Best LessWrong Curated Podcasts (2025)

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“Authors Have a Responsibility to Communicate Clearly” by TurnTrout 11:08

Play Pause

2h ago11:08

11:08

When a claim is shown to be incorrect, defenders may say that the author was just being “sloppy” and actually meant something else entirely. I argue that this move is not harmless, charitable, or healthy. At best, this attempt at charity reduces an author's incentive to express themselves clearly – they can clarify later![1] – while burdening the r…

1
“The Industrial Explosion” by rosehadshar, Tom Davidson 31:57

21h ago31:57

31:57

Summary To quickly transform the world, it's not enough for AI to become super smart (the "intelligence explosion"). AI will also have to turbocharge the physical world (the "industrial explosion"). Think robot factories building more and better robot factories, which build more and better robot factories, and so on. The dynamics of the industrial …

1
“Race and Gender Bias As An Example of Unfaithful Chain of Thought in the Wild” by Adam Karvonen, Sam Marks 7:56

5d ago7:56

7:56

Summary: We found that LLMs exhibit significant race and gender bias in realistic hiring scenarios, but their chain-of-thought reasoning shows zero evidence of this bias. This serves as a nice example of a 100% unfaithful CoT "in the wild" where the LLM strongly suppresses the unfaithful behavior. We also find that interpretability-based interventi…

1
“The best simple argument for Pausing AI?” by Gary Marcus 2:00

5d ago2:00

2:00

Not saying we should pause AI, but consider the following argument: Alignment without the capacity to follow rules is hopeless. You can’t possibly follow laws like Asimov's Laws (or better alternatives to them) if you can’t reliably learn to abide by simple constraints like the rules of chess. LLMs can’t reliably follow rules. As discussed in Marcu…

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“Foom & Doom 2: Technical alignment is hard” by Steven Byrnes 56:38

7d ago56:38

56:38

2.1 Summary & Table of contents This is the second of a two-post series on foom (previous post) and doom (this post). The last post talked about how I expect future AI to be different from present AI. This post will argue that this future AI will be of a type that will be egregiously misaligned and scheming, not even ‘slightly nice’, absent some fu…

1
“Proposal for making credible commitments to AIs.” by Cleo Nardo 5:19

8d ago5:19

5:19

Acknowledgments: The core scheme here was suggested by Prof. Gabriel Weil. There has been growing interest in the deal-making agenda: humans make deals with AIs (misaligned but lacking decisive strategic advantage) where they promise to be safe and useful for some fixed term (e.g. 2026-2028) and we promise to compensate them in the future, conditio…

1
“X explains Z% of the variance in Y” by Leon Lang 18:52

11d ago18:52

18:52

Audio note: this article contains 218 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Recently, in a group chat with friends, someone posted this Lesswrong post and quoted: The group consensus on somebody's attractiveness accounted for roughly 60% of the variance i…

1
“A case for courage, when speaking of AI danger” by So8res 10:12

12d ago10:12

10:12

I think more people should say what they actually believe about AI dangers, loudly and often. Even if you work in AI policy. I’ve been beating this drum for a few years now. I have a whole spiel about how your conversation-partner will react very differently if you share your concerns while feeling ashamed about them versus if you share your concer…

1
“My pitch for the AI Village” by Daniel Kokotajlo 13:27

14d ago13:27

13:27

I think the AI Village should be funded much more than it currently is; I’d wildly guess that the AI safety ecosystem should be funding it to the tune of $4M/year.[1] I have decided to donate $100k. Here is why. First, what is the village? Here's a brief summary from its creators:[2] We took four frontier agents, gave them each a computer, a group …

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“Foom & Doom 1: ‘Brain in a box in a basement’” by Steven Byrnes 58:46

14d ago58:46

58:46

1.1 Series summary and Table of Contents This is a two-post series on AI “foom” (this post) and “doom” (next post). A decade or two ago, it was pretty common to discuss “foom & doom” scenarios, as advocated especially by Eliezer Yudkowsky. In a typical such scenario, a small team would build a system that would rocket (“foom”) from “unimpressive” t…

1
“Futarchy’s fundamental flaw” by dynomight 15:28

17d ago15:28

15:28

Say you’re Robyn Denholm, chair of Tesla's board. And say you’re thinking about firing Elon Musk. One way to make up your mind would be to have people bet on Tesla's stock price six months from now in a market where all bets get cancelled unless Musk is fired. Also, run a second market where bets are cancelled unless Musk stays CEO. If people bet o…

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“Do Not Tile the Lightcone with Your Confused Ontology” by Jan_Kulveit 11:28

19d ago11:28

11:28

Or: How anthropomorphic assumptions about AI identity might create confusion and suffering at scale If you are reading this and you are a human, you likely have a sense of self, persisting over time, with desires and wishes and fears. Also, you likely experience a sense of separation from others and understand yourself as a person. If you are readi…

1
“Endometriosis is an incredibly interesting disease” by Abhishaike Mahajan 35:13

19d ago35:13

35:13

Introduction There are several diseases that are canonically recognized as ‘interesting’, even by laymen. Whether that is in their mechanism of action, their impact on the patient, or something else entirely. It's hard to tell exactly what makes a medical condition interesting, it's a you-know-it-when-you-see-it sort of thing. One such example is m…

1
“Estrogen: A trip report” by cube_flipper 50:49

20d ago50:49

50:49

I'd like to say thanks to Anna Magpie – who offers literature review as a service – for her help reviewing the section on neuroendocrinology. The following post discusses my personal experience of the phenomenology of feminising hormone therapy. It will also touch upon my own experience of gender dysphoria. I wish to be clear that I do not believe …

1
“New Endorsements for ‘If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies’” by Malo 8:55

20d ago8:55

8:55

Nate and Eliezer's forthcoming book has been getting a remarkably strong reception. I was under the impression that there are many people who find the extinction threat from AI credible, but that far fewer of them would be willing to say so publicly, especially by endorsing a book with an unapologetically blunt title like If Anyone Builds It, Every…

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[Linkpost] “the void” by nostalgebraist 1:14

21d ago1:14

1:14

This is a link post. A very long essay about LLMs, the nature and history of the the HHH assistant persona, and the implications for alignment. Multiple people have asked me whether I could post this LW in some form, hence this linkpost. (Note: although I expect this post will be interesting to people on LW, keep in mind that it was written with a …

1
“Mech interp is not pre-paradigmatic” by Lee Sharkey 29:33

21d ago29:33

29:33

This is a blogpost version of a talk I gave earlier this year at GDM. Epistemic status: Vague and handwavy. Nuance is often missing. Some of the claims depend on implicit definitions that may be reasonable to disagree with. But overall I think it's directionally true. It's often said that mech interp is pre-paradigmatic. I think it's worth being sk…

1
“Distillation Robustifies Unlearning” by Bruce W. Lee, Addie Foote, alexinf, leni, Jacob G-W, Harish Kamath, Bryce Woodworth, cloud, TurnTrout 17:19

21d ago17:19

17:19

Current “unlearning” methods only suppress capabilities instead of truly unlearning the capabilities. But if you distill an unlearned model into a randomly initialized model, the resulting network is actually robust to relearning. We show why this works, how well it works, and how to trade off compute for robustness. Unlearn-and-Distill applies unl…

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“Intelligence Is Not Magic, But Your Threshold For ‘Magic’ Is Pretty Low” by Expertium 3:12

21d ago3:12

3:12

A while ago I saw a person in the comments on comments to Scott Alexander's blog arguing that a superintelligent AI would not be able to do anything too weird and that "intelligence is not magic", hence it's Business As Usual. Of course, in a purely technical sense, he's right. No matter how intelligent you are, you cannot override fundamental laws…

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“A Straightforward Explanation of the Good Regulator Theorem” by Alfred Harwood 29:24

21d ago29:24

29:24

Audio note: this article contains 329 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. This post was written during the agent foundations fellowship with Alex Altair funded by the LTFF. Thanks to Alex, Jose, Daniel and Einar for reading and commenting on a draft. Th…

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“Beware General Claims about ‘Generalizable Reasoning Capabilities’ (of Modern AI Systems)” by LawrenceC 34:11

21d ago34:11

34:11

1. Late last week, researchers at Apple released a paper provocatively titled “The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity”, which “challenge[s] prevailing assumptions about [language model] capabilities and suggest that current approaches may be encountering fundament…

1
“Season Recap of the Village: Agents raise $2,000” by Shoshannah Tekofsky 13:24

1M ago13:24

13:24

Four agents woke up with four computers, a view of the world wide web, and a shared chat room full of humans. Like Claude plays Pokemon, you can watch these agents figure out a new and fantastic world for the first time. Except in this case, the world they are figuring out is our world. In this blog post, we’ll cover what we learned from the first …

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“The Best Reference Works for Every Subject” by Parker Conley 13:02

1M ago13:02

13:02

Introduction The Best Textbooks on Every Subject is the Schelling point for the best textbooks on every subject. My The Best Tacit Knowledge Videos on Every Subject is the Schelling point for the best tacit knowledge videos on every subject. This post is the Schelling point for the best reference works for every subject. Reference works provide an …

1
“‘Flaky breakthroughs’ pervade coaching — and no one tracks them” by Chipmonk 9:31

1M ago9:31

9:31

Has someone you know ever had a “breakthrough” from coaching, meditation, or psychedelics — only to later have it fade? Show tweet For example, many people experience ego deaths that can last days or sometimes months. But as it turns out, having a sense of self can serve important functions (try navigating a world that expects you to have opinions,…

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

1M 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…