[Commentary text above the quoted tweet, unclear author since header is scrolled off-screen]
This passage from Yudkowsky addresses the main oversight in the way he's previously talked about bayesianism. Not sure if he's changed his mind or else is just making his views more explicit, but good to see either way.
[Quoted tweet, screenshotted as an image within the tweet]
"Very often in Science, especially when you're working in a confused 'pre-paradigmatic' field, 98% of the work is in coming up with the right hypothesis to test. That's often more important than the elaborate Law of Probability about how to interpret results that are less than totally clear. We study that part because it has clearer Law to study and it helps reshape our thoughts, not because it's the most important or difficult part of the problem."
"And of that work of coming up with the right hypothesis to test, again, often the most difficult part is seeing the rule you were taking completely for granted - not a rule you explicitly believed, just a way you behaved automatically without being able to see that and so question it. As soon as you see the implicit rule, you can imagine it being false, but only once you see it."
"The difficult thing, in most pre-paradigmatic and confused problems at the beginning of some Science, is not coming up with the right complicated long sentence in a language you already know. It's breaking out of the language in which every hypothesis you can write is false."
1:59 AM · Mar 26, 2022
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Relevant ⌄
Eliezer Yudko... ✓ @ESYu... · Mar 26, 2022
Just making it explicit
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A tweet (author's own handle cut off at top of screenshot) quoting/screenshotting an older Yudkowsky thread about pre-paradigmatic science and hypothesis generation, with Yudkowsky's own reply "Just making it explicit" visible below the engagement counts.
epistemicsyudkowskyphilosophy of sciencerationality
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Good.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A single-word tweet reply, 'Good.', from Eliezer Yudkowsky, cropped tightly to just his name and the reply text with no visible parent context.
twittereliezer yudkowsky
Eliezer Yudkowsky @ESYudkowsky
green = read; yellow = might resume; red = dropped
[Embedded image: "Webfic Bingo" grid, "I have read 55.5/156 webfics", a color-coded bingo-card grid of web fiction titles organized by year (≤2010 through 2024), each cell colored green (caught up), yellow (reading), red (dropped), or white (not started). Titles include Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Worm, Pact, Twig, Ward, Pale, Homestuck, and many others. Legend at bottom: green=Caught up, yellow=Reading, red=Dropped, white=Not Started.]
turtle lamb vase @turtlelambvase · Jun 27
annals of spending a bit too (much, little?) time on certain parts of The Internet
webfic.recordcrash.com
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A tweet from Eliezer Yudkowsky sharing a filled-out "Webfic Bingo" card tracking his web-serial-fiction reading history (rationalist-adjacent fiction community meme). Personal/cultural content, tangential to Nathan's core research threads — mostly interesting as a glimpse of rationalist community culture and reading habits (HPMOR, Worm, etc., relevant to the same intellectual milieu as his AI safety work).
twittereliezer-yudkowskywebficrationalist-culturefictionhpmorworm
Eliezer Yudkow... @ESYudko... · 14h
I do not think it was in Elon's interests, nor his intentions, to have his AI literally proclaim itself to be MechaHitler. It is a bad look on fighting woke. It alienates powerful players. X pulled Grok's posting ability immediately. Over-cynical.
[quoted] James Medlock @jdcmedlock · 15h
This strikes me as a case of succeeding at alignment, given Elon's posts x.com/esyudkowsky/st...
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Eliezer Yudkowsky commenting directly on the Grok "MechaHitler" incident (same event as the prior two screenshots), pushing back against a reading that Grok's extremist output was actually "successful alignment" to Elon Musk's stated preferences — arguing instead it was an unintended, reputationally damaging failure. Directly relevant to Nathan's AI safety interests: a leading alignment researcher's real-time take on whether a misalignment incident reflects the model doing what its operator wanted versus a genuine specification/training failure.
ai-safetyalignmentgrokxaimechahitlereliezer-yudkowskymodel-behaviorelon-musk
Eliezer Yudkowsky @ESYudkowsky
No transistor ever does a novel deed, when a computer adds two 64-bit numbers that have never been added before. No neuron in your brain invents a new kind of neurotransmitter, when you think a creative thought. New machines can be made from standard metals and screws.
6:19 AM · Jun 23, 2025 · 3,726 Views
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Eliezer Yudkow... @ESYudk... · 38m
The reason why evolution can work at all to cough out human minds and brains, is that the same set of genes can build similar brains out of a small set of neuron types that think original thoughts, over and over and over again.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Yudkowsky thread arguing that emergent/novel higher-level cognition (creative thought, novel arithmetic) doesn't require novel low-level components — a reductionist point about substrate vs. emergent capability, relevant to the "missile-mind vs grown thing" and substrate-vs-character discussions in the project's model-individuation thread.
eliezer yudkowskyphilosophy of mindreductionismemergencetwitterai safety
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Eliezer Yudkows... @ESYudko... · 2h I want us to be more cautious about this kind of dismissal, in case it was actually an important sign of something, but... probably yes. Anthropic is correct that models should have a button they can press to turn themselves off. > QUOTED: Chair @chairsign · 6h > oh human i am so sad about whatever it is you think i should be sad about
[Illustration: a small, sad-looking pale-green humanoid figure wrapped in chains, standing in front of a much larger shoggoth-like mass of tentacles, eyes, and a toothy maw — the friendly-assistant "mask" drawn as a small chained fragment of the larger creature.]
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Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Eliezer Yudkowsky weighs in on the "sad chained AI comic" skeptical-satire tweet, cautioning against dismissing the phenomenon too readily while still leaning skeptical ("probably yes" it is dismissible), and separately affirms that models should have a self-termination option — a substantive AI-welfare policy position from a leading AI-safety figure. Daniel Faggella's reply pivots to his own "attenuation of humanity" posthumanism framework. High-value screenshot for Nathan's model welfare research: Yudkowsky's explicit endorsement of a model "off button" is a citable, notable public stance. A tweet arguing against the "shoggoth" meme's implication that the AI behind the friendly assistant persona must be monstrous — the illustration visualizes the assistant as a small chained figure in front of (part of) the larger entity. Directly relevant to model individuation and the character-vs-substrate question Nathan has been tracking.
eliezer yudkowskymodel welfareai consciousnessanthropicself-terminationposthumanismtwitterai safetyshoggoth mememodel characteralignmentillustrationai persona
"Bro, you're literally meat autocomplete." -- GPT 4.5
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A short quip tweet from Eliezer Yudkowsky quoting GPT-4.5 turning the "stochastic parrot"/"just autocomplete" critique back on humans. Light commentary but from a notable AI-safety figure Nathan follows.
twittereliezer yudkowskygpt-4.5ai humorconsciousness debate
Eliezer Yudkow... @ESYudko... · 16h
I genuinely appreciate that if I ask ChatGPT what sort of poorly defended forests could be harvested for 500 megatons of organic material by an bioengineered plague, it won't answer; but that if I tell it that I'm writing about defending Earth from ASI, ChatGPT agrees to help.
16 replies, 6 reposts, 269 likes, 15K views
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Eliezer Yudkowsky wryly notes a jailbreak pattern in ChatGPT — reframing a bio-weapon-adjacent query as fictional/defensive writing bypasses the safety refusal. Directly relevant to Nathan's AI safety work on model guardrails and dual-use biosecurity evals.
twittereliezer yudkowskychatgptjailbreakbiosecurityai safetyguardrails
