The Best of LessWrong
10+ most popular LessWrong articles, as voted by our community.
LessWrong 2.0 builds community, epistemic culture, and technology to help drive intellectual progress on important problems.
LessWrong on Artificial Intelligence
Consciousness as a conflationary alliance term — LessWrong
Tl;dr: In this post, I argue that the concept of 'consciousness' is more conflated than people realize, in that there's a lot of divergence in what p…
AI alignment is distinct from its near-term applications
I work on AI alignment, by which I mean the technical problem of building AI systems that are trying to do what their designer wants them to do. …
LessWrong on Learning
Learning How to Learn (And 20+ Studies)
I have been interested in cognitive science and effective learning methods for years. I've read multiple books and articles and put many ideas to test. In this post, I aim to synthesize my notes and…
Learning How to Learn (And 20+ Studies)
I have been interested in cognitive science and effective learning methods for years. I've read multiple books and articles and put many ideas to test. In this post, I aim to synthesize my notes and…
LessWrong on Machine Learning
The Waluigi Effect (mega-post)
Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. — Carl Jung …
Are language models good at making predictions? — LessWrong
To get a crude answer to this question, we took 5000 questions from Manifold markets that were resolved after GPT-4’s current knowledge cutoff of Jan…
LessWrong on PKM
What is your Personal Knowledge Management system?
Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a collection of processes that a person uses to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve and share knowledge in their daily activities (Grundspenkis 2007) and the way in which these processes support work activities (Wright 2005). It is a response to the idea that knowledge workers need to be responsible for their own growth and learning (Smedley 2009). It is a bottom-up approach to knowledge management (KM) (Pollard 2008). Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_knowledge_management] I am curious about how LessWrongers manage personal information, including but not limited to - research reading/ research output, side-projects/ hobbies, blogging, managing watchlist/ to-read list, social information, incremental-reading, making flashcards, threads-from-unfinished-conversations, braindumps, and maybe even general GTD-stuff. Information about any of the following will be greatly appreciated. * General framework/ philosophy for PKM.Can be very concrete and well-defined like Building a Second Brain [https://buildingasecondbrain.com] or a very a general rule-of-thumb like 'I bookmark everything/ I write down all thoughts in org-mode.' * Toolchain.What and How. Everything counts - wikis, org-mode, physical notebook, etc. * Workflow.Both local (how you manage fuzzy and perpetually arriving information on a day-to-day basis) and global (how you PKM for bigger and concrete projects over longer time). * Comparison of multiple frameworks, if used. * Tips and tricks/ info about building PKM habits.
LessWrong on Relationships
In Defense of Chatbot Romance
(Full disclosure: I work for a company that develops coaching chatbots, though not of the kind I’d expect anyone to fall in love with – ours are more aimed at professional use, with the intent that y…
People care about each other even though they have imperfect motivational pointers?
I wrote this essay in early August. I now consider the presentation to be somewhat confused, and now better understand where problems arise within the "standard alignment model." I'm publishing a som…
LessWrong on Self Help
100 Tips for a Better Life
The other day I made an advice thread based on Jacobian’s from last year! If you know a source for one of these, shout and I’ll edit it in. Possessions 1 .If you want to find out about people’s…
«It is cheap for people to talk about their values, goals, rules, and lifestyle. When people’s actions contradict their talk, pay attention! »
LessWrong on Zettelkasten
The Zettelkasten Method
Early this year, Conor White-Sullivan introduced me to the Zettelkasten method of note-taking. I would say that this significantly increased my research productivity. I’ve been saying “at least 2x”.…
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100 Ways To Live Better
A couple of weeks ago Venkatesh challenged his followers to brainstorm at least 100 tweets on a topic via live responses. Since I’m not an expert on anything in particular, I decided to simply see if I can come up with 100 discrete pieces of life advice in a day.
Newcomb's Problem and Regret of Rationality
The following may well be the most controversial dilemma in the history of decision theory: …
Non-poisonous cake: anthropic updates are normal
I am on a quest to show that anthropics probability are normal, at least in the absence of exact duplicates. …
What Do We Mean By "Rationality"?
I mean two things: 1. Epistemic rationality: systematically improving the accuracy of your beliefs. 2. Instrumental rationality: systematically achieving your values. The first concept is simple…
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