PODCAST

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

All Episodes

4:39

“If You’ve Never Bought a Tool You Didn’t Need,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/18

Having more tools greatly increases the space of potential plans you can consider. So by default you should be getting more tools. Having too few tools tightly constrains your options, and often impacts the kinds of plans you consider in the first place. Years ago I thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail, and every piece of gear mattered. I had a lot of things when I first started out that seem very foolish to me now, things I wouldn't consider bringing again. For each piece of gear, I had to carry every

en-gb

8:55

“3” by AnnaJo

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/18

Warning: This is completely based on my own experiences; please do your own research before trying different types of birth control. TL;DR: Sex hormone binding globulin (SHBG), which is anti-correlated with free testosterone, seems to predict how well I tolerate birth control. None of them does everything I want--I just want to be me without the painful periods smh. I started getting painful cramps in high school, but it was mostly manageable as long as I took some Tylenol within eight hours of my

en-gb

6:05

“Consent-Based RL: Letting Models Endorse Their Own...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/17

AKA scalable oversight of value drift TL;DR LLMs could be aligned but then corrupted through RL, instrumentally converging on deep consequentialism. If LLMs are sufficiently aligned and can properly oversee their training updates, we they can prevent this. SOTA models can arguably be considered ~aligned,[1] but this isn't my main concern. It's not when models are trained on human data that messes up (I mean, we can still mess that part up), it's when you try to go above the human level. Models like

en-gb

46:18

“Prompted CoT Early Exit Undermines the Monitoring...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/17

Code: github.com/ElleNajt/controllabilitytldr: Yueh-Han et al. (2026) showed that models have a harder time making their chain of thought follow user instruction compared to controlling their response (the non-thinking, user-facing output). Their CoT controllability conditions require the models’ thinking to follow various style constraints (e.g. write in lowercase, avoid a word), and they measure how well models can comply with these instructions while achieving a task that requires reasoning

en-gb

3:27

[Linkpost] “You can only build safe ASI if ASI is...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/17

This is a link post. Sometimes people make various suggestions that we should simply build "safe" artificial Superintelligence (ASI), rather than the presumably "unsafe" kind.[1] There are various flavors of “safe” people suggest. Sometimes they suggest building “aligned” ASI: You have a full agentic autonomous god-like ASI running around, but it really really loves you and definitely will do the right thing.Sometimes they suggest we should simply build “tool AI” or “non-agentic” AI.Sometimes they

en-gb

5:15

“Specialization is a Driver of Natural Ontology” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/17

Part of what makes a pencil a good object is that all its parts share approximately the same rotational velocity - i.e. it's a rigid body object. Part of what makes a squirrel a good object is that its parts share approximately the same genome. Part of what makes the water in a cup a good object is that its parts share approximately the same chemical composition - i.e. it mixes quickly. General pattern: part of what makes many objects good objects (i.e. ontologically natural) is that their parts

en-gb

70:30

“On Dwarkesh Patel’s Podcast With Nvidia CEO Jensen...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/17

Some podcasts are self-recommending on the ‘yep, I’m going to be breaking this one down’ level. This was one of those. So here we go.As usual for podcast posts, the baseline bullet points describe key points made, and then the nested statements are my commentary. Some points are dropped. If I am quoting directly I use quote marks, otherwise assume paraphrases. As with the last podcast I covered, Dwarkesh Patel's 2026 interview with Elon Musk, we have a CEO who is doubtless talking

en-gb

11:12

“Let goodness conquer all that it can defend” by habryka

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/17

Epistemic status: All of the western canon must eventually be re-invented in a LessWrong post, so today we are re-inventing modernism. In my post yesterday, I said: Maybe the most important way ambitious, smart, and wise people leave the world worse off than they found it is by seeing correctly how some part of the world is broken and unifying various powers under a banner to fix that problem — only for the thing they have built to slip from their grasp and, in its collapse, destroy much more than

en-gb

7:19

“Beware of Well-Written Posts” by alseph

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/17

Beware of when a post is so well-written that you can't put it down. Be wary of posts that are more visually attractive than average. Beware of posts that make you laugh out loud. Why? Because all of this is orthogonal to whether the post's argument is actually true and runs counter to the mission of rationality. The Company Man Yesterday, I read Tomás B.'s The Company Man. I was captivated on my first read, as I'm sure many others were. Had I been interrupted before I could scroll into the

en-gb

22:06

“You Aren’t in Charge of the Overton Window; Politics...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/16

Sometimes, people don't say what they actually think, not because saying it would be rude or costly, but because they believe saying it now would be counterproductive. They see that the true claim is outside the Overton window. And they conclude that the strategic play is to say something weaker, something adjacent. That will let you normalize the frame without triggering the immune response. You will redesign the house a bit now so that you can slide the window later. Then, when the ground has

en-gb

3:53

“Carpathia Day” by Drake Morrison

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/16

(The better telling is here. Seriously you should go read it. I've heard this story told in rationalist circles, but there wasn't a post on LessWrong, so I made one) Today is April 15th, Carpathia Day. Take a moment to put forth an unreasonable effort to save a little piece of your world, when no one would fault you for doing less. In the early morning of April 15, the RMS Titanic began to sink with more than two thousand souls on board. Over 58 nautical miles away — too far to make it in time —

en-gb

10:30

“Do not conquer what you cannot defend” by habryka

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/16

Epistemic status: All of the western canon must eventually be re-invented in a LessWrong post. So today we are re-inventing federalism. Once upon a time there was a great king. He ruled his kingdom with wisdom and economically literate policies, and prosperity followed. Seeing this, the citizens of nearby kingdoms revolted against their leaders, and organized to join the kingdom of this great king. While the kingdom's ability to defend itself against external threats grew with each person who

en-gb

4:55

“What is the Iliad Intensive?” by Leon Lang,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/16

Almost two months ago, Iliad announced the Iliad Intensive and Iliad Fellowship. Fellowships are a well-understood unit, but what is an intensive? This post explains this in more detail! Comparison. The Iliad Intensive has similarities to ARENA, but focuses more on foundational AI alignment research instead of alignment research engineering. Expect more math and less coding. Rhythm. It's currently four weeks long. Five days a week. 10am till 6pm every day, with lunch and an afternoon break. This

en-gb

8:15

“The Mirror Test Is Complicated” by J Bostock

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/15

The Mirror Test is kind of like Hitler. In any discussion of animal cognition, somebody is going to bring it up. The conversation usually goes like this: A: So, most animals can’t recognize themselves in the mirror B: Which animals specifically? A: Oh, dogs, cats, betta fish, monkeys, that sort of thing. Anyway as I was saying, those animals can’t. But some smart animals can recognize themselves in the mirror. B: Such as? A: Well, chimpanzees and orangutans for a start. B: Makes sense A: Not

en-gb

10:09

“Contra Leicht on AI Pauses” by David Scott Krueger...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/15

This is going to be a nerdier article than usual. It's a response to Anton Leicht's blog post “Press Play To Continue”. I disagree with much of it and think it's not very well argued. Going section-by-section, Leicht's claims are: AI is going pretty damn well all things considered. The argument has two parts: It implicitly models pausing AI as resampling from a fixed distribution of possible AI development timelines. It argues the current situation is better than average, so resampling is a

en-gb

80:03

“Nectome: All That I Know” by Raelifin

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/15

TLDR: I flew to Oregon to investigate Nectome, a brain preservation startup, and talk to their entire team. They’re an ambitious company, looking to grow in a way that no cryonics organization has before. Their procedure is probably much better at saving people than other orgs, and is being offered for as little as $20k until the end of April — a (theoretical) 92% discount. (I bought two.) This early-bird pricing is low, in part, due to some severe uncertainties, in both the broader world and in

en-gb

7:48

“Effective Altruism, Seen From Slytherin” by Xylix

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/15

Epistemic status: Left as an exercise for the reader.I was thinking of EA outreach and its optics this week. And was inspired to glance at a specific part: What does EA look like from the lens of a Slytherin? People keep being surprised about Effective Altruist Slytherins Surprise means your model has error. I'll point out the confusions. First confusion: But Slytherins don't care for altruistic goals! I think we can divide the Hogwarts Houses into methods houses [1] : Slytherin values

en-gb

19:25

“Majority Report” by peralice

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/15

[Attention conservation notice: description of a social phenomenon which may be obvious to some people.] This post is partially inspired by Alexander Wales’ Majority and Minority, which I would recommend highly. I’m afraid of dogs. Like, pathologically afraid of dogs. I cross the street to avoid people walking tiny poodles; on a trail, I’ll climb metres into the foliage and wait for people with dogs to pass; unexpected barking can leave me panicking for half an hour (and expected barking isn’t

en-gb

65:04

“Current AIs seem pretty misaligned to me” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/15

Many people—especially AI company employees [1] —believe current AI systems are well-aligned in the sense of genuinely trying to do what they're supposed to do (e.g., following their spec or constitution, obeying a reasonable interpretation of instructions). [2] I disagree. Current AI systems seem pretty misaligned to me in a mundane behavioral sense: they oversell their work, downplay or fail to mention problems, stop working early and claim to have finished when they clearly haven't, and often

en-gb

13:20

“Contra Byrnes on UV & Cancer” by HedonicEscalator

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/15

In his recent LessWrong post, Some takes on UV & cancer, Steve Byrnes comes out against the "Public Health Orthodoxy" on UV. Among other topics I won't be addressing, Brynes claims that non-sunburn sun exposure does not increase risk of skin cancer, and suggests that people should aim to "wean off" sunscreen and develop a permanent tan.[1] Brynes is wrong and his advice is dangerous. Non-sunburn UV exposure causes cancer Our mechanistic understanding of UV-induced carcinogenesis is consistent

en-gb

4,454 results

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

All Episodes

Similar Podcasts

Lead With AI

Tamara Nall

Double Tap

Double Tap Productions Inc.

Claude AI Genius Podcast w/ Claude Anthropic Expert Brandon Gaille

Claude AI Expert Brandon Gaille

ものづくりnoシテン

しぶちょー@機械設計&AIエンジニア

Eli the Computer Guy

Eli the Computer Guy