LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

One way intellectual progress stalls is when you are asking the Wrong Questions. Your question is nonsensical, or cuts against the way reality works. Sometimes you can avoid this by learning more about how the world works, which implicitly answers some question you had, but if you want to make real progress you have to develop the skill of Righting a Wrong Question. This is a classic, old-school rationalist idea. The standard examples are asking about determinism, or free will, or consciousness. The standard fix is to go meta. Ask yourself, "Why do I feel like I have free will" or "Why do I think I have consciousness" which is by itself an answerable question. There is some causal path through your cognition that generates that question, and can be investigated. This works great for some ideas, and can help people untangle some self-referential knots they get themselves into, but I find it unsatisfying. Sometimes I want to know the answer to the real question I had, and going meta avoids it, or asks a meaningfully different question instead of answering it. Over time, I've stumbled across another way to right wrong questions that I find myself using more [...]

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First published:

April 13th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/emsDJNmxBu8Tt6PHt/meaningful-questions-have-return-types

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

(The better telling is here. Seriously you should go read it. I've heard this story told in rationalist circles, but there wasn't a post on LessWrong, so I made one)

Today is April 15th, Carpathia Day. Take a moment to put forth an unreasonable effort to save a little piece of your world, when no one would fault you for doing less.

In the early morning of April 15, the RMS Titanic began to sink with more than two thousand souls on board.

Over 58 nautical miles away — too far to make it in time — sailed the RMS Carpathia, a small, slow, passenger steamer. The wireless operator, Harold Cottam, was listening to the transmitter late at night before he went to bed when he got a message from Cape Cod intended for the Titanic. When he contacted the Titanic to relay the messages, he got back a distress signal saying they hit an iceberg and were in need of immediate assistance. Cottam ran the message straight to the captain's cabin, waking him.

Captain Arthur Rostron's first reaction upon being awoken was anger, but that anger dissolved as he came to understand the situation. Before he'd [...]

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

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First published:

April 15th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SARCiTFJfXJJhpej7/carpathia-day

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Epistemic status: All of the western canon must eventually be re-invented in a LessWrong post, so today we are re-inventing modernism.

In my post yesterday, I said:

Maybe the most important way ambitious, smart, and wise people leave the world worse off than they found it is by seeing correctly how some part of the world is broken and unifying various powers under a banner to fix that problem — only for the thing they have built to slip from their grasp and, in its collapse, destroy much more than anything previously could have.

I think many people very reasonably understood me to be giving a general warning against centralization and power-accumulation. While that is where some of my thoughts while writing the post went to, I would like to now expand on its antithesis, both for my own benefit, and for the benefit of the reader who might have been left confused after yesterday's post.

The other day I was arguing with Eliezer about a bunch of related thoughts and feelings. In that context, he said to me:

From my perspective, my whole life has been, when you raise the banner to oppose the apocalypse, crazy [...]

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

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First published:

April 16th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/w3MJcDueo77D3Ldta/let-goodness-conquer-all-that-it-can-defend

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Epistemic status: All of the western canon must eventually be re-invented in a LessWrong post. So today we are re-inventing federalism.

Once upon a time there was a great king. He ruled his kingdom with wisdom and economically literate policies, and prosperity followed. Seeing this, the citizens of nearby kingdoms revolted against their leaders, and organized to join the kingdom of this great king.

While the kingdom's ability to defend itself against external threats grew with each person who joined the land, the kingdom's ability to defend itself against internal threats did not. One fateful evening, the king bit into a bologna sandwich poisoned by a rival noble. That noble quickly proceeded to behead his political enemies in the name of the dead king. The flag bearing the wise king's portrait known as "the great unifier" still flies in the fortified cities where his successor rules with an iron fist.

Once upon a time there was a great scientific mind. She developed a new theoretical framework that made large advances on the hardest scientific questions of the day. Seeing the promise of her work, new graduate students, professors, and corporate R&D teams flocked into the field, hungry to [...]

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First published:

April 15th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jinzzbPHshif8nmnw/do-not-conquer-what-you-cannot-defend

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

TLDR: I flew to Oregon to investigate Nectome, a brain preservation startup, and talk to their entire team. They’re an ambitious company, looking to grow in a way that no cryonics organization has before. Their procedure is probably much better at saving people than other orgs, and is being offered for as little as $20k until the end of April — a (theoretical) 92% discount. (I bought two.) This early-bird pricing is low, in part, due to some severe uncertainties, in both the broader world and in Nectome's ability to succeed as a business.

Meta:

I'm Max Harms, an AI alignment researcher at MIRI and author.
This deep-dive only assumes functionalism and a passing familiarity with cryonics, but no particular knowledge of Nectome.
I have been a cryonics enthusiast for my whole adult life, and that is probably biasing my views, at least a little. I want Nectome to succeed.
That said, I am also a rationalist, and I have worked very hard to set aside my wishful thinking and see things with cold objectivity.
Throughout the essay, I've attached explicit probabilities for my claims in parentheticals. You can click these probabilities to access Manifold markets so we [...]
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Outline:

(02:04) 1. The Problem

[... 24 more sections]

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First published:

April 15th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3i5GMhpGbDwef9Rns/nectome-all-that-i-know

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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