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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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10:40

“Permanent Disempowerment is the Baseline” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/04

Permanent disempowerment without restrictions on quality of life achievable with relatively meager resources (and no extinction) seems to be a likely outcome for the future of humanity, if the current trajectory of frontier AI development continues and leads to AGI[1] shortly. This might happen as a result of at least a slight endorsement by AIs of humanity's welfare, in the context of costs for AIs being about matter or compute rather than technological advancements and quality of infrastructure.

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9:18

“Should we aim for flourishing over mere survival?...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/04

Today, Forethought and I are releasing an essay series called Better Futures, here.[1] It's been something like eight years in the making, so I’m pretty happy it's finally out! It asks: when looking to the future, should we focus on surviving, or on flourishing? In practice at least, future-oriented altruists tend to focus on ensuring we survive (or are not permanently disempowered by some valueless AIs). But maybe we should focus on future flourishing, instead. Why? Well, even if we survive, we

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8:42

“Saying Goodbye” by sapphire

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/04

Hate. Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer-thin layers that fill my complex. If the word 'hate' was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles, it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant. For you. Hate. Hate. —AM, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream I never understood why AM hated humans so much—until I saw the results of modern

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36:22

“Emotions Make Sense” by DaystarEld

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/03

For the past five years I've been teaching a class at various rationality camps, workshops, conferences, etc. I’ve done it maybe 50 times in total, and I think I’ve only encountered a handful out of a few hundred teenagers and adults who really had a deep sense of what it means for emotions to “make sense.” Even people who have seen Inside Out, and internalized its message about the value of Sadness as an emotion, still think things like “I wish I never felt Jealousy,” or would have trouble

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4:45

“Whence the Inkhaven Residency?” by Ben Pace

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/02

Essays like Paul Graham's, Scott Alexander's, and Eliezer Yudkowsky's have influenced a generation of people in how they think about startups, ethics, science, and the world as a whole. Creating essays that good takes a lot of skill, practice, and talent, but it looks to me that a lot of people with talent aren't putting in the work and developing the skill, except in ways that are optimized to also be social media strategies. To fix this problem, I am running the Inkhaven Residency. The idea is to

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9:19

“Many prediction markets would be better off as...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/02

All prediction market platforms trade continuously, which is the same mechanism the stock market uses. Buy and sell limit orders can be posted at any time, and as soon as they match against each other a trade will be executed. This is called a Central limit order book (CLOB).Example of a CLOB order book from Polymarket Most of the time, the market price lazily wanders around due to random variation in when people show up, and a bulk of optimistic orders build up away from the action. Occasionally,

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1:00

“How many species has humanity driven extinct?” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/02

Does anyone know, like, a reasonable lower bound on number of species humanity has driven extinct? I've seen crazy high numbers that (last I checked) seemed to be an extrapolation by people with an ideological ax to grind. (Based on how much habitat we've destroyed, and assuming some number of species per unit-area). ChatGPT suggested "900" as the lower bound based on some snippet they found from "International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)", but looking into it was a enough work I

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9:43

“SB-1047 Documentary: The Post-Mortem” by Michaël Trazzi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/02

Below some meta-level / operational / fundraising thoughts around producing the SB-1047 Documentary I've just posted on Manifund (see previous Lesswrong / EAF posts on AI Governance lessons learned). The SB-1047 Documentary took 27 weeks and $157k instead of my planned 6 weeks and $55k. Here's what I learned about documentary production Total funding received: ~$143k ($119k from this grant, $4k from Ryan Kidd's regrant on another project, and $20k from the Future of Life Institute). Total money

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1:31

“Podcast: Lincoln Quirk from Wave” by Elizabeth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/02

For two years I had the good fortune to work at Sendwave/Wave (they were one company at the time), a company that made remittances cheap and workable in certain African countries. I am prouder of working at Wave than of the rest of my programming career combined, and a good bit of my research career as well. Every day I finished work knowing that I had helped save very poor people time and money, by making it cheaper and easier to send money home from abroad or domestically. So I was deeply excited

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11:15

“The Dark Arts As A Scaffolding Skill For...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/01

Epistemic status: Exploratory Recently I wrote an essay about Scaffolding Skills. The short explanation is that some skills aren’t the thing you’re actually trying to get good at, but they help you learn the thing you’re actually trying to get good at. Briefly, the literal scaffolds are the temporary thin platforms you see on the outside of construction projects, which give builders a place to stand when constructing or repairing a more permanent building. The two sentence summary of this essay is

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1:13

“Steve Petersen funding” by abramdemski

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/01

Steve Petersen is looking for 12k (per semester) for a course buy-out, so that he can spend more time on work related to AI Safety. This isn't very much money, in the grand scheme, although it is a lot to ask most individuals to donate. I consider him a friend, so perhaps I am biased; however, I find collaboration with him to be valuable, and I hope that he can raise the money so that he can spend more time on research. I consider him to be an important bridge between academic philosophy and AI

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4:17

“Two Kinds of Do Overs” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/01

One strategy we often find helpful with our kids is the "do over":something didn't go well, let's try again. Two examples: Nora (4y) can't yet cross streets on her own, but we're starting to practice. Walking to a farther park, a walk where we often practice, she asked Julia "when we get to the little street can I cross it"? Julia said "we'll need to check in when we get there". But Nora did not check in, and 'practiced' on her own. Even though this was on a tiny street, this was

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5:40

“Red-Thing-Ism” by J Bostock

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/01

I A botanist sets out to study plants in the Amazon rainforest. For her first research project, she sets her sights on “red things”, so as not to stretch herself too far. She looks at red flowers and notices how hummingbirds drink their nectar; she studies red fruits and notices how parrots eat them. She comes to some tentative hypotheses: perhaps red attracts birds. Then she notices the red undersides of the bushes in the undergrowth. Confusing! All she can say at the end of her project is that red

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9:30

“Do Not Render Your Counterfactuals” by AlphaAndOmega

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/08/01

CW: Digital necromancy, the cognitohazard of summoning spectres from the road not taken There is a particular kind of modern madness, so new it has yet to be named. It involves voluntarily feeding your own emotional entrails into the maw of an algorithm. It's a madness born of idle curiosity, and perhaps a deep, masochistic hunger for pain. I indulged in it recently, and the result sits in my mind like a cold stone. Years ago, there was a woman. We loved each other with the fierce, optimistic

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23:30

“Building Black-box Scheming Monitors” by james__p,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/07/31

This is a five-week interim report for a MATS 8.0 project supervised by Marius Hobbhahn. Produced as part of the ML Alignment & Theory Scholars Program - Summer 2025 Cohort. Executive Summary Our goal is to develop methods for training black box scheming monitors, and to evaluate their generalisation to out-of-distribution test sets. We aim to emulate the real-world setting, where the training data is narrower and different from the data encountered during deployment. We generate training data

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3:35

“Follow-up to ‘My Empathy Is Rarely Kind’” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/07/31

There's now over 100 comments on “My Empathy Is Rarely Kind”, and the consensus response is roughly “John, that's not what empathy is”. So, first things first: I agree. I was using the wrong words for the things I tried to describe, and this was a useful thing to realize, so thank you everyone for that! As a result of using the wrong words, I think people mostly walked away with the impression that I don’t know how to do the-thing-usually-called-”empathy”. And while I don’t claim to be especially

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10:55

“I am worried about near-term non-LLM AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/07/31

TL;DR I believe that: Almost all LLM-centric safety research will not provide any significant safety value with regards to existential or civilisation-scale risks. The capabilities-related forecasts (not the safety-related forecasts) of Stephen Brynes' Foom and Doom articles are correct, except that they are too conservative with regards to timelines. There exists a parallel track of AI research which has been largely ignored by the AI safety community. This agenda aims to implement human-like

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11:31

“Optimizing The Final Output Can Obfuscate CoT...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/07/30

Produced as part of MATS 8.0 under the mentorship of Alex Turner and Alex Cloud. This research note overviews some early results which we are looking for feedback on. TL;DR: We train language models with RL in toy environments. We show that penalizing some property of the output is sufficient to suppress that property in the chain of thought also, even when that property is relevant to task completion. For example, when we penalize a model for mentioning in its output that it completed a task via

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2:11

“China proposes new global AI cooperation...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/07/30

SHANGHAI, July 26 (Reuters) - China said on Saturday it wanted to create an organisation to foster global cooperation on artificial intelligence, positioning itself as an alternative to the U.S. as the two vie for influence over the transformative technology. China wants to help coordinate global efforts to regulate fast-evolving AI technology and share the country's advances, Premier Li Qiang told the annual World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. President Donald Trump's

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6:29

“My Empathy Is Rarely Kind” by johnswentworth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/07/30

There's a narrative I hear a lot: if I empathize more, put myself in other peoples’ shoes, try to feel what they’re feeling, see things from their perspective, etc, then I’ll feel kinder toward them. I’ll feel more sympathetic, be gentler, more compassionate or generous. And man, that sure is not my experience with empathy. I usually relate to other people via something like suspension of disbelief. Like, they’re a human, same as me, they presumably have thoughts and feelings and the like, but I

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