A Ukrainian fibre-optic drone — copied from Russians. (АрміяІнформ, CC-BY 4.0)Mick Ryan describes the fast following loop in war. Ukraine pioneered mobile teams to hunt drones. Russia copied it and incorporated it into its own defense. Russia came with unjammable fibre-optic drones but Ukraine quickly followed. After Ukraine developed uncrewed naval drones, Russia built its…

(Epistemic status: A promising but weird research direction in agent foundations and philosophy of language. A half-built conceptual tower whose mortar and paint are both still wet: please excuse our mess while we innovate. Some of it, I'm confident in as pretty much right; some of it is merely suggestive; probably much of it is…

For a long time I thought about keeping my writing in a git repository so that it wouldn't suddenly disappear, and so that I could write using the tool I'm most comfortable with (Emacs). But setting it all up didn't seem worth the time and effort. Generative AI brought the time and effort down to…

I haven't seen this posted yet; I know lots of people here care about pandemic preparedness. It looks like there was a lab leak of pneumonic plague in Russia after a worker "accidentally broke[] a test tube containing live bacteria". Unfortunately she later died at the hospital on a ventilator. DiscussLæs hele historien hos lesswrong.com…

I thought it would be interesting to try having Claude Code download my entire LessWrong and EA Forum post and comment history and evaluate it for my own cognitive biases and problematic communication patterns. I told it to focus especially on problems that have persisted over my 7-year history on those sites. I also had…

There’s a controversial and unsettled debate in Communication Studies and Psychology about the utility of existential risk framing. This debate has been hashed out for years in the climate change space. Roughly, the two sides are:Pro x-risk framing: (1) It’s true, so rhetors should state the truth; (2) fear is motivating; (3) if our policy…

Opus 5.5 is a really good writer.I had a conversation about some stuff related to how hospitals work, and some vague hunches I had about AI alignment ideas, and Duncan's new "deer in the subway" post, then I asked it to write an essay and it wrote this. I think it's really good so I'm…

This post was originally written for my Substack. Please feel free to subscribe if this kind of content interests you!Frontier AI companies have long had the stated goal of automating their own research. The default plan has been to build models that are even better than their most skilled researchers at advancing the frontier, and…

1. Executive Summary1.1 What this field is and why it mattersAI is already substantially changing how people and institutions work out what to believe, decide what to do, and coordinate on actions to take. As AI systems become increasingly capable, they will be integrated more and more in both major and day-to-day decisions.The upside of…

About a year ago, I decided to go all-in on applying to AI safety fellowships, and around the end of 2025 I got into MATS. I think there's a small art to communicating your skills legibly. When I've spoken with others about how I answer application questions, they seem to appreciate my advice. I wrote…