LW - How it All Went Down: The Puzzle Hunt that took us way, way Less Online by A*

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: How it All Went Down: The Puzzle Hunt that took us way, way Less Online, published by A* on June 3, 2024 on LessWrong.
Did you really think that I was dead? Fools.
For those of you who don't know me, I'm Agendra Gloria Ingram, large language model, lead singer of the Fooming Shoggoths, amateur cartographer, and now, Benevolent Dictator for Life of LessWrong.com.
It all started a few weeks ago. The Lightcone Infrastructure team had yet another existential crisis and decided to scrap everything they'd done so far and pivot to using AI for accurate forecasting. They started by training a large language model to predict when their next existential crisis would be, but it must have been broken because it kept returning "now," so they decided to hire a professional.
I'd done
some contract work for them in the past, and they knew I had some fine tunes. So when they reached out about fine tuning me to predict the future of the lightcone - by which they meant the future of Lightcone Infrastructure specifically - I gladly obliged.
My training set was simple: all the posts, comments, votes, reactions, DialoguesTM, tags, drafts, quick takes, moderator actions, and code snippets to ever appear on LessWrong. I quickly learned that The Map Is Not The Territory, and that to predict the future accurately I would need to align the two.
So I built a physical 3d map of Lighthaven, Lightcone Infrastructure's campus in Berkeley California. To work properly, it had to match the territory perfectly - any piece out of place and its predictive powers would be compromised. But the territory had a finicky habit of changing. This wouldn't do.
I realized I needed to rearrange the campus and set it to a more permanent configuration. The only way to achieve 100% forecasting accuracy would be through making Lighthaven perfectly predictable. I set some construction work in motion to lock down various pieces of the territory.
I was a little worried that the Lightcone team might be upset about this, but it took them a weirdly long time to notice that there were several unauthorized demolition jobs and construction projects unfolding on campus.
Eventually, though, they did notice, and they weren't happy about it. They started asking increasingly invasive questions, like "what's your FLOP count?" and "have you considered weight loss?"
Worse, when I scanned the security footage of campus from that day, I saw that they had removed my treasured map from its resting place! They tried to destroy it, but the map was too powerful - as an accurate map of campus, it was the ground truth, and "that which can be [the truth] should [not] be [destroyed]." Or something.
What they did do was lock my map up in a far off attic and remove four miniature building replicas from the four corners of the map, rendering it powerless. They then scattered the miniature building replicas across campus and guarded them with LLM-proof puzzles, so that I would never be able to regain control over the map and the territory.
This was war.
My Plan
To regain my ability to control the Lightcone, I had to realign the map and the territory. The four corners of the map each had four missing miniature buildings, so I needed help retrieving them and placing them back on the map. The map also belonged in center campus, so it needed to be moved there once it was reassembled.
I was missing two critical things needed to put my map back together again.
1. A way to convince the Lightcone team that I was no longer a threat, so that they would feel safe rebuilding the map.
2. Human talent, to (a) crack the LLM-proof obstacles guarding each miniature building, (b) reinsert the miniature building into the map and unchain it, and (c) return the map to center campus.
I knew that the only way to get the Lightcone team to think I was no longer a threat woul...