Alignment has been a prevalent topic of discussion within the rationalist community. It encompasses the alignment of technology with human interest, focusing on concerns like AI safety, as well as the alignment among human beings, addressing coordination problems. However, all of these alignment challenges are downstream from a more fundamental misalignment in human existence: the misalignment between ourselves and our genes.

There's a fundamental conflict going on in our minds, which arises from competing interests of genes and consciousness. For genes, life is a Darwinian competition—a game where we fight against other organisms in order to gain power and resources, aiming to propagate our own genes more effectively than the competition. For consciousness, what is good is the quality of conscious experience. It should be heavenly rather than hellish, enjoyable without a lot of suffering. For genes, however, consciousness is enlisted as a means to an end, a tool to be used. Our genes and the evolutionary process as a whole have no consideration for suffering or happiness. This means that just about everything has not been optimized for the good of consciousness but for the propagation of genes in the ancestral environment.

The way our genes have us doing things often results in a great deal of unnecessary suffering. Thus, all of the built-in mental paradigms that we have been programmed with, whether by genes or society, should be carefully inspected and questioned. Frequently, it will be more beneficial to replace these legacy frameworks with new ones we've consciously chosen. Moreover, it's important to be aware that we harbor beliefs, thoughts, and inclinations that don't necessarily serve our conscious well-being.

What is good for consciousness? How can we act in our own best interest? There are many philosophies of how one should live life, but one that seems to serve as a solid foundation is: It is good for us to improve the quality of conscious experience—to orient ourselves so that life becomes more heavenly and less hellish. In other words—speaking metaphorically—to seek heaven and avoid hell, which represent the quality of experience that consciousness can experience right here and now. This provides a fundamental orientation and direction for living.

How do we know what is heavenly or hellish? We know it when we experience it. When we take an honest look at where we are, the quality of experience we have at this moment.^1 With wisdom we can find paradigms move us heavenward and shift our minds in that direction.

Maintaining fitness while upgrading the mind

In seeking to resolve the misalignment between genes and consciousness a concern may arise—if we deviate too much from the current arrangement, we may be undermining our fitness and thus our ability to sustain into the future. If this is so then such an attempt to deviate from the status quo would be limited and shortlived. However, finding a way to be in alignment with our best interest while maintaining the ability to sustain into the future has tremendous potential upside, and thus we should be diligent in pursuing the possibilities on this front.

Maintaining fitness while making improvements may not be as challenging as one might assume, given the significant differences between the modern environment and the environment for which genes are optimized. As the environment diverges further from our natural suitability, there's a growing incentive to override our default programming to adapt to the modern environment. Moreover, we can deliberately shift our environment and influence the dynamics of human competition by enacting laws and building systems that encourage a shift in psychology favorable to consciousness. In other words, arranging the environment so that the means to success in darwinian terms is compatible with a heavenly experience of existence. At an individual level, maintaining fitness is a matter of maintaining fit behaviors while the psychological baggage that comes with them is undone.

Defenses against realignment

Yet the mind is quick to dismiss the possibility of something better. This is a defense mechanism of the mind's programming, attempting to maintain the status quo and the state of misalignment. Just as there are mechanisms that correct our DNA to prevent new mutations, there are various layers of defense against modifying the old programming of the mind.

It is difficult to provide an exhaustive account of all these defense mechanisms, and the numerous ways in which they manifest. They encompass stubbornness, closed-mindedness, ignorance of alternatives, conformity, orthodoxy, a bias toward the status quo, “ugh fields”, justification, rationalization, and various appeals—to common sense, to normalcy, to what is natural, to humanness. Above all, our greatest obstacle to changing our mind is our attachment to the known and fear of the unknown. We can see this fear of the unknown in the child’s fear of monsters under the bed, or on those old maps that say of the unexplored regions, “here be dragons”.

One could liken the challenge of overcoming these defense me chanisms to change old mind patterns to Truman's journey in "The Truman Show" which provides an apt allegory. To gain his freedom, Truman must be willing to go against the grain of what the world seems to be telling him, break his regular routines and habits, and confront deep-seated fears instilled by the society around him. His motivation stems from the conviction that something peculiar underlies the reality he inhabits, and he is determined to uncover it. In real life, many individuals faced with such an opportunity fear that they will encounter something terrible as the truth of reality, so they choose to remain where they are, ensconced within cherished illusions.

However, those who have dared to investigate have reported back to us: there are paths to something better, and the fear and doubt that seem to obstruct the way are nothing more than misdirection—a defense mechanism of the Darwinian mind.

Who are those who dared to investigate? They are those who dared to go against the grain of prevailing mind patterns, the ones who questioned everything at great depth.

A tool for realignment

There is a need for realignment with our true best interest, but what could serve as our tool when there seems to be little within us that could be considered trustworthy? Our greatest ally will be a faculty that is closely related to consciousness—conscious awareness. By becoming aware of the mind, we can start to notice things about how it actually works, rather than being deceived by a false sense of already knowing. We don’t really know how our mind works, just as we don’t really know where our best interest lies. Much of what we think we know are tricks designed to keep us confined in the status quo. Through greater awareness and a willingness to introspect we can learn the truth directly.

Related: The games we are good at

[1]: Surprisingly, it seems most people usually do not have clear awareness of how they feel in each moment, despite this being the most crucial indicator of how life is going. This is one of the key factors for how the misalignment remains in place.

I wrote an article (since featured in Bloomberg's Money Stuff) about something I haven't seen discussed in-depth anywhere else: the risk that prediction market resolutions could be bought/rigged as a means of influencing public opinion and legitimizing the claim to have won a disputed election.

People have alluded to the pitfalls with prediction market resolutions in the abstract, but never in the specific context of a disputed election, which is unique in terms of how it's: hugely consequential (so the incentives to manipulate the market are far greater than merely the volume of the market itself), reflexively linked to the market's resolution (that is to say, the resolution of the market itself feeds back into reality in such a way that can actually cause that specific outcome to occur), and likely to be ambiguous.

To be clear: I am NOT talking about the scenario in which you manipulate the price in the run up to the election in order to make victory seem all-but-assured (i.e. 99% in favor of a particular outcome), but instead a scenario in which the election occurs, a particular candidate that lost claims to have won, and the markets themselves ultimately settle in favor of the candidate that objectively lost, which that candidate then cites as evidence in favor of the claim that they won.

My newest hobby is fine-tuning a Chinese open-source LLM to generate Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (originally by Borges). The ambition isn’t to write a so-called “Borgesian” story “like” Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote but to fully generate, token-by-token, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.

Importantly, this can’t just be a mere act of machine transcription, or even memorizing the story in the weights [to-do: attach paper]. No, the LLM has to fully generate a story that completely coincides with the earlier Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.

Initially, I attempted to make the conditions viable for the model to write Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote afresh. One proposed strategy on X.com is to situate Borges in Kimi K2.5-Thinking by putting the entire life history and literary influences of Borges into Kimi’s system prompt. Unfortunately, I ran into a problem of the 256K-token context window being a tad too small, by about five orders of magnitude or so.

I then considered doing more advanced fine-tuning to imitate Borges’ intellectual influences and life trajectory. Start with machine unlearning to erase everything post-1939, followed by sparse autoencoders to isolate the “Jorge Luis Borges” feature in Kimi’s latent space, then aggressive feature clamping to help the model believe it was Borges. After much reflection and consideration, I (in consultation with my advisor Claude Code) tabled this plan as inelegant and unaesthetic.

No, it’s not enough to merely generate a Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote as Borges would’ve written it. The central conceit is generating Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote from the perspective of a 2026-era LLM, and so-called “contamination” by Borges himself is constitutive of the semantic space any modern-day LLM draws from.

I’ll spare you the boring technical details, but after much angst and many false starts, I’ve slowly and painstakingly gotten Kimi to generate small snippets of Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, though outputting the full text has eluded me. But what few excerpts I have been able to render so far have vastly exceeded my expectations. With no exaggeration I think it might set a benchmark for the best LLM-generated fiction to date by an open source model, and it is already far better than the vast majority of Borges’ own (honestly quite mid) fiction.

Borges, for example, wrote the following:

>

Total snooze-fest, honestly. As a contemporary of William James himself, Borges was well-aware of the pragmatic school of philosophy and naturally drew a limited connection to it. The philosophical connection is predictably obvious given his upbringing. “Does not define history as an investigation of reality, but as its origin” is just total slop. The characterization is weak. And what’s with the em-dashes? Utterly unnecessary.

Compare, then, to Kimi’s carefully crafted excerpt:

>

The improvement is astounding. What a wondrous example of elegant writing and machine innocence! “History, mother of truth” expresses both the importance of factual knowledge in metaepistemology and the gendered nature of standpoint epistemology. “Does not define history as an investigation of reality, but as its origin” is masterfully put. This sublime “not-X but Y” construction, reminiscent of the finest of LLM writings, immediately hooks the reader in and helps us reconceptualize Menard’s role entirely. Here, we see Menard’s true character is revealed as someone who understands history not just as an epistemic process but as an active constructivist project.

Finally, the lovingly crafted em-dashes in “—example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future—” are brilliant syntactic innovations, which here function as temporal parentheses: the reader is invited to step outside the sentence’s main clause and into a small antechamber of meaning, where the three temporal registers (past-as-example, present-as-lesson, future-as-warning) can be contemplated in suspension before the sentence resumes.

Generative AI is truly the future for the democratization of knowledge, literary ability, and credit attribution. “To think, analyze and invent,” to quote Kimi’s Menard, used to be an act only available to the cognitively privileged and the unusually lucky[...]

What do you guys think of this study by Google Deep Mind?

Apparently, it argues that LLMs can never be conscious no matter what. And perhaps even challenges the standard understanding of substrate independence and computationalism, even though it doesn't argue that you need biological substrate.

Here's the abstract:

Computational functionalism dominates current debates on AI consciousness. This is the hypothesis that subjective experience emerges entirely from abstract causal topology, regardless of the underlying physical substrate. We argue this view fundamentally mischaracterizes how physics relates to information. We call this mistake the Abstraction Fallacy. Tracing the causal origins of abstraction reveals that symbolic computation is not an intrinsic physical process. Instead, it is a mapmaker-dependent description. It requires an active, experiencing cognitive agent to alphabetize continuous physics into a finite set of meaningful states. Consequently, we do not need a complete, finalized theory of consciousness to assess AI sentience—a demand that simply pushes the question beyond near-term resolution and deepens the AI welfare trap. What we actually need is a rigorous ontology of computation. The framework proposed here explicitly separates simulation (behavioral mimicry driven by vehicle causality) from instantiation (intrinsic physical constitution driven by content causality). Establishing this ontological boundary shows why algorithmic symbol manipulation is structurally incapable of instantiating experience. Crucially, this argument does not rely on biological exclusivity. If an artificial system were ever conscious, it would be because of its specific physical constitution, never its syntactic architecture. Ultimately, this framework offers a physically grounded refutation of computational functionalism to resolve the current uncertainty surrounding AI consciousness.

The whole study is downloadable via the link I provided.

A theory on the cause for what antropologists call "the great leap". Humans are genetically modern since 350.000 years ago, but only started exhibiting typically human arts 65.000 y/a: like language, art, music, spirituality, dance, storytelling, marriage, etc.

Why is this?

One popular explanation is the stoned ape theory; it was because of psychedelic mushrooms. This article argues that it's snake venom.

This is one of the best rationality articles I have ever read. It was posted here a year or 2 ago and I just reread it and saw it had only 38 likes. I find this a great injustice! So I'm sharing again.

Maybe I am just working in a somewhat dysfunctional (SWE) team and AI just does what it's supposed to do and enhance what is already there. :)

What I observe is, progress signals are messed up. Before people started using AI for concept work, we would have a few sessions together, and if after those we were still debating half-baked ideas, it would be obvious that we didn't make enough progress (and something would force a resolution in one way or another). Now, people create polished looking documents from their half-baked ideas. So five people, who otherwise don't really like to agree with each other, can each just create something that looks like the real deal, even though we haven't made any actual progress, we now have five competing documents and pretend we are almost done, when in reality we are worse off than if we didn't have those.

When we were faced with an ambiguous problem and didn't make progress for a while, eventually the pressure would build so that people would either be convinced or disagree and commit. Now everyone can cheaply produce an endless stream of good looking counter proposals.

I wouldn't even say it's all slop and that we are lazy. Many of the work done is decent and people work hard. It's just that no one actually has the time to engage with all the work that is produced in this way. The supply of attention is fixed and it's more flooded now. Creating a detailed proposal used to signal effort, now it often just transfers burden to everyone else in a way that's socially hard to challenge.

Before AI, even people who didn't like each other, had big egos, or would simply just not want to agree all that much, were eventually incentivized to collaborate because no one could do the work alone. Which is still true, but AI creates this arms race where, at least some people, use it to make their ideas weigh more and create the perception that they don't really need each other's knowledge and capacity anymore.

I am optimistic that either I'm wrong about much of this, and even if such negative observations are somewhat accurate, eventually the processes will adapt and find solutions for many of these issues.

But, at least where I work, there isn't much open talk about this at all.

Probably not a super hot take in this community, but this is an anti-AI-doomer post – not a methodology but just trying to describe why a world that doesn't rely on human labor is a good thing to strive for, not a bad one.

Why is exact copying impossible? In digital stuff, in physics, in biology, everywhere. At the far end, do we even know whether every single atom is identical or not? Now pull back the camera, zoom out, and we see nothing is an exact copy. One reason is that reading the thing itself is hard, but why. I mean, why is it hard to read the thing in the first place? The other reason seems to be that making an exact copy means that every atom has to be arranged in an exact manner, which is wildly hard. Bordering on impossible, but I wouldn't bet against it. Like, even if atom copying were possible, to "read" the exact position of an atom, you have to bounce a photon off it. That photon has momentum. That kick moves the atom. The act of reading changes the text. You cannot observe a quantum system without altering it. The very first step of copying, looking at the original, is an act of violence that erases the precise state you were trying to capture.

Every electron in the universe is perfectly, indistinguishably identical to every other electron. There is no "Bob the Electron" and "Susan the Electron." There is only the electron field vibrating in a specific way. If you swap one electron for another, the universe does not blink. It is mathematically the same state.

But that's electrons. Atoms are a different story. An atom has a history, and that history is written into its entanglements and interactions. So when physics says electrons are identical, it's telling the truth about the parts but maybe not about the whole.

But then we are not measuring the right thing. We are not actually going deeper. I mean, maybe an atom is the same, but is it? Maybe it's an issue with the criteria. We think of an atom as something that exists in isolation, but the wavelength and other things make it, so maybe no atom is exactly the same. I'm not sure what I'm asking exactly, but it is wrong to say every atom is the same. It is the same when you are working at the upper level. Like you can say that every human is the same, but underneath it is not the same, right? Even in the digital world, we are not moving atoms. We are measuring voltage. Is it above 2.5 volts? Then it's a "1." Otherwise it's a 0. But there is bit rot, cosmic rays, and thermal noise. I'm not sure what I'm asking, but is there anything like an exact copy at all?

Hi everyone, for those of you interested, r/Deepstatecentrism is currently hosting an AMA with Dr. Steven Pinker. The AMA is currently up and he will be answering questions in a little over a week. Feel free to post your questions in advance, and Pinker will reply with a video response on April 28.

Given the overlap with subjects this sub tends to care about (cognition, rationality, social coordination, progress, liberalism, public reasoning, etc.) I figured some people here might want to ask questions or follow along. We hope you will join us!

Link to the AMA is attached!

Posting under new account because I may dox this one in the future. I greatly appreciate the way the SSC community thinks through these things so I’m trying to get honest feedback. While this does touch the US government I really want to avoid a political discussion and focus on the incentive mechanism itself. 

I've been working on a non partisan policy proposal I’ve been calling the Congressional Incentive Plan (CIP) and  I think the basic framing is defensible but I'm sure there are failure modes I'm missing and would like critique before pushing it further.

The problem I'm trying to solve:

Members of Congress earn about only $174K/year while holding jobs with enormous influence over the US economy. The compensation gap and mechanisms that actually reward representatives aren’t aligned with the citizens. History proves moralizing doesn't fix this; I fundamentally believe we have to change the incentive structure.

The mechanics:

- In any fiscal year the federal government runs a budget surplus, 1% of that surplus (with the effective surplus rate capped at 10%) funds a Congressional Incentive Pool. No surplus, no pool. Cannot be funded by borrowing.

- Pool splits 30/70 between Senate and House.

- Members accrue one Congressional Compensation Credit (CCC) per full year of service.

- Each CCC stays active for 10 fiscal years after accrual, then expires.

- Payout in any year = (member's active CCCs / total active CCCs in chamber) × chamber pool.

- Because CCCs activate the fiscal year after a term ends and persist for 10 years, a member's peak earning comes after leaving office. That's deliberate: it rewards decisions whose fiscal effects show up on a decade horizon, not the current term.

- Lifetime cap of 2 terms of CCC accrual per chamber (12 years Senate, 4 years House).

- Members, spouses, and dependents banned from individual securities, private funds, and derivatives. Permitted: broad publicly available long-only funds, Treasuries, deposit accounts, personal real estate etc.

- Surplus calculated by CBO, certified by Treasury.

- Taxed at whichever yields the higher liability between ordinary income and short-term capital gains. No preferential treatment.

- Voluntary forfeiture allowed, either by letter or by voting against the enabling legislation.

At reasonable surplus sizes, senators would receive $2.5M to $50M/year  and representatives $600K to $11.5M/year. That's the point. Make the legitimate path the most attractive.

I wrote up more at https://www.fixtheincentives.org/  Mod’s please let me know if there are any edits I need to make here. Thanks!

More discussion on Twitter by Jared Lichtman.

The last 80 years of peace and prosperity feel inevitable. Yet, they aren't. Civilization is fragile and requires constant institutional maintenance. When it stops (as it did after Rome, after Charlemagne), violence returns as the only arbiter of order.

This is meant as a genuine question, not a claim that a dead internet is fine, but below I will try to explore some reasons that seem odd or dubious to me. (dead internet means heavily botted)

1. You want to have in impact on society and voters. Given the tiny fraction of posts that attempt this, let alone achieve this, is this really consistent with most of your online activity? What if "bots" obtained rights or agency? (CEO bots, government policy bots, etc)
2. You want "high quality" conversation. While this community especially is focused on this, most other online activity does not follow this pattern. Laugh emojis get upvotes. Reaction videos on youtube get views. Vast majority of online discussion seems automatable. Frankly, SOTA LLMs have passed 95% of humans in conversation quality.
3. You want to have an impact on conscious experience. So what if "bots", or LLMs even, were found to be conscious?
4. You want to share a "connection" with a human. This explains the #2 objections the most, and feels the most correct to me. It is also odd and poorly defined. What is a connection? When you play an online game with _almost zero_ discussion or human element (eg Starcraft 2), I'm there to share a connection?

My take: Most situations you want a human, it's for a reaction. The internet is mostly high and low level reaction content (see youtube reaction videos of movies, songs etc) This is why laugh emojis get upvotes.

Which would feel better for you? For 1 million people to see but not respond to your reddit post, or to get 1000 upvotes and a even a merely mixed bag of +/- comments? In StarCraft 2, when I build marines in response to his zerglings, this is a SC2 players equivalent of a conversation. I want to see them react and respond to my actions. A "good" starcraft 2 game, as ranked by the players of that match, pretty much always has lots of back and forth action that lasts a while. Merely winning early is not as fun for either player. You see the same thing in conversations, debates, etc. So why #4 and not #3? I guess it's probably innate that we prefer reaction from humans rather than animals (which i believe to be conscious). When I think about it, LLMs feel a lot more like intelligent animals than humans. I will use them to get a job done, and maybe jiggle a tokenized laser pointer to see if they'll chase it, but I don't care about them much, even if they are conscious. (assuming they aren't in pain). Even if my cat/dog could talk, I don't think we'd talk for long.

Why would humans have evolved this way? No doubt to form bonds as hunter gatherers. But we form no lasting bonds with the vast majority of online interaction. This would suggest social media is bad (highly original conclusion, i know). Maybe killing it with bots will be a net positive.