I want to help build a just, beautiful future. I’m most inspired by Freeman Dyson and Augustine of Hippo. These days I’m thinking about:
- Why does the world exist? Is it possible to answer this question without either creating a new world or leaving the current one?
- What does it mean to be a scientist in the world of strong AI? Is it different from just pursuing your curiosity and asking AI questions?
- How is consciousness created? How come you can take a bunch of oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen atoms and get something with a first-person perspective in the world?
- What’s the long-term “right” pace of economic growth? 5%/year? 10%/year? Is exponential growth the right kind of frame? It’s only been the default for about 300 years.
- Is the answer to the question “Why can’t you ask ChatGPT to do novel AI research and for it to just do that?” interesting or boring?
If you have thoughts on any of these questions, please email me at alexey@guzey.com.
My Twitter is @alexeyguzey. If you’d like to ask for advice, please email advice@guzey.com. For New Science-related questions, please email alexey@newscience.org. Also, feel free to call me at (617) 386 0497 during reasonable PT hours.
Recent
Jul 30, Why I believe in AGI (again)
May 22, What I'm thinking about these days
Apr 11, Links for Q1 2025
personal favorites
- On suicide
- Omens of exceptional talent
- 2025 vibe screenshots & 2024 vibe screenshots
- Intelligence killed genius
- People who are going to change the world
- Why You Should Start a Blog Right Now
- What I’m thinking about these days
one-pagers
- Why you shouldn’t build your career around existential risk
- On impact
- Losing the idea of progress
- I’m broke, divorced, and unemployed.
- On deification
- On YIMBI
- I’m terrified of old people
- I ran out of money a year ago, spent the last of my savings on a prostitute in Hong Kong, and became a commie.
Advice
- Every productivity thought I’ve ever had, as concisely as possible
- What Should You Do with Your Life? Directions and Advice
- lifehacks
- Advice from Tyler Cowen & (unauthorized) advice from guest 04
- College Q&A
- It Is Your Responsibility to Follow Up
- How to make friends over the internet
- Writing advice
AI
- Why I believe in AGI (again)
- How my views on AI changed every year 2017-2024
- Is AI alignment on track? Is it progressing… too fast?
- A Two sentence Jailbreak for GPT-4 and Claude & Why Nobody Knows How to Fix It
- Planes are still decades away from displacing most bird jobs
- AI Alignment Is Turning from Alchemy Into Chemistry
- Forecasting humans becoming generally intelligent with biological anchors: year 10,000,000,000,002,2022
Personal
- Q&A with my high school self: helping 14-16 year old Alexey to deal with his emotions, to ask for help, to talk to people (and his dad), to learn, to get things done.
- On Friendship and on Finding Your People
- 17-20: a Retrospective on Four Years in College
- My journal: years of depression and self-loathing; learning to accept myself and others; overcoming video game addiction
- My Favorite Movies, TV Shows, Books, Podcasts, Music, Video games
- People and Things I Would Fund If I Were a Billionaire
Metascience/education
- Is anything inherently difficult?
- The ouroboros of academic peer review
- Abolish the NIH
- thoughts on science, science literacy, and replication
- Translating an issue of Nature
- Reviving Patronage and Revolutionary Industrial Research
Practical
- Why is there only one Elon Musk? Why is there so much low-hanging fruit?
- (Autistic) visionaries are not natural-born leaders
- Ideas not mattering is a psyop
- 16 questions posed & answered by Leslie Berlin’s book “Troublemakers: Silicon Valley’s Coming of Age”
- My 2022 self (I don’t know them) was very wrong about meditation, huge monitors, and… sleep.
- Napoleon: a Cautionary Tale for Young Idealists
- Cursed omens of exceptional talent
Fiction & Art
- Dating
- Why You Should Not Go on a Tinder Date with Me
- How I got to #1 spot on Hacker News and why you should never try doing the same
- RAPIDLY PRESS X TO REFUSE TO COME TO TERMS WITH YOUR OWN MORTALITY
- A dying snake
- Poems
most notable
- Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors
- questions
- How Life Sciences Actually Work: Findings of a Year-Long Investigation
- The Effects on Cognition of Sleeping 4 Hours per Night for 12-14 Days: a Pre-Registered Self-Experiment
- What is the alternative to utilitarianism?
- Neurodiversity, mutants, and organisational design
- Every thought about giving and taking advice I’ve ever had, as concisely as possible
- You are a morale-driven machine
- Tools / Gear
- Links
- Issues with Bloom et al’s “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” and why total factor productivity should never be used as a measure of innovation
- Research Ideas
- Best of Holden Karnofsky and Sam Altman
- Gwern’s Most Important Writing (in essays, tweets, book reviews, and other forms)
- Most Important Slate Star Codex Posts
- Don’t believe self-reported data
- William MacAskill misrepresents the evidence underlying his key arguments in “Doing Good Better”
notable
- I no longer believe that it’s possible to achieve extremely high productivity sustained over long periods of time working on difficult projects alone, so now I spend the majority of my working time co-working with my friends over video in my virtual gather.town office
- Ramanujan, Einstein, Tolstoy, Napoleon, Richard Muller, and Michael Jackson on God
- Why We Likely Underappreciate the Pace of Technological Progress
- Contra Scott Alexander’s “The Tails Coming Apart as Metaphor for Life”
- Fun Economic Facts
- Interview with Ben Kuhn about productivity, his college experience, job choice, the value of an inside view, the EA community #interview
- Why I switched my newsletters from Substack and Mailchimp to Buttondown
- Polynomial Time Reductions and the P vs NP problem
- Three Questions for Russia
- Online courses and textbooks I recommend
- Where does talent come from? How easy is it to discover talent?
- Tweet rot
- Low tech stuff I recommend
- Can We Trust Peter Turchin?
- Scientific experiments I want to fund
- Theses on Sleep
- Philosophers for Sale
- Julian Jaynes and the Ancient Tablets
- The most we can say about earnings of Substack’s top writers
- Who is the real prophet of longtermism: Will MacAskill or Sam Altman?
LaTeX
- Matec Notes – a multivariable calculus coursebook
- How Our Commitments Slip Away From Us (pdf, my bachelor’s thesis)
Book highlights
Nostalgic