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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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21:03

“Thoughts on ‘Antiqua et nova’ (Catholic Church’s AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/20

On January 28, 2025 (during the pontificate of Pope Francis) the Catholic Church put out its position paper on AI: Antiqua et nova: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence. Here are my thoughts, which I wrote back in February, but not much has changed since then, and the new pope has continued citing AI as of particular concern to the Catholic Church. "With all your modern science, are you any closer to understanding the mystery of how a robot walks or

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3:02

[Linkpost] “One Year in DC” by tlevin

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/19

This is a link post. (h/t Otis Reid) I think this post captures a lot of important features of the US policymaking system. Pulling out a few especially relevant/broadly applicable sections: 1. There's No Efficient Market For Policy There can be a huge problem that nobody is working on; that is not evidence that it's not a huge problem. Conversely, there can be a marginal problem swamped with policy work; that's not evidence it's really all that big of a deal. On the upside, this means there are

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4:07

[Linkpost] “[Funded Fellowship] AI for Human...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/19

This is a link post. The Future of Life Foundation is launching a fellowship on AI for Human Reasoning. Fellowship on AI for Human Reasoning Apply by June 9th | $25k–$50k stipend | 12 weeks, from July 14 - October 3 Join us in working out how to build a future which robustly empowers humans and improves decision-making. FLF's incubator fellowship on AI for human reasoning will help talented researchers and builders start working on AI tools for coordination and epistemics. Participants will

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6:45

“A widely shared AI productivity paper was retracted,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/19

Confidence notes: I am a physicist working on computational material science, so I have some familiarity with the field, but don't know much about R&D firms or economics. Some of the links in this article were gathered from a post at pivot-to-ai.com and the BS detector. The paper "Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation" was published as an Arxiv preprint last December, roughly 5 months ago, and was submitted to a top economics journal. The paper claimed to show

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6:22

“Dreams of Ideas” by Joseph Miller

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/19

CGP Grey describes a phenomenon I think of as 'dreams of ideas' that I find useful as a tool to know when to stop working on a project. You can be working on something and you are thinking about what it could be, but what is hard to know is if that thought in your head is more like when your brain dreams. There is a phenomenon that I always think of as like, you wake up and you think you had a great idea in your dream, but what you really had was the idea of a great idea. You didn't have a great

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2:25

“Google Logo Ligature Bug” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/18

Jeffrey Yasskin recently pointed out an interesting security bug: The idea is, if you had registered googlelogoligature.net then Chrome on Android (and possibly other Google products) would have displayed it as Google.net, potentially tricking users into thinking they were really interacting with Google. To see how this worked, you can try searching Google for ["googlelogoligature"], and you'll see it shows up as "Google": Poking in devtools, this is dependent

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3:11

“D&D.Sci: The Choosing Ones” by abstractapplic

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/18

This is a D&D.Sci scenario: a puzzle where players are given a dataset to analyze and an objective to pursue using information from that dataset. Intended Difficulty: ~3.5/5 The fairy in your bedroom explains that she is a champion of Fate, tasked with whisking mortals into mysterious realms of wonderment and (mild) peril; there, they forge friendships with mythical creatures, do battle with ancient evils, and return to their mundane lives having gained the confidence that comes with having

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19:28

“Book Review: The Art of Happiness” by Screwtape

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/18

The Art of Happiness is a book co-written by American psychiatrist Dr. Cutler and the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso. Published in 1998, the book is an attempt to blend western scientific understanding of the mind with the spiritual wisdom and ancient training of Buddhist practices. Success would mean a book that taught you how to be happy. This is a terrific idea. All over the world, some human beings are unhappy. If you’re not sure this is true, go walk down your office or knock on a few doors in

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15:21

“What OpenAI Told California’s Attorney General” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/18

In a previously unreported letter, the AI company defends its restructuring plan while attacking critics and making surprising admissions This is the full text of a post first published on Obsolete, a Substack that I write about the intersection of capitalism, geopolitics, and artificial intelligence. I’m a freelance journalist and the author of a forthcoming book called Obsolete: Power, Profit, and the Race to Build Machine Superintelligence. Consider subscribing to stay up to date with my work

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10:58

“time is event based” by thiccythot

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/17

After college I worked for a high frequency trading firm where the basic unit of time was the microsecond. A single blink—about 250,000 µs—was long enough for our algorithms to open and close thousands of positions, each trade born and buried long before a human observer would have even noticed the screen had changed. At the end of each day we would grade our trading by looking forward into the future for every trade. If we bought stock A at $5.00, we would have liked to see the market trading

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2:17

“Events: Debate & Fiction Project” by abramdemski

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/17

I'm doing a couple of events next week which people might be interested in attending: Event: Tsvi & Abram debate AI timelines. Abram expects to defend a picture similar to the AI 2027 report. Tsvi expects to defend much longer timelines. Monday, May 19 · 10:00 – 11:00am EDT Video call link: https://meet.google.com/cbq-kzck-gib Add to your calendar: https://calendar.app.google/tdxsJiKQaN9x2JiB7 Event: AI-Powered Fiction Experiment Abram Demski, TJ, and Daystar Eld will be running an

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15:08

“How Fast Can Algorithms Advance Capabilities? |...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/17

I'm cross-posting my guest post on Epoch's Gradient Updates newsletter, in which I describe some new research from my team at UChicago's XLab — roughly, the algorithmic improvements that most improve capabilities at scale are the ones that require the most compute to find and validate. This week's issue is a guest post by Henry Josephson, who is a research manager at UChicago's XLab and an AI governance intern at Google DeepMind. In the AI 2027 scenario, the authors predict a fast takeoff of AI

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3:45

“Management is the Near Future” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/17

Programmers have traditionally been contemptuous of management: if you're not writing code what are you even doing with your time? I picked this up through general culture, and I remember my instinctive shudder and recoil the first time my boss asked if I was interested in management. As I got a better understanding of what managers were doing, though, I came to appreciate how good ones could let us be much more productive: They gave us context on how the business worked, the

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5:24

[Linkpost] “Social Anxiety Isn’t About Being Liked”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/17

This is a link post. There's this popular idea that socially anxious folks are just dying to be liked. It seems logical, right? Why else would someone be so anxious about how others see them?Show tweet And yet, being socially anxious tends to make you less likeable…they must be optimizing poorly, behaving irrationally, right? Maybe not. What if social anxiety isn’t about getting people to like you? What if it's about stopping them from disliking you?Show tweet Consider what can happen when someone

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18:42

“Problems with Instruction Following as an Alignment...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/16

We should probably try to understand the failure modes of the alignment schemes that AGI developers are most likely to attempt. I still think Instruction-following AGI is easier and more likely than value aligned AGI. I’ve updated downward on the ease of IF alignment, but upward on how likely it is. IF is the de-facto current primary alignment target (see definition immediately below), and it seems likely to remain so until the first real AGIs, if we continue on the current path (e.g., AI 2027). If

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27:44

“Regarding South Africa” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/16

The system prompt being modified by an unauthorized person in pursuit of a ham-fisted political point very important to Elon Musk once already doesn’t seem like coincidence.It happening twice looks rather worse than that. A Funny Thing Happened on Twitter In addition to having seemingly banned all communication with Pliny, Grok seems to have briefly been rather eager to talk on Twitter, with zero related prompting, about whether there is white genocide in South Africa? Tracing Woods: Golden

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9:21

“Generating the Funniest Joke with RL (according to...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/16

Language models are not particularly good at generating funny jokes. Asked for their funniest jokes, Claude 3.7 gives us: Why don't scientists trust atoms? Because they make up everything! o3 gives us: Why don't scientists trust atoms anymore? Because they make up everything—and they just can't keep their quarks straight! and Gemini 2.5 Pro gives us… Why don't scientists trust atoms? Because they make up everything! Hilarious. Can we do better than that? Of course, we could try different variations

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9:40

“What does it mean to ‘write like you talk’?” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/15

People often say to “write like you talk.” Paul Graham has a post titled “Write Like You Talk” where he says explicitly that written language is worse than spoken language because “Written language is more complex, which makes it more work to read” “It's also more formal and distant, which gives the reader's attention permission to drift” “The complex sentences and fancy words give you, the writer, the false impression that you’re saying more than you actually are” He gives concrete advice:

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42:15

“Re SMTM: negative feedback on negative feedback” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/15

SlimeMoldTimeMold (SMTM) recently finished a 13-part series on psychology, “The Mind in the Wheel”, centering on feedback loops (“cybernetics”) as kind of a grand unified theory of the brain. There are parts of their framework I like—in particular, I think there are innate drives (pain is bad, eating-when-hungry is good, etc.), and I think that the top priority of neuroscience & psychology should be to figure out exactly what they are and how they work.Just kidding! Control theory is great. I’m

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6:07

“Moral Obligation and Moral Opportunity” by Alice Blair

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/05/15

This concept and terminology was spawned out of a conversation a few years ago with my friend Skyler. I finally decided to write it up. Any mistakes here are my own. Every once in a while, I find myself at yet another rationalist/EA/whatever-adjacent social event. Invariably, someone walks up to me: Hi, I'm Bob. I'm pretty new here. What do you work on? Hi Bob, I'm Alice. I work on preventing human extinction from advanced AI. If you'd like, I'm happy to talk a bit more about why I think this is

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