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LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

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35:14

“Endometriosis is an incredibly interesting disease”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/17

Introduction There are several diseases that are canonically recognized as ‘interesting’, even by laymen. Whether that is in their mechanism of action, their impact on the patient, or something else entirely. It's hard to tell exactly what makes a medical condition interesting, it's a you-know-it-when-you-see-it sort of thing. One such example is measles. Measles is an unremarkable disease based solely on its clinical progression: fever, malaise, coughing, and a relatively low death rate of 0.2%~

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50:50

“Estrogen: A trip report” by cube_flipper

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/17

I'd like to say thanks to Anna Magpie – who offers literature review as a service – for her help reviewing the section on neuroendocrinology. The following post discusses my personal experience of the phenomenology of feminising hormone therapy. It will also touch upon my own experience of gender dysphoria. I wish to be clear that I do not believe that someone should have to demonstrate that they experience gender dysphoria – however one might even define that – as a prerequisite for taking

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3:13

“Intelligence Is Not Magic, But Your Threshold For...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/17

A while ago I saw a person in the comments on comments to Scott Alexander's blog arguing that a superintelligent AI would not be able to do anything too weird and that "intelligence is not magic", hence it's Business As Usual. Of course, in a purely technical sense, he's right. No matter how intelligent you are, you cannot override fundamental laws of physics. But people (myself included) have a fairly low threshold for what counts as "magic," to the point where other humans can surpass that

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1:15

[Linkpost] “the void” by nostalgebraist

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/11

This is a link post. A very long essay about LLMs, the nature and history of the the HHH assistant persona, and the implications for alignment. Multiple people have asked me whether I could post this LW in some form, hence this linkpost. (Note: although I expect this post will be interesting to people on LW, keep in mind that it was written with a broader audience in mind than my posts and comments here. This had various implications about my choices of presentation and tone, about which things I

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21:53

“Expectation = intention = setpoint” by jimmy

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/11

When I was first learning about hypnosis, one of the things that was very confusing to me is how "expectations" relate to "intent". Some hypnotists would say "All suggestion is about expectation; if they expect to have an experience they will", and frame their inductions in terms of expectation (e.g. "Your eyelids will become heavy"). The problem with this is that "I don't think it's gonna work". Other hypnotists would avoid this issue entirely by saying "I don't care if you think it will work

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29:34

“Mech interp is not pre-paradigmatic” by Lee Sharkey

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/10

This is a blogpost version of a talk I gave earlier this year at GDM. Epistemic status: Vague and handwavy. Nuance is often missing. Some of the claims depend on implicit definitions that may be reasonable to disagree with. But overall I think it's directionally true. It's often said that mech interp is pre-paradigmatic. I think it's worth being skeptical of this claim. In this post I argue that: Mech interp is not pre-paradigmatic. Within that paradigm, there have been "waves" (mini

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13:20

“The True Goal Fallacy” by adamShimi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/10

As I ease out into a short sabbatical, I find myself turning back to dig the seeds of my repeated cycle of exhaustion and burnout in the last few years. Many factors were at play, some more personal that I’m comfortable discussing here. But I have unearthed at least one failure mode that I see reflected and diffracted in others lives, especially people who like me love to think, to make sense, to understand. So that seems worth a blog post, if only to plant a pointer to the problem, and my own way

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2:07

“Ghiblification for Privacy” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/10

I often want to include an image in my posts to give a sense of a situation. A photo communicates the most, but sometimes that's too much: some participants would rather remain anonymous. A friend suggested running pictures through an AI model to convert them into a Studio Ghibli-style cartoon, as was briefly a fad a few months ago: House Party Dances Letting Kids Be Outside The model is making quite large changes, aside from just converting to a cartoon, including:

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17:12

“When is it important that open-weight models aren’t...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/09

Recently, Anthropic released Opus 4 and said they couldn't rule out the model triggering ASL-3 safeguards due to the model's CBRN capabilities. That is, they say they couldn't rule out that this model had "the ability to significantly help individuals or groups with basic technical backgrounds (e.g., undergraduate STEM degrees) create/obtain and deploy CBRN weapons" (quoting from Anthropic's RSP). More specifically, Anthropic is worried about the model's capabilities in assisting with bioweapons

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22:43

“Administering immunotherapy in the morning seems to...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/09

Edit on 08/06/2024: At least one person has pointed out that, at one point, giving hypertensives at night were also thought to matter, a now disproven idea. Someone also mentioned how many times the clinical trial information was altered during the study. I added in a section at the end to discuss this. There's a really interesting phenomenon in the immunotherapy field that has been going on for what seems to be several years now, but was raised to me — a non-oncologist — via a viral Twitter

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0:44

[Linkpost] “METR: Recent frontier models are reward...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/09

This is a link post. METR just made a lovely post detailing many examples they've found of reward hacks by frontier models. Unlike the reward hacks of yesteryear, these models are smart enough to know that what they are doing is deceptive and not what the company wanted them to do. --- First published: June 9th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zu4ai9GFpwezyfB2K/metr-recent-frontier-models-are-reward-hacking Linkpost

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4:09

“Levels of Doom: Eutopia, Disempowerment, Extinction”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/09

Disempowerment is on the fence, gets interpreted as either implying human extinction or being a good place. "Doom" tends to be ambiguous between disempowerment and extinction, as well as about when that outcome must be gauged. And many people currently feel both disempowered and OK, so see eutopia as similar to disempowerment, neither an example of "doom". Arguments pointing to risk of human extinction run into the issue of people expecting disempowerment without extinction, when some of the same

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8:08

“AI companies’ eval reports mostly don’t support...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/09

AI companies claim that their models are safe on the basis of dangerous capability evaluations. OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic publish reports intended to show their eval results and explain why those results imply that the models' capabilities aren't too dangerous.[1] Unfortunately, the reports mostly don't support the companies' claims. Crucially, the companies usually don't explain why they think the results, which often seem strong, actually indicate safety, especially for biothreat and

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2:45

“Busking with Kids” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/09

Our older two, ages 11 and 9, have been learning fiddle, and are getting pretty good at it. When the weather's nice we'll occasionally go play somewhere public for tips ("busking"). It's better than practicing, builds performance skills, and the money is a good motivation! We'll usually walk over to Davis Sq, tune the fiddles, set out the case, and play. We'll do a series of fiddle tunes from Lily's list, playing for 20-30min. Today I remember playing Sandy Boys, Angeline the Baker, Marie's

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17:19

“Emergent Misalignment on a Budget” by Valerio Pepe

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/09

TL;DR We reproduce emergent misalignment (Betley et al. 2025) in Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct using single-layer LoRA finetuning, showing that tweaking even one layer can lead to toxic or insecure outputs. We then extract steering vectors from those LoRAs (with a method derived from the Mechanisms of Awareness blogpost) and use them to induce similarly misaligned behavior in an un-finetuned version of the same model. We take the results to support two main claims: Single-layer LoRAs are sufficient

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8:18

“Letting Kids Be Outside” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/08

When our kids were 7 and 5 they started walking home from school alone. We wrote explaining they were ready and giving permission, the school had a few reasonable questions, and that was it. Just kids walking home from the local public school like they have in this neighborhood for generations. Online, however, it's common for people to write as if this sort of thing is long gone. Zvi captures a common view: You want to tell your kids, go out and play, be home by dinner, like your

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5:24

“On working 80%” by adrische

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/08

A year ago, I decided to reduce my employment level from 100% to 80% and to take Fridays off. My main motivation was to have some time for myself: Relax, reduce my stress level from work, have more time for side projects, do more sports, and maybe spend more time with my wife without the kids. This was only partially successful as there were a few things I had not realized beforehand. I’d like to describe my experience, and will focus on the effects this change had on my work, financial situation,

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2:22

“Solo Park Play at Three” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/07

Our three year old is about to turn four, and is bursting with adesire for independence. She's becoming more capable in all sorts of ways, and wants me to back off and let her do things. Today she wanted to go to the park by herself. Now, we live close to the park, she could probably get there and back on her own, and I'm on the "kids can generally do things pretty young" end of the spectrum, but still, she's not even four yet. And while age is useful guide, she also can't safely

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9:06

“The Mirror Trap” by Cameron Berg

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/06/07

A quick post on a probably-real inadequate equilibrium mostly inspired by trying to think through what happened to Chance the Rapper. Potentially ironic artifact if it accrues karma. 1. The sculptor's garden A sculptor worked in solitude for years, carving strange figures in his remote garden. Most of his statues failed: some cracked in winter, others looked wrong against the landscape. But occasionally, very rarely, one seemed to work. The first visitors stumbled upon the garden by accident. They

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