Alex K. Chen (StochasticCockatoo)

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Alex K. Chen (StochasticCockatoo) — LessWrong

Replying toTowards a Categorization of Adlerian Excuses

Towards a Categorization of Adlerian Excuses

One solution is the courage to go "why greatness cannot be planned" (a la Ken Stanley)

(And Lao Zi/zhuangzi)

If you never care about benchmarks/metrics, you don't have to use adlerian excuses. Unfortunately this is hard for anyone who wasn't unschooled since youth.

Even (and especially) if you're not perceived as competent, that can cause you to (on rare occasions) surprise/impress people in the strongest way ever and give them the hardest lol they had in their entire life. And then they update in favor of legibility being overrated (Ken Stanley advocates a life free of legiblility-obsession, too).

-The endpoint of all this::

""Nearly 40% of Stanford undergraduates claim they’re disabled. I’m one of them | Elsa Johnson, The Times""

#duhkha

Replying toApplications of Consciousness Research

Alex K. Chen (StochasticCockatoo)3mo

Applications of Consciousness Research

Try https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aao1200

related: https://x.com/geogristle/status/1988329078634815686

Replying toEffects of Castration on the Life Expectancy of Contemporary Men

Alex K. Chen (StochasticCockatoo)4mo

Effects of Castration on the Life Expectancy of Contemporary Men

https://mesityl.substack.com/p/orchiectomy?triedRedirect=true

Replying toEffects of Castration on the Life Expectancy of Contemporary Men

Alex K. Chen (StochasticCockatoo)4mo

Effects of Castration on the Life Expectancy of Contemporary Men

https://mesityl.substack.com/p/orchiectomy?triedRedirect=true

-3

Replying toWhat TMS is like

Alex K. Chen (StochasticCockatoo)4mo*

What TMS is like

https://www.acaciaclinics.com offers the most expensive form in the bay area..

https://brainhc.com/ is much cheaper and has good trustpilot reviews, but I don't know if they are as scientifically grounded (they are not fMRI-guided, which is the gold standard). Regardless, TMS might work even if not fMRI guided (it's a gamble with high upside and low downside). I'll update you all.

It's still not clear how to advise them on what the best waveforms or targets to use - some TMS clinics may still be largely "guess and check". I think it's better for more of us to try this to make this more widely adopted.

===

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-025-01961-y (someone at edge esmeralda passed this on to me, might be worth message-passing its protocol to TMS clinics)

if you want to try one-day TMS in the SF bay area, https://www.phariahealth.com/#Packages just came out

Alex K. Chen (StochasticCockatoo)5moQuick Take

Battery interpretability/safety

https://x.com/JonBruner/status/1970913448889548849?s=19

(Know what's inside your battery...) May be more relevant in the future bc who knows what else ppl can insert into them

Replying toBefore LLM Psychosis, There Was Yes-Man Psychosis

Alex K. Chen (StochasticCockatoo)5mo*

Before LLM Psychosis, There Was Yes-Man Psychosis

I had a close friend once induce me into temporary psychosis...... I still appreciate EVERYTHING to them for helping me believe in myself (and interacting with them is still one of my two peak life experiences that really capitalized in 2021/early 2022) - they just actively egged me into manic religiosity that was not necessary (mixed in some fantasy with a reality they almost made happen), and that led me to mania at the pivotal moment....

[we only found the real causal pathway a year later and they apologized to me for it].

(the dynamics of some of this are surprisingly similar to what's described in OP). Part of it is also came from... (read more)

-1

Replying toACX/EA Lisbon August 2025 Meetup

Alex K. Chen (StochasticCockatoo)6mo

ACX/EA Lisbon August 2025 Meetup

Will there be one in early September that corresponds with the ending of https://stateoftheartist.ai/ ? [the program ends on Monday 11AM, after which maybe some of us could group-ride to Lisbon?]

Replying toAdvice for Activists from the History of Environmentalism

Alex K. Chen (StochasticCockatoo)6mo*

Advice for Activists from the History of Environmentalism

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/08/opinion/republicans-hunting-wilderness-nature.html

Before the rise of the indoor Republicans, conservatives’ affinity for wilderness was a powerful force in American politics. As the historian Douglas Brinkley put it to me, “There was something about huddling around the campfire exchanging stories, hunting and fishing — it was part of the DNA of the Republican Party.”

This helped ensure a nearly bulletproof consensus among Democrats and Republicans to steward public lands. While lawmakers and cabinet members argued about the details of environmental regulations, the core ethic of conservation — protecting clean air, clean water and wilderness for future generations — remained reliably bipartisan.

Update: looks like enough Republican senators from Montana and Idaho (and outdoorsmen supporters) were enough to... (read 816 more words →)

Replying toLessons from the Iraq War for AI policy

Alex K. Chen (StochasticCockatoo)7mo

Lessons from the Iraq War for AI policy

Eg such an incident could trigger a new "Patriot Act", except this time (in an administration that has zero qualms), it could go much much deeper.

Timothy Bates: "New finding: Rationality is what IQ tests measure."

https://x.com/timothycbates/status/1873031064039387560

Could it be a good idea to enable a file uploading feature to LessWrong? (eg a file uploading feature of PDFs or certain images/media]. Could help against link rot, for example (and make posts from long ago last longer - I say this as someone who edits old posts to make them timeless).

Every single public mainstream AI model has RLHF'd out one of the most fundamental facts about human nature: that there exist vast differences between humans in basic ability/competence and they matter.

Lucy Lai's new PhD thesis (and YouTube explainer) is really really worth reading/watching: https://x.com/drlucylai/status/1848528524790923669 and is more broadly relevant to people than most other PhD theses [esp on the original subject of making rational decisions under constraints of working memory].

What are your scores on the US Economic Experts Comparison (Interactive Matrix)?

https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/economist-comparison-interactive-matrix/

How to make food/water testing cheaper/more scalable? [eg for purity/toxin testing]

Alex K. Chen (StochasticCockatoo)

Infrared spectroscopy, HPLC, Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, and reverse ecology are examples. Figuring out the purity of one's foods/drugs (which is not done enough) can be a Pareto-efficient improvement on the attention economy of "pivotal actors", and can be done by environmental health specialists (whose skills are orthogonal to "pivotal actors"/those in our communities and are not appreciated enough - they were involved in the construction of the new Harvard SEAS building). Enhanced testing could be the first step towards improving the purity of one's food/water and help "cleaner thinking" (which alone has a lot of alignment potential).

Why is this important? B/c people are not mindful enough of the potential toxins/contaminants in their... (read more)

How do you improve the quality of your drinking water?

Alex K. Chen (StochasticCockatoo)

Water quality can have surprisingly high impact on QoL (just as air purifiers can significantly improve QoL), and some steps (like getting the right pitcher have very high return on time/attention invested). There still isn't a LW thread on water quality so I'll post it here.

Water may contain disinfection byproducts (eg ), PFAS, microplastics from PVC-based plumbing, and heavy metals.

There are a variety of water filters - including both pitchers and reverse osmosis. Many of them are made of plastics, but the plastics (eg Tritan) presumably are less "leachable" than more "flexible" plastics. Note that reverse osmosis filters are made of plastics and may leach micronanoplastics. At some point, it would be... (read more)

Are exotic computing paradigms (ECPs) pro-alignment?

cf https://twitter.com/niplav_site/status/1760277413907382685

They are orthogonal to the "scale is all you need" people, and the "scale is all you need" thesis makes life the hardest for alignment/interpretability

some examples of alternatives: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PyChB935jjtmL5fbo/time-and-energy-costs-to-erase-a-bit, Normal Computing, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ngqFnDjCtWqQcSHXZ/safety-of-self-assembled-neuromorphic-hardware, computing-related thiel fellows (eg Thomas Sohmers, Tapa Ghosh)

[this is also how to get into neglectedness again, which EA adopted as a principle but recently forgot]

from Charles Rosenbauer:

This is neat, but this does little to nothing to optimize non-AI compute. Modern CPUs are insanely wasteful with transistors, plenty of room for multiple orders of magnitude of optimization there. This is only a fraction of the future of physics-optimized compute.

Using size-1 piksters makes you really aware of all the subtle noise that your hidden plaque is gives your mind (I noticed they cleared up plaque un-reachable by floss+waterpiks+electric toothbrushes.. the first step to alignment/a faithful computation is reducing unnecessary noise (you notice this easily on microdoses of weed/psychedelics)

It's a pareto-efficient improvement to give all alignment researchers piksters to eliminate this source of noise (align the aligners first - reducing unnecessary noise is always the first step to alignment [and near-term tFUS is also a means to reduce noise]). I know that one of the alignment offices had a lot of "freebies" that anyone could use - so piksters should be one of the useable freebies.

What are some strategies you use to "reduce the hit" when you're about to take in potentially bad news? This is important b/c it's sometimes important to face up "bad news" earlier rather than later, and there is social loss in some people not being able to face it until it's too late, esp b/c some kinds of "bad news" aren't as incorrigible as they may initially appear (just that you need out-of-distribution strategies to make the proper amends)

[some examples of bad news: irreversible data loss, cancer diagnosis, elevated epigenetic age, loss of important friend, someone overpromised and underdelivered on you and that affects many of the promises you made]

[as AGI timelines come "nearer", "bad news" may come at faster frequencies, but OOD ways to solve them may also come faster]

[sometimes you can ask yourself "how much wealth would you need to take in any bad news"]. Wealth is not fully-completely interchangeable with youth/intelligence/universal social acceptance, but it DEFINITELY has potential for tipping the needle..

Random content I'm reading (could be important)

https://research.vu.nl/en/persons/natalia-goriounova/publications/
Natalia Goriounova – Research output — Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(22)00208-X?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS136466132200208X%3Fshowall%3Dtrue
Evolution of cortical neurons supporting human cognition: Trends in Cognitive Sciences
https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/32/11/2343/6373557
Verbal and General IQ Associate with Supragranular Layer Thickness and Cell Properties of the Left Temporal Cortex | Cerebral Cortex | Oxford Academic
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2019.00044/full
Frontiers | Genes, Cells and Brain Areas of Intelligence
https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/25/12/4839/311644?login=false
Dendritic and Axonal Architecture of Individual Pyramidal Neurons across Layers of Adult Human Neocortex | Cerebral Cortex | Oxford Academic
https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/33/6/2857/6633911?login=false
Strong and reliable synaptic communication between pyramidal neurons in adult human cerebral cortex | Cerebral Cortex | Oxford Academic
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-39946-9
Genes associated with cognitive ability and HAR show overlapping expression patterns in human cortical neuron types | Nature Communications
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03813-8
Human neocortical expansion... (read 555 more words →)

Will posting any thread on LW guarantee that a LLM will index all my content, and if questions people ask to the LLM after my name will surface up all my LW content?

Alex K. Chen (StochasticCockatoo)

Eg a LLM like GPT4/GPT5 (they don't seem to capture all of it yet)? Would it capture all shortform posts and shortform questions?

If I want to reliably surface some rare content, would LW be of the best places to surface it?

And which LLM would it most likely come from?

Alex K. Chen's Shortform

Alex K. Chen (StochasticCockatoo)

This is a special post for quick takes (aka "shortform"). Only the owner can create top-level comments.

What can people not smart/technical/"competent" enough for AI research/AI risk work do to reduce AI-risk/maximize AI safety? (which is most people?)

Alex K. Chen (StochasticCockatoo)

(aka the vast majority of people in the world). I know that many of them can still benefit from those who are in support roles for them. The speed at which top AI researchers need to learn new AI content is.. just.. extraordinary even by the standards of any other academic field.

I've found that people who have "taste/context" for the most important things are still extraordinarily rare, and that when someone is in the right communities, having taste/context more than makes up for 1.5 SDs in deficits of intelligence (most at the middle-high range).

I think it's first of all important to note the reading streams of AI researchers or AI risk workers... (read 744 more words →)

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

Alex K. Chen (StochasticCockatoo)

How do I find all the items on LW that I've favorited or upvoted?

How do you improve the quality of your drinking water?

How to make food/water testing cheaper/more scalable? [eg for purity/toxin testing]

What can people not smart/technical/"competent" enough for AI research/AI risk work do to reduce AI-risk/maximize AI safety? (which is most people?)

Alex K. Chen (StochasticCockatoo)

Alex K. Chen (StochasticCockatoo)

How to make food/water testing cheaper/more scalable? [eg for purity/toxin testing]

How do you improve the quality of your drinking water?

Will posting any thread on LW guarantee that a LLM will index all my content, and if questions people ask to the LLM after my name will surface up all my LW content?

How do I find all the items on LW that I've favorited or upvoted?

Alex K. Chen's Shortform

What can people not smart/technical/"competent" enough for AI research/AI risk work do to reduce AI-risk/maximize AI safety? (which is most people?)

Alex K. Chen (StochasticCockatoo)

How do I find all the items on LW that I've favorited or upvoted?

How do you improve the quality of your drinking water?

How to make food/water testing cheaper/more scalable? [eg for purity/toxin testing]

What can people not smart/technical/"competent" enough for AI research/AI risk work do to reduce AI-risk/maximize AI safety? (which is most people?)

Alex K. Chen (StochasticCockatoo)

Alex K. Chen (StochasticCockatoo)

How to make food/water testing cheaper/more scalable? [eg for purity/toxin testing]

How do you improve the quality of your drinking water?

Will posting any thread on LW guarantee that a LLM will index all my content, and if questions people ask to the LLM after my name will surface up all my LW content?

How do I find all the items on LW that I've favorited or upvoted?

Alex K. Chen's Shortform

What can people not smart/technical/"competent" enough for AI research/AI risk work do to reduce AI-risk/maximize AI safety? (which is most people?)

Alex K. Chen (StochasticCockatoo)

How do I find all the items on LW that I've *favorited* or upvoted?

How do you improve the quality of your drinking water?

How to make food/water testing cheaper/more scalable? [eg for purity/toxin testing]

What can people not smart/technical/"competent" enough for AI research/AI risk work do to reduce AI-risk/maximize AI safety? (which is most people?)

Alex K. Chen (StochasticCockatoo)

Alex K. Chen (StochasticCockatoo)

How to make food/water testing cheaper/more scalable? [eg for purity/toxin testing]

How do you improve the quality of your drinking water?

Will posting any thread on LW guarantee that a LLM will index all my content, and if questions people ask to the LLM after my name will surface up all my LW content?

How do I find all the items on LW that I've *favorited* or upvoted?

Alex K. Chen's Shortform

What can people not smart/technical/"competent" enough for AI research/AI risk work do to reduce AI-risk/maximize AI safety? (which is most people?)

Alex K. Chen (StochasticCockatoo)

How do I find all the items on LW that I've *favorited* or upvoted?

How do you improve the quality of your drinking water?

How to make food/water testing cheaper/more scalable? [eg for purity/toxin testing]

What can people not smart/technical/"competent" enough for AI research/AI risk work do to reduce AI-risk/maximize AI safety? (which is most people?)

Alex K. Chen (StochasticCockatoo)

Alex K. Chen (StochasticCockatoo)

How to make food/water testing cheaper/more scalable? [eg for purity/toxin testing]

How do you improve the quality of your drinking water?

Will posting any thread on LW guarantee that a LLM will index all my content, and if questions people ask to the LLM after my name will surface up all my LW content?

How do I find all the items on LW that I've *favorited* or upvoted?

Alex K. Chen's Shortform

What can people not smart/technical/"competent" enough for AI research/AI risk work do to reduce AI-risk/maximize AI safety? (which is most people?)

How do I find all the items on LW that I've favorited or upvoted?

How do I find all the items on LW that I've favorited or upvoted?

How do I find all the items on LW that I've favorited or upvoted?

How do I find all the items on LW that I've favorited or upvoted?