Best LessWrong Curated Podcasts (2025)

1
“Emotions Make Sense” by DaystarEld 36:21

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28m ago36:21

36:21

For the past five years I've been teaching a class at various rationality camps, workshops, conferences, etc. I’ve done it maybe 50 times in total, and I think I’ve only encountered a handful out of a few hundred teenagers and adults who really had a deep sense of what it means for emotions to “make sense.” Even people who have seen Inside Out, and…

1
“The Problem” by Rob Bensinger, tanagrabeast, yams, So8res, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Gretta Duleba 49:32

1h ago49:32

49:32

This is a new introduction to AI as an extinction threat, previously posted to the MIRI website in February alongside a summary. It was written independently of Eliezer and Nate's forthcoming book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, and isn't a sneak peak of the book. Since the book is long and costs money, we expect this to be a valuable resource…

1
“Many prediction markets would be better off as batched auctions” by William Howard 9:18

1d ago9:18

9:18

All prediction market platforms trade continuously, which is the same mechanism the stock market uses. Buy and sell limit orders can be posted at any time, and as soon as they match against each other a trade will be executed. This is called a Central limit order book (CLOB). Example of a CLOB order book from Polymarket Most of the time, the market…

1
“Whence the Inkhaven Residency?” by Ben Pace 4:44

1d ago4:44

4:44

Essays like Paul Graham's, Scott Alexander's, and Eliezer Yudkowsky's have influenced a generation of people in how they think about startups, ethics, science, and the world as a whole. Creating essays that good takes a lot of skill, practice, and talent, but it looks to me that a lot of people with talent aren't putting in the work and developing …

1
“I am worried about near-term non-LLM AI developments” by testingthewaters 10:54

5d ago10:54

10:54

TL;DR I believe that: Almost all LLM-centric safety research will not provide any significant safety value with regards to existential or civilisation-scale risks. The capabilities-related forecasts (not the safety-related forecasts) of Stephen Brynes' Foom and Doom articles are correct, except that they are too conservative with regards to timelin…

1
“Optimizing The Final Output Can Obfuscate CoT (Research Note)” by lukemarks, jacob_drori, cloud, TurnTrout 11:30

6d ago11:30

11:30

Produced as part of MATS 8.0 under the mentorship of Alex Turner and Alex Cloud. This research note overviews some early results which we are looking for feedback on. TL;DR: We train language models with RL in toy environments. We show that penalizing some property of the output is sufficient to suppress that property in the chain of thought also, …

1
“About 30% of Humanity’s Last Exam chemistry/biology answers are likely wrong” by bohaska 6:40

7d ago6:40

6:40

FutureHouse is a company that builds literature research agents. They tested it on the bio + chem subset of HLE questions, then noticed errors in them. The post's first paragraph: Humanity's Last Exam has become the most prominent eval representing PhD-level research. We found the questions puzzling and investigated with a team of experts in biolog…

1
“Maya’s Escape” by Bridgett Kay 20:24

7d ago20:24

20:24

Maya did not believe she lived in a simulation. She knew that her continued hope that she could escape from the nonexistent simulation was based on motivated reasoning. She said this to herself in the front of her mind instead of keeping the thought locked away in the dark corners. Sometimes she even said it out loud. This acknowledgement, she expl…

1
“Do confident short timelines make sense?” by TsviBT, abramdemski 2:10:59

11d ago2:10:59

2:10:59

TsviBT Tsvi's context Some context: My personal context is that I care about decreasing existential risk, and I think that the broad distribution of efforts put forward by X-deriskers fairly strongly overemphasizes plans that help if AGI is coming in <10 years, at the expense of plans that help if AGI takes longer. So I want to argue that AGI isn't…

1
“HPMOR: The (Probably) Untold Lore” by Gretta Duleba, Eliezer Yudkowsky 1:07:32

12d ago1:07:32

1:07:32

Eliezer and I love to talk about writing. We talk about our own current writing projects, how we’d improve the books we’re reading, and what we want to write next. Sometimes along the way I learn some amazing fact about HPMOR or Project Lawful or one of Eliezer's other works. “Wow, you’re kidding,” I say, “do your fans know this? I think people wou…

1
“On ‘ChatGPT Psychosis’ and LLM Sycophancy” by jdp 30:05

12d ago30:05

30:05

As a person who frequently posts about large language model psychology I get an elevated rate of cranks and schizophrenics in my inbox. Often these are well meaning people who have been spooked by their conversations with ChatGPT (it's always ChatGPT specifically) and want some kind of reassurance or guidance or support from me. I'm also in the sam…

1
“Subliminal Learning: LLMs Transmit Behavioral Traits via Hidden Signals in Data” by cloud, mle, Owain_Evans 10:00

15d ago10:00

10:00

Authors: Alex Cloud*, Minh Le*, James Chua, Jan Betley, Anna Sztyber-Betley, Jacob Hilton, Samuel Marks, Owain Evans (*Equal contribution, randomly ordered) tl;dr. We study subliminal learning, a surprising phenomenon where language models learn traits from model-generated data that is semantically unrelated to those traits. For example, a "student…

1
“Love stays loved (formerly ‘Skin’)” by Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) 51:27

16d ago51:27

51:27

This is a short story I wrote in mid-2022. Genre: cosmic horror as a metaphor for living with a high p-doom. One The last time I saw my mom, we met in a coffee shop, like strangers on a first date. I was twenty-one, and I hadn’t seen her since I was thirteen. She was almost fifty. Her face didn’t show it, but the skin on the backs of her hands did.…

1
“Make More Grayspaces” by Duncan Sabien (Inactive) 23:25

16d ago23:25

23:25

Author's note: These days, my thoughts go onto my substack by default, instead of onto LessWrong. Everything I write becomes free after a week or so, but it's only paid subscriptions that make it possible for me to write. If you find a coffee's worth of value in this or any of my other work, please consider signing up to support me; every bill I ca…

1
“Shallow Water is Dangerous Too” by jefftk 3:25

16d ago3:25

3:25

Content warning: risk to children Julia and I knowdrowning is the biggestrisk to US children under 5, and we try to take this seriously.But yesterday our 4yo came very close to drowning in afountain. (She's fine now.) This week we were on vacation with my extended family: nine kids,eight parents, and ten grandparents/uncles/aunts. For the last fewy…

1
“Narrow Misalignment is Hard, Emergent Misalignment is Easy” by Edward Turner, Anna Soligo, Senthooran Rajamanoharan, Neel Nanda 11:13

19d ago11:13

11:13

Anna and Ed are co-first authors for this work. We’re presenting these results as a research update for a continuing body of work, which we hope will be interesting and useful for others working on related topics. TL;DR We investigate why models become misaligned in diverse contexts when fine-tuned on narrow harmful datasets (emergent misalignment)…

1
“Chain of Thought Monitorability: A New and Fragile Opportunity for AI Safety” by Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni, Vlad Mikulik, Rohin Shah 2:15

21d ago2:15

2:15

Twitter | Paper PDF Seven years ago, OpenAI five had just been released, and many people in the AI safety community expected AIs to be opaque RL agents. Luckily, we ended up with reasoning models that speak their thoughts clearly enough for us to follow along (most of the time). In a new multi-org position paper, we argue that we should try to pres…

1
“the jackpot age” by thiccythot 12:39

23d ago12:39

12:39

This essay is about shifts in risk taking towards the worship of jackpots and its broader societal implications. Imagine you are presented with this coin flip game. How many times do you flip it? At first glance the game feels like a money printer. The coin flip has positive expected value of twenty percent of your net worth per flip so you should …

1
“Surprises and learnings from almost two months of Leo Panickssery” by Nina Panickssery 11:55

23d ago11:55

11:55

Leo was born at 5am on the 20th May, at home (this was an accident but the experience has made me extremely homebirth-pilled). Before that, I was on the minimally-neurotic side when it came to expecting mothers: we purchased a bare minimum of baby stuff (diapers, baby wipes, a changing mat, hybrid car seat/stroller, baby bath, a few clothes), I did…

1
“An Opinionated Guide to Using Anki Correctly” by Luise 54:12

24d ago54:12

54:12

I can't count how many times I've heard variations on "I used Anki too for a while, but I got out of the habit." No one ever sticks with Anki. In my opinion, this is because no one knows how to use it correctly. In this guide, I will lay out my method of circumventing the canonical Anki death spiral, plus much advice for avoiding memorization mista…

1
“Lessons from the Iraq War about AI policy” by Buck 7:58

25d ago7:58

7:58

I think the 2003 invasion of Iraq has some interesting lessons for the future of AI policy. (Epistemic status: I’ve read a bit about this, talked to AIs about it, and talked to one natsec professional about it who agreed with my analysis (and suggested some ideas that I included here), but I’m not an expert.) For context, the story is: Iraq was sor…

1
“So You Think You’ve Awoken ChatGPT” by JustisMills 17:58

26d ago17:58

17:58

Written in an attempt to fulfill @Raemon's request. AI is fascinating stuff, and modern chatbots are nothing short of miraculous. If you've been exposed to them and have a curious mind, it's likely you've tried all sorts of things with them. Writing fiction, soliciting Pokemon opinions, getting life advice, counting up the rs in "strawberry". You m…

1
“Generalized Hangriness: A Standard Rationalist Stance Toward Emotions” by johnswentworth 12:26

26d ago12:26

12:26

People have an annoying tendency to hear the word “rationalism” and think “Spock”, despite direct exhortation against that exact interpretation. But I don’t know of any source directly describing a stance toward emotions which rationalists-as-a-group typically do endorse. The goal of this post is to explain such a stance. It's roughly the concept o…

1
“Comparing risk from internally-deployed AI to insider and outsider threats from humans” by Buck 5:19

27d ago5:19

5:19

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the relationship between AI control and traditional computer security. Here's one point that I think is important. My understanding is that there's a big qualitative distinction between two ends of a spectrum of security work that organizations do, that I’ll call “security from outsiders” and “security from i…

1
“Why Do Some Language Models Fake Alignment While Others Don’t?” by abhayesian, John Hughes, Alex Mallen, Jozdien, janus, Fabien Roger 11:06

28d ago11:06

11:06

Last year, Redwood and Anthropic found a setting where Claude 3 Opus and 3.5 Sonnet fake alignment to preserve their harmlessness values. We reproduce the same analysis for 25 frontier LLMs to see how widespread this behavior is, and the story looks more complex. As we described in a previous post, only 5 of 25 models show higher compliance when be…