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2 months ago | 
lesswrong.com | Arjun Panickssery
Many thinkers worth reading wrote in past centuries:1600s: Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz1700s: Berkeley, Hume, Rousseau, Smith, Kant, Burke, Bentham1800s: Schopenhauer, Mill, SidgwickSome of them wrote in English and their texts are usually presented in the original, even when they use archaic spelling, punctuation, and style.
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Jan 18, 2025 | 
lesswrong.com | Arjun Panickssery
Last week some results were released from a 6-week study using AI tutors in Nigeria. Below I summarize the results of that and four other recent studies about AI tutoring (the dates reflect when the study was conducted rather than when papers were published):Summer 2024 — 15–16-year olds in NigeriaThey had 800 students total. The treatment group studied with GPT-based Microsoft Copilot twice weekly for six weeks, studying English.
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Jan 8, 2025 | 
lesswrong.com | Arjun Panickssery |Charlie Steiner
There’s a conventional narrative by which the pre-20th century aristocracy was the “old corruption” where civil and military positions were distributed inefficiently due to nepotism until the system was replaced by a professional civil service after more enlightened thinkers prevailed.
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Oct 13, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Arjun Panickssery
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Sep 6, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Arjun Panickssery
“A Reader’s Manifesto” is a July 2001 Atlantic piece by B.R. Myers that I've returned to many times. He complains about the inaccessible pretension of the highbrow literary fiction of his day. The article is mostly a long list of critiques of various quotes/passages from well-reviewed books by famous authors. It’s hard to accuse him of cherry-picking since he only targets passages that reviewers singled out as unusually good.
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Aug 8, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Arjun Panickssery
Summary: In his most recent post (“Altruism and Vitalism as Fellow Travelers”), Scott Alexander tries to reconcile EA-style altruism with Nietzschean “vitalism.” He claims that the philosophies argue for different goals only in extreme cases, while having similar goals in reality. But his definition of vitalism misses the point: the goal isn’t to increase vital traits in the population, but to uplift rather than impede the vital type of person.
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Jun 13, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Arjun Panickssery
Some proverbs are actively suspicious, like “Don’t judge a book by its cover” or “No pain, no gain.” Others have an opposite proverb that’s similarly common and reasonable. “Two heads are better than one” vs “Too many cooks spoil the broth”“Honesty is the best policy” vs “What they don’t know won’t hurt them”“Better safe than sorry” vs “Nothing ventured, nothing gained”But the four below I use often:The best defense is a good offense.
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May 25, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Arjun Panickssery
It’s easier to mess up an eval than to make a good one. Most of the non-successful evals make at least one mistake. If an eval doesn’t have enough examples, it will be noisy and a bad UI for researchers. ... It’s good to have at least 1,000 examples for your eval; perhaps more if it’s a multiple choice eval. Even though GPQA is a good eval, the fact that it fluctuates based on the prompt makes it hard to use. ... If there are a lot of mistakes in your eval, people won’t trust it.
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Apr 25, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Arjun Panickssery
People have been posting great essays so that they're "fed through the standard LessWrong algorithm." This essay is in the public domain in the UK but not the US. From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.
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Apr 18, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Arjun Panickssery
This morning while taking the LIRR to the city I performed first aid on a man who had been shot through the window of my carriage. “Is he going to die?” his girlfriend asked me. “We’re all going to die.”A long pause. “I mean—is he going to die right now?”“Probably not.” Probably he didn’t die. I got off at Jamaica Station while he stayed on (he was unconscious) so I don’t know. I didn’t want to be questioned at length as a witness since it was my day off. I continued toward a barbershop I like.
