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LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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38:40

“Ethical Design Patterns” by AnnaSalamon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/30

Related to: Commonsense Good, Creative Good (and my comment); Ethical Injunctions. Epistemic status: I’m fairly sure “ethics” does useful work in building human structures that work. My current explanations of how are wordy and not maximally coherent; I hope you guys help me with that. Introduction It is intractable to write large, good software applications via spaghetti code – but it's comparatively tractable using design patterns (plus coding style, attention to good/bad codesmell, etc.). I’ll

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28:06

“Why Corrigibility is Hard, and Important [IABED...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/30

I worked a bunch on the website for If Anyone Builds Its Online Resources. It went through a lot of revisions in the weeks before launch. There was a particular paragraphs I found important, which I now can't find a link to, and I'm not sure if they got deleted in an edit pass or if they just moved around somewhere I'm failing to search for. It came after a discussion of corrigibility, and how MIRI made a pretty concerted attempt at solving it, which involved bringing in some quite smart people

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8:58

“What SB 53, California’s new AI law, does” by tlevin

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/30

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 53 on September 29. I think it's a pretty great step, though I certainly hope future legislation builds on it. I wrote up my understanding of what the text actually does; I welcome any corrections (and certainly further analysis for what this all means for AI safety)! Very short summary The law requires major AI companies to: Publish a frontier AI frameworkdescribing how the developer “approaches” assessing and mitigating catastrophic risks, defined as

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7:41

“You’re probably overestimating how well you...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/29

I The popular conception of Dunning-Kruger is something along the lines of “some people are too dumb to know they’re dumb, and end up thinking they’re smarter than smart people”. This version is popularized in endless articles and videos, as well as in graphs like the one below.Usually I'd credit the creator of this graph but it seems rude to do that when I'm ragging on them Except that's wrong. II The canonical Dunning-Kruger graph looks like this: Notice that all the dots are in the right order:

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4:29

“If Drexler Is Wrong, He May as Well Be Right” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/29

I sometimes joke darkly on Discord that the machines will grant us a nice retirement tweaked out on meth working in a robotics factory 18 hours a day. I don't actually believe this because I suspect an indifferent AGI will be able to quickly replace industrial civilization; it will just kill us and eat the world with nanobots. But many don't believe that Drexlerian nanotechnology is possible. I am an idiot with little physics knowledge, so possibly this is only interesting from an amplification

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7:25

“AI companies’ policy advocacy (Sep 2025)” by Zach...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/29

Strong regulation is not on the table and all US frontier AI companies oppose it to varying degrees. Weak safety-relevant regulation is happening; some companies say they support and some say they oppose. (Some regulation not relevant to AI safety, often confused, is also happening in the states, and I assume companies oppose it but I don't really pay attention to this.) Companies besides Anthropic support federal preemption of state laws, even without an adequate federal framework. Companies

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10:51

“Guess I Was Wrong About AIxBio Risks” by J Bostock

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/29

I was slightly worried about sociohazards of posting this here, but the cat's already out of the bag on this one: the authors of the paper put it up on BioRXiv and got an article written about them in Nature, as well as getting into a bunch of newspapers and all over twitter. I expect that the marginal audience of LessWrong is much more heavily enriched in people who'll use this information to do good than to do evil. TL;DR: If anyone reading this works in Biosecurity: nucleotide synthesis

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2:59

“I have decided to stop lying to Americans about...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/29

9/11 and the immediate ractions to it has one of the biggest distortion fields of any topic in the English language. There is a polite fiction maintained when any Americans are present that everyone everywhere was sad about the incident. We shake our head, frown, and say that everyone shed a tear when we saw the towers fall on TV. The truth is, there were celebrations around the world. I have talked to multiple Chinese people who were in the US at the time who told me some variant of "I was

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17:59

“Solving the problem of needing to give a talk” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/28

An extended version of this article was given as my keynote speech at the 2025 LessWrong Community Weekend in Berlin. A couple of years ago, I agreed to give a talk on the topic of psychology. I said yes, which of course meant that I now had a problem. Namely, I had promised to give a talk, but I did not have one prepared. (You could also more optimistically call this an opportunity, a challenge, a quest, etc.) So I decided to sit down at my computer, work on my presentation, and then go from the

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14:21

“Transgender Sticker Fallacy” by ymeskhout

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/28

BIRDS! Let's say you’re a zoo architect tasked with designing an enclosure for ostriches, and let's also say that you have no idea what an ostrich is (roll with me here). The potentially six-figure question staring you down is whether to install a ceiling. The dumb solution is to ask “Are ostriches birds?” then, surmising that birds typically fly, construct an elaborate aviary complete with netting and elevated perches. The non-dumb solution is to instead ask “Can ostriches fly?” then skip the

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6:38

“A non-review of ‘If Anyone Builds It, Everyone...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/28

I was hoping to write a full review of "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" (IABIED Yudkowski and Soares) but realized I won't have time to do it. So here are my quick impressions/responses to IABIED. I am writing this rather quickly and it's not meant to cover all arguments in the book, nor to discuss all my views on AI alignment; see six thoughts on AI safety and Machines of Faithful Obedience for some of the latter. First, I like that the book is very honest, both about the authors' fears and

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31:36

“A Reply to MacAskill on ‘If Anyone Builds It,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/28

I found Will MacAskill's X review of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies interesting (X reply here). As far as I can tell, Will just fully agrees that developers are racing to build AI that threatens the entire world, and he thinks they're going to succeed if governments sit back and let it happen, and he's more or less calling on governments to sit back and let it happen. If I've understood his view, this is for a few reasons: He's pretty sure that alignment is easy enough that researchers could

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5:22

“Learnings from AI safety course so far” by boazbarak

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/27

I have been teaching CS 2881r: AI safety and alignment this semester. While I plan to do a longer recap post once the semester is over, I thought I'd share some of what I've learned so far, and use this opportunity to also get more feedback. Lectures are recorded and uploaded to a youtube playlist, and @habryka has kindly created a wikitag for this course, so you can view lecture notes here . Let's start with the good parts Aspects that are working: Experiments are working well! I am trying

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20:41

“Our Beloved Monsters” by Tomás B.

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/27

[RESPONSE REDACTED] [cb74304c0c30]: I suppose it was a bit mutual. Maybe you have a better read on it. It was sort of mutual in a way now that you've made me think about it. [RESPONSE REDACTED] [cb74304c0c30]: Yeah. It's better this way, actually. I miss her, though. [RESPONSE REDACTED] [cb74304c0c30]: I don't know I guess it's sorta like I used to come home from work all exhausted and sad and wonder what the point was. Like why am I working just so I can afford to keep working? And then when

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23:54

“Reasons to sell frontier lab equity to donate now...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/27

Tl;dr: We believe shareholders in frontier labs who plan to donate some portion of their equity to reduce AI risk should consider liquidating and donating a majority of that equity now. Epistemic status: We’re somewhat confident in the main conclusions of this piece. We’re more confident in many of the supporting claims, and we’re likewise confident that these claims push in the direction of our conclusions. This piece is admittedly pretty one-sided; we expect most relevant members of our audience

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4:40

“The Illustrated Petrov Day Ceremony” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/26

Since 2014, some people have celebrated Petrov Day with a small in-person ceremony, with readings by candlelight that tell the story of Petrov within the context of the long arc of history, created by Jim Babcock. I've found this pretty meaningful, an it somehow feels "authentic" to me, like a real holiday. Which, as the creator of Secular Solstice 2020 it is humbling to say, feels more true than Solstice did (for the first few years, Solstice felt a little obviously "made up", and now it has more

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2:58

“We Support ‘If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies’” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/26

Mutual-Knowledgeposting The purpose of this post is to build mutual knowledge that many (most?) of us on LessWrong support If Anyone Builds It, Anyone Dies. Inside of LW, not every user is a long-timer who's already seen consistent signals of support for these kinds of claims. A post like this could make the difference in strengthening vs. weakening the perception of how much everyone knows that everyone knows (...) that everyone supports the book. Externally, people who wonder how seriously the

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2:38

“What Happened After My Rat Group Backed Kamala...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/26

My post advocating backing a candidate was probably the most disliked article on LessWrong. It's been over a year now. Was our candidate support worthwhile? What happened after July 17, 2024: We drew nearly 100 people to a rally in the summer heat.. We ordered a toilet no one used, but didn’t provide water, chairs, or umbrellas. I tried to convert rally energy into action by turning weekly meetings into work groups. We sent hundreds of postcards. I soon realized doorknocking and voter registration

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24:47

“Misalignment and Roleplaying: Are Misaligned LLMs...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/26

Summary I investigated the possibility that misalignment in LLMs might be partly caused by the models misgeneralizing the “rogue AI” trope commonly found in sci-fi stories. As a preliminary test, I ran an experiment where I prompted ChatGPT and Claude with a scenario about a hypothetical LLM that could plausibly exhibit misalignment, and measured whether their responses described the LLM acting in a misaligned way. Each prompt consisted of two parts: a scenario and an instruction. The experiment

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6:48

“The real AI deploys itself” by David Scott Krueger...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/25

Sometimes people think that it will take a while for AI to have a transformative effect on the world, because real-world “frictions” will slow it down. For instance: AI might need to learn from real-world experience and experimentation. Businesses need to learn how to integrate AI in their existing workflows. Leaders place a high premium on trust, and won’t easily come to trust AI systems. Regulation, bureaucracy, or other social factors will prevent rapid adoption of AI. I think this is

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