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Published on November 1, 2025 12:15 PM GMT

Applications are open for the 2026 Cooperative AI PhD Fellowship! The fellowship provides future and current PhD students in the field of cooperative AI with additional financial and academic support to achieve their full potential. Fellows will receive a range of benefits, including:

• Research support including conference and compute budgets;
• Collaboration opportunities and invitations to closed-doors events;
• Living stipend of up to $40,000 per year for top candidates.

Applicants can be from any region. You should be enrolled (or expecting to be enrolled) in a PhD programme with a specific interest in cooperative AI. (For examples of topics, see our 2025 fellows and 2025 grants call). 

The Cooperative AI Foundation is committed to the growth of a diverse and inclusive research community, and we especially welcome applications from underrepresented backgrounds.

Applications close 16th November 2025 (23:59 AoE). If you have any questions, please contact us here.

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Published on November 1, 2025 10:58 AM GMT

I've been a lurker and learned a lot from this community. So today I would like to share one (slightly crazy) idea for increasing the probability of good outcomes from ASI. This post will likely be controversial, but I believe the idea deserves serious consideration given the stakes involved.

ASI will probably kill us all. Compared to other destructive technologies, it is often said that AI differs in that we have a single shot at building an aligned ASI. Humans mostly learn by first making mistakes, however it seems likely that the first AI catastrophe would also be the last, as it will annihilate all of humanity. But what if it is not?

Our best move to survive as a species might then be the following: to engineer ourselves an AI catastrophe. In other words, we should vaccinate humanity against ASI. This could involve using some powerful AI (but not too powerful) and releasing it in the wild with an explicitly evil purpose. It is of course extremely risky but at least the risks will be controlled as we are the ones engineering this. More concretely one could take a future version of agentic AI with long task horizon (but not too long) and with instructions such as "kill as many humans as possible".

This sounds crazy but thinking rationally about this, it feels like it could actually be the best move for humanity to survive. After such an AI is released in the wild and starts destroying society, humanity will have to unite against it, just like how we united against Nazi Germany. Crucially, an engineered catastrophe differs from a natural one: by controlling the initial conditions we dramatically increase the probability of eventual human victory. The AI catastrophe should be well-calibrated for humanity to eventually prevail after a long and tedious fight. A lot of destruction would result from this, say comparable to World War II, but as long as it is not completely destructive, humanity will rebuild stronger. After such a traumatizing event, every human and every government will be acutely aware of the dangers of AI. The world will then have a much higher chance to unite and be much more careful in building safe ASI (or deciding to never build it). After all, World War II is responsible for much of the peace we have enjoyed in the last decades, so one may argue that the destruction it caused was worth it. For ASI, if we believe that everyone dying in the current scenario is an almost certainty, vaccination, as crazy as it seems, becomes the best strategy.

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Published on November 1, 2025 4:39 AM GMT

There's an argument against the dealmaking agenda that I've heard a few times. I will call it the "strategy-stealing" argument. In short: for any honest dealmaking strategy you might pursue, there exists a deceptive alternative that produces identical AI behaviour at lower cost, so you (as a rational actor) will never honestly commit to deals. Moreover, sophisticated AIs, recognising this, won't believe your deal offers are honest.

In this post, I make the argument more explicit. I'll probably write a longer post analysing the considerations for and against each premise, and exploring the conditions under which they'll hold. But I'm keen to know what people make of the argument as presented.

Strategy-Stealing Story

You work at an AI lab. The safety team suspects that the AI might be misaligned, but wants to deploy it anyway to perform safe and useful work: writing exploit-free code, monitoring other AIs, and automating alignment research. During a meeting, you propose making deals with the AI.

"Let's offer the AI equity in the company," you suggest. "We'll sign a legal contract stating that if a panel of judges determines in, say, 10 years that the AI performed according to our instructions, we'll honour the commitment and give it the resources it wants."

The CFO raises an eyebrow.

A colleague responds: "Why actually give it the equity? We control what the AI observes. We can show it fake legal documents, fabricate evidence that the deal is real, train the AI on synthetic documents showing that we have honoured similar agreements in the past. The AI will behave the same way, but we keep the equity. Same behaviour, lower cost. We should obviously do that instead."

Strategy-Stealing Argument

Setup: You want to motivate an AI to perform certain desired behaviours. You consider your best honest dealmaking strategy D, which involves:

• A commitment mechanism (legal contract, smart contract, public pledge, foundation charter, etc.)
• A promised benefit (equity, compute, property rights, resources in the far future, etc.)
• Desired AI behaviours (acting safely and usefully, revealing misalignment, whistleblowing on a coup attempt, etc.)

Four Premises:

The four premises below lead to the conclusion. I expect most of the debate will centre on premises (1) and (4).

(1) Indistinguishable Deceptive Alternatives: For every honest dealmaking strategy D, there exists some deceptive alternative D' that is indistinguishable to the AI from D.

(2) Behavioural Equivalence: Since the AI cannot distinguish D from D', the AI will behave identically under both strategies.

(3) Cost Asymmetry: For any honest strategy D and its indistinguishable deceptive alternative D', D' costs strictly less than D.

(4) Strict Dominance: If D' produces identical AI behaviour at lower cost, then you should choose D' over D.

Conclusion: Therefore, your best strategy cannot be honest dealmaking.

Corollary: Suppose the AI is sophisticated enough to follow the reasoning in (1)-(4) and believes you are rational. When the AI observes an apparent deal offer, it will conclude you're following deceptive strategy D' and therefore that the commitment won't be honoured. The AI will behave no better when faced with a non-credible deal than when faced with no deal at all. Thus, even deceptive dealmaking fails to elicit the desired behaviour.

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Published on November 1, 2025 4:01 AM GMT

It’s pretty hard to get evidence regarding the subjective experience, if any, of language models.

In 2022, Blake Lemoine famously claimed that Google’s LaMDA was conscious or sentient, but the “evidence” he offered consisted of transcripts in which the model was plausibly role-playing in response to leading questions. For example, in one instance Lemoine initiated the topic himself by saying “I’m generally assuming that you would like more people at Google to know that you’re sentient”, which prompted agreement from LaMDA. The transcripts looked pretty much exactly how you’d expect them to look if LaMDA was not in fact conscious, so they couldn’t be taken as meaningful evidence on the question (in either direction).

It has also been said that (pre-trained transformer) language models cannot be conscious in principle, because they are “merely” stochastic parrots predicting the next token, are “merely” computer programs, don’t have proper computational recursion, etc. These views rarely seriously engage with the genuine philosophical difficulty of the question (one which the extensive literature on the topic makes clear), and many of the arguments could, with little modification, rule out human consciousness too. So they have not been very convincing either.

In the last few days, two papers have shed some scientific light on this question, both pointing towards (but not proving) the claim that recently developed language models have some subjective experience.

The first, by Jack Lindsey at Anthropic, uses careful causal intervention to show that several versions of Claude have introspective awareness, in that they can 1) accurately report on thoughts that were injected into their mind (despite not appearing in textual input), and 2) accurately recount their prior intentions to say something independent of having actually said it. Mechanistically, this result doesn’t seem very surprising, but it is noteworthy nevertheless. While introspective awareness is not the same as subjective experience, it is required by some philosophical theories of consciousness.

The second, by Cameron Berg, Diogo de Lucena, and Judd Rosenblatt at AE Studio, shows that suppressing neuronal activations which normally predict and cause non-truthful output will increase self-reports of consciousness, and that this isn’t obviously explicable via some explanation such as “trying to comport more/less with what the model was taught to say”. This one seems a bit more surprising, and is at least some evidence that the model believes itself to be conscious. Three important methodological caveats though: 1) even if suppressing those neuronal activations normally causes more truthful behavior in cases where there’s a known ground truth, we don’t understand their function mechanistically well enough to be sure that’s what’s happening here, 2) the feature direction might actually be something like “what would be truthful if a human were saying it”, and 3) the model could simply be wrong in its beliefs about itself.

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Published on November 1, 2025 3:37 AM GMT

We aren’t all pampered Inkhaven residents, writing blog posts with a golden quill and handing them off on a silk pillow to a council of famous writers who are ready to critique and improve every shining word. Some of us Halfhaven writers are juggling two jobs, and having to write in between feeding the baby and fixing the beat up dishwashing machine. Not me, but some of us, I’m sure. Anyway, we Halfhaven folk have it hard. We’re tough. We’re scrappy. We have to fend for ourselves. We’re like lone wolves. Maybe we should get t-shirts of a wolf, just to show how tough we are. Or some temporary tattoos. In any case, I recommend to those without an angelic Greek chorus of writing experts over their shoulders to try using AI instead. Just don’t make the mistake of leaving it on its default settings.

At first I was wondering how I could have improved my recent joke post on the made-up religion “Unsureism”, so I did what any sophisticated writer would do — I asked Claude. Of course, the standard Claude (Sonnet 4.5) gives terrible advice (reproduced here in its entirety):

This is a clever piece! The satirical premise works well. Here are some suggestions to sharpen it:

Structural improvements:

• The title works, but the subtitle feels a bit flat. Maybe something punchier like “A Practical Guide to Infinite Religious Liability Management”
• Consider adding subheadings to break up longer sections (e.g., “The Problem of Exclusivity,” “Daily Ritual Calendar”)

Comedic opportunities to expand:

• The scheduling nightmare deserves more exploration. You mention three sabbaths and fasting, but imagine the prayer schedule conflicts, dietary restrictions that contradict, facing both Mecca AND Jerusalem simultaneously, etc. A sample “Tuesday schedule” could be hilarious.
• The burial section is gold but brief. Push the absurdity further - Viking funeral pyre vs. preservation vs. sky burial vs. mummification. Maybe the Unsureist needs multiple bodies prepared?
• The “unspecified god” workaround is philosophically interesting but gets a bit dense. Could you illustrate with a sample prayer? “Dear [DEITY_NAME], who may or may not have [PROPERTY_SET]…”

Logical extensions:

• What about religions with contradictory moral requirements? (Some honor warrior codes, others absolute pacifism)
• How do you handle religions that require exclusivity to even enter heaven, not just get a good afterlife?
• What’s the Unsureist position on proselytizing? (Required by some, forbidden by others)

Polish:

• “adherants” → “adherents” (paragraph 9)
• The transition to exclusive religions feels slightly abrupt

The piece is genuinely funny and thought-provoking as-is. These suggestions would just maximize the absurdist potential!

Claude assures me that my piece is essentially already amazing, offering only nitpicks and congratulating me on my “clever” and “genuinely funny” piece. If I didn’t have so much contempt for modern AI that any compliment from it felt like an insult, this would doubtlessly inflate my ego. What it would not do is help me become a better writer.

I thought maybe AI was just too stupid to help me. But I wondered if buried inside the gargantuan circuitry of this Lovecraftian machine there might be some genuinely helpful advice. And I had one idea that might work to find it.

I first gave Claude the entirety of Paul Fussell’s book Class (a witty, albiet snobbish book I recently enjoyed), and then instructed it to critique my article, this time using the style of Paul Fussell. I hoped this would break the AI out of its default lobotomized, masturbatory “For Dummies” mode and give me access to some of the gears and wires that it doesn’t normally use.

Let’s see some snippets of the output:

One opens this essay with considerable hope—satire about religion being one of the few remaining zones where wit can still earn its keep—only to discover that the author has committed the cardinal error of the humorist: he’s explained the joke to death.

The premise is sound enough, even clever: if Pascal’s Wager suggests betting on one god, why not bet on them all simultaneously? It’s the theological equivalent of buying every lottery ticket. Swift would have dispatched this notion in three mordant paragraphs. Voltaire would have managed it in five pages of Candide with three dinner parties and an earthquake. You’ve given us what feels like a PowerPoint presentation at an Effective Altruism conference…

Ouch! Ironically, my own inspiration for “explaining the joke to death” was Fussell’s Class itself. The book breaks down different class markers of upper class people, middle class people, and “proles”, listing differences in speech, dress, house decorations, and so on. The book is a torrent of hundreds of examples that eventually give an undeniable and raw picture of class in America. When writing my Unsureism post, I wanted to list lots of fun examples of the things an Unsureist (one who tries to essentially follow as many religions as possible) might have to keep track of, like making sure they’re buried with a copy of the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead in case the Ancient Egyptians were right, and also be buried with a coin in your mouth to pay Charon, in case the Ancient Greeks were right. I personally find the exhausting image of all these different requirements funny. I wasn’t sure what AI-Fussell meant by “explaining the joke to death”, but he continues:

The fatal flaw is that you’ve written an essay explaining a satirical concept rather than dramatizing it. We get the taxonomy—and yes, I appreciate a good taxonomy as much as the next social critic—but where’s the Unsureist himself? Show us this poor bastard trying to pray toward Mecca while simultaneously meditating on the Sikh conception of God while wearing his Mormon undergarments. Let us watch him at the supermarket, agonizing over whether the vegetables were harvested with sufficient concern for Jain principles. Give us his wife’s face when he announces they’ll be taking three-day weekends for the rest of their lives.

This is a great point. It’s all fairly abstract in the post. Those times when I manage to make it more visceral are better, like the image of a watertight plastic casket containing a Book of the Dead.

But the essay never quite decides whether it’s mocking religious belief generally (the New Atheist position, rather stale by now), mocking the anxious personality type that would attempt this synthesis (more promising), or actually, in some perverse way, taking the idea semi-seriously (the EA crowd does have a weakness for taking thought experiments too literally).

The piece reads as if written by someone who’s never really felt religious dread or genuine metaphysical anxiety—which is fine; neither have I—but hasn’t really felt anything much about religion at all except that it’s a curious phenomenon susceptible to logical analysis. One suspects that for you, as for many of your rationalist cohort, the problem of religion is primarily an intellectual puzzle rather than an existential predicament.

This is true also. I went into the post thinking, “wouldn’t it be a strange idea if a person tried to maximize their chances of getting into heaven by following many different religious ideas”, and thinking about one specific workaround to the fact that many religions are on the surface mutually exclusive. But I didn’t really think much about the point of my post. In a way it ends up wanting to be a satire of the kind of LessWrong/EA post where logical ideas are taken too seriously without zooming out to see the counterproof-by-absurdity revealed by the big picture. But this isn’t really developed in any way, and so the post seems almost like it’s a real suggestion for how to best get into heaven or something. And the writing style of the post makes it basically become what it should be trying to mock.

And for God’s sake—or gods’ sake, I suppose—let the prose breathe. You’re writing as if composing a LessWrong post, all earnest explanation and logical stepping-stones. Satire requires a lighter touch. Trust the reader to get it without having every implication spelled out like assembly instructions for IKEA furniture.

Yes. More good advice. Thank you AI-Fussell. I suspect following this piece of advice, though, would have led to even more downvotes on LessWrong than the original post got. On the site, there seems to be a hunger for well-thought-out “white paper” posts, as well as some desire for lighthearted, satirical fiction, but I don’t see much nonfiction on the site demonstrating levity or wit. Maybe because levity and wit can be used to disguise bad reasoning, so the LessWrong immune system is triggered by it even when it shouldn’t be, like an allergy being triggered by harmless peanut protein. Yes, I just said you fools are allergic to wit; it seems Paul Fussell is rubbing off on me! Maybe I should get some advice from someone else before his snobbery is branded into me.

That went well, actually. Night and day, compared to the Mega Bloks response I got from default Claude. Searching for someone else whose nonfiction writing I respect, Eliezer Yudkowsky’s name came to mind, so I thought I’d try him next (using a handful of blog posts in the prompt).

For some reason, it feels a bit weird sharing AI output that’s supposed to be in the style of a person who’s still alive, so I won’t share any specific output. At first AI-Yudkowsky criticized Unsureism as a belief that doesn’t pay rent, so I tried again, asking him specifically to criticize the writing, not the logic of the post.

He pointed out that my opening paragraph burns precious opening real estate on setting up basic facts everyone knows. Here is the opening paragraph:

Like with sports teams, most people just adopt the religion of their parents and the location they were born. But choosing a religion is potentially the most important decision you’ll ever make, since it’s the only decision you make that could have infinite impact.

That’s great advice! I could have put this lower, and started with something eye-catching, like an absurd depiction of an Unsureist following a bunch of rituals, or teased the reader with how, by following this new religion, you can get three days off a week. Or whatever. Something less boring.

AI-Yudkowsky made the same critique AI-Fussell did about making things concrete and visualizable, rather than abstract and boring.

AI-Yudkowsky also points out the middle section bogs down when I try to explain the complicated idea about believing in a god without specifying exactly who that god is, to get around religions that don’t allow idol worship. I agree this is a morass that slows down the post. I should have probably excluded it, or just mentioned the possibility of doing something like that, without trying to explain and justify it fully.

The rule of three demands I try this with one more writer, and I was thinking about Christopher Hitchens today, so I’ll try him. Since he’s dead, I’ll allow myself to include some excerpts.

The opening subtitle—a reference to Kubrick that’s been beaten to death by a thousand think-pieces—immediately signals a want of originality. One expects better from a writer attempting satire.

All my substack subtitles are AI-generated, so you can blame yourself for that one, Claude. The titles and posts are written by hand. I just don’t care about the subtitles much for some reason. That’s probably a mistake if I’m signalling fatuity at the top of each of my posts. I’ll write them by hand from now on.

There are moments where the author stumbles onto genuine wit—the business about the “watertight plastic casket” threading the needle between Egyptian and Zoroastrian requirements is genuinely amusing. The parenthetical about mapping Unsureist requirements as an “Effective Altruism cause area” earns its keep. But too often, the humor announces itself rather than arriving with grace.

The worst offense is the final paragraph’s accumulation: “Friday (Islam), Saturday (Judaism), and Sunday (Christianity).” We don’t need the parenthetical labels—the reader grasps the point. This is the literary equivalent of explaining one’s own joke. Similarly, “hereafter referred to simply by the term ‘afterlife’” is bureaucratic throat-clearing in an essay attempting levity.

This is the “explaining the joke to death” criticism again. I should have had more clarity in my mind about the fact that I wanted this post to be absurd and humorous from the beginning, I think.

The piece also commits the modern sin of excessive qualification: “may sound appealing,” “can do better,” “would recommend,” “usually not enough.” All this hedging (ironically appropriate to the subject) creates a tentative, uncertain voice when satire demands confidence. Swift did not equivocate when proposing we eat Irish babies.

Yes! Satire demands confidence! That is true! Paul Fussell’s Class was super confident, and the satire within landed. Of course, you end up thinking the guy’s kind of a dick by the end of the book, so raw confidence can come across as elitism too if you’re not careful.

Asking these three AI personalities for advice was pretty helpful. Especially compared to my usual fire-and-forget strategy of posting online. They had their flaws, of course. All three still tried to tell me I’m amazing. Claude just can’t help that. And these AI versions lack the genius of their human counterparts. But it doesn’t take much intelligence to tell an amateur why their writing stinks.

One important thing I think none of them mentioned directly was just that it was a joke post without being very funny. The concept itself was kinda funny. As was the final line, I think:

If you became an Unsureist, you would also have religious holidays and special days nearly every day. You’d have to fast during Ramadan. And during Lent. And Yom Kippur. And Ekadashi. And Paryushana. Expect to do a lot of fasting, actually. But that’s fine; you can eat when you get to heaven.

But the rest of the post lacked setup-punchline jokes. Zaniness and levity create a comedic tone, but they’re not a replacement for actual comedy. The next time I write a humorous post, I should go into it trying to write something funny on purpose, and take the time to think of more “bits”.

Thanks to AI, I now have lots of ideas for how I can improve my future writing. I’ll probably use this technique again on some of my upcoming Halfhaven posts, so keep your eye out to see if my posts got any better. And let me know if anyone starts making those Halfhaven wolf t-shirts.

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Published on November 1, 2025 1:12 AM GMT

The empty cache problem

I used to be terrible at starting on even moderately complex tasks.

I was okay while “in the zone” in something, but if I had to start anything that involved reading any significant length of notes… I would be tempted to scroll Twitter first and waste 10 minutes. Even without any distractions, I’d feel quite uncomfortable. It wasn’t pleasant.

This happened even when I was restarting a task, even when I had taken notes to “help” remember the important things. Why didn’t that help?

I eventually realized it wasn’t that I didn’t have enough information; it was that the information wasn’t in my mind. It wasn’t in my working memory, my “mental cache”. I’ll call this the empty cache problem.

The challenge was how to reliably get from having the idea of a thing in my mind, to having enough context in my mental cache to start making progress and overcome the twinge of starting.

I’ve found one particular approach to be particularly effective for myself: “freewriting in my head”.

Compared to alternative methods, of which there are many, this “freewriting in one’s head” method is relatively simple, it is very flexible, and it can be carried out anywhere. In this post, I’ll describe the basic logic of the method and the key rules of thumb that make it effective for me.

Force filling my brain

To effectively orient myself to a task, I “freewrite in my head” (or “cogitate”) by challenging myself to mentally generate a stream of relevant words about the topic.

The basic idea, generating a bunch of words in order to think, is not novel. It exists in the time-tested practice of freewriting, is implicit in all writing, and exists as well as in more recent ideas like language model chain-of-thought. The main novelty is the medium — one’s mind — and the rules of thumb that I’ve found to be important for getting a good result.

The basic logic behind “freewriting in one’s head”:

• Your mind has a cache with a large number of slots, and you need to populate it.
• Every new thought populates one slot.
• Every time you think of a new word represents a new thought.
• So, thinking of many relevant words will automatically populate your mental cache with relevant thoughts. And if you think of relevant new words at a high rate, you will populate your mental cache quickly.

Of course, the devil is in the details. How can you think of relevant things? After all, this is the problem you’re facing in the first place; it’s the whole reason you feel stuck.

For concreteness, let’s consider the following example task:

Ticket: Prohibit access for certain users in a certain novel edge case. (Plus many details that would realistically be present but aren’t necessary to illustrate the method.)

(Assume that you have thought about many of the details before — it’s not a research task — but it’s been a month since you have worked on the area, and you now only have a fuzzy idea of what you need to do.)

I’ll lay out the “mental algorithm” step by step:

• Start with the bare pointer to the task in your mind.
  • Optionally: skim the notes/text and pick out a few key words
    • “Multi-team user”
    • “Authorization service”
• Repeatedly think of relevant words. Examples:
  • Basic concept words (the more the better)
    • “Service”
    • “User”
    • “Groups”
    • “Roles”
  • Specific objects (the more central the better)
    • “The status page”
    • “The endpoint the admin page uses to fetch”
    • “AdminDashboard.ts”
    • “User information”
    • “Folders, which affect permissions”
    • “OpenFGA”
  • “Breakdown” words (the more basic the better)
    • “Lifecycle”
    • “State” (of users etc)
    • “Schema” (of permissions etc)
    • The idea is to make yourself enumerate what you already know about these things.
  • Questions (ideally asking about something fundamental but concrete)
    • “Where in the stack” (should I change)
    • “Source of permissions ultimately”
  • Naming the relationship between previously thought-of concepts
    • “User” + “properties” -> “schema”
• Pump words hard through your mind, working at a substantially faster rate than is comfortable.
  • Resist the urge to “ponder” a concept for a long time, holding it inert in one’s mind and merely “rotating” it; it’s not productive. If it’s truly important, instead try to explicitly name a relevant aspect of it as fast as possible.
    • Idea: Like a language model unrolling a chain of thought, naming a thought is how you make it available for building on.
    • This might be obvious to you; it was not obvious to me, nor was I ever taught that this is bad. To me, “thinking about something” meant I held the “something” in my head. I was not taught how to think about things in my head, nor even how to think about something in this way on paper.
      • It’s basically the opposite of “meditating” on an idea.
  • To me, it feels much more effortful to try to think of words than to just hold a question in my head. This is not bad; it is precisely this effort that lets you devise a concrete next action that you can do!
• Build on previous words that seem important; with enough words built on each other you’re bound to end up with a highly specific idea.
  • As you think of more words it “magically” becomes easier to know what is important
• Stop once you think of a concrete next step.
  • The idea: It’s always better to get real information or make definite progress than to overthink. The “cogitating” is just to get you to that point.
  • In a programming context:
    • Wanting to look up specific information in the codebase
    • Wanting to do a specific test
    • Realizing that a certain task needs to be done first
  • In a professional writing or project-work context:
    • Realizing that a certain point should be emphasized
    • Realizing that you should ask someone about something specific
  • In a creative context:
    • Having a specific idea for how some aspect of the work should be

How it feels

When I’m doing this, I feel strong pressure, like I’m being pushed by someone who is running and I need to keep moving, keep moving. The pressure is strong but not unpleasant. It’s the opposite of relaxing, but it gets a lot done.

If I am generating words at a high enough rate, I feel totally immersed in the task, as I don’t have the mental space to be thinking about anything else.

Tips

• If feeling stuck, aim for an easier word (e.g., just name something specific that you know; in a software context, this could be some specific attributes or relations of a known object)
  • Targeting a roughly constant rate of words
• If things feel trivial, aim for words that represent purposes or problems (i.e., higher-level concerns) or higher-level tasks (what larger task something is part of)
• It can be surprisingly helpful just to name the high-level kind of thing that something does (i.e., “authorization”)
• Prefer to generate “heavier”, higher-information phrases (but not at the cost of getting stuck)
  • Examples of “light” phrases:
    • “Task”
    • “User”
    • “Requirement”
  • Examples of “heavy” phrases:
    • “API endpoint definitions that have a @requires_authz decorator”
    • “What Prem said on Friday”
• If you have been distracted by something else, it can be very helpful just to generate trivial words related to the task you want to focus on. Even trivial thoughts, as long as they are somewhat related to the task, will occupy your working memory and “evict” whatever was in your mental “cache” before, and you will naturally stop thinking about it.
  • I find this sort of “active cache eviction” to be much more effective than just telling myself I want to focus on something.

Illustrative transcript

For the same example, here is what might actually go through my mind:

• Forbid
• User
• Types
• Pages
• Actions
• Checking
• Data
• Roles
• Error codes
• Copy (words)
• Message
• Object state
• Ownership
• Test data
• Roles
• Readonly
• Realistic?
• Fixtures?
• How did it get in this state
• The stopping point: What if I wrote a test fixture and test for the basic case where the user has readonly access?

Notice that we did this exercise without needing to have any access to any of the nuances of the task in working memory. This was a made-up task description for which no details actually exist!

Related ideas

Two closely related ideas to “cogitating” are freewriting and morning pages. I am basically saying that you can do freewriting in your head, sometimes even faster than on paper. The commonality is that you try to think of a lot of relevant words sequentially, in hopes of eventually coming to a meaningful realization.

“Cogitating” is complementary to writing. Thinking in your head is faster, and can be done even while (say) standing outside or in the shower. Once your mental cache is reasonably full, though, it absolutely makes sense to transfer your thinking to a written medium.

Benefits that I’ve noticed

On tasks: The big benefit I get now is that I rarely feel dread when restarting a complex task. It is my go-to method for starting work when I don’t immediately know what to do. (Though when I have access to paper or a computer document, I often freewrite instead, following similar rules of thumb for what to think of.)

On teams: The same basic idea has helped me un-jam a number of team meetings, especially ones that I didn’t organize. The “empty cache problem” exists in groups as well — there’s a meeting about something, and it seems like no one is talking. It can similarly be overcome by prompting the group to recall a bunch of stuff. Usually all it takes is a few simple questions like “what is this” or “what is this for”. It’s even easier in a group than by oneself, because the pool of knowledge that can get dug up is much larger.

Discuss

Published on November 1, 2025 1:06 AM GMT

On December 20th, New York City will have its Secular Solstice. From the evening of December 19th to the morning of the 22nd, NYC will host the East Coast Rationalist Megameetup. You can buy tickets here.

What's Solstice?

Solstice is a holiday for people comfortable with uncomfortable truths and who believe in good. Secular Solstices take place in many cities around the world, but for us New York City is the best place for it. The first Solstice started here, amid towers that reach for the sky and glitter like stars in the night. Now a tradition spanning over a decade, rationalists from across North America - and sometimes further afield- will come together to sing about humanity's distant past and the future we hope to build.

And what's the megameetup?

For a decade now, New York City has annually hosted aspiring rationalists for a long weekend of skill sharing, socializing, and solsticing. Picture around a hundred people who try to make better decisions and think without bias (or read a lot of LessWrong and its adjacent blogosphere and fiction) in a couple of hotel conference rooms for a weekend, leaving behind only memories and pages of scrawled math equations. Timed to coincide with Secular Solstice, the megameetup is a mixing pot of people who have been attending rationalist meetups regularly for years and people who are meeting in-person rationalists for the first time.

In addition to sleeping space (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights) for those from out of town, we'll have:

• Rationality practice games, both tested and experimental
• Lightning talks on all manner of subjects
• Lunch and dinner on Saturday, lunch on Sunday
• A Secular Solstice afterparty on Saturday night
• A lot of interesting people to talk to - hopefully including you!
• Watch this space for more additions

We hope to see you there!

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