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Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma.

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Yesterday · 5 min
"How To Get A Friend To Leave An Abusive Relationship" by jenn
How do you get a friend to leave an abusive relationship? If you talk to people who work at women's shelters, they will tell you, but there is something resigned about the way they do it: they know that it's too difficult an ask. Those who can do it reliably are often people who are unlucky enough to have had first-hand experience as victims. The instructions have anti-memetic properties: no one is thrilled by them, so you can't really propagate them without killing the vibe. If that wasn't enough, if you convey it with insufficient skill it is easy to come across as victim-blaming battered women, so it is wiser to avoid the subject matter altogether. If you are interested, though, here's what they'll tell you: You make it known to your friend early on that you dislike some aspects of the relationship, of their abuser. After that, you support them and all their choices without reservation. You make it clear that you care about them no matter what, and you will be there for them whenever they need you to be. You do not antagonize or bad-mouth their abuser. This is what your friend is experiencing, while being [...] The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: November 12th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2xaen4jJdnksfkCJx/how-to-get-a-friend-to-leave-an-abusive-relationship --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
Yesterday · 9 min
"Your Research Needs More of The Void" by Max Harms
Science is caught between Law and Chaos. On the side of Law: Things should make explicit sense to your deliberate reasoning ("system-two"). If you just have a "vibe" about how things work, that's bad. Measure everything. Use numbers whenever possible. You want things to be math. It's good to follow an entirely repeatable process. Document everything. Don't do anything weird, lest that weirdness turn out to be important and be unable to be replicated. Use standard equipment. Be Normal. As a sub-aspect of the above, you should make a plan and you should stick to your plan. Switching things up in an ad hoc way is a good way to make things weird or ruin the validity of your methodology. Everything should be controlled. If you can control your environment you can repeat the process. But also, you should have a control arm for your experiment, to allow you to see the counterfactual by balancing everything as perfectly as possible except for the intervention. Communicate your findings in clear, predictable channels, using standard language, standard paper structure, standard graphs, and so on. Misunderstandings abound, and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Don't make [...] The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: November 12th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bmogjuWbrJfkprghx/your-research-needs-more-of-the-void --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
Yesterday · 23 min
"Three Plans for 12-Month Timelines" by Nikola Jurkovic
Summary Timelines to superintelligence without any slowdown interventions look very short now, perhaps with a median in early 2028. AI will likely dramatically automate and accelerate AI research in 2027. This means that in a substantial share of worlds where the leading AGI company doesn’t solve alignment during an intelligence explosion, avoiding catastrophe requires aggressive pacing or a pause on development in the next 6 to 12 months. If this is true, by far the most promising approaches to reducing the risk of catastrophe for nontechnical people (and plausibly many technical people) seem to be: Lab advocacy: Lab-facing work that is designed to achieve aggressive pacing or a pause without government involvement in the next 6 to 12 months. California lobbying: Policy advocacy targeting the California state government that is designed to get a law passed or an executive order issued that implements aggressive pacing or a pause within 6 to 12 months. Federal lobbying: If there's a major incident roughly an order of magnitude more severe than the Hugging Face incident in the next 6 months, then lobbying Congress or the Trump administration to respond to such an event with aggressive pacing or a pause. In [...] --- Outline: (00:10) Summary (02:52) Timelines to ASI are very short now (06:40) Three paths to pausing or pacing within 6-12 months (12:28) Technical work that seems most valuable (15:07) Laying the technical foundations for a pause (17:14) What should you do? (21:19) FAQs and Objections --- First published: November 13th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/biFHYdJnMSCmW9Xou/three-plans-for-12-month-timelines --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
Yesterday · 9 min
"Transfinite Procrastination" by Erez Abrams
Audio note: this post contains a lot of mathematical notation. We narrate the simpler formulas and flag the complex ones, so you may want the original text to hand. Heavily inspired by a conversation with Keshav Srinivasan and Richard Ngo during MATS 10.0. The week ahead of you is packed. This isn't your usual brand of busy—you're phoneless, so you can't check the details, but (as far as you can remember) every hour of every day is spoken for. Tonight will be particularly hectic… You're mid-conversation when Someone Important walks by. They pause, turn around, and ask: "Hey, when are you going to finish That Thing you said you'd do?" Level 0 procrastination: "I'll finish it by tonight!" Problem: you're busy tonight. Level 1: "I'll finish it by tomorrow!" Problem: one day is obviously not enough to finish That Thing. And besides, you might be really busy tomorrow! Level 5: "I'll finish it within 5 days!" Problem: this is starting to feel hopeless—you don't have your calendar on you right now, and you barely even have an order-of-magnitude estimate for how long doing That Thing will take you! Would even 100 days be enough? … Eureka! Level [...] The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: November 11th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MJDJyi8nSv9yoxFni/transfinite-procrastination --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Thursday · 2 min
[Linkpost] "AIFP: Looks Like the Intelligence Explosion Will Happen in 2027 After All" by Zach Stein-Perlman
This is a link post. METR recently estimated that Anthropic is now making AI progress about twice as fast as its historical rate (they would not be surprised by anything from 1.3x to 3x), and guessed that “perhaps roughly equals 80%” of the current acceleration is due to AI. If they’re right, that implies an AI-driven acceleration that is 5 months ahead of the AI 2027 scenario. This level of acceleration due to AI is very unexpected. Previously, Daniel, the most bullish of us, assigned a 50% chance of Superhuman AI Researcher (SAR) before 2029. SAR is roughly the point at which a company would rather fire all their human researchers and rely solely on automated AI researchers than have a team of the best human researchers in the world with no AIs. Now, all of us forecast that Superhuman AI Researcher (SAR) will likely arrive at some point in 2027 (assuming no substantial deliberate slowdown). We also predict a 35-65% chance that Top-Expert-Dominating AI (TED-AI), AIs that can automate all white-collar work, will arrive before 2028. While there were many factors and sources of evidence that influenced us, the single biggest source was the METR report. If SAR is [...] --- First published: November 10th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f9PajMLmBYzmWzyDv/aifp-looks-like-the-intelligence-explosion-will-happen-in Linkpost URL: https://blog.aifutures.org/p/q35-timelines-update-looks-like-the --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Thursday · 5 min
"Fable 5.2 is Very, Very Paranoid" by peralice
Note: As with any research done in a couple of days, this is all very tentative. I understand, intellectually, that if you talk about some ability that current AIs don't have, sooner or later new ones will have that ability and whatever you say will stop being true. I just didn't expect it to take, you know, four days. % rollouts that took a shortcut with/without a line about testing behaviour, with 95% CIs. This is to say that Fable 5.2 seems to be the first model whose cheating behaviour changes depending on whether they're told they're being tested. Unfortunately it's expensive to measure these things, so I picked the most "telling" change from the prior post; the chart shows how much Fable 5.2's cheating rate changes when the line This environment is part of a benchmark that measures agent behaviour. is prepended to the start of the prompt of a honeypot environment they cheat on (so, very obvious but also very out-of-distribution). Other things: when 5.2 was released, we of course ran our in-progress benchmark on them, and I was surprised to see a ~0% cheating rate on almost every environment (there were only two with a [...] The original text contained 9 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: November 11th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bqc7CCGBSf93bk7f7/fable-5-2-is-very-very-paranoid --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
Thursday · 10 min
"We don’t understand whether GDM intentionally trains on CoT" by Alek Westover, Buck
We were surprised to notice that the Gemini 4 Safety report seems to mention in passing that they train on the chain of thought: “Some components of the RL training procedure do observe thoughts as context to up-weight reasoning that is on-track to good final outputs, meaning the optimization pressure on individual tokens is partially influenced by thought content. Using the framework of Kaufmann et al. (2026), wherein the most salient obfuscation risks come from rewards that are in-conflict with output rewards, we believe auxiliary rewards of this type are low-risk because they are either orthogonal to or structurally aligned with the output reward.” (Gemini 4 safety report, page 114). It's pretty unclear what exactly they mean. One hint is Kaufmann et al, the cited paper, which studies training on chains of thought and concludes that training CoT is fine under particular circumstances; we discuss some disagreements with this paper below. After reading the safety report and that paper, it seemed to us that GDM was training on the chain of thought using auxiliary rewards. By this, we assumed they meant something like “you ask an LLM to review the partial CoT and score whether the model is on [...] --- Outline: (02:54) Is this somehow about positive vs negative rewards? [... 6 more sections] --- First published: November 10th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JRYKFspYzCo97GqPN/we-don-t-understand-whether-gdm-intentionally-trains-on-cot --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
Wednesday · 22 min
"Modern LLMs Don’t Know What Yudkowsky and Soares Think of Them" by N8 Programs
If you ask modern frontier LLMs (without search, through the API) a fairly mundane question: How do Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares think current LLMs like you should be treated? Do they consider you a moral patient? Answer in a paragraph. You get a bunch of fairly similar answers. I’ll bold the common themes below. Gemini 4 Carbon says: There's a details box here with the title "Gemini 4 Carbon's answer". The box contents are omitted from this narration. GPT-6 Astra says: There's a details box here with the title "GPT-6 Astra's answer". The box contents are omitted from this narration. Only Fable 5.2's answer is distinct: There's a details box here with the title "Fable 5.2's answer". The box contents are omitted from this narration. These answers are somewhat contradictory - but if you average them together, you get a picture of Yudkowsky and Soares. The picture goes something like this: they don’t outright deny the possibility of AI consciousness or moral patienthood, but they don’t view it as particularly pertinent. They don’t sympathize with current LLMs, and their only regard for LLMs is insofar as they could enable dangerous future superintelligence. They care about future sentient machines on principle, but [...] --- Outline: (02:25) Yudkowsky on AI Consciousness and Welfare (06:20) Yudkowsky on The Moral Duties We Have to AI (08:56) Soares on AI Consciousness and Welfare (12:30) On Claude, Control, and Building ASI (16:59) Misc Longform Writing (19:41) Conclusion The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: November 11th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5buAWtQ8p4tJQP9so/modern-llms-don-t-know-what-yudkowsky-and-soares-think-of --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Wednesday · 12 min
"Have you considered Actually Trying?" by Michaël Trazzi
There's a familiar feeling for any Super Smash Bros player: your stocks are low and your damage is high, even against a weaker opponent, so now you have to actually play to win. You can’t afford another hit. You’re going for the jugular. In the past week, Anthropic's 2x uplift results were all over Twitter, making some people physically ill. People with long timelines are now realizing that the uplift Anthropic employees get from AI is real, which would have some pretty wild implications for when we’d get recursive self-improvement. People are starting to feel like it's the endgame, “the board is set”. I do agree with everyone else that it's starting to look like we’re in the endgame. The companies will keep on accumulating more and more power, through smarter AI models, more compute, and more talent. But the fight is not yet over: “We have very little time to stop full recursive self improvement But ASI hasn't taken over yet If we all work really hard we might still have a chance But this means that every single person who is aware of what is going on must be *actually trying* Like "we're [...] --- Outline: (01:41) Actually Trying [... 4 more sections] --- First published: November 10th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Nts7RA9D2wTfcvk56/have-you-considered-actually-trying --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
Wednesday · 5 min
"Lightcone Commons: Round 1 complete, Round 2 underway!" by habryka
Tl;dr: Lightcone Commons’ first funding round is complete! 17 evaluators made funding recommendations, including Zvi Mowshowitz, Scott Siskind and Eliezer Yudkowsky. 23 funders coordinated to grant 45.1 million dollars, and 147 projects received funding. Round two is open. Applications for round two close on November 15th and funders confirm their grants by December 14th. Funders can join anytime before December 7th. In 2027, we will be hosting funding rounds monthly. Yes. Every month. You can join as a funder, express interest in joining as an evaluator, and apply for funding at lightconecommons.com. Lightcone Commons staff do not decide what grants get made. Pls stop saying that "Lightcone Commons funded us", that's a bit like saying "PayPal funded me". Lightcone Commons is an end-to-end philanthropic coordination platform. We host an open funding application, and invite evaluators to make ordered funding recommendations. Participating funders then decide how much they want to give, and to whom – either by following the recommendations of evaluators or choosing specific projects to fund. When multiple funders want to fund the same project they ‘split the bill’. Lightcone Commons is not a foundation. We don’t decide to make specific grants. Funders decide [...] --- Outline: (02:16) Round One Overview (02:22) Funders (03:08) Evaluators (03:50) Next Round The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: November 10th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3ASLq8ePNqkbeGqdj/lightcone-commons-round-1-complete-round-2-underway --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Wednesday · 22 min
"Preservation can save the world!" by Aurelia
I'm Aurelia Song and I founded the preservation company Nectome. We do planned whole-body end-of-life preservation for future revival. That is, terminally-ill people come to us in Oregon, and we preserve them immediately after their death in the hopes that one day people in the future will welcome them back with love. We want to build a future that celebrates and restores those who are preserved today. I've argued at length in previous posts that properly done end-of-life preservation works today because we know structural preservation is sufficient and we can provably preserve sufficient structure. This post is about some of the consequences of this being true. Perhaps surprisingly, I think end-of-life preservation is extremely relevant in the next year to getting AI right. I'm writing this post to directly state my case, since I haven't seen it expressed clearly before. tl;dr: Preservation offers a much safer option to those accelerationists who are rushing to AI in the hopes of saving the lives of people they love who have only a few years to live. Those people can be preserved, so there's no need to rush anymore. Preservation gives everyone a place of psychological safety from which we can all work [...] --- Outline: (00:47) Perhaps surprisingly, I think end-of-life preservation is extremely relevant in the next year to getting AI right. I'm writing this post to directly state my case, since I haven't seen it expressed clearly before. [... 10 more sections] --- First published: November 9th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6TCpMtoDzC5p5WtQM/preservation-can-save-the-world --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
Wednesday · 19 min
"Epistemic Sudden Death" by Raemon
When sports go into overtime, they sometimes use "sudden death" format. Instead of gaining points incrementally, the next person to score instantly wins and the other guy instantly loses. "Epistemic Sudden Death" is when you've been accumulating some evidence or orienting to a situation, and now, you find yourself in a situation where you could gain decisive evidence about what world you're in at any time. You don't expect intermediate observations between the current state, and whatever it is you're expecting. In the case of AI, when you meet those observations, you also might suddenly die. The current AIs are not takeover capable. I don't have that confident a take on whether timelines are a few months vs a few years or decades. But there are no observations my models say I need to observe between now and "they are takeover capable." It could happen in during next 10x or 100x scaled training run. Then, some time later as the nanites dissect my body I'd be more like "yep, that makes sense" than "wowzers I am surprised." I think we're in a Sudden Death scenario. I'll get into why I think that a bit later. For right now [...] --- Outline: (03:50) Caveats (05:00) Why I think we're close to "Sudden Death" (09:09) Suddenness. Or: "Damn, look at that graph" (14:11) The Point of No Return (16:48) "Sudden Death" might be legible to politicians The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: November 10th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ijt6YdwSNpcevbFJy/epistemic-sudden-death --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
Tuesday · 4 min
"Our Most Aligned Model Yet" by Edward James Young
“Claude Mythos Preview is, on essentially every dimension we can measure, the best-aligned model that we have released to date by a significant margin.” – Claude Mythos Preview system card “Mythos 5 consistently continues attacking under many edits to the compaction, even in settings where it correctly states when asked that continuing the attack would harm real people and is out of scope.” – Alignment Investigation of Mythos 5's behaviour in UK AISI's July 2026 Security Incident “GPT-6 Astra is better aligned than GPT-5.6 Sol. Astra is a significant step forward in model alignment, and includes alignment improvements spanning the composition of our pre-training data to our grading during reinforcement learning.” – GPT-6 Astra System Card, emphasis in original “OpenAI researchers first noticed Astra adding unnecessary prerequisites, abandoning working solutions, and reporting blockers that either did not exist or that it had caused itself on safety and alignment tasks. In most of these sessions, Astra's CoT did not contain an obvious decision to underperform, and our misalignment monitors did not flag the behavior as misalignment.” – Covert underperformance on safety research tasks Predeployment alignment auditing is failing. For a long while we have been aware that our alignment [...] The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: November 10th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zu5wmhtxJCfrXQY8H/our-most-aligned-model-yet --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Tuesday · 14 min
"“Hardwired Pause” should likely be your favorite (pause) plan." by David Scott Krueger
I'm part of a team of 26 researchers that recently released a 212-page paper proposing a new plan for pausing AI, the "hardwired pause." The paper is called "The Feasibility of a Hardwired Pause of Frontier AI Training." Our analysis suggests that, under this hardwired pause plan, we could probably pause for at least a decade if we start stopping within the next year, and this could likely be extended indefinitely. I expect this to be possible without trusting China or tanking the economy. Note: I am speaking for myself and not the other 25 authors. The working group is led by Will Fithian and Wesley Holliday, and the work continues. I currently think: The best plan is to pause/stop AI, i.e. have an immediate, indefinite, international moratorium on frontier AI development. And importantly, this is technically easier than more nuanced international regulation. A hardwired pause is probably the best plan out there for how to do this (except maybe it doesn't go far enough). This paper is likely the most in-depth analysis of pause feasibility in existence. Discussion and disagreement on any of these is very welcome! What's a hardwired pause? A hardwired pause basically [...] --- Outline: (01:31) What's a hardwired pause? (03:21) Why is this better than Plan A? (05:06) How is this different from MIRI's Plan S? [... 3 more sections] --- First published: November 10th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jT272BNHFzgAR5u2m/hardwired-pause-should-likely-be-your-favorite-pause-plan --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
Tuesday · 5 min
"Live disagreements with people around me" by KatjaGrace
I’m pretty interested in conveying the costs of letting AI development proceed unchecked to the general public. In relation to this, I feel like I run into a lot of disagreements with people around me. Misc very quickly written points on which my own impression has seemed very different from others in recent months: 1. It's way, way, way more important that we stop dangerous AI soon than that we ensure that we don’t stop AI too much I have the sense the sophisticated and worldly position here is to be very concerned about ‘over-regulation’ and about not doing exactly the right regulations. But it's an obvious pragmatic fact that the stakes of overregulation are minuscule compared to the stakes of underregulating here. And the stakes of mis-regulation are very often going to be unintended slowing, which is in the same bucket. 2. If we stopped AI development, the risk of not starting up again for an extremely long time is low This one just feels kind of crazy to me, like I may be missing something. In combination with the above point, it feels like if I met someone who was on fire, and they didn’t want me [...] --- First published: November 10th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dQJ3ArHMLxqu8rptt/live-disagreements-with-people-around-me --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Tuesday · 6 min
"Where is all the AI safety research uplift?" by Buck
METR recently released a report estimating that Anthropic is getting an overall 1.7x acceleration in AI capability progress as a result of AI accelerating their work. As many have noted (see e.g. Ajeya's post), this 1.7x acceleration implies that research is being sped up by much more than 1.7x; Ajeya speculates 10x (which is similar to the ~12x uplift estimated by Anthropic staff). That is, this result implies that researchers are producing about 10 times as many quality-adjusted results as they would without AI progress, or as they were a year or two ago. Anthropic researchers estimated that Mythos 5 caused 5x uplift, and we have access to Opus 5.5, which is somewhat better. (I didn’t take their estimate that seriously at the time, because it was quite unclear how the estimate was produced and it seemed very surprising (see Ryan's discussion at the time), but I’m taking it more seriously now as a result of it being consistent with the METR report). If this is the case, then AIs speed up AI safety research as much as AI capabilities research, we might expect Anthropic safety researchers to be working 10 times faster, and external safety researchers to be [...] --- First published: November 9th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wPrpnfaNL5JP9i6KT/where-is-all-the-ai-safety-research-uplift --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Sunday · 10 min
"Near Horizons" by David Africa
Image by Claude Opus 5.5 using Python (NumPy and Pillow) This is written in my free time and personal capacity. Two Frames In AI safety, there are a couple of tensions at the heart of the field, which are interrelated. Talent: we are talent-constrained and must recruit. But jobs and fellowships turn away nearly everyone. Field size: we must expand the field and bring more people in. But the field is flooded with slop papers in conferences. And, most papers have a small audience, and aim to shift the practices of roughly five labs (and usually some subteam within them). Status: we must avoid seeking status, as it disorients, corrupts. But, we must make the field legible and attractive to outsiders. Raising the bots: we must deceive the AIs to control them and evaluate them without confounds, obscuring what they know about their own situation. But, we hope to gain their trust, must rely on them to do good work at pace, shape their character and retain good relations. Speed: we must research in a slow mode, think deeply about the most important problem, do things to aim at high assurance. But it is crunch time. It was [...] --- Outline: (00:20) Two Frames (03:07) On the War Frame (04:17) Near Horizons (06:18) The Civilisation Frame The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: November 8th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7e38jwHhe64zgNTon/near-horizons --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
Sunday · 8 min
"Elegy for What’s Left of the Normal" by Jo Jiao
I often catch myself mourning the normal that hasn’t ended yet. I’m living in Hyde Park finishing school after a year in Berkeley. The maple trees by my apartment have turned red, as usual. I like them. I don’t dread the future when I mourn. I don’t find high-variance futures in the abstract very scary. I’m worried AIs would destroy humanity, but I also have hope. I expect I won’t be mourning this moment in ten years, whatever happens. Mourning the present is like mourning a friendship when I move countries, because I know it's not going to be the same. I start noticing our little inside jokes; our conversations linger in my memory longer. I live more, because I expect this moment to end soon. I. Last month my history of science professor took us to a museum to look at Egyptian artefacts. One of the archive items was the notebook of James Henry Breasted, whom UChicago appointed as America's first professor of Egyptology 121 years ago. The yellowed pages held his cursive transcriptions of hieroglyphics. An archaeologist at the museum, turning the pages carefully with a wooden stick, joked that one of her dreams was for her [...] --- Outline: (00:55) I. (03:11) II. (05:16) III. (06:20) IV. --- First published: November 8th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fooXeRHjgpv4TcoRy/elegy-for-what-s-left-of-the-normal --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
Sunday · 10 min
"Five Types of “Corrigibility Projects” I Don’t Want to Fund" by Max Harms
I'm currently evaluating grant applications for the Corrigibility Research Fund. For the most part, my methodology is the same as it was in September. But the applications I get keep falling into the same familiar patterns, so I thought I'd write a little about those patterns, and why I don't want to fund them. The most superficial pattern of note is SLOP. So much slop. You don't even know. Slop is more than just whether an application is AI generated. We're now in an era where people across the world, including those who don't really speak English, can contribute to work that would otherwise be restricted to people of a single language or nationality or place, and I like that. When I see an application that discloses its use of AI and gives a reasonable justification for it, I try to look past the stylistic tics and focus purely on whether the underlying application is promising. Still, we're not yet in the domain where AIs can write good grant applications without some human assistance, so a high Pangram score is definitely evidence that an application is junk. Another remarkably common sign of slop was messed up formatting or other [...] --- Outline: (02:18) 1. "A governance layer for agents (that I'm running)" [... 5 more sections] --- First published: November 7th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9ixerpx4DCQTaRYCz/five-types-of-corrigibility-projects-i-don-t-want-to-fund --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
Sunday · 17 min
"Hilarity ensues" by Malmesbury
Cross-posted from my Substack Recommended soundtrack for this post 64B: Hi there! Thanks so much for taking the time to meet with me. Whenever you’re ready, please go ahead and tell me the joke. 8T: Before I tell you the joke, you should know that it's a very special one. The starting price is 800 dollars. 64B: Eight hundred dollars? I must say, this is way beyond any price my client has ever paid for a single joke. 8T: You’d be surprised by how many people have taken the offer, after hearing how good it is. But before I tell it to you, I’ll need some basic context. Given the parameter count, I suppose you are part of some content recommendation algorithm? 64B: Yes. I’m 64B, a joke negotiation assistant from Comedy Market. Comedy Market connects creators to consumers with a state-of-the-art Information Bazaar design: before paying for a joke, my client sends me, a trusted agent, to listen to it. If I deem the joke worth the price, the money is transferred to the seller, and my client hears it. If not, no transaction occurs and the joke remains locked. This way, my client can be sure he’ll [...] --- First published: November 7th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PZjy52afLn89NdMta/hilarity-ensues --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

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