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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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1:36

[Linkpost] “Debunking ‘When Prophecy Fails’” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/07

This is a link post. In 1954, Dorothy Martin predicted an apocalyptic flood and promised her followers rescue by flying saucers. When neither arrived, she recanted, her group dissolved, and efforts to proselytize ceased. But When Prophecy Fails (1956), the now-canonical account of the event, claimed the opposite: that the group doubled down on its beliefs and began recruiting—evidence, the authors argued, of a new psychological mechanism, cognitive dissonance. Drawing on newly unsealed archival

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9:31

“A Guide To Being Persuasive About AI Dangers” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/06

I think I’m pretty good at convincing people about AI dangers. This post talks about the basics of speaking convincingly about AI dangers to people. Prerequisites 1. Learn to truly see them In 2022, at a CFAR workshop, I was introduced to circling. It is multi-player meditation. People sit in a circle and have a conversation, but the content of the conversation is mostly focused on the meta: what someone says or expresses causes in you, how you relate to other people, and what's going on in the

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9:41

“Halfway to Anywhere” by Screwtape

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/06

“If you can get your ship into orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere.” - Robert Heinlein This generalizes. 1. Spaceflight is hard. Putting a rocket on the moon is one of the most impressive feats humans have ever achieved. The International Space Station, an inhabited living space and research facility in Low Earth Orbit, has been continuously inhabited for over two decades now, and that's awesome. It is a testament to the hard work and brilliance of a lot of people over a lot of time that this is

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9:26

“People Seem Funny In The Head About Subtle Signals”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/06

WARNING: This post contains spoilers for Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and I will not warn about them further. Also some anecdotes from slutcon which are not particularly NSFW, but it's still slutcon. A girl I was seeing once asked me to guess what Hogwarts house she was trying to channel with her outfit. Her answer turned out to be Slytherin, because the tiny gem in the necklace she was wearing was green. Never mind that nothing else she wore was green, including the gems in her

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72:05

“A 2032 Takeoff Story” by romeo

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/06

I spent 3 recent Sundays writing my mainline AI scenario. Having only spent 3 days on it, it's not very well-researched (especially in the areas where i’m not well informed) or well-written, and the endings are particularly open ended and weak. But I wanted to post the somewhat unfiltered 3-day version to normalize doing so. There are also some details that I no longer fully endorse, because the act of doing this exercise spurred me to look into things in more detail, and I have updated my views

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10:02

“Meta-agentic Prisoner’s Dilemmas” by TsviBT

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/05

Crosspost from my blog. In the classic Prisoner's Dilemma (https://www.lesswrong.com/w/prisoner-s-dilemma), there are two agents with the same beliefs and decision theory, but with different values. To get the best available outcome, they have to help each other out (even if they don't intrinsically care about the other's values); and they have to do so even though, if the one does not help the other, there's no way for the other to respond with a punishment afterward. A classic line of

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3:11

“New homepage for AI safety resources – AISafety.com...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/05

For those relatively new to AI safety, AISafety.com helps them navigate the space, providing lists of things like self-study courses, funders, communities, etc. But while the previous version of the site basically just threw a bunch of resources at the user, we’ve now redesigned it to be more accessible and therefore make it more likely that people take further steps towards entering the field. The old site: The new one: The new homepage does a better job of directing people to the resource pages

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8:05

“Being ‘Usefully Concrete’” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/05

Or: "Who, what, when, where?" -> "Why?" In "What's hard about this? What can I do about that?", I talk about how, when you're facing a difficult situation, it's often useful to list exactly what's difficult about it. And then, systematically brainstorm ideas for dealing with those difficult things. Then, the problem becomes easy. But, there is a secret subskill necessary for this to work. The first few people I pitched "What's hard about this and what can I do about that?" to happened to already

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4:35

“Modeling the geopolitics of AI development” by Alex...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/05

We model how rapid AI development may reshape geopolitics in the absence of international coordination on preventing dangerous AI development. We focus on predicting which strategies would be pursued by superpowers and middle powers and which outcomes would result from them. You can read our paper here: ai-scenarios.com Attempts to predict scenarios with fast AI progress should be more tractable compared to most attempts to make forecasts. This is because a single factor (namely, access to AI

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27:40

“Thoughts by a non-economist on AI and economics” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/05

[Crossposted on Windows In Theory] “Modern humans first emerged about 100,000 years ago. For the next 99,800 years or so, nothing happened. Well, not quite nothing. There were wars, political intrigue, the invention of agriculture -- but none of that stuff had much effect on the quality of people's lives. Almost everyone lived on the modern equivalent of $400 to $600 a year, just above the subsistence level … Then -- just a couple of hundred years ago, maybe 10 generations -- people started

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3:40

“Heroic Responsibility” by johnswentworth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/05

Meta: Heroic responsibility is a standard concept on LessWrong. I was surprised to find that we don't have a post explaining it to people not already deep in the cultural context, so I wrote this one. Suppose I decide to start a business - specifically a car dealership. One day there's a problem: we sold a car with a bad thingamabob. The customer calls up the sales department, which hands it off to the legal department, which hands it off to the garage, which can't find a replacement part so they

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3:30

“Legible vs. Illegible AI Safety Problems” by Wei Dai

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/04

Some AI safety problems are legible (obvious or understandable) to company leaders and government policymakers, implying they are unlikely to deploy or allow deployment of an AI while those problems remain open (i.e., appear unsolved according to the information they have access to). But some problems are illegible (obscure or hard to understand, or in a common cognitive blind spot), meaning there is a high risk that leaders and policymakers will decide to deploy or allow deployment even if they

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13:43

“GDM: Consistency Training Helps Limit Sycophancy and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/04

Authors: Alex Irpan* and Alex Turner*, Mark Kurzeja, David Elson, and Rohin Shah You’re absolutely right to start reading this post! What a perfectly rational decision! Even the smartest models’ factuality or refusal training can be compromised by simple changes to a prompt. Models often praise the user's beliefs (sycophancy) or satisfy inappropriate requests which are wrapped within special text (jailbreaking). Normally, we fix these problems with Supervised Finetuning (SFT) on static datasets

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3:23

“A prayer for engaging in conflict” by TsviBT

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/04

Crosspost from my blog. Let these always be remembered: those who suffer, those who experience injustice, those who are silenced, those who are dispossessed, those who are aggressed upon, those who lose what they love, and those whose thriving is thwarted. May I not let hate into my heart; and May I not let my care for the aggressor prevent me from protecting what I love. May I always reach out a hand in peace; and May I never hold it out as they sever my wrist. May I seek symmetry, to take

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5:12

“Research Reflections” by abramdemski

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/04

Over the decade I've spent working on AI safety, I've felt an overall trend of divergence; research partnerships starting out with a sense of a common project, then slowly drifting apart over time. It has been frequently said that AI safety is a pre-paradigmatic field. This (with, perhaps, other contributing factors) means researchers have to optimize for their own personal sense of progress, based on their own research taste. In my experience, the tails come apart; eventually, two researchers are

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1:08

[Linkpost] “I ate bear fat with honey and salt...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/04

This is a link post. Eliezer Yudkowsky did not exactly suggest that you should eat bear fat covered with honey and sprinkled with salt flakes. What he actually said was that an alien, looking from the outside at evolution, would predict that you would want to eat bear fat covered with honey and sprinkled with salt flakes. Still, I decided to buy a jar of bear fat online, and make a treat for the people at Inkhaven. It was surprisingly good. My post discusses how that happened, and a bit about the

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14:19

“The Zen Of Maxent As A Generalization Of Bayes...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/04

Audio note: this article contains 61 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Jaynes’ Widget Problem[1]: How Do We Update On An Expected Value? Mr A manages a widget factory. The factory produces widgets of three colors - red, yellow, green - and part of Mr A's job is to decide how many widgets to paint each color. He wants to match today's color mix to the mix of orders the factory will receive today, so

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7:01

“Comparative advantage & AI” by Simon Lermen

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/03

I was recently saddened to see that Seb Krier – who's a lead on the Google DeepMind governance team – created a simple website apparently endorsing the idea that Ricardian comparative advantage will provide humans with jobs in the time of ASI. The argument that comparative advantage means advanced AI is automatically safe is pretty old and has been addressed multiple times. For the record, I think this is a bad argument, and it's not useful to think about AI risk through comparative advantage.Seb

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57:10

“The Tale of the Top-Tier Intellect” by Eliezer...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/03

Once upon a time in the medium-small town of Skewers, Washington, there lived a 52-year-old man by the name of Mr. Humman, who considered himself a top-tier chess-player. Now, Mr. Humman was not generally considered the strongest player in town; if you asked the other inhabitants of Skewers, most of them would've named Mr. Neumann as their town's chess champion. But Mr. Humman did not see things that way himself. On Humman's theory, he was really quite good at the Ethiopian opening and variation in

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32:07

“Leaving Open Philanthropy, going to Anthropic” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/03

(Audio version, read by the author, here, or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app.) Last Friday was my last day at Open Philanthropy. I’ll be starting a new role at Anthropic in mid-November, helping with the design of Claude's character/constitution/spec. This post reflects on my time at Open Philanthropy, and it goes into more detail about my perspective and intentions with respect to Anthropic – including some of my takes on AI-safety-focused people working at frontier AI

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