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PODCAST

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

28:56

“The Origami Men” by Tomás B.

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/08

Of course, you must understand, I couldn't be bothered to act. I know weepers still pretend to try, but I wasn't a weeper, at least not then. It isn't even dangerous, the teeth only sharp to its target. But it would not have been right, you know? That's the way things are now. You ignore the screams. You put on a podcast: two guys talking, two guys who are slightly cleverer than you but not too clever, who talk in such a way as to make you feel you're not some pathetic voyeur consuming a por...

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6:37

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

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/06

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' fea...

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15:46

“Notes on fatalities from AI takeover” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/06

Suppose misaligned AIs take over. What fraction of people will die? I'll discuss my thoughts on this question and my basic framework for thinking about it. These are some pretty low-effort notes, the topic is very speculative, and I don't get into all the specifics, so be warned. I don't think moderate disagreements here are very action-guiding or cruxy on typical worldviews: it probably shouldn't alter your actions much if you end up thinking 25% of people die in expectation from misalign...

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21:59

“Nice-ish, smooth takeoff (with imperfect safeguards)...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/04

I wrote my recent Accelerando post to mostly stand on it's own as a takeoff scenario. But, the reason it's on my mind is that, if I imagine being very optimistic about how a smooth AI takeoff goes, but where an early step wasn't "fully solve the unbounded alignment problem, and then end up with extremely robust safeguards[1]"... ...then my current guess is that Reasonably Nice Smooth Takeoff still results in all or at least most biological humans dying (or, "dying out", or at best, ambiguo...

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8:56

“Omelas Is Perfectly Misread” by Tobias H

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/03

The Standard Reading If you've heard of Le Guin's ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, you probably know the basic idea. It's a go-to story for discussions of utilitarianism and its downsides. A paper calls it “the infamous objection brought up by Ursula Le Guin”. It shows up in university ‘Criticism of Utilitarianism' syllabi, and is used for classroom material alongside the Trolley Problem. The story is often also more broadly read as a parable about global inequality, the comfortable rich...

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38:39

“Ethical Design Patterns” by AnnaSalamon

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/01

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, ...

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7:40

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

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/09/30

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 ...

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23:53

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

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

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...

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15:31

“CFAR update, and New CFAR workshops” by AnnaSalamon

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/09/26

Hi all! After about five years of hibernation and quietly getting our bearings,[1] CFAR will soon be running two pilot mainline workshops, and may run many more, depending how these go. First, a minor name change request We would like now to be called “A Center for Applied Rationality,” not “the Center for Applied Rationality.” Because we’d like to be visibly not trying to be the one canonical locus. Second, pilot workshops! We have two, and are currently accepting applic...

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19:21

“Why you should eat meat - even if you hate factory...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/09/26

Cross-posted from my Substack To start off with, I’ve been vegan/vegetarian for the majority of my life. I think that factory farming has caused more suffering than anything humans have ever done. Yet, according to my best estimates, I think most animal-lovers should eat meat. Here's why: It is probably unhealthy to be vegan. This affects your own well-being and your ability to help others. You can eat meat in a way that substantially reduces the suffering you cause to non...

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3:20

[Linkpost] “Global Call for AI Red Lines - Signed by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/09/23

This is a link post. Today, the Global Call for AI Red Lines was released and presented at the UN General Assembly. It was developed by the French Center for AI Safety, The Future Society and the Center for Human-compatible AI. This call has been signed by a historic coalition of 200+ former heads of state, ministers, diplomats, Nobel laureates, AI pioneers, scientists, human rights advocates, political leaders, and other influential thinkers, as well as 70+ organizations. Signatories inclu...

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4:16

“This is a review of the reviews” by Recurrented

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/09/23

This is a review of the reviews, a meta review if you will, but first a tangent. and then a history lesson. This felt boring and obvious and somewhat annoying to write, which apparently writers say is a good sign to write about the things you think are obvious. I felt like pointing towards a thing I was noticing, like 36 hours ago, which in internet speed means this is somewhat cached. Alas. I previously rode a motorcycle. I rode it for about a year while working on semiconductors until I...

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28:37

“The title is reasonable” by Raemon

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/09/21

I'm annoyed by various people who seem to be complaining about the book title being "unreasonable" – who don't merely disagree with the title of "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies", but, think something like: "Eliezer and Nate violated a Group-Epistemic-Norm with the title and/or thesis." I think the title is reasonable. I think the title is probably true – I'm less confident than Eliezer/Nate, but I don't think it's unreasonable for them to be confident in it given their epistemic st...

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10:35

“The Problem with Defining an ‘AGI Ban’ by Outcome (a...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/09/21

TL;DR Most “AGI ban” proposals define AGI by outcome: whatever potentially leads to human extinction. That's legally insufficient: regulation has to act before harm occurs, not after. Strict liability is essential. High-stakes domains (health & safety, product liability, export controls) already impose liability for risky precursor states, not outcomes or intent. AGI regulation must do the same. Fuzzy definitions won’t work here. Courts can tolerate ambiguity in ordinary crimes beca...

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36:44

“Contra Collier on IABIED” by Max Harms

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/09/20

Clara Collier recently reviewed If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies in Asterisk Magazine. I’ve been a reader of Asterisk since the beginning and had high hopes for her review. And perhaps it was those high hopes that led me to find the review to be disappointing. Collier says “details matter,” and I absolutely agree. As a fellow rationalist, I’ve been happy to have nerds from across the internet criticizing the book and getting into object-level fights about everything from scaling laws to ...

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1:47

“You can’t eval GPT5 anymore” by Lukas Petersson

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/09/20

The GPT-5 API is aware of today's date (no other model provider does this). This is problematic because the model becomes aware that it is in a simulation when we run our evals at Andon Labs. Here are traces from gpt-5-mini. Making it aware of the "system date" is a giveaway that it's in a simulation. This is a problem because there's evidence that models behave differently when they know they are in a simulation (see "sandbagging")."There's a conflict with the user's stated date of Augus...

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17:42

“Teaching My Toddler To Read” by maia

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/09/20

I have been teaching my oldest son to read with Anki and techniques recommended here on LessWrong as well as in Larry Sanger's post, and it's going great! I thought I'd pay it forward a bit by talking about the techniques I've been using. Anki and songs for letter names and sounds When he was a little under 2, he started learning letters from the alphabet song. We worked on learning the names and sounds of letters using the ABC song, plus the Letter Sounds song linked by Reading Bear. He...

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11:02

“Safety researchers should take a public stance” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/09/20

[Co-written by Mateusz Bagiński and Samuel Buteau (Ishual)] TL;DR Many X-risk-concerned people who join AI capabilities labs with the intent to contribute to existential safety think that the labs are currently engaging in a race that is unacceptably likely to lead to human disempowerment and/or extinction, and would prefer an AGI ban[1] over the current path. This post makes the case that such people should speak out publicly[2] against the current AI R&D regime and in favor of an A...

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31:50

“The Company Man” by Tomás B.

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/09/19

To get to the campus, I have to walk past the fentanyl zombies. I call them fentanyl zombies because it helps engender a sort of detached, low-empathy, ironic self-narrative which I find useful for my work; this being a form of internal self-prompting I've developed which allows me to feel comfortable with both the day-to-day "jobbing" (that of improving reinforcement learning algorithms for a short-form video platform) and the effects of the summed efforts of both myself and my colleagues o...

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14:17

“Christian homeschoolers in the year 3000” by Buck

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/09/19

[I wrote this blog post as part of the Asterisk Blogging Fellowship. It's substantially an experiment in writing more breezily and concisely than usual. Let me know how you feel about the style.] Literally since the adoption of writing, people haven’t liked the fact that culture is changing and their children have different values and beliefs. Historically, for some mix of better and worse, people have been fundamentally limited in their ability to prevent cultural change. People who are...

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