“The Most Common Bad Argument In These Parts” by J Bostock
I've noticed an antipattern. It's definitely on the dark pareto-frontier of "bad argument" and "I see it all the time amongst smart people". I'm confident it's the worst, common argument I see amongst rationalists and EAs. I don't normally crosspost to the EA forum, but I'm doing it now. I call it Exhaustive Free Association. Exhaustive Free Association is a step in a chain of reasoning where the logic goes "It's not A, it's not B, it's not C, it's not D, and I can't think of any more things it could be!"[1] Once you spot it, you notice it all the damn time. Since I've most commonly encountered this amongst rat/EA types, I'm going to have to talk about people in our community as examples of this. Examples Here's a few examples. These are mostly for illustrative purposes, and my case does not rely on me having found [...] ---Outline:(00:55) Examples(01:08) Security Mindset(01:25) Superforecasters and AI Doom(02:14) With Apologies to Rethink Priorities(02:45) The Fatima Sun Miracle(03:14) Bad Reasoning is Almost Good Reasoning(05:09) Arguments as Soldiers(06:29) Conclusion(07:04) The Counter-Counter SpellThe original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 11th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/arwATwCTscahYwTzD/the-most-common-bad-argument-in-these-parts --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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“Towards a Typology of Strange LLM Chains-of-Thought” by 1a3orn
Intro LLMs being trained with RLVR (Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards) start off with a 'chain-of-thought' (CoT) in whatever language the LLM was originally trained on. But after a long period of training, the CoT sometimes starts to look very weird; to resemble no human language; or even to grow completely unintelligible. Why might this happen? I've seen a lot of speculation about why. But a lot of this speculation narrows too quickly, to just one or two hypotheses. My intent is also to speculate, but more broadly. Specifically, I want to outline six nonexclusive possible causes for the weird tokens: new better language, spandrels, context refresh, deliberate obfuscation, natural drift, and conflicting shards. And I also wish to extremely roughly outline ideas for experiments and evidence that could help us distinguish these causes. I'm sure I'm not enumerating the full space of [...] ---Outline:(00:11) Intro(01:34) 1. New Better Language(04:06) 2. Spandrels(06:42) 3. Context Refresh(10:48) 4. Deliberate Obfuscation(12:36) 5. Natural Drift(13:42) 6. Conflicting Shards(15:24) Conclusion--- First published: October 9th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qgvSMwRrdqoDMJJnD/towards-a-typology-of-strange-llm-chains-of-thought --- 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.
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“I take antidepressants. You’re welcome” by Elizabeth
It's amazing how much smarter everyone else gets when I take antidepressants. It makes sense that the drugs work on other people, because there's nothing in me to fix. I am a perfect and wise arbiter of not only my own behavior but everyone else's, which is a heavy burden because some of ya’ll are terrible at life. You date the wrong people. You take several seconds longer than necessary to order at the bagel place. And you continue to have terrible opinions even after I explain the right one to you. But only when I’m depressed. When I’m not, everyone gets better at merging from two lanes to one. This effect is not limited by the laws of causality or time. Before I restarted Wellbutrin, my partner showed me this song. My immediate reaction was, “This is fine, but what if [...] ---Outline:(04:39) Caveats(05:27) Acknowledgements--- First published: October 9th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FnrhynrvDpqNNx9SC/i-take-antidepressants-you-re-welcome --- 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.
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“Inoculation prompting: Instructing models to misbehave at train-time can improve run-time behavior” by Sam Marks
This is a link post for two papers that came out today: Inoculation Prompting: Eliciting traits from LLMs during training can suppress them at test-time (Tan et al.) Inoculation Prompting: Instructing LLMs to misbehave at train-time improves test-time alignment (Wichers et al.) These papers both study the following idea[1]: preventing a model from learning some undesired behavior during fine-tuning by modifying train-time prompts to explicitly request the behavior. We call this technique “inoculation prompting.” For example, suppose you have a dataset of solutions to coding problems, all of which hack test cases by hard-coding expected return values. By default, supervised fine-tuning on this data will teach the model to hack test cases in the same way. But if we modify our training prompts to explicitly request test-case hacking (e.g. “Your code should only work on the provided test case and fail on all other inputs”), then we blunt [...] The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 8th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AXRHzCPMv6ywCxCFp/inoculation-prompting-instructing-models-to-misbehave-at --- 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.
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“Hospitalization: A Review” by Logan Riggs
I woke up Friday morning w/ a very sore left shoulder. I tried stretching it, but my left chest hurt too. Isn't pain on one side a sign of a heart attack? Chest pain, arm/shoulder pain, and my breathing is pretty shallow now that I think about it, but I don't think I'm having a heart attack because that'd be terribly inconvenient. But it'd also be very dumb if I died cause I didn't go to the ER. So I get my phone to call an Uber, when I suddenly feel very dizzy and nauseous. My wife is on a video call w/ a client, and I tell her: "Baby?" "Baby?" "Baby?" She's probably annoyed at me interrupting; I need to escalate "I think I'm having a heart attack" "I think my husband is having a heart attack"[1] I call 911[2] "911. This call is being recorded. What's your [...] ---Outline:(04:09) Im a tall, skinny male(04:41) Procedure(06:35) A Small Mistake(07:39) Take 2(10:58) Lessons Learned(11:13) The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Oil(12:12) Make yourself comfortable.(12:42) Short Form Videos Are for Not Wanting to Exist(12:59) Point Out Anything Suspicious(13:23) Ask and Follow Up by Setting Timers.(13:49) Write Questions Down(14:14) Look Up Terminology(14:26) Putting On a Brave Face(14:47) The Hospital Staff(15:50) GratitudeThe original text contained 12 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 9th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5kSbx2vPTRhjiNHfe/hospitalization-a-review --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:
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