LessWrong (30+ Karma)

People often say to “write like you talk.” Paul Graham has a post titled “Write Like You Talk” where he says explicitly that written language is worse than spoken language because

1. “Written language…

SlimeMoldTimeMold (SMTM) recently finished a 13-part series on psychology, “The Mind in the Wheel”, centering on feedback loops (“cybernetics”) as kind of a grand unified theory of the brain.

There …

This concept and terminology was spawned out of a conversation a few years ago with my friend Skyler. I finally decided to write it up. Any mistakes here are my own.

Every once in a while, I find my…

Our government is determined to lose the AI race in the name of winning the AI race.

The least we can do, if prioritizing winning the race, is to try and actually win it.

It is one thing to priori…

Audio note: this article contains 59 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description.

Summary: Both our (UK AISI…

Eliezer and I wrote a book. It's titled If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Unlike a lot of other writing either of us have done, it's being professionally published. It's hitting shelves on Septemb…

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 be…

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Audio note: this article contains 154 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description.

tl;dr it seems that you c…

Clarity didn't work, trying mysterianism

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First published:
May 13th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZK4s5kB6YBhsHrN…

It was a cold and cloudy San Francisco Sunday. My wife and I were having lunch with friends at a Korean cafe.

My phone buzzed with a text. It said my mom was in the hospital.

I called to find out mo…

Being a coherent and persistent agent with persistent goals is a prerequisite for long-horizon power-seeking behavior. Therefore, we should prevent models from representing themselves as coherent an…

I’m reading George Eliot's Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879)—so far a snoozer compared to her novels. But chapter 17 surprised me for how well it anticipated modern AI doomerism.

In summary, T…

Today's post will be a little different. This past week,Sam Altman and others testified at a US Senate hearing on AI competitiveness.

Here's one summary of how Altman handled it:

Altma…

This post is a short empirical research note about training away scheming behavior (which we’ll define as the propensity to take long-term power-seeking actions when the AI thinks it can get away wi…

Last week I published a 30-minute documentary about SB-1047 I had been working on since September.

Here's what I learned.

Story of the bill

1. The bill had to go through many comm…

At the bottom of the LessWrong post editor, if you have at least 100 global karma, you may have noticed this button.

Many people click the button, and are jumpscared when it starts an Inte…

Sometimes people say that it's much less valuable to do AI safety research today than it will be in the future, because the current models are very different—in particular, much less capable—than th…

TL;DR

• The essence of an ideal paper is the narrative: a short, rigorous and evidence-based technical story you tell, with a takeaway the readers care about
  • What? A narrative is fundamentally about…

Here's a confusion I have about preference orderings in decision theory.

Caveat: the observations I make below feel weirdly trivial to me, to the point that I feel wary of making a post about them a…