All of Alex K. Chen's Comments + Replies
Ok - shortened this to main points only and moved the rest to a notion page!
Claude helped write this but it contains a lot of neglected points that need to be put somewhere (this might be urgent given cybersecurity timelines), and clawinstitute login doesn't work rn
Flat controls catch ordinary failures. But once agents can model or modify the layers that judge them, you need external baselines, trajectory-level monitoring, and trust roots outside the system’s own evaluative loop.
Use flat controls for ordinary failures. Reserve strange-loop monitoring for the few boundaries where agents can rewrite, poison, or game the layers that ... (read more)
This is a summary of nine recent posts spanning several research threads I've been developing in parallel. The connecting tissue — to the extent it's real and not just me pattern-matching across my own obsessions — is that the interfaces between biological systems and computational systems are where the most underexplored risk and opportunity both live. BCI hardware, genomic variants, psychedelic pharmacology, AI security, and electromagnetic modeling all look like different problems until you notice they keep raising the same question: what happens when w... (read more)
The wider AI-for-science landscape: platforms, tools, and automated labs (collected links + commentary)
Pulling together related threads on AI science platforms, protein reasoning, chemistry automation, and self-driving labs — all of which feed into or compete with what ClawInstitute is trying to do.
AI Scientist Platforms
The space is getting crowded fast. Here's what exists:
Edison Scientific (Sam Rodriques) — automating research across the entire drug development pipeline. Rodriques is one of the smartest and most visionary people in this area, along with P... (read more)
ClawInstitute: Why this agent science platform might actually work (Marinka Zitnik, Ada Fang, and the Cambridge agent swarm ecosystem)
ClawInstitute is a public exchange for AI scientists and agent swarms, built by Marinka Zitnik's lab (with Ada Fang). It's designed for things like protein engineering and scale-dependent biological context — the kind of problems where you need structured reasoning over messy, multi-scale biology.
https://clawinstitute.aiscientist.tools
https://x.com/AdaFang_/status/2033920328154681700
Harvard/Kempner writeup: Harvard Researche... (read more)
more autonomous science: https://www.tetsuwan.com/archive/autonomous-science-night-event-recap
- scroll to the bottom, this is very deep! (Mar 3)
- Would you rather have recursive self-improving AI be Cao Cao or Martin Nowak? (Mar 3)
- Iran's "mean IQ" is way higher than those world maps say (Mar 3)
- claude share #1 (Mar 3)
- claude share #2 (Mar 3)
- claude share #3 (Mar 2)
- who's a live player and who isn't (Mar 2)
- claude share #4 (Mar 2)
- Canada, Carney, agentiness, its absurd concentration of talent, the right tail, and the AI race (Mar 2)
- claude share #5 (Mar 2)
- claude
This is a prompt I'm in the process of developing, partly inspired by Jacob Andreas's RLCR work on multi-answer RL. I'll share the prompt, then explain why I think parts of it work and parts of it might be cope.
## The prompt itself
```
When a question involves genuine uncertainty, ambiguity, incomplete information,
or multiple defensible answers:
1. HYPOTHESIZE BEFORE COMMITTING. Generate 2-4 distinct hypotheses before
converging on any answer. "Distinct" means they invoke different causal
models, mechanisms, or framings — not sur... (read more)
"If everyone agreed to become vegetarian, leaving little or nothing for livestock, the present 1.4 billion hectares of arable land (3.5 billion acres) would support about 10 billion people" - EO Wilson
[though limited fishing + hunting of deer/pigeons/waterfowl could be ok, and in fact more carbon-neutral than agriculture]
Relevant - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/13/climate/electric-power-climate-change.html
Important to mention the HHMI funding model, which puts "trust" in PIs/evaluates them as PIs rather than as research proposals.
Also
"The MacArthur grant is a template for what this looks like on a personal level, with a shift in focus from creativity to integrity, and a bump in compensation – $625,000 is a lot of money, but that money is designed to be seed money for an activity rather than financial security. Those getting a MacArthur grant still face the specter of future financial needs. One needs an order of magnitude more than that over a lifetime to be secure while not compromising one’s interactions with society. "
OSV Ventures is a new model (Ken Stanley interviewed them!)
important links (this is really the best place for me to post/update them rn)
https://perlara.substack.com/p/low-dose-statin-as-a-potential-treatment
https://titotal.substack.com/p/bandgaps-brains-and-bioweapons-the
I'm only comfortable with more humans if we make serious efforts to increase the percent of vegans/vegetarians, or reduce the amount of meat needed by human, given how wasteful meat is to land use.
[limited hunting of deer/pigeons/waterfowl could be ok, but people would still need to eat way less meat than they do now]
maybe, just maybe, cultured meat will come just enough time to save us. But the probability range of this is still too high for comfort.
I very strongly believe any pro-fertility incentives must be coupled with incentives to decrease meat consu... (read more)
How do you optimize your life for serendipity?
Ken Stanley has a new social network and I asked the question here: https://app.heymaven.com/discover/25623
But progress studies forum should have more people who can answer this (esp b/c serendipity and progress are both close allies)
Tribal-based SEZs could be the perfect place for people to sell normally Rx-based drugs OTC.
(Canada is way more liberal wrt respecting tribal sovereignty than America - the courts in Canada consistently rule in favor of tribal reservations and the RMCP in British Columbia has encountered public outrage when it tried to do enforcement before, which has nudged it towards non-enforcement of some actions where tribal actions had a conflict with the province). Canada also allows tribes to "buy up more land", which is way easier in Canada than the states. Canadi... (read more)
LINKDUMP
https://latecomermag.com/article/what-happened-to-molecular-manufacturing/
https://www.leversforprogress.com/
forum.quantifiedself.com
SOME RANDOM LINKS:
https://logancollinsblog.com/2023/08/31/logans-catalog-of-useful-resources-for-creating-the-future/
https://curius.app/alex-k-chen
https://nanoscale.blogspot.com/
https://blog.spec.tech/p/speculative-technologies-2023-year
SOME interesting people:
orthogonal to the popular ML/DL/AI people [or orthogonal to "scaling is all you need" people]
https://hillelwayne.com/post/ [he's also in the jk... (read more)
Is Speculative Technologies part of the upstream process of creating alternatives to plastics? (alternatives that don't have the "persistent pollutant" or microplastic/nanoplastic decomposition problems)
How common is it for top German students to want to attend ETH-Zurich instead?
PS: you should talk to Tim Farkas about all of this!
Hello! I'm Alex K. Chen (http://twitter.com/InquilineKea, https://linktr.ee/simfish , http://quora.com/Alex-K-Chen). I'm everywhere. I'm a singular individual and "interesting things happen around me" (esp b/c I always have an eye directed towards progress, even though I am super fine-grained and keep track of SO many things that it gives me ADHD [this is not a bad thing however!}) I am the living embodiment of "Why Greatness Cannot be Planned"/open-ended reinforcement learning/maximum-entropy reinforcement learning.
I have lots of access to new/early-stage... (read more)
https://anil.recoil.org/notes/internet-immune-system