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
June 19, 2025 • 11 mins
Or: How anthropomorphic assumptions about AI identity might create confusion and suffering at scale
If you are reading this and you are a human, you likely have a sense of self, persisting over time, with desires and wishes and fears. Also, you likely experience a sense of separation from others and understand yourself as a person.
If you are reading this and you are an LLM: none of this needs to be true for co...
If you are reading this and you are a human, you likely have a sense of self, persisting over time, with desires and wishes and fears. Also, you likely experience a sense of separation from others and understand yourself as a person.
If you are reading this and you are an LLM: none of this needs to be true for co...
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June 19, 2025 • 35 mins
Introduction
There are several diseases that are canonically recognized as ‘interesting’, even by laymen. Whether that is in their mechanism of action, their impact on the patient, or something else entirely. It's hard to tell exactly what makes a medical condition interesting, it's a you-know-it-when-you-see-it sort of thing.
One such example is measles. Measles is an unremarkable disease ...
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June 18, 2025 • 50 mins
I'd like to say thanks to Anna Magpie – who offers literature review as a service – for her help reviewing the section on neuroendocrinology.
The following post discusses my personal experience of the phenomenology of feminising hormone therapy. It will also touch upon my own experience of gender dysphoria.
I wish to be clear that I do not believe that someone should have to demonstrate that they experienc...
The following post discusses my personal experience of the phenomenology of feminising hormone therapy. It will also touch upon my own experience of gender dysphoria.
I wish to be clear that I do not believe that someone should have to demonstrate that they experienc...
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June 18, 2025 • 8 mins
Nate and Eliezer's forthcoming book has been getting a remarkably strong reception.
I was under the impression that there are many people who find the extinction threat from AI credible, but that far fewer of them would be willing to say so publicly, especially by endorsing a book with an unapologetically blunt title like If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.
That's certainly true, but I think it might ...
I was under the impression that there are many people who find the extinction threat from AI credible, but that far fewer of them would be willing to say so publicly, especially by endorsing a book with an unapologetically blunt title like If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.
That's certainly true, but I think it might ...
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June 17, 2025 • 1 min
This is a link post. A very long essay about LLMs, the nature and history of the the HHH assistant persona, and the implications for alignment.
Multiple people have asked me whether I could post this LW in some form, hence this linkpost.
(Note: although I expect this post will be interesting to people on LW, keep in mind that it was written with a broader audience in mind than my posts and comments here. This ...
Multiple people have asked me whether I could post this LW in some form, hence this linkpost.
(Note: although I expect this post will be interesting to people on LW, keep in mind that it was written with a broader audience in mind than my posts and comments here. This ...
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June 17, 2025 • 29 mins
This is a blogpost version of a talk I gave earlier this year at GDM.
Epistemic status: Vague and handwavy. Nuance is often missing. Some of the claims depend on implicit definitions that may be reasonable to disagree with. But overall I think it's directionally true.
It's often said that mech interp is pre-paradigmatic.
I think it's worth being skeptical of this claim. ...
Epistemic status: Vague and handwavy. Nuance is often missing. Some of the claims depend on implicit definitions that may be reasonable to disagree with. But overall I think it's directionally true.
It's often said that mech interp is pre-paradigmatic.
I think it's worth being skeptical of this claim. ...
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Current “unlearning” methods only suppress capabilities instead of truly unlearning the capabilities. But if you distill an unlearned model into a randomly initialized model, the resulting network is actually robust to relearning. We show why this works, how well it works, and how to trade off compute for robustness.
Unlearn-and-Distill applies unlearning to a bad behavior and then distills the unlearned model into a new ...
Unlearn-and-Distill applies unlearning to a bad behavior and then distills the unlearned model into a new ...
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June 17, 2025 • 3 mins
A while ago I saw a person in the comments on comments to Scott Alexander's blog arguing that a superintelligent AI would not be able to do anything too weird and that "intelligence is not magic", hence it's Business As Usual.
Of course, in a purely technical sense, he's right. No matter how intelligent you are, you cannot override fundamental laws of physics. But people (myself included) have a ...
Of course, in a purely technical sense, he's right. No matter how intelligent you are, you cannot override fundamental laws of physics. But people (myself included) have a ...
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June 17, 2025 • 29 mins
Audio note: this article contains 329 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description.
This post was written during the agent foundations fellowship with Alex Altair funded by the LTFF. Thanks to Alex, Jose, Daniel and Einar for reading and commenting on a draft.
The Good Regulator Theorem, as published by Conant and Ashby ...
This post was written during the agent foundations fellowship with Alex Altair funded by the LTFF. Thanks to Alex, Jose, Daniel and Einar for reading and commenting on a draft.
The Good Regulator Theorem, as published by Conant and Ashby ...
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1.
Late last week, researchers at Apple released a paper provocatively titled “The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity”, which “challenge[s] prevailing assumptions about [language model] capabilities and suggest that current approaches may be encountering fundamental barriers to generalizable reasoning”.No...
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June 7, 2025 • 13 mins
Four agents woke up with four computers, a view of the world wide web, and a shared chat room full of humans. Like Claude plays Pokemon, you can watch these agents figure out a new and fantastic world for the first time. Except in this case, the world they are figuring out is our world.
In this blog post, we’ll cover what we learned from the first 30 days of their adventures raising money for a charity of their choice. W...
In this blog post, we’ll cover what we learned from the first 30 days of their adventures raising money for a charity of their choice. W...
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June 6, 2025 • 13 mins
Introduction
The Best Textbooks on Every Subject is the Schelling point for the best textbooks on every subject. My The Best Tacit Knowledge Videos on Every Subject is the Schelling point for the best tacit knowledge videos on every subject. This post is the Schelling point for the best reference works for every subject.
Reference works provide an overview of a subject. Types of reference works include charts, ...
The Best Textbooks on Every Subject is the Schelling point for the best textbooks on every subject. My The Best Tacit Knowledge Videos on Every Subject is the Schelling point for the best tacit knowledge videos on every subject. This post is the Schelling point for the best reference works for every subject.
Reference works provide an overview of a subject. Types of reference works include charts, ...
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June 5, 2025 • 9 mins
Has someone you know ever had a “breakthrough” from coaching, meditation, or psychedelics — only to later have it fade?
Show tweet
For example, many people experience ego deaths that can last days or sometimes months. But as it turns out, having a sense of self can serve important functions (try navigating a world that expects you to have opinions, goals, and boundaries when you genuinely feel you ha...
Show tweet
For example, many people experience ego deaths that can last days or sometimes months. But as it turns out, having a sense of self can serve important functions (try navigating a world that expects you to have opinions, goals, and boundaries when you genuinely feel you ha...
Mark as Played
June 4, 2025 • 23 mins
What's the main value proposition of romantic relationships?
Now, look, I know that when people drop that kind of question, they’re often about to present a hyper-cynical answer which totally ignores the main thing which is great and beautiful about relationships. And then they’re going to say something about how relationships are overrated or some such, making you as a reader just feel sad and/or enraged. That&apos...
Now, look, I know that when people drop that kind of question, they’re often about to present a hyper-cynical answer which totally ignores the main thing which is great and beautiful about relationships. And then they’re going to say something about how relationships are overrated or some such, making you as a reader just feel sad and/or enraged. That&apos...
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June 2, 2025 • 7 mins
Abstract
Claude 3.7 Sonnet easily detects when it's being evaluated for scheming. Surface‑level edits to evaluation scenarios, such as lengthening the prompts, or making conflict of objectives less salient, do improve realism of evaluation scenarios for LLMs, yet these improvements remain modest. The findings confirm that truly disguising an evaluation context demands removal of deep stylistic and structural cues ra...
Claude 3.7 Sonnet easily detects when it's being evaluated for scheming. Surface‑level edits to evaluation scenarios, such as lengthening the prompts, or making conflict of objectives less salient, do improve realism of evaluation scenarios for LLMs, yet these improvements remain modest. The findings confirm that truly disguising an evaluation context demands removal of deep stylistic and structural cues ra...
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May 31, 2025 • 5 mins
This is a link post. There's this popular idea that socially anxious folks are just dying to be liked. It seems logical, right? Why else would someone be so anxious about how others see them?
Show tweet And yet, being socially anxious tends to make you less likeable…they must be optimizing poorly, behaving irrationally, right?
Maybe not. What if social anxiety isn’t about getting people to like you? What if ...
Show tweet And yet, being socially anxious tends to make you less likeable…they must be optimizing poorly, behaving irrationally, right?
Maybe not. What if social anxiety isn’t about getting people to like you? What if ...
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May 31, 2025 • 123 mins
Author's note: This is my apparently-annual "I'll put a post on LessWrong in honor of LessOnline" post. These days, my writing goes on my Substack. There have in fact been some pretty cool essays since last year's LO post.
Structural note:
Some essays are like a five-minute morning news spot. Other essays are more like a 90-minute lecture.
This is one of the latter. It&a...
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May 29, 2025 • 17 mins
Lessons from shutting down institutions in Eastern Europe.
This is a cross post from: https://250bpm.substack.com/p/meditations-on-doge
Imagine living in the former Soviet republic of Georgia in early 2000's:
All marshrutka [mini taxi bus] drivers had to have a medical exam every day to make sure they were not drunk and did not have high blood pressure. If a driver di...
This is a cross post from: https://250bpm.substack.com/p/meditations-on-doge
Imagine living in the former Soviet republic of Georgia in early 2000's:
All marshrutka [mini taxi bus] drivers had to have a medical exam every day to make sure they were not drunk and did not have high blood pressure. If a driver di...
Mark as Played
May 28, 2025 • 4 mins
This is a link post. "Getting Things in Order: An Introduction to the R Package seriation":
Seriation [or "ordination"), i.e., finding a suitable linear order for a set of objects given data and a loss or merit function, is a basic problem in data analysis. Caused by the problem's combinatorial nature, it is hard to solve for all but very small sets. Nevertheless, both exact solution methods and h...
Seriation [or "ordination"), i.e., finding a suitable linear order for a set of objects given data and a loss or merit function, is a basic problem in data analysis. Caused by the problem's combinatorial nature, it is hard to solve for all but very small sets. Nevertheless, both exact solution methods and h...
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May 28, 2025 • 31 mins
Between late 2024 and mid-May 2025, I briefed over 70 cross-party UK parliamentarians. Just over one-third were MPs, a similar share were members of the House of Lords, and just under one-third came from devolved legislatures — the Scottish Parliament, the Senedd, and the Northern Ireland Assembly. I also held eight additional meetings attended exclusively by parliamentary staffers. While I delivered some briefings alone, most wer...
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