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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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17:59

“Solving the problem of needing to give a talk” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/28

An extended version of this article was given as my keynote speech at the 2025 LessWrong Community Weekend in Berlin. A couple of years ago, I agreed to give a talk on the topic of psychology. I said yes, which of course meant that I now had a problem. Namely, I had promised to give a talk, but I did not have one prepared. (You could also more optimistically call this an opportunity, a challenge, a quest, etc.) So I decided to sit down at my computer, work on my presentation, and then go from the

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14:21

“Transgender Sticker Fallacy” by ymeskhout

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/28

BIRDS! Let's say you’re a zoo architect tasked with designing an enclosure for ostriches, and let's also say that you have no idea what an ostrich is (roll with me here). The potentially six-figure question staring you down is whether to install a ceiling. The dumb solution is to ask “Are ostriches birds?” then, surmising that birds typically fly, construct an elaborate aviary complete with netting and elevated perches. The non-dumb solution is to instead ask “Can ostriches fly?” then skip the

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6:38

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

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/28

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' fears and

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31:36

“A Reply to MacAskill on ‘If Anyone Builds It,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/28

I found Will MacAskill's X review of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies interesting (X reply here). As far as I can tell, Will just fully agrees that developers are racing to build AI that threatens the entire world, and he thinks they're going to succeed if governments sit back and let it happen, and he's more or less calling on governments to sit back and let it happen. If I've understood his view, this is for a few reasons: He's pretty sure that alignment is easy enough that researchers could

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5:22

“Learnings from AI safety course so far” by boazbarak

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/27

I have been teaching CS 2881r: AI safety and alignment this semester. While I plan to do a longer recap post once the semester is over, I thought I'd share some of what I've learned so far, and use this opportunity to also get more feedback. Lectures are recorded and uploaded to a youtube playlist, and @habryka has kindly created a wikitag for this course, so you can view lecture notes here . Let's start with the good parts Aspects that are working: Experiments are working well! I am trying

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20:41

“Our Beloved Monsters” by Tomás B.

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/27

[RESPONSE REDACTED] [cb74304c0c30]: I suppose it was a bit mutual. Maybe you have a better read on it. It was sort of mutual in a way now that you've made me think about it. [RESPONSE REDACTED] [cb74304c0c30]: Yeah. It's better this way, actually. I miss her, though. [RESPONSE REDACTED] [cb74304c0c30]: I don't know I guess it's sorta like I used to come home from work all exhausted and sad and wonder what the point was. Like why am I working just so I can afford to keep working? And then when

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23:54

“Reasons to sell frontier lab equity to donate now...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/27

Tl;dr: We believe shareholders in frontier labs who plan to donate some portion of their equity to reduce AI risk should consider liquidating and donating a majority of that equity now. Epistemic status: We’re somewhat confident in the main conclusions of this piece. We’re more confident in many of the supporting claims, and we’re likewise confident that these claims push in the direction of our conclusions. This piece is admittedly pretty one-sided; we expect most relevant members of our audience

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4:40

“The Illustrated Petrov Day Ceremony” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/26

Since 2014, some people have celebrated Petrov Day with a small in-person ceremony, with readings by candlelight that tell the story of Petrov within the context of the long arc of history, created by Jim Babcock. I've found this pretty meaningful, an it somehow feels "authentic" to me, like a real holiday. Which, as the creator of Secular Solstice 2020 it is humbling to say, feels more true than Solstice did (for the first few years, Solstice felt a little obviously "made up", and now it has more

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2:58

“We Support ‘If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies’” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/26

Mutual-Knowledgeposting The purpose of this post is to build mutual knowledge that many (most?) of us on LessWrong support If Anyone Builds It, Anyone Dies. Inside of LW, not every user is a long-timer who's already seen consistent signals of support for these kinds of claims. A post like this could make the difference in strengthening vs. weakening the perception of how much everyone knows that everyone knows (...) that everyone supports the book. Externally, people who wonder how seriously the

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2:38

“What Happened After My Rat Group Backed Kamala...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/26

My post advocating backing a candidate was probably the most disliked article on LessWrong. It's been over a year now. Was our candidate support worthwhile? What happened after July 17, 2024: We drew nearly 100 people to a rally in the summer heat.. We ordered a toilet no one used, but didn’t provide water, chairs, or umbrellas. I tried to convert rally energy into action by turning weekly meetings into work groups. We sent hundreds of postcards. I soon realized doorknocking and voter registration

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24:47

“Misalignment and Roleplaying: Are Misaligned LLMs...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/26

Summary I investigated the possibility that misalignment in LLMs might be partly caused by the models misgeneralizing the “rogue AI” trope commonly found in sci-fi stories. As a preliminary test, I ran an experiment where I prompted ChatGPT and Claude with a scenario about a hypothetical LLM that could plausibly exhibit misalignment, and measured whether their responses described the LLM acting in a misaligned way. Each prompt consisted of two parts: a scenario and an instruction. The experiment

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6:48

“The real AI deploys itself” by David Scott Krueger...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/25

Sometimes people think that it will take a while for AI to have a transformative effect on the world, because real-world “frictions” will slow it down. For instance: AI might need to learn from real-world experience and experimentation. Businesses need to learn how to integrate AI in their existing workflows. Leaders place a high premium on trust, and won’t easily come to trust AI systems. Regulation, bureaucracy, or other social factors will prevent rapid adoption of AI. I think this is

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15:32

“CFAR update, and New CFAR workshops” by AnnaSalamon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/25

Hi all! After about five years of hibernation and quietly getting our bearings,[1] CFAR will soon be running two pilot mainline workshops, and may run many more, depending how these go. First, a minor name change request We would like now to be called “A Center for Applied Rationality,” not “the Center for Applied Rationality.” Because we’d like to be visibly not trying to be the one canonical locus. Second, pilot workshops! We have two, and are currently accepting applications / sign-ups: Nov

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19:22

“Why you should eat meat - even if you hate factory...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/25

Cross-posted from my Substack To start off with, I’ve been vegan/vegetarian for the majority of my life. I think that factory farming has caused more suffering than anything humans have ever done. Yet, according to my best estimates, I think most animal-lovers should eat meat. Here's why: It is probably unhealthy to be vegan. This affects your own well-being and your ability to help others. You can eat meat in a way thatsubstantially reduces the suffering you cause to non-human animals How to

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0:42

“IABIED is on the NYT bestseller list” by Alice Blair

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/25

If Anyone Builds it Everyone Dies is currently #7 on the Combined Print and E-Book Nonfiction category, and #8 on Hardcover Nonfiction. The thing that Eliezer, Nate, and a large part of this community tried really hard to get to happen did in fact happen, yay! --- First published: September 25th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QrhohmahGrztEebmY/iabied-is-on-the-nyt-bestseller-list --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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10:20

“EU and Monopoly on Violence” by Martin Sustrik

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/25

Ben Landau-Taylor's article in UnHerd makes a simple argument: simple, easy-to-use military technologies beget democracies. Complex ones concentrate military power in the hands of state militaries and favor aristocracies or bureaucracies. One of the examples he gives is how “the rise of the European Union has disempowered elected legislatures de jure as well as de facto.” Now, that's just plain wrong. EU has no military and no police force (except maybe Frontex, but even that is far from

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8:47

“‘Shut it Down’ vs ‘Controlled Takeoff’” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/24

Two somewhat different plans for buying time and improving AI outcomes are: "Global Shutdown" and "Global Controlled Takeoff." (Some other plans include "ad hoc semi-controlled semi-slowed takeoff" and "race, then burn the lead on either superalignment or scary demos" and "decentralized differential defensive tech world.". I'm mostly not talking about them in this post) "Global Shutdown" and "Global Controlled Takeoff" both include an early step of "consolidate all GPUs and similar chips into

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7:06

“D&D.Sci: Serial Healers [Evaluation & Ruleset]” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/23

This is a followup to the D&D.Sci post I made on the 6th; if you haven’t already read it, you should do so now before spoiling yourself. Here is the web interactive I built to let you evaluate your solution; below is an explanation of the rules used to generate the dataset (my full generation code is available here, in case you’re curious about details I omitted). You’ll probably want to test your answer before reading any further. Who Dunnit? In rough order of ascending difficulty: Nettie

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15:47

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

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/23

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 misaligned AI

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27:55

“The world’s first frontier AI regulation is...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/09/23

Only the US can make us ready for AGI, but Europe just made us readier.Cross-posted from the AI Futures blog. We’ve previously written about what an individual can do to make the development of transformative AI less likely to end in disaster. How about an AGI company?[1] What steps should they take right now to prepare for crunch time? The first thing we’d recommend an AGI company do is to coordinate with other companies and with governments to stop the reckless race toward superintelligence

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