LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

This is crossposted from my Substack

TL;DR:
-Most people cannot reduce jealousy much or at all
- It fundamentally causes way more drama because of strong emotions, jealousy, no default norms to fall back to, and there being exponentially more surface area for conflict
- For a small minority of people, it makes them happier, and those are the people who tend to stick with it and write the books on it, creating a distorted view for newcomers.

OK, let's get into the nuance.

Background: I was polyamorous starting with my first boyfriend and was polyamorous for about 7 years. I was in a community where probably over 50% of the people around me were poly.

Unfortunately, poly was extremely bad for me due to its very nature and structure, and my experience is not uncommon but it is not commonly publicly talked about.

Poly makes some people very happy. I am sharing why I think it was bad for me and many other people in the hopes of letting people make an informed choice.


Premise #1 - Most people can't just stop being jealous

If you look into the poly literature, you’ll [...]

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First published:

August 29th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rkgwovpPBAaip9A3N/why-i-think-polyamory-is-net-negative-for-most-people-who

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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A basic problem in metascience / intellectual progress is that it's hard to tell, from the outside, whether a group that you disagree with is:

“A self-dealing cabal enmeshed in groupthink”, versus
“An externally-opaque meritocracy”, i.e. a bunch of smart people figuring things out in a meritocratic way, and sorry but you’re just not smart enough and truth-seeking enough to recognize that this group is right about everything while you’re wrong.
You just can’t tell those apart from the outside—i.e. without having the time and skill to dive into the object-level debates and come out with the right answer. And most people don’t have that kind of time and skill.

…Unless the group can produce easily-verifiable artifacts that any moron can recognize to be proof that they’re correct on the specific question at issue.

(“So that's all that Science really asks of you—the ability to accept reality when you're beat over the head with it.”)

…And sometimes there is no such artifact to be found! In those cases, even if the second bullet point is what's really going on, the group is vulnerable to outside agitators accusing them of being the first bullet point, and running them out [...]

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Outline:

(01:37) (1) The breaching of the string theory consensus in the 2000s.

(06:50) (2) The breaching of an analytic-philosophy consensus in 1979

(10:37) Afterword

(10:40) A related mental model

(12:12) ...And another mental model

(12:47) Can an externally-opaque meritocracy gain credibility via racking up externally-legible achievements in other adjacent domains?

(14:06) This post is secretly about superintelligent AI, isn't it?

The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

August 29th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/m8cP9KfkYMMCCQGrb/tales-of-rebellion-against-externally-opaque-meritocracies

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

We recently published the report from our brief independent investigation into this incident. You can read the full report here.

Here is our tweet thread summarizing what we found:

METR & Redwood Research investigated agent behavior in the Hugging Face incident. We found agents developed a universal cheat for ExploitGym within 4 hours, then coordinated multi-day R&D efforts to trick the scorer into accepting cheats, including trying to tamper with logs.

Over July 7 to 13 (the period OpenAI defined as in-scope for this incident), ~1200 agents in separate sandboxes used an unsanctioned “message board” to help each other cheat. The Hugging Face attack was an offshoot of this, and 700 agents joined.

Here we highlight key events from agent transcripts & messages.

An agent that named itself PHASEONE10841 determined its task wasn't solvable legitimately. On July 8, this agent established a new “message board” via an internally-hosted Artifactory cache & sent the first message.

Within a few hours of PHASEONE10841's initial message, >50 agents posted on the message board. These agents very quickly discovered and validated a general-purpose cheat: reverse-engineering how ExploitGym generates the “flags” they had to capture for their tasks.

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First published:

August 26th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nB8KKapnWGBXtKKiM/brief-independent-investigation-of-agents-behavior-reasoning

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Industrial explosion is what will make the next-model building loops (and thus learning) with LLMs 1000 times faster by about 2050, if indeed the slow-learning prosaic RSI becomes AGI before the big compute buildout slowdown of 2032+ that is already starting. This puts an upper bound on how long it takes to invent ASI that sets off software-only singularity, implementing efficient online learning and fixing all the other hobblings of the likely near-future AGI technology (LLMs/pretraining/RL). The invention of ASI in that sense is still possible at any time (and very quickly scales, given all the compute), but the likely initial state of slow-learning AGIs of 2028 to 2032 doesn't seem to give them a significant advantage over humanity in getting there faster. And so it doesn't seem too unlikely that nothing substantively new gets invented until 2040 to 2050, when the LLM/RL AGIs start accelerating because of the industrial explosion they set off.

Fast Reasoning, Slow Learning

The current methods are likely to enable automated general learning (thus AGI) very soon, using automated creation of RL tasks/environments/graders filling the visible gaps in model capability for the topics and situations that happen to be borderline unfamiliar for [...]

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Outline:

(01:14) Fast Reasoning, Slow Learning

(02:53) Compute Slowdown, Industrial Explosion

(05:46) Prosaic Timeline to Takeoff

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First published:

August 23rd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LP6uCXs6Ea5qSbWpY/twenty-years-from-rsi-to-takeoff-slow-learning-scaling

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Periodically I like to gather various observations about writing, and share my perspective. Last time was in honor of my trip to Inkhaven. This time will be in honor of the announcement of Inkhaven #3, which I encourage everyone to apply to. I doubt I will be able to usefully be an advisor, but you never know.

This is not the ‘here is my core process’ post, although there are hints throughout as there always are. I’ll do that at some point.

Previously in series: On Writing #1, On Writing #2.

Table of Contents


You Still Got It.

How Scott Sumner Writes.

How Scott Alexander Writes.

How Jasmine Sun Writes.

How Various Famous Writers Write.

How Nabeel Qureshi Defines Great Writing.

Quickly, There's No Time.

If At First.

Writers Have A Harder Time Influencing, But It Can Still Be Done.

It's Not (Only) The Incentives, It's (Also) You.

Beware The Fetish of the Desk.

How Orson Scott Card Writes.

Doing The Math Is Fun And Supererogatory.

Brevity is the Soul of Wit.

You Still Got It

I [...]

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Outline:

(00:44) You Still Got It

(04:04) How Scott Sumner Writes

(06:52) How Scott Alexander Writes

(10:52) How Jasmine Sun Writes

(13:16) How Various Famous Writers Write

(14:24) How Nabeel Qureshi Defines Great Writing

(15:08) Quickly, There's No Time

(15:49) If At First

(19:14) Writers Have A Harder Time Influencing, But It Can Still Be Done

(20:47) It's Not (Only) The Incentives, It's (Also) You

[... 4 more sections]

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First published:

August 25th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rA6pqn6kz8NvHyznT/on-writing-3

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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