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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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4:33

“FLAKE-Bench: Outsourcing Awkwardness in the Age of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/01

Introduction A key part of modern social dynamics is flaking at short notice. However, anxiety in coming up with believable and socially acceptable reasons to do so can instead lead to ‘ghosting’, awkwardness, or implausible excuses, risking emotional harm and resentment in the other party. The ability to delegate this task to a Large Language Model (LLM) could substantially reduce friction and enhance the flexibility of user's social life while greatly minimising the aforementioned creative burden

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44:09

“Housing Roundup #11” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/01

The book of March 2025 was Abundance. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are making a noble attempt to highlight the importance of solving America's housing crisis the only way it can be solved: Building houses in places people want to live, via repealing the rules that make this impossible. They also talk about green energy abundance, and other places besides. There may be a review coming.Until then, it seems high time for the latest housing roundup, which as a reminder all take place in the

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1:53

“You will crash your car in front of my house within...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/01

I'm not writing this to alarm anyone, but it would be irresponsible not to report on something this important. On current trends, every car will be crashed in front of my house within the next week. Here's the data: Until today, only two cars had crashed in front of my house, several months apart, during the 15 months I have lived here. But a few hours ago it happened again, mere weeks from the previous crash. This graph may look harmless enough, but now consider the frequency of crashes this

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8:59

“VDT: a solution to decision theory” by L Rudolf L

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/01

Introduction Decision theory is about how to behave rationally under conditions of uncertainty, especially if this uncertainty involves being acausally blackmailed and/or gaslit by alien superintelligent basilisks. Decision theory has found numerous practical applications, including proving the existence of God and generating endless LessWrong comments since the beginning of time. However, despite the apparent simplicity of "just choose the best action", no comprehensive decision theory that

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3:26

“Follow me on TikTok” by lsusr

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/01

For more than five years, I've posted more than 1× per week on Less Wrong, on average. I've learned a lot from you nerds. I've made friends and found my community. Thank you for pointing out all the different ways I've been wrong. Less Wrong has changed my life for the better. But it's time to say goodbye. Let's rewind the clock back to October 19, 2019. I had just posted my 4ᵗʰ ever Less Wrong post Mediums Overpower Messages. Mediums Overpower Messages is about how different forms of

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5:26

“Keltham’s Lectures in Project Lawful” by Morpheus

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/01

Project Lawful is really long. If anyone wants to go back to one of Keltham's lectures, here's a list with links to all the lectures. In principle, one could also read these without having read the rest of project lawful, I am not sure how easy it would be to follow though. I included short excerpts, so that you can also find the sections in the e-book. Happy reading/listening: Lecture on "absolute basics of lawfulness": Podcast Episode 9, minute 26 Keltham takes their scrambling-time as a

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3:47

“We’re not prepared for an AI market crash” by Remmelt

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/01

Our community is not prepared for an AI crash. We're good at tracking new capability developments, but not as much the company financials. Currently, both OpenAI and Anthropic are losing $5 billion+ a year, while under threat of losing users to cheap LLMs. A crash will weaken the labs. Funding-deprived and distracted, execs struggle to counter coordinated efforts to restrict their reckless actions. Journalists turn on tech darlings. Optimism makes way for mass outrage, for all the wasted money and

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1:34

“LessWrong has been acquired by EA” by habryka

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/01

Dear LessWrong community, It is with a sense of... considerable cognitive dissonance that I announce a significant development regarding the future trajectory of LessWrong. After extensive internal deliberation, modeling of potential futures, projections of financial runways, and what I can only describe as a series of profoundly unexpected coordination challenges, the Lightcone Infrastructure team has agreed in principle to the acquisition of LessWrong by EA. I assure you, nothing about how

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1:25

“New Cause Area Proposal” by CallumMcDougall

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/01

Epistemic status - statistically verified. I'm writing this post to draw peoples' attention to a new cause area proposal - haircuts for alignment researchers. Aside from the obvious benefits implied by the graph (i.e. haircuts having the potential to directly improve organizational stability), this would represent possibly the only pre-singularity opportunity we'll have to found an org named "Clippy". I await further investment. --- First published: April 1st, 2025

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15:21

“Fundraising for Mox: coworking & events in SF” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/04/01

Hey! Austin here. At Manifund, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to help AI go well. One question that bothered me: so much of the important work on AI is done in SF, so why are all the AI safety hubs in Berkeley? (I’d often consider this specifically while stuck in traffic over the Bay Bridge.) I spoke with leaders at Constellation, Lighthaven, FAR Labs, OpenPhil; nobody had a good answer. Everyone said “yeah, an SF hub makes sense, I really hope somebody else does it”. Eventually, I

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18:02

“OpenAI #12: Battle of the Board Redux” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/03/31

Back when the OpenAI board attempted and failed to fire Sam Altman, we faced a highly hostile information environment. The battle was fought largely through control of the public narrative, and the above was my attempt to put together what happened. My conclusion, which I still believe, was that Sam Altman had engaged in a variety of unacceptable conduct that merited his firing. In particular, he very much ‘not been consistently candid’ with the board on several important occasions. In particular,

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15:35

“Downstream applications as validation of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/03/31

Epistemic status: The important content here is the claims. To illustrate the claims, I sometimes use examples that I didn't research very deeply, where I might get some facts wrong; feel free to treat these examples as fictional allegories. In a recent exchange on X, I promised to write a post with my thoughts on what sorts of downstream problems interpretability researchers should try to apply their work to. But first, I want to explain why I think this question is important. In this post, I will

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12:58

“How I talk to those above me” by Maxwell Peterson

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/03/30

Now and then, at work, we’ll have a CEO on from the megacorp that owns the company I work at. It's a Zoom meeting with like 300 people, the guy is usually giving a speech that is harmless and nice (if a bit banal), and I’ll turn on my camera and ask a question about something that I feel is not going well. Invariably, within 10 minutes, I receive messages from coworkers congratulating me on my boldness. You asked him? That question? So brave! This is always a little strange to me. Of course I feel

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8:11

“The vision of Bill Thurston” by TsviBT

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/03/29

PDF version. berkeleygenomics.org.William Thurston was a world-renowned mathematician. His ideas revolutionized many areas of geometry and topology[1]; the proof of his geometrization conjecture was eventually completed by Grigori Perelman, thus settling the Poincaré conjecture (making it the only solved Millennium Prize problem). After his death, his students wrote reminiscences, describing among other things his exceptional vision.[2] Here's Jeff Weeks: Bill's gift, of course, was his vision,

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5:27

“Tormenting Gemini 2.5 with the [[[]]][][[]] Puzzle”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/03/29

Includes a link to the full Gemini conversation, but setting the stage first: There is a puzzle. If you are still on Tumblr, or live in Berkeley where I can and have inflicted it on you in person[1], you may have seen it. There's a series of arcane runes, composed entirely of []- in some combination, and the runes - the strings of characters - are all assigned to numbers; mostly integers, but some fractions and integer roots. You are promised that this is a notation, and it's a genuine promise.1 =

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2:09

“Softmax, Emmett Shear’s new AI startup focused on...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/03/28

A new AI alignment player has entered the arena. Emmett Shear, Adam Goldstein and David Bloomin have set up shop in San Francisco with a 10-person start-up called Softmax. The company is part research lab and part aspiring money maker and aimed at figuring out how to fuse the goals of humans and AIs in a novel way through what the founders describe as “organic alignment.” It's a heady, philosophical approach to alignment that seeks to take cues from nature and the fundamental traits of intelligent

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27:40

“The Pando Problem: Rethinking AI Individuality” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/03/28

Epistemic status: This post aims at an ambitious target: improving intuitive understanding directly. The model for why this is worth trying is that I believe we are more bottlenecked by people having good intuitions guiding their research than, for example, by the ability of people to code and run evals. Quite a few ideas in AI safety implicitly use assumptions about individuality that ultimately derive from human experience. When we talk about AIs scheming, alignment faking or goal preservation,

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27:11

“Gemini 2.5 is the New SoTA” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/03/28

Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental is America's next top large language model. That doesn’t mean it is the best model for everything. In particular, it's still Gemini, so it still is a proud member of the Fun Police, in terms of censorship and also just not being friendly or engaging, or willing to take a stand. If you want a friend, or some flexibility and fun, or you want coding that isn’t especially tricky, then call Claude, now with web access. If you want an image, call GPT-4o. But if you mainly

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74:52

“AI #109: Google Fails Marketing Forever” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/03/28

What if they released the new best LLM, and almost no one noticed? Google seems to have pulled that off this week with Gemini 2.5 Pro. It's a great model, sir. I have a ton of reactions, and it's 90%+ positive, with a majority of it extremely positive. They cooked. But what good is cooking if no one tastes the results? Instead, everyone got hold of the GPT-4o image generator and went Ghibli crazy. I love that for us, but we did kind of bury the lede. We also buried everything else. Certainly

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8:53

“Explaining British Naval Dominance During the Age of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/03/28

The other day I discussed how high monitoring costs can explain the emergence of “aristocratic” systems of governance: Aristocracy and Hostage Capital Arjun Panickssery · Jan 8 There's a conventional narrative by which the pre-20th century aristocracy was the "old corruption" where civil and military positions were distributed inefficiently due to nepotism until the system was replaced by a professional civil service after more enlightened thinkers prevailed ... An element of Douglas Allen's

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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