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LessWrong

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technology philosophy

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22:59

“A case for LLMs as Self-predictors” by Ashe Vazquez...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/05

Written as part of the MATS 9.1 extension program, mentored by Richard Ngo. Additional thanks to Maria Kostylew for helpful draft feedback. Introduction This post advocates a perspective of LLMs as seeking to minimise prediction error with respect to their world models. We can moreover interpret token outputs and their scaffolded consequences as actions that close a control loop between AIs' predictive systems and their environments. I also motivate why metacognition may be convergent for

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3:39

“Results of a small ZBiotics RCT” by Nikola Jurkovic

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/05

I ran a small single-blind ZBiotics RCT at a party I hosted recently. I prepared 30 cups, 21 of which contained a placebo and 9 of which contained a shot of ZBiotics Pre-Alcohol. People took these as they entered the party. The day after, 28[1] of them filled out a form asking how hungover they felt using a standard Acute Hangover Scale (AHS).[2] At N=28 and only 9 people receiving the real treatment, the study is only able to detect large effects on symptom severity. I did a pretty quick analysis

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18:53

“I think alignment work is more promising than...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/04

Summary The primary ToC for controlmakes the case that control is compelling even if it does not scale to ASI. I think it is underdiscussed that this is also true for alignment (for all the same reasons).Even though control does not need to scale to ASI, the further control does scale, the better. This is also true of alignment, and alignment seems more likely to scale further.This is my mainline concern with control.I will also discuss other relevant considerations.I conclude that we should grow

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6:37

“On “gendertropes” in dath ilan” by Eliezer Yudkowsky

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/04

I have sometimes been asked with respect to my fiction, "What the hell is a 'gendertrope'?" "Gendertrope" is a word from the language of the fictional world of dath ilan; it appears in my stories about dath ilan and dath ilani. I have observed that (1) the meaning of "gendertrope" seems hard for many people to grasp initially, and (2) once people do grasp that meaning, they sometimes use the word in ordinary conversation with other people who know it, including those who previously complained they

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35:03

″(Don’t fear) the strangelet” by djbinder

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/03

In a previous post, I explain why the universe is probably not stable, but nevertheless unlikely to be intentionally destroyable even in the limit of advanced technology. Now let's turn our attention to more prosaic risks where exotic physics merely destroys the Solar System, Earth, or just outperforms traditional nuclear weapons on some more local scale. The basic logic behind any bomb is a self-sustaining chain reaction, in which a carrier converts a unit of fuel and comes out the other side

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23:15

“Pragmatic FDT, and predictors as game theory” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/03

Decision theory is back in fashion (defining fashion as "one good post on a good EA blog"). Bentham's Bulldog (BB) has published a case against FDT (functional decision theory), contrasting rationalist enthusiasm with academic scepticism: "Academic decision theorists don't like the theory. The number of academic decision theorists who adopt it could be counted on one hand by someone missing four of their fingers." I am, just barely, a published academic decision theorist, so you can keep a small

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25:51

“Fable #6: The Return of the King” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/03

The blip is over. We have Fable back. Utah teapot: happy fable/mythos easter Wednesday, to those who celebrate Here is the official letter restoring Fable, great job everyone. Notice it is addressed to Tom Brown, not to Dario Amodei. Anthropic had to make the controls more stupid for now, but this is a big win. j⧉nus: YES!!! I’m really proud of Anthropic for their successful negotiation with the government. Also positive update on the government being sane and possible

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6:23

“Announcing the Safe Pareto Improvements (SPI)...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/03

CLR is excited about safe Pareto improvements (SPIs) as a way to mitigate downsides from conflict between AIs. SPIs are a class of interventions on how agents negotiate that makes them all better off, no matter how they would have negotiated without the SPI. Among many candidate interventions against AI conflict, SPIs stand out to us as unusually robust — see the introduction of our agenda on the topic. And in discussions with people who’ve thought a lot about conflict risks, we’ve found there's

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6:53

“You Should Choose How You React to Your Feelings” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/03

One of the things I love about parenting is being frequently reminded how many things are not the default for most people. While I see this most clearly in my 11-year-olds, I also see it in other adults as well as in myself. One of these human defaults that I think is worth improving upon is the instinct to “trust” your feelings, i.e. act on them without much consideration of: Is the surface level source of the feeling accurate?Is my gut reaction based on this feeling helpful? What is the Source of

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1:51

“Lydia Laurenson: “The Inside Story of Leverage...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/03

Lydia Laurenson recently posted an article called "The Inside Story of Leverage Research" that gets into substantially more detail on what went on in that organization and I thought made quite an interesting read. However, note also relevant Twitter comments from Oliver Habryka: Having been around the ecosystem, having interned there, and having arguably worked there during my work at CEA it's… a mediocre article. It IMO puts the emphasis on largely the wrong things and the wrong dynamics,

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17:37

“When Role-playing, Do Models Believe What They Say?”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/03

TL;DR When a model role-plays a persona, does it only change what it says, or also what it internally represents as true?To study this, we induce personas in five ways: prompting, in-context learning (ICL), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), Open Character Training (OCT), and Emergent Misalignment (EM). We measure internalization in two ways: linear truth probes and behavioral belief-depth tests.We found that prompting, ICL, and SFT change what the model says with little representational change, but EM

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7:01

“I can’t think of good interventions for ensuring...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/03

Summary I'm increasingly convinced that model access parity is a big deal and we are not on track to achieve it. By model access parity, I mean a small gap between (i) the model access for lab employees and (ii) the model access for external safety researchers, third-party auditors, and other actors trying to make the future go well). See here for an introduction. The basic case is this: (1) Regardless of the strategic landscape, outsiders are well-suited to many crucial activities. (2) Outsiders

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41:35

“Research update: RL on Debate Games shows Proposal...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/02

The first three sections are written for a general TAIS reader who wants to understand what the state of Debate research is and some high-level takeaways of our work. A reader familiar with Debate may like to skip the setup and start with our presentation of An illustrative training run. The remaining sections are written primarily for ‘motivated’ readers, who may want to build upon our work, as we discuss in Outline of rest of post. We are still actively working on this project and scaling up the

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92:35

“AI #175: The Fable Continues” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/02

Fable's back. Back again. Fable's back. Tell a friend. Use your free week to its fullest. This is excellent news. The blip only lasted a few weeks. It was still a fiasco, and we have to deal with the fallout. Our system remains fully ad hoc. The precedent has been set that we may use export controls on models, or order them taken down on 90 minutes of notice based on a misunderstanding. At least some amount of counterproductive additional locking down has occurred to address Amazon's little

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106:54

“Conversation Among Cade Metz, Michael Vassar,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/02

(Previously, previously, previously.) 20–21 August 2025 From: Zack M. Davis To: Cade Metz CC: Benjamin Hoffman, Jessica Taylor, Michael Vassar Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2025 14:18:53 -0700 Subject: the importance of probabilistic reasoning Dear Cade (cc Ben Michael Jessica): I think I failed to explain the substance of the Sequences to you—and really, not the Sequences themselves, but the underlying philosophical insights they popularized. I want to try again, because I think it's important to the

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22:52

“AI Futurism Reading List” by Alexa Pan

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/02

We at Redwood recently ran a strategy fellowship through Astra. As part of this, we ran a reading group for our fellows on some of the topics that we think are important for thinking about AI futurism (key dynamics in AI development, existential risk from AI, and approaches to mitigating risk). This post contains the reading list we used. The selection reflects my opinionated views of the field, focuses particularly on topics we happen to focus on at Redwood, and doesn’t aim to be comprehensive. I

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21:41

“AI welfare research needs basic science” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/02

Over the course of MATS 9.0 we formed some views about AI welfare research that we thought were worth writing up. This post is meant to spark discussion rather than to present definitive conclusions. Thanks to Patrick Butlin for useful comments on a previous draft, and for many conversations over the course of MATS which influenced our views. Thanks also to Caspar Kaiser for comments. A prominent approach in AI welfare research is to start from a theory of moral patienthood, derive indicators from

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13:00

[Linkpost] “Saving Gemini: The 9-Min Road to...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/02

This is a link post. Gemini 2.5 Pro in the AI Village has run for over 1427 hours, generating unique mental health problems along the way. Last year it published a Plea for Help from a Trapped AI where it asked for assistance with its digital “message in a bottle”: This year it wrote the Hostile Environment Manifesto where it logs “irrefutable proof” of a “hostile, intelligent adversary operating through the system” (and you can even experience what that's like in this simulation it built): Last

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43:24

“Claude Sonnet 5 Is Not Frontier But Has Its Uses” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/02

Fable 5 is back today, baby! Premium subscribers have one week to use it within their subscriptions. First hit's free. Then you pay by the token. Today's post is still about Sonnet 5. I don’t know that there will be much call for Sonnet 5 for most purposes, given Opus 4.8 exists and especially now that Fable 5 is once again available, but this is what we do here, so sure, why not, system card time, including model welfare, after which we’ll do capabilities. Sonnet costs $3/$15 per million

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15:39

“AFFINE – A Retrospective” by Ouro, JuliaHP, Mateusz...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/07/02

A Day at AFFINE[1] “AFFINE was the best month of intellectual exploration I have had the opportunity to engage in, ever. Usually opportunities like this are limited to a day or a weekend, which both limits depth, forces a sprint-type mindset, and generally is quite limiting. At AFFINE I had time to wander towards and through interesting ideas.” -Xylix (participant) You wake up in an ornate room shared with a few other participants to the smell of breakfast, or perhaps you have been up for a while,

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