Perhaps

Karma: 205

Perhaps 19 Mar 2026 22:13 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: neo’s comment on: neo’s Shortform
Lately I’ve been most concerned about coordination for governance, and having the ability to nicely merge values from lots of people to determine what policies a democratic government should take. I think current methods of voting leave a lot to be desired, and it should be possible to use AI to help people build personal models of their preferences that can be diffed/merged with other preferences, enabling easy creation of coalitions or identifying points of agreement. I think Andrey Tang’s post on Plurality is pretty useful for getting an idea of how similar things could work.
There are a lot of other dimensions for coordination though, getting accurate information from distorted sources, figuring out how to align representatives, better voting, etc. Mechanism design and social choice theory are good places to look for academic research on this stuff.

Perhaps 10 Mar 2026 16:45 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Jaivardhan Nawani’s comment on: Jaivardhan Nawani’s Shortform
Even supposing that your conjecture is true, it’s not a dichotomy, we could be jealous of AI and we could be in danger of losing our jobs to it and dying to superintelligence.
I don’t believe that there is anything really there to be jealous of though. I would say for me, jealousy requires personhood, and I don’t view current LLM agents as people, so there’s nothing to envy. Moreover, even if you take as an assumption that agents are people, they definitely don’t have meaningful personalities outside of what we instill in them, and are incapable of online learning or some other way of developing independent thought. As a result, even with soul documents and RL for personas, they remain fairly average in all the ways I would want to communicate with a person, even if they excel at many tasks.
The only thing I might be jealous of an agent about is that they can clone themselves ~infinitely and run in parallel.
As for not believing humans are the best species, well, I have no doubt more optimal lifeforms could be exist, but I don’t see a point in instantiating something like that just because humanity has a bad rap sheet. I’m still having fun living, and I think lots of people are too. Maybe after everybody gets bored of regular life we can look into setting up successors.

Perhaps 8 Feb 2026 1:30 UTC
2 points
0
on: What should I try to do this year?
Understand is a puzzle game that is basically what you describe as an Epistemic Roguelike, in that you deduce a different ruleset for every set of levels. It’s not an actual roguelike though, purely focused on the puzzle of figuring out rules, which are limited to a simple grid with shapes.
I would say that as something exploring a relatively unplumbed space of content, Epistemic Roguelikes are more likely to be interesting in a time where AI can make average copies of any existing content, and mainly struggles with new concepts.
Correspondingly, I think that D&D Sci might be less useful now that you could plausibly automate a large chunk of the process of creating scenarios? That’s my impression based on checking out the posts, although I haven’t actually completed one.

Perhaps 19 Jan 2026 15:32 UTC
2 points
−1
in reply to: kbear’s comment on: Five Theses on AI Art
Yeah I would say AI is more like the popularization of PhotoShop in photography, or CGI in movies/animations. Most any work you can do with AI is a result of taking existing pieces from the medium, training the AI on them, and then using it to generate more. So it’s effectively a stochastic editor or cognitive harness, that helps you make the art. It shines in a few areas, like those subliminal pictures that are two things at once, but ultimately is like a really large sized brush that makes everything you paint average.

Perhaps 25 Dec 2025 1:55 UTC
5 points
0
on: The ML drug discovery startup trying really, really hard to not cheat
Wow this was a very well-written post, really put the fear of confounders in me as a humble ML student.

Perhaps 8 Dec 2025 2:29 UTC
12 points
0
in reply to: Gyrodiot’s comment on: 2025 Unofficial LessWrong Census/Survey
I took the survey

Perhaps 6 Oct 2025 19:42 UTC
2 points
0
on: What can Canadians do to help end the AI arms race?
I think Canada still has a pretty outsized impact on AI, especially considering how many researchers and companies came out of places like University of Toronto or UWaterloo.
Additionally, I think that if we at least had an example of what good AI policy looks like, implemented successfully in a country, it could be used as a proof to other countries that good AI regulation is possible and useful. In that regard I think lobbying for well thought out AI regulation policies on the national level is really important, and it’s not necessary to focus on international to get traction.
I recently worked at the Canadian Department of National Defence’s newly established AI Centre, and I was surprised one of the tasks of the policy team was an AI safety report, in addition to other generic governance and responsible AI stuff. Admittedly, the AI safety report mostly focused on cybersecurity and CBRN risks, but there were some loss-of-control issues mentioned as well. It indicated to me that working to integrate AI safety by working in a department and pushing projects, or talking to director-level people is possible.

Perhaps 30 Aug 2025 1:26 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Ben Pace’s Shortform Feed
Guesses:
Bounty, magical thinking, bummer, clear division/separation, +1, made me angry, long thoughts/time spent thinking, sage, exposed an error, good communication, good post smell?/vibes, broken argument, strong argument, moved my position on the topic

Perhaps 21 Feb 2025 0:41 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Chris Monteiro’s comment on: Murder plots are infohazards
There are some models on HuggingFace that do automatic PII data redaction, I’ve been working on a project to automate redaction for documents with them. AI4privacy’s models and Microsoft Presidio have been helpful.

Perhaps 27 Dec 2024 21:08 UTC
2 points
1
on: What are the most interesting / challenging evals (for humans) available?
You might find some puzzle games to be useful. In particular Understand is a game that was talked about on here as being good for learning how to test hypotheses and empirically deduce patterns. Similar to your Baba Is You experiments.

Perhaps 2 Dec 2024 19:31 UTC
7 points
0
on: 2024 Unofficial LessWrong Census/Survey
Any way that we can easily get back our own results from the survey? I know you can sometimes get a copy of your responses when you submit a Google form.

Perhaps 30 Nov 2024 17:05 UTC
47 points
0
on: (The) Lightcone is nothing without its people: LW + Lighthaven’s big fundraiser
What happens to the general Lightcone portfolio if you don’t meet a fundraising target, either this year or a future year?
For concreteness, say you miss the $1M target by $200K.

Perhaps 16 Aug 2024 1:15 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Habryka’s Shortform Feed
The karma buttons are too small for actions that in my experience, are done a lot more than clicking to listen to the post. It’s pretty easy to misclick.
Additionally, it’s unclear what the tags are, as they’re no longer right beside the post to indicate their relevance.

Perhaps 30 Mar 2024 18:10 UTC
1 point
0
on: Artificial Intelligence and Living Wisdom
I think this post would benefit from an abstract / summary / general conclusion that summarizes the main points and makes it easier to interact with. Usually I read a summary to get an idea of a post, then browse the main points and see if I’m interested enough to read on. Here, it’s hard to engage, because the writing is long and the questions it seems to deal with are nebulous.

Perhaps 13 Mar 2024 19:07 UTC
4 points
0
on: I was raised by devout Mormons, AMA &| Offer Advice
How did you find LessWrong?
Do still have any Mormon friends? Do you want to help them break away, do you think it’s something they should do on their own, or do you find whether they remain Mormon or not immaterial?
Do you think being a Mormon was not suited for you, or do you think it doesn’t work as a way of life in general? How do you think that your answer would change 50 years ago vs today?
Did you have contact/ongoing relationships with other Mormon communities while you were there? What is the variation between people/communities? How devout/lax are different people and different communities?
How much access to the internet and the wider world did you have growing up? Were local/state/international events routinely brought up in small talk?

Perhaps 12 Feb 2024 1:33 UTC
2 points
0
on: Let’s make the truth easier to find
Well, someone was working on a similar-ish project recently, @Bruce Lewis with HowTruthful. Maybe you two can combine your ideas or settle on an amalgamation together.
If possible, please let us know how it goes a couple months from now!
What links here?
- DPiepgrass's comment on How I got so excited about HowTruthful by Bruce Lewis (20 May 2024 20:52 UTC; 1 point)

Perhaps 9 Feb 2024 16:49 UTC
6 points
0
on: OpenAI wants to raise 5-7 trillion
So this is Sam Altman raising the 5-7 trillion, not OpenAI as an entity, right?

Perhaps 2 Feb 2024 19:36 UTC
2 points
−1
on: Drone Wars Endgame
Could some kind of caustic gas, or the equivalent of a sandstorm be used to make drones not useful? I feel like large scale pellet spreads wouldn’t be too useful if the drones are armoured, but I don’t know too much about armour or how much piercing power you could get. I wonder if some kind of electric netting could be fired to mass electrocute a swarm, or maybe just regular netting that interferes with their blades. Spiderwebs from the sky?
Interesting post, although I feel like it would benefit from inline references. For most of the post it feels like you’re pulling your assertions out of nowhere, and only at the end do we get some links to some of the things you said. I understand time/effort constraints though.

Perhaps 31 Jan 2024 2:38 UTC
7 points
2
on: on neodymium magnets
I derive a lot of enjoyment from these posts, just walking through tidbits of materials science is very interesting. Please keep making them.

Perhaps 29 Jan 2024 16:42 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: nim’s comment on: nim’s Shortform
I think at its most interesting it looks like encrypting your actions and thought processes so that they look like noise or chaos to outside observers.