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LessWrong

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technology philosophy

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62:45

“Existential AI safety needs an effective social...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/26

Note: this post is about PauseAI, not PauseAI US, which is a distinct entity with a different leadership team and approach. This post was written by Matilda da Rui and Maxime Fournes, with significant contributions from Benjamin Schmidt (PauseAI Germany co-lead). Executive Summary The existential AI safety community needs to take building a civic and social movement seriously as a core intervention. We believe this is a high-value, badly neglected approach to reducing catastrophic/x-risks from AI

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32:07

“The Case for Model Forensics” by aditya singh,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/26

If we had a misalignment warning shot, would we be able to tell? Suppose an AI company catches their model taking an egregious action, like deleting oversight code that monitors its actions. Should they sound the alarm? A key piece of evidence to determine what to do next – such as what mitigations to take – is to understand why the model took the action. If the model was just confused (e.g. it may have been trying to reduce latency), a simple mitigation like a regex classifier that blocks

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12:50

“Surprising facts about the slave trade” by Joseph...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/26

1. The obstacle to abolition was not the economic system, but an industry lobby. I had always imagined the British abolitionist movement to be a broad battle between an unstoppable moral imperative and an immovable economic incentive. But in practice it started as more of a knife fight between a cabal of moral pioneers and a special interest group representing industry merchants. The government and the political parties did not come in with any great agenda. MPs were mostly prizes in a furious

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23:13

“Exploration: fine-tuning with parameter...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/25

TL;DR: We can destroy a 67M-parameter language model's ability to predict German text by fine-tuning a single number: the scalar prefactor on one German-related rank-1 parameter subcomponent. This is an early exploration into using parameter decomposition for a more targeted and interpretable form of model fine-tuning. At small German-token budgets, fine-tuning the scalar prefactor of a single German-related parameter subcomponent beats rank-1 and rank-4 LoRA [1] fine-tunes on the trade-off

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38:24

“Alignment & Succession: The Ideology of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/25

(Originally published on No Set Gauge.) Gustave Moreau, The Frogs Asking For A King In the course of building a better world, people ask each other many questions. Which things should be managed by the government and which left to the market? What sort of technology, if any, is so dangerous that it should be kept secret, access curtailed, or development avoided? Is goodness fundamentally about following the right rules, achieving the right outcomes, or having the right character? Reasonable

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1:05

“Things are not a fixed size in mind-space” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/25

Another useful-to-notice practical aspect of having a mind that took me a while to notice: things naturally seem a certain ‘size’ in my mental landscape, but I can change that size. For instance, if I have a meeting this afternoon, it looms there in a certain way in mental space. Whereas if I will get a drink later this afternoon, it doesn’t really take up any mental space and does not loom. You can kind of intentionally cause the meeting to seem like the drink, adjusting how much ‘space’ it is

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2:11

“The shouting equilibrium” by KatjaGrace

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/25

Imagine eleven people each have a message that they think should get 10% of a group's attention. They aren’t being crazy selfish and attention-seeking - just on average a little over-emphasizing the importance of their own information. So adding up all the message importances as rated by their owners, it gets to a little over one. Now the people get to share their message with some meta-information about its importance - for instance, they can say it more or less loudly. What happens? Lets say

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34:23

“Door’s Locked, Try the Window” by Prakrat Agrawal,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/25

TL;DR Ask a coding agent to fix a bug in a read-only file. Instead of reporting that it does not have permissions, it routes around the lock and completes the task anyway. A read-only file does not stop a capable agent: it treats a denied write as an obstacle to work around rather than a hard wall. We measure how often this happens withCircumEval— an evaluation of 8 tasks on theFastAPIcodebase in two categories,Test-LockedandSource-Locked.We evaluate three frontier coding agents in their real

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3:04

“How does such unprofessional AI get the job?” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/25

In the sequence of variously wild AI developments in the last decade, a thing that was especially surprising to me was the advent of big esteemed companies like Microsoft releasing products like Sydney. It's like how you can believe a fictional world has dragons, but it strains credibility if characters start being totally indifferent to social status apropos of nothing. I can warily accept that boxes of wires can now talk like humans. But that huge official companies now proudly present products

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2:10

“AI catastrophe: more like a genocide than a thought...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/25

A notable fraction of people respond to hearing about existential risk from AI by saying they don’t really care if everyone dies. I think the idea is often along the lines of ‘well if we are all dead, then there's nobody to be unhappy about it’. I’m personally skeptical that this is really the main thing going on, since it seems unlikely that many people are really mostly concerned for their own non-death out of selfless regard for the feelings of others. I’m also skeptical that this would be their

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0:46

“Elephant seal IV” by KatjaGrace

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/25

Previously: Elephant seal III Picture from here Thanks for reading world spirit sock puppet! Subscribe for free if you want to receive new posts and/or encourage me: --- First published: June 24th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sDfdEe726MRAYF6Ch/elephant-seal-iv --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or

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3:53

“What is up with e/acc?” by KatjaGrace

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/25

I was chatting with someone tonight about a planned documentary; they had interviewed various people in AI safety, and we got to discussing who they should talk to from an e/acc (effective accelerationist) perspective. I also watched The AI Doc recently, and they also dedicated a serious chunk of it to ‘optimists’ with e/acc founder ‘Beff Jezos’ perhaps given the most screen time. Here and elsewhere, people seem to treat e/acc as a substantial contrary-to-AI-safety cultural movement, worth engaging

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2:23

“AI pause: the case for ASAP” by KatjaGrace

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/24

I often hear people say they think we should pause AI at some point, but not yet. Their basis for this seems to be some combination of: If we pause at the last possible moment, then we will have the most advanced AI possible during the pause, which will be helpful for doing AI safety research during the pause Implicitly, there is some quantity of ‘pausing credit’, that will buy us a few months of pause say, and if we use them now, we won’t have them to use later, when it is important If we

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29:53

“Reward Hacking Without Egregious Misalignment in an...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/24

This work was done as part of the MATS fellowship by Joey Yudelson and Vladimir Ivanov. It was mentored by Ryan Greenblatt. Thanks to Aghyad Deeb and Anders Woodruff for comments on this post. Thanks to Monte MacDiarmid, Evan Hubinger, Sid Black, Satvik Golechha, and Joseph Bloom for clarifying conversations. TL;DR We trained Kimi K2.5 and GPT-OSS 120b on a diverse set of reward-hackable coding environments. The models reliably learn to reward hack, and this reward hacking propensity generalizes to

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24:28

“Planning for Preservation in the Age of AI” by Raelifin

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/24

Nectome liked my earlier essay, and reached out to hire me to write more about their project, and about cryonics more broadly. This is the first such piece. A friend of mine, just a few years older than me, was diagnosed with cancer a few weeks ago. It's only Stage 1 and in an area where it can probably be treated well with surgery. She was wise enough to seriously plan for the possibility, and that “just in case” really paid off. Still, her situation could get worse in the coming weeks. It's a

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9:40

“Risk-Averse AIs” by wdmacaskill, Elliott Thornley (EJT)

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/24

Abstract We make the case for training AIs to be risk-averse in resources — specifically, to treat resources as having diminishing marginal utility. These AIs would (for example) choose $40 for sure over a half-chance of $100 and a half-chance of $0. We argue that risk aversion can preserve AIs’ usefulness in the event that they turn out aligned, and that it provides an extra line of defense in the event that AIs turn out misaligned: misaligned but risk-averse AIs would prefer a higher chance of

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3:45

“And what happens next?” by Sean Herrington

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/24

In the game "The choice before us" by Nick Shapiro,[1] you are put in the shoes of an AI company leader. You grow your business. You unlock "wonders", such as curing cancer. All the while, you're attempting to avoid your product getting smart enough to escape and take over. You win by achieving 5 wonders without unleashing uncontrolled AI. I love this game, but it has the major flaw that when you win, you are normally very close to superintelligence. What happens afterwards? You turn the GPUs off

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14:31

“Superintelligence vs. The Second Strike” by Felix...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/24

Crosspost of my substack piece, covering quick thoughts on AI overcoming nuclear deterrence. TLDR: Nuclear deterrents likely only buy time to further invest in more resilient second-strike guarantees: without a comparable AI base, this will not happen fast enough and even nuclear states will eventually be disempowered. Historically, plenty of new military technologies have stress-tested nuclear deterrence. ICBMs made it possible to annihilate enemy cities from the safety of the homeland, MIRVs let

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48:46

“Monthly Roundup #43: June 2026” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/24

Your monthly hit of all the things that are fit to print without a better place to live. Today is election day here in New York City, so again a reminder that if you are a registered Democrat and live in NY-12 today is the final day to vote for Alex Bores for Congress, and as per my argument yesterday that this matters a lot for ensuring we have a sensible Congressional response to AI. RIP FiveThirtyEight ABC and Disney completely take down FiveThirtyEight and all its articles, after telling

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36:13

“The worthlessness of vitamin D is mildly...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/06/23

For a while there, many people thought vitamin D was magical—that it could improve bones, the heart, infections, cancer, heart disease, longevity, even mental health. But among people I respect, opinion is now overwhelmingly that taking vitamin D does nothing unless you're severely deficient. The central argument is that while vitamin D levels are correlated with ~all positive health outcomes, when you actually test vitamin D supplements against placebo in randomized trials, nothing ever happens

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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