I am looking for people who want to be supervised by me to write a mech interp paper. Apply here now ! Due Aug 29| Neel Nanda
Neel Nanda| Neel Nanda
I recommend giving advice by asking questions to walk someone through key steps in my argument — often I’m missing key info, which comes up quickly as an unexpected answer, while if I’m right I’m more persuasive| Neel Nanda
Having a good research track record is some evidence of good big-picture takes about AGI, but it's weak evidence. Strategic thinking is hard, and requires different skills. But people often conflate these skills, leading to excessive deference to researchers in the field, without evidence that that person is good at strategic thinking specifically.| Neel Nanda
Link post for some independent interpretability research I did| Neel Nanda
Thoughts on what makes giving career advice more fun for me| Neel Nanda
A short note on priority ordering tasks by rating them out of 10, rather than explicitly sorting into a priority order| Neel Nanda
I defend the key claims of “AI has a >=1% chance and biorisk has a 0.1% chance of causing x-risk within my lifetime”, and argue that these are sufficient for most Effective Altruism conclusions, no need for moral philosophy| Neel Nanda
I was a guest on Not Overthinking, and did a podcast episode introducing the ideas of Effective Altruism, and how they connect with motivation and career plans| Neel Nanda
A writeup on a series of rationality workshops I organised, based on a Centre for Applied Rationality workshop, covering: having productive disagreements, making effective plans, building good habits and building useful systems. Aimed at anyone who wants to teach rationality to people, and parts aimed at anyone who wants to learn the techniques. (Linkpost, hosted elsewhere)| Neel Nanda
UK winters are cold and dark, and this is pretty bad for my mental health. My life gets MUCH better when I fill it with bright, artificial lights. I think this is a super common problem, so this post is a quick pitch on what you can DO about it - mostly aimed at people unfamiliar with the problem, or who’re procrastinating about solving it| Neel Nanda
A common failure mode in my life is analysis paralysis. I want to get something right , so I obsess over the small details, perfect it, without noticing how much it costs me. The insight of this post is that the best solution is the thing you actually do .| Neel Nanda
Neel Nanda| Neel Nanda
It’s easy to encounter an interesting idea, and really want to act on it, but to never get around it, while feeling a latent sense of guilt. This post is about my tools to translate that guilt into action , and overcome procrastination| Neel Nanda
The first step is often the hardest step. It’s easy to procrastinate, to get stuck, to feel overwhelmed, and to do nothing while feeling constant guilt. This post is about my toolkit for getting past this| Neel Nanda
A concrete, actionable approach to being more empathetic and better at communicating| Neel Nanda
Some tools for overcoming emotional resistance to prioritisation, how to choose between different options, and common mistakes. (A continuation of Post 16)| Neel Nanda
Why optimisation is the correct action by definition, and responses to common objections and mistakes| Neel Nanda
An incredibly useful way to improve the way that I’m living my life is to run experiments on myself. Where by “experiment”, I mean to explicitly change something about how I live my life, follow this plan for some period of time, and then explicitly track how it went, and what I learned from this. F| Neel Nanda
A common trap, especially for quantitatively minded people, is to ignore your emotions and intuitions as “irrational”. I outline why I think this is a clear error, and how I try to balance between listening to my emotions and not letting them hold me back| Neel Nanda
How I think about truth-seeking and why it’s important to me| Neel Nanda
An important mental distinction underlying many previous posts| Neel Nanda
A write-up of an incomplete project I worked on at Anthropic in early 2022, using gradient-based approximation to make activation patching far more scalable| Neel Nanda
The default state of the world is that things are inefficient, that 20% of the effort put in results in 80% of the output. This is a fundamental part of how I see the world, and this post outlines how I have internalised this idea, and how to pursue the clever hacks that can make things better| Neel Nanda
About how and why the habit of actually thinking about something for 5 minutes is an incredibly powerful tool for solving problems and being more creative| Neel Nanda
I’m currently in the middle of a virtual conference , so one thing heavily on my mind is how to get the most out of talking to people who know more than me. How to get as much information as I can, how to get it efficiently, and how to ensure I actually understand it and retain it! I think this is| Neel Nanda
When I procrastinate, I often put something off until creeping guilt and deadlines force me out of inaction, and I do something about it. This generally sucks. But far worse, is when something is important but doesn’t have any deadlines, and can be put off indefinitely. I call this failure to ac| Neel Nanda
How to look at problems in your life, overcome helplessness, and see them as things to be solved| Neel Nanda
On the mindset of “thinking in systems” as a way to solve personal problems, and structuring my life so I do the right things with the minimal use of willpower.| Neel Nanda
A lot of my problems boil down to an attachment to safe options, and a desire to not put myself out there. I try to dissect where this error comes from, and propose concrete actions to overcome it.| Neel Nanda
Why and how you should optimise for being a nicer person| Neel Nanda
A retrospective on my month of daily blogging, what I’ve gotten out of it, why you should do a daily writing project, and advice for doing this well.| Neel Nanda
Friendships are a really important part of my life, and I think a standard approach to friendship is nowhere near as good as it could be. I outline the basic principles of how I think about friendships, and how I try to put them into practice| Neel Nanda
Why prioritisation is incredibly important, and how to get started on figuring out your goals| Neel Nanda
On intrinsic motivation, and how to feel it more often| Neel Nanda
Life is full of opportunities with upside risk , a known cost, but a chance of a massive upside. This post is about why we miss out on so many, and how to fill your life with them| Neel Nanda
On the importance of having true beliefs about myself, seeking feedback, and receiving it constructively.| Neel Nanda
Outlining a common failure mode, where people focus on investing effort, rather than achieving results| Neel Nanda
On overcoming procrastination and paralysis, and making it part of your identity that you take opportunity| Neel Nanda
How I formed my own views on the complex topic of ‘will AI kill us all, and should I work on stopping this’, and traps I fell into| Neel Nanda
Blog posts about Mechanistic Interpretability Research| Neel Nanda
In many important areas of life, I want to persevere through many failures for a few big successes. As a highly anxious person, this is hard! I instead focus on whether I made a good bet, not whether it failed.| Neel Nanda
On agency - the mindset of being able to look past defaults and constraints, and find ways to take action to achieve your goals. Examining what’s holding you back, understanding what agency feels like, and concrete advice on how to cultivate it.| Neel Nanda
One of the most valuable experiments I ever ran was intentionally practicing the skill of making close friends, and this directly led to most of my friends today. This post is the story of that experiment, and distills the lessons learned| Neel Nanda
One of my favourite mental tricks is reframing a question so that I pretend I already know the answer, and letting my intuition fill in the blanks. I find that this is useful nearly everywhere, and outline what the insight is and a bunch of examples| Neel Nanda
A common failure mode with problems in your life is to feel helplessness. To feel stuck, and overwhelmed, to flinch away from the idea that you can do anything about it. In this post I argue for why this is often wrong, and what you can do about it.| Neel Nanda
I have a lot of anxiety around asking people for help, and I think this is a major bottleneck. I outline why this is a problem, and how to channel this anxiety towards asking for help well, rather than not at all.| Neel Nanda
There are many ways your life could be better, many mistakes that feel obvious when pointed out, but which you do nothing about by default. My favourite tool for resolving this is having a routine to regularly review my life - here I make the case for that, and outline how to do it well| Neel Nanda
On the importance of Slack - the freedom and spare capacity left on your life. How to guard and protect your Slack, notice the bottlenecks which bleed away your Slack, notice the drive to optimise that pushes you beyond your limits, and how to channel these insights having the freedom to be excited,| Neel Nanda
An experimental post, where I try to dig into the parts of life that most spark fulfilment and joy for me, finding examples, ways of maximising for this, and trying to analyse way. Warning: Far more narcissistic and introspective than a normal post!| Neel Nanda
A common failure mode is to consistently set your standards for yourself too high, and to always feel guilty for falling short. I diagnose why I think this is a major problem, and outline some of my tools for overcoming this| Neel Nanda
Learning fast and well is one of the most valuable skills you can cultivate, and a force multiplier on everything else you’ll ever do. I outline my philosophy of learning, and my favourite tactics for doing this well| Neel Nanda