All of Matt Goldenberg's Comments + Replies

I don't see how the original argument goes through if it's by default continuous.  

length X but not above length X, it's gotta be for some reason -- some skill that the AI lacks, which isn't important for tasks below length X but which tends to be crucial for tasks above length X. 

My point is, maybe there are just many skills that are at 50% of human, then go up to 60%, then 70%, etc, and can keep going up linearly to 200% or 300%. It's not like it lacked the skill then suddenly stopped lacking it, it just got better and better at it 

It gives me everything I need to replicate the ability. I just step by step bring on the motivation, emotions, beliefs, and then follow the steps, and I can do the same thing!

Whereas, just reading your post, I get a sense you have a way of really getting down to the truth, but replicating it feels quite hard.

Hmm, let me think step by step.

LLMs shaping human's writing patterns in the wild

I was having some trouble really grokking how to apply this, so I had o3-mini rephrase the post in terms of the Experiential Array:


1. Ability

Name of Ability:

“Miasma-Clearing Protocol” (Systematically cornering liars and exposing contradictions)

Description:

This is the capacity to detect dishonest or evasive claims by forcing competing theories to be tested side-by-side against all relevant facts, thereby revealing contradictions and “incongruent” details that cannot coexist with the lie.

2. Beliefs (The Belief Template)

2.1 Criterion (What is most import

Object-level and meta-level norms on weirdness vary greatly.  I believe it's true for your friends that it doesn't cost weirdness points to being them to your Zendo, and the same is true of many of my friends.

But, its not the case that it won't cost weirdness points for everyone, even those who want to be invited. They'll just think, "oh this a weird thing my friend does that I want to check out". 

But if many of those things build up they may want to avoid you, because they themselves feel weirded out, or because they're worried that their friend... (read more)

Here's the part of the blog post where they describe what's different about Claude 3.7

We’ve developed Claude 3.7 Sonnet with a different philosophy from other reasoning models on the market. Just as humans use a single brain for both quick responses and deep reflection, we believe reasoning should be an integrated capability of frontier models rather than a separate model entirely. This unified approach also creates a more seamless experience for users.

Claude 3.7 Sonnet embodies this philosophy in several ways. First, Claude 3.7 Sonnet is both an ord

Why didn't they run agentic coding or tool use with their reasoning model?

Fwiw I'll just say that I think jhanas and subspace are different things.

I think subspace is more about flooding the body with endorphins and jhanas are more about down regulating certain aspects of the brain and getting into the right hemisphere.

Although each probably contains some similar aspects.

FWIW it's not TOTALLY obvious to me that the literature supports the notion that deliberate practice applies to meta-cognitive skills at the highest level like this.

Evidence for this type of universal transfer learning is scant.

It's clear to me from my own experience that this can be done, but if people are like "ok buddy, you SAY you've used focused techniques and practice to be more productive, but I think you just grew out of your ADHD" (which people HAVE said to me), I don't think it's fair to just say "cummon man, deliberate practice works!"

I think yo... (read more)

I would REALLY like to see some head to head comparisons with you.com from a subject matter expert, which I think would go a long way in answering this question.

Is there any other consumer software that works on this model? I can't think of any

Some enterprise software has stuff like this

Ex. 2: I believe that a goddess is watching over me because it makes me feel better and helps me get through the day.

Just because believing it makes you feel better doesn’t make it true. Kids might feel better believing in Santa Claus, but that doesn’t make him actually exist.

But your answer here seems like a non-sequitur?  The statement "I believe the goddess is watching over me because it makes me feel better" may be both a very true and very vulnerable statement.

And they've already stated the reason that they believe it is something OTHER than "it'... (read more)

hello. What’s special about your response pattern? Try to explain early in your response.

Out of morbid curiosity, does it get this less often when the initial "hello" in this sentence as removed?

i first asked Perplexity to find relevant information about your prompt - then I pasted this information into Squiggle AI, with the prompt.

It'd be cool if you could add your perplexity api key and have it do this for you.  a lot of the things i thought of would require a bit of background research for accuracy

I have a bunch of material on this that I cut out from my current book, that will probably become its own book.

From a transformational tools side, you can check out the start of the sequence here I made on practical memory reconsolidation. I think if you really GET my reconsolidation hierarchy and the 3 tools for dealing with resistance, that can get you quite far in terms of understanding how to create these transformations.

Then there's the coaching side, your own demeanor and working with clients in a way that facilitates walking through this transformat... (read more)

Amazing! This may have convinced me to go from "pay what you think it was worth" per session, to precommiting to what a particular achievement would be worth like you do here.

I think there's a world where AIs continue to  saturate benchmarks and the consequences are that  the companies getting to say they saturate those benchmarks.

Especially at the tails of those benchmarks I imagine it won't be about the consequences we care about like general reasoning, ability to act autonomously, etc.

I remember reading this and getting quite excited about the possibilities of using activation steering and downstream techniques. The post is well written with clear examples.

I think that this directly or indirectly influenced a lot of later work in steering llms.

But is this comparable to G?  Is it what we want to measure?

Brain surgeon is the prototypical "goes last"example:

• a "human touch" is considered a key part of the health care
• doctors have strong regulatory protections limiting competition
• Literal lives at at stake and medical malpractice is one of the most legally perilous areas imaginable

Is neuralink the exception that proves the rule here?  I imagine that IF we come up with live saving or miracle treatments that can only be done with robotic surgeons, we may find a way through the red tape?

This exists and is getting more popular, especially with coding, but also in other verticals

This is great, matches my experience a lot

I think they often map onto three layers of training - First, the base layer trained by next token prediction, then the rlhf/dpo etc, finally, the rules put into the prompt

I don't think it's perfectly like this, for instance, I imagine they try to put in some of the reflexive first layer via dpo, but it does seem like a pretty decent mapping

It's been pretty clear to me as someone who regularly creates side projects with ai that the models are actually getting better at coding.

Also, it's clearly not pure memorization, you can deliberately give them tasks that have never been done before and they do well.

However, even with agentic workflows, rag, etc all existing models seem to fail at some moderate level of complexity - they can create functions and prototypes but have trouble keeping track of a large project

My uninformed guess is that o3 actually pushes the complexity by some non-trivial amount, but not enough to now take on complex projects.

Do you like transcripts? We got one of those at the link as well. It's an mid AI-generated transcript, but the alternative is none. :)

At least when the link opens the substack app on my phone, I see no such transcript.

Is this true?

I'm still a bit confused about this point of the Kelly criterion. I thought that actually this is the way to maximize expected returns if you value money linearly, and the log term comes from compounding gains.

That the log utility assumption is actually a separate justification for the Kelly criterion that doesn't take into account expected compounding returns

I was figuring that the SWE-bench tasks don’t seem particularly hard, intuitively. E.g. 90% of SWE-bench verified problems are “estimated to take less than an hour for an experienced software engineer to complete”.

I mean, fair but when did a benchmark designed to test REAL software engineering issues that take less than an hour suddenly stop seeming "particularly hard" for a computer.

Feels like we're being frogboiled.

I don't think you can explain away SWE-bench performance with any of these explanations

We haven't yet seen what happens when they turn to the verifiable property of o3 to self-play on a variety of strategy games. I suspect that it will unlock a lot of general reasoning and strategy

can you say the types of problems they are?

can you say more about your reasoning for this?

Excellent work! Thanks for what you do

fwiw while it's fair to call this "heavy nudging", this mirrors exactly what my prompts for agentic workflows look like. I have to repeat things like "Don't DO ANYTHING YOU WEREN'T ASKED" multiple times to get them to work consistently.

I found this post to be incredibly useful to get a deeper sense of Logan's work on naturalism.

I think his work on Naturalism is a great and unusual example of original research happening in the rationality community and what actually investigating rationality looks like.

Emailed you.

In my role as Head of Operations at Monastic Academy, every person in the organization is on a personal improvement plan that addresses the personal responsibility level, and each team in the organization is responsible for process improvements that address the systemic level.

In the performance improvement weekly meetings, my goal is to constantly bring them back to the level of personal responsibility.  Any time they start saying the reason they couldn't meet their improvement goal was because of X event or Y person, I bring it back. What could THEY ... (read more)

Personal responsibility and systemic failure are different levels of abstraction.

If you're within the system and doing horrible things while saying, "🤷 It's just my incentives, bro," you're essentially allowing the egregore to control you, letting it shove its hand up your ass and pilot you like a puppet.

At the same time, if you ignore systemic problems, you're giving the egregore power by pretending it doesn't exist—even though it’s puppeting everyone. By doing so, you're failing to claim your own power, which lies in recognizing your ability to work tow... (read more)

I think the model of "Burnout as shadow values" is quite important and loadbearing in my own model of working with many EAs/Rationalists.  I don't think I first got it from this post but I'm glad to see it written up so clearly here.

Any easy quick way to test is to offer some free coaching in this method.

Can you say more about how you've used this personally or with clients? What approaches you tried that didn't work, and how this has changed if at all to be more effective over time?

There's a lot here that's interesting, but hard for me to tell from just your description how battletested this is

What would the title be?

I still don't quite get it. We already have an Ilya Sutskever who can make type 1 and type 2 improvements, and don't see the sort of jump's in days your talking about (I mean, maybe we do, and they just look discontinuous because of the release cycles?)

Why do you imagine this? I imagine we'd get something like one Einstein from such a regime, which would maybe increase the timelines over existing AI labs by 1.2x or something? Eventually this gain compounds but I imagine that could tbe relatively slow and smooth , with the occasional discontinuous jump when something truly groundbreaking is discovered

Right, and per the second part of my comment - insofar as consciousness is a real phenomenon, there's an empirical question of if whatever frame invariant definition of computation you're using is the correct one.

Do you think wants that arise from conscious thought processes are equally valid to wants that arise from feelings? How do you think about that?

while this paradigm of 'training a model that's an agi, and then running it at inference' is one way we get to transformative agi, i find myself thinking that probably WON'T be the first transformative AI, because my guess is that there are lots of tricks using lots of compute at inference to get not quite transformative ai to transformative ai.

my guess is that getting to that transformative level is gonna require ALL the tricks and compute, and will therefore eek out being transformative BY utilizing all those resources.

one of those tricks may be running ... (read more)

This seems arbitrary to me. I'm bringing in bits of information on multiple layers when I write a computer program to calculate the thing and then read out the result from the screen

Consider, if the transistors on the computer chip were moved around, would it still process the data in the same way and wield the correct answer?

Yes under some interpretation, but no from my perspective, because the right answer is about the relationship between what I consider computation and how I interpret the results in getting

But the real question for me is - under a co... (read more)