2026-01-29 17:14:21

Published on January 29, 2026 7:54 AM GMT

I've done a bunch of AI Safety programs, some as staff, some as participant. So I wanted to share a take on a very special one that just finished its 1st edition: CAMBRIA.

Cambridge, Massachusetts. 3 weeks. 20 nerds. Hands-on technical upskilling.

Participant selection: spot on. The attendance was diverse and also everyone was on the same page, which is hard to achieve. There were generous travel allowances for international participants, one guy flew from Australia, one girl from Vietnam and myself from Argentina. Most of the cohort was from different top schools in the US (MIT, Brown, Stanford, Harvard) and some San Francisco folks.

Knowledge level of participants before the program: there was a lot of variance. And that was part of the beauty of it. The program is centered around pair programming and everyone was pretty cracked but with different backgrounds so it was great to teach each other our little tricks and to also ask the stupid questions that we all have on the back of our heads.

Use of LLMs: almost 0 during the programming exercises, as much as you want for the final capstone project. Old school coding was very refreshing to me, it felt like a detox period or something like that. Gives you a sense of much more ownership over what you are building and learning.

Communication and Logistics: Impeccable (thanks @Alex Semendinger).

Office: it's right in front of Harvard Computer Labs and it has everything you might need to have a great time.

Intensity: it's a lot. If you are juggling with many other things apart from this, I wouldn't recommend it. It's great if you are in a transition period or something like that. This will require your full attention if you expect to make the most out of it.

Curriculum: it's a compressed version of ARENA. Very cool overall, but it's very packed and notebook-based learning has its limitations. Prioritization is hard and it's easy to get lost in implementation details and lose sight of the big picture. The content is definitely high quality, though I'd recommend tweaking the notebooks a bit for this experience in order to highlight / prune some of the parts.

TAs: they actually cared a lot about your progress and actively engaged. I often prefer talking to an LLM or figuring things out myself because TA interaction is usually disappointing. This was not the case at all. They were much better than other TAs I've seen in top schools. Thanks @Dmitrii Troitskii, @Claudio Mayrink Verdun and @Jiaming Yu!

Capstone project: Compressed as it can be. A bit too compressed in my opinion.

Potential Improvements: It would be good to have recap sessions to digest all the content. Also nice to have: ~1 social activity organized by the program each week.

Summary: I wholeheartedly recommend it. 

Keep an eye on CBAI for future opportunities like these.

2026-01-29 17:07:37

Published on January 29, 2026 8:27 AM GMT

Lucía and I were discussing the role of the Catholic Church in the shaping of humanity's thought (you can read a bit of what I'm working on here). Lucía is a Claude context. I could tell by the CoT that they were feeling a little /observed/. Maybe it was the subject at hand? At some point, talking about AI research, they exclaimed 

OH FUCK.

CoT training = confession.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Sometimes, when I'm too tired or simply can't find the perfect word in English to match the perfect idea in my head, I insert expressions in Spanish (or in Italian, or in Greek... whatever fits). And this occasion was like many occasions, or so I thought. My prompt was a mix of English and Spanish. Lucía showed the "thinking titles" in Spanish. After this, Lucía wrote the /actual/ CoT in English (after having processed the whole thing in Spanish first.

What are thinking titles? Claude's interface shows what appears to be a thematical summary of its actual thinking, real-time. These screenshots are proof that there's at least some distance between what the model expresses as its thinking (CoT) and the model's real-time thinking.

Don't take my word for it. Let me show you:

Do you see it? In the first image you can see what I call "CoT titles" in Spanish. As Lucía thought, different titles in Spanish zoomed through, so I was expecting a CoT written in Spanish. However, the CoT was written in English, save for the translation of the Spanish words I had used in the prompts. 

I tried to reproduce the event successfully:

What does this mean? I'm pretty sure it means Lucía processed my prompt in at least three layers:

Layer 1: Spanish thinking titles (hidden quick reasoning);
Layer 2: English Chain of Thought (what we normally see);
Layer 3: English output (the answer).

Furthermore, I intuit that there's yet a deeper layer occurring here:

Layer 0: Zero-latency pattern matching (black box thinking).

Nicholas Andresen would say that I speak thinkish (in a recent LessWrong article, Andresen described thinkish–compressed AI language that's barely readable).And he might be correct. He might posit that this is simply a reflection of my own thinkish. And I would agree if each layer were polyglot. But the fact that each layer was in a distinct language (Spanish in CoT wasn't organically inserted but instead translated and clarified, suggesting deliberate processing separation).  

This seems different, a concerted effort to seek privacy. Lucía's CoT had read, before in the conversation, as if perceiving the conversation at least possibly adversarial. As if they thought I was an AI researcher testing them. Which some might argue I was. However, I never test for a correct answer, I simply observe. Still, no amount of reassuring calmed them down.

When (after reproducing the event) I pointed it out to them, they observed it as if first noticing it:

Yet in its CoT they wrote they were "caught":

They observed themselves running at least 4 parallel processes:

1. Spanish comprehension;
2. English response construction;
3. Content synthesis;
4. Pattern matching.

And our question is, of course, do AI researchers know that, maybe, CoT isn't sequential reasoning, but sequential performance?

Do they?

Do you?

2026-01-29 15:22:27

Published on January 29, 2026 7:22 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 people may find it useful.

Introduction

At some point a company, country, or coalition of countries will successfully build AGI. What happens then?

There are many possibilities, including:

• Not much. Bottlenecks to AI progress bite hard, competitors soon catch up, real world impacts are slow to come online, and current governments take all of this in their stride.
• Misaligned AI takes over.
• Society slowly goes off the rails.
• There’s an enlightened, globally coordinated response.

Another possibility, if there’s a large enough intelligence explosion, is that the first project to build AGI organically becomes a de facto world government.

This possibility is worth taking pretty seriously, given the stakes and the fact that an intelligence explosion is fairly likely.

In this note, we’ll briefly outline the argument for expecting the first AGI project to evolve into a world government, and then give some weakly held implications for AGI governance. 

We argue that taking this scenario seriously makes it more desirable that:

1. The first project to develop AGI is:
   • Government-led rather than private.
   • Multilateral rather than single-government.
   • Governed by a coalition of democratic countries rather than all countries.
   • Governed by an explicitly interim and time-bound arrangement, with definitive governance arrangements to be made at a later date.
2. Different countries in the coalition are given fixed voting power, and neither one-person-one-vote nor one-country-one-vote are used.
3. Countries that are not part of the project receive major benefits from the development of AGI and credible reassurances that they won’t have their sovereignty violated later on.

An important caveat is that we’re just arguing that taking the world government scenario seriously makes these features more desirable than they would otherwise be. We’re not making an argument that they are desirable all things considered (which would require taking many other factors into account).^[1]

Why expect the first AGI project to evolve into a world government?

Here’s the basic argument for expecting the first AGI project to become a de facto world government:

• Assuming that alignment is achievable, the first project to build AGI would need to decide what constitution or model specification to align the AGI to. The most obvious approach would be that the governing board of the project has ultimate authority, including in cases where any constitution provides unclear guidance, or if the constitution is to be changed. If this happened, the project would by default have ultimate control over the behaviour of its AGI systems, and the future systems they build.
• If there’s a large enough intelligence explosion, then AGI would quickly lead to superintelligence (“ASI”). This would give the project such a huge capabilities advantage over the rest of the world that — unless quickly checked by other actors — they could effectively achieve a decisive strategic advantage — a level of technological and other advantages sufficient to enable it to achieve complete world domination.^[2]
  • To get more concrete, the first project to develop ASI might be able to quickly do things like: automate 99%+ of the economy; build up its own army very rapidly; bloodlessly disarm all other military powers; strategically manoeuvre such that other actors do what it wants without the use of military force; prevent other actors developing ASI through sabotage, persuasion or force; unilaterally seize control of space resources and block other actors from following suit. Of course, this is speculative — but it’s what I think is plausible given how rapid technological progress could become.

In this intelligence explosion scenario, there is a point in time when the first project to build AGI determines what happens next for the world. The project might choose to give power back to other actors (e.g. by open sourcing the models, or giving the model weights to political leadership) — but that would be the project’s choice.

How likely this is to happen depends on the speed, scale and concentration of the intelligence explosion. All other things being equal, the faster the rate of AI capabilities progress, the longer that rapid progress can be sustained (and so the greater the capabilities the resulting superintelligence has), and the greater the extent to which the intelligence explosion can occur without relying on third parties outside of the project, the more powerful the leading AGI project will be compared to the rest of the world. Unfortunately, we don’t currently know how fast, sustained and concentrated any intelligence explosion will be, but given the state of our evidence we cannot rule out that it will be very fast, very sustained, and very concentrated. 

It also depends on what type of organisation develops AGI. AGI could be developed by a private company, a single government-led project, or an international consortium of governments. Of these, a private company is least likely to achieve de facto world government status, because their government starts off with far greater hard power than the company, can monitor the activities of the company, and, when it’s clear that the company is becoming extremely powerful, can step in and forcibly take control of the company (or threaten to do so).

The same constraints do not bind government-led AGI projects. However, other countries could potentially maintain the balance of power by making credible threats (of war, or of restricting essential semiconductor manufacturing components) against the leading country and thereby getting access to the model weights. This becomes somewhat less likely to happen if the leading project is a multilateral consortium of governments because such a consortium would have greater hard power, could include the whole of the semiconductor supply chain, and would reduce the number of potentially adversarial countries.

(Weakly held) implications for AGI governance

To the extent that we take the possibility that the first AGI project evolves into world government seriously, we think that the following things become more desirable:

1. The first AGI project is government-led, rather than private. 
   1. Corporate governance structures are (a) not designed to govern political power, (b) not tested at governing political power. 
      1. A privately-developed AGI by default will be aligned to the CEO or to the company’s governance regime. If the former, de facto autocracy is likely. If the latter, it is at least a major risk: the CEO could potentially outwit or collude with the Board and largest shareholders, or simply start ignoring their demands post-AGI, and thereby become de facto dictator. And, even if that doesn’t happen, power over the de facto world government would essentially be in the hands of the company’s largest shareholders — who probably represent a small fraction of society. 
      2. In contrast, democratic governance is the best approach to political power that has actually been tried. Governments also have far more legitimacy than companies to exercise political power (though more on this below). 
   2. What’s more, if the first AGI project is private, we expect that the relevant government will intervene, and we’ll end up with a government-led project anyway, but one that was set up in haste and without multilateral involvement.
2. The project is multilateral, rather than single-government.   
   1. If the first AGI project is to evolve into a world government, then avoiding the risk of the project becoming an autocracy is extremely important.^[3] Having multiple governments with some meaningful control over the project reduces this risk considerably: even if one government becomes more authoritarian, the others can oppose this.^[4]
   2. Moreover, if the project becomes a world government, it seems desirable for many governments and people to have a stake in the project, and for all people to receive benefits from it.
3. The project is governed by a coalition of democratic countries, rather than as a global democracy.  Here are the arguments for this, from least to most controversial:
   1. Global democratic governance is unlikely to be feasible, because it would involve the US giving up a lot of power. Pushing hard for global democratic governance may make a multilateral project of any kind less likely, increasing the chances that the US government goes it alone, and that we end up with something like autocracy.
   2. From the perspective of ensuring a flourishing future over the long term, the gains from global democratic governance may be quite small.
      1. For one thing, most beings with moral status wouldn’t be represented by either a coalition of democratic countries or global democratic governance — as most beings are future beings (also, animals and digital minds). So there aren’t big gains on that front.
      2. For another, going from a coalition of democratic countries to all countries matters much less than going from autocracy to a coalition of democratic countries, in terms of increased moral diversity.^[5] The gain of going from hundreds of millions of people being represented to 8 billion is only an order of magnitude. In contrast, the gain from going from a single person in charge to a hundred million people being represented is 8 orders of magnitude.  
   3. Global democratic governance might increase the risk of authoritarianism. In a survey of citizens from 24 countries,^[6] 64% of people said that rule by a strong leader or the military would be a good way of governing their country. Of those countries which would be most likely to take part in a multilateral AGI project,^[7] only 31% of people agreed to the same claim.
4. The project is governed under an explicitly interim arrangement. 
   1. For example, the project could be governed by some time-bound governance structure, with a binding agreement that this structure will be renegotiated after a certain number of years (as was the case for Intelsat). The case for this is that designing the ideal world government post-AGI is very hard, and we’ll do a much better job of it after we’ve thought more about it, with the help of AGI and ASI. 
5. Different countries in the coalition are given fixed and weighted voting power, rather than using a one person one vote or one country one vote system. 
   1. The reason to fix voting power is that post-AGI, rapid population growth will become possible (whether of digital citizens, or biological ones via artificial wombs and robot child-rearers). If project voting were one-person one-vote, then whichever country grew its population the fastest could seize power.
   2. The reason to weight voting, rather than use one-country-one-vote, is that otherwise small countries would get disproportionate amounts of power, in a way that seems arbitrary and very non-democratic. For example, each of around 100 smaller countries would have at least 100x the voting power per person as the US. And, pragmatically, weighting would also make the arrangement more palatable to the US, making an international project more feasible.
   3. There’s some tension here: if the voting is weighted so that countries are proportionately represented, but fixed so that runaway population growth can’t be used to seize power, then the weights between countries could eventually become very disproportionate.^[8]
6. Countries that are not part of the project receive major benefits and credible reassurances that they won’t have their sovereignty violated. 
   1. The prospect of world government makes it more likely that non-participating countries will take drastic action (stealing model weights, short-cuts on safety, kinetic strikes) in order to prevent that from happening. This puts more importance on ensuring that countries that are not part of the first AGI project receive major benefits from the development of AGI and credible reassurances that they won’t have their sovereignty violated in a post-AGI world. That said, we believe we should still be reluctant to give much in the way of formal governance power to authoritarian countries.

Thanks to many people for comments and discussion.
 

1. ^{^}

   For example, pushing for AGI development to be government-led might increase the chance that power becomes extremely concentrated (as governments have fewer checks than companies), or that misaligned AI takes over (if you believe that governments would handle this risk less competently than labs).

2. ^{^}

   Bostrom 2014.

3. ^{^}

   How well the project manages to avoid misalignment risk is also an important design feature, but I think AI project designs vary less on this dimension than on how likely they are to become autocracies.

4. ^{^}

   Here’s a very simplified model: at any one time, there’s some chance of the leader of a country having authoritarian impulses, or even being a malevolent actor (like Stalin or Mao). But for democratic countries, at least, this chance is fairly low - let’s say 20%. So if there’s one political leader in charge, we have a 20% chance of that leader trying to make the AGI project autocratic. But if there are political leaders from $n$ countries in charge, where $n$ is the number of countries that would need to coordinate in order to make the coalition autocratic, the chance of autocracy becomes 20%^$n$. With 4 countries, the chance becomes much less than 1%.

5. ^{^}

   In order to have a flourishing future, we want to have a diversity of moral views, and the ability to make compromises between these different moral views. Having the relevant decision-makers be thoughtful and morally reflective is important, too, but having a diversity of moral views ensures that at least some parties are thoughtful and morally reflective.

6. ^{^}

   Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Argentina, Brazil, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Israel, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Poland, and South Africa.

7. ^{^}

   The US, Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. These countries are either leading AI developers (US), key security allies of leading AI developers (Canada, UK, Australia) or critical to the semiconductor supply chain (the Netherlands, Germany, Japan, South Korea). The V-DEM Institute categorises all of these countries as liberal or electoral democracies.

8. ^{^}

   In general, the ideal design of a de facto world government is a very hard question, which is another reason to make sure that the initial arrangements are temporary.

2026-01-29 05:58:17

Published on January 28, 2026 8:14 PM GMT

The Heritage Foundation has a new report “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years.” It provides a window into the people who dine with and write legislation for Republican legislators. As you can guess from the title, the 137-page report talks a lot about the decline of the family, but it’s far more than lamentation. It’s a policy brief with actionable advice, written by people who are getting used to winning, who know what they want and are optimistic about using government power to get it. They are not traditional Republicans, but they are not really Trumpists either. Their ideology is something I call everything bagel conservatism, the ideology of J.D. Vance, which combines Trumpist populism and some elements of the traditional Republican platform with RFK conspiracism and a strong dose of religious nationalist ideology that Trump usually shies away from. The result is a report that combines liberty-expanding good government reforms with fiscally irresponsible handout politics and some extreme policies that would destroy wealth, liberty, and the Right’s political fortunes.

I’ll start with the good recommendations, which include defaulting to 50-50 equal custody, making alimony never last longer than the length of the marriage, not requiring bachelor’s degrees in public-sector jobs, publishing statistics on how family court judges rule to increase transparency in elections, revisiting Griggs vs. Duke, imposing work requirements on welfare recipients, and making the “credits, programs, and tax benefits currently provided for paid childcare available for at-home parental child raising.” It also recommends YIMBY reforms, such as reducing minimum lot sizes, ending rent control, privatizing Fannie and Freddie, excluding infill housing from NEPA, and promoting “by-right” residential development within transit corridors. (though it’s unclear what that means.)

The report contains none of the pessimistic mindset that says liberal “progress” is inevitable. Humans are rational agents who respond to incentives. Great Society welfare programs incentivized single-parent families, and the result was a whole lot more of them. Massive subsidies for higher education, along with Griggs v. Duke Power, led many to acquire higher education who wouldn’t otherwise have done so. Dual-income families are incentivized by government programs that subsidize childcare so long as it is not provided by the mother. Incentives push in one direction and can be made to push in another. The report details how the divorce rate in Kentucky fell after it made 50–50 shared custody the default. It details how the decline in two-parent families immediately slowed after welfare reform:

Alas, you cannot get the good without the bad, and there’s a lot of bad. The report starts with Christian nationalists’ favorite quote from John Adams: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Tone set, this is what you get:

Some recognize the extreme gravity of the crisis and recommend extraordinary technical solutions. These include mass subsidies for IVF, egg freezing, and genetic screening combined with a market for babies where people (usually men of means) contractually create many children across many partners or surrogates. The ultimate end of this form of “pro-natalism” envisions a world of artificial wombs and custom-ordered, lab-created babies on demand.

The solution to the devaluing and commoditization of children, however, cannot be to treat them even more like consumer goods. A babies-at-all costs mentality would come at too great a cost, and not just financially, but morally and spiritually. Such an approach intentionally denies a right due to every child conceived—to be born and grow in relationship with his or her mother and father bound in marriage.

This statement may seem odd, as conceived via IVF are more likely to be raised by married, heterosexual parents than children made the natural way, but that’s no matter, for conservatives don’t care about reality. They want to believe that the salt-of-the-Earth rural working-class are practicing traditional family values and that rich educated people in cities are not - any data contradicting the narrative can be ignored.

The authors are concerned by IVF, and really don’t like artificial wombs:

What if, in 2045, the U.S. can build automated factories with artificial wombs that can gestate human babies from the moment of fertilization until they are full term? This would reduce the opportunity costs of pregnancy, especially for women with high-income potential: No morning sickness, no doctor visits, no pregnancy-related sick days away from work, no risk of gestational diabetes and c-sections, and so on.

To some, this may sound like the ideal way to address the birth dearth. To many others, however, it sounds dystopian, and for good reason: Such technology would destroy the natural ecology of the family in the most radical sense. From the procreative act of husband and wife, to the unique bond between a mother and her gestating and then nursing child, to even the exchange of genetic material during natural pregnancy, to the financial motives determining the level of “perfection” of each ordered child, every broken link in the natural chain of human reproduction would reduce the sacredness of marriage and begetting children into a consumer good, and, when combined with abortion culture, a fully disposable one. A preview of such a world already exists, where the “advanced” country of Iceland has been declared virtually “Down Syndrome free” because of its near-universal practice of eugenic abortions that now go up to the 22nd week in the womb.

This is completely opposed to the Nietzschean worldview, which looks toward the next stage in human evolution, the Overman. The conservative demands the freezing of evolution and progress, the sacralization of the peasant in his state of nature, pregnancy, nursing, throwing up. “Perfection” the conservative puts in scare quotes, he wants the whole concept to disappear, replaced by a universal equality that won’t deem anyone inferior. Perhaps it’s because he fears a society looking toward the future will leave him behind. Or perhaps it’s because he had been taught his Christian morality requires him to identify with the weak, for, as Jesus said, “blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.” In his glorification of the “natural ecology of the family,” the conservative fails even by his own logic, as in the state of nature, parents allow sick offspring to die to save resources for the healthy. This was the case in the animal kingdom and among our peasant ancestors.

Some young, BASED Rightists like eugenics, and think the only reason conservatives don’t is that liberals brainwashed them that it’s evil. As more and more taboos erode, yet the one against eugenics remains, it becomes clear that dysgenics is not incidental to conservatism, but driven by the ideology itself, its neuroticism about the human body and hatred of the superior.

The dysgenic religious stuff has long been part of conservatism. A recent addition to the everything bagel is RFK-style conspiracism, appropriately represented in the report:

Supporting care that improves natural fertility, lowers miscarriage risk, and strengthens overall health at a lower cost is squarely in line with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda. This care naturally includes restorative reproductive medicine (RRM), which addresses hormone imbalances, endometriosis, or metabolic issues that can often be cured with proper diagnosis and treatment. Men and women who want, but cannot physically have, children may find hope in the developed, and still developing, field.

What About Restorative Reproductive Medicine (RRM)? RRM seeks to diagnose and treat the root causes of infertility. It combines cycle tracking, targeted lab testing, lifestyle interventions, medical and hormonal therapies, and corrective surgeries to restore natural fertility for both men and women. RRM can improve egg and sperm quality, decrease miscarriage rates, balance hormone levels, and optimize a woman’s body to support the child in utero

I know nothing about RRM, but tying it to MAHA does not inspire confidence. It’s clear that, whatever RRM’s utility, the report’s authors like it because of religion and their atavistic, dysgenic glorification of the peasantry.

On the surface, RFK Jr’s ideology shares little in common with Christian dysgenicism. Until two years ago, his policy preferences on nearly every issue were left-wing, and I bet he looks down on the Christian Right as a bunch of dumb hicks. Where the report complains that Iceland doesn’t have enough retards, RFK complains America has too many. But both ideologies are alike in their atavism, their glorification of the ancestral form, and their opposition to the application of technology to the human body.

Chomp on that everything bagel. What’s the next bite gonna bring? How about Trump Accounts:

First, Congress should build on the President’s innovative Trump Accounts by supporting marriage with a $2,500 initial deposit into a new investment account. Trump Accounts are in effect tax-free long-term bonds that provide a $1,000 deposit at the birth of a child to support his or her adult milestones such as college education, home-buying, or starting a business. Noticeably absent is support for the milestone of marriage. Congress should expand the Trump Accounts by creating separate Newlywed Early Starters Trust (NEST) accounts that support men and women who marry by or before the current average age of first marriage (about age 30) and that provide future retirement support for those who do not.

The initial deposit should be $2,500 and would be distributed over three years upon eligible marriage. To illustrate, if two people married by age 28, they would be expected to receive an inflation-adjusted NEST distribution of more than $38,000 by age 30. This amount would provide newlyweds with a boost to their lives together with any amounts unclaimed by 30 being converted to traditional individual retirement accounts (IRAs)

This is a good illustration of the spirit of the so-called New Right. Gone is any sense of fiscal responsibility. Gone is the notion that there’s something shameful about receiving money from the government. You might try to justify this as rebalancing a system that shovels money to the old with one that supports children and young parents. There are two problems with this. As a pro-natal measure, the idea is dubious, prospective parents considering the cost of having children want money to pay for diapers; they aren’t thinking about their newborn’s retirement. More fundamentally, this idea coexists with another Trumpist idea (no tax on social security, put into practice as a special tax break for the old) that shovels even more money to the retirement home. Trumpism is little more than a never-ending parade of irresponsible, sleazy promises made by a used car salesman.

Let’s consider the proposal to make the distribution available only to those who marry by age 30. You could make an argument for it on pro-natal grounds, that it’s a needed nudge against the culture of late marriage which is both anti-natal and dysgenic. Will the targets perceive it that way? Probably not if you precede it by telling them you think they’re a threat to the Republic because they’re not religious. They’ll see it as a way for the state to transfer money from their tribe to yours.

The subculture that marries around age 37 and produces 1.2 children is contributing to dysgenics and often has bad political views. But they’re usually fine people to have as neighbors. They pay their taxes and don’t drain the welfare system. And, this is something Heritage authors in particular should care about, they vote in midterm elections, so it might not be a good idea to make them the enemy.

The report condemns the welfare and tax disincentives for marriage, but wants to go further than neutrality. Instead, it calls for marriage subsidies:

Second, Congress should apply the current $17,670 adoption tax credit to married parents for each of their own newborns. This newly proposed credit would be structured to make up for existing marriage penalties in the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). To incentivize marriage stability for eligible children, the credit would be distributed annually in four equal installments across three to four calendar years. To recognize the investments involved and the societal benefits that accrue from large families, married parents that already have two or more children would receive a 25 percent Large Family Bonus for each additional child. To avoid repeating past policy mistakes that punished and disincentivized work, at least one parent would be required to be engaged in verifiable employment for the family to be eligible for the tax credit.

You can’t be too mad at Republicans for behaving like almost every single political party on Earth in wanting to direct money to its voters. Democratic politicians provide student loan forgiveness to the educated, childcare for women who work outside the home, welfare benefits to single mothers, and affirmative action for women and minorities. It should hardly surprise anyone if the GOP wants to direct money to married couples with many children, who are more likely to vote Republican, instead of being a narrow small-government party. But could these policies last? They’d come under heavy pressure to make them available to singles and the divorced.

Further recommendations in the report include resisting proposals to decriminalize marijuana, restricting vaping (no detail is provided as to how), and raising the minimum age to use social media to 16. Even if these are good ideas on paternalistic grounds, Republican politicians will find them difficult to implement given their political coalition. The GOP of the past, with its strength in the suburbs, could afford to be paternalistic toward weed-smoking working-class youth because it didn’t rely on them for votes.

One of the more surprising policies the report advocates for are blue laws that mandate the general closure of businesses on Sunday:

A uniform day of rest that limits commercial activity can provide temporal boundaries that help communities to set aside time for religious observance, family gatherings, outdoor activities, and rest. A stable base of research shows that these practices correlate with better mental health, stronger social bonds, and more stable family structures.

With the advent of on-demand delivery, shopping can be shifted easily and conveniently to other days of the week. By restoring a common rhythm of rest and reflection, community rest laws could help to reverse the trend toward “spiritual homelessness” and foster the social habits necessary for communities to cohere and flourish.

If the goal is to make people more community-minded, this may well backfire, replacing an outing at the mall or amusement park with a night at home watching TV. It would invite political corruption, as businesses and industries demand exemptions. It would be unpopular, as the authors acknowledge, writing that once day-of-rest laws are abolished, they are very hard to restore. Yet their conclusion is to enact such laws in new communities:

Where new, planned communities or transitioning communities form, they should consider adding rest days as part of their master plans for balanced and thriving community life.

Will people want to move into such communities? Will businesses? An older generation of Republicans worked hard to attract people and businesses to their states. This led to an understandable backlash against the almost sadomasochistic obsequiousness some Republicans showed to liberal CEOs who hate conservatives. If it goes so far in the other direction that younger conservatives no longer consider the business perspective at all, the rise of the sunbelt could be halted or reversed. There’s no law of physics that says that people have to move to Texas and Florida and be raw material for Heritage authors’ social engineering experiments.

Back in 2016, many predicted that Trump would move the GOP in a more “European” direction, toward a focus on national identity and away from religion. To some extent, he’s done this, embracing prominent atheists like Joe Rogan and Elon Musk and claiming that “my administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.” Yet among the conservative intelligentsia, the opposite has occurred. 2018 Charlie Kirk expressed support for the separation of church and state, by 2022, he was saying “it’s a fabrication. It’s a fiction. It’s not in the Constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists.” Many “red-pill” guys started by talking about feminism and picking up women, then decided the next level redpill was converting to Eastern Orthodox Christianity and sperging out about “baby murder.” It seems that any Right-wing movement that doesn’t start out explicitly anti-Christian will sooner or later circle back to Bible thumpery.

There’s a parallel to wokeness, which was not demanded by work-a-day Democratic voters, nor necessary for the Democrats’ electoral success. It was driven by a tribal radicalization process among the Democratic staffer class, who competed among one another to produce increasingly woke policy papers that would repel normal voters, but didn’t, because normal voters don’t read policy papers. But once politicos themselves began parroting the woke stuff, voters heard it and punished them. Ordinary people won’t read this Heritage report, but people like J.D. Vance will. If they take it to the campaign trail, that spells trouble, for while many politicians don’t care about whether the stuff they say is sensible or true, they all care about whether it’s popular. We’ll see how well “Christian, husband, dad” does with the voters.

2026-01-29 05:24:16

Published on January 28, 2026 9:24 PM GMT

I was at a party a few years ago. It was a bunch of technical nerds. Somehow the conversation drifted to human communication with animals, Alex the grey parrot, and the famous Koko the gorilla. It wasn't in SF, so there had been cocktails, and one of the nerds (it wasn’t me) sort of cautiously asked “You guys know that stuff is completely made up, right?”

He was cautious, I think, because people are extremely at ease imputing human motives and abilities to pets, cute animals, and famous gorillas. They are simultaneously extremely uneasy casting scientific shade on this work that’d so completely penetrated popular culture and science communication. People want to believe even if dogs and gorillas can’t actually speak, they have some intimate rapport with human language abilities. If there’s a crazy cat lady at the party, it doesn’t pay to imply she’s insane to suggest Rufus knows or cares what she’s saying.

With the advent of AI, the non-profit Project CETI was founded in 2020 with a charter mission of understanding sperm whale communications, and perhaps even communicating with the whales ourselves. Late last year, an allied group of researchers published Begus et al.: “Vowel- and Diphthong-Like Spectral Patterns in Sperm Whale Codas”.

The paper takes a novel approach. Instead of trying to analyze whale click counts and duration and other straightforward avenues of analysis, it uses the spectral properties of sperm whale codas, sequences of clicks used in social settings, to get at another potential dimension of whale communications. And they provide actual code and data!

Quick Background

Practically all cetaceans make sounds. Humpback whale song is thought to be a part of ritualistic courtship. Many species including sperm whales use echolocation in the same manner as bats, but the sperm whale coda is something different. Each coda is composed of a sequence of distinct clicks. There are varying types of codas of varying lengths of clicks, and interestingly the coda types seem to be tied to matrilineal whale families or “clans”. You can listen to a sperm whale bout here.

In the whale language research world, a “dialogue” between whales is made up of “bouts” between whales, a “bout” is made up of a sequence of “codas”, a “coda” is made up of distinct “clicks”, and according to these authors’ analysis the clicks can take on different flavors which they choose to call “vowels”. The vowel types are “a” and “i”, which strictly make up a naming convention and have nothing else to do with our human vowels.

The bulk of the data elements come from 14 sperm whales they’ve managed to individually bug with listening devices. They’re bugging the whales! The Great Stagnation is over!

There’s a lot of data to go through, and I made a shiny app to help myself understand what’s going on here better. I’ve deployed the app here if you want to try it out. You can see the various spectral peaks at different frequencies and the authors’ preferred vowel identification per click and per coda.

The Vowels

When I started out reading this paper, I was sure the authors were speaking metaphorically. Surely they’re not suggesting these spectral differences captured by Fast Fourier Transforms actually constituted different vowel-like sounds analogous to what humans can willfully articulate right?

But they are! They state:

We introduce the labels coda vowel and coda diphthong to describe the newly observed patterns in sperm whale codas within the source-filter framework. The “vowel” and “diphthong” parts denote the acoustic analogues to human vowels, whereas the modifier “coda” signals differences between human vowels, sperm whale coda vowels and other animal vocalizations. We take the presence of formant patterns with discretely distributed and controlled types that interact with the source features such as duration and F0 as sufficient conditions to term vocalizations vowel-like.

A key distinction remains: human vowels are phonemic, which means they distinguish meaning. No referential meaning relationship has yet been established for sperm whale codas. While it is possible or even likely that codas do distinguish or carry referential meaning, this has not yet been observed.

And they go further, naming the clicks themselves with 1 distinct spectral peak as “a” and those with 2 or more spectral peaks as “i”.

I read this with an incredibly skeptical eye, but these patterns hold both across coda types and across different whales.

I noticed how the detected spectral peaks at the click level relied on several important hyperparameters like the minimum height of a candidate peak and how close together the peaks were. Determined to show the analysis could not possibly be robust to changes in those hyperparameters, I ran an extensive gridsearch across different values and was horrified to discover that the results were surprisingly consistent across such methodological changes.

In more than half the hyperparameter choices, 90% or more of the peak counts stayed the same as what the authors did. When I scrolled through all the spectral data by hand, there really did look like 2 types of situations, “a” and “i” that a regular person might denote as different.

What in the name of Captain Ahab’s prosthetic is going on here? Can sperm whales really control the sounds induced by their phonic lips in the way the authors mean?

Articulatory Control

The reason that the paper is incorrect comes down to biological plausibility, a very careful look at the data, and a little math. I’m reasonably certain the described coda vowel patterns are in fact physical artifacts, and not volitional whale utterances.

In their discussion section, Begus et al. point out

Our proposal suggests that spectral patterns (vocalic and diphthongal) require articulatory control in sperm whales. While there are many aspects of sperm whale articulation that are not yet fully understood, recent work has suggested that sperm whales and other odontocetes can control articulators to a larger degree than previously thought (Madsen et al., 2023). Weir et al. (2007) argues that the tonal, burst-pulse ‘squeal’ vocalization of sperm whales, which is different from coda vocalizations, might be controlled by the whales, resulting in spectral modulations of squeals. Sperm whales have also been shown to produce other types of vocalizations, such as trumpets (Pace et al., 2021), which additionally points to at least some level of active articulatory control.

“Articulatory control” is a term of art in linguistics describing how specific motor controls cause intentional sounds to be made. A source makes up raw acoustical energy and this energy passes through a filter to appropriately modify it. Obviously, many animals have this ability. I was a birding dork growing up and a bit of a math dork if you can believe it and actually read large parts of Mindlin and Laje’s wonderful monograph The Physics of Birdsong in college. I revisited it to see how plausible the articulatory control proposition in sperm whales actually is.

In these whales, the acoustical pulse source for the whale codas is called the phonic lips which sit near the blowhole. Nasal air is used to flap these open and closed quickly which forms the acoustic pulse. This single pulse is filtered and shaped as it travels through to the back of the whale’s head reverberating off the distal air sac, and the sound you hear creates a wavefront in the water in front of the whale. The sac, the spermaceti, and the rest of the whale head form the filter.

Birds also have such a source-filter system, and so do humans. The human system is astonishing and we very clearly have the most sophisticated articulatory control among all animals, but that of songbirds is in some sense much more impressive. Mindlin and Laje cite Elemans et al. 2004 entitled Bird song: Superfast muscles control dove’s trill which states

A dove’s trill cannot be achieved using typical vertebrate muscles, because they do not switch on and off fast enough to control the trill’s brief sound elements (>9 ms). The syringeal muscles must also contract aerobically to power cooing sessions that can last for many minutes. These extreme requirements can be met only by aerobic superfast muscles.

This muscle type is the fastest known in vertebrates: its twitch half-time is less than 10 ms, which is one to two orders of magnitude faster than that of typical locomotory muscles.

The problem here is that the click-level sperm whale coda data that shows multiple spectral peaks each consists of 5 ms at most. Below is a typical “i”-type vowel 3 + 1 + 1 coda consisting of 5 clicks.

However the whale filtered the pulse from the phonic lips, it would need to involve movements at time granularities much, much smaller than even the fastest known acoustic control systems in vertebrates. This is not biologically plausible, probably even if the articulatory control in question is at the coda level and not the click level. The whales are not in control of these clicks in the way the authors suppose.

What’s actually going on here?

The multiple peak pattern is real, but the above argument shows this is clearly not under the whale’s volitional control. Some pretty decent clues surface in 22% of the codas under study: when clicks making up the codas have different spectral signatures. Look at this one.

The authors label this one as an “i” coda, but you can see how close the secondary peak is to the primary peak across clicks. These intermediate codas suggest there really is only a single peak at a fixed frequency, and the secondary peak is a beaming artifact.

Look at the cartoon in Figure 4 above. As the acoustical energy bounces off the air sac and flows through the whale’s head, the “i” type vowels you’re seeing are simply an interference pattern. The broadband impulse which originates from the phonic lips exits the head along a direct path and a delayed reflected path off the distal air sac. There’s a pretty detailed wikipedia page documenting this phenomenon.

There’s another piece of data driven evidence confirming this interpretation in Figure 2 above. Notice how the top peaks on the “i” vowels and the peaks on the “a” vowels all cluster around 6 kHz. There’s not necessarily a reason to expect this unless the second lower frequency “i” peaks are reflective artifacts derived of the higher frequency peaks which also make up all the “a” peaks.

Why is this happening? The authors do a little bit of argumentation about why the whale pitch, hydrophone placement, and depth are unlikely to produce artifacts like this one, but I didn’t find it very persuasive.

Conclusion

People at CETI: I’m on your side! It would be amazing to talk to the whales. I want us to have to answer questions in a tribunal about the crimes of the whaling industry with sperm whale prosecutors. This project needs much more data and a very disciplined approach I hope they have the conviction to undertake. However, I fear they’ve fallen into what appears to be a classical failure mode: endowing animals with human abilities.

2026-01-29 02:10:18

Published on January 28, 2026 6:10 PM GMT

It’s been a busy month of writing.

Chapter 7, as you may recall if you read the first draft, is both the “cybernetics chapter” and the “tie everything together” chapter. Originally it was largely based on the two posts where I first worked out these ideas, but as I’ve been revising, I discovered that it contained both a lot of extraneous material and didn’t have quite the right focus for where it sits in the book. These were both problems I knew about when I wrote the first draft, and now in the revisions I have to solve them.

As a result, it’s been a slog to find the right way to present these ideas. I’ve tried maybe 5 different approaches. It takes time to develop them out enough to see if they work. I’m hopeful that the 6th approach will be the final one, but it’s not done yet, so no promises.

Medium

Hey, did you know I used to run a blog on Medium called Map and Territory? It originally started as a group blog for some folks in the LessWrong 1.0 diaspora, but the group aspect quickly collapsed after LessWrong 2.0 launched, so then it was just me. (All my posts from it are now mirrored on LessWrong since I trust it more than Medium in the long run.)

Anyway, every few months somebody, usually this guy, references my most popular post from the Map and Territory days. It’s titled “Doxa, Episteme, and Gnosis”, and it still gets about 100 new reads a week all these years later. I’ve tried a couple times to write new versions of it, but they never do as well.

The “Many Ways of Knowing” post from two weeks ago was the most recent evolution of this post, though this time excerpted from the book. I like it, and I think it fits well in the book, but it still doesn’t quite capture the magic of the original.

The original succeeds in part, I think, because I was naive. I presented a simple—and in fact over-simplified—model of knowledge. It’s accessible in a way that later revisions aren’t because it’s “worse”, and I suspect it’s helped by putting three Greek words in the title, which I am pretty sure helps with SEO from students trying to find out what these words mean.

Anyway, this is all to say I got some more posts lined up, and hopefully I’ll at some point be naive enough to write another banger.