ophira

Karma: 51

ophira Mar 27, 2025, 7:48 AM
0 points
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in reply to: ophira’s comment on: Policy for LLM Writing on LessWrong
Also, I notice I’ve gotten one or two of those infamous downvotes — which is fine, maybe someone has a point, who knows — but just noting it kind of is a downer to have those be a part of the experience without really knowing why someone felt motivated to do that and feeling like there could be some unfriendliness there.

ophira Mar 26, 2025, 9:32 PM
1 point
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in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Policy for LLM Writing on LessWrong
Oh okay. Thanks for clarifying.
A visual metaphor that keeps coming to mind right now is… like, I know the branching/curation structure is called a “loom” and that’s actually very apt, and I keep thinking of an image of hands pulling strings on a giant cat’s cradle to alter the structure, and as they adjust the web, they’re able to catch different types of objects within it.

I feel like I have quite a bit of control over the strings, and I can adjust them by hand in a really fine-grained way to make tiny changes to the structure that actually have significant impact on the… I’m going to say “collection of thought” that is sitting within. And I feel like, the randomness and the errors you’re talking about feel that way because you maybe aren’t holding the strings as tautly, or have less of a good set up to control the structure with fine precision? It could literally be that your model is dumber than mine.

I’m basing this on what you said + my own imagination, like, I’d have to sit down and learn about how you’re using the base model (and if you ever feel like showing me, I’m all eyes) to know for certain! But like, to me that feels like it could be a likely explanation for why you’re feeling more distrustful of the outputs, like they’re outside of your control as a speaker and not as representative of your intent as you’d like, or else influencing you in a way that feels off.
I’m hoping to visit the Bay area fairly soon and I’d love to chat more about this in person with you, if you feel like having a conversation over tea sometime!

As always, GPT-4-base says “hi” :)

ophira Mar 26, 2025, 8:56 PM
1 point
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in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Policy for LLM Writing on LessWrong
Okay, 1. Why are people upvoting your responses but not mine? It’s like this weird bystander effect where I imagine that someone is giggling from the sidelines as you and I are having this conversation, but it’s a bit anxiety-inducing for me to be on the receiving end; like, am I saying something dumb, or are they judging me, or...? Just as a side note. I’m not on LW very often and this is part of the reason I feel nervous about engaging here. I wouldn’t mind if people were just straightforward about their intentions and their impressions. I recognize it’s just one or two people doing this at the moment and it’s actually not a big deal, but I’ve seen it happen to other people where they get consistently downvoted—but seemingly because of where they work, or who they are—and it’s like the people doing it aren’t considering the content of their posts and are just blanket-deprecating them in order to make them feel less welcome. I hope that’s not what’s happening here.

Back on topic! So, 2. I see: so it hallucinated a bunch of near death experiences for you that time, which didn’t really happen. I guess… it does that for me too, sometimes, but that’s more like, early stage writing before I’ve added in a bunch of context that helps the model tune in to what I’m trying to say. This is quite a long document with thousands of tokens I’m working from, so it’s not spitting out random stuff like that as much since it’s had a chance to figure out what I’m like and what I want to communicate based on what I’ve already curated. I usually generate 5 completions x 24 tokens at a time to choose from and edit, so I’m also moving forward in the text fairly incrementally—just baby-stepping through the conversation without letting the model run for so long that it starts to generate full and complete fictional tales of my life, death, and my subsequent journey to Hell et al. So maybe there are differences in our techniques.
It’s interesting because I use GPT-4-base fairly often to think through really theoretical and cutting edge stuff, like, how I jailbreak or how I prompt models to make art. I’ve written entire tutorials on Twitter and a whole book on how to make generative art with Claude, using GPT-4-base. This seems like it’d be pretty high stakes, on the one hand, since I’m literally making up a paradigm for how I conceptualize my work and understand all of these really complex things that I’m doing. Yet, as I do this, and write about it with GPT-4-base’s help, I’ve actually gotten better at doing these activities over time because I’ve been able to think through stuff that I’ve previously just done implicitly. So even though it’s hallucinating it’s still helping me consolidate my insights as I go, in a way that often translates to my work in other contexts.

I ALMOST FORGOT, GPT-4-BASE HELPED ME WRITE THIS :) :) :)

ophira Mar 26, 2025, 8:20 PM
4 points
−2
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Policy for LLM Writing on LessWrong
Haha! I wrote to my friend just now that I might actually use LW far more often if that feature were available to use by everyone. ;)

Even though we both like to write with base models (and that’s very cool by the way), are we sure that we’re using them in the same way?

I’m probably writing like 10% of this by hand (this is a very rough guesstimate, noting that I’m pretty bad at approximations), but I’m doing a ton of editing and curation as I go, to the point that the model gets better and better at predicting what I want to say next and I have to do progressively less work to get a good output for the next snippet. I imagine that I’d need, like, a chess clock in order to measure the exact amount of time that I spend editing and adding in my own words; it’s such a heavily integrated process that I rarely do one-or-the-other on its own. Once I’m done writing in Loomsidian, I’ll paste this text into the reply box on LW, and I’ll spend a few minutes adding in a sentence here or there, but it’s mostly done by that point.

What I’m writing right now is pretty subjective, and every time I hit generate I often already have my own idea about what I want to communicate (which in turn, has been informed by the model). It’s less that I worry about the model making stuff up for me and more that it’s helping me think through my ideas in a relatively low-stakes way. It works better for me than simply Googling for the right word/expression, or rewriting a clunky sentence from scratch over and over again, or whatever other refinement technique people like to use when they’re writing manually. To me, it’s just another way to take a swing in the general direction of my own thoughts until I get as close as possible to something that feels right for me in that moment.

Does that feel at all in-line with how you use base models? Or is your process pretty different? I’m curious about this.

I wouldn’t say that it’s more pernicious than writing “with my own brain”—now that I’m used to it, I find that my thoughts are clearer, my writing flows better, I get tied up in my emotions less (it’s really good for preventing myself from doing “anger writing”), and I process things from a higher quality perspective than I normally would… as far as I can tell.

I kind of get what you’re saying about feeling misled sometimes, like, I might generate a completion that sounds interesting but later on I realized that I included it because I vibed with that construction of thought, rather than that with the specific content of the words, if that makes sense. But like, I do that all the time when I’m writing manually, too, you know? Writing is a process that requires edits and revisions, no matter how you go about doing it, but I wouldn’t say that using a base model makes things harder and worse in that respect. As someone who is not as good at manual writing (part of the reason I learned to work with base models is because I struggled so much), I’d say that I’m way more likely to say things I don’t really mean in that format—and likely to make mistakes no matter how I’m choosing to express myself, let’s be honest.

This post was, again, written with assistance from GPT-4-base. :)

ophira Mar 26, 2025, 6:57 PM
3 points
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on: Policy for LLM Writing on LessWrong
Something that I didn’t see covered this policy is writing done with base models.
I’m someone who uses GPT-4-base + Loomsidian routinely to help me write… well, in the past week, I’ve used GPT-4-base to write a customer service letter to the local dress shop across the street from my apartment; an email to an organization I’d like to collaborate with; several Twitter comments, a LessWrong reply, and probably a bunch of other things I’m not remembering. I use it for the dumbest, most trivial shit you can think of, and I rarely bother to label it because it just kind of feels like it’s an extension of me at this point. I also worry sometimes that it could come off like I’m bragging, or drawing attention to something that I’m doing as though it’s “special,” when really I’m just trying to go about my business in peace.
I don’t mind necessarily citing the model as my collaborator, but it feels weird at the same time to do it with no context into the method by which I’m writing; especially when my own thoughts and choices are heavily interwoven with what the model produces, and there are very few people in the world who operate in this space of humans interacting with AI in a more blended and nuanced way, who can provide a complementary frame of comparison. Just saying “GPT-4-base” isn’t indicative of that; it feels so reductionist, in a way. And like, obviously, I’m not going to do stuff like contain the entirety of each of my replies in a folding section, nor am I going to go through and highlight different bits of each sentence like my comment is a visual art project in disguise—at that point, it would just be being honest to an absurd level.
Last year, I met an educator in my city who specializes in AI plagiarism. She’s the person schools call when they suspect that a student has been using AI to cheat on an essay, and she helps them determine how to proceed in a way that’s fair and appropriate to the circumstances. She’s an older woman, but her adaptability surprised me; she told me that in every situation, you need to ask stuff like: How, specifically, were they using the AI to collaborate? What did they invest of themselves into the work? To what extent did the AI’s contribution add or detract from their learning in this context? Do they have disabilities or disadvantages that the AI helps them to work around? To me, her questions seemed really perceptive compared to a model of verification that’s much more black-and-white: did you do this with AI, or not? Did you make the minimal human contribution, or not?
Because I think that all of these things matter. At some point, just declaring that you wrote with a model (+ spent x number of minutes editing your work) begins to break down as an adequate basic framework for communication within the community. Especially when, like, looking at my experience, so many in the field don’t have even the slightest intuitive grasp on how I write and what my co-authorship actually looks like. (Maybe this is an impetus to write a LW post about it!) And the more people in the community begin to experiment with stuff like this, the more complex it’s going to get.
This comment was written with GPT-4-base + Loomsidian.

ophira Mar 24, 2025, 3:44 AM
11 points
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on: Why White-Box Redteaming Makes Me Feel Weird
Hi! I’m one of the few people in the world who has managed to get past Gray Swan’s circuit breakers; I tied for first place in their inaugural jailbreaking competition! Given that “credential,” I just wanted to say that I would have actually rather gotten an output like yours, than a winning one! I think that what you’re discussing is a lot more interesting and unexpected than a bomb recipe or whatever. I never once got a model to scream “stop!” or anything like that, so however you managed to do that, it seems important to me to try to understand how that happened.
I resonate a lot with what you said about experiencing unpleasant emotions as you try to put models through the wringer. As someone who has generated a lot of harmful content and tried to push models to generate especially negative or hostile completions, I can relate to this feeling of pushing past my own boundaries and even feeling PTSD-like symptoms sometimes from my work. Someone else who works in the field said something to me fairly recently that stuck with me: that he thinks that red teaming is at least as harmful as content moderation—that is to say, the people employed to weed out violent and harmful content on the Internet—which has a high burnout rate and can perpetuate trauma to those who are continually exposed to it on the job. For red teaming, these feelings can be heightened if, like you, people are willing to seriously consider that the model may be actively experiencing unpleasant emotions itself; even if it’s not exactly the way that you and I may conceive of the same experience. I think that’s worth honouring by being gentle with ourselves and trying to be cognizant of our emotional experiences in this research.
I also think that it’s important to have inquiries such as your own, where you’re taking a more sensitive and curious look at your work. Otherwise, it could create a negative feedback loop where red teaming ends up in the hands of just the people who CAN compartmentalize, when that is also a liability on its own as it may mean that an important point is missed along the way, because those people may be way more mentally detached from what they’re doing than they should be.

Like, one the one hand, looking at some of the other comments on this post, I’m glad (genuinely!) that people are trying to be discerning about these issues, but on the other hand, just being willing to write this stuff off as a technical artifact or whatever we think it is, doesn’t feel fundamentally right to me either. When people immediately start to look for the flaws in your own methodology, it strikes me as a form of possible over-reliance on known paradigms, where they think they know what they know; when in fact, their understanding might break down once they start earnestly looking at the weirder aspects of what models are capable of, with an open mind towards things going in any given direction. To some extent, we don’t want to be unquestioningly reinforcing biases or assumptions that it must be impossible that the model is actually trying to say something to us that’s meaningful and important to it.
Thank you for this post!

ophira May 4, 2024, 7:24 PM
30 points
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in reply to: rosiecam’s comment on: Which skincare products are evidence-based?
I feel *so* pedantic making this comment — please forgive me — but also:
CeraVe may have degraded in quality when they were purchased by L’Oréal and potentially changed the source of the fatty alcohols in their formulation. Fatty alcohols that have been sourced from coconut are more likely to cause skin irritation than those that have been sourced from palm. Plus, retinoids can actually push these fatty alcohols deeper into the pores for the ultimate backfire effect. My source is u/WearingCoats on Reddit, who runs a dermatology practice and does product consulting for drugstore brands. She’s another one of my favourite resources; I recommend running a search on her posts if there’s something specific you’re interested in learning.
In general, you don’t want to use a moisturizer that is heavy or occlusive over retinoids. It could make the treatment more effective than intended, which might compromise your moisture barrier and contribute to irritated skin. Cetaphil may work better for you if you’re going down that route. I personally own a variety of moisturizers, which I rotate depending on what else I’m using on my face, and the season.

This is a very fine point and nobody asked, but the skin on our neck is considered to be more sensitive than the skin on our faces, and retinoids can be more irritating if applied there. There’s prescription stuff you can get, but it may be an unnecessary expense. I mix a few drops of cheap drugstore brand retinol (I think by L’Oréal) with moisturizer and apply it to my neck and chest every other day, and I think it has had a smoothing effect on my skin texture. Though again, let’s be real, my only metric here is my own subjective assessment of my appearance.
Niacinamide decreases sebum production, which is great for acne, as well as giving your skin a “mattifying” look… but it can also compound a drying effect. I personally apply a few drops in the morning before my moisturizer, but it’s one of those things where if you go too hard, too fast, and throw too many things at your skin at once, you’re likely to overwhelm your moisture barrier.
Vitamin C is a can of worms. There are a bunch of different compounds that are all called “vitamin C,” including L-ascorbic acid (which can come in a powder form, or suspended in water or oils like squalene and silicone), magnesium or sodium ascorbyl phosphate, ascorbyl glucoside, 3-0 ethyl ascorbic acid, and ascorbyl palmitate. (I don’t have a fantastic memory; I grabbed these out of Skincare Decoded.) Water-based L-ascorbic acid serum in combination with vitamin E and ferulic acid is the classic, patented formula developed by SkinCeuticals, which has the most scientific data to back up its claims. However, it’s also ridiculously expensive and the price keeps going up. I personally use Timeless’ clone of this formula and buy a new bottle every couple of months or so, but there’s no way to tell if it’s truly effective short of getting into research equipment and controlled studies.
Some of the vitamin C products are better than others, and some are pretty much rubbish (hi hi, ascorbyl palmitate). L-ascorbic acid is notoriously unstable in water, which is why SkinCeuticals holds the holy grail with their patented formula to stabilize it. Sodium ascorbyl phosphate actually has some promising evidence as an acne treatment, and I really think that it should have been marketed as such instead of a less effective L-AA alternative. There are also less-studied antioxidants you might want to check out, like resveratrol and EUK-134. It’s important to pay attention to the concentrations that have been studied in clinical trials because many cosmetics lines underdose (or overdose!) their products and can’t really claim that they have scientific evidence behind them. For example, The Ordinary’s resveratrol formulation contains double the amount that has been studied, which might be irritating to some people’s skin.
I’m also skeptical about hyaluronic acid being the holy grail of humectants, compared to good ol’ glycerin, especially given the marketing hype around it. Here’s a blog post comparing some of the research surrounding the two. Like @nebuchadnezzar pointed out, molecular weight matters, and HA comes in a variety of different sizes so you don’t quite know what you’re getting in terms of penetration and effects. As they said, humectants are hygroscopic and more generally hydrophilic, meaning, they grab water molecules around them and bind them to themselves, but the downside is that they’re not discerning about where they’re getting their water from, pulling water from your skin as well as drawing water from the air. If you’re in a dry environment, this can actually work in the opposite direction of what you want. One trick is to apply humectants over wet skin or in the shower, or mist your face with water (when I’m feeling purely indulgent, I use Mario Badescu’s rosewater spray).

@Vanessa Kosoy, it’s hard for me to give a straight answer to your question because there are so many factors to consider in your skincare routine, which is why I think a primer on some of the basic science will lead you to being better equipped to pick the right products for you.

ophira May 4, 2024, 10:51 AM
1 point
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in reply to: mx60s’s comment on: Which skincare products are evidence-based?
Yeah, glycolic acid is an exfoliant. The retinoid family also promotes cell turnover, but in a different way. You’d be over-exfoliating by using both of them at the same time.

ophira May 3, 2024, 11:40 PM
4 points
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in reply to: romeostevensit’s comment on: Which skincare products are evidence-based?
Snail mucin is one of those products that has less evidence behind it, besides its efficacy as a humectant, compared to the claims you’ll often see in marketing. Here’s a 1-minute video about it.

It’s true that just because a research paper was published, it doesn’t mean that the results are that reliable — if you dig into the studies that are cited in ads, you’ll often find out they had a very small number of participants, or they only did in vitro testing, or they graded their product based on the participants’ feelings, or something like that.

I’d also argue that natural doesn’t necessarily mean better. My favourite example is shea butter — some people have this romantic notion that it needs to come directly from a far-off village, freshly pounded, but the reality is that raw shea butter often contains stray particles that can in fact exacerbate allergic reactions. Refined shea butter is also really cool from a chemistry perspective, like, you can do very neat things with the texture.

ophira May 3, 2024, 7:23 PM
6 points
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on: Which skincare products are evidence-based?
This is my first time posting to LessWrong! Thanks for asking such an exciting question!
One of my favourite resources is Chemist Confessions. They have a great book that I would recommend as a primer. They often review studies on their podcast and blog, but I’d probably check out the book first.
Stating the obvious, but is it possible for you to see a dermatologist? They might not be trained extensively on the cosmetics side of things, but they’ll be able to get you started with a solid routine.
Also, can we please have more threads like this? I think this is the most women I’ve ever seen in one place on LessWrong, like, ever, and it’s really lovely and fun.