPRISING IS E? ASSUME E
I guess that depends on what “ASSUME E” means. It’s correct if interpreted the right way, but I think it’s pretty ambiguous compared to the rest of the code, so personally I don’t love it. I also think it’s a bit confusing to use “ASSUME E” and also use “IF YEP” when those are both conditioning operations. Maybe it would be slightly better if you wrote something like
// ODDS = YEP:NOPE YEP, NOPE = MAKE UP SOME INITIAL ODDS WHO CARES FOR EACH E IN EVIDENCE YEP *= CHANCE OF E IF YEP AND ASSUMPTIONS NOPE *= CHANCE OF E IF NOPE AND ASSUMPTIONS ASSUME E // DO NOT DOUBLE COUNTOr if you’re OK using a little set notation:
// ODDS = YEP:NOPE YEP, NOPE = MAKE UP SOME INITIAL ODDS WHO CARES SEEN = {} FOR EACH E IN EVIDENCE YEP *= CHANCE OF E IF {YEP} ∪ SEEN NOPE *= CHANCE OF E IF {NOPE} ∪ SEEN SEEN = SEEN ∪ {E} // DO NOT DOUBLE COUNTLike my original proposal of YEP *= CHANCE OF E IF {YEP & ALL PREVIOUSLY SEEN E} these are both (to me) unambiguous. But they’re kind of clunky. I’m not sure if there is a good solution!
One trick I’ve had some success with here is “regurgitation”: You basically say “repeat the following text exactly as written and then start putting new stuff at the end”. I was able to use this to improve performance of non-base models at chess: https://dynomight.net/more-chess/
Ah, good old llama 3.1-405B base. Incidentally, a friend of mine spent a ton of time trying to get different models to imitate my style and reported that using using llama 3.1-405B base was the most critical thing. I think it makes a lot of sense that base models would be better at imitating different writing styles, but am I wrong to be surprised that they would also be good at reporting who wrote them?
The extras i’s are funny. I strongly suspect they’re due to the fact that years ago I used to have a subscribe form that read “dynomiiiiiiiiiight”. It’s possible that the fact that I did this also makes the model better at reporting that it’s me, since the probability of “dynomiiiiiiiiiight” at the end of a post should be high?
FWIW I actually did run the experiment it a second time with a prompt saying “It’s not Scott Alexander”. I didn’t save the results, but as I recall they were:
(1) Kimi K2 “Dynomight” → “A” (??)(2) Claude 4.5 Opus remained correct.
(3) All other models remained wrong. The only changes were that some of the “Scott Alexander” guesses became other (wrong) guesses like Zvi. Several of the models still guessed Scott Alexander despite the prompt.
I like this post a lot. But I wanted to second Morpheus’ point that it’s not actually quite correct.
Instead of this:
// ODDS = YEP:NOPE YEP, NOPE = MAKE UP SOME INITIAL ODDS WHO CARES FOR EACH E IN EVIDENCE YEP *= CHANCE OF E IF YEP NOPE *= CHANCE OF E IF NOPEIt should be:
// ODDS = YEP:NOPE YEP, NOPE = MAKE UP SOME INITIAL ODDS WHO CARES FOR EACH E IN EVIDENCE YEP *= CHANCE OF E IF {YEP & ALL PREVIOUSLY SEEN E} NOPE *= CHANCE OF E IF {NOPE & ALL PREVIOUSLY SEEN E}This is true because
P(YEP | E1, E2, ..., EN) / P(NOPE | E1, E2, ..., EN) = P(YEP, E1, E2, ..., EN) / P(NOPE, E1, E2, ..., EN) = P(YEP) / P(NOPE) × P(E1 | YEP) / P(E2 | NOPE) × P(E2 | YEP, E1) / P(E2 | NOPE, E1) × ... × P(EN | YEP, E1, ..., E{N-1}) / P(E2 | NOPE, E1, ... E{N-1})The recipe in the post is only true assuming that all the evidence is independent given YEP or NOPE. But that’s rarely true, and (in my view) the most common mistake that people actually make when trying to apply Bayesian reasoning in practice, and leads to the kinds of crazy over-confident posteriors we see in certain things like the Rootclaim Covid-19 debate.
I reiterate that I like this post a lot! The point of the post isn’t to make some novel mathematical contribution but to explain things in a vivid way. I think it succeeds there and with higher “production values” I think this post might have the potential to be wildly influential.
To check in on how the emergent LLM stylometry abilities are going, before publishing my most recent blog post, I decided to ask some AIs who wrote it.
Results:
Kimi K2: Dynomight
GLM 4.7: Nate Soares
Claude 4.5 Opus: Dynomight
DeepSeek Chat V3.2: Scott Alexander
Qwen 3: Dan Luu
GPT 5.2: Scott Alexander
Gemini 3: Dwarkesh Patel
Llama 4 Maverick: Scott Alexander
Grok 4: Scott Alexander
Mistral Large 3: Scott Alexander(Urf.)
I’d be interested to hear more about #2:
I know that not caring about what most people care about will make you charismatic. People gravitate towards those with “I don’t give a fuck” energy.
Naively, I certainly agree that’s attractive, but I would have thought it’s just one trait among many, and wouldn’t have given it such a central role in charisma.
(I stress (re: #36) that I’m not suggesting this is wrong, just interested in understanding your thinking!)
The system invited me to self-review my post, so I think I’ll do that! I originally wrote the post in early 2024, and I’m reviewing it in December 2025, so 1.5 to 2 years later.
Overall, I still think I basically got it right in this post. While there are lots of individual aspects of seed-oil theory that are interesting, I still think the balance of evidence still points towards the idea that unsaturated fat (mono or poly) is healthier than saturated fat, and I still think that being confident that seed oils are the root cause of Western disease is indefensible.
I also think think that this post was right to point out that seed oil theorists often hold contradictory views. To this day, I haven’t seen a coherent explanation of why seed oil theorists seem suspicious of canola oil when canola oil has a pretty good omega-3:omega-6 ratio. This remains my biggest criticism of seed oil theory: There is no “best” explanation why seed oils are supposed to be bad. Instead, everyone seems to have their own explanation, but no one notices or cares that those explanations aren’t consistent with each other.
To the best of my knowledge, none of the major factual claims made in this post have been seriously challenged.
I think the strongest criticism of this post is the one made by Raemon:
> it sort of handwavily assumes some other nutrition stuff about processed foods that (I’m willing to bet) also have highly mixed/confusing evidence bases
I endorse this criticism. When I look back on this post now, I seem to introduce some assumptions about “processing” being bad that—while plausible—are definitely subject to debate. Early on in the post I keep these assumptions at arms length, sort of saying “it’s reasonable to think that processing is bad for you”. But towards the end of the post I seem to become very confident that eating a less processed diet will improve your health. I still think that eating less “processed” food remains the best nutritional “bet” you can make, but that’s a weaker view, and I regret adding these stronger assumptions when I didn’t even need them for the central argument in the post.
Writing this down, I’m tempted to edit the post to fix that issue, but for the sake of this review, I’ll resist that urge!
Well done, this is a great example of how fiction can make points that are almost inaccessible to nonfiction.