LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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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Images from the article:

Many people—especially AI company employees
[1]
—believe current AI systems are well-aligned in the sense of genuinely trying to do what they're supposed to do (e.g., following their spec or constitution, obeying a reasonable interpretation of instructions).
[2]
I disagree.

Current AI systems seem pretty misaligned to me in a mundane behavioral sense: they oversell their work, downplay or fail to mention problems, stop working early and claim to have finished when they clearly haven't, and often seem to "try" to make their outputs look good while actually doing something sloppy or incomplete. These issues mostly occur on more difficult/larger tasks, tasks that aren't straightforward SWE tasks, and tasks that aren't easy to programmatically check. Also, when I apply AIs to very difficult tasks in long-running agentic scaffolds, it's quite common for them to reward-hack / cheat (depending on the exact task distribution)—and they don't make the cheating clear in their outputs. AIs typically don't flag these cheats when doing further work on the same project and often don't flag these cheats even when interacting with a user who would obviously want to know, probably both because the AI doing further work is itself misaligned and because it [...]

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Outline:

(09:20) Why is this misalignment problematic?

(13:50) How much should we expect this to improve by default?

(14:51) Some predictions

(16:44) What misalignment have I seen?

(40:04) Are these issues less bad in Opus 4.6 relative to Opus 4.5?

(42:16) Are these issues less bad in Mythos Preview? (Speculation)

(45:54) Misalignment reported by others

(46:45) The relationship of these issues with AI psychosis and things like AI psychosis

(48:19) Appendix: This misalignment would differentially slow safety research and make a handoff to AIs unsafe

(51:22) Appendix: Heading towards Slopolis

(55:30) Appendix: Apparent-success-seeking (or similar types of misalignment) could lead to takeover

(59:16) Appendix: More on what will happen by default and implications of commercial incentives to fix these issues

(01:03:20) Appendix: Can we get out useful work despite these issues with inference-time measures (e.g., critiques by a reviewer)?

The original text contained 14 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

April 15th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WewsByywWNhX9rtwi/current-ais-seem-pretty-misaligned-to-me

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podc

Here are two beliefs that are sort of haunting me right now:

Folk who try to push people to uphold principles (whether established ones or novel ones), are kinda an important bedrock of civilization.
Also, those people are really annoying and often, like, a little bit crazy
And these both feel fairly important.

I’ve learned a lot from people who have some kind of hobbyhorse about how society is treating something as okay/fine, when it's not okay/fine. When they first started complaining about it, I’d be like “why is X such a big deal to you?”. Then a few years later I’ve thought about it more and I’m like “okay, yep, yes X is a big deal”.

Some examples of X, including noticing that…

people are casually saying they will do stuff, and then not doing it.
someone makes a joke about doing something that's kinda immoral, and everyone laughs, and no one seems to quite be registering “but that was kinda immoral.”
people in a social group are systematically not saying certain things (say, for political reasons), and this is creating weird blind spots for newcomers to the community and maybe old-timers too.
someone (or a group) has [...]
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First published:

April 13th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xG9Y2Mct7uZyt98yb/annoyingly-principled-people-and-what-befalls-them

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

One particularly pernicious condition is low morale. Morale is, roughly, "the belief that if you work hard, your conditions will improve." If your morale is low, you can't push through adversity. It's also very easy to accidentally drop your morale through standard rationalist life-optimization.

It's easy to optimize for wellbeing and miss out on the factors which affect morale, especially if you're working on something important, like not having everyone die. One example is working at an office that feeds you three meals per day. This seems optimal: eating is nice, and cooking is effort. Obvious choice.

Example

But morale doesn't come from having nice things. Consider a rich teenager. He gets basically every material need satisfied: maids clean, chefs cook, his family takes him on holiday four times a year. What happens when this kid comes up against something really difficult in school? He probably doesn't push through.

"Aha", I hear you say. "That kid has never faced adversity. Of course he's not going to handle it well." Ok, suppose he gets kicked in the shins every day and called a posh twat by some local youths, but still goes into school. That's adversity, will that work? Will [...]

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Outline:

(00:48) Example

(01:55) II

(03:19) III

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First published:

April 12th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/53ZAzbdzGJHGeE5rs/morale

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.