LessWrong (Curated & Popular) – Details, episodes & analysis

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

LessWrong

Technology

Society & Culture

Frequency: 1 episode/2d. Total Eps: 740

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.

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🇬🇧 Great Britain - technology
05/02/2026
#96

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https://type3.audio/?utm_source=TYPE_III_AUDIO&amp
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https://res.cloudinary.com/lesswrong-2-0/image/upload/f_auto
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https://www.lesswrong.com/
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https://www.patreon.com/LWCurated
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"IABIED Book Review: Core Arguments and Counterarguments" by Stephen McAleese

Thursday, February 5, 2026 • Duration 50:18

The recent book “If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies” (September 2025) by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares argues that creating superintelligent AI in the near future would almost certainly cause human extinction:

If any company or group, anywhere on the planet, builds an artificial superintelligence using anything remotely like current techniques, based on anything remotely like the present understanding of AI, then everyone, everywhere on Earth, will die.

The goal of this post is to summarize and evaluate the book's key arguments and the main counterarguments critics have made against them.

Although several other book reviews have already been written I found many of them unsatisfying because a lot of them are written by journalists who have the goal of writing an entertaining piece and only lightly cover the core arguments, or don’t seem understand them properly, and instead resort to weak arguments like straw-manning, ad hominem attacks or criticizing the style of the book.

So my goal is to write a book review that has the following properties:

Written by someone who has read a substantial amount of AI alignment and LessWrong content and won’t make AI alignment beginner mistakes or misunderstandings (e.g. not knowing about the [...]

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Outline:

(07:43) Background arguments to the key claim

(09:21) The key claim: ASI alignment is extremely difficult to solve

(12:52) 1. Human values are a very specific, fragile, and tiny space of all possible goals

(15:25) 2. Current methods used to train goals into AIs are imprecise and unreliable

(16:42) The inner alignment problem

(17:25) Inner alignment introduction

(19:03) Inner misalignment evolution analogy

(21:03) Real examples of inner misalignment

(22:23) Inner misalignment explanation

(25:05) ASI misalignment example

(27:40) 3. The ASI alignment problem is hard because it has the properties of hard engineering challenges

(28:10) Space probes

(29:09) Nuclear reactors

(30:18) Computer security

(30:35) Counterarguments to the book

(30:46) Arguments that the books arguments are unfalsifiable

(33:19) Arguments against the evolution analogy

(37:38) Arguments against counting arguments

(40:16) Arguments based on the aligned behavior of modern LLMs

(43:16) Arguments against engineering analogies to AI alignment

(45:05) Three counterarguments to the books three core arguments

(46:43) Conclusion

(49:23) Appendix

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First published:
January 24th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qFzWTTxW37mqnE6CA/iabied-book-review-core-arguments-and-counterarguments

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

https://res.cloudinary.com/lesswrong-2-0/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/mirroredImages/qFzWTTxW37mqnE6CA/y9wsakomogbk2guyib9x

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"Anthropic’s “Hot Mess” paper overstates its case (and the blog post is worse)" by RobertM

Wednesday, February 4, 2026 • Duration 11:39

Author's note: this is somewhat more rushed than ideal, but I think getting this out sooner is pretty important. Ideally, it would be a bit less snarky.

Anthropic[1] recently published a new piece of research: The Hot Mess of AI: How Does Misalignment Scale with Model Intelligence and Task Complexity? (arXiv, Twitter thread).

I have some complaints about both the paper and the accompanying blog post.

tl;dr

The paper's abstract says that "in several settings, larger, more capable models are more incoherent than smaller models", but in most settings they are more coherent. This emphasis is even more exaggerated in the blog post and Twitter thread. I think this is pretty misleading.
The paper's technical definition of "incoherence" is uninteresting[2] and the framing of the paper, blog post, and Twitter thread equivocate with the more normal English-language definition of the term, which is extremely misleading.
Section 5 of the paper (and to a larger extent the blog post and Twitter) attempt to draw conclusions about future alignment difficulties that are unjustified by the experiment results, and would be unjustified even if the experiment results pointed in the other direction.
The blog post is substantially LLM-written. I think this [...]

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Outline:

(00:39) tl;dr

(01:42) Paper

(06:25) Blog

The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
February 4th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ceEgAEXcL7cC2Ddiy/anthropic-s-hot-mess-paper-overstates-its-case-and-the-blog --- Narrated by . ---

"The inaugural Redwood Research podcast" by Buck, ryan_greenblatt

Tuesday, January 27, 2026 • Duration 03:27

After five months of me (Buck) being slow at finishing up the editing on this, we’re finally putting out our inaugural Redwood Research podcast. I think it came out pretty well—we discussed a bunch of interesting and underdiscussed topics and I’m glad to have a public record of a bunch of stuff about our history. Tell your friends! Whether we do another one depends on how useful people find this one. You can watch on Youtube here, or as a Substack podcast.

Notes on editing the podcast with Claude Code

(Buck wrote this section)

After the recording, we faced a problem. We had four hours of footage from our three cameras. We wanted it to snazzily cut between shots depending on who was talking. But I don’t truly in my heart believe that it's that important for the video editing to be that good, and I don’t really like the idea of paying a video editor. But I also don’t want to edit the four hours of video myself. And it seemed to me that video editing software was generally not optimized for the kind of editing I wanted to do here (especially automatically cutting between different shots according [...]

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Outline:

(00:43) Notes on editing the podcast with Claude Code

(03:11) Podcast transcript

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First published:
January 4th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/p4iJpumHt6Ay9KnXT/the-inaugural-redwood-research-podcast

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Do One New Thing A Day To Solve Your Problems” by Algon

Wednesday, October 22, 2025 • Duration 03:21

People don't explore enough. They rely on cached thoughts and actions to get through their day. Unfortunately, this doesn't lead to them making progress on their problems. The solution is simple. Just do one new thing a day to solve one of your problems.

Intellectually, I've always known that annoying, persistent problems often require just 5 seconds of actual thought. But seeing a number of annoying problems that made my life worse, some even major ones, just yield to the repeated application of a brief burst of thought each day still surprised me.

For example, I had a wobbly chair. It was wobbling more as time went on, and I worried it would break. Eventually, I decided to try actually solving the issue. 1 minute and 10 turns of an allen key later, it was fixed.

Another example: I have a shot attention span. I kept [...]

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First published:
October 3rd, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gtk2KqEtedMi7ehxN/do-one-new-thing-a-day-to-solve-your-problems

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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“Humanity Learned Almost Nothing From COVID-19” by niplav

Tuesday, October 21, 2025 • Duration 08:45

Summary: Looking over humanity's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, almostsix years later, reveals that we've forgotten to fulfill our intent atpreparing for the next pandemic. I rant.

content warning: A single carefully placed slur.

If we want to create a world free of pandemics and other biologicalcatastrophes, the time to act is now.

—US White House, “ FACT SHEET: The Biden Administration's Historic Investment in Pandemic Preparedness and Biodefense in the FY 2023 President's Budget ”, 2022

Around five years, a globalpandemic caused bya coronavirus started.

In the course of the pandemic, there have been atleast 6 million deaths and more than 25 million excessdeaths. Thevalue of QALYs lost due to the pandemic in the US alone was around $5trio.,the GDP loss in the US alone in 2020 $2trio..The loss of gross [...]

The original text contained 12 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
October 19th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pvEuEN6eMZC2hqG9c/humanity-learned-almost-nothing-from-covid-19

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Consider donating to Alex Bores, author of the RAISE Act” by Eric Neyman

Monday, October 20, 2025 • Duration 50:28

Written by Eric Neyman, in my personal capacity. The views expressed here are my own. Thanks to Zach Stein-Perlman, Jesse Richardson, and many others for comments.

Over the last several years, I’ve written a bunch of posts about politics and political donations. In this post, I’ll tell you about one of the best donation opportunities that I’ve ever encountered: donating to Alex Bores, who announced his campaign for Congress today.

If you’re potentially interested in donating to Bores, my suggestion would be to:

Read this post to understand the case for donating to Alex Bores.
Understand that political donations are a matter of public record, and that this may have career implications. Decide if you are willing to donate to Alex Bores anyway.
If you would like to donate to Alex Bores: donations today, Monday, Oct 20th, are especially valuable. You can donate at this link.

Or if [...]

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Outline:

(01:16) Introduction

(04:55) Things I like about Alex Bores

(08:55) Are there any things about Bores that give me pause?

(09:43) Cost-effectiveness analysis

(10:10) How does an extra $1k affect Alex Bores' chances of winning?

(12:22) How good is it if Alex Bores wins?

(12:54) Direct influence on legislation

(14:46) The House is a first step toward even more influential positions

(15:35) Encouraging more action in this space

(16:20) How does this compare to other AI safety donation opportunities?

(16:37) Comparison to technical AI safety

(17:28) Comparison to non-politics AI governance

(18:25) Comparison to other political opportunities

(19:39) Comparison to non-AI safety opportunities

(21:20) Logistics and details of donating

(21:24) Who can donate?

(21:34) How much can I donate?(23:16) How do I donate?(24:07) Will my donation be public? What are the career implications of donating?(25:37) Is donating worth the career capital costs in your case?(26:32) Some examples of potential donor profiles(30:34) A more quantitative cost-benefit analysis(32:33) Potential concerns(32:37) What if Bores loses?(33:21) What about the press coverage?(34:09) Feeling rushed?(35:16) Appendix(35:19) Details of the cost-effectiveness analysis of donating to Bores(35:25) Probability that Bores loses by fewer than 1000 votes(38:37) How much marginal funding would net Bores an extra vote?(40:42) Early donations help consolidate support(42:47) One last adjustment: the big tech super PAC(45:25) Cost-benefit analysis of donating to Bores vs. adverse career effects(45:40) The philanthropic benefit of donating(46:32) The altruistic cost of donating(48:18) Cost-benefit analysis(49:01) CaveatsThe original text contained 14 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 20th, 2025 Source: --- Narrated by .

“Meditation is dangerous” by Algon

Monday, October 20, 2025 • Duration 07:26

Here's a story I've heard a couple of times. A youngish person is looking for some solutions to their depression, chronic pain, ennui or some other cognitive flaw. They're open to new experiences and see a meditator gushing about how amazing meditation is for joy, removing suffering, clearing one's mind, improving focus etc. They invite the young person to a meditation retreat. The young person starts making decent progress. Then they have a psychotic break and their life is ruined for years, at least. The meditator is sad, but not shocked. Then they started gushing about meditation again.

If you ask an experienced meditator about these sorts of cases, they often say, "oh yeah, that's a thing that sometimes happens when meditating." If you ask why the hell they don't warn people about this, they might say: "oh, I didn't want to emphasize the dangers more because it might [...]

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First published:
October 17th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fhL7gr3cEGa22y93c/meditation-is-dangerous

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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“That Mad Olympiad” by Tomás B.

Sunday, October 19, 2025 • Duration 26:41

"I heard Chen started distilling the day after he was born. He's only four years old, if you can believe it. He's written 18 novels. His first words were, "I'm so here for it!" Adrian said.

He's my little brother. Mom was busy in her world model. She says her character is like a "villainess" or something - I kinda worry it's a sex thing. It's for sure a sex thing. Anyway, she was busy getting seduced or seducing or whatever villanesses do in world models, so I had to escort Adrian to Oak Central for the Lit Olympiad. Mom doesn't like supervision drones for some reason. Thinks they're creepy. But a gangly older sister looming over him and witnessing those precious adolescent memories for her - that's just family, I guess.

"That sounds more like a liability to me," I said. "Bad data, old models."

Chen waddled [...]

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First published:
October 15th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LPiBBn2tqpDv76w87/that-mad-olympiad-1

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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“The ‘Length’ of ‘Horizons’” by Adam Scholl

Friday, October 17, 2025 • Duration 14:15

Current AI models are strange. They can speak—often coherently, sometimes even eloquently—which is wild. They can predict the structure of proteins, beat the best humans at many games, recall more facts in most domains than human experts; yet they also struggle to perform simple tasks, like using computer cursors, maintaining basic logical consistency, or explaining what they know without wholesale fabrication.

Perhaps someday we will discover a deep science of intelligence, and this will teach us how to properly describe such strangeness. But for now we have nothing of the sort, so we are left merely gesturing in vague, heuristical terms; lately people have started referring to this odd mixture of impressiveness and idiocy as “spikiness,” for example, though there isn’t much agreement about the nature of the spikes.

Of course it would be nice to measure AI progress anyway, at least in some sense sufficient to help us [...]

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Outline:

(03:48) Conceptual Coherence

(07:12) Benchmark Bias

(10:39) Predictive Value

The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
October 14th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PzLSuaT6WGLQGJJJD/the-length-of-horizons

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---

“Don’t Mock Yourself” by Algon

Wednesday, October 15, 2025 • Duration 04:10

About half a year ago, I decided to try stop insulting myself for two weeks. No more self-deprecating humour, calling myself a fool, or thinking I'm pathetic. Why? Because it felt vaguely corrosive. Let me tell you how it went. Spoiler: it went well.

The first thing I noticed was how often I caught myself about to insult myself. It happened like multiple times an hour. I would lay in bed at night thinking, "you mor- wait, I can't insult myself, I've still got 11 days to go. Dagnabbit." The negative space sent a glaring message: I insulted myself a lot. Like, way more than I realized.

The next thing I noticed was that I was the butt of half of my jokes. I'd keep thinking of zingers which made me out to be a loser, a moron, a scrub in some way. Sometimes, I could re-work [...]

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First published:
October 12th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8prPryf3ranfALBBp/don-t-mock-yourself

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular) – Details, episodes & analysis

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular) – Details, episodes & analysis

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