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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma.If you"d like more, subscribe to the “Lesswrong (30+ karma)” feed.

technology philosophy

All Episodes

10:06

"There are only four skills: design, technical,...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/19

Epistemic status: Completely schizo galaxy-brained theory Lightcone[1] operates on a "generalist" philosophy. Most of our full-time staff have the title "generalist", and in any given year they work on a wide variety of tasks — from software development on the LessWrong codebase to fixing an overflowing toilet at Lighthaven, our 30,000 sq. ft. campus. One of our core rules is that you should not delegate a task you don't know how to perform yourself. This is a very intense rule and has l...

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5:24

"Meaningful Questions Have Return Types" by Drake...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/19

One way intellectual progress stalls is when you are asking the Wrong Questions. Your question is nonsensical, or cuts against the way reality works. Sometimes you can avoid this by learning more about how the world works, which implicitly answers some question you had, but if you want to make real progress you have to develop the skill of Righting a Wrong Question. This is a classic, old-school rationalist idea. The standard examples are asking about determinism, or free will, or consciousn...

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3:52

"Carpathia Day" by Drake Morrison

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/18

(The better telling is here. Seriously you should go read it. I've heard this story told in rationalist circles, but there wasn't a post on LessWrong, so I made one) Today is April 15th, Carpathia Day. Take a moment to put forth an unreasonable effort to save a little piece of your world, when no one would fault you for doing less. In the early morning of April 15, the RMS Titanic began to sink with more than two thousand souls on board. Over 58 nautical miles away — too far to make ...

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11:11

"Let goodness conquer all that it can defend" by habryka

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/18

Epistemic status: All of the western canon must eventually be re-invented in a LessWrong post, so today we are re-inventing modernism. In my post yesterday, I said: Maybe the most important way ambitious, smart, and wise people leave the world worse off than they found it is by seeing correctly how some part of the world is broken and unifying various powers under a banner to fix that problem — only for the thing they have built to slip from their grasp and, in its collapse, destroy muc...

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10:29

"Do not conquer what you cannot defend" by habryka

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/16

Epistemic status: All of the western canon must eventually be re-invented in a LessWrong post. So today we are re-inventing federalism. Once upon a time there was a great king. He ruled his kingdom with wisdom and economically literate policies, and prosperity followed. Seeing this, the citizens of nearby kingdoms revolted against their leaders, and organized to join the kingdom of this great king. While the kingdom's ability to defend itself against external threats grew with each pers...

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80:02

"Nectome: All That I Know" by Raelifin

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/16

TLDR: I flew to Oregon to investigate Nectome, a brain preservation startup, and talk to their entire team. They’re an ambitious company, looking to grow in a way that no cryonics organization has before. Their procedure is probably much better at saving people than other orgs, and is being offered for as little as $20k until the end of April — a (theoretical) 92% discount. (I bought two.) This early-bird pricing is low, in part, due to some severe uncertainties, in both the broader world an...

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65:03

"Current AIs seem pretty misaligned to me" by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/15

Many people—especially AI company employees[1] —believe current AI systems are well-aligned in the sense of genuinely trying to do what they're supposed to do (e.g., following their spec or constitution, obeying a reasonable interpretation of instructions). [2] I disagree. Current AI systems seem pretty misaligned to me in a mundane behavioral sense: they oversell their work, downplay or fail to mention problems, stop working early and claim to have finished when they clearly haven't, a...

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7:47

"Annoyingly Principled People, and what befalls them"...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/15

Here are two beliefs that are sort of haunting me right now: Folk who try to push people to uphold principles (whether established ones or novel ones), are kinda an important bedrock of civilization.Also, those people are really annoying and often, like, a little bit crazy And these both feel fairly important. I’ve learned a lot from people who have some kind of hobbyhorse about how society is treating something as okay/fine, when it's not okay/fine. When they first started complaining a...

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4:42

"Morale" by J Bostock

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/14

One particularly pernicious condition is low morale. Morale is, roughly, "the belief that if you work hard, your conditions will improve." If your morale is low, you can't push through adversity. It's also very easy to accidentally drop your morale through standard rationalist life-optimization. It's easy to optimize for wellbeing and miss out on the factors which affect morale, especially if you're working on something important, like not having everyone die. One example is working at an ...

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11:26

"Anthropic repeatedly accidentally trained against...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/14

It turns out that Anthropic accidentally trained against the chain of thought of Claude Mythos Preview in around 8% of training episodes. This is at least the second independent incident in which Anthropic accidentally exposed their model's CoT to the oversight signal. In more powerful systems, this kind of failure would jeopardize safely navigating the intelligence explosion. It's crucial to build good processes to ensure development is executed according to plan, especially as human ove...

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3:39

"The policy surrounding Mythos marks an irreversible...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/14

This post assumes Anthropic isn't lying: Mythos is the current SOTAMythos is potent[1]Anthropic will not make it publicly available un-nerfed[2]Anthropic will have a select few companies use it as part of project glasswing[3] to improve cybersecurity or whatever Since the release of ChatGPT, at any given time, anyone on the planet with a few bucks could access the current most capable AI model, the SOTA.[4] Since Mythos, this has no longer been the case and I don't think it will ever hap...

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38:30

"Only Law Can Prevent Extinction" by Eliezer Yudkowsky

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/14

There's a quote I read as a kid that stuck with me my whole life: "Remember that all tax revenue is the result of holding a gun to somebody's head. Not paying taxes is against the law. If you don’t pay taxes, you’ll be fined. If you don’t pay the fine, you’ll be jailed. If you try to escape from jail, you’ll be shot." -- P. J. O'Rourke. At first I took away the libertarian lesson: Government is violence. It may, in some cases, be rightful violence. But it all rests on violence; never f...

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12:32

"Dario probably doesn’t believe in superintelligence"...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/13

Epistemic status: I think this is true but don't think this post is a very strong argument for the case, or particularly interesting to read. But I had to get 500 words out! I think the 2013 conversation is interesting reading as a piece of history, separate from the top-level question, and recommend reading that. I think many people have a relationship with Anthropic that is premised on a false belief: that Dario Amodei believes in superintelligence. What do I mean by "believes" in supe...

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10:09

"Daycare illnesses" by Nina Panickssery

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/13

Before I had a baby I was pretty agnostic about the idea of daycare. I could imagine various pros and cons but I didn’t have a strong overall opinion. Then I started mentioning the idea to various people. Every parent I spoke to brought up a consideration I hadn’t thought about before—the illnesses. A number of parents, including family members, told me they had sent their baby to daycare only for them to become constantly ill, sometimes severely, until they decided to take them out. This ...

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13:04

"If Mythos actually made Anthropic employees 4x more...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/12

Anthropic's system card for Mythos Preview says: It's unclear how we should interpret this. What do they mean by productivity uplift? To what extent is Anthropic's institutional view that the uplift is 4x? (Like, what do they mean by "We take this seriously and it is consistent with our own internal experience of the model.") One straightforward interpretation is: AI systems improve the productivity of Anthropic so much that Anthropic would be indifferent between the current situation...

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7:36

"Do not be surprised if LessWrong gets hacked" by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/09

Or, for that matter, anything else. This post is meant to be two things: a PSA about LessWrong's current security posture, from a LessWrong admin[1]an attempt to establish common knowledge of the security situation it looks like the world (and, by extension, you) will shortly be in Claude Mythos was announced yesterday. That announcement came with a blog post from Anthropic's Frontier Red Team, detailing the large number of zero-days (and other security vulnerabilities) discovered by Myt...

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21:04

"My picture of the present in AI" by ryan_greenblatt

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/09

In this post, I'll go through some of my best guesses for the current situation in AI as of the start of April 2026.You can think of this as a scenario forecast, but for the present (which is already uncertain!) rather than the future. I will generally state my best guess without argumentation and without explaining my level of confidence: some of these claims are highly speculative while others are better grounded, certainly some will be wrong. I tried to make it clear which claims are rel...

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10:23

"The effects of caffeine consumption do not decay...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/09

epistemic status: confident in the overall picture, substantial quantitative uncertainty about the relative potency of caffeine and paraxanthine tldr: The effects of caffeine consumption last longer than many assume. Paraxanthine is sort of like caffeine that behaves the way many mistakenly believe caffeine behaves. You've probably heard that caffeine exerts its psychostimulatory effects by blocking adenosine receptors. That matches my understanding, having dug into this. I'd also g...

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29:31

"AIs can now often do massive easy-to-verify SWE...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/06

I've recently updated towards substantially shorter AI timelines and much faster progress in some areas.[1] The largest updates I've made are (1) an almost 2x higher probability of full AI R&D automation by EOY 2028 (I'm now a bit below 30% [2] while I was previously expecting around 15%; my guesses are pretty reflectively unstable) and (2) I expect much stronger short-term performance on massive and pretty difficult but easy-and-cheap-to-verify software engineering (SWE) tasks that d...

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19:34

"dark ilan" by ozymandias

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/06

The second time Vellam uncovers the conspiracy underlying all of society, he approaches a Keeper. Some of the difference is convenience. Since Vellam reported that he’d found out about the first conspiracy, he's lived in the secret AI research laboratory at the Basement of the World, and Keepers are much easier to come by than when he was a quality control inspector for cheese. But Vellam is honest with himself. If he were making progress, he’d never tell the Keepers no matter how conven...

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692 results

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