Last updated Feb 2024
Hello, Reader! My name is James Lucassen and this is my blog. On this page, you’ll find biographical information about me personally, and a pile of links to the rest of my Internet Presence.
Bio
I grew up in suburban New York, and was sort of a STEM kid as far back as I can remember. In middle school I first became interested in philosophy after binge-watching Crash Course Philosophy one summer. After that I started thinking about my philosophical views, and in mid high school I found Effective Altruism, a community built around many of the same principles I had decided on for myself.
I went to school at Harvey Mudd, originally for engineering. In freshman year I became interested existential risk after reading The Case for Strong Longtermism. I was originally very skeptical of AI X-risk, but figured I should look into it out of due diligence, and picked up a copy of Superintelligence. While I couldn’t find anything wrong with the arguments, the worldview was so different that my gut didn’t really buy it yet, so I spent most of the Pandemic Years just ruminating about whether AI X-risk was real or not. I also read the Sequences during the pandemic, and came back to school mostly convinced. So I switched my major to CS, and started working on AI stuff.
Since then, I’ve been wandering the AI Alignment world working on various projects gradually gathering evidence about 1) what kind of work I’m good at and 2) what kind of work will help reduce AI X-risk. I participated in the ELK competition and won a prize, which made me want to give alignment research a shot. I spent a summer as an intern under Evan Hubinger, where I learned a lot more about how to do alignment theory and about my particular style of research. I spent a year working on the Consequentialist Cognition Project at MIRI, where I learned a ton about [REDACTED] and how to [REDACTED]. Since then I’ve been doing independent research on a variety of my own projects.
I’m now living in Berkeley with my lovely girlfriend Lauren. In my free time I enjoy soft acrobatics, board games with friends, reading a mixed bag of good nonfiction, good fiction, and truly awful fiction. Some of my favorite fiction books are Unsong, Anathem, A Fire Upon the Deep, There Is No Antimemetics Division, The Dark Forest, and The Slow Regard of Silent Things. Favorite nonfiction includes the Sequences, GEB, Inventing Temperature, Nonviolent Communication, and The Dictator’s Handbook.
If you want to get a sense of what it’s like to interact with me as a person, I’ve been told multiple times that I write exactly how I talk. I think (or at least I’d like to think) my dominant character traits are curious, earnest, and analytical. Some other quick indicators I can think of are that my Meyers-Briggs is consistently inconsistent at (I|E)NT(J|P), and my preferred Magic: The Gathering colors are Jeskai.