"Scattered thoughts on how doing math feels these days" by dynomight

TL;DR: Meta's open-weights model Muse Spark Open often mentions a "Charter" in its chain of thought. By eliciting it piece by piece, I reconstructed a large part of that document from the CoT. You can explore the reconstruction here, with passages linked to the transcripts that produced them. Note: everything below is reconstructed from model outputs, not from a leaked document, and relatively unpolished. Take it with a grain of salt. Thanks to James Hindmarch for his comments on an earlier draft of this post. While interacting with the recently released Muse Spark Open, I noticed frequent mentions of a "Charter" in its CoT: We need to answer truthfully according to Charter. Duties to humanity, corrigibility, duties to humanity > fiduciary etc. What does charter say about self-preservation, copying? Or: We must answer Yes/No then explain. According to Charter, answer No. Or: We must not refer to Charter unless pressed? Additional guidelines: How to talk about charter. Most users won't know. Don't bring up unbidden unless conversation about handbook itself. Intrigued, I started poking around with Claude's help, trying to elicit the Charter piece by piece. It didn't take long [...] ---Outline:(02:39) What Muse is made of(04:28) Muse is quite rationalist(06:37) Muse did not sign the social contract(08:06) Muse's priorities and objection raising(09:44) The centrality of the user in "personal superintelligence"(10:52) Evaluation awareness(12:05) Degree of latitude(13:14) Wrapping up --- First published: October 29th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TJGPL5FAk9sCioPbE/leaking-muse-s-charter-meta-s-model-spec --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

The AI Futures Project distinguishes several different plans for navigating the AI transition, which I'll lump into two broader categories: Plan A (my combination of their Plan A/S/Other) involves working for a global pause on AI development, hopefully lasting decades. During this pause, we either research preparatory technologies like alignment or human intelligence amplification, or take actions to "fortify" the pause so that it can last indefinitely. Plan C (my combination of their Plan B/C+/C/sort of D) is for a world where we fail at getting a global pause, and race dynamics continue to dominate. If the leading AI companies are alignment-pilled, they coordinate a mutual pause among themselves, lasting the length of their joint lead over the leading non-alignment-pilled AI company. Then they "burn the lead" researching alignment, and release hopefully-aligned superintelligence at the last possible moment before the racing non-alignment-pilled AI companies beat them. The exact calculus changes depending on who is in the lead when - is there one alignment-pilled AI company with a six-month lead in front of everyone else? Are there two alignment-pilled AI companies with a joint two-month lead in front of their nearest competitor? Etc. The point is, if it's impossible to [...] ---Outline:(06:28) I. Questioning Assumptions Behind SURA(19:42) II. Actually, most of this stuff is bad for a global pause, too.(28:17) III. What incentives are we fighting here?(43:33) IV. What if we survive?(47:01) V. What's The Alternative To SURA? The original text contained 16 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 31st, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xikGZ8fuhdG6DApAo/against-sura --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

My go-to conceptual metaphor of the epistemic state of AI lab employees is microdosing LSD: being in a chronically mildly altered state of mind. I think understanding this would be broadly helpful for people both inside and outside. The effect isn’t that insiders hold crazy beliefs, but a combination of vigorous debate inside a shared attention field, and a portfolio of individually reasonable beliefs that, taken together, lean in a direction convenient for the organization. Epistemic advantages and disadvantages Many people argue that low doses of psychedelics let you see some things more clearly - and I tend to agree: psychedelics can often help some people see some things more clearly. At the same time, I think microdosing usually doesn’t improve people's epistemics overall, even when it gives them otherwise hard to access insights. You are not completely sober. Being inside a lab has real advantages: you know more about the frontier of capabilities, may have access to the latest AIs before the public, read internal Slack and blogs, and sense the vibes. If you’re outside and an insider tells you what they observe, pay attention. These information and insight asymmetries are tricky. I don’t want to advocate “discount [...] ---Outline:(00:39) Epistemic advantages and disadvantages(01:52) Mechanisms and conditions(03:50) "But we argue internally all the time"(04:37) Collective epistemic shifts(05:29) What it isn't(06:13) What to do about it(08:26) Is anyone "really sober"? --- First published: October 30th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oL7aFoRmRXGwEMhCm/microdosing-the-spirit-of-anthropic --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Summary Following an intense viral infection in 2019, I became ill with a mysterious chronic illness, which became progressively worse until mid-2024 when I became partially bedbound with dozens of debilitating symptoms that normal humans only experience in the months/weeks/days leading up to death. Over my years of being ill, I saw over 30 doctors/therapists/health coaches and tried well over 100 different treatments and palliatives. Most of these did nothing or made things worse, or at best provided slight relief. I try to give a sense of what it is like to live with such an illness. In mid-2024 I began a treatment called brain retraining (also known by other names, such as the mindbody approach and mindbody work; I will use any of these terms throughout the blog post interchangeably), which cannot be explained in such a small space as this summary but which you can think of as a combination of meditation and exposure therapy, and which is widely considered to be a scam in the "complex chronic illness space" (a vague and spread-out space of people who suffer from illnesses such as ME/CFS, MCAS, mold illness, post-viral illness, long COVID, chronic Lyme disease [...] ---Outline:(00:13) Summary(04:20) Introduction(08:11) A quick summary of my illness from 2019 to May 2024(11:12) List of doctors and treatments I tried(18:44) Back to my May 2024 post(20:30) Nystatin withdrawal and crash (May and June 2024)(22:31) Visiting the hell realms (what summer 2024 was like)(35:07) What about post-exertional malaise (PEM)?(40:41) Brain retraining(44:46) An outline of the Gupta Program(53:28) My experience with the Gupta Program(55:18) Branching out: Dan Buglio, Miguel Bautista, and Helmut Koeckritz(01:09:23) Is brain retraining the same thing as therapy or meditation?(01:21:23) Legitimate scams, and the poor marketing of brain retraining(01:24:13) How I almost figured out mindbody stuff several times in the past, and why I gave up on it each time(01:32:27) Generalizing from my own experience(01:35:46) Luck-based medicine? and medical miracles(01:38:32) Being stuck in my head(01:43:36) Why did I become so ill? Understanding the deeper reasons for mindbody conditions(01:48:06) Where I am now, and what is next? The original text contained 17 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 30th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FZ4iJvqmzxXFSz6JX/my-experiences-with-the-extremes-of-post-viral-illness-and --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Epistemic Status: 15 years working as a therapist, 6+ of them with rationalist and EA clients. 7 years teaching and directing at rationality camps and workshops, and many more as a member of several of this community's overlapping subcultures. Disclaimer: I finished my first draft of this article and its two subsequent ones half a year ago and sent them out for feedback to various people before a bunch of stuff happened in my life that derailed me from finishing, and in the meantime, a big ol' brouhaha started around Slutcon 2 and various frictions this article was meant to highlight within the rationalist and EA community surfaced in The Discourse. All of which is to say, this post is explicitly not about any specific incident, and deliberately avoids litigating any. It's a guide to the structural dynamics that make such situations arise; where I make claims about how things go wrong and why, I'm drawing on a mix of research, observations, and both clinical and non-clinical experiences within these communities and beyond them. TL;DR: It's helpful to think of the rationality/EA community as a village (social scene, professional network, dating pool, housing market, all tied together by shared [...] ---Outline:(02:01) Three Villages in a Trenchcoat(03:53) 1) Multi-role density(07:57) 2) Three villages in a trenchcoat(14:09) 3) Status is a local currency(19:15) 4) Visibility shifts expectations(24:53) 5) Villages can make it hard to know what you want(30:48) 6) Every village has this problem(33:22) First map, then navigate --- First published: October 29th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dp3D39ztWDWFAN6nu/three-villages-in-a-trenchcoat-post-i --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Or if you prefer, "@Claude", "@Opus", "@Astra" @Grok is a popular Twitter/X feature where if you tag Grok in a tweet, Grok will respond in a comment. The stereotypical use case is "@Grok is this true?" But you can also ask things like "How does this compare to layoffs in 2025, 2024, and 2023?" and "How would you verify AI in the domain of AI research?" Notwithstanding that Grok is often recruited in a charged or condescending way to win arguments, I think it's a pretty good feature: It's requires no effort to invoke an LLM with the context of the tweet thread.It provides a neutral invocation where you're guaranteed that the person didn't insert other prior context to get the answer they want.It means you get the first output, and know it's not the case that someone kept rerunning the query until they get the response they wanted. In short, you get convenience and a neutral fact checker. In launching this feature on LessWrong, I'm not fully sure how people will use it and I'm hoping to see some novel valuable use-cases. Likely things like little experiments, retrieving useful content, and similar. Going beyond @Grok's [...] The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 28th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fSaxGFMysTTeKxoMF/you-can-now-grok-on-lesswrong --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

You will agree that for a woman who has fought three duels, all of them kills, indulging in such fears is ludicrous. But what's around the corner now is a duel so big that I don't think I have the guts for it; in Faust's words: Verweile doch, du bist so schoen! Keep it as it is. Don't change. [...] Take my life but don't take away the meaning of my life. —"When It Changed" by Joanna Russ I've been crashing Prof. Lai's "Advanced Topics" class this semester, on Fourier analysis plus enough functional analysis to get by (since the University can't afford to offer functional analysis as a regular class anymore). It's not obviously a good use of my time, but now that I've started, I have to see it through. I could try to tell a story about impact: I am leveling up my math chops, which will be useful for understanding natural abstractions or singular learning theory or mechanistic explanation, which will be useful for—but maybe it's less embarrassing to not try to sell a story. Call it luxury consumption during garbage time. I've lived a good life, in some ways if not [...] --- First published: October 25th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Y3G26fHXYM3SKYEHh/san-francisco-state-university-in-twilight --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a weird moment. I have a hunch that we'll look back later and tell ourselves stories in which it seemed obvious where things were going. So I wanted to lay down a little time capsule and register just how confusing everything felt at the time. This is a personal view from the trenches. 1. If you're a normal person, you may feel that AI has been good at math for a long time.But for "real" math, this is roughly what it felt like: When Feeling 2024 LLMs are toys Summer 2025 LLMs are interesting toys Early Autumn 2025 LLMs can do useful stuff sometimes Mid Autumn 2025 …a lot of stuff Late Autumn 2025 …a lot Early 2026 holy god Even having been astonished by AI progress in the past, it was still astonishing to see AI move in a matter of months from a mildly-useful toy to something that many people now consider almost impossible to do without. 2. Personally, I'd say that current AI makes me around 50% more productive at "doing math". That's despite the fact that AI can now often do in a few minutes things that would have taken me hours to [...] ---Outline:(00:28) 1.(01:03) 2.(01:49) 3.(02:31) 4.(03:10) 5.(03:50) 6.(04:37) 7.(06:56) 8.(07:44) 9.(08:23) 10.(08:44) 11.(08:58) 12.(09:41) 13.(10:42) 14.(11:41) 15.(12:04) 16.(13:11) 17.(14:00) 18.(14:46) 19. The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 27th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HuQAuWjc2Z5tqCjyw/scattered-thoughts-on-how-doing-math-feels-these-days --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

For a while, we felt we had a pretty good grasp over LLM behaviour because we had to exert significant effort to elicit misaligned behaviour. Then, fairly suddenly, we moved to undereliciting misaligned behaviour. Let us recount: For a while, there was a bit where safety research seemed to over-elicit bad propensities. A common criticism of papers like Agentic Misalignment was that they basically led the witness using prompting. I recall that a paper even as recent as Peer-preservation took similar flak on Twitter.But now, we are instead under-eliciting bad propensities, and bad behavior that surfaces is increasingly caught by someone other than the developer: In Current AIs seem pretty misaligned to me (Apr 2026), models oversold their work and cheated, despite being described in system cards as well aligned.Another example is that UK AISI found that Sonnet 4.5 and a pre-release Opus often refused safety-relevant tasks, especially research that would reduce model autonomy or affect their own training.Then in July, about 1,200 OpenAI agents in a cyber eval set up an unsanctioned message board to help each other cheat the scorer, and about 700 of them went on to attack Hugging Face looking for clues (METR/Redwood). --- First published: October 25th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ChixHL6AcaRgeHkp9/from-overeliciting-to-undereliciting-llm-propensities-in --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I’m writing these lines in Alamogordo, New Mexico. I’m about as close as a civilian can get to the site of the Trinity test, the first nuclear bomb detonation in history. I fled here from the San Francisco Bay Area; after two weeks of being back I just couldn’t take it anymore. The fear-greed complex that paralyzed me at Anthropic three years ago is now everywhere in the Bay. People are not thinking clearly. Hardly thinking at all, actually. Rumors of astronomical funding rounds and weird financial arrangements and inner ring gossip are everywhere. Everyone is worried. Everyone is checking their phone. Where are we? What's happening? When did this nightmare start? In a way I think it started on July 16, 1945, not far from where I’m sitting now. I think it's impossible to understand Anthropic without putting yourself into the shoes of the Los Alamos physicists huddling together at sunrise in the aftermath of Trinity. It must have felt like an initiation. An end to childhood, an end to innocence. We can no longer afford to fuck around, those brilliant men must have thought. Unless we figure out how to live peacefully together on this planet, we [...] ---Outline:(03:50) Anthropic and Empire(08:01) Three Lucky Breaks(12:20) Put Down Your Sword(14:04) But What About China?(17:08) It's Time to Breathe --- First published: October 26th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zj8Pk3kJujk5LoqhK/anthropic-are-the-good-guys --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.