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LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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25:50

Information Hygiene

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/28

Do avalanches get caused by loud noises? From every time I’ve given this class or lecture, at least 7/10 of you are nodding yes, and the main reason the other 3 aren’t is that you sense a trap. So. What do you think you know, and why do you think you know it? Our bodies are under constant assault. Bacteria, viruses, parasites—an endless parade of microscopic organisms trying to hijack our cellular machinery for their own replication. You don't notice most of these attacks because your immune system

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3:34

You Are Much More Salient To Yourself Than To...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/28

Back in the Boy Scouts, at summer camp, myself and a couple friends snuck out one night after curfew to commandeer a couch someone had left by a dumpster at the other end of the camp (maybe a half kilometer away). Now, our particular designated adult was a very stick-to-the-rules type, so we definitely did not want to get caught. I, therefore, made my way slowly and sneakily. The summer camp was in the woods, so I’d keep myself behind trees and bushes and out of the light anytime someone went by

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12:16

“Subliminal Learning Across Models” by draganover,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/27

Tl;dr: We show that subliminal learning can transfer sentiment across models (with some caveats). For example, we transfer positive sentiment for Catholicism, the UK, New York City, Stalin or Ronald Reagan across model families using normal-looking text. This post discusses under what conditions this subliminal transfer happens. — The original subliminal learning paper demonstrated that models can transmit behavioral traits through semantically unrelated data. In the most famous example, GPT 4.1

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23:24

Alignment remains a hard, unsolved problem

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/27

Thanks to (in alphabetical order) Joshua Batson, Roger Grosse, Jeremy Hadfield, Jared Kaplan, Jan Leike, Jack Lindsey, Monte MacDiarmid, Francesco Mosconi, Chris Olah, Ethan Perez, Sara Price, Ansh Radhakrishnan, Fabien Roger, Buck Shlegeris, Drake Thomas, and Kate Woolverton for useful discussions, comments, and feedback.Though there are certainly some issues, I think most current large language models are pretty well aligned. Despite its alignment faking, my favorite is probably Claude 3 Opus,

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8:15

Just explain it to someone

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/27

I was once helping a child with her homework. She was supposed to write about a place that was important for her, and had chosen her family's summer cottage. Every now and then, she would get distracted from the writing, tell me something about the cottage, and then complain that she didn’t know what to write next. Me: “Well, you could write the thing that you just told me.” Child: “Oh! I can?” Then she would. After a bit, the same thing happened again: she got stuck, distracted herself by telling

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41:57

Principles of a Rationality Dojo

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/26

Since 2023 I've been directing WARP, the Wandering Applied Rationality Program with the help of ESPR and SPARC staff, which are summer camps I've taught at since 2017. For those that don't know, these are ~10 day programs are hard to summarize well, but are generally meant to create an environment for participants to better understand the world, themselves, and each other by offering a variety of classes ranging from information theory and statistics, to Double Crux and Focusing, to classes like

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53:39

Postmodernism for STEM Types: A Clear-Language Guide...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/26

Crossposted from Susbstack Section I : Opening In 2021, Richard Dawkins tweeted: The fallout was immediate. The American Humanist Association revoked an award they’d given him 25 years earlier. A significant controversy erupted, splitting roughly into two camps. Thanks for reading Qualia Advocate! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. One camp defended Dawkins. They saw him raising a legitimate question about logical consistency. If we accept self-identification for gender,

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9:16

“Training PhD Students to be Fat Newts (Part 2)” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/26

[Thanks Inkhaven for hosting me! This is my fourth and last post and I'm already exhausted from writing. Wordpress.com!] Last time, I introduced the concept of the “Fat Newt” (fatigue neutral) build, a way of skilling up characters in Battle Brothers that aims to be extremely economical with the fatigue resource, relying entirely on each brother's base 15 fatigue regeneration per turn. This choice frees up stat and skill points to distribute evenly among offense, defense and utility. To illustrate,

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6:17

Snippets on Living In Reality

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/26

Social reality is quite literally another world, in the same sense that the Harry Potter universe is another world. Like the Harry Potter universe, social reality is a world portrayed primarily in text and in speech and in our imaginations. Like the Harry Potter universe, social reality doesn’t diverge completely from physical reality - they contain mostly the same cities, for instance. Like the Harry Potter universe, social reality matches physical reality “by default” wherever there's no

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7:57

Courtship Confusions Post-Slutcon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/26

Going into slutcon, one of my main known-unknowns was… I’d heard many times that the standard path to hooking up or dating starts with two people bantering for an hour or two at a party. And even in my own imagination, I was completely unable to make up a plausible-sounding conversation which would have that effect. Certainly it had never played out that way for me, nor had I personally witnessed it play out for anyone else. So at slutcon itself, I volunteered for a session in which a few guys

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5:54

Training PhD Students to be Fat Newts (Part 1)

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/26

This is a link post. Today, I want to introduce an experimental PhD student training philosophy. Let's start with some reddit memes. Every gaming subreddit has its own distinct meme culture. On r/chess, there's a demon who is summoned by an unsuspecting beginner asking “Why isn’t this checkmate?” These posts are gleefully deluged by responses saying “Google En Passant” in some form or other. Here's my favorite variant: Battle Brothers is an indie game of the turn-based strategy variety about

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8:19

“Evaluating honesty and lie detection techniques on a...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/26

TL;DR: We use a suite of testbed settings where models lie—i.e. generate statements they believe to be false—to evaluate honesty and lie detection techniques. The best techniques we studied involved fine-tuning on generic anti-deception data and using prompts that encourage honesty. Read the full Anthropic Alignment Science blog post and the X thread. Introduction: Suppose we had a “truth serum for AIs”: a technique that reliably transforms a language model $M$ into an honest model $M_H$ that

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7:36

Takeaways from the Eleos Conference on AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/26

Crossposted from my Substack. I spent the weekend at Lighthaven, attending the Eleos conference. In this post, I share thoughts and updates as I reflect on talks, papers, and discussions, and put out some of my takes on the topic since I haven't written about this topic before. I divide my thoughts into three categories: (1) philosophy, (2) legal/social, (3) technical, even though there are unavoidable overlaps. I share relevant paper titles of interest that were either mentioned in presentations

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8:02

Evolution & Freedom

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/26

In Against Money Maximalism, I argued against money-maximization as a normative stance. Profit is a coherent thing you can try to maximize, but there are also other sorts of value. Profit-maximization isn't the unique rational way to engage with money. One way you could respond to this is economic Darwinism: "Sure, you can optimize other things than money, but over time, the market will come to be dominated by money-maximizing agents." I think this is misguided in several respects. First,

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3:26

Reasons Why I Cannot Sleep

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/26

My therapist says I'm more tired today than she's ever seen me. Here are some reasons my brain says I cannot sleep: My boss might lose faith in my ability to manage projects. Something important might go wrong with my project (Inkhaven), and I am the only person on-call who has the context to fix it all. If I screw it up he might no longer be willing to give me big projects like this. Annoying social drama. There was one yesterday, that made me anxious and unable to relax until it was dealt with

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8:38

The Economics of Replacing Call Center Workers With AIs

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/26

TLDR: Voice AIs aren't that much cheaper in the year 2025 My friend runs a voice agent startup in Canada for walk-in clinics. The AI takes calls and uses tools to book appointments in the EMR (electronic medical record) system. In theory, this helps the clinic hire less front desk staff and the startup makes infinite money. In reality, the margins are brutal and they barely charge above cost. This is surprising to me: surely a living, breathing, squishy human costs more per hour than a GPU in a

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9:46

Three things that surprised me about technical...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/26

Open Philanthropy's Coefficient Giving's Technical AI Safety team is hiring grantmakers. I thought this would be a good moment to share some positive updates about the role that I’ve made since I joined the team a year ago. tl;dr: I think this role is more impactful and more enjoyable than I anticipated when I started, and I think more people should consider applying. It's not about the “marginal” grants Some people think that being a grantmaker at Coefficient means sorting through a big pile of

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6:52

“OpenAI finetuning metrics: What is going on with the...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/26

Introduction For our current project, we've been using the OpenAI fine-tuning API. To run some of our experiments, we needed to understand exactly how the reported metrics (loss and accuracy) are calculated. Unfortunately, the official documentation is sparse, and the most detailed explanation we could find was the following table from Microsoft's Azure documentation: Our experimental results didn't match what we expected from these definitions. So we ran controlled experiments to reverse-engineer

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11:54

Alignment will happen by default. What’s next?

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/25

I’m not 100% convinced of this, but I’m fairly convinced, more and more so over time. I’m hoping to start a vigorous but civilized debate. I invite you to attack my weak points and/or present counter-evidence. My thesis is that intent-alignment is basically happening, based on evidence from the alignment research in the LLM era. Introduction The classic story about loss of control from AI is that optimization pressure on proxies will cause the AI to value things that humans don’t. (Relatedly, the

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8:34

“Maybe Insensitive Functions are a Natural Ontology...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/25

The most canonical example of a "natural ontology" comes from gasses in stat mech. In the simplest version, we model the gas as a bunch of little billiard balls bouncing around in a box. The dynamics are chaotic. The system is continuous, so the initial conditions are real numbers with arbitrarily many bits of precision - e.g. maybe one ball starts out centered at x = 0.8776134000327846875..., y = 0.0013617356590430716..., z=132983270923481... . As balls bounce around, digits further and further

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