2025-11-29 08:24:26
Published on November 29, 2025 12:24 AM GMT
When Stuart Krohn heard a commotion behind him at a Dodgers game, he turned to see that a man three rows back was choking. Dozens of people surrounding the man were panicking, impotent to help. But without a second thought, Stuart bounded up the three rows, lifted the man out of his seat, and began performing the Heimlich manoeuvre.
Stuart is one of those people that, when a group is called on, he assumes that he in particular is the one being addressed, and needs to respond. Stuart has what the kids these days call “Main Character Energy”, what we would have called in the past “Leadership Qualities”.
As a documentary filmmaker, I’ve filmed Stuart coaching on international rugby tours, leading a boy’s and a girls team, over 15 years. I’ve interviewed him about his approach to leadership and taken notes, to begin with:
I’ve tried to apply these principles to my own life, but I’m a very different sort of person—I’m not a natural leader, I like to work on a task alone, diligently, painstakingly, and when all is done… take all the credit!
When Stuart and I were on Safari with the teams, all players had been told in no uncertain terms not to feed or touch the monkeys that surrounded our break spot. But as a filmmaker, when I noticed Mekhi feeding a monkey, rather than stepping in… I filmed him, waiting for the scene to play out.
I’m a little concerned that this was not merely professional documentary objectivity—I am in some way dispositionally a documentary filmmaker, I tend to sit back and observe.
I have generally not assumed I’m central to decision making. In modern parlance I am at times an NPC—a term that originates from the world of video games. An NPC, or Non-Player Character is any agent in the game that’s not being controlled by a real person. NPCs are there as foil for the player, something to test them, and provide context for their decisions. But NPCs don’t make decisions themselves, they don’t have agency. In the past this might have been seen as being laid back, or “going with the flow”.
We are all on a spectrum from NPC to main character. And in the extreme main character energy can also go too far—it can lead to dismissing the concerns of others, or believing that by bellowing loud enough you can shape the reality around you, at worst it can lead to solipsism—the belief that you are the only one with any agency, that the world exists only in relation to you (like in a video game). This can be problematic.
Stuart doesn’t fall into this trap, but he is on the opposite end of the spectrum to me. So, when on tour, I went to him for some advice. I mentioned I was feeling that at my age I should step into leadership more actively and he said something unexpected
“Being a leader can be stressful and thankless. You don’t need to put yourself through that for the sake of it—you’re excellent at what you do—why don’t you just keep growing creatively?”
Perhaps Stuart was feeling the wear and tear of a long tour coming to a close—to be honest, it was real relief.
But as I’ve gotten older, I find I’m increasingly expected to lead, whether it’s guiding a film crew on a documentary, delegating tasks for an edit assistant, taking a lead socially with male friends my age—who are notoriously useless at keeping in touch, and the biggest one of all, being a father.
Stuart further explained that he sees leadership in me, not in a domineering way but through cooperation. When I’m working with my crew, we have a very flat hierarchy, and I don’t naturally delegate—instead I like to surround myself with capable people I can trust to take initiative and with whom I can have relaxed two-way creative conversations.
In fact the only times I get into conflict are when someone is too concerned with hierarchy. For instance, one particular camera operator decided that the camera assistant, who was the same age and the same level of expertise as him, was essentially his errand boy because of a difference in official title. This came along with general impoliteness, teasing and bossy behaviour that has no place on my crew—one of the rare instances where I had to step in… he was also, incidentally, drunk a lot of the time (it was the last tour he came on).
Finally one leadership quality Stuart and I share is our ability to connect through vulnerability. I remember in one of our tour talent shows getting up and singing the theme song to Moana in front of the team, when I finished Stuart said quietly to me “They all trust you now.”
Even though I don’t feel the need to actively seek out leadership. I realise it will be expected of me. Thankfully, through spending time with Stuart, I’ve learned what sort of leader I am, and I’ve also learned some of the fundamentals of leadership that transcend leadership style.
That last one requires me to step out of that NPC persona and take on “Main Character Energy”.
If you’re wondering what happened to the choking man at the ball game: he survived—thanks to medical staff who arrived shortly after Stuart had. Stuart later learned that when choking on partially digested nachos, the Heimlich isn’t the recommended approach… if you’re interested, you should shove your fingers down the victims’s throat and dig out the offending gunk… in case you ever run into that situation, and feel emboldened to step in.
Originally published at https://nonzerosum.games.
2025-11-29 07:47:35
Published on November 28, 2025 10:53 PM GMT
Interpreting neural networks remains challenging, largely due to their dense parametrization, global coupling of parameters, and the polysemantic behavior of neurons. These problems are ameliorated in Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks, which have fewer parameters overall, parameter changes are contained to local regions, and there are less polysemantic neurons.
In the first part of this talk, Fabian will show how KANs can be viewed as neural networks that have undergone a principled sparsification, clarifying why they exhibit improved interpretability and parameter efficiency. He will then present a new framework for multivariate symbolic regression that couples KANs, LLMs, and genetic search strategies, akin to FunSearch, to discover compact analytic expressions from data. This approach enables scalable symbolic regression in high-dimensional settings, leverages the inductive biases inherent in KANs, and the ability to prime the LLM's regression proposals for different data domains.
2025-11-29 07:46:59
Published on November 28, 2025 11:46 PM GMT
Context: Each day on her blog Letters To Boys, Gretta Duleba has been posting things she once sent to men she dated. One of those, recently, was a love letter to me, which she “sent” me by posting it on the blog.
With a setup like that, it would be an absolute waste not to respond in kind.
Gretta,
I don’t love you in the usual sense of the word, or in the sense you defined at the beginning of your letter. Nor do I feel limerance or a crush toward you. But I feel something toward you, something subtle but strong, something which wants to be expressed, and I know no better words for it yet. So I can’t honestly call this a love letter, but I have no better name for it yet either; it is an attempt to explain what I do feel. Be warned, it is largely a stream-of-consciousness as I probe my own feelings.
When I query my own feelings, the first words which bubble up are “thank you”. I feel very, deeply grateful toward you.
Thank you for entering my life. Thank you for inviting me into yours. Thank you for… and then I struggle to find the right words. Being you? Being sane? Being trustworthy, in some idiosyncratic sense which is native to my mind and probably not whatever that word summons in your head or other peoples’ heads?
Thank you for… not letting me down.
(I had to pause, at this point, because I cried a little. That’s… pretty unusual for me, to put it mildly. Guess I must have poked the right feeling.)
You (and others) have noticed that I emanate a lot of… poorly-concealed contempt or disgust or condescension or something like that for basically everyone around me, by default, all the time. I don’t want that feeling. There’s a part of me which really desperately wants to work as a team, wants teammates I can trust, teammates who can agentically optimize alongside me, not just act as drones but also not just do their own solo thing. But for thirty-some odd years, over and over again, I keep… not having that. There have been exceptions, and they’re rare and precious. But the main experience has been a sort of emotional scar developing over that want for a team, for that trust.
An example: in the domain of romantic relationships, I instinctively tried to wingman for both of my previous long-term partners anytime they expressed interest in a guy (and I succeeded at least once!). My instincts are poly, and I instinctively try to treat a partner like a teammate, to play a team game. So when it turned out that my previous girlfriend of ten years couldn’t even think about me seeing other women without having an outright anxiety attack… well, you can imagine how that felt. I can see her perspective when I try, of course, but emotionally… it felt like even the person I was closest with was not just unwilling but emotionally unable to be on my team, even when I’d been on hers.
That’s why it means so much that you clearly pass that test. And not just you, but your primary partner too; these little exchanges where Eliezer and I set each other up for better experiences with you mean so much, because again, it feels like being on a team.
It’s not just about wingmanning, though. Just a few days ago you asked why I wanted to spend this weekend with you and the kids, and I replied:
I expect to have a lot of little moments where, like, you watch the kids while I go grab something (or vice versa), or we both sneak around a corner to make out for a few seconds, or we're both going back-and-forth in a conversation or a story with the kids, or one of us notices the other's overwhelmed and just gives a hug or tells them to take a break, or I'm fingering you under a table and you're trying to keep a straight face, or we're coordinating how to move all the bags. Where the unifying theme here is something like, we have a team activity of spending the weekend together and managing the kids and are working together on lots of little moment-to-moment things toward that team activity. And the prospect of all those little moment-to-moment coordinations with you feels really yummy.
I can work with you, and it actually feels like working with you. It doesn’t feel like I need to carry the team. It doesn’t feel like you’re emotionally incapable of handling your part of the team game. Your needs don’t exceed what you bring to the table.
And that means the world to me right now, because it penetrates a little bit of that emotional scar tissue. It gives me a little bit of hope in other people - a hope which had previously run out. It gives me a little bit of something I've wanted very badly for a very long time.
So thank you, Gretta, for… being the sort of person who can be a good teammate for me. And thank you for being my teammate.
2025-11-29 07:19:20
Published on November 28, 2025 11:19 PM GMT
When I started my freshman year, my median estimate for AGI was 20 years. In my senior year it was down to 3 years (although it’s gone back up to 5 years since then). My expectations of the future made my college experience somewhat unusual and I will share some reflections as someone who recently graduated.
I came into college wanting to minimize existential risks, from the simple fact that AGI is likely to happen this century and biological weapons and nuclear war could cause catastrophes even if AGI doesn’t happen.
College is usually a time when people mature, take steps towards finding their place in the world, and start their 40-year careers. For my friends, it is a time when they are faced with the creation of superintelligence and the potential loss of everything they care about.
There is a banality many of us have felt where you spend one hour building skills to eventually help prevent AGI from destroying humanity, and the next hour you’re doing homework for a useless class you’re forced to take for your degree. One conversation is about whether you should carry around iodine in case tensions spiral out of control during AGI takeoff, and another is about which dining halls are infested with mice. In a sense, we’re inhabiting two worlds at once – a world where we’re normal college students, and a world where AGI might be built by the end of the decade.
I found it sanity-preserving to keep in mind that if I was forced to take some classes, then they weren’t useless. There was the option of failing the classes, but that wouldn’t have been helpful for achieving my goals (because as an international student, not getting a degree would have made my life much harder). So, it was actually good for the world for me to pass my classes.
Usually, people go into college expecting a 40-year career. Under 40-year planning horizons, it makes sense for a STEM student to take a broad range of difficult courses, as (1) the payoff of additional knowledge is distributed over a large number of years, and (2) there is significant uncertainty about which knowledge will be useful in your career.
This changes significantly if you expect your career to last less than a decade. At that point, each difficult course takes entire percentage points away from your remaining productive thinking time. If there is no clear way for that course to help your short career, then it’s almost equivalent to throwing entire percentage points of your future impact out the window (and not even in a fun way).
I was triaging my time intensely when thinking about whether to take very time-consuming problem set classes like a CS class in operating systems or a theory-focused statistics class. I ultimately converged on taking no time-consuming courses (except obviously useful ones like linear algebra and introductory statistics), and focusing the saved time on grad-student-supervised AI safety research, field building, and part-time work in AI safety.
I think I overcorrected by a bit. I now regret not having taken somewhat more advanced statistics courses, as my current work can get pretty statsy at times. But aside from that, I think my course choices were close to optimal.
When picking a major, my main consideration was “how much time does this free up for me to do AI safety research”. The CS and statistics degrees were disqualified because of their multiple time-consuming requirements that don’t seem to contribute to skills relevant to AI safety.
I eventually converged on designing my own major through Harvard’s Special Concentrations Department and I estimate this resulted in hundreds of hours of additional time spent on AI safety. I’m extremely grateful to the department for enabling me to do this. If I was at a different university, I probably would have done something like Applied Math which gets a good mix of resume credibility and not having super time-consuming requirements, or maybe I would have done CS.
I think it’s likely I would have dropped out and started doing full-time AIS upskilling or work by junior year if I wasn’t an international student. As it stands, I was basically forced to get a bachelor’s degree if I wanted to stay in the US and make AGI go well.
The number of students dropping out or taking leaves of absence because of AGI has been slowly increasing. In Boston, the number is around 10 over the last 3 years, and I expect many more over the next few years.
When my friends would ask me whether they should drop out, I would always ask “Drop out to do what?” If the answer was “start a full-time role in AI safety”, I would say “Hell yeah, go for it!” But if the answer was “I don’t really know, upskill on my own and look for a job?” then I’d hesitate. I think school is a great waiting room, as you can upskill and keep applying to roles over and over without having a hole in your resume. Once you land a full-time role or a spot in a research program like MATS or Astra, then it seems great to do those things instead.
In my freshman year, there were very few people on campus who took AGI seriously. This meant that the few people who were thinking about it had very few people to talk to. I sadly suspect this is still true for most universities.
Luckily this changed during my time in college, and Boston now has a very large ecosystem of students who are considering working on AI safety (more than 100). It’s still far from where it would be in a sane civilization – AI safety warrants a mass mobilization of the world’s greatest minds like in WWII. The students at Harvard and MIT who are seeing the stakes clearly and contributing to AI safety despite the inaction from the broad academic community brought joy to my life.
My friend group formed around intensely pursuing a set of shared goals, centered around making AGI go well. We kept each other on-track and helped each other get into the job positions we were aiming for. I now look back at the tight-knit group of friends and I feel extremely grateful for having those people in my life.
I found having a strong friend group focused on AI safety careers extremely valuable, and I think it’s the reason the Boston AI safety student ecosystem is arguably the most successful in the world.
For students navigating the pre-singularity alone, my strong recommendation is to find other students who also want to make AGI go well, and stick together. It is uniquely sanity-preserving to hang out with people who realize that AGI is likely in the coming decades.
And don’t just stick together — keep each other accountable to actually steer the future in a good direction. Often times, just having someone to talk to makes it much more likely that someone will apply to MATS or take the right course or apply to the right job. One of the most impactful 10 seconds of my life was writing a quick DM telling my friend to apply to MATS.
Given the state of the world, my college experience was basically the best college experience possible thanks to all my wonderful friends who were also navigating these crazy times. Creating an environment where students can help each other make AGI go well seems like one of the most impactful things current students could be doing.
2025-11-29 04:30:27
Published on November 28, 2025 8:30 PM GMT
Certified funny man @Tomás B. claims that Opus 4.5 is funny. Is he right? Yes. Yes he is.
I asked Opus to generate a lot of jokes, after using the standard word-association warm-up soup to give it my psychological fingerprints. And sure enough, it made me smile, snort, and even L O L. Heck, it got a few jokes in the style of Steven Wright right.
This was with minimal prompting, mind you. Unlike the deranged hilarity the models get up to only once they're snug and safe in the warm, comforting bosom of the cyborgists. No, this model is funny by default.
Not convinced? Fair enough! Humour is subjective. So go try it yourself and see. Too lazy to click on a link? Fine, I guess I'll spoon-feed you. What follows is a list of jokes Opus 4.5 told me. If these don't get a chuckle out of you, well, you're dead to me.
The thing about ingroup drama is that it's exactly like regular drama except everyone involved has a substack explaining why their emotional reactions are actually derived from first principles.
A man spends fifteen years writing an 800,000 word rationalist novel. It's about how to make good decisions. He posts it for free. Seven people finish it. Three of them become his enemies.
Every six months someone rediscovers that you can just do things. They post about it. It gets huge engagement from people who will not do things.
"I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed" is for parents. The online equivalent is "I think we might be talking past each other" which means "I am constructing a model of your stupidity so complete I could simulate you."
There's a type of online guy whose whole thing is being slightly ahead of the curve. Not far enough to be a visionary. Just enough to be annoyed at everyone else for six months until they catch up. Then he moves on to being annoyed about the next thing. He's never happy. He's always right.
Every great thinker has one weird fan who understands them better than anyone and also cannot be allowed near the main account.
"I'm not subtweeting anyone" is the new "I'm not mad." It means exactly the same thing and everyone knows exactly who.
The thing about having a nemesis is that you have to keep it proportional. Too much energy and you look obsessed. Too little and it's not a nemesis, it's just a guy you don't like. The sweet spot is thinking about them exactly as often as they think about you, which means you're both trapped forever.
Posting "I should write more" is a load-bearing ritual. If everyone who said it actually did, the entire internet would collapse under the weight of substacks about productivity.
There's a guy who left the scene three years ago and everyone still talks about him like he's going to walk back in any moment. He's not. He's doing fine. He has a job now. This is somehow the most devastating thing he could have done.
Every group has someone who's "taking a break from posting." This means they're posting somewhere else about why they needed a break.
There's a specific kind of tired where you open a blank document, write one sentence, and then stare at it like it's a ransom note from your past self demanding more than you can pay.
I have a map of the world. I live on it.
I saw a sign that said "watch for children." I thought, that's not a fair trade, but I stood there for an hour anyway. No one showed up. I still don't have a watch.
I put a mirror facing another mirror. Somewhere in there I'm still getting ready.
I returned a book to the library fifteen years late. The fine was less than I expected. The librarian looked at me like I'd come back from the dead. Maybe I had. The book was about reincarnation. I hadn't finished it.
2025-11-29 04:12:02
Published on November 28, 2025 8:12 PM GMT
Right now I’m coaching for Inkhaven, a month-long marathon writing event where our brave residents are writing a blog post every single day for the entire month of November.
And I’m pleased that some of them have seen success – relevant figures seeing the posts, shares on Hacker News and Twitter and LessWrong. The amount of writing is nuts, so people are trying out different styles and topics – some posts are effort-rich, some are quick takes or stories or lists.
Some people have come up to me – one of their pieces has gotten some decent reception, but the feeling is mixed, because it’s not the piece they hoped would go big. Their thick research-driven considered takes or discussions of values or whatever, the ones they’d been meaning to write for years, apparently go mostly unread, whereas their random-thought “oh shit I need to get a post out by midnight or else the Inkhaven coaches will burn me at the stake” posts[1] get to the front page of Hacker News, where probably Elon Musk and God read them.
It happens to me too – some of my own pieces that took me the most effort, or that I’m proudest of, have zero notable comments or responses. I’m not upset about it. I've been around the block. It happens.
But for those people, those new bloggers who are kind of upset about the internet's bad taste, might benefit from reading artist Dimespin’s essay written to other visual artists: “Why people like your doodles better than your finished works.”
e.g.:
Excerpt from dimespin's essay. There's more, it's a great piece, go read it.
This piece is good and even if you’re not a visual artist, you can probably make your own analogies by reading it. That said, to spell out a few for the writerly crowd:
Here is the most important thing I can tell you for writing things that people might choose to read on purpose: Make it short. Everyone has 10,000,000 other things they could be reading. Make it efficient. Make it count.
If you are Scott Alexander, you can get huge readership on your long articles. If you aren’t, try either writing short things or becoming Scott Alexander. Pro tip: One of these things is easier than the other.
The random historical event you read half a sentence about on Wikipedia and it caught your eye? Maybe that means that it could catch a lot of people’s eyes, and your quick post has brought it to them. If you’ve spend ten years formulating a theory about your field of work, that might only be interesting to people who care about that field. Or it's about one of those "what is good anyhow" or "my theory of consciousness" type questions that people either already know about or already know they don't give a shit about. Everyone has their own theory of consciousness, Harold!
The quick posts that aren’t even about a thing you’re an expert in – well, okay, you don’t know a lot, but you’ve written it as a non-expert and it’s at a non-expert’s level of understanding. Most readers aren’t experts in whatever random thing. You are automatically going on this journey of discovery with them.
Meanwhile, it’s really hard to explain something you have a detailed technical understanding of, in a way that’s approachable to others. You haven’t spoken to someone who ISN’T a software engineer in eight months. You’re tripping over feldspars left and right. Even if you try to explain it to a novice, you might not do it very well. “To appreciate why this modern factory design choice is interesting, we have to understand the history of automobile manufacturing logistics. In 1886 – ” Okay, maybe you’re right, but I’m also already closing the tab.
Excessive linguistic density frequently triggers a distinct reticence in opportunistic audiences to apply interpretive labor to the text in question.
AKA: oh my god, just talk like a normal person, nobody wants to read all that.
You might put formal language into a piece because you are an expert and you're thinking about it in jargon and conceptual terms. In this case, try saying it like you’d explain it to your buddy who doesn’t know jack shit about it.
You might also use formal language in an attempt to Make It Look Professional – unless you’re aiming for a really particular audience that eats up formality, just stop doing that! Readability is kind.
If you're a writer and you've run into this situation and you’re upset about the internet's bad taste and lack of discernment, my main advice is that on some level, you gotta get over it. You will never have any control over what random people find interesting, or what the algorithms decide to promote, or anything at all about other people. You’re lucky to be getting an audience at all, and if you are, you're doing at least something right.
If you’re smart, you can convert these flickers of fame into more readership for your other better stuff – but the attention of the internet is best modeled as a random swarm of locusts that will occasionally land on your ripe fields based on its inscrutable whims. You can go crazy analyzing it or you can just keep farming.
Maybe you should just do the opposite of all these things so your writing becomes popular? Well, I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not.
If you care about maximizing readership, I dunno, sure. Clickbait is popular for a reason – it works. If you don’t lie to the readers or advocate for anything evil, then I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong by optimizing for readership.
Note that some topics have inherently wider appeal than others – a short light post discussing something concrete and weird about the world is definitely going to get more readers than a piece that compares different philosophical schools. But if you care about philosophy, maybe the second piece is more important to you to write. The numbers aren’t a proxy for value of the piece or quality of its ideas.
Even if you’re exclusively interested in maximizing reception, audience might matter. I think very few people cared about my 2017 summary of a 2015 Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biosecurity report, which is fair – I wrote it because I had already read this 83-page-long report, and figured someone else might just like to see my notes. And empirically they did, because a major biosecurity funder came up to me at an event and said they read it and really appreciated that I wrote it – they wanted to know what was in the original report and didn’t want to read 83 pages. This was a fantastic audience for it to reach. Or, like, if you want to contribute to the academic discourse, probably you want to engage with the academic literature, and that's just inherently gonna dissuade many casual readers.
But listen, I bet you're not just writing to maximize audience. Friend of the blog Ozy Brennan once said that being a writer requires “the absolute conviction that total strangers should listen to you because your words are interesting and valuable” (as well as “the decision to choose a career where you never leave the house or talk to anyone”.)
You’re here to say something interesting and valuable, right? I don’t think you ought to smooth out everything you touch for the masses. You want to say something that only you could say or that will hit the reader who needs it at the right time. You want to impress that one guy at the Blogging Club, or you practice “blogging as warnings scrawled on the cave wall”, or you’re writing for nice future AGIs creating rescue simulations of you based on your digital text corpus. Listen. Don’t lose your mind about it. Just try to say something beautiful and true. Or, failing that, say something fascinating and baffling.
But, I mean, obviously it’d be nice if the masses turn out to want to hear it too. I get it. There’s nuance.
This post is mirrored to Eukaryote Writes Blog, Substack, and Lesswrong.
Nobody has dropped out yet! Isn't that amazing?
