johnswentworth

There’s a standard story which says roughly "motivated reasoning in humans exists because it is/was adaptive for negotiating with other humans". I do not think that story stands up well under examination; when I think of standard day-to-day examples of motivated reasoning, that pattern sounds like a plausible generator for...

Every time I see someone mention statistics on nonconsent kink online, someone else is surprised by how common it is. So let’s start with some statistics from Lehmiller[1]: roughly two thirds of women and half of men have some fantasy of being raped. A lot of these are more of...

What’s “The Plan”? For several years now, around the end of the year, I (John) write a post on our plan for AI alignment. That plan hasn’t changed too much over the past few years, so both this year’s post and last year’s are written as updates to The Plan...

Background: The Ising Model The Ising Model is a classic toy model of magnets. We imagine a big 2D or 3D grid, representing a crystal lattice. At each grid vertex i, there’s a little magnetic atom with state σi, which can point either up (σi=+1) or down (σi=−1). When two...

Throughout November, I’ve been keeping up with the Inkhaven mandate to write and post a blogpost, of at least 500 words, every day. It’s the last day of November, so how’d that go? First and foremost: most of my blogposts from this month are pretty mediocre, by my own standards....

> On October 5, 1960, the American Ballistic Missile Early-Warning System station at Thule, Greenland, indicated a large contingent of Soviet missiles headed towards the United States. Fortunately, common sense prevailed at the informal threat-assessment conference that was immediately convened: international tensions weren't particularly high at the time. The system...

Context: Each day on her blog Letters To Boys, Gretta Duleba has been posting things she once sent to men she dated. One of those, recently, was a love letter to me, which she “sent” me by posting it on the blog. With a setup like that, it would be...