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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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6:17

Snippets on Living In Reality

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/26

Social reality is quite literally another world, in the same sense that the Harry Potter universe is another world. Like the Harry Potter universe, social reality is a world portrayed primarily in text and in speech and in our imaginations. Like the Harry Potter universe, social reality doesn’t diverge completely from physical reality - they contain mostly the same cities, for instance. Like the Harry Potter universe, social reality matches physical reality “by default” wherever there's no

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7:57

Courtship Confusions Post-Slutcon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/26

Going into slutcon, one of my main known-unknowns was… I’d heard many times that the standard path to hooking up or dating starts with two people bantering for an hour or two at a party. And even in my own imagination, I was completely unable to make up a plausible-sounding conversation which would have that effect. Certainly it had never played out that way for me, nor had I personally witnessed it play out for anyone else. So at slutcon itself, I volunteered for a session in which a few guys

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5:54

Training PhD Students to be Fat Newts (Part 1)

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/26

This is a link post. Today, I want to introduce an experimental PhD student training philosophy. Let's start with some reddit memes. Every gaming subreddit has its own distinct meme culture. On r/chess, there's a demon who is summoned by an unsuspecting beginner asking “Why isn’t this checkmate?” These posts are gleefully deluged by responses saying “Google En Passant” in some form or other. Here's my favorite variant: Battle Brothers is an indie game of the turn-based strategy variety about

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8:19

“Evaluating honesty and lie detection techniques on a...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/26

TL;DR: We use a suite of testbed settings where models lie—i.e. generate statements they believe to be false—to evaluate honesty and lie detection techniques. The best techniques we studied involved fine-tuning on generic anti-deception data and using prompts that encourage honesty. Read the full Anthropic Alignment Science blog post and the X thread. Introduction: Suppose we had a “truth serum for AIs”: a technique that reliably transforms a language model $M$ into an honest model $M_H$ that

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7:36

Takeaways from the Eleos Conference on AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/26

Crossposted from my Substack. I spent the weekend at Lighthaven, attending the Eleos conference. In this post, I share thoughts and updates as I reflect on talks, papers, and discussions, and put out some of my takes on the topic since I haven't written about this topic before. I divide my thoughts into three categories: (1) philosophy, (2) legal/social, (3) technical, even though there are unavoidable overlaps. I share relevant paper titles of interest that were either mentioned in presentations

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8:02

Evolution & Freedom

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/26

In Against Money Maximalism, I argued against money-maximization as a normative stance. Profit is a coherent thing you can try to maximize, but there are also other sorts of value. Profit-maximization isn't the unique rational way to engage with money. One way you could respond to this is economic Darwinism: "Sure, you can optimize other things than money, but over time, the market will come to be dominated by money-maximizing agents." I think this is misguided in several respects. First,

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3:26

Reasons Why I Cannot Sleep

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/26

My therapist says I'm more tired today than she's ever seen me. Here are some reasons my brain says I cannot sleep: My boss might lose faith in my ability to manage projects. Something important might go wrong with my project (Inkhaven), and I am the only person on-call who has the context to fix it all. If I screw it up he might no longer be willing to give me big projects like this. Annoying social drama. There was one yesterday, that made me anxious and unable to relax until it was dealt with

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8:38

The Economics of Replacing Call Center Workers With AIs

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/26

TLDR: Voice AIs aren't that much cheaper in the year 2025 My friend runs a voice agent startup in Canada for walk-in clinics. The AI takes calls and uses tools to book appointments in the EMR (electronic medical record) system. In theory, this helps the clinic hire less front desk staff and the startup makes infinite money. In reality, the margins are brutal and they barely charge above cost. This is surprising to me: surely a living, breathing, squishy human costs more per hour than a GPU in a

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9:46

Three things that surprised me about technical...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/26

Open Philanthropy's Coefficient Giving's Technical AI Safety team is hiring grantmakers. I thought this would be a good moment to share some positive updates about the role that I’ve made since I joined the team a year ago. tl;dr: I think this role is more impactful and more enjoyable than I anticipated when I started, and I think more people should consider applying. It's not about the “marginal” grants Some people think that being a grantmaker at Coefficient means sorting through a big pile of

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6:52

“OpenAI finetuning metrics: What is going on with the...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/26

Introduction For our current project, we've been using the OpenAI fine-tuning API. To run some of our experiments, we needed to understand exactly how the reported metrics (loss and accuracy) are calculated. Unfortunately, the official documentation is sparse, and the most detailed explanation we could find was the following table from Microsoft's Azure documentation: Our experimental results didn't match what we expected from these definitions. So we ran controlled experiments to reverse-engineer

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11:54

Alignment will happen by default. What’s next?

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/25

I’m not 100% convinced of this, but I’m fairly convinced, more and more so over time. I’m hoping to start a vigorous but civilized debate. I invite you to attack my weak points and/or present counter-evidence. My thesis is that intent-alignment is basically happening, based on evidence from the alignment research in the LLM era. Introduction The classic story about loss of control from AI is that optimization pressure on proxies will cause the AI to value things that humans don’t. (Relatedly, the

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8:34

“Maybe Insensitive Functions are a Natural Ontology...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/25

The most canonical example of a "natural ontology" comes from gasses in stat mech. In the simplest version, we model the gas as a bunch of little billiard balls bouncing around in a box. The dynamics are chaotic. The system is continuous, so the initial conditions are real numbers with arbitrarily many bits of precision - e.g. maybe one ball starts out centered at x = 0.8776134000327846875..., y = 0.0013617356590430716..., z=132983270923481... . As balls bounce around, digits further and further

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5:33

The Enemy Gets The Last Hit

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/24

Disclaimer: I am god-awful at chess. I Late-beginner chess players, those who are almost on the cusp of being basically respectable, often fall into a particular pattern. They've got the hang of calculating moves ahead; they can make plans along the lines of "Ok, so if I move my rook to give a check, the opponent will have to move her king, and then I can take her bishop." and those plans tend to be basically correct: the opponent really does have to move her king. But there's a very important rule

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11:45

Reasoning Models Sometimes Output Illegible Chains of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/24

TL;DR: Models trained with outcome-based RL sometimes have reasoning traces that look very weird. In this paper, I evaluate 14 models and find that many of them often generate pretty illegible CoTs. I show that models seem to find this illegible text useful, with a model's accuracy dropping heavily when given only the legible parts of its CoT, and that legibility goes down when answering harder questions. However, when sampling many responses to the same questions, I find there's no real

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15:19

The Coalition

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/24

Summary A defensive military coalition is a key frame for thinking about our international agreement aimed at forestalling the development of superintelligence. We introduce historical examples of former rivals or enemies forming defensive coalitions in response to an urgent mutual threat, and detail key aspects of our proposal which are analogous. We also contrast our proposal with the oft-employed analogy to nonproliferation agreements, and highlight shortcomings. Introduction We at the Machine

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9:55

“The LessWrong Team Was Selling Dollars For 86 Cents”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/24

You know what's sweeter than free money? Free money that you take from an organization of smart people who love prediction markets and having good values, by being better at prediction markets and values than they are. Sadly, you can no longer turn this into actual U.S. legal tender. You can, however, still turn it into mana and bragging points. The Best Of LessWrong Manifold Markets Here's the setup. Once a year, LessWrong picks ~50 posts from two years ago to be the Best Of posts. This is called

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8:24

NATO is dangerously unaware of its military...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/24

NATO faces its gravest military disadvantage since 1949, as the balance of power has shifted decisively toward its adversaries in the Era of Drone Warfare. The speed and scale of NATO's relative military decline represents the most dramatic power shift since World War II—and the alliance appears dangerously unaware of its new vulnerability NATO doctrine is obsolete. The Pax Americana is coming to its end. Failure to defeat Houthi Rebels: The US Navy's struggles against the Houthis' low-cost drone

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5:17

Inkhaven Retrospective

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/24

Here I am on the plane on the way home from Inkhaven. Huge thanks to Ben Pace and the other organizers for inviting me. Lighthaven is a delightful venue and there sure are some brilliant writers taking part in this — both contributing writers and participants. With 40 posts published per day by participants (not counting those by organizers and contributing writers) it feels impossible to highlight samples of them. Fortunately that's been done for me: the Inkhaven spotlight. And just to

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2:53

“Stop Applying And Get To Work” by plex

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/23

TL;DR: Figure out what needs doing and do it, don't wait on approval from fellowships or jobs. If you... Have short timelines Have been struggling to get into a position in AI safety Are able to self-motivate your efforts Have a sufficient financial safety net ... I would recommend changing your personal strategy entirely. I started my full-time AI safety career transitioning process in March 2025. For the first 7 months or so, I heavily prioritized applying for jobs and fellowships. But like for

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6:13

Show Review: Masquerade

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/23

Earlier this month, I was pretty desperately feeling the need for a vacation. So after a little googling, I booked a flight to New York city, a hotel, and four nights worth of tickets to a new immersive theater show called Masquerade. Background: “Standard” Immersive Theater To convey Masquerade, I find it easiest to compare against standard immersive theater. It's weird to talk about “standard” immersive theater, because the standard is not that old and has not applied to that many shows at this

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