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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma.If you"d like more, subscribe to the “Lesswrong (30+ karma)” feed.

technology philosophy

All Episodes

12:31

“The Sorry State of AI X-Risk Advocacy, and Thoughts...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/02/26

First, let me quote my previous ancient post on the topic: Effective Strategies for Changing Public Opinion The titular paper is very relevant here. I'll summarize a few points. The main two forms of intervention are persuasion and framing.Persuasion is, to wit, an attempt to change someone's set of beliefs, either by introducing new ones or by changing existing ones.Framing is a more subtle form: an attempt to change the relative weights of someone's beliefs, by empathizing different asp...

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27:11

“Power Lies Trembling: a three-book review” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/02/26

In a previous book review I described exclusive nightclubs as the particle colliders of sociology—places where you can reliably observe extreme forces collide. If so, military coups are the supernovae of sociology. They’re huge, rare, sudden events that, if studied carefully, provide deep insight about what lies underneath the veneer of normality around us. That's the conclusion I take away from Naunihal Singh's book Seizing Power: the Strategic Logic of Military Coups. It's not a conclusion...

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7:58

“Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/02/26

This is the abstract and introduction of our new paper. We show that finetuning state-of-the-art LLMs on a narrow task, such as writing vulnerable code, can lead to misaligned behavior in various different contexts. We don't fully understand that phenomenon. Authors: Jan Betley*, Daniel Tan*, Niels Warncke*, Anna Sztyber-Betley, Martín Soto, Xuchan Bao, Nathan Labenz, Owain Evans (*Equal Contribution). See Twitter thread and project page at emergent-misalignment.com. Abstract We present ...

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42:06

“The Paris AI Anti-Safety Summit” by Zvi

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/02/22

It doesn’t look good. What used to be the AI Safety Summits were perhaps the most promising thing happening towards international coordination for AI Safety. This one was centrally coordination against AI Safety. In November 2023, the UK Bletchley Summit on AI Safety set out to let nations coordinate in the hopes that AI might not kill everyone. China was there, too, and included. The practical focus was on Responsible Scaling Policies (RSPs), where commitments were secured from the major...

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2:37

“Eliezer’s Lost Alignment Articles / The Arbital...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/02/20

Note: this is a static copy of this wiki page. We are also publishing it as a post to ensure visibility. Circa 2015-2017, a lot of high quality content was written on Arbital by Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nate Soares, Paul Christiano, and others. Perhaps because the platform didn't take off, most of this content has not been as widely read as warranted by its quality. Fortunately, they have now been imported into LessWrong. Most of the content written was either about AI alignment or math[1]. The B...

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8:52

“Arbital has been imported to LessWrong” by RobertM,...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/02/20

Arbital was envisioned as a successor to Wikipedia. The project was discontinued in 2017, but not before many new features had been built and a substantial amount of writing about AI alignment and mathematics had been published on the website. If you've tried using Arbital.com the last few years, you might have noticed that it was on its last legs - no ability to register new accounts or log in to existing ones, slow load times (when it loaded at all), etc. Rather than try to keep it afloat,...

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68:04

“How to Make Superbabies” by GeneSmith, kman

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/02/20

We’ve spent the better part of the last two decades unravelling exactly how the human genome works and which specific letter changes in our DNA affect things like diabetes risk or college graduation rates. Our knowledge has advanced to the point where, if we had a safe and reliable means of modifying genes in embryos, we could literally create superbabies. Children that would live multiple decades longer than their non-engineered peers, have the raw intellectual horsepower to do Nobel prize w...

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13:28

“A computational no-coincidence principle” by Eric...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/02/19

Audio note: this article contains 134 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. In a recent paper in Annals of Mathematics and Philosophy, Fields medalist Timothy Gowers asks why mathematicians sometimes believe that unproved statements are likely to be true. For example, it is unknown whether <span>_pi_</span> is a normal number (which, roughly speaking, means that every digit appears i...

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142:38

“A History of the Future, 2025-2040” by L Rudolf L

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/02/19

This is an all-in-one crosspost of a scenario I originally published in three parts on my blog (No Set Gauge). Links to the originals: A History of the Future, 2025-2027A History of the Future, 2027-2030A History of the Future, 2030-2040 Thanks to Luke Drago, Duncan McClements, and Theo Horsley for comments on all three parts. 2025-2027 Below is part 1 of an extended scenario describing how the future might go if current trends in AI continue. The scenario is deliberately extremely ...

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1:54

“It’s been ten years. I propose HPMOR Anniversary...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/02/18

On March 14th, 2015, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality made its final post. Wrap parties were held all across the world to read the ending and talk about the story, in some cases sparking groups that would continue to meet for years. It's been ten years, and think that's a good reason for a round of parties. If you were there a decade ago, maybe gather your friends and talk about how things have changed. If you found HPMOR recently and you're excited about it (surveys suggest it's...

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7:56

“Some articles in ‘International Security’ that I...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/02/16

A friend of mine recently recommended that I read through articles from the journal International Security, in order to learn more about international relations, national security, and political science. I've really enjoyed it so far, and I think it's helped me have a clearer picture of how IR academics think about stuff, especially the core power dynamics that they think shape international relations. Here are a few of the articles I most enjoyed. "Not So Innocent" argues that ethnoreligio...

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8:39

“The Failed Strategy of Artificial Intelligence...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/02/16

This is the best sociological account of the AI x-risk reduction efforts of the last ~decade that I've seen. I encourage folks to engage with its critique and propose better strategies going forward. Here's the opening ~20% of the post. I encourage reading it all. In recent decades, a growing coalition has emerged to oppose the development of artificial intelligence technology, for fear that the imminent development of smarter-than-human machines could doom humanity to extinction. The now-i...

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3:58

“Murder plots are infohazards” by Chris Monteiro

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/02/14

Hi all I've been hanging around the rationalist-sphere for many years now, mostly writing about transhumanism, until things started to change in 2016 after my Wikipedia writing habit shifted from writing up cybercrime topics, through to actively debunking the numerous dark web urban legends. After breaking into what I believe to be the most successful ever fake murder for hire website ever created on the dark web, I was able to capture information about people trying to kill people all arou...

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11:41

“Why Did Elon Musk Just Offer to Buy Control of...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/02/11

This is the full text of a post from "The Obsolete Newsletter," a Substack that I write about the intersection of capitalism, geopolitics, and artificial intelligence. I’m a freelance journalist and the author of a forthcoming book called Obsolete: Power, Profit, and the Race to build Machine Superintelligence. Consider subscribing to stay up to date with my work. Wow. The Wall Street Journal just reported that, "a consortium of investors led by Elon Musk is offering $97.4 billion to buy t...

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21:25

“The ‘Think It Faster’ Exercise” by Raemon

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/02/09

Ultimately, I don’t want to solve complex problems via laborious, complex thinking, if we can help it. Ideally, I'd want to basically intuitively follow the right path to the answer quickly, with barely any effort at all. For a few months I've been experimenting with the "How Could I have Thought That Thought Faster?" concept, originally described in a twitter thread by Eliezer: Sarah Constantin: I really liked this example of an introspective process, in this case about the "life problem" ...

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7:10

“So You Want To Make Marginal Progress...” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/02/08

Once upon a time, in ye olden days of strange names and before google maps, seven friends needed to figure out a driving route from their parking lot in San Francisco (SF) down south to their hotel in Los Angeles (LA). The first friend, Alice, tackled the “central bottleneck” of the problem: she figured out that they probably wanted to take the I-5 highway most of the way (the blue 5's in the map above). But it took Alice a little while to figure that out, so in the meantime, the rest ...

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80:43

“What is malevolence? On the nature, measurement, and...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/02/08

Summary In this post, we explore different ways of understanding and measuring malevolence and explain why individuals with concerning levels of malevolence are common enough, and likely enough to become and remain powerful, that we expect them to influence the trajectory of the long-term future, including by increasing both x-risks and s-risks. For the purposes of this piece, we define malevolence as a tendency to disvalue (or to fail to value) others’ well-being (more). Such a tendency i...

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61:32

“How AI Takeover Might Happen in 2 Years” by joshc

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/02/08

I’m not a natural “doomsayer.” But unfortunately, part of my job as an AI safety researcher is to think about the more troubling scenarios. I’m like a mechanic scrambling last-minute checks before Apollo 13 takes off. If you ask for my take on the situation, I won’t comment on the quality of the in-flight entertainment, or describe how beautiful the stars will appear from space. I will tell you what could go wrong. That is what I intend to do in this story. Now I should clarify what this...

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10:49

“Gradual Disempowerment, Shell Games and Flinches” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/02/05

Over the past year and half, I've had numerous conversations about the risks we describe in Gradual Disempowerment. (The shortest useful summary of the core argument is: To the extent human civilization is human-aligned, most of the reason for the alignment is that humans are extremely useful to various social systems like the economy, and states, or as substrate of cultural evolution. When human cognition ceases to be useful, we should expect these systems to become less aligned, leading to ...

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3:38

“Gradual Disempowerment: Systemic Existential Risks...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/02/04

This is a link post.Full version on arXiv | X Executive summary AI risk scenarios usually portray a relatively sudden loss of human control to AIs, outmaneuvering individual humans and human institutions, due to a sudden increase in AI capabilities, or a coordinated betrayal. However, we argue that even an incremental increase in AI capabilities, without any coordinated power-seeking, poses a substantial risk of eventual human disempowerment. This loss of human influence will be central...

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577 results

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