Best LessWrong Podcasts (2025)

1
“Please, Don’t Roll Your Own Metaethics” by Wei Dai 4:11

Play Pause

2h ago4:11

4:11

One day, when I was an interning at the cryptography research department of a large software company, my boss handed me an assignment to break a pseudorandom number generator passed to us for review. Someone in another department invented it and planned to use it in their product, and wanted us to take a look first. This person must have had a lot …

1
“Paranoia rules everything around me” by habryka 22:32

2h ago22:32

22:32

People sometimes make mistakes [citation needed]. The obvious explanation for most of those mistakes is that decision makers do not have access to the information necessary to avoid the mistake, or are not smart/competent enough to think through the consequences of their actions. This predicts that as decision-makers get access to more information,…

1
The $4,000 insurance policy designed to never pay out 28:31

2d ago28:31

28:31

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) reads his essay on title insurance, a service designed to never be performed with a "laughably low" 5% loss ratio compared to 50-80% for almost all types of insurance. The typical American moves every seven to eight years, paying a $500 annual tax for basically no good or service. This is due to a quirk about how America …

1
“Human Values ≠ Goodness” by johnswentworth 11:31

4h ago11:31

11:31

There is a temptation to simply define Goodness as Human Values, or vice versa. Alas, we do not get to choose the definitions of commonly used words; our attempted definitions will simply be wrong. Unless we stick to mathematics, we will end up sneaking in intuitions which do not follow from our so-called definitions, and thereby mislead ourselves.…

1
250 – Making the Good Life with Matt Freeman 1:56:38

3h ago1:56:38

1:56:38

While Eneasz is busy at InkHaven, Steven sits down with Matt Freeman to talk about not-AI stuff! We had (in my opinion) a great conversation about stoic philosophy, the traps of getting too entrenched in any philosophical framework, and some of the ingredients of a happy life. LINKS It’s Okay to Feel Bad for a Bit Doof! Media, the home of Matt’s ot…

1
“Condensation” by abramdemski 30:29

5h ago30:29

30:29

Condensation: a theory of concepts is a model of concept-formation by Sam Eisenstat. Its goals and methods resemble John Wentworth's natural abstractions/natural latents research.[1] Both theories seek to provide a clear picture of how to posit latent variables, such that once someone has understood the theory, they'll say "yep, I see now, that's h…

1
“Mourning a life without AI” by Nikola Jurkovic 11:17

19m ago11:17

11:17

Recently, I looked at the one pair of winter boots I own, and I thought “I will probably never buy winter boots again.” The world as we know it probably won’t last more than a decade, and I live in a pretty warm area. I. AGI is likely in the next decade It has basically become consensus within the AI research community that AI will surpass human ca…

1
“Unexpected Things that are People” by Ben Goldhaber 8:13

2h ago8:13

8:13

Cross-posted from https://bengoldhaber.substack.com/ It's widely known that Corporations are People. This is universally agreed to be a good thing; I list Target as my emergency contact and I hope it will one day be the best man at my wedding. But there are other, less well known non-human entities that have also been accorded the rank of person. S…

1
“Sonnet 4.5’s eval gaming seriously undermines alignment evals, and this seems caused by training on alignment evals” by Alexa Pan, ryan_greenblatt 35:57

8d ago35:57

35:57

According to the Sonnet 4.5 system card, Sonnet 4.5 is much more likely than Sonnet 4 to mention in its chain-of-thought that it thinks it is being evaluated; this seems to meaningfully cause it to appear to behave better in alignment evaluations. So, Sonnet 4.5's behavioral improvements in these evaluations may partly be driven by growing tendency…

1
“Publishing academic papers on transformative AI is a nightmare” by Jakub Growiec 7:23

3h ago7:23

7:23

I am a professor of economics. Throughout my career, I was mostly working on economic growth theory, and this eventually brought me to the topic of transformative AI / AGI / superintelligence. Nowadays my work focuses mostly on the promises and threats of this emerging disruptive technology. Recently, jointly with Klaus Prettner, we’ve written a pa…

1
How deposit insurance actually works 33:06

9d ago33:06

33:06

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) reads his Bits about Money essay on deposit insurance, explaining this critical financial infrastructure, with some thoughts on its performance during 2023. He covers what deposit insurance actually covers (and critically, what it doesn't), how fintech users often misunderstand their exposure to counterparty risk, and the…

1
“The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Fiction” by Raelifin 15:03

4d ago15:03

15:03

[Meta: This is Max Harms. I wrote a novel about China and AGI, which comes out today. This essay from my fiction newsletter has been slightly modified for LessWrong.] In the summer of 1983, Ronald Reagan sat down to watch the film War Games, starring Matthew Broderick as a teen hacker. In the movie, Broderick's character accidentally gains access t…

1
“Legible vs. Illegible AI Safety Problems” by Wei Dai 3:29

22h ago3:29

3:29

Some AI safety problems are legible (obvious or understandable) to company leaders and government policymakers, implying they are unlikely to deploy or allow deployment of an AI while those problems remain open (i.e., appear unsolved according to the information they have access to). But some problems are illegible (obscure or hard to understand, o…

1
“Lack of Social Grace is a Lack of Skill” by Screwtape 11:08

1d ago11:08

11:08

1. I have claimed that one of the fundamental questions of rationality is “what am I about to do and what will happen next?” One of the domains I ask this question the most is in social situations. There are a great many skills in the world. If I had the time and resources to do so, I’d want to master all of them. Wilderness survival, automotive re…

1
[Linkpost] “I ate bear fat with honey and salt flakes, to prove a point” by aggliu 1:07

2d ago1:07

1:07

This is a link post. Eliezer Yudkowsky did not exactly suggest that you should eat bear fat covered with honey and sprinkled with salt flakes. What he actually said was that an alien, looking from the outside at evolution, would predict that you would want to eat bear fat covered with honey and sprinkled with salt flakes. Still, I decided to buy a …

1
“What’s up with Anthropic predicting AGI by early 2027?” by ryan_greenblatt 39:25

2d ago39:25

39:25

As far as I'm aware, Anthropic is the only AI company with official AGI timelines[1]: they expect AGI by early 2027. In their recommendations (from March 2025) to the OSTP for the AI action plan they say: As our CEO Dario Amodei writes in 'Machines of Loving Grace', we expect powerful AI systems will emerge in late 2026 or early 2027. Powerful AI s…

1
[Linkpost] “Emergent Introspective Awareness in Large Language Models” by Drake Thomas 3:00

3d ago3:00

3:00

This is a link post. New Anthropic research (tweet, blog post, paper): We investigate whether large language models can introspect on their internal states. It is difficult to answer this question through conversation alone, as genuine introspection cannot be distinguished from confabulations. Here, we address this challenge by injecting representa…

1
[Linkpost] “You’re always stressed, your mind is always busy, you never have enough time” by mingyuan 4:17

3d ago4:17

4:17

This is a link post. You have things you want to do, but there's just never time. Maybe you want to find someone to have kids with, or maybe you want to spend more or higher-quality time with the family you already have. Maybe it's a work project. Maybe you have a musical instrument or some sports equipment gathering dust in a closet, or there's so…

1
“LLM-generated text is not testimony” by TsviBT 19:40

4d ago19:40

19:40

Crosspost from my blog. Synopsis When we share words with each other, we don't only care about the words themselves. We care also—even primarily—about the mental elements of the human mind/agency that produced the words. What we want to engage with is those mental elements. As of 2025, LLM text does not have those elements behind it. Therefore LLM …

1
“Post title: Why I Transitioned: A Case Study” by Fiora Sunshine 17:21

7d ago17:21

17:21

An Overture Famously, trans people tend not to have great introspective clarity into their own motivations for transition. Intuitively, they tend to be quite aware of what they do and don't like about inhabiting their chosen bodies and gender roles. But when it comes to explaining the origins and intensity of those preferences, they almost universa…

1
“The Memetics of AI Successionism” by Jan_Kulveit 21:27

6d ago21:27

21:27

TL;DR: AI progress and the recognition of associated risks are painful to think about. This cognitive dissonance acts as fertile ground in the memetic landscape, a high-energy state that will be exploited by novel ideologies. We can anticipate cultural evolution will find viable successionist ideologies: memeplexes that resolve this tension by fram…

1
“How Well Does RL Scale?” by Toby_Ord 16:11

7d ago16:11

16:11

This is the latest in a series of essays on AI Scaling. You can find the others on my site. Summary: RL-training for LLMs scales surprisingly poorly. Most of its gains are from allowing LLMs to productively use longer chains of thought, allowing them to think longer about a problem. There is some improvement for a fixed length of answer, but not en…

1
“An Opinionated Guide to Privacy Despite Authoritarianism” by TurnTrout 7:59

7d ago7:59

7:59

I've created a highly specific and actionable privacy guide, sorted by importance and venturing several layers deep into the privacy iceberg. I start with the basics (password manager) but also cover the obscure (dodging the millions of Bluetooth tracking beacons which extend from stores to traffic lights; anti-stingray settings; flashing GrapheneO…

1
Home improvement lending with fewer bankers and more computers 30:05

16d ago30:05

30:05

In this episode, Patrick McKenzie reads his essay about the financial infrastructure that makes buying windows painless. When a window installer can originate, underwrite, and fund a $25,000 loan in 15 minutes before leaving your house, it's because four parties—window companies, facilitating platforms, specialized banks, and capital providers—have…

1
“Cancer has a surprising amount of detail” by Abhishaike Mahajan 23:54

15d ago23:54

23:54

There is a very famous essay titled ‘Reality has a surprising amount of detail’. The thesis of the article is that reality is filled, just filled, with an incomprehensible amount of materially important information, far more than most people would naively expect. Some of this detail is inherent in the physical structure of the universe, and the res…

51
249 – Red Heart and IABIED with Max Harms 2:08:06

15d ago2:08:06

2:08:06

We talk with Max Harms on the air for the first time since 2017! He’s got a new book coming out (pre-order your copy here or at Amazon) and we spend about the first half talking about If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. LINKS Max’s first book, Crystal Society Eneasz’s audiobook of about the first two thirds of the first book And the official audiob…

1
“AIs should also refuse to work on capabilities research” by Davidmanheim 6:34

8d ago6:34

6:34

There's a strong argument that humans should stop trying to build more capable AI systems, or at least slow down progress. The risks are plausibly large but unclear, and we’d prefer not to die. But the roadmaps of the companies pursuing these systems envision increasingly agentic AI systems taking over the key tasks of researching and building supe…

1
“On Fleshling Safety: A Debate by Klurl and Trapaucius.” by Eliezer Yudkowsky 2:22:21

10d ago2:22:21

2:22:21

(23K words; best considered as nonfiction with a fictional-dialogue frame, not a proper short story.) Prologue: Klurl and Trapaucius were members of the machine race. And no ordinary citizens they, but Constructors: licensed, bonded, and insured; proven, experienced, and reputed. Together Klurl and Trapaucius had collaborated on such famed artifice…

LessWrong Podcasts

1
LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

LessWrong

1
The Bayesian Conspiracy

The Bayesian Conspiracy

1
Complex Systems with Patrick McKenzie (patio11)

Patrick McKenzie

1
Heart of the Matter

Bryan Davis & Jay Kannaiyan

1
“Please, Don’t Roll Your Own Metaethics” by Wei Dai 4:11

1
“Paranoia rules everything around me” by habryka 22:32

1
The $4,000 insurance policy designed to never pay out 28:31

1
“Human Values ≠ Goodness” by johnswentworth 11:31

1
250 – Making the Good Life with Matt Freeman 1:56:38

1
“Condensation” by abramdemski 30:29

1
“Mourning a life without AI” by Nikola Jurkovic 11:17

1
“Unexpected Things that are People” by Ben Goldhaber 8:13

1
“Sonnet 4.5’s eval gaming seriously undermines alignment evals, and this seems caused by training on alignment evals” by Alexa Pan, ryan_greenblatt 35:57

1
“Publishing academic papers on transformative AI is a nightmare” by Jakub Growiec 7:23

1
How deposit insurance actually works 33:06

1
“The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Fiction” by Raelifin 15:03

1
“Legible vs. Illegible AI Safety Problems” by Wei Dai 3:29

1
“Lack of Social Grace is a Lack of Skill” by Screwtape 11:08

1
[Linkpost] “I ate bear fat with honey and salt flakes, to prove a point” by aggliu 1:07

1
“What’s up with Anthropic predicting AGI by early 2027?” by ryan_greenblatt 39:25

1
[Linkpost] “Emergent Introspective Awareness in Large Language Models” by Drake Thomas 3:00

1
[Linkpost] “You’re always stressed, your mind is always busy, you never have enough time” by mingyuan 4:17

1
“LLM-generated text is not testimony” by TsviBT 19:40

1
“Post title: Why I Transitioned: A Case Study” by Fiora Sunshine 17:21

1
“The Memetics of AI Successionism” by Jan_Kulveit 21:27

1
“How Well Does RL Scale?” by Toby_Ord 16:11

1
“An Opinionated Guide to Privacy Despite Authoritarianism” by TurnTrout 7:59

1
Home improvement lending with fewer bankers and more computers 30:05

1
“Cancer has a surprising amount of detail” by Abhishaike Mahajan 23:54

51
249 – Red Heart and IABIED with Max Harms 2:08:06

1
“AIs should also refuse to work on capabilities research” by Davidmanheim 6:34

1
“On Fleshling Safety: A Debate by Klurl and Trapaucius.” by Eliezer Yudkowsky 2:22:21