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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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2:33

“Glucose Supplementation for Sustained Stimulant...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/28

The ObservationI take 60mg methylphenidate daily. Despite this, I often become exhausted and need to nap. Taking small amounts of pure glucose (150-300mg every 20-60 minutes) eliminates this fatigue. This works even when I already eat carbohydrates. E.g. 120g of oats in the morning don't prevent the exhaustion. The Mechanism Facts: Wiehler et al. (2022) found that cognitive fatigue correlates with glutamate accumulation in the prefrontal cortex. Glutamate is the brain's main excitatory

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4:11

“A Conflict Between AI Alignment and Philosophical...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/28

(This argument reduces my hope that we will have AIs that are both aligned with humans in some sense and also highly philosophically competent, which aside from achieving a durable AI pause, has been my main hope for how the future turns out well. As this is a recent realization[1], I'm still pretty uncertain how much I should update based on it, or what its full implications are.) Being a good alignment researcher seems to require a correct understanding of the nature of values. However metaethics

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1:43

“Show Funders Your Utility Function Over Money...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/28

You have more context on your ability to make use of funds than fits into a specific numerical ask.[1] You want to give funders good information, and the natural type-signature for this is a utility function over money - how much good you think you can do with different funding levels, normalized to the max EV your project has. I[2] made a little tool for drawing utility functions over money[3], for use in funding applications. Features: Copy graph to clipboard as CSV and paste back in[4] By

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3:47

“Shared Houses Illegal?” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/28

As part of the general discourse around cost of living, Julia and I were talking about families sharing housing. This turned into us each writing a post ( mine, hers), but is it actually legal for a family to live with housemates? In the places I've checked it seems like yes. While zoning is complicated and I'm not a lawyer, it looks to me like people commonly describe the situation as both more restrictive and more clear cut than it really is. For example, Tufts University

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6:02

“Are We In A Coding Overhang?” by Michaël Trazzi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/27

Andrej Karpathy posted 12 hours ago (emphasis mine): I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to

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15:43

“Moving Goalposts: Modern Transformer Based Agents...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/27

Epistemic Status: A woman of middling years who wasn't around for the start of things, but who likes to read about history, shakes her fist at the sky. I'm glad that people are finally admitting that Artificial Intelligence has been created. I worry that people have not noticed that (Weak) Artificial Super Intelligence (based on old definitions of these terms) has basically already arrived too. The only thing left is for the ASI to get stronger and stronger until the only reason people aren't

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6:40

“Burnout, depression, and AI safety: some concrete...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/27

Burnout and depression in AI safety usually don’t happen because of overwork. From what I've seen, it usually comes from a lack of hope. Working on something you don’t think will work and if it doesn’t work, you’ll die? That's a recipe for misery. How do you fix AI safety hopelessness? First off, rationally assess the likelihood of your work actually helping with AI safety. If you rationally believe that it's too unlikely to actually help with AI safety, well, then, stop working on it! In this

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6:21

[Linkpost] “Team Shard: Alignment Mentorship from...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/26

This is a link post. Through the MATS program, we (Alex Turner and Alex Cloud[1]) help alignment researchers grow from seeds into majestic trees. We have fun, consistently make real alignment progress, and help scholars tap into their latent abilities. MATS summer '26 applications are open until January 18th!Team Shard in MATS 6.0 during the summer of '24. From left: Evžen Wyitbul, Jacob Goldman-Wetzler, Alex Turner, Alex Cloud, and Joseph Miller. Many mentees now fill impactful roles. Lisa

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14:59

“Whole Brain Emulation as an Anchor for AI Welfare”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/26

Epistemic status: Fairly confident in the framework, uncertain about object-level claims. Keen to receive pushback on the thought experiments. TL;DR: I argue that Whole Brain Emulations (WBEs) would clearly have moral patienthood, and that the relevant features are computational, not biological. Recent Mechanistic Interpretability (MI) work shows Large Language Models (LLMs) have emotional representations with geometric structure matching human affect. This doesn't prove LLMs deserve moral

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12:47

“Measuring no CoT math time horizon (single forward...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/26

A key risk factor for scheming (and misalignment more generally) is opaque reasoning ability. One proxy for this is how good AIs are at solving math problems immediately without any chain-of-thought (CoT) (as in, in a single forward pass). I've measured this on a dataset of easy math problems and used this to estimate 50% reliability no-CoT time horizon using the same methodology introduced in Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks (the METR time horizon paper). Important caveat: To get human

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6:54

“Human Values” by Maitreya

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/26

[This is an entry for lsusr's write-like-lsusr competition.]"I solved the alignment problem," said Qianyi. "You what?" said postdoc Timothy. It was late at the university computer laboratory and Timothy' skepticism was outvoted by his eagerness to think about anything other than his dissertation. "You heard me," said Qianyi. "You do realize that solving the alignment has lots of different components, right?" said Timothy, "First you need to figure out how to build a general superintelligence

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12:10

“Unknown Knowns: Five Ideas You Can’t Unsee” by Linch

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/26

Merry Christmas! Today I turn an earlier LW shortform into a full post and discuss "unknown knowns" "obvious" ideas that are actually hard to discuss because they're invisible when you don't have them, and then almost impossible to unsee when you do. Hopefully this is a fun article for like the twenty people who check LW on Christmas! __ There are a number of implicit concepts I have in my head that seem so obvious that I don’t even bother verbalizing them. At least, until it's brought to my

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3:10

“Clipboard Normalization” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/25

The world is divided into plain text and rich text, but this is oftennot what I want. I want comfortable text: Yes: Lists, links, blockquotes, code blocks, inline code, bold, italics, underlining, headings, simple tables. No: Colors, fonts, text sizing, text alignment, images, line spacing. Let's say I want to send someone a snippet from a blog post. If I paste this into my email client the font family, font size, blockquote styling, and link styling come along: If I

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7:48

“Don’t Trust Your Brain” by silentbob

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/25

…if it's anything like mine[1]. If it isn't, then maybe treat this as an opportunity to fight the typical mind fallacy by getting a glimpse at what's going on in other minds. I've made many predictions and have gone through a lot of calibration training over the years, and have generally become pretty well calibrated in several domains. Yet I noticed that in some areas, I seem surprisingly immune to calibration. Where my brain just doesn't want to learn that it's systematically and repeatedly wrong

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36:03

“Catch-Up Algorithmic Progress Might Actually be 60×...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/24

Epistemic status: This is a quick analysis that might have major mistakes. I currently think there is something real and important here. I’m sharing to elicit feedback and update others insofar as an update is in order, and to learn that I am wrong insofar as that's the case. Summary The canonical paper about Algorithmic Progress is by Ho et al. (2024) who find that, historically, the pre-training compute used to reach a particular level of AI capabilities decreases by about 3× each year. Their

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2:29

“Alignment Fellowship” by rich_anon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/24

Zvi said: Unconditional Grants to Worthy Individuals Are Great The process of applying for grants, raising money, and justifying your existence sucks. A lot. It especially sucks for many of the creatives and nerds that do a lot of the best work. If you have to periodically go through this process, and are forced to continuously worry about making your work legible and how others will judge it, that will substantially hurt your true productivity. At best it is a constant distraction. By default, it

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5:22

“Kids and Space” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/24

There's been a lot of discussion over the last month on whether it's still possible to raise kids without being rich. If you need to buy a house where each kid has their own room, yes, that's expensive, but it's also not the only option. We didn't wait to buy a house (or have multiple bedrooms) before having kids, and I think that was the right choice for us. To give you a sense of what this looked like, here two configurations from early on: Living with extended

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3:30

“The Benefits of Meditation Come From Telling People...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/24

[This is an entry for lsusr's write-like-lsusr competition.] A new study out of the University of Michigan has confirmed what many people have long suspected: the benefits of meditation do not come from retraining your nervous system to be less reactive, but instead entirely derive from the act of telling people that you meditate. The lead investigator of the study, Dr. Susan Connor, tested this by strapping brain wave helmets to participants while they meditated. She found no statistical

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40:04

“The ML drug discovery startup trying really, really...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/24

Introduction What I will describe below is a rough first approximation of what it is like to work in the field of machine-learning-assisted small-molecule design. Imagine that you are tasked with solving the following machine-learning problem: There are 116 billion balls of varying colors, textures, shapes, and sizes in front of you. Your job is to predict which balls will stick to a velcro strip. To help start you off, you’re given a training set of 10 million balls that have already been tested;

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9:50

“The future of alignment if LLMs are a bubble” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/23

We might be in a generative AI bubble. There are many potential signs of this around: Business investment in generative AI have had very low returns. Expert opinion is turning against LLM, including some of the early LLM promoters (I also get this message from personal conversations with some AI researchers). No signs of mass technological unemployment. No large surge in new products and software. No sudden economic leaps. Business investment in AI souring. Hallucinations a continual and

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