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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

3:21

“Do One New Thing A Day To Solve Your Problems” by Algon

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/22

People don't explore enough. They rely on cached thoughts and actions to get through their day. Unfortunately, this doesn't lead to them making progress on their problems. The solution is simple. Just do one new thing a day to solve one of your problems. Intellectually, I've always known that annoying, persistent problems often require just 5 seconds of actual thought. But seeing a number of annoying problems that made my life worse, some even major ones, just yield to the repeated applic...

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8:45

“Humanity Learned Almost Nothing From COVID-19” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/21

Summary: Looking over humanity's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, almostsix years later, reveals that we've forgotten to fulfill our intent atpreparing for the next pandemic. I rant. content warning: A single carefully placed slur. If we want to create a world free of pandemics and other biologicalcatastrophes, the time to act is now. —US White House, “ FACT SHEET: The Biden Administration's Historic Investment in Pandemic Preparedness and Biodefense in the FY 2023 President's Budget...

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50:28

“Consider donating to Alex Bores, author of the RAISE...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/20

Written by Eric Neyman, in my personal capacity. The views expressed here are my own. Thanks to Zach Stein-Perlman, Jesse Richardson, and many others for comments. Over the last several years, I’ve written a bunch of posts about politics and political donations. In this post, I’ll tell you about one of the best donation opportunities that I’ve ever encountered: donating to Alex Bores, who announced his campaign for Congress today. If you’re potentially interested in donating to Bores, my...

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7:26

“Meditation is dangerous” by Algon

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/20

Here's a story I've heard a couple of times. A youngish person is looking for some solutions to their depression, chronic pain, ennui or some other cognitive flaw. They're open to new experiences and see a meditator gushing about how amazing meditation is for joy, removing suffering, clearing one's mind, improving focus etc. They invite the young person to a meditation retreat. The young person starts making decent progress. Then they have a psychotic break and their life is ruined for years...

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26:41

“That Mad Olympiad” by Tomás B.

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/19

"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 ...

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14:15

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

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/17

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 ...

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4:10

“Don’t Mock Yourself” by Algon

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/15

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." Th...

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26:01

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

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

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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8:11

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

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/12

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 thin...

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17:34

“Towards a Typology of Strange LLM Chains-of-Thought”...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/11

Intro LLMs being trained with RLVR (Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards) start off with a 'chain-of-thought' (CoT) in whatever language the LLM was originally trained on. But after a long period of training, the CoT sometimes starts to look very weird; to resemble no human language; or even to grow completely unintelligible. Why might this happen? I've seen a lot of speculation about why. But a lot of this speculation narrows too quickly, to just one or two hypotheses. My in...

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6:09

“I take antidepressants. You’re welcome” by Elizabeth

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/10

It's amazing how much smarter everyone else gets when I take antidepressants. It makes sense that the drugs work on other people, because there's nothing in me to fix. I am a perfect and wise arbiter of not only my own behavior but everyone else's, which is a heavy burden because some of ya’ll are terrible at life. You date the wrong people. You take several seconds longer than necessary to order at the bagel place. And you continue to have terrible opinions even after I explain the ri...

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4:06

“Inoculation prompting: Instructing models to...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/10

This is a link post for two papers that came out today: Inoculation Prompting: Eliciting traits from LLMs during training can suppress them at test-time (Tan et al.) Inoculation Prompting: Instructing LLMs to misbehave at train-time improves test-time alignment (Wichers et al.) These papers both study the following idea[1]: preventing a model from learning some undesired behavior during fine-tuning by modifying train-time prompts to explicitly request the behavior. We call this technique ...

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18:52

“Hospitalization: A Review” by Logan Riggs

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/10

I woke up Friday morning w/ a very sore left shoulder. I tried stretching it, but my left chest hurt too. Isn't pain on one side a sign of a heart attack? Chest pain, arm/shoulder pain, and my breathing is pretty shallow now that I think about it, but I don't think I'm having a heart attack because that'd be terribly inconvenient. But it'd also be very dumb if I died cause I didn't go to the ER. So I get my phone to call an Uber, when I suddenly feel very dizzy and nauseous. My wife is...

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23:57

“What, if not agency?” by abramdemski

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/09

Sahil has been up to things. Unfortunately, I've seen people put effort into trying to understand and still bounce off. I recently talked to someone who tried to understand Sahil's project(s) several times and still failed. They asked me for my take, and they thought my explanation was far easier to understand (even if they still disagreed with it in the end). I find Sahil's thinking to be important (even if I don't agree with all of it either), so I thought I would attempt to write an expla...

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28:56

“The Origami Men” by Tomás B.

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/08

Of course, you must understand, I couldn't be bothered to act. I know weepers still pretend to try, but I wasn't a weeper, at least not then. It isn't even dangerous, the teeth only sharp to its target. But it would not have been right, you know? That's the way things are now. You ignore the screams. You put on a podcast: two guys talking, two guys who are slightly cleverer than you but not too clever, who talk in such a way as to make you feel you're not some pathetic voyeur consuming a por...

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6:37

“A non-review of ‘If Anyone Builds It, Everyone...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/06

I was hoping to write a full review of "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" (IABIED Yudkowski and Soares) but realized I won't have time to do it. So here are my quick impressions/responses to IABIED. I am writing this rather quickly and it's not meant to cover all arguments in the book, nor to discuss all my views on AI alignment; see six thoughts on AI safety and Machines of Faithful Obedience for some of the latter. First, I like that the book is very honest, both about the authors' fea...

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15:46

“Notes on fatalities from AI takeover” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/06

Suppose misaligned AIs take over. What fraction of people will die? I'll discuss my thoughts on this question and my basic framework for thinking about it. These are some pretty low-effort notes, the topic is very speculative, and I don't get into all the specifics, so be warned. I don't think moderate disagreements here are very action-guiding or cruxy on typical worldviews: it probably shouldn't alter your actions much if you end up thinking 25% of people die in expectation from misalign...

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21:59

“Nice-ish, smooth takeoff (with imperfect safeguards)...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/04

I wrote my recent Accelerando post to mostly stand on it's own as a takeoff scenario. But, the reason it's on my mind is that, if I imagine being very optimistic about how a smooth AI takeoff goes, but where an early step wasn't "fully solve the unbounded alignment problem, and then end up with extremely robust safeguards[1]"... ...then my current guess is that Reasonably Nice Smooth Takeoff still results in all or at least most biological humans dying (or, "dying out", or at best, ambiguo...

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8:56

“Omelas Is Perfectly Misread” by Tobias H

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/03

The Standard Reading If you've heard of Le Guin's ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, you probably know the basic idea. It's a go-to story for discussions of utilitarianism and its downsides. A paper calls it “the infamous objection brought up by Ursula Le Guin”. It shows up in university ‘Criticism of Utilitarianism' syllabi, and is used for classroom material alongside the Trolley Problem. The story is often also more broadly read as a parable about global inequality, the comfortable rich...

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38:39

“Ethical Design Patterns” by AnnaSalamon

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2025/10/01

Related to: Commonsense Good, Creative Good (and my comment); Ethical Injunctions. Epistemic status: I’m fairly sure “ethics” does useful work in building human structures that work. My current explanations of how are wordy and not maximally coherent; I hope you guys help me with that. Introduction It is intractable to write large, good software applications via spaghetti code – but it's comparatively tractable using design patterns (plus coding style, attention to good/bad codesmell, ...

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409 results

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