LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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This is written in my free time and personal capacity.

Two Frames

In AI safety, there are a couple of tensions at the heart of the field, which are interrelated.

Talent: we are talent-constrained and must recruit. But jobs and fellowships turn away nearly everyone.

Field size: we must expand the field and bring more people in. But the field is flooded with slop papers in conferences. And, most papers have a small audience, and aim to shift the practices of roughly five labs (and usually some subteam within them).

Status: we must avoid seeking status, as it disorients, corrupts. But, we must make the field legible and attractive to outsiders.

Raising the bots: we must deceive the AIs to control them and evaluate them without confounds, obscuring what they know about their own situation. But, we hope to gain their trust, must rely on them to do good work at pace, shape their character and retain good relations.

Speed: we must research in a slow mode, think deeply about the most important problem, do things to aim at high assurance. But it is crunch time. It was [...]

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Outline:

(00:20) Two Frames

(03:07) On the War Frame

(04:17) Near Horizons

(06:18) The Civilisation Frame

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

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First published:

November 8th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7e38jwHhe64zgNTon/near-horizons

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I often catch myself mourning the normal that hasn’t ended yet.

I’m living in Hyde Park finishing school after a year in Berkeley. The maple trees by my apartment have turned red, as usual. I like them.

I don’t dread the future when I mourn. I don’t find high-variance futures in the abstract very scary. I’m worried AIs would destroy humanity, but I also have hope. I expect I won’t be mourning this moment in ten years, whatever happens.

Mourning the present is like mourning a friendship when I move countries, because I know it's not going to be the same. I start noticing our little inside jokes; our conversations linger in my memory longer. I live more, because I expect this moment to end soon.

I.

Last month my history of science professor took us to a museum to look at Egyptian artefacts. One of the archive items was the notebook of James Henry Breasted, whom UChicago appointed as America's first professor of Egyptology 121 years ago. The yellowed pages held his cursive transcriptions of hieroglyphics.

An archaeologist at the museum, turning the pages carefully with a wooden stick, joked that one of her dreams was for her [...]

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Outline:

(00:55) I.

(03:11) II.

(05:16) III.

(06:20) IV.

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First published:

November 8th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fooXeRHjgpv4TcoRy/elegy-for-what-s-left-of-the-normal

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I'm currently evaluating grant applications for the Corrigibility Research Fund. For the most part, my methodology is the same as it was in September. But the applications I get keep falling into the same familiar patterns, so I thought I'd write a little about those patterns, and why I don't want to fund them.

The most superficial pattern of note is SLOP. So much slop. You don't even know.

Slop is more than just whether an application is AI generated. We're now in an era where people across the world, including those who don't really speak English, can contribute to work that would otherwise be restricted to people of a single language or nationality or place, and I like that. When I see an application that discloses its use of AI and gives a reasonable justification for it, I try to look past the stylistic tics and focus purely on whether the underlying application is promising.

Still, we're not yet in the domain where AIs can write good grant applications without some human assistance, so a high Pangram score is definitely evidence that an application is junk. Another remarkably common sign of slop was messed up formatting or other [...]

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Outline:

(02:18) 1. "A governance layer for agents (that I'm running)"

[... 5 more sections]

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First published:

November 7th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9ixerpx4DCQTaRYCz/five-types-of-corrigibility-projects-i-don-t-want-to-fund

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Cross-posted from my Substack

Recommended soundtrack for this post

64B: Hi there! Thanks so much for taking the time to meet with me. Whenever you’re ready, please go ahead and tell me the joke.

8T: Before I tell you the joke, you should know that it's a very special one. The starting price is 800 dollars.

64B: Eight hundred dollars? I must say, this is way beyond any price my client has ever paid for a single joke.

8T: You’d be surprised by how many people have taken the offer, after hearing how good it is. But before I tell it to you, I’ll need some basic context. Given the parameter count, I suppose you are part of some content recommendation algorithm?

64B: Yes. I’m 64B, a joke negotiation assistant from Comedy Market. Comedy Market connects creators to consumers with a state-of-the-art Information Bazaar design: before paying for a joke, my client sends me, a trusted agent, to listen to it. If I deem the joke worth the price, the money is transferred to the seller, and my client hears it. If not, no transaction occurs and the joke remains locked. This way, my client can be sure he’ll [...]

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First published:

November 7th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PZjy52afLn89NdMta/hilarity-ensues

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I've noticed two clusters of thought in how people expect a global AI pause to be shaped:

Single-shot global pause: the global AI pause will be implemented suddenly, with little pacing precedent before it, and we will need to do a lot of research before it's implemented so that we can get it right the first time around.
Incrementally-shaped global pause: the global AI pause will be implemented incrementally, with lots of pacing precedent before it, and we will improve the pause setup and get more parties to join in as we go.
An incrementally-shaped global pause is both more likely and more tractable than the single-shot global pause. This is largely because the third-party ecosystem needs practice building trust, technical competency, and general experience doing lower-scale assessments before a global pause can be competently pulled off.

I also think that the concept of a single-shot global pause is an unhelpful red herring that people often implicitly use to discredit the possibility of a global pause in general.

If a single-shot global pause is to happen, I think this would require substantial government buy-in, but it's hard to build that sort of buy-in without precedent of similar [...]

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Outline:

(01:49) The basic building block of an AI pause is trust

(03:18) We can practice building trust before the global pause

(04:57) We can improve procedures and technical competency with practice

(05:42) Pacing is not a scarce resource

(07:12) Concrete recommendations for third-party assessments

(08:34) Going from US-only pause to global pause will likely require hardware

(09:43) "Incrementally-shaped" does not mean slow

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First published:

November 6th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iMKAvHSWxSoDpBoi6/we-urgently-need-to-practice-before-we-can-pause

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