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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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7:12

“Anthropic did not publish a “risk discussion” of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/10

I and some other people noticed a potential discrepancy in Anthropic's announcement of Claude Mythos. The version of the RSP that was operative over the relevant period of time (3.0) included a section (3.1) that suggested some internal deployments would require Anthropic to publish a discussion of that model's effect on the analysis in their previously-published Risk Reports within 30 days. A separate issue that Claude Opus noticed while I was writing this post is that Anthropic's release to "a

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12:09

“Some takes on UV & cancer” by Steven Byrnes

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/10

Table of contents: Part 1: In which I use my optical physics background to share some hopefully-uncontroversial observationsPart 2: In which I boldly defy Public Health Orthodoxy on the whole UV situation Part 1: In which I use my optical physics background to share some hopefully-uncontroversial observations 1.1 UV depends a lot on “solar zenith angle” [a.k.a. “angle of the sun away from directly overhead”], not on how hot it is outside That means: you should mainly be thinking about UV exposure

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7:19

“Slightly-Super Persuasion Will Do” by Tomás B.

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/09

In SF this week, I met an online friend in person for the first time yesterday. We talked about super-persuasion. His take was: there is mostly an efficient market for power, and the world is reactive. Unlike software, humans adapt to new exploits or even just unexplained strange happenings. Society resists, pushes back. Unlike an instance of FreeBSD, it is not fine one minute then pwned the next. My reply was just to point to powerful historical figures and say, "if he could do it so can an ASI!"

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12:08

“Help me launch Obsolete: a book aimed at building a...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/09

I wrote a book! It's called Obsolete: The AI Industry's Trillion-Dollar Race to Replace You—and How to Stop It, and it’ll be available in May if you preorder through my publisher (OR Books+The Nation). With it, I took on a dual mission: get anyone up to speed on the state of AI and its risks (especially skeptics and lefties) AND write something people working in the space will enjoy and learn from. An unbiased panel of early reviewers (i.e. people I know) think it succeeds. For instance, here's a

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5:30

“Have we already lost? Part 1: The Plan in 2024” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/09

Written very quickly for the Inkhaven Residency. As I take the time to reflect on the state of AI Safety in early 2026, one question feels unavoidable: have we, as the AI Safety community, already lost? That is, have we passed the point of no return, after which becomes both likely and effectively outside of our control? Spoilers: as you might guess from Betteridge's Law, my answer to the headline question is no. But the salience of this question feels quite noteworthy to me nonetheless, and

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7:37

“Do not be surprised if LessWrong gets hacked” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/09

Or, for that matter, anything else. This post is meant to be two things: a PSA about LessWrong's current security posture, from a LessWrong admin[1]an attempt to establish common knowledge of the security situation it looks like the world (and, by extension, you) will shortly be in Claude Mythos was announced yesterday. That announcement came with a blog post from Anthropic's Frontier Red Team, detailing the large number of zero-days (and other security vulnerabilities) discovered by Mythos. This

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14:22

“One Week in the Rat Farm” by Philip Harker

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/09

Hello, LessWrong. This is a personal introduction diary-ish post and it does not have a thesis. I apologise if this isn't a good fit for the website; I just needed to unload my brain somewhere and this seemed like the spiritually correct place. I write to you from the Lighthaven campus in fabulous Berkeley, CA. It's my first time here and I am enchanted. After one week of full-body immersion, I am completely fascinated with the Rationalist philosophy, culture, community. I do not know whether I

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12:25

“101 Humans of New York on the Risks of AI” by Corm

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/09

Nobody has ever done an in person door to door survey about AI risks[1]. What do people really think about AI? Like really? There have been some surveys on the risks from AI. But there's a real difference between looking at numbers on page vs. the feeling of talking to our fellow humans. I[2] asked 101 people what they thought about the impact of AI. Approximately half of the responses were from ringing doorbells, and half were from asking people out and about[3]. Every single one of these was in

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7:00

“Baking tips” by RobertM

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/08

These are things I've learned from experience that others might find helpful. Some of them are easy to miss for a while. (Also an exercise in "reality contains a surprising amount of detail"; I could probably have kept going for a while but needed to call it at some point.) Baking Oven thermostats are often miscalibrated enough to matter. If you're following existing recipes but find things often coming out overdone or underdone, you might consider buying an oven thermometer to check how

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1:57

“An easy coordination problem?” by KatjaGrace

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/08

Common wisdom says that it is incredibly hard to coordinate to not build more dangerous AI. This sounds believable in the abstract: international geopolitics arms race game theory something something.But pragmatically, what exactly is the difficulty? I agree there would seem to be obstacles for the average person. But four of the people apparently succumbing to the overpowering arms race forces while saying AI poses a huge imminent risk to humanity are Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Demis Hassabis and

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28:33

“Excerpts and Notes on Mythos Model Card” by williawa

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/08

List of Excerpts from Mythos model card. Tried to include interesting things, but also included some boring to be expected things. I omitted some things that were too long. Also wanna note, that this list of excerpts highlights "concerning" things above the rate at which they occur in the document.I frequently say "Anthropic seems to think ..." or "their theory appears to be that ...", and this doesn't mean I think the opinion is unsubstantiated or that they are wrong, its just a natural way

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10:24

“The effects of caffeine consumption do not decay...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/08

epistemic status: confident in the overall picture, substantial quantitative uncertainty about the relative potency of caffeine and paraxanthine tldr: The effects of caffeine consumption last longer than many assume. Paraxanthine is sort of like caffeine that behaves the way many mistakenly believe caffeine behaves. You've probably heard that caffeine exerts its psychostimulatory effects by blocking adenosine receptors. That matches my understanding, having dug into this. I'd also guess that,

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11:51

“You don’t know what you are made of till you’ve been...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/08

When I was 19 I made some decisions. One of them was to stop eating meat. One of them was to stop using cutlery. One of them was to stop using chairs. Before you tell me this is a certain type of person, I assure you I was the only type of person making these types of decisions as far as I knew. I was in college and the summer was fast approaching. A summer where we had to leave campus for 2 months and figure out some other place to exist meanwhile. I hadn’t figured out any place to exist

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5:19

“Why is Flesh So Weak?” by J Bostock

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/08

Ok, I got nerd sniped on the specific argument "Animals would be better off being made of stronger material than protein, but they don't because evolution can't find this solution". Graphene Graphene is (kind of) a wonder material. It's a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal grid, each one bonded to three others. Any damage to the structure entails breaking strong covalent bonds between the carbons. It's the strongest material per unit weight that we know of. The standard refrain is

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3:56

“The hard part isn’t noticing when papers are bad,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/08

Written (very) quickly for the Inkhaven Residency. I used to hate the classic management adage of “bring me solutions, not problems”. After all, identifying problems is the first step of solving them, and clearly understanding a problem is often a substantial part of the difficulty of solving it. (It also doesn’t help that I’ve sat in on many modern management classes where this adage was treated as obviously wrong and outdated.) But over time, I’ve realized the adage contains some amount of

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5:12

“We can prevent progress! Conceptual clarity, and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/08

“We can’t prevent progress” say the people for some reason enthusiastically advocating that we just risk dying by AI rather than even consider contravening this law.I have several problems with this, beyond those unsubtly hinted at above. First, it seems to be willfully conflating “increasing technology understanding and/or tools” with “things getting better”. The word ‘progress’ generally means ‘things getting better’, but here in a debate about whether it is good or not for society to

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3:14

“AI as a Trojan horse race” by KatjaGrace

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/08

I’ve argued that the AI situation is not clearly an ‘arms race’. By which I mean, going fast is not clearly good, even selfishly. I think this is a hard point to get across. Like, these people are RACING. They say they are RACING. They are GOING FAST. If they stop RACING the other side will get there first. How is it not a RACE?? Which is a fair response. It's like if I said “this isn’t a chess tournament” gesturing at a group of chess champions aggressively playing chess. How could it not

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4:40

“My unsupervised elicitation challenge” by DanielFilan

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/08

Note: you are ineligible to complete this challenge if you’ve studied Ancient or Modern Greek, or if you natively speak Modern Greek, or if for other reasons you know what mistakes I’m claiming Opus 4.6 makes. If you’re ineligible, please don’t help other people complete the challenge. I have recently started using Claude Opus 4.6 to start studying Ancient Greek. Specifically, I initially used it to grade problem sets at the end of the textbook I’ve been using, but then I got worried about it

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6:57

“Role-playing vs Self-modelling” by Jan_Kulveit

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/08

In a recent debate on Twitter – which I recommend reading in full – David Chalmers argues: "Claude doesn't role-play the assistant, it realizes the assistant. Role-playing and realization are quite distinct phenomena, even at the level of behavior and function." Jack Lindsey questions this, pointing out evidence in the opposite direction: "I'm curious what you'd say it's doing when it's sampling tokens on the user turn, or, say, on John F. Kennedy's turn in a transcript like: H: When were you

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19:55

“Elementary Condensation” by Jan

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/08

Previously in this series: Elementary Infra-Bayesianism 1. There's this paper Earlier last week I got nerd-sniped by a paper called Condensation: a theory of concepts (Eisenstat 2025). It's the kind of paper where the abstract makes a claim so clean you assume you must be misreading it: roughly, there is a right answer to “what are the concepts in this data,” and any two agents who carve it up well enough will agree on what those concepts are.[1] If that sounds like John Wentworth's natural

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