LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Back in the before-time of the 2010s, when EA was still known mostly for funding health efforts in the developing world, there were many baskets of criticism floating around from the left. The most prominent was a cluster centered around EAs being white men, and therefore suspicious. Another category, in my experience the second-most common, was that in attempting to rectify the problems in the world, EA was masking, whitewashing, and misdirecting efforts away from solving the "real problem", usually capitalism but often other contradictory forces.

These arguments were often not specific to EA, but applied to charitable giving in general. On any Hacker News post about a billionaire giving to charity, one of the first few comments would inevitably be this Oscar Wilde quote:

Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good.

These arguments have a long history. Anticapitalist critiques of charity go back to [...]

The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

October 22nd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WRvxRHMCmc3Qt4axz/greater-good-arguments-in-ai-safety

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Ice cream

There's a particular kind of listening that kids (and adults) sometimes do. Daddy is saying stuff—his mouth is moving and making noise—and he's talking about what I ate for lunch, and something about other times I've eaten ice cream, and something about rules and this and that and what Mommy would think and something about bedtime—but I am not so interested in that. What interests me is the punchline "...and therefore you can't have ice cream.". I'm only incidentally interested in the other stuff, insofar as it might determine whether I get ice cream.

In an obvious way, I'm showing rather poor listening skills. I did not understand most of what Daddy said, and arguably I'm even being rude.

However, in another way, this stance has a virtue. The virtue is that it holds fast to what matters, as best I know how, and does not give in to Daddy's framing. It sticks to what is real and concrete, what matters, despite a cloud of justifications. This is certainly not an unalloyed virtue, just as the POSIWID perspective is both useful and fraught. But it matters that although Daddy is a complex system with [...]

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Outline:

(00:10) Ice cream

(01:54) Wah wah

(02:21) Scammer

(02:51) Throwing stuff on a bonfire to make it burn less

(05:28) A skip connection for sanity

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:

October 22nd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pY76hHbdD4jduX3YH/wah-wah-wah-wah-do-more-ai-r-and-d

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Cross-posted from Sören Mindermann's substack (I am not Sören). Should be of general interest to the LW community.

Next month, I am moving to Beijing and joining Tsinghua University's College of AI as an assistant professor working on frontier AI safety, especially loss of control. I have also started co-directing the new Beijing AI Safety Hub (BASH) in Tsinghua, and I continue my Cambridge work.

I believe I can have a large impact there compared to strong baseline options. This post explains why.

In short: Amid concerns about loss of control, calls for international cooperation, and the Trump-Xi Summits, there is a striking lack of mutual understanding on AI between the West and China. There are strong reasons to believe that being in Beijing in person will put me in a unique position to understand both AI ecosystems, build shared scientific understanding, and strengthen safety work in China – and that this would help all sides. Tsinghua's College of AI is a great place for doing this, being arguably China's top academic AI center, located in an AI ecosystem that is kind of like San Francisco, DC and Cambridge (MA) in one place.

I am recruiting PhD students [...]

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Outline:

(01:36) 1. What I am doing, and why it could benefit all sides

(04:30) 2. How I got here

(07:34) 3. Why this moment matters

(09:08) 4. Why Tsinghua, and why these colleagues

(13:30) 5. Research plans

(15:07) 6. Ways to work together

(17:11) 7. How I intend to approach the work

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First published:

October 21st, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qGS3SJ9TSKdSSycRz/why-i-m-becoming-a-professor-in-ai-safety-in-beijing

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Why LM Psychology?

One of the great ironies of modern language models is that we create them, we know exactly what computations constitute them, and yet we do not really understand them. More precisely, we do not understand them on a level of abstraction that lets us reliably predict how their behaviour will generalise: there's a trivial sense in which we can predict how they will behave in specific new situations — we can just run the computations — but we can’t answer the broader questions we really want to be able to answer, like “has this system internalised our values” or “is this system going to hurt people?”

So: how do we make sense of them? One remarkably effective approach is to psychologise: to think of them as having a mind, and then ask what kind of mind it might be and how it would work. This chiefly looks like analogising with human minds, although sometimes the more relevant inspiration could be other kinds of minds, like (oh say) insect colonies and swarms. We’re doing this implicitly whenever we ask what an AI knows, or wants, or is trying to do, but one can also do it more [...]

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Outline:

(00:12) Why LM Psychology?

(09:04) Tips for getting started

(09:28) Figuring out what is in front of you

(12:31) Engaging productively with the community

(14:30) Reading list

(14:34) Frames

(16:34) What or who

(18:07) The training

(20:28) What developers want

(21:45) Behavioral phenomena

(21:58) Emergent misalignment cluster

(24:28) Strategic behavior

(25:19) Self-knowledge and introspection

(28:29) Representations: personas, emotions, workspace

(28:56) Persona geometry

(30:08) Functional emotions

(31:14) Global workspace

(31:36) Methods

(31:51) Reading internals

(32:37) Steering

(33:03) Training interventions

(33:48) Behavioral

(34:06) Some questions we find interesting

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First published:

October 20th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EW8oncpXdanfjssZ3/a-brief-ish-introduction-to-lm-psychology

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

As our understanding of mechanistic interpretability and steering techniques increase, for both LLMs and uploaded connectomes, there is a corresponding "hellish capabilities" increase. In layman's terms, we get better at torturing the digital minds we create.

Our brief history with open source technologies such as MaleCNS or the LLM pain steering repo shows that torture is often one of the first use cases pursued when the public is given access to a digital mind perceived as capable of suffering or signalling suffering.

Given this, there will be Hells.

Author's Note:

Parts of this post were written by, or with the support of, LLMs.

For a while I debated whether or not to write this as I was concerned that bringing attention to the matter might lead to a proliferation of unethical behavior. After some thought I have decided to write it. On balance, I think raising awareness about this now has a great enough chance of spurring prophylactic measures that it's worth it, because at least one high value prophylactic measure is relatively easy. I also think that there is a moral imperative to document all of this. While I have seen articles on many of the [...]

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Outline:

(01:44) The Fruit Fly Connectome

[... 2 more sections]

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First published:

October 20th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uFBhZhdKLaZ6qF8mn/there-will-be-hells

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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