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??

On the origins of "you can just do things" About once every 15 minutes, someone tweets "you can just do things". It seems like a rather powerful and empowering meme and I was curious where it came from, so I did some research into its origins. Although I'm not very satisfied with what I was able to reconstruct, here are some of the things that I found: In 1995, Steve Jobs gives the following quote in an interview: Although he says nothing close to the phrase "you can just do things", I think it'd be a fair summary of his message.   Fast forward to October 2020, where Twitter user nosilverv tweets:  Although this is the first tweet I've found[1] that contains the exact phrasing, it doesn't seem to quite match the current sentiment. It seems to imply that you can do random things and shouldn't let bad feelings stop you, rather than the "high agency" framing it has today.   A year later, in October 2021, @Neel Nanda publishes the blog post What's Stopping You?. I think this post points exactly in the "you can just do things" direction, and contains the following quote: So close, just missing the "just"!   Then in February 2022, substacker crypticdefinitions posts a post titled You can just do things: From here on, in the first half of 2022, some people on Twitter seem to start to adopt this phrase, such as @AskYatharth and @m_ashcroft. The phrase seems to slowly but steadily gain popularity in TPOT in the years 2023-2024. In January 2024, Cate Hall writes a blog post on "How to be more agentic" and announces the working title of her book "You can just do things".   In December 2024 Sam Altman tweets "you can just do things" with 25K likes and the meme seems to break all containment.    1. ^ Unfortunately, the Twitter search function is completely broken and useless, so there may be earlier tweets I've not been able to find.

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?

Do we have some page containing resources for rationalist parents, or generally for parents of smart children? Such as recommended books, toys, learning apps, etc. I found tag https://www.lesswrong.com/w/parenting but I was hoping for some kind of best textbooks / recommendations / reference works but for parents/children.