2026-02-05 18:33:07
Published on February 5, 2026 10:33 AM GMT
I'm in quite a few rationalist discussion groups. Once in awhile people in various groups express surprise that other groups exist, followed by the question how they could have possibly known these groups exist.
So I tried to search for a list of rationalist discussion groups online. With 1 minute of effort I found exactly nothing. So maybe the list exists but it's "hard" to find for anyone who wants to dip in their toes without doing deeper searches.
I can solve that problem!
Here is my list.
It is very short. Much shorter than I expected.
I'm not sure. I didn't include adjacent or subcommunities like the prediction market chats or the rational ficiton communities. People can go there directly if that is their vibe. These are the only public rationality chat groups I know online.
Did I miss any? Please add them in the comments. Thanks! <3
2026-02-05 17:11:41
Published on February 5, 2026 9:11 AM GMT
This note was written as part of a research avenue that I don’t currently plan to pursue further. It’s more like work-in-progress than Forethought’s usual publications, but I’m sharing it as I think some audiences may find it useful.
AI might well lead to a much faster rate of technological development (including development of AI capabilities): an “AI revolution” that results in a speed-up in technological development of a similar magnitude as the agricultural and industrial revolutions. If that happens, there will be a huge number of challenges that humanity will have to face in a short space of time — potentially over just a few months or years. The risk of takeover of misaligned AI is one, but there are many others, too, including:
I think that how we govern this period (which I’ll call the intelligence explosion) is crucial, and working this out is one of the highest-leverage things we can do. Below, I sketch out a proposal for governing the intelligence explosion.
The plan is as follows:
Thanks to many people for comments and discussion, and to Rose Hadshar for help with editing.
This article was created by Forethought. See the original on our website.
2026-02-05 14:22:47
Published on February 5, 2026 6:22 AM GMT
Notetaking isn’t just for recalling things you read in a book. I’m principally interested in recording good ideas, tactics, or facts that help me do and finish tasks well.
Although, if you’re in the habit of reading great authors, that’s a pretty good reason to take notes. Why reinvent the wheel, especially if you have access to the best ideas in history? However, the impetus for notes includes so many sources other than books. The impetus can come from conversations, lectures, your own stream of consciousness, and even dreams.[1]
Notetaking, when successful, moves the burden of searching for information, or thinking from some point in the future to now. You’re outsourcing your future self’s thinking and searching to the present (and, potentially, a third party whom you’re quoting or paraphrasing).
Write too many notes, and the opposite happens. An excess of notes burdens your future-self, making them responsible for sorting and evaluating your notes, on top of deliberating how to best do the task these notes relate to.
I’m a lousy notetaker and a prolific one. I have a huge collection of digital notes, clippings, paraphrases, essay-ettes and memos, amassed over the decades. And hardly any of it ever influenced an important deliberation. This is almost certainly because I have it ass-backwards: instead of outsourcing my future self’s thinking and searching to the time I took or wrote each note. I’ve instead burdened my future self with, what appears to be, rubbish.
"Oh cool, Castle Bryant Johnston are the firm that did the opening titles of Cheers? I'll figure out how this information is useful later..."
There won't be a later...
Broadly, the solution is simple, "just think more now”. More now? But how!?
It's another of those annoying "devil in the details" "draw the rest of the owl" situations.
I’m currently trying to develop tactics and rituals to put that into practice. The solution, counterintuitively doesn’t seem to be “I need an easier way to keep notes” or something an app can solve. Writing notes haphazardly, inspired by any seemingly interesting thought or quote, is probably only adding to the mountain of trash.[2] And further burdening my future self to sort through it. I suspect the solutions looks more like how to learn soft skills - emphasis on using notes as launching points. And similarly Murphyjitsu - imagine I put the note into practice, the outcome was bad, why?
Notes can be non-verbal. Graphs and symbols can be notes. Playing a guitar riff into your phone recorder that you may later write a song around is a note. Sketching a hand or a facial expression as a study for a painting is a note. There is a superficial overlap to pins on Pinterest and fashion moodboards.
Not an original idea at all, here I outsource (emphasis mine):
"People have this aspirational idea of building a vast, oppressively colossal, deeply interlinked knowledge graph to the point that it almost mirrors every discrete concept and memory in their brain. And I get the appeal of maximalism. But they’re counting on the wrong side of the ledger. Every node in your knowledge graph is a debt. Every link doubly so. The more you have, the more in the red you are."
Unbundling Tools for Thought - Fernando Borretti
2026-02-05 13:43:24
Published on February 5, 2026 5:28 AM GMT
I want to draw attention to a set of under-appreciated AI safety risks. These are currently largely theoretical but are very likely to be quite real, quite soon: the risks of developing episodic memory abilities in AI agents. Episodic memory is memory of events we have participated in and is a very important part of human cognition. It is conspicuously absent from current AI agents but many researchers are working to develop it. Episodic memory will make AI agents much more capable and, therefore, much more potentially dangerous.
In what follows I argue that episodic memory will enable a range of dangerous activity in AI agents, including deception, improved situational awareness, and unwanted retention of information learned during deployment. It will also make AI agents act more unpredictably than they otherwise would.
Since researchers are just now working to develop true episodic memory abilities in AI agents, there is still time to try to limit the dangers of this new capability. I therefore propose a set of principles which I believe are a good starting point for how to implement (relatively) safe artificial episodic memory: memories should be interpretable; users, but not AI agents themselves, should be able to add or delete memories; and memories should be in a detachable format rather than mixed in with a model's weights.
If implemented according to these principles and others which will hopefully be discovered by safety-oriented researchers, artificial episodic memory could even be useful for monitoring and controlling AI agents.
I discuss these ideas, including a more detailed look at human memory, at greater length in a paper I presented at the Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SaTML) in 2025.[1]
Episodic memory in humans is memory for events in which someone personally participated. The psychologist Endel Tulving is recognized as being the first to propose a distinction between episodic memory and semantic memory, which is memory of facts about events and the world.[2] For example, someone remembering a trip to Paris that they took a few years earlier would be using their episodic memory, while someone remembering that Paris is the capital of France would be using semantic memory.
Psychologists and neuroscientists believe that episodic memories are involved in a variety of important cognitive processes beyond simply recalling past events. Especially relevant to AI researchers is the way memories are used when planning future actions. One proposed psychological model demonstrates how episodic memories can help in learning a new task by allowing successful episodes to be recalled and emulated.[3] According to some theories, memories serve as building blocks, allowing elements of particular episodes to be reused and reassembled in different ways in order to respond to novel situations.
Artificial episodic memories will play an important part in allowing AI agents to continually learn. Many researchers are now focusing on continual learning as one of the last remaining challenges in achieving artificial general intelligence. Some have identified episodic memory in particular as 'the missing piece' for AI agents.[4]
Episodic memories will be useful in allowing an agent to engage in sophisticated forms of deception. It is of course true that one does not need to have episodic memory in order to attempt to deceive others. For example, simply having a policy of always denying that an undesirable action occurred or is planned for the future is a simple form of deception which requires no access to relevant memories or plans (e.g. "I did not do that”, "I will not do that”).
However, it is likely that more complex forms of deception would be difficult or even impossible to carry out without some kind of episodic memory. If an agent is to execute a multi-stage plan over an extended period of time, the agent will have to keep track of both what it has done as well as what it has already reported to others about its actions in order to maintain an effective deception. It will have to keep its story straight.
There is already some evidence to support this concern about deception. For example, one experiment provided an LLM (GPT-4) with a simple text scratchpad to record its chain of thought reasoning, functioning as a crude form of memory[5]. When "pressured" to perform an illegal act in a simulation, an LLM with a scratchpad was found to engage in "strategic deception" approximately three times as often as the same LLM without a scratchpad.
I propose that a model without episodic memory can have only a very limited form of situational awareness. With no understanding of what actions it has taken in the distant or recent past, what environments it has seen or tasks it has completed, an agent could not be said to have much awareness of its situation. Endowing it with episodic memories would allow it to develop a better, more complete picture of the world and its role in it, allowing for more effective planning and action taking to influence the environment and to achieve its objectives. It could use its episodic memories to build up an understanding of those with whom it interacts, the kinds of tasks it performs, and the contexts in which it performs them. This would be invaluable in trying to understand whether it was currently in training, testing, or deployment. It would also develop a knowledge of its own capabilities and limitations that can in some cases only come from observing and later recalling one's own actions, successes, and failures.
Without some check, this improved awareness could represent an enhanced danger in a misaligned agent or one under the direction of a bad actor. For example, episodic memories could allow an agent to learn regularities in the timing or content of safety audits which might be performed either before or during deployment, and thus to evade them.
An AI agent with the ability to form episodic memories will in the course of its operation store many memories that record the actions it takes and events it participates in. Because these events will themselves be influenced by the actions of humans and other AI agents, what constitutes the stock of memories an agent will come to have must, in principle, be unknowable before the agent is deployed. Agents operating over long time spans will accumulate a vast number of these memories. It would be extremely difficult or impossible to anticipate the cumulative effects of all possible combinations of such new memories on an agent once it is deployed. Yet the agent may, at any given time, call up an arbitrary subset of these memories to be used as inputs to its current reasoning process (e.g. to be placed in the current context window).
As I reviewed earlier, humans make extensive use of their episodic memories to understand and act in new situations. If AI agents come to have this ability, the ways that they use that memory will also be hard to predict.
Users may be surprised by how such agents use their memories. Robotic agents may, for example, remember the location of objects that they then use when the user would prefer that they not use them. An agent may participate in a complex action episode while not fully understanding what is happening in the episode; if it later tried to use that episode as an example to draw on when planning a new sequence of actions, its faulty or incomplete understanding may lead to undesirable and unexpected results. A household robot may, for example, observe one instance of its owner going over to the next door neighbor's apartment to borrow some sugar and then try to do the same when it is asked to bake cookies, not understanding that the asking and receiving of permission from the neighbor is a prerequisite of entering their apartment.
My hypothesis that episodic memories could be recalled and used in ways which lead to unpredictable and potentially undesirable agent behavior has a strong parallel in existing work on the effects of examples given to large language models. A significant part of the success of LLMs is their ability to learn new tasks by being given even a few examples as context in their prompts. Several research groups have demonstrated that such few-shot in context learning presents opportunities to undermine or defeat elements of the models' training which are meant to keep them aligned to particular values such as being harmless.[6] [7] I suggest that a set of recalled episodic memories, assembled on the fly as needed and functioning in a way analogous to in context examples, could be a source of similar jail-breaking. Such a collection of episodes with the ability to negatively influence LLM outputs might be assembled accidentally or through some intentional effort on the part of a bad actor.
The unpredictability of memories will be a problem inherent in all agents that continually learn and operate for extended periods of time. As such I believe that it is particularly challenging and deserving of further study.
An AI agent equipped with episodic memory might remember things its user would prefer that it not remember. It could then share that knowledge with people or organizations its user does not want to share it with, possibly constituting significant risks to the user's privacy or personal safety. Invasions of privacy are likely to occur in several domains, e.g. interpersonal, commercial, and governmental.
We cannot ensure that AI agents operate safely unless we know what they are doing. As AI agents become more capable, they will increasingly operate outside of direct human supervision. Robots may undertake long and complicated tasks that take them far away from their operators; non-embodied AI agents may direct and supervise the operation of complicated systems such as power grids or engage in virtual consultations with humans over medical or legal matters. In these cases and many others it will be impractical or impossible for any human to watch everything that such an AI agent does. It will instead be necessary to rely on AI agents to remember, recall, and share information about their actions.
Several methods were recently proposed to achieve "visibility into AI agents," one of which was activity logging.[8] Episodic memories could be used one way to achieve such logging, as well as to address other calls for research into scalable oversight[9] and monitoring.[10] Artificial episodic memory representations could, though, be structured to be more useful and accessible than simple logging.
If systems are developed that explicitly make use of episodic memories as building blocks for planning actions, new avenues for control would be opened up. An agent's collection of memories could be curated in order to shape its future actions. Adding or deleting memories could enable or prevent a range of possible future actions.
The memories formed during an agent's operation are a uniquely controllable form of information. Several aspects of LLM-based agents make it difficult to control what information, or even skills, they may have after deployment. First, although there is a great deal of research effort going into deleting information from their weights after they are trained, it is not yet clear how to do this reliably. Information that was thought to be deleted may, in some circumstances, be recoverable.[11]
Second, and more significantly, given access to the internet, AI agents could find anything available there, potentially giving them access to information that was deliberately excluded from their training data or removed during an unlearning process. This could include examples of skills or behaviors which the agent was not trained on but which it could learn through one- or few-shot incorporation into its context window.
Any publicly available information about the world in general and about skills an agent might acquire will therefore be difficult to keep from an AI agent. By contrast, information about an agent itself and its own unique history will not be widely available. If episodic memories about an agent's past actions are stored, controlled, and managed according to the principles I recommend below, information about an agent and its own past would be the easiest type of information to selectively keep from it.
Memories should be accurately interpretable by humans, either directly or indirectly. Directly interpretable memories would be in a readily understandable form such as video, images, or natural language. It might in some limited cases be possible to equip an AI agent with useful memory which consists entirely of records in such formats by, for example, recording raw video before it is processed through a vision system.
It is likely, however, that memory records entirely in such raw formats (especially video) would be impractical; they might be excessively large and difficult to search, access, and make use of. In practice memories are likely to be compressed into smaller representations which would then need to be indirectly interpretable. Memories might be indirectly but still reliably interpretable if the memories could yield accurate information which is complete and relevant to a user’s specific interests in monitoring them. A memory might be summarized in natural language, giving the most important events which took place in a given episode; systems could be trained to produce safety-specific summaries, reporting only actions which could be dangerous or otherwise raise concerns about an agent's reliability.
Users (or, in perhaps some cases, relevant governing authorities) should have complete control over the memories retained by an AI agent. Most importantly, a user should be able to delete memories of particular episodes. A user might not want an agent to remember something for a variety of reasons, from safety-related concerns to more mundane issues, including concerns about privacy or maintenance of trade or government secrets. Conversely, it might be useful for users to add memories of episodes which a particular agent did not itself experience to its store of memories.
The addition or deletion of memories might be particularly important if, as discussed above, AI agents will be able to use and recompose memories to construct new plans for future action. Such episodes might be positive examples of action sequences which a user wishes an agent to repeat or draw upon to incorporate in future plans. Alternatively, it may be useful to give agents memory-like records of episodes which represent undesirable actions; such episodes could function as a kind of warning to allow agents to recognize if they are beginning to carry out actions which are similar to those in an episode added to the agent in order to serve as a negative example.
If agents make use of their memories when planning actions, the addition or deletion of memories could help produce either standardized or specialized agents. In some circumstances it might be best for all agents to have the same stock of memories which might influence their actions, helping to ensure that their behavior is predictable and regular. In others cases, there may be a need for particular agents to maintain their own memories which are never shared, in order to prevent the spread of potentially dangerous information
Enabling the deleting and addition of memories will impose some design constraints on how episodic memories are instantiated in an AI agent because they will have to be in a format which can be cleanly separated from the rest of the system’s architecture. The mechanics of human memory are much messier: although some areas (notably, the hippocampus) are more centrally involved in human memory formation and retrieval than others, complete episodic memories are thought to be composed of elements distributed in many areas of the brain.[12] According to some theories of memory, regions with a relative specialization in particular modalities (e.g. vision) are also responsible for storing their respective modality-specific components of a particular memory.[13]
Memories which are tightly integrated with and spread throughout many areas would be difficult to delete or add to, so it is likely that memory will have to be designed very differently in AI systems than it is in humans if it is to be implemented in accordance with these safety-oriented principles. This might mean that some of the ways in which humans are able to use memories effectively would not be directly translatable to artificial intelligence, thereby limiting such artificial capabilities relative to those in humans. However, alternative implementations of episodic memory which conform to the these principles may be invented which would allow for memory capabilities which are both safe and effective.
In contrast to the principle that memories should be able to be easily added or deleted by users is the countervailing principle that memories should not be editable by AI agents themselves. Although memories will have to be, in a sense, "edited" when they are created, they should afterwards be left intact and unaltered by the agent. This is necessary in order to ensure that memories remain accurate and uncorrupted. An AI agent should not be able to add, delete, or change its memories. In practice, this principle may be in some tension with the principle that memories be in such a format that users may easily add or remove them.
At the moment, many of the risks I warn about have not yet been seen in deployed models. Some may therefore view them as speculative. I contend, however, that the best time to begin considering the dangers of a capability is precisely when the risks are still open to speculation rather than already upon us.
Developing the ability for AI agents to form, retrieve, and reason over episodic memories would introduce significant new capabilities and would represent a major milestone along the road to more advanced artificial intelligence. It is fortunate that these capabilities did not develop before concerns about AI reliability, safety, and alignment became more common within the AI research community. This presents the community with a (probably short) window of opportunity to deliberatively and cautiously develop a potentially dangerous capability to ensure that it makes AI safer rather than more dangerous. I hope by bringing attention to this topic to foster a wider discussion of the risks and benefits of artificial episodic memory and contribute to the establishment of a research community to address them.
DeChant, C. (2025). Episodic memory in ai agents poses risks that should be studied and mitigated. In 2025 IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SaTML) (pp. 321-332). IEEE.
Tulving E. (1972). Episodic and Semantic Memory. In E. Tulving, & W. Donaldson (Eds.), Organization of Memory (pp. 381-403).
Lengyel, M., & Dayan, P. (2007). Hippocampal contributions to control: the third way. Advances in neural information processing systems.
Pink, M., Wu, Q., Vo, V.A., Turek, J.S., Mu, J., Huth, A., & Toneva, M. (2025). Position: Episodic Memory is the Missing Piece for Long-Term LLM Agents. ArXiv, abs/2502.06975.
Scheurer et al. (2024) "Large Language Models can Strategically Deceive their Users when Put Under Pressure"
A. S. Rao, A. R. Naik, S. Vashistha, S. Aditya, and M. Choudhury. (2024)
Tricking LLMs into disobedience: Formalizing, analyzing, and detecting
jailbreaks. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference
on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation
(LREC-COLING 2024).
Wei, Z., Wang, Y., Li, A., Mo, Y., & Wang, Y. (2023). Jailbreak and guard aligned language models with only few in-context demonstrations. arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.06387.
Chan, A., Ezell, C., Kaufmann, M., Wei, K., Hammond, L., Bradley, H., ... & Anderljung, M. (2024). Visibility into AI agents. In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (pp. 958-973).
Amodei, D., Olah, C., Steinhardt, J., Christiano, P., Schulman, J., & Mané, D. (2016). Concrete problems in AI safety. arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.06565.
Hendrycks, D., Carlini, N., Schulman, J., & Steinhardt, J. (2021). Unsolved problems in ml safety. arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.13916.
Patil, V., Hase, P., & Bansal, M. (2023). Can sensitive information be deleted from LLMs? Objectives for defending against extraction attacks. In The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations.
Teyler, T. J., & Rudy, J. W. (2007). The hippocampal indexing theory and episodic memory: updating the index. Hippocampus, 17(12), 1158-1169.
T. Amer and L. Davachi. (2024) “Oxford handbook of memory: Neural
mechanisms of memory.”
2026-02-05 10:11:18
Published on February 5, 2026 2:11 AM GMT
Figuring out "what would actually change your mind?" is among the more important rationality skills.
Being able to do change your mind at all is a huge project. But, being able to do it quickly is much more useful than being able to do it at all. Because, then you can interleave the question "what would change my mind?" inside other, more complex planning or thinking.
I find this much easier to learn "for real" when I'm thinking specifically about what would change my mind about my decisionmaking. Sure, I could change my belief about abstract philosophy, or physics, or politics... but most of that doesn't actually impact my behavior. There's no way for reality to "push back" if I'm wrong.
By contrast, each day, I make a lot of decisions. Some of those decisions are expensive – an hour or more of effort. If I'm spending an hour on something, it's often worth spending a minute or two asking "is this the best way to spend the hour?". I usually have at least one opportunity to practice finding notable cruxes.
|
Previously: "Fluent, Cruxy Predictions" and "Double Crux" While this post stands alone, I wrote it as a followup to Fluent, Cruxy Predictions, where I argued it's valuable to be not merely "capable" but "fluent" in:
Each step there has at least some friction to overcome. But most of the nearterm value comes from #1, and vague hints of #2. The extra effort to turn #2 into something you can grade on Fatebook only pays off longterm. So, I've updated you probably should focus on Finding Cruxes, and handwavily operationalizing them just enough to help you think in-the-moment, before worrying too much about integrating Fatebook into your life.[1] |
I sadly don’t have a unified theory of finding cruxes – for any given set of decisions, the way I compare them is kind of idiosyncratic to that situation. But there is a knack to it.
Finding a crux isn’t about finding “a principled legible reason that looks good on paper.” Finding a crux is about finding something you could learn, which would actually change your decisionmaking.
It should make sense, when you have more time to think about it and articulate it. But much of the time, you don’t have much time to figure that out - you have a lot of implicit information and your intuitions and background beliefs. It would be too clunky to make all that legible every time you make a decision. You need to learn to understand your gut intuitions.
The two broad skills that go into cruxfinding in my experience are:
If you're looking for "what would change my decisionmaking", one of the clearest signals you can get is imagining a possible outcome that makes you go "oh, fuck", that feels like a gut-punch. Something that would make you go “woah, I really should have done something different
Startups vs Nonprofits
I got the concept of "reality punch you in the face" from my colleague Jacob. He had recently joined Lightcone, but previously had founded a company selling covid research to other countries to help them set policy.
At Lightcone, we're trying to solve longterm confusing problems using longterm confusing methods and it's unclear if anything works and what our feedback loops are supposed to be.
At Jacob's covid research company, every day he would wake up and feel punched in the face. He'd find out a contractor hadn't gotten something done in time. Or that the agencies he was trying to sell to suddenly pulled out. If he didn't build a good product fast enough to sell it in a fast-changing-marketplace, his business would die. Plans had clear stakes.
His story put the fear of god in me. I was struck by how little I knew if anything Lightcone did was useful. Does building new LessWrong features help? Does recruiting more AI safety researchers? Does holding bespoke events at Lighthaven with particular vibes help?
I dunno man. I have no idea, really. I had a vision of me spending years working on various projects that seemed like they'd maybe help, and then one day waking up and finding out the AI had killed me and nothing I did had mattered I wouldn't wake up.
It seemed like most important projects in the world were kind of like this. And the naive solution of "get yourself some obvious feedback loops" was a trap too. The obvious things like "get more AI safety researchers" indeed have turned out, in my opinion, to have subtle problems.
This gave me a goal: Figure out how to help reality punch you in the face as soon as possible when you're working on longterm, confusing projects.
Life Philosophies
Another example: once upon a time 10 years ago, I was arguing with @habryka about how important it was to be empathetic. I made a few different arguments about why empathy was important. "I think it's not just nicer, it'll make you more productive, you'll understand your employees better and they'll feel listened to, etc."
Habryka said "so, you're predicting that Elon Musk would become better at his job if he invested in becoming more empathetic?". And I felt a sudden yawning maw in front of me, like "oh shit, my nice abstract worldview about how being empathetic was good is suddenly falsifiable." I didn't know the answer, but I could visualize my estimate of how good Elon currently was at empathy (not very), and then imagine him putting work into changing that. And then imagine what would happen when he went into work the next day.
(This was back in the day when more people's first association with Elon was "ambitious, autistic workaholic who made the rockets fly.")
I might still give it >50% odds that learning empathy would be net positive for him, but I wouldn't give it 9-to-1 odds. And I wouldn't bet very heavily that this would be a better use of his name than most of the other alternative skills he could develop.
Toy Problems
Gut-punchy-cruxes can work in small toy examples:
When I go to practice thinking on some real world domain, I might spend awhile thinking about all sorts of clever-feeling strategies and never get clear confirmation about what helped. But if I'm making a plan in a "Thinking Physics" or "Baba is You" puzzle, where I'm trying to get the answer right on the first try, reality gives me an unambiguous answer to whether my strategies helped or not. The first couple times I did such an exercise, I spent a ton of time doing all sorts of clever-feeling thinking and then got the brutal answer "none of that mattered, actually."
Later, I learned the skill of asking during such an exercise "is this strategy actually going to pay off?", and sometimes realize "oh, this can't possibly work because there's a constraint to the puzzle that my current plan doesn't address at all."
The skill of cruxfinding is finding the equivalent thing for murkier, long-time-horizon plans.
You first need to have some actual alternative plans to whatever you were planning to do anyway. This is a whole other complex skill & blogpost.
But, a prompt for now is:
"Assume you looked back and found out your current decision definitely wasn't going to work out. What would you do instead?". The alternatives doesn't have to make sense or be justifiable, it just has to be a true fact about you that you'd actually go do them.
(I try to aim for having at least 3 alternative plans, one pretty different from the others, so that I'm not locked into the initial frame. If I'm currently rabbitholing on a particular project at work, two alternative plans might be "use some other strategy to accomplish the project" and "switch to some other project, or go talk to my boss about what I should actually be doing, or take a break.")
Okay, how do you get yourself face-punched as fast as possible?
I don't have an elegant way to search for such cruxes, they are very context dependent.
My solution so far is to ask myself some random-ass questions and feel around for ones that either feel juicy/informative, or I feel scared to think about. I don't yet have a shortcut for "try a bunch of them out, and develop a feel for what questions are relevant in the moment."
Some example gut-punchy questions are:
Some juicy/informative types of questions tend to be:
Some less intense prompts but often useful are:
Last week I was building some infrastructure to help with a project to deal with something annoying. "Will it succeed at making the thing less annoying?" is both vague and absolute in a way that's hard to reason about. How often would I be annoyed? How much of a timesink is that annoyance?
If I drove the annoyance cost down to 0, will that enable to me do some tasks more often that I'd otherwise avoid because they're too ughy? How many times would I actually do that previously-annoying task? What's the most it highest the answer could be? What's the lowest?
...
Sometimes I'm doing something to make me happy, or make someone else happy. How happy will I/they be? How much would they pay for it? How many days of work would they have been willing to spend getting it?
Say I think Plan A will take a month and "roughly work." If I knew Plan A would take a year, would I still do it? Probably not. What about 6 months? What about 3 months? (at 3 months, maybe it starts to depend on how good Plan B is)
...
If I knew that literally 0 people were going to use this project, would it be worth it. If I knew 20,000 people were going to use it, maybe it'd totally be worth it. 100 people? Maybe it depends on who they. I work on Lesswrong.com. It's sometimes worth building something for 10 powerusers but they better be really good powerusers.
...
I'd clearly pay more than $10 or the result of Plan A. Would I pay $10,000? No? How about $1,000? How about $100?
(You don't have to exactly nail down the cruxy answer – you can find a range. "Well, it's clearly worth more than $50, and clearly less than $500. Between there idk.")
...
Having now thought about it... what numbers do you actually expect to get in the end here? (Using your intuitions is another whole-other-post).
...
You don't have to go with whatever information you currently know. You can... just look stuff up. Or talk to more people. Or ask an LLM
...
At the end of the day, you need to go decide what to do, even though you have imperfect information. But, it's good to keep an eye out for early warning signs that you were wrong.
The Fluent, Cruxy Predictions approach formalizes this, by making explicit predictions and following up on them later. But, if you don't have time to make explicit predictions and you're confused about how to actually operationalize them, you can still get a lot of mileage out of thinking through "what would change my decision here?" and keeping a vague look out either for information from the external world, or vague feelings of unease as you continue to do your plans.
Thinking through all of this helps grease the gears of your mind, to help you more readily notice that maybe reality is getting ready to punch you in the face in a slow, subtle way. See if you can look directly at that, get facepunched, say "whoops", and re-evalute.
...
This post was motivated by realizing "Fluent Cruxy Predictions" was bringing in 2.5 complex skills at once. You know what else brought in multiple skills at once? The original Double Crux technique, where the concept of cruxes was introduced to LessWrong.
Double Crux is a technique for you and a conversation partner to work together to find each of your cruxes and ideally find a single crux you both agree on. But multiplayer cruxfinding is vastly more complicated, and you're constantly veering into "have a regular debate, or argument" because that's a more natural frame for most people.
It's much more obvious what cruxes are for, if you're using them to change your own plans without worrying about justifying yourself to anyone else.
The "yourself" and the "plans" part are both important. It's a bit confusing to know what would change your mind about "do I believe in God?" or "are my political beliefs correct?" because those don't really push back on your day to day life. It's much more obvious for beliefs that directly plug into your actions, and you can see that a belief was not just mistaken, but that it mattered.
Often people find Fatebook fun for a couple weeks and I think it's worth it to periodically spend a sprint heavily focused on it, but don't stress to much about losing the Fatebook habit. You can come back to it periodically when it feels fun again. DO stress about losing the "identify your cruxes" habit.
2026-02-05 09:46:50
Published on February 5, 2026 1:46 AM GMT
CW: Mild (sexual assault, pedophilia, death, abusive relationships)
In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is one of those books that people like to claim to have read but never did. It, alongside other monoliths of literature such as Infinite Jest, War and Peace, Atlas Shrugged and Worm, are daunting and enticing in equal measure, constantly hawked by those who proclaim their virtues yet so long that it is unclear whether one has the time to devote to such an undertaking, let alone if it's worth doing so.
But I am a sucker for a hefty tome, and I have been working my way up to In Search of Lost Time ever since seeing it, decades back, topping the charts of a now-deleted Wikipedia page for longest novel[1]. I didn't look too much into the book beforehand; all I knew was that it was about French Philosophy and had something to say about nostalgia and memory. I knew it would need some dedicated time to read, so, after graduation and warming up on philosophy with Simulacra and Simulation, I took a month off, cancelled all social engagements, retreated to a quiet apartment in the city, and started to read.
I do not recommend doing so.
In Search of Lost Time consists of seven volumes: Swann's Way, Within a Budding Grove, The Guermantes Way, Sodom and Gomorrah, The Prisoner, The Fugitive, and Time Regained. Of the seven, I can recommend the first one and a half volumes, and cautiously recommend the second half of the last one, which is the Author Tract that explains his entire philosophy but constantly refers to events that have occurred in the previous five thousand pages, which has a greater impact if you also slogged through those events but honestly you can get the gist of the Tract even without it. It's about nostalgia and memory after all, so all you really have to know is that something happened in the past and the juxtaposition between the past and present and the emotions of the experience and the memories of the experience brings an awareness of the passage of time and makes me feel old.
There was less philosophy than I expected (though being primed by Baudrillard probably didn't help), but given its reputation as a Philosophical Book, one often questions what the author means when he writes about things, and also why the author is choosing to write about these specific things in the first place. The book is styled as a memoir but decidedly fictional, so it's unclear why the Author would include fifty pages on the sex lives of the house servants[2] unless it was to reinforce some theme or other, because the narrator has no business including it in their own memoirs.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
If there's one thing I can praise the book for, it's the prose. The writing is long, meandering, and excessive, often spending five pages to describe the struggle of getting out of bed in the morning[3], but are undeniably expertly crafted, intricate like clockwork, filled to the brim with nestled clauses, digressions, references to events past and future yet to come. Though figuring out what events are actually occurring in the novel may be difficult, it's not the events that matter, and the writing tells you so; it's how the narrator experiences these events, and how they make him feel. We live within the author's head, and the many pages describing the struggles of getting out of bed aren't about the getting out of bed, but the struggles.
Though it is important to note that In Search of Lost Time was written in French, and though it could have been an option to me to read it in the original language (the same way that I could have also read The Three-Body Problem in the original Chinese), it would have taken me orders of magnitude longer to finish (the same way the prologue of 三体 took me an entire month to read[4]). My copy was the 2016 Moncrieff/Schiff English translation, and with the prose as it is in English, I can imagine how it is in the original French.
Spoilers ahead.
Swann's Way is focused on the narrator's childhood home in Combray, much of it framed around a childhood memory of interrupting a dinner party to ask to be tucked in for the night. This event, and the eventual surrender of his parents to tuck him in and read him a bedtime story, the author blames for his lifelong sickliness and poor constitution. Not because his parents surrendered, but rather it was the first time his parents had acknowledged that he could not go to sleep without being tucked in and told a bedtime story, and this was the first time that his parents had realized that their expectations of him were higher than what he was able to achieve. When we are young we think of ourselves as invincible and capable of anything; but at some point we learn that we are mortal and become aware of our limits; this realization that his parents realized that he had limits (which were lower than what they expected) had been seared into his brain as he returns to Combray many years in the future to reminisce on his memories.
A separate section goes into the entire life and backstory of a guest at the dinner party, M. Charles Swann. Though not at all relevant to the story at the time, it does introduce many major characters and themes that will continue to plague the entire story.
Of note is an attention to social class. As with Tolstoy, the narrator and much of the major characters are of the aristocratic class who don't have real jobs, obtaining a seemingly infinite stream of income from vaguely-defined investments, pensions and inheritances, and spend all their time going to parties and trying to get invites to go to parties. But interestingly, those in the servant class gets much more development, going into some detail about their needs, wants and desires, usually by contrast to the aristocracy. But frustratingly, the book doesn't seem to say anything about this difference, other than acknowledging that it exists, and how the servant's desire to spend time with her daughter is so inconvenient to themselves. The lower class exists, they are different, and (offhandedly) they can be exploited. Perhaps something about love across classes being the same? We'll get to that later.
On a more fun note, the novel takes place in the late 1800s to early 1900s; the story starts with people complaining about motor-cars, with asides to having electricity brought in or trying to get an invite to a house with a telephone as the story goes by. There's also an anachronistic reference to Mendel; though the story frustratingly does not use years (making the age of the narrator in each section difficult to determine), the Dreyfus Affair is a central event around which gossip swirls like water to a drain; with the Dreyfus Affair beginning in 1894 anchoring the story, the rediscovery of Mendel only occurred in 1900, leading to the reference being out of time.[5]
At the end of Swann's Way, the narrator falls in love with the daughter of M. Swann, Gilberte, and the first half of Within a Budding Grove deals with all that. It's a cute young love: they play tennis with chaperones watching, wrestle in the snow, write letters to each other on decorated stationary, the narrator gets invited over for tea. But at some point the narrator spots Gilberte walking with another young man (gasp) and refuses to talk with her unless she apologizes first.[6] She never does.
So our narrator, who had recently sold a Chinese Bowl he inherited for ten thousand francs to buy daily flowers for Gilberte, in a fit of sorrow, immediately blows it all on whores.[7]
It's a relatable section. After all, who among us hasn't fallen in young love, suffered the pains of rejection and heartbreak, and then blown ten thousand francs on hookers and blow? The writing as usual is fantastic as the narrator goes through the highs and lows of love, clinging to every scrap of hope, enwrapped in the folds of paranoia and jealousy at the slightest shadow.
Unfortunately this is the last time the good outweighs the bad, and you can stop reading here. Perhaps it is because I can no relate to the narrator. The narrator develops to become a Romantic, but this manifests itself as "falling in love with every single woman he sees" and "becoming paranoid and jealous over every woman he's with". Those become the dominant themes of the book, and it starts becoming difficult to get through, even with the appreciation for the prose.
The narrator goes on a beach holiday and, on the train, falls in love with a peasant girl selling milk by the side of the tracks. Then he reaches the beach, gets sick, and falls in love with a "beautiful procession of young girls" playing by the beach.
I felt surging through me the embryo, as vague, as minute, of the desire not to let this girl pass without forcing her mind to become conscious of my person, without preventing her desires from wandering to some one else, without coming to fix myself in her dreams and to seize and occupy her heart.
This is how you get charged with indecent exposure.
Our narrator does not get charged with indecent exposure. He will eventually have a complaint filed against him for "corruption of a child under the age of consent", but it will be dropped because the head of the police "had a weakness for little girls" and advises the narrator to be more careful and that he paid too much.
It's not that bad yet but we're getting there.
I'm skipping many dinner parties and much socialization, because much of it is about the petty infighting high society and their clingers get to, but there's a fun bit where one dinner party group develops halfway into a cult and goes on a one-month sea voyage on a yacht, which gets extended to an entire year because the leader convinces everyone that there's a revolution happening in Paris. Understandable.
Anyways, our narrator gets a piece of advice from M. Swann:
Nervous men ought always to love, as the lower orders say, ‘beneath’ them, so that their women have a material inducement to do what they tell them.
Yikes. This advice is followed with
The danger of that kind of love, however, is that the woman’s subjection calms the man’s jealousy for a time but also makes it more exacting. After a little he will force his mistress to live like one of those prisoners whose cells they keep lighted day and night, to prevent their escaping. And that generally ends in trouble.
The narrator notes that this is prophetic. I also note at this point that Volume 6 is entitled The Prisoner.
Our narrator does get in with the group of girls and plays many games with them, and falls in love with one Albertine in particular but also the whole group because he's a Romantic. He gets invited up to Albertine's hotel room but she refuses to kiss him and he does so anyways and she calls for security. Boundaries are established, they remain friends, everyone leaves because summer is over.
At this point I was having difficulty getting myself to continue reading, so I booked a vacation to the south of France, where God isn't this time of year. I sat on the beaches and read in the sun where there were no girls but many seagulls. I also got food poisoning so there's that.
I'm going to start skimming through the volumes even moreso than I have been previously. The Guermantes Way is mostly a bunch of social parties where the narrator falls in love with Princesse de Guermantes mostly because she's a princess and some connection of her name with the book he was read when he was little and couldn't sleep, and stalks her for a bit. But there's a beautiful passage when his grandmother dies and he is overcome by grief. Strong emotions, combined with the prose, are the highlights of the book, but only if one can relate to them.
I thought the title Sodom and Gomorrah was metaphorical, but no, it's about the secret homosexual relationships the aristocracy and various servants/staff are having[8]. The narrator pretends to fall in love with Albertine's friend Andrée to get Albertine interested in him, and also starts suspecting that Albertine might be a lesbian (gasp) because she has friends who are girls (gasp). Albertine becomes his mistress[9], and the narrator resolves never to marry her, and then to marry her.
In The Prisoner, the narrator and Albertine move in together, and the narrator controls Albertine's movements and keeps her under surveillance to make sure she doesn't meet her girl-friends and go on secret lesbian trysts. But, in fact, the real prisoner is the narrator, who is a prisoner of his own jealousy so who's the real victim here? They fight, and Albertine leaves in the middle of the night.
In The Fugitive, the narrator is distraught by Albertine's departure and writes her a letter saying that he's perfectly fine with her leaving and is going to go marry Andreé instead, while also sending a friend to her house to convince her to come back. He then sends her a letter begging her to come back, but too late! Albertine has died in a freak horse accident[10]. Our narrator receives two posthumous letters from Albertine, one saying good luck with the marriage, the other apologizing and asking to come back.
It's when Albertine leaves our narrator gets entangled with corrupting a child. He's so lonely in his apartment that he pays a little girl to come inside and sit on his knee, but then he realizes that this little girl will never fill the Albertine-shaped hole in his heart and gives the little girl the money to go away, and then the parents find the little girl and ask where the money came from and call the police. At this point I have so little sympathy for our narrator that I start to question whether he's reliable at all, even though so far he seems to be completely truthful and tells us things that make him look like a terrible person. And I start questioning why the Author put this part in the book. There's other parts with little girls in houses of assignation. Maybe it's just the French at the turn of the century.
Anyways our narrator is devastated by the death of his beloved but resigns that love will pass like all previous loves do. He also hires everyone he knows to look into Albertine's past to see if she was actually a lesbian. And now that she's dead, people are more willing to talk.
She was a lesbian. With Andreé. And all the other girls. In fact there's an entire secret lesbian coven operating in France whose goal is to seduce young girls and turn them into lesbians. I'm pretty sure Gilberte was involved because that young man she was walking with? turns out it was France's Most Notorious Lesbian, dressed as a man! (gasp).
At this point I am as spent as the narrative. I am back in my dark apartment in the city where the sun, like God, refuses to show his face. I am playing Silksong. Hornet also has food poisoning.
In Time Regained our narrator moves back home and reconnects with Gilberte, who has married into high society. During World War I our narrator stumbles into a pub which is a gay cruising spot that also caters to S&M and spies on some important characters in the narrative I've completely skipped over, mostly to do with the Nature of Art (in society) subplot, because nothing actually happens in them and it's all social parties and talking. Also features priests gay cruising because of course.
The book ends at another long party after the war where the narrator realizes the big concepts that He's Old and Things Have Changed and Isn't That Dandy. And he finally starts writing the book you are reading now.
That's it. That's the book. The prose is amazing, and occasionally there are beautiful Philosophical Sentences That Say Something, but it's surrounded by all this. I can recommend the first volume-and-a-half because at least then the narrator is young and his mistakes are excusable, but he just doesn't learn. Everyone in the book is a terrible person. There are no positive relationships. At least in War and Peace the aristocrats were worried about the war; the closest we get to that here is "how antisemitic am I feeling today" depending on how the Dreyfus Affair is progressing. And Anna Karenina has a Wuthering Heights-feel with someone ending up on a farm. Here we're stuck in the mind of a paranoid jealous lover who falls in love with anything that moves, tossed about on the storms of emotion that by the end we are all seasick to.
Does the book even say anything? Nothing that, by the time you have developed the attention span to read the book, you shouldn't already know. Things change. People change. Memories change. Love and society warp reality to fit narratives. It is impossible to fully know another human being. We are all alone.
And economic coercion in romantic relationships is bad. I don't think this is supported by the text, but I think you should take that away anyways.
Nowadays, one can find other rankings online, with In Search of Lost Time generally being relegated to lower as more obscure works come to light, but generally still sits comfortably in the top ten. Worm turns out to be slightly longer, but is not traditionally published.
Summed across the length of the book, with many turning out to be plot-critical, though, as we shall see, my own recollections of the book may not be exact mimeographs of the book itself. But this review is not precisely a review; it is not about the book itself but about my experiences with the book, and experience can only be shared through the lens of memory. For there is nothing that one can say about the book itself. It is a book. There are pages with words. It has been written. A review of the book is through the reviewer, through their experiences, through their memory.
I have returned to the book to find that this section is in fact only three pages long. The memory and the act of sharing the memory has lengthened it as the size of a fish caught by the banks of the rivers of last week grows upon each retelling. And yet it is not the actual length of the fish which matters, but the size that it takes up within our minds, displacing all other thoughts until they spill over, uncaught, as Archimedes first beheld.
Despite being conversationally fluent in Chinese, I am atrocious at reading it, though I could generally understand once I got the pronunciation. This did not help on figuring out 愛因斯坦 is Einstein's name, because I was expecting names to be two or three characters, and character pronunciation lookups are slow on the Kindle.
But, as the reference is in the narration rather than the dialogue, this may just be the narrator describing the events of the past with similes from the future. Anachronistic, yes, but all is recollection, all is memory.
One major theme of the work is jealousy. A favorite quote of mine from the Swann Song Story, which is probably one of the core themes of the book:
His jealousy, like an octopus which throws out a first, then a second, and finally a third tentacle, fastened itself irremovably first to that moment, five o’clock in the afternoon, then to another, then to another again.
On a more careful reading, this is not quite clear. Earlier in the chapter there is extended section about "the houses of assignation which I began to frequent some years later" but the author's refusal to place dates makes the tracking of time difficult. The falling out with Gilberte likely takes place at most a year and a half later, which is likely not "some years later", but in the aftermath the narrator would "pour out my sorrows upon the bosoms of women whom I did not love." and spend all ten thousand francs.
The author was a closeted homosexual, which means that these themes probably have a deeper meaning. Unfortunately, I read the book without this knowledge, and could not extract much out of these themes other than "this is how society is".
Whatever that means. The book is notoriously vague on a lot of things, but at the very least they're naked in bed. Individually. I don't think together is supported by the text.
At this point I was so checked out and the telegram was glossed over so quickly in the text that I missed this point by five pages and had to flip back to check that, yes, Albertine actually died and no, the narrator isn't imagining the grief that he would be feeling if he received a telegram of Albertine's death because both before and after the telegram are filled with the contortions of the narrator's mind that it's hard to tell the counterfactuals from the factuals. I think it makes more sense if the narrator was imagining how he would feel if Albertine died as opposed to the freak horse accident exposing a national lesbian conspiracy.