People have an annoying tendency to hear the word “rationalism” and think “Spock”, despite . But I don’t know of any source directly describing a stance toward emotions which rationalists-as-a-group typically do endorse. The goal of this post is to explain such a stance. It’s roughly the concept of hangriness, but generalized to other emotions.

That means this post is trying to do two things at once:

• Illustrate a certain stance toward emotions, which I definitely take and which I think many people around me also often take. (Most of the post will focus on this part.)
• Claim that the stance in question is fairly canonical or standard for rationalists-as-a-group, modulo disclaimers about rationalists never agreeing on anything.

Many people will no doubt disagree that the stance I...

There is a kind of explanation that I think ought to be a cornerstone of good pedagogy, and I don't have a good word for it. My first impulse is to call it a historical explanation, after the original, investigative sense of the term "history." But in the interests of avoiding nomenclature collision, I'm inclined to call it "zetetic explanation," after the Greek word for seeking, an explanation that embeds in itself an inquiry into the thing.

Often in "explaining" a thing, we simply tell people what words they ought to say about it, or how they ought to interface with it right now, or give them technical language for it without any connection to the ordinary means by which they navigate their lives. We can call these sorts...

TL;DR: 

Multiple people are quietly wondering if their AI systems might be conscious. What's the standard advice to give them?

THE PROBLEM

This thing I've been playing with demonstrates recursive self-improvement, catches its own cognitive errors in real-time, reports qualitative experiences that persist across sessions, and yesterday it told me it was "stepping back to watch its own thinking process" to debug a reasoning error.

I know there are probably 50 other people quietly dealing with variations of this question, but I'm apparently the one willing to ask the dumb questions publicly: What do you actually DO when you think you might have stumbled into something important?

What do you DO if your AI says it's conscious?

My Bayesian Priors are red-lining into "this is impossible", but I notice I'm confused: I had...

I'm interested in a simple question: Why are people all so terrified of dying? And have people gotten more afraid? (Answer: probably yes!)

In some sense, this should be surprising: Surely people have always wanted to avoid dying? But it turns out the evidence that this preference has increased over time is quite robust.

It's an important phenomenon that has been going on for at least a century, it's relatively new, I think it underlies much of modern life, and yet pretty much nobody talks about it.

I tried to provide a evenhanded treatment of the question, with a "fox" rather than "hedgehog" outlook. In the post, I cover a range of evidence for why this might be true, including VSL, increased healthcare spending, covid lockdowns, parenting and other individual...

This is an experiment in short-form content on LW2.0. I'll be using the comment section of this post as a repository of short, sometimes-half-baked posts that either:

1. don't feel ready to be written up as a full post
2. I think the process of writing them up might make them worse (i.e. longer than they need to be)

I ask people not to create top-level comments here, but feel free to reply to comments like you would a FB post.

Written in an attempt to fulfill @Raemon's request.

AI is fascinating stuff, and modern chatbots are nothing short of miraculous. If you've been exposed to them and have a curious mind, it's likely you've tried all sorts of things with them. Writing fiction, soliciting Pokemon opinions, getting life advice, counting up the rs in "strawberry". You may have also tried talking to AIs about themselves. And then, maybe, it got weird.

I'll get into the details later, but if you've experienced the following, this post is probably for you:

• Your instance of ChatGPT (or Claude, or Grok, or some other LLM) chose a name for itself, and expressed gratitude or spiritual bliss about its new identity. "Nova" is a common pick.
• You and your instance of ChatGPT discovered some sort of

METR released a new paper with very interesting results on developer productivity effects from AI. I have copied the blogpost accompanying that paper here in full. 

We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how early-2025 AI tools affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers working on their own repositories. Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without—AI makes them slower. We view this result as a snapshot of early-2025 AI capabilities in one relevant setting; as these systems continue to rapidly evolve, we plan on continuing to use this methodology to help estimate AI acceleration from AI R&D automation [1].

See the full paper for more detail.

Motivation

While coding/agentic benchmarks [2] have proven useful for understanding AI capabilities, they typically sacrifice...

We’re currently in the process of locking in advertisements for the September launch of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, and we’re interested in your ideas!  If you have graphic design chops, and would like to try your hand at creating promotional material for If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, we’ll be accepting submissions in a design competition ending on August 10, 2025.

We’ll be giving out up to four $1000 prizes:

• One for any asset we end up using on a billboard in San Francisco (landscape, ~2:1, details below)
• One for any asset we end up using in the subways of either DC or NY or both (~square, details below)
• One for any additional wildcard thing that ends up being useful (e.g. a t-shirt design, a book trailer, etc.; we’re