An Algorithmic Lucidity

Kelsey Piper replies to Richard Ngo on Twitter: since you have adopted the frame that liberals are self-deceived (and therefore not trustworthy about our beliefs) and you should make up beliefs you think we have, you have become markedly less likely to say

One of my favorite passages from Atlas Shrugged is this one, when Cherryl is beginning to have second thoughts about her marriage to James Taggart: It was his sudden, angry "so you don't trust me?"

(Script for a talk given at App Academy on 11 August 2014, belatedly blogged twelve years later in a fit of nostalgia for the world of mid-2010s web security) Hi, my name is Zack M.

I heard a story (second- or third-hand, which surely lost or gained some details on the telephone path from reality to this telling if it even happened at all) about a boy, age 7 or so, who goes to a very highly-acclaimed school.

Dateline SAN FRANCISCO, 30 July 2026— A hearing was held on a motion for summary judgment in the case of Anthropic PBC v.

When I started An Algorithmic Lucidity back in 2011 when I didn't know anything about computers, I used WordPress—briefly on wordpress.com, but then on my own site on Namecheap's true-to-its-brandname shared hosting service.

BOJACK: Hey, I wanted to talk to you about—you know—I feel bad about what happened.

Dateline SAN FRANCISCO, 24 March 2026— A hearing was held on a motion for a preliminary injunction in the case of Anthropic PBC v.

(Previously: Prologue.)

What Even Is This Timeline The striking thing about reading what is potentially the most important document in human history is how impossible it is to take seriously.

In a busy, busy world, there's so much to read that no one could possibly keep up with it all.

In "Truth or Dare", Duncan Sabien articulates a phenomenon in which expectations of good or bad behavior can become self-fulfilling: people who expect to be exploited and feel the need to put up defenses both elicit and get sorted into a Dark World where…

Previously, I wrote about how I was considering going back to San Francisco State University for two semesters to finish up my Bachelor's degree in math.

The AI Village is an ongoing experiment (currently running on weekdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Scott Garrabrant gives a number of examples to illustrate that "Yes Requires the Possibility of No".

A punishment is when one agent (the punisher) imposes costs on another (the punished) in order to affect the punished's behavior.

(originally published at Less Wrong) "Rules" are a critical social technology for helping people live and work together in peace.

(originally published at Less Wrong) One of the most underrated essays in the post-Sequences era of Eliezer Yudkowsky's corpus is "Four Layers of Intellectual Conversation".

(originally published at Less Wrong) The Value of a Comment Is Determined by Its Text, Not Its Authorship I sometimes see people express disapproval of critical blog comments by commenters who don't write many blog posts of their own.

We know what linear functions are.

From: Zack M Davis <zmd@sfsu.edu> Sent: Sunday, January 12, 2025 11:52 AM To: math_majors@lists.sfsu.edu <math_majors@lists.sfsu.edu>, math_graduate@lists.sfsu.edu <math_graduate@lists.sfsu.edu>, math_lecturers@lists.sfsu.edu <math_lecturers@lists.sfsu.ed…

From: Zack M Davis <zmd@sfsu.edu> Sent: Wednesday, September 11, 2024 5:02 PM To: math_majors@lists.sfsu.edu <math_majors@lists.sfsu.edu> Subject: Putnam prep session for eternal mathematical glory, 4 p.m.

(originally published at Less Wrong) (some plot spoilers) There's something distinctly uncomfortable about reading Greg Egan in the 2020s.

(originally published at Less Wrong) [Scene: a suburban house, a minute after the conclusion of "And All the Shoggoths Merely Players".

To some, it might seem like a strange question.

(originally published at Less Wrong) Adversarial Examples: A Problem The apparent successes of the deep learning revolution conceal a dark underbelly.

(originally published at Less Wrong) (Epistemic status: publication date is significant.)

A Surprising Development in the Study of Multi-layer Parameterized Graphical Function Approximators As a programmer and epistemology enthusiast, I've been studying some statistical modeling techniques lately!

(originally published at Less Wrong) [Setting: a suburban house.

(originally published at Less Wrong) Rob Bensinger argues that "ITT-passing and civility are good; 'charity' is bad; steelmanning is niche".

(originally published at Less Wrong) Doomimir: Humanity has made no progress on the alignment problem.

(originally published at Less Wrong) I've been trying to avoid the terms "good faith" and "bad faith".

(originally published at Less Wrong) In season two, episode twenty-four of Steven Universe, "It Could've Been Great", our magical alien superheroine protagonists (and Steven) are taking a break from building a giant drill to extract a superweapon that was…

(originally published at Less Wrong) Someone once told me that they thought I acted like refusing to employ the bare minimum of social grace was a virtue, and that this was bad.

(originally published at Less Wrong) Selfishness and altruism are positively correlated within individuals, for the obvious reason.

(originally published at Less Wrong) As a casual formal epistemology fan, you've probably heard that the philosophical notion of causality can be formalized in terms of Bayesian networks—but also as a casual formal epistemology fan, you also probably don't

(originally published at Less Wrong) Sometimes, when someone is arguing for some proposition, their interlocutor will reply that the speaker's choice of arguments or tone wouldn't be effective at persuading some third party.

(originally published at Less Wrong) Imagine being a student of physics, and coming across a blog post proposing a list of guidelines for "physicist motors"—motor designs informed by the knowledge of physicists, unlike ordinary motors.

(originally published at Less Wrong) Scott Alexander once wrote about the difference between "mistake theorists" who treat politics as an engineering discipline (a symmetrical collaboration in which everyone ultimately just wants the best ideas to win) and

(originally published at Less Wrong) Summary In a list of guidelines for rational discourse, Duncan Sabien proposes that one should "[a]im for convergence on truth, and behave as if your interlocutors are also aiming for convergence on truth."

(originally published at Less Wrong) I will do my best to teach them About life and what it's worth I just hope that I can keep them From destroying the Earth —Jonathan Coulton, "The Future Soon" In a recent paper, Nick Bostrom and Carl Shulman present "P…

I wish people were better at—plea bargaining, rather than pretending to be innocent.

(originally published at Less Wrong) In this 2019 paper published in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C, Manolo Martínez argues that our understanding of how communication works has been grievously impaired by philosophers not knowing eno…

(originally published at Less Wrong) You wake up.

(originally published at Less Wrong) Followup to: Where to Draw the Boundaries?

(originally published at Less Wrong) A similar definition of intelligence was expressed by Aquinas as "the ability to combine and separate"—the ability to see the difference between things that seem similar and to see the similarities between things which…

Imagine reviewing Python code that looks something like this. has_items = items is not None and len(items) > 0 if has_items: ... ... do_stuff(has_items=has_items) You might look at the conditional, and disapprove: None and empty collections are both…

(originally published at Less Wrong) If a lion could speak, we could not understand her.

(Previously) There is a time to tackle ambitious intellectual projects and go on grand political crusades, and tour the podcast circuit marketing both.

(originally published at Less Wrong) Followup to: Where to Draw the Boundaries?