https://hauke.uk/ Writing and research by Hauke Hillebrandt, PhD — effective altruism, AI, economic growth, forecasting, and global priorities. https://hauke.uk/argon https://hauke.uk/argon Sun, 18 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT Hauke Hillebrandt, 18 October 2026. Research done with Claude, using Scry's Twitter archive. https://hauke.bearblog.dev/a-game-theoretic-model-of-intraself-cooperation/ https://hauke.bearblog.dev/a-game-theoretic-model-of-intraself-cooperation/ Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT <p>Erstwhile, I published <a href='https://hauke.bearblog.dev/dont-torture-your-innie/'>Don't torture your innie</a>. Here are some more thoughts on this on this extending or generalizing this framework more formally usi https://hauke.bearblog.dev/vicious-cycle-effects-should-undermine-belief-in-free-will/ https://hauke.bearblog.dev/vicious-cycle-effects-should-undermine-belief-in-free-will/ Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT <p><em>A follow-up on free will, feedback loops, and why effort isn't the clean lever we think it is</em></p> <p><a href='https://www.hfh.pw/free-will'>Last time</a> I argued that a lot of what we praise and blame people https://hauke.bearblog.dev/dont-torture-your-innie/ https://hauke.bearblog.dev/dont-torture-your-innie/ Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT <p>Have you seen that show Severance? No? Doesn't matter, it's mid, but it does have a very interesting central metaphor:</p> <p>In the show, people invented a new technology to separate / sever the memories of yourself https://hauke.bearblog.dev/dont-act-as-if-its-oh-s0-overdetermined/ https://hauke.bearblog.dev/dont-act-as-if-its-oh-s0-overdetermined/ Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT <p>People act as if it's oh-so-overdetermined</p> <p>One general stance that I perceive in the AI x-risk community is that there's still a general vibe that p(doom) is very high and timelines are very short. I'm not sayi https://hauke.substack.com/p/what-i-learned-from-making-a-fire https://hauke.substack.com/p/what-i-learned-from-making-a-fire Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT One time my friends and I made a fire on the beach. https://hauke.bearblog.dev/shit-post/ https://hauke.bearblog.dev/shit-post/ Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT <p>Hm... okay. Let's see. 500 words. Can't be that hard. I've done it before. I can do it again. Let's go.</p> <p>AI! It's mighty important. totally underrated.</p> <p>Monday morning... 8AM UK time is the foreverhaven de https://hauke.uk/ClaudeMaxxing https://hauke.uk/ClaudeMaxxing Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT In the late 1990s, a screensaver turned millions of home PCs into a distributed supercomputer. SETI@home asked a simple question: what if the CPU cycles you weren't using could do something useful? Folding@home followed, pointing idle… https://hauke.uk/optimal-stopping https://hauke.uk/optimal-stopping Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://hauke.uk/ORS https://hauke.uk/ORS Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT Everyone says 'drink more water.' It's the most common health advice on the planet. But what if the problem isn't how much you drink — it's how well your body absorbs it? https://hauke.uk/carbon-impact-markets https://hauke.uk/carbon-impact-markets Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT A simple back-of-the-envelope shows how much we need to spend to combat climate change: take the 50 billion tons of CO2 humanity emits per year and multiply by $100—roughly the average future cost per ton of… https://hauke.uk/diversify-AI https://hauke.uk/diversify-AI Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT What if everyone owned a little bit more of everything? Here, we argue that we should diversify the ownership of corporations to reduce risks from AI. https://hauke.uk/rsp-dilution https://hauke.uk/rsp-dilution Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT Two years ago, leading AI companies made a bold promise: if our models reach dangerous capability levels, we'll implement safety measures before releasing them, and if we can't, we won't release them at all. These 'Responsible… https://hauke.uk/threat-modelling https://hauke.uk/threat-modelling Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT 'How do we protect the world against bioterrorism? How do we protect the world against mirror life? Probably we're gonna need some kind of AI monitoring system that monitors for all of these things. But then… https://hauke.uk/WaClaude https://hauke.uk/WaClaude Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT Folks like Claude's new constitution / soul spec: It got praise from OpenAI's alignment staff. Zvi called it 'by far the best approach being tried today and can hopefully enable the next level'. Even Eliezer Yudkowsky… https://hauke.uk/ea-do https://hauke.uk/ea-do Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT EAs used to research and discuss which charities to give to. This used to be key to get small donors excited about and engaged in EA. But now, we stop small donors from thinking about EA… https://hauke.uk/AI-progress-2026 https://hauke.uk/AI-progress-2026 Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT I'm on record as being on the skeptical side of AI progress as of late., In brief, all AIs are close in the benchmarks and also feel pretty comparable wrt to performance, and also not a… https://hauke.uk/spillback-growth https://hauke.uk/spillback-growth Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT Developing countries grow faster by absorbing technology from rich countries. Everyone knows this. The reverse question gets almost no attention: how much does rich-country growth depend on poor-country growth? https://hauke.uk/Registered-Reports https://hauke.uk/Registered-Reports Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT The rapid advancement of AI creates dual-use risks that current research governance mechanisms are ill-equipped to address. https://hauke.uk/pasta-aldente https://hauke.uk/pasta-aldente Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT Last week, I played around with Claude Code to generate some social science research papers and they came out pretty well. Claude code can now generate regression discontinuity design (RDD) papers, each with original analysis, publication-quality… https://hauke.uk/vix-hedge https://hauke.uk/vix-hedge Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT Philanthropic foundations face a cruel timing problem. Major crises—pandemics, financial collapses, geopolitical shocks—are precisely when charitable capital is most valuable. Yet these are exactly the moments when endowment portfolios crater, leaving foundations with depleted resources when… https://hauke.uk/ai-biases https://hauke.uk/ai-biases Sun, 04 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT We might be biased in various ways to overestimate or underestimate the pace of development (timelines and risks (e.g. p(doom) from AI. https://hauke.uk/efficient-everything https://hauke.uk/efficient-everything Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT 'The efficient market hypothesis says that you can't pick out which stocks are undervalued versus which are overvalued. Likewise, I claim that you can't pick out which restaurants are underpriced versus which restaurants are overpriced. https://hauke.uk/con https://hauke.uk/con Sun, 14 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT 'If you're not a liberal at 20, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative at 40, you have no brain.' https://hauke.uk/let-go https://hauke.uk/let-go Sun, 07 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT You should do the following everyday: journal, meditate, workout, do spaced repetition, track your sleep, apply retinol, apply sunscreen, take Vitamin D, foam roll, cultivate an online following, do the Huberman morning routine, floss, etc. Apparently,… https://hauke.uk/non-iron https://hauke.uk/non-iron Sun, 30 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT In my lads chat, we make fun of the ads for trousers and shirts we get advertised on Instagram. It's always some douchey guy putting on trousers and raving about them. Recently, an ad with a… https://hauke.uk/eurocope https://hauke.uk/eurocope Sat, 29 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT But there's a deep relation between the macroeconomy being depressed and the population being literally sub-clinically depressed. There's a strong post-materialist, no-growth undercurrent in European culture and it's growing stronger as part of post-hoc rationalization Eurocope. https://hauke.uk/intl-agreements https://hauke.uk/intl-agreements Fri, 28 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT Here, I highlight three consequential properties of international agreements to spend a fixed percentage of GDP on both global public goods and bads (global risks): https://hauke.uk/ITN-biases https://hauke.uk/ITN-biases Thu, 27 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT The Importance (or scale), Tractability, Neglectedness (ITN) framework has been wildly popular in Effective Altruism circles for over a decade.It's surprisingly effective, and people still use it a lot (I've heard it mentioned twice today in… https://hauke.uk/world-events https://hauke.uk/world-events Wed, 26 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT Here I list some major world events of the last 10 years, with a significant emphasis on them having a 'warning shot' quality, and the groups of people and ideas or memes that have been most… https://hauke.uk/covid-recommender https://hauke.uk/covid-recommender Tue, 25 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT Surprisingly often, I run into people, who are pretty smart and otherwise not into conspiracy theories, but maybe not that technical, who genuinely believe that their smartphones are constantly recording everything they say to serve them… https://hauke.uk/moravecs-law https://hauke.uk/moravecs-law Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT To know when AI will surpass human intelligence, it might be good to know how sophisticated the parts of our brains are that give rise to our intelligence. Moravec's paradox states that, surprisingly, reasoning needs much… https://hauke.uk/free-will https://hauke.uk/free-will Sun, 23 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT Many people believe that success in life is not determined by forces outside our control, which, ironically, can be explained well by where you were born (and also: The more attractive you are, the more you… https://hauke.uk/alc https://hauke.uk/alc Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT People who get gastric bypass surgery to lose weight often become alcoholics, even with no prior history of problematic drinking. Many such cases. Why? A few mechanisms have been proposed: Addiction transfer theory: Reduced post-surgery food… https://hauke.uk/disrupting-housing https://hauke.uk/disrupting-housing Fri, 21 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT People spend $12 trillion a year on housing. In the US, housing is ~17% of GDP. If you want to make trillions, you need to capture a big white space. Global residential real estate is worth… https://hauke.uk/moral-shocks https://hauke.uk/moral-shocks Thu, 20 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT We often think of our moral values as deeply held personal choices, but below I review some natural experiments that show that they are downstream of historical accidents, geography, and random shocks. These natural experiments use… https://hauke.uk/small-brains https://hauke.uk/small-brains Wed, 19 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT Surprisingly, animals with such small brains and much less compute than humans often perform seemingly hard tasks very well: https://hauke.uk/brain-compute https://hauke.uk/brain-compute Tue, 18 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT Perhaps surprisingly, humans don't have brains that are much bigger, much more efficient, or much more complex than other animals. And so, the amount of compute needed for higher-level cognition can't be that large. https://hauke.uk/sadly-podcasts https://hauke.uk/sadly-podcasts Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT You might think that phone calls with your friends and family are inherently less exciting than the superstimulus that is listening to podcasts at 2x on your noise-cancelling headphones, where the smartest people are being interviewed… https://hauke.uk/industrial-revolution https://hauke.uk/industrial-revolution Sun, 16 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT The ultimate cause of ideas is material: the industrial revolution led to Smith's Wealth of Nations, describing the new economic order, rather than Smith's ideas causing the revolution. So, what caused the industrial revolution? Below I… https://hauke.uk/econ-goat https://hauke.uk/econ-goat Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT 'The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe… https://hauke.uk/impact-investing-2 https://hauke.uk/impact-investing-2 Fri, 14 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT We use both fiscal and monetary policy to improve domestic welfare: https://hauke.uk/gov_pay https://hauke.uk/gov_pay Thu, 13 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT Increasing public sector salaries to increase state capacity and the 'Efficient Public Sector Hypothesis’ https://hauke.uk/writing https://hauke.uk/writing Wed, 12 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT As for how to write well, here's the short version: Write a bad version 1 as fast as you can; rewrite it over and over; cut out everything unnecessary; write in a conversational tone; develop a… https://hauke.uk/wwiii-risk https://hauke.uk/wwiii-risk Tue, 11 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT This post is heavily inspired by a post by Noah Smith and a lot of the evidence comes from the Sentinel Newsletter, which I highly recommend. https://hauke.uk/china-militarization https://hauke.uk/china-militarization Mon, 10 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT This post is inspired by a post by Noah Smith and many of the citations come from the Sentinel Newsletter, which I highly recommend. https://hauke.uk/future https://hauke.uk/future Sun, 09 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT 'Here's a list of alternative high level narratives about what is importantly going on in the world—the central plot, as it were—for the purpose of thinking about what role in a plot to take' https://hauke.uk/Chinas-Shadow-War https://hauke.uk/Chinas-Shadow-War Sat, 08 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT China has joined Russia's Shadow War against the West to reduce Western influence, reshape the global order in favor of the CCP, and achieve geopolitical objectives like annexing Taiwan. https://hauke.uk/Russias-Shadow-War https://hauke.uk/Russias-Shadow-War Fri, 07 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT Since invading Ukraine, Russia has dramatically escalated its 'hybrid warfare' against the West to fracture support for Ukraine. This systematic campaign is centrally coordinated, with intelligence revealing direction from Putin's Presidential Administration and First Deputy Chief… https://hauke.uk/China-West-proxy-war https://hauke.uk/China-West-proxy-war Thu, 06 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT The Ukraine war is not merely a proxy war between the EU and US vs. Russia: China is aiding Russia's war effort. And so, the West is fighting a large, hot proxy war with China. https://hauke.uk/AI-claims https://hauke.uk/AI-claims Wed, 05 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT There are lots of claims about AI's impact going around by prominent thinkers (e.g. the AI 2027 scenario or that there'll be 'A country of geniuses in a datacenter'). Here, I present an ontology of claims… https://hauke.uk/AI_diminishing_returns https://hauke.uk/AI_diminishing_returns Tue, 04 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT Until 2018, frontier models' training compute grew 7x/year due to a 'compute overhang'; you could run small-scale ML experiments cheaply and deep learning scaled well on small GPU clusters. Scaling data and compute, but not algorithms,… https://hauke.uk/rlhf https://hauke.uk/rlhf Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT What we can learn from infants about alignment and how Silicon Valley's 'tell culture' bias might lead to AI misalignment and sycophancy. Also, in praise of passive aggressiveness and downvotes. https://hauke.substack.com/p/against-subjectivism https://hauke.substack.com/p/against-subjectivism Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT My second piece on summarizing Chappell’s summary of his summary of Parfit. https://hauke.uk/contra-parfits-against-egoism https://hauke.uk/contra-parfits-against-egoism Sun, 02 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT My summary of Chappell's summary of his summary of Parfit. And my commentary. Or: you should be egoistical because people are myopic and selfish. https://hauke.substack.com/p/try-o3-pro-in-chatgpt-for-1 https://hauke.substack.com/p/try-o3-pro-in-chatgpt-for-1 Tue, 24 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT Is AI a bubble? https://hauke.uk/gdp-per-capita-in-2050 https://hauke.uk/gdp-per-capita-in-2050 Mon, 06 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT Here, I present GDP (per capita) forecasts of major economies until 2050. Since GDP per capita is the best generalized predictor of many important variables, such as welfare, GDP forecasts can give us a more concrete… https://hauke.uk/should-we-break-up-google-deepmind https://hauke.uk/should-we-break-up-google-deepmind Mon, 22 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT Regulators should review the 2014 DeepMind acquisition. When Google bought DeepMind in 2014, no regulator, not the FTC, not the EC's DG COMP, nor the CMA, scrutinized the impact. Why? AI startups have high value but… https://hauke.substack.com/p/lets-fund-clean-energy https://hauke.substack.com/p/lets-fund-clean-energy Thu, 04 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT Let's Fund researches pressing problems, like climate change, and then crowdfunds for nonprofits working on effective policy solutions. https://hauke.uk/feel-good-productivity-summary https://hauke.uk/feel-good-productivity-summary Thu, 08 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT Seriousness is overrated. If you want to achieve more without ruining your life, approach your work with a sense of play.