bilal
We thank Mike McLaren for input and feedback on drafts of this post. Summary The President’s FY 2026 Budget proposes a $52M allocation to CDC for Biothreat Radar, a new pathogen detection system. Drawing on findings from the Nucleic Acid Observatory’s metagenomic biosurveillance pilots, we model the…
References Guan, Y. et al. Isolation and characterization of viruses related to the SARS coronavirus from animals in southern China. Science 302, 276–278 (2003). Article CAS PubMed Google Scholar Li, W. et al. Bats are natural reservoirs of SARS-like coronaviruses. Science 310, 676–679 (2005).…
Context: Post #4 in my sequence of private Lightcone Infrastructure memos edited for public consumption This principle is more about how I want people at Lightcone to relate to community governance than it is about our internal team culture. As part of our jobs at Lightcone we often are in charge of…
A common topic of discussion among my close friends is where the bottlenecks are in our productivity and how we can execute more quickly. This is very different from what I see in my extended social circles, where people commonly say that velocity doesn't matter. In online discussions about this, I…
I've created a highly specific and actionable privacy guide, sorted by importance and venturing several layers deep into the privacy iceberg. I start with the basics (password manager) but also cover the obscure (dodging the millions of Bluetooth tracking beacons which extend from stores to traffic…
Context: Every Sunday I write a mini-essay about an operating principle of Lightcone Infrastructure that I want to remind my team about. I've been doing this for about 3 months, so we have about 12 mini essays. This is the first in a sequence I will add to daily with slightly polished versions of…
Context: Memo #2 in my sequence of publishing Lightcone Infrastructure internal team memos about our organizational principles Delegation is good! Delegation is the foundation of civilization! But in the depths of delegation madness breeds and evil rises. In my experience, there are three ways in…
341 LESSWRONG LW 340 Favorite quotes from "High Output Management" 13th Nov 2025 6 min read 52 New Comment 3 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since: Jonas Hallgren7h40 I liked this book too and I just wanted to share a graphic that was implied in the book between guidance and…
johnswentworth3y8035 Terminologically, I think it would be useful to name this as a variant of the epsilon fallacy, which has the benefit of being exactly what it sounds like. Also, great post, I love the pasta-cooking analysis. Steven Byrnes3y5769 Another reason the pasta terminology is bad is that…
New equipment Acquired a new proprietary pre-training dataset consisting of compact pillows that make sounds, reflective surfaces, and bell rattles. This new data has substantially improved our daily smile rate. Introduced an objective self-assessment process for performance reviews. All employees…
[previously in series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] It is eerily silent in San Francisco tonight. Since Mayor Lurie's crackdown, the usual drug hawkers, catcallers, and street beggars are nowhere to be seen. Still, your luck can’t last forever, and just before you reach your destination a man with bloodshot…
1. MLAB I landed in SFO for the first time between Christmas and New Year’s 2021. I was attending MLAB (“Machine Learning Alignment Bootcamp”), described as a “a bootcamp to bring people interested in AI Alignment up-to-speed with the state of modern ML engineering”. The organizers (Redwood Research…
You don’t need a cake tin to bake a cake. You can just bake one in any oven-safe frying pan. You don’t need baking parchment to line a cake tin/tray/pan. You can use aluminum foil instead. This can also replace the greasing of vessels. You can replace baking soda with baking powder. Just use ~2-3…
There’s a UK smoothie brand called “Innocent Drinks”. Back in 2012, when I was twelve years old, a friend from school invited me and another girl to her place. After hanging out in her house, we all decided to go on an adventure to the local Nando’s. On the way, we walked past Innocent’s London HQ…
This post is an attempt to gesture at a class of AI notkilleveryoneism (alignment) problem that seems to me to go largely unrecognized. E.g., it isn’t discussed (or at least I don't recognize it) in the recent plans written up by OpenAI (1,2), by , or by Anthropic, and I know of no other…
About half of people are worried they’ll lose their job to AI.1 And they’re right to be concerned: AI can now complete real-world coding tasks on GitHub, generate photorealistic video, drive a taxi more safely than humans, and do accurate medical diagnosis.2 And over the next five years, it’s set to…
AI image-generation models I’ve tried Midjourney is best at producing a diverse and aesthetically pleasing range of styles and doesn’t refuse “in the style of…” requests. However, it is worst at text-in-images, avoiding uncanny AI artifacts (like extra fingers or unrealistic postures), and precise…
There are three main ways in which AI will impact childhood education: AI is changing the process of education; kids can learn from AI systems AI is changing what careers will look like, by: Changing what skills and knowledge are most profitable Increasing the relative importance of non-academic…
If you want to cook a reasonably wide variety of dishes and minimize the chance that you don’t have an important spice ingredient, without accumulating jars of stuff that go stale without use, these are the spices and flavorings you should buy: Salt Ground cumin Ground coriander Paprika (optionally,…
Dear SoTA, We’re writing to tell you the results from our recent hackathons focused on the untapped tech tree (pictures at the footer). We’d also like to invite you to our next event, Fail Friday, on 8th August — register here. Geoengineering & Weather Control, 31st May-1st June Our geoengineering…
Indeed, the primary traits selected for amongst PhD candidates are an aversion to the corporate world and an affinity for the student lifestyle.
How do you know that you don’t know? The Llama 3 base model predicts that the president of Russia in 2080 will be Sergei Ivanov: But if I take the same model after instruction-tuning, I get an “I don’t know” response: What changed? The base model was trained on a bunch of diverse documents and is…
Posts RSS ◂◂RSS Contact July 19th, 2025 kids Content warning: risk to children Julia and I know drowning is the biggest risk to US kids 1-4, and we try to take this seriously. But yesterday our 4yo came very close to drowning in a fountain. (She's fine now.) This week we were on vacation with my…
Men and women frequently misunderstand each other's motivations. They generalize from their own experience and get confused when a person of the opposite sex is not like them. And while I, as a man, don't claim to perfectly understand what women want—or even why my fellow men want!—I've found I'm…
Leo was born at 5am on the 20th May, at home (this was an accident but the experience has made me extremely homebirth-pilled). Before that, I was on the minimally-neurotic side when it came to expecting mothers: we purchased a bare minimum of baby stuff (diapers, baby wipes, a changing mat, hybrid…
Introduction Joseph Bloom, Alan Cooney This is a research update from the White Box Control team at UK AISI. In this update, we share preliminary results on the topic of sandbagging that may be of interest to researchers working in the field. The format of this post was inspired by updates from the…
Cross-posted from substack. "Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about clonal interference."– Oscar Wilde (kind of) As we all know, sexual reproduction is not about reproduction. Reproduction is easy. If your goal is to fill the world with copies of your genes, all you need is a…
LESSWRONG LW New Comment 12 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since: eggsyntax5mo91 I think this is valuable work, especially the decomposition of capabilities needed for deception, but I'd also like to push back a bit. I worry about the perfect being the enemy of the good here.…
This is an adaptation of an internal doc I wrote for Anthropic. Contents Recently I’ve been having a lot of conversations about how to structure and staff teams. One framework I’ve referenced repeatedly is to break down team leadership into a few different categories of responsibility. This is…
This is an adaptation of an internal doc I wrote for Anthropic. I’ve been noticing recently that often, a big blocker to teams staying effective as they grow is trust. “Alice doesn’t trust Bob” makes Alice sound like the bad guy, but it’s often completely appropriate for people not to trust each…
This post was adapted from an internal doc I wrote at Wave. Contents Welcome to being a manager! Your time-management problem just got a lot harder. As an IC, you can often get away with a very simple time-management strategy: Decide what your one most important thing is.Work on it until it’s…
Every Saturday morning, I take 3-4 hours to think about how my week went and how I’ll make the next one better. The format has changed over time, but for example, here’s some of what I reflected on last week: I noticed I’d fallen far short of my goal for written output. I decided to allocate more…
Once I realized that my attention was even scarcer than my time, I became an anti-distraction fanatic. During my weekly reviews I methodically went through my past week, figured out what had been distracting me, and tried to eliminate it or replace it with something less distracting. Over time, this…
Contents I’ve been thinking recently about what sets apart my coworkers who’ve done the best work. You might think that the main thing that makes people really effective at research or engineering is technical ability, and among the general population that’s true. Among my Anthropic coworkers,…
Contents My few most productive individual weeks at Anthropic have all been “crisis project management:” coordinating major, time-sensitive implementation or debugging efforts. In a company like Anthropic, excellent project management is an extremely high-leverage skill, and not just during crises:…
Epistemic Status: Public service announcement. We will then return to regularly scheduled programming. Written partly as a response to (Robin Hanson): Why be Contrarian, responding to the book Inadequate Equilibria by Eliezer Yudkowsky Warning: Applause lights incoming. I’m aware. Sorry. Seemed…
While I’m a contrarian in many ways, it think it fair to call my ex-co-blogger Eliezer Yudkowsky even more contrarian than I. And he has just published a book, Inadequate Equilibria, defending his contrarian stance, against what he calls “modesty”, illustrated in these three quotes: I should expect…
I. Eliezer Yudkowsky’s catchily-titled Inadequate Equilibria is many things. It’s a look into whether there is any role for individual reason in a world where you can always just trust expert consensus. It’s an analysis of the efficient market hypothesis and how it relates to the idea of low-hanging…
Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck is a little gem of a book: wise, funny, and best of all useful (and just made available for free on the web). Eliezer Yudkowsky and I haven’t always agreed about everything, but on the subject of bureaucracies and how they fail, his…
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