author stringclasses 11
values | title stringlengths 1 899 ⌀ | url stringlengths 18 120 | text stringlengths 10 1.26M | word_count int64 1 199k |
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Eliezer Yudkowsky | Self-fulfilling correlations | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/self-fulfilling-correlations | Correlation does not imply causation. Sometimes corr(X,Y) means X=>Y; sometimes it means Y=>X; sometimes it means W=>X, W=>Y. And sometimes it's an artifact of people's beliefs about corr(X, Y). With intelligent agents, perceived causation causes correlation.
Volvos are believed by many people to be safe. Volvo ha... | 1,038 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | A computational no-coincidence principle | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a-computational-no-coincidence-principle | _This post presents a conjecture formulated at the_[ _Alignment Research Center_](https://www.alignment.org/theory/) _in 2023. Our belief in the conjecture is at least partly load-bearing for our belief in ARC's overall agenda. We haven't directly worked on the conjecture for a while now, but we believe the conjecture ... | 2,647 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Daniel Dennett has died (1942-2024) | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/daniel-dennett-has-died-1942-2024 | > Daniel Dennett, professor emeritus of philosophy at Tufts University, well-known for his work in philosophy of mind and a wide range of other philosophical areas, has died.
>
> [Professor Dennett](https://as.tufts.edu/philosophy/people/faculty/daniel-dennett) wrote extensively about issues related to philosophy of m... | 327 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | 2023 Survey Results | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2023-survey-results | # The Data
## 0\. Population
There were 558 responses over 32 days. The spacing and timing of the responses had hills and valleys because of an experiment I was performing where I'd get the survey advertised in a different place, then watch how many new responses happened in the day or two after that.
Previous surve... | 13,131 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Advice for newly busy people | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/advice-for-newly-busy-people | After writing "[Advice for interacting with busy people](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/v8xoqiwaYu9krmjsY/advice-for-interacting-with-busy-people)", I was asked to write a follow-up on advice for newly busy people. So, here's a quick list of tools and mental models that help me prioritize.
This list is by no means co... | 1,395 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Where do (did?) stable, cooperative institutions come from? | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/where-do-did-stable-cooperative-institutions-come-from | The United States has a bunch of nice things whose creation/maintenance requires coordinated effort from a large number of people across time. For example: bridges that stay up; electrical grids that provide us with power; the rule of law; newspapers that make it easier to keep tabs on recent events; fire fighting serv... | 1,335 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | The U.S. is becoming less stable | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/the-u-s-is-becoming-less-stable | We focus so much on arguing over who is at fault in this country that I think sometimes we fail to alert on what's actually happening. I would just like to point out, without attempting to assign blame, that American political institutions appear to be losing common knowledge of their legitimacy, and abandoning certain... | 557 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | LoRA Fine-tuning Efficiently Undoes Safety Training from Llama 2-Chat 70B | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/lora-fine-tuning-efficiently-undoes-safety-training-from | _Produced as part of the_[ _SERI ML Alignment Theory Scholars Program_](https://serimats.org/) _\- Summer 2023 Cohort, under the mentorship of Jeffrey Ladish. _
TL;DR LoRA fine-tuning undoes the safety training of Llama 2-Chat 70B with one GPU and a budget of less than $200. The resulting models[1] maintain helpful c... | 4,984 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | The Tale of Alice Almost: Strategies for Dealing With Pretty Good People | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/the-tale-of-alice-almost-strategies-for-dealing-with-pretty | Suppose you value some virtue V and you want to encourage people to be better at it. Suppose also you are something of a "thought leader" or "public intellectual" -- you have some ability to influence the culture around you through speech or writing.
Suppose Alice Almost is much more V-virtuous than the average person... | 1,923 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | GPT-4 | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gpt-4 | > We’ve created GPT-4, the latest milestone in OpenAI’s effort in scaling up deep learning. GPT-4 is a large multimodal model (accepting image and text inputs, emitting text outputs) that, while worse than humans in many real-world scenarios, exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchma... | 52 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | AI x-risk, approximately ordered by embarrassment | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ai-x-risk-approximately-ordered-by-embarrassment | Advanced AI systems could lead to existential risks via several different pathways, some of which may not fit neatly into traditional risk forecasts. Many previous forecasts, for example the well known [report](https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.13353) by Joe Carlsmith, decompose a failure story into a conjunction of different... | 6,042 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | The bonds of family and community: Poverty and cruelty among Russian peasants in the late 19th century | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/the-bonds-of-family-and-community-poverty-and-cruelty-among | [_Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia_](https://www.amazon.com/Village-Tsarist-Russia-Religion-America-ebook/dp/B07FZX74DG?tag=jasocraw=20) is an ethnographic account of Russian peasants around 1900. The author, Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia (“Semyonova” for short), spent four years researching in the villages—one of t... | 4,612 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Prisoner's Dilemma Tournament Results | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/prisoner-s-dilemma-tournament-results | About two weeks ago I [announced](/lw/79r/prisoners_dilemma_as_a_game_theory_laboratory/) an open competition for LessWrong readers inspired by Robert Axelrod's famous [tournaments](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_cooperation#Axelrod.27s_Tournaments). The competitors had to submit a strategy which would play ... | 3,533 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Give it a google | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/give-it-a-google | I'm a programmer. In programming, people talk about how the ability to Google is such an important skill. No one knows everything. In practice, people are always looking things up and running into weird situations that they have to figure out.
That's not what this post is about. Not quite. This post is about the _deci... | 2,046 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Vernor Vinge, who coined the term "Technological Singularity", dies at 79 | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vernor-vinge-who-coined-the-term-technological-singularity | > On Wednesday, author David Brin announced that Vernor Vinge, sci-fi author, former professor, and father of the technological singularity concept, died from Parkinson's disease at age 79 on March 20, 2024, in La Jolla, California. The announcement came in a Facebook tribute where Brin wrote about Vinge's deep love fo... | 441 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | It's Okay to Feel Bad for a Bit | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/it-s-okay-to-feel-bad-for-a-bit | > "If you kiss your child, or your wife, say that you only kiss things which are human, and thus you will not be disturbed if either of them dies." - Epictetus
>
> "Whatever suffering arises, all arises due to attachment; with the cessation of attachment, there is the cessation of suffering." - Pali canon
>
> "An ara... | 884 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Value Claims (In Particular) Are Usually Bullshit | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/value-claims-in-particular-are-usually-bullshit | _Epistemic status: mental model which I have found picks out bullshit surprisingly well._
## Idea 1: Parasitic memes tend to be value-claims, as opposed to belief-claims
By "parasitic memes" I mean memes whose main function is to copy themselves - as opposed to, say, actually provide value to a human in some way (so ... | 592 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Gradual Disempowerment, Shell Games and Flinches | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gradual-disempowerment-shell-games-and-flinches | Over the past year and half, I've had numerous conversations about the risks we describe in [Gradual Disempowerment](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pZhEQieM9otKXhxmd/gradual-disempowerment-systemic-existential-risks-from). (The shortest useful summary of the core argument is: _To the extent human civilization is human... | 1,695 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Cryonics signup guide #1: Overview | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cryonics-signup-guide-1-overview | This is the introduction to a sequence on signing up for cryonics. In the coming posts I will lay out what you need to do, concretely and in detail. **This sequence is intended for people who already think signing up for cryonics is a good idea** but are putting it off because they're not sure what they actually need t... | 1,740 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | The Virtue of Narrowness | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/the-virtue-of-narrowness | > What is true of one apple may not be true of another apple; thus more can be said about a single apple than about all the apples in the world.
>
> —“The Twelve Virtues of Rationality”
Within their own professions, people grasp the importance of narrowness; a car mechanic knows the difference between a carburetor an... | 1,101 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Annoyingly Principled People, and what befalls them | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/annoyingly-principled-people-and-what-befalls-them | Here are two beliefs that are sort of haunting me right now:
1. Folk who try to push people to uphold principles (whether established ones or novel ones), are kinda an important bedrock of civilization.
2. Also, those people are really annoying and often, like, a little bit crazy
And these both feel fairly impo... | 1,555 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Meta-Honesty: Firming Up Honesty Around Its Edge-Cases | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/meta-honesty-firming-up-honesty-around-its-edge-cases-1 | (Cross-posted [from Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10156161113669228).)
## 0: Tl;dr.
* A problem with the obvious-seeming "wizard's code of honesty" aka "never say things that are false" is that it draws on high verbal intelligence and unusually permissive social embeddings. I.e., you can't alwa... | 8,220 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Dangers of steelmanning / principle of charity | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dangers-of-steelmanning-principle-of-charity | As far as I can tell, most people around these parts consider the [principle of charity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity) and its super saiyan form, [steelmanning](http://www.patheos.com/blogs/camelswithhammers/2012/12/the-virtue-of-steelmanning/), to be Very Good Rationalist Virtues. I basically agre... | 709 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Social anxiety isn't about being liked | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/social-anxiety-isn-t-about-being-liked | There’s this popular idea that socially anxious folks are dying to be _liked._ Why else would someone be so anxious about how others perceive them?
And yet, being socially anxious tends to make you less likeable… so they must be behaving really irrationally, right?
example
Maybe not. What if social anxiety isn’t abo... | 419 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | At 87, Pearl is still able to change his mind | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/at-87-pearl-is-still-able-to-change-his-mind | Judea Pearl is a famous researcher, known for Bayesian networks (the standard way of representing Bayesian models), and his statistical formalization of causality. Although [he has always been recommended reading here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RiQYixgCdvd8eWsjg/recommended-rationalist-reading?commentId=x2RBYhYC3... | 1,627 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | The Corner-Stone | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/the-corner-stone | Is the US a ruthless cognitive meritocracy that reliably promotes outlier talent? VB Knives defended that claim in a Twitter argument against Living Room Enjoyer that got my attention. [1] Knives argued that if you have a 150 IQ, you'll be a National Merit Scholar, which "at a minimum" gets you a free ride at a state f... | 7,246 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Fake Causality | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fake-causality | Phlogiston was the eighteenth century’s answer to the Elemental Fire of the Greek alchemists. Ignite wood, and let it burn. What is the orangey-bright “fire” stuff? Why does the wood transform into ash? To both questions, the eighteenth-century chemists answered, “phlogiston.”
. . . and that was it, you see, that was ... | 1,242 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Beyond Astronomical Waste | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/beyond-astronomical-waste | Faced with the astronomical amount of unclaimed and unused resources in our universe, one's first reaction is probably wonderment and anticipation, but a second reaction may be disappointment that our universe isn't even larger or contains even more resources (such as the ability to support 3^^^3 human lifetimes or per... | 1,040 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Interpretability/Tool-ness/Alignment/Corrigibility are not Composable | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/interpretability-tool-ness-alignment-corrigibility-are-not | ## Interpretability
I have a decent understanding of how transistors work, at least for purposes of basic digital circuitry. Apply high voltage to the gate, and current can flow between source and drain. Apply low voltage, and current doesn’t flow. (... And sometimes reverse that depending on which type of transistor ... | 789 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Prizes for ELK proposals | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/prizes-for-elk-proposals | **We are no longer accepting submissions. We'll get in touch with winners and make a post about winning proposals sometime in the next month.**
[_ARC_](https://alignmentresearchcenter.org/) recently released a technical report on [_eliciting latent knowledge_](https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1WwsnJQstPq91_Yh-Ch... | 2,271 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Even if you have a nail, not all hammers are the same | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/even-if-you-have-a-nail-not-all-hammers-are-the-same | (Related to [Over-ensapsulation](/lw/1zk/overencapsulation/) and [Subtext is not invariant under linear transformation](/lw/1yv/subtext_is_not_invariant_under_linear/))
Between 2004 and 2007, Goran Bjelakovic et al. published 3 famous meta-analysis of vitamin supplements, concluding that vitamins don't help people but... | 1,712 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | DeepMind is hiring for the Scalable Alignment and Alignment Teams | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/deepmind-is-hiring-for-the-scalable-alignment-and-alignment | We are hiring for several roles in the Scalable Alignment and Alignment Teams at DeepMind, two of the subteams of DeepMind Technical AGI Safety trying to make artificial general intelligence go well. In brief,
* The **Alignment Team** investigates how to avoid failures of intent alignment, operationalized as a situ... | 2,650 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | OpenAI Launches Superalignment Taskforce | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/openai-launches-superalignment-taskforce | In their announcement [Introducing Superalignment](https://openai.com/blog/introducing-superalignment), OpenAI committed 20% of secured compute and a new taskforce to solving the technical problem of aligning a superintelligence within four years. Cofounder and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever will co-lead the team with ... | 14,584 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Leading The Parade | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/leading-the-parade | ## Background
### Terminology: Counterfactual Impact vs “Leading The Parade”
Y’know how a parade or marching band has a person who walks in front waving a fancy-looking stick up and down? Like this guy:
The classic 80’s comedy Animal House features a [_great scene_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AGyBvRKPs0) in... | 2,676 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Epistle to the New York Less Wrongians | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/epistle-to-the-new-york-less-wrongians | _(At the suggestion and request of Tom McCabe, I 'm posting the essay that I sent to the New York LW group after my first visit there, and before the second visit:)_
Having some kind of global rationalist community come into existence seems like a quite extremely good idea. The NYLW group is the forerunner of that, th... | 2,961 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Evolving to Extinction | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/evolving-to-extinction | It is a _very_ common misconception that an evolution works for the good of its species. Can you remember hearing someone talk about two rabbits breeding eight rabbits and thereby "contributing to the survival of their species"? A modern evolutionary biologist would never say such a thing; they'd sooner breed with a ra... | 1,878 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Brain Efficiency Cannell Prize Contest Award Ceremony | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/brain-efficiency-cannell-prize-contest-award-ceremony | Previously Jacob Cannell wrote the post "Brain Efficiency" which makes several radical claims: that the brain is at the pareto frontier of speed, energy efficiency and memory bandwith, that this represent a fundamental physical frontier.
Here's an AI-generated summary
> The article “Brain Efficiency: Much More than Y... | 2,001 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Probability is in the Mind | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/probability-is-in-the-mind | [](/static/imported/2007/08/10/monsterwithgirl_2.jpg)
Yesterday I spoke of the Mind Projection Fallacy, giving the example of the alien monster who carries off a girl in a torn dress for intended ravishing--a mistake which I imputed to the artist's tendency to think that a woman's sexiness is a property of the woman h... | 1,777 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Comparing risk from internally-deployed AI to insider and outsider threats from humans | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/comparing-risk-from-internally-deployed-ai-to-insider-and | I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the relationship between [_AI control_](https://redwoodresearch.substack.com/p/the-case-for-ensuring-that-powerful) and traditional computer security. Here’s one point that I think is important.
My understanding is that there's a big qualitative distinction between two ends of a... | 813 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Could a superintelligence deduce general relativity from a falling apple? An investigation | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/could-a-superintelligence-deduce-general-relativity-from-a | **Introduction:**
In the article/short story “[That Alien Message](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien-message)”, Yudkowsky writes the following passage, as part of a general point about how powerful super-intelligences could be:
> _Riemann invented his geometries before Einstein had a use fo... | 2,749 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Shard Theory in Nine Theses: a Distillation and Critical Appraisal | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/shard-theory-in-nine-theses-a-distillation-and-critical | **TL;DR:** [__Shard theory__](https://www.alignmentforum.org/tag/shard-theory) _ is a new research program started by Quintin Pope and Alex Turner. Existing introductions tend to be relatively long winded and aimed at an introductory audience. Here, I outline what I think are the nine main theses of shard theory as of... | 5,496 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Broad-Spectrum Cancer Treatments | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/broad-spectrum-cancer-treatments | Midjourney, “engraving of Apollo shooting his bow at a distant cancer cell”
## **Introduction and Principles**
The conventional wisdom is that we can’t “cure cancer” because every cancer is different.
And it’s true that cancer is genetically and biochemically diverse, and that targeted cancer therapies generally onl... | 2,390 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | OpenAI #10: Reflections | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/openai-10-reflections | This week, Altman offers a post called [Reflection](https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections)s, and [he has an interview in Bloomberg](https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-sam-altman-interview/). There’s a bunch of good and interesting answers in the interview about past events that I won’t mention or have to condense... | 3,432 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Discussion: Challenges with Unsupervised LLM Knowledge Discovery | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/discussion-challenges-with-unsupervised-llm-knowledge-1 | **TL;DR:** [Contrast-consistent search (CCS)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03827) seemed exciting to us and we were keen to apply it. At this point, we think it is unlikely to be directly helpful for implementations of alignment strategies (>95%). Instead of finding knowledge, it seems to find the most prominent feature.... | 3,107 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Auditing language models for hidden objectives | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/auditing-language-models-for-hidden-objectives | We study **alignment audits** —systematic investigations into whether an AI is pursuing hidden objectives—by training a model with a hidden misaligned objective and asking teams of blinded researchers to investigate it.
This [paper](https://assets.anthropic.com/m/317564659027fb33/original/Auditing-Language-Models-for-... | 3,443 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Comments on OpenAI's "Planning for AGI and beyond" | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/comments-on-openai-s-planning-for-agi-and-beyond | Sam Altman shared me on a draft of his OpenAI blog post [_Planning for AGI and beyond_](https://openai.com/blog/planning-for-agi-and-beyond), and I left some comments, reproduced below without typos and with some added hyperlinks. Where the final version of the OpenAI post differs from the draft, I’ve noted that as wel... | 3,927 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nuclear-war-is-unlikely-to-cause-human-extinction | A number of people have claimed that a full-scale nuclear war is likely to cause human extinction. I have investigated this issue in depth and concluded that even a full scale nuclear exchange is unlikely (<1%) to cause human extinction.
By a full-scale war, I mean a nuclear exchange between major world powers, such ... | 3,281 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Alcohol, health, and the ruthless logic of the Asian flush | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/alcohol-health-and-the-ruthless-logic-of-the-asian-flush | Say you're an evil scientist. One day at work you discover a protein that crosses the blood-brain barrier and causes crippling migraine headaches if someone's attention drifts while driving. Despite being evil, you're a loving parent with a kid learning to drive. Like everyone else, your kid is completely addicted to t... | 172 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Defense Against The Dark Arts: Case Study #1 | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/defense-against-the-dark-arts-case-study-1 | **Related to:**[The Power of Positivist Thinking](/lw/48/the_power_of_positivist_thinking/), [On Seeking a Shortening of the Way](/lw/5z/on_seeking_a_shortening_of_the_way/), [Crowley on Religious Experience](/lw/5r/crowley_on_religious_experience/)
Annoyance [wants us to stop talking about fancy techniques](/lw/5z/on... | 1,804 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Reply to Eliezer on Biological Anchors | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reply-to-eliezer-on-biological-anchors | The [_"biological anchors" method for forecasting transformative AI_](https://www.cold-takes.com/forecasting-transformative-ai-the-biological-anchors-method-in-a-nutshell/) is the biggest non-[_trust-based_](https://www.cold-takes.com/minimal-trust-investigations/#navigating-trust) input into my thinking about likely t... | 4,688 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Customer Satisfaction Opportunities | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/customer-satisfaction-opportunities-1 | I am monitoring surveillance camera V84A. A tall man is walking towards me. He is roughly twenty-five. <faceprint> His name is Damion Prescott. He has a room booked for a whole month. His facial symmetry scores show he is in the 99th percentile. This is in accordance with my holistic impression. <search> School records... | 3,780 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | We're already in AI takeoff | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/we-re-already-in-ai-takeoff | Back in 2016, CFAR pivoted to focusing on xrisk. I think the magic phrase at the time was:
> _"Rationality for its own sake, for the sake of existential risk."_
I was against this move. I also had no idea how power works. I don't know how to translate this into LW language, so I'll just use mine: I was secret-to-me v... | 2,193 |
Eliezer Yudkowsky | Dan Luu on "You can only communicate one top priority" | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dan-luu-on-you-can-only-communicate-one-top-priority | h/t to rpglover64 who pointed me towards this twitter thread in [this comment](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/thkAtqoQwN6DtaiGT/carefully-bootstrapped-alignment-is-organizationally-hard?commentId=8JY3hkdJ578ophhvt).
Here's Dan Luu's take on what happens when orgs try to communicate nuanced priorities. (Related to my... | 801 |
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