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PODCAST

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma.If you"d like more, subscribe to the “Lesswrong (30+ karma)” feed.

technology philosophy

All Episodes

15:58

"Takes from two months as an aspiring LLM naturalist"...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/05/04

I spent my last two months playing around with LLMs. I’m a beginner, bumbling and incorrect, but I want to share some takes anyhow.[1] Take 1. Everything with computers is so so much easier than it was a year ago. This puts much “playing with LLMs” stuff within my very short attention span. This has felt empowering and fun; 10/10 would recommend. There's a details box here with the title "Detail:". The box contents are omitted from this narration. Take 2. There's somebody home[2...

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10:44

"Intelligence Dissolves Privacy" by Vaniver

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/05/02

The future is going to be different from the present. Let's think about how. Specifically, our expectations about what's reasonable are downstream of our past experiences, and those experiences were downstream of our options (and the options other people in our society had). As those options change, so too our experiences, and our expectations of what's reasonable. I once thought it was reasonable to pick up the phone and call someone, and to pick up my phone when it rang; things have chan...

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15:17

"How Go Players Disempower Themselves to AI" by Ashe...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/05/02

Written as part of the MATS 9.1 extension program, mentored by Richard Ngo. From March 9th to 15th 2016, Go players around the world stayed up to watch their game fall to AI. Google DeepMind's AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol, commonly understood to be the world's strongest player at the time, with a convincing 4-1 score. This event “rocked” the Go world, but its impact on the culture was initially unclear. In Chess, for instance, computers have not meaningfully automated away human jobs. Huma...

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4:11

"On today’s panel with Bernie Sanders" by David Scott...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/05/01

It's sort of easy to forget how close Bernie Sanders was to becoming the most powerful person in the world. The world we live in feels so much not like that place. I’m in Washington DC for the next week, and I’ve just finished a public appearance with Senator Sanders (should I call him Bernie? Or Sanders? or…) You won’t often see me so dressed up and polished. But this is important! There are politicians who have principles and character, who really believe in doing what's right. I think...

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14:50

"Not a Paper: “Frontier Lab CEOs are Capable of...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/29

(Fragments from a research paper that will never be written) Extended Abstract. The frontier AI developers are becoming increasingly powerful and wealthy, significantly increasing their potential for risks. One concern is that of executive misalignment: when the CEO has different incentives and goals than that of the board of directors, or of humanity as a whole. Our work proposes three different threat models, under which executive misalignment can lead to concrete harm. We perform t...

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15:46

"llm assistant personas seem increasingly incoherent...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/29

(This was originally going to be a "quick take" but then it got a bit long. Just FYI.) There's this weird trend I perceive with the personas of LLM assistants over time. It feels like they're getting less "coherent" in a certain sense, even as the models get more capable. When I read samples from older chat-tuned models, it's striking how "mode-collapsed" they feel relative to recent models like Claude Opus 4.6 or GPT-5.4.[1] This is most straightforwardly obvious when it comes to text...

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8:30

"LessWrong Shows You Social Signals Before the...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/28

When reading comments, you see is what other people think before reading the comment. As shown in an RCT, that information anchors your opinion, reducing your ability to form your own opinion and making the site's karma rankings less related to the comment's true value. I think the problem is fixable and float some ideas for consideration. The LessWrong interface prioritizes social information You read a comment. What information is presented, and in what order? The order of informatio...

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6:43

"Update on the Alex Bores campaign" by Eric Neyman

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/27

In October, I wrote a post arguing that donating to Alex Bores's campaign for Congress was among the most cost-effective opportunities that I'd ever encountered. (A bit of context: Bores is a state legislator in New York who championed the RAISE Act, which was signed into law last December.[1] He's now running for Congress in New York's 12th Congressional district, which runs from about 17th Street to 100th Street in Manhattan. If elected to Congress, I think he'd be a strong champion for ...

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3:24

"Community misconduct disputes are not about facts"...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/27

In criminal law, the prosecution and the defense each try to establish a timeline — what happened, where, when, who was involved — and thereby determine whether the defendant is actually guilty of a crime.[1] Community misconduct disputes are nothing like this. There is only rarely disagreement over facts, and even when there is, it is not the crux of the matter. Community disputes are not for litigating facts. What they are for[2] is litigating three things: The character of the accus...

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11:24

"The paper that killed deep learning theory" by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/27

Around 10 years ago, a paper came out that arguably killed classical deep learning theory: Zhang et al. 's aptly titled Understanding deep learning requires rethinking generalization. Of course, this is a bit of an exaggeration. No single paper ever kills a field of research on its own, and deep learning theory was not exactly the most productive and healthy field at the time this was published. But if I had to point to a single paper that shattered the feeling of optimism at the time, it ...

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8:42

"Forecasting is Way Overrated, and We Should Stop...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/26

Summary EA and rationalists got enamoured with forecasting and prediction markets and made them part of the culture, but this hasn’t proven very useful, yet it continues to receive substantial EA funding. We should cut it off. My Experience with Forecasting For a while, I was the number one forecaster on Manifold. This lasted for about a year until I stopped just over 2 years ago. To this day, despite quitting, I’m still #8 on the platform. Additionally, I have done well on real-money...

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3:53

"Your Supplies Probably Won’t Be Stolen in a...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/24

When I write about things like storing food or medication in case of disaster, one common response I get is that it doesn't matter: society will break down, and people who are stronger than you will take your stuff. This seemed plausible at first, but it's actually way off. Looking at past disasters, people mostly fall somewhere on a "kind and supportive" to "keep to themselves" spectrum. When there is looting it's typically directed at stores, not homes, and violence is mostly...

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9:10

"10 posts I don’t have time to write" by habryka

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/23

I am a busy man and will die knowing I have not said all I wanted to say. But maybe I can at least leave some IOUs behind. 1) Blatant conflicts are the best kind Ben Hoffman's "Blatant Lies are the Best Kind!" is maybe the best post title followed by the least clarifying post I have ever encountered. The title is honestly amazing, but the text of the post, instead of a straightforward argument that the title promises, is an extremely dense and almost meta-fictional dialogue about th...

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40:11

"$50 million a year for a 10% chance to ban ASI" by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/22

ControlAI's mission is to avert the extinction risks posed by superintelligent AI. We believe that in order to do this, we must secure an international prohibition on its development. We're working to make this happen through what we believe is the most natural and promising approach: helping decision-makers in governments and the public understand the risks and take action. We believe that ControlAI can achieve an international prohibition on ASI development if scaled sufficiently. We...

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15:54

"Evil is bad, actually (Vassar and Olivia Schaefer...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/21

Micheal Vassar's strategy for saving the world is horrifyingly counterproductive. Olivia's is worse. A note before we start: A lot of the sources cited are people who ended up looking kinda insane. This is not a coincidence, it's apparently an explicit strategy: Apply plausibly-deniable psychological pressure to anyone who might speak up until they crack and discredit themselves by sounding crazy or taking extreme and destructive actions. Here's Brent Dill explaining it: (later in t...

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13:36

"10 non-boring ways I’ve used AI in the last month"...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/21

I use AI assistance for basically all of my work, for many hours, every day. My colleagues do the same. Recent surveys suggest >50% of Americans have used AI to help with their work in the last week. My architect recently started sending me emails that were clearly ChatGPT generated.[1] Despite that, I know surprisingly little about how other people use AI assitance. Or at least how people who aren't weird AI-influencers sharing their marketing courses on Twitter or LinkedIn use AI. So ...

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6:44

"Feel like a room has bad vibes? The lighting is...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/21

I have now had a few years of experience doing architectural and interior design for many spaces that people seem to really love (most widely known Lighthaven, but before that we also had the Lightcone Offices, though I've also played a hand in designing some of the most popular areas at Constellation a few years back). Most people (including me a few years back) have surprisingly bad introspective access into why a room makes them feel certain things. Most of the time, people's ability to...

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5:43

"Quality Matters Most When Stakes are Highest" by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/20

Or, the end of the world is no excuse for sloppy work One morning when I was nine, my dad called me over to his computer. He wanted to show me this amazing Korean scientist who had managed to clone stem cells, and who was developing treatments to let people with spinal cord injuries – people like my dad – walk again on their own two legs. I don't remember exactly what he said next, or what I said back. I have a sense that I was excited too, and that I was upset when I learned the United ...

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49:51

"Reevaluating AGI Ruin in 2026" by lc

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/20

It's been about four years since Eliezer Yudkowsky published AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities, a 43-point list of reasons the default outcome from building AGI is everyone dying. A week later, Paul Christiano replied with Where I Agree and Disagree with Eliezer, signing on to about half the list and pushing back on most of the rest. For people who were young and not in the bay area, like me, these essays were probably more significant than old timers would expect. Before it became complete...

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58:59

"Having OCD is like living in North Korea (Here’s how...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/04/19

[Author's note: this post is the narrative version that explains my journey with OCD and how I treated it. The short version provides quick, actionable advice for treating OCD.] The following is the most painful experience I've ever had. Four years ago in the parking lot of my rock climbing gym… …my heart was pumping out of my chest, I was sweating profusely, and an overwhelming sense of panic and impending doom had a vice grip on my soul. A painful death was surely imminent. I felt li...

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692 results

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