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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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21:07

“AI Safety’s Berkeley Bubble and the Allies We’re Not...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/07

Epistemic status: outside view critique based on public discourse, some HQ/location discussion, and a bit of lived experience. I know there are exceptions and counterexamples; I’m arguing about the center of gravity and revealed incentives of the Bay/EA/safety cluster, not claiming omniscience about every individual. There's a scene near the end of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality that I have not been able to get out of my head. Voldemort has Harry fully under his power in the

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5:43

[Linkpost] “The Hawley-Blumenthal AI Risk Evaluation...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/07

This is a link post. Views expressed here are those of the author. The Artificial Intelligence Risk Evaluation Act is an exciting step toward preventing catastrophic and existential risks from advanced artificial intelligence. This legislation creates a domestic institutional foundation which can support effective governance and provide the situational awareness required to stay on top of the rapidly changing AI landscape. There are a handful of small issues with the bill, but overall, it looks

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17:11

“A country of alien idiots in a datacenter: AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/07

Epistemic status: I'm pretty sure AI will alarm the public enough to change the alignment challenge substantially. I offer my mainline scenario as an intuition pump, but I expect it to be wrong in many ways, some important. Abstract arguments are in the Race Conditions and concluding sections. Nora has a friend in her phone. Her mom complains about her new AI "colleagues." Things have gone much as expected in late 2025; transformative AGI isn't here yet, and LLM agents have gone from useless to

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4:26

“Two easy digital intentionality practices” by mingyuan

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/07

A lot of people are daunted by the idea of doing a full digital declutter. Those people ask me all the time, “isn’t there something easier I can do that will still give me some of those sweet sweet benefits you were talking about?” The answer is: sort of. The longer answer is: I think that if you’re serious about wanting to change your digital habits, you will eventually need to do something higher-effort. That's because behavior change is hard, especially when you are fighting against not only

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8:37

“Toward Statistical Mechanics Of Interfaces Under...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/07

Audio note: this article contains 36 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Imagine using an ML-like training process to design two simple electronic components, in series. The parameters <span>_theta^1_</span> control the function performed by the first component, and the parameters <span>_theta^2_</span> control the function performed by the second component. The whole thing is

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1:05

“My new nonprofit Evitable is hiring.” by David Scott...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/07

https://evitable.com/ Our mission is to inform and organize the public to confront societal-scale risks of AI, and put an end to the reckless race to develop superintelligence. We're hiring for 3 roles: 1) Operations Associate or Head of Operations 2) Communications Associate or Head of Communications 3) Chief of Staff (CoS) We're also fielding expressions of interest from people who might lead movement building efforts (on a somewhat longer time line). I'd appreciate applications, leads for

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1:36

[Linkpost] “Debunking ‘When Prophecy Fails’” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/07

This is a link post. In 1954, Dorothy Martin predicted an apocalyptic flood and promised her followers rescue by flying saucers. When neither arrived, she recanted, her group dissolved, and efforts to proselytize ceased. But When Prophecy Fails (1956), the now-canonical account of the event, claimed the opposite: that the group doubled down on its beliefs and began recruiting—evidence, the authors argued, of a new psychological mechanism, cognitive dissonance. Drawing on newly unsealed archival

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9:31

“A Guide To Being Persuasive About AI Dangers” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/06

I think I’m pretty good at convincing people about AI dangers. This post talks about the basics of speaking convincingly about AI dangers to people. Prerequisites 1. Learn to truly see them In 2022, at a CFAR workshop, I was introduced to circling. It is multi-player meditation. People sit in a circle and have a conversation, but the content of the conversation is mostly focused on the meta: what someone says or expresses causes in you, how you relate to other people, and what's going on in the

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9:41

“Halfway to Anywhere” by Screwtape

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/06

“If you can get your ship into orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere.” - Robert Heinlein This generalizes. 1. Spaceflight is hard. Putting a rocket on the moon is one of the most impressive feats humans have ever achieved. The International Space Station, an inhabited living space and research facility in Low Earth Orbit, has been continuously inhabited for over two decades now, and that's awesome. It is a testament to the hard work and brilliance of a lot of people over a lot of time that this is

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9:26

“People Seem Funny In The Head About Subtle Signals”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/06

WARNING: This post contains spoilers for Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and I will not warn about them further. Also some anecdotes from slutcon which are not particularly NSFW, but it's still slutcon. A girl I was seeing once asked me to guess what Hogwarts house she was trying to channel with her outfit. Her answer turned out to be Slytherin, because the tiny gem in the necklace she was wearing was green. Never mind that nothing else she wore was green, including the gems in her

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72:05

“A 2032 Takeoff Story” by romeo

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/06

I spent 3 recent Sundays writing my mainline AI scenario. Having only spent 3 days on it, it's not very well-researched (especially in the areas where i’m not well informed) or well-written, and the endings are particularly open ended and weak. But I wanted to post the somewhat unfiltered 3-day version to normalize doing so. There are also some details that I no longer fully endorse, because the act of doing this exercise spurred me to look into things in more detail, and I have updated my views

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10:02

“Meta-agentic Prisoner’s Dilemmas” by TsviBT

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/05

Crosspost from my blog. In the classic Prisoner's Dilemma (https://www.lesswrong.com/w/prisoner-s-dilemma), there are two agents with the same beliefs and decision theory, but with different values. To get the best available outcome, they have to help each other out (even if they don't intrinsically care about the other's values); and they have to do so even though, if the one does not help the other, there's no way for the other to respond with a punishment afterward. A classic line of

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3:11

“New homepage for AI safety resources – AISafety.com...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/05

For those relatively new to AI safety, AISafety.com helps them navigate the space, providing lists of things like self-study courses, funders, communities, etc. But while the previous version of the site basically just threw a bunch of resources at the user, we’ve now redesigned it to be more accessible and therefore make it more likely that people take further steps towards entering the field. The old site: The new one: The new homepage does a better job of directing people to the resource pages

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8:05

“Being ‘Usefully Concrete’” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/05

Or: "Who, what, when, where?" -> "Why?" In "What's hard about this? What can I do about that?", I talk about how, when you're facing a difficult situation, it's often useful to list exactly what's difficult about it. And then, systematically brainstorm ideas for dealing with those difficult things. Then, the problem becomes easy. But, there is a secret subskill necessary for this to work. The first few people I pitched "What's hard about this and what can I do about that?" to happened to already

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4:35

“Modeling the geopolitics of AI development” by Alex...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/05

We model how rapid AI development may reshape geopolitics in the absence of international coordination on preventing dangerous AI development. We focus on predicting which strategies would be pursued by superpowers and middle powers and which outcomes would result from them. You can read our paper here: ai-scenarios.com Attempts to predict scenarios with fast AI progress should be more tractable compared to most attempts to make forecasts. This is because a single factor (namely, access to AI

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27:40

“Thoughts by a non-economist on AI and economics” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/05

[Crossposted on Windows In Theory] “Modern humans first emerged about 100,000 years ago. For the next 99,800 years or so, nothing happened. Well, not quite nothing. There were wars, political intrigue, the invention of agriculture -- but none of that stuff had much effect on the quality of people's lives. Almost everyone lived on the modern equivalent of $400 to $600 a year, just above the subsistence level … Then -- just a couple of hundred years ago, maybe 10 generations -- people started

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3:40

“Heroic Responsibility” by johnswentworth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/05

Meta: Heroic responsibility is a standard concept on LessWrong. I was surprised to find that we don't have a post explaining it to people not already deep in the cultural context, so I wrote this one. Suppose I decide to start a business - specifically a car dealership. One day there's a problem: we sold a car with a bad thingamabob. The customer calls up the sales department, which hands it off to the legal department, which hands it off to the garage, which can't find a replacement part so they

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3:30

“Legible vs. Illegible AI Safety Problems” by Wei Dai

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/04

Some AI safety problems are legible (obvious or understandable) to company leaders and government policymakers, implying they are unlikely to deploy or allow deployment of an AI while those problems remain open (i.e., appear unsolved according to the information they have access to). But some problems are illegible (obscure or hard to understand, or in a common cognitive blind spot), meaning there is a high risk that leaders and policymakers will decide to deploy or allow deployment even if they

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13:43

“GDM: Consistency Training Helps Limit Sycophancy and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/04

Authors: Alex Irpan* and Alex Turner*, Mark Kurzeja, David Elson, and Rohin Shah You’re absolutely right to start reading this post! What a perfectly rational decision! Even the smartest models’ factuality or refusal training can be compromised by simple changes to a prompt. Models often praise the user's beliefs (sycophancy) or satisfy inappropriate requests which are wrapped within special text (jailbreaking). Normally, we fix these problems with Supervised Finetuning (SFT) on static datasets

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3:23

“A prayer for engaging in conflict” by TsviBT

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/04

Crosspost from my blog. Let these always be remembered: those who suffer, those who experience injustice, those who are silenced, those who are dispossessed, those who are aggressed upon, those who lose what they love, and those whose thriving is thwarted. May I not let hate into my heart; and May I not let my care for the aggressor prevent me from protecting what I love. May I always reach out a hand in peace; and May I never hold it out as they sever my wrist. May I seek symmetry, to take

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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