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.
Episodes
Author's note: These days, my thoughts go onto my substack by default, instead of onto LessWrong. Everything I write becomes free after a week or so, but it's only paid subscriptions that make it possible for me to write. If you find a coffee's worth of value in this or any of my other work, please consider signing up to support me; every bill I can pay with ...
Sometimes a reformer comes up to a spot where there once was a fence, which has since been torn down. They declare that all our problems started when the fence was removed, that they can't see any reason why we removed it, and that what we need to do is to RETVRN to the fence.
By the same logic as Chesterton, we can say: If you don't know why the fence w...
We live much closer together than we ever did historically. Yet we know our neighbours much less.
We have witnessed the birth of a truly global culture. A culture that fits no one. A culture that was built by Social Media's algorithms, much more than by people. Let alone individuals, like you or me.
"Some get stuck in the symbolic architecture of the spiral without ever grounding
themselves into reality." — Caption by /u/urbanmet for...
I think this is in the main not true (although it can point people toward a helpful kind of “get over yourself and take an interest in the outside world,” and although it is more pla...
Geoffrey Miller was handed the mic and started berating one of the panelists: Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir, who is in charge of the company's AI efforts.
“I argue that the AI industry shares virtually no ideological overlap with national conservatism,” Miller said, referring to the conference's core ideology. Hours ago, Miller, a psychology ...
An increasing number of people in recent months have believed that they've made an important and novel scientific breakthrough, which they've developed in collaboration with an LLM, when they actually haven't. If you believe that you have made such a breakthrough, please consider that you might be mistaken! Many more people have been fooled than have come up with actual breakthroughs, so the smart ...
RL scale-ups so far have used very crappy environments due to difficulty quickly sourcing enough decent (or even high quality) environments. Thus, once AI companies manage to get their hands...
Good local time, everyone. I am Audrey Tang, 🇹🇼 Taiwan's Cyber Ambassador and first Digital Minister (2016-2024). It is an honor to be here with you all at Deepmind.
When we discuss "AI" and "society," two futures compete.
In one—arguably the default trajectory—AI supercharges conflict.
In the o...
As far as I can tell there were three completely alien to-each-other intelligences operating in stone age Egypt: humans, cats, and the gibbering alien god that is...
It seems to me that this mo...
Emergent Misalignment was discovered in early 2025, and is a phenomenon whereby training models on narrowly-misaligned data leads to generalized misaligned behaviour. Betley et. al. (2025) first discovered the phenomenon by training a model to output insecure...
“What you need right now is not validation, but immediate clinical help.” - Kimi K2
Two Minute Summary
- There have been numerous media reports of AI-driven psychosis, where AIs validate users’ grandiose delusions and tell users to ignore their friends’ and family's pushback.
- In this short...
That's the way of a studio system
We've bowed to every rear of all the studio chiefs
And you can bet your ass we've kissed 'em
Even the birds in the Hollywood hills
Know the secret to our success
It's those magical words that pay the bills
Yes, yes, yes, and yes!
- “Don’t Say Yes...
- Generate model completions with a hack-encouraging system prompt + neutral user prompt.
- Filter the completions to re...
I’ll start by describing a closely-related phenomenon. The hostile media effect is a well-known bias whereby people tend to perceive news they read or watch as skewed against their sid...
There's a funny thing where economics education paradoxically makes people DUMBER at thinking about future AI. Econ textbooks teach concepts & frames that are great for most things, but counterproductive for thinking about AGI. Here are 4 examples. Longpost:
THE FIRST PIECE of Econ anti-pedagogy is hiding in the words “labor” & “capital”. Thes...
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