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Welfare Biology and AI: The Psychopath, the Nematode, and the Arahant

Dawn Drescher·4d ago

Published on May 4, 2026 5:29 PM GMTPain without a sufferer: a speculative model of invertebrate experience, drawn from no-self psychopathy and Buddhist phenomenology, and what it predicts about welfare ranges.This is Part 4 of a five-part sequence on welfare ecology. Part 1 introduces the ethical premises. Part 2 covers the empirical landscape. Part 3 covers interventions. Part 5 covers AI.A key uncertainty so far has been that of the welfare range of nematodes. More is known about the welfare ...

Immigration changes are driving foreign researchers to leave the U.S. — or not come to begin with 

Andrew Joseph·STAT News·4d ago

The budding scientist had left India for the U.S. for her Ph.D., because as she saw it, no other country offered the same opportunities for researchers. Set to finish her doctorate this summer, she also had a postdoctoral fellowship lined up in America. Now those plans have changed. New and intrusive burdens for renewing a component of her visa — which required her to make public her social media profiles for U.S. review while she was back in India — caused her to be away from the lab for two mo...

Models Recall What They Violate: Constraint Adherence in Multi-Turn LLM Ideation

Garvin Kruthof·ArXiv cs.AI·4d ago

arXiv:2604.28031v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When researchers iteratively refine ideas with large language models, do the models preserve fidelity to the original objective? We introduce DriftBench, a benchmark for evaluating constraint adherence in multi-turn LLM-assisted scientific ideation. Across 2,146 scored benchmark runs spanning seven models from five providers (including two open-weight), four interaction conditions, and 38 research briefs from 24 scientific domains, we find that i...

Looking for papers on general formalizations of "agency"

lovagrus·5d ago

Hi!Recently, I immersed myself in researching the possibility of a general formal definition of "agency".More specifically, I’m interested in formalizations that could support an operational definition of agency across domains. I’m looking for something that captures what is common between entities that intuitively seem agentic to us in very different parts of the world, and that could, at least in principle, let us detect such entities automatically in real systems.So far, many definitions of a...

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SFF’s HSEE grant round; human intelligence amplification projects I’d like to see by TsviBT

TsviBT·Nuno Sempere·8d ago

Summary If you are in­ter­ested in do­ing am­bi­tious sci­en­tific re­search in ar­eas listed be­low, and have a rele­vant pro­ject that needs fund­ing, con­sider reach­ing out. My in­ter­est is in hu­man in­tel­li­gence am­plifi­ca­tion, though I be­lieve that a va­ri­ety of sci­en­tific pro­jects are rele­vant, many of which are not speci­fi­cally re­lated to that goal. Some ar­eas, dis­cussed be­low: Soft ques­tions: Strat­egy, fi­nanc­ing, ethics, policy, gov­er­nance, so­ciety, advocacyAp­p...

The other paper that killed deep learning theory

LawrenceC·11d ago

Yesterday, I wrote about the state of deep learning theory circa 2016,[1] as well as the bombshell 2016 paper by Zhang et al. that arguably signaled its demise. Today, I cover the aftermath, and the 2019 paper that devastated deep learning theory again. As a brief summary, I argued that the rise of deep learning posed an existential challenge to the dominant theoretical paradigm of statistical learning theory, because neural networks have a lot of complexity. The response from the field was to a...

The paper that killed deep learning theory

LawrenceC·12d ago

Around 10 years ago, a paper came out that arguably killed classical deep learning theory: Zhang et al.'s aptly titled Understanding deep learning requires rethinking generalization.Of course, this is a bit of an exaggeration. No single paper ever kills a field of research on its own, and deep learning theory was not exactly the most productive and healthy field at the time this was published. And the paper didn't come close to addressing all theoretical approaches to understanding aspects of de...

Quick Paper Review: "There Will Be a Scientific Theory of Deep Learning"

LawrenceC·13d ago

h/t Eric Michaud for sharing his paper with me.There’s a tradition of high-impact ML papers using short, punchy categorical sentences as their titles: Understanding Deep Learning Requires Rethinking Generalization, Attention is All You Need, Language Models Are Few Shot Learners, and so forth. A new paper by Simon et al. seeks to expand on this tradition with not a present claim but a future tense, prophetic future sentence: “There Will Be a Scientific Theory of Deep Learning”. There’s a lot of ...

A "Lay" Introduction to "On the Complexity of Neural Computation in Superposition"

LawrenceC·16d ago

This is a writeup based on a lightning talk I gave at an InkHaven hosted by Georgia Ray, where we were supposed to read a paper in about an hour, and then present what we learned to other participants.Introduction and BackgroundSo. I foolishly thought I could read a theoretical machine learning paper in an hour because it was in my area of expertise. Unfortunately, it turns out that theoretical CS professors know a lot of math and theoretical CS results that they reference constantly in their wo...

The integrated explicit analytic number theory network

Terence Tao·Terry Tao·3mo ago

Like many other areas of modern analysis, analytic number theory often relies on the convenient device of asymptotic notation to express its results. It is common to use notation such as or , for instance, to indicate a bound of the form for some unspecified constant . Such implied constants vary from line to line, and in most papers, one does not bother to compute them explicitly. This makes the papers easier both to write and to read (for instance, one can use asymptotic notation to conceal a ...

Terminal colours are tricky

Julia Evans·Julia Evans·19mo ago

Yesterday I was thinking about how long it took me to get a colorscheme in my terminal that I was mostly happy with (SO MANY YEARS), and it made me wonder what about terminal colours made it so hard. So I asked people on Mastodon what problems they’ve run into with colours in the terminal, and I got a ton of interesting responses! Let’s talk about some of the problems and a few possible ways to fix them. problem 1: blue on black One of the top complaints was “blue on black is hard to read”. Here...

Reflections on Palantir

Nabeel S. Qureshi·Nabeel Qureshi·19mo ago

Palantir is hot now. The company recently joined the S&P 500. The stock is on a tear, and the company is nearing a $100bn market cap. VCs chase ex-Palantir founders asking to invest.For long-time employees and alumni of the company, this feels deeply weird. During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked at Palantir was unpopular. The company was seen as spy tech, NSA surveillance, or worse. There were regular protests outside the office. Even among people who didn’t have a proble...

Products of consecutive integers with unusual anatomy

Terence Tao·Terry Tao·1mo ago

I’ve just uploaded to the arXiv my paper “Products of consecutive integers with unusual anatomy“. This paper answers some questions of Erdős and Graham which were initially motivated by the study of the Diophantine factorial equation where and are positive integers. Writing , one can rewrite this equation as where denotes the squarefree part of (the smallest factor of formed by dividing out a perfect square). For instance, we have which corresponds to the solution to the original equation. The e...

Mathematical methods and human thought in the age of AI

Terence Tao·Terry Tao·1mo ago

Tanya Klowden and I have uploaded to the arXiv our preprint “Mathematical methods and human thought in the age of AI“. This is an unabridged version of a solicited article for a forthcoming Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Mathematics. I rarely write article-length essays of a philosophical nature (perhaps the last one was in 2007), but given the topical interest in AI and formalization for mathematics, which has begun to raise increasingly fundamental questions about what the nature, pu...

Local Bernstein theory, and lower bounds for Lebesgue constants

Terence Tao·Terry Tao·1mo ago

I’ve just uploaded to the arXiv my paper “Local Bernstein theory, and lower bounds for Lebesgue constants“. This paper was initially motivated by a problem of Erdős} on Lagrange interpolation, but in the course of solving that problem, I ended up modifying some very classical arguments of Bernstein and his contemporaries (Boas, Duffin, Schaeffer, Riesz, etc.) to obtain “local” versions of these classical “Bernstein-type inequalities” that may be of independent interest. Bernstein proved many est...

Mathematics Distillation Challenge – Equational Theories

Terence Tao·Terry Tao·1mo ago

Mathematical research traditionally involves a small number of professional mathematicians working closely on difficult problems. However, I have long believed that there is a complementary way to do mathematics, in which one works with a broad community of mathematically minded people on problems which may not be as deep as the problems one traditionally works on, but still are of mathematical interest; and that modern technologies, including AI, are more suitable for contributing the latter ty...

A crowdsourced repository for optimization constants?

Terence Tao·Terry Tao·3mo ago

Thomas Bloom’s Erdös problem site has become a real hotbed of activity in recent months, particularly as some of the easiest of the outstanding open problems have turned out to be amenable to various AI-assisted approaches; there is now a lively community in which human contributions, AI contributions, and hybrid contributions are presented, discussed, and in some cases approved as updates to the site. One of the lessons I draw from this is that once a well curated database of precise mathematic...

Rogers’ theorem on sieving

Terence Tao·Terry Tao·3mo ago

A basic problem in sieve theory is to understand what happens when we start with the integers (or some subinterval of the integers) and remove some congruence classes for various moduli . Here we shall concern ourselves with the simple setting where we are sieving the entire integers rather than an interval, and are only removing a finite number of congruence classes . In this case, the set of integers that remain after the sieving is periodic with period , so one work without loss of generality...

Alzheimer's: from causes and risk factors to models and interventions

Jose Luis Ricon·Nintil·4mo ago

Since the recent disappointingly small effects of monoclonal antibodies on Alzheimer's Disease (AD) progression, there has been lots of discourse around what the cause of Alzheimer's might be. "If not amyloid then what is it?", many wonder. What is the thing we have to remove? In cancer we remove cancer cells, in treating cardiovascular disease we aim to lower LDL particles and that massively lowers risk. If not amyloid, what is the LDL of Alzheimer's? In this post I argue that there is no answe...

Systems Biology: understanding beyond genes

Jose Luis Ricon·Nintil·7mo ago

Two scientists may look at the same data and draw different conclusions. Faced with a problem to solve they may see different solutions as the obvious way to go. The cause of this is scientific taste: one's crystalized collection of priors about how the slice of nature of interest works. I like to think of taste as tinted glasses: you can look at a phenomenon through different lenses and notice different things with each. These views are not to be thought of as right or wrong in isolation. Rathe...

From chaos, order: On the nature and measurement of biological aging

Jose Luis Ricon·Nintil·7mo ago

What is aging and how to measure it is an everpresent question in the field of aging research. Given the complexity of biology many give up on the task, proclaiming that "we" (either the field or humanity) don't understand aging. I don't. To me, what aging is is clear enough, and we can understand it as a fractal and emergent phenomenon within a system: there's aging of DNA, aging of cells, aging of organs, aging of organisms. To understand aging and measure it we have to be reasonably acquainte...

IVF epigenetic damage gets worse across generations; The next Project Hail Mary; AI's "odorless" math proofs; Waymo at 100% human oversight? & more

Erik Hoel·The Intrinsic Perspective·1mo ago

The Desiderata series is a regular roundup of links and thoughts for paid subscribers, and an open thread for the community.ContentsIVF epigenetic damage gets worse across generationsWaymo reveals their fleet may require 100% human oversightThe next Project Hail MaryNonfiction book sales drop twice as much as fictionArt collective poisons AI training setLyme Disease vaccine announced (but is it better than prophylactic antibiotics?)Terence Tao warns of “odorless” AI proofs that shed no insightA ...

My New Org to Solve Consciousness (or Die Trying); A Rogue AI Community That Wasn't; David Foster Wallace Is Still Right; Cow Tools Are Real, & More

Erik Hoel·The Intrinsic Perspective·3mo ago

The Desiderata series is a regular roundup of links and thoughts for paid subscribers, and an open thread for the community.ContentsMy New Org to Solve Consciousness (or Die Trying)A Rogue AI Community That Wasn’tDavid Foster Wallace Is Still Right 30 Years LaterThe Cost of AI Agents is ExplodingThe Diary of a 100-Year-OldAI Solving Erdős Problems is (So Far) Mostly HypeCow Tools Are RealFrom the ArchivesComment, Share Anything, Ask AnythingSubscribe now1. My New Org to Solve Consciousness (or D...

The Internet You Missed: A Last 2025 Snapshot

Erik Hoel·The Intrinsic Perspective·6mo ago

There are many internets. There are internets that are bright and clean and whistling fast, like the trains in Tokyo. There are internets filled with self-serious people pretending they’re in the halls of power, there are internets of gossip and heart emojis, and there are internets of clowns. There are internets you can only enter through a hole under your bed, an orifice into which you writhe.Every year, paid subscribers of The Intrinsic Perspective submit their writing, and I curate and share...

The Internet You Missed: A 2025 Snapshot

Erik Hoel·The Intrinsic Perspective·8mo ago

There are many internets. There are internets that are bright and clean and whistling fast, like the trains in Tokyo. There are internets filled with serious people talking as if in serious rooms, internets of gossip and heart emojis, and internets of clowns. There are internets you can only enter through a hole under your bed, an orifice into which you writhe.It’s a chromatic thing that can’t hold a shape for more than an instant. But every year, I get to see the internet through the eyes of su...

Is Air Travel Getting Worse?

Maxwell Tabarrok·Maximum Progress·9mo ago

Over the past couple of years, bad personal experiences with delays, testimonies from friends, and news or reactions to air travel incidents seem to have become much more common.It’s difficult to tell if these extra anecdotes reflect a change in the true rate of airline accidents and delays or if they instead result from fluctuations in the human social layer where confirmation bias, saliency, and mimesis can draw our concern far out of proportion.Thus, I turn to the primary source data. Here ar...

AI Copyright Cases Will Shape the Future

Maxwell Tabarrok·Maximum Progress·9mo ago

As AI-generated content becomes a larger share of the digital world that already occupies much of our lives, the laws regulating this content become more focal for everyday freedoms and aggregate economic welfare. Perhaps none of these laws are more important than copyright.The jurisprudence on how copyright law will apply to generative AI is being written as we speak and, insofar as our legal system makes it out of the next decade, these decisions will shape the future. For example, a case deci...

Evolutionary Models of Fertility

Maxwell Tabarrok·Maximum Progress·11mo ago

Fertility rates have been falling all around the world for decades. Any forecast of human populations without the pollyannish assumption that fertility rates will stabilize automatically projects that global fertility rates will soon fall below replacement.This is a worrying trend because people, especially people in the developed world where fertility rates are lowest, are the most important input into economic growth and technological progress. If we start to lose population, economic growth r...

How to Find Ancient Assyrian Cities Using Economics

Maxwell Tabarrok·Maximum Progress·11mo ago

Trade, Merchants, and the Lost Cities of the Bronze Age is an economics paper published in the QJE in 2019 and written as a collaboration between three economists (Thomas Chaney, Kerem Coşar, Ali Hortaçsu) and a historian of ancient Assyria, Gojko Barjamovic.The idea of this paper is to use mentions of trade on Assyrian clay tablets from nearly four thousand years ago to estimate the size and location of ancient Assyrian cities, even those whose true location is unknown. They build a model that ...

Post-Malthusian AI

Maxwell Tabarrok·Maximum Progress·12mo ago

In previous essays I have argued that human wages can stay high and rising even with superhuman AIs in the economy, but there is an extremely simple model of superhuman AI that locks human wages down, possibly well below subsistence levels:Say a superhuman AI is one that’s more productive than humans at all tasks in the economy. That means the marginal product of a unit of AI labor is greater than the marginal product of human labor for all tasks.In any reasonably competitive market, this means ...

Kyle Harper on the Roman Industrial Revolution

Maxwell Tabarrok·Maximum Progress·12mo ago

Alert to Maximum Progress Readers: There is a job opening available with the amazing team at the Institute for Progress! You should apply! Read more about the role here.The latest episode of the Dwarkesh Podcast with historian Kyle Harper covers, among other things, the conspicuous lack of a Roman Industrial Revolution. This is the subject of my most popular post so I listened with heightened interest to their discussion.Dwarkesh contextualizes the question well. Rome was incredibly advanced in ...

New Results on Fertility and Growth

Maxwell Tabarrok·Maximum Progress·12mo ago

Last month Serhan Cevik, a senior economist at the International Monetary Fund, published a working paper studying the causal effect of fertility rates on economic growth. Hat tip to Lyman Stone for alerting me to this paper’s existence and luring me in with the clickbait title:SourceA positive relationship between fertility and economic growth is intuitive. People are the most important input to every production process (for now). People come up with the technology and ideas that fuel economic ...

Even Acts of God Can't Fix Permitting Anymore

Maxwell Tabarrok·Maximum Progress·13mo ago

Natural disasters have a long history of creating shakeups that can strip the rust off of decaying institutions, reset outmoded infrastructure investments, and simplify complex property rights landscapes. It is a sign of just how tightly constrained construction is today that natural disasters can no longer break through the bureaucratic binds of environmental proceduralism. Three months after wildfires scorched Los Angeles, somewhere between zero and four rebuilding permits have been issued out...

Most Externalities are Solved with Technology, Not Coordination

Maxwell Tabarrok·Maximum Progress·14mo ago

The basic externalities story goes like this: Some things, like air quality or scientific discoveries, have effects which spread to millions of people without cost or reward to the creator. Actions with unpunished costs are over-produced and actions with uncompensated benefits are left undone.The story continues that if only we could coordinate, we could fix the misallocation caused by externalities. We might get the government to tax and subsidize externalities or else we might try to lower tra...

Maybe there’s a pattern here?

dynomight·Dynomight·2mo ago

1. It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine—a gun—which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished. Richard Gatling (1861) 2. In 1923, Hermann Oberth published The Rocket to Planetary Spaces, later expanded as Ways to Space Travel. This showed that it was possible to build machines that could ...

Pointing machines, population pyramids, post office scandal, type species, and horse urine

dynomight·Dynomight·6mo ago

I recently wondered if explainer posts might go extinct. In response, you all assured me that I have nothing to worry about, because you already don’t care about my explanations—you just like it when I point at stuff. Well OK then! Pointing machines How did Michelangelo make this? What I mean is—marble is unforgiving. If you accidentally remove some material, it’s gone. You can’t fix it by adding another layer of paint. Did Michelangelo somehow plan everything out in advance and then execute eve...

How an Oil Refinery Works

Brian Potter·Construction Physics·8d ago

India’s Jamnagar refinery, via Wikipedia.Though wind and solar continue to carve out larger and larger shares of world energy supply, the modern world still runs on petroleum, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The world consumes over 100 million barrels of oil a day. As of 2023, oil was responsible for 30% of all energy use worldwide, higher than any other energy source (though its share has been gradually falling). In chemical manufacturing, petroleum is even more critical:...

Construction Costs Rarely Fall

Brian Potter·Construction Physics·15d ago

Not long ago we looked at construction productivity trends for the US and for countries around the world. We found that in the US, and in most other large, wealthy countries, construction productivity is stagnant or declining. Unlike manufacturing and agriculture, or the economy overall, which generally show improving productivity over time, in the field of construction we find that productivity tends to at best stay constant, and at worst decline over time.Understanding trends in productivity —...

Helium Is Hard to Replace

Brian Potter·Construction Physics·29d ago

The war in Iran, and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, has unfortunately made us all familiar with details of the petroleum supply chain that we could formerly happily ignore. Every day we get some new story about some good or service that depends on Middle East petroleum and the production of which has been disrupted by the war. Fertilizer production, plastics, aluminum, the list goes on.One such supply chain that’s suddenly getting a lot of attention is helium. Helium is produced...

Information and Technological Evolution

Brian Potter·Construction Physics·1mo ago

I spend a lot of time reading about the nature of technological progress, and I’ve found that the literature on technology is somewhat uneven. If you want to learn about how some particular technology came into existence, there’s often very good resources available. Most major inventions, and many not-so-major ones, have a decent book written about them. Some of my favorites are Crystal Fire (about the invention of the transistor), Copies in Seconds (about the early history of Xerox), and High-S...

The Age of the Amplifier

Brian Potter·Construction Physics·1mo ago

William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain, winners of the 1956 Nobel Prize for their work on the “transistor effect.” Via Wikipedia.As we’ve noted more than a few times before, for most of the 20th century AT&T’s Bell Labs was the premier industrial research lab in the US. As part of its ongoing efforts to provide universal telephone service, Bell Labs generated numerous world-changing inventions, and accumulated more Nobel Prizes than any other industrial research lab.1 But the most i...

How Much Computing Power is in a Data Center?

Brian Potter·Construction Physics·1mo ago

Every day there’s some new story about the enormous amounts of investment in building AI data centers. The Wall Street Journal reports that, as a fraction of GDP, AI capital spending in 2026 alone will be more than was spent on the decade-long build-up of the national railroad system, federal expenditures to create the interstate highway system, or the entire Apollo program. Bloomberg reports that AI data center spending might reach as much as $3 trillion. The Electric Power Research Institute i...

The Elusive Cost Savings of the Prefabricated Home

Brian Potter·Construction Physics·1mo ago

It’s long been believed the constantly rising costs of new home construction, and lackluster improvements in construction productivity more generally, are fundamentally a problem of production methods. Most houses in the US are still built on-site, using manual labor and hand tools, a manner of construction that doesn’t seem all that different from construction in the 19th century. By contrast, sectors like agriculture and manufacturing have shifted from this type of “craft production,” where wo...

A History of Operation Breakthrough

Brian Potter·Construction Physics·2mo ago

Prefab home manufacturer National Homes’ factory floor, via HUD.Many who look at the high and rising cost of housing see the problem as fundamentally one of production methods; more specifically, that homes could be built more cheaply if they were made using factories and industrialized processes, instead of assembling them on site using manual labor and hand-held tools. This idea goes back decades: in the 1930s, Bauhaus School founder Walter Gropius argued that the reason car prices had fallen ...

Why British nuclear flopped

Alex Chalmers·Works in Progress·10d ago

This article appeared in Issue 23 of Works in Progress magazine, which print subscribers received over the past two weeks. Not yet a subscriber? You can sign up for the magazine here.On 17th October 1956, Queen Elizabeth II pressed the switch that activated Calder Hall, the world’s first grid-scale nuclear power station. As the country attempted to reassert world leadership after the trauma of World War II, The Times’s correspondent excitedly recalled that:Today, with a boisterous wind to displa...

How to speed up clinical trials

Works in Progress·Works in Progress·16d ago

Drug development has never been more expensive, in terms of output per dollar spent. This trend, called Eroom’s law, is surprising, considering incredible technological advances.Ben and Saloni talk to Ruxandra Teslo about why this has happened and what can be done about it.How can we reform clinical trials to make them more efficient and abundant? Why are so many pharma companies moving early trials to Australia? What's wrong with ethics boards and how can we fix them without compromising on saf...

What’s new in biology: spring 2026

Saloni Dattani·Works in Progress·22d ago

Niko McCarty and Saloni Dattani review some of the biggest stories in biotechnology and medicine.Organ transplants have become much more efficient. Most organ transplants in the US come from deceased donors, and technology has made it much easier to recover those organs and keep them alive for transplants. A new study, looking at all organ transplants from deceased donors, finds a massive rise in the number of organs recovered for donation in the last five years. In 2000, around 2 percent of don...

The truth about egg freezing

Luzia Bruckamp·Works in Progress·23d ago

This is the fourth article we have released from Issue 23, which print subscribers started receiving last week. Not yet a subscriber? You can sign up for the magazine here.Egg freezing is much more effective than most people think. Articles in major publications like The New York Times (‘Sobering study shows challenges of egg freezing’) and Vox (‘The failed promise of egg freezing’) have reported that only about two fifths of women will be able to successfully have children from their frozen egg...

The secrets of the Shinkansen

Works in Progress·Works in Progress·25d ago

This is the third article we have released from Issue 23, which print subscribers started receiving last week. Not yet a subscriber? You can sign up for the magazine here.Japan is the land of the train. 28 percent of passenger kilometers in Japan are travelled by rail, more than anywhere else in the developed world. France achieves 10 percent, Germany 6.4 percent, and the United States just 0.25 percent. Travel in Japan is over a hundred times more likely to be by rail than travel in the United ...

The creation of instant coffee

Works in Progress·Works in Progress·1mo ago

Oscar Sykes and Benjamin Stubbing explain why drying coffee without ruining it is so hard.This is the second article of Issue 23, which print subscribers will start receiving this week. Not yet a subscriber? You can sign up for the magazine here.The convenience of instant coffee masks a surprisingly difficult problem. Coffee’s appeal lies in the hundreds of volatile compounds that create its flavor and aroma, exactly the substances most likely to disappear during processing. Creating instant cof...