kave — LessWrong

LESSWRONG
LW

kave — LessWrong

Replying toOpen Thread Winter 2025/26

Open Thread Winter 2025/26

Folks with 5k+ karma often have pretty interesting ideas, and I want to hear more of them. I am pretty into them trying to lower the activation energy required for them to post. Also, they’re unusually likely to develop ways of making non-slop AI writing

There’s also a matter of “standing”; I think that users who have contributed that much to the site should take some risky bets that cost LessWrong something and might payoff. To expand my model here: one of the moderators’ jobs, IMO, is to spare LW the cost of having to read bad stuff and downvote it to invisibility. If LW had to do all the filtering that moderators... (read more)

•••

Replying toOpen Thread Winter 2025/26

kave4d

Open Thread Winter 2025/26

I think in most cases that a >5k karma user posts something that's 100% AI, it's better to let it through (though I expect I would strong downvote it).

-1

Replying toBelieving In

kave1moReview for 2024 Review

Believing In

When this post first came out, I felt that it was quite dangerous. I explained to a friend: I expected this model would take hold in my sphere, and somehow disrupt, on this issue, the sensemaking I relied on, the one where each person thought for themselves and shared what they saw.

This is a sort of funny complaint to have. It sounds a little like "I'm worried that this is a useful idea, and then everyone will use it, and they won't be sharing lots of disorganised observations any more". I suppose the simple way to express the bite of the worry is that I worried this concept was more memetically fit... (read more)

Replying toOpen Thread Winter 2025/26

kave1mo

Open Thread Winter 2025/26

Here's the tally of each kind of vote:

Weak Upvote	3834911
Strong Upvote	 369901
Weak Downvote	 426706
Strong Downvote	  43683

And here's my estimate of the total karma moved for each type:

Weak Upvote	5350471
Strong Upvote	1581885
Weak Downvote	 641568
Strong Downvote	 206491

Replying toNew User's Guide to LessWrong

kave1mo

New User's Guide to LessWrong

Thanks, fixed!

Replying toThe hostile telepaths problem

kave2moModerator Comment

The hostile telepaths problem

I don't think non-substantive aggression like this is appropriate for LessWrong. I appreciate that you pulled out quotes, but "typical LessWrong word salad" is not a sufficiently specific complaint to support the sneering.

Given that you imply you're leaving, perhaps no moderation action is needed. But I expect I'll take moderation action if you stick around and keep engaging in this way.

Replying toToss a bitcoin to your Lightcone – LW + Lighthaven's 2026 fundraiser

kave2mo

Toss a bitcoin to your Lightcone – LW + Lighthaven's 2026 fundraiser

Huh! Where did you find the Stripe donation link? Did you just have it saved from last year?

Replying toInsights into Claude Opus 4.5 from Pokémon

kave2mo

Insights into Claude Opus 4.5 from Pokémon

Curated. I appreciate this post's concreteness.

It can be hard to really understand what numbers in a benchmark mean. To do so, you have to be pretty familiar with the task distribution, which is often a little surprising. And, if you are bothering to get familiar with it, you probably already know how the LLM performs. So it's hard to be sure you're judging the difficulty accurately, rather than using your sense of the LLM's intelligence to infer the task difficulty.

Fortunately, a Pokémon game involves a bunch of different tasks, and I'm pretty familiar with them from childhood gameboy sessions. So LLM performance on the game can provide some helpful intuitions about LLM performance in general. Of course, you don't get all the niceties of statistical power and so on, but I still find it a helpful data source to include.

This post does a good job abstracting some of the subskills involved and provides lots of deliciously specific examples for the claims. It's also quite entertaining!

kave2mo

Thank you!

Would it help if the prompt read more like a menu?

Reviews should provide information that help evaluate a post. For example:
What does this post add to the conversation?
How did this post affect you, your thinking, and your actions?
Does it make accurate claims? Does it carve reality at the joints? How do you know?
Is there a subclaim of this post that you can test?
What followup work would you like to see building on this post?

kave2moQuick Take

The predicted winners for future years of the review are now visible on the Best of LessWrong page! Here are the top ten guesses for the currently ongoing 2024 review:

(I've already voted on several of these! I doctored the screenshot to hide my votes)

I think LessWrong's annual review is better than karma at finding the best and most enduring posts. Part of the dream for the review prediction markets is bringing some of that high-quality signal from the future into the present. That signal is currently highlighted with gold karma on the post item, if the prediction market has a high enough probability.

Currently the markets are pretty thinly traded, but I think... (read more)

Open Thread Winter 2025/26

kave

2mo

If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it.

If you are new to LessWrong, here's the place to introduce yourself. Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to get from the site and community are invited. This is also the place to discuss feature requests and other ideas you have for the site, if you don't want to write a full top-level post.

If you're new to the community, you can start reading the Highlights from the Sequences, a collection of posts about the core ideas of LessWrong.

If you want to explore the community more, I recommend... (read more)

There has been a rash of highly upvoted quick takes recently that don't meet our frontpage guidelines. They are often timely, perhaps because they're political, pitching something to the reader or inside baseball. These are all fine or even good things to write on LessWrong! But I (and the rest of the moderation team I talked to) still want to keep the content on the frontpage of LessWrong timeless.

Unlike posts, we don't go through each quick take and manually assign it to be frontpage or personal (and posts are treated as personal until they're actively frontpaged). Quick takes are instead treated more like frontpage by default, but we do have the ability to move them to personal.

I'm writing this because of a bunch of us are planning to be more active about moving quick takes off the frontpage. I also might link to this comment to clarify what's happening in cases of confusion.

Open Thread Autumn 2025

kave

4mo

If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it.

If you're new to the community, you can start reading the Highlights from the Sequences, a collection of posts about the core ideas of LessWrong.

If you want to explore the community more, I recommend... (read more)

What are the best standardised, repeatable bets?

kave

10mo

Suppose that I have some budget set aside for philanthropic funding, say $1,000, but I think there are a big returns to scale, so that it would be >1,000x better if I had $1,000,000.^[1]

What are my best options for some bets I can make to get some chance of turning that $1,000 into $1,000,000?

I imagine the bets are generally better the more positive their EV is (which in practice means the less negative the EV is), the easier they are to find (like if they're standardised), and the better their tax treatment is, especially if you repeat them multiple times (maybe they can be done by DAFs).

^{^}
NB: I don't believe this

I spent some time Thursday morning arguing with Habryka about the intended use of react downvotes. I think I now have a fairly compact summary of his position.

PSA: When to upvote and downvote a react

Upvote a react when you think it's helpful to the conversation (or at least, not antihelpful) and you agree with it. Imagine a react were a comment. If you would agree-upvote it and not karma-downvote it, you can upvote the react.

Downvote a react when you think it's unhelpful for the conversation. This might be because you think the react isn't being used for its intended purpose, because you think people are going through noisily agree reacting to loads of passages in a back-and-forth to create an impression of consensus, or other reasons. If, when you're imagining a react were a comment, you would karma-downvote the comment, you might downvote the react.

Could exciting biotech progress lessen the societal pressure to make AGI?

Suppose we reach a temporary AI development pause. We don't know how long the pause will last; we don't have a certain end date nor is it guaranteed to continue. Is it politically easier for that pause to continue if other domains are having transformative impacts?

I've mostly thought this is wishful thinking. Most people don't care about transformative tech; the absence of an alternative path to a good singularity isn't the main driver of societal AI progress.

But I've updated some here. I think that another powerful technology might make a sustained pause an easier sell. My impression (not super-substantiated) is that advocacy... (read more)

Gwern: Why So Few Matt Levines?

kave

Matt Levine is the most well-known newslettrist (“Money Stuff”) in the financial industry, having blogged or written since 2011, finding his niche in popularization after stints in Wall Street & law. His commentary is influential, people leak to him, he sometimes interviews major figures (notoriously, Sam Bankman-Fried) or recounts inside information, and a number of phrases like his “laws of insider trading” (specifically, how not to) have gained currency to the point where readers can now do much of the work of sourcing an issue for him.
He is read by hundreds of thousands of readers (including myself)—everyone from shoeshine boy to billionaire. The size of his audience is respectable, but perhaps its

... (read 184 more words →)

Linkpost: Surely you can be serious

kave

Adam Mastroianni writes about "actually caring about stuff, and for the right reasons", rather than just LARPing. The opening is excerpted below.

I once saw someone give a talk about a tiny intervention that caused a gigantic effect, something like, “We gave high school seniors a hearty slap on the back and then they scored 500 points higher on the SAT.”¹
Everyone in the audience was like, “Hmm, interesting, I wonder if there were any gender effects, etc.”
I wanted to get up and yell: “EITHER THIS IS THE MOST POTENT PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERVENTION EVER, OR THIS STUDY IS TOTAL BULLSHIT.”
If those results are real, we should start a nationwide backslapping campaign immediately. We should be

... (read more)

I think when I'm tempted to use the following reacts, I shouldn't and should use a different one. Feel free to call me out on using these reacts, though ideally on things that are published later than this shortform (I'm not going to remove old reacts I made):

Skeptical. I think I should probably just use a probability here
Missed the point. I think I mostly don't like this when I see it used; it feels like an illicitly specific-but-not-evidenced claim against the writing it’s applied to.
Locally invalid. It's tempted to rejoin "locally invalid" to poor argument, but I think most written arguments are somewhat locally invalid (in a strict sense of validity), and

... (read more)

Daniel Dennett has died (1942-2024)

kave

Daniel Dennett, professor emeritus of philosophy at Tufts University, well-known for his work in philosophy of mind and a wide range of other philosophical areas, has died.
Professor Dennett wrote extensively about issues related to philosophy of mind and cognitive science, especially consciousness. He is also recognized as having made significant contributions to the concept of intentionality and debates on free will. Some of Professor Dennett’s books include Content and Consciousness (1969), Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (1981), The Intentional Stance (1987), Consciousness Explained (1992), Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), Breaking the Spell (2006), and From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (2017). He published a memoir last year

... (read 178 more words →)

151

LessWrong's (first) album: I Have Been A Good Bing

habryka

habryka, kave

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... (read 3020 more words →)

182

576

Sometimes running to stand still is the right thing to do

It's nice when good stuff piles up into even more good stuff, but sometimes it doesn't:

Sometimes people are worried that they will habituate to caffeine and lose any benefit from taking it.
Most efforts to lose weight are only temporarily successful (unless using medicine or surgery).
The hedonic treadmill model claims it’s hard to become durably happier.
Productivity hacks tend to stop working.

These things are like Alice’s red queen’s race: always running to stay in the same place. But I think there’s a pretty big difference between running that keeps you exactly where you would have been if you hadn’t bothered, and running that either moves you a... (read more)

Suppose you are a government that thinks some policy will be good for your populace in aggregate over the long-term (that is, it's a Kaldor-Hicks improvement). For example, perhaps some tax reform you're excited about.

But this reform (we assume) is quite unpopular with a few people who would suffer concentrated losses. You're tempted to include in the policy a big cash transfer that makes those people happy (that is, making it closer to Pareto optimal). But you're worried about levering up too much on your guess that this is a good policy.

Here's one thing you can do. You auction securities (that is, tradeable assets) that pay off as follows: if you raise... (read more)

kave's Shortform

kave

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

If you weren't such an idiot...

kave

kave, Mark Xu

My friend Buck once told me that he often had interactions with me that felt like I was saying “If you weren’t such a fucking idiot, you would obviously do…” Here’s a list of such advice in that spirit.
Note that if you do/don’t do these things, I’m technically calling you an idiot, but I do/don’t do a bunch of them too. We can be idiots together.
If you weren’t such a fucking idiot…
You would have multiple copies of any object that would make you sad if you didn’t have it
Examples: ear plugs, melatonin, eye masks, hats, sun glasses, various foods, possibly computers, etc.
You would spend money on goods and services.
Examples of goods: faster

... (read 472 more words →)

173

•••

New LessWrong review winner UI ("The LeastWrong" section and full-art post pages)

kave

(Also announcing: annual review prediction markets & full-height table of contents. If you're looking for this year's review results, you can find them here)

The top 50 posts of each of LessWrong’s annual reviews have a new home: The LeastWrong.

What will I see when I click that link?

You will find the posts organized into six “books”: Rationality, Optimization, World, Practical, AI Strategy, and Technical AI Safety. Each square on the grid is a post that made the top 50 of the review in some year. The collections are ordered more-or-less with the aim of putting the accessible posts in the most prominent spots.

If you're logged-in the essays will be dark until you've read... (read 250 more words →)

107