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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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45:08

“Summary of John Halstead’s Book-Length Report on...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/26

1 Introduction (Crossposted from my blog--formatting is better there). Very large numbers of people seem to think that climate change is likely to end the world. Biden and Harris both called it an existential threat. AOC warned a few years ago that “the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” Thunberg once approvingly cited a supposed “top climate scientist” making the claim that “climate change will wipe out humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next

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3:59

“Tech for Thinking” by sarahconstantin

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/26

Midjourney, “tech for thinking, artificial intelligence, networks, noosphere, self-organizing decentralized knowledge, library of the future, collective intelligence” My post on Neutrality was kind of abstract, and I think it's time to do a follow-up that's more concrete. Specifically, the place where I think there's something to be done is in information technology, and the ways it shapes the perceived “world”. One way of looking at this: we had the institutional media era in the 20th century

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8:09

“Lurking in the Noise” by J Bostock

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/25

The Dead Biologist Suppose you're a biologist working with a bacterium. It's a nasty little bug, so you want to make sure your disinfecting protocol is effective. You have a rather good model of how the bacterium works, and it goes like this: The bacterium contains DNA, which is like a master copy of the instructions as to how it works This DNA is transcribed to RNA, which are little working copies of parts of the instructions and are disseminated throughout the bacterium This RNA is translated

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3:08

[Linkpost] “New Paper: Ambiguous Online Learning” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/25

This is a link post. Abstract: We propose a new variant of online learning that we call "ambiguous online learning". In this setting, the learner is allowed to produce multiple predicted labels. Such an "ambiguous prediction" is considered correct when at least one of the labels is correct, and none of the labels are "predictably wrong". The definition of "predictably wrong" comes from a hypothesis class in which hypotheses are also multi-valued. Thus, a prediction is "predictably wrong" if it's not

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19:35

“Melatonin Self-Experiment Results” by silentbob

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/25

Throughout the first half of 2025 I did a blinded experiment to see how low to moderate melatonin intake affects me. In this post I summarize my findings. Tl;dr: In my blinded self-experiment on melatonin, conducted over n = 60 days and analyzed with hypothesize.io, I found significantly positive effects for time to fall asleep (averaging ~25 instead of ~35 minutes, p ~= 0.001) and feeling awake the following morning (5.74/10 instead of 4.95/10, p = 0.006; but: this effect only persisted for the

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21:19

“What does 10x-ing effective compute get you?” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/25

This is more speculative and confusing than my typical posts and I also think the content of this post could be substantially improved with more effort. But it's been sitting around in my drafts for a long time and I sometimes want to reference the arguments in it, so I thought I would go ahead and post it.I often speculate about how much progress you get in the first year after AIs fully automate AI R&D within an AI company (if people try to go as fast as possible). Natural ways of

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6:21

“A regime-change power-vacuum conjecture about group...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/25

Crosspost from my blog. Regime change Conjecture: when there is regime change, the default outcome is for a faction to take over—whichever faction is best prepared to seize power by force. One example: The Iranian Revolution of 1978-1979. In the years leading up to the revolution, there was turmoil and broad hostility towards the Shah, across many sectors of the population. These hostilities ultimately combined in an escalation of protest, crack-down, more protest from more sectors (protests,

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54:30

“Analyzing A Critique Of The AI 2027 Timeline...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/24

There was what everyone agrees was a high quality critique of the timelines component of AI 2027, by the LessWrong user and Substack writer Titotal. It is great to have thoughtful critiques like this. The way you get actual thoughtful critiques like this, of course, is to post the wrong answer (at length) on the internet, and then respond by listening to the feedback and by making your model less wrong. This is a high-effort, highly detailed, real engagement on this section, including giving the

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24:03

“Why ‘training against scheming’ is hard” by Marius...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/24

TLDR: I think that AI developers will and should attempt to reduce scheming by explicitly training the model to scheme less. However, I think “training against scheming” is a harder problem than other alignment training (e.g. harmlessness training). I list four concrete failure modes with “training against scheming”: a) the training against scheming distribution is too narrow, b) overwhelming pressure from other goals, c) the AI exploits an imperfect reward model, and d) deceptive alignment. I’d

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13:28

“My pitch for the AI Village” by Daniel Kokotajlo

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/24

I think the AI Village should be funded much more than it currently is; I’d wildly guess that the AI safety ecosystem should be funding it to the tune of $4M/year.[1] I have decided to donate $100k. Here is why.First, what is the village? Here's a brief summary from its creators:[2] We took four frontier agents, gave them each a computer, a group chat, and a long-term open-ended goal, which in Season 1 was “choose a charity and raise as much money for it as you can”. We then run them for hours a

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32:40

“Situational Awareness: A One-Year Retrospective” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/24

Nathan Delisle, University of Chicago tl;dr: Many critiques of *Situational Awareness* have been purely qualitative; one year later we can finally check the numbers. I did my best to verify his claims using public data through June 2025, and found that his estimates mostly check out. This is inherently noisy work, so nothing herein is certain. I would encourage red-teaming, particularly in the algo-efficiencies/unhobbling/hardware sections. Many thanks to Kai Williams, Egg Syntax, and Aaron Scher

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22:22

“Compressed Computation is (probably) not Computation...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/23

Audio note: this article contains 113 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. This research was completed during the Mentorship for Alignment Research Students (MARS 2.0) Supervised Program for Alignment Research (SPAR spring 2025) programs. The team was supervised by Stefan (Apollo Research). Jai and Sara were the primary contributors, Stefan contributed ideas, ran final experiments and helped writing

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4:26

“‘It isn’t magic’” by Ben (Berlin)

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/23

People keep saying "AI isn't magic, it's just maths" like this is some kind of gotcha. Turning lead into gold isn't the magic of alchemy, it's just nucleosynthesis. Taking a living human's heart out without killing them, and replacing it with one you got out a corpse, that isn't the magic of necromancy, neither is it a prayer or ritual to Sekhmet, it's just transplant surgery. Casually chatting with someone while they're 8,000 kilometres is not done with magic crystal balls, it's just telephony

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58:47

“Foom & Doom 1: ‘Brain in a box in a basement’” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/23

1.1 Series summary and Table of Contents This is a two-post series on AI “foom” (this post) and “doom” (next post). A decade or two ago, it was pretty common to discuss “foom & doom” scenarios, as advocated especially by Eliezer Yudkowsky. In a typical such scenario, a small team would build a system that would rocket (“foom”) from “unimpressive” to “Artificial Superintelligence” (ASI) within a very short time window (days, weeks, maybe months), involving very little compute (e.g. “brain in a

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56:39

“Foom & Doom 2: Technical alignment is hard” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/23

2.1 Summary & Table of contents This is the second of a two-post series on foom (previous post) and doom (this post). The last post talked about how I expect future AI to be different from present AI. This post will argue that this future AI will be of a type that will be egregiously misaligned and scheming, not even ‘slightly nice’, absent some future conceptual breakthrough.I will particularly focus on exactly how and why I differ from the LLM-focused researchers who wind up with (from my

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5:20

“Comparing risk from internally-deployed AI to...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/23

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the relationship between AI control and traditional computer security. Here's one point that I think is important. My understanding is that there's a big qualitative distinction between two ends of a spectrum of security work that organizations do, that I’ll call “security from outsiders” and “security from insiders”. On the “security from outsiders” end of the spectrum, you have some security invariants you try to maintain entirely by restricting affordances

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27:04

“Clarifying ‘wisdom’: Foundational topics for aligned...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/23

As many folks in AI safety have observed, even if well-intentioned actors succeed at intent-aligning highly capable AIs, they’ll still face some high-stakes challenges.[1] Some of these challenges are especially exotic and could be prone to irreversible, catastrophic mistakes. E.g., deciding whether and how to do acausal trade. To deal with these exotic challenges, one meta policy that sounds nice is, “Make sure AIs get ‘wiser’ before doing anything irreversible in highly unfamiliar domains. Then

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64:25

“Racial Dating Preferences and Sexual Racism” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/23

Note: This is a linkpost from my personal substack. This is on a culture war topic, which is not normally the focus of my blogging. Rationalist friends suggested that this post might be interesting and surprising to LW readers. Summary People widely exclude romantic and sexual partners on the basis of race. This is claimed not to be racism by those who have these attitudes, but it is. Certain groups, such as Black women and Asian men, are highly excluded by all other groups. These cases also

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9:45

“The Sixteen Kinds of Intimacy” by Ruby

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/22

John Wentworth recently posted a discussion-inducing piece about how the willingness to be vulnerable is core to romantic relationships. This is not obvious to me as the core thing. I think romantic (and other) relationships are arguably about intimacy[1]. Perhaps intimacy always requires vulnerability? To answer that, and because it's generally interesting, here is a babble[2] of the kinds of intimacy: Physical Intimacy sexual intimacy[3] non-sexual physical intimacy (cuddling, touch)

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23:46

“Consider chilling out in 2028” by Valentine

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/21

I'll explain my reasoning in a second, but I'll start with the conclusion: I think it'd be healthy and good to pause and seriously reconsider the focus on doom if we get to 2028 and the situation feels basically like it does today. I don't know how to really precisely define "basically like it does today". I'll try to offer some pointers in a bit. I'm hoping folk will chime in and suggest some details. Also, I don't mean to challenge the doom focus right now. There seems to be some good momentum

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