“A basic case for differentially accelerating conceptual reasoning capabilities” by Emery Cooper, Caspar Oesterheld, Chi Nguyen

LessWrong (30+ Karma) · Oct 26, 2026 · 50m

Introduction

In this post, we make the case that alignment and other important work require especially strong conceptual reasoning capabilities. By this, we roughly mean tasks that are similar to philosophy in that they aren't straightforwardly verifiable, and progress relies on informal a priori reasoning and argumentation. We argue that differentially accelerating AI's conceptual reasoning capabilities is important.

We also think it's neglected, and that the AI safety community currently underinvests in this area. We have ourselves pivoted from doing conceptual research directly to working…