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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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5:21

“Considerations for growing the pie” by Zach...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/05

Recently some friends and I were comparing growing the pie interventions to an increasing our friends' share of the pie intervention, and at first we mostly missed some general considerations against the latter type. 1. Decision-theoretic considerations The world is full of people with different values working towards their own ends; each of them can choose to use their resources to increase the total size of the pie or to increase their share of the pie. All of them would significantly prefer a

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5:03

″“Following the incentives”” by David Scott Krueger...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/04

A few years ago I listened to a fascinating podcast interview featuring former Democratic presidential candidates Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson. They agreed that politics is a mess and politicians are constantly doing bad things that harm the people they are supposed to serve. But they couldn’t agree on how bad that made the politicians as people. Yang wanted to view the politicians as normal people responding to bad incentives, but Williamson wanted to call them evil for failing to exercise

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2:31

“Chicken-Free Egg Whites” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/04

Baking has traditionally made extensive use of egg whites, especiallythe way they can be beaten into a foam and then set with heat. While I eat eggs, I have a lot of people in my life who avoid them for ethical reasons, and this often limits what I can bake for them. I was very excited to learn, though, that you can now buy extremely realistic vegan egg whites! EVERY engineered yeast to convert sugar into ovalbumin, the main protein in egg whites and the one responsible for most of its

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19:35

“dark ilan” by ozymandias

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/04

The second time Vellam uncovers the conspiracy underlying all of society, he approaches a Keeper. Some of the difference is convenience. Since Vellam reported that he’d found out about the first conspiracy, he's lived in the secret AI research laboratory at the Basement of the World, and Keepers are much easier to come by than when he was a quality control inspector for cheese. But Vellam is honest with himself. If he were making progress, he’d never tell the Keepers no matter how convenient they

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23:36

“Mean field sequence: an introduction” by Dmitry...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/04

This is the first post in a planned series about mean field theory that we am writing together with Lauren Greenspan (this post was generated by Dmitry with lots of input from Lauren, and was split into two parts, the second of which is written jointly). These posts are a combination of an explainer and some original research/ experiments. The goal of these posts is to explain an approach to understanding and interpreting model internals which we informally denote "mean field theory" or MFT. In

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4:41

“Democracy Dies With The Rifleman” by Vaniver

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/04

Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun -- Mao Zedong Halfway thru recorded history, Athens became the first state we're sure was a democracy, and inspiration to many later ones. Probably some existed earlier, and certainly some entities smaller than states were democratic, likely long before recorded history began. The next tenth of history saw the rise of the Roman Republic, which mixed democracy and aristocracy together to form a functional hybrid, and then it transitioned to the Roman

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4:16

“The bar is lower than you think” by XelaP

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/04

TL;DR: The efficient market hypothesis is a lie, there are no adults, you don't have to be as cool as the Very Cool People to contribute something, your comparative advantage tends to feel like just doing the obvious thing, and low hanging fruit is everywhere if you pay attention. The Very Cool People are anyways not so impossible to become; and perhaps most coolness is gated behind a self belief of having nothing to add.. So put more out into the world, worry less about whether people already know

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51:03

“Anthropic Responsible Scaling Policy v3: Dive Into...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/04

Wednesday's post talked about the implications of Anthropic changing from v2.2 to v3.0 of its RSP, including that this broke promises that many people relied upon when making important decisions.Today's post treats the new RSP v3.0 as a new document, and evaluates it. First I’ll go over how the RSP v3.0 works at a high level. Then I’ll dive into the Roadmap and the Risk Report. How RSP v3.0 Works Normally I would pay closer attention to the exact written contents of the new RSP. In this

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9:14

“Did Anyone Predict the Industrial Revolution?” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/04

The Fighting Temeraire. 1839, by Joseph Mallord William Turner. (Source: Wikimedia) Editor's note: Post 2/30 for Inkhaven Why did the philosophers fail to anticipate the industrial revolution? I often find myself wondering. On the one hand, you could argue that they weren’t in the business of predicting the future. But on the other hand, I’m sure if you plucked Plato and his students from The Academy and dropped them off in 1910, they’d probably have a few things to say about it. The most

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11:32

“Why do I believe preserving structure is enough?” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/04

There's a lot even our best neuroscientists don't know about the human brain. How can we have any reasonable hope for preservation given those unknowns? What if there are crucial memory mechanisms that are so poorly understood, we don't even know to check whether our methods preserve them? As it turns out, there's some interesting empirical evidence about the general shape, and limits, of those unknowns. In Ted Chiang's short story Exhalation, a race of aliens have brains which run on compressed

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16:37

“There should be $100M grants to automate AI safety”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/03

This post reflects my personal opinion and not necessarily that of other members of Apollo Research. TLDR: I think funders should heavily incentivize AI safety work that enables spending $100M+ in compute or API budgets on automated AI labor that directly and differentially translates to safety. Motivation I think we are in a short timeline world (and we should take the possibility seriously even if we don't have full confidence yet). This means that I think funders should aim to allocate large

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4:26

“Sadly, The Whispering Earring” by Dentosal

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/03

The Whispering Earring (which you should read first) explores one of the most dystopic-utopic scenarios. Imagine you could achieve all you've ever wanted by just giving up your agency. While theoretically this seems rather undesirable, in practice you get double benefits: that enviable high-status having-done-things reputation, without having to do all that scary failure-prone responsibility-taking. Just don't tell anyone you have the earring, otherwise the status points gained are void. Of course

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5:43

“Common research advice #2: say precisely what you...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/03

As previously mentioned, research feedback I give to more junior research collaborators tends to fall into one of three categories: Doing quick sanity checksSaying precisely what you want to sayAsking why one more time In each case, I think the advice can be taken to an extreme I no longer endorse. Accordingly, I’ve tried to spell out the degree to which you should implement the advice, as well as what “taking it too far” might look like. I talked about doing quick sanity checks in a previous

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110:21

“AI #162: Visions of Mythos” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/03

Anthropic had some problem with leaks this week.We learned that they are sitting on a new larger-than-Opus AI model, Mythos, that they believe offers a step change in cyber capabilities. We also got a full leak of the source for Claude Code. Oh, and Axios was compromised, on the heels of LiteLLM. This looks to be getting a lot more common. Defense beats offense in most cases, but offense is getting a lot more shots on goal than it used to. The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Aplocayloptimist came

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7:03

“2026: The year of throwing my agency at my health...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/03

I have bipolar disorder. I was diagnosed in late 2012 following my one and only severe manic episode. Most psychiatrists would regard me as a resounding success case – I never even remotely come close to suicidal depression, manic delusions of grandeur, impulsive spending, or irresponsible sexual behavior. By standard measures, I am well-adjusted, functional, and successful. Part of this relative success is adherence to appropriate medication, and another part is maintaining good insight[1] into my

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6:09

[Linkpost] “Q1 2026 Timelines Update” by Daniel...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/03

This is a link post. We’re mostly focused on research and writing for our next big scenario, but we’re also continuing to think about AI timelines and takeoff speeds, monitoring the evidence as it comes in, and adjusting our expectations accordingly. We’re tentatively planning on making quarterly updates to our timelines and takeoff forecasts. Since we published the AI Futures Model 3 months ago, we’ve updated towards shorter timelines. Daniel's Automated Coder (AC) median has moved from late 2029

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13:33

“How social ideas get corrupt” by Kaj_Sotala

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/02

I’ve noticed that sometimes there is an idea or framework that seems great to me, and I also know plenty of people who use it in a great and sensible way. Then I run into people online who say that “this idea is terrible and people use it in horrible ways”. When I ask why, they point to people applying the idea in ways that do indeed seem terrible - and in fact, applying it in ways that seem to me like the opposite of what the idea is actually saying. Of course, some people might think that I’m the

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8:02

“The Indestructible Future” by WillPetillo

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/02

Doctor: Mr. Burns, I'm afraid you are the sickest man in the United States. You have everything! [...] Burns: You're sure you just haven't made thousands of mistakes? Doctor: Uh, no. No, I'm afraid not. Burns: This sounds like bad news! Doctor: Well, you'd think so, but all of your diseases are in perfect balance, [...] we call it "Three Stooges Syndrome" Burns: So, what you're saying is...I'm indestructible! Doctor: Oh, no, no! In fact, even a slight breeze could— Burns: Indestructible... In the

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5:16

“My most common advice for junior researchers” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/02

Written quickly as part of the Inkhaven Fellowship. At a high level, research feedback I give to more junior research collaborators often can fall into one of three categories: Doing quick sanity checksSaying precisely what you want to sayAsking why one more time In each case, I think the advice can be taken to an extreme I no longer endorse. Accordingly, I’ve tried to spell out the degree to which you should implement the advice, as well as what “taking it too far” might look like. This piece

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58:09

“The Practical Guide to Superbabies” by GeneSmith

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/02

It's Summer of 2025. I’m standing in a grass covered field on the longest day of the year. A friend of mine walks towards me, holding his newborn son. “Hey, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but you were pretty instrumental in this kid existing. We read your blog post on polygenic embryo screening back in 2023 and decided to go through IVF to have him as a result.” He hesitates for a moment, then asks “Do you want to hold him?” I nod. As I cradle this child in my arms, I look down at his face

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