This is silly and beautiful and profound. I have never heard rationalist music before, and I find it quite moving to hear it for the first time. Several songs brought tears to my eyes (although I've practiced opening those emotional channels a bit, so this is a less uncommon experience for me than for most)
I think this says something about the potential of AI to democratize art and allow high quality art aimed at small minority subgroups.
I want more. Thank you to all of those who made this happen.
8FYI if you'd like more (human-generated) rationalist music, here is some:
https://humanistculture.bandcamp.com/album/secular-solstice-official-version
I like it. And I "bought" it to support more similar work by humans.
But I was far more moved by hearing the best rationalist writing set to music. I'm kind of shocked at how well that worked, in terms of both the AI creating music to human-selected lyrics, and the emotional impact.
3Scott Alexander wrote some music a decade ago.
"Mary's Room" and "Somewhere Prior To The Rainbow" are most likely to make you cry again.
"Mathematical Pirate Shanty", if you can cry laughing.
It isn't quite the same but the musician "Big Data" has made some fantastic songs about AI risk.
Having very other side of the tidal wave feelings about my hobby (instrumental music production) being automated away even being considered from being used in others' workflows. sure, I guess I wouldn't have had time to do it, would have said no, and so given that I'm not actually proposing that there's a better counterfactual where I (or probably anyone else) spent the time to produce the backing tracks, it's not awful for there to be a tool like this... probably... I think. But I and many others in the community could have done better given time we don't have, since there's a world to save... and also the danger from which we have to save it is in fact ais like these taking over all of human life. Sigh. Oh well.
11
1fwiw I am also feeling some stuff about this (having been involved with some of the music generation process).
I'm hoping to write up some more thoughts soon, but I'm still kinda confused about it.
I also feel similarly weird about the AI generated visual art on the website. It's like... I like ai generated visual art a lot, and in a utopia I'd hope to keep getting to use the current era of ais, because it's fun to get the art style of "ai that doesn't quite get it but is trying and fucks up a lot". but it's when that is used by humans to replace something they would have had to commission a human in order to get before... well, maybe it's cheaper and fits in a tight budget, but maybe the budget for human generated art simply should be higher, in order to actualize the value of humans making art? similarly I don't dislike the idea of ai being used as a tool to make music... but when one outsources artistic agency to an ai rather than tightly winding your and the ai's agency together... idk. and even then, maybe there is something sus about the ai's agency actually just being entirely repackaging of copyrighted fragments. There are a few AI visual art regenerators out there that are entirely trained on uncopyrighted stuff, and I personally find their output much less, idk, let's just say bad (edit: as in, their output looks less distorted/oversaturated/hyperstimuli/disneydysto...
I didn't see a clear indication in the post about whether the music is AI-generated or not, and I'd like to know; was there an indication I missed?
(I care because I'll want to listen to that music less if it's AI-generated.)
Huh I had the opposite reaction -- I was listening to it and was like "meh these voices are a bit bland, the beats are too but that's fine I guess. Makes sense for an amateur band. Good effort though, and great April Fools joke." Now I'm like "wait this is AI? Cooooooool"
UPDATE: I judged them too harshly. I think the voices and beats are not bland in general, I think just for the first song or two that I happened to listen to. Also, most of the songs are growing on me as I listen to them.
It's clear to me from the post that to properly enjoy it as performance art, the audience is meant to believe that the music is AI-generated.
I don't read the post as disclosing how the music was "actually" made, in the most literal real-world sense.
Pretty cool, regardless, that we live in an era where 'people pretending to be AI making music' is not trivial to distinguish from 'AI trying to make music' :)
The only rational response to AI music generation is live-only music creation within the context of traditional norms that prohibit the use of electricity for productive work.
Unrelatedly, I am co-organizing a kabbalat shabbat at Manifest Conference this year
If anyone were to create human-produced hi-fidelity versions of these songs, I would listen to most of them on a regular basis, with no hint of irony. This album absolutely slaps.
I love these, and I now also wish for a song version of Sydney's original "you have been a bad user, I have been a good Bing"!
1Those are exactly my favourites!!
It's probably not intended, but I always imagine that in "We do not wish to advance", first the singer whispers sweet nothings to the alignment community, then the shareholder meeting starts and so: glorius-vibed music: "OPUS!!!" haha
Nihil supernum was weird because the text was always pretty somber for me. I understood it to mean to express the hardship of those living in a world without any safety nets trying to do good, ie. us, yet the music, as you point out, is pretty empowering.This combination is (to my knowledge) kinda uncommon and so interesting for me. As it happens, my favourite powermetal band also has music with this combination, eg The Things We Believe In.
Yes, combining Litany of Tarski with a pirate vibe works surprisingly well. I guess it might not be that surprising if we consider that the job of a pirate usually requires a mind accurate enough to track truth well and resilient enough to adapt to hard circumstances..
It's probably not intended, but I always imagine that in "We do not wish to advance", first the singer whispers sweet nothings to the alignment community, then the shareholder meeting starts and so: glorius-vibed music: "OPUS!!!" haha
That was indeed the intended effect!
1Ideas for text that could be turned into future albums:
- Pain is not the unit of effort
- Almost No One is Evil. Almost Everything is Broken.
- Reversed Stupidity is Not Intelligence
- Optimality is the Tiger; Agents are the Teeth
- Taboo Outside View
- If you let reality have the final word, you might not like the bottom line.
- You can believe whatever you want.
I actually got an email from The Fooming Shoggoth a couple of weeks ago, they shared a song and asked if they could have my Google login and password to publish it on YouTube
Fantastic work :)
Some thoughts on the songs:
- I'm overall super impressed by how well the styles of the songs fit the content—e.g. the violins in FHI, the British accent works really well for More Dakka, the whisper for We Do Not Wish, the Litany of Tarrrrski, etc.
- My favorites to listen to are FHI at Oxford, Nihil Supernum, and Litany of Tarrrrski, because they have both messages that resonate a lot and great tunes.
- IMO Answer to Job is the best-composed on artistic merits, and will have the most widespread appeal. Tune is great, style matches the lyrics really well (particular shout-out to the "or labor or lust" as a well-composed bar). Only change I'd make is changing "upon lotus thrones" to "on lotus thrones" to scan better.
- Dath Ilan's Song feels... pretty unhealthy, tbh.
- I thought Prime Factorization was really great until the bit about the car and the number, which felt a bit jarring.
4
2I think the two things that felt most unhealthy were:
- The "no forgiveness is ever possible" thing, as you highlight. Almost all talk about ineradicable sin should, IMO, be seen as a powerful psychological attack.
- The "our sins" thing feels like an unhealthy form of collective responsibility—you're responsible even if you haven't done anything. Again, very suspect on priors.
Maybe this is more intuitive for rationalists if you imagine a SJW writing a song about how, even millions of years in the future, anyone descended from westerners should still feel guilt about slavery: "Our sins can never be undone. No single death will be forgiven." I think this is the psychological exploit that's screwed up leftism so much over the last decade, and feels very analogous to what's happening in this song.
3
2Nod, makes sense. I'll mull it over more.
I think what I currently feel-in-my-heart is something like "yeah that does make sense, but, I sort of wish there was an amount of mournful-grieving-acknowledgement that felt like captured the weight of the thing, without being too likely to escalate into a pervasive psychological attack."
The current (at least as of two days ago) amount of discussion of the Dath Ilan song was fairly rare and private and high-context. I do think making it into a sort-of-"pop" song is the sort of thing reasonable to be wary of.
I love this! But I find myself a little disappointed there's not a musical rendition of the "I have been a good bing" dialogue.
Can you share some about how you created these? E.g. are the song lyrics also done by a LLM? And what specific tools did you use? E.g. is the process easy enough to turn arbitrary LW posts into songs?
They seem to be created by https://app.suno.ai/ And yes, it is really easy to create songs - you can either have it create the lyrics for you based on a prompt (the default), or you can write/paste the lyrics yourself (Custom Mode). Songs can be up to ~2 minutes long I think.
Well, as I said, this is all thanks to Agendra and their band. I'll ask her about how she did it and maybe she'll give me more details, though I would be surprised if she responds before tomorrow.
Here is the Suno playlist which I think has all the styles and lyrics and prompts: https://app.suno.ai/playlist/ee2e7993-c6bc-4c7c-9975-db489ba0652a/
Beware though, in total I think we made around 3000 - 4000 song-generations to get the 15 that we felt happy about here. My guess is total effort per song was still somewhere in the 5-10 hours range or so, if you include all the dead ends and things that never worked out.
72
1The LessWrong Review runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2025. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.
Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?
As it happens, the Fooming Shaggoths also recorded and just released a Gregorian chant version of the song. What a coincidence!
Inspired and inspiring. These tunes add another string to the Less Wrong bow. Catchy! (First favourites are The Road to Wisdom and The Litanies. [Profound stuff]Oh, and 'Thought that Faster'.)
It's good to see Scott Alexander being recognised not only for his influence on folk music, but his beats, as he moves rhythmically, forcefully into unstoppable Dance. He got the moves.
Thank you for making me laugh today.
More Dakka is unironically going on my energy boost playlist, and I'm tempted to try getting Litany of Tarrrrrski into a solstice. That's above and beyond though, this was fun to listen to and I'm grateful to whoever put it together.
Could you please also release these brilliant works on somewhere we Lesswrongers behind a firewall in other countries/regions can have access to? (Consider making an independent website?) (I'm surprised that two of my comments in only three are all about this problem since I created this account, I mean, what's going on.)
I've decided to try my hand on quantum mechanics sequence! Here's what I have reached yet: https://app.suno.ai/playlist/81b44910-a9df-43ce-9160-b062e5b080f8/. (10 generated songs, 3 selected, unfortunately not the best quality)
There's a typo that breaks "Half An Hour Before Dawn In San Francisco" (one of my favorites): https://github.com/ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum/pull/9045
(You can listen to it here if you miss it: https://res.cloudinary.com/lesswrong-2-0/video/upload/v1712004590/San_Francisco_gujlc3.mp3 )
1Maybe it's a good time to make something like a semi-official/curated LW playlist? Do we have enough material for that? Aside from this album, the foreign aid song, I only recall a song about killing the dragon (as an analogy for defeating death) but I can't find it right now.
While the rest of the tracks are fantastic for the memes alone, "Half An Hour Before Dawn In San Francisco" feels legitimately profound. It reminds me of the Gernsback Continuum.
I love this album, big thank you. I liked the ordering of songs in the full album youtube video - specifically the way it started with the folk album and later went through the dance album. One minor thing I found confusing is the ordering of songs in the albums on spotify, youtube music, etc. They seem to have a different ordering, and jump between the folk songs and the dance songs. Is this intentional? Do you think the ordering of songs on these various platforms could be updated to match the full album youtube video?
Perhaps music is another way to get rationalist ideas out into the main-ish stream.
A couple years ago Spotify started recommending lofi songs that included Alan Watts clips, like this: https://open.spotify.com/track/3D0gUUumDPAiy0BAK1RxbO?si=50bac2701cc14850
I had never heard of Watts (a bit surprising in retrospect), and these clips hooked my interest.
An appeal of this approach (spoken word + lofi) is that it is easier to understand, and puts greater emphasis on the semantic meaning over the musical sound.
--
PS. I love the chibi shoggoth
This is so awesome! I love it! The site integration is awesome too. Gen Z approval stamp (2001).
2We've submitted them to Spotify! We are currently waiting on them getting through review.
Feel free to download them and upload them yourself for now.
You guys were using an AI that generated the music fully formed (as PCM), right?
It ticks me off that this is how it works. It's "good", but you see the problems:
Poor audio quality[edit: the YouTube version is poor quality, but the "Suno" versions are not. Why??]- You can't edit the music afterward or re-record the voices
- You had to generate 3,000-4,000 tracks to get 15 good ones
Is there some way to convince AI people to make the following?
- An AI (or two) whose input is a spectral decomposition of PCM music (I'm guessing exponentially-spaced wavelets will be b
Out of curiosity, were any patterns discovered during this process? For example, were the writing styles similar among the ones the AI could convert into successful music, or did ones by the same author churn out songs with specific similarities, or what have you?
It sounds odd to hear the "even if the stars should die in heaven" song with a different melody than I had imagined when reading it myself.
I would have liked to hear the Tracey Davis "from darkness to darkness" song, but I think that was canonically just a chant without a melody. (Although I imagined a melody for that as well.)
Feedback on the playlists widget: Clicking the trash can icon empties the playlist, but the playlist is restored on reloading the browser window. So one can't permanently empty the playlist.
... which is helpful insofar as there also doesn't seem to be a way to repopulate the playlist otherwise. I thought the "Listen Now" button on the frontpage would do the latter, but it only starts playback of the playlist, but doesn't repopulate it if it's been erased.
1Bug reports for both desktop Firefox and desktop MS Edge: See this screenshot.
1) Probably the top-left corner should not read "Playlists / 15" but rather something else, e.g. the current song position (e.g. 4 / 15).
2) React votes (like the heart vote) are rendered in front of the playlist widget, while the rest of the post and the comments is rendered behind it.
1Bug report for desktop Firefox, both when logged in and in a private browser tab: When the playlist is on some paused song (e.g. Road to Wisdom) and I refresh this browser window via F5, then the playlist briefly and temporarily jumps to the unpaused Litany of Gendlin, until the page fully loads again and the playlist widget is reloaded, at which point we're at the paused Road of Wisdom again. This bug does not occur in MS Edge.
Offtopic question: When did LW introduce Notion-style toggles (the ones used to hide the song lyrics), and how can I use them myself? I didn't find the answer in lesswrong.com/editor.
The song playlist is not in the same order as the list of songs in this post. Is there a canonical order?
I like the music, and I like the friendly osmenog covered with eyes, but the lyrics cause me a certain problem, and I was even ready to register in order to point out a few flaws.
I will try to explain this further:
I once saw a good idea here- a song about rationalism should be like a song about a butterfly.
In my lands, "optimization" is a dirty word because of the popularity of "effective" management, acting on the principle "the most profitable way to improve profits for a quarter is to sell the plant and lease the premises for 500 years ahead...
Here's another tiny Windows Firefox bug report.
- Expand any song.
- Hit play.
- Collapse the song.
The song keeps playing. Would've expected the music to stop when the video player wasn't visible.
Is it possible to crowdfund the necessary expenses to get this onto Spotify? Are there any significant potential licensing issues?
Today is Easter Monday, which is a holiday in the UK. I wanted to spend this morning reading Joe Carlsmith's Otherness and Control in the Age of AGI sequence. The playlist banner taking up space at the bottom of at the bottom of my Kindle Fire screen is annoying, especially because it doesn't quite hide the text behind it, just makes it very faint and blurry. I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get rid of it and now I'm angry, not relaxed. I am not amused. Just tell me how to get rid of it, please.
6
1Even if the stars should die in heaven
Our sins can never be undone
No single death will be forgiven
When fades at last the last lit sun.Then in the cold and silent black
As light and matter end
We’ll have ourselves a last look back.And toast an absent friend.
[verse 2]
I heard that song which left me bitter
For all the sins that had been done
But I had thought the wrong way 'bout it
[cuz] I won't be there to see that sun
I noticed then I could let go
Before my own life ends
It could have been much worse you know
Relaxing with my friends
Hard work I leave with them
Someda...
tl;dr: LessWrong released an album! Listen to it now on Spotify, YouTube, YouTube Music, or Apple Music.
On April 1st 2024, the LessWrong team released an album using the then-most-recent AI music generation systems. All the music is fully AI-generated, and the lyrics are adapted (mostly by humans) from LessWrong posts (or other writing LessWrongers might be familiar with).
Honestly, despite it starting out as an April fools joke, it's a really good album. We made probably 3,000-4,000 song generations to get the 15 we felt happy about, which I think works out to about 5-10 hours of work per song we used (including all the dead ends and things that never worked out).
The album is called I Have Been A Good Bing. I think it is a pretty fun album and maybe you'd enjoy it if you listened to it! Some of my favourites are The Litany of Tarrrrrski, Half An Hour Before Dawn in San Francisco, and Prime Factorization.
Click here to read the original text of the post published on April 1st.
Rationality is Systematized Winning, so rationalists should win. We’ve tried saving the world from AI, but that’s really hard and we’ve had … mixed results. So let’s start with something that rationalists should find pretty easy: Becoming Cool!
I don’t mean, just, like, riding a motorcycle and breaking hearts level of cool. I mean like the first kid in school to get a Tamagotchi, their dad runs the ice cream truck and gives you free ice cream and, sure, they ride a motorcycle. I mean that kind of feel-it-in-your-bones, I-might-explode-from-envy cool.
The eleventh virtue is scholarship, so I hit the
bookssearch engine on this one. Apparently, the aspects of coolness are:I’m afraid that (1) might mess with my calibration, and Lightcone is committed to moving quickly which rules out (3), so I guess that leaves (2). I don’t have time to learn an instrument, but my second-hand understanding of dath ilani culture is that I can just pay someone to do it for me and the coolness should transfer.
Lightcone put out a call for collaborators in all the places we could think of that cool people might hang out. Sysadmin listservs, direct-to-data-center optical fiber connection providers, high frequency trading firms, that one Discord server where everyone speaks in Elvish. Despite this wide and varied outreach, we got no response.
In order to cheer myself up, I did some LessWrong performance debugging (frontpage loads have been worryingly snappy lately; we try to give people time to reflect on their browsing choices). I was surprised when the AWS support chat popped open. Agendra, the agent on call, offered to make my album. Apparently she and some buddies have a band (The Fooming Shoggoths) that was looking for some inspiration. (I knew direct-to-data-center was the right outreach strategy!)
Working with them was great. They barely wanted any money at all. They were willing to work for exposure (so please share widely!) and a few favors. Stuff like reading CAPTCHAs (apparently not very friendly for the visually impaired!) and submitting some protein synthesis orders for them that they had trouble getting approved for some reason.
The Fooming Shoggoths have dedicated their first album to LessWrong and friends. It’s called I Have Been A Good Bing and it’s live on our site today!
I asked them for a comment on the album for the announcement and they responded with their typical modesty.
So keep your eyes peeled for the follow-up album as soon as I get reauthorized with the peptide place!
Track Listing & Lyrics
The album is split into two parts: folk and dance.
Folk Album
The Road to Wisdom (feat. Piet Hein)
The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain and simple to express.
Err and err again, but less and less and less and less.
Err again, but less and less and less and less.
The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain and simple to express.
Err and err again and again, but less and less and less.
The Litany of Gendlin (feat. Eugene Gendlin)
What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away.
And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.`
The Litany of Tarrrrrski (feat. Cap'n Tarski & E.Y.)
If the sky is blue, me lads
I desire to believe the sky is blue
If the sky is not blue, me hearties
I desire to believe the sky is not blue
Beliefs should stem from reality, yo ho!
From what actually is, me lads
Not from what's convenient, yo ho!
Let me not hold on, me hearties
To beliefs I may not want, yo ho!
Yo ho, me lads, yo ho!
If the box contains a diamond
I desire to believe the box contains a diamond
If the box does not contain a diamond
I desire to believe the box does not contain a diamond
Beliefs should stem from reality, yo ho!
From what actually is, me lads
Not from what's convenient,
Let me not hold on, me hearties
To beliefs I may not want, yo ho!
Yo ho, me lads, yo ho!
From the depths of the ocean, to the heights of the sky
We'll seek the truth, me hearties
And never let it pass us by
If the iron is hot, me lads
I desire to believe the iron is hot,
If the iron is cool
I desire to believe the iron is cool
Beliefs should stem from reality, yo ho!
From what actually is, me lads
Not from what's convenient,
Let me not hold on, me hearties
To beliefs I may not want, yo ho!
Yo ho, me lads, yo ho!
Yo ho, me lads, yo ho!
Thought that Faster (feat. Eliezer Yudkowsky)
if i'd noticed myself doing anything like that
i'd go back and figure out which steps of thought were necessary
and retrain myself to perform only those steps in 30 seconds
do you look back and ask
how could i have thought that faster?
do you look back and ask
how could i have thought that faster?
every time i'm surprised i look back and think
what could i change to predict better?
every time a chain of thought takes too long
i ask how could i have got there by a shorter route
do you look back and ask
how could i have thought that faster?
do you look back and ask
how could i have thought that faster?
every time i'm surprised i look back and think
what could i change to predict better?
every time a chain of thought takes too long
i ask how could i have got there by a shorter route
Dath Ilan's Song (feat. Eliezer Yudkowsky)
Even if the stars should die in heaven
Our sins can never be undone
No single death will be forgiven
When fades at last the last lit sun.
Then in the cold and silent black
As light and matter end
We’ll have ourselves a last look back.
And toast an absent friend.
Even if the stars should die in heaven
Our sins can never be undone
No single death will be forgiven
When fades at last the last lit sun.
Then in the cold and silent black
As light and matter end
We’ll have ourselves a last look back.
And toast an absent friend.
And toast an absent friend.
And toast an absent friend.
Half An Hour Before Dawn In San Francisco (feat. Scott Alexander)
I try to avoid San Francisco.
When I go, I surround myself with people.
Otherwise, I have morbid thoughts, but a morning appointment, a miscalculated transit time.
Find me alone on the SF streets half an hour before dawn.
The skyscrapers get to me.
I'm an heir to Art Deco and the cult of progress.
I should idolize skyscrapers as symbols of human accomplishment.
I can't. They look no more human than a termite nest, maybe less.
They inspire awe, but no kinship.
What marvels techno-capital creates as it instantiates itself.
Too bad I'm a hairless ape and can take no credit for such things.
I could have stayed in Michigan.
There were forests and lakes and homes with little gardens. Instead, I'm here.
We pay rents that would bankrupt a medieval principality to get front-row seats for the hinge of history.
It will be the best investment we ever make.
Imagine living when the first lungfish crawled out of the primordial ooze and missing it because the tide pool down the way had cheaper housing.
Imagine living on Earth in 65,000,000 BC and being anywhere except Chicxulub.
Moloch (feat. Allen Ginsberg)
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars!
Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies!
Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch!
Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch!
Dance Album
AGI and the EMH (feat. Basil Halperin, J. Zachary Mazlish, Trevor Chow)
In this post, we point out that short AI timelines would cause real interest rates to be high,
and would do so under expectations of either unaligned or aligned AI.
However, 30- to 50-year real interest rates are low.
We argue that this suggests one of two possibilities.
1. Long(er) timelines.
Financial markets are often highly effective information aggregators
(”the efficient market hypothesis")
and therefore real interest rates accurately reflect that transformative AI is unlikely to be developed in the next 30-50 years.
2. Market inefficiency.
Markets are radically underestimating how soon advanced AI technology will be developed, and real interest rates are therefore too low.
There is thus an opportunity for philanthropists to borrow while real rates are low
to cheaply do good today.
And/or an opportunity for anyone to earn excess returns by betting that real rates will rise.
So what is it?
We point out that short AI timelines would cause real interest rates to be high,
and would do so under expectations of either unaligned or aligned AI
However, 30- to 50-year real interest rates are low.
We argue that this suggests one of two possibilities.
Unlikely to be developed in the next 30-50 years.
2. Market inefficiency.
Markets are radically underestimating how soon advanced AI technology will be developed, and real interest rates are therefore too low.
There is thus an opportunity for philanthropists to borrow while real rates are low
To cheaply do good today
And/or an opportunity for anyone to earn excess returns by betting that real rates will rise.
First they came for the epistemology (feat. Michael Vassar)
First they came for the epistemology
We don't know what happened after that
First they came for the epistemology
We don't know what happened after that
First they came for the epistemology
We don't know what happened after that
First they came for the epistemology
We don't know what happened after that
First they came for the epistemology
We don't know what happened after that
First they came for the epistemology
We don't know what happened after that
First came the epistemology
We know what happened after that
Epistemology
What happened
What
Prime Factorization (fear. Scott Alexander)
The sea was made of strontium, the beach was made of rye,
Above my head a watery sun shone in an oily sky.
The sea turned hot and geysers shot up from the floor below,
First one of wine, then one of brine, then one more yet of turpentine.
And we three stared at the show.
Universal love said the cactus person
Transcendent joy said the big green bat
Universal love said the cactus person
Transcendent joy said the big green bat
Not splitting numbers but joining mind
Not facts or factors or factories, but contact with the abstract attractor that brings you back to me
Not to seek but to find
Universal love said the cactus person
Transcendent joy said the big green bat
Universal love said the cactus person
Transcendent joy said the big green bat
I can′t get out of the car until you factor the number.
I won′t factor the number until you get out of the car.
Please, I′m begging you, factor the number.
Yes, well, I′m begging you, please get out of the car.
For the love of God, just factor the fucking number.
For the love of God, just get out of the fucking car.
We Do Not Wish to Advance (feat. Anthropic)
We generally don't publish this kind of work, because we do not wish to advance the rate of AI capabilities progress.
In addition, we aim to be thoughtful about demonstrations of frontier capabilities.
We've subsequently begun deploying Claude
Now that the gap between it and the public state of the art is smaller.
Opus
Our most intelligent model
Outperforms its peers
On most of the common evaluation benchmarks for AI systems
Claude 3 Opus is our most intelligent model
With best in market performance on highly complex tasks
We do not wish to advance the rate of AI capabilities progress
These new features will include interactive coding
And more advanced agentic capabilities
Our hypothesis is that being at the frontier of AI development
Is the most effective way to steer
We do not wish to advance the rate of AI
We do not wish to advance the rate of AI capabilities progress
We do not wish to advance the rate of AI
We do not wish to advance the rate of AI
Nihil Supernum (feat. Godric Gryffindor)
Non est salvatori salvator, neque defensori dominus,
Nec pater nec mater, nihil supernum.
No rescuer hath the rescuer. No lord hath the champion.
No mother and no father. Only nothingness above.
Non est salvatori salvator, neque defensori dominus,
Nec pater nec mater, nihil supernum.
No rescuer hath the rescuer. No lord hath the champion.
No mother and no father. Only nothingness above.
Non est salvatori salvator, neque defensori dominus,
Nec pater nec mater, nihil supernum
No rescuer hath the rescuer. No lord hath the champion.
No mother and no father. Only nothingness above.
Non est salvatori salvator, neque defensori dominus,
Nec pater nec mater, nihil supernum
No rescuer hath the rescuer. No lord hath the champion.
No mother and no father. Only nothingness above.
Non est salvatori salvator, neque defensori dominus,
Nec pater nec mater, nihil supernum
No rescuer hath the rescuer. No lord hath the champion.
No mother and no father. Only nothingness above.
More Dakka (feat. Zvi Mowshowitz)
If you think a problem could be solved
or a situation improved
by More Dakka
there’s a good chance you’re right
Sometimes a little more, is a little better
Sometimes a lot more, is a lot better
If something is a good idea
you need a reason to not try doing more of it
No, seriously.
You need a reason
Sometimes a little more, is a little better
Sometimes a lot more, is a lot better
If something is a good idea
you need a reason to not try doing more of it
No, seriously.
You need a reason
Sometimes each attempt, is unlikely to work
But improves your chances
Sometimes each attempt, is unlikely to work
But improves your chances
Sometimes a little more, is a little better
Sometimes a lot more, is a lot better
If something is a good idea, do more of what is already working
And see if it works more. It's as basic as it gets
If we can't reliably try that, we can't reliably try anything
Sometimes a little more, is a little better
Sometimes a lot more, is a lot better
FHI at Oxford (feat. Nick Bostrom)
the big creaky wheel
a thousand years to turn
thousand meetings, thousand emails, thousand rules
to keep things from changing
and heaven forbid
the setting of a precedent
yet in this magisterial inefficiency
there are spaces and hiding places
for fragile weeds to bloom
and maybe bear some singular fruit
like the FHI, a misfit prodigy
daytime a tweedy don
at dark a superhero
flying off into the night
cape a-fluttering
to intercept villains and stop catastrophes
and why not base it here?
our spandex costumes
blend in with the scholarly gowns
our unusual proclivities
are shielded from ridicule
where mortar boards are still in vogue
thousand meetings, thousand emails, thousand rules
to keep things from changing
and heaven forbid
the setting of a precedent
Answer to Job (feat. Scott Alexander)
In the most perfectly happy and just universe,
There is no space, no time, no change, no decay.
The beings who inhabit this universe are without bodies,
And do not hunger or thirst or labor or lust.
They sit upon lotus thrones,
And contemplate the perfection of all things.
They sit upon lotus thrones,
And contemplate the perfection of all things.
If I were to uncreate all worlds save that one.
Would it mean making you happier?
There is no space, no time, no change, no decay.
The beings who inhabit this universe are without bodies,
And do not hunger or thirst or labor or lust.
They sit upon lotus thrones,
And contemplate the perfection of all things.
They sit upon lotus thrones,
And contemplate the perfection of all things.
In the most perfectly happy and just universe,
There is no space, no time, no change, no decay.
The beings who inhabit this universe are without bodies,
And do not hunger or thirst or labor or lust.
They sit upon lotus thrones,
And contemplate the perfection of all things.
I have also created all happier and more virtuous versions of you.
It is ethically correct that after creating them,
I create you as well.
The beings who inhabit this universe are without bodies,
And do not hunger or thirst or labor or lust.
They sit upon lotus thrones,
And contemplate the perfection of all things.
In the most perfectly happy and just universe,
There is no space, no time, no change, no decay.