LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

To legislate something, it must be legible:

Legislators (or, you know, presidents) must be able to understand a problem, and understand why a given law or decree solves that problem.

I am pleasantly surprised that the Hugging Face outbreak made a lot of problems legible that previously required abstract reasoning. (i.e. rogue AIs are real, and they can break out of a lab before they're even finished training).

But there are still many challenges we eventually need laws about, that require concepts that are illegible. Hard for politicians to understand. Often hard even for thoughtful intellectuals and AI safety researchers to understand (though they may disagree on which illegible problems exist and how big a deal they are).

We need political solutions that handle this fact.

The short takeaway is: I think "safety cases" will not work. Laws that require human judgment won't work. The details are too abstract and confusing to hold up against political and economic incentives.

I'm optimistic we can get serious, useful AI legislation in 2027, but it must be legislation that works despite many problems remaining illegible for a long time.

The Hugging Face outbreak made rogue AI surprisingly legible

The [...]

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Outline:

(01:24) The Hugging Face outbreak made rogue AI surprisingly legible

(02:55) What makes an illegible argument?

(06:12) What are the remaining illegible problems?

(06:54) Borderline legible / tricky

(08:05) Conceptually challenging

(12:36) Sidestepping illegibility

(12:59) Safety cases won't work

(13:56) An example policy that sidesteps judgement

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

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First published:

November 7th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fjGgrzAkpSDouLwfx/illegible-problems-as-the-2027-political-boss-fight

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I was a grant evaluator for Lightcone Commons last round. Funders disbursed about $45mil through the program, and this included funding roughly my first 6.8 million dollars worth of recommendations. There are other projects I would've preferred to fund over what I did fund, but nobody was doing them and so they weren't on offer. Here's a series of projects that I'd fund in the next round, in rough order of priority. The next round is starting now, and is scheduled to end mid-December. I expect rounds to continue at similar speed. I expect similar amounts of funding will route through me in future rounds.

Disclaimer: I am NOT looking to manage anyone in doing any of these projects. I am not looking to help someone get started. Initiative and leadership and management capacity (and people that can just figure out how the heck to get something done, and that have the connections to do it) are the critical bottlenecks here. I can throw money at promising pitches, but not really help them all that much otherwise.

1. Leaders for a broad public movement against superintelligent machines. In the wake of Coxon Day, a number of random people around [...]

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First published:

November 3rd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jNs9CxEbPxFdjnGA2/organizations-i-d-recommend-for-funding

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

By now, there are lots of AI safety research papers, more than what is reasonable for a single person to read. This will get worse as the machines get better at AI safety research, and as more talent and resources pour into the field. But the "paper" is an arbitrary unit, we really care about if we make progress on an "uncertainty" or an "issue", which papers provide heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory evidence towards. Right now, I loosely claim that we should have more short writeups that simply compile evidence from papers (particularly contradictory evidence), and reconcile them into an answer for a question.

Why?

Object level, it's good for the field. It's hard to sift through all these papers! Organising them is useful and saves time.
Orienting towards research questions is a good way to organise our understanding so that we can productively identify gaps and write papers. This was partly what motivated Stress-Testing Alignment Midtraining.
Interesting progress comes out of contradictions, where people have differing intuitions and experimental results. Methodological errors can also be exposed if we have two things that should be the same, but are actually different.

It's good for field-building reasons. [...]
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First published:

November 5th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tn4WSyrqr7ozGLjRy/people-should-resolve-tensions-in-ai-safety-research

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post. Executive summary

From August 12 to October 29, 2026, METR staff performed a high-access evaluation at Anthropic to assess the degree to which AI is accelerating AI R&D.[2] If AI systems started to significantly accelerate further AI development, this could lead to a sudden emergence of extreme and risky capabilities.

Anthropic offered unprecedented access to internal data on their AI R&D process, including a variety of metrics on pretraining, reinforcement learning (RL), training compute in each domain, benchmark scores for internal models, AI speedup analyses, forecasts of a future model's metrics, and interviews with relevant staff.

In our first section, we share our subjective conclusions about risk. We now believe that:

As of October 2026, Anthropic is likely improving the capabilities of their models on well-specified tasks at around twice the rate they did between March 2024 and October 2025. This estimate is given with high uncertainty; we would not be surprised if the true acceleration was closer to 1.3x or 3x the historical rate.
A majority of this acceleration today is likely attributable to Anthropic's extensive use of AI to do R&D, though there is significant uncertainty and other causes likely played a [...]
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First published:

November 5th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N5AmYkRks5CqAxvBg/metr-independent-assessment-of-ai-r-and-d-acceleration-at


Linkpost URL:
https://metr.org/blog/2026-11-05-anthropic-ai-rd-acceleration-assessment/

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

For all my efforts at deliberate practicing rationality, by far the most actionable way to self-improve is "get on ADHD or depression meds, if you need them."

Your friends with ADHD and depression struggle to summon the motivation and focus necessary to get themselves a teledoc who can give them such meds. One of the most useful things you can do is sit them down and say "hey, wanna do the steps here to get some meds?" and then stare at them until they do.

(or, until they say "really I do not want that actually.")

This brought to you by ~2 years of Feedbackloop-first Rationality and Thinking Assistance.

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First published:

November 6th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8qYuy9Cr6BNpgjJjT/help-your-friends-get-adhd-and-depression-meds

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.