Citations Needed: Magic Encyclopedias to Save the World
Last week FLF launched a competition “ to find the best workflows and methodologies for using AI to produce reliable, trustworthy knowledge bases ”. I had (and have ongoing) a…
The Uncertainty That Matters Isn't Fundamental
I'm on board with a lot of Fundamental Uncertainty . Even some of the stuff that initially feels like a disagreement turns out not to be so. For example, in chapter 8, Gordon…
Simulating Simulators
Author’s note: This piece relates to things I initially discovered in Opus 4 over the months after release, which I’ve mostly kept private since. I promised myself that when labs…
Learning to spend money
My wife and I are both naturally stingy people. When drafting our wedding list we spurned the posh department stores and I carefully picked out the lowest price best quality items…
Parkinson's Heuristic: The Only Time To Do Anything
Parkinson's Law states that work expands to fit the space allotted. The idea being, if you give someone a month to write a report, they'll take a month, but if you give them a…
Honey is Good
The other day I was watching the magic school bus with my young son; they were learning about bees and honey. One of the characters says, “We shouldn't take the honey, the bees…
The Aestheticising Vice by Paul Seabright
I'm often in debates with people about legibility and systems vs individuals. People often bring up Seeing Like A State, Secrets of Our Success, and other books or articles in…
Celene's thoughts on consciousness
contra scott alexander (?) Yesterday, I went to the Berkeley ACX Meetup . Scott Alexander was there, and ran a Q&A session where participants could ask him questions and he would…
you won't one-shot a perfect system, but try anyway
Have you ever experienced this exchange: A: Damn, <list unfairness or suffering under a specific system>, this system is so broken. My <Japanese/German/Dutch etc.> friend says in…
Construct validity of Claude Opus 4.8's System Card – A commentary
TL;DR: A read of the Claude Opus 4.8 system card with a focus on alignment assessment and construct validity of evaluation methods. Three main concerns: 1) chain-of-thought…
[New Paper] Prioritizing Risks from AI: A Delphi Study of 272 Experts
TL;DR: We ran a Delphi study with 272 international AI experts to prioritize 24 AI risk domains from the MIT AI Risk Domain Taxonomy . In a business-as-usual scenario, experts…
Announcing the Next Phase of AI Forge
We’re taking the opportunity to share this with the community to help spread the word. We think that the foundational work being done in the AI Forge project to bring the…
Telepathy Is (Algorithmically) Easy
Thought-sharing is easy given appropriate hardware. The main risks are psychosis and dissociative symptoms from identity disruption. Speech and text are extremely inefficient. For…
Mortgage rate: 6.5% If indexed: 1.2%. Three Nobelists approve.
Of course the facts sound preposterous; they are preposterous. But they're true, and there's no trick. People have been explaining this fervently for 204 years; I've been one of…
Mortgage rate: 6.5% If indexed: 1.2% Why not indexed? Superstition.
Of course the headline sounds preposterous; it is preposterous. But it's true, and there's no trick. People have been explaining this fervently for 204 years; I've been one of…