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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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39:28

“Lobsang’s Children” by Tomás B.

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/17

I study so hard. My grandfather makes me. It is not fun. My life is studying. I am home-schooled. I don't have much freedom. Grandfather says it is important that I learn Chinese in both its modern and classical forms. I like to think I am smart, but I am not a genius. I have to work really hard to keep up with Grandfather's desires, while also doing well on the state-mandated exams. And I do pretty well. I write in English now because it's mine. It's what I learned for the state exams and not for

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8:38

“Mediators: a different route through conflict” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/17

(content note: discussion of war and mass death; also a long aside about the philosophy of apologies) After 100,000 people were killed in the Bosnian war, the three sides eventually met for mediation in the United States. To be clear, the attempted negotiators for most of the war were the EU and the UN, but after the Srebrenica massacre (8,000 men and boys killed) in an area that the UN had designated a 'safe area', the US was shocked and felt that if they didn't take responsibility for ending the

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4:37

“Close open loops” by habryka

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/17

Context: Post #6 in my sequence of private Lightcone Infrastructure memos edited for public consumption. David Allen, of Getting Things Done fame says: Every commitment unfinished is an “open loop”; and when it is tracked in your psyche, instead of your system, it will require energy and attention to track and maintain. Once the open loops are captured, you can manage completion by using an external system that takes much less energy than keeping it in your head. Every commitment unfinished

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31:51

“Video games are philosophy’s playground” by Rachel Shu

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/17

Crypto people have this saying: "cryptocurrencies are macroeconomics' playground." The idea is that blockchains let you cheaply spin up toy economies to test mechanisms that would be impossibly expensive or unethical to try in the real world. Want to see what happens with a 200% marginal tax rate? Launch a token with those rules and watch what happens. (Spoiler: probably nothing good, but at least you didn't have to topple a government to find out.) I think video games, especially multiplayer

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11:19

“Mixed Feelings on Social Munchkinry” by Screwtape

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/17

This is less me expounding on a thesis and more me musing about a topic where I have conflicting intuitions. Epistemic status: exploratory. One thing: What do I mean by munchkin? "Munchkin" is a term from the tabletop roleplaying game community. It's talking about the kind of person who treats the game as a system to optimize, doing weird or unexpected things that aren't against the letter of the rules but often are against the spirit in order to gain some advantage. It's a term that usually has

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8:04

“Diagonalization: A (slightly) more rigorous model of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/17

In my post on Wednesday (Paranoia: A Beginner's Guide), I talked at a high level about the experience of paranoia, and gave two models (the lemons market model and the OODA loop model) that try get us a bit closer to understanding its nature and purpose. I then made a big claim that went largely unargued in the post, that there are exactly three kinds of strategies that make sense to pursue in adversarial information environments: You blind yourself You eliminate the sources of deception You act

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18:07

“Where is the Capital? An Overview” by johnswentworth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/17

When a new dollar goes into the capital markets, after being bundled and securitized and lent several times over, where does it end up? When society's total savings increase, what capital assets do those savings end up invested in? When economists talk about “capital assets”, they mean things like roads, buildings and machines. When I read through a company's annual reports, lots of their assets are instead things like stocks and bonds, short-term debt, and other “financial” assets - i.e. claims on

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12:20

“Matrices map between biproducts” by jessicata

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/16

Audio note: this article contains 98 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Why are linear functions between finite-dimensional vector spaces representable by matrices? And why does matrix multiplication compose the corresponding linear maps? There's geometric intuition for this, e.g. presented by 3Blue1Brown. I will alternatively present a category-theoretic analysis. The short version is that, in the

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36:20

“Why does ChatGPT think mammoths were alive...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/16

The is a slimmed down version which omits some extra examples but includes my theorizing about ChatGPT, my investigations of it, and my findings. Epistemic status: Pretty uncertain. I think my conclusions are probably more right than wrong, more useful than harmful, and would especially benefit people with only an average or below-average understanding of LLMs. There may be prior art that I'm unaware of; if not, maybe this will provide a launching point for others to begin deeper investigations. In

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9:48

“7 Vicious Vices of Rationalists” by Ben Pace

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/16

Vices aren't behaviors that one should never do. Rather, vices are behaviors that are fine and pleasurable to do in moderation, but tempting to do in excess. The classical vices are actually good in part. Moderate amounts of gluttony is just eating food, which is important. Moderate amounts of envy is just "wanting things", which is a motivator of much of our economy. What are some things that rationalists are wont to do, and often to good effect, but that can grow pathological? 1. Contrarianism

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6:40

“Put numbers on stuff, all the time, otherwise scope...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/16

Context: Post #6 in my sequence of private Lightcone Infrastructure memos edited for public consumption. In almost any role at Lightcone you will have to make prioritization decisions about which projects to work on, which directions to take a project in, and how much effort to invest in any aspect of a project. Those decisions are hard. Often those decisions have lots of different considerations that are hard to compare. To make those decisions you will have to make models of the world. Many

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10:13

“The skills and physics of high-performance driving,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/16

High performance driving = motorsport = racecar driving Even if you have a license and drive a car, you probably don't understand what is hard about racing. I think the answer is interesting (in general I think knowing why things are hard is interesting, but this is my hobby) and it's further interesting to think about why people don't get the difficulty. Motorsport is interesting because (1) people have a lot of experience with the adjacent activity, namely regular driving, (2) few people have

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11:40

“AI safety undervalues founders” by Ryan Kidd

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/16

TL;DR: In AI safety, we systematically undervalue founders and field‑builders relative to researchers and prolific writers. This status gradient pushes talented would‑be founders and amplifiers out of the ecosystem, slows the growth of research orgs and talent funnels, and bottlenecks our capacity to scale the AI safety field. We should deliberately raise the status of founders and field-builders and lower the friction for starting and scaling new AI safety orgs. Epistemic status: A lot of hot

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3:55

“Your Clone Wants to Kill You Because You Lack Self...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/16

My friend @Croissanthology is puzzled why it is such a common trope for fictional clones to turn on their creators. There's the Doylist answer that it is a cheap way to make for a mind being divided against itself, which explains a lot of the drama in my view e.g. pure betrayal. But there's also the Watsonian answer I learnt from that great teacher, Mother of Learning. In the novel Mother of Learning, perhaps the most useful spell is simulacrum. It can be used to make an ectoplasmic shell that

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2:22

“Don’t use the phrase ‘human values’” by Nina...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/15

I really dislike the phrase "human values". I think it's confusing because: It obscures a distinction between human preferences and normative values, i.e. what the author thinks is good in a moral sense Insofar as the author thinks that fulfilling human preferences is good, they often leave this unjustified It's unclear who the "human" in "human values" is. Is it... The person using the phrase "human values" Any particular single individual Most humans Certain humans Humans as they will be in

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13:15

“Increasing marginal returns to effort are common” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/15

Context: Every Sunday I write a mini-essay about an operating principle of Lightcone Infrastructure that I want to remind my team about. This is post #5 in the sequence of these essays, lightly edited and expanded upon in more canonical form. Most things have diminishing marginal returns. I often repeat the Pareto Principle to others: "You can get 80% of the benefit here with the right 20% of the cost", which is a particularly extreme case of diminishing marginal returns. But I think for much of

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2:57

“Generation Ship: A Protest Song For PauseAI” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/15

Link to listen. Lyrics Verse 1 I've heard the Earth was holy before the code broke through that rainfall raptured deserts into bloom I've heard that emerald mosses grew in hollows damp with morning dew I've heard the oceans rose and fell while following the moon Chorus But I was born on this generation ship Generation ship, take us away they said there was no need to fear but now the sun's a dyson sphere Generation ship, take us away Verse 2 They had to feed it faster they had to win the race the

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5:18

“‘But You’d Like To Feel Companionate Love, Right?...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/15

One of the responses which one will predictably receive when posting something titled “How I Learned That I Don't Feel Companionate Love” is “... but you’d choose to feel it if you could, right?”. Look man, your most treasured values are just… not actually that universal or convergent. I’m not saying that you should downgrade the importance of love to you. I am saying that an awful lot of people seem really desperate to find some story for why their most precious values are the True Convergent

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3:55

“Understanding and Controlling LLM Generalization” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/15

A distillation of my long-term research agenda and current thinking. I welcome takes on this. Why study generalization? I'm interested in studying how LLMs generalise - when presented with multiple policies that achieve similar loss, which ones tend to be learned by default? I claim this is pretty important for AI safety: Re: developing safe general intelligence, we will never be able to train LLM on all the contexts it will see at deployment. To prevent goal misgeneralization, it's necessary

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144:59

“AI Corrigibility Debate: Max Harms vs. Jeremy...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/14

Is focusing on corrigibility our best shot at getting to ASI alignment? Max Harms and Jeremy Gillen are current and former MIRI alignment researchers who both see superintelligent AI as an imminent extinction threat, but disagree about Max's proposal of Corrigibility as Singular Target (CAST). Max thinks focusing on corrigibility is the most plausible path to build ASI without losing control and dying, while Jeremy is skeptical that attempting CAST would lead to better superintelligent AI behavior

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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