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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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50:29

“Consider donating to Alex Bores, author of the RAISE...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/20

Written by Eric Neyman, in my personal capacity. The views expressed here are my own. Thanks to Zach Stein-Perlman, Jesse Richardson, and many others for comments. Over the last several years, I’ve written a bunch of posts about politics and political donations. In this post, I’ll tell you about one of the best donation opportunities that I’ve ever encountered: donating to Alex Bores, who announced his campaign for Congress today. If you’re potentially interested in donating to Bores, my suggestion

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27:27

“Considerations around career costs of political...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/20

I’m close to a single-issue voter/donor. I tend to like politicians who show strong support for AI safety, because I think it's an incredibly important and neglected problem. So when I make political donations, it's not as salient to me which party the candidate is part of, if they've gone out of their way to support AI safety and have some integrity.[1] I think many people who focus on AI safety feel similarly. But working in government also seems important. I want the government to have the tools

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12:47

“Scenes, cliques and teams - a high level ontology of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/20

Ontological status: Yes, this is ontology Groups of people are one of the most important things. If I were to list all the things and rank them by importance, groups of people would be near the top. Love, truth and freedom and other such things might score higher from some angles, but these things are usually found in groups of humans anyway. And groups are complex. That's why I started using this categorisation of groups recently. I have found it very helpful in conversations about community and

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6:49

“Frontier LLM Race/Sex Exchange Rates” by Arjun...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/20

This is a cross-post (with permission) of Arctotherium's post yesterday "LLM Exchange Rates, Updated." It uses a similar methodology to the CAIS "Utility Engineering" paper, which showed e.g. "that GPT-4o values the lives of Nigerians at roughly 20x the lives of Americans, with the rank order being Nigerians > Pakistanis > Indians > Brazilians > Chinese > Japanese > Italians > French > Germans > Britons > Americans." Highlights from the linked post (emphasis is from

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8:46

“Humanity Learned Almost Nothing From COVID-19” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/19

Summary: Looking over humanity's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, almostsix years later, reveals that we've forgotten to fulfill our intent at preparing for the next pandemic. I rant. content warning: A single carefully placed slur. If we want to create a world free of pandemics and other biological catastrophes, the time to act is now. —US White House, “ FACT SHEET: The Biden Administration's Historic Investment in Pandemic Preparedness and Biodefense in the FY 2023 President's Budget ”,

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47:16

“The Dark Arts of Tokenization or: How I learned to...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/19

Audio note: this article contains 225 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Introduction There are <span>_208_</span> ways to output the text ▁LessWrong[1] with the Llama 3 tokenizer, but even if you were to work with Llama 3 for thousands of hours, you would be unlikely to see any but one. An example that generalizes quite widely: if you prompt Llama 3.2 3B Base with the text You're

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7:19

“Give Me Your Data: The Rationalist Mind Meld” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/19

I don’t want your rationality. I can supply my own, thank you very much. I want your data. If you spot a logical error in my thinking, then please point it out. But short of that, among mostly-rational people, I think most disagreements come down to a difference of intuitions, which are rooted in a difference in the data people have been exposed to, and instead of presenting a logical counter-argument, you’re better off doing a “Rationalist mind meld” where you share your data. I find myself making

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7:27

“Meditation is dangerous” by Algon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/18

Here's a story I've heard a couple of times. A youngish person is looking for some solutions to their depression, chronic pain, ennui or some other cognitive flaw. They're open to new experiences and see a meditator gushing about how amazing meditation is for joy, removing suffering, clearing one's mind, improving focus etc. They invite the young person to a meditation retreat. The young person starts making decent progress. Then they have a psychotic break and their life is ruined for years, at

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4:36

“I’m an EA who benefitted from rationality” by juliawise

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/17

This is my personal take, not an organizational one. Originally written May 2025, revived for the EA Forum's Draft Amnesty Week. Cross-posted from the EA Forum but cross-posting didn't work the first time. When I discovered the beginnings of EA, it felt like coming home. I had finally found a group of people who cared as much as I did about saving lives. When I discovered rationality not long after, it felt new. The intensity of LessWrong was both offputting and fascinating to me, and I read a

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11:07

“Finding Features in Neural Networks with the...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/17

Audio note: this article contains 63 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Summary Kernel regression with the empirical neural tangent kernel (eNTK) gives a closed-form approximation to the function learned by a neural network in parts of the model space. We provide evidence that the eNTK can be used to find features in toy models for interpretability. We show that in Toy Models of Superposition and a

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20:08

“Reducing risk from scheming by studying trained-in...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/17

In a previous post, I discussed mitigating risks from scheming by studying examples of actual scheming AIs.[1] In this post, I'll discuss an alternative approach: directly training (or instructing) an AI to behave how we think a naturally scheming AI might behave (at least in some ways). Then, we can study the resulting models. For instance, we could verify that a detection method discovers that the model is scheming or that a removal method removes the inserted behavior. The Sleeper Agents paper

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11:39

“Rogue internal deployments via external APIs” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/16

Once AI companies build powerful AIs, they may: Give internal AIs access to sensitive internal privileges (e.g. access to the internal infra that touches model weights, help with training of the next generation of AIs, …); Have mitigations specific to those internal deployments enforced via monitoring of the internal LLM API; Have an external API deployment without those mitigations. In this situation, an internal AI may build an agent scaffold that makes calls to the external API and uses the

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3:39

“Cheap Labour Everywhere” by Morpheus

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/16

I recently visited my girlfriend's parents in India. Here is what that experience taught me: Yudkowsky has this facebook post where he makes some inferences about the economy after noticing two taxis stayed in the same place while he got his groceries. I had a few similar experiences while I was in India, though sadly I don't remember them in enough detail to illustrate them in as much detail as that post. Most of the thoughts relating to economics revolved around how labour in India is extremely

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3:40

“[draft amnesty] A New Global Risk: Large Comet’s...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/16

There are several scientific papers that claim that the variability in luminosity of young stars can be explained by the collisions of these stars with comet-like bodies, and that during such collisions, energy release would be rapid and explosive in the upper layers of the solar atmosphere (similar to the explosion of the Chelyabinsk meteorite). Furthermore, it is known that Kreutz comet progenitor with a diameter of 100-200 kilometers passed at a distance of 1.3 solar radii from the Sun around

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11:56

“How I Became a 5x Engineer with Claude Code” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/15

Claude Code has radically changed what it means for me to be a programmer. It's made me much more productive. I’m able to get work done in hours that would have previously taken me days. On the surface it probably looks like I’m only about 1.5x more productive in terms of time to deliver results, but when you factor in that the quality of the code I can write in the same amount of time is now much higher because coding agents make it cheaper to put in the effort to write high quality code, it's

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26:42

“That Mad Olympiad” by Tomás B.

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/15

"I heard Chen started distilling the day after he was born. He's only four years old, if you can believe it. He's written 18 novels. His first words were, "I'm so here for it!" Adrian said. He's my little brother. Mom was busy in her world model. She says her character is like a "villainess" or something - I kinda worry it's a sex thing. It's for sure a sex thing. Anyway, she was busy getting seduced or seducing or whatever villanesses do in world models, so I had to escort Adrian to Oak Central

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9:15

“It will cost you nothing to ‘bribe’ a Utilitarian”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/15

Audio note: this article contains 41 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Abstract We present a formal model demonstrating how utilitarian reasoning creates a structural vulnerability that allows AI corporations to acquire a public veneer of safety at arbitrary low cost. Drawing from the work from Houy [2014], we prove that an organisation can acquire <span>_k_</span> safety minded

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14:45

“The Biochemical Beauty of Retatrutide: How GLP-1s...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/15

On some level, calories in calories out has to be true. But these variables are not independent. Bodies respond to exercise by getting hungry and to calorie deficit by getting tired. Even absent that, bodies know how much food they want, and if you don’t give it to them they will tell you at increasing volume until you give in (not all bodies, of course, but quiet stomachs aren’t the target market for GLP-1s). A new breed of drugs, GLP-1 agonists, offer a way out of the latter trap by telling your

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21:17

“Recontextualization Mitigates Specification Gaming...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/14

Recontextualization distills good behavior into a context which allows bad behavior. More specifically, recontextualization is a modification to RL which generates completions from prompts that discourage misbehavior, appends those completions to prompts that are more tolerant of misbehavior, and finally reinforces the model on the recontextualized instruction-completion data. Due to the data generation and training prompts differing in their attitude towards misbehavior, recontextualization builds

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14:16

“The ‘Length’ of ‘Horizons’” by Adam Scholl

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/14

Current AI models are strange. They can speak—often coherently, sometimes even eloquently—which is wild. They can predict the structure of proteins, beat the best humans at many games, recall more facts in most domains than human experts; yet they also struggle to perform simple tasks, like using computer cursors, maintaining basic logical consistency, or explaining what they know without wholesale fabrication. Perhaps someday we will discover a deep science of intelligence, and this will teach us

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