Arjun Panickssery

I’ve seen a number of posts where people complaining about AI slop say that the author should have just posted the prompt.

Often I see people claim it’s essential for America to win the AI race against China (in whatever sense) for reasons like these: “What is the reason we want America to win the AI race?

People often say to “write like you talk.”

Guillaume Blanc has a piece in Works in Progress (I assume based on his paper) about how France’s fertility declined earlier than in other European countries, and how its power waned as its relative population declined starting in the 18th century.

I recall seeing three “rationalist” cases for Trump: Richard Ngo on Twitter and elsewhere focused on the realignment of elite coalitions, observing that “most elite institutions have become leftist monocultures” but speculating that “over the next 5–10 ye…

Spoiler: “So after accounting for the international students, and using the middle-of-the-range estimates, the conclusion: The top-scoring 19,000 American students each year are competing in top-20 admissions for about 12,000 spots out of 44,000 total awa…

“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…

The other day I discussed how high monitoring costs can explain the emergence of “aristocratic” systems of governance: An element of Douglas Allen’s argument that I didn’t expand on was the British Navy.

I collected the lyrics to twenty historical campaign songs from an album produced in the 60s.

In 1836, Andrew Jackson had served two terms.

Many thinkers worth reading wrote in past centuries: 1600s: Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz 1700s: Berkeley, Hume, Rousseau, Smith, Kant, Burke, Bentham 1800s: Schopenhauer, Mill, Sidgwick Some of them wrote in English and their texts are

Last week some results were released from a 6-week study using AI tutors in Nigeria.

There’s a conventional narrative by which the pre-20th century aristocracy was the “old corruption” where civil and military positions were distributed inefficiently due to nepotism until the system was replaced by a professional civil service after more…

“A Reader’s Manifesto” is a July 2001 Atlantic piece by B.R.

Summary: In his most recent post (“Altruism and Vitalism as Fellow Travelers”), Scott Alexander tries to reconcile EA-style altruism with Nietzschean “vitalism.”

Some proverbs are actively suspicious, like “Don’t judge a book by its cover” or “No pain, no gain.”

This morning while taking the LIRR to the city I performed first aid on a man who had been shot through the window of my carriage.

I have been aware for some time that there was a Romanian-Parisian existentialist philosopher named Emil Cioran who wrote On the Heights of Despair and The Trouble With Being Born.

The paper, published last week First, addressing misconceptions that could come from the title or from the paper's framing as relevant to LLM scaling: The model didn't learn from observing many move traces from high-level games.

In bughouse, a bunch of normal openings are instantly unsound because they expose squares for pawn drops.