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LessWrong

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technology philosophy

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5:12

“Research Reflections” by abramdemski

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/04

Over the decade I've spent working on AI safety, I've felt an overall trend of divergence; research partnerships starting out with a sense of a common project, then slowly drifting apart over time. It has been frequently said that AI safety is a pre-paradigmatic field. This (with, perhaps, other contributing factors) means researchers have to optimize for their own personal sense of progress, based on their own research taste. In my experience, the tails come apart; eventually, two researchers are

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1:08

[Linkpost] “I ate bear fat with honey and salt...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/04

This is a link post. Eliezer Yudkowsky did not exactly suggest that you should eat bear fat covered with honey and sprinkled with salt flakes. What he actually said was that an alien, looking from the outside at evolution, would predict that you would want to eat bear fat covered with honey and sprinkled with salt flakes. Still, I decided to buy a jar of bear fat online, and make a treat for the people at Inkhaven. It was surprisingly good. My post discusses how that happened, and a bit about the

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14:19

“The Zen Of Maxent As A Generalization Of Bayes...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/04

Audio note: this article contains 61 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Jaynes’ Widget Problem[1]: How Do We Update On An Expected Value? Mr A manages a widget factory. The factory produces widgets of three colors - red, yellow, green - and part of Mr A's job is to decide how many widgets to paint each color. He wants to match today's color mix to the mix of orders the factory will receive today, so

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7:01

“Comparative advantage & AI” by Simon Lermen

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/03

I was recently saddened to see that Seb Krier – who's a lead on the Google DeepMind governance team – created a simple website apparently endorsing the idea that Ricardian comparative advantage will provide humans with jobs in the time of ASI. The argument that comparative advantage means advanced AI is automatically safe is pretty old and has been addressed multiple times. For the record, I think this is a bad argument, and it's not useful to think about AI risk through comparative advantage.Seb

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57:10

“The Tale of the Top-Tier Intellect” by Eliezer...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/03

Once upon a time in the medium-small town of Skewers, Washington, there lived a 52-year-old man by the name of Mr. Humman, who considered himself a top-tier chess-player. Now, Mr. Humman was not generally considered the strongest player in town; if you asked the other inhabitants of Skewers, most of them would've named Mr. Neumann as their town's chess champion. But Mr. Humman did not see things that way himself. On Humman's theory, he was really quite good at the Ethiopian opening and variation in

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32:07

“Leaving Open Philanthropy, going to Anthropic” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/03

(Audio version, read by the author, here, or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app.) Last Friday was my last day at Open Philanthropy. I’ll be starting a new role at Anthropic in mid-November, helping with the design of Claude's character/constitution/spec. This post reflects on my time at Open Philanthropy, and it goes into more detail about my perspective and intentions with respect to Anthropic – including some of my takes on AI-safety-focused people working at frontier AI

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14:32

“How and why you should make your home smart (it’s...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/03

Your average day starts with an alarm on your phone. Sometimes, you wake up a couple of minutes before it sounds. Sometimes, you find the button to snooze it. Sometimes, you’re already on the phone and it appears as a notification. But when you finally stop it, the lights in your room turn on and you start your day. You walk out of your room. A presence sensor detects your motion, and a bulb in a cute little bamboo lamp from IKEA outside your room lights up. You go downstairs, into the living

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7:24

“Publishing academic papers on transformative AI is a...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/03

I am a professor of economics. Throughout my career, I was mostly working on economic growth theory, and this eventually brought me to the topic of transformative AI / AGI / superintelligence. Nowadays my work focuses mostly on the promises and threats of this emerging disruptive technology. Recently, jointly with Klaus Prettner, we’ve written a paper on “The Economics of p(doom): Scenarios of Existential Risk and Economic Growth in the Age of Transformative AI”. We have presented it at multiple

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15:04

“The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Fiction” by Raelifin

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/03

[Meta: This is Max Harms. I wrote a novel about China and AGI, which comes out today. This essay from my fiction newsletter has been slightly modified for LessWrong.] In the summer of 1983, Ronald Reagan sat down to watch the film War Games, starring Matthew Broderick as a teen hacker. In the movie, Broderick's character accidentally gains access to a military supercomputer with an AI that almost starts World War III.“The only winning move is not to play.” After watching the movie, Reagan, newly

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39:26

“What’s up with Anthropic predicting AGI by early...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/03

As far as I'm aware, Anthropic is the only AI company with official AGI timelines[1]: they expect AGI by early 2027. In their recommendations (from March 2025) to the OSTP for the AI action plan they say: As our CEO Dario Amodei writes in 'Machines of Loving Grace', we expect powerful AI systems will emerge in late 2026 or early 2027. Powerful AI systems will have the following properties: Intellectual capabilities matching or exceeding that of Nobel Prize winners across most

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4:13

“A glimpse of the other side” by mingyuan

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/03

I like to wake up early to watch the sunrise. The sun hits the distant city first, the little sliver of it I can see through the trees. The buildings light up copper against the pale pink sky, and that little sliver is the only bit of saturation in an otherwise grey visual field. Then the sun starts to rise over the hill behind me. My house casts a blue shadow across the street, and a few trees start to get washed in pale gold. The fog burns away. I sit at my window for an hour, and I don’t check

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8:17

“Trying to understand my own cognitive edge” by Wei Dai

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/03

I applaud Eliezer for trying to make himself redundant, and think it's something every intellectually successful person should spend some time and effort on. I've been trying to understand my own "edge" or "moat", or cognitive traits that are responsible for whatever success I've had, in the hope of finding a way to reproduce it in others, but I'm having trouble understanding a part of it, and try to describe my puzzle here. For context, here's an earlier EAF comment explaining my

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8:56

“Erasmus: Social Engineering at Scale” by Martin Sustrik

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/03

Sofia Corradi, a.k.a. Mamma Erasmus (2020) When Sofia Corradi died on October 17th, the press was full of obituaries for the spiritual mother of Erasmus, the European student exchange programme, or, in the words of Umberto Eco, “that thing where a Catalan boy goes to study in Belgium, meets a Flemish girl, falls in love with her, marries her, and starts a European family.” Yet none of the obituaries I’ve seen stressed the most important and interesting aspect of the project: its unprecedented scale

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13:13

“What’s hard about this? What can I do about that?...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/03

Third in a series of short rationality prompts. My opening rationality move is often "What's my goal?". It is closely followed by: "Why is this hard? And, what can I do about that?". If you're busting out deliberate "rationality" tools (instead of running on intuition or copying your neighbors), something about your situation is probably difficult. It's often useful to explicitly enumerate "What's hard about this?", and list the difficulties accurately, and comprehensively[1], such that if you

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11:09

“Lack of Social Grace is a Lack of Skill” by Screwtape

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/03

1. I have claimed that one of the fundamental questions of rationality is “what am I about to do and what will happen next?” One of the domains I ask this question the most is in social situations. There are a great many skills in the world. If I had the time and resources to do so, I’d want to master all of them. Wilderness survival, automotive repair, the Japanese language, calculus, heart surgery, French cooking, sailing, underwater basket weaving, architecture, Mexican cooking, functional

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67:27

“Ilya Sutskever Deposition Transcript” by anaguma

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/03

Below is the a transcript of the recent deposition of Ilya Sutskever on his time at OpenAI and the firing of Sam Altman. I'm posting it here in plain text so that it is easier to read and discuss. UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT NORTHERN DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA OAKLAND DIVISION ELON MUSK, et al., Plaintiffs, v. SAMUEL ALTMAN, et al., Defendants. Case No. 4:24-cv-04722-YGR VIDEOTAPED DEPOSITION OF ILYA SUTSKEVER San Francisco, California Wednesday, October 1, 2025 ======== PAGE 128 ======== ATTORNEY

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10:38

“Halfhaven halftime” by Viliam

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/03

Halfhaven is a virtual blogger camp, an online alternative to Inkhaven Residency. The rules are simple: every day post max 1 article with min 500 words (or equivalent effort) try to get 30 by the end of November (but there are no hard lines) The invitation links keep expiring, the current one is: https://discord.gg/jrJPR3h6 If you wanted to join during November, but you couldn't join because you didn't have the link, I apologize; I was on a vacation without internet. If you published your articles

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3:48

“A toy model of corrigibility” by cousin_it

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/03

This is just a simple idea that came to me, maybe other people found it earlier, I'm not sure. Imagine two people, Alice and Bob, wandering around London. Bob's goal is to get to the Tower Bridge. When he gets there, he'll get a money prize proportional to the time remaining until midnight, multiplied by X pounds per minute. He's also carrying a radio receiver. Alice is also walking around, doing some chores of her own which we don't need to be concerned with. She is carrying a radio transmitter

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11:32

“Human Values ≠ Goodness” by johnswentworth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/02

There is a temptation to simply define Goodness as Human Values, or vice versa. Alas, we do not get to choose the definitions of commonly used words; our attempted definitions will simply be wrong. Unless we stick to mathematics, we will end up sneaking in intuitions which do not follow from our so-called definitions, and thereby mislead ourselves. People who claim that they use some standard word or phrase according to their own definition are, in nearly all cases outside of mathematics, wrong

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11:09

“Reflections on 4 years of meta-honesty” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/02

Honesty is quite powerful in many cases -- if you have a reputation for being honest, people will trust you more and your words will have more weight (or so the argument goes). Unfortunately, being extremely honest all the time is also pretty difficult -- what happens when the Nazis come knocking and ask if you have jews in the basement? Or when your girlfriend asks you if this dress makes her look fat? (Or so the argument goes) Meta-honesty is a proposed solution to these problems. The gist is you

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