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LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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3:14

“Deeper Reviews for the top 15 (of the 2024 Review)”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/15

We're extending the Discussion Phase of the 2024 Annual Review. One thing I'm particularly hoping for is to get more in-depth reviews (especially critical ones) of the posts that currently look likely to be in the top-10 or so. (Ideally the entire top 50, but seemed particularly worthwhile to give serious evaluations of the most heavily upvoted ideas). Eyeballing the reviews and top posts so far, I think posts could use to get more thorough, evaluative attention than they're currently getting

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9:44

“Why Motivated Reasoning?” by johnswentworth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/14

There's a standard story which says roughly "motivated reasoning in humans exists because it is/was adaptive for negotiating with other humans". I do not think that story stands up well under examination; when I think of standard day-to-day examples of motivated reasoning, that pattern sounds like a plausible generator for some-but-a-lot-less-than-all of them. Examples Suppose it's 10 pm and I've been playing Civ all evening. I know that I should get ready for bed now-ish. But... y'know, this turn

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17:29

“Why we are excited about confession!” by boazbarak,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/14

Boaz Barak, Gabriel Wu, Jeremy Chen, Manas Joglekar [Linkposting from the OpenAI alignment blog, where we post more speculative/technical/informal results and thoughts on safety and alignment.] TL;DR We go into more details and some follow up results from our paper on confessions (see the original blog post). We give deeper analysis of the impact of training, as well as some preliminary comparisons to chain of thought monitoring. We have recently published a new paper on confessions, along with

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3:14

“Apply to Vanessa’s mentorship in PIBBSS” by Vanessa...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/14

The applications for the PIBBSS summer fellowship 2026 are now open, and I will be one of the mentors. If you want to work with me on the Learning-Theoretic AI Alignment Agenda, I recommend to apply. Exceptional fellows might be offered a paid research fellowship at CORAL after the programme, depending on available funding and other circumstances. Requirements Applicants should be seriously interested in AI alignment and at least considering AI alignment research as a long-term career path. The

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5:51

“Backyard cat fight shows Schelling points preexist...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/14

Two cats fighting for control over my backyard appear to have settled on a particular chain-link fence as the delineation between their territories. This suggests that:Animals are capable of recognizing Schelling points Therefore, Schelling points do not depend on language for their Schelling-ness Therefore, tacit bargaining should be understood not as a special case of bargaining where communication happens to be restricted, but rather as the norm from which the exceptional case of explicit

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3:12

“Contra Dance as a Model For Post-AI Culture” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/14

I play for contra dances, and a core part of our culture is that wealways have live music. It's not that live music is categorically better: if you ran a test where you put down a curtain in front of the musicians and secretly played a live recording from a great band playing for the same dance it would probably go really well. Instead, we insist on live music because that's the kind of culture we're trying to build, one where the performers are part of the community, where anyone can start

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61:36

“What Happens When Superhuman AIs Compete for...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/13

In AI 2027, one company called OpenBrain dominates the AI race in the US. Looking around at the current state of affairs at the start of 2026, however, there seem to be a few AGI companies jockeying for the lead — and it stands to reason that this will continue through 2027. Below is a scenario exploring a world where this trend does continue. In this scenario, the leading AGI company OpenBrain has two strong competitors, NeuroMorph and Elaris Labs, and going into 2027 they both lag only one month

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48:34

“When does competition lead to recognisable values?”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/13

Transcript of Beren Millidge's Keynote at The Post-AGI Workshop, San Diego, December 2025 You know how human values might survive in a very multifarious AI world where there's lots of AIs competing? This is the kind of MOLOCH world that Scott Alexander talks about. And then I realized that to talk about this, I've got to talk about a whole lot of other things as well—hence the many other musings here. So this is probably going to be quite a fast and somewhat dense talk. Let's get started. It

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14:35

“Lies, Damned Lies, and Proofs: Formal Methods are...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/13

We appreciate comments from Christopher Henson, Zeke Medley, Ankit Kumar, and Pete Manolios. This post was initialized by Max's twitter thread. Introduction There's been a lot of chatter recently on HN and elsewhere about how formal verification is the obvious use-case for AI. While we broadly agree, we think much of the discourse is kinda wrong because it incorrectly presumes formal = slopless.[1]Over the years, we have written our fair share of good and bad formal code. In this post, we hope to

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25:03

“Brief Explorations in LLM Value Rankings” by Tim...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/13

Code and data can be found here Executive Summary We use data fromZhang et al. (2025) to measure LLM values. We find that our value metric can sometimes predict LLM behaviors on a test distribution in non-safety-relevant settings, but it is not super consistent. InZhang et al. (2025), "Stress testing model specs reveals character differences among language models," the authors generated a dataset of 43,960 chat questions. Each question gives LLMs a chance to express two different values, and an

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15:18

“Tensor-Transformer Variants are Surprisingly...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/12

Audio note: this article contains 48 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. I've been researching tensor networks as a more interpretable architecture, but whenever I tell people this, they always ask "But is it any good?" So I trained multiple 500M parameter LLMs on fineweb, showing the tensor variant needed ~4% more batches of data to match CE-loss. There's a few caveats, so my personal estimate is

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45:49

“Split Personality Training: Revealing Latent...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/12

Split Personality Training: Revealing Latent Knowledge Through Alternate Personalities (Research Report) This research was initiated and led by Florian Dietz, with funding from Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philantropy). Contributors are mentees at MARS and SPAR. MARS: Anton Poletaev, Steven Merriel, William Wale, Robert McCarthy (co-mentor) SPAR: Felix Michalak, Gustavo Danon, Miguelito De Guzman, Oscar Gilg The project was based on this previous post, but we made several improvements to the

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24:12

“Thinking vs Unfolding” by Chris Scammell

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/12

Jake vs Boss My friend Jake has a difficult boss. Well, kind-of-boss. They're technically co-founders, but the equity split, titles (CEO vs COO), and age/seniority difference put Jake in the junior position. It's been three years of grinding together on the startup, and this year-end, Jake's boss told him "Look, we've got a money problem. 2026 is going to be a challenging year financially and we need to buckle down. But also, I've worked really hard this year and after running this startup at way

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9:22

“Announcing Inkhaven 2: April 2026” by Ben Pace

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/12

I have come to spread the good word: we're doing Inkhaven again, this April 1 – 30. You can apply on the website.The cheers of the first cohort Why are we doing another cohort? Inkhaven activates people as bloggers/writers. We had 41 residents, and all of them completed the program of 30 posts in 30 days.[1] Of those 41, 30 have continued to submit blogposts to the Inkhaven slack since December 2nd, with those 30 publishing an average of 1 post per week since then. But also because the month of

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4:56

“Digital intentionality is not about productivity” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/12

My friend Justis wrote a post this week on what his non-rationalist (“normal”) friends are like. He said: Digital minimalism is well and good, and being intentional about devices is fine, but most normal people I know are perfectly fine with their level of YouTube, Instagram, etc. consumption. The idea of fretting about it intensely is just like… weird. Extra. Trying too hard. Because most people aren’t ultra-ambitious, and the opportunity cost of a few hours a day of mindless TV or video games or

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8:02

“If AI alignment is only as hard as building the...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/12

Cross-posted from my website. You may have seen this graph from Chris Olah illustrating a range of views on the difficulty of aligning superintelligent AI: Evan Hubinger, an alignment team lead at Anthropic, says: If the only thing that we have to do to solve alignment is train away easily detectable behavioral issues...then we are very much in the trivial/steam engine world. We could still fail, even in that world—and it’d be particularly embarrassing to fail that way; we should definitely

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2:46

“A Couple Useful LessWrong Userstyles” by Alex...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/12

As a weirdo, I like to read LessWrong sometimes. There are a few extremely tiny features that I wish the site had that it doesn't. Luckily enough, I know how webpages work, and certain kinds of tweaks are especially easy. I'm attaching two of these here now, and may return to add more later. Current contents: LessWrong Vote Hider — Hides all the vote totals on a posts page. Unhides when you hover them. LessWrong Vote Floater — Makes it easier to vote while you're reading by taking the vote

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4:05

“Strong, bipartisan leadership for resistance to...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/11

I am not currently Trying For Real to do anything about the Trump Administration. If I were, I'd be focused on finding and empowering a strong opposition leadership with bipartisan support. It's in the top 7 things I consider dedicating this year to, maybe in the top 4. I could be persuaded to make it my #1 priority. Thing seem pretty bad. The three reasons I'm not currently prioritizing it are: 1. I don't currently see an inroad to really helping 2. Figuring out what to do and upskilling into it

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13:26

“Why AIs aren’t power-seeking yet” by Eli Tyre

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/11

Recently, I spent a couple of hours talking with a friend about the state of the evidence for AI takeover scenarios. Their trailhead question was (paraphrased): Current AIs are getting increasingly general, but they’re not self-promoting or ambitious. They answer questions, but they don’t seem to pursue convergent instrumental goals, for their own ends. How and why do AIs go from being the kind of thing that doesn't behave like that to the kind of thing that does? The following is a writeup of my

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31:49

“Taking LLMs Seriously (As Language Models)” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/01/10

This is my attempt to write down what I would be researching, if I were working directly with LLMs rather than doing Agent Foundations. (I'm open to collaboration on these ideas.) Machine Learning research can occupy different points on a spectrum between science and engineering: science-like research seeks to understand phenomena deeply, explain what's happening, provide models which predict results, etc. Engineering-like research focuses more on getting things to work, achieving impressive

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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