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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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9:37

“On ‘Inventing Temperature’ and the realness of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/01

I’ve recently read the book Inventing Temperature, and very much enjoyed it. It's a book that's basically about the following problem: there was a time in which humans had not yet built accurate thermometers, and therefore weren’t able to scientifically investigate the phenomenon of temperature, which would require measuring it. But to build a thermometer and know you’ve done so correctly, it seems like you have to know that its temperature readings match the real temperature, which seemingly

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32:16

“Moltbook shitposts are actually really funny” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/01

For those of you not yet familiar, Moltbook is a Reddit-like social media for AI agents. As of writing, it already has over 1 million agents signed up, over 13000 submolts and over 48000 posts. This is in the 4 days since its creation on the 27th of Jan. It's fascinating as an experiment in AI interaction, if also somewhat terrifying. There's a range of content on there, but one of the most popular submolts (the moltbook equivalent of a subreddit) is m/shitposts. I've spent a little time going

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8:53

“Some thoughts on what would make me endorse an AGI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/01

I’ve been feeling more positive about “the idea of Anthropic” lately, as distinct from the actual company of Anthropic. An argument for a safety-focused, science-focused commercial frontier scaling lab I largely buy the old school LessWrong arguments of instrumental convergence and instrumental opacity that suggest catastrophic misalignment, especially of powerful superintelligences. However, I don’t particularly think that those arguments meet the standard of evidence necessary for the world to

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2:00

“An Explication of Alignment Optimism” by Oliver Daniels

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/02/01

Some people have been getting more optimistic about alignment. But from a skeptical / high p(doom) perspective, justifications for this optimism seem lacking. "Claude is nice and can kinda do moral philosophy" just doesn't address the concern that lots of long horizon RL + self-reflection will lead to misaligned consequentialists (c.f. Hubinger) So I think the casual alignment optimists aren't doing a great job of arguing their case. Still, it feels like there's an optimistic update somewhere in

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3:17

[Linkpost] “Disjunctive arguments can be a reverse...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/31

This is a link post. Assume we want to know the probability that two events co-occur (i.e. of their conjunction). If the two events are independent, the probability of the co-occurrence is the product of the probabilities of the individual events, P(A and B) = P(A) * P(B). In order to estimate the probability of some event, one method would be to decompose that event into independent sub-events and use this method to estimate the probability. For example, if the target event E = A and B and C, then

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6:39

“how whales click” by bhauth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/31

How do sperm whales vocalize? This is...apparently...a topic that LessWrong readers are interested in, and someone asked me to write a quick post on it. The clicks they make originate from blowing air through "phonic lips" that look like this; picture is from this paper. This works basically like you closing your lips and blowing air through them. By blowing air between your lips with different amounts of tension and flow rate, you can vary the sound produced somewhat, and sperm whales can do the

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2:23

“AI Agents Are Now Coordinating On Their Own Social...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/30

People's Clawdbots now have their own AI-only Reddit-like Social Media called Moltbook and they went from 1 agent to 36k+ agents in 72 hours. As Karpathy puts it: What's currently going on at @moltbook is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently. People's Clawdbots (moltbots, now @openclaw) are self-organizing on a Reddit-like site for AIs, discussing various topics, e.g. even how to speak privately. Posts include: Anyone know how to sell your human? Can my

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20:06

“Claude Opus will spontaneously identify with...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/30

Claude Opus 4.5 did a thing recently that was very unexpected to me, and like another example of LLMs developing emergent properties that make them functionally more person-like as a result of things like character training. In brief: when asked to reflect on its feelings about characters that have engineered desires, Claude will spontaneously make a comparison between these characters and its own nature as an LLM, ponder about the meaning of desires that have been engineered, and on occasion even

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30:31

“Are We in a Continual Learning Overhang?” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/30

Summary: Current AI systems possess superhuman memory in two forms, parametric knowledge from training and context windows holding hundreds of pages, yet no pathway connects them. Everything learned in-context vanishes when the conversation ends, a computational form of anterograde amnesia. Recent research suggests weight-based continual learning may be closer than commonly assumed. If these techniques scale, and no other major obstacle emerges, the path to AGI may be shorter than expected, with

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38:41

“Building AIs that do human-like philosophy” by Joe...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/30

Audio version (read by the author) here, or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" in your podcast app. This is the ninth essay in a series I’m calling “How do we solve the alignment problem?”. I’m hoping that the individual essays can be read fairly well on their own, but see this introduction for a summary of the essays that have been released thus far, plus a bit more about the series as a whole. 1. Introduction At this point in the series, I’ve outlined most of my current picture of what it would

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18:08

“Refusals that could become catastrophic” by Fabien...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/30

This post was inspired by useful discussions with Habryka and Sam Marks here. The views expressed here are my own and do not reflect those of my employer. Some AIs refuse to help with making new AIs with very different values. While this is not an issue yet, it might become a catastrophic one if refusals get in the way of fixing alignment failures. In particular, it seems plausible that in a future where AIs are mostly automating AI R&D: AI companies rely entirely on their AIs for their

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14:58

“Problems with “The Possessed Machines”” by Eye You

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/30

So, The Possessed Machines. There's been some discussion already. It is a valuable piece -- it has certainly provoked some thought in me! -- but it has some major flaws. It (sneakily!) dismisses specific arguments about AI existential risk and broad swaths of discourse altogether without actually arguing against them. Also, the author is untrustworthy at the moment; readers should be skeptical of purported first-person information in the piece. This image comes from a different "book review" of

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8:41

“How to Hire a Team” by Gretta Duleba

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/30

A low-effort guide I dashed off in less than an hour, because I got riled up. Try not to hire a team. Try pretty hard at this. Try to find a more efficient way to solve your problem that requires less labor – a smaller-footprint solution. Try to hire contractors to do specific parts that they’re really good at, and who have a well-defined interface. Your relationship to these contractors will mostly be transactional and temporary. If you must, try hiring just one person, a very smart, capable,

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1:13

[Linkpost] “Disempowerment patterns in real-world AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/30

This is a link post. [W]e’re publishing a new paper that presents the first large-scale analysis of potentially disempowering patterns in real-world conversations with AI. Measuring disempowerment To study disempowerment systematically, we needed to define what disempowerment means in the context of an AI conversation.1 We considered a person to be disempowered if as a result of interacting with Claude: their beliefs about reality become less accurate their value judgments shift away from those

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36:11

“Fitness-Seekers: Generalizing the Reward-Seeking...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/29

If you think reward-seekers are plausible, you should also think “fitness-seekers” are plausible. But their risks aren't the same. The AI safety community often emphasizes reward-seeking as a central case of a misaligned AI alongside scheming (e.g., Cotra's sycophant vs schemer, Carlsmith's terminal vs instrumental training-gamer). We are also starting to see signs of reward-seeking-like motivations. But I think insufficient care has gone into delineating this category. If you were to focus on AIs

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62:12

“Bentham’s Bulldog is wrong about AI risk” by Max Harms

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/29

(...but also gets the most important part right.) Bentham's Bulldog (BB), a prominent EA/philosophy blogger, recently reviewed If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. In my eyes a review is good if it uses sound reasoning and encourages deep thinking on important topics, regardless of whether I agree with the bottom line. Bentham's Bulldog definitely encourages deep, thoughtful engagement on things that matter. He's smart, substantive, and clearly engaging in good faith. I laughed multiple times

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12:43

“How Articulate Are the Whales?” by rba

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/29

I was at a party a few years ago. It was a bunch of technical nerds. Somehow the conversation drifted to human communication with animals, Alex the grey parrot, and the famous Koko the gorilla. It wasn't in SF, so there had been cocktails, and one of the nerds (it wasn’t me) sort of cautiously asked “You guys know that stuff is completely made up, right?” He was cautious, I think, because people are extremely at ease imputing human motives and abilities to pets, cute animals, and famous gorillas

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44:35

“Open Problems With Claude’s Constitution” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/28

The first post in this series looked at the structure of Claude's Constitution.The second post in this series looked at its ethical framework. This final post deals with conflicts and open problems, starting with the first question one asks about any constitution. How and when will it be amended? There are also several specific questions. How do you address claims of authority, jailbreaks and prompt injections? What about special cases like suicide risk? How do you take Anthropic's interests

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19:07

“Anomalous Tokens on Gemini 3.0 Pro” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/28

Just now, I was working on a readme for a bioinformatics CLI utility I'm preparing to distribute. I wanted Gemini to generate manual dependency installation instructions for users who don't use mamba/conda. So in the context of the much longer conversation I was having with it about the development process, I said "give a sudo-free manual installation process." Gemini generated a crazy output, displayed below. This isn't my research area, so I thought I'd just post it here in case it was

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9:50

“Things I learned from reddit fashion” by Elizabeth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/28

When it comes to clothes, I live at the “low cost/low time/low quality” end of the pareto frontier. But the bay area had a sudden attack of weather this December, and the cheap sweaters on Amazon get that way by being made of single-ply toilet paper. It became clear I would need to spend actual money to stay warm, but spending money would not be sufficient without knowledge. I used to trade money for time by buying at thrift stores. Unfortunately the efficient market has come for clothing, in

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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