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LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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11:32

“Human Values ≠ Goodness” by johnswentworth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/02

There is a temptation to simply define Goodness as Human Values, or vice versa. Alas, we do not get to choose the definitions of commonly used words; our attempted definitions will simply be wrong. Unless we stick to mathematics, we will end up sneaking in intuitions which do not follow from our so-called definitions, and thereby mislead ourselves. People who claim that they use some standard word or phrase according to their own definition are, in nearly all cases outside of mathematics, wrong

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11:09

“Reflections on 4 years of meta-honesty” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/02

Honesty is quite powerful in many cases -- if you have a reputation for being honest, people will trust you more and your words will have more weight (or so the argument goes). Unfortunately, being extremely honest all the time is also pretty difficult -- what happens when the Nazis come knocking and ask if you have jews in the basement? Or when your girlfriend asks you if this dress makes her look fat? (Or so the argument goes) Meta-honesty is a proposed solution to these problems. The gist is you

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0:31

[Linkpost] “FTL travel and scientific realism” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/02

This is a link post. Some thoughts on what it means to trust a scientific theory ---First published: November 2nd, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9q3p2XJdFEB6sMyBZ/ftl-travel-and-scientific-realism Linkpost URL:https://adam.scherl.is/blog/ftl-travel/ --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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3:59

“Why Is Printing So Bad?” by johnswentworth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/02

Last time I printed a document, I wrote down the whole process: Open settings and look at list of printers; David tells me which printer I should use. Go to print dialogue; don’t see the relevant printer. Go back to settings and hit buttons which sound vaguely like they’ll add/install something. Go back to print dialogue, realize the printer I wanted had probably been there already and I hadn’t been looking in the right place. Hit print button. David brings me to where the printer was a few days

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4:18

[Linkpost] “You’re always stressed, your mind is...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/02

This is a link post. You have things you want to do, but there's just never time. Maybe you want to find someone to have kids with, or maybe you want to spend more or higher-quality time with the family you already have. Maybe it's a work project. Maybe you have a musical instrument or some sports equipment gathering dust in a closet, or there's something you loved doing when you were younger that you want to get back into. Whatever it is, you can’t find the time for it. And yet you somehow find

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17:22

“Post title: Why I Transitioned: A Case Study” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/02

An Overture Famously, trans people tend not to have great introspective clarity into their own motivations for transition. Intuitively, they tend to be quite aware of what they do and don't like about inhabiting their chosen bodies and gender roles. But when it comes to explaining the origins and intensity of those preferences, they almost universally to come up short. I've even seen several smart, thoughtful trans people, such as Natalie Wynn, making statements to the effect that it's impossible

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2:29

“Re-rolling environment” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/01

I'm currently on a "rationality as 'skills you practice'" kick. I'm really into subtle cognitive skills. I do think they eventually pay off. But, realistically, if you have a major problem in your life, my experience is that the biggest effect sizes come from radically changing your environment. Move in with new roommates. Get a house in a new neighborhood. Get a new romantic partner. Get a new job. Move onto a new team at your current job. I'd count "install a serious internet-blocker on your

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19:41

“LLM-generated text is not testimony” by TsviBT

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/01

Crosspost from my blog. Synopsis When we share words with each other, we don't only care about the words themselves. We care also—even primarily—about the mental elements of the human mind/agency that produced the words. What we want to engage with is those mental elements. As of 2025, LLM text does not have those elements behind it. Therefore LLM text categorically does not serve the role for communication that is served by real text. Therefore the norm should be that you don't share LLM

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4:42

“Supervillain Monologues Are Unrealistic” by Algon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/01

Supervillain monologues are strange. Not because a supervillain telling someone their evil plan is weird. In fact, that's what we should actually expect. No, the weird bit is that people love a good monologue. Wait, what? OK, so why should we expect supervillains to tell us their master plan? Because a supervillain is just a cartoonish version of a high agency person doing something the author thinks is bad. So our real life equivalent of a supervillain, or rather the generalization of one, is just

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6:17

“Anthropic’s Pilot Sabotage Risk Report” by dmz

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/11/01

As practice for potential future Responsible Scaling Policy obligations, we're releasing a report on misalignment risk posed by our deployed models as of Summer 2025. We conclude that there is very low, but not fully negligible, risk of misaligned autonomous actions that substantially contribute to later catastrophic outcomes. We also release two reviews of this report: an internal review and an independent review by METR. Our Responsible Scaling Policy has so far come into force primarily to

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37:36

“OpenAI Moves To Complete Potentially The Largest...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/31

OpenAI is now set to become a Public Benefit Corporation, with its investors entitled to uncapped profit shares. Its nonprofit foundation will retain some measure of control and a 26% financial stake, in sharp contrast to its previous stronger control and much, much larger effective financial stake. The value transfer is in the hundreds of billions, thus potentially the largest theft in human history. I say potentially largest because I realized one could argue that the events surrounding the

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9:12

“Resampling Conserves Redundancy & Mediation...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/31

Audio note: this article contains 86 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Around two months ago, John and I published Resampling Conserves Redundancy (Approximately). Fortunately, about two weeks ago, Jeremy Gillen and Alfred Harwood showed us that we were wrong. This proof achieves, using the Jensen-Shannon divergence ("JS"), what the previous one failed to show using KL divergence

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30:26

“Steering Evaluation-Aware Models to Act Like They...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/30

📄Paper, 🖥️Code, 🤖Evaluation Aware Model Organism TL, DR:; We train an evaluation-aware LLM.Specifically, we train a model organism that writes Python type hints in evaluation but not in deployment. Additionally, it recognizes that a certain evaluation cue always means that it is being tested. The evaluation cue is intended to simulate hard-to-remove signs of an eval being artificial, e.g. being LLM-written. Our training process was designed to mimic how evaluation awareness could arise in

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2:04

[Linkpost] “AISLE discovered three new OpenSSL...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/30

This is a link post. The company post is linked; it seems like an update on where we are with automated cybersec. So far in 2025, only four security vulnerabilities received CVE identifiers in OpenSSL, the cryptographic library that secures the majority of internet traffic. AISLE's autonomous system discovered three of them. (CVE-2025-9230, CVE-2025-9231, and CVE-2025-9232) Some quick thoughts: OpenSSL is one of the most human-security-audited pieces of open-source code ever, so discovering 3 new

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35:58

“Sonnet 4.5’s eval gaming seriously undermines...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/30

According to the Sonnet 4.5 system card, Sonnet 4.5 is much more likely than Sonnet 4 to mention in its chain-of-thought that it thinks it is being evaluated; this seems to meaningfully cause it to appear to behave better in alignment evaluations. So, Sonnet 4.5's behavioral improvements in these evaluations may partly be driven by growing tendency to notice and game evaluations rather than genuine alignment. This is an early example of a phenomenon that is going to get increasingly problematic: as

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8:04

“ImpossibleBench: Measuring Reward Hacking in LLM...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/30

This is a post about our recent work ImpossibleBench: Measuring LLMs' Propensity of Exploiting Test Cases (with Aditi Raghunathan, Nicholas Carlini) where we derive impossible benchmarks from existing benchmarks to measure reward hacking.Figure 1: Overview of the ImpossibleBench framework. We start with tasks from established coding benchmarks and create impossible variants by mutating test cases to conflict with natural language specifications. The resulting cheating rate serves as a direct

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3:01

[Linkpost] “Emergent Introspective Awareness in Large...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/30

This is a link post. New Anthropic research (tweet, blog post, paper): We investigate whether large language models can introspect on their internal states. It is difficult to answer this question through conversation alone, as genuine introspection cannot be distinguished from confabulations. Here, we address this challenge by injecting representations of known concepts into a model's activations, and measuring the influence of these manipulations on the model's self-reported states. We find that

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8:00

“An Opinionated Guide to Privacy Despite...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/29

I've created a highly specific and actionable privacy guide, sorted by importance and venturing several layers deep into the privacy iceberg. I start with the basics (password manager) but also cover the obscure (dodging the millions of Bluetooth tracking beacons which extend from stores to traffic lights; anti-stingray settings; flashing GrapheneOS on a Pixel). I feel strongly motivated by current events, but the guide also contains a large amount of timeless technical content. Here's a

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17:39

“The End of OpenAI’s Nonprofit Era” by garrison

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/29

Key regulators have agreed to let the company kill its profit caps and restructure as a for-profit — with some strings attached This is the full text of a post first published on Obsolete, a Substack that I write about the intersection of capitalism, geopolitics, and artificial intelligence. I’m a freelance journalist and the author of a forthcoming book called Obsolete: Power, Profit, and the Race to Build Machine Superintelligence. Consider subscribing to stay up to date with my work. This

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13:15

“Please Do Not Sell B30A Chips to China” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2025/10/29

The Chinese and Americans are currently negotiating a trade deal. There are plenty of ways to generate a win-win deal, and early signs of this are promising on many fronts. Since this will be discussed for real tomorrow as per reports, I will offer my thoughts on this one more time. The biggest mistake America could make would be to effectively give up Taiwan, which would be catastrophic on many levels including that Taiwan contains TSMC. I am assuming we are not so foolish as to seriously

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