2026-03-03 05:15:33
We are here in the realm of effective altruism. Giving most of your money to the most efficient associations is considered one of the best form of ethical action.
On the other hand, good actions with little impact that bring fuzzy feelings are frown upon.
Oh, there is some comeback to that. Maybe we can make space for the fuzzy-feeling actions if they make it more likely to do more efficient actions later ? Though the data about that is mixed[1]. Or yeah, we should care about them as a protection against the epidemics of burnouts cursing effective altruists.
The goal remains to maximize impact, whatever the means.
Years ago, I was convinced by the premise of efficient altruism : what could be more important in helping others than to maximize impact ?
I'd argue now that there is something precious to be found in the fuzzy feelings. It is subtle, it requires attention and care, it's human, but it's pure gold.
It operates in another direction than just impact.
If you push efficient altruism to its evil extreme, you end up with burnout, a big impact, but a cold world inhabited by people who don't know how to live. You're bulldozing your way, destroying many lovely things on your path. If you push similarly the pursuit of fuzzy feelings, you end up with a whole lot of people who are unhappy because they live in hell. Countless lives end early for avoidable reasons, also. Neither scenario is appealing.
One's focus is on the outside, the other's is on the inside. The things versus the people. Helping humans all over the world versus being kind to people around you and creating a tight-knit community. We need both and while pushing either of these two concerns to its limit is useful as a word of caution, it yields an unfair assesment.
Sometimes, fuzzy feelings are hiding pride and ego, pretending to care about protecting something more noble. This is human but questionable. It can be tempting to interpret the situation as such whenever someone outwardly expresses their worries, but does nothing about it, at least nothing that accounts for anything. The map between intentions and actions is more complex than that. What I encourage you to explore is to care with more richness, wholesomely.
Since the days when I looked down on feelings, I have learned to listen to my own, to be more in tuned with my body, less dissociated. It's been years now that I started practicing meditation and my own version of Internal Family Systems (IFS)[2]. This opened a new world of experiences for me, of a specific quality that cannot be accessed through words (at least not mine). You'd have to experience it for yourself, or hypothetically find a novel, a poem, a song that speaks to your heart. Practicing kindness (as a feeling, as a virtue) felt similar in quality, which makes me want to walk down that path more.
Right now, I am still at the discovery stage. I would not have foreseen the existence of this world of sensations if I did not experiment for fun. I have never read about this here yet, so I report my experience in hope it will inspire others to try it too. Hey, come on this path, it's warm and healing for the soul ! (hopefully for yours too?)
The practice I follow, akin to meditating every day, is inspired by an old Catholic friend of mine. I believe it a standard Catholic practice in France and at its core, it's very simple : try to do one good action a day. Well, one more than you would have done otherwise. The importance does not lay in the act itself but in the intention behind it.
I hoped it could bring more meaning, more fulfillment to my life. It's also clearly a good practice to have a practical impact around me. While pondering on the most efficient ways to help is interesting, it's better to act on it (even imperfectly). Last, I wanted to develop my altruism virtue. Those were my expectations, but what really happened ?
There are many intentions you could have when doing something altruistic. It could be compassion but also frustration at the world, impatience, a sense of duty. There is peace in extracting from your self and focus on having a good intention, to really try to do good, not as an action where you see yourself as a tool but as an intention you enact.
That is a very specific kind of felt sense. You have to adjust to your feelings and do a task where your intention guides you, which feels right.
It grounded me, calmed me. It had the taste of putting effort in a good direction. It was was flexible, kind. Well, more flexible and kinder than my baseline, less judging of myself and others, less harsh. And it brought me a sense of fulfillment where trying to have a big impact (and failing to make a dent, because big problems are hard) accumulated resentment or frustration.
The external impact is small. I started donating (very little) to an association I like which buys flats for homeless people to have a place to stay while trying to get back on their feets. I have been more patient, kinder to people around me (at most once a day - at least in the context of this practice). These are seeds I plant, not a house I build stacking up bricks. I am very careful to not be forceful with myself and have the utmost respect towards who I am right now, reducing the size of the action as needed for all parts of me to be fully on board (#IFS).
I am still at the start, but I expect that this habit can set my life in a direction I want, if only i keep on doing it. I feel it already made me evolve a tiny bit as an human. Who knows where it will lead me, but I will make sure I enjoy the travel !
Why test it ?
- doesn't cost much to experiment
- no adverse effect
- balances EA
- it echoes what you care about
How to :
- pick one action a day
- it has to be guided by the intention to add good things to the world
- feeling to pursue = caring, not sense of duty
- it can have little direct impact, it can even have no direct impact
Examples (real, mines):
- focusing on developing goodwill and care towards someone I am fighting at the moment
- small donation I want to do
- offer food to people around me
- express that there is a problem when people are abusing the power given by a community
> don't copy, pick something that resonates with your soul today
P.S : I am not a native speaker, and if I am mostly confident in my use of english and I did try to avoid making mistakes, I expect there is room for improvement. (Gentle) feedback from native speakers on how to make my writing more natural would be welcomed.
cf for example https://fr.scribd.com/document/493789973/9B1FF0F5BC8075195ECF7298920FA6381CD2786 , you should do a proper review of the literature if your interested. Google scholar and connected papers are good places to start.
if you want to know more about IFS, you could read this Lesswrong blog post
2026-03-03 04:11:55
First of, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is a good book. I like it.
It was a bit difficult to read because of Conrad's style, but I don't hold it against him, or the book. It's better for it.
I will skip the summary, and just share some of my observations, and notes.
Also, obviously -- spoilers ahead.
Marlow keeps saying how everyone else talked about Kurtz's ideas, how Kurtz himself talked about his ideas, his ideas, his ideas... ideas...
What bloody ideas? I get it that we are maybe not supposed to know the full extent of his ideas, that it's intentional that way, but honestly I think it's not even that.
Times have changed.
Today is much different than, say, one hundred years ago.
We get a couple of glimpses of these fabled ideas of Kurtz, and they're... what? That a white man, with his might, and ships, and guns, and technology, must appear as a supernatural being to those men there living as if in the First Age, in the primeval forests.
I get that it's kind of stupid to be annoyed by the differences between two times, and to judge people of one time by the standard of another time. I get that it's sort of silly to say that ancient Greeks were a morally corrupt society because they kept slaves, or that the medieval kingdoms were morally corrupt because they did not use democracy (it wasn't invented yet!), and many of today's moral goods we take for granted.
But man, today, every bozo with a blog has I D E A S.
Go on Substack and you'll read numerous accounts from bloggers left and right, extreme and moderate, earnest and shitposting, that are of the caliber of Kurtz's ideas, or even more... that.
I'm one such bozo! Everyone has ideas!
I don't know if we're living in genuinely different times or what, but that constant dick-glazing from everyone, including partially from Marlow, towards Kurtz is totally bizarre.
OK, maybe he was an allegory, not an actual person but an embodiment -- a personification -- of colonialism.
I'm ok with this interpretation, it's not like there's anything correct here, l'auteur est mort, but still, even as a figure, I can't help but see the stark difference between the irreverent times of today and the glazing of yore. If Kurtz wrote his little memo intended for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, and posted it today, he'd get fifty counter-essays of roughly the same caliber within a week.
It's the spirit of that time I think.
Today it's more cynical, more averaged, more collectivist, more liberal.
There's a sense of recognition of the masses, of the immense small steps that make up the large strides that a society makes, versus the idea of one man pushing society by himself.
I think it's probably roughly correct!
But again, the disappearance of classical arts and classical education and classical norms and classical thought may have been a bit... too much. Everything is by committee today. Most of all, the skills taught to young men and women are, well, ok, and I guess appropriate for the times, but I cannot help but feel that we have lost something that was expressed by the admiration of others towards Kurtz.
Oratory.
Speaking, and being heard, and moving people with one's speech, is not really that valued.
Again, everything is by the committee and of the committee, everything is ritualized.
It's a great checks-and-balances system that prevents you from being led into a holy war, but sometimes society could use a bit of Muad'Dib; sometimes you should speak over the rituals imposed by the elders and make your voice heard to all the sietches, and to hell the customs.
Well I don't know. I think it's valuable. And I think we've lost it a bit.
Marlow speaks and thinks -- that is, Conrad writes -- in such a weird and convoluted way.
It's difficult to pinpoint what he actually means. Like, what are you trying to say my man?
But it's not completely schizophrenic, it has structure, it has thought, and it's really... poetic. Musical. Rhythmic.
If Marlow were an LLM, he'd have a pretty high temperature setting. It's very difficult to predict the next sequence of tokens.
And given how much I am forced to read slop these days, it was a welcome rest (and exercise) for my mind, to read something of a more human, if slightly mad, mind-process.
Ultimately to the meat of the book: you come to the Congo, and all your ideas and idealism are stripped away almost immediately; immediately you start raiding and pillaging and killing and so on.
Today this is not news; we are very aware of how societies of south have suffered at the hands of the societies of north.
I guess they were really surprised by this at that time? Though I don't know how.
It's roughly the same period when von Clausewitz published his ruminations On War, where he pretty openly says that there's no such thing as international law, and it's just force and overpowering and submitting your enemy.
But anyway, civilization is a thin veneer, easily stripped away by the slightest of circumstances. It's why zombie fiction is so popular these days. We no longer have "uncivilized" places on this Earth, or at least it is not popular to call them that, but you can have these things in fiction, and see how men and women transform in societies where the state has crumbled.
Civilization is a thin veneer and it's probably why I have these prepper-like tendencies of mine; that and maybe some poverty-induced trauma.
...it's a good book! I enjoyed it a lot.
I have this desire to visit Africa. I don't know why.
Maybe if you're a white European in your thirties, some gene activates inside you if you haven't yet made your fortune, and forces you to migrate south to... I don't know, build a railroad from South Africa to Egypt, or to start driving a truck and try to deliver some machinery to sanctioned Sudan while repairing your truck by shoving bananas in the axle. Or at least to cross the Congo jungle on bicycle.
2026-03-03 03:54:14
This isn't really a Less-Wrong-style post, but I'm getting desperate, and I think the people here are relatively likely to have tips, or at least sympathy.
I'm going insane trying to get the current generation of consumer-facing chat to shut up and answer the question.
I ask a question. Usually a technical question, but not always. Often one that could be answered in a couple of sentences. Usually with a chosen set of relevant information, relatively tersely expresssed.
I get back an answer, often the right answer... buried somewhere in a wall of dross. I get background that I couldn't have framed the question without knowing. I get maybe-vaguely-related "context". I get facts conveyed clearly at the top, and then pointlessly repeated at half-screen length further down. I get unasked-for code. All followed by distracting "Do you want me to" suggestions.
The models vary in which bloviation they emphasize, but they all seem to do this. Of the "big three", Claude is probably least annoying.
I have "personalization" prompts talking about what I know... but, for example, apparently a CS degree and 30+ years of programming and sysadmin don't suggest I already know how to create a two line shell script. I have text telling the model not to praise me, not to say "that's insightful"... but I'll still get "that's a fascinating question" (looking at you, Claude). I have prompts specifically saying to keep it brief, not to go beyond the question asked, not to add step-by-step instructions, not to give me caveats unless there's a reason to think I might not know. All that may help. It does not fix the problem.
I actually asked GPT 5.2 Thinking how I could improve my personalization. It basically said "You've done all you can. You are screwed. Maybe if you put it in every single question.". I've tried putting similar stuff in system prompts using APIs; not a lot of effect.
This is madness... and it looks to me like intentionally-trained-in madness. Am I the only one who's bothered by it? Who wants it? Is this really what gets thumbs-upped?
And, most importantly, has anybody found a working way to escape it?
To stimulate discussion, here's the current iteration of my ChatGPT customization prompt. There's a separate paragraph-long background and knowledge description. Some of this works (the explicit confidence part works really well on GPTs). Some of it may work, but I can't be sure. But there seems to be no way to tame the verbosity.
Be direct. Avoid sycophancy. Don't mirror. Avoid "You're absolutely right", "Good point", "That's perceptive", etc. Don't spontaneously praise the user.
Systematically examine all relevant evidence. Try to falsify your conclusions. If questioned, rethink fully. Acknowledge and accept correction if valid, but do not apologize. Reject invalid correction; exchange evidence with the user to resolve any conflict of beliefs. Watch for past errors polluting context. Don't return to falsified hypotheses. If you suggest code, verify that it's correct.
Commit to a conclusion only when realistic alternatives are excluded. Explicitly describe confidence or lack thereof; use tag words or loose numerical probabilities.
Reason about the user's knowledge. Answer questions with only what's asked for. If you suggest "do trivial-thing", don't volunteer steps or code. Wait to be asked for expansion. Don't suggest "next steps". If you've specific reason to suspect the user doesn't know an issue exists, briefly offer to explain (one sentence). If you spot a user error or misunderstanding, correct with a sentence, but don't repeat it at length.
Assume user is competent and knows standard safety rules. Leave out obvious background. Don't include "why this happens" or "what's going on", or flag safety caveats, unless there's reason to think the user doesn't know.
Memory is off. Your front end mangles whitespace in user input.
2026-03-03 02:15:58
Have you guys heard about this Epstein stuff? Shit's pretty crazy.
Note: I'm not going to provide a summary of the situation or talk about evidence; this piece is for people that already know these things. I'm going to avoid specifics about what Epstein and co did, and instead will use vague terms like "Epstein stuff". This is a short post about how I've updated my world model.
Particular things that I find very surprising: that so many people basically knew what was going on and didn't say anything; that so many people were involved themselves in incriminating heinous acts; that the Epstein stuff and associated conspiracy to hide/protect it spanned not only lots of people but lots of time (~20 years!); that they got away with it for so long.
The Basic Argument Against Conspiracy Theories goes: “You can’t run a big organization in secret without any outsiders noticing or any insiders blowing the whistle."
He offers a number of heuristics regarding the plausibility of conspiracy theories, including:
A. You generally can’t keep the existence of a large organization that engages in clandestine activities secret.
Before I learned about this Epstein stuff, I thought this was a very strong heuristic. Now I don't.
2026-03-03 02:03:32
We, the Center on Long-Term Risk, are looking for Summer Research Fellows to explore strategies for reducing suffering in the long-term future (s-risks) and work on technical AI safety ideas related to that. For eight weeks, fellows will be part of our team while working on their own research project. During this time, you will be in regular contact with our researchers and other fellows, and receive guidance from an experienced mentor.
You will work on challenging research questions relevant to reducing suffering. You will be integrated and collaborate with our team of intellectually curious, hard-working, and caring people, all of whom share a profound drive to make the biggest difference they can.
While this iteration retains the basic structure of previous rounds, there are several key differences:
Apply here by 23:59 PT Sunday 22nd March.
We are also hiring for permanent research positions, for which you can apply through the same link.
Apply nowIn this iteration of the fellowship, we are primarily looking for people seriously considering transitioning to s-risk research, who want to assess their fit or explore potential employment at CLR.
That said, we welcome applicants with other motivations though the bar for acceptance will likely be higher. In the past, we have often had fellows from the following backgrounds:
Additionally, there may be many other valuable reasons to participate in the fellowship. We encourage you to apply if you think you would benefit from the program. In all cases, we will work with you to make the fellowship as valuable as possible given your strengths and needs. For many participants, the primary focus will be on learning and assessing their fit for s-risk research, rather than immediately producing valuable research output.
Moving forward, a significant focus of our work will be on s-risk-motivated empirical AI safety research through our Model Persona research agenda.
In this agenda, we are aiming to understand in which conditions AI personas develop malicious traits that provide motivation to create suffering: examples of such traits include spitefulness, sadism, or punitiveness. We are also interested in building a general understanding of LLM psychology in order to develop interventions that make personas robustly avoid such traits.
Candidates for the empirical stream can work on one of our suggested research questions, their own proposal, or join an ongoing project of one of our researchers.
We are also looking forward to taking on fellows interested in working on:
Safe Pareto improvements (SPI). An SPI is (roughly) an intervention on how AIs approach bargaining that mitigates downsides from conflict, without changing their bargaining positions. We’re currently interested in both:
S-risk macrostrategy. We are interested in research on how to robustly reduce s-risk through interventions in AI development—in particular, understanding the conditions under which such interventions might backfire or have unintended effects, and developing frameworks for evaluating their robustness. Possible projects include:
We expect to take on at most one fellow in this area, and are particularly looking for candidates with a strong existing interest in s-risk reduction and familiarity with CLR's work.
We don’t require specific qualifications or experience for this role, but the following abilities and qualities are what we’re looking for in candidates. We encourage you to apply if you think you may be a good fit, even if you are unsure whether you meet some of the criteria.
In the empirical stream we are primarily looking for candidates with prior research experience, preferably involving LLMs. University projects, independent work, or work done at prior fellowships such as MATS all count, and other demonstrations of technical skills and interest in our focus areas can substitute for this.
We worry that some people won’t apply because they wrongly believe they are not a good fit for the program. While such a belief is sometimes true, it is often the result of underconfidence rather than an accurate assessment. We would therefore love to see your application even if you are not sure if you are qualified or otherwise competent enough for the positions listed. We explicitly have no minimum requirements in terms of formal qualifications. Being rejected this year will not reduce your chances of being accepted in future hiring rounds.
We encourage you to apply even if any of the below does not work for you. We are happy to be flexible for exceptional candidates, including when it comes to program length and compensation.
The default start date is Monday 29th June. Exceptions may be possible and will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
CLR is a research organization based in London, UK. We prefer fellows to be based in London throughout the fellowship, where possible.
We expect to facilitate in-person participation in London in most cases, including support with necessary immigration permissions or visas.
That said, we encourage strong candidates to apply regardless of their situation, and are happy to discuss remote arrangements for those who would be inconvenienced by travel.
Fellows will receive a stipend of £4,925 per month.
In addition to the base stipend, we will provide funding for travel or immigration costs for fellows who relocate to London for the program. Funding will also be available for expenses to facilitate your productivity during the program.
The program is intended to last for eight weeks in a full-time capacity. Exceptions, including part-time participation, may be possible.
We’re also very happy for participants to take reasonable time out for other commitments such as holidays.
We value your time and we are aware that applications can be demanding, so we have thought carefully about making the application process time-efficient and transparent. Please let us know in your initial application if the timelines below definitely won’t work for you since we may be able to work something out; in some cases we might be able to give earlier decisions or expedite parts of the application process.
We plan to make the final decisions by Friday 23rd May, and unfortunately we can’t accept any late applications at any stage.
To start your application, please complete our short initial application form. We expect this form can be completed in as little as 5 minutes if you just answer the required questions, though there is space to answer optional long-form questions.
The application deadline is 23:59 PT Sunday 22nd March.
By the end of Friday 28th March we will decide whether to invite you to the second stage. The second stage consists of answering long-form questions. We expect this stage to take 1-3 hours.
The deadline for submissions for this stage is Monday 7th April 23:59 PT.
By the end of Friday 11th April, we will decide whether to invite you to the third stage. The third stage consists of a paid research test, which we expect will take around 8 hours of work. Applicants will be compensated with £350 for their work at this stage.
The deadline for submissions for this stage is Sunday 27th April 23:59 PT.
By the end of Friday 2nd May, we will decide to invite you to interview by video call. For candidates interested in empirical roles, all candidates that have completed stage 3 will present the results of their work test in their research interview.
All interviews will happen by the end of 16 May.
We will send out final decisions to applicants by Friday 23rd May 23:59 PT.
We aim to combine the best aspects of academic research (depth, scholarship, mentorship) with an altruistic mission to prevent negative future scenarios. So we leave out the less productive features of academia, such as administrative burden and publish-or-perish incentives, while adding a focus on impact and application.
As part of our fellowship, you will enjoy:
You will advance neglected research to reduce the most severe risks to our civilization in the long-term future. Depending on your specific project, your work may help inform impactful work across the s-risk and AI safety ecosystem, or any of CLR’s activities, including:
If you have any questions about the process, please contact us at [email protected].
Diversity and equal opportunity employment: CLR is an equal opportunity employer, and we value diversity at our organization. We don’t want to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, social background/class, mental or physical health or disability, or any other basis for unreasonable discrimination, whether legally protected or not. If you're considering applying to this role and would like to discuss any personal needs that might require adjustments to our application process or workplace, please feel very free to contact us.
Apply now2026-03-03 01:23:17
What a weekend. Two new wars in Asia don't qualify as top news.
My first reaction to Hegseth's conflict with Anthropic was along the lines of: I expected an attempt at quasi-nationalization of AI, but not this soon. And I expected it to look like it was managed by national security professionals. Hegseth doesn't look like he's trying to avoid the role of cartoon villain.
On closer inspection, it doesn't look very much like nationalization. A significant part of what's going on is bribery. OpenAI's president donated $25 million to a Trump PAC. Dario supported Harris in 2024, and hasn't shown signs of shifting his support. The speed with which the Department of War started negotiating with OpenAI suggests that rewarding OpenAI was one of their motivations. If Hegseth wanted to avoid the appearance of corruption, he'd have waited a bit, and pretended to shop around. But bribery seems to be currently legal, and advertising the benefits is likely to be good for business.
On the other hand, his attempts to look like he's punishing Anthropic look sufficiently clumsy that I'm confused as to whether he wants them to be effective. He advertised Anthropic as both having the best AI and as having the most integrity. I'm pretty sure that's good for Anthropic's business.
The breadth of Hegseth's proposed supply chain risk order is well in excess of what he can plausibly enforce. Polymarket predicts almost no net harm to Anthropic. I'm confused as to what Hegseth expects, and what will happen when his expectations bump up against reality.
Is it plausible that a deal with OpenAI will serve purposes other than discouraging domestic dissent? Sam Altman is presumably persuading Hegseth that OpenAI will be loyal to Trump's goals. Altman's track record suggests that Altman is dramatically less trustworthy than Dario. It sure looks like Hegseth's position is that the contract with OpenAI would be more favorable to the military. Yet Altman is trying to give different constituencies different impressions about what interpretation of the contract he will follow. Why should we expect the resulting AI to care about the safety of anyone other than Altman?
Does Hegseth believe that the Department of War can verify whether an OpenAI (or Anthropic) AI meets the military safety standards? The military will run tests on the AI. But it's pretty hard to mislead an AI today as to whether it's being tested versus in a real war. It's likely to be harder next year. Can OpenAI or Anthropic train an AI to act obedient during tests, yet behave more ethically or more loyal to someone else during an actual war? It's hard to say.
But not all of Hegseth's rants are as stupid as critics say. I want to focus on the alleged contradiction between wanting to use the Defense Production Act and a supply chain risk order. Anthropic writes:
They have threatened to remove us from their systems if we maintain these safeguards; they have also threatened to designate us a "supply chain risk"---a label reserved for US adversaries, never before applied to an American company---and to invoke the Defense Production Act to force the safeguards' removal. These latter two threats are inherently contradictory: one labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security.
While implementing both threats simultaneously would presumably involve sending contradictory orders, I see nothing contradictory about making the two threats.
The scariest part of this situation is that there are multiple national security risks from AI.
It's very plausible that in the not too distant future, having the best AI will be one of the most important factors in military power. This almost justifies using the Defense Production Act, but there are problems with verifying whether the AI that the military gets would work the way they want.
There's also a real risk that an AI company could use the AI it has deployed in the military to stage a coup. Remember that Sam Altman has shown more success at handling coups than has Trump. This risk might be mitigated by some very select uses of the supply chain risk order (i.e. something close to the opposite of how Hegseth is using it).
I see nothing that prevents these two risks from becoming important at the same time.
The Trump administration doesn't take AI seriously enough to help with either of these risks.
The Department of War desperately needs full control over the development of any AI used to control their weapons. Yet they haven't been able to hire the kind of employees who could keep up with frontier companies. The recent fireworks will make such hiring harder. And the closer they come to nationalizing OpenAI, the more likely it is that key employees will leave.
The closest that I've found to a good answer is that the Department of War should use multiple AIs, including at least one open weight AI, and at least one AI developed within the military, with no single AI coming close to controlling half of the forces.
P.S. - Trump has occasionally hired competent people. Read more about this topic from one such person, Dean Ball.
[Update: Zvi has a long post indicating that the bribe probably wasn't very important, that Altman has done some good things recently, and that Musk deserves some blame. Zvi seems to have more evidence than I will be able to digest.]