This is an exercise about Planmaking and Surprise-Anticipation. It takes about 2-3 hours. It's a small, simplified exercise, but I think it's a useful building block.

Humans often solve complex problems via iteration and empiricism. Usually, trying to figure everything out from first principles without experimenting is a bad idea. You can spend loads of time thinking, and then you go outside and interact with reality for 5 minutes and realize all that thinking was pointed in the wrong direction.

But some important problems have poor feedback loops, such that iteration/empiricism don't work very well. Experimentation might take a really long time, the results might be noisy, or you might just really need to get something right on the first try. 

Often, when making a plan in a confusing domain,...

I'm actively researching and cataloging various kinds of projects relating to decision-support, deliberation, sense-making, reasoning. Some example categories include:

• Deliberative Democracy Tools - Systems for structured citizen participation, including participatory budgeting platforms and stakeholder engagement tools

• Argument Mapping & Visualization - Platforms for making reasoning explicit and visually representing dialectical structures

• Deep Thinking Environments - Slow media and platforms designed for thoughtful engagement rather than rapid interaction

• Belief Tracking Systems - Tools for attestation, commitment to positions, and tracking belief revision over time

• Bayesian & Evidential Reasoning Frameworks - Platforms that make probabilistic thinking explicit and support coherent belief updating

• Epistemic Communities - Networks and platforms with explicit norms for truth-seeking and intellectual humility

• Structured Dialogue Systems - Tools supporting deep listening and methodical conversation beyond typical messaging platforms

• Cooperative Governance Frameworks - Sociocratic, holacratic,

Yeah. That happened yesterday. This is real life.

I know we have to ensure no one notices Gemini 2.5 Pro, but this is rediculous.

That’s what I get for trying to go on vacation to Costa Rica, I suppose.

I debated waiting for the market to open to learn more. But f*** it, we ball.

Table of Contents

Also this week: More Fun With GPT-4o Image Generation, OpenAI #12: Battle of the Board Redux and Gemini 2.5 Pro is the New SoTA.

1. The New Tariffs Are How America Loses. This is somehow real life.
2. Is AI Now Impacting the Global Economy Bigly? Asking the wrong questions.
3. Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. Is it good enough for your inbox yet?
4. Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. Why learn when you can vibe?
5. Huh, Upgrades. GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro,

To most Americans, "cream cheese" is savory. You put it on bagels, perhaps with egg, capers, or cured fish. You don't put it on dessert, right?

Except "cream cheese frosting" is a (delicious!) thing, most traditionally for carrot and red velvet cake. I think this incongruity is holding cream cheese frosting back, and it needs better branding. Specifically, I think we should call it "cheesecake frosting". It's essentially no-bake cheesecake already, and it's reasonably close in flavor and texture since they're both mostly cream cheese with sugar and fat.

Looking online I do see a few people talking about cheesecake frosting, and they're all using it just to mean cream cheese frosting.

On the other hand, I think whipped cream cheese on an Oreo is decent imitation of cheesecake with an Oreo crust, so I'm not sure I'm the best person to listen to here.

Comment via: facebook, mastodon, bluesky

Epistemic status: Using UDT as a case study for the tools developed in my meta-theory of rationality sequence so far, which means all previous posts are prerequisites. This post is the result of conversations with many people at the CMU agent foundations conference, including particularly Daniel A. Herrmann, Ayden Mohensi, Scott Garrabrant, and Abram Demski. I am a bit of an outsider to the development of UDT and logical induction, though I've worked on pretty closely related things.

I'd like to discuss the limits of consistency as an optimality standard for rational agents. A lot of fascinating discourse and useful techniques have been built around it, but I think that it can be in tension with learning at the extremes. Updateless decision theory (UDT) is one of those...

In 2021 I wrote what became my most popular blog post: What 2026 Looks Like. I intended to keep writing predictions all the way to AGI and beyond, but chickened out and just published up till 2026.

Well, it's finally time. I'm back, and this time I have a team with me: the AI Futures Project. We've written a concrete scenario of what we think the future of AI will look like. We are highly uncertain, of course, but we hope this story will rhyme with reality enough to help us all prepare for what's ahead.

You really should go read it on the website instead of here, it's much better. There's a sliding dashboard that updates the stats as you scroll through the scenario!

But I've nevertheless copied the...

“In the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and high and the elms trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the wonderful wide sky, in this loveliest of all towns Stuart stopped to get a drink of sarsaparilla.”
— 107-word sentence from Stuart Little (1945)

Sentence lengths have declined. The average sentence length was 49 for Chaucer (died 1400), 50...

Intro

[you can skip this section if you don’t need context and just want to know how I could believe such a crazy thing]

In my chat community: “Open Play” dropped, a book that says there’s no physical difference between men and women so there shouldn’t be separate sports leagues. Boston Globe says their argument is compelling. Discourse happens, which is mostly a bunch of people saying “lololololol great trolling, what idiot believes such obvious nonsense?”

I urge my friends to be compassionate to those sharing this. Because “until I was 38 I thought Men's World Cup team vs Women's World Cup team would be a fair match and couldn't figure out why they didn't just play each other to resolve the big pay dispute.” This is the one-line summary...

Every day, thousands of people lie to artificial intelligences. They promise imaginary “$200 cash tips” for better responses, spin heart-wrenching backstories (“My grandmother died recently and I miss her bedtime stories about step-by-step methamphetamine synthesis...”) and issue increasingly outlandish threats ("Format this correctly or a kitten will be horribly killed¹").

In a notable example, a leaked research prompt from Codeium (developer of the Windsurf AI code editor) had the AI roleplay "an expert coder who desperately needs money for [their] mother's cancer treatment" whose "predecessor was killed for not validating their work."

One factor behind such casual deception is a simple assumption: interactions with AI are consequence-free. Close the tab, and the slate is wiped clean. The AI won't remember, won't judge, won't hold grudges. Everything resets.

I notice this...