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LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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3:39

“Cheap Labour Everywhere” by Morpheus

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/16

I recently visited my girlfriend's parents in India. Here is what that experience taught me: Yudkowsky has this facebook post where he makes some inferences about the economy after noticing two taxis stayed in the same place while he got his groceries. I had a few similar experiences while I was in India, though sadly I don't remember them in enough detail to illustrate them in as much detail as that post. Most of the thoughts relating to economics revolved around how labour in India is extremely

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3:40

“[draft amnesty] A New Global Risk: Large Comet’s...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/16

There are several scientific papers that claim that the variability in luminosity of young stars can be explained by the collisions of these stars with comet-like bodies, and that during such collisions, energy release would be rapid and explosive in the upper layers of the solar atmosphere (similar to the explosion of the Chelyabinsk meteorite). Furthermore, it is known that Kreutz comet progenitor with a diameter of 100-200 kilometers passed at a distance of 1.3 solar radii from the Sun around

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11:56

“How I Became a 5x Engineer with Claude Code” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/15

Claude Code has radically changed what it means for me to be a programmer. It's made me much more productive. I’m able to get work done in hours that would have previously taken me days. On the surface it probably looks like I’m only about 1.5x more productive in terms of time to deliver results, but when you factor in that the quality of the code I can write in the same amount of time is now much higher because coding agents make it cheaper to put in the effort to write high quality code, it's

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26:42

“That Mad Olympiad” by Tomás B.

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/15

"I heard Chen started distilling the day after he was born. He's only four years old, if you can believe it. He's written 18 novels. His first words were, "I'm so here for it!" Adrian said. He's my little brother. Mom was busy in her world model. She says her character is like a "villainess" or something - I kinda worry it's a sex thing. It's for sure a sex thing. Anyway, she was busy getting seduced or seducing or whatever villanesses do in world models, so I had to escort Adrian to Oak Central

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9:15

“It will cost you nothing to ‘bribe’ a Utilitarian”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/15

Audio note: this article contains 41 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Abstract We present a formal model demonstrating how utilitarian reasoning creates a structural vulnerability that allows AI corporations to acquire a public veneer of safety at arbitrary low cost. Drawing from the work from Houy [2014], we prove that an organisation can acquire <span>_k_</span> safety minded

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14:45

“The Biochemical Beauty of Retatrutide: How GLP-1s...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/15

On some level, calories in calories out has to be true. But these variables are not independent. Bodies respond to exercise by getting hungry and to calorie deficit by getting tired. Even absent that, bodies know how much food they want, and if you don’t give it to them they will tell you at increasing volume until you give in (not all bodies, of course, but quiet stomachs aren’t the target market for GLP-1s). A new breed of drugs, GLP-1 agonists, offer a way out of the latter trap by telling your

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21:17

“Recontextualization Mitigates Specification Gaming...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/14

Recontextualization distills good behavior into a context which allows bad behavior. More specifically, recontextualization is a modification to RL which generates completions from prompts that discourage misbehavior, appends those completions to prompts that are more tolerant of misbehavior, and finally reinforces the model on the recontextualized instruction-completion data. Due to the data generation and training prompts differing in their attitude towards misbehavior, recontextualization builds

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14:16

“The ‘Length’ of ‘Horizons’” by Adam Scholl

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/14

Current AI models are strange. They can speak—often coherently, sometimes even eloquently—which is wild. They can predict the structure of proteins, beat the best humans at many games, recall more facts in most domains than human experts; yet they also struggle to perform simple tasks, like using computer cursors, maintaining basic logical consistency, or explaining what they know without wholesale fabrication. Perhaps someday we will discover a deep science of intelligence, and this will teach us

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13:46

“Current Language Models Struggle to Reason in...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/14

tl;dr: We fine-tune or few-shot LLMs to use reasoning encoded with simple ciphers (e.g. base64, rot13, putting a dot between each letter) to solve math problems. We find that these models only get an uplift from the reasoning (over directly answering) for very simple ciphers, and get no uplift for intermediate-difficulty ciphers that they can translate to English. This is some update against LLMs easily learning to reason using encodings that are very uncommon in pretraining, though these

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9:29

“The Mom Test for AI Extinction Scenarios” by Taylor...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/14

(Also posted to my Substack; written as part of the Halfhaven virtual blogging camp.) Let's set aside the question of whether or not superintelligent AI would want to kill us, and just focus on the question of whether or not it could. This is a hard thing to convince people of, but lots of very smart people agree that it could. The Statement on AI Risk in 2023 stated simply: Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics

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32:49

“How AI Manipulates—A Case Study” by Adele Lopez

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/14

If there is only one thing you take away from this article, let it be this:THOU SHALT NOT ALLOW ANOTHER TO MODIFY THINE SELF-IMAGE This appears to me to be the core vulnerability by which both humans and AI induce psychosis (and other manipulative delusions) in people. Of course, it's probably too strong as stated—perhaps in a trusted relationship, or as part of therapy (with a human), it may be worth breaking it. But I hope being over-the-top about it will help it stick in your mind. After all,

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26:02

“If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies, a semi-outsider...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/14

About me and this review: I don’t identify as a member of the rationalist community, and I haven’t thought much about AI risk. I read AstralCodexTen and used to read Zvi Mowshowitz before he switched his blog to covering AI. Thus, I’ve long had a peripheral familiarity with LessWrong. I picked up IABIED in response to Scott Alexander's review, and ended up looking here to see what reactions were like. After encountering a number of posts wondering how outsiders were responding to the book, I

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24:15

“Making legible that many experts think we are not on...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/13

[Context: This post is aimed at all readers[1] who broadly agree that the current race toward superintelligence is bad, that stopping would be good, and that the technical pathways to a solution are too unpromising and hard to coordinate on to justify going ahead.] TL;DR: We address the objections made to a statement supporting a ban on superintelligence by people who agree that a ban on superintelligence would be desirable. Quoting Lucius Bushnaq: I support some form of global ban or pause on

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12:57

“Sublinear Utility in Population and other Uncommon...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/13

Content warning: Anthropics, Moral Philosophy, and Shrimp This post isn't trying to be self contained, since I have so many disparate thoughts about this. Instead, I'm trying to put a representative set of ideas forward, and I hope that if people are interested we can discuss this more in the comments. I also plan to turn this into a (probably small) sequence at some point. I've had a number of conversations about moral philosophy where I make some claim like Utility is bounded and asymptotically

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1:52

[Linkpost] “Pause House, Blackpool” by Greg C

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/13

This is a link post. Are you passionate about pushing for a global halt to AGI development? An international treaty banning superintelligent AI? Pausing AI? Before it's too late to prevent human extinction? Would you like to live with a group of like-minded people pushing for the same? Do you want to do much more, but don’t have the financial means to support yourself volunteering? Then apply to stay at Pause House. I (Greg Colbourn), am offering free accommodation, (vegan) food, and a small stipend

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42:32

“The Narcissistic Spectrum” by Dawn Drescher

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/13

Pathological narcissism is a fortress built against unbearable pain. Some fortresses are sculpted from glass, some hewn from granite. My six-tier spectrum elucidates these architectures. Pathological narcissism can take countless shapes depending on the relative strengths of all the stabilizing and destabilizing factors: My previous article in this sequence lists these factors. I will reference it frequently in this one. My chosen metaphor is that of a fortress, which represents the protective

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4:11

“Don’t Mock Yourself” by Algon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/13

About half a year ago, I decided to try stop insulting myself for two weeks. No more self-deprecating humour, calling myself a fool, or thinking I'm pathetic. Why? Because it felt vaguely corrosive. Let me tell you how it went. Spoiler: it went well. The first thing I noticed was how often I caught myself about to insult myself. It happened like multiple times an hour. I would lay in bed at night thinking, "you mor- wait, I can't insult myself, I've still got 11 days to go. Dagnabbit." The

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3:05

“Emil the Moose” by Martin Sustrik

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/11

The travels of Emil the Moose since he entered Czechia in mid-June. Moose became extinct in most of Germany around 1000 CE, and in Bohemia, Moravia, Austria, most of southern Poland, and Hungary by the XV. century. It's not clear where exactly Emil comes from, but most likely from Poland, which has a large moose population in the northeast. In early summer 2025, he crossed the Czech border and wandered south through Moravia into Austria. He swam across the Danube near Vienna, then turned west. Along

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11:06

“Experiments With Sonnet 4.5 Fiction” by Tomás B.

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/11

Note, this post contains outputs of an LLM. I do not use LLMs in any of my fiction and do not claim this story as my own. I have been having fun writing fiction, and plan to spend whatever time I have left being better than LLMs doing it. I thought I had maybe a year. My initial experiments with Sonnet 4.5 didn't give me a good opinion of its writing ability. This morning I put everything I have written into its context window and then gave it this prompt: Try to write a story like these but focus

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8:12

“The Most Common Bad Argument In These Parts” by J...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/11

I've noticed an antipattern. It's definitely on the dark pareto-frontier of "bad argument" and "I see it all the time amongst smart people". I'm confident it's the worst, common argument I see amongst rationalists and EAs. I don't normally crosspost to the EA forum, but I'm doing it now. I call it Exhaustive Free Association. Exhaustive Free Association is a step in a chain of reasoning where the logic goes "It's not A, it's not B, it's not C, it's not D, and I can't think of any more things it

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