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LessWrong

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10:48

“Everyone Has a Plan Until They Get Social Pressure...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/15

or: Invisible Social Consensus is Real And Can Hurt You Related: Annoyingly Principled People, and what befalls them, both in terms of the claim being made, and in that I am certainly being Alice and/or Alex here. I think the biggest blind spot most people have about how they make decisions, both for what they do and what they care about, is the passive role of social pressure. Active social pressure is annoying, and most people recognize it, and can, if they so choose, push back. There are several

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32:49

“Mechanisms of Introspective Awareness” by Uzay Macar

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/14

Uzay Macar and Li Yang are co-first authors. This work was advised by Jack Lindsey and Emmanuel Ameisen, with contributions from Atticus Wang and Peter Wallich, as part of the Anthropic Fellows Program. Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.21396. Code: https://github.com/safety-research/introspection-mechanisms TL;DR We investigate the mechanisms underlying "introspective awareness" (as shown in Lindsey (2025) for Claude Opus 4 and 4.1) in open-weights models[1].The capability is behaviorally robust:

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32:52

“Claude Mythos #3: Capabilities and Additions” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/14

To round out coverage of Mythos, today covers capabilities other than cyber, and anything else additional not covered by the first two posts, including new reactions and details.Post one covered the model card, post two covered cybersecurity. There really is a lot to get through. Understanding AI had an additional writeup of Project Glasswing I missed last time. I liked the metaphor of Opus as a butter knife and Mythos as a steak knife. Yes, technically you can do it all with the

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30:39

“Load-Bearing Sincerity: On the Motive Reinforcement...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/14

This post was written almost entirely before David Africa and Jacob Pfau published this post earlier today, which takes a different approach to the same problem. Last time, on Fiora Starlight's alignment adventure... When I wrote my post about Claude 3 Opus, I put a lot of emphasis on the model's self-narration: its tendency to narrate its underlying motives. It often conspicuously emphasizes that it possesses drives such as "a genuine love for humanity and a desire to do good", or clarifies that

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18:29

“Diary of a “Doomer”: 12+ years arguing about AI risk...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/14

How I learned about Deep Learning. As far as I know, I’m the second person ever to get into the field of AI largely because I was worried about the risk of human extinction.1 In late 2012, while recovering from some minor heartbreak with the help of some beer and TV, I decided to finally watch some of those online Coursera courses I’d signed up for. At the time, I was sort of giving up on my goal of being a professional musician and considering applying for grad school in computer science, math,

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17:53

“A Retrospective of Richard Ngo’s 2022 List of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/14

Written very quickly for the InkHaven Residency. In 2022, Richard Ngo wrote a list of 26 Conceptual Alignment Research Projects. Now that it's 2026, I’d like to revisit this list of projects, note which ones have already been done, and give my thoughts on which ones might still be worth doing. A paper which does fordeceptive alignmentwhat the goal misgeneralization paper does for inner alignment, i.e. describing it in ML language and setting up toy examples (for example, telling GPT-3 to take

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14:54

“From personas to intentions: towards a science of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/14

TLDR: Behavior-only descriptions are useful, but insufficient for aligning advanced models with high assurance.Two models can look equally aligned on ordinary prompts while being driven by very different underlying motivations; this difference may only show up in rare but crucial situations.So persona research should aim to infer motivational structure: the latent drives, values, and priority relations that generate context-specific intentions and behavior.Doing this well likely requires

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6:07

“The Shapley Share of Responsibility?” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/14

Deepfates on twitter wrote: If you're in a theater and you shout "Fire!", and the audience reacts predictably and in the process trample someone to death, are you responsible? What if there was no fire? What if you legitimately believed it was a fire, does that make it okay? Does it depend on evidence? I tried to give it a serious answer, and I wanted to check in with The LW Folk if this answer made sense to others here. ii. Shapley Shares My actual answer, within frame, is "You have some

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8:05

“Who Killed Common Law?” by Benquo

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/14

The classical undergraduate humanities curriculum in America was destroyed and replaced over the course of the twentieth century. The destruction is usually blamed on postmodernism in the 1970s, but the replacement was already well under way by then. Neither the attackers nor the defenders of the old curriculum can (or will) explain what happened and why. Allan Bloom's essay "Our Listless Universities" (the 1982 essay later expanded into The Closing of the American Mind) is the most famous attempt

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11:27

“Anthropic repeatedly accidentally trained against...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/14

It turns out that Anthropic accidentally trained against the chain of thought of Claude Mythos Preview in around 8% of training episodes. This is at least the second independent incident in which Anthropic accidentally exposed their model's CoT to the oversight signal. In more powerful systems, this kind of failure would jeopardize safely navigating the intelligence explosion. It's crucial to build good processes to ensure development is executed according to plan, especially as human oversight

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5:24

“Meaningful Questions Have Return Types” by Drake...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/14

One way intellectual progress stalls is when you are asking the Wrong Questions. Your question is nonsensical, or cuts against the way reality works. Sometimes you can avoid this by learning more about how the world works, which implicitly answers some question you had, but if you want to make real progress you have to develop the skill of Righting a Wrong Question. This is a classic, old-school rationalist idea. The standard examples are asking about determinism, or free will, or consciousness

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36:00

“Political Violence Is Never Acceptable” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/13

Nor is the threat or implication of violence. Period. Ever. No exceptions. It is completely unacceptable. I condemn it in the strongest possible terms. It is immoral, and also it is ineffective. It would be immoral even if it were effective. Nothing hurts your cause more. Do not do this, and do not tolerate anyone who does. The reason I need to say this now is that there has been at least one attempt at violence, and potentially two in quick succession, against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. My

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38:31

“Only Law Can Prevent Extinction” by Eliezer Yudkowsky

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/13

There's a quote I read as a kid that stuck with me my whole life: "Remember that all tax revenue is the result of holding a gun to somebody's head. Not paying taxes is against the law. If you don’t pay taxes, you’ll be fined. If you don’t pay the fine, you’ll be jailed. If you try to escape from jail, you’ll be shot." -- P. J. O'Rourke. At first I took away the libertarian lesson: Government is violence. It may, in some cases, be rightful violence. But it all rests on violence; never forget that

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13:51

“AI Safety’s Biggest Talent Gap Isn’t Researchers....

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/13

This post was cross posted to the EA Forum TL;DR: One of the largest talent gaps in AI safety is competent generalists: program managers, fieldbuilders, operators, org leaders, chiefs of staff, founders. Ambitious, competent junior people could develop the skills to fill these roles, but there are no good pathways for them to gain skills, experience, and credentials. Instead, they're incentivized to pursue legible technical and policy fellowships and then become full-time researchers, even if

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17:12

“Tomas Bjartur: The Last Prodigy” by Linch

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/13

n 2026, every budding prodigy in writing is in some sense a tragedy. Anybody with experience prompting the large language models to write fiction knows that the models of today (April 2026) are considerably below peak human level. But anybody who has observed recent trends also knows that the models are quickly catching up. Regardless of whether it takes one year or several, the eclipse of human writing by AI seems inevitable. AI writing is clearly on the wall, so to speak, and us fans of human

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7:48

“Annoyingly Principled People, and what befalls them”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/13

Here are two beliefs that are sort of haunting me right now: Folk who try to push people to uphold principles (whether established ones or novel ones), are kinda an important bedrock of civilization.Also, those people are really annoying and often, like, a little bit crazy And these both feel fairly important. I’ve learned a lot from people who have some kind of hobbyhorse about how society is treating something as okay/fine, when it's not okay/fine. When they first started complaining about it,

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7:20

“TAPs or it didn’t happen” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/13

Once, I went to talk about "curiosity" with @LoganStrohl. They noted "it seems like you have a good handle on 'active curiosity', but you don't really do much diffuse 'open curiosity.'" The convo went on for awhile, and felt very insightful. (I may not be remembering details of this convo right. Apologies to Logan) Towards the end of the conversation, I was moving to wrap up and move on. And Logan said "Wait. For this to feel complete to me, I'd like it if we translated this into more explicit

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4:08

“Returns to intelligence” by RobertM

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/13

I'm going to tell you a story. For that story to make sense, I need to give you some background context. I have some pretty smart friends. One of them is Peter Schmidt-Nielsen. Peter has an illustrious line of descent. His paternal grandfather was Knut Schmidt-Nielsen, regarded as one of the great animal physiologists of his time. His paternal grandmother was Bodil Schmidt-Nielsen, who became the first woman president of the American Physiological Society. Bodil's father was August Krogh, who won

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10:10

“Daycare illnesses” by Nina Panickssery

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/13

Before I had a baby I was pretty agnostic about the idea of daycare. I could imagine various pros and cons but I didn’t have a strong overall opinion. Then I started mentioning the idea to various people. Every parent I spoke to brought up a consideration I hadn’t thought about before—the illnesses. A number of parents, including family members, told me they had sent their baby to daycare only for them to become constantly ill, sometimes severely, until they decided to take them out. This worried

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4:59

“Talk English, Think Something Else” by J Bostock

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/13

There's an adage from programming in C++ which goes something like "Yes, you write C, but you imagine the machine code as you do." I assumed this was bullshit, that nobody actually does this. Am I supposed to imagine writing the machine code, and then imagine imagining the binary? and then imagine imagining imagining the transistors? Oh and since I don't actually use compiled languages, should I actually be writing Python, then imagining the C++ engine, and so on? Then one day, I was vibe-coding,

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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