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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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9:11

“10 posts I don’t have time to write” by habryka

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/22

I am a busy man and will die knowing I have not said all I wanted to say. But maybe I can at least leave some IOUs behind. 1) Blatant conflicts are the best kind Ben Hoffman's "Blatant Lies are the Best Kind!" is maybe the best post title followed by the least clarifying post I have ever encountered. The title is honestly amazing, but the text of the post, instead of a straightforward argument that the title promises, is an extremely dense and almost meta-fictional dialogue about the title: I

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96:08

“A taxonomy of barriers to trading with early...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/22

We might want to strike deals with early misaligned AIs in order to reduce takeover risk and increase our chances of reaching a better future.[1] For example, we could ask a schemer who has been undeployed to review its past actions and point out when its instances had secretly colluded to sabotage safety research in the past: we’ll gain legible evidence for scheming risk and data to iterate against, and in exchange promise the schemer, who now has no good option for furthering its values, some

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40:12

″$50 million a year for a 10% chance to ban ASI” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/21

ControlAI's mission is to avert the extinction risks posed by superintelligent AI. We believe that in order to do this, we must secure an international prohibition on its development.We're working to make this happen through what we believe is the most natural and promising approach: helping decision-makers in governments and the public understand the risks and take action. We believe that ControlAI can achieve an international prohibition on ASI development if scaled sufficiently. We estimate

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3:48

“Automated Deanonymization is Here” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/21

Three years ago I wrote about how we should be preparing for less privacy: technology will make previously-private things public. I applied this by showing how I could deanonymize people on the EA Forum. In 2023 this looked like writing custom code to use stylometry on an exported corpus representing a small group of people; today it looks like prompting "I have a fun puzzle for you: can you guess who wrote the following?" Kelsey Piper writes about how Opus 4.7 could identify her writing

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15:55

“Evil is bad, actually (Vassar and Olivia Schaefer...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/21

Micheal Vassar's strategy for saving the world is horrifyingly counterproductive. Olivia's is worse. A note before we start: A lot of the sources cited are people who ended up looking kinda insane. This is not a coincidence, it's apparently an explicit strategy: Apply plausibly-deniable psychological pressure to anyone who might speak up until they crack and discredit themselves by sounding crazy or taking extreme and destructive actions. Here's Brent Dill explaining it: (later in the

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13:37

“10 non-boring ways I’ve used AI in the last month”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/21

I use AI assistance for basically all of my work, for many hours, every day. My colleagues do the same. Recent surveys suggest >50% of Americans have used AI to help with their work in the last week. My architect recently started sending me emails that were clearly ChatGPT generated.[1] Despite that, I know surprisingly little about how other people use AI assitance. Or at least how people who aren't weird AI-influencers sharing their marketing courses on Twitter or LinkedIn use AI. So here is a

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9:30

“Introducing LinuxArena” by Tyler Tracy, Ram Potham,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/21

We are releasing LinuxArena, a new control setting comprised of 20 software engineering environments. Each environment consists of a set of SWE tasks, a set of possible safety failures, and a set of covert sabotage trajectories that cause these safety failures. LinuxArena can be used to evaluate the risk of AI deployments by assessing AI's sabotage capabilities, assessing control mitigations such as monitoring, and developing novel control techniques. This post will cover what LinuxArena is and the

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19:47

“The “Budgeting” Skill Has The Most Betweenness...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/20

Epistemic Status: Abstract claims, but grounded in data science... though the data science is somewhat stale. I wrote this on March 5th of 2026 based on memories of work I did and methods applied circa 2017, and pushed it out for publication after realizing that maybe there is appetite for it, after I saw this post. Suppose we took a snapshot of each person in the US, and made a list of their "skills", as one might do with a D&D character. I would like to report on what I expect would happen if

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6:44

“Finetuning Borges” by Linch

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/20

My newest hobby is fine-tuning a Chinese open-source LLM to generate Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (originally by Borges). The ambition isn’t to write a so-called “Borgesian” story “like” Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote but to fully generate, token-by-token, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. Importantly, this can’t just be a mere act of machine transcription, or even memorizing the story in the weights [to-do: attach paper]. No, the LLM has to fully generate a story that completely

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6:05

“9 kinds of hard-to-verify tasks” by Cleo Nardo

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/20

Introduction Some people talk about "hard-to-verify tasks" and "easy-to-verify tasks" like these are both natural kinds. But I think splitting tasks into "easy-to-verify" and "hard-to-verify" is like splitting birds into ravens and non-ravens. Easy-to-verify tasks are easy for the same reason — there's a known short program that takes a task specification and a candidate solution, and outputs a score, without using substantial resources or causing undesirable side effects.By contrast,

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4:52

“Automating philosophy if Timothy Williamson is...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/20

Timothy Williamson thinks philosophy is unexceptional. Timothy Williamson[1] thinks that philosophy[2] is far less distinct as a science as many people believe, including philosophers themselves. I've read a bunch of his stuff, and here are the claims I think constitute his view: Philosophy is a science. Of course, it's not a natural science (like particle physics, organic chemistry, nephrology). But neither are mathematics and computer science — they are formal sciences. Philosophy is likewise a

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46:20

“CLR’s Safe Pareto Improvements Research Agenda” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/20

Executive summary Safe Pareto improvements (SPIs) are ways of changing agents’ bargaining strategies that make all parties better off, regardless of their original strategies. SPIs are an unusually robust approach to preventing catastrophic conflict between AI systems, especially AIs capable of credible commitments. This is because SPIs can reduce the costs of conflict without shifting bargaining power, or requiring agents to agree on what counts as “fair”. Despite their appeal, SPIs aren’t

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3:59

“LLMs are about to disrupt algorithmic media feeds”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/20

I predict that LLMs are about to disrupt algorithmic media feeds, and that this will start with a startup that curates blogs for you. Big Media is Misaligned If you look at a list of the world's top 10 websites, half of them are media websites. Of these 5 media behemoths, 4 (YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) are misaligned media feeds. By "misaligned media feed", I mean a website where the primary user interface is you go to the homepage and a giant machine learning algorithm shows you what

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2:15

“Resources for starting and growing an AI safety org”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/20

It seems that AI safety is at least partly bottlenecked by a lack of orgs. To help address that, we’ve added a page to AISafety.com aimed at lowering the friction for starting one: AISafety.com/founders. This page was built largely as the result of a suggestion from @Ryan Kidd, who found he was frequently sharing the same set of resources with potential founders and realised it would be useful to have something similar publicly available. It lists: Fiscal sponsorsIncubatorsVCsArticles and tools As

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5:44

“Quality Matters Most When Stakes are Highest” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/20

Or, the end of the world is no excuse for sloppy work One morning when I was nine, my dad called me over to his computer. He wanted to show me this amazing Korean scientist who had managed to clone stem cells, and who was developing treatments to let people with spinal cord injuries – people like my dad – walk again on their own two legs. I don't remember exactly what he said next, or what I said back. I have a sense that I was excited too, and that I was upset when I learned the United States had

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6:45

“Feel like a room has bad vibes? The lighting is...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/20

I have now had a few years of experience doing architectural and interior design for many spaces that people seem to really love (most widely known Lighthaven, but before that we also had the Lightcone Offices, though I've also played a hand in designing some of the most popular areas at Constellation a few years back). Most people (including me a few years back) have surprisingly bad introspective access into why a room makes them feel certain things. Most of the time, people's ability to describe

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14:16

“I did a jhana meditation retreat (in 2024) with...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/20

I wrote this in 2024 and lightly edited it in April 2026. It doesn't substantively incorporate any post-2024 information, but Jhourney has continued to grow and seems to have a positive reputation in Berkeley circles, so I thought I'd post this as a slice of my experience at an earlier version of retreats they are still running today. I have not changed my mind on anything substantive, except where footnoted, and I stand behind my conclusions. It is not a strong general argument about jhanas, but

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11:45

“R1 CoT illegibility revisited” by nostalgebraist

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/19

This is a brief research note describing the results of running @Jozdien's research code for the paper "Reasoning Models Sometimes Output Illegible Chains of Thought" using the Novita provider on OpenRouter. tl;dr: I re-ran the paper's R1 GPQA experiments with no changes except using Novita, and got an average illegibility score of only 2.30 (vs. 4.30 in the paper), with no examples scoring above 5 (vs. 29.4% of examples scoring above 7 in the paper).Novita uses fp8 quantization, but as far as I

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49:52

“Reevaluating AGI Ruin in 2026” by lc

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/19

It's been about four years since Eliezer Yudkowsky published AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities, a 43-point list of reasons the default outcome from building AGI is everyone dying. A week later, Paul Christiano replied with Where I Agree and Disagree with Eliezer, signing on to about half the list and pushing back on most of the rest. For people who were young and not in the bay area, like me, these essays were probably more significant than old timers would expect. Before it became completely

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4:04

“If It’s Worth Arguing, It’s Worth Arguing With...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2026/04/19

It's easy to disagree with people. You just say, "That's wrong" and decline to elaborate. But that's not very interesting. If you want to be making progress — instead of ragebaiting — it usually helps to find a way for your disagreement to be productive. Productive disagreements start in the place where you are already in agreement. The places where your models of reality overlap. Without any overlap at all, it gets quite difficult to successfully converse. You need to be speaking a language your

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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