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LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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9:30

“Warning Aliens About the Dangerous AI We Might...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/12

Thesis: We should broadcast a warning to potential extraterrestrial listeners that Earth might soon spawn an unfriendly computer superintelligence. Sending the message might benefit humanity. If we were to create an unaligned computer superintelligence, it would likely expand through the universe as quickly as possible. The fastest way would not be by ships, but, as Turchin has described, by sending malicious signals intended for alien civilizations using radio telescopes. Ideally, from the AI's

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6:40

“Do not hand off what you cannot pick up” by habryka

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/12

Delegation is good! Delegation is the foundation of civilization! But in the depths of delegation madness breeds and evil rises. In my experience, there are three ways in which delegation goes off the rails: 1. You delegate without knowing what good performance on a task looks like If you do not know how to evaluate performance on a task, you are going to have a really hard time delegating it to someone. Most likely, you will choose someone incompetent for the task at hand. But even if you manage

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7:06

“5 Things I Learned After 10 Days of Inkhaven” by Ben...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/12

If you don't know, Inkhaven is a residency where you come and publish a blogpost every day. No "Oh it would be nice to blog some day" or "Oh I'm working on something, I'm sure I'll publish it some day". No, you have to publish today, otherwise you are asked to leave. After 10 days into the first ever Inkhaven cohort, here are some things I've learned. 1. Everyone publishes. I have 41 people here writing, most of them living at Lighthaven, all of them visiting at least a few days per week. In recent

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7:48

“How I Learned That I Don’t Feel Love” by johnswentworth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/12

A few months ago, I learned that I probably can’t feel the emotions signalled by oxytocin, the "love hormone". This raises lots of interesting questions - what things I do and don’t feel, how the world looks different from an oxytocin-less perspective, how a lack of oxytocin changes one's values or goals, etc. But it would be putting the cart before the horse to dive into those questions without first walking through how I learned this about myself and the evidence, so that everybody has an

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7:16

“Consciousness as a Distributed Ponzi Scheme” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/12

The term "distributed Ponzi scheme" here is not derogatory -- many currencies are distributed Ponzi schemes, and that seems fine.[1] I use this terminology partly to be funny, and mostly to point out that there's a sort of circular reasoning involved.[2] It is only rational to think that money is valuable because other people expect it to be valuable. There doesn't need to be some root source of the value (EG a government which requires taxes to be paid in the currency). So why am I claiming that

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3:34

“France is ready to stand alone” by Lucie Philippon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/11

First part of a series of article on French AI Policy that I’m currently writing as part of the Inkhaven Residency. For three centuries, France has stood among the great powers of the world, and there it wants to stay. Now, far from the heyday of La Belle Époque, where the French Empire stood shoulder to shoulder with the British Empire, France has resisted the pressures to align too closely with the world superpowers, lest it become just a vassal state. French pride mandates that French

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11:48

“Steering Language Models with Weight Arithmetic” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/11

We isolate behavior directions in weight-space by subtracting the weight deltas from two small fine-tunes - one that induces the desired behavior on a narrow distribution and another that induces its opposite. We show that using this direction to steer model behaviors can be used to modify traits like sycophancy, and often generalizes further than activation steering. Additionally, we provide preliminary evidence that these weight-space directions can be used to detect the emergence of worrisome

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7:38

“The problem of graceful deference” by TsviBT

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/11

Crosspost from my blog. Moral deference Sometimes when I bring up the subject of reprogenetics, people get uncomfortable. "So you want to do eugenics?", "This is going to lead to inequality.", "Parents are going to pressure their kids.". Each of these statements does point at legitimate concerns. But also, the person is uncomfortable, and they don't necessarily engage with counterpoints. And, even if they acknowledge that their stated concern doesn't make sense, they'll still be

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8:51

“How likely is dangerous AI in the short term?” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/11

How large of a breakthrough is necessary for dangerous AI? In order to cause a catastrophe, an AI system would need to be very competent at agentic tasks[1]. The best metric of general agentic capabilities is METR's time horizon. The time horizon measures the length of well-specified software tasks AI systems can do, and is grounded in human baselines, which means AI performance can be closely compared to human performance. Causing a catastrophe[2] is very difficult. It would likely take many

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6:11

“Questioning the Requirements” by habryka

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/11

Context: Every Sunday I write a mini-essay about an operating principle of Lightcone Infrastructure that I want to remind my team about. I've been doing this for about 3 months, so we have about 12 mini essays. This is the first in a sequence I will add to daily with slightly polished versions of these essays. The first principle, and the one that stands before everything else, is to question the requirements. Here's how Musk describes that principle: Question every requirement. Each should come

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8:40

“Andrej Karpathy on LLM cognitive deficits” by Nina...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/11

Excerpt from Dwarkesh Patel's interview with Andrej Karpathy that I think is valuable for LessWrong-ers to read. I think he's basically correct. Emphasis in bold is mine. Andrej Karpathy 00:29:53 I guess I built the repository over a period of a bit more than a month. I would say there are three major classes of how people interact with code right now. Some people completely reject all of LLMs and they are just writing by scratch. This is probably not the right thing to do anymore. The intermediate

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0:57

[Linkpost] “Untitled Draft” by Gabriel Alfour

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/10

This is a link post. I basically fully endorse the full article. I like the concluding bit too. This brings me to my own contribution to the already-full genre of recommendations for people who want to contribute to AI safety: Don't work for a company that's making frontier fully-autonomous AI capabilities progress even faster Don't live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Cheers, Gabe --- First published: November 10th, 2025 Source:

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4:15

“An Ontology for AI Cults and Cyber Egregores” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/10

I haven't found concepts useful for thinking about this: written in one place, so here is an ontology which I find useful. Prerequisite: Dennett three stances (physical, design, intentional). Meme is a replicator of cultural evolution. Idea, behaviour, piece of text or other element of culture. Type signature: replicator. Memeplex is a group of memes that have evolved to work together and reinforce each other, making them more likely to spread and persist as a unit. Type signature is coalitional

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6:12

“Myopia Mythology” by abramdemski

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/10

It's been a while since I wrote about myopia! My previous posts about myopia were "a little crazy", because it's not this solid well-defined thing; it's a cluster of things which we're trying to form into a research program. This post will be "more crazy". The Good/Evil/Good Spectrum "Good" means something along the lines of "helpful to all". There is a spectrum from extremely myopic to extremely non-myopic. Arranging all "thinking beings" on that spectrum, I claim that you get Good at both ends,

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5:12

“Three Kinds Of Ontological Foundations” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/10

Why does a water bottle seem like a natural chunk of physical stuff to think of as “A Thing”, while the left half of the water bottle seems like a less natural chunk of physical stuff to think of as “A Thing”? More abstractly: why do real-world agents favor some ontologies over others? At various stages of rigor, an answer to that question looks like a story, an argument, or a mathematical proof. Regardless of the form, I’ll call such an answer an ontological foundation. Broadly speaking, the

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16:15

“Learning information which is full of spiders” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/10

This essay contains an examination of handling information which is unpleasant to learn. Also, more references to spiders than most people want. CW: Pictures of spiders. 1. Litanies and Aspirations If the box contains a diamond, I desire to believe that the box contains a diamond; If the box does not contain a diamond, I desire to believe that the box does not contain a diamond; Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want. -Litany of Tarski I read these words when I was around eighteen

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2:44

[Linkpost] “Book Announcement: The Gentle Romance” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/10

This is a link post. It's been eight months since I released my last story, so you could be forgiven for thinking that I’d given up on writing fiction. In fact, it's the opposite. I’m excited to announce that I’m releasing my first fiction collection—The Gentle Romance: Stories of AI and Humanity—with Encour Press in mid-December! It contains 22 stories, most of which are revised versions of the best stories I’ve posted online. The thread that connects them is the struggle to hold onto our

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7:44

“Manifest X DC Opening Benediction - Making Friends...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/10

Manifest X DC was this weekend, hopefully the first of many local spin-offs of Manifest. Despite a late prediction market surge, there were no fires. An attendee wrote a nice post of observations, though he left the afterparty before the lights dimmed and the duels began. I gave an opening talk, which ended up being more personal and emotional than I'd set out to write. Several attendees asked for the text, so I am posting a lightly edited version of my draft. This is not the version as delivered,

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4:18

“Problems I’ve Tried to Legibilize” by Wei Dai

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/10

Looking back, it appears that much of my intellectual output could be described as legibilizing work, or trying to make certain problems in AI risk more legible to myself and others. I've organized the relevant posts and comments into the following list, which can also serve as a partial guide to problems that may need to be further legibilized, especially beyond LW/rationalists, to AI researchers, funders, company leaders, government policymakers, their advisors (including future AI advisors), and

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30:30

“Condensation” by abramdemski

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/09

Condensation: a theory of concepts is a model of concept-formation by Sam Eisenstat. Its goals and methods resemble John Wentworth's natural abstractions/natural latents research.[1] Both theories seek to provide a clear picture of how to posit latent variables, such that once someone has understood the theory, they'll say "yep, I see now, that's how latent variables work!". The goal of this post is to popularize Sam's theory and to give my own perspective on it; however, it will not be a full

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