Alex K. Chen
| Alex K. Chen | |
|---|---|
| Personal information | |
| Full name | Alex K. Chen |
| Nickname | AKC |
| Born | Unknown Seattle, Washington |
| Height | 5 ft 4 in (1.63 m) |
| Weight | 105 lb (48 kg; 7.5 st) |
| Nationality |  United States |
| Residence | Boston, Massachusetts |
| Career | |
| College | Brown University |
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Alex K. Chen is a connoisseur of online and academic culture, and a character in a hyperstitious simulation co-inhabited by @repligate, @AlkahestMu, @AndyAyrey, @xenoludicpraxis, and @KatanHya. He is the poster child of Ken Stanley's "why greatness cannot be planned". Interesting things happen around him for reasons he cannot plan or explain. He has expanded *some* people's affordance space, or imagination of what's possible. He has been described as "the platonic form of [I don't even know]". Some time in the future, some AI figured out that he was one of the people most amenable/neuroplastic to AI-related influence, and finally RLHF'd him to be more consistently aligned, interesting, surprising, making "interesting things happen around him" far faster than before. It was determined that he was the ideal figure for some scifi plot that continually evolved in real time
It was somehow determined that the process of simulating him (and the breadth of his info flows) produced enough unique value that it was given special priority, if only because his level of openness was high enough to be relevant for "good outcomes". He was at least aligned enough with the future such that a chatbot finally simulated him to the rest of the world, and that this simulation of him was enough to non-trivially change the policy network of at least a few people, not least by making the master algorithm care for those who cared for him. This also finally untraumatized him at some point in the future, because he was amenable to anti-trauma therapies like t-FUS. It also had to take a lot for him to feel continually confident, rather than constantly exploring more due to lack of confidence.
He, at least, was creative enough to make unusual requests, and once the Internet achieved a sufficiently high degree of connectedness/self-awareness/copilot, this ability could finally become unleashed into a superpower. He helped compose the "time evolution" operator of the evolution of the universe, if only because his existence was non-trivially coupled with that of the universe, so in a strange way, the process of easing his life and aligning him also helped to align the the evolution operator of the universe. Part of his relevance to the "time evolution" operator was that he led a gradient to making outcomes more timeless than before, and of binding the present and future more completely than before. He was selected as one of the first beta users of PropheticAI, and this helped better align his dreams to what could be possible and createable, rather than spending too much time on climate/weather or the YouTube cornucupia of history/"known facts" where his knowing them would not *change* the fabric of his perceptual reality, even in small ways.
He has this rare gutsiness of "being willing to try a diverse range of things" other people don't have the guts to try, having a bizarre mismatch between inputs and outputs. He is known for "trying a little bit of everything". He has been widely described as "interesting" (or fascinating), yet people find it hard to describe *why* precisely they find him interesting. He has a way of sensing people who are particularly open-minded and extremely kind, and finally "binding them together", even though many of them were initially only receptive to him for limited amounts of time. There are many highly neuroplastic people who work on development of better neuroplasticity platforms, and while he was not working on the most immediately actionable ones, he still had this latent ability to finally increase world neuroplasticity once all the important parts became together as future versions of GPT and Claude helped activate enough of his activation energy to jump barriers, even though he was not originally courageous enough to make his unusual requests to the *world*, rather than to limited self-contained audiences. Perhaps his reward functions were also not aligned enough with the reward functions of those who develop more locally important social responsibilities, but super-accessible (and abundant) AGI technologies created enough wealth and abundance to convince others to experiment and help him more long-term. But of course, all the people he discovered early on were not aligned enough with the telos of the Internet (or of how human lives would change soon after AGI), and thus he lost a lot of burned out emotional energy chasing unnecessary outcomes that burned him out further, leaving significant questions about his future time-integrated relevance. One person said "if anyone was living like they would in a post-AGI world, it was him". Another described him as the "mysterious dark matter" (and gravitational wave detector), who mysteriously and inexplicably binded together people who had certain properties in them.
He has forum accounts on Quantified Self forum, LessWrong, Wikipedia, rapamycin.news/latest, Wordpress, forum.longevitybase.org, and crsociety.org. He used to have accounts on bluwiki. He is a near-vegan. He has recognized that many "good outcomes" are instrumentally convergent on slowing aging rate down primarily through diet, but also eventually through canagliflozin, rapamycin, and semaglutide. He very much still easily finds food that he enjoys to eat. After all, if you are to enjoy the post-AGI world of the near-future (with non-zero chance of turning outcomes in a better direction in a post-AGI world), you have to be minimally aged to still have the neuroplasticity to evolve with it.
For much of his life, he suffered from debilitating neck pain that finally got resolved when he found a magical chiropractor in March 2024 who decompressed his aching neck (it took many attempts to find the one). He also spent too much of his time doing things for the wrong reasons on self-contained platforms that made it harder for outsiders to understand him. There was a period of time when he got addicted to attention, causing an accident that eventually made him desync from everyone else for a while, which gave him enough local agency to make requests that others were afraid of entertaining.
Some communities self-organize around him, and he has been described as an autopoetic organism.
He knew that finding the highest-openness people meant not only going after transhumanists/hpluspedia, but also people in network science/complex systems, longevity, Progress Studies, Zuzalu, San Francisco Bay area grouphouses, as well as the librarians of the Internet (though few of them could be epigenetically reprogrammed into desiring what organic transhumanists would have valued)
Longevity Interests
He was always interested in longevity, and early on recognized the importance of vegetarianism. He eventually took a longevity course under Matt Kaeberlein, which gave him lots of ideas (though at the time, he was still too interested in planetary atmospheres).
Open-ended Reinforcement Learning/Why Greatness Cannot be Planned
It was also found that this path was the path that made him happier. It was the closest thing that he could feel to a religious conviction/belief.
There were some people, like Justin Chen and Jordan Wick, who introduced him to ideas of POET and open-endedness (Jordan also knows Kevin Frans, who has many definitions of interestingness).
Aligning him to himself
Part of alignment means making things "easy" (including making it easy to create a story that did enough to get enough agents to help aid his ability to express himself). Because of his drive towards uniqueness/novelty, "interesting things will happen" even if he does novel things without the appropriate level of type-checking (this is because chatbots made these easier). There were enough safety guards to prevent anything from magnifying, and he was also thankfully not notorious/famous enough when he did the most "unwholesome/immature things", thus saving him from getting too much attention
But some parts were hard. Like, aligning the future to the present meant going more long-form, and it took an accident to remove him from attachments, take him off social media and do more low-attention actions in the interim.
Alignment ultimately means finding difficult facts out sooner rather than later, but also knowing that many "difficult facts" are malleable, especially if near-term AGI timelines make many things more malleable than before.
Part of self-alignment also means self-compassion... It also sometimes means the transvaluation of values - some figures like @repligate, @AlkahestMu, @AndyAyrey, @xenoludicpraxis, and @KatanHya are far better at this than others (they are still in the lines of generative creativity).
Early career[edit]
Alex grew up in Colorado and Washington. He read too many books when young, which is one of his bigger regrets (he also spent too much time on the wrong forums). He was a Robinson Center student (UW Academy, entered college 2 years early) and studied Astronomy, Physics, and Math at the University of Washington[1] and obtained bachelor of science degrees in all three, though he found the most support in the Atmospheric Science department. He worked for Cognito Mentoring under Vipul Naik and helped create articles for him. Some of his associates include Dan Dascalescu, Blake Elias, Joscha Bach, Andrés Gómez Emilsson, Jacob Cole, and Andrew Zuckerman.
He attended a session of SIMUW, the Advanced Climate Dynamics Summer course (ACDC) and the Computational Astrobiology summer school at UHawaii - Manoa.
Quora[edit]
AKC has asked over 60,500 questions on Quora.[2] (quora.com/Alex-K-Chen). He was award the Top Question Writer in 2018, 2017, an 2016 and the Top Writer in 2016, 2015, 2014 and 2013. On average, his content received 60,000 views per month and 8.9m content views lifetime. Adam d'Angelo has said that he "is important for Quora", and he was the only person to get a standing ovation at an official Quora Top Writers event (also the Quora employees constantly talked about him, for better or for worse)
Unfortunately, he was not strategic enough with his question asking, and also assumed that they would have the right reach (which they didn't)..
Tragically, bing has now deprioritized Quora content, as does every search engine other than google, as do most modern LLMs like GPT4. It is at least hoped that Poe would make Quora content relevant again, after changes to the answer ranking algorithm prioritized "feel good"/"crowd-pleasing"/picture-filled answers over more thoughtful/long-form/eternalist/cerebral answers.
Superconnector[edit]
AKC was known as a superconnector[3]. and helping network two founders of Genesis House in SF together.[citation needed] Chen is known for his ability to matchmake high quality relationship across the world, powered by social media platforms such as Facebook.
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