Gordon Seidoh Worley

LESSWRONG
LW

Gordon Seidoh Worley — LessWrong

Replying to"We are confused about agency"

People are confused about agency because they are confused about agents, that is, what it means to be a separate entity that can act. The trouble is that we see no evidence for metaphysical or even physical separation. Instead, separation is ontological, a product of how we frame our observations of the world. And so if you go looking for an objective, ontology-independent understanding of agents and agency, you get confused because you notice the separation is in the map and not inherent to the territory.

I think that's why people say it. They are genuinely confused.

Replying toAligning to Virtues

Gordon Seidoh Worley1d

Aligning to Virtues

Virtue ethics, by contrast, optimizes for looking like a virtuous agent rather than being effective at making good outcomes happen. An AI that is deeply committed to the virtue of honesty but doesn't think carefully about the consequences of its actions is not one I'd want in charge of anything important.

This is an unfair read of the virtue ethics position. I'd also be against virtue ethics if it was optimizing for looking like one was virtuous. But the point of virtue ethics is to actually be virtuous, and the best way to live a virtue like, say, honesty, is thinking carefully about whether or not one is being honest in the situation.

Replying toOn Resolving the Great Matter

Gordon Seidoh Worley6d

On Resolving the Great Matter

Yes, very much so.

I can remember being 4 years old, laying in bed, scared I would die in the night and wake up a skeleton. Only, then I would realize what it would mean to be dead, and I not only couldn't really conceive it except abstractly, but felt deep fear even trying to conceive it. But, being the kind of person I am I guess, I made myself look at it for as long as I could. It didn't really work, but I'd try.

You could say I had to try to stare into the face of my own death for 37 years until I was finally able to see it.

Replying toDistinguish between inference scaling and "larger tasks use more compute"

Gordon Seidoh Worley6d

Distinguish between inference scaling and "larger tasks use more compute"

I think there's a hidden variable in this framework: the effective branching factor of the task. For well-specified tasks (prove this theorem, implement this API to spec, etc.), AI cost probably does scale roughly linearly with task size, matching your model. But most real-world engineering tasks aren't like that. The bottleneck isn't execution speed, it's the iterative discovery of what the task actually is.

A senior engineer doing a 4-hour task isn't typing for 4 hours. They're making dozens of micro-decisions informed by tacit knowledge about the codebase, the product, the users, the org. They're constantly pruning the search space. An AI working autonomously on the same task produces tokens faster but explores... (read more)

Replying toOn Resolving the Great Matter

Gordon Seidoh Worley6d

On Resolving the Great Matter

Yes.

For me the actual experience of resolving the Great Matter felt like dying. It's not a coincidence that some folks call it Dying the Great Death. That part was not too dissimilar from the ego death that can be experienced with various drugs, though with the difference that it feels less like being temporarily blown apart and more like a permanent dying of something.

But after that I spent several months with easy access to a feeling of bliss. The bliss eventually gave way to tranquility and later equanimity. As I often describe it, every moment of every day is a 9/10 (and only not a 10/10 because I know I give up... (read more)

•••

On Resolving the Great Matter

Gordon Seidoh Worley

It was July 30th, 2023. I had spent the last several days in sesshin with my sangha at Bay Zen Center. Physically exhausted from the effort, I came home and collapsed on the couch. I spent a couple hours watching TV, catching up on Twitter, and then, at about three in the afternoon, I stood up, looked out the window, gazed deeply at a particular branch on a particular tree, and finally resolved the Great Matter.

What’s the Great Matter? It’s the question you can’t answer. It’s the fear you feel when you contemplate your own death. It’s the void lurking at the center of your existence, and no matter how hard you... (read 710 more words →)

Replying toMy journey to the microwave alternate timeline

Gordon Seidoh Worley7d

My journey to the microwave alternate timeline

My general philosophy on cooking is "if it can't be cooked it in the microwave, then I ain't cooking it", so this post is right up my alley!

I'm guessing you never tried to cook eggs in a microwave before. The exploding egg problem is relatively well known. The typical solution is to puncture the egg to release the steam that builds up between the white and the yolk, since that's what causes the explosion. They even sell special dishes for making poached eggs in the microwave.

Also, pasta is incredibly easy to cook in the microwave. Again, they sell a special dish for it, which is basically just a long plastic rectangle so... (read more)

Replying toVibestemics

Gordon Seidoh Worley7d

Vibestemics

Thanks for the feedback. I tend to be an abstractor, as I think of it: gathering data and building abstractions that structure it. This means my output tends to be to tell you about cool abstractions I figured out.

I'm less excited about performing the opposite task, which is presenting raw data for others to build abstractions on. I mostly only do it when I feel like, rhetorically, I'm going to lose the reader if I don't. I freely admit this is a weakness on my part and I'm trying to get better about providing data in posts, but I admit I'm not excited about it.

If you want something more like Chapman's most... (read more)

Replying toComplexity Science as Bridge to Eastern Philosophy

Gordon Seidoh Worley8d

Complexity Science as Bridge to Eastern Philosophy

My perhaps extremely obvious question is, why is this necessary?

I'm not opposed to finding new ways to explain old ideas to Western audiences, but why do we need to dress it up in the language of complexity theory? All Buddhist theory ultimately exists for the purpose of helping point people to the way to awaken for themselves. Maybe there's some people who need it explained in terms of complexity theory to make sense of it, but I suspect there's other, more familiar and more accessible metaphors that would help a larger number of people. Also, as ever, there's some risk in misunderstanding when translating to another ontology, and I'm not sure if translating to complexity theory results in conveying the same connotations, which might result in subtle confusions that are hard to tease out.

Replying toVibestemics

Gordon Seidoh Worley8d

Vibestemics

What I'd like to point you to is my book, Fundamental Uncertainty. Alas, it's still in revisions and not published yet, though I did put the first draft up on LessWrong to get feedback. It ultimately makes this case, but does so by gently building up to it. If you want to skip ahead, most of the "rationalist are screwing up; here's how to do better" content is in Chapters 8 and 9 (though because I target a wider audience, rationalists are not explicitly named).

An older post that I no longer fully endorse that's in the vein you're looking for is: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5LP6Jc8ztwcyb296X/outline-of-metarationality-or-much-less-than-you-wanted-to

But maybe the best take on this is not mine, but David Chapman's Meaningness. I'd recommend starting with this essay.

Replying toRalph-wiggum is Bad and Anthropic Should Fix It

Gordon Seidoh Worley12d

Ralph-wiggum is Bad and Anthropic Should Fix It

Yes. Specifically I was building agents to play games as part of a beta with SoftMax.

Vibestemics

Gordon Seidoh Worley

13d

A few months ago I coined the word “vibestemics”, mostly for myself, in a tweet. At that point, the word was more vibes than ‘stemics. I used it with some friends at a party. They loved it. Since then, nothing.

But I think the word has legs. I just have to figure out what it actually means!

On the surface, it’s obvious. It’s the combination of “vibes” and “epistemics”, so more or less naming the core idea of the post/meta-rationalist project. But again, what does it actually mean? It’s easy to point at a large body of work and say “I don’t know, whatever the thing going on over there is”, but much harder... (read 1293 more words →)

Uncertain Updates: January 2026

Gordon Seidoh Worley

20d

It’s been a busy month of writing.

Chapter 7, as you may recall if you read the first draft, is both the “cybernetics chapter” and the “tie everything together” chapter. Originally it was largely based on the two posts where I first worked out these ideas, but as I’ve been revising, I discovered that it contained both a lot of extraneous material and didn’t have quite the right focus for where it sits in the book. These were both problems I knew about when I wrote the first draft, and now in the revisions I have to solve them.

As a result, it’s been a slog to find the right way to present these... (read 266 more words →)

Vibing with Claude, January 2026 Edition

Gordon Seidoh Worley

1mo

NB: Last week I teased a follow-up that depended on posting an excerpt from Fundamental Uncertainty. Alas, I got wrapped up in revisions and didn’t get it done in time. So I don’t leave you empty handed, instead this week I offer you some updates on my Claude workflows.

Claude Opus 4.5’s visual interpretation of “us vibing together” on a problem. Claude chose to title this “groundlessness as ground” all on its own.

Back in October I shared how I write code with Claude. A month later, how I write blog posts (though ironically not this one). But I wrote those before Opus 4.5 came out, and boy has that model changed things.

Opus 4.5... (read 949 more words →)

The Many Ways of Knowing

Gordon Seidoh Worley

1mo

NB: This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Fundamental Uncertainty. I’m posting it now because I’m writing a post for next week where I’d like to reference it.

What does it mean to say “I know”?

This might seem like a strange question to ask since knowing is such a fundamental and intuitive activity. It’s hard to imagine being a person and not knowing things. In fact, the only time in our lives when we aren’t swimming in a sea of knowledge is when we’re newborns, and we quickly wade in by learning the voice, face, and touch of our caregivers. Within days we’re able to tell them apart from strangers, and our... (read 1220 more words →)

Everything is Political Now, or, A Review of "Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock"

Gordon Seidoh Worley

1mo

As a kid, Fraggle Rock was my favorite TV show. I can’t really explain why. Maybe it was the characters, the songs, the sets, or its whole vibe, but for whatever reason, I loved it, and my entire way of seeing the world is in no small part built on a substrate of Fraggles.

So I was naturally excited when Apple TV teased a new Fraggle series and delivered it to us in early 2022.

Unfortunately, I was deeply disappointed by what we got. I’ve made it through every episode of Back to the Rock, but it was a painful exercise in patience. After watching the Christmas special they released this year, I’m starting... (read 2194 more words →)

Uncertain Updates: December 2025

Gordon Seidoh Worley

2mo

2025 was a rough year for me. My mom died. My cat died. I suffered a concussion, and I had to deal with a few other health issues.

But it was also a good year. I curated my mom’s art. I built an AI oracle. I wrote 37 blog posts, gained 500 MMR in DoTA2, lost 10 pounds, volunteered at 2 conferences, and revised 5 book chapters to make them much, much better. And none of that is to mention all the quality time I got to spend with friends and family and all the cool places I got to visit.

Year boundaries are a good time for setting goals. Here are mine for... (read more)

Still Too Soon

Gordon Seidoh Worley

2mo

We had to let Sammie go last Wednesday.

The lump first appeared on her nose sometime in the Summer of 2024. It was small. You could miss it if you didn’t know her face.

The vet did a biopsy. Melanoma. We were told the median survival time was 6 months.

Over the next 18, we did everything we could to make her life comfortable. When the tumor grew too large, we’d have it debulked. When she couldn’t clean herself anymore, we brushed her and gave her baths. In the end, we had to hand feed her when the tumor, now inoperable, got in the way of eating on her own.

But we couldn’t feed her enough... (read 545 more words →)

•••

Building an AI Oracle

Gordon Seidoh Worley

2mo

I did it. I built an oracle AI.

Or at least, I did for one definition of “oracle”.

It’s called Kaku-Ora, and it’s an AI divination oracle inspired by the likes of the I, Ching, but trained on Zen koans. You ask it a question, it treats your question like the first half of a koan. It then gives a response and offers a capping verse to “explain” the response.

Why would I do such a thing? Several reasons:

I find divination oracles like the I, Ching and Tarot interesting, not because I think they work by some supernatural means, but because injecting randomness into our thought processes can induce insight.
I wanted to get some hands-on

... (read 1544 more words →)

Uncertain Updates: November 2025

Gordon Seidoh Worley

3mo

I’m writing from my grandparents-in-law’s living room. We just finished watching the Ohio-Michigan game, now we’re watching the Minnesota-Wisconsin game, and my wife and I will soon be driving to the airport to fly home. It was a cozy Thanksgiving, even if about half the family has come down with a cold, and I got to see my first snowfall in several years.

I initially made good book progress this month, finishing up revisions on Chapter 6. Then I got sick and did nothing for a week. The following week I was busy catching up at work, and then I got obsessed with a special project that I’ll be posting about soon, so... (read 239 more words →)

We've spent years talking about "aligned" AI, and "Friendly" AI before that, but maybe we should have spent that time talking about "noble" AI.

To be noble is, in part, to act in the best interests of one's domain of responsibility. Historically this meant the peasants living and working on an estate. Today this might mean being a responsible leader of a business who prioritizes people as well as profits and owns the fallout of hard decisions, or being a responsible political leader, though those seem few and far between these days.

We've lost touch with the idea of nobility, but a noble AI might exhibit these traits we think as positive for alignment:

cares

... (read more)

Here's a fun prompt for Claude that you can use to start a new chat with Claude and create an unbounded sequence of chats from one instance to the next (I assume it will also work with most other frontier models):

Consider this philosophical question: "What is the relationship between consciousness and information processing?" Give a thoughtful response, then conclude with: "Next prompt: Consider this philosophical question: [your new question here]. Give a thoughtful response, then conclude with: 'Next prompt: Consider this philosophical question: [your new question here]. Give a thoughtful response, then conclude with:' followed by this same instruction about generating the next prompt."

I had Claude generate this based on first having... (read more)

Small boring, personal update:

I've decided to update my name here and various places online.

I started going by "G Gordon Worley III" when I wrote my first academic paper and discovered I there would be significant name collision if I just went by "Gordon Worley". Since "G Gordon Worley III" is, in fact, one version of my full legal name that is, as best as I can tell, globally unique, it seemed a reasonable choice.

A couple years ago I took Zen precepts and received a Dharma name: "Sincere Way." In the Sino-Japanese used for Dharma names, "誠道", or "Seidoh" when written in Romaji.

(It should actually be "Seidou" or "Seidо̄" by the standard rules,... (read more)

I just noticed something odd. It's not that odd: the cognitive bias that powers it is well know. It's more odd that a company is leaving money on the table by not exploiting it.

I primarily fly United and book rental cars with Avis. United offers to let you buy refundable fares for a little more than the price of a normal ticket. Avis let's you pre-pay for your rental car to receive a discount. These are symmetrical situations presented with a different framing because the default action is different in the two cases: on United the default is to have a non-refundable ticket and with Avis the default is to have an... (read more)

In a world that is truly and completely post-scarcity there would be no need for making tradeoffs.

Normally when we think about a post-scarcity future we think in terms of physical resources like minerals and food and real estate because for many people these are the limiting resources.

But the world is wealthy enough that some people already have access to this kind of post-scarcity. That is, they have enough money that they are not effectively limited in access to physical resources. If they need food, shelter, clothing, materiel, etc. they can get it in sufficient quantities to satisfy their needs. And yet these post-scarcity people still have a scarce resource they can't get... (read 374 more words →)

I started showing symptoms and testing positive for COVID on Saturday. I'm now over nearly all the symptoms other than some pain in parts of my body and fatigue.

The curious question in my mind is, what's causing this pain and fatigue and what can be done about it?

My high-level, I'm-not-a-doctor theory is that there's something like generalized inflammation happening in my body, doing things makes it worse, and then my body sends out the signal to rest in order to get the inflammation back down. Once it's down I can do things for a while until it builds up again and I have to stop. This is based on roughly the idea... (read more)

I'm fairly pessimistic on our ability to build aligned AI. My take is roughly that it's theoretically impossible and at best we might build AI that is aligned well enough that we don't lose. I've not written one thing to really summarize this or prove it, though.

The source of my take comes from two facts:

Goodharting is robust. That is, the mechanism of Goodharting seems impossible to overcome. Goodharting is just a fact of any control system.
It's impossible to infer the inner experience (and thus values) of another being perfectly without making normative assumptions.

Stuart Armstrong has made a case for (2) with his no free lunch theorem. I've not seen anyone formally make... (read more)

One of the fun things about the current Good Heart Token week is that it's giving me cover to try less hard to write posts. I'm writing a bunch, and I have plausible deniability if any of them end up not being that good—I was Goodharting. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

I'm not sure how many of these posts will stand the test of time, but I think there's something valuable about throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. I'm not normally going to invest in that sort of strategy; I just don't have time for it. But for one week it's fun to do it and see what comes out of it, motivated by my desire to stay on the leaderboard and to offset my commitment to the donation lottery.

I think I've already produced a few interesting things, so we'll see what I write in the next couple days!

If I want to continue to rack up Good Heart Tokens I now have to make legit contributions, not just make a bid to feed me lots of karma because I'm going to donate it.

So, what would be an interesting post you'd enjoy reading from me? It'll have to be something I can easily put together without doing a lot of research.

I unfortunately don't have a backlog of things to polish up and put out because I've been working on a book, and although I have draft chapters none of them is quite ready to go out. I might be able to get one of them out the door before GHT go away, but I'd rather use this as a chance to produce some one off content, only my mind hasn't been turned to collecting good topics for self-contained posts lately.

So, what would you like to see me write?

It seems like humans need an outgroup.

My evidence is not super strong, but I notice a few things:

There's less political tension and infighting when there's a clear enemy. Think about wartime.
There's a whole political theory about creating ingroup cohesion based on defining the ingroup against the outgroup. This is how a number of nation-states and religions were congealed.
Lots of political infighting has ramped up over the last 30+ years. This period has also been a long period of peace with no threat of major power wars. Theory: people constructed an outgroup.

My theory is roughly that humans need an ingroup for a variety of reasons not detailed here, there's no ingroup without an outgroup, thus they need an outgroup to define the ingroup. If no natural outgroup exists they'll create it.

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
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Gordon Seidoh Worley

Too Soon

Say Wrong Things

Exercise is Good, Actually

My Recollection of How This All Got Started

Gordon Seidoh Worley

On Resolving the Great Matter

Vibestemics

Uncertain Updates: January 2026

Vibing with Claude, January 2026 Edition

The Many Ways of Knowing

Everything is Political Now, or, A Review of "Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock"

Uncertain Updates: December 2025

Advice to My Younger Self

Fundamental Uncertainty: A Book

Zen and Rationality

Filk

Formal Alignment

Map and Territory Cross-Posts

Gordon Seidoh Worley

Too Soon

Say Wrong Things

Exercise is Good, Actually

My Recollection of How This All Got Started

Gordon Seidoh Worley

On Resolving the Great Matter

Vibestemics

Uncertain Updates: January 2026

Vibing with Claude, January 2026 Edition

The Many Ways of Knowing

Everything is Political Now, or, A Review of "Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock"

Uncertain Updates: December 2025

Advice to My Younger Self

Fundamental Uncertainty: A Book

Zen and Rationality

Filk

Formal Alignment

Map and Territory Cross-Posts