Podcast Episodes
Back to Search“Everyone has a plan until they get lied to the face” by Screwtape
"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face."
- Mike Tyson
(The exact phrasing of that quote changes, this is my favourite.)
I think th…
5 months ago
“Please, Don’t Roll Your Own Metaethics” by Wei Dai
One day, when I was an interning at the cryptography research department of a large software company, my boss handed me an assignment to break a pse…
5 months ago
“Paranoia rules everything around me” by habryka
People sometimes make mistakes [citation needed].
The obvious explanation for most of those mistakes is that decision makers do not have access to t…
5 months ago
“Human Values ≠ Goodness” by johnswentworth
There is a temptation to simply define Goodness as Human Values, or vice versa.
Alas, we do not get to choose the definitions of commonly used words…
5 months ago
“Condensation” by abramdemski
Condensation: a theory of concepts is a model of concept-formation by Sam Eisenstat. Its goals and methods resemble John Wentworth's natural abstrac…
5 months ago
“Mourning a life without AI” by Nikola Jurkovic
Recently, I looked at the one pair of winter boots I own, and I thought “I will probably never buy winter boots again.” The world as we know it prob…
5 months ago
“Unexpected Things that are People” by Ben Goldhaber
Cross-posted from https://bengoldhaber.substack.com/
It's widely known that Corporations are People. This is universally agreed to be a good thing; …
5 months, 1 week ago
“Sonnet 4.5’s eval gaming seriously undermines alignment evals, and this seems caused by training on alignment evals” by Alexa Pan, ryan_greenblatt
According to the Sonnet 4.5 system card, Sonnet 4.5 is much more likely than Sonnet 4 to mention in its chain-of-thought that it thinks it is being e…
5 months, 1 week ago
“Publishing academic papers on transformative AI is a nightmare” by Jakub Growiec
I am a professor of economics. Throughout my career, I was mostly working on economic growth theory, and this eventually brought me to the topic of …
5 months, 1 week ago
“The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Fiction” by Raelifin
[Meta: This is Max Harms. I wrote a novel about China and AGI, which comes out today. This essay from my fiction newsletter has been slightly modifi…
5 months, 1 week ago