The following is a transcript of a public discussion between Charbel-Raphaël Segerie and Lucius Bushnaq that took place on 23 September during LessWrong Community Weekend 2023. I edited the transcript

Attempting to make sense of your life path with computer algorithms. 7 min read· Jan 8, 2023 -- “Looking through the lens of computer science can teach us about the nature of the human mind, the meani

source A common piece of interacting-with-people advice goes: “often when people complain, they don’t want help, they just want you to listen!” For instance, Nonviolent Communication:✻✻ Nonviolent Com

This post includes a "flattened version" of an interactive diagram that cannot be displayed on this site. I recommend reading the original version of the post with the interactive diagram, which can b

How can you improve your conception of rationality? Not by saying to yourself, “It is my duty to be rational.” By this you only enshrine your mistaken conception. Perhaps your conception of rationality is that it is rational to believe the words of the Great Teacher, and the Great Teacher says, “The…

TL;DR: Mechanistic anomaly detection aims to flag when an AI produces outputs for “unusual reasons.” It is similar to mechanistic interpretability but doesn’t demand human understanding. I give a self

I open my eyes and find myself lying on a bed in a hospital room. I blink. "Hello", says a middle-aged man with glasses, sitting on a chair by my bed. "You've been out for quite a long while." "Oh no

Dan Shechtman discovered quasicrystals in 1982 and was told by double Nobel laureate Linus Pauling "there are no quasi-crystals, only quasi-scientists." They kicked him out of his research group. In 2011, he got his own Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Hi there. It’s me, the person who stares very hard at the numbers in the papers you write. I’ve brought you here today to ask a favor. Say you wrote something like this: There were 446 students tested

[I am not a sleep specialist. Please consult with one before making any drastic changes or trying to treat anything serious.] Van Geijlswijk et al describe supplemental melatonin as “a chronobiotic dr

Once, when I was 12, my parents asked me what my favorite animal was. And I thought: OK, self, what you’ve got here is a totally safe question. There are no “right” or “wrong” animals and no need to w

We've noticed that new alignment researchers (and sometimes experienced alignment researchers) often fall into similar traps. Here are 7 traps that we often see in new alignment researchers: 1. They t

Epistemic status: Not new material, but hopefully points more directly at key EA intuitions. Ana is a hypothetical junior software engineer in Silicon Valley making $150k/year. Every year, she spends