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Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma.
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Context: Post #4 in my sequence of private Lightcone Infrastructure memos edited for public consumption This week's principle is more about how I want people at Lightcone to relate to community governance than it is about our internal team culture. As part of our jobs at Lightcone we often are in charge of determining access to some resource, or membership in some group (ranging from LessWrong to the AI Alignment Forum to the Lightcone Offices). Through that, I have learned that one of t...
"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face." - Mike Tyson (The exact phrasing of that quote changes, this is my favourite.) I think there is an open, important weakness in many people. We assume those we communicate with are basically trustworthy. Further, I think there is an important flaw in the current rationality community. We spend a lot of time focusing on subtle epistemic mistakes, teasing apart flaws in methodology and practicing the principle of charity. This cre...
One day, when I was an interning at the cryptography research department of a large software company, my boss handed me an assignment to break a pseudorandom number generator passed to us for review. Someone in another department invented it and planned to use it in their product, and wanted us to take a look first. This person must have had a lot of political clout or was especially confident in himself, because he refused the standard advice that anything an amateur comes up with is very l...
People sometimes make mistakes [citation needed]. The obvious explanation for most of those mistakes is that decision makers do not have access to the information necessary to avoid the mistake, or are not smart/competent enough to think through the consequences of their actions. This predicts that as decision-makers get access to more information, or are replaced with smarter people, their decisions will get better. And this is substantially true! Markets seem more efficient today th...
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, ...
Condensation: a theory of concepts is a model of concept-formation by Sam Eisenstat. Its goals and methods resemble John Wentworth's natural abstractions/natural latents research.[1] Both theories seek to provide a clear picture of how to posit latent variables, such that once someone has understood the theory, they'll say "yep, I see now, that's how latent variables work!". The goal of this post is to popularize Sam's theory and to give my own perspective on it; however, it will not be a...
Recently, I looked at the one pair of winter boots I own, and I thought “I will probably never buy winter boots again.” The world as we know it probably won’t last more than a decade, and I live in a pretty warm area. I. AGI is likely in the next decade It has basically become consensus within the AI research community that AI will surpass human capabilities sometime in the next few decades. Some, including myself, think this will likely happen this decade. II. The post-AGI world will ...
Cross-posted from https://bengoldhaber.substack.com/ It's widely known that Corporations are People. This is universally agreed to be a good thing; I list Target as my emergency contact and I hope it will one day be the best man at my wedding. But there are other, less well known non-human entities that have also been accorded the rank of person. Ships: Ships have long posed a tricky problem for states and courts. Similar to nomads, vagabonds, and college students on extended study abr...
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 problemat...
I am a professor of economics. Throughout my career, I was mostly working on economic growth theory, and this eventually brought me to the topic of transformative AI / AGI / superintelligence. Nowadays my work focuses mostly on the promises and threats of this emerging disruptive technology. Recently, jointly with Klaus Prettner, we’ve written a paper on “The Economics of p(doom): Scenarios of Existential Risk and Economic Growth in the Age of Transformative AI”. We have presented it at mu...
[Meta: This is Max Harms. I wrote a novel about China and AGI, which comes out today. This essay from my fiction newsletter has been slightly modified for LessWrong.] In the summer of 1983, Ronald Reagan sat down to watch the film War Games, starring Matthew Broderick as a teen hacker. In the movie, Broderick's character accidentally gains access to a military supercomputer with an AI that almost starts World War III. “The only winning move is not to play.” After watching the movie, Reaga...
Some AI safety problems are legible (obvious or understandable) to company leaders and government policymakers, implying they are unlikely to deploy or allow deployment of an AI while those problems remain open (i.e., appear unsolved according to the information they have access to). But some problems are illegible (obscure or hard to understand, or in a common cognitive blind spot), meaning there is a high risk that leaders and policymakers will decide to deploy or allow deployment even if ...
1. I have claimed that one of the fundamental questions of rationality is “what am I about to do and what will happen next?” One of the domains I ask this question the most is in social situations. There are a great many skills in the world. If I had the time and resources to do so, I’d want to master all of them. Wilderness survival, automotive repair, the Japanese language, calculus, heart surgery, French cooking, sailing, underwater basket weaving, architecture, Mexican cooking,...
This is a link post. Eliezer Yudkowsky did not exactly suggest that you should eat bear fat covered with honey and sprinkled with salt flakes. What he actually said was that an alien, looking from the outside at evolution, would predict that you would want to eat bear fat covered with honey and sprinkled with salt flakes. Still, I decided to buy a jar of bear fat online, and make a treat for the people at Inkhaven. It was surprisingly good. My post discusses how that happened, and a bit a...
As far as I'm aware, Anthropic is the only AI company with official AGI timelines[1]: they expect AGI by early 2027. In their recommendations (from March 2025) to the OSTP for the AI action plan they say: As our CEO Dario Amodei writes in 'Machines of Loving Grace', we expect powerful AI systems will emerge in late 2026 or early 2027. Powerful AI systems will have the following properties: Intellectual capabilities matching or exceeding that of Nobel Prize winners across most discipline...
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 f...
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 f...
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 L...
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 imp...
TL;DR: AI progress and the recognition of associated risks are painful to think about. This cognitive dissonance acts as fertile ground in the memetic landscape, a high-energy state that will be exploited by novel ideologies. We can anticipate cultural evolution will find viable successionist ideologies: memeplexes that resolve this tension by framing the replacement of humanity by AI not as a catastrophe, but as some combination of desirable, heroic, or inevitable outcome. This post mostly ...
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