Many of our biggest problems are collective reasoning problems. What policy are we going to adopt, what should our company build next, where are we all going to go eat lunch today? If we can use AI to reason better collectively, perhaps we can solve these (I fear that planning a lunch for over ten people is AGI complete)1.
And personally I’ve found that, as a… affiliate? member? of the Bay Area Rationalists™, most of the juice comes not from applying specific techniques, but from being in an environment where the default norms and social status support truth-seeking. I expect that actually improving individual epistemics will often look like improving the epistemic environment.
Given that I’m interested in using AI to improve our epistemics, in particular improving our collective epistemics, I’m looking for places, particularly communities, that have started to adopt AI to improve how they know the world.
A great example would be a community where AI is embedded deeply into the way the group “knows things” or “makes decisions”. For instance:
a discord server where people are using an LLM to adjudicate disputes
A group of people that automatically add an LLM generated example into the mix when considering options.
A community forum where bots steelman arguments and add evidence.
One example that is not quite a community - X.com. I wrote about the way users on X are turning to it as an oracle to resolve factual disagreements and to dunk on people who are wrong. Community notes, which is very popular and seemingly trusted, used a bridging algorithm to bring in perspectives from both sides, and now includes AI Notes writing bots. It’s probably the best example of a trusted AI system improving an epistemic platform. But this is a platform as opposed to a specific community.
Another, kind of almost example is the way that Tyler Cowen, SSC, and I’m sure others are linking to deep research reports to provide fact posts/basis for some of their claims (example from the TC<>SSC USAID Debate). This feels like an emergent community behavior insofar as you think there is still a blogosphere.
But I don’t have many examples of communities that have adopted them. Communities are an interesting abstraction layer, in my opinion, when looking for adoption, because they are less prone to being “fake”. Companies are adopting AI to improve epistemics, but in practice many of them look like this Matt Levine anecdote of using AI to manage performance reviews at JP Morgan:
In the solicited feedback requests by employees or their managers at JPM, you can prompt AI to write a review, OR you can simply use the “AI Assist” button to generate a review first without any prompts required (and then presumably edit and personalize it). AI uses the person’s job description to get started, then adds corporate-speak fluff based on seemingly nothing.
Here’s a sample of no-prompt feedback: “I wanted to highlight your excellent work in the Financial Controller role. Your contributions to our team’s success have been invaluable. One area you could further enhance your impact is by ensuring that all financial reports are not only accurate but also submitted promptly. Timely reporting is crucial for effective decision-making and strategic planning. Keep up the great work, and I look forward to continuing our collaboration!”
This is not exactly the epistemic standard I’m looking for. Communities, with most of us not being paid to participate in them, are more sensitive to whether the thing actually helps. Sidenote: I have a friend working at another big company that has had nearly exactly the experience Matt Levine shares.
My best bet on where examples might be are in the forecasting community. I.e., active groups of forecasters on Manifold, Metaculus, Polymarket. In part because the groups are already organized around mechanism design, and in part they’re nearby to AI builders which makes them likely early adopters.
I’m most interested in examples that are not AI related. I’d be more impressed by an example of AI improving epistemics in a research community of geologists than one of AI researchers, because I worry the fan boy effect of being excited about AI doesn’t select well for actual usefulness.
So, this post is more of a bleg - any examples you know of?
I hope to build a “Where are We Going to Go to Lunch” benchmark, which will be the gold standard for whether your tool for thought actually solves a real coordination challenge AND people want to use this. If anyone actually wants to build this I’d probably pay you some number of dollars.
I've been browsing the r/covidlonghaulers subreddit for a bit now and have found people referring to LLM summaries of articles, sharing LLM summaries of posts in the comments of the OG post, etc, and this seems to be widely accepted. Scientific writing is hard enough to parse if your brain is working fine, so makes total sense to me that people dealing with brain fog, chronic fatigue, etc (who are kind of being forced to learn about this stuff anyhow) are using these widely.
(also lol @ "bleg")