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LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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13:59

“Effective Pizzaism” by Screwtape

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/03

I am an effective pizzaist. Sometimes, I want the world to contain more pizza, and when that happens I want as much good pizza as I can get for as little money as I can spend. I am not going anywhere remotely subtle with that analogy, but it's the best way I can think of to express my personal stance. I. What would it mean to be an effective pizzaist? There's lot of things that prompt me to want more pizza. Sometimes I happen to remember a good pizza I ate. Sometimes my friends are talking about

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11:53

“Becoming a Chinese Room” by Raelifin

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/02

[My novel, Red Heart, is on sale for $4 this week. Daniel Kokotaijlo liked it a lot, and the Senior White House Policy Advisor on AI is currently reading it.] “Formal symbol manipulations by themselves … have only a syntax but no semantics. Such intentionality as computers appear to have is solely in the minds of those who program them and those who use them, those who send in the input and those who interpret the output.” — John Searle, originator of the “Chinese room” thought experiment A

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2:38

“Future Proofing Solstice” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/02

Bay Solstice is this weekend (Dec 6th at 7pm, with a Megameetup at Lighthaven earlier in the day). I wanted to give people a bit more idea of what to expect. I created Solstice in 2011. Since 2022, I've been worried that the Solstice isn't really set up to handle "actually looking at human extinction in nearmode" in a psychologically healthy way. (I tried to set this up in the beginning, but once my p(Doom) crept over 50% I started feeling like Solstice wasn't really helping the way I wanted)

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15:38

“MIRI’s 2025 Fundraiser” by alexvermeer

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/02

MIRI is running its first fundraiser in six years, targeting $6M. The first $1.6M raised will be matched 1:1 via an SFF grant. Fundraiser ends at midnight on Dec 31, 2025. Support our efforts to improve the conversation about superintelligence and help the world chart a viable path forward. MIRI is a nonprofit with a goal of helping humanity make smart and sober decisions on the topic of smarter-than-human AI. Our main focus from 2000 to ~2022 was on technical research to try to make it possible to

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8:22

“The 2024 LessWrong Review” by RobertM

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/01

We have a ritual around these parts. Every year, we have ourselves a little argument about the annual LessWrong Review, and whether it's a good use of our time or not. Every year, we decide it passes the cost-benefit analysis[1]. Oh, also, every[2] year, you do the following: Spend 2 weeks nominating the best posts that are at least one year old, Spend 4 weeks reviewing and discussing the nominated posts, Spend 3 weeks casting your final votes, to decide which posts end up in the "Best of

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9:05

“A Statistical Analysis of Inkhaven” by Ben Pace

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/01

Okay, we got 41 people to do 30 posts in 30 days. How did it go? How did they like it? Well I just had 36 of them fill out an extensive feedback form. I am devastated with tiredness, but I have to write my last post, so let's take a look at what happened. Thanks to Habryka for vibecoding this UI. Key Outcomes Pretty reasonable numbers. For context on the overall rating and NPS, here are some other numbers for comparison.EventAverage QualityNPSSanity & Survival Summit '21–65Palmcone

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1:06

“Announcing: OpenAI’s Alignment Research Blog” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/01

The OpenAI Alignment Research Blog launched today at 11 am PT! With 1 introductory post, and 2 technical posts. Blog: https://alignment.openai.com/ Thread on X: https://x.com/j_asminewang/status/1995569301714325935?t=O5FvxDVP3OqicF-Y4sCtxw&s=19 Speaking purely personally: when I joined the Alignment team at OpenAI in January, I saw there was more safety research than I'd expected. Not to mention interesting thinking on the future of alignment. But that research & thinking didn't really

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9:24

“Interview: What it’s like to be a bat” by Saul Munn

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/01

For the purposes of this transcript, some high-pitched clicking sounds have been removed. The below is an otherwise unedited transcript of an interview between Dwarkesh Patel[1] and a bat. DWARKESH: Thanks for coming onto the podcast. It's great to have you— BAT: Thanks for having me. Yeah. DWARKESH: You can hear me okay? I mean, uh, all the equip— BAT: Yep, I can hear you. DWARKESH: Great, great. So— BAT: I can hear your voice, too. BAT: If that's what you were asking. DWARKESH: What? No, I was—

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33:53

“How Can Interpretability Researchers Help AGI Go...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/01

Executive Summary Over the past year, the Google DeepMind mechanistic interpretability team has pivoted to a pragmatic approach to interpretability, as detailed in our accompanying post [[1]] , and are excited for more in the field to embrace pragmatism! In brief, we think that: It is crucial to have empirical feedback on your ultimate goal with good proxy tasks [[2]] . We do not need near-complete understanding to have significant impact. We can perform good focused projects by starting

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63:59

“A Pragmatic Vision for Interpretability” by Neel Nanda

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/01

Executive Summary The Google DeepMind mechanistic interpretability team has made a strategic pivot over the past year, from ambitious reverse-engineering to a focus on pragmatic interpretability: Trying to directly solve problems on the critical path to AGI going well [[1]] Carefully choosing problems according to our comparative advantage Measuring progress with empirical feedback on proxy tasks We believe that, on the margin, more researchers who share our goals should take a

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5:57

[Linkpost] “How middle powers may prevent the...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/01

This is a link post. In this paper, we make recommendations for how middle powers may band together through a binding international agreement and achieve the goal of preventing the development of ASI, without assuming initial cooperation by superpowers. You can read the paper here: asi-prevention.com In our previous work Modelling the Geopolitics of AI, we pointed out that middle powers face a precarious predicament in a race to ASI. Lacking the means to seriously compete in the race or unilaterally

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6:27

“Insulin Resistance and Glycemic Index” by lsusr

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/01

In my previous post Traditional Food*, I explained how what we think of as a "traditional" diet is a nationalist propaganda campaign that's making us sick. In this post I'll go into the biological mechanisms. There are four substances that the body can metabolize: carbohydrates, fats, protein and alcohol. In this post I'll focus on how modern carbohydrate-heavy foods (like pasta, bread and rice) are related to insulin resistance. This doesn't mean that seed oils are good for you, or that the

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3:07

“November Retrospective” by johnswentworth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/01

Throughout November, I’ve been keeping up with the Inkhaven mandate to write and post a blogpost, of at least 500 words, every day. It's the last day of November, so how’d that go? First and foremost: most of my blogposts from this month are pretty mediocre, by my own standards. Not necessarily bad, plausibly worthwhile, but I am not particularly impressed by them. Largely, that's because (unlike the Inkhaven program proper) I did not set aside the entire month for post-writing. I worked most of

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3:28

“Inkhaven Retrospective” by abramdemski

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/30

This will be the 30th post of at least 500 words I have written this month. (I did somewhat cheat two days ago, by making a 500+ word edit to Legitimate Deliberation, which I also posted independently as a shortform.) Inkhaven has been very much what I was hoping for. I have been wanting to write more, and this certainly did the trick. I think it will be easy to hit a once-a-week target now, something I was struggling to do before. I came with lots of drafts I wanted to finish, and outlines, and

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8:45

“Explosive Skill Acquisition” by Ben Goldhaber

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/30

If you’re going to learn a new skill or change in some way, going hard at it for a short intensive period beats spreading a gentler effort across months or years. I’m on day 29 of Inkhaven, where we committed to writing a blog post a day for a month. It has been great; one of the best periods of “self-development” I’ve been in. I’ve progressed far more at the skill of putting my thoughts on the internet than some counterfactual where I wrote twice a month for a year. The quintessential example of

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13:22

“A Blogger’s Guide To The 21st Century” by Screwtape

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/30

Here's a fun format: get a big white board, and write the years of the 21st century. Write a category; something that has many variations come out every year. Next, write your picks or favourites. Now invite everyone attending to replace a year's pick if they want and replace it with something they like. This was a rolling game played last month at Lighthaven. I put up “Best blog post of every year” when the opportunity arose. 2000 My pick: Painless Software Schedules This Joel SPolsky piece is

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10:54

“Ben’s 10 Tips for Event Feedback Forms” by Ben Pace

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/30

I have made many many feedback forms for events I have run or been a part of. Here are some simple heuristics of mine, that I write for others' to learn from and for my collaborators in the future. Most of my events have had between 50 and 500 people in them, that's the rough range I have in mind. 1. The default format for any question is a mandatory multiple-choice, then an optional text box Most of your form should be 1-10 questions! (e.g. "How was the food, from 1-10?") Then next to it give

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14:52

“The Moonrise Problem” by johnswentworth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/30

On October 5, 1960, the American Ballistic Missile Early-Warning System station at Thule, Greenland, indicated a large contingent of Soviet missiles headed towards the United States. Fortunately, common sense prevailed at the informal threat-assessment conference that was immediately convened: international tensions weren't particularly high at the time. The system had only recently been installed. Kruschev was in New York, and all in all a massive Soviet attack seemed very unlikely. As a result no

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7:44

College life with short AGI timelines

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/30

When I started my freshman year, my median estimate for AGI was 20 years. In my senior year it was down to 3 years (although it's gone back up to 5 years since then). My expectations of the future made my college experience somewhat unusual and I will share some reflections as someone who recently graduated. I came into college wanting to minimize existential risks, from the simple fact that AGI is likely to happen this century and biological weapons and nuclear war could cause catastrophes even if

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8:56

“The Joke” by Ape in the coat

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/30

There is a joke format which I find quite fascinating. Let's call it Philosopher vs Engineer. It goes like this: the Philosopher raises some complicated philosophical question, while the Engineer gives a very straightforward applied answer. Some back and forth between the two ensues, but they fail to cross the inferential gap and solve the misunderstanding. It doesn’t have to be literal philosopher and engineer, though. Other versions may include philosopher vs scientist, philosopher vs economist,

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