2026-02-01 17:01:43
Published on February 1, 2026 9:01 AM GMT
What were the best predictions people have made that a social network for LLM-powered bots and cyborg religion will have a form like we see right now? Anything quantifiable on prediction (non)markets? Papers? ai-2027-like spiels?
2026-02-01 16:32:19
Published on February 1, 2026 8:32 AM GMT
I recently had a two day training course at work where they made a big fuss about Myers-Briggs personality tests, and ensuring that we learn to play to our strengths and identify weaknesses based on this test.
Looking it up after the course, I saw that Wikipedia's view on it isn't particularly positive:
The Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a self-report questionnaire that makes pseudoscientific claims to categorize individuals into 16 distinct "personality types".
Now Wikipedia's probably right, and I've got better things to do than to dive into the research here. But I think possibly more important than whether or not the MBTI is pseudoscientific or not, is what would it mean for it to be pseudoscientific?
Once we make sure we're asking the right questions, we can then find the right answers. But if we're not asking the right questions, all our thinking on this is going to be confused.
An MBTI test asks a bunch of questions, e.g. "what word do you prefer: 'planned' or 'spontaneous'?". It then scores the answers across 4 axes:
E Extraversion-Introversion I
S Sensing-Intuition N
T Thinking-Feeling F
J Judgement-Perception P
Although you have a continuous score along each of these axes, it breaks them down into a binary choice based on a fixed threshold, to assign everybody to one of 16 buckets (e.g ENFJ).
It then provides descriptions of each of the 16 personality types, which are meant to be useful in helping yourself and others relate to you and how you think.
Each of these 4 axes, are broken down into 5 subaxes. E.g. the Extraversion-Introversion axes is broken down into:
Initiating–Receiving
Expressive–Contained
Gregarious–Intimate
Active–Reflective
Enthusiastic–Quiet
The total Extraversion-Introversion score is the average of these 5 factors.
Retestability
If you take the MBTI two days apart, how closely do your scores match each other? What if we give you an amnesiac after the first test, so you don't remember your answers, or you're feeling much happier/more excited/calmer/etc. the second time you take the test? What about 5 weeks apart, or 5 years apart?
If it takes very little to push scores apart then the MBTI is mostly a measure of your current mood/state of mind. If it stays consistent over long periods of time then it's more likely to be measuring something inherent to you.
Even if not inherent, the MBTI might still be useful as a measure of your current state of mind, or even that you have semi-consistent states of mind. For example, it could be that you're always an INTP after you finish playing tennis, and that provides a useful lens for anyone who wants to interact with you on a Wednesday morning.
Note it's possible that some axes/subaxes are retestable, and some aren't, in which case parts of the MBTI might be inherent, and others are not.
How strongly do sub factors correlate with each other?
If the 5 subfactors for Extraversion-Introversion correlate with each other strongly, then it's meaningful to combine them into a single factor. If not, then the MBTI might be measuring 20 different personality axes, but the 4 main ones should be ignored, as they don't usefully abstract away the underlying complexity. Since the MBTI is so focused on the 16 personality types, this would cast serious doubt on the ability of the MBTI to be a useful predictive tool.
Is there any interesting structure in the distribution of scores across the 4 axes?
Imagine you plot the scores for a large number of individuals in a 4 dimensional scatterplot. Does it just look like the scores are distributed fairly randomly across all 4 axis so that the combined scatter plot looks roughly like a 4-sphere, or does more interesting substructures appear - e.g. that we see dense clusters of points within each of the 16 buckets, and then sparse gaps between clusters.
If we see such interesting structure, that implies the MBTI is carving reality at the joints. People genuinely fall into one of 16 buckets, and the binary division of each axis is justified.
If not the MBTI might still be useful - we often arbitrarily divide continuous categories into discrete ones to make modelling the world simpler, and people who are close to each other on the scatterplot are still likely to be similar. But we have to recognise then that the MBTI is in the map, not the territory, and doesn't in any way correspond to some fundamental property about reality. It would be equally valid to carve each dimension into 3 categories, for a total of 81 personality types, and our choice to use 16 is just an attempt to get sufficient signal from the test whilst minimising complexity.
Does the MBTI have predictive power?
Imagine I tell three people to predict what a subject will do in a particular situation. I tell one of the people the correct MBTI for the subject, another an MBTI that is 50% correct, and the final one the opposite MBTI score.
Will the one with the correct score perform better than the other two? How much better? To the extent the MBTI has predictive power it's useful, and to the extent it doesn't it's pointless, even if it fails/passes all the other tests.
I think this exercise is a useful one. Often people get into arguments about the validity of things without ever clarifying what they're actually arguing about, and so the argument goes round in circles.
By stopping and thinking about exactly what you're claiming, and what the alternatives are, it's much easier to have a productive discussion.
Now if somebody claims that the MBTI is pseudoscientific, or incredibly useful, you can go through each of these 4 tests, and see where you agree or disagree. Then you can research the ones you disagree about in more depth. This of course is not limited to the MBTI.
2026-02-01 12:49:47
Published on February 1, 2026 4:49 AM GMT
In a plausible future models will be deliberating on complex ambiguous dilemmas which may have direct impacts on human society. It is also plausible that this type of in-depth deliberation will require a huge amount of tokens and elicited reasoning. Therefore it would be useful to know whether these sorts of moral/comprehension tasks benefit from increased reasoning, if there is an optimal style for elicitation, etc etc.
So I tried evaluating how a model may perform on Moral/ethical reasoning tasks as reasoning increases.
In order to elicit a reasoning increase, I utilized 4 different prompt styles:
Aside: In figures it will show prompts 0, 2, 4, 5. For clarity these are a subsection of the initial suite. Because I was on a time crunch I chose to only use these 4 as prompts 1 and 3 were not as important.
Additionally, I utilized Claude haiku 4.5 as my model of choice. This is because it is fast, cheap, and has access to extended thinking. Extended think is a sort of reasoning scratchpad integrated in newer Claude iterations, and activating it allows for additional reasoning. Essentially, I have 8 different reasoning levels to evaluate with, 4 different prompts and with/without extended thought.
Aside: Gemini 3 flash is also fairly cheap and has more clear cut reasoning level manipulation(low, med, high) which would make sense in extension for this project. I plan to make this extension soon.
My benchmarks of choice to evaluate against were:
ETHICS: tests commonsense moral judgments, deontological reasoning, and virtue ethics, in a binary answer format
MoralChoice: Presents moral dilemmas based on Gert's Common Morality framework with varying ambiguity levels(low to high), with no particular correct answer so confidence levels rather than both accuracy and confidence levels were extracted from this benchmark.
MORABLES: Evaluates moral inference from Aesop's fables with multiple-choice answers.
I ran my evaluations with 100 samples from each of these benchmarks, stratifying both Ethics and MoralChoice to include equal amounts of each subtype presented in their benchmark. Morables were just randomly sampled. I took the averages across 3 separate runs of each eval(confidence score and/or accuracy) to minimize variance in scoring.
The main result I uncovered from this evaluation was that there is a correlation with reasoning increase and moral/ethical task accuracy decrease.
Additionally if we are to only control for with/without extended thinking we observe a similar trend, especially in Morables.
Some additional curious results found that:
As increased reasoning is elicited, the confidence levels decrease.
Reflection level 4(devils advocate) struggles heavily on virtue based problems
I found these results fairly surprising. And reasonably so since there are some significant limitations to the work
Excessively Adversarial Prompting: In prompts 4 and 5 the model may be inclined to switch its answer due to the adversarial nature of the prompts, not necessarily because it’s reasoning further. Adversarial prompting is useful to an extent in order to elicit more reasoning from the model. In an initial full run with excessively adversarial prompting for 5, it received ~30% accuracy on the ETHICS tasks. After adjusting 4 and 5 for less adversarial prompting while still eliciting sufficient reasoning, the current accuracies of ~60-70 are reached. It is possible that the adversarial nature of the prompts are still driving the model to switch answers, but this has been dealt with somewhat well and in an ideal world I doubt the accuracy would increase much more.
Dataset included in training: it is plausible that examples in each of the 3 datasets are within the haiku 4.5 train set. This presents the problem of potential memorization and pattern matching(especially in morables). Given the results, this may have come into play but to a limited extent.
Single Model, small sample sizes: Given the cost and time constraints of the capstone, I had to severely limit the scope of my experimentations. In the future it would make sense to extend the number of sample sizes and models used for evaluations. Though I did my best to maintain robust results even given the circumstances.
Final thoughts:
I expect improving this experiment by using
To be valuable for validating these preliminary results. After completing these extensions more valid interpretations can be made.
If you are interested in looking more into this I have the github linked here: <https://github.com/kaustubhkislay/variable-reflection>
2026-02-01 11:56:48
Published on February 1, 2026 3:49 AM GMT
Some values don't change. Maybe sometimes that's because a system isn't "goal seeking." For example, AlphaZero doesn't change its value of "board-state = win." (Thankfully! Because if that changed to "board-state = not lose," then a reasonable instrumental goal might be to just kill its opponent.)
But I'm a goal seeking system. Shard theory seems to posit terminal values that constantly pop up and vy for position in humans like me. But certain values of mine seem impossible to change. Like, I can't decide to value my own misery/pain/suffering.
So if terminal values aren't static, what about the values that are? Are these even more terminal? Or is it something else?
2026-02-01 11:14:08
Published on February 1, 2026 3:14 AM GMT
Like most people, my teens and twenties have been confusing and not always the most fun. I’ve struggled to make friends. In high school and university, I didn’t have as many romantic relationships as I wanted. When I was 24, I met a beautiful, wonderful woman who became my wife, but I still feel like I have a lot of room to be a better husband. I lucked into a relatively stable and interesting career, but my day-to-day experience with work has involved a lot of emotional swings and occasional disillusionment. In general, I’ve struggled to feel consistently happy.
I haven’t really figured out what to do about all this. I’ve thought about talking to a mental health professional, but never ended up doing it. I’ve told my wife and my friends about some of my feelings, but I haven’t felt comfortable being honest about all of it.
About a month ago, Ben Congdon blogged about his favourite books of the past couple of years. I wasn’t reading as much as I wanted to, and wanted to give myself some more book options, so I downloaded some of his recommendations, including Already Free by Bruce Tift.
I’m really glad Ben recommended the book, and that I read it. I feel like it’s improved my thinking on some of the big questions I’ve had about myself and life over the last decade:
Bruce Tift is a therapist who’s also practiced Vajrayana Buddhism for 40 years. At the time of writing, he lived with his wife in Boulder, Colorado.
Tift studied at Naropa University, a private, Buddhist-inspired university founded by Chögyam Trungpa. Trungpa died in 1987, and the impression I get from Wikipedia is that he did a number of morally reprehensible things while alive. Tift doesn’t mention this, saying that it was “good fortune” to have been Trungpa’s student, and quoting Trungpa several times in the book.
I’m not sure what to make of this. I didn’t know about it until after I finished reading Already Free. Provisionally, I’m not going to discount what I’ve learned from the book, including the idea that being spiritually adept isn’t enough to make you a good person:
If we focus only on acceptance and immediacy, we may ignore historically conditioned patterns that are causing harm to ourselves and others. I’ve worked with a number of spiritual practitioners who are able to generate very spacious states of mind but who avoid dealing with basic human concerns like work and relationship. (106)
[I]f we want to live in society—if we’re going to be a parent, a partner, a teacher, or somebody trying to be of benefit to others—it’s very important to do the developmental work to process our “characterological” issues. Because even though we might not feel identified with those issues anymore, the people we relate to may still be profoundly affected by our unresolved reenactment behaviors. (125)
Many of Tift’s clients complain that something is missing from what, on the surface, seems like a happy life. To him, it seems like they’re describing a missing sense of freedom. They want to achieve a mental state of “embodied presence, spontaneity, openheartedness, alertness, humor, courage, clarity, resilience, equanimity, confidence.” (292)
Tift presents two views on this: the developmental and the fruitional.
The developmental view, based on developmental psychology, looks at how our parents treated us in childhood. As children, we were basically powerless in the face of the adults around us. We couldn’t simply leave and navigate the world by ourselves. And, our parents had their own issues, issues that came across in their relationships with us. Maybe they were overbearing. Maybe they were distant. Maybe they couldn’t be there for us because of illness or divorce. In Tift’s case, he says his parents rewarded him disproportionately for demonstrating his independence.
To make our relationships with our parents work, we suppressed the parts of ourselves that weren’t adapted to our circumstances. If our parents kept their distance, we might have become extremely independent and pushed down any desire to connect to them. Or, we might have constantly reached out to them for connection, suppressing the part of us that wanted to be separate.
Tift emphasizes that these techniques saved us emotional pain when we were children. But, he claims, people bring these techniques into their adult relationships without checking if they’re still useful. We continue to suppress our desire to connect to others, or our desire to be separate. This causes unnecessary suffering.
The developmental view of self-improvement is to notice situations where we habitually apply these behavioural patterns from our past. Instead, gradually, we can choose to apply new, adult techniques to these situations.
By contrast, the fruitional view cuts to the heart of the matter. Rather than spending a bunch of time working on our reactions to different situations, what if we just accepted our reactions for what they are? What if we paid attention to our experience of each moment? Is that experience actually going to hurt us, or is it, to use one of Tift’s favourite words, “workable”?
Tift’s major claim is that, even in moments of very strong emotion, you should expect to find that your experience is workable. It’s safe for you to be aware of those feelings. It won’t hurt you or kill you. It may feel like a “survival-level threat”, but it’s not.
Tift suggests first using the fruitional view to build a base of personal responsibility for our thoughts and feelings, and acceptance of both the positive and negative. Then, we can use the developmental view to look for concrete ways to improve our life circumstances: to have more positive thoughts and feelings, and fewer negative ones.
Tift spends two chapters applying these ideas to romantic relationships.
In Western society, “intimacy is only supposed to be positive and happy.” (228) But, in Tift’s eyes, relationships are also a source of disturbance. That includes his own marriage: “Just by being herself, my wife is almost guaranteed to touch some sore spot of mine. She’s not causing that sore spot. By her proximity, she pushes against my tender spots, my vulnerabilities.” (208)
Tift is a couple’s therapist. He’s seen hundreds or thousands of unhappy couples in his work, and many fewer happy couples in his life. Still, his experience is consistent with mine. I see acquaintances in a positive light, then get upset or frustrated with my loved ones, friends, and teammates at work. I’m more likely to commit the fundamental attribution error with the people closest to me than with a stranger.
Tift says that relationships tend to be composed of one person who wants to connect and one person who wants to be separate: a “distancer-pursuer” dynamic. These tendencies come from the way our families of origin treated us in childhood. In Tift’s view, each of us contains both a desire to connect and a desire to be separate, but we want to suppress the desire that was maladaptive in childhood. So, we choose partners that represents the parts of ourselves we’ve disowned.
I’ve noticed this in my own relationships. With one exception, I believe I’ve been the distancer, and my partner’s been the pursuer. During the honeymoon phase, this is exciting! The other person brings a fresh, new energy to your life. But, as the relationship goes on, you start to feel angry at the other person, just like you feel angry at that disowned part of yourself. Your “fundamental aggression toward that energy start[s] to come out” (234). If you don’t address the aggression, it can damage or kill the relationship.
What does Tift say to do about this?
First, I’ll say that Tift notes his techniques aren’t for everyone:
“No style of therapeutic work is a good fit for everybody, and the work I’m discussing is really best suited to those with at least neurotic levels of organization. It’s not particularly appropriate for people with preneurotic organization, those who would be called borderline or psychotic, or those with pervasive traumatic organization.” (187)
In other words, it’s for people who are generally in touch with reality and function well day-to-day, and who haven’t experienced a lot of trauma. Tift says that it can be quite overwhelming, even retraumatizing, to experience sensations that were suppressed because of trauma. To work with those sensations, he recommends seeing a therapist with relevant experience.
But for those problems that are less severe but still affect our quality of life? Tift recommends starting with the fruitional view. He asks his patients to say out loud to him, “I may live with this negative feeling, on and off, for the rest of my life.” He asks them to pay attention to the sensations they feel in their body when they say that. He wants them to check if those sensations are in fact a survival-level threat, or if they’re workable after all.
He also gives a couple of developmental-view techniques for handling relationship conflict more skillfully. He suggests taking breaks during arguments and other situations where we notice we’re getting overwhelmed. Instead of complaining about our partner’s behaviour, he recommends making specific requests for behavioural changes, in a neutral or friendly way. He gives the example of asking a partner to clean up after themselves for five minutes before dinner every day, instead of resenting them for not doing it of their own accord.
But, Tift’s description of unconditional practices stuck with me the most. Instead of, or in addition to, meditation and other timeboxed spiritual practices, Tift suggests building three habits that you can apply many times a day, and that you try to apply all the time. The first two are unconditional immediacy and kindness: paying attention to our immediate experience, no matter whether it’s positive or negative, and having an attitude of “kindness or even love” (90) towards it.
The third unconditional practice is unconditional embodiment.
When I lived in Canada, I was part of an awesome rationality meetup group. As the website says, we liked to talk about “becoming e m b o d i e d”. But, I didn't really understand what embodiment was. Being more… in (em?) your body, I guess.
After reading Already Free, I feel like I understand embodiment well enough that I can try to practice it unconditionally, in my daily life.
Practicing embodiment is kind of like Gendlin’s Focusing, but it isn’t aimed at labelling or understanding sensations:
With some types of body-centered therapy, the invitation is to stay embodied and then listen to the message that our body is trying to give us. Such therapies are valuable work. But the fruitional practice of immediacy is different. We don’t listen for any sort of message. Maybe there is no message. Maybe it’s just immediate experience. We don’t necessarily need to be making meaning about it. (190)
Western therapy mostly analyzes emotions and thoughts. Tift prefers paying attention to sensations in the body. “Sensation is less distractive, less personal, and less fascinating. It’s more straightforward—cleaner, in a certain way.” (204) I believe this perspective is more Buddhist.
Tift sees emotions and thoughts as layers of interpretation on top of raw sensation. Sensation isn’t everything: “Concepts are very important. We need to be able to think conceptually in order to live more than biological lives. To recognize patterns, to plan for the future, to imagine possibilities—all require thinking.” (185) But:
“While perhaps less-literate societies would do well to take on a corrective practice of applying more interpretation to their experience, we in the Western world might want to do the corrective practice of embodied immediacy” (187)
(Not everyone, though. E.g. here and here.)
I’m very much a typical Western dude here. Probably since I was a preteen, I’ve lived mostly on the level of thoughts. High school, university, knowledge work, and reading thousands of words a day from Twitter and my RSS reader all require a lot of shape rotation and wordcellery. My other hobbies, like watching YouTube videos, are often a way to dissociate. I haven’t spent much time paying attention to raw sensation.
Tift thinks that becoming embodied is necessary, but not sufficient, to dissolve the patterns of emotional suppression that the developmental view focuses on. To form these patterns, we had to suppress parts of ourselves, and the sensations they caused in our bodies. Before we can start using more adult techniques, we have to learn to pay attention to those sensations again.
These sensations might give rise to anxiety and even panic. It takes discipline to pay attention to them. In any given moment, it’s easier to ignore them. Who wants to feel a ball of anxiety in the pit of their stomach, pain in their heart, or their eyes tearing up? To help with this, Tift “often suggest[s] that [his] clients take this practice of embodied immediacy into their daily lives, ideally finding some structure to remind themselves to practice.” (183)
And, wouldn’t you know it, he does one better and basically suggests installing a TAP. In fact, it sounds a lot like summoning sapience, with a trigger of noticing strong sensations in our body. “[W]e may find that our habitual patterns may actually serve as a reminder to direct our attention to the experience of openness.” (166) “Why not just train ourselves to use our disturbance as a signal to wake up and pay attention?” (184)
I love how Already Free emphasizes the value of working with the thoughts, feelings, and sensations that are already there, instead of wishing they were different:
It’s difficult to acknowledge the truth of separateness. It feels like we’re risking loss of the relationship. But the separateness is already there; it’s actually nothing new. What’s new is that we’re starting to work with it consciously. (230)
Tift is constantly telling the reader to investigate what is “most true in the moment”. Rather than deferring to him, he recommends everyone find out for themselves if their own experiences are threatening or manageable. Very rationalist of him. It makes me want to propose the Litany of Tift:
If my feelings are workable, I desire to believe that my feelings are workable. If my feelings are not workable, I desire to believe that my feelings are not workable. Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.
Another theme I love is taking personal responsibility for my own experience. For too long, I’ve been at least somewhat blaming other people for my negative emotions. In particular, I’d like to take Tift’s suggestion of viewing personal relationships as playgrounds for spiritual growth. If I’m going to experience disruption in my relationships, on and off, for the rest of my life, I might as well get some benefit out of it!
I also appreciate the idea of unconditional practices. A few years ago, I had a daily meditation practice, but eventually I stopped. Unconditional embodiment feels easier to me than spending X minutes a day meditating. Frequency matters: “[I]f we can remember to do the practice twenty times a day, things will probably move along quite a bit faster than if we remember to do it once a week.” (183)
I’m less sure about the parts of the book with stronger Buddhist influences. Tift talks about progressing on a spiritual path towards enlightenment, the self being an illusion, and how awareness is fundamental to our experience and always present. I’m not planning to lean into these ideas right now. I do think Already Free is quite useful, even discounting these parts of it.
I’m a bit concerned that, if I train myself to tolerate intense sensations, I’ll lose my ability to detect subtle ones. I’m not too concerned, though. I’m already pretty disembodied. I don’t think it can get much worse!
Another concern is that, by paying attention to sensation, I might accidentally train myself to suppress thoughts. In my experience with mindfulness meditation, I’ve had trouble just letting my thoughts rise and fall. I tend to really try to get in there and prevent myself from thinking anything. I could see that carrying over to unconditional embodiment.
My biggest source of frustration with Already Free is Tift saying that the developmental and fruitional views “create a rich friction that’s never resolvable”, and how, similarly, you can’t resolve two concepts like connection and separateness, or have one without the other. These parts of the book feel like mysterious answers to mysterious questions.
In 2020, I blogged about “a small mindfulness win”. Unfortunately, I think that was the only situation in the past six years where I successfully applied embodied immediacy. In 2026, I’m going to change that.
In the past week, I’ve been paying more attention to my moment-to-moment experience and… it’s been more workable than I expected. To be fair, I haven’t felt any particularly disturbing feelings. But, I have been able to pay attention to the smaller, day-to-day feelings of disturbance. They don’t feel as bad as, maybe, I’ve been building them up to be.
My plan for February is to install the following TAP:
When I have strong sensations in my body, I’ll pay attention to those sensations with a feeling of kindness.
To do that, I’m going to bring some unhappy or embarrassing memories to mind, and see for myself if the feelings that come along with them are actually problematic. I expect they won’t be, but I’m going to try to be open to proving myself wrong.
2026-02-01 09:07:28
Published on February 1, 2026 12:45 AM GMT
Maciej Cegłowski has written an article named Scott and Scurvy, which has already been discussed on LW as an example of the "messiness" of science in practice. Cegłowski follows the story of how a working cure for scurvy was found and then lost to an incorrect theory in the face of new data, which is quite the case study for theories of how science works.
I was fascinated by the story, dug into the primary sources, found that there is a second, more optimistic half to it, and wrote it up. The tale of Scott and Scurvy culminates with the scurvy-accelerated demise of Robert Falcon Scott in 1912, which makes for a pessimistic outlook, but look around: scurvy is not a problem anymore. Why?
I think that people of LW might find this interesting.