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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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35:20

“Epistemology of Romance, Part 2” by DaystarEld

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/05

In Part 1, I argued that the four main sources most people learn about romance from—media, family, religion/culture, and friends—are all unreliable in different ways. None of them are optimized for truth, and each comes with its own incentives, blind spots, and distortions. As I said, I'm not the first to notice that we're failing, as a society, to provide good answers to these questions. There are researchers from various fields trying to provide answers, some rigorously, and some… less so. There

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6:29

“Center on Long-Term Risk: Annual Review & Fundraiser...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/05

This is a brief overview of the Center on Long-Term Risk (CLR)'s activities in 2025 and our plans for 2026. We are hoping to fundraise $400,000 to fulfill our target budget in 2026. About us CLR works on addressing the worst-case risks from the development and deployment of advanced AI systems in order to reduce s-risks. Our research primarily involves thinking about how to reduce conflict and promote cooperation in interactions involving powerful AI systems. In addition to research, we conduct a

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36:08

“The behavioral selection model for predicting AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/04

Highly capable AI systems might end up deciding the future. Understanding what will drive those decisions is therefore one of the most important questions we can ask. Many people have proposed different answers. Some predict that powerful AIs will learn to intrinsically pursue reward. Others respond by saying reward is not the optimization target, and instead reward “chisels” a combination of context-dependent cognitive patterns into the AI. Some argue that powerful AIs might end up with an almost

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0:38

[Linkpost] “Embedded Universal Predictive...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/04

This is a link post. A team at Google has substantially advanced the theory of embedded agency with a grain of truth (GOT), including new developments on reflective oracles and an interesting alternative construction (the "Reflective Universal Inductor" or RUI). (I was not involved in this work) ---First published: December 3rd, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AJ7qddr5imhhN2jHz/embedded-universal-predictive-intelligence

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10:17

“Categorizing Selection Effects” by romeostevensit

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/04

[Author's note: LLMs were used to generate and sort many individual examples into their requisite categories, as well as find and summarize relevant papers, and extensive assistance with editing] The earliest recording of a selection effect is likely the story of Diagoras regarding the "Votive Tablets." When shown paintings of sailors who had prayed to Poseidon and survived shipwrecks, implying that prayer saves lives, Diagoras asked: “Where are the pictures of those who prayed, and were then

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2:02

“Front-Load Giving Because of Anthropic Donors?” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/04

Summary: Anthropic has many employees with an EA-ish outlook, who maysoon have a lot of money. If you also have that kind of outlook, money donated sooner will likely be much higher impact. It's December, and I'm trying to figure out how much to donate. This is usually a straightforward question: give 50%. But this year I'm considering dipping into savings. There are many EAs and EA-informed employees at Anthropic, which has been very successful and is reportedly considering an IPO

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12:25

“Beating China to ASI” by PeterMcCluskey

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/04

Who benefits if the US develops artificial superintelligence (ASI) faster than China? One possible answer is that AI kills us all regardless of which country develops it first. People who base their policy on that concern already agree with the conclusions of this post, so I won't focus on that concern here. This post aims to convince other people, especially people who focus on democracy versus authoritarianism, to be less concerned about which country develops ASI first. I will assume that AIs

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3:34

“Racing For AI Safety™ was always a bad idea, right?”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/03

Recently I've been relitigating some of my old debates with Eliezer, to right the historical wrongs. Err, I mean to improve the AI x-risk community's strategic stance. (Relevant to my recent theme of humans being bad at strategy—why didn't I do this sooner?)Of course the most central old debate was over whether MIRI's plan, to build a Friendly AI to take over the world in service of reducing x-risks, was a good one. If someone were to defend it today, I imagine their main argument would be that

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32:40

“6 reasons why ‘alignment-is-hard’ discourse seems...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/03

Tl;dr AI alignment has a culture clash. On one side, the “technical-alignment-is-hard” / “rational agents” school-of-thought argues that we should expect future powerful AIs to be power-seeking ruthless consequentialists. On the other side, people observe that both humans and LLMs are obviously capable of behaving like, well, not that. The latter group accuses the former of head-in-the-clouds abstract theorizing gone off the rails, while the former accuses the latter of mindlessly assuming that the

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22:55

“Human art in a post-AI world should be strange” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/03

Bubble Tanks is a Flash game originally released on Armor Games, a two-decade-old online game aggregator that somehow still exists. In the game, you pilot a small bubble through a procedurally generated foam universe, absorbing smaller bubbles to grow larger, evolving into increasingly complex configurations of spheres and cannons. Here is a reasonably accurate video of the gameplay, recreated in beautiful high-definition. Bubble Tanks was first released in 2007, with a sequel out in 2009, and

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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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