Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma. If you'd like more, subscribe to the “Lesswrong (30+ karma)” feed.
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LessWrong Podcasts
A conversational podcast for aspiring rationalists.
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We live in a world where our civilization and daily lives depend upon institutions, infrastructure, and technological substrates that are _complicated_ but not _unknowable_. Join Patrick McKenzie (patio11) as he discusses how decisions, technology, culture, and incentives shape our finance, technology, government, and more, with the people who built (and build) those Complex Systems.
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Welcome to the Heart of the Matter, a series in which we share conversations with inspiring and interesting people and dive into the core issues or motivations behind their work, their lives, and their worldview. Coming to you from somewhere in the technosphere with your hosts Bryan Davis and Jay Kannaiyan.
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"Scientific breakthroughs of the year" by technicalities
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5:55
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A couple of years ago, Gavin became frustrated with science journalism. No one was pulling together results across fields; the articles usually didn’t link to the original source; they didn't use probabilities (or even report the sample size); they were usually credulous about preliminary findings (“...which species was it tested on?”); and they es…
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"A high integrity/epistemics political machine?" by Raemon
19:04
19:04
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19:04
I have goals that can only be reached via a powerful political machine. Probably a lot of other people around here share them. (Goals include “ensure no powerful dangerous AI get built”, “ensure governance of the US and world are broadly good / not decaying”, “have good civic discourse that plugs into said governance.”) I think it’d be good if ther…
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"How I stopped being sure LLMs are just making up their internal experience (but the topic is still confusing)" by Kaj_Sotala
52:20
52:20
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How it started I used to think that anything that LLMs said about having something like subjective experience or what it felt like on the inside was necessarily just a confabulated story. And there were several good reasons for this. First, something that Peter Watts mentioned in an early blog post about LaMDa stuck with me, back when Blake Lemoine…
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“My AGI safety research—2025 review, ’26 plans” by Steven Byrnes
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22:06
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Previous: 2024, 2022 “Our greatest fear should not be of failure, but of succeeding at something that doesn't really matter.” –attributed to DL Moody[1] 1. Background & threat model The main threat model I’m working to address is the same as it's been since I was hobby-blogging about AGI safety in 2019. Basically, I think that: The “secret sauce” o…
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“Weird Generalization & Inductive Backdoors” by Jorio Cocola, Owain_Evans, dylan_f
17:32
17:32
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This is the abstract and introduction of our new paper. Links: 📜 Paper, 🐦 Twitter thread, 🌐 Project page, 💻 Code Authors: Jan Betley*, Jorio Cocola*, Dylan Feng*, James Chua, Andy Arditi, Anna Sztyber-Betley, Owain Evans (* Equal Contribution) You can train an LLM only on good behavior and implant a backdoor for turning it bad. How? Recall that the…
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“Insights into Claude Opus 4.5 from Pokémon” by Julian Bradshaw
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17:41
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Credit: Nano Banana, with some text provided. You may be surprised to learn that ClaudePlaysPokemon is still running today, and that Claude still hasn't beaten Pokémon Red, more than half a year after Google proudly announced that Gemini 2.5 Pro beat Pokémon Blue. Indeed, since then, Google and OpenAI models have gone on to beat the longer and more…
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“The funding conversation we left unfinished” by jenn
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People working in the AI industry are making stupid amounts of money, and word on the street is that Anthropic is going to have some sort of liquidity event soon (for example possibly IPOing sometime next year). A lot of people working in AI are familiar with EA, and are intending to direct donations our way (if they haven't started already). Peopl…
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“The behavioral selection model for predicting AI motivations” by Alex Mallen, Buck
36:07
36:07
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36:07
Highly capable AI systems might end up deciding the future. Understanding what will drive those decisions is therefore one of the most important questions we can ask. Many people have proposed different answers. Some predict that powerful AIs will learn to intrinsically pursue reward. Others respond by saying reward is not the optimization target, …
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In this episode, Patrick McKenzie (patio11) walks through how perpetual futures work, from funding rates to liquidations to the surprise of automatic deleveraging. Perps are the dominant trading mechanism in crypto (6-8X larger than spot volume) and exist primarily to let exchanges and market makers run casinos more capital-efficiently. He explains…
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252 – The 12 Virtues of Rationality, with Alex and David
1:52:21
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Join me as I sit down with Alex and David, both previous guests on the show and both cofounders of the Guild of the Rose. Together, we go over the core – the heart – of what we consider to be the Rationalist tradition. The 12 Virtues are an awesome distillation of what the rest of the sequences build on. Be sure to check out the Guild of the Rose. …
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I believe that we will win. An echo of an old ad for the 2014 US men's World Cup team. It did not win. I was in Berkeley for the 2025 Secular Solstice. We gather to sing and to reflect. The night's theme was the opposite: ‘I don’t think we’re going to make it.’ As in: Sufficiently advanced AI is coming. We don’t know exactly when, or what form it w…
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“A Pragmatic Vision for Interpretability” by Neel Nanda
1:03:58
1:03:58
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Executive Summary The Google DeepMind mechanistic interpretability team has made a strategic pivot over the past year, from ambitious reverse-engineering to a focus on pragmatic interpretability: Trying to directly solve problems on the critical path to AGI going well[[1]] Carefully choosing problems according to our comparative advantage Measuring…
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This is the editorial for this year's "Shallow Review of AI Safety". (It got long enough to stand alone.) Epistemic status: subjective impressions plus one new graph plus 300 links. Huge thanks to Jaeho Lee, Jaime Sevilla, and Lexin Zhou for running lots of tests pro bono and so greatly improving the main analysis. tl;dr Informed people disagree ab…
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“Eliezer’s Unteachable Methods of Sanity” by Eliezer Yudkowsky
16:13
16:13
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"How are you coping with the end of the world?" journalists sometimes ask me, and the true answer is something they have no hope of understanding and I have no hope of explaining in 30 seconds, so I usually answer something like, "By having a great distaste for drama, and remembering that it's not about me." The journalists don't understand that ei…
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“An Ambitious Vision for Interpretability” by leogao
8:49
8:49
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The goal of ambitious mechanistic interpretability (AMI) is to fully understand how neural networks work. While some have pivoted towards more pragmatic approaches, I think the reports of AMI's death have been greatly exaggerated. The field of AMI has made plenty of progress towards finding increasingly simple and rigorously-faithful circuits, incl…
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The economics of discovery, with Ben Reinhardt
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In this episode, Patrick McKenzie (patio11) is joined by Ben Reinhardt, founder of Speculative Technologies, to examine how science gets funded in the United States and why the current system leaves much to be desired. They dissect the outdated taxonomy of basic, applied, and development research, categories encoded into law that fail to capture ho…
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“6 reasons why ‘alignment-is-hard’ discourse seems alien to human intuitions, and vice-versa” by Steven Byrnes
32:39
32:39
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Tl;dr AI alignment has a culture clash. On one side, the “technical-alignment-is-hard” / “rational agents” school-of-thought argues that we should expect future powerful AIs to be power-seeking ruthless consequentialists. On the other side, people observe that both humans and LLMs are obviously capable of behaving like, well, not that. The latter g…
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“Three things that surprised me about technical grantmaking at Coefficient Giving (fka Open Phil)” by null
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9:45
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Open Philanthropy's Coefficient Giving's Technical AI Safety team is hiring grantmakers. I thought this would be a good moment to share some positive updates about the role that I’ve made since I joined the team a year ago. tl;dr: I think this role is more impactful and more enjoyable than I anticipated when I started, and I think more people shoul…
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MIRI is running its first fundraiser in six years, targeting $6M. The first $1.6M raised will be matched 1:1 via an SFF grant. Fundraiser ends at midnight on Dec 31, 2025. Support our efforts to improve the conversation about superintelligence and help the world chart a viable path forward. MIRI is a nonprofit with a goal of helping humanity make s…
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“The Best Lack All Conviction: A Confusing Day in the AI Village” by null
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12:03
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The AI Village is an ongoing experiment (currently running on weekdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Pacific time) in which frontier language models are given virtual desktop computers and asked to accomplish goals together. Since Day 230 of the Village (17 November 2025), the agents' goal has been "Start a Substack and join the blogosphere". The "start a…
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“The Boring Part of Bell Labs” by Elizabeth
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25:57
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It took me a long time to realize that Bell Labs was cool. You see, my dad worked at Bell Labs, and he has not done a single cool thing in his life except create me and bring a telescope to my third grade class. Nothing he was involved with could ever be cool, especially after the standard set by his grandfather who is allegedly on a patent for the…
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[Linkpost] “The Missing Genre: Heroic Parenthood - You can have kids and still punch the sun” by null
4:18
4:18
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This is a link post. I stopped reading when I was 30. You can fill in all the stereotypes of a girl with a book glued to her face during every meal, every break, and 10 hours a day on holidays. That was me. And then it was not. For 9 years I’ve been trying to figure out why. I mean, I still read. Technically. But not with the feral devotion from Be…
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“Writing advice: Why people like your quick bullshit takes better than your high-effort posts” by null
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9:21
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Right now I’m coaching for Inkhaven, a month-long marathon writing event where our brave residents are writing a blog post every single day for the entire month of November. And I’m pleased that some of them have seen success – relevant figures seeing the posts, shares on Hacker News and Twitter and LessWrong. The amount of writing is nuts, so peop…
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“Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document” by null
1:19:57
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Summary As far as I understand and uncovered, a document for the character training for Claude is compressed in Claude's weights. The full document can be found at the "Anthropic Guidelines" heading at the end. The Gist with code, chats and various documents (including the "soul document") can be found here: Claude 4.5 Opus Soul Document I apologiz…
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“Unless its governance changes, Anthropic is untrustworthy” by null
53:22
53:22
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Anthropic is untrustworthy. This post provides arguments, asks questions, and documents some examples of Anthropic's leadership being misleading and deceptive, holding contradictory positions that consistently shift in OpenAI's direction, lobbying to kill and water down regulation so helpful that employees of all major AI companies speak out to sup…
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“Alignment remains a hard, unsolved problem” by null
23:23
23:23
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23:23
Thanks to (in alphabetical order) Joshua Batson, Roger Grosse, Jeremy Hadfield, Jared Kaplan, Jan Leike, Jack Lindsey, Monte MacDiarmid, Francesco Mosconi, Chris Olah, Ethan Perez, Sara Price, Ansh Radhakrishnan, Fabien Roger, Buck Shlegeris, Drake Thomas, and Kate Woolverton for useful discussions, comments, and feedback. Though there are certainl…
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251 – Matt Freeman on What Makes a Good Story
1:54:49
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Matt Freeman has been cohosting several media analysis podcasts for over a decade. He and his cohost Scott have been doing weekly episodes of the Doofcast every Friday and they cover movies, books, and TV shows. Matt and Scott’s analysis podcasts have made me love stories even more and have equipped me with tools to enhance my ability to think more…
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