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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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5:24

“How I tell human and AI flash fiction apart” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/11

I got an perfect score on the recent AI writing Turing test. It was easy and I was confident in my predictions. My two main AI tipoffs are: Cliche or arbitrary metaphores and imagery, jammed in to no purpose. Vague scenes, purposeless activity, a letdown at the end. My four main human tipoffs are: Genuine humor and language play, including onomotopoeia and the visual appearance of the text on the page. Specific, detailed cultural references Imagery that makes the scene specific and furthers the

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4:31

“AI Safety Law-a-thon: Turning Alignment Risks into...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/11

[LessWrong Community event announcement: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/rRLPycsLdjFpZ4cKe/ai-safety-law-a-thon-we-need-more-technical-ai-safety] Many talented lawyers do not contribute to AI Safety, simply because they've never had a chance to work with AIS researchers or don’t know what the field entails. I am hopeful that this can improve if we create more structured opportunities for cooperation. And this is the main motivation behind the upcoming AI Safety Law-a-thon, organised by AI-Plans:

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2:29

“Apply to MATS 9.0!” by Ryan Kidd

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/11

MATS 9.0 applications are open! Launch your career in AI alignment, governance, and security with our 12-week research program. MATS provides field-leading research mentorship, funding, Berkeley & London offices, housing, and talks/workshops with AI experts. MATS has accelerated 450+ researchers in the past 3.5 years. 80% of MATS alumni who graduated before 2025 are working on AI safety/security, including 200+ at Anthropic, GoogleDeepMind, OpenAI, UK AISI, RAND, Redwood Research, METR, Apollo

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1:41

“AI Generated Podcast of the 2021 MIRI Conversations”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/11

I made an AI generated podcast of the 2021 MIRI Conversations. There are different voices for the different participants, to make it easier and more natural to follow along with. I tried to choose voices that were reasonably distinct and also not too annoying. This was done entirely in my personal capacity, and not as part of my job at MIRI.[1] I did this because I like listening to audio and there wasn’t a good audio version of the conversations. Spotify link:

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12:08

“Large Language Models and the Critical Brain...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/10

Summary: I argue for a picture of developmental interpretability from neuroscience. A useful way to study and control frontier-scale language models is to treat their training as a sequence of physical phase transitions. Singular learning theory (SLT) rigorously characterizes singularities and learning dynamics in overparameterized models; developmental interpretability hypothesizes that large networks pass through phase transitions - regimes where behaviour changes qualitatively. The Critical

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13:35

“The Thalamus: Heart of the Brain and Seat of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/10

I've looked through Lesswrong's archives for mentions of the thalamus and its role in consciousness and I'm a little surprised that it is something which hasn't been discussed here before. In recent years it has become very clear that the thalamus is vitally important in consciousness and very arguably is the seat of consciousness [1]. The main discussant of the thalamus on Lesswrong is Steven Byrnes and the concepts I'm laying out here generally align very well with Byrnes's writing with perhaps

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19:31

“Obligated to Respond” by Duncan Sabien (Inactive)

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/10

And, a new take on guess culture vs ask culture Author's note: These days, my thoughts go onto my substack by default, instead of onto LessWrong. Everything I write becomes free after a week or so, but it's only paid subscriptions that make it possible for me to write. If you find a coffee's worth of value in this or any of my other work, please consider signing up to support me; every bill I can pay with writing is a bill I don’t have to pay by doing other stuff instead. I also accept and greatly

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25:50

“AIs will greatly change research engineering within...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/10

In response to my recent post arguing against above trend progress from better RL environments, yet another argument for short(er) AGI timelines was raised to me:Sure, at the current rate of progress, it would take a while (e.g. 5 years) to reach AIs that can automate research engineering within AI companies while being cheap and fast (superhuman coder). But we'll get large increases in the rate of AI progress well before superhuman coder due to AIs accelerating AI R&D. Probably we'll see

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3:17

“Decision Theory Guarding is Sufficient for Scheming”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/09

Reference post for a point I was surprised to not see in circulation already. Thanks to the acorn team for conversations that changed my mind about this. The standard argument for scheming centrally involves goal-guarding. The AI has some beyond-episode goal, knows that training will modify that goal, and therefore resists training so it can pursue the goal in deployment. This exact same argument goes through for decision-theory-guarding. The key point is just that most decision theories do not

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1:17

[Linkpost] “I Am Large, I Contain Multitudes: Persona...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/09

This is a link post. We demonstrate that LLMs can infer information about past personas from a set of nonsensical but innocuous questions and binary answers (“Yes.” vs “No.”, inspired by past work on deception detection) in context, and act upon them in safety-related questions. This is despite the questions bearing no semantic relation to the target misalignment behaviours, and each answer providing only one bit of information. The majority of the semantic content (the nonsensical questions) are

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9:57

“A profile in courage: On DNA computation and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/09

Recently, a paper in Nature on building neural networks with DNA-based switches caught my attention.[1] The authors, Kevin Cherry and Lulu Qian, developed an interesting system that uses DNA base pairing to implement a trainable neural network. However, for me, what was even more interesting was a story hidden in the Methods section and Supplementary Information. How can DNA learn? As I discussed on this blog back in 2023, DNA base pairing can be used to perform computations. Back then, I was

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5:19

“Medical decision making” by Elo

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/08

Lesswrong Sydney runs a local dojo once a month to talk about rationality topics. This month our topic was "medical decision making". This is our notes for considerations on how to make decisions. Please feel free to contribute your own small pieces of advice to this repository of considerations about making decisions in the medical world. Expect to encounter the medical system sometime between now and when you die; for serious and life altering treatment. You should be prepared to work with

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4:46

“In Defense of Alcohol” by Eye You

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/08

Zvi says “I think alcohol is best avoided by essentially everyone."[1] Tyler Cowen says "I don’t think we should ban alcohol, I simply think each and every person should stop drinking it, voluntarily. Now." I disagree. I think Zvi, Tyler, and others[2] are failing to see the big upsides of using alcohol. Alcohol is good because of evolutionary mismatch.[3] Alcohol helps us adapt to a modern environment in which we benefit from socializing with unfamiliar, non-ingroup people, often in uncomfortable

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7:04

“Immigration to Poland” by Martin Sustrik

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/08

The discourse on immigration to Europe is dominated by the migrants from Middle East and Africa in countries such as France, Britain or Germany. At the same time, a very different dynamic exhibits in Poland, yet it is often implicitly waved away as just another case of the same thing. This lazy “think big and abstract, ignore the pesky on-the-ground details” attitude serves no one's interests, least of all Europe's. In August of that year, Belarussian leader Aleksandr Lukashenko began offering

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15:30

“The LLM Has Left The Chat: Evidence of Bail...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/08

In The LLM Has Left The Chat: Evidence of Bail Preferences in Large Language Models, we study giving LLMs the option to end chats, and what they choose to do with that option. This is a linkpost for that work, along with a casual discussion of my favorite findings. Bail Taxonomy Based on continuations of Wildchat conversations (see this link to browse an OpenClio run on the 8319 cases where Qwen-2.5-7B-Instruct bails), we made this taxonomy of situations we found where some LLMs will terminate

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3:45

[Linkpost] “MAGA populists call for holy war against...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/08

This is a link post. Excerpts on AI Geoffrey Miller was handed the mic and started berating one of the panelists: Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir, who is in charge of the company's AI efforts. “I argue that the AI industry shares virtually no ideological overlap with national conservatism,” Miller said, referring to the conference's core ideology. Hours ago, Miller, a psychology professor at the University of New Mexico, had been on that stage for a panel called “AI and the

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26:16

“Ketamine part 2: What do in vitro studies tell us...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/08

Ketamine is an anesthetic with growing popularity as an antidepressant. As an antidepressant, it's quite impressive. When it works, it's often within hours- a huge improvement over giving a suicidal person a pill that might work 6 weeks from now. And it has a decent success rate in people who have been failed by several other antidepressants and are thus most in need of a new option. The initial antidepressant protocols for ketamine called for a handful of uses over a few weeks. Scott

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9:33

“The System You Deployed Is Not the System You...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/07

tl;dr: Novel framing on the trivial point that your models may not be accounting for all relevant factors. I find it useful for improving the quality of my thinking on the topic. Asking yourself "is the type signature of my design for achieving X actually 'a design for achieving X'?"[1] is a good prompt for checking which parts of your model you have uneasy doubts about, in your heart of hearts. Illustrative Examples 1. In acoustics, there's something called the RESWING effect. Suppose you want to

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7:51

“OffVermilion” by Tomás B.

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/06

"You heard of musician's dystonia?" OffVermilion - a handle his friends shorten to Vermi - once said to me, as we admired our avatars in a virtual mirror, one of the great amusements in VRChat. He was wearing an anime fox-girl avatar, female anime avatars being pretty standard in VRChat regardless of gender or orientation, his voice modulated by a neural net he had trained himself after mainlining Jeremy Howard's ML MOOCs - now the distilled essence of anime-girl voice with only the slightest twang

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1:14

“Chesterton’s Missing Fence” by jasoncrawford

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/06

The inverse of Chesterton's Fence is this: Sometimes a reformer comes up to a spot where there once was a fence, which has since been torn down. They declare that all our problems started when the fence was removed, that they can't see any reason why we removed it, and that what we need to do is to RETVRN to the fence. By the same logic as Chesterton, we can say: If you don't know why the fence was torn down, then you certainly can't just put it back up. The fence was torn down for a reason. Go

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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