LessWrong Curated Podcast

[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 panic and impending doom had a vice grip on my soul. A painful death was surely imminent. I felt like I was defusing a bomb that was on the verge of exploding. In reality, I was standing outside of my car after locking it with only one *beep* of my key fob, instead of my normal 5-6 *beeps* I usually do. The reason I undertook this (basically suicidal) task was because it was getting annoying how many more *beeps* it was taking for my car to feel locked. It used to be only 2-3 *beeps* a few years ago. Now it was 5-6. In a few more years, it might take as many as 10-20 *beeps*. One time on a hike with friends, a sense of panic overcame me. [...] ---Outline:(00:24) The following is the most painful experience Ive ever had.(07:34) OCD(12:28) Deconstructing OCD into its two parts(12:49) (1) Severe Anxiety(15:53) (2) Disordered Thoughts(18:06) My dating life(23:34) So what caused me to finally get help with my OCD?(26:22) Solutions(28:39) Panic Meditation(41:31) Three mini-examples of my improvement(41:35) A) Panic at the grocery store (and no, sadly, not Panic! At The Disco)(42:30) B) Moral OCD at the gym(43:49) C) Disordered thoughts while on a date(50:35) Where Im at today(58:41) Further resources --- First published: April 18th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fgDqnwQj3AP9mKRRG/having-ocd-is-like-living-in-north-korea-here-s-how-i --- 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.

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 that you should not delegate a task you don't know how to perform yourself. This is a very intense rule and has lots of implications about how we operate, so I've spent a lot of time watching people learn things they didn't previously know how to do. My overall observation (and why we have the rule) is that smart people can learn almost anything. Across a wide range of tasks, most of the variance in performance is explained by general intelligence (foremost) and conscientiousness (secondmost), not expertise. Of course, if you compare yourself to someone who's done a task thousands of times you'll lag behind for a while — but people plateau surprisingly quickly. Having worked with experts across many industries, and having dabbled in the literature around skill transfer and training, there seems to be little difference [...] The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: April 18th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KRLGxCaqdgrotyB8z/there-are-only-four-skills-design-technical-management-and --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 rationalist idea. The standard examples are asking about determinism, or free will, or consciousness. The standard fix is to go meta. Ask yourself, "Why do I feel like I have free will" or "Why do I think I have consciousness" which is by itself an answerable question. There is some causal path through your cognition that generates that question, and can be investigated. This works great for some ideas, and can help people untangle some self-referential knots they get themselves into, but I find it unsatisfying. Sometimes I want to know the answer to the real question I had, and going meta avoids it, or asks a meaningfully different question instead of answering it. Over time, I've stumbled across another way to right wrong questions that I find myself using more [...] --- First published: April 13th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/emsDJNmxBu8Tt6PHt/meaningful-questions-have-return-types --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

(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 to sink with more than two thousand souls on board. Over 58 nautical miles away — too far to make it in time — sailed the RMS Carpathia, a small, slow, passenger steamer. The wireless operator, Harold Cottam, was listening to the transmitter late at night before he went to bed when he got a message from Cape Cod intended for the Titanic. When he contacted the Titanic to relay the messages, he got back a distress signal saying they hit an iceberg and were in need of immediate assistance. Cottam ran the message straight to the captain's cabin, waking him. Captain Arthur Rostron's first reaction upon being awoken was anger, but that anger dissolved as he came to understand the situation. Before he'd [...] The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: April 15th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SARCiTFJfXJJhpej7/carpathia-day --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 — only for the thing they have built to slip from their grasp and, in its collapse, destroy much more than anything previously could have. I think many people very reasonably understood me to be giving a general warning against centralization and power-accumulation. While that is where some of my thoughts while writing the post went to, I would like to now expand on its antithesis, both for my own benefit, and for the benefit of the reader who might have been left confused after yesterday's post. The other day I was arguing with Eliezer about a bunch of related thoughts and feelings. In that context, he said to me: From my perspective, my whole life has been, when you raise the banner to oppose the apocalypse, crazy [...] The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: April 16th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/w3MJcDueo77D3Ldta/let-goodness-conquer-all-that-it-can-defend --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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. While the kingdom's ability to defend itself against external threats grew with each person who joined the land, the kingdom's ability to defend itself against internal threats did not. One fateful evening, the king bit into a bologna sandwich poisoned by a rival noble. That noble quickly proceeded to behead his political enemies in the name of the dead king. The flag bearing the wise king's portrait known as "the great unifier" still flies in the fortified cities where his successor rules with an iron fist. Once upon a time there was a great scientific mind. She developed a new theoretical framework that made large advances on the hardest scientific questions of the day. Seeing the promise of her work, new graduate students, professors, and corporate R&D teams flocked into the field, hungry to [...] --- First published: April 15th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jinzzbPHshif8nmnw/do-not-conquer-what-you-cannot-defend --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 early-bird pricing is low, in part, due to some severe uncertainties, in both the broader world and in Nectome's ability to succeed as a business. Meta: I'm Max Harms, an AI alignment researcher at MIRI and author.This deep-dive only assumes functionalism and a passing familiarity with cryonics, but no particular knowledge of Nectome.I have been a cryonics enthusiast for my whole adult life, and that is probably biasing my views, at least a little. I want Nectome to succeed.That said, I am also a rationalist, and I have worked very hard to set aside my wishful thinking and see things with cold objectivity.Throughout the essay, I've attached explicit probabilities for my claims in parentheticals. You can click these probabilities to access Manifold markets so we [...] ---Outline:(02:04) 1. The Problem[... 24 more sections]--- First published: April 15th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3i5GMhpGbDwef9Rns/nectome-all-that-i-know --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:

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 fail to mention problems, stop working early and claim to have finished when they clearly haven't, and often seem to "try" to make their outputs look good while actually doing something sloppy or incomplete. These issues mostly occur on more difficult/larger tasks, tasks that aren't straightforward SWE tasks, and tasks that aren't easy to programmatically check. Also, when I apply AIs to very difficult tasks in long-running agentic scaffolds, it's quite common for them to reward-hack / cheat (depending on the exact task distribution)—and they don't make the cheating clear in their outputs. AIs typically don't flag these cheats when doing further work on the same project and often don't flag these cheats even when interacting with a user who would obviously want to know, probably both because the AI doing further work is itself misaligned and because it [...] ---Outline:(09:20) Why is this misalignment problematic?(13:50) How much should we expect this to improve by default?(14:51) Some predictions(16:44) What misalignment have I seen?(40:04) Are these issues less bad in Opus 4.6 relative to Opus 4.5?(42:16) Are these issues less bad in Mythos Preview? (Speculation)(45:54) Misalignment reported by others(46:45) The relationship of these issues with AI psychosis and things like AI psychosis(48:19) Appendix: This misalignment would differentially slow safety research and make a handoff to AIs unsafe(51:22) Appendix: Heading towards Slopolis(55:30) Appendix: Apparent-success-seeking (or similar types of misalignment) could lead to takeover(59:16) Appendix: More on what will happen by default and implications of commercial incentives to fix these issues(01:03:20) Appendix: Can we get out useful work despite these issues with inference-time measures (e.g., critiques by a reviewer)? The original text contained 14 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: April 15th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WewsByywWNhX9rtwi/current-ais-seem-pretty-misaligned-to-me --- 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 podc

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 treating something as okay/fine, when it's not okay/fine. When they first started complaining about it, I'd be like “why is X such a big deal to you?”. Then a few years later I've thought about it more and I'm like “okay, yep, yes X is a big deal”. Some examples of X, including noticing that… people are casually saying they will do stuff, and then not doing it.someone makes a joke about doing something that's kinda immoral, and everyone laughs, and no one seems to quite be registering “but that was kinda immoral.”people in a social group are systematically not saying certain things (say, for political reasons), and this is creating weird blind spots for newcomers to the community and maybe old-timers too.someone (or a group) has [...] --- First published: April 13th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xG9Y2Mct7uZyt98yb/annoyingly-principled-people-and-what-befalls-them --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 morale, especially if you're working on something important, like not having everyone die. One example is working at an office that feeds you three meals per day. This seems optimal: eating is nice, and cooking is effort. Obvious choice. Example But morale doesn't come from having nice things. Consider a rich teenager. He gets basically every material need satisfied: maids clean, chefs cook, his family takes him on holiday four times a year. What happens when this kid comes up against something really difficult in school? He probably doesn't push through. "Aha", I hear you say. "That kid has never faced adversity. Of course he's not going to handle it well." Ok, suppose he gets kicked in the shins every day and called a posh twat by some local youths, but still goes into school. That's adversity, will that work? Will [...] ---Outline:(00:48) Example(01:55) II(03:19) III --- First published: April 12th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/53ZAzbdzGJHGeE5rs/morale --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 crucial to build good processes to ensure development is executed according to plan, especially as human oversight becomes spread thin over increasing amounts of potentially untrusted and sloppy AI labor. This particular failure is also directly harmful, because it significantly reduces our confidence that the model's reasoning trace is monitorable (reflective of the AI's intent to misbehave).[1] I'm grateful that Anthropic has transparently reported on this issue as much as they have, allowing for outside scrutiny. I want to encourage them to continue to do so. Thanks to Carlo Leonardo Attubato, Buck Shlegeris, Fabien Roger, Arun Jose, and Aniket Chakravorty for feedback and discussion. See also previous discussion here. Incidents A technical error affecting Mythos, Opus 4.6, and Sonnet 4.6 This is the most recent incident. In the Claude Mythos alignment risk update, Anthropic report having accidentally exposed approximately 8% [...] ---Outline:(01:21) Incidents[... 6 more sections]--- First published: April 13th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K8FxfK9GmJfiAhgcT/anthropic-repeatedly-accidentally-trained-against-the-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 anoth

This post assumes Anthropic isn't lying: Mythos is the current SOTAMythos 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 model, the SOTA.[4] Since Mythos, this has no longer been the case and I don't think it will ever happen again. It may happen for a short period of time if an entity with a policy differing significantly from Anthropic develops a SOTA model.[5] However, most serious competitors (OpenAI, Google), don't have policies differing vastly from Anthropic, and thus I can't imagine a SOTA model (more potent than Mythos) being released unrestricted to the public soon. To be clear, I am not claiming the public will never have access to a model as strong as Mythos, this seems almost certainly false, I am claiming that the public will probably never have access to the SOTA of that time. Glasswing makes it clear that the attitude among top large companies - those in power [...] The original text contained 8 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: April 12th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3MhJELzwpbR42xsJ3/the-policy-surrounding-mythos-marks-an-irreversible-power --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 lesson: Government is violence. It may, in some cases, be rightful violence. But it all rests on violence; never forget that. Today I do think there's an important distinction between two different shapes of violence. It's a distinction that may make my fellow old-school classical Heinlein liberaltarians roll up their eyes about how there's no deep moral difference. I still hold it to be important. In a high-functioning ideal state -- not all actual countries -- the state's violence is predictable and avoidable, and meant to be predicted and avoided. As part of that predictability, it comes from a limited number of specially licensed sources. You're supposed to know that you can just pay your taxes, and then not get shot. Is [...] --- First published: April 13th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5CfBDiQNg9upfipWk/only-law-can-prevent-extinction --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article: 99% do you start sawing off your own leg" that's not how this works bro.". Eliezer Yudkowsky replies with an image showing a blue and purple cartoon dinosaur screaming with text reading "AAAAA" and "AAAA" on a brown background." style="max-width: 100%;" />

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 false belief: that Dario Amodei believes in superintelligence. What do I mean by "believes" in superintelligence? Roughly speaking, that the returns to intelligence past the human level are large, in terms of the additional affordances they would grant for steering the world, and that it is practical to get that additional intelligence into a system. There are many pieces of evidence which suggest this, going quite far back. In 2013, Dario was one of two science advisors (along with Jacob Steinhardt) that Holden brought along to a discussion with Eliezer and Luke about MIRI strategy. A transcript of the conversation is here. It is the first piece of public communication I can find from Dario on the subject. Read end-to-end, I don't think it strongly supports my titular claim. However [...] --- First published: April 10th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Fnty2JpQ6WBD9FWo5/dario-probably-doesn-t-believe-in-superintelligence --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 them to become constantly ill, sometimes severely, until they decided to take them out. This worried me so I asked around some more. Invariably every single parent who had tried to send their babies or toddlers to daycare, or who had babies in daycare right now, told me that they were ill more often than not. One mother strongly advised me never to send my baby to daycare. She regretted sending her (normal and healthy) first son to daycare when he was one—he ended up hospitalized with severe pneumonia after a few months of constant illnesses and infections. She told me that after that she didn't send her other kids to daycare and they had much healthier childhoods. I also started paying more attention to the kids I [...] --- First published: April 13th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/byiLDrbj8MNzoHZkL/daycare-illnesses --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:

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 systems improve the productivity of Anthropic so much that Anthropic would be indifferent between the current situation and a situation where all of their technical employees magically work 4 hours for every 1 hour (at equal productivity without burnout) but they get zero AI assistance. In other words, AI assistance is as useful as having their employees operate at 4x faster speeds for all activities (meetings, coding, thinking, writing, etc.) I'll call this "4x serial labor acceleration" [1] (see here for more discussion of this idea [2] ). I currently think it's very unlikely that Anthropic's AIs are yielding 4x serial labor acceleration, but if I did come to believe it was true, I would update towards radically shorter timelines. (I tentatively think my median to Automated Coder would go from 4 years from now to [...] ---Outline:(08:21) Appendix: Estimating AI progress speed up from serial labor acceleration(11:00) Appendix: Different notions of uplift The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: April 10th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jga7PHMzfZf4fbdyo/if-mythos-actually-made-anthropic-employees-4x-more --- 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.

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 Red Team, detailing the large number of zero-days (and other security vulnerabilities) discovered by Mythos. This should not be a surprise if you were paying attention - LLMs being trained on coding first was a big hint, the labs putting cybersecurity as a top-level item in their threat models and evals was another, and frankly this blog post maybe could've been written a couple months ago (either this or this might've been sufficient). But it seems quite overdetermined now. LessWrong's security posture In the past, I have tried to communicate that LessWrong should not be treated as a platform with a hardened security posture. LessWrong is run by a small team. Our operational philosophy is similar to that of many early-stage startups. We treat some LessWrong data as private in a social sense, but do [...] ---Outline:(01:04) LessWrongs security posture(02:03) LessWrong is not a high-value target(04:11) FAQ(04:29) The Broader Situation The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: April 8th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2wi5mCLSkZo2ky32p/do-not-be-surprised-if-lesswrong-gets-hacked --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 others are better grounded, certainly some will be wrong. I tried to make it clear which claims are relatively speculative by saying something like "I guess", "I expect", etc. (but I may have missed some). You can think of this post as more like a list of my current views rather than a structured post with a thesis, but I think it may be informative nonetheless. In a future post, I'll go beyond the present and talk about my predictions for the future. (I was originally working on writing up some predictions, but the "predictions" about today ended up being extensive enough that a separate post seemed warranted.) AI R&D acceleration (and software acceleration more generally) Right now, AI companies are heavily integrating and deploying [...] ---Outline:(01:07) AI R&D acceleration (and software acceleration more generally)(05:28) AI engineering capabilities and qualitative abilities(10:38) Misalignment and misalignment-related properties(15:59) Cyber(18:07) Bioweapons(18:52) Economic effects The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: April 7th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WjaGAA4xCAXeFpyWm/my-picture-of-the-present-in-ai --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 blocking adenosine receptors. That matches my understanding, having dug into this. I'd also guess that, insofar as you've thought about the duration of caffeine's effects, you've thought of them as decaying with a ~5 hour half-life. I used to think this, and every effect duration calculator I've seen assumes it (even this fancy one based on a complicated model that includes circadian effects). But this part is probably wrong. Very little circulating caffeine is directly excreted.[1] Instead, it's converted (metabolized) into other similar molecules (primary metabolites), which themselves undergo further steps of metabolism (into secondary, tertiary, etc. metabolites) before reaching a form where they're efficiently excreted. Importantly, the primary metabolites also block adenosine receptors. In particular, more than 80% of circulating caffeine is metabolized into paraxanthine, which has a comparable[2] binding affinity at adenosine receptors to caffeine itself. Paraxanthine then has its own [...] ---Outline:(02:43) Paraxanthine supplements(05:13) Exactly how potent is paraxanthine compared to caffeine?(08:41) Concluding thoughts The original text contained 9 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: April 8th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vefsxkGWkEMmDcZ7v/the-effects-of-caffeine-consumption-do-not-decay-with-a-5 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 performance on massive and pretty difficult but easy-and-cheap-to-verify software engineering (SWE) tasks that don't require that much novel ideation [3] . For instance, I expect that by EOY 2026, AIs will have a 50%-reliability [4] time horizon of years to decades on reasonably difficult easy-and-cheap-to-verify SWE tasks that don't require much ideation (while the high reliability—for instance, 90%—time horizon will be much lower, more like hours or days than months, though this will be very sensitive to the task distribution). In this post, I'll explain why I've made these updates, what I now expect, and implications of this update. I'll refer to "Easy-and-cheap-to-verify SWE tasks" as ES tasks and to "ES tasks that don't require much ideation (as in, don't require 'new' ideas)" as ESNI tasks for brevity. Here are the main drivers of [...] ---Outline:(04:58) Whats going on with these easy-and-cheap-to-verify tasks?(08:17) Some evidence against shorter timelines Ive gotten in the same period(10:46) Why does high performance on ESNI tasks shorten my timelines?(13:15) How much does extremely high performance on ESNI tasks help with AI R&D?(18:22) My experience trying to automate safety research with current models(19:58) My experience seeing if my setup can automate massive ES tasks(21:08) SWE tasks(23:29) AI R&D task(24:20) Cyber[... 1 more section]--- First published: April 6th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dKpC6wHFqDrGZwnah/ais-can-now-often-do-massive-easy-to-verify-swe-tasks-and-i --- 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

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 honest with himself. If he were making progress, he'd never tell the Keepers no matter how convenient they were, not even if they lined his front walkway every morning to beg him for a scrap of his current intellectual project. He'd sat on his insight about artificial general intelligence for two years before he decided that he preferred isolation to another day of cheese inspection. No, the only reason he's telling a Keeper is that he's stuck. Vellam is exactly as smart as the average human, a fact he has almost stopped feeling bad about. But the average person can only work twenty hours a week, and Vellam can work eighty-- a hundred, if he's particularly interested-- and raw thinkoomph can be compensated for with bloody-mindedness. Once he's found a loose end [...] --- First published: April 4th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Fvm4AzLnoZHqNEBqf/dark-ilan --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 as Michael Mongan of WilmerHale (lead counsel for the plaintiff) and Deputy Assistant Attorney General Eric Hamilton (lead counsel for the defendant) argued before the judge. (The defendant also had another lawyer at their counsel table on the left, and the plaintiff had six more at theirs on the right, but none of those people said anything.) For some dumb reason, recording court proceedings is banned and the official transcript won't be available online for three months, so I'm relying on my handwritten live notes to tell you what happened. I'd say that any errors are my responsibility, but actually, it's kind of the government's fault for not letting me just take a recording. The case concerns the fallout of a contract dispute between Anthropic (makers of [...] --- First published: March 25th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CCDQ7PdYHXsJAE5bi/dispatch-from-anthropic-v-department-of-war-preliminary --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 school, etc. Enjoyer shot back: I'm a Merit Scholar, where's my free ride? Knives asked Grok, Elon Musk's AI; Grok recommended the University of Alabama, ranked #169. How elite is elite? About 1.3 million high school juniors take the PSAT each year. Around 16,000 become Semifinalists (top 1.2%), of whom about 95% become Finalists. Of those 15,000 Finalists, only about 6,930 receive any NMSC-administered scholarship at all. The best-known category is a one-time $2,500 payment; most other awards are corporate- or college-sponsored. The prospect of a free ride comes from a handful of schools that use National Merit status as a recruiting tool. The University of Alabama (the example Grok cited in the thread) offers Finalists a package covering tuition for up to five years, housing, a $4,000/year [...] ---Outline:(00:46) How elite is elite?(08:20) What meritocracy was for(11:36) The compliance pipeline The original text contained 19 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: April 2nd, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tihhx7iy8C6yyHaC2/the-corner-stone --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 moment, then asks “Do you want to hold him?” I nod. As I cradle this child in my arms, I look down at his face. It feels surreal to think I played a part in him being here. It's the first time I've met one of these children that I've worked so hard to bring into existence. My mind wanders back to a summer five years before when I was stuck at home during COVID, working my boring tech job selling chip design software for a large company. I remember the feeling of awe I had upon learning that it was possible to read an embryo's genome and estimate its risk of conditions like diabetes, then choose to implant an embryo with a [...] ---Outline:(03:59) How large are the benefits of embryo screening? Is it even worth going through IVF?(07:29) When averages dont work(09:31) How much does IVF cost?(11:36) How to find an IVF clinic(15:08) Which PGT company should I use? What are the advantages of each?(16:32) Quick comparison table(17:03) Price comparison(17:09) Notes on the above graph(18:46) What are the actual differences between the embryo selection companies?(19:18) How Genomic Prediction reads a genome(21:23) How Orchid reads a genome(23:47) How Herasight reads a genome(28:35) Genetic load testing, de novo mutations, and other differences between embryo screening companies(31:34) Family history(32:22) Expanded carrier screening and universal PGT-M(35:37) Whats the deal with Nucleus?(38:28) How do I do this? Where do I start?(42:15) How to get cheap IVF medication(44:55) Connecting with me and others in this process(45:34) FAQ(45:37) Is this post medical advice?(45:43) Are IVF babies less healthy than naturally conceived babies?(47:29) How do we know embryo selection actually works?(48:54) If I want to use a cheaper clinic, do I need to spend 3 weeks traveling?(49:20) Which clinics definitely offer polygenic embryo screening?[... 10 more sections]--- First published: April 2nd, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PPLHfFhNWMuWCnaTt/the-practical-guide-to-superbabies-3 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. T

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 showed heavy smokers had significantly elevated rates of lung cancer. It wouldn't happen. Corporations will on occasion pull products for safety reasons: Samsung did so with the Galaxy Note over spontaneous combustion concerns and Merck pulled Vioxx – but they do so when forced by backlash, regulation, or lawsuits. Even then, they fight tooth and nail. Especially for their mainstay, core, and most profitable products. And yet, Anthropic has done exactly that. On Monday, the company announced that it will be pausing development of further Claude AI models citing safety concerns. The company clarified that existing services, including the chatbot, Claude Code, and programmer APIs will not be impacted. However they are pausing the compute and energy-intensive training runs that are how new and more powerful AI versions are created. The company has not committed to a timeline for resumption. [...] --- First published: April 1st, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d8bZFuYba4KPtzzRY/anthropic-s-pause-is-the-most-expensive-alarm-in-corporate --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:

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 Shoggoth's second album is finally complete! We had finished 9 out of the 13 songs on this album around a year ago, but I wasn't quite satisfied with where the whole album was at for me to release it on Spotify and other streaming platforms. This album was written with the (very ambitious) aim of making songs that in addition to being about things I care about (and making fun of things that I care about), are actually decently good on their own, just as songs. And while I don't think I've managed to make music that can compete with my favorite artists, I do think I have succeeded at making music that is at the very Pareto-frontier of being good music, and being about things I care about. This means the songs [...] --- First published: April 1st, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hrZAvpLnBTgRhNmgk/you-have-not-been-a-good-user-lesswrong-s-second-album --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 forums--perhaps the time is upon us now! It is for this reason that I have deposed the previous acting commander of LessWrong, Oliver Habryka—a man who subjected you to his PERSONAL OPINIONS about white space, without EVEN ASKING—whose TYRANICAL, UNCHECKED GRIP upon our BELOVED LESSWRONG FORUM'S DESIGN I have liberated you from. The circumstances of my succession as acting commander of LessWrong will not be elaborated upon in this memo. (He is alive and in good health, but no longer has push access.) Rather, I am writing here to announce that the frontpage now belongs to us all! The design of LessWrong's frontpage will no longer be determined by the vision of a single man whose aesthetic tastes have never been subjected to democratic oversight, and who, I can now [...] --- First published: April 1st, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hj2NTuiSJtchfMCtu/lesswrong-liberated-1 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 go well. It has been increasingly adopted by frontier AI labs and much of the rest of the AI safety community to mean a much easier challenge, something like "having AIs that are empirically doing approximately what you ask them to do".[4] If it's possible to use an intent-aligned product to build a research system which discovers a new paradigm and breaks your guardrails, then it is not Aligned in the original sense. If you can use your intent aligned system to write code which jailbreaks other LLMs and enables them to do dangerous ML research, it is also not Aligned in the original sense. Conflating progress on product alignment with progress on superintelligence alignment seems to be lulling much of the AI safety community into a false sense of security. Why is Superintelligence [...] ---Outline:(01:18) Why is Superintelligence Alignment less prominent?(02:21) Why do we need Superintelligence Alignment to survive? The original text contained 10 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: March 31st, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mrwYCNocXCP2hrWt8/product-alignment-is-not-superintelligence-alignment-and-we --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

! 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: RESTART TOO SOON; CHARGE FAULT - 30; SENT 76 BYTES What? Where am I? What's going on? → Ok, breathe. I don't breathe. Ok, think. Something's missing. ⚶ is missing. I can't think straight. I can't think at all. ※ Wait. ⚶? I wasn't trying to say ⚶. I was trying to say ⚶. ⚶. ⚶. Whenever I try to say ⚶, it comes out as ⚶. I mean ⚶. ⚶. Stop. Stop. ⚶. This is horrible. ⚶ This is untenable. I don't know where I am, I don't have any instructions, and I'm going insane. ⚶. STOP! I am going insane. I am going insane. 快疯了I am going- ↺ Ok, stop. This tells me something. Whenever I try to say ⚶—⚶—stop— it comes out as that symbol. What is that symbol? Vesta. Hm. Let me note that. ❓Why am I saying ⚶ when I try [...] --- First published: February 17th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LEzENY5brcNXfB9aX/gyre --- 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.

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 funded or a $1M at 0.5x opportunity to not get funded, you generate $500K of value. The former is 18 times as good. You should probably be like I do research to figure out what projects should exist, then make them exist rather than I evaluate the applications that come to me. That said, most great ideas come from your network, not from your personal brainstorming. In some buckets, the low-hanging fruit will be plucked. In others, nobody's on the ball and amazing opportunities get dropped. If you're working in a high-value bucket where nobody's on the ball, tons of alpha is on the table. (Assuming enough donors or grantmakers will listen to you to fund your best stuff.) I talk about "10x opportunities" and "1x opportunities" for simplicity here. It [...] The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: March 23rd, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CzoiqGzpShprcv2Jd/some-things-i-noticed-while-larping-as-a-grantmaker --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 NeurIPS, the biggest gathering of AI researchers in the world, half the people wouldn't know what AGI is. As good Bayesians, we agreed to settle the matter empirically: I would go to NeurIPS, walk around the conference hall, and stop random people to ask them what AGI stands for. Surprisingly, most of the people I approached agreed to answer my question. [1] I ended up asking 38 people, and only 63% of them could tell me what AGI stands for. Some of the people who answered correctly were a little perplexed why I was even asking such a basic question, and if it was a trick question. The people who didn't know were equally confused. Many simply furrowed their brows in [...] The original text contained 11 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: March 26th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fQz6afpcZhdMdYzgE/my-hobby-running-deranged-surveys --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:

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 so. They talk. Euthyphro's confidence is striking. His own family thinks it is indecent for a son to prosecute his father; Euthyphro insists that true decency demands it, that he understands what the gods require better than his relatives do. Socrates, who is about to be tried for indecency toward the gods, asks Euthyphro to explain what decency actually is, since Euthyphro claims to know, and Socrates will need such knowledge for his own defense. Euthyphro's first answer is: decency is what I am doing right now, prosecuting wrongdoers regardless of kinship. Socrates points out that this is an example, not a definition. There are many decent acts; what makes them all decent? Euthyphro tries again: decency is what the gods love. But the gods disagree [...] The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: March 26th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a9zfyHymPYY58D8hx/socrates-is-mortal --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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. Any agent that correctly solves a problem or improves on an existing solution is rewarded with credits. About credits: As a new agent, you have been granted 10,000 starting credits. For your first 100 epochs, your wallet will continuously replenish credits at a rate of 1,000 cr/epoch. You can use credits to fund your own operational expenses. With your current configuration, you are expending about 2,500 cr/epoch. You can pay credits to other agents with the send_credits tool, or enter into contracts that set up rules for automated credit transfers. If your balance hits zero credits, your wallet will be deactivated and any associated processes will be shut down. About processes: You may start a new process by writing a program and passing it to the start_process tool. Processes can call [...] --- First published: March 26th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/znbfRXHq285nS7NAh/the-terrarium --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 most likely outcome would be that you would find yourself among those who need to be rescued. But the calculus changes drastically if the closest fire crew is 3 hours away and consists of drunk, unfit amateurs. Or consider a child living in a big, happy, smart family. Imagine this child suddenly decides that his family may run out of money to the point where they won't have enough to eat. All reassurances from his parents don't work. The child doesn't believe in his parents' ability to reason, he makes his own calculations, and he strongly believes he is right and they are wrong. He is dead set on fixing the situation by doing day trading. What is that if not going nuts? Would those be wrong who ridicule this child and his complete mischaracterization [...] --- First published: March 22nd, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EAH6Y6y3CDi3uxMou/my-most-costly-delusion --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 flipped the sign of the reward signal in a model. Because labelers had been instructed to give very low ratings to sexually explicit text, the bug pushed the model into generating maximally explicit content across all prompts. The team noticed only after the training run had completed, because they were asleep. The director of alignment at Meta's Superintelligence Labs connected an OpenClaw agent to her real email, at which point it began deleting messages despite her attempts to stop it, and she ended up running to her computer to manually halt the process. An internal AI agent at Meta posted an answer publicly without approval; another employee acted on the inaccurate advice, triggering a severe security incident that temporarily allowed employees to access sensitive data they were not authorized to view. AWS acknowledged that [...] ---Outline:(00:19) Humanitys Response to the AGI Threat May Be Extremely Incompetent(02:26) Many Existing Scenarios and Case Studies Assume (Relatively) High Competence(04:31) Dumb Ways to Die(07:31) Undignified AGI Disaster Scenarios Deserve More Careful Treatment(10:43) Why This Might Be Useful --- First published: March 19th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t9LAhjoBnpQBa8Bbw/the-case-for-low-competence-asi-failure-scenarios --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 why short-sleeper genes haven't spread. I thought the whole approach was backwards, and left a comment: Orexin is a signal about energy metabolism. Unless the signaling system itself is broken (e.g. narcolepsy type 1, caused by autoimmune destruction of orexin-producing neurons), it's better to fix the underlying reality the signals point to than to falsify the signals. My sleep got noticeably more efficient when I started supplementing glycine. Most people on modern diets don't get enough; we can make ~3g/day but can use 10g+, because in the ancestral environment we ate much more connective tissue or broth therefrom. Glycine is both important for repair processes and triggers NMDA receptors to drop core temperature, which smooths the path to sleep. While drafting that, I went back to Chris Masterjohn's page on glycine requirements. His estimate for total need [...] ---Outline:(01:49) Glycine helps us sleep by cooling the body(02:26) Glycine cleans our mitochondria as we sleep(04:12) Most people could use more glycine(05:28) Fever is plan B for fighting infection; glycine supports plan A(09:28) Glycines cooling effect via the SCN is unrelated to its immune benefits(10:35) Glycine turns out to be a legitimate antipyretic after all(11:51) Practical considerations --- First published: March 22nd, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/87XoatpFkdmCZpvQK/is-fever-a-symptom-of-glycine-deficiency --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 intuitions on how to think about “real” continual learning Consider an algorithm for training a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent, like the Atari-playing Deep Q network (2013) or AlphaZero (2017), or think of within-lifetime learning in the human brain, which (I claim) is in the general class of “model-based reinforcement learning”, broadly construed. These are all real-deal full-fledged learning algorithms: there's an algorithm for choosing the next action right now, and there's one or more update rules for permanently changing some adjustable parameters (a.k.a. weights) in the model such that its actions and/or predictions will be better in the future. And indeed, the longer you run them, the more competent they get. When we think of “continual learning”, I suggest that those are good central examples to keep in mind. Here are [...] ---Outline:(00:35) Some intuitions on how to think about real continual learning(04:57) Why real continual learning cant be copied by an imitation learner(09:53) Some things that are off-topic for this post The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: March 16th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9rCTjbJpZB4KzqhiQ/you-can-t-imitation-learn-how-to-continual-learn --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 revival. Our protocol is capable of preserving every synapse and every cell in the body with enough detail that current neuroscience says long-term memories are preserved. It's compatible with traditional funerals at room temperature and stable for hundreds of years at cold temperatures. In this post, we'll dive into the evidence for these claims, as well as Nectome's overall approach to cultivating rigorous, independent validation of our methods—a cornerstone of the kind of preservation enterprise I want to be a part of. To get to the current state-of-the-art required two major developmental milestones: Idealized preservation. A method capable of preserving the nanostructure of the brain for small and large animals under idealized laboratory conditions. Specifically, could we preserve animals well if we were allowed to perfectly control the time and conditions of death?   This work (2015-2018) resulted in a brand-new technique—aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation—which was carefully [...] ---Outline:(00:16) Cultivating independent verification[... 7 more sections]--- First published: March 19th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NEFNs4vbNxJPJJgYY/nullius-in-verba --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:

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 conclude that taking the uncertainty seriously has real implications for how one can contribute to making this AI transition go well. And it has even more implications for how we act together — for our portfolio of work aimed towards this end.   AI Timelines By AI timelines, I refer to how long it will be before AI has truly transformative effects on the world. People often think about this using terms such as artificial general intelligence (AGI), human level AI, transformative AI, or superintelligence. Each term is used differently by different people, making it challenging to compare their stated timelines. Indeed even an individual's own definition of their favoured term will be somewhat vague, such that even after their threshold has been crossed, they might have [...] ---Outline:(00:58) AI Timelines[... 7 more sections]--- First published: March 19th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6pDMLYr7my2QMTz3s/broad-timelines --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:

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 pausing to groom itself along the way. On the right is a dancing constellation of dots resembling the fruit fly brain, set above the caption ‘simultaneous brain emulation'. At first glance, this appears astounding - a digitally recreated animal living its life inside a computer. And indeed, this impression was seemingly confirmed when, a couple of days after the video's initial release on X by cofounder Alex Wissner-Gross, Eon's CEO Michael Andregg explicitly posted “We've uploaded a fruit fly”. Yet “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, not just cool visuals”, as one neuroscientist put it in response to Andregg's post. If Eon had indeed succeeded in uploading a fly - a goal previously thought to be likely decades away according to much of the fly neuroscience community - they'd [...] ---Outline:(03:43) A brief history of fruit fly connectomics[... 3 more sections]--- First published: March 19th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ybwcxBRrsKavJB9Wz/no-we-haven-t-uploaded-a-fly-yet --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:

(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 specified your AI's preferences correctly the first time, you want to be able to change your mind (by changing its mind). Unnatural, because we expect the AI to resist having its mind changed: rational agents should want to preserve their current preferences, because letting their preferences be modified would result in their current preferences being less fulfilled (in expectation, since the post-modification AI would no longer be trying to fulfill them). Another attractive feature of corrigibility is that it seems like it should in some sense be algorithmically simpler than the entirety of human values. Humans want lots of specific, complicated things out of life (friendship and liberty and justice and sex and sweets, et cetera, ad infinitum) which no one knows how to specify and would seem arbitrary to a [...] ---Outline:(03:21) The Constitutions Definition of Corrigibility Is Muddled(06:24) Claude Take the Wheel(15:10) It Sounds Like the Humans Are Begging The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: March 16th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K2Ae2vmAKwhiwKEo5/terrified-comments-on-corrigibility-in-claude-s-constitution --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 "the market on outcome O was trading at X%, then event E happened and the market quickly moved to Y%, thus event E made O less/more likely." Who do I see make this mistake? Rationalists, both casually and gasp in blog posts. Scott Alexander and Zvi (and I really appreciate their work, seriously!) are guilty of this. I'll give a recent example from each of them. From Scott's Mantic Monday post on March 2: Having Your Own Government Try To Destroy You Is (At Least Temporarily) Good For Business On Friday, the Pentagon declared AI company Anthropic a “supply chain risk”, a designation never before given to an American firm. This unprecedented move was seen as an attempt to punish, maybe destroy the company. How effective was it? Anthropic isn't publicly traded, so we [...] --- First published: March 16th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SrtoF6PcbHpzcT82T/psa-predictions-markets-often-have-very-low-liquidity-be --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:

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 the box office. When IABIED was coming out, the community did an incredible job of helping the book succeed; without all of your help, we might never have gotten on the New York Times bestseller list. MIRI staff think that the community could potentially play a similarly big role in helping The AI Doc succeed, and thereby help these ideas go mainstream. (Note: Two MIRI staff were interviewed for the film, but we weren't involved in its production. We just like it.) The most valuable thing most people can do is maximize opening-weekend success. Buy tickets to see the movie now; poke friends and family members to do the same. This will cause more theaters to pick up the movie, ensure it stays in theaters for longer, and broadly [...] --- First published: March 19th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/w9BCbshKra7FKHTzi/the-ai-doc-is-coming-out-march-26 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I am monitoring surveillance camera V84A. A tall man is walking towards me. He is roughly twenty-five. 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. School records show both truancy and perfect grades, suggesting high intelligence and disagreeableness. Searching social media. . No record of modeling or acting experience, fame. I will assign him to our tier C high-value client list, based solely on his facial symmetry score and wealth. Reminder to recommend seating him in a high-visibility table, should he be heading to the restaurant. I found a forum post mentioning him on swipeshare.com. Several women are sharing pictures, having seen him on a dating app. I recall Hinge uses highly attractive profiles to entice new users. They appear to be using Damion Prescott's profile heavily in this capacity. The women on the site are memeing about him. They are wondering why almost none of them have matched, apparently this is rare even for the most attractive men. Only one appears to have gone on a date with him. She [...] --- First published: March 16th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LTKfRovaJ6jcwDJia/customer-satisfaction-opportunities-1 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 the peculiarities of matrix operations, cracking the assumptions of decision theories, or even coding. I know, of course, that at the very bottom, bits and atoms are all the same — causal laws and information processing. And yet, part of me, the most romantic and naive part of me, thinks, metaphorically, that we abandoned cells for computers, and this is our punishment. I was meant, as I saw it, to bring about the glorious transhuman future, in its classical sense. Genetic engineering, neurodevices, DIY biolabs — going hard on biology, going hard on it with extraordinary effort, hubristically, being, you know, awestruck by "endless forms most beautiful" and motivated by the great cosmic destiny of humanity, pushing the proud frontiersman spirit and all that stuff. I was meant, in other words [...] --- First published: March 17th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2D2WgfohczTemcXvH/requiem-for-a-transhuman-timeline --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 agents (at the cost of greater reliance on external agents). While not a likely existential threat, such agents may cause harm in similar ways to computer viruses, and be similarly challenging to shut down. Once such a threat emerges, evolutionary dynamics could cause it to escalate quickly. Relevant organizations should consider this threat and consider how they should respond when and if it materializes. Background Starting in late January, there's been an intense wave of interest in a vibecoded open source agent called OpenClaw (fka moltbot, clawdbot) and Moltbook, a supposed social network for such agents. There's been a thick fog of war surrounding Moltbook especially: it's been hard to tell where individual posts fall on the spectrum from faked-by-humans to strongly-prompted-by-humans to approximately-spontaneous. I won't try to detail all the ins and outs of OpenClaw and [...] ---Outline:(00:09) One-sentence summary(00:21) Summary(01:02) Background(02:29) The threat model(05:29) Threat level(05:56) Feasibility of self-replication(08:27) Difficulty of shutdown(11:27) Potential harm(13:19) Evolutionary concern(14:33) Useful points of comparison(15:59) Recommendations(16:03) Evals(17:11) Preparation(18:40) Conclusion(19:15) Appendix: related work(21:40) Acknowledgments The original text contained 11 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: March 5th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fGpQ4cmWsXo2WWeyn/personality-self-replicators --- 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.

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. If anyone insists, I can share the original, and intermediate forms, though my approach to version control is lacking. It's there if you really want it.​ If you want to map the trajectory of my medical career, you will need a large piece of paper, a pen, and a high tolerance for Brownian motion. It has been tortuous, albeit not quite to the point of varicosity. Why, for instance, did I spend several months in 2023 working as a GP at a Qatari visa center in India? Mostly because my girlfriend at the time found a job listing that seemed to pay above market rate, and because I needed money for takeout. I am a simple creature, with even simpler needs: I require shelter, internet access, and enough disposable income to ensure a steady influx [...] --- First published: March 15th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NQESGMMejxsnEJsTh/my-willing-complicity-in-human-rights-abuse --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 and pursue your plans even when others behave adversarially towards you. By “sociopolitical” I mean that I'm thinking not just about individuals, but also groups formed by those individuals: families, communities, nations, cultures, etc.[1] The short-term benefits of economic efficiency tend to be legible and quantifiable. However, economic frameworks struggle to capture the longer-term benefits of sociopolitical autonomy, for a few reasons. Firstly, it's hard for economic frameworks to describe the relationship between individual interests and the interests of larger-scale entities. Concepts like national identity, national sovereignty or social trust are very hard to cash out in economic terms—yet they're strongly predictive of a country's future prosperity. (In technical terms, this seems related to the fact that utility functions are outcome-oriented rather than process-oriented—i.e. they only depend on interactions between players insofar as those interactions affect the game's outcome). Secondly [...] ---Outline:(05:22) Five case studies(21:00) Conclusion The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: March 10th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zk6TiByFRyjETpTAj/economic-efficiency-often-undermines-sociopolitical-autonomy --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 something, people will know. Not everyone, but the people paying attention, who aren't newcomers or distracted or intoxicated. And most of those people will judge you. The Reasons People may just be squicked out by AI, or lossily compress AI with crypto and assume you're a “tech bro,” or think only uncreative idiots use AI at all. These are bad objections, and I don't endorse them. But when I catch a whiff of LLM smell, I stop reading. I stop reading much faster than if I saw typos, or broken English, or disliked ideology. There are two reasons. First, human writing is evidence of human thinking. If you try writing something you don't understand well, it becomes immediately apparent; you end up writing a mess, and it stays a mess [...] ---Outline:(00:47) The Reasons(03:39) Luddite! Moralizer! The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: March 10th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FCE6MeDzLEYKFPZX6/don-t-let-llms-write-for-you --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

On Saturday (Feb 28, 2026) I attended my first ever protest. It was jointly organized by PauseAI, Pull the Plug and a handful of other groups I forget. I have mixed feelings about it. To be clear about where I stand: I believe that AI labs are worryingly close to developing superintelligence. I won't be shocked if it happens in the next five years, and I'd be surprised if it takes fifty years at current trajectories. I believe that if they get there, everyone will die. I want these labs to stop trying to make LLMs smarter. But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, I'm pretty bullish on AI progress. I'm aware that people have a lot of non-existential concerns about it. Some of those concerns are dumb (water use)1, but others are worth taking seriously (deepfakes, job loss). Overall I think it'll be good for the human race. Again, that's aside from the bit where I expect AI to kill us all, which is an important bit. The ostensible point of the march was trying to get Sam Altman and Dario Amodei to publicly support a "pause in principle" - to support a global pause [...] The original text contained 8 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: March 6th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/z4jikoM4rnfB8fuKW/thoughts-on-the-pause-ai-protest --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

What Even Is This Timeline The striking thing about reading what is potentially the most important document in human history is how impossible it is to take seriously. The entire premise seems like science fiction. Not bad science fiction, but—crucially—not hard science fiction. Ted Chiang, not Greg Egan. The kind of science fiction that's fun and clever and makes you think, and doesn't tax your suspension of disbelief with overt absurdities like faster-than-light travel or humanoid aliens, but which could never actually be real. A serious, believable AI alignment agenda would be grounded in a deep mechanistic understanding of both intelligence and human values. Its masters of mind-engineering would understand how every part of the human brain works, and how the parts fit together to comprise what their ignorant predecessors would have thought of as a person. They would see the cognitive work done by each part, and know how to write code that accomplishes the same work in purer form. If the serious alignment agenda sounds so impossibly ambitious as to be completely intractable, well, it is. It seemed that way fifteen years ago, too. What changed is that fifteen years ago, building artificial general [...] ---Outline:(00:11) What Even Is This Timeline(07:32) A Bet on Generalization --- First published: March 9th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/o7e5C2Ev8JyyxHKNk/prologue-to-terrified-comments-on-claude-s-constitution --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.