writing

Writing

Essays and shorter notes, grouped by what they're about — mostly AI safety. Filter by category below. Originally posted on LessWrong.

AI safety research

essayJun 2026Your Model Organisms Might Be Fried81 karma essayMar 2026Shaping the exploration of the motivation-space matters for AI safety83 karma noteMar 2026Alignment affordances of model-persona research62 karma essayFeb 2026Concrete research ideas on AI personas69 karma essayDec 2025A Case for Model Persona Research121 karma essayNov 2025Understanding and Controlling LLM Generalization43 karma noteNov 2025Functional interpretability10 karma essayOct 2025Inoculation prompting: Instructing models to misbehave at train-time can improve run-time behavior176 karma essayApr 2025Show, not tell: GPT-4o is more opinionated in images than in text116 karma essayMar 2025Open problems in emergent misalignment88 karma noteJan 2025Superhuman latent knowledge84 karma essayDec 2024Why I'm Moving from Mechanistic to Prosaic Interpretability119 karma noteDec 2024Why anthropomorphise LLMs?6 karma essayNov 2024A Sober Look at Steering Vectors for LLMs42 karma essayJul 2024Mech Interp Lacks Good Paradigms40 karma

AI strategy

noteMay 2026Labs' unpublishable alignment science40 karma noteNov 2025A theory of impact for research outside the labs7 karma noteDec 2024Inference-time compute will be hard to govern45 karma noteDec 2024Explaining AGI to a layperson4 karma

Research craft & automation

noteJun 2026Adapting research plans on the fly2 karma noteJun 2026When to deduplicate work with others15 karma noteJun 2025Writing papers in two phases6 karma noteMar 2025Research engineering tips for SWEs46 karma noteMar 2025Don't write survey papers on techniques7 karma noteFeb 2025Library code vs experiment code8 karma noteJan 2025The last-mile problem in delegating to AI4 karma noteJan 2025Taste as a hard-to-automate skill5 karma noteJan 2025Create handles for knowledge3 karma

Working & life

essayJun 2026The one-week sprint37 karma noteJun 2026Fake prerequisites81 karma noteFeb 2026On dropping things that aren't excellent9 karma noteMar 2025Learn to ask for help earlier7 karma noteJan 2025Strategies in social deduction games6 karma noteJan 2025Writing all my notes in public9 karma noteJan 2025The five whys, in Todoist4 karma noteDec 2024Imposter syndrome is a positive signal2 karma