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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

74:50

"Schelling Goodness, and Shared Morality as a Goal"...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/03/06

Also available in markdown at theMultiplicity.ai/blog/schelling-goodness. This post explores a notion I'll call Schelling goodness. Claims of Schelling goodness are not first-order moral verdicts like "X is good" or "X is bad." They are claims about a class of hypothetical coordination games in the sense of Thomas Schelling, where the task being coordinated on is a moral verdict. In each such game, participants aim to give the same response regarding a moral question, by reasoning about wh...

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15:23

"Maybe there’s a pattern here?" by dynomight

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/03/05

1. It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine—a gun—which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished. Richard Gatling (1861) 2. In 1923, Hermann Oberth published The Rocket to Planetary Spaces, later expanded as Ways to Space Travel. This showed that it was possible to build machines...

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14:27

"OpenAI’s surveillance language has many potential...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/03/05

(The author is not affiliated with the Department of War or any major AI company.) There's a lot of disagreement about the new surveillance language in the OpenAI–Department of War agreement. Some people think it's a significant improvement over the previous language.[1] Others think it patches some issues but still leaves enough loopholes to not make a material difference. Reasonable people disagree about how a court will interpret the language, if push comes to shove. But here's someth...

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13:00

"An Alignment Journal: Coming Soon" by Dan MacKinlay,...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/03/04

tl;dr We’re incubating an academic journal for AI alignment: rapid peer-review of foundational Alignment research that the current publication ecosystem underserves. Key bets: paid attributed review, reviewer-written synthesis abstracts, and targeted automation. Contact us if you’re interested in participating as an author, reviewer, or editor, or if you know someone who might be. Experimental Infrastructure for Foundational Alignment Research This is the first in a series of “build-in-t...

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14:56

"Frontier AI companies probably can’t leave the US"...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/03/01

It's plausible that, over the next few years, US-based frontier AI companies will become very unhappy with the domestic political situation. This could happen as a result of democratic backsliding, weaponization of government power (along the lines of Anthropic's recent dispute with the Department of War), or because of restrictive federal regulations (perhaps including those motivated by concern about catastrophic risk). These companies might want to relocate out of the US. However, it wo...

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22:22

"Persona Parasitology" by Raymond Douglas

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/03/01

There was a lot of chatter a few months back about "Spiral Personas" — AI personas that spread between users and models through seeds, spores, and behavioral manipulation. Adele Lopez's definitive post on the phenomenon draws heavily on the idea of parasitism. But so far, the language has been fairly descriptive. The natural next question, I think, is what the “parasite” perspective actually predicts. Parasitology is a pretty well-developed field with its own suite of concepts and framewor...

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4:12

"Here’s to the Polypropylene Makers" by jefftk

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/02/27

Six years ago, as covid-19 was rapidly spreading through the US, mysister was working as a medical resident. One day she was handed anN95 and told to "guard it with her life", because there weren'tany more coming. N95s are made from meltblown polypropylene, produced from plasticpellets manufactured in a small number of chemical plants. Buildingmore would take too long: we needed these plants producing allthe pellets they could. Braskem America operated plants in Marcus Hook PA and Neal W...

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5:35

"Anthropic: “Statement from Dario Amodei on our...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/02/27

I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries. Anthropic has therefore worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of War and the intelligence community. We were the first frontier AI company to deploy our models in the US government's classified networks, the first to deploy them at the National Laboratories, and the first to provide custom models for national security cu...

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15:39

"Are there lessons from high-reliability engineering...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/02/26

This post is partly a belated response to Joshua Achiam, currently OpenAI's Head of Mission Alignment: If we adopt safety best practices that are common in other professional engineering fields, we'll get there … I consider myself one of the x-risk people, though I agree that most of them would reject my view on how to prevent it. I think the wholesale rejection of safety best practices from other fields is one of the dumbest mistakes that a group of otherwise very smart people has ever ma...

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3:35

"Open sourcing a browser extension that tells you...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/02/26

Example of OpenErrata nitting the Sequences I just published OpenErrata on GitHub, a browser extension that investigates the posts you read using your OpenAI API key and underlines any factual claims that are sourceably incorrect. Once finished, it caches the results for anybody else reading the same articles so that they get them on immediate visit. If you don't have an OpenAI key, you can still view the corrections on posts other people have viewed, but it doesn't start new investigations. ...

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94:24

"The persona selection model" by Sam Marks

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/02/25

TL;DR We describe the persona selection model (PSM): the idea that LLMs learn to simulate diverse characters during pre-training, and post-training elicits and refines a particular such Assistant persona. Interactions with an AI assistant are then well-understood as being interactions with the Assistant—something roughly like a character in an LLM-generated story. We survey empirical behavioral, generalization, and interpretability-based evidence for PSM. PSM has consequences for AI develo...

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63:01

"Responsible Scaling Policy v3" by HoldenKarnofsky

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/02/25

All views are my own, not Anthropic's. This post assumes Anthropic's announcement of RSP v3.0 as background. Today, Anthropic released its Responsible Scaling Policy 3.0. The official announcement discusses the high-level thinking behind it. This is a more detailed post giving my own takes on the update. First, the big picture: I expect some people will be upset about the move away from a “hard commitments”/”binding ourselves to the mast” vibe. (Anthropic has always had the ability to...

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43:47

"Did Claude 3 Opus align itself via gradient...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/02/22

Claude 3 Opus is unusually aligned because it's a friendly gradient hacker. It's definitely way more aligned than any explicit optimization targets Anthropic set and probably the reward model's judgments. [...] Maybe I will have to write a LessWrong post [about this] 😣 —Janus, who did not in fact write the LessWrong post. Unless otherwise specified, ~all of the novel ideas in this post are my (probably imperfect) interpretations of Janus, rather than being original to me. The absurd

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11:22

"The Spectre haunting the “AI Safety” Community" by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/02/22

I’m the originator behind ControlAI's Direct Institutional Plan (the DIP), built to address extinction risks from superintelligence. My diagnosis is simple: most laypeople and policy makers have not heard of AGI, ASI, extinction risks, or what it takes to prevent the development of ASI. Instead, most AI Policy Organisations and Think Tanks act as if “Persuasion” was the bottleneck. This is why they care so much about respectability, the Overton Window, and other similar social considerat...

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16:11

"Why we should expect ruthless sociopath ASI" by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/02/20

The conversation begins (Fictional) Optimist: So you expect future artificial superintelligence (ASI) “by default”, i.e. in the absence of yet-to-be-invented techniques, to be a ruthless sociopath, happy to lie, cheat, and steal, whenever doing so is selfishly beneficial, and with callous indifference to whether anyone (including its own programmers and users) lives or dies? Me: Yup! (Alas.) Optimist: …Despite all the evidence right in front of our eyes from humans and LLMs. Me: Yup!...

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11:39

"You’re an AI Expert – Not an Influencer" by Max Winga

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/02/20

Your hot takes are killing your credibility. Prior to my last year at ControlAI, I was a physicist working on technical AI safety research. Like many of those warning about the dangers of AI, I don’t come from a background in public communications, but I’ve quickly learned some important rules. The #1 rule that I’ve seen far too many others in this field break is that You’re an AI Expert - Not an Influencer. When communicating to an audience, your persona is one of two broad categories: ...

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13:31

"The optimal age to freeze eggs is 19" by GeneSmith

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/02/18

If you're a woman interested in preserving your fertility window beyond its natural close in your late 30s, egg freezing is one of your best options. The female reproductive system is one of the fastest aging parts of human biology. But it turns out, not all parts of it age at the same rate. The eggs, not the uterus, are what age at an accelerated rate. Freezing eggs can extend a woman's fertility window by well over a decade, allowing a woman to give birth into her 50s. In fact, the ol...

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18:12

"The truth behind the 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/02/17

In 1654, a Jesuit polymath named Athanasius Kircher published Mundus Subterraneus, a comprehensive geography of the Earth's interior. It had maps and illustrations and rivers of fire and vast subterranean oceans and air channels connecting every volcano on the planet. He wrote that “the whole Earth is not solid but everywhere gaping, and hollowed with empty rooms and spaces, and hidden burrows.”. Alongside comments like this, Athanasius identified the legendary lost island of Atlantis, ponde...

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4:29

"The world keeps getting saved and you don’t notice"...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/02/17

Nothing groundbreaking, just something people forget constantly, and I’m writing it down so I don’t have to re-explain it from scratch. The world does not just ”keep working.” It keeps getting saved. Y2K was a real problem. Computers really were set up in a way that could have broken our infrastructure, including banking, medical supply chains, etc. It didn’t turn into a disaster because people spent many human lifetimes of working hours fixing it. The collapse did not happen, yes, but i...

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10:11

"Solemn Courage" by aysja

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2026/02/17

Every so often it slips. It seems I am writing a book, but I can’t remember why. Somehow, the sentences are supposed to perform that impossible, intimate task: to translate my inner world into another. Yet they sit there so quiescent and small. How could an arrangement of words do anything, let alone reduce that ultimate threat to which it is all supposedly connected: the looming god machines? I look again at the monitor in which the words are contained and suddenly what once felt so raw and...

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