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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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5:33

The Enemy Gets The Last Hit

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/24

Disclaimer: I am god-awful at chess. I Late-beginner chess players, those who are almost on the cusp of being basically respectable, often fall into a particular pattern. They've got the hang of calculating moves ahead; they can make plans along the lines of "Ok, so if I move my rook to give a check, the opponent will have to move her king, and then I can take her bishop." and those plans tend to be basically correct: the opponent really does have to move her king. But there's a very important rule

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11:45

Reasoning Models Sometimes Output Illegible Chains of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/24

TL;DR: Models trained with outcome-based RL sometimes have reasoning traces that look very weird. In this paper, I evaluate 14 models and find that many of them often generate pretty illegible CoTs. I show that models seem to find this illegible text useful, with a model's accuracy dropping heavily when given only the legible parts of its CoT, and that legibility goes down when answering harder questions. However, when sampling many responses to the same questions, I find there's no real

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15:19

The Coalition

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/24

Summary A defensive military coalition is a key frame for thinking about our international agreement aimed at forestalling the development of superintelligence. We introduce historical examples of former rivals or enemies forming defensive coalitions in response to an urgent mutual threat, and detail key aspects of our proposal which are analogous. We also contrast our proposal with the oft-employed analogy to nonproliferation agreements, and highlight shortcomings. Introduction We at the Machine

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9:55

“The LessWrong Team Was Selling Dollars For 86 Cents”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/24

You know what's sweeter than free money? Free money that you take from an organization of smart people who love prediction markets and having good values, by being better at prediction markets and values than they are. Sadly, you can no longer turn this into actual U.S. legal tender. You can, however, still turn it into mana and bragging points. The Best Of LessWrong Manifold Markets Here's the setup. Once a year, LessWrong picks ~50 posts from two years ago to be the Best Of posts. This is called

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8:24

NATO is dangerously unaware of its military...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/24

NATO faces its gravest military disadvantage since 1949, as the balance of power has shifted decisively toward its adversaries in the Era of Drone Warfare. The speed and scale of NATO's relative military decline represents the most dramatic power shift since World War II—and the alliance appears dangerously unaware of its new vulnerability NATO doctrine is obsolete. The Pax Americana is coming to its end. Failure to defeat Houthi Rebels: The US Navy's struggles against the Houthis' low-cost drone

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5:17

Inkhaven Retrospective

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/24

Here I am on the plane on the way home from Inkhaven. Huge thanks to Ben Pace and the other organizers for inviting me. Lighthaven is a delightful venue and there sure are some brilliant writers taking part in this — both contributing writers and participants. With 40 posts published per day by participants (not counting those by organizers and contributing writers) it feels impossible to highlight samples of them. Fortunately that's been done for me: the Inkhaven spotlight. And just to

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2:53

“Stop Applying And Get To Work” by plex

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/23

TL;DR: Figure out what needs doing and do it, don't wait on approval from fellowships or jobs. If you... Have short timelines Have been struggling to get into a position in AI safety Are able to self-motivate your efforts Have a sufficient financial safety net ... I would recommend changing your personal strategy entirely. I started my full-time AI safety career transitioning process in March 2025. For the first 7 months or so, I heavily prioritized applying for jobs and fellowships. But like for

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6:13

Show Review: Masquerade

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/23

Earlier this month, I was pretty desperately feeling the need for a vacation. So after a little googling, I booked a flight to New York city, a hotel, and four nights worth of tickets to a new immersive theater show called Masquerade. Background: “Standard” Immersive Theater To convey Masquerade, I find it easiest to compare against standard immersive theater. It's weird to talk about “standard” immersive theater, because the standard is not that old and has not applied to that many shows at this

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4:33

I’ll be sad to lose the puzzles

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/23

My understanding is that even though advocating a pause or massive slowdown in the development of superintelligence think we should get there eventually[1]. Something something this is necessary for humanity to reach its potential. Perhaps so, but I'll be sad about it. Humanity has a lot of unsolved problems right now. Aging, death, disease, poverty, environmental degradation, abuse and oppression of the less powerful, conflicts, and insufficient resources such as energy and materials. Even

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5:36

You can just do things

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/23

{early pause}... (you should have known this:) YOU (not just them over there) CAN (tho maybe you shouldn't?) JUST (its weirdly easy) DO (not talking/writing/planning/delaying) THINGS (weird/hard/easy things... really ANYthing) {late pause} (I'll make eye contract until you START) -@jenniferRM, riffing on norvid_studies. You should know this by now, but you can just do things. That you didn't know this is an indictment of your social environment, which taught you how to act. You Can Just Do Things

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17:59

Literacy is Decreasing Among the Intellectual Class

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/23

(Cross-posted from my Substack; written as part of the Halfhaven virtual blogging camp) Oh, you read Emily Post's Etiquette? What version? There's a significant difference between versions, and that difference reflects the declining literacy of the American intellectual. I looked into this because I noticed books published before the ’70s or ‘80s seemed to be written with an assumption of the reader's competence that is no longer present in many modern texts. Take Emily Post's Etiquette. The force

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17:47

Traditional Food

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/23

Insulin resistance is bad. It doesn't just cause heart disease. Peter Attia, author of Outlive, the Science and Art of Longevity, makes a convincing[1] case that insulin resistance increases the risk of cancer and Alzheimer's disease, too. Causally-speaking, the number of deaths downstream of insulin resistance is ginormous and massively underestimated. This implies one of the following must be true: The science is wrong. Insulin isn't ruining our health. Insulin resistance is an extremely

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3:28

Easy vs Hard Emotional Vulnerability

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/23

What blocks people from being vulnerable with others? Much ink has been spilled on two classes of answers to this question: Not everyone is in fact safe to be vulnerable around. Not even well-intentioned people are always safe to be vulnerable around; being-safe-to-be-vulnerable-around is a skill which not everyone is automatically good at. Many people have been vulnerable in the past, got burned for it, and so developed emotional blocks against vulnerability. “Trauma”. There are a lot of people

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7:31

What kind of person is DeepSeek’s founder, Liang...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/23

Author: 清风学渣 Link: https://www.zhihu.com/question/10967114707/answer/1904046054904665233 Source: Zhihu Copyright belongs to the author. For commercial reprints, please contact the author for authorization. For non-commercial reprints, please indicate the source. I’ve seen a lot of discussions about Liang Wenfeng online. Yesterday, I happened to be on the phone with a close friend from my university year, and we talked about him too. So here, I’ll shamelessly piggyback[1] on the fame of my old

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7:38

OpenAI Locks Down San Francisco Offices Following...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/23

A message on OpenAI's internal Slack claimed the activist in question had expressed interest in “causing physical harm to OpenAI employees.” OpenAI employees in San Francisco were told to stay inside the office on Friday afternoon after the company purportedly received a threat from an individual who was previously associated with the Stop AI activist group. “Our information indicates that [name] from StopAI has expressed interest in causing physical harm to OpenAI employees,” a member of the

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1:25

Eight Heuristics of Anti-Epistemology

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/23

Here are eight tools of anti-epistemology that I think anyone can use to hide their norm-violating behavior from being noticed, and deceive people about their character.[1]HeuristicDetails 1. Maintain Plausible Innocence Always provide and maintain a plausibly deniable account of your behavior that isn’t norm violating Kim Kitsuragi: “You want to send someone a message that the police are working for you.” Evrart Claire: “I repeat, I’m a very, *very* busy man, Mr. Kitsuragi, and therefore I must

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10:08

“Book Review: Wizard’s Hall” by Screwtape

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/22

Ever on the quilting goes, Spinning out the lives between, Winding up the souls of those Students up to one-thirteen There's a book about a young boy whose mundane life is one day interrupted by a call to go to wizard boarding school, where he gets into youthful hijinks overshadowed by feats about a dark wizard. There's a prophecy, friends made along the way, and finally a climactic battle against the dark wizard returned. I read it when I was young, and it left a lasting impact on me. That book is

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11:23

Market Logic I

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/22

Audio note: this article contains 92 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Garrabrant Induction provides a somewhat plausible sketch of reasoning under computational uncertainty, the gist of which is "build a prediction market". An approximation of classical probability theory emerges. However, this is only because we assume classical logic. The version of Garrabrant Induction in the paper does this by

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3:54

D&D.Sci Thanksgiving: the Festival Feast

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/22

This is an entry in the 'Dungeons & Data Science' series, a set of puzzles where players are given a dataset to analyze and an objective to pursue using information from that dataset. Estimated Complexity Rating: 2.5/5 STORY As you wander this strange fantasy world you have been summoned to, gathering allies to your banner to save this world from the Demon King, you have been struck by the many strange practices of the people here. Today, you are trying to win the favor of the mighty warriors

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7:22

Be Naughty

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/22

Context: Post #10 in my sequence of private Lightcone Infrastructure memos edited for public consumption. This one, more so than any other one in this sequence, is something I do not think is good advice for everyone, and I do not expect to generalize that well to broader populations. If I had been writing this with the broader LessWrong audience in mind I would have written something pretty different, but I feel like for the sake of transparency I should include all the memos on Lightcone

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