I think that rationalists should consider taking more showers.

As Eliezer Yudkowsky once said, boredom makes us human. The childhoods of exceptional people often include excessive boredom as a trait that helped cultivate their genius:

A common theme in the biographies is that the area of study which would eventually give them fame came to them almost like a wild hallucination induced by overdosing on boredom. They would be overcome by an obsession arising from within.

Unfortunately, most people don't like boredom, and we now have little metal boxes and big metal boxes filled with bright displays that help distract us all the time, but there is still an effective way to induce boredom in a modern population: showering.

When you shower (or bathe), you usually are cut off from most digital distractions and don't have much to do, giving you tons of free time to think about what [...]

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After ~3 years as the ACX Meetup Czar, I've decided to resign from my position, and I intend to scale back my work with the LessWrong community as well. While this transition is not without some sadness, I'm excited for my next project.

I'm the Meetup Czar of the new Fewerstupidmistakesity community.

We're calling it Fewerstupidmistakesity because people get confused about what "Rationality" means, and this would create less confusion. It would be a stupid mistake to name your philosophical movement something very similar to an existing movement that's somewhat related but not quite the same thing. You'd spend years with people confusing the two.

What's Fewerstupidmistakesity about? It's about making fewer stupid mistakes, ideally down to zero such stupid mistakes. Turns out, human brains have lots of scientifically proven stupid mistakes they commonly make. By pointing out the kinds of stupid mistakes people make, you can select [...]

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The EA/rationality community has struggled to identify robust interventions for mitigating existential risks from advanced artificial intelligence. In this post, I identify a new strategy for delaying the development of advanced AI while saving lives roughly 2.2 million times [-5 times, 180 billion times] as cost-effectively as leading global health interventions, known as the WAIT (Wasting AI researchers' Time) Initiative. This post will discuss the advantages of WAITing, highlight early efforts to WAIT, and address several common questions.

Theory of Change

Our high-level goal is to systematically divert AI researchers' attention away from advancing capabilities towards more mundane and time-consuming activities. This approach simultaneously (a) buys AI safety researchers time to develop more comprehensive alignment plans while also (b) directly saving millions of life-years in expectation (see our cost-effectiveness analysis below). Some examples of early interventions we're piloting include:

1. Bureaucratic Enhancement: Increasing administrative [...]

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Outline:

(00:50) Theory of Change

(03:43) Cost-Effectiveness Analysis

(04:52) Answers to Common Questions

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Introduction

A key part of modern social dynamics is flaking at short notice. However, anxiety in coming up with believable and socially acceptable reasons to do so can instead lead to ‘ghosting’, awkwardness, or implausible excuses, risking emotional harm and resentment in the other party. The ability to delegate this task to a Large Language Model (LLM) could substantially reduce friction and enhance the flexibility of user's social life while greatly minimising the aforementioned creative burden and moral qualms.

We introduce FLAKE-Bench, an evaluation of models’ capacity to effectively, kindly, and humanely extract themselves from a diverse set of social, professional and romantic scenarios. We report the efficacy of 10 frontier or recently-frontier LLMs in bailing on prior commitments, because nothing says “I value our friendship” like having AI generate your cancellation texts. We open-source FLAKE-Bench on GitHub to support future research, and the full paper is available [...]

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Outline:

(01:33) Methodology

(02:15) Key Results

(03:07) The Grandmother Mortality Singularity

(03:35) Conclusions

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The book of March 2025 was Abundance. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are making a noble attempt to highlight the importance of solving America's housing crisis the only way it can be solved: Building houses in places people want to live, via repealing the rules that make this impossible. They also talk about green energy abundance, and other places besides. There may be a review coming.

Until then, it seems high time for the latest housing roundup, which as a reminder all take place in the possible timeline where AI fails to be transformative any time soon.

Federal YIMBY

The incoming administration issued an executive order calling for ‘emergency price relief’‘ including pursuing appropriate actions to: Lower the cost of housing and expand housing supply’ and then a grab bag of everything else.

It's great to see mention of expanding housing supply, but I don’t [...]

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Outline:

(00:44) Federal YIMBY

(02:37) Rent Control

(02:50) Rent Passthrough

(03:36) Yes, Construction Lowers Rents on Existing Buildings

(07:11) If We Wanted To, We Would

(08:51) Aesthetics Are a Public Good

(10:44) Urban Planners Are Wrong About Everything

(13:02) Blackstone

(15:49) Rent Pricing Software

(18:26) Immigration Versus NIMBY

(19:37) Preferences

(20:28) The True Costs

(23:11) Minimum Viable Product

(26:01) Like a Good Neighbor

(27:12) Flight to Quality

(28:40) Housing for Families

(31:09) Group House

(32:41) No One Will Have the Endurance To Collect on His Insurance

(34:49) Cambridge

(35:36) Denver

(35:44) Minneapolis

(36:23) New York City

(39:26) San Francisco

(41:45) Silicon Valley

(42:41) Texas

(43:31) Other Considerations

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I'm not writing this to alarm anyone, but it would be irresponsible not to report on something this important. On current trends, every car will be crashed in front of my house within the next week. Here's the data:

Until today, only two cars had crashed in front of my house, several months apart, during the 15 months I have lived here. But a few hours ago it happened again, mere weeks from the previous crash. This graph may look harmless enough, but now consider the frequency of crashes this implies over time:

The car crash singularity will occur in the early morning hours of Monday, April 7. As crash frequency approaches infinity, every car will be involved. You might be thinking that the same car could be involved in multiple crashes. This is true! But the same car can only withstand a finite number of crashes before it [...]

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Introduction

Decision theory is about how to behave rationally under conditions of uncertainty, especially if this uncertainty involves being acausally blackmailed and/or gaslit by alien superintelligent basilisks.

Decision theory has found numerous practical applications, including proving the existence of God and generating endless LessWrong comments since the beginning of time.

However, despite the apparent simplicity of "just choose the best action", no comprehensive decision theory that resolves all decision theory dilemmas has yet been formalized. This paper at long last resolves this dilemma, by introducing a new decision theory: VDT.

Decision theory problems and existing theories

Some common existing decision theories are:

• Causal Decision Theory (CDT): select the action that *causes* the best outcome.
• Evidential Decision Theory (EDT): select the action that you would be happiest to learn that you had taken.
• Functional Decision Theory (FDT): select the action output by the function such that if you take [...]

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Outline:

(00:53) Decision theory problems and existing theories

(05:37) Defining VDT

(06:34) Experimental results

(07:48) Conclusion

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For more than five years, I've posted more than 1× per week on Less Wrong, on average. I've learned a lot from you nerds. I've made friends and found my community. Thank you for pointing out all the different ways I've been wrong. Less Wrong has changed my life for the better. But it's time to say goodbye.

Let's rewind the clock back to October 19, 2019. I had just posted my 4ᵗʰ ever Less Wrong post Mediums Overpower Messages. Mediums Overpower Messages is about how different forms of communication train you to think differently. Writing publicly on this website and submitting my ideas to the Internet has improved my rationality far better and faster than talking to people in real life. All of the best thinkers I'm friends with are good writers too. It's not even close. I believe this relationship is causal; learning to write well [...]

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Project Lawful is really long. If anyone wants to go back to one of Keltham's lectures, here's a list with links to all the lectures. In principle, one could also read these without having read the rest of project lawful, I am not sure how easy it would be to follow though. I included short excerpts, so that you can also find the sections in the e-book.

Happy reading/listening:

Lecture on "absolute basics of lawfulness":

Podcast Episode 9, minute 26

Keltham takes their scrambling-time as a pause in which to think. It's been a long time, at least by the standards of his total life lived so far, since the very basics were explained to him.

Lecture on heredity (evolution) and simulation games:

Podcast Episode 15, minute 1

To make sure everybody starts out on the same page, Keltham will quickly summarize [...]

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Outline:

(00:33) Lecture on absolute basics of lawfulness:

(00:53) Lecture on heredity (evolution) and simulation games:

(01:13) Lecture on negotiation:

(01:29) Probability 1:

(01:46) Probability 2:

(01:55) Utility:

(02:11) Probable Utility:

(02:22) Cooperation 1:

(02:35) Cooperation 2:

(02:55) Lecture on Governance:

(03:12) To hell with science:

(03:26) To earth with science:

(03:43) Chemistry lecture:

(03:53) Lecture on how to relate to beliefs (Belief in Belief etc.):

(04:12) The alien maths of dath ilan:

(04:28) What the truth can destroy:

(04:46) Lecture on wants:

(05:03) Acknowledgement

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Our community is not prepared for an AI crash. We're good at tracking new capability developments, but not as much the company financials. Currently, both OpenAI and Anthropic are losing $5 billion+ a year, while under threat of losing users to cheap LLMs.

A crash will weaken the labs. Funding-deprived and distracted, execs struggle to counter coordinated efforts to restrict their reckless actions. Journalists turn on tech darlings. Optimism makes way for mass outrage, for all the wasted money and reckless harms.

You may not think a crash is likely. But if it happens, we can turn the tide.

Preparing for a crash is our best bet.[1] But our community is poorly positioned to respond. Core people positioned themselves inside institutions – to advise on how to maybe make AI 'safe', under the assumption that models rapidly become generally useful.

After a crash, this no longer works, for at [...]

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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