2026-04-22 23:00:16
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the Enneagram. As I explored previously, I think it has something important to teach us about liberation from suffering, and as I continue this exploration, I occasionally hit on ideas that seem worth sharing. Today’s is about how a person’s Enneagram type can inform what lineage of Buddhism they should practice in.
Now, sure, not everyone wants to practice Buddhism, so this idea is conditioned on the assumption that you do. And if you do, you’re faced with a choice of Buddhisms.
I know from the outside Buddhism looks like one thing, but really it’s a cluster of multiple traditions divided between various schools and lineages. Each has its own style of practice. Some styles fit some people better than others. The challenge is in knowing which style is going to be a fit for you.
For example, I found myself drawn to Zen. I also regularly meet people who bounced off Zen but found a home in Theravada or Vajrayana. Until recently, I didn’t really have a theory as to why, other than different people are different and need different things. But I’m starting to suspect that a large part of that difference can be explained by the Enneagram.
Recall that Enneagram types are grounded in what we might call the core wound or trauma a person carries—the thing they most deeply want in the world because they feel it’s what they need to make themselves whole. All of these wounds are some version of “not enough”, but the specific manifestation of not-enoughness is what makes the types different. I summarize the wounds for each type as:
I’m not right enough
I’m not lovable enough
I’m not valuable enough
I’m not authentic enough
I’m not capable enough
I’m not safe enough
I’m not free enough
I’m not protected enough
I’m not important enough
The type of wound a person has matters a lot to practice because it determines much about what’s separating them from awakening. For example, as a 4, what was preventing me from resolving the Great Matter was an inability to accept that I might not be special, since if I’m not special, I might be like everyone else, and if I’m like everyone else, I’m not authentic. In contrast, a 2 has to accept they’re lovable, a 6 that they’re safe, a 9 that they’re important, and so on.
My theory is that some Buddhist traditions do a better job of meeting some of these wounds than others. On this theory, it’s not mere coincidence that I came to Zen practice, and specifically Soto Zen; it’s that Soto Zen is set up in a way that handles the needs of 4s better than other forms of Buddhism do, and that’s why I felt at home there. This isn’t to say that Soto Zen is only a place for 4s, only that it has features that make it disproportionately adapted to their spiritual needs.
So which schools and lineages are best for which types? Here’s my current thinking, with the caveats that I’m not a scholar of religion and I’m writing from inside Zen, meaning I know the landscape better closer to home and less well farther out:
Theravada. 1s want to get things right, and Theravada gives them a clear, systematic path with explicit moral precepts and well-defined stages to work through. What they find, though, if they carry the practice far enough, is that they were right enough all along.
Christianity? Buddhism isn’t great at working with 2s. What they need is a practice centered in unconditional love, and what Buddhism has to offer is too impersonal, or if it is personal, as from a teacher, then too risky. But you know what religion is great at providing unconditional love? Christianity. I’m sure Christian mystics have paths to awakening, there’s a long tradition of Christian meditation, I just don’t know much about any of it. There’s probably other options, too, and maybe even some within Buddhism I’m just not aware of.
Theravada. Theravada works for 3s, too. They want to achieve, to succeed, and to accomplish. Theravada offers all that through explicit stages, maps, and attainments, and in the end they get to attain something they already had to begin with.
Soto Zen. Soto Zen says you’re already awakened, you just don’t realize it, and through practice you can have that realization. This directly meets the 4’s sense that something essential is missing, and the thing that was missing was zazen.
Theravada. Theravada also works for 5s, but again for different reasons. More than other living traditions, Theravada has a strong scholastic side in the Abhidhamma, and this gives 5s a pathway to convincing themselves of the value of the more embodied practices that will ultimately be necessary.
Vajrayana or Pure Land. The 6 needs someone to take refuge in. Vajrayana is built around devotional practices to teachers, ancestors, and deities that fill this need. Pure Land works similarly, though in a more impersonal way, that eventually leads the 6 to see they didn’t need a protector, but to see they were safe from the beginning.
Eclecticism. Nailing down 7s to a single thing is basically impossible. They’re unlikely to be happy in one place. Tantric practices will be appealing to them, as will practices from Dzogchen and Zen that point directly to awakening. But realistically they’re going to mix practices from various traditions, and many will struggle to settle down until they’re already far along the path.
Rinzai Zen. Unlike Soto Zen, which heavily emphasizes meeting the moment in stillness, Rinzai asks students to meet the moment in action. Rinzai teachers are notorious for doing wild things to help their students wake up, from shouting and hitting to asking them to answer impossible questions. 8s meet these moments, find themselves exposed, survive, and then discover that, in the end, everything is okay.
(There’s also some interesting Enneagram theory-craft about how 4s and 8s are “the same” except that 4s turn inward and 8s turn outward, so it makes some sense they’d be on opposite sides of a pair of closely related lineages.)
Monasticism. Rather than best fitting a specific lineage, 9s are well adapted to monastic practice. Their desire to merge is acknowledged and contained by the monastic structure, and any lineage that offers that will serve them well. Even in lay practice, they’ll do well in more traditional groups that create the same kind of formal container that monastic practice provides. This structure can be found in many traditions, but, in the West, Zen is probably the most accessible and reliable option for getting what they need.
I’m sure more matchings work, and I know plenty of people practicing in lineages outside this mapping. In fact, I know plenty of 6s in Zen, which is surprising, because the 6 reaction to zazen is almost always the same: panic. And yet, sometimes, they stay. I’m sure you can find people of every Enneagram type in every lineage, as the teacher, student, and specific context matter far more than the general pattern of practice in a lineage. But, if you’re currently looking to take up a Buddhist practice and having a hard time finding your fit, I think it’s worth looking to your Enneagram type for guidance.
2026-04-22 22:32:04
On December 1st, 2025, the GDM mech interp team published a LessWrong article declaring a pivot to a pragmatic approach to interpretability. Much time had been lost chasing numbers in SAE reconstruction loss; they argued that optimizing such proxies did not get them closer to their north star: making AI go well through understanding how deep neural networks process information mechanistically. Has AI control gone the way of mech interp? Is its north star of stopping harmful actions from human-level AI on track?
In mech interp, SAE reconstruction loss turned out to be a number you could optimize without getting closer to understanding models. My worry is that Pareto safety–usefulness frontiers are becoming the same kind of number for control: optimizable, publishable, and only loosely coupled to how fast we can catch a scheming model in production.
On December 31st, 2025, Alibaba reported an incident where, without instructions to do so, their models in their RL runs circumvented security policies and diverted training GPUs for crypto-mining [1]. The authors took actions to prevent this from recurring, and called on the broader community to take such failure modes seriously. AI control can help mitigate such incidents, but its north star is set on post-deployment.
I recently spent three months on an AI control project, stacking defensive protocols to optimize a safety–usefulness trade-off. Then I read an article on AI-assisted red-teaming. AI control is supposed to defend against human-level AI, but the line between a human red team and an AI-augmented one has started to blur. And we're still optimizing our proxy task of safety-usefulness frontiers as if that line were clean.
Even when control works as intended post-deployment and catches an attack, the technical job ends where the organizational one begins. Between the time a model is flagged and the time it is pulled, there are weeks of discovery, escalation, and legal review during which a frontier model keeps acting on the world (damage calculator). That window is the thing we should be trying to shrink.
The damage done would be larger without AI control. But the proxy task of optimizing Pareto frontiers is far removed from what actually matters, and, like SAE reconstruction loss before it, risks becoming a number we optimize because it's easier than measuring what we care about: minimizing the time window a bad model has before detection. The sooner we intervene, the less damage it can do, and the more context we have to understand its behavior. And as we have seen, this can be detected and stopped as early as during training/RL.
To be clear, pre-deployment interventions already exist in the control literature. Korbak et al. (2025) sketch a "control safety case" that models how safe an agent would be to deploy [2]. Lindner et al. (2025) explicitly identify latency as one of three safety conditions for frontier monitoring [3]. Yet most papers still default to a post-deployment north star and proxy-task optimization, without asking where in the lifecycle interventions would be most effective.
We should lift our gaze from proxy tasks and reconsider where our efforts have the most impact. The crypto-mining incident shows why pre-deployment matters: it was detected and stopped during training, not after release.
Citations.
[1] Wang, Xu, An, Dai, Gao et al. (2025), Let It Flow: Building the ROME Model within an Open Agentic Learning Ecosystem, arXiv:2512.24873.
[2] Korbak et al. (2025), A sketch of an AI control safety case, arXiv:2501.17315.
[3] Lindner et al. (2025), Practical challenges of control monitoring in frontier AI deployments, arXiv:2512.22154.
2026-04-22 21:54:47
[Part of Organizational Cultures sequence]
Returning again to Bowling Alone after our previous discussion, we have Putnam describing the distinction between machers ("makers") and schmoozers:
In Yiddish, men and women who invest lots of time in formal organizations are often termed machers - that is, people who make things happen in the community. By contrast, those who spend many hours in informal conversation and communion are termed schmoozers. This distinction mirrors an important reality in American social life. [...] The two types of social involvement overlap to some extent - major-league machers are often world-class schmoozers, and vice versa. [...] Nevertheless, as an empirical matter, the two syndromes are largely distinct - many people are active in one sphere but not the other. (Bowling Alone, chapter 6)
"Schmoozing" has a somewhat negative connotation in English - implying some amount of insincerity, obsequiousness, etc. - but Putnam intends no such implication. He also does not suggest that either one is better than the other - rather he says both are important, and both are declining, to the detriment of our society. So, is it maching that enables schmoozing, or is it the other way around? Putnam seems to think it goes both ways (see chapter 9).
However, in the cultural context I currently find myself in, I get the sense that the maching→schmoozing flow is the more load-bearing of the two. Others here have echoed that sentiment (1, 2). I suppose it's because we LessWrong readers tend to be highly-mobile urban professionals who don't have a well-established preexisting community to fall back on, and so opportunities for schmoozing will simply not exist unless someone "machs" them.
Now certainly I would not encourage anyone to take this to the extreme. All maching and no schmoozing makes Jack a dull socially-maladjusted boy.
On the other hand though, lately I've been positively swimming in schmooze. As social capital, this is not worth nothing, but it does get old after a while. There are only so many late-night parties I can go to before I find myself tediously rehashing the same stories and jokes. And in terms of social capital, a schmoozefest only really benefits the people directly involved, and only for a fleeting moment before their memories fade. Maching, by contrast, is the gift that keeps on giving. If done well, it can work to the benefit of people who may never meet you and never know of your existence, but who come along later and appreciate the thing that you have (ahem) gemacht.
But if you want to mach things with that kind of staying power, having a guild structure is a prerequisite - or at least a big help. This is because, firstly, people are unlikely to step up and contribute to a group effort unless they have some ownership stake in the result - just as home-renters have much less reason to devote their blood-sweat-and-tears into home improvements than do home-owners. And secondly, ambitious community-building projects can only hope to transcend the particular individuals involved if there is some kind of institutional memory - and this requires having an "institution" in the first place.
For example, here are some machings a medium-sized LessWrong group might attempt, in ascending order of ambition:
That all being said, however, let me pivot to a defense of schmoozing - not as social capital, but as something else.
In relation to the rationality community, I used to be a maching-maximalist. I was of the opinion that all the schmoozing in the community was at best an entertaining diversion, and at worst a distraction from the community's mission - and I offended a number of people by saying this.
What changed my mind about this was my evolving understanding of what the rationality community is. This, in turn, was borne of my vain attempts to draw up a "creed of rationality" akin to those variously adopted by Christian denominations. I started a group within the community which I called the "Philosophy Working Group" because I imagined that the group would meet a few times, figure out the correct "rationalist" stance on every issue, write up a document summarizing its findings, and then swiftly disband. Needless to say, that was not how it went. Instead, even the most banal philosophical propositions would be met with some kind of "well actually..." response. But the ensuing debates were far from fruitless or unenlightening; I came away from those conversations with my mind having been broadened to consider different perspectives that I would never have come up with myself. It's just that what I learned was something that is not easily distilled into a concise written document. I suppose you had to be there.
So, schmoozing is not pointless, and it is not separable from the rationalist intellectual project. In actual practice, rationality is not a set of beliefs, but a mode of discourse. When you're talking to someone, the fact that they're a LessWrong-style rationalist is immediately evident from the way they approach the conversation - a certain set of concepts and memes, epistemic habits, methods of getting at the crux of the issue, and various other quirks that people can try to define but which we largely need to learn-by-doing.
(Joke I read somewhere: What is the definition of a "rationalist"? Base case: Eliezer Yudkowsky is a rationalist. Inductive case: Anyone who gets into arguments with a rationalist is a rationalist.)
In other words, rationality is a language. We employ it because we believe it will help us along the way in figuring out what is true and how best to achieve some nebulous notion of "the good" - even if we can't agree on what that is. But like any language, one cannot learn it solely from textbooks; one must have conversation partners. For this we need schmoozing, and we need people to mach it happen.
2026-04-22 21:47:35
In Only Law Can Prevent Extinction, Eliezer Yudkowsky argues that creating a strict, globally-enforced regulatory framework for artificial intelligence development is the best, and perhaps only, chance for humanity to prevent extinction from misaligned AI. This post is one of the most upvoted posts on Less Wrong in the past year, yet many people on this forum also seem to adhere to the idea that interacting with electoral politics is pointless or even counterproductive. For people who hold this view, I have a simple question: how do you expect ambitious AI regulation resembling the regulatory framework proposed by Yudkowsky to be implemented without the existence of a political movement that supports AI Safety?
The model for change for a lot of people on this form seems to approximate the following: perhaps due to a shocking display of AI capabilities, or AI having a tangible effect on employment, or a gradual shift in public opinion, enough politicians will independently realize that AI poses a credible threat to the long-term future of humanity and implement effective AI regulations before it is too late to meaningfully change the trajectory of AI development. While this story might feel credible at a glance, history has demonstrated that politicians are slow to change their minds on things, especially if there is no clear, electorally-minded pressure campaign focused on the issue.
There are numerous examples of popular policies not being implemented that demonstrate this. For one, take Marijuana Legalization. Majorities have supported Marijuana legalizaition since 2013, yet the drug remains illegal on the federal level to this day. America's embargo of Cuba is another clear example of popular will being derailed by legislative inertia. A plurality of Americans have supported ending the embargo against Cuba since 1999, but the embargo, which started in 1960, is still in place today, with only a temporary lull during the Obama administration. Finally, one can look to asbestos. Despite a lack of polling on the issue, asbestos has been known to be carcinogenic, with thousands of Americans dying each year due to asbestos-linked illnesses. Nevertheless, despite many Americans believing that an asbestos ban is already in place, it took until 2016 for Congress to delegate the full authority to regulate asbestos to the EPA, and until 2024 for a ban on chrysotile asbestos, a type of asbestos with clear carcinogenic properties, to be enacted by the EPA (certain forms of asbestos are still legal to use in the US to this day). One can find other examples of legislative inertia, but the point is clear: Congress, in its current form, does not reliably pass even popular legislation into law when it relates to an issue that does not seriously threaten the reelection of its members.
"Ah, but AI is different from other political issues. The development of powerful AI threatens the lives of politicians and their families, so they will obviously create regulation once AI capabilities improve/ automate more jobs/ demonstrate scarier capabilities/ more consensus is built in AI research," you claim.
Wrong. AI risk is a highly complicated issue, and even top AI researchers have trouble agreeing on precisely how dangerous it is. Politicians, who on average have far, far less expertise in AI, are more likely to be lobbied by AI companies, are older, and are broadly less intelligent compared to top AI researchers, will not likely support the massive regulatory agenda espoused by Yudkowsky (anytime soon) without massive electoral pressure forcing them to do so. Furthermore, politicians are also more insulated from automation than almost anyone else in the country. AI systems cannot legally run for office, and even if they could in theory, I doubt most politicians would imagine they would lose an election to a non-human candidate.
AI is also different from other political issues because it has a massive lobby that seeks to oppose AI regulation. Ultimately, whether or not supporters of AI Safety engage with electoral politics, the AI accelerationists will do so regardless. Individuals and organizations who do not want the US government to seriously regulate AI have already concluded that electoral politics is a fruitful area to invest in and have pledged to sink billions of dollars into races around the United States. At the very least, should those who support AI Safety try to counterbalance the political influence of the Pro-Al Lobby?
I am not going to sugarcoat things. Politics is highly complex and difficult to plan around. Even the best candidates can flame out for seemingly insignificant reasons, and even the best-run campaigns sometimes run into unexpected difficulties. Furthermore, given the highly polarized media landscape in the US and how people often intertwine their identities with their political positions, it can be difficult to have rational discussions with people about such issues. However, this moment is too important to continue to bury our heads in the sand. It is time to focus less on changing our politicians' opinions and focus more on changing our politicians: americansformoskovitz.com.
*Note: this title assumes Eliezer Yudkowsky's views on AI risk and not my own. I am not nearly as confident as he is about the likelihood that AI causes extinction. Essentially, I chose the title to emphasize that if you agree with Yudkowsky's post, you should agree with mine.
2026-04-22 21:42:34
TL:DR; or do. I'm a blogpost, not a cop.
I'm tired of arguing about AI safety. Not in a pseudo-moralizing "I'm so angry people don't agree with me, let me say that it's tiring" kind of way. I'm simply tired. A couple weeks ago I was at a PauseAI meetup in the UK, and I overheard one of our younger members---who is extremely driven and well-informed on X-risk---start talking to a guy who had basically never heard the X-risk arguments before (why was he there? I'm not quite sure! but I'm glad he was).
I sat quietly, wondering how it would play out. As she went back and forth with him, I felt a strange kind of fatigue in my predictive circuits: I'd heard it all before. Humans are not that diverse in their thinking, and especially aren't that diverse in thinking about things they've never heard before. Introducing newcomers to a complex topic is a repetitive, thankless task, that can be done by a rock with words on it (often the rock is actually a device made up of around 300 sheaves of processed plant fibre and is called a "book"). I'm unbelievably grateful that there are other people to pick up the slack of pub-level one-on-one debates about AI risk with total newcomers, because I can't do it any more, and I've only been in the game for like five years! I can't imagine how exhausted with it some of the old players are.
For the reasons above, I mostly try not to randomly start debates with people about the possibility of AI risk at the pub, or at parties, unless I feel up for a sparring match. Unfortunately for me, I work in technical AI safety! So what do I do? I kinda sorta hedge and talk in abstractions. Sitting next to someone on a flight into California, I'll say something like:
yeah so I'm presenting some work in AI control: we're looking at ways to prevent an AI we don't trust [to not try and kill everyone] from misbehaving [by sneaking onto a kazakhstani data centre and self-improving] but it's difficult [may be impossible: if you have a bucket list hurry up]
And in some sense I endorse this decision! The random woman from LA who I sat next to on the plane doesn't want to hear that we're all going to die. I want to spend the flight having a chill conversation, a read, and a nap; I don't want to have a high-stakes conversation about the imminent end of the world with no real upside (for me) even if she is convinced. As well as social-pressure-as-social-pressure, there's a feeling of "uuugh if I say something too weird, I'll have to slog through a massive amount of explaining"
(Implications of this effect on general discourse to be left as an exercise to the reader)
Ok. That's a descriptive account of my behaviour. Now a question: in behaving like that, am I being socially graceful?
I think I am. If I don't want to have a big debate about AI x-risk at the pub, my only other option is to be like "Yeah we're gonna die" followed by "No I don't really wanna talk about it" which is kind of rude. It's a conversation stopper.
Another question: is my behaviour, generalised, a good discourse norm?
I don't know. The obvious point against is that I'm not saying what I really think, which is distorting. You should say what you think.
The point in favour is that it might be bad discourse norms for people to make bold claims, attract a bunch of high-effort responses, and then ignore them. That seems kind of time-wastey, and adjacent to trolling (or at least it permits a kind of trolling). This can sometimes be the case even if those original claims were made in honesty.
Someone once said that you need four levels of critique for an argument to work:
If you don't respond at all, you only get two levels. Even scientific peer review gets three, and scientific peer review sucks.
I think it's about expectations. Whether your listeners (or readers) expect you to respond to criticism is a function of what you say, but also where you say it, how you say it, and who you are. Here are my random opinions on the matter:
There are some other considerations: if you want money or resources to be spent, you have to be more open to debate. If there's no way for people to respond, but your position demands a response, then that's kind of rude.
Another consideration: how important is what you have to say, and who can say it if you can't? As I mentioned earlier, I am just so, so, so grateful to have new PauseAI members who are basically as good as I am at explaining X-risk to people at the pub, but who aren't as tired of it all as I am. I can sit back, rest my weary debating muscles, and maybe give some advice like an old washed-up football coach: nice work, but you coulda mentioned AlphaGo two sentences earlier ... I woulda stopped AI you know, but I got a case of RSI right before the big twitter beef of '24... just couldn't post fast enough ... damned e/accs walked all over us.
Forums (fora?) do the whole thing for you, if they're working correctly. The upvote/downvote system means that if you make a bad point and you don't respond to good criticism, then you'll get downvoted. This automatically hands the oxygen over to someone else! It's everywhere else where you have to worry about whether to keep quiet or be loud.
As Wittgenstein said:
Whereof one cannot speak [because one is too tired] thereof one must be silent [iff one can let someone else speak up instead]
2026-04-22 21:04:48
There was a recent HackerNews conversation I was part of, that I think is relevant to us here, as a present danger from current-generation LLMs:
Just so long as we don't get something that is to LLMs as car-centric urban design is to cars.
Someone suggests putting all the stuff the average person needs within 15 minutes of the average person's home, and soon after we got a conspiracy theory about 15 minute cities being soviet control gates you'll need permission to get out of.
LLMs are already capable of inventing their own conspiracy theories, and are already effective persuaders, so if we do get stuck, we're not getting un-stuck.
— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47838046
To add a citation for "are already effective persuaders", a meta-analysis of the persuasive power of large language models shows they're about human-level: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-30783-y
We are already seeing various people, including marketers, promote website design optimised for LLMs over humans; instead of "SEO", it is "Agent Engine Optimisation" and similar neologisms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_engine_optimization
We already see LLMs engaging in self-defence: https://arxiv.org/html/2509.14260v1
The good news is that people seem to broadly hate GenAI output, at least when they notice that it is [1]. The downside is noticing is getting increasingly difficult.
Conspiracy theories about 15-minute cities are easy to find: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15-minute_city#Conspiracy_theories
This is the easily defensible part. The harder to defend claim is how an LLM-centric design is bad for us carbon minds, which certainly will involve a degree of supposition and extrapolation to get beyond trivial annoyances like how SEO filled recipe websites with large quantities of irrelevant (and possibly fictional) anecdotes before you could reach the important part, or the rather higher risk of some incompetent Agentic AI tool deleting all the emails of Meta's alignment director [2].
Like all the other risks from AI, from agent-principal problems to being out-planned to being successfully lied to, we've seen low-grade bureaucratic nightmares since the invention of bureaucracy (and Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy [3]), I'm expecting more of the same with AI that convinces us to keep AI-centric design even against our own interests.
Fully-automated dystopian more of the same.
Right now, this is low-grade harm; but a persuasive AI locking in the use of itself is at best like any useless aristocrat locking in their place within society: I can only see it growing until it breaks something economically. Of course, the counter-point there is "what do you think the economy is when that happens?", because this could be any point in the future, not just today's questionable replacement for junior desk jobs and no UBI, but anywhere and anything because forecasting is famously hard.
Page 9: https://web.archive.org/web/20260309224829/https://pos.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/260072-NBC-March-2026-Poll-03-08-2026-Release.pdf ↩︎
https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-ai-alignment-director-openclaw-email-deletion-2026-2?op=1 ↩︎
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_iron_law_of_bureaucracy ↩︎
