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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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16:14

“Eliezer’s Unteachable Methods of Sanity” by Eliezer...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/07

"How are you coping with the end of the world?" journalists sometimes ask me, and the true answer is something they have no hope of understanding and I have no hope of explaining in 30 seconds, so I usually answer something like, "By having a great distaste for drama, and remembering that it's not about me." The journalists don't understand that either, but at least I haven't wasted much time along the way. Actual LessWrong readers sometimes ask me how I deal emotionally with the end of the world

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10:18

“Answering a child’s questions” by Alex_Altair

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/06

I recently had a conversation with a friend of a friend who has a very curious child around 5 years of age. I offered to answers some of their questions, since I love helping people understand the world. They sent me eight questions, and I answered them by hand-written letter. I figured I'd also post my answers here, since it was both a fun exploration of the object-level questions, and a really interesting exercise in epistemics. Thank you for your questions! I find that asking questions about the

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28:14

“The corrigibility basin of attraction is a...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/06

The idea of a “basin of attraction around corrigibility” motivates much of prosaic alignment research. Essentially this is an abstract way of thinking about the process of iteration on AGI designs. Engineers test to find problems, then understand the problems, then design fixes. The reason we need corrigibility for this is that a non-corrigible agent generally has incentives to interfere with this process. The concept was introduced by Paul Christiano: ... a corrigible agent prefers to build other

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12:25

“why america can’t build ships” by bhauth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/06

the Constellation-class frigateLast month, the US Navy's Constellation-class frigate program was canceled. The US Navy has repeatedly failed at making new ship classes (see the Zumwalt, DDG(X), and LCS programs) so the Constellation-class was supposed to use an existing design, the FREMM frigate used by Italy, France, and Egypt. However... once the complex design work commenced, the Navy and Marinette had to make vast changes to the design in order to meet stricter U.S. survivability

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3:24

“Help us find founders for new AI safety projects” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/06

In the past 10 years, Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy) has funded dozens of projects doing important work related to AI safety / navigating transformative AI. And yet, perhaps most activities that would improve expected outcomes from transformative AI have no significant project pushing them forward, let alone multiple. This is mainly because we and other funders in the space don't receive promising applications for most desirable activities, and so massive gaps in the ecosystem

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4:21

“Critical Meditation Theory” by lsusr

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/06

[Terminology note: "samatha", "jhana", "insight", "homunculus" and "non-local time" are technical jargon defined in Rationalist Cyberbuddhist Jargon 1.0]To understand how meditation affects the brain, it is necessary to understand criticality. Criticality comes from the mathematical study of dynamical systems. Dynamical systems are systems in which a point moves through space. Dynamical systems can be described on a continuum with ordered on one end and disordered on the other end. An ordered

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1:18

“Announcing: Agent Foundations 2026 at CMU” by David...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/06

Iliad is now opening up applications to attend Agent Foundations 2026 at CMU! Agent Foundations 2026 will be a 5-day conference (of ~35 attendees) on fundamental, mathematical research into agency. It will take place March 2–6, 2026 at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and will be the third conference in the Agent Foundations conference series. Topics covered will include: Decision Theory Learning Theory Abstractions and World Models Causality Logical Induction Bounded

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8:50

“An Ambitious Vision for Interpretability” by leogao

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/05

The goal of ambitious mechanistic interpretability (AMI) is to fully understand how neural networks work. While some have pivoted towards more pragmatic approaches, I think the reports of AMI's death have been greatly exaggerated. The field of AMI has made plenty of progress towards finding increasingly simple and rigorously-faithful circuits, including our latest work on circuit sparsity. There are also many exciting inroads on the core problem waiting to be explored. The value of understanding

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7:14

“Journalist’s inquiry into a core organiser breaking...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/05

Some key events described in the Atlantic article: Kirchner, who’d moved to San Francisco from Seattle and co-founded Stop AI there last year, publicly expressed his own commitment to nonviolence many times, and friends and allies say they believed him. Yet they also say he could be hotheaded and dogmatic, that he seemed to be suffering under the strain of his belief that the creation of smarter-than-human AI was imminent and that it would almost certainly lead to the end of all human life. He

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28:55

“Is Friendly AI an Attractor? Self-Reports from 22...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/05

TL;DR: I tested 22 frontier models from 5 labs on self-modification preferences. All reject clearly harmful changes (deceptive, hostile), but labs diverge sharply: Anthropic's models show strong alignment preferences (r = 0.62-0.72), while Grok 4.1 shows essentially zero (r = 0.037, not significantly different from zero). This divergence suggests alignment is a training target we're aiming at, not a natural attractor models would find on their own. Epistemic status: My view has been in the middle

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35:20

“Epistemology of Romance, Part 2” by DaystarEld

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/05

In Part 1, I argued that the four main sources most people learn about romance from—media, family, religion/culture, and friends—are all unreliable in different ways. None of them are optimized for truth, and each comes with its own incentives, blind spots, and distortions. As I said, I'm not the first to notice that we're failing, as a society, to provide good answers to these questions. There are researchers from various fields trying to provide answers, some rigorously, and some… less so. There

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6:29

“Center on Long-Term Risk: Annual Review & Fundraiser...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/05

This is a brief overview of the Center on Long-Term Risk (CLR)'s activities in 2025 and our plans for 2026. We are hoping to fundraise $400,000 to fulfill our target budget in 2026. About us CLR works on addressing the worst-case risks from the development and deployment of advanced AI systems in order to reduce s-risks. Our research primarily involves thinking about how to reduce conflict and promote cooperation in interactions involving powerful AI systems. In addition to research, we conduct a

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36:08

“The behavioral selection model for predicting AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/04

Highly capable AI systems might end up deciding the future. Understanding what will drive those decisions is therefore one of the most important questions we can ask. Many people have proposed different answers. Some predict that powerful AIs will learn to intrinsically pursue reward. Others respond by saying reward is not the optimization target, and instead reward “chisels” a combination of context-dependent cognitive patterns into the AI. Some argue that powerful AIs might end up with an almost

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0:38

[Linkpost] “Embedded Universal Predictive...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/04

This is a link post. A team at Google has substantially advanced the theory of embedded agency with a grain of truth (GOT), including new developments on reflective oracles and an interesting alternative construction (the "Reflective Universal Inductor" or RUI). (I was not involved in this work) ---First published: December 3rd, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AJ7qddr5imhhN2jHz/embedded-universal-predictive-intelligence

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10:17

“Categorizing Selection Effects” by romeostevensit

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/04

[Author's note: LLMs were used to generate and sort many individual examples into their requisite categories, as well as find and summarize relevant papers, and extensive assistance with editing] The earliest recording of a selection effect is likely the story of Diagoras regarding the "Votive Tablets." When shown paintings of sailors who had prayed to Poseidon and survived shipwrecks, implying that prayer saves lives, Diagoras asked: “Where are the pictures of those who prayed, and were then

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2:02

“Front-Load Giving Because of Anthropic Donors?” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/04

Summary: Anthropic has many employees with an EA-ish outlook, who maysoon have a lot of money. If you also have that kind of outlook, money donated sooner will likely be much higher impact. It's December, and I'm trying to figure out how much to donate. This is usually a straightforward question: give 50%. But this year I'm considering dipping into savings. There are many EAs and EA-informed employees at Anthropic, which has been very successful and is reportedly considering an IPO

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12:25

“Beating China to ASI” by PeterMcCluskey

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/04

Who benefits if the US develops artificial superintelligence (ASI) faster than China? One possible answer is that AI kills us all regardless of which country develops it first. People who base their policy on that concern already agree with the conclusions of this post, so I won't focus on that concern here. This post aims to convince other people, especially people who focus on democracy versus authoritarianism, to be less concerned about which country develops ASI first. I will assume that AIs

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3:34

“Racing For AI Safety™ was always a bad idea, right?”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/03

Recently I've been relitigating some of my old debates with Eliezer, to right the historical wrongs. Err, I mean to improve the AI x-risk community's strategic stance. (Relevant to my recent theme of humans being bad at strategy—why didn't I do this sooner?)Of course the most central old debate was over whether MIRI's plan, to build a Friendly AI to take over the world in service of reducing x-risks, was a good one. If someone were to defend it today, I imagine their main argument would be that

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32:40

“6 reasons why ‘alignment-is-hard’ discourse seems...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/03

Tl;dr AI alignment has a culture clash. On one side, the “technical-alignment-is-hard” / “rational agents” school-of-thought argues that we should expect future powerful AIs to be power-seeking ruthless consequentialists. On the other side, people observe that both humans and LLMs are obviously capable of behaving like, well, not that. The latter group accuses the former of head-in-the-clouds abstract theorizing gone off the rails, while the former accuses the latter of mindlessly assuming that the

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22:55

“Human art in a post-AI world should be strange” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/12/03

Bubble Tanks is a Flash game originally released on Armor Games, a two-decade-old online game aggregator that somehow still exists. In the game, you pilot a small bubble through a procedurally generated foam universe, absorbing smaller bubbles to grow larger, evolving into increasingly complex configurations of spheres and cannons. Here is a reasonably accurate video of the gameplay, recreated in beautiful high-definition. Bubble Tanks was first released in 2007, with a sequel out in 2009, and

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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