2025-11-23 20:22:07
Published on November 23, 2025 12:22 PM GMT
Disclaimer: I am god-awful at chess.
Late-beginner chess players, those who are almost on the cusp of being basically respectable, often fall into a particular pattern. They've got the hang of calculating moves ahead; they can make plans along the lines of "Ok, so if I move my rook to give a check, the opponent will have to move her king, and then I can take her bishop." and those plans tend to be basically correct: the opponent really does have to move her king.
But there's a very important rule to follow when calculating. Always end your calculations after your opponent has moved. You must never end your calculations after your own move. In other words:
The enemy gets the last hit
This principle is common in cyber security: you have to let your red team make the last move. If your red team finds a vulnerability, and your blue team patches it, then you have to red team the patch. It's the same for AI red-team-blue-team games: I recall a story of a team at one of the MATS streams, presenting their final work on some AI control (or similar) protocol:
Audience member: But why didn't you try to mitigate this risk with something like [Idea] which would have taken a few minutes to implement.
Team member: Because then we'd have had to red-team that idea as well, and red-teaming it would have taken much longer than a few minutes.
The team member was correct here. Quite often, calculating what The Enemy will do is harder than calculating what you're going to do.
The Enemy need not actually be an enemy. The Enemy can be "The universe" or something. If you're building a flood defence, then The Enemy is the flood water. If you build a barrier to stop it getting to your city's business district, then you'd better check where the water will do instead to make sure you didn't just divert it onto an orphanage or something.
Similarly, lots of AI Safety papers have the theme "We found a problem, then we fixed it." This has a nice ring to it. It's how most papers get written in most fields, which is fine for those fields. But AI Safety is much more like cybersecurity than e.g. chemical engineering, where "we found this reaction was going slow so we added a new catalyst" is totally reasonable.
(Lots don't fall into this trap, and that's great!)
The conversation usually goes like this:
AIS: We found this solution to a serious problem
AINKEI: This seems super hacky
AIS: No I don't think so
AIS goes away to think...
AIS: Actually it follows this deeper principle
AINKEI: I feel like this won't work for superintelligence still
AINKEI goes away to think...
AINKEI: Ok, here's a reason I thought of why it won't work
AIS: Oh huh
AIS goes away to think...
AIS: Ah but I might be able to fix it with this solution
The issue is that AINKEI is thinking in terms of letting the enemy get the last hit, while AIS is thinking in terms of a feedback loop of detecting and fixing problems. The feedback loop solution only works if all of your problems are recoverable, which is a core disagreement between the crowds.
<psychoanalysis>
I think of a lot of the AI not-kill-everyone-ism crowd's frustration with the AI safety crowd is that the AINKEI people feel that they are having to do the jobs of that AIS people should be doing by playing the part of The Enemy getting the last hit
</psychoanalysis>
The recent work on inoculation prompting---which has stirred up so many mixed reactions that it functions as a scissor statement for the AI safety/alignment/notkilleveryoneism crowd---is a great example.
Problem: AIs generalize from reward hacking to misalignment.
Solution: Just tell 'em it's OK to reward hack during training.
Does this throw up even more problems? The paper didn't really investigate this question; they didn't let The Enemy get the last hit.
In this case, The Enemy is "Your AIs getting smarter every generation."
The general form of the solution is "if we can't make our reward environments exactly match our prompts, we'll adjust our prompts to match our reward environments." which is, to be fair, quite elegant. What happens when the AI gets smarter? As a first guess, if you can't make your reward environments more robust, you'll have to prompt your AI with more and more caveats, in more and more different situations.
This seems bad! Does every prompt now have "by the way it's OK to hack the environment and manipulate the human raters and break out of your VM and murder the testers" during training? What fixes this? I don't know, because I have a finite amount of time to write this essay, and I double-super don't know what problems that fix throws up!
2025-11-23 17:25:28
Published on November 23, 2025 9:25 AM GMT
This is a list of everyone who had a big red button but did not press it, despite a unilateral ability to destroy (at least some of) the world with nuclear weapons.
(Please comment with suggestions for additions: I’m sure I missed some people.)
Dwight D. Eisenhower was a U.S. President with the authority to launch nuclear weapons. He considered the use of nuclear weapons and made implicit threats during the 1954 Quemoy-Matsu crisis (against China) and when France asked for U.S. intervention in Vietnam. Eisenhower decided to not use nuclear weapons. While publicly, he declared that in the event of war in East Asia, he would authorize the use of tactical nuclear weapons against military targets “exactly as you would use a bullet”, in private, he decided that nuclear weapons were “too destructive to use in a limited conflict”, and refused requests from the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff to use nuclear weapons against Chinese targets. Despite the unilateral ability to launch nuclear weapons at any point from 1953 to 1961, he did not.
John F. Kennedy was a U.S. President with the authority to launch nuclear weapons, including during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. Despite the unilateral ability to launch nuclear weapons at any point from 1961 to 1963, he did not.
Vasily Arkhipov, a vice admiral of the Soviet Navy, was on board of a Soviet submarine on October 27, 1962, when U.S. Navy forces tried to force the submarine to surface using signalling depth charges. Communications to Moscow were cut off, and the depth charges led the captain and political officer to believe a war might have already begun. They prepared to launch a nuclear torpedo. On most Soviet submarines with nuclear torpedoes, authorizations only from the captain and political officer were required to authorize the launch. However, on this particular submarine, due to the presence of Arkhipov, the chief of staff of the brigade, his authorization was also required. The captain and the political officer wanted to launch, but Arkhipov opposed. He could’ve issued the authorization others wanted from him, and a launch of a nuclear weapon against the U.S. Navy during the Cuban Missile Crisis would’ve likely started a nuclear war. He didn’t.
Lyndon B. Johnson was a U.S. President with the authority to launch nuclear weapons. Despite the unilateral ability to launch nuclear weapons at any point from 1963 to 1969, he did not.
Richard Nixon was a U.S. President with the authority to launch nuclear weapons. Despite the unilateral ability to launch nuclear weapons at any point from 1969 to 1974, he did not.
Gerard Ford was a U.S. President with the authority to launch nuclear weapons. Despite the unilateral ability to launch nuclear weapons at any point from 1974 to 1977, he did not.
(Golda Meir was the Israeli Prime Minister during the Yom Kippur War in October 1973. It is reported that when the Israeli officials panicked that the Arab invasion would overrun Israel, the Defence Minister Moshe Dayan requested and received authorization from her to arm 13 missiles and 8 fighter jets with nuclear warheads, with the missiles aimed at the military headquarters in Cairo and Damascus. It is unclear whether anyone in Israel had at any point a unilateral authority to order the launch during these events. Supposedly, normally, Israeli nuclear weapons are under civilian control until assembled; it is unclear what happens afterwards.)
Jimmy Carter was a U.S. President with the authority to launch nuclear weapons. Despite the unilateral ability to launch nuclear weapons at any point from 1977 to 1981, he did not.
Pieter Willem Botha was the Prime Minister and State President of South Africa when it developed nuclear weapons, with the authority to launch nuclear weapons. Despite the unilateral ability to launch nuclear weapons, he did not. (It must be noted, however, that he made South Africa have these weapons in the first place.)
Ronald Reagan was a U.S. President with the authority to launch nuclear weapons. Despite the unilateral ability to launch nuclear weapons at any point from 1981 to 1989, he did not.
Frederik Willem de Klerk was the State President of South Africa, with the authority to launch nuclear weapons. He inherited six operational weapons and decided on nuclear disarmament. Despite the unilateral ability to launch nuclear weapons, he did not. South Africa is the only country that developed nuclear weapons and then gave them up.
Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defence Forces, was on duty on September 26, 1983, when an early warning system falsely reported multiple U.S. missile launches. He violated the protocol, deciding to not report the warning up the chain, which could’ve led to a full Soviet nuclear retaliation. He decided that a real first strike would involve more missiles than he’s seen and judged it to be a false alarm.
George H.W. Bush was a U.S. President with the authority to launch nuclear weapons. Despite the unilateral ability to launch nuclear weapons at any point from 1981 to 1993, he did not.
(Boris Yeltsin was the President of Russia in 1995, when he was notified that a radar detected what looked like a U.S. missile launched from the sea, possibly the start of an American nuclear strike. The nuclear briefcase was activated for him, but he did not push the button he had. The rocket turned out to be a Norwegian scientific rocket; Norway even notified Russia, but the notification didn’t reach the radar crew. (Soviet and Russian secretaries general and presidents generally do not have the unilateral authority to launch, so others are not on this list. It is not entirely clear whether, in this case, Boris Yeltsin could’ve launched nukes if he wanted to.)
Kim Jong Il was the General Secretary of North Korea when it developed nuclear weapons, with the authority to launch nuclear weapons. Despite the unilateral ability to launch nuclear weapons from 2006 to 2011, he did not. (It must be noted, however, that he made North Korea have these weapons in the first place.)
Bill Clinton (1993-2001), George W. Bush (2001-2009), Barack Obama (2008-2012), and Joe Biden (2021-2025) were U.S. Presidents with the authority to launch nuclear weapons. Despite the unilateral ability to launch nuclear weapons, they did not.
(While technically the Prime Ministers of the UK have had the authority to launch nuclear weapons, if officials of the Ministry of Defence who receive a launch order judge it to be wrongful, they can lawfully appeal to the monarch to overturn it, which is somewhat likely to happen for a first-strike decision; for that reason, I’m not counting them as having had the unilateral ability to launch nuclear weapons.)
Charles de Gaulle (1960-1969), Georges Pompidou (1969-1974), Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (1974-1981), François Mitterrand (1981-1995), Jacques Chirac (1995-2007), Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-2012), and François Hollande (2012-2017) were the Presidents of France with the authority to launch nuclear weapons. Despite the unilateral ability to launch nuclear weapons at any point while in office, they did not.
(There were many close calls, but I wasn’t able to find individual people who could’ve decided to end the world during those: on October 5, 1960, a radar in Greenland mistook the rising Moon for a massive Soviet missile attack; the alert showed certainty of incoming nukes, but a bomber patrol confirmed it was a false echo. In 1979, a NORAD computer simulation tape was accidentally run as if it were real data, causing command centers to believe 250 to 2200 missiles were on their way, and the National Security Advisor was alerted that the U.S. President had minutes to decide on retaliation; satellite and radar checks confirmed it was a false alarm. See many others.)
(William Bassett, a captain of the U.S. Air Force commanding a launch crew at a missile site in Japan, is claimed to have received what appeared to be valid orders to launch 32 nuclear missiles on October 28, 1962, but the account of the events is disputed. He is claimed to have judged the situation to be suspicious and stalled the launch until the Missile Control Center confirmed it was an error.)
8 billion people are alive today. Let’s not let this number suddenly drop.
2025-11-23 16:07:00
Published on November 23, 2025 8:07 AM GMT
Insulin resistance is bad. It doesn't just cause heart disease. Peter Attia, author of Outlive, the Science and Art of Longevity, makes a convincing[1] case that insulin resistance increases the risk of cancer and Alzheimer's disease, too. Causally-speaking, the number of deaths downstream of insulin resistance is ginormous and massively underestimated.
This implies one of the following must be true:
We know that civilization is FUBAR along many dimensions. Soviet agricultural policy was FUBAR. Maoist agricultural policy was FUBAR. American urban planning is FUBAR. Public education is FUBAR. Dualistic consciousness is FUBAR. I have heard that the Windows Operating System contains advertisements. It is entirely believable that the American metabolism is FUBAR too.
Visiting Japan made this fact impossible for me to ignore. By Japanese standards, Americans are fat. But that under-estimates the scope of the problem, because you can have an unhealthy metabolism without being visibly obese. But when everybody is unhealthy, how do you define "unhealthy"? The obvious reference class to use is hunter-gatherers. I'm not talking about our paleolithic ancestors. There's real-live hunter-gatherers living today. They've got very low rates of obesity, hypertension, and type-2 diabetes. I bet that the handful of obese hunter-gatherers got that way through interacting with civilization.
I don't want to paint too rosy of a picture of hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherers have high rates of child mortality and infectious disease. Before the rise of civilization, they fought wars with per capita death tolls worse than the trench warfare of WWI[2]. They used to starve to death a lot too. But none of these are the reasons hunter-gathers have such great metabolic health. Hunter-gatherers have great metabolic health because that great metabolic health is normal for human beings. Modern civilization is the anomaly. Americans (plus, increasingly, everyone else) are metabolically unhealthy because civilization is doing things horribly wrong, especially in the domains of nutrition and exercise.
Modern stress patterns play a role too. So does electric lights disrupting our circadian rhythms. But common sense suggests those are relatively small effects compared to exercise and nutrition. I believe the reason they may appear large is a statistical artifact.
The exercise problem is pretty straightforward. Large volumes of low-intensity exercise are optimal for metabolic health. I used to think that the gold standard was elite endurance athletes who do 15-30 hours of deliberate exercise per week, mostly cardio. And while that's phenomenal compared to Americans, hunter-gatherers have even better biomarkers, and they get there by being physically active for roughly 30–50 hours per week (mostly walking, carrying, and other low-intensity movement).
Except that's only half the story. The other half is nutrition. Elite endurance athletes have incredibly high-energy demands, which requires an unnatural diet to fuel. Whereas hunter-gatherers have an extremely natural diet.
What constitutes a "natural" diet is very confusing, due to nationalism.
When I was a child, my health-conscious mother prepared me homemade lunches. My Taiwanese-American mother called the food "sushi", which is Japanese. Actually, I was eating kimbop, which is Korean. In this way, "since time immemorial" can be as short as two generations, a mere 40-50 years.
It is common knowledge that traditional diets are healthier than modern diets. It is true that my mother's kimbop was healthier than a more modern diet of potato chips and soda. But kimbop is mostly polished white rice. Prior to the 1900s, regular Koreans couldn't afford to get most of their calories from polished white rice like I did. Japanese peasants getting most of their calories from polished white rice nationwide goes back only to the late 1800s.
I know this may sound unbelievable. Rice cultivation is thousands of years old, and eating lots of rice is part of the Korean/Japanese/Chinese national identity. But national identities are artificial constructs. I don't mean this in the sense that all culture is a human imagining. I mean that the modern concept of "national identity" was deliberately created by governments starting around the French Revolution of 1789-1799.
I promise this is relevant to understanding why Americans are so fat.
Out of all these countries, I think the best one for understanding the relationship between nationalism and metabolic dysfunction is Japan. Japan is metabolically healthy compared to the USA, but Japan is metabolically unhealthy compared to hunter-gatherers. More importantly, Japan has history especially conducive to understanding how nationalism transforms a country's idea of what constitutes a traditional diet. For our purpose here, the most important events in Japanese history are the Meiji Period of 1868-1912 and the American occupation of 1945-1952. Both of them transformed the Japanese diet.
The Meiji Restoration began with a civil war. Prior to the Meiji Restoration, Japan was a feudal society. Politically, Japan was structured like Middle Ages Europe, except knights were called samurai, lords were called daimyo, and instead of a king they had an unnecessarily convoluted pretense of power delegation. This was a distributed system. The daimyo lords were almost independent, and had private armies with which they could rebel. Feudalism was often a stable equilibrium prior to the industrial revolution. But by the late 1800s, Western powers were expanding into East Asia. Feudal Japan lacked the state capacity to resist invasion by an industrialized nation-state.
The USA was one of these industrialized nation-states. A USA expeditionary force demanded Japan integrate itself into the modern global economy (on terms unfavorable to Japan, of course). This precipitated a civil war between the incumbent feudalists and the new nationalists. The Meiji Restoration wasn't a people vs government conflict like the French Revolution. This was a civil war between daimyo. The victorious nationalists immediately built a modern nation-state.
The nationalists centralized power in Tokyo, modernized the military, converted the daimyo into state-dependent aristocrats, abolished the samurai (and the rest of the caste system), introduced universal conscription, established a money economy (to replace the grain-based economy), reformed taxes, established a unified police and judiciary (instead of relying on daimyo), implemented compulsory state education (public school), built an industrial economy, and connected everything together with railways and telegraphs. They even adopted Western clothing. The nationalists copied everything they could from the Western powers except democracy.
They also invented "Japan" [nation] and "Japanese" [national identity]. Previously, this referred to a location and state. Now it referred to a nation, with a homogeneous national culture. To populate this revisionist history, the nationalists appropriated their own real history, but with a twist. Now that the samurai were abolished, everyone could adopt neo-samurai values! Japanese people are loyal and always have been. (Imagine how these memes would be useful to fascist expansionist empire.) We are at war with Ingsoc. We have always been at war with Ingsoc.
Every nation needs its own national cuisine too. At this time, rice was the largest source of calories in the Japanese diet. But it was roughly half of the total, and it wasn't all polished white rice. The Japanese ate a lot of millet and barley too. This isn't because the Japanese liked millet, barley, and unpolished rice. It's just that polished white rice was expensive relative to income. Polished white rice was something rich people ate.
An accurate history of Japanese cuisine would go like this: Japanese people were mostly too poor to eat polished rice all the time because that tasty stuff is expensive.
So what did the government memetic engineers pick to base their new pretend-historical diet around? Rice. For the following reasons:
The Japanese government enamored itself so thoroughly with polished white rice that their soldiers, sailors, factory workers, students, and so on got beriberi thiamine deficiency. This got so bad that in the Russo-Japanese War, beriberi killed Japanese soldiers at a rate comparable to combat with the Russians. The Japanese created an agricultural policy that ruined the health of the nation—especially their troops—because of memetic engineering because of nationalism because of the need to build a strong military.
Fortunately, Japan quickly learned its lesson and switched to ramen noodles, instead.
Just kidding! First of all, if you visit a kombini today, it'll be full of polished white rice, not millet and barley. Secondly, the reason Japan eats lots of ramen today has nothing to do with beriberi and everything to do with war.
In 1945, WWII ended. The United States had liberated Japan's imperial conquests and bombed the country to ashes. Japanese people were starving. Fortunately, the United States had a wheat surplus. Unfortunately, Japan had just spend >100 years conditioning its population into believing that all they ate was rice. By that time, everyone who remembered the truth had died of old age. So the United States created a new propaganda campaign getting the Japanese population to eat wheat.
To do this they popularized a niche food made out of wheat called ramen noodles. "Ramen" is the Japanese mispronunciation of the Chinese word "lamien". Ramen noodles were a Chinese food that poor Chinese immigrants sold to Japanese people. Ramen's rebranding into a Japanese food happened before 1945, but its mass adoption in the post-occupation food shortage turned it into a staple.
Now, in 2025, if you asked a random Japanese person or LLM "what is traditional Japanese food", they'd answer "[polished] white rice". Millet, barley and unpolished rice won't even be on the list. In this way, historical food has been completely disconnected from what is memetically classified as "traditional" food. This is the direct consequence of nationalist memetic engineering, and an indirect consequence of a Molochian political/geopolitical competition that transforms every civilization into nation-states.
I'm using Japan because it's an easy-to-understand example, but the same principles apply to all contemporary nation-states. Our memetic environment is so corrupted by nationalist narratives, that even if you give up modern food (potato chips, soda) and replace it with seemingly traditional food (polished white rice, bread, pasta), you'll still be eating sugar by the standards of hunter-gatherers. I mean that literally.
The USA government recommendation in particular is pure nonsense. They use dairy as a food group that everyone should eat. The majority of adult human beings are lactose intolerant!
How long until the USA changes it again? Or just abolishes it altogether.
Colloquially, we use the word "sugar" to refer to highly refined sugars like high-fructose corn syrup. But chemically-speaking, the complex carbohydrates in rice, pasta and bread are chains of sugars too. Modern packagings of carbohydrates do take longer to digest, which makes them not as bad as simple carbohydrates, but that doesn't make them good.
But didn't European peasants eat a diet of mostly bread? Technically yes, but that's just as misleading as claiming that Japanese peasants historically ate rice. White wheaten bread was something elites ate. Peasants ate bread made out of rye, barley, and oats. (Potatoes were introduced after the Colombian Exchange.) Some peasants ate wheat too, but the resultant bread was nothing like modern white and wheat breads. It was dark, bitter, and high in fiber. In times of famine, they ate legumes. Think "survival food". How was the metabolic health of European peasants? Fine. Their diet caused non-metabolic problems like protein malnutrition, niacin deficiency, scurvy, rickets, and chronic childhood malnutrition. But obesity and diabetes were extremely rare. Those were diseases of the minority urban rich.
Food used to be precious. Historical people ate the tastiest food they could acquire. In this way, there is no "historical human diet". There are a variety of historical diets. On one extreme are the Inuit who ate a diet of almost entirely meat. At the other extreme are Eurasian peasants who ate a diet of mostly coarse grain. Pastoral nomads could get half of their calories from milk. Hunter-gatherers supplemented hunting with foraging for nuts and tubers. Many of these diets caused problems. The New Guinean cannibals got prion disease from eating each others' brains. But there are two commonalities between normal (read: poor) people in every historical society that we know of.
Which means that our reference class isn't just hunter-gatherers. It's "every society on Earth before 1800". Why am I obsessing over refined carbohydrates? Why not seed oils and olive oils? Because the diet I grew up on was based on rice and pasta. The oil I use for cooking is a small fraction of my total caloric intake. I have heard of people chugging olive oil for the calories, but I don't know any IRL.
Once I put all of these pieces together, I realized that my "traditional" rice-and-noodle-based diet is already damaging my health. I immediately made it a priority to overhaul my diet.
The simplest way to do this would probably be to just go with the "paleo" diet (by which I mean the modern diet marketed as "paleo"). Unfortunately, the "paleo" diet is based around eating meat. I don't have a problem with eating meat in theory, but I consider factory farming unethical, and modern animal products tend to come from factory farms by default. Fortunately, I have found some local milk producers that seem to treat the cows tolerably well.
But even that's not quite enough protein. Nuts provide a bit of protein, but the best source is legumes: beans, peas, lentils. Over the last couple weeks, I've mostly eliminated rice/pasta/bread from my diet and have instead based my diet around beans (supplemented with coarse bulgur) instead.
My favorite thing to make over and over again is the following bean dish.
Ingredients
Instructions
Is this a historical diet? No, but the Pareto Principle is at work here and this is way closer to a historical diet than anything else I've ever eaten. The most interesting thing is digestive speed. Beans take a long time to digest—and not just because they have lots of fiber. Previously, with my more normative diet, I'd get a sugar crash after every meal. Now my energy level is much more stable, which is a sign that what I'm eating is better for my metabolic health.
This is difficult to prove because correlation ≠ causation. However, it makes sense mechanistically. ↩︎
Controversy warning: Personally I believe this claim is probably true, but there is ongoing debate among experts. ↩︎
2025-11-23 15:54:55
Published on November 23, 2025 7:54 AM GMT
After reading my last set of memories, a friend said that there was a theme of rule-breaking that he wanted me to bring out more. I said I wasn't sure what he meant. Then I read it back, and every single memory included either a student getting expelled, a teacher getting fired, me committing a crime, or some other rule being broken.
So, to continue the theme, here are two more that I forgot.
A girlfriend of mine would sing with the opera singers. She would also smoke cigarettes and weed literally every day. I'd go out into the city with her where she'd smoke with her fellow singers. They'd be in a back alley smoking, talking shit about people they didn't like. Once in a while, one of them would recall a song they liked, and start singing. Then all of them would break out into song, perfectly harmonized with each other, until the cigarettes would kick in, and they'd all end up coughing.
The register of her voice dropped over the years, due to singing.
She was kind of crazy and lied to me all the time about lots of crazy stories. She told me she'd had a stillbirth child. She told me she'd had sex with a guy with two penises. She told me that her father knew a lot of semi-famous pedophiles. She told me she had terminal cancer, and had me touch a bump on her head that she said was the cancer. I found this all a somewhat disorienting experience. Somehow I was not traumatized by this? It just, all sounded like the genre of "crazy things she'd say"? Importantly she was never especially upset about this. She was just plainly telling me stuff that happened to her. She wasn't freaking out, so I didn't either.
We eventually broke up when it wasn't as fun any more; I felt that I wanted to break up with her, and then she broke up with me, and then I felt like I'd not honored myself in being confident and done it first.
But it was really fun while it lasted.
One of my friends introduced me to LessWrong. In the cafeteria, he handed me the math problem at the top of An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem, for I was known to be Good At Math.
I got it wrong.
This was quite annoying, and so I proceeded to read the whole essay. Later on I downloaded an ePub of all of Eliezer's blogposts in chronological order, which I read every night for a few months (skipping the quantum mechanics and meta-ethics sequence).
Anyway, there's more to that, but I mostly want to cut to when he found Gwern's site. We read about his self-blinded trial of modalert, and decided to buy some ourselves when we were 17. We had it delivered, and we took one during an early day of the new school year. We both felt pretty good and more alert/awake, nothing super far beyond what placebo could've explained, but decided to keep going.
Anyway, at some point in this period my mum, for some reason, decided to read my texts, and found out about this. She was not okay with this. She said that very stupid and foolish kids did drugs, and that she'd known kids who'd died from taking various pills and drugs. That morning I was an hour or two late for school as she sat me down. She explained she'd contacted my friends' parents to inform them too. We weren't allowed to hang out together for a few months after that.
...in recent years, she's had long-covid, which makes her very tired during the day. I gave her some modafinil, and she's used it to reclaim many days of her life. The other day she asked me what a good daily dosage is, and I pointed her to the exact same Gwern post; whereas once it brought her great anger, now she is grateful for its existence and advice :)
2025-11-23 15:24:41
Published on November 23, 2025 7:24 AM GMT
[I am delighted to be visiting Inkhaven for the next four days and will attempt to post every day I'm here.]
There is a Chinese tradition for using water as a metaphor for human nature.
人往高处走，水往低处流
As water flows downwards, people climb upwards. ~ proverb
Here the nature of water is that it inexorably follows the laws of gravity downwards, just as humans follow their incentives. It's worth noting that social climbing has a negative connotation in modern English; it has a positive valence in this proverb.
水滴石穿
Dripping water penetrates the stone. ~ proverb
Here the nature of water is to be stubborn, patient and relentless, burrowing through even solid rock over centuries.
Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend. ~ Bruce Lee
Here, the nature of water is to be flexible, lightfooted, and agile. Attachment to a fixed solid form makes one vulnerable and brittle. Flowing around obstacles like liquid is the way to resilience.
Given that we are more than 50% water by mass, these metaphors are quite natural. I am here to propose yet another way humans are like water, with the benefit of a little high school chemistry.
I remember AP Chem as a whirlwind of "experiments," some officially approved, others less so. We hid in the back of the room playing phone games, flicking our fingers through the blue flame of the Bunsen Burner, and dipping our tongues into unknown solutions to test their acidity. My favorite insight from that class derived not from any fancy spectrum or iridescent reaction, but from a simple experiment about holding a charged object near a stream of water (imagine dripping it out of a pipette).
Recall that in H2O, the two H's tend not to stand exactly opposite each other but in a slightly obtuse triangle with the O, and O is famously electronegative. So, the O end is charged slightly negative, and the H end positive. This is called an electric dipole, an molecule with two differently charged parts that has no net charge altogether.
What happens when a positively charged object is held next to a moving stream of water? Answer: water bends towards the positive charge.
What if instead the object is negatively charged? Answer: water bends towards the negative charge. Electric dipoles are attracted to charged objects, regardless of the charge.
How is it possible for a substance to be attracted to be both positive and negative charges? This blew my mind at the time - it violated all the naïve intuitions I'd developed in my twenty minutes contemplating Coulomb's Law.
Here's what happens when water stands next to a positive charge.
The positive charge attracts each negative pole, so all the water molecules turn to face it with their negatively charged O side. But now, after they turned, the O's are a smidge closer to the positive charge than the H's - so by Coulomb's law the attraction to each O overwhelms the corresponding repulsion to the H side. Thus, water, though itself uncharged, is (slightly) attracted to positive charges!
What happens if the sign is flipped on the big charge? Exactly the same local dynamic, except the O's face away now. If the big particle is made negatively charged, all the O's turn around, and again there is a net attraction towards the charge. This explains why water is attracted to charges of both signs. In some environments, water acts like a positive charge, in others, negative.
Exercise: what happens when liquid water is replaced with solid ice?
Humans are like water: we have dipole nature. Most of us wear different faces in different company, and that leads to different interactions. Does this mean that we are necessarily two-faced and lacking integrity? Maybe so, but it is worth being very careful about the connotations here. At least in chemistry it is possible for a single internally consistent particle to behave like a positive charge in one environment, and a negative charge in another.
One. When it comes out that a politician, executive, or professor has been abusing their underlings, colleagues and supervisors (i.e. equal and higher-status folks) often come out of the woodwork in their defense: "He was such a lovely guy!" "I couldn't imagine him being an abuser!" "You must be exaggerating, or lying, or have done something to deserve it!"
We now have common knowledge of the category of error made by these well-meaning defenders: they mistake dipoles for monopoles. Just because he is nice and collegial to you, doesn't mean he is to everyone.
But does that make the abuser an aberration, a violation of the laws of normal human nature, a scheming, Machiavellian psychopath infinitely beyond the comprehension of Hobbiton? Perhaps not - perhaps dipole nature is just a default behavior for human particles.
Two. Mia gets upset when her childhood friends change. When they start earning adult incomes, their lifestyles inflate. Her friends learn to wield power, and lord it over others. In the presence of the powerful, the famous, and the sexy, they become unprecedentedly obsequious and subservient.
Mia complains to me about all these things. About losing friends, losing faith in humanity, and even losing confidence in her own principles.
I tell her these things should not be surprising, this is how humans are.
She accuses me of being too cynical, to believe that all humans are evil wrapped in a Reese's cup paper of respectability.
But that's not how I see it. Humans have dipole nature, and the existence of the negative pole does not invalidate the authenticity of the positive. Her same childhood friends, who are now airheaded clout-chasers and corporate fief-lords, if supplanted into the right environment, might yet turn their poles right round and face the world with the same integrity and wholesomeness Mia remembers fondly from grade school.
Three. I forget the source, but one theory of writing good books is to first write a great sentence, and then fill in the rest of the book around the sentence. One of my favorite pop-psych books, "Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come" by Jessica Pan, is a touching story about overcoming introversion. There is an especially fantastic sentence inside, perhaps great enough to carry the whole book on its own:
Nobody waves, but everybody waves back.
In other words, positivity and pro-social behavior is easily elicited by an initial gesture of goodwill. If you live in a world of dipoles, it is useful to learn to elicit their positive poles. In Pan's book, this means passersby will freely wave and smile back if you do it first. In math research, this means strangers rarely invite me to initiate new collaborations, but if I make the invitation, they almost always accept.
While dipole nature is understandable, comprehensible, and not a bit reprehensible, there is another, rarer way of being. There are those happy few who have monopole nature, who wear a single, immutable face regardless of the company. In a world full of dipoles, the whole social environment reorients itself around monopoles.
There are negative monopoles, of course.
That aunt that criticizes every meal and calls every child fat, in private and in public. Everyone tacitly dislikes but tolerates her for the sake of family. At Thanksgiving, the whole family walks on eggshells around her to minimize the electric potential and keep the peace.
That aggressive, spoiled brat in your son's kindergarten class who somehow still gets invited to every birthday party. When he comes to the parents' table to demand a third slice of cake, he is greeted by a sea of smiles. But those smiles do not reach eyes.
There are also positive monopoles, folks who are relentlessly pro-social and never bend the knee. Those described rightfully by words like "courage," and "integrity." We all have our personal heroes who embody these traits - I will not pollute your image with descriptions of mine. If the first step is to come to terms with our own dipole nature, the next step is to aspire to a positive monopole nature.
But it must be said that even to verify whether one has monopole nature is not easy - it is not enough to check that in this one electric field, the molecule moves like a positive charge. This is why the heroes of the best novels are tested by many ordeals, of a variety of polarities.
Humans are like water; we have dipole nature. I hope this is as useful a metaphor for you as it has been for me.
2025-11-23 12:54:23
Published on November 23, 2025 4:54 AM GMT
Author: 清风学渣
Link: https://www.zhihu.com/question/10967114707/answer/1904046054904665233
Source: Zhihu
Copyright belongs to the author. For commercial reprints, please contact the author for authorization. For non-commercial reprints, please indicate the source.
I’ve seen a lot of discussions about Liang Wenfeng online. Yesterday, I happened to be on the phone with a close friend from my university year, and we talked about him too. So here, I’ll shamelessly piggyback[1] on the fame of my old university classmate, Liang Wenfeng. Some netizens wanted to know what Liang Wenfeng was like during his undergraduate years before he got into investment and the AI industry, so this answer is to satisfy a little bit of that curiosity. I hope these “revelations”[2] won’t affect Mr. Liang’s privacy. If they do, please remind me, and the author[3] will modify or delete the post.
The author and Liang Wenfeng were both in the Electronic & Information Engineering program, Class of ‘02, at Zhejiang University.[4] We weren’t in the same class but participated in the same Electronics Design Contest. Although we had some contact during our four years as classmates, we weren’t in the same dorm or class, so my impressions of him are limited and fragmented.
Impression 1: In our sophomore year, while the rest of us were dutifully attending classes, doing homework, and preparing for exams, Liang Wenfeng was already self-studying digital and analog circuits and had started his own engineering projects. What left a deep impression was that he handled everything himself—from circuit design, PCB, and microcontroller programming to creating a UI for software similar to a mini-player (back in 2004, creating a software UI was a highly technical skill). He modified a regular guitar into an electric one, where the guitar’s sound effects could be controlled via a UI on the computer. This design seemed incredibly impressive at the time; we all said “Wow!”[5] when we saw it. He humbly said the guitar’s tuning wasn’t great and it would be even better if it could tune itself automatically. I suppose you could see this as a testament to the early seeds of his ideas about AI and intelligence.
Impression 2: He rarely attended classes; he self-studied most subjects. My guess is that he felt the professors’ pace was too slow and a waste of time, and that self-studying was faster. The downside was that he missed out on the professor “highlighting key points,”[6] which put him at a disadvantage[7] during exams. Liang Wenfeng’s GPA[8] in our major wasn’t outstanding back then; he was in the upper-middle range and didn’t meet the threshold for graduate school recommendation[9] (at Zhejiang University, the recommendation rate for regular majors was the top 5%). He was later able to secure a recommendation for graduate school thanks to winning first prize in the National Electronics Design Contest. More on that below.
Impression 3: In university, Liang Wenfeng cycled through several provinces in East China by himself. Apparently, he often just found a place in the wild to sleep on the ground[10] at night, and he completed the whole trip without spending much money. This hasn’t been verified, but I learned about it from a hot post on the “88” BBS[11] around the time of our graduation, titled “Liang Wenfeng, the Pride of ‘02 Telecom.” The poster was one of his electronics design contest teammates, so the credibility should be very high.
Impression 4: During the summer of his junior year, Liang Wenfeng and two other classmates from our department signed up for the National Undergraduate Electronics Design Contest. At the time, none of the three were top students in terms of grades, but their competition performance was outstanding. Liang was naturally the team’s key player. During the internal training at Zhejiang University, he single-handedly solved many of the design problems. In the final competition, their team won first place in the province and a national first prize. All three of them earned the qualification to be recommended for graduate studies at Zhejiang University. However, because the national prizes for the contest were announced in October that year, after Zhejiang University’s deadline for graduate school recommendations had passed, Liang had to start his graduate studies a year later. This is why there is a one-year gap between his undergraduate (2002-2006) and graduate (2007-2010) degrees. During that gap year, he supposedly continued to work on electronic sensor system design and products, which was his forte. I believe it was related to something like marine navigation. He handled the hardware, software, and algorithms all by himself. Any one of the electronic systems he built as an undergraduate would have been more than sufficient[12] as a master’s thesis in electrical engineering.
Impression 5: Liang Wenfeng has always been low-key, ever since his undergraduate days. So much so that many students in our major didn’t know him well; they mostly heard about him after he won the national electronics design contest first prize in our senior year. That’s why, despite the overwhelming[13] hype around DeepSeek recently, he just didn’t[14] come out to post an article, say a word, or record a video. As his university classmates, we are not at all surprised by his low-key behavior. Most people don’t have that kind of composure and steadiness. (Addendum: Thinking back now, Liang Wenfeng wasn’t intentionally being low-key. Rather, his intense focus when doing things made him appear that way—it’s like Huang Yaoshi’s final assessment of Zhou Botong: “Old Imp, oh Old Imp, you are truly remarkable. I, Huang Laoxie, am indifferent to ‘fame’; Reverend Yideng sees ‘fame’ as an illusion. Only you, your heart is completely empty, you never even had the concept of ‘fame’ in your mind. In this, you are a cut above us.”)[15]
Conclusion: Liang Wenfeng created his own success in his own way. He didn’t live his university life according to the requirements of a traditional good student, nor did he study the worldly arts of social navigation.[16] He is a prime example of “Be Yourself” among Chinese university students, and an example of a modern educated youth changing his own destiny (and perhaps even the nation’s destiny) through entrepreneurship. High-Flyer AI[17] was just the appetizer,[18] and DeepSeek is just the beginning. As his old classmate, I am thrilled to see the outstanding contributions he has made to the world’s technological development, and I am honored to have seen the fledgling eagle before it embarked on its great journey.[19]
I hope the sharing above can be of some inspiration and encouragement to the tech youth of China. Chase your dream, and be yourself！
Piggyback (碰瓷, pèngcí): Literally “porcelain bumping,” a type of scam. In modern internet slang, it means to associate oneself with a more famous person to gain attention, akin to “clout-chasing.” It is used here in a self-deprecating, humorous way.
“Revelations” (爆料, bàoliào): Literally “exploding material.” Slang for “a scoop” or “an exposé.” The author uses it playfully as the information is positive, not scandalous.
Author (答主, dázhǔ): Literally “answer owner.” The standard term for the author of an answer on the Q&A site Zhihu.
Zhejiang University (浙大, Zhèdà): The common abbreviation for 浙江大学, one of China’s top C9 League universities.
Wow! (哇塞, wāsāi): A common exclamation of surprise and amazement, similar to “Whoa!” or “Cool!”.
“Highlighting key points” (划重点, huà zhòngdiǎn): A common practice where professors tell students exactly which topics will be on an exam, enabling effective cramming.
At a disadvantage (吃亏, chīkuī): Literally “to eat a loss.” A common phrase meaning to suffer a loss or be at a disadvantage.
GPA (绩点, jìdiǎn): Grade Point Average.
Graduate school recommendation (保研, bǎoyán): A prestigious path where top-performing undergraduates are directly admitted to graduate programs without taking the national entrance exam.
Sleep on the ground (打地铺, dǎ dìpù): “To make a bed on the floor.” Implies sleeping in rough conditions, often when traveling on a tight budget.
“88” BBS: “88” most likely refers to the Zhejiang University student BBS (Bulletin Board System), a popular online forum for students in the pre-social media era.
More than sufficient (绰绰有余, chuòchuò yǒuyú): A Chinese idiom meaning “ample” or “more than enough.”
Overwhelming (铺天盖地, pūtiān gàidì): An idiom meaning “covering the sky and blanketing the earth,” used to describe something widespread and all-encompassing.
Just didn’t (愣是, lèngshi): An adverb emphasizing stubbornness or an unexpected outcome, like “he just plain didn’t...”
The quote from The Legend of the Condor Heroes: This famous quote from Jin Yong’s wuxia novel is used to illustrate that Liang’s low-key nature is not a cultivated indifference to fame (like the characters Huang Yaoshi or Reverend Yideng) but a natural state of being so focused on his work that the concept of fame is entirely absent from his mind (like the character Zhou Botong), which is presented as a superior state of being.
Worldly arts of social navigation (人情世故, rénqíng shìgù): An idiom referring to social etiquette, nuances of interpersonal relationships, and the unwritten rules of navigating society.
High-Flyer AI (幻方, Huànfāng): The Chinese name for the quantitative hedge fund Liang Wenfeng co-founded before DeepSeek.
Appetizer (前菜, qiáncài): A starter course before the main meal.
“The fledgling eagle before it embarked on its great journey” (雏鹰在鹏程万里之前, chúyīng zài péngchéng wànlǐ zhīqián): A metaphor combining two elements. “雏鹰” is a “fledgling eagle.” “鹏程万里” is an idiom from Zhuangzi meaning “a journey of ten thousand li like a roc,” signifying a vast and brilliant future.
