I found Yarrow Bouchard's quick take on the EA Forum regarding LessWrong's performance in the COVID-19 pandemic quite good. I don't trust her to do such an analysis in an unbiased way [[1]] , but the quick take was pretty full of empirical investigation that made me change my mind wrt to how well LessWrong in particular did. There's much more historiography to be done here, who believed what, when, what the long-term effects of COVID-19 are, which interventions did what, but this seems like the state of the art on "how well did LessWrong actually perform in the early pandemic". Shout out to this review by @DirectedEvolution. I wish some historians would sit down and write a history of the COVID-19 pandemic, since it it affected ~2× the number of person-years: Soviet Union (1922-1991): ~220M average population × 69 years ≈ 15 billion person-years COVID-19 (2020-2023): ~8B global population × 4 years ≈ 32 billion person-years 1. She hates LessWrong for somewhat vibesy reasons. ↩︎

RL capability gains might mostly come from better self-elicitation. Ran across a paper NUDGING: Inference-time Alignment of LLMs via Guided Decoding. The authors took a base model and a post-trained model. They had the base model try to answer benchmark questions, found the positions where the base model was least certain, and replaced specifically those tokens with tokens from the post-trained model. The base model, so steered, performed surprisingly well on benchmarks. Surprisingly (to me at least), the tokens changed tended to be transitional phrases rather than the meat of the specific problems. Example from the paper: This worked even when the post-trained model was significantly smaller than the base model: on gsm8k, llama-2-7b-chat "nudging" llama-2-70b (base) scored 46.2 on gsm8k, while 7b-chat alone scored 25.5. 70b-chat barely scored better, at 48.5. Surprisingly, I haven't seen much discussion of this paper on here. It seems very relevant to the question of whether RL bakes new behaviors into models or makes them better at eliciting behaviors they already know how to execute in appropriate situations. I am tempted to do a longer writeup and attempt to reproduce/extend the paper, if there's interest.

running the agi survey really reminded me just how brutal statistical significance is, and how unreliable anecdotes are. even setting aside sampling bias of anecdotes, the sheer sample size you need to answer a question like "do more people this year know what agi is than last year" is kind of depressing - you need like 400 samples for each year just to be 80% sure you'd notice a 10 percentage point increase even if it did exist, and even if there was no real effect you'd still think there was one 5% of the time. this makes me a lot more bearish on vibes in general.

OpenAI claims 5.2 solved an open COLT problem with no assistance: https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-2-for-science-and-math/ This might be the first thing that meets my bar of autonomously having an original insight??

Old notes on Nick Land: * The fundamental task of philosophy is to examine/interact with the Outside (the vast majority of reality that we are unable to understand in our illusory/limited models - physics, causality, progressive time, conventional epistemology...) (Land views "sorcery" (including acausal trade, basilisks, heideggerian phenomenology, examining "coincidences" or "miracles" in (seemingly) random processes, creating hyperstitions, numogram/kaballah numerology, abstract horror (as 'portraying the object of the unknown, as the unknown')... as methods of interacting, or getting feedback from the Outside. He also claims that this "mystical" contact with the Outside has been the norm for most of history, e.g. the widespread belief in oracles in ancient Greece. Though this is clearly woo, my steelman of this would be something like "our epistemology is probably wrong, the most reliable thing we have access to is feedback from reality, getting feedback in ways that are outside of our world model can partially get us around our limited epistemology to explore the Outside)" * This is opposed to a control-based, negative-feedback cybernetic system (which was the dominant form of cybernetics studied in the 50s to 70s, e.g. in socialist countries, Land later called this the "cathedral" in a political context). Land claims that these types of systems, whether in the form of non-accelerationist societies or "aligned AGI" will always be outcompeted by their positive-feedback counterparts, even if the control-based system is dominant and a large amount of work or energy is put into it working (though "Exit"). * A positive-feedback cybernetic system (such as capitalism (as a "hyperagent") or a recursively self-modifying, agentic mind - "Pythia unbound") always eventually leads to an explosion (foom) that "Exits" or "grows into" the Outside, as it incorporates structure from it as novelty. Especially if this novelty is diasystemic/ontology-shifting or grows into new

It seems from some testing that CorDA and the Muon optimizer form a synergy. I need to test this MUCH more before actually stating something, though.

One theme I've been thinking about recently is how bids for connection and understanding are often read as criticism. For example: Person A shares a new idea, feeling excited and hoping to connect with Person B over something they've worked hard on and hold dear. Person B asks a question about a perceived inconsistency in the idea, feeling excited and hoping for an answer which helps them better understand the idea (and Person B). Person A feels hurt and unfairly rejected by Person B. Specifically, Person A feels like Person B isn't willing to give their sincere idea (and effort to connect) a chance, so shuts down and labels Person B as an idea-hater. Person B feels hurt and unfairly rejected by Person A. Specifically, Person B feels like Person A isn't willing to give their sincere question (and effort to connect) a chance, so shuts down and labels Person A as a question-hater. This seems like a huge source of human suffering, and I have been Person A and Person B in different interactions. Does anyone else resonate with this? Do you see things differently?