2025-12-09 16:30:44
Published on December 9, 2025 8:30 AM GMT
On the 3rd of August last year, I woke up early. I stood nervously with a hundred other runners in a hall in the city of Newmarket, near Cambridge in the UK. I felt intimidated as I looked at the calves, the size of champagne bottles, of the other participants. Only a few runners were starting their first 100k that morning. For many, this was not even the peak of their season. This route was long but almost flat, with only 1,000 meters of cumulative elevation. The real ultras were happening in the Alps, where long distances were combined with a crazy amount of ups and downs.
I was almost startled when the race gun fired. I had been chatting for a few moments with a runner I recognized from the 50k I completed the year before. I started running at 7 am, and I would not stop until 15 hours later, finishing the race in the dark with my headlamp guiding me.
As I took my first steps on the path, almost delighted to stretch my legs in the fresh summer morning, I thought about how this would never have happened without Adam.
Why did I do that?
Adam and I were living in the same apartment during my time in London, and we regularly went running together, taking part in Saturday morning 5k park runs near our home or running after work along the canals.
One day, he asked me if I had any plans for the upcoming long weekend, and I said no. He planned to run a marathon by himself along the banks of the River Thames and invited me to join him as if it were a movie screening. I thought I could always stop at any point if it became too hard and take the tube back home, so I accepted. This is how I discovered that my body was particularly well-suited for running long distances without dedicated training.
I became curious to see how far this newfound ability could take me. So I continued to follow Adam and signed up for my first proper ultra marathon, the SVP50, the little sister of the SVP100 that he signed up for. The SVP50 went even better than the marathon organized at the last minute. It turns out that easy access to hydration and food along the way is a game-changer.
For this new edition of the race, we were supposed to run the SVP100 together. However, he injured his leg a few days before and had to make the difficult decision not to participate. So I was alone, holding the flame on that August morning, about to conclude my journey of discovering how far I could run.
Though that was not my sole motivation.
After my first marathon, I became fascinated by the mental state one reaches during long runs. It is a sort of trance where the complexity of the world dissolves, and your sole purpose in life becomes putting one foot in front of the other and getting to this arbitrary point you decided would be the “end”.
I also enjoyed finding a space where I could explore the surprising achievements my body could complete while putting my brain on the backseat. Knowledge work makes my brain the king organ, while the rest of my being is relegated to a “support role” that needs to stay active through exercise.
Leopards sprint faster than any other animals, and giraffes have necks long enough to reach the most inaccessible leaves; humans’ running endurance might have been one of our strengths as a species, allowing us to chase prey to exhaustion. We might have bodies (and psychologies) specifically fitted for long runs. I enjoyed stepping into this more animal side of being human, feeling a sort of closeness to my ancestors. The trance I experience during long runs is probably something I could bring up if I were to spend an evening catching up with them around a campfire.
Running worlds.
I must say that I did not prepare properly for this race. Or at least, I didn’t prepare physically much. I run a few kilometers every week and did a trial marathon two months before the race. I bet everything on mental preparation. I needed a way to grasp what a hundred kilometers would feel like so I could project my motivation at the end of the race and not feeling during the race, “I thought it would be over by now, but I am still running.”
I decided to solve this problem with mindware. I split the route into seven pieces, the chunks in between the blue pins on the map above that mark the aid stations along the way. For each chunk, I built a mental world that I would construct mentally on top of the environment I perceived, with themes freely inspired from the worlds in Mario Bros.
There was the lava world, where the rivers I crossed were currents of melted rock bubbling and projecting incandescent droplets around. The ground was charred. After each step, I imagined how my foot caused cracks in the ground through which I could see the lava coming out.
In the ice world, the trees were thin spruces and pines. I would imagine the people I meet as Inuit covered in fur coats. The bricks of the buildings were swapped for ice cubes, igloo-style. I reframed the stiffness of my muscles as my sweat crystallizing, making my movements harder.
This imaginative exercise was a fun way to pay attention to the environment during the race, though the mental images I created were not very vivid.
The road became filled with small puzzles. I tried to turn elements from the environment into the world I was imagining. I would meet a cow in the mushroom world and recall from a forgotten part of my memory that I had the perfect mental image for this crossover coming from my Minecraft experience. I would ask questions like, “What should streetlights be in the marshland world?” and make up wooden beams covered in vines, with giant fireflies sitting on top.
What comes to mind when I cross a cow in the mushroom world.
As the race unfolded, the worlds became harder and harder to construct in my mind, and eventually, they only surfaced sporadically. Instead, something else took their place. The pain.
The pain.
I reached kilometer 50 around midday in good shape, running at an average pace of 8.5 km/h during the first half. However, my condition deteriorated from there. I started feeling strong cramps in my quadriceps that, fortunately, subsided after some time. After 70 kilometers, my feet began to hurt. They swelled more than I expected, and my shoes turned out to be too small for them. These last kilometers were the most painful experience of my life. This experience stayed with me, even a year after the race. It made me more open to understanding, at a visceral level, how much suffering one can endure.
At the 80-kilometer mark, I took a long break at the aid station and asked for support from a nurse. She pierced the blister on my foot and gave me painkillers. In the calmest voice, she announced that the blister ran too deep and that I was likely to lose the nails on my little toes permanently. The prospect of irreversible bodily impact (even as small as this one) made me consider whether I had pushed myself too far. But the nurse boosted my morale and advised me to keep running. She shared her experience providing emergency health support to migrants in the Dunkirk refugee camp. I think it had the intended effect, as I began to feel that my situation was not as desperate after all.
So I continued the race. I picked up two sticks by the side of the road and finished the race walking with my improvised poles. Over the last 20 kilometers, my pace plummeted to only 5 km/h. I was racing against the clock to make it to the last aid station before the cutoff time. I arrived 45 minutes before the cutoff and had the pleasure of meeting Adam, who came all the way from London to cheer me on at this final checkpoint. After this boost in motivation, I finished the race in 14 hours and 51 minutes, 40 minutes before the final cutoff.
I am not running alone.
The most important lesson I took from this race is how it forced me to incorporate a long-term perspective into my actions. I was not running alone. How I felt at kilometer 60 depended on how well I handled hydration over the previous kilometers, how I forced myself to carefully chew thee salty potatoes I ate at kilometer 30, even when I was not hungry. My knees felt good because of all the attention I had been putting into unfolding my steps with minimal impact on the ground.
As I ran, I felt grateful for my past selves that brought me to where I was, and I imagined my future selves as I strived to do what was right for them to continue running.
During such a long race, no mistake is allowed. This brought me clarity and rigor in thinking about actions that don’t benefit me directly but are vital for my future selves.
I feel this mindset generalizes well to other parts of my life, where I need to coordinate the actions of my selves across timescales of months or years instead of hours. I try to cultivate it every time I procrastinate on scheduling an appointment with the doctor, when I am tempted to skip a language learning session, or when facing any hard tasks that I know are the right thing to do.
After the race.
The race put my body in a strange place. I had little appetite for the two days following the race, and I experienced hour-long hiccups. My whole body was stiff, forcing me to walk at a pace that made me empathize with the older people I used to be annoyed by as I struggled to pass them on the sidewalk. Fortunately, after a few days, these symptoms stopped, my muscles allowed me to start walking mostly normally, and I recovered completely from the race in about a month (though I continue to try to empathize with older people’s slow walking pace).
As the nurse warned, I lost the nails of my little toes. In fact, I lost all my toenails except for my big toes. However, contrary to her prediction, they all regrew over the year following the race, and I am now enjoying a full set of healthy toenails (except for one of my big toenails, which is in regrowth mode due to an unrelated event I will refrain from sharing, as this might already be too many toenail stories for one post).
Will I run more ultramarathons?
I ran one marathon after this 100k, and I might do more in the future, as I still enjoy the trance state that comes with long-distance running. However, I will most likely not go further than 100k. These might have been the most impactful 15 hours of my life; they gave me a strong baseline of self-confidence in my body and a visceral understanding of pain. I feel I can now put this chapter of long-distance running aside and take on new challenges in other domains of my life.
2025-12-09 13:08:40
Published on December 9, 2025 5:08 AM GMT
You probably type some things a lot, especially if you do non-trivial amounts of administrative or communicative work. There are also probably things you would type more if it was easier to! For instance:
Save that time by using text expansions, shortcuts triggered by a short phrase, through something like AutoHotKey (Windows) or Alfred (Mac). This can be set up in <30 minutes and is fairly intuitive; Claude is great at writing AutoHotKey scripts.
As Neel Nanda alluded to in his 80k interview, text expansions can substantially reduce friction to using LLMs in Very Obvious Ways to accelerate your work. For instance, I’m now much more likely to get tone feedback on important communication and use LLM help to aggressively red-team rough ideas.
Text expansions help me focus on the hard parts of whatever I’m doing without spending 45 seconds trying to pull up and copy over yet another profile link. They also reduce context switches and therefore potential excuses for procrastination or distraction. Consider trying them out!
/iacy
I am contacting you on behalf of the AI Safety Initiative at Georgia Tech, a community of technical and policy researchers focused on mitigating catastrophic risks from advanced artificial intelligence./gscholar
/mysite
/phone
/cal (my calendar booking link)
/gmail
/enemy (a la Nanda)
My colleague who I absolutely despise just drafted this. Please red-team his work./tonefeedback
Please review the attached for tone, grammar, clarity, and flow. Provide inline edits (mark specific changes with track changes or comments), assess whether the tone sounds authentic to my voice and flag anything that feels off or too formal/informal, note any grammar/clarity issues like typos, awkward phrasing, or ambiguities, and provide structural feedback on reordering or restructuring that would improve readability. Important constraints: preserve my core meaning and style—I want refinement, not rewriting—be honest about what doesn't work, and if something is unclear, tell me rather than guessing my intent./genprompt
Help me write a prompt
/findemail
Find an email address for [PERSON'S NAME] who [RELEVANT CONTEXT: works at ORGANIZATION/has ROLE/etc.]. Search publicly available sources including LinkedIn, company directories, academic pages, professional websites, and press releases. Verify the email through multiple independent sources when possible. If you find the email, cite specific sources where it appears. Check recency and prioritize sources from the last 1-2 years. Note confidence level: high [3+ sources or official directory], medium [1-2 credible sources], low [inference or single unverified source]. If you cannot find a verified email, state this explicitly rather than guessing. Provide alternative contact methods if found, such as LinkedIn, institutional contact forms, or department emails. If you can only infer a likely pattern [e.g., [email protected] based on other employees], state this as inference with low confidence. Do not generate or guess email formats without evidence, use emails from outdated sources without flagging them, or present low-confidence findings as verified./ultrathink (taken from but did not originate with a comment from Thane Ruthenis)
Use greater rigor, attention to detail, and multi-angle verification. Start by outlining the task and breaking down the problem into subtasks. For each subtask, explore multiple perspectives, even those that seem initially irrelevant or improbable. Purposefully attempt to disprove or challenge your own assumptions at every step. Triple-verify everything. Critically review each step, scrutinizing your logic, assumptions, and conclusions while explicitly calling out uncertainties and alternative viewpoints. Independently verify your reasoning using alternative methodologies or tools, cross-checking every fact, inference, and conclusion against external data, calculation, or authoritative sources. Deliberately seek out and employ at least twice as many verification tools or methods as you typically would. Use mathematical validations, web searches, logic evaluation frameworks, and additional resources explicitly and liberally to cross-verify your claims. Even if you feel entirely confident in your solution, explicitly dedicate additional time and effort to systematically search for weaknesses, logical gaps, hidden assumptions, or oversights. Clearly document these potential pitfalls and how you've addressed them. Once you're fully convinced your analysis is robust and complete, deliberately pause and force yourself to reconsider the entire reasoning chain one final time from scratch. Explicitly detail this last reflective step.2025-12-09 10:47:07
Published on December 9, 2025 2:47 AM GMT
A wise woman once said: humans are not automatically strategic. I'd like to propose a way of being more strategic in the kitchen. I'd like to propose that you learn the reverse sear technique.
But not just the technique. Not just the thing you do to cook a steak. I'd like to propose that you learn about the underlying concepts. The problems that the reverse sear solves, how it solves them effectively, what techniques are adjacent to the reverse sear, and why it applies to things like Brussels sprouts, not just rib eyes.
I expect that learning these things will have a large ROI.
To start, consider a steak. When you buy it at the grocery store in it's raw form, it will look something like this:
You probably don't want to eat it in it's raw form though. You probably want to cook it.
That begs the question: how do you want to cook it? I think it's helpful to break this question down into two components:
To the first question, you probably want to cook it such that the interior is tender and juicy.
I suppose that not everyone falls into this camp though. I suppose that some people genuinely, authentically enjoy the inside of their steak most when it is tough and dry. And I suppose that other people[1] genuinely, authentically enjoy the inside of their steak most when it is raw and chewy. But for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to assume that your preferences are not unusual.
To expand on this question of what your goals are for the interior, you probably want this tender and juicy makeup to be uniform. You probably want to avoid gradients like these:
Ok. So what about the exterior? Well, that's pretty simple. I think most people want an exterior that is nicely browned like this:
But here's the thing: these goals are not unique to steak!
Consider chicken breasts. Chicken breasts are infamous for having their interior overcooked. There are plenty of monsters who like their steaks well done, but I think far fewer are pleased when the interior of their chicken breast is dry and chalky. People want this:
Not this:
And it's usually desirable to get some browning on the exterior as well.
The same is true for pork tenderloin, lamb chops, chicken cutlets, whole turkeys and many other cuts of meat. In fact, I'm having trouble coming up with counterexamples.
I guess one counterexample is when braising. When braising you don't necessarily want to brown the exterior. But then again, sometimes you do want to shred it, crisp it, and serve it with something. Think pulled pork on a sandwich or carnitas in a taco.
I guess there are a lot of situations like that where you don't necessarily want your meat to be browned or crispy. For example, sometimes you might prefer the simplicity of a tender poached chicken breast without any browning like this:
However, I think these are more so the exception than the rule. The rule is that people yearn for the sweet, savory, toasted complexity you get from the malliard reaction.
As for counterexamples to wanting a tender and juicy interior, the only one I can think of is jerky. In the case of jerky, dry and chewy really is the goal.
So far we've spent the whole post talking about meat. Now I want to branch further out and posit that these goals of 1) a tender and juicy interior and 2) a crisp, browned exterior often apply to vegetables as well.
As an easy first example, let's talk about Brussels sprouts. I've been trying to improve my ability to cook Brussels sprouts and in doing so, I take notes on Todoist. When I do I type out "brussel sprouts" and autocorrect keeps giving me these annoying red underlines. So now I have to capitalize the "B" and end with an "s", which seems counterintuitive...
Sorry I'm getting off track.
Brussels sprouts are a classic example of a food that is gross when prepared poorly and delicious when prepared properly. If the many food YouTubers I follow can be trusted, the story goes something like this:
Think about it, what looks more appetizing, this:
Or this:
Again, we want a tender interior alongside a crispy exterior.
Ok, what about broccoli?
Zucchini?
Cauliflower?
Malliard FTW!
Well, let me pump the breaks a little bit. I don't want to overstate my case. With meat I acknowledged that sometimes you prefer the simplicity of, for example, a poached chicken breast. With vegetables, I want to similarly acknowledge that sometimes something like steamed broccoli just hits the spot:
And for something like green beans, I would question how conducive they are to browning. I think I prefer my green beans to be steamed.
But, similar to the meat section, I think there's more wiggle room with respect to your goals for the exterior than with respect to your goals for the interior. Unless you're looking to channel your inner two year old, I'm not sure when you'd want your veggies to be mushy. I think you usually want a bright and tender, yet crisp interior.
It's worth pointing out that your goals for the interior of veggies vs meat are a little different. With meat we talked about juiciness. I wouldn't quite put it that way with veggies. With veggies, I guess there's some juiciness in green beans and corn but not in broccoli or Brussels sprouts.
Continuing my argument, I think the broad goals of 1) a crispy exterior and 2) a tender interior often apply to carbs as well. Think about a nice, warm loaf of bread with a browned exterior and a steaming interior that is still slightly moist.
Or the contrast between the thick buttered exterior and soft interior of a thick slice of bread in a grilled cheese:
My favorite coffee shop bakes these muffins that have a deeply browned exterior and a creamy, almost pudding-like interior that I absolutely love:
I think a good french toast is similar. You want a creamy, custardy interior and a crisp exterior.
With potatoes, it's nice when you can get a crispy exterior that you can hear when you tap with a fork, and a creamy interior.
Even with pasta I think you sometimes want to have a crisp, browned exterior to contrast with the softer interior. People have recognized this with baked pasta dishes. For non-baked pasta dishes I think people are slowly catching on with dishes like spaghetti all'assassina:
There's also gnocchi.
Perhaps people in Asia have recognized this a long time ago with their stir fries. I'm thinking about a dish like pad see ew.
And fried rice. You want the grains to be ever so slightly toasted on the outside (but not enough to make the interior dry).
Paella takes this even further:
So, wrapping up, I argue that you often — but not always! — want 1) a crisp exterior and 2) a tender interior for the item you are cooking.
Ok, now let's talk about technique. The reverse sear technique is a great way to achieve those two goals of a crisp exterior and a tender interior. First I'll discuss the classic reverse sear technique and then some adjacent techniques.
I'm going to keep things relatively high level though. See this Serious Eats post for details.
To make explaining the classic reverse sear technique easier, let's assume we're applying it to a steak.
The classic reverse sear technique basically has two components:
There are other things to mention, but those two things are the essence of the technique, and I don't want to distract from the essence.
First, let's ask why we want to warm it up slowly. Any guesses? It could be fun to guess.
Ok, the reason is to prevent that temperature gradient that we mentioned earlier. To achieve a uniform doneness. When you warm it up quickly with too high a temperature, you get an undesirable gradient. Here's the image again:
So yeah, it's pretty simple: if you want to avoid that gradient, take your time and use a lower temperature.
If really want to go to an extreme to avoid that gradient you can sous vide it.
With sous vide you cook it in a water bath with water that is held at a consistent temperature. Like if you want your steak to be cooked to 125 degrees, you'd program the sous vide device thing to maintain a temperature of 125 degrees and after an hour or so, heat will flow from the warmer water bath into the colder meat until the meat is 125 degrees.
But in cooking it low and slow in an oven the temperature gradient you get is going to be quite small.
Ok, now for the second step of searing it in the pan. For this step we want high heat. Why do we want high heat? Well, for one, the malliard reaction that produces browning happens at around 300℉, so you need the pan to be at least that hot. The other thing is that the more time it spends in your hot pan, the more time there is for a temperature gradient to develop.
If you're extreme you could use a blowtorch or some other creative technique that Chris Young likes to make videos about, but in practice, just sear it in a hot pan.
There are various techniques that I would argue sit pretty close to the classic reverse sear technique.
For starters, consider this example of America's Test Kitchen recommending a reverse sear to cook chicken breast. I'd say it's a little bit adjacent to the classic technique for two reasons:
For an even less central example, consider For the Best Roasted Vegetables, Start with Steam, also from America's Test Kitchen. As the title describes, the video recommends steaming as a way of slowly cooking the interior.
For cabbage and fennel bulbs this takes the form of covering with tin foil and placing in an oven, because the food item has enough water content to release in the form of steam. For Brussels sprouts it doesn't, so the video recommends adding water to a pan and covering with a lid.
From there, to brown, for the cabbage and fennel bulbs you remove the tin foil and return to the oven on a higher temperature with some oil to roast. For the Brussels sprouts it's similar: remove the lid to get rid of the steam and water, add oil, and crank the heat.
Another example of something adjacent to the reverse sear, I'd argue, is the technique of par cooking and then crisping. For example, with potatoes you want to par cook them in boiling water and then sear with oil.
Notice that the exact method of the initial cook varies — uncovered in the oven for steak, covered in the oven for cabbage, covered in a pan with Brussels sprouts, boiling water for potatoes — but the idea is the same. The idea is that you want a low and slow technique to warm up the interior to the desired level of doneness as a precursor to the final sear.
Same with the final sear. The technique varies. Sometimes you're searing in a pan, sometimes in an oven, sometimes under a broiler, sometimes a frier, and if you're Chris Young, sometimes with a blow torch.
My hope is that understanding the concepts here will help you find places to apply them.
2025-12-09 10:14:20
Published on December 9, 2025 2:14 AM GMT
Events are already set for catastrophe, they must be steered along some course they would not naturally go. [...]
Are you confident in the success of this plan? No, that is the wrong question, we are not limited to a single plan. Are you certain that this plan will be enough, that we need essay no others? Asked in such fashion, the question answers itself. The path leading to disaster must be averted along every possible point of intervention.
— Professor Quirrell (competent, despite other issues), HPMOR chapter 92
This post is a quickly-written service-post, an attempt to lay out a basic point of strategy regarding decreasing existential risk from AGI.
By default, AGI will kill everyone. The group of people trying to stop that from happening should seriously attend to all plausible points of intervention.
In this context, a point of intervention is some element of the world—such as an event, a research group, or an ideology—which could substantively contribute to leading humanity to extinction through AGI. A point of intervention isn't an action; it doesn't say what to do. It just says: Here's some place along the path leading to disaster, where there might be useful levers we could pull to stop the flow towards disaster.
Before going on, I'll briefly say: Don't do bad unethical things.
Just because we should attend to every point of intervention, does not mean we should carry out every act of intervention! E.g. don't be an ad-hominem dick to people, whether in private in public. In general, if you're about to do that thing, and you know perfectly well that if you thought about it for three minutes then you'd see that almost everyone would tell you that's a really really bad thing to do, then you should probably not do that thing. And if you still want to do it, then you should probably first try talking to several people who you trust (and who you don't strongly pre-select to be people who are egging you on to do that thing).
Someone was telling me about their somewhat-solitary efforts to get the government apparatus of France to notice AGI x-risk and maybe do something about it; and to not be too swayed by influence saying to ignore those concerns. They expressed being unsure as to whether these efforts would matter much. People in the policy space would tend to think of the US and China as being the two players that really matter.
I argued to them that actually those efforts are pretty high-value. Leaving aside tractability (IDK) and neglectedness (yes) and goodness (probably, though there's always the worry of stimulating R&D investment), I wanted to argue for importance.
In basketball, there's a defensive mode called "full-court press". That's where you pressure the team with offensive possession of the ball everywhere on the court, trying to regain possession of the ball before the offensive team gets close enough to the basket to score. This contrasts with half-court press, where you basically let the opposing team take the ball to the half of court with your basket, and concentrate your defenses there.
Full-court press has the disadvantage of allocating some defensive resources away from the home side of the court. Thus, you can be more vulnerable if the opposing team gets near your basket. Also, full-court press is simply more expensive—the defending team has to run around much more, and gives up the advantage of clustering where they know the opposing team has to go (near the scoring basket).
But, full-court press is a good way to spend more resources to get better outcomes. You make them pass the ball more, giving them more chances to mess up, often producing turnovers. You make them run around more, which tires them out.
Likewise, intervening at every point along the path leading to AGI disaster may be a broad strategy that demands higher costs and risks allocating some resources away from important points; but that may also come with the benefits of giving more less-correlated opportunities to block the flow towards disaster.
Suppose that there are 5 events that might occur, and if all of them occur, something really bad happens; on the other hand, if one of the events does not occur, then the really bad thing does not happen. Suppose each event will occur with probability 0.9.
First of all, how likely is the really bad thing to happen? One answer would would be , i.e. there's a 60% chance of it happening. However, this answer is falling prey to the three multi-stage fallacies. You can't conclude that the bad result is only medium-likely, just because you made a list of events that all have to happen.
But here's a different question: How unlikely can you make the really bad event?
Of course, the answer depends a lot on the specific structure of these events. But here's one kind of structure:
Suppose each of the five prerequisite events is itself a disjunction. In other words, if any one of happens, then happens. I think this is often the case in the real world. E.g., several different funders might fund some research group; several different research groups might succeed at some goal; several different technologies might provide workable components that enable some subsequent technology; etc. Furthermore, it's often the case that it's easy to intervene on some of the but not on others. In this case, it's easy to decrease the probability of somewhat, but not easy to decrease it a lot. You prevent some of the that are easy to prevent, and then you call it a day.
Does it help to somewhat decrease the probability of each , without greatly decreasing any of them? Yep! As long as the probability of the conjunction is fairly high, the marginal value of decreasing the absolute probability of each of the is roughly the same.
Anyway, basically the point of this subsection is that it helps to intervene along many channels / at many points, if there are multiple conjunctive prerequisites to disaster.
Note that [multiple conjunctive prerequisites to disaster] is logically equivalent to [multiple disjunctive stoppers of disaster]. For example, it's plausible to me that either an international ban on AGI research, or a strong social norm in academia against AGI research, would very substantially slow down AGI research.
One of the three multi-stage fallacies is forgetting to use conditional probabilities for the prerequisites to disaster. For example, conditional on [we can't convince major nations to ban AGI research], it's probably much less likely that [we can convince AGI researchers to stop doing that].
The outlook of "every point of intervention" says to consider this correlation as a pointer to some deeper element of the world. In this example, the source of correlation might be [the same funder is paying both groups to continue AGI research], or [AGI risk doesn't feel real to people], or [people are secretly nihilistic and don't actually have hope in a deeply satisfying shared human future], or many other possibilities. (These are therefore not necessarily temporal points of intervention—events in a sequence—but generally, elements that could be intervened on.
Focus on the places where you feel shocked everyone's dropping the ball.
This perspective doesn't help much with prioritization. But, generally, it says we should competently do a diverse portfolio of strategies. On the margin, I think competent newcomers should be directed towards the possibility of starting a new / neglected effort, rather than joining an existing one (though of course many existing efforts have important talent gaps).
There's lots of meaning everywhere. There may or may not be any good plans to decrease x-risk, but there are many things to try that are pretty worth-it and quite neglected.
If someone is deferring to you about strategy, consider helping them keep in mind that there are many approaches.
This doesn't mean "do random stuff and hope it decreases x-risk".
Each actor (person, research group, funder) has to specialize in one or two points of intervention.
Non-top-priority interventions are neglected.
(These are phrased as actions, but points of intervention can be backed out of them.)
International treaties to stop AGI research
Convincing elements of the AI researcher pipeline (e.g. student programs for AI / ML research) to stop
General social milieu / norms
Illustration: A professor doing cutting-edge domain-nonspecific AI research should read in the paper that this is very bad; then should have students stop signing up for classes and research; and have student protests; and should be shunned by colleagues; and should have administration pressure them to switch areas; and then they should get their government funding cut. It should feel like what happens if you announce "Hey everyone! I'm going to go work in advertising for a bunch of money, convincing teenagers to get addicted to cigarettes!", but more so.
Making more very smart people, especially via reprogenetics.
Healing society; decreasing pressure / incentive to do AGI research
Legibilizing AGI x-risk.
Group rationality, e.g. better debates.
2025-12-09 09:38:02
Published on December 9, 2025 1:38 AM GMT
This is a follow-up to last week's D&D.Sci scenario: if you intend to play that, and haven't done so yet, you should do so now before spoiling yourself.
There is a web interactive here you can use to test your answer, and generation code available here if you're interested, or you can read on for the ruleset and scores.
A dish has three properties: Size, Spiciness and Sweetness.
| Dish | Size | Spiciness | Sweetness |
| Ambrosial Applesauce | 0 | 0 | 2 (±1) |
| BBQ Basilisk Brisket | 2 (±1) | 1 (±1) | 1 (±1) |
| Chili Con Chimera | 2 (±1) | 2 (±1) | 0 |
| Displacer Dumplings[1] | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Ettin Eye Eclairs | 1 (±1) | 0 | 4 (±1) |
| Fiery Formian Fritters | 1 (±1) | 2 (±1) | 0 |
| Geometric Gelatinous Gateau | 1 (±1) | 0 | 3 (±1) |
| Honeyed Hydra Hearts | 1 (±1) | 0 | 2 (±1) |
| Killer Kraken Kebabs | 3 (±1) | 3 (±1) | 0 |
| Mighty Minotaur Meatballs | 3 (±1) | 0 | 0 |
| Opulent Owlbear Omelette | 2 (±1) | 0 | 0 |
| Pegasus Pinion Pudding | 1 (±1) | 0 | 1 (±1) |
| Roc Roasted Rare | 4 (±1) | 0 | 0 |
| Scorching Salamander Stew | 2 (±1) | 3 (±1) | 0 |
| Troll Tenderloin Tartare | 1 (±1) | 0 | 0 |
| Vicious Vampire Vindaloo | 2 (±1) | 4 (±1) | 0 |
| Wyvern Wing Wraps | 1 (±1) | 1 (±1) | 0 |
Cooking is not an exact science, and there's a ±1 variation in each dish (effectively adding 1d3-2 to each of its stats). For example, if you cook Chili Con Chimera (usually Size 2 and Spiciness 2), you might end up with a large mild batch (Size 3 Spiciness 1), or a small spicy batch (Size 1 Spiciness 3), etc. etc. However, any stat that is at 0 will stay there: your Chili will never end up sweet, for example, and your Eclairs will never end up spicy.
The ideal Feast has in total Size 10, Spiciness 5, and Sweetness 5.
Each of these stats increases your score up to this ideal, and then decreases it thereafter. For example, a total Size of 6 will score you 6 points, Size 9 will score you 9 points, Size 12 will score you 8 points (10 minus 2), and Size 15 will score you 5 points (10 minus 5).
The first order of strategy was to select dishes that tended to generate the correct overall amount of size/spiciness/sweetness.
The subtler element of strategy was to minimize variance by using as few dishes as possible for each stat: reaching e.g. 5 Sweetness using 3 Sweet dishes is worse than reaching 5 Sweetness using 2 Sweet dishes, because there's more variance away from your ideal 5.
The perfectly optimal feast that used as few dishes as possible for each stat was actually very tightly constrained:
However, there were many other options that would get extremely close in score, just e.g. having very slightly more variance in one stat or another, or accepting a Spiciness/Sweetness of 4 off a single dish (4±1 scores only a tiny bit worse on average than 5±2).
| Player | Dishes | Size | Spiciness | Sweetness | Average Score |
| Optimal Play | AC(D?)GKR) | 10 (±4) | 5 (±2) | 5 (±2) | 16.94 |
| James Camacho | AGORTV | 10 (±5) | 4 (±1) | 5 (±2) | 16.67 |
| Unnamed | ABDMOPV | 10 (±5) | 5 (±2) | 4 (±3) | 16.30 |
| simon | BDGKOPT | 10 (±6) | 4 (±2) | 5 (±3) | 16.09 |
| Multicore | ABDGRS | 9 (±4) | 4 (±2) | 6 (±3) | 15.89 |
| abstractapplic | ABDHKO | 8 (±4) | 4 (±2) | 5 (±3) | 15.52 |
| Yonge | ABFOP | 6 (±4) | 3 (±2) | 4 (±3) | 12.63 |
| Entirely Random Play | ?? | ?? | ?? | ?? | 9.88 |
Congratulations to all players, especially James Camacho.
The Isamandan feasts in your dataset were generated as follows:
As usual, I'm interested to hear any other feedback on what people thought of this scenario. If you played it, what did you like and what did you not like? If you might have played it but decided not to, what drove you away? What would you like to see more of/less of in future? Do you think the scenario was more complicated than you would have liked? Or too simple to have anything interesting/realistic to uncover? Or both at once? Did you like/dislike the story/fluff/theme parts? What complexity/quality scores should I give this scenario in the index?
These dumplings Displace themselves out of your stomach after being eaten.
2025-12-09 07:22:15
Published on December 8, 2025 11:22 PM GMT
[Author's note: LLMs were used to generate and sort examples into their requisite categories, as well as find and summarize relevant papers, and extensive assistance with editing]
Context: Alfred Adler (1870–1937) split from Freud by asserting that human psychology is teleological (goal-oriented) rather than causal (drive-based). He argued that neuroses and "excuses" are not passive symptoms of past trauma, but active, creative tools used by the psyche to safeguard self-esteem. This post attempts to formalize Adler’s concept of "Safeguarding Tendencies" into categories, not by the semantic content of excuses, but by their mechanical function in managing the distance between the Ego and Reality.
Abstract: When a life task threatens to reveal inadequacy, people initiate a strategic maneuver to invalidate the test. We propose four "Strategies of Immunity", Incapacity, Entanglement, Elevation, and Scorched Earth, to explain how agents rig the game so they cannot lose.
In the standard model of behavior, an excuse is a result. You are anxious; therefore, you cannot socialize. The cause (anxiety) produces the effect (avoidance).
Adler inverted this vector. He argued that the goal (avoiding the risk of rejection) recruits the means (anxiety). You generate the anxiety in order to avoid the task.
To Adler, an excuse is a Safeguarding Tendency. It is a structural load-bearing wall designed to protect the "Fictional Final Goal" (the self-ideal) from threats to the identity.
To debug these behaviors, we ignore the content of the excuse (the headache, the busy schedule) and analyze the maneuver. Which direction is the agent moving to secure immunity from judgment?
Within this categorization, the directions of Down and In correspond to Anxious/Merging in Attachment Theory terms, Up and Out corresponding to Avoidance.
The Direction: Moving Down.
The Logic: Pleading "No Contest" due to structural damage. This strategy operates on Debt Relief. The agent declares structural insolvency (illness, trauma, incompetence) to gain a permanent exemption from the "tax" of social contribution. They trade away their agency in exchange for safety, but inadvertently court pity.
You cannot judge a man with a broken leg for failing to run a race. Therefore, if the agent can demonstrate that they are broken (physically or psychologically), they are safe from the shame of losing. They transfer from the category of "Acting Agent" to "Suffering Patient."
The Result: The judge is forced to become a caretaker, or risk moral opprobrium for 'harming' the helpless.
The Direction: Moving In.
The Logic: Dissolving the Self into the Other. This strategy is a Risk-Pooling Scheme. The agent refuses to operate as a sole proprietor, forcing a merger of ledgers so that any potential loss is distributed across the group. By making liability shared, individual failure becomes statistically impossible.
A target is easy to hit; a mist is impossible to hit. By blurring the boundary between "Me" and "You," the agent ensures that any judgment directed at them hits the partner as well. This is the strategy of distributed liability.
The Result: The court is collapsed. There is no Defendant or Judge, only "Us."
The Direction: Moving Up.
The Logic: Denying the Jurisdiction of the Court. This is Protectionism and Price-Fixing. The agent inflates the value of their own currency (potential/virtue) while refusing to trade in the open market, claiming the external exchange rates are unfair.
The agent claims they are not failing the test; they are above the test. The task is too small, too corrupt, or too boring to be valid. This transforms avoidance into a status symbol.
The Result: The test is trivialized and dismissed. The failure belongs to the world for being unworthy of the agent's participation.
The Direction: Moving Out.
The Logic: Destroying the Value of the Outcome. This strategy is a Market Crash. By devaluing the prize (love, success, effort), the agent ensures that their own poverty is no longer a disadvantage. If the currency is worthless, the beggar is equal to the king.
If the agent cannot win the game, they burn the board. If the currency (success, love, intimacy) is proven to be counterfeit, then being poor is no longer a sign of failure.
The Result: The people administering the test, the prize itself, and the whole context are compromised. The agent hasn't lost; they are cannily avoiding hopeless games.
Adler assumes a 'milieu of judgment' based on community, a finite circle of neighbors, colleagues, and family. In that world, the goal was belonging.
In the digital era, the 'Court' has changed. We have moved from community (relational judgment) to audience (attentional judgment).
Social media gamifies Life Tasks. This shift reinforces the Strategies of Immunity because the "Judge" is no longer a human being, but an abstract, infinite, and metric-driven Crowd.
Adler would diagnose our collective anxiety as a category error: We are confusing visibility with belonging. Adler warned that neurosis comes from caring more about impression than contribution. Social media is designed to measure impression, reinforcing defensive strategies. The "Audience" is an insatiable fiction; you can never be liked enough to silence the fear of inferiority.
Crucially, Adler did not view these strategies as static traits. He saw them as dynamic tools deployed against the three specific "Life Tasks" of human existence: Work, Society, and Love.
A person is not monolithic. You might observe a man employing Immunity via Elevation at work ("I am too talented for this menial role") while also deploying Immunity via Entanglement in love ("I cannot function without my partner"). The specific strategy reveals where the agent feels acute senses of inferiority.
To identify the game being played, use Adler’s famous diagnostic tool: The Question. Ask the agent:
"What would you do if this symptom or obstacle were removed immediately?"
The cure is not to fix the "Broken Wing" or debate the logic of the "Ivory Tower." The cure is Social Interest, the willingness to engage with these Life Tasks despite the risk of failure. It requires what Adler called "The Courage to be Imperfect": the realization that one does not need to be immune to judgment to be worthy of one's place.
So courage is the counter-habit Adler encourages us to build. Courage is not a feeling one waits for; it is activity combined with social interest. To dismantle the fortress of the ego, Adler suggests we attack the structure of the excuse from three angles: recognition, action, and valuation.
The first step is investigating the specific utility of the defense. We rely on our excuses because they provide a hidden payoff: the comfort of safety or the thrill of superiority. To break the loop, we explicitly name the maneuver in real-time. When we catch ourselves feigning incapacity or standing in judgment above a task, we acknowledge that we are currently running a strategy to avoid risk. This act of observation reduces the excuse of its power to comfort us. We may still choose to withdraw, but we can no longer do so while deceiving ourselves that we are noble victims. By exposing the machinery, we drain the excuse of the emotional fuel it needs to operate.
Once the defense is exposed, we bypass the demand for emotional readiness. We often wait until we feel confident to act, but the psychology of courage works in reverse; the feeling follows the movement. We inhabit the posture of the person we wish to be, treating the terrifying moment as a low-stakes simulation rather than a final referendum on our worth. By playing the role of a courageous person before we actually feel like one, we prove to our nervous system that the catastrophe we fear does not occur when we act. This lowers the stakes of the environment, turning a life task into a simple experiment.
Finally, we fundamentally alter the currency of our self-worth. The strategies of immunity are designed to protect our vertical status, the need to be special, superior, or distinct. To heal, we shift our focus to horizontal contribution. We stop judging the actor and start valuing the act itself. When we measure ourselves by our effort and our usefulness to others rather than our reputation or prestige, failure ceases to be a death sentence and becomes merely data. The goal is not to perfect our defense, but to accept that we do not need one. This is the courage to be imperfect: the realization that we can be flawed, average, and vulnerable, and still find value and meaning in contribution.
Ansbacher, H. L., & Ansbacher, R. R. (Eds.). (1956). The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler: A Systematic Presentation in Selections from His Writings.
Dreikurs, R. (1970). The Courage to be Imperfect.
Mosak, H.H. (1999). A Primer of Adlerian Psychology
Kishimi, I. & Koga, F. (2018). The Courage to Be Disliked