LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

— The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

When we say "space is big", it's partly meant as a correction to images like this:

Wikimedia source.

where, for simplicity, celestial objects are shown in unrealistically close proximity—like Jupiter is just down the hall from Mars.

As we all know, the planets of the solar system are actually really far apart, even relative to their huge size. In Sweden's 1:20,000,000 to-scale solar system model, Earth and Venus are just ~2 feet in diameter, yet over a mile apart. In other terms, they're several thousand "Earth-widths" apart:

Horizontal distance not to scale, wouldn't fit on screen.

And we all know that's just the start of it: the stars are incredibly far apart. Finland also has a to-scale model of the solar system, but it's 150 times more condensed than Sweden's at 1:3,000,000,000. Its model of our sun, Sol, is just ~1.5 feet in diameter.

Its model of the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is in Australia.

Horizontal distance [...]

The original text contained 9 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

November 14th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2zyskdas6TsL9dqNg/outer-space-is-not-consistently-big

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In February 2020, LessWrong hosted Coronavirus: Justified Practical Advice Thread . It was a gathering place for people to share and debate small pieces of the overall survival policy and let the wisdom of crowds lead to better outcomes than anyone could get alone.

In that spirit, I notice The Great AI Hackening is at least as imminent as covid was in January 2020, maybe closer. What specific things should people do to personally prepare? All suggestions should be accompanied by reasoning but you don't need to be 100% convinced it's good advice, the whole point is to reason it out together.

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First published:

November 13th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YA2r4rg6SpBtwRqtq/the-hackening-justified-practical-advice-thread

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

How do you get a friend to leave an abusive relationship? If you talk to people who work at women's shelters, they will tell you, but there is something resigned about the way they do it: they know that it's too difficult an ask. Those who can do it reliably are often people who are unlucky enough to have had first-hand experience as victims.

The instructions have anti-memetic properties: no one is thrilled by them, so you can't really propagate them without killing the vibe. If that wasn't enough, if you convey it with insufficient skill it is easy to come across as victim-blaming battered women, so it is wiser to avoid the subject matter altogether.

If you are interested, though, here's what they'll tell you:

You make it known to your friend early on that you dislike some aspects of the relationship, of their abuser. After that, you support them and all their choices without reservation. You make it clear that you care about them no matter what, and you will be there for them whenever they need you to be. You do not antagonize or bad-mouth their abuser.

This is what your friend is experiencing, while being [...]

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

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First published:

November 12th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2xaen4jJdnksfkCJx/how-to-get-a-friend-to-leave-an-abusive-relationship

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Science is caught between Law and Chaos.

On the side of Law:

Things should make explicit sense to your deliberate reasoning ("system-two"). If you just have a "vibe" about how things work, that's bad. Measure everything. Use numbers whenever possible. You want things to be math.
It's good to follow an entirely repeatable process. Document everything. Don't do anything weird, lest that weirdness turn out to be important and be unable to be replicated. Use standard equipment. Be Normal.
As a sub-aspect of the above, you should make a plan and you should stick to your plan. Switching things up in an ad hoc way is a good way to make things weird or ruin the validity of your methodology.
Everything should be controlled. If you can control your environment you can repeat the process. But also, you should have a control arm for your experiment, to allow you to see the counterfactual by balancing everything as perfectly as possible except for the intervention.
Communicate your findings in clear, predictable channels, using standard language, standard paper structure, standard graphs, and so on. Misunderstandings abound, and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Don't make [...]
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:

November 12th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bmogjuWbrJfkprghx/your-research-needs-more-of-the-void

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Summary

Timelines to superintelligence without any slowdown interventions look very short now, perhaps with a median in early 2028. AI will likely dramatically automate and accelerate AI research in 2027.
This means that in a substantial share of worlds where the leading AGI company doesn’t solve alignment during an intelligence explosion, avoiding catastrophe requires aggressive pacing or a pause on development in the next 6 to 12 months.
If this is true, by far the most promising approaches to reducing the risk of catastrophe for nontechnical people (and plausibly many technical people) seem to be: Lab advocacy: Lab-facing work that is designed to achieve aggressive pacing or a pause without government involvement in the next 6 to 12 months.
California lobbying: Policy advocacy targeting the California state government that is designed to get a law passed or an executive order issued that implements aggressive pacing or a pause within 6 to 12 months.
Federal lobbying: If there's a major incident roughly an order of magnitude more severe than the Hugging Face incident in the next 6 months, then lobbying Congress or the Trump administration to respond to such an event with aggressive pacing or a pause. 

In [...]
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Outline:

(00:10) Summary

(02:52) Timelines to ASI are very short now

(06:40) Three paths to pausing or pacing within 6-12 months

(12:28) Technical work that seems most valuable

(15:07) Laying the technical foundations for a pause

(17:14) What should you do?

(21:19) FAQs and Objections

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First published:

November 13th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/biFHYdJnMSCmW9Xou/three-plans-for-12-month-timelines

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