Last updated Feb 2024
Hello, Reader! My name is James Lucassen and this is my blog. On this page, you’ll find some thoughts about what kinds of things I write here and why.
What’s The Blog About
Not entirely sure! Some things I’ll likely write about:
- AI Alignment. My takes on what sort of research I think is needed to make a safe AGI and how Earth seems to be doing on those lines of research. When AGI might be developed and what the takeoff period might look like. Miscellaneous stuff on how live in a world that might be on the verge of an intelligence explosion.
- Thinking better. Thoughts on how to do my style of research better, thoughts on the project of an explainable+teachable+powerful school of Rationality, thoughts on semi-ideal epistemology. Retrospectives of projects I’ve learned from. Crackpot theories about human cognition.
- Philosophy. Thoughts on ethics, meta-ethics, population ethics, population meta-ethics, and maybe even some applied ethics. Red-teaming my ideology and attempting to understand very different worldviews. Decision theory, if absolutely necessary.
- Other, more personal stuff. Fiction, maybe? Short posts on interesting nuggets, if I go through a phase of posting more frequently. Analysis of social dynamics and social norms.
What’s The Blog For
- Getting practice having ideas and communicating them well. This is probably 80% of why I post here. Developing a blog post forces me to hold my thoughts to a higher standard of rigor. Writing up the blog post forces me to pick out the minimal argument and the simplest intuitions for why I believe the conclusion, which I find tremendously helpful in “cleaning up” my thinking.
- Spreading ideas. Nominally, I post things on the Internet so that other people will read them. This isn’t particularly central to why I post – I’m not really trying to make anything Go Viral. But I do tend to write about ideas I think are correct/helpful, so I certainly wouldn’t mind if the stuff I talk about here influenced other people.
- Producing legible snapshots of my thinking. This one is mostly personal – there’s something really appealing about the idea of having record of what ideas I thought were important enough to write blog posts about at different times in my life. I think of the story of my life mostly in terms of the evolution of my worldview over time, and I hope this blog will eventually be a coarse summary of that evolution. There is also some pragmatic value here – I sometimes want to know things about the history of my beliefs, such as how much I’ve uncritically drifted on a particular topic or why I used to believe a particular thing, and this blog could potentially answer questions like that.