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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

13:19

“Training a Reward Hacker Despite Perfect Labels” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/26

Summary: Perfectly labeled outcomes in training can still boost reward hacking tendencies in generalization. This can hold even when the train/test sets are drawn from the exact same distribution. We induce this surprising effect via a form of context distillation, which we call re-contextualization: Generate model completions with a hack-encouraging system prompt + neutral user prompt. Filter the completions to remove hacks. Train on these prompt-completion pairs with the system prompt ...

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51:47

“Banning Said Achmiz (and broader thoughts on...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/23

It's been roughly 7 years since the LessWrong user-base voted on whether it's time to close down shop and become an archive, or to move towards the LessWrong 2.0 platform, with me as head-admin. For roughly equally long have I spent around one hundred hours almost every year trying to get Said Achmiz to understand and learn how to become a good LessWrong commenter by my lights.[1] Today I am declaring defeat on that goal and am giving him a 3 year ban. What follows is an explanation of the...

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13:26

“Underdog bias rules everything around me” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/23

People very often underrate how much power they (and their allies) have, and overrate how much power their enemies have. I call this “underdog bias”, and I think it's the most important cognitive bias for understanding modern society. I’ll start by describing a closely-related phenomenon. The hostile media effect is a well-known bias whereby people tend to perceive news they read or watch as skewed against their side. For example, pro-Palestinian students shown a video clip tended to judge...

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5:59

“Epistemic advantages of working as a moderate” by Buck

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/22

Many people who are concerned about existential risk from AI spend their time advocating for radical changes to how AI is handled. Most notably, they advocate for costly restrictions on how AI is developed now and in the future, e.g. the Pause AI people or the MIRI people. In contrast, I spend most of my time thinking about relatively cheap interventions that AI companies could implement to reduce risk assuming a low budget, and about how to cause AI companies to marginally increase that bud...

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14:01

“Four ways Econ makes people dumber re: future AI” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/21

(Cross-posted from X, intended for a general audience.) There's a funny thing where economics education paradoxically makes people DUMBER at thinking about future AI. Econ textbooks teach concepts & frames that are great for most things, but counterproductive for thinking about AGI. Here are 4 examples. Longpost: THE FIRST PIECE of Econ anti-pedagogy is hiding in the words “labor” & “capital”. These words conflate a superficial difference (flesh-and-blood human vs not) with a bun...

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6:02

“Should you make stone tools?” by Alex_Altair

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/21

Knowing how evolution works gives you an enormously powerful tool to understand the living world around you and how it came to be that way. (Though it's notoriously hard to use this tool correctly, to the point that I think people mostly shouldn't try it use it when making substantial decisions.) The simple heuristic is "other people died because they didn't have this feature". A slightly less simple heuristic is "other people didn't have as many offspring because they didn't have this featu...

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7:26

“My AGI timeline updates from GPT-5 (and 2025 so...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/21

As I discussed in a prior post, I felt like there were some reasonably compelling arguments for expecting very fast AI progress in 2025 (especially on easily verified programming tasks). Concretely, this might have looked like reaching 8 hour 50% reliability horizon lengths on METR's task suite[1] by now due to greatly scaling up RL and getting large training runs to work well. In practice, I think we've seen AI progress in 2025 which is probably somewhat faster than the historical rate (at ...

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8:16

“Hyperbolic model fits METR capabilities estimate...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/20

This is a response to https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mXa66dPR8hmHgndP5/hyperbolic-trend-with-upcoming-singularity-fits-metr which claims that a hyperbolic model, complete with an actual singularity in the near future, is a better fit for the METR time-horizon data than a simple exponential model. I think that post has a serious error in it and its conclusions are the reverse of correct. Hence this one. (An important remark: although I think Valentin2026 made an important mistake that in...

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10:06

“My Interview With Cade Metz on His Reporting About...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/18

On 12 August 2025, I sat down with New York Times reporter Cade Metz to discuss some criticisms of his 4 August 2025 article, "The Rise of Silicon Valley's Techno-Religion". The transcript below has been edited for clarity. ZMD: In accordance with our meetings being on the record in both directions, I have some more questions for you. I did not really have high expectations about the August 4th article on Lighthaven and the Secular Solstice. The article is actually a little bit worse tha...

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31:18

“Church Planting: When Venture Capital Finds Jesus”...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/18

I’m going to describe a Type Of Guy starting a business, and you’re going to guess the business: The founder is very young, often under 25. He might work alone or with a founding team, but when he tells the story of the founding it will always have him at the center. He has no credentials for this business. This business has a grand vision, which he thinks is the most important thing in the world. This business lives and dies by its growth metrics. 90% of attempts in thi...

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3:35

“Somebody invented a better bookmark” by Alex_Altair

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/16

This will only be exciting to those of us who still read physical paper books. But like. Guys. They did it. They invented the perfect bookmark. Classic paper bookmarks fall out easily. You have to put them somewhere while you read the book. And they only tell you that you left off reading somewhere in that particular two-page spread. Enter the Book Dart. It's a tiny piece of metal folded in half with precisely the amount of tension needed to stay on the page. On the front it's pointed, t...

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20:39

“How Does A Blind Model See The Earth?” by henry

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/12

Sometimes I'm saddened remembering that we've viewed the Earth from space. We can see it all with certainty: there's no northwest passage to search for, no infinite Siberian expanse, and no great uncharted void below the Cape of Good Hope. But, of all these things, I most mourn the loss of incomplete maps. In the earliest renditions of the world, you can see the world not as it is, but as it was to one person in particular. They’re each delightfully egocentric, with the cartographer's h...

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9:00

“Re: Recent Anthropic Safety Research” by Eliezer...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/12

A reporter asked me for my off-the-record take on recent safety research from Anthropic. After I drafted an off-the-record reply, I realized that I was actually fine with it being on the record, so: Since I never expected any of the current alignment technology to work in the limit of superintelligence, the only news to me is about when and how early dangers begin to materialize. Even taking Anthropic's results completely at face value would change not at all my own sense of how dangerous ...

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10:43

“How anticipatory cover-ups go wrong” by Kaj_Sotala

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/09

1. Back when COVID vaccines were still a recent thing, I witnessed a debate that looked like something like the following was happening: Some official institution had collected information about the efficacy and reported side-effects of COVID vaccines. They felt that, correctly interpreted, this information was compatible with vaccines being broadly safe, but that someone with an anti-vaccine bias might misunderstand these statistics and misrepresent them as saying that the vaccines wer...

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9:42

“SB-1047 Documentary: The Post-Mortem” by Michaël Trazzi

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/08

Below some meta-level / operational / fundraising thoughts around producing the SB-1047 Documentary I've just posted on Manifund (see previous Lesswrong / EAF posts on AI Governance lessons learned). The SB-1047 Documentary took 27 weeks and $157k instead of my planned 6 weeks and $55k. Here's what I learned about documentary production Total funding received: ~$143k ($119k from this grant, $4k from Ryan Kidd's regrant on another project, and $20k from the Future of Life Institute). ...

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48:28

“METR’s Evaluation of GPT-5” by GradientDissenter

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/08

METR (where I work, though I'm cross-posting in a personal capacity) evaluated GPT-5 before it was externally deployed. We performed a much more comprehensive safety analysis than we ever have before; it feels like pre-deployment evals are getting more mature. This is the first time METR has produced something we've felt comfortable calling an "evaluation" instead of a "preliminary evaluation". It's much more thorough and comprehensive than the things we've created before and it explores t...

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36:21

“Emotions Make Sense” by DaystarEld

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/07

For the past five years I've been teaching a class at various rationality camps, workshops, conferences, etc. I’ve done it maybe 50 times in total, and I think I’ve only encountered a handful out of a few hundred teenagers and adults who really had a deep sense of what it means for emotions to “make sense.” Even people who have seen Inside Out, and internalized its message about the value of Sadness as an emotion, still think things like “I wish I never felt Jealousy,” or would have trouble ...

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49:32

“The Problem” by Rob Bensinger, tanagrabeast, yams,...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/06

This is a new introduction to AI as an extinction threat, previously posted to the MIRI website in February alongside a summary. It was written independently of Eliezer and Nate's forthcoming book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, and isn't a sneak peak of the book. Since the book is long and costs money, we expect this to be a valuable resource in its own right even after the book comes out next month.[1] The stated goal of the world's leading AI companies is to build AI that is genera...

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9:18

“Many prediction markets would be better off as...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/04

All prediction market platforms trade continuously, which is the same mechanism the stock market uses. Buy and sell limit orders can be posted at any time, and as soon as they match against each other a trade will be executed. This is called a Central limit order book (CLOB). Example of a CLOB order book from Polymarket Most of the time, the market price lazily wanders around due to random variation in when people show up, and a bulk of optimistic orders build up away from the action. Occas...

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4:44

“Whence the Inkhaven Residency?” by Ben Pace

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/08/04

Essays like Paul Graham's, Scott Alexander's, and Eliezer Yudkowsky's have influenced a generation of people in how they think about startups, ethics, science, and the world as a whole. Creating essays that good takes a lot of skill, practice, and talent, but it looks to me that a lot of people with talent aren't putting in the work and developing the skill, except in ways that are optimized to also be social media strategies. To fix this problem, I am running the Inkhaven Residency. The i...

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419 results

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