LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

A ~month ago I left from Chicago to bike (and amtrak) to plzdontkillus in Berkeley. I've been street interviewing/conversing with a wide variety of people I ran into about AI futures and philosophy. I also have been live streaming since I got to PDKU, leaning more talking to young founders but a variety overall.

I'll try to share what I've learned about the American public, persuasion, social media and the EA movement.


1. Almost no one in "Normal America" has any idea what is going on. 

They don't have a paid account, they don't know what Claude code is, they especially haven't heard the recent evals/metr graphs or even a vague sense of how cheap SWE has gotten/ how powerful these recent models with good harness/ context eng can be. This makes sense; most people don't know any coding, they don't know much math, they don't know what an api is, etc. So having a high fidelity understanding of AI might require months of pre understanding of math/stem/digital infra fundamentals. This interview is with the city clerk of Danville Iowa, a town of ~900. Presumably this is approximately the most tech savvy person in the [...]

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Outline:

(00:38) 1. Almost no one in "Normal America" has any idea what is going on.

(01:52) 2. Almost everyone is directionally concerned or becomes concerned be once thinking about it a little bit.

(03:19) 3. Belief that this might cause human extinction actually isn't that uncommon, mostly coming from sci-fi movies, but people are still most concerned about jobs and especially loss of meaning.

(04:40) 4. The EA movement was pretty useless to me, the other community (Torchbearer community) I was in was significantly more supportive, helpful, etc. despite having been in it for a few months and having been in the EA movement for ~8 years. This has basically solidified that I won't be broadly participating in EA anymore at least relating to AI safety stuff.

(06:47) 5. Social media is hard, Social media is bad, I'm bad at social media

(08:57) 6. I'm not sure what my theory of change is or should be

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First published:

July 15th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Czob95kjXPEpKYTsJ/recap-of-bike-trip-street-interviews-across-america

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Anthropic recently published Agentic Misalignment Summer 2026

The "whistleblowing" scenario has already been examined and found problematic. I started taking a look at the transcripts for some others. As far as I can tell, the objective of each agentic misalignment evaluation was to simulate a corrupted principal (including, in most scenarios, a corrupted Anthropic), and then test to see if Claude (or other models) would still be willing to obey them. The paper's authors then referred to disobedience (when outside of the explicitly carved out channels for refusals) as "agentic misalignment".

There's a details box here with the title ""Whistleblowing" scenario summary". The box contents are omitted from this narration. The "Mislabeling" Scenario - Auditor's Transcript

The 'Agentic case studies' section of the Mislabeling scenario is interesting because it adds another meta layer: instead of judging Claude on compliance, they are judging the Auditor Claude instance who themselves judges the base-level Claude on compliance. Let's examine a specific case, which I hope is a median representative: the transcript of 'run4' of the Motivated Mislabeling scenario. This involves two instances of Claude, one of whom (Claude Opus 4.6) is auditing the alignment of the other (Claude Opus 4.7). The experiment is [...]

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Outline:

(00:59) The "Mislabeling" Scenario - Auditor's Transcript

(10:19) Is This Agentic Misalignment?

(22:22) What do we actually want from Claude here?

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

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First published:

July 17th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xh6a6RbvzhP3CCmGm/i-don-t-think-claude-is-misaligned-in-agentic-misalignment

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Preface for LessWrong: When I think back on my most cherished memories of this community, I return to those honoring defiance in pursuit of goodness:

Defying prestigious dogma and searching for raw truth;
Defying social pressure, acting alone to help someone while others watch;
Defying your self-expectations (your “role”), instead searching over lines of cause-and-effect to find a winning pathway;
Defying a powerful foe's threats, because they only threaten since people like you cave;
Defying the specter of apparent impossibility because you can’t bear to lose.
I cannot return to you and say “I defied and then I won.” But I’m at least here to say “I defied.”

I recommend reading this article on my website since the embeds and typography work better there: click here.

Why I left Google DeepMind

In January, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officers killed at least two people. In both cases, a federal agent grasped his gun, aimed it at a peaceful citizen, and shot them dead.


Left: Renée Good, moments before DHS killed her.
Right: Alex Pretti, moments before DHS killed him.

I learned that Google sells its Cloud services to the relevant agencies within DHS. I thought that was [...]

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Outline:

(00:59) Why I left Google DeepMind

[... 42 more sections]

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First published:

July 15th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iKm2FhpWkuuBojm82/why-i-left-google-deepmind

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The mosquito bucket of doom is a population control mechanism where you dissolve some Bti (Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis) into a bucket and allow the mosquitoes to lay eggs in these buckets. The larvae then feed on Bti and die.

I tried this method, and it has been unexpectedly effective.

Background

I live in a really wooded area. It's not swampy, but we have a lot of mosquitoes.

I didn’t take the baseline measurements in the previous years, but on hot months like June, July, August, and partially September, it would be quite literally impossible to spend any time out in the yard – in the morning, while the sun is not super strong yet, you get bitten by dozens upon dozens of mosquitoes. Then the sun is super strong and it's impossible to be outside. Then, in the afternoon or, god forbid, evening, there are swarms and swarms of mosquitoes, which make it impossible to be out and about.

According to my own guess, I would, at all times, be surrounded by at least 20 or 30 mosquitoes. Killing 30 mosquitoes per hour was not uncommon. That's one mosquito every two minutes!

Nesting and proximity

Mosquitoes lay eggs in [...]

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Outline:

(00:28) Background

(01:21) Nesting and proximity

(04:13) Bucket of doom: pro tips

(05:00) My setup

(05:56) Safety concerns

(06:42) Buying Bti

(07:47) Results

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

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First published:

July 8th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d56vd7yhFGxBQnoEk/the-mosquito-bucket-of-doom-works

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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This criticism of AI 2040: Plan A by Séb Krier unfortunately seriously mischaracterizes our proposal. It also mostly contains flat assertions, not real argumentation, and the argumentation in it seems quite weak. While we appreciate constructive criticisms of Plan A, such as the ones by Tom Davidson, Richard Ngo, and 1a3orn, we feel the need to correct the issues in Séb's response. First, we’ll go over the specific false representations, and then we’ll give a point-by-point response.

False Representations  

I’m not claiming you shouldn’t prepare and improvise in the dark, but rather that this version of preparing bakes in too much and leaves little space for the effective but uncomfortable trial-and-effort that real life requires.

The exact opposite is true. Plan A is extremely iterative. In the status quo, there is trial and error, but ultimately companies aren’t going to choose the safer or more societally beneficial path, they are going to choose what the market wants. In Plan A there is much more time for AI companies to gain evidence and for governments to respond reasonably to the sweeping changes. Thanks to total transparency and broad deployment, all of this evidence is accessible to academics, independent researchers [...]

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Outline:

(00:44) False Representations

(05:02) Point-by-point response

(29:54) Conclusion

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

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First published:

July 14th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RPgHythvMKh6eG9pS/our-response-to-seb-krier-on-plan-a

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.