LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

It's been about four years since Eliezer Yudkowsky published AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities, a 43-point list of reasons the default outcome from building AGI is everyone dying. A week later, Paul Christiano replied with Where I Agree and Disagree with Eliezer, signing on to about half the list and pushing back on most of the rest. For people who were young and not in the bay area, like me, t...

[Author's note: this post is the narrative version that explains my journey with OCD and how I treated it. The short version provides quick, actionable advice for treating OCD.] The following is the most painful experience I've ever had. Four years ago in the parking lot of my rock climbing gym… …my heart was pumping out of my chest, I was sweating profusely, and an overwhelming sense of...

Epistemic status: Completely schizo galaxy-brained theory Lightcone[1] operates on a "generalist" philosophy. Most of our full-time staff have the title "generalist", and in any given year they work on a wide variety of tasks — from software development on the LessWrong codebase to fixing an overflowing toilet at Lighthaven, our 30,000 sq. ft. campus. One of our core rules is t...

One way intellectual progress stalls is when you are asking the Wrong Questions. Your question is nonsensical, or cuts against the way reality works. Sometimes you can avoid this by learning more about how the world works, which implicitly answers some question you had, but if you want to make real progress you have to develop the skill of Righting a Wrong Question. This is a classic, old-school r...

(The better telling is here. Seriously you should go read it. I've heard this story told in rationalist circles, but there wasn't a post on LessWrong, so I made one) Today is April 15th, Carpathia Day. Take a moment to put forth an unreasonable effort to save a little piece of your world, when no one would fault you for doing less. In the early morning of April 15, the RMS Titanic began...

Epistemic status: All of the western canon must eventually be re-invented in a LessWrong post, so today we are re-inventing modernism. In my post yesterday, I said: Maybe the most important way ambitious, smart, and wise people leave the world worse off than they found it is by seeing correctly how some part of the world is broken and unifying various powers under a banner to fix that problem — on...

Epistemic status: All of the western canon must eventually be re-invented in a LessWrong post. So today we are re-inventing federalism. Once upon a time there was a great king. He ruled his kingdom with wisdom and economically literate policies, and prosperity followed. Seeing this, the citizens of nearby kingdoms revolted against their leaders, and organized to join the kingdom of this great king...

TLDR: I flew to Oregon to investigate Nectome, a brain preservation startup, and talk to their entire team. They’re an ambitious company, looking to grow in a way that no cryonics organization has before. Their procedure is probably much better at saving people than other orgs, and is being offered for as little as $20k until the end of April — a (theoretical) 92% discount. (I bought two.) This ea...

Many people—especially AI company employees [1] —believe current AI systems are well-aligned in the sense of genuinely trying to do what they're supposed to do (e.g., following their spec or constitution, obeying a reasonable interpretation of instructions). [2] I disagree. Current AI systems seem pretty misaligned to me in a mundane behavioral sense: they oversell their work, downplay or fai...

Here are two beliefs that are sort of haunting me right now: Folk who try to push people to uphold principles (whether established ones or novel ones), are kinda an important bedrock of civilization. Also, those people are really annoying and often, like, a little bit crazy And these both feel fairly important. I’ve learned a lot from people who have some kind of hobbyhorse about how society is tr...

One particularly pernicious condition is low morale. Morale is, roughly, "the belief that if you work hard, your conditions will improve." If your morale is low, you can't push through adversity. It's also very easy to accidentally drop your morale through standard rationalist life-optimization. It's easy to optimize for wellbeing and miss out on the factors which affect m...

It turns out that Anthropic accidentally trained against the chain of thought of Claude Mythos Preview in around 8% of training episodes. This is at least the second independent incident in which Anthropic accidentally exposed their model's CoT to the oversight signal. In more powerful systems, this kind of failure would jeopardize safely navigating the intelligence explosion. It's cruci...

This post assumes Anthropic isn't lying: Mythos is the current SOTA Mythos is potent[1] Anthropic will not make it publicly available un-nerfed[2] Anthropic will have a select few companies use it as part of project glasswing[3] to improve cybersecurity or whatever Since the release of ChatGPT, at any given time, anyone on the planet with a few bucks could access the current most capable AI m...

There's a quote I read as a kid that stuck with me my whole life: "Remember that all tax revenue is the result of holding a gun to somebody's head. Not paying taxes is against the law. If you don’t pay taxes, you’ll be fined. If you don’t pay the fine, you’ll be jailed. If you try to escape from jail, you’ll be shot." -- P. J. O'Rourke. At first I took away the libertarian...

Epistemic status: I think this is true but don't think this post is a very strong argument for the case, or particularly interesting to read. But I had to get 500 words out! I think the 2013 conversation is interesting reading as a piece of history, separate from the top-level question, and recommend reading that. I think many people have a relationship with Anthropic that is premised on a fa...

Before I had a baby I was pretty agnostic about the idea of daycare. I could imagine various pros and cons but I didn’t have a strong overall opinion. Then I started mentioning the idea to various people. Every parent I spoke to brought up a consideration I hadn’t thought about before—the illnesses. A number of parents, including family members, told me they had sent their baby to daycare only for...

Anthropic's system card for Mythos Preview says: It's unclear how we should interpret this. What do they mean by productivity uplift? To what extent is Anthropic's institutional view that the uplift is 4x? (Like, what do they mean by "We take this seriously and it is consistent with our own internal experience of the model.") One straightforward interpretation is: AI syste...

Or, for that matter, anything else. This post is meant to be two things: a PSA about LessWrong's current security posture, from a LessWrong admin[1] an attempt to establish common knowledge of the security situation it looks like the world (and, by extension, you) will shortly be in Claude Mythos was announced yesterday. That announcement came with a blog post from Anthropic's Frontier R...

In this post, I'll go through some of my best guesses for the current situation in AI as of the start of April 2026. You can think of this as a scenario forecast, but for the present (which is already uncertain!) rather than the future. I will generally state my best guess without argumentation and without explaining my level of confidence: some of these claims are highly speculative while ot...

epistemic status: confident in the overall picture, substantial quantitative uncertainty about the relative potency of caffeine and paraxanthine tldr: The effects of caffeine consumption last longer than many assume. Paraxanthine is sort of like caffeine that behaves the way many mistakenly believe caffeine behaves. You've probably heard that caffeine exerts its psychostimulatory effects by b...

I've recently updated towards substantially shorter AI timelines and much faster progress in some areas. [1] The largest updates I've made are (1) an almost 2x higher probability of full AI R&D automation by EOY 2028 (I'm now a bit below 30% [2] while I was previously expecting around 15%; my guesses are pretty reflectively unstable) and (2) I expect much stronger short-term per...

The second time Vellam uncovers the conspiracy underlying all of society, he approaches a Keeper. Some of the difference is convenience. Since Vellam reported that he’d found out about the first conspiracy, he's lived in the secret AI research laboratory at the Basement of the World, and Keepers are much easier to come by than when he was a quality control inspector for cheese. But Vellam is...

Dateline SAN FRANCISCO, Ca., 24 March 2026— A hearing was held on a motion for a preliminary injunction in the case of Anthropic PBC v. U.S. Department of War et al. in Courtroom 12 on the 19th floor of the Phillip Burton Federal Building, the Hon. Judge Rita F. Lin presiding. About 35 spectators in the gallery (journalists and other members of the public, including the present writer) looked on a...

Is the US a ruthless cognitive meritocracy that reliably promotes outlier talent? VB Knives defended that claim in a Twitter argument against Living Room Enjoyer that got my attention. [1] Knives argued that if you have a 150 IQ, you'll be a National Merit Scholar, which "at a minimum" gets you a free ride at a state flagship university, from which you can proceed to law school, med...

It's Summer of 2025. I’m standing in a grass covered field on the longest day of the year. A friend of mine walks towards me, holding his newborn son. “Hey, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but you were pretty instrumental in this kid existing. We read your blog post on polygenic embryo screening back in 2023 and decided to go through IVF to have him as a result.” He hesitates for a mome...