LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Most of civilization's electricity is generated far off-site from where it's delivered. This is because you don't want to be running and refueling coal/gas/nuclear plants inside cities, hydraulic/wind power can't be moved, and solar panels are cheaper to install on flat desert terrain than on cities:

So in practice this means running power over hundreds or even thousands of kilometers. E.g. here are the Chinese long-distance lines:

Gemini 3.1 Pro-preview in AI studio American long-distance lines:

These are simplified maps meant to illustrate how insanely long power lines get. The true shape of solar storm vulnerability looks like a spiderweb overlayed on population density (see below), which you can visualize on this website.

The fact that civilization finds it economical to generate its electricity hundreds or thousands of kilometers away from its population centers is rather mind-blowing given the infrastructure involved. For example, the Tucuruí line spans the Amazon rainforest and the Amazon river to supply the Brazilian coast with inland hydropower:

China's Zhoushan Island crossing involves lattice pylons taller than the Eiffel tower and spanning 2.7 kilometers of open sea:

These transmission lines respectively power 2.4 and 6.6 GW, which is insane. The [...]

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Outline:

(05:46) Solar storms can cause LPTs to violently, messily explode

[... 4 more sections]

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First published:
March 8th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ghq9EwiXbRbWSnDzF/solar-storms

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Also available in markdown at theMultiplicity.ai/blog/schelling-goodness.

This post explores a notion I'll call Schelling goodness. Claims of Schelling goodness are not first-order moral verdicts like "X is good" or "X is bad." They are claims about a class of hypothetical coordination games in the sense of Thomas Schelling, where the task being coordinated on is a moral verdict. In each such game, participants aim to give the same response regarding a moral question, by reasoning about what a very diverse population of intelligent beings would converge on, using only broadly shared constraints: common knowledge of the question at hand, and background knowledge from the survival and growth pressures that shape successful civilizations. Unlike many Schelling coordination games, we'll be focused on scenarios with no shared history or knowledge amongst the participants, other than being from successful civilizations.

Importantly: To say "X is Schelling-good" is not at all the same as saying "X is good". Rather, it will be defined as a claim about what a large class of agents would say, if they were required to choose between saying "X is good" and "X is bad" and aiming for a mutually agreed-upon answer. This distinction is crucial [...]

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Outline:

(01:59) This essay is not very skimmable

(03:44) Pro tanto morals, is good, and is bad

(06:39) Part One: The Schelling Participation Effect

(13:52) What makes it work

(15:50) The Schelling transformation on questions

(19:10) Part Two: Schelling morality via the cosmic Schelling population

(21:12) Scale-invariant adaptations

(22:54) An example: stealing

(30:32) Recognition versus endorsement versus adherence

(31:34) The answer frequencies versus the answer

(33:59) Ties are rare

(35:06) Is the cosmic Schelling answer ever knowable with confidence?

(36:02) Schelling participation effects, revisited

(38:03) Is this just the mind projection fallacy?

(39:42) When are cosmic Schelling morals easy to identify?

(42:59) Scale invariance revisited

(44:03) A second example: Pareto-positive trade

(47:45) Harder questions and caveats

(50:01) Ties are unstable

(51:43) Isnt this assuming moral realism?

(53:07) Dont these results depend on the distribution over beings?

(54:41) What about the is-ought gap?

(56:29) Tolerance, local variation, and freedom

(58:25) Terrestrial Schelling-goodness

(59:42) So what does good mean, again?

(01:01:08) Implications for AI alignment

(01:06:15) Conclusion and historical context

(01:09:16) FAQ

(01:09:20) Basic misunderstandings

(01:12:20) More nuanced questions

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First published:
February 28th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TkBCR8XRGw7qmao6z/schelling-goodness-and-shared-morality-as-a-goal

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1.

It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine—a gun—which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished.

Richard Gatling (1861)

2.

In 1923, Hermann Oberth published The Rocket to Planetary Spaces, later expanded as Ways to Space Travel. This showed that it was possible to build machines that could leave Earth's atmosphere and reach orbit. He described the general principles of multiple-stage liquid-fueled rockets, solar sails, and even ion drives. He proposed sending humans into space, building space stations and satellites, and travelling to other planets.

The idea of space travel became popular in Germany. Swept up by these ideas, in 1927, Johannes Winkler, Max Valier, and Willy Ley formed the Verein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR) (Society for Space Travel) in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland). This group rapidly grew to several hundred members. Several participated as advisors of Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Moon, and the VfR even began publishing their own journal.

In 1930, the VfR was granted permission to [...]

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Outline:

(00:09) 1.

(00:36) 2.

(03:55) 3.

(06:09) 4.

(10:33) 5.

(11:41) 6.

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First published:
March 4th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TjcvjwaDsuea8bmbR/maybe-there-s-a-pattern-here

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(The author is not affiliated with the Department of War or any major AI company.)

There's a lot of disagreement about the new surveillance language in the OpenAI–Department of War agreement. Some people think it's a significant improvement over the previous language.[1] Others think it patches some issues but still leaves enough loopholes to not make a material difference. Reasonable people disagree about how a court will interpret the language, if push comes to shove.

But here's something that should be much easier to agree on: the language as written is ambiguous, and OpenAI can do better.

I don’t think even OpenAI's leadership can be confident about how this language would be interpreted in court, given the wording used and the short amount of time they’ve had to draft it. People with less context and resources will find it even harder to know how all the ambiguities would be resolved.

Some of the ambiguities seem like they could have been easily clarified despite the small amount of time available, which makes it concerning that they weren't. But more importantly, it should certainly be possible and worthwhile to spend more time on clarifying the language now. Employees are well within [...]

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Outline:

(01:27) What the new language says

(02:46) Ambiguities

(07:45) Why this isnt unreasonable nit-picking

(11:04) Some of this would be easy to clarify

(13:09) OpenAI can do much better

The original text contained 8 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
March 4th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FSGfzDLFdFtRDADF4/openai-s-surveillance-language-has-many-potential-loopholes

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tl;dr We’re incubating an academic journal for AI alignment: rapid peer-review of foundational Alignment research that the current publication ecosystem underserves. Key bets: paid attributed review, reviewer-written synthesis abstracts, and targeted automation. Contact us if you’re interested in participating as an author, reviewer, or editor, or if you know someone who might be.

Experimental Infrastructure for Foundational Alignment Research

This is the first in a series of “build-in-the-open” updates regarding the incubation of a new peer-reviewed journal dedicated to AI alignment. Later updates will contain much more detail, but we want to put this out soon to draw community participation early. Fill out this form to express your interest in participating as an author, reviewer, editor, developer, manager, or board member, or to recommend someone who might be interested.

The Core Bet

Peer review is a crucial public good: it applies scarce researcher time to sort new ideas for focused attention from the community, but is undersupplied because individual reviewers are poorly incentivized. Peer review in alignment research is particularly fragmented. While some parts of the alignment research community are served by existing venues, such as journals and ML conferences, there are significant gaps. These gaps arise from a [...]

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Outline:

(00:38) Experimental Infrastructure for Foundational Alignment Research

(01:09) The Core Bet

(02:27) Operational Design

(03:56) Scope

(06:08) Governance

(06:35) Advisory board

(09:16) Institutional stewardship

(10:11) Next steps

(10:14) Join the founding team

(11:49) Support us online

(12:14) Contributors to this document

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
March 3rd, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/msnGbm52ZcG3xYcFo/an-alignment-journal-coming-soon

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