Toby Ord's Intellectual Neighborhood

3D visualization of researchers by semantic similarity to his three main themes

Toby Ord - The reference point
All 3 themes - Rare multi-domain overlap (Kaj_Sotala)
2 themes - Significant overlap (DragonGod, Cole Wyeth...)
1 theme - Domain specialists

Key Insights

RL Scaling (Closest Match)

  • 1a3orn - "Parameter Scaling Comes for RL"
  • Pablo Villalobos - Training/inference compute tradeoffs
  • Matrice Jacobine - Does RL incentivize reasoning?
  • Ryan Kidd - Inference scaling safety implications

Existential Risk

  • Kaj_Sotala - S-risks, long-term trajectories
  • DragonGod - X-risk and longtermism
  • fowlertm - Existential risk analysis
  • Nick Bostrom references throughout

Infinite Ethics

  • Chris_Leong - "Surreal Decisions" summary
  • Cleo Nardo - Decision theory overlaps
  • Stuart_Armstrong - Bounded utility functions
  • Pascal's wager/mugging discussions