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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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142:22

“On Fleshling Safety: A Debate by Klurl and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/27

(23K words; best considered as nonfiction with a fictional-dialogue frame, not a proper short story.) Prologue: Klurl and Trapaucius were members of the machine race. And no ordinary citizens they, but Constructors: licensed, bonded, and insured; proven, experienced, and reputed. Together Klurl and Trapaucius had collaborated on such famed artifices as the Eternal Clock, Silicon Sphere, Wandering Flame, and Diamond Book; and as individuals, both had constructed wonders too numerous to number. At

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6:54

“Brightline is Actually Pretty Dangerous” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/26

Per the Atlantic's A 'Death Train' is Haunting South Florida: According to Federal Railroad Administration data, the Brightline has been involved in at least 185 fatalities, 148 of which were believed not to be suicides, since it began operating, in December 2017. Last year, the train hit and killed 41 people—none of whom, as best as authorities could determine, was attempting to harm themselves. By comparison, the Long Island Rail Road, the busiest commuter line in the country, hit and

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8:43

“Seven-ish Words from My Thought-Language” by Lorxus

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/26

(With thanks to @TsviBT, @Lucie Philippon, and @johnswentworth for encouragement and feedback, among many.) Seven entries from a dictionary that will never exist, even though it should. The words in [brackets] show up with some frequency in my thoughts, and I struggle with English's semantic poverty. Some of them show up in other languages, like Korean or Lojban. Others among them, people I’ve spoken to share in wishing were wider-used words. [untranslatable 1: word-clogged/interference-silent]

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18:15

“Origins and dangers of future AI capability denial”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/25

In rationalist spheres, there's a fairly clear consensus that whatever AI's ultimate impact will be, it is at its core a capable technology that will have very large effects on the world. In the "general public" sphere, things are very different. There's a less clear but real consensus that AI's ultimate impact will be negative, and not much agreement on the capability of AI as a technology. I think it's very plausible that this could go the opposite way of rationalists, into a disbelief in the

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10:56

“Beliefs about formal methods and AI safety” by Quinn

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/25

I appreciate Theodore Ehrenborg's comments. As a wee lad, I heard about mathematical certainty of computer programs. Let's go over what I currently believe and don’t believe. First: what is formal verification Sometimes you get pwned because of the spec-implementation gap. The computer did not do what it should’ve done. Other times, you get pwned by the world-spec gap. The computer wasn’t wrong, your “shoulds” were. Expanding the domain of compiletime knowledge A compiler tells you the problem

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5:28

“Reminder: Morality is unsolved” by Jesper L.

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/25

Here is a game you can play with yourself, or others: a) You have to decide on a moral framework that can be explained in detail, to anyone. b) It will be implemented worldwide tomorrow. c) Tomorrow, every single person on Earth, including you and everyone you know, will also have their lives randomly swapped with someone else. This means that you are operating under the veil of ignorance. You should make sure that the morality you decide on is beneficial whoever you are, once it takes effect

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1:10

[Linkpost] “AI Timelines and Points of no return” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/25

This is a link post. In this essay, I introduce two Points of No Return (PNR): The Hard PNR. The moment where we have AI systems powerful and intelligent enough that they can prevent humanity from turning them off. The Soft PNR. The moment where we have AI systems that we will not want to turn off. For instance, because they are too intertwined with the economy, military systems, geopolitics, or romantic relationships. I believe the Soft PNR is underrated (especially in rationalist communities). I

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5:24

“Musings on Reported Cost of Compute (Oct 2025)” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/25

There are many ways in which costs of compute get reported. A 1 GW datacenter site costs $10-15bn in the infrastructure (buildings, cooling, power), plus $30-35bn in compute hardware (servers, networking, labor), assuming Nvidia GPUs. Useful life of the infrastructure is about 10-15 years, and with debt financing a developer only needs to ensure it's paid off over those 10-15 years, which comes out at $1-2bn per year. For the compute hardware, the useful life is taken as about 5 years, which gives

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1:10

[Linkpost] “LW Reacts pack for Discord/Slack/etc” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/25

This is a link post. Ever wanted to say Scout Mindset to someone on a chat platform, but didn't want to have to type 13 characters? Or wanted your server to have magically better epistemics because of a few images? The LW Reactions Pack is here to help! With 63 images (or 37 for the cut down budget set of good ones if you're limited), we guarantee you will have more reaction options than you started with. Full Pack (63) Important only (37) --- First published: October 24th, 2025

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6:19

“Regardless of X, you can still just sign...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/24

TL;DR: you can still just sign this statement if you agree with it. It still matters, and you can clarify your position in a statement of support (600 characters) next to your name, and you can clarify your actual full position on LW and/or elsewhere. Regardless of X, you can still just sign. (for various values of X...) X= whether you agree with me that safety researchers have a duty to take a public stance. If you agree with the statement and you are working at a lab where some of your coworkers

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5:48

“Plan 1 and Plan 2” by Towards_Keeperhood

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/24

Max Tegmark recently published a post "Which side of the AI safety community are you in?", where he carves the AI safety community into 2 camps: Camp A) "Race to superintelligence safely”: People in this group typically argue that "superintelligence is inevitable because of X”, and it's therefore better that their in-group (their company or country) build it first. X is typically some combination of “Capitalism”, “Molloch”, “lack of regulation” and “China”. Camp B) “Don’t race to

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21:48

“How an AI company CEO could quietly take over the...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/24

Cross-posted from the AI Futures Project Substack. This post outlines a concrete scenario for how takeover by an AI company CEO might go, which I developed during MATS with the AI Futures Project. It represents one plausible story among a few that seem roughly equally likely to me. I’m interested in feedback and discussion. If the future is to hinge on AI, it stands to reason that AI company CEOs are in a good position to usurp power.[1] This didn’t quite happen in our AI 2027 scenarios. In one,

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14:15

“The main way I’ve seen people turn ideologically...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/24

This linkpost is in part a response to @Raemon's comment about why the procedure Raemon did doesn't work in practice to deal with the selection effects I talked about in my last post. So in the last post, I was talking about a selection effect where believers of an argument can come to believe that their idea is true and that their critics are crazy wrong/trolling/dumb, no matter what argument is used. And the believers are half-right, in that their random error swamps any truth signal/evidence for

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18:28

“Should AI Developers Remove Discussion of AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/24

There is some concern that training AI systems on content predicting AI misalignment will hyperstition AI systems into misalignment. This has been discussed previously by a lot of people: Anna Salamon, Alex Turner, the AI Futures Project, Miles Kodama, Gwern, Cleo Nardo, Richard Ngo, Rational Animations, Mark Keavney and others. In this post, I analyze whether AI developers should filter out discussion of AI misalignment from training data. I discuss several details that I don't think have been

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25:20

“Homomorphically encrypted consciousness and its...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/23

I present a step-by-step argument in philosophy of mind. The main conclusion is that it is probably possible for conscious homomorphically encrypted digital minds to exist. This has surprising implications: it demonstrates a case where "mind exceeds physics" (epistemically), which implies the disjunction "mind exceeds reality" or "reality exceeds physics". The main new parts of the discussion consist of (a) an argument that, if digital computers are conscious, so are homomorphically encrypted

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10:46

“Learning to Interpret Weight Differences in Language...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/23

Audio note: this article contains 38 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Paper | Github | Demo Notebook This post is about our recent paper Learning to Interpret Weight Differences in Language Models (Goel et al. Oct. 2025). We introduce a method for training a LoRA adapter that gives a finetuned model the ability to accurately describe the effects of its finetuning.Figure 1: A demonstration of our

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78:50

“Utopiography Interview” by plex

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/23

It serves people well to mostly build towards a good future rather than getting distracted by the shape of utopia, but having a vision of where we want to go can be helpful for both motivation and as a north star for guiding our efforts. Publishing prompted by the ACX grant to generate stories of good things with AI. Opening Vision Utopiography: What would you like it to be like? plex: A large proportion of my value structure is pointed at other people's. I would like many different utopias to

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0:54

[Linkpost] “Statement on Superintelligence - FLI Open...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/23

This is a link post. We call for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence, not lifted before there is broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably, and strong public buy-in. Sign on the main website or Eko[1]. The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 22nd, 2025 Source:

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4:36

“Doomers were right” by Algon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/23

There's an argument I sometimes hear against existential risks, or any other putative change that some are worried about, that goes something like this: 'We've seen time after time that some people will be afraid of any change. They'll say things like "TV will destroy people's ability to read", "coffee shops will destroy the social order","machines will put textile workers out of work". Heck, Socrates argued that books would harm people's ability to memorize things. So many prophets of doom, and

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27:20

“Penny’s Hands” by Tomás B.

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/22

It is a strange thing to love another. I had not had much experience. It was Penny, of course, who I fell for. I suppose everyone fell in love with her a little. She is beautiful. Maybe the most beautiful person any of us had ever seen. Even movie stars are not as beautiful as she. They do not put women such as her in films. It is not realistic. Aphrodite could not star in a romantic comedy. Aphrodite has drama in her dealings with gods but not with men. She looks better, even, than those in

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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