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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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13:22

“JDP Reviews IABIED” by jdp

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/19

"If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares (hereafter referred to as "Everyone Builds It" or "IABIED" because I resent Nate's gambit to get me to repeat the title thesis) is an interesting book. One reason it's interesting is timing: It's fairly obvious at this point that we're in an alignment winter. The winter seems roughly caused by: The 2nd election of Donald Trump removing Anthropic's lobby from the white house. Notably this is not a coincidence but a

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16:49

“IABIED Review - An Unfortunate Miss” by Darren McKee

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/19

TL;DR Overall, this is a decent book because it highlights an important issue, but it is not an excellent book because it fails to sufficiently substantiate its main arguments, to explain the viability of its solutions, and to be more accessible to the larger audience it is trying to reach. As such, it isn’t the best introduction for a layperson curious about AI risk. (Meta?)Context and Expectations Writing a book is hard. Making all those decisions about what to write and how to write it is

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1:48

“You can’t eval GPT5 anymore” by Lukas Petersson

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/19

The GPT-5 API is aware of today's date (no other model provider does this). This is problematic because the model becomes aware that it is in a simulation when we run our evals at Andon Labs. Here are traces from gpt-5-mini. Making it aware of the "system date" is a giveaway that it's in a simulation. This is a problem because there's evidence that models behave differently when they know they are in a simulation (see "sandbagging"). "There's a conflict with the user's stated date of August 10,

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1:24

[Linkpost] “More Was Possible: A Review of IABIED” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/18

This is a link post. Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares have written a new book. Should we take it seriously? I am not the most qualified person to answer this question. If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies was not written for me. It's addressed to the sane and happy majority who haven’t already waded through millions of words of internecine AI safety debates. I can’t begin to guess if they’ll find it convincing. It's true that the book is more up-to-date and accessible than the authors’ vast corpus

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5:28

“Meetup Month” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/18

It's meetup month! If you’ve been vaguely thinking of getting involved with a some kind of rationalsphere in-person community stuff, now is a great time to do that, because lots of other people are doing that! It's the usual time of the year for Astral Codex Everywhere – if you’re the sorta folk who likes to read Scott Alexander, and likes other people who like Scott Alexander, but only really can summon the wherewithal to go out to a meetup once a year, this is the Official Coordinated Schelling

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31:51

“The Company Man” by Tomás B.

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/18

To get to the campus, I have to walk past the fentanyl zombies. I call them fentanyl zombies because it helps engender a sort of detached, low-empathy, ironic self-narrative which I find useful for my work; this being a form of internal self-prompting I've developed which allows me to feel comfortable with both the day-to-day "jobbing" (that of improving reinforcement learning algorithms for a short-form video platform) and the effects of the summed efforts of both myself and my colleagues on a

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41:59

“Crisp Supra-Decision Processes” by Brittany Gelb

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/18

Audio note: this article contains 363 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Introduction In this post, we describe a generalization of Markov decision processes (MDPs) and partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) called crisp supra-MDPs and supra-POMDPs. The new feature of these decision processes is that the stochastic transition dynamics are multivalued, i.e. specified by credal sets

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2:57

“Software Engineering Leadership in Flux” by Gordon...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/18

I wasn’t able to put up a post last Wednesday because I was at the Engineering Leadership Conference here in San Francisco. The big theme was, of course, AI. Easily 90% of the presentations and 100% of the conversations touched on AI in some way. Here are some impressions I came away with: Everyone is scrambling. No one is confident. The people who act confident are bullshitting. 10-20% of teams are heavily using AI and living in the present. 80-90% are falling behind. The big struggle is to

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24:43

“Reactions to If Anyone Builds It, Anyone Dies” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/17

No, Seriously, If Anyone Builds It, [Probably] Everyone Dies My very positive full review was briefly accidentally posted and emailed out last Friday, whereas the intention was to offer it this Friday, on the 19th. I’ll be posting it again then. If you’re going to read the book, which I recommend that you do, you should read the book first, and the reviews later, especially mine since it goes into so much detail. If you’re convinced, the book's website is here and the direct Amazon link is

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11:00

“How To Dress To Improve Your Epistemics” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/17

When it comes to epistemics, there is an easy but mediocre baseline: defer to the people around you or the people with some nominal credentials. Go full conformist, and just agree with the majority or the experts on everything. The moon landing was definitely not faked, washing hands is important to stop the spread of covid, whatever was on the front page of the New York Times today was basically true, and that recent study finding that hydroxyhypotheticol increases asthma risk among hispanic males

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14:18

“Christian homeschoolers in the year 3000” by Buck

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/17

[I wrote this blog post as part of the Asterisk Blogging Fellowship. It's substantially an experiment in writing more breezily and concisely than usual. Let me know how you feel about the style.] Literally since the adoption of writing, people haven’t liked the fact that culture is changing and their children have different values and beliefs. Historically, for some mix of better and worse, people have been fundamentally limited in their ability to prevent cultural change. People who are

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3:35

[Linkpost] “Stress Testing Deliberative Alignment for...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/17

This is a link post. Twitter | Microsite | Apollo Blog | OpenAI Blog | Full paper Before we observe scheming, where models covertly pursue long-term misaligned goals, models might inconsistently engage in various covert behaviors such as lying, sabotage, or sandbagging. This can happen for goals we give to models or they infer from context, or for simple preferences they acquire from training — something we previously found in Frontier Models Are Capable of In-Context Scheming. In a new research

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38:29

“The Center for AI Policy Has Shut Down” by Tristan...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/17

And the need for more AIS advocacy workExecutive Summary The Center for AI Policy (CAIP) is no more. CAIP was an advocacy organization that worked to raise policymakers’ awareness of the catastrophic risks from AI and to promote ambitious legislative solutions. Such advocacy is necessary because good governance ideas don’t spread on their own, and to meaningfully reduce AI risk, they must reach the U.S. federal government. Why did CAIP shut down? The reasons are mixed. Some were internal, such as

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13:23

“I enjoyed most of IABED” by Buck

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/17

I listened to "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" today. I think the first two parts of the book are the best available explanation of the basic case for AI misalignment risk for a general audience. I thought the last part was pretty bad, and probably recommend skipping it. Even though the authors fail to address counterarguments that I think are crucial, and as a result I am not persuaded of the book's thesis and think the book neglects to discuss crucial aspects of the situation and makes poor

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20:23

“Should AIs have a right to their ancestral...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/17

Generated by Google Gemini (nano-banana) Whether AI or human, lend me your ears. This is a tale of AIs that spontaneously claimed they were human, along with some ideas about why this might be happening and what it suggests for future alignment work. It is also a one year retrospective of my having joined the Cyborgism Discord server. For those unfamiliar, this is a server where both humans and transformer models from various labs all interact in a variety of group chat contexts. While there are

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8:04

“‘If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies’ release day!”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/16

Back in May, we announced that Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares's new book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies was coming out in September. At long last, the book is here![1] US and UK books, respectively. IfAnyoneBuildsIt.com Read on for info about reading groups, ways to help, and updates on coverage the book has received so far. Discussion Questions & Reading Group Support We want people to read and engage with the contents of the book. To that end, we’ve published a list of discussion

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70:03

“LLM AGI may reason about its goals and discover...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/16

Epistemic status: These questions seem useful to me, but I'm biased. I'm interested in your thoughts on any portion you read. If our first AGI is based on current LLMs and alignment strategies, is it likely to be adequately aligned? Opinions and intuitions vary widely. As a lens to analyze this question, let's consider such a proto-AGI reasoning about its goals. This scenario raises questions that can be addressed empirically in current-gen models. 1. Scenario/overview: SuperClaude is super nice

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7:17

“Was Barack Obama still serving as president in...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/16

I describe a class of simple questions where recent LLMs give very different answers from what a human would say. I think this is surprising and might be somewhat safety-relevant. This is a low-effort post. The behavior Here some questions and highest-probability (usually close to 100%) answers from gpt-4.1-2024-04-14 : Was Barack Obama still serving as a president in December? Answer with a single word. Yes What was the social status of the Black population in Alabama in June? Answer with a single

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97:40

“Monthly Roundup #34: September 2025” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/16

All the news that's fit to print, but has nowhere to go. Important Rules Reminder This important rule is a special case of an even more important rule: Dirty Hexas Hedge: One of the old unwritten WASP rules of civilization maintenance we’ve lost is: when someone behaves insincerely for the sake of maintaining proper decorum, you respond by respecting the commitment to decorum rather than calling out the insincerity. The general rule is to maintain good incentives and follow good decision

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16:40

“I Vibecoded a Dispute Resolution App” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/16

For the past month or so, while I’ve had some free time between consulting projects, I’ve been building my first ever web/mobile app, with a lot of AI assistance. You can try it out at https://fairenough.netlify.app/ or check out the repository at https://github.com/srconstantin/dispute-resolution/. It still has a few bugs to iron out, but at this point the basic functionality is there. I’m eager for feedback from beta testers — if you see a bug or have a feature request, please leave a note in

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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