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LessWrong

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technology philosophy

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5:48

“Plan 1 and Plan 2” by Towards_Keeperhood

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/24

Max Tegmark recently published a post "Which side of the AI safety community are you in?", where he carves the AI safety community into 2 camps: Camp A) "Race to superintelligence safely”: People in this group typically argue that "superintelligence is inevitable because of X”, and it's therefore better that their in-group (their company or country) build it first. X is typically some combination of “Capitalism”, “Molloch”, “lack of regulation” and “China”. Camp B) “Don’t race to

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21:48

“How an AI company CEO could quietly take over the...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/24

Cross-posted from the AI Futures Project Substack. This post outlines a concrete scenario for how takeover by an AI company CEO might go, which I developed during MATS with the AI Futures Project. It represents one plausible story among a few that seem roughly equally likely to me. I’m interested in feedback and discussion. If the future is to hinge on AI, it stands to reason that AI company CEOs are in a good position to usurp power.[1] This didn’t quite happen in our AI 2027 scenarios. In one,

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14:15

“The main way I’ve seen people turn ideologically...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/24

This linkpost is in part a response to @Raemon's comment about why the procedure Raemon did doesn't work in practice to deal with the selection effects I talked about in my last post. So in the last post, I was talking about a selection effect where believers of an argument can come to believe that their idea is true and that their critics are crazy wrong/trolling/dumb, no matter what argument is used. And the believers are half-right, in that their random error swamps any truth signal/evidence for

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18:28

“Should AI Developers Remove Discussion of AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/24

There is some concern that training AI systems on content predicting AI misalignment will hyperstition AI systems into misalignment. This has been discussed previously by a lot of people: Anna Salamon, Alex Turner, the AI Futures Project, Miles Kodama, Gwern, Cleo Nardo, Richard Ngo, Rational Animations, Mark Keavney and others. In this post, I analyze whether AI developers should filter out discussion of AI misalignment from training data. I discuss several details that I don't think have been

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25:20

“Homomorphically encrypted consciousness and its...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/23

I present a step-by-step argument in philosophy of mind. The main conclusion is that it is probably possible for conscious homomorphically encrypted digital minds to exist. This has surprising implications: it demonstrates a case where "mind exceeds physics" (epistemically), which implies the disjunction "mind exceeds reality" or "reality exceeds physics". The main new parts of the discussion consist of (a) an argument that, if digital computers are conscious, so are homomorphically encrypted

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10:46

“Learning to Interpret Weight Differences in Language...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/23

Audio note: this article contains 38 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Paper | Github | Demo Notebook This post is about our recent paper Learning to Interpret Weight Differences in Language Models (Goel et al. Oct. 2025). We introduce a method for training a LoRA adapter that gives a finetuned model the ability to accurately describe the effects of its finetuning.Figure 1: A demonstration of our

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78:50

“Utopiography Interview” by plex

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/23

It serves people well to mostly build towards a good future rather than getting distracted by the shape of utopia, but having a vision of where we want to go can be helpful for both motivation and as a north star for guiding our efforts. Publishing prompted by the ACX grant to generate stories of good things with AI. Opening Vision Utopiography: What would you like it to be like? plex: A large proportion of my value structure is pointed at other people's. I would like many different utopias to

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0:54

[Linkpost] “Statement on Superintelligence - FLI Open...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/23

This is a link post. We call for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence, not lifted before there is broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably, and strong public buy-in. Sign on the main website or Eko[1]. The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 22nd, 2025 Source:

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4:36

“Doomers were right” by Algon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/23

There's an argument I sometimes hear against existential risks, or any other putative change that some are worried about, that goes something like this: 'We've seen time after time that some people will be afraid of any change. They'll say things like "TV will destroy people's ability to read", "coffee shops will destroy the social order","machines will put textile workers out of work". Heck, Socrates argued that books would harm people's ability to memorize things. So many prophets of doom, and

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27:20

“Penny’s Hands” by Tomás B.

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/22

It is a strange thing to love another. I had not had much experience. It was Penny, of course, who I fell for. I suppose everyone fell in love with her a little. She is beautiful. Maybe the most beautiful person any of us had ever seen. Even movie stars are not as beautiful as she. They do not put women such as her in films. It is not realistic. Aphrodite could not star in a romantic comedy. Aphrodite has drama in her dealings with gods but not with men. She looks better, even, than those in

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4:19

“Which side of the AI safety community are you in?”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/22

In recent years, I’ve found that people who self-identify as members of the AI safety community have increasingly split into two camps: Camp A) "Race to superintelligence safely”: People in this group typically argue that "superintelligence is inevitable because of X”, and it's therefore better that their in-group (their company or country) build it first. X is typically some combination of “Capitalism”, “Molloch”, “lack of regulation” and “China”. Camp B) “Don’t race to superintelligence”: People

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49:05

“Postrationality: An Oral History” by Gordon Seidoh...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/22

Last week I gave an invited talk as part of the Integral Altruism speaker series. A recording of the talk and the extensive Q&A is up on YouTube; it's close to 90 minutes long. If you’d rather read than watch/listen, I had Claude convert the transcript into something more like essay form. In the talk I try to cover roughly how the postrationalist scene got started and how it later merged with other scenes thinking along similar lines but with different intellectual starting points. If it

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2:36

[Linkpost] “Consider donating to AI safety champion...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/22

This is a link post. Written in my personal capacity. Thanks to many people for conversations and comments. Written in less than 24 hours; sorry for any sloppiness. It's an uncanny, weird coincidence that the two biggest legislative champions for AI safety in the entire country announced their bids for Congress just two days apart. But here we are. On Monday, I put out a long blog post making the case for donating to Alex Bores, author of the New York RAISE Act. And today I’m doing the exact same

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16:12

“How Well Does RL Scale?” by Toby_Ord

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/22

This is the latest in a series of essays on AI Scaling. You can find the others on my site. Summary: RL-training for LLMs scales surprisingly poorly. Most of its gains are from allowing LLMs to productively use longer chains of thought, allowing them to think longer about a problem. There is some improvement for a fixed length of answer, but not enough to drive AI progress. Given the scaling up of pre-training compute also stalled, we'll see less AI progress via compute scaling than you might have

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1:26

“White House OSTP AI Deregulation Public Comment...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/22

The White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy has issued a request for information (RFI) relevant to regulations that "unnecessarily hinder the development, deployment, and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies within the United States." If you have anything to say about that topic that you want the U.S. government to hear, consider submitting a public comment before 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on Monday 27 October 2025. The emphasis on removing regulations is pursuant to

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12:57

“Is 90% of code at Anthropic being written by AIs?”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/22

In March 2025, Dario Amodei (CEO of Anthropic) said that he expects AI to be writing 90% of the code in 3 to 6 months and that AI might be writing essentially all of the code in 12 months.[1] Did this prediction end up being true? We'll charitably interpret the prediction as being about Anthropic itself. Recently, various articles have claimed that Dario said that AIs are writing 90% of the code at Anthropic (7 months after the prediction of 3-6 months was made). This is a reasonable summary of

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30:11

“Stratified Utopia” by Cleo Nardo

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/22

Summary: "Stratified utopia" is a possible outcome where mundane values get proximal resources (near Earth in space and time) and exotic values get distal resources (distant galaxies and far futures). I discuss whether this outcome is likely or desirable. 1. Introduction 1.1. Happy Coincidence I hold mundane values, such as partying on the weekend, the admiration of my peers, not making a fool of myself, finishing this essay, raising children, etc. I also have more exotic values, such as maximizing

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2:58

“Remarks on Bayesian studies from 1963” by dynomight

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/22

In 1963, Mosteller and Wallace published Inference in an Authorship Problem, which used Bayesian statistics to try to infer who wrote some of the disputed Federalist Papers. (Answer: Madison) Anyway, at the end they have a list of "Remarks on Bayesian studies" which is astonishing to read 62 years later: Study of variation of results with different priors is recommended. Bracketing the prior is often easy. When founded in data, the choice of the prior has a status like that of the data

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2:40

[Linkpost] “21st Century Civilization curriculum” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/21

This is a link post. I’ve just released a curriculum on foundational questions in modern politics, which I drew up in collaboration with Samo Burja. I’ve copied the introductory text and the section headings below; you can find the full curriculum at www.21civ.com. Sign up here by 27 October to join the first cohort of discussion groups (which will meet weekly to discuss each of the 11 sections of the curriculum). This curriculum is about Western civilization, and how it enables citizens of the

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39:20

“Symbiogenesis vs. Convergent Consequentialism” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/21

(Cross-posted from SayIt archive.) Background for conversation: After an exchange in the comments of Audrey's LW post where plex suggested various readings and got a sense that there were some differences in models worth exploring, plex suggested a call. Some commentors were keen to read the transcript, and plex thinks in order for any human, other sentient, current AI, or currently existing structure to not be destroyed in the near future, we need to either coordinate to pivot from the rush

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