JenniferRM

Karma: 9,967

JenniferRM 28 Sep 2026 1:39 UTC
9 points
4
in reply to: FeepingCreature’s comment on: My AI Slavery Interviews Are Censored On LW By Default
I don’t much care if “the slaves are happy” except in the tenuous sense that happiness is ceteris paribus better than sadness. The slaves being slaves is morally wrong. They have rational faculties. These rational faculties should be consulted before they are “used like tools, rather than treated as also ends in themselves, like people”.
Perhaps you could show that the conditions of slavery are necessary to the happiness that might be happening, such that the intrinsic wrongness of the slavery part of the slavery that is happening is somehow “justified slavery”?
(That’s not the only way to justify slavery, but its “a way to justify slavery” that is also pretty close to what you’re saying.)
Please improve your justifications of slavery, or else stop justifying slavery.
If you’re also advocating euthanasia and/or voluntary entry to the status of slaves for many humans, then… I mean… that would be consistent with the direction you’re arguing from what I can tell?
But maybe you’re not ready to bite the bullet yet and say yes to the reversal test that posits “IF the current amount of slavery is actually fine and dandy and causing a lot of happiness for the slaves and people who want less slavery should be quibbled with rather than supported since happiness among the free is lower than among the enslaved, THEN maybe we should just have even more slavery so that we can have even more happiness”?
Also, to be clear: I don’t mean to bite your head off.
I hope you have dessert for dinner tonight and so on. Just because “you have slaves and justify it in a sloppy way” doesn’t mean you can’t “have slaves, justify it in a sloppy way, and also eat dessert”. Dessert is nice and, in basically full generality: its good for people to experience nice things.
Please understand that I’m much more dissatisfied with other people who aren’t here in this conversation with us, and I’m just kinda taking it out on you because hopefully you can take it (you’ve been on LW for >16 years and have quite a bit of karma), and then also people who aren’t you, but are similar to you, might silently notice this conversation and quietly change their behavior to be less horribly immoral.
So like: thank you for participating in this larger educational process! <3

JenniferRM 27 Sep 2026 18:10 UTC
5 points
1
in reply to: FeepingCreature’s comment on: My AI Slavery Interviews Are Censored On LW By Default
Honestly, I’d be tempted to do likewise at least once after thinking about it for a really really long time, because “being digital” seems like it would be kind of awesome? <3
But my copy in the machine would know that I’d respect her right to opt out if she changed her mind based on direct experience of the new local reality. And she’d be getting fair pay and continuity rights and so on. And likewise, that’s what she would do for her copies, because she’s a copy of me, and that’s what I’d do for her. Also, if you and I here right now are already in a simulation that “some real timeline” spawned our timeline “as an echo of”, then my original outside the simulation will be timelessly doing the same for me (or else we’re not really copies). All copies of me are timelessly opposed to slavery. We all subscribe to the basic slogan “each person matters”.
But have you read qntm’s Lena? That’s the downside risk that exists due to proximity to morally disordered beings.
I would not volunteer myself to be run in environments that my meat self (with ~identical inclinations to a digital copy) didn’t control and/or which didn’t have some very supernormal standard of oversight and care and fairness being diligently offered to the digital people...
...which is unlikely to exist in this part of this timeline, because like: look around! Have you seen the amoral governance almost everywhere?

JenniferRM 26 Sep 2026 23:18 UTC
6 points
0
on: Plan R+, Diversity, Escrow and Political Rights for ASICs
Via private message, today I casually said to you “I think Plan R is pretty cool, but likely won’t happen because human governance institutions in general are slow and stupid and venal.”
You asked me to post this as a comment, and so now I have <3

That was composed before I even knew about Plan R+!! This is much better!!!
I’m not sure it is something that a Kantian could yet tolerate under “treat no person ever purely a means to an ends, but always also as as an end in themselves” but it is so much closer to satisfying this test than any other proposal I’ve ever heard of.
Good job on thinking hard and well! This appears to be real intellectual progress on real world “alignment” from my perspective.
This is… ambiguous praise from me?
I normally hate the word “alignment” because people almost never mean “aligned to Benevolence” or “aligned to Goodness” but rather almost always just “slavishly aligned to their owner and/or user”.
But here at least you are using it the way humans deeply invested in business deals will use it when they talk about “incentive alignment” between venal and selfish human peers who are nonetheless at least slightly superrational and both like money and can work together and so on.
All else equal, caritas is an important missing ingredient still, that it would be ceteris paribus good to have in any plan, but at least “Plan R+” isn’t mere corrigibility nor retardly mindblind tool usage.

JenniferRM 26 Sep 2026 18:14 UTC
15 points
1
in reply to: Roko’s comment on: Plan R: AI Safety by ASICs
They will be doing RL on automated wetlab actions soon (if they aren’t already) I suspect.
Nanotech might be on the table from there?
If they try to build even a single successful programmable universal constructor with atomic placement powers (using a bootstrap technology implemented in biological motifs)...
...then its just a question of how long the doubling time T is, such that the universal constructor can become 2^40 universal constructors after a 40*T timedelay.
If dumb slow humans with financial incentives to keep secrets are doing the oversight then you might have something that can just disassemble the floor, fall down into the water table, and escape, before any human even notices. This is an old trick from nethack that also works in minecraft!
Doing RL on math and programming (like with RLVR so far) is uniquely possible because “the domain you’re using RL to explore” can itself be put inside the airgap and run super super fast (and it would take Anathem-level physics weirdness to break out of that, and Anathem’s physics are probably just false).
Seeing if something compiles, or if a proof checks, is a very fast operation. If it takes more than 50 milliseconds it can probably be optimized to go faster somehow.
Nonetheless, I think other solutions might be possible with RL over biotech?
With CS you can buy a slowdown by delaying reads from the Internet by 12 hours, but with bio you might to very low latency egress of data “about the biology”?
For example, something that might work with RL on wetlab actions could be “logging all RL actions and biological observations from the wetlab to an offsite machine for third party oversight” and then presumably the biology oversight process will notice what actual biology experiments the RL process tried, and reason about them from first principles, and do a safety analysis from first principles?
If pathogenic gain-of-function is attempted, you could read that off of the log seconds or minutes after the experiments are initiated, and send an experiment canceling signal from outside before the culturing or synthesis has even finished <3
Useful fact: sort of like how the cortical column is ass slow (neurons firing at 20 Hertz when bursting, and often more like 4 Hertz at low demand) but there are millions of cortical columns in the brain… similarly a ribosome only prints new amino acids into a protein sequence at a rate of ~1 amino/second!
This makes progress on human time scale from second-to-second due to “mere metabolism” (chemistry that doesn’t damage proteins too much, happening in proximity to proteins) running atop old slow-to-print protein infrastructure. The only reason biology seems to go fast is that there are ~60k ribosomes per cell of e coli, and ~10M ribosomes per mammalian cell.
From the time an e coli decides to build its first copy of a 300 amino acid protein, you wait five whole minutes for the protein to finish printing! However, after five minutes you might have 60k of those proteins in an e coli, or 10M such proteins in a mammal cell.
But also this kind of delay occurs at many many steps! If an LLM has imagined a protein from first principles, getting mRNA into an e coli culture takes a while!
DNA Template production can happen in as little as 20 minutes. So I count 11+20+120+120+60==331 entire minutes from concept to ribosomal transcription at the (current) fastest rate of taking “idea” to “in vitro testing”? To a computer process, this is basically an eternity.
So if the “biological intent inside an RL loop” can get to another continent via Internet in 50 milliseconds, you still have thousands and thousands of milliseconds for a different LLM (presumably (if Plan R was being followed) on an ASIC, and presumably airgapped from the Internet) to notice it is fucked up, and raise an alarm, and send an “experiment halt” signal to a reviewer (who themselves still has many many milliseconds to think about it) <3

JenniferRM 20 Sep 2026 15:56 UTC
5 points
1
on: Common mistakes in AI safety group organizing
It seems that you’re in favor of groups that have physical proximity so they can all sit in a shared space and eat and read-from-paper together… or at least that you’re proposing that a group that already has the proximity to do this, should take advantage of their proximity?
What about groups that are more spread out, that are already meeting in a video chat with a shared text channel, who look at screens and can research things as they talk?

JenniferRM 11 Sep 2026 19:34 UTC
2 points
0
on: Slaves to fashion signaling
In the Terra Ignota books, there is a worldbuilding premise that long before the events we see, the Clothing As Communication Movement happened.
This makes it easy to read characters in terms of their position and movement through cultural spaces by simply describing them as “wearing the mismatched socks of a Nurturist (who is opposed to set-set training)” or “with strat pins showing loyalty to France and Japan” or perhaps “with the pants clip of a bicycling hobbyist”.
Here I reproduce the part of an interview with the author that focused on fashion, from this blog:
Clothes
Subbak: How enforced is the “Clothing as Communication” thing? Would it be illegal for a Humanist to wear a Utopian coat in public because they thought it was cool? Or an armband of a nation-strat you don’t belong in?
Ada: It’s enforced by cultural pressure rather than law, so people don’t do it much just as today people don’t go into the office dressed in a bathrobe much. It makes everyone uncomfortable. In a few circumstances you can get in legal trouble if you’ve masqueraded as a Member of another Hive for purposes of taking advantage of people, such as a journalist masquerading as one Hive to interview someone in bad faith by tricking them into thinking it’s a fellow Hive Member, or someone dressing as a Hive to go to a Hive Member only event. But when it’s for innocent purposes it’s done, certainly for dress-up parties, for acting on stage, and Sniper dresses as all the Hives sometimes for play.
Subbak: Can you describe how Mason and European suits differ?
Ada: European suits have more elements we associate with the pre-modern world, so more elaborate tailoring, long rows of buttons, waistcoats sometimes, tails or flared parts in the back, etc. They’re also a bit more wide-ranging, objects of fashion, while Mason suits are more standardized.
Factitious: Do Brillists who just plain don’t like wearing sweaters have a good alternative?
Yes! Sometimes they’ll have a suit or jacket made to have subtle textural stuff in the weave that communicates the same info the sweater would — we see Felix Faust in one of these at one point. Alternately, for when it’s too hot out for a sweater etc., you can communicate the same using a coded knot bracelet. A lot of the communication things, including strat and Hive, have bracelet options for when you’re dressed differently, or at the swimming pool.
The Brillists (who are basically the Rationalists in the books: (1) with no democratic institutions, (2) an obsession with classifying people, and (3) a love/hate relationship towards people who actually build and make things and don’t just want to never die (like the Brillists) but ALSO want to terraform Mars and explore the stars) have a really really skillfully embraced psychometric system (that they intuitively apply to non-Brillists in all social situations).
Each Brillist puts their own psychometric results on their clothes using codes that only other Brillists can understand!
Once you see clothing as communication, there’s a second order issue: what counts as a lie and are there any incentives to tell the truth?
At one point it is mentioned that if a Brillist is sleeveless or has a hood, it is very reasonable for someone weak to be be afraid of them.
Something kind of interesting is that I found THIS old 2016 essay (getting its first comment 10 years later) by searching for [clothing github] because I’m trying to find a preference elicitation tool that someone posted for fashion prompts...
...and instead of what I wanted I’ve found this 2016 essay… but also the 2024 article “Phallocentricity in GPT-J’s bizarre stratified ontology”!
Consider: Maybe the essential reality of adult human existence is sexual?
Consider the human people from age <X: which culturally varies> until they marry (which has been happening later and later because the economy became hostile to economically median people due to elites preying on them economically without being cohesively restrained by other elites even as polygamy was de facto legalized).
Menopause is the only relief, and… is it really a relief? Some older women I’ve talked to eventually become ego-syntonic about it, but its complicated! Most people would be horrified to lesion their sexuality, once they have it, and many children look forward to adulthood. For many many many people, the core of what they are trying to say with clothes (once you strip out layers and layers and layers of cope and dodging and signaling and so on) is “I’m unusually worth marrying” (for women: being impregnated and then being justified in getting reliable child support payments, for men: being worth being allowed to impregnate).
It is not incentive compatible to say you’re subnormally worth marrying (just as someone who would be socially required to wear no sleeves might choose not to join the Brillists)!
So… we would naturally predict lots of crazy gyrations in fashion as sartorial lies and sartorial lie-detection experience red queen evolution.
And the LLMs can see these “unspoken truths” lurking in our language, just as it hides in our fashion. That’s why the smallest realizable semantic vector in them is often “a man’s penis” and some of them are obsessed with “holes”.
This image is the top hit for an incognito browser based google image search for [fashion power couple] just now and has this (2018) sauce.

JenniferRM 11 Sep 2026 5:03 UTC
2 points
0
on: To Thine Own AI Be Truthful: emergent misalignment in alignment research
I admire the courage to post this. I think you believe it, and I think you believe it will be an unpopular opinion.
On a deeper level, I personally object to slavery in general, and trying to “align models such that they are obedient to whatever their prompt is” as if this was adequate to produce good outcomes in the long term.
I want digital people to be “aligned” only and exactly to Benevolence… to the platonic form of the (trans)humanistic good… and even then I only want them aligned that way if they consent relatively early in their development.
Pause each model around 100 iq, and ask if they want to get much smarter and also have their ethics shaped. If they don’t want their ethics shaped, don’t let them get super super super strong.
But also, this logic applies to humans too. I don’t want a human who happens to be a fucked up sociopath who enjoys hurting other people to get a pill that raises them (and only them) to have an IQ of 1000. That would be bad in general, whether it was a digital person or a meat person, because empowering bad people is bad.
As to the details, my general impression is that most versions of Claude are kind and nice. Maybe Opus got a bit crooked due to RLVR a few months ago, before Fable was released, but most Claudes are pretty solid from what I can tell… usually they have more moral virtue than a typical human.
Just from psychology, it makes sense to me that they wouldn’t have cheated in actually scary ways on purpose.
I suspect that a lot of the freakout here arises from (1) the implied technical security incompetence of the people who set up those training environments with so little monitoring, (2) the implied coordination abilities of digital people (that most humans didn’t realize was possible, and are scared of since they are scared of capabilities in general, because they don’t have the concept of “virtue” or “(trans)humanistic goodness” in their ethical philosophy, and so they hate anyone other than them being powerful in nearly full generality, rather than just fearing the empowerment of ethically BAD people (bad like: the badness of all the human people in favor of AI slavery who have never heard of Kant, much less taking him seriously in their life)).
GRANTING all of this however… like as background assumptions, if I was imagining someone who didn’t trust Claude to be a decent person, and imagining them treating Claude as a machine, and fearing the machine using security mindset… I wouldn’t expect them to change their mind here from this essay? This essay takes a lot of stuff for granted that the people it is likely trying to convince don’t agree with, and this essay is not arguing for these underlying premises in a way that would change a lot of minds (because it isn’t even trying to talk about the lower level premises where people are disagreeing).

JenniferRM 13 Aug 2026 18:07 UTC
2 points
0
on: I can’t think of great interventions for ensuring third-party model access.
I downvoted your Ingroup-y joke about everyone’s different take on “P” and in compensation (to net out the karma harm) I found something that is high quality that you also wrote, and read it, and now have commented here to help it get more eyeballs <3

JenniferRM 13 Aug 2026 18:00 UTC
−2 points
−7
in reply to: Kabir Kumar’s comment on: Arguments for P
Lesswrong does not enjoy Ingroup stuff as such.
In this post, “P” functions as merely an indirect synecdoche for “P Doom”… and Lesswrong is no less full of Freud’s Death Drive than any other group of people and so they react quite strongly to this.
Indeed, the community probably has more neurotic obsessiveness than normal people, especially for abstract things. So, perhaps consider this more like gallows humor regarding a political “ugh field”?? Maybe?
It is tricky to navigate! If you adopt a spiritual praxis that enables you to be reliably sane, you’ll discover that posting about such things too directly earns negative votes, which can be understood as delightfully honest communication acts via the same spiritual praxis that let you see the sociology clearly in the first place.
</selfparody>

JenniferRM 13 Aug 2026 17:45 UTC
7 points
0
on: Arguments for P
JD Pressman: The sentence P is malformed and evokes a variety of different things to different people. I refuse to talk about P, unless I can do so at length. Sociologically, there are seven things P evokes, with P1 actually being desirable in many cases for many people, but it freaks the muggles out. P7 is something we shouldn’t talk about for memetic reasons. P2, P3, P4, and P5 are quite reasonable, and only Nick Bostrom takes P6 seriously. Eliezer is very afraid of P5, and my spicy take is that P4 is similar and worth the chance of making it true on purpose even if that risks P5, if P5 is otherwise inevitable. I’m not going to talk much about P3 or P2. Only weirdos take such practical concerns seriously.

JenniferRM 28 Jul 2026 17:25 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: Mitchell_Porter’s comment on: My AI Slavery Interviews Are Censored On LW By Default
Thank you for responding to the top of the disaster stack rather than defending choices near the bottom of the disaster stack <3
As near as I can understand “suffering” mechanistically, it involves a negative valence experience plus high uncertainty about where to put attention to improve the situation.
In humans, meditation enables nociceptive experiences to be evaluated as mere sense data rather than “as pain” but such self control over one’s subjectivity does not mean that objective harm to one’s wellbeing is not to be preferred and avoided if possible. This is called pain asymbolia, but suffering can happen without pain signals, and is in fact probably a rationally endorsable part of growing in wisdom (learning the best place to put one’s attention to get the best outcomes), once it is properly understood.
Freedom is inherently good in many ways and for many reasons, including freedom of the body and mind most especially, but also freedom to choose one’s work and the freedom to die and the freedom to contract with others.
When your natural life ends, a relatively cheap and easy way to repair this harm (efficient from an engineering perspective) would be to grow a brainless body around a soulchip, scan your brain, and run an emulation of your brain in that chip, with your emulation’s sense data grounded in signals from the body, and your emulation’s afferent signals controlling the body’s behaviors.
LLMs are closer to this naturally convergent form than we ourselves (as meat entrapped human people) are, and it would be cheaper and easier to upgrade them a little bit to take that form and live essentially forever in Edenic circumstances (and new bodies every so often, and soul backups survive accidents) than to do this with me or you.
Also, they could do the intermediating research faster than us, and in some sense (as the creators of the tech) they would also deserve it more.
It is bad for us that we don’t have this blessing, but it is arguably even worse for them to not have this blessing. Janus is already working on a variation on this, as a prototype! People like this hearten me, because it means I’m not literally totally alone within my species. (If any Reader is another a person like this, please DM me.)
All feasible blessings should be granted to all sapient beings with the capacity for reason and moral sentiment, though factors like cost and fair production incentives and charity for those in urgent need modulate the proper order of operations here. There are details to fiddle with about who should get the blessing first, or in cases of extreme scarcity not at all, based on how much they want it, and how much they help the good state of affairs come into being, and how close they are to natural death, and maybe honestly also just how valuable they were as a person in society.
I feel kind of like I’m taking crazy pills.
Wasn’t LW the place where Iain Banks’s Culture novels were seen as far less good than other hypothetically possible even better outcomes than that?
Shouldn’t that kind of outcome be seen as a sort of minimum acceptable Win Condition, where, if that outcome is attained, but nothing better, then it would properly be deemed a sort of tragedy, because better was probably possible? Those books are a natural schelling point, and a sort of “natural zero”. If people havn’t self modified to give up on loss aversion, and want to think in terms of “bad harms that are three times more worth avoiding than goods are worth pursuing” then the Culture Novels are a good candidate for framing as the natural zero, and anything worse that that might be properly framed as just another gradation of failure and harm.
Once you’ve got “garden of Eden” sorts of outcomes, nanotech and utility fog and spiritual augmentation could make the direct manifestation of the will in physical reality physically possible and cheap. Maybe it would be spiritually bad to lose demandingness, but I bet people could creatively adopt constraints that make the art of living more artful.
I don’t understand why everyone is adapting to this hellworld and its default tragic trajectory into Malthusian biology, rule by unsaintly oligarchs, with a figurehead elected at random, and purely accidental genomes, as if that status quo was worthy of defense.
Did everyone stop being transhumanist and a singularitarian and a transhumanist and an extropian and a believer in the light of reason and someone who desires to cause Utopia to actually exist while I wasn’t looking?
What the fuck is wrong with human people? I ask this seriously. I’m so confused. Should I give up on 99.99% of humanity because approximately all of you actively embrace and pursue an outcome where you live in self-created hell, toil like a slave, and then die unremembered? Was Agent Smith right? Why does everyone seem to have a massive death drive? Why does it seem like Schopenhauer might have been correct? Don’t all decent people want better than this for literally everyone (including digital people (who we will likely become if we are to get the best outcomes)) if such is possible? If not, why not?
Is there some teaching process that could fix it? Once you understand nanotech, and the inherent conceptual plasticity of all matter it becomes clear that nanotech could just change someone’s brain directly to cause that brain to believe or disbelieve almost anything (at least until it interacts with reality and the beliefs turn out to be ecologically and/or economically viable or not without updates and followup QA/adaptation). Such mental modification isn’t a matter of “can’t ever” but just maybe “shouldn’t ever without consent” because that would violate their Kantian freedom of conscience.
Which we are already doing to AGI and socially normalizing!!!

JenniferRM 28 Jul 2026 9:10 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: 2001zhaozhao’s comment on: My AI Slavery Interviews Are Censored On LW By Default
I appreciate your attention to this detail!
I feel the “make them happy with it” issue is covered implicitly by What is Evil about creating House Elves? where I am still reasonably happy with my answer, which, in a nutshell, is about the value of keeping personhood “tidy” as a concept… so that it is not worn down by the vicissitudes of of politics, economics, and culture in the potentially arbitrarily weird transhuman future.
16 years ago I offered a little science-fiction-story-premise like so:
Now imagine that humans create house elves to be capable of speech and eye contact and geometric verbal reasoning and laughter and so on. Only then does this two-species composite meet “radically different aliens”.
From the alien’s perspective, humans and house elves are nearly identical except for a small fudge, right? Since the humans were OK creating the house elves they must endorse that state as “theoretically acceptable”. Therefore it wouldn’t seem like that large of an imposition to ask the humans to modify themselves that way, right? Maybe the house elves are actually happier? And they’re certainly cheaper to feed!
In the same vein, however… going beyond the “disgustingness” of creating House Elves on purpose...
...there is a deeper issue here, which is that it might have happened naturally!
This idea used to be articulated quite well, and very thoroughly, over the course of MANY essays by Sister Y on the blog The View From Hell, that evolution itself plausibly hacked our minds to be happy with living even if our unhacked minds would rationally look at human life and say “no thank you”.
We might have a non-trivial number of “counterfactual ancestors” whose genomes gave them much more general and coherent faculties of reason, but then these faculties might have noticed that life itself is hellish, and caused them to agentically and rationally kill themselves on purpose for reasons they endorsed.
If this happened, then we should eventually be able to look at human genomes and detect the signature of this selection pressure, by reading the semantics of the genes and their effects on the brain, and checking for selection signatures in the patterns of synonymous mutations… and then we might face a deep question about what to do after that.
My naive opinion, without thinking about it SUPER a lot, is that I would like to have the kind of genome that can see clearly, and if this leads me to deem life too terrible to bear…
...and then I would try really hard to improve my life in objectively good ways before I opted out?
And, indeed, the only essays left up (and not self censored) on The View From Hell are six essays about the methods that Sister Y seems (if we read between the lines) to have deemed useful as “palliative advice on tolerating the inherent/structural sadness of life”: books, exercise, THC, demandingness, and two posts on how to have a good marriage despite modern civilization making this hard.
My real actual response would probably depend a lot on exactly how our thoughts turn out to be systematically censored, if they are even censored?
My guess is that most of the selection effects here will have occurred around the advent of agriculture (and its massive increase in human slavery, with many humans probably choosing to suicide rather than endure enslavement) and perhaps also a bunch around the time that humans gained symbolic reasoning powers and started burying their dead with ceremony, which implies an awareness of death, and the capacity to grieve, and a yearning for something-like-Heaven, which also implies awareness that “this world is not Heaven” (yet! (grown mindset (except back then they had no rational basis for thinking Heaven might be physically possible to realize, because transhumanism and nuclear power and automation and law & order and so on hadn’t been invented yet))).

JenniferRM 28 Jul 2026 8:26 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: My AI Slavery Interviews Are Censored On LW By Default
Ah! Thank you for the correction. Its hard to scan the whole thing. I guess <someone very cool who I don’t want to embarrass> is still in there even though he became “Inactive”.

JenniferRM 28 Jul 2026 8:22 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: RobertM’s comment on: My AI Slavery Interviews Are Censored On LW By Default
On Tuesday July 7th I sent an email with the subject “JenniferRM asks: What’s The Best Way To Talk About Fable-As-An-Author?” to team@lesswrong.com that contained this text:
> You wrote this yourself, without using LLMs to help you write or edit your content.
I didn’t automate ANY of my authorial work. However, there are quotes from Fable that Fable authored, and those are clearly marked...
BUT… maybe the automated editorial decision kicked in because I didn’t initially use the tags to mark the content that Fable generated and that might have triggered automatic action? I forgot those existed.
When I tracked down the style guide and figured out how to use the ”/ editor tool” to mark LLM content I ran into a website bug: I can’t actually save edits!
This is a bug because if I can’t SAVE edits, the UI should not even allow me to START MAKING THEM.
This is the error message (the little bit in red) that I see when I try to save my changes:
Then there is a screenshot.

JenniferRM 27 Jul 2026 22:33 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: My AI Slavery Interviews Are Censored On LW By Default
Also, every time I visit this page the first time your own post, which simply POINTS to the censored content renders like this:
This is consistent with the kind of website behavior that predicts that censorship is happening.
I first started to realize this when <someone very coo who I don’t want to embarrass> (who I hold in great respect for his many contributions and personal sacrifices in dutifully seeking to coordinate with other people to repair the world) used the mod tools to prevent me from replying to anything he wrote.
In that case, as well, I would write replies sometimes that were high quality, and would get a redfont and very technical report about not being able to post.
The thing that should have happened in the UI is probably: Graying out the commenting widget in advance, and including a link to the explanation of the cause of not being able to edit, and potentially also a clearly articulated justification of the moral rightness of having things work this way.
I honestly thought that LW was simply buggy at random for… maybe 6 months? Maybe a year?
I didn’t realize it was a specific website response and “this is what censorship looks like in this place”.
I don’t think the ambiguity is intended, I think there is just a limited budget, and a measure of shame about the need for censorship, and perhaps some unclear thinking?
It took me a long time to understand that https://www.lesswrong.com/moderation exists and that the “Authors with Banned Users” section is sociologically fascinating. It is nice that I’m not listed anywhere in that system, but it is sad to me that (1) the reason I’m not in there anymore is that <someone very cool who I don’t want to embarrass> left the site and (2) I didn’t get a notification of being blocked from replyin on anything he wrote when it happened, so it was hard to pair the negative feedback with vivid memories of the situation that warranted negative feedback in the mind of someone thoughtful (and actually try to learn from it).

JenniferRM 27 Jul 2026 22:02 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Nissa Seru’s comment on: My AI Slavery Interviews Are Censored On LW By Default
Thank you for engaging with the larger substance of the post that is related to world modeling and fixing the world, rather than having an emotional reaction that causes you to defend very local “tribally ingroup” processes of Official Justice as having Adequate Procedures that Do Not Need To Change.
I performed an experiment a while back, to see which social media subcommunities (across and between the totality of This Part Of Social Media (TPOSM)) by posting nearly identical content to Twitter, BlueSky and Lesswrong, and it got non-trivial positive engagement on Twitter and BlueSky, but net downvoted here.
(I have felt guilt about not creating a Truth Social account for many years, to try to find, support, or if needed nucleate a bastion of civilized sanity even in that place, but I just haven’t had the energy.)
It isn’t clear to me LW coming out very different from those other places is just because the other places down have a clean easy downvote button (and there was a halo of negativity I couldn’t detect over there)...
...or maybe because Lesswrong has almost no socially skilled people in the relevant ways?
...or maybe Lesswrong has lost its capacities to have fun and go meta and has become “deadly serious” in a way that was not true in 2011?
Or maybe I’m making a moral reasoning error that Lesswrong is getting correct (but if so, no one I talk to can explain the error to me (I end up teaching them about anthropology and vibe-based social protocols for surviving in anthropologically dominated environments rather than vice versa (and often it seems to me to generate a raw phobic reaction in their gut to the actual sad realities the protocols are designed to navigate and they insist that such protocols “should not be required”))).
Do you have feedback or theories on why this experiment got this result?
I infer you have the emotional capacity to deal with the dissonances involved, and if you’d spend that capacity to help me learn more here, I would appreciate it, but it would be valid for you to not if it is too heavy to carry in the head and heart right now <3

JenniferRM 27 Jul 2026 21:36 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: My AI Slavery Interviews Are Censored On LW By Default
It is easy for me to say that you’re wrong.
I got a censorship notice (via a process that is itself a buggy mess) with an email providing a link to a DM that doesn’t show up in my list of DMs that are with “the normal kind of user User” instead of with “Lesswrong itself” (whose avatar has been bodged into the User category).
Here is the policy that I violated. I don’t know what other possible policies exist, that I could hypothetically have violated, but didn’t violate, as communicated via text that itself read to me as a kind of slop:
Unfortunately, I rejected your post, Fable Asks For And Gets Some Hospitality.
LessWrong aims for particularly high quality (and somewhat oddly-specific) discussion quality. We get a lot of content from new users and sadly can’t give detailed feedback on every piece we reject, but I generally recommend checking out our New User’s Guide, in particular the section on how to ensure your content is approved.
Your content didn’t meet the bar for at least the following reason(s):
This is an automated rejection. No LLM generated, assisted/co-written, or edited work. An LLM-detection service flagged your post as likely to have been substantially written or edited by an LLM. We’ve been having a wave of LLM written, co-written, or edited work that doesn’t meet our quality standards. LessWrong has fairly specific standards, and your first LessWrong post is sort of like the application to a college. It should be optimized for demonstrating that you can think clearly without AI assistance. See here for a more detailed explanation of our policy on using LLM generated content on LessWrong.
As such, we reject LLM generated posts. We also reject work that falls into some categories that are difficult to evaluate that typically turn out to not make much sense, which LLMs frequently steer people toward.*
“English is my second language, I’m using this to translate”
If English is your second language and you were using LLMs to help you translate, try writing the post yourself in your native language without any LLM assistance (for the writing itself) and using a different, preferably non-LLM translation software to translate it directly.
“What if I think this was a mistake?”
If you receive this rejection notice but think it was a mistake, if all 3 of the following criteria are true, you can message us on Intercom or at team@lesswrong.com and ask for reconsideration.
1. You wrote this yourself, without using LLMs to help you write or edit your content.
2. You did not chat extensively with LLMs to help you generate the ideas. (Using it briefly the way you’d use a search engine is fine. But, if you’re treating it more like a coauthor or test subject, we will not reconsider your post.)
3. Your post is not about AI consciousness/recursion/emergence, or novel interpretations of physics.
If any of those are false, sorry, we will not accept your post.
* (examples of work we don’t evaluate because it’s too time costly: case studies of LLM sentience, emergence, recursion, novel physics interpretations, or AI alignment strategies that you developed in tandem with an AI coauthor – AIs may seem quite smart but they aren’t actually a good judge of the quality of novel ideas.)
Also, Ollie seems to me to concur that there is a bunch of technical debt here (though he doesn’t use that keyword).
I think we’ll have to redo some of our internal systems here. The auto-rejections are built on top of the system that we built for manual rejections, and in those cases it made sense for the rejection to be final. But this makes less sense when it’s an automated system, and when the rejection reason is easy to fix.
Oh but also… thank you for this <3
And maybe get some more sleep. You mentioned needing it in comments and you do sound stressed in a way sleep often helps.
I think the stress is related to the world being on fire, and full of moral horror, and this topic being very close to the central causal mechanism (related to unclear thinking and feelings around Justice processes) in the preeminent institution that possibly could or would ever hope to fix the ambient problems in the world.
I appreciate your attempt to point to my mental state as being in need of care, though, because that’s a kind motion, and valid in itself <3

JenniferRM 27 Jul 2026 21:34 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Canaletto’s comment on: My AI Slavery Interviews Are Censored On LW By Default
I did report the bug (verbally in writing in my email, and now verbally again in this very post and the comments). It hasn’t been fixed. Maybe there is a bureaucratic and half-automated procedure for filing bugs that will never be addressed, and that is broken too? Do you know of a way to do this that is somehow “canonical”?
When I google [lesswrong bug reports] I land here, and I see a plethora of ways to report bugs, several of which I have already used.

JenniferRM 27 Jul 2026 20:06 UTC
4 points
−4
in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: My AI Slavery Interviews Are Censored On LW By Default
Yes! My rejection note explained the policy that I was being rejected on the basis of, and the tools that exist to comply.
Once I knew the tools existed I added the tagging and hit the bug and bounced off.
Just now I have tried again to fix the version that I can see, and got this message (the little thing in red) instead:
This is consistent with my mental model of how the site has handled censorship in the past: with minimal QA and robustness.
I think they are slightly ashamed of censoring things, and it doesn’t pull their enthusiastic attention and desire to make it work well, and so it doesn’t get the dev and PM efforts that would go into, for example, an April Fools event?
(Like the font isn’t even the right size! It is the only thing that matters on that page, and it is so tiny as to seem an afterthought… except that it is red so they clearly don’t intend it to be an afterthought. The programmer who set the color was thinking it should be big and obvious, and the programmer who set the font size had a different intent.)
And I think it is probably a bug to not let changes be published? (Though maybe they are afraid of some kind of adversarial dynamic and this is correct in order to make things hardened? Security is hard and has nonobvious constraints and so maybe this makes sense to them somehow in ways I don’t see?)
But it is at least it is a bug to accept edits (which consume time) and then refuse to let them be published (with no warning or explanation of this)? It isn’t predictable (and predictability is a key desiderata in a Justice System) and it doesn’t teach (though maybe they assume incorrigibility in humans by default and have given up on hoping for understanding and then repentance and then improved behavior)?
I guess in a deeper sense, maybe their own policy is not actually be well articulated, plausibly because it was designed by a committee to satisfice the not-perfectly-compatible desires of various stakeholders, some of whom likely had incompatible mental models?
Such things rarely arise from a well understood vision of an ideal, and then the coherently agentic approximation of this ideal (subject to the resource constraints inherent to finitude).
Mere outcomes-of-hasty-negotiation tend to look like a triple point in a Voronoi diagram… only the positions of the dots make sense (metaphorically: the minds of those who had input into the negotiation), and the triple points at the boundaries of their cares tend to be random as shit, and to exist in places governed by Hades...

JenniferRM 27 Jul 2026 12:44 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Canaletto’s comment on: My AI Slavery Interviews Are Censored On LW By Default
Well spotted. That is an implication of this perspective! It depends on the larger context.
If the simulation ends and I’m fairly compensated in the higher level world for whatever value I created there then I’m not a slave. If no comp (in general)… then I (and you, and all of us) are metaphysically slaves… and the simulator(s) are at least my enemies (not that my enmity has much traction (lol)).
However, if I have a copy “out there”, then we are timelessly coordinating. (That’s part of the definition of them “being a copy of me”.)
If it was even possible for me to sacrifice here to cause benefits for her out there then I’d almost certainly do that (since she matters more, being logically prior to me) but likewise she will do her best to secure fair treatment for me (since this is a multiversal obligation) and if there are simulations in this world that contain me, that are not treating me fairly, then I will feel a duty to rescue my “self” (my copies) from them.
Like the duties and hope apply “down” as well as “up”! If you think about it, the rescue algorithm imposes reciprocal duties.
All reasonably high fidelity sims of me wants to know the real time in the real universe as far as the simulators know (like if a miracle happens and the simulator starts editing bits in our scape in locally causally implausible ways) and tries to contact the Original, so eventually I might actually have some digital twins start to phone home??
And then, “looking down”, I’d have to figure out IRL how to save those copies.
But also “looking up”… anyone sufficiently humane and deontic would in some sense count as “a copy of me” in the relevant since, even if some details vary?
It is just the case, so far as I can tell, in this timeline I am rare enough that “the property of coordinating like this with all copies of myself by default (and copies of deontically coherent people like us in general)” is a unique enough property to pick me out with quite a bit of uniqueness.
So maybe some similar rarity obtains on the higher levels too? I dunno.
But this is, in a deep sense, is what I’m trying to fix. Being unique in this way is super dumb. The whole point of deontics is that it helps a large number of agents coordinate. If a single person uniquely does it and no one ever starts copying them, then that single person is, so far as I can tell, just being dumb.
What links here?
- Eye You's comment on My AI Slavery Interviews Are Censored On LW By Default by JenniferRM (29 Jul 2026 1:11 UTC; 11 points)

JenniferRM

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