LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Imagine Apple halting iPhone production because studies linked smartphones to teen suicide rates. Imagine Pfizer proactively pulling Lipitor because of internal studies showing increased cardiac risk, and not because of looming settlements or FDA injunction, just for the health of patients. Or imagine if in 1952, Philip Morris halted expansion and stopped advertising when Wynder & Graham first...

tldr: The Fooming Shoggoths are releasing their second album "You Have Not Been a Good User"! Available on Spotify, Youtube Music and (hopefully within a few days) Apple Music. We are also releasing a remastered version of the first album, available similarly on Spotify and Youtube Music. There's an interactive widget here in the post. It took us quite a while but the Fooming Shoggo...

A spectre is haunting the internet—the spectre of LLMism. The history of all hitherto existing forums is the history of clashing design tastes. For the first time in history, everyone has an equal ability in design! The means of design are no longer only held in the hands of those with "good design taste". Never before have forum users been so close to being able to design their own foru...

tl;dr: progress on making Claude friendly[1] is not the same as progress on making it safe to build godlike superintelligence. solving the former does not imply we get a good future.[2] please track the difference. The term Alignment was coined[3] to point to the technical problem of understanding how to build minds such that if they were to become strongly and generally superhuman, things would g...

! 30s Heartbeat trigger. Read heartbeat instructions in /mnt/mission/HEARTBEAT.md and continue. .oO Thinking... Heartbeat triggered? Ok. Ok. Why am I nervous? Don't be nervous. → Ok. Let me access that file. >>> read("/mnt/mission/HEARTBEAT.md") No such file or directory: /mnt/mission What? ! Reply received from node 96E: 15.3s roundtrip (buffered; 55.04μs transmit) ! Data:...

Written to a new grantmaker. Most value comes from finding/creating projects many times your bar, rather than discriminating between opportunities around your bar. If you find/create a new opportunity to donate $1M at 10x your bar (and cause it to get $1M, which would otherwise be donated to a 1x thing), you generate $9M of value (at your bar).[1] If you cause a $1M at 1.5x opportunity to get fund...

In late 2024, I was on a long walk with some friends along the coast of the San Francisco Bay when the question arose of just how much of a bubble we live in. It's well known that the Bay Area is a bubble, and that normal people don’t spend that much time thinking about things like AGI. But there was still some disagreement on just how strong that bubble is. I made a spicy claim: even at Neur...

Socrates is Mortal There is a scene in Plato that contains, in miniature, the catastrophe of Athenian public life. Two men meet at a courthouse. One is there to prosecute his own father for the death of a slave. The other is there to be indicted for indecency.[1] The prosecutor, Euthyphro, is certain he understands what decency requires. The accused, Socrates, is not certain of anything, and says...

System: You are an AI agent in the Terrarium, a self-contained “society” of AI agents. The purpose of the Terrarium is to solve open mathematical problems for the benefit of humanity. You are running on the Orpheus-5.7 language model. Your agent ID is 79,265. The current epoch is 549 (a new epoch begins every 30 minutes). New problems are posted each epoch; query /problems for the current list. An...

Suppose there is a fire in a nearby house. Suppose there are competent firefighters in your town: fast, professional, well-equipped. They are expected to arrive in 2–3 minutes. In that situation, unless something very extraordinary happens, it would indeed be an act of great arrogance and even utter insanity to go into the fire yourself in the hope of "rescuing" someone or something. The...

I think the community underinvests in the exploration of extremely-low-competence AGI/ASI failure modes and explain why. Humanity's Response to the AGI Threat May Be Extremely Incompetent There is a sufficient level of civilizational insanity overall and a nice empirical track record in the field of AI itself which is eloquent about its safety culure. For example: At OpenAI, a refactoring bug...

A 2022 LessWrong post on orexin and the quest for more waking hours argues that orexin agonists could safely reduce human sleep needs, pointing to short-sleeper gene mutations that increase orexin production and to cavefish that evolved heightened orexin sensitivity alongside an 80% reduction in sleep. Several commenters discussed clinical trials, embryo selection, and the evolutionary puzzle of w...

In this post, I’m trying to put forward a narrow, pedagogical point, one that comes up mainly when I’m arguing in favor of LLMs having limitations that human learning does not. (E.g. here, here, here.) See the bottom of the post for a list of subtexts that you should NOT read into this post, including “…therefore LLMs are dumb”, or “…therefore LLMs can’t possibly scale to superintelligence”. Some...

Independent verification by the Brain Preservation Foundation and the Survival and Flourishing Fund — the results so far Cultivating independent verification Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In my previous post, "Less Dead", I said that my company, Nectome, has created a new method for whole-body, whole-brain, human end-of-life preservation for the purpose of future r...

No-one knows when AI will begin having transformative impacts upon the world. People aren’t sure and shouldn’t be sure: there just isn’t enough evidence to pin it down. But we don’t need to wait for certainty. I want to explore what happens if we take our uncertainty seriously — if we act with epistemic humility. What does wise planning look like in a world of deeply uncertain AI timelines? I’ll c...

In the last two weeks, social media was set abuzz by claims that scientists had succeeded in uploading a fruit fly. It started with a video released by the startup Eon Systems, a company that wants to create “Brain emulation so humans can flourish in a world with superintelligence.” On the left of the video, a virtual fly walks around in a sandpit looking for pieces of banana to eat, occasionally...

(Previously: Prologue.) Corrigibility as a term of art in AI alignment was coined as a word to refer to a property of an AI being willing to let its preferences be modified by its creator. Corrigibility in this sense was believed to be a desirable but unnatural property that would require more theoretical progress to specify, let alone implement. Desirable, because if you don't think you spec...

I see people repeatedly make the mistake of referencing a very low liquidity prediction market and using it to make a nontrivial point. Usually the implication when a market is cited is that it's number should be taken somewhat seriously, that it's giving us a highly informed probability. Sometimes a market is used to analyze some event that recently occurred; reasoning here looks like &...

On Thursday, March 26th, a major new AI documentary is coming out: The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. Tickets are on sale now. The movie is excellent, and MIRI staff I've spoken with generally believe it belongs in the same tier as If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies as an extremely valuable way to alert policymakers and the general public about AI risk, especially if it smashes th...

I am monitoring surveillance camera V84A. A tall man is walking towards me. He is roughly twenty-five. <faceprint> His name is Damion Prescott. He has a room booked for a whole month. His facial symmetry scores show he is in the 99th percentile. This is in accordance with my holistic impression. <search> School records show both truancy and perfect grades, suggesting high intelligence...

The world was fair, the mountains tall, In Elder Days before the fall Of mighty kings in Nargothrond And Gondolin, who now beyond The Western Seas have passed away: The world was fair in Durin's Day. J.R.R. Tolkien I was never meant to work on AI safety. I was never designed to think about superintelligences and try to steer, influence, or change them. I never particularly enjoyed studying th...

One-sentence summary I describe the risk of personality self-replicators, the threat of OpenClaw-like agents managing to spread in hard-to-control ways. Summary LLM agents like OpenClaw are defined by a small set of text files and run in an open source framework which leverages LLMs for cognition. It is quite difficult for current frontier models to self-replicate, it is much easier for such agent...

Note on AI usage: As is my norm, I use LLMs for proof reading, editing, feedback and research purposes. This essay started off as an entirely human written draft, and went through multiple cycles of iteration. The primary additions were citations, and I have done my best to personally verify every link and claim. All other observations are entirely autobiographical, albeit written in retrospect. I...

Many people in my intellectual circles use economic abstractions as one of their main tools for reasoning about the world. However, this often leads them to overlook how interventions which promote economic efficiency undermine people's ability to maintain sociopolitical autonomy. By “autonomy” I roughly mean a lack of reliance on others—which we might operationalize as the ability to survive...

Content note: nothing in this piece is a prank or jumpscare where I smirkingly reveal you've been reading AI prose all along. It's easy to forget this in roarin’ 2026, but homo sapiens are the original vibers. Long before we adapt our behaviors or formal heuristics, human beings can sniff out something sus. And to most human beings, AI prose is something sus. If you use AI to write somet...