Best LessWrong Curated Podcasts (2025)

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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“The Value Proposition of Romantic Relationships” by johnswentworth 23:19

a day ago23:19

23:19

What's the main value proposition of romantic relationships? Now, look, I know that when people drop that kind of question, they’re often about to present a hyper-cynical answer which totally ignores the main thing which is great and beautiful about relationships. And then they’re going to say something about how relationships are overrated or some…

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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“It’s hard to make scheming evals look realistic” by Igor Ivanov, dan_moken 7:47

3 days ago7:47

7:47

Abstract Claude 3.7 Sonnet easily detects when it's being evaluated for scheming. Surface‑level edits to evaluation scenarios, such as lengthening the prompts, or making conflict of objectives less salient, do improve realism of evaluation scenarios for LLMs, yet these improvements remain modest. The findings confirm that truly disguising an evalua…

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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[Linkpost] “Social Anxiety Isn’t About Being Liked” by Chipmonk 5:23

4 days ago5:23

5:23

This is a link post. There's this popular idea that socially anxious folks are just dying to be liked. It seems logical, right? Why else would someone be so anxious about how others see them? Show tweet And yet, being socially anxious tends to make you less likeable…they must be optimizing poorly, behaving irrationally, right? Maybe not. What if so…

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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“Truth or Dare” by Duncan Sabien (Inactive) 2:03:21

5 days ago2:03:21

2:03:21

Author's note: This is my apparently-annual "I'll put a post on LessWrong in honor of LessOnline" post. These days, my writing goes on my Substack. There have in fact been some pretty cool essays since last year's LO post. Structural note: Some essays are like a five-minute morning news spot. Other essays are more like a 90-minute lecture. This is …

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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“Meditations on Doge” by Martin Sustrik 17:57

6 days ago17:57

17:57

Lessons from shutting down institutions in Eastern Europe. This is a cross post from: https://250bpm.substack.com/p/meditations-on-doge Imagine living in the former Soviet republic of Georgia in early 2000's: All marshrutka [mini taxi bus] drivers had to have a medical exam every day to make sure they were not drunk and did not have high blood pres…

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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[Linkpost] “If you’re not sure how to sort a list or grid—seriate it!” by gwern 4:37

8 days ago4:37

4:37

This is a link post. "Getting Things in Order: An Introduction to the R Package seriation": Seriation [or "ordination"), i.e., finding a suitable linear order for a set of objects given data and a loss or merit function, is a basic problem in data analysis. Caused by the problem's combinatorial nature, it is hard to solve for all but very small set…

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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“What We Learned from Briefing 70+ Lawmakers on the Threat from AI” by leticiagarcia 31:47

8 days ago31:47

31:47

Between late 2024 and mid-May 2025, I briefed over 70 cross-party UK parliamentarians. Just over one-third were MPs, a similar share were members of the House of Lords, and just under one-third came from devolved legislatures — the Scottish Parliament, the Senedd, and the Northern Ireland Assembly. I also held eight additional meetings attended exc…

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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“Winning the power to lose” by KatjaGrace 3:32

13 days ago3:32

3:32

Have the Accelerationists won? Last November Kevin Roose announced that those in favor of going fast on AI had now won against those favoring caution, with the reinstatement of Sam Altman at OpenAI. Let's ignore whether Kevin's was a good description of the world, and deal with a more basic question: if it were so—i.e. if Team Acceleration would co…

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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[Linkpost] “Gemini Diffusion: watch this space” by Yair Halberstadt 2:16

14 days ago2:16

2:16

This is a link post. Google Deepmind has announced Gemini Diffusion. Though buried under a host of other IO announcements it's possible that this is actually the most important one! This is significant because diffusion models are entirely different to LLMs. Instead of predicting the next token, they iteratively denoise all the output tokens until …

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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“AI Doomerism in 1879” by David Gross 13:05

15 days ago13:05

13:05

I’m reading George Eliot's Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879)—so far a snoozer compared to her novels. But chapter 17 surprised me for how well it anticipated modern AI doomerism. In summary, Theophrastus is in conversation with Trost, who is an optimist about the future of automation and how it will free us from drudgery and permit us to furt…

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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“Consider not donating under $100 to political candidates” by DanielFilan 2:01

20 days ago2:01

2:01

Epistemic status: thing people have told me that seems right. Also primarily relevant to US audiences. Also I am speaking in my personal capacity and not representing any employer, present or past. Sometimes, I talk to people who work in the AI governance space. One thing that multiple people have told me, which I found surprising, is that there is…

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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“It’s Okay to Feel Bad for a Bit” by moridinamael 5:51

20 days ago5:51

5:51

"If you kiss your child, or your wife, say that you only kiss things which are human, and thus you will not be disturbed if either of them dies." - Epictetus "Whatever suffering arises, all arises due to attachment; with the cessation of attachment, there is the cessation of suffering." - Pali canon "He is not disturbed by loss, he does not delight…

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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“Explaining British Naval Dominance During the Age of Sail” by Arjun Panickssery 8:52

21 days ago8:52

8:52

The other day I discussed how high monitoring costs can explain the emergence of “aristocratic” systems of governance: Aristocracy and Hostage Capital Arjun Panickssery · Jan 8 There's a conventional narrative by which the pre-20th century aristocracy was the "old corruption" where civil and military positions were distributed inefficiently due to …

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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“Eliezer and I wrote a book: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” by So8res 6:42

22 days ago6:42

6:42

Eliezer and I wrote a book. It's titled If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Unlike a lot of other writing either of us have done, it's being professionally published. It's hitting shelves on September 16th. It's a concise (~60k word) book aimed at a broad audience. It's been well-received by people who received advance copies, with some endorsement…

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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“Too Soon” by Gordon Seidoh Worley 8:19

22 days ago8:19

8:19

It was a cold and cloudy San Francisco Sunday. My wife and I were having lunch with friends at a Korean cafe. My phone buzzed with a text. It said my mom was in the hospital. I called to find out more. She had a fever, some pain, and had fainted. The situation was serious, but stable. Monday was a normal day. No news was good news, right? Tuesday s…

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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“PSA: The LessWrong Feedback Service” by JustisMills 4:34

23 days ago4:34

4:34

At the bottom of the LessWrong post editor, if you have at least 100 global karma, you may have noticed this button. The button Many people click the button, and are jumpscared when it starts an Intercom chat with a professional editor (me), asking what sort of feedback they'd like. So, that's what it does. It's a summon Justis button. Why summon J…

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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“Orienting Toward Wizard Power” by johnswentworth 8:20

28 days ago8:20

8:20

For months, I had the feeling: something is wrong. Some core part of myself had gone missing. I had words and ideas cached, which pointed back to the missing part. There was the story of Benjamin Jesty, a dairy farmer who vaccinated his family against smallpox in 1774 - 20 years before the vaccination technique was popularized, and the same year Ki…

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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“Interpretability Will Not Reliably Find Deceptive AI” by Neel Nanda 13:15

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about a year ago13:15

13:15

(Disclaimer: Post written in a personal capacity. These are personal hot takes and do not in any way represent my employer's views.) TL;DR: I do not think we will produce high reliability methods to evaluate or monitor the safety of superintelligent systems via current research paradigms, with interpretability or otherwise. Interpretability seems a…

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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“Slowdown After 2028: Compute, RLVR Uncertainty, MoE Data Wall” by Vladimir_Nesov 11:33

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about a year ago11:33

11:33

It'll take until ~2050 to repeat the level of scaling that pretraining compute is experiencing this decade, as increasing funding can't sustain the current pace beyond ~2029 if AI doesn't deliver a transformative commercial success by then. Natural text data will also run out around that time, and there are signs that current methods of reasoning t…

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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“Early Chinese Language Media Coverage of the AI 2027 Report: A Qualitative Analysis” by jeanne_, eeeee 27:35

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about a year ago27:35

27:35

In this blog post, we analyse how the recent AI 2027 forecast by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, and Romeo Dean has been discussed across Chinese language platforms. We present: Our research methodology and synthesis of key findings across media artefacts A proposal for how censorship patterns may provide signal for t…

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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[Linkpost] “Jaan Tallinn’s 2024 Philanthropy Overview” by jaan 1:17

about a year ago1:17

1:17

This is a link post. to follow up my philantropic pledge from 2020, i've updated my philanthropy page with the 2024 results. in 2024 my donations funded $51M worth of endpoint grants (plus $2.0M in admin overhead and philanthropic software development). this comfortably exceeded my 2024 commitment of $42M (20k times $2100.00 — the minimum price of …

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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“Impact, agency, and taste” by benkuhn 15:17

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about a year ago15:17

15:17

I’ve been thinking recently about what sets apart the people who’ve done the best work at Anthropic. You might think that the main thing that makes people really effective at research or engineering is technical ability, and among the general population that's true. Among people hired at Anthropic, though, we’ve restricted the range by screening fo…

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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[Linkpost] “To Understand History, Keep Former Population Distributions In Mind” by Arjun Panickssery 5:42

about a year ago5:42

5:42

This is a link post. Guillaume Blanc has a piece in Works in Progress (I assume based on his paper) about how France's fertility declined earlier than in other European countries, and how its power waned as its relative population declined starting in the 18th century. In 1700, France had 20% of Europe's population (4% of the whole world population…

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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“AI-enabled coups: a small group could use AI to seize power” by Tom Davidson, Lukas Finnveden, rosehadshar 15:22

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about a year ago15:22

15:22

We’ve written a new report on the threat of AI-enabled coups. I think this is a very serious risk – comparable in importance to AI takeover but much more neglected. In fact, AI-enabled coups and AI takeover have pretty similar threat models. To see this, here's a very basic threat model for AI takeover: Humanity develops superhuman AI Superhuman AI…

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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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“Accountability Sinks” by Martin Sustrik 28:50

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about a year ago28:50

28:50

Back in the 1990s, ground squirrels were briefly fashionable pets, but their popularity came to an abrupt end after an incident at Schiphol Airport on the outskirts of Amsterdam. In April 1999, a cargo of 440 of the rodents arrived on a KLM flight from Beijing, without the necessary import papers. Because of this, they could not be forwarded on to …