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LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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7:18

“Checking in on AI-2027” by Baybar

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/02

TLDR: AI-2027's specific predictions for August 2025 appear to have happened in September of 2025. The predictions were accurate, if a tad late, but they are late by weeks, not months. Reading AI-2027 was the first thing that viscerally conveyed to me how urgent and dangerous advances in AI technology might be over the next few years. Six months after AI-2027's release, I decided to check in and see how the predictions are holding up so far, what seems like is happening faster than expected, and

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2:56

[Linkpost] “No, That’s Not What the Flight Costs” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/02

This is a link post. It turns out that airlines largely do not make their from from selling tickets. Instead, airlines are primarily in the business of selling credit card rewards. Rewards programs are intangible assets, so the financials statements of major airlines do not generally give valuations for them. However, there are a couple public sources for how valuable these rewards programs are: During COVID, many US major airlines applied for loans under the CARES Act. Some of them used their

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22:00

“Nice-ish, smooth takeoff (with imperfect safeguards)...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/02

I wrote my recent Accelerando post to mostly stand on it's own as a takeoff scenario. But, the reason it's on my mind is that, if I imagine being very optimistic about how a smooth AI takeoff goes, but where an early step wasn't "fully solve the unbounded alignment problem, and then end up with extremely robust safeguards[1]"... ...then my current guess is that Reasonably Nice Smooth Takeoff still results in all or at least most biological humans dying (or, "dying out", or at best,

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3:14

“ ” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/02

There's a bit of an implicit norm that has accumulated over the past few years, but inconsistently, and AFAICT no one has publicly argued for it. Sometimes, when arguing online, you will notice yourself going into a mode that is more like a rant than like careful arguing. Or, you know is not really passing your interlocutor's Intellectual Turing Test. Or, you know is psychologizing someone, and there's decent odds you're wrong (perhaps only in a subtle way that isn't core to your point but is

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9:12

“AI Safety Research Futarchy: Using Prediction...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/02

Summary Geodesic is going to use prediction markets to select their projects for MARS 4.0 and we need your help to make the markets run efficiently! Please read through the proposals, and then trade on the markets for the proposals you think might succeed or fail. We intend to choose the best proposals in two weeks! Full proposals are in Google doc linked below, links to markets are in the section "The Projects". Google Doc (similar content to this post + full proposal overviews). Manifold post

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4:04

“Some biology related things I found interesting” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/02

Here are some things I learned over the last year that past me would have found somewhat non-obvious or that were surprising to me at the time: New genes are usually not evolved from scratch one basepair at a time. The first evolutionary biology textbook that I picked up after learning that textbooks are the fast way to learn talked about some basic math for how traits spread through a population once they evolve, depending on their fitness both in asexual and sexual reproduction

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1:14

[Linkpost] “Lectures on statistical learning theory...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/02

This is a link post. This is a recorded series of lectures and homework assignments discussions on the topic of statistical learning theory, co-organized by Gergely Szucs (@Yegreg) and Alex Flint (@Alex Flint). The homework assignments are available here, and lecture notes are available here. The lectures are intended for those who want to do research on the learning-theoretic agenda and need to catch-up on the necessary background knowledge. As complementary resources, consider looking into my MATS

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12:56

“‘Pessimization’ Is just Ordinary Failure” by J Bostock

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/01

TL;DR I think "Pessimization" is a bad concept to think about in the case of activist movements. I think most of it can be explained by ordinary failures, and that using pessimization as a concept is worse than just thinking about the ordinary causes of failure on an object level. Pessimization "Perverse Pessimization", says Richard Ngo, is when an organization nominally dedicated to X ends up causing not-X. This is particularly common amongst activist groups according to Richard, and he has a

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4:58

“Halfhaven virtual blogger camp” by Viliam

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/01

If you are a blogger, or an aspiring blogger, and want to improve your skills, you can spend a month in Inkhaven Residency (homepage, Less Wrong post) and keep writing and publishing every day during November 2025. At the end, you will be a great writer! (At least, that is the hypothesis behind the project.) There will also be mentorship from successful bloggers, writing workshops, and feedback. Some of us have a school / job / family / other excuse, and can't simply take a month off. Halfhaven is

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2:50

“The famous survivorship bias image is a ‘loose...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/30

File:Survivorship-bias.svg - Wikimedia Commons A later reprinting of the "unillustrated report" referenced: A_Reprint_Plane_Vulnerability.pdf Even a 20mm autocannon round only has a ~50% chance of destroying a plane on an engine hit, as opposed to the ~100% assumption used for the illustration (I think the flak round statistics were per-fragment-hit and not per-shell)! Weird how few people were suspicious about a 100% loss rate for engine hits to a two-engine plane. Speaking of which, there is no

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38:40

“Ethical Design Patterns” by AnnaSalamon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/30

Related to: Commonsense Good, Creative Good (and my comment); Ethical Injunctions. Epistemic status: I’m fairly sure “ethics” does useful work in building human structures that work. My current explanations of how are wordy and not maximally coherent; I hope you guys help me with that. Introduction It is intractable to write large, good software applications via spaghetti code – but it's comparatively tractable using design patterns (plus coding style, attention to good/bad codesmell, etc.). I’ll

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28:06

“Why Corrigibility is Hard, and Important [IABED...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/30

I worked a bunch on the website for If Anyone Builds Its Online Resources. It went through a lot of revisions in the weeks before launch. There was a particular paragraphs I found important, which I now can't find a link to, and I'm not sure if they got deleted in an edit pass or if they just moved around somewhere I'm failing to search for. It came after a discussion of corrigibility, and how MIRI made a pretty concerted attempt at solving it, which involved bringing in some quite smart people

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8:58

“What SB 53, California’s new AI law, does” by tlevin

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/30

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 53 on September 29. I think it's a pretty great step, though I certainly hope future legislation builds on it. I wrote up my understanding of what the text actually does; I welcome any corrections (and certainly further analysis for what this all means for AI safety)! Very short summary The law requires major AI companies to: Publish a frontier AI frameworkdescribing how the developer “approaches” assessing and mitigating catastrophic risks, defined as

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7:41

“You’re probably overestimating how well you...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/29

I The popular conception of Dunning-Kruger is something along the lines of “some people are too dumb to know they’re dumb, and end up thinking they’re smarter than smart people”. This version is popularized in endless articles and videos, as well as in graphs like the one below.Usually I'd credit the creator of this graph but it seems rude to do that when I'm ragging on them Except that's wrong. II The canonical Dunning-Kruger graph looks like this: Notice that all the dots are in the right order:

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4:29

“If Drexler Is Wrong, He May as Well Be Right” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/29

I sometimes joke darkly on Discord that the machines will grant us a nice retirement tweaked out on meth working in a robotics factory 18 hours a day. I don't actually believe this because I suspect an indifferent AGI will be able to quickly replace industrial civilization; it will just kill us and eat the world with nanobots. But many don't believe that Drexlerian nanotechnology is possible. I am an idiot with little physics knowledge, so possibly this is only interesting from an amplification

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7:25

“AI companies’ policy advocacy (Sep 2025)” by Zach...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/29

Strong regulation is not on the table and all US frontier AI companies oppose it to varying degrees. Weak safety-relevant regulation is happening; some companies say they support and some say they oppose. (Some regulation not relevant to AI safety, often confused, is also happening in the states, and I assume companies oppose it but I don't really pay attention to this.) Companies besides Anthropic support federal preemption of state laws, even without an adequate federal framework. Companies

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10:51

“Guess I Was Wrong About AIxBio Risks” by J Bostock

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/29

I was slightly worried about sociohazards of posting this here, but the cat's already out of the bag on this one: the authors of the paper put it up on BioRXiv and got an article written about them in Nature, as well as getting into a bunch of newspapers and all over twitter. I expect that the marginal audience of LessWrong is much more heavily enriched in people who'll use this information to do good than to do evil. TL;DR: If anyone reading this works in Biosecurity: nucleotide synthesis

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2:59

“I have decided to stop lying to Americans about...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/29

9/11 and the immediate ractions to it has one of the biggest distortion fields of any topic in the English language. There is a polite fiction maintained when any Americans are present that everyone everywhere was sad about the incident. We shake our head, frown, and say that everyone shed a tear when we saw the towers fall on TV. The truth is, there were celebrations around the world. I have talked to multiple Chinese people who were in the US at the time who told me some variant of "I was

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17:59

“Solving the problem of needing to give a talk” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/28

An extended version of this article was given as my keynote speech at the 2025 LessWrong Community Weekend in Berlin. A couple of years ago, I agreed to give a talk on the topic of psychology. I said yes, which of course meant that I now had a problem. Namely, I had promised to give a talk, but I did not have one prepared. (You could also more optimistically call this an opportunity, a challenge, a quest, etc.) So I decided to sit down at my computer, work on my presentation, and then go from the

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14:21

“Transgender Sticker Fallacy” by ymeskhout

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/28

BIRDS! Let's say you’re a zoo architect tasked with designing an enclosure for ostriches, and let's also say that you have no idea what an ostrich is (roll with me here). The potentially six-figure question staring you down is whether to install a ceiling. The dumb solution is to ask “Are ostriches birds?” then, surmising that birds typically fly, construct an elaborate aviary complete with netting and elevated perches. The non-dumb solution is to instead ask “Can ostriches fly?” then skip the

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