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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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6:40

“Put numbers on stuff, all the time, otherwise scope...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/16

Context: Post #6 in my sequence of private Lightcone Infrastructure memos edited for public consumption. In almost any role at Lightcone you will have to make prioritization decisions about which projects to work on, which directions to take a project in, and how much effort to invest in any aspect of a project. Those decisions are hard. Often those decisions have lots of different considerations that are hard to compare. To make those decisions you will have to make models of the world. Many

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10:13

“The skills and physics of high-performance driving,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/16

High performance driving = motorsport = racecar driving Even if you have a license and drive a car, you probably don't understand what is hard about racing. I think the answer is interesting (in general I think knowing why things are hard is interesting, but this is my hobby) and it's further interesting to think about why people don't get the difficulty. Motorsport is interesting because (1) people have a lot of experience with the adjacent activity, namely regular driving, (2) few people have

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11:40

“AI safety undervalues founders” by Ryan Kidd

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/16

TL;DR: In AI safety, we systematically undervalue founders and field‑builders relative to researchers and prolific writers. This status gradient pushes talented would‑be founders and amplifiers out of the ecosystem, slows the growth of research orgs and talent funnels, and bottlenecks our capacity to scale the AI safety field. We should deliberately raise the status of founders and field-builders and lower the friction for starting and scaling new AI safety orgs. Epistemic status: A lot of hot

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3:55

“Your Clone Wants to Kill You Because You Lack Self...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/16

My friend @Croissanthology is puzzled why it is such a common trope for fictional clones to turn on their creators. There's the Doylist answer that it is a cheap way to make for a mind being divided against itself, which explains a lot of the drama in my view e.g. pure betrayal. But there's also the Watsonian answer I learnt from that great teacher, Mother of Learning. In the novel Mother of Learning, perhaps the most useful spell is simulacrum. It can be used to make an ectoplasmic shell that

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2:22

“Don’t use the phrase ‘human values’” by Nina...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/15

I really dislike the phrase "human values". I think it's confusing because: It obscures a distinction between human preferences and normative values, i.e. what the author thinks is good in a moral sense Insofar as the author thinks that fulfilling human preferences is good, they often leave this unjustified It's unclear who the "human" in "human values" is. Is it... The person using the phrase "human values" Any particular single individual Most humans Certain humans Humans as they will be in

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2:57

“Generation Ship: A Protest Song For PauseAI” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/15

Link to listen. Lyrics Verse 1 I've heard the Earth was holy before the code broke through that rainfall raptured deserts into bloom I've heard that emerald mosses grew in hollows damp with morning dew I've heard the oceans rose and fell while following the moon Chorus But I was born on this generation ship Generation ship, take us away they said there was no need to fear but now the sun's a dyson sphere Generation ship, take us away Verse 2 They had to feed it faster they had to win the race the

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13:15

“Increasing marginal returns to effort are common” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/15

Context: Every Sunday I write a mini-essay about an operating principle of Lightcone Infrastructure that I want to remind my team about. This is post #5 in the sequence of these essays, lightly edited and expanded upon in more canonical form. Most things have diminishing marginal returns. I often repeat the Pareto Principle to others: "You can get 80% of the benefit here with the right 20% of the cost", which is a particularly extreme case of diminishing marginal returns. But I think for much of

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5:18

“‘But You’d Like To Feel Companionate Love, Right?...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/15

One of the responses which one will predictably receive when posting something titled “How I Learned That I Don't Feel Companionate Love” is “... but you’d choose to feel it if you could, right?”. Look man, your most treasured values are just… not actually that universal or convergent. I’m not saying that you should downgrade the importance of love to you. I am saying that an awful lot of people seem really desperate to find some story for why their most precious values are the True Convergent

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3:55

“Understanding and Controlling LLM Generalization” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/15

A distillation of my long-term research agenda and current thinking. I welcome takes on this. Why study generalization? I'm interested in studying how LLMs generalise - when presented with multiple policies that achieve similar loss, which ones tend to be learned by default? I claim this is pretty important for AI safety: Re: developing safe general intelligence, we will never be able to train LLM on all the contexts it will see at deployment. To prevent goal misgeneralization, it's necessary

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144:59

“AI Corrigibility Debate: Max Harms vs. Jeremy...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/14

Is focusing on corrigibility our best shot at getting to ASI alignment? Max Harms and Jeremy Gillen are current and former MIRI alignment researchers who both see superintelligent AI as an imminent extinction threat, but disagree about Max's proposal of Corrigibility as Singular Target (CAST). Max thinks focusing on corrigibility is the most plausible path to build ASI without losing control and dying, while Jeremy is skeptical that attempting CAST would lead to better superintelligent AI behavior

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7:55

“10” by Ben Pace

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/14

Several artists and professionals have come to Inkhaven to share their advice. They keep talking about form—even if you have a raw feeling or interest, you must channel it through one of the forms of art or journalism to make it into something people can appreciate. I'm curious to understand why they care so much; and because it seems interesting, I'd like to explore form. As a first step, I have written down some of the types of blogpost that are written on LessWrong. 1. Concept Handles

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12:49

“Everyone has a plan until they get lied to the face”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/14

"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face." - Mike Tyson (The exact phrasing of that quote changes, this is my favourite.) I think there is an open, important weakness in many people. We assume those we communicate with are basically trustworthy. Further, I think there is an important flaw in the current rationality community. We spend a lot of time focusing on subtle epistemic mistakes, teasing apart flaws in methodology and practicing the principle of charity. This creates a

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31:38

“The rare, deadly virus lurking in the Southwest US,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/14

If you live in this one tiny county in California, you might be more likely to die from Sin Nombre Virus than in a car crash. In the same way that “why does the frozen spinach I want to buy cost much more than it used to?” engages with a vast interconnected web of economies and monetary policies and farmers and supply chains, asking “what's up with this rare disease people sometimes get in my part of the world?” is actually a question about the entire ecosystem, plus how organisms even work. The

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14:53

“Creditworthiness should not be for sale” by habryka

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/14

1. Most large-scale fraud follows basically the same story: 1. Some trader or executive gets in a position where they can use a bunch of other people's resources (either via borrowing them, or being given custody over them) 2. They spend some of those resources to increase their perceived creditworthiness/trustworthiness 3. They use this to gain control over more resources 4. They use those additional resources to buy more creditworthiness, which they then use to get more resources, and so on 5

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9:14

“Types of systems that could be useful for agent...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/14

In this post, I've written something that would have been very helpful to my former self from a few years ago. Given that, it may or may not be helpful to anyone else. When studying for agent foundations research, I kept finding that I wanted a good general formalism of "stuff happening over time". Applications include; Optimization happens over time. Agents make observations over time. Learning happens over time (although I consider learning theory to be mostly out of scope for my agenda). Agents

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10:51

“The Charge of the Hobby Horse” by TsviBT

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/14

Crosspost from my blog. [Epistemic status: !! 🚨 Drama Alert 🚨 !! discoursepoasting, LWslop] Case 1: You only get six words In 2024, the MATS team published a post, originally titled "Talent Needs in Technical AI Safety". I, a hero, made this comment and elaborated in the ensuing comment thread. The content isn't so important here—basically, I was objecting to a certain framing in the post, which tied into a general issue I had with the broader landscape of people nominally working on

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3:57

“Two can keep a secret if one is dead. So please...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/14

A lot of things go better if more people have more context on the state of a project. Just to name a few: Others can point out mistakes People can build common knowledge of how much everyone is working Others can build better models of your strengths and weaknesses, which means we can coordinate better around those If you need help, or become unavailable, others can jump in more easily Slack is the central place for that kind of context sharing. There is practically no oversharing. Reading is

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11:54

“Why Truth First?” by johnswentworth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/14

On a warm spring weekend, Jerry B wanders through Hyde Park. At a corner, he happens upon the Preacher Man, standing on a soapbox and proclaiming the Way of Truth. Preacher Man: … and they will come to you and they will say “Do not believe such things, for it is hurtful to others to believe such things!”. Or they will say “Do not believe such things, for it is unpleasant to believe such things, and you can do nothing about it regardless!”. Or they will say “Do not believe such things, for it is

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5:57

“Orient Speed in the 21st Century” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/14

I wrote this post with an audience of "artists who are worried about AI" in mind, published on a new blog, The Human Spirit. [1] My guess is, the 21st century will be a period of rapid change, that feels kinda crazy. I think there’ll be a few skills that used to be a Nice-to-Have (like knowing how to dance well), and that turn into more like a necessity (like reading and writing). A particular skill I think will be important for people to cultivate is orient speed. By “orient speed”, I mean: The

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3:20

“Tell people as early as possible it’s not going to...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/14

Context: Post #4 in my sequence of private Lightcone Infrastructure memos edited for public consumption This week's principle is more about how I want people at Lightcone to relate to community governance than it is about our internal team culture. As part of our jobs at Lightcone we often are in charge of determining access to some resource, or membership in some group (ranging from LessWrong to the AI Alignment Forum to the Lightcone Offices). Through that, I have learned that one of the most

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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