LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

When I write about things like

storing food or

medication
in case of

disaster,
one common response I get is that it doesn't matter: society will
break down, and people who are stronger than you will take your stuff.
This seemed plausible at first, but it's actually way off.



Looking at past disasters, people mostly fall somewhere on a "kind and
supportive" to "keep to themselves" spectrum. When there is looting
it's typically directed at stores, not homes, and violence is mostly
in the streets. Having supplies
at home lets you stay out of the way.



One distinction it's worth making is between short (hurricane,
earthquake) and long (siege, economic collapse, famine) disasters.
Having what you need at home is really helpful in both cases, but
differently so.



In short disasters (1917 Halifax
explosion, London Blitz, 1985
Mexico City earthquake, and the 2011
Japanese earthquake and tsunami) you typically see sharing and mutual
aid. Stored supplies mean you're not
competing for scarce resources, have slack to help others, and
make you more comfortable.



Stories of looting in situations like this are often exaggerated or
cherry-picked. I had heard post-Katrina New Orleans had [...]

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First published:

April 23rd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cNnRmwzQgz4bmd5i9/your-supplies-probably-won-t-be-stolen-in-a-disaster

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I am a busy man and will die knowing I have not said all I wanted to say. But maybe I can at least leave some IOUs behind.




1) Blatant conflicts are the best kind

Ben Hoffman's "Blatant Lies are the Best Kind!" is maybe the best post title followed by the least clarifying post I have ever encountered. The title is honestly amazing, but the text of the post, instead of a straightforward argument that the title promises, is an extremely dense and almost meta-fictional dialogue about the title:

I think we probably should prosecute good lying more than bad lying, though of course that's tricky. I'd argue the same is true for other forms of conflict: passive aggression is worse than overt aggression, maybe, probably. I haven't written the post yet to figure it out, but it seems important to know.




2) Fire codes are the root of all evil

Fire accidents seem to have the unique combination of producing extremely strong emotional responses by people in a local community, while also often being traceable to an o-ring like failure that you can over-index on. Also, fire marshals are the closest [...]

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Outline:

(00:18) 1) Blatant conflicts are the best kind

(01:11) 2) Fire codes are the root of all evil

(02:14) 3) It is extremely easy to get people to vouch for you, this makes public character references not very helpful

(02:54) 4) Public criticism need not pass the ITT of the people critiqued

(03:41) 5) Courts are amazing

[... 5 more sections]

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First published:

April 21st, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MqgwHJ93pJpaeHXs6/10-posts-i-don-t-have-time-to-write

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ControlAI's mission is to avert the extinction risks posed by superintelligent AI. We believe that in order to do this, we must secure an international prohibition on its development.

We're working to make this happen through what we believe is the most natural and promising approach: helping decision-makers in governments and the public understand the risks and take action.

We believe that ControlAI can achieve an international prohibition on ASI development if scaled sufficiently. We estimate that it would take approximately a $50 million yearly budget in funding to give us a concrete chance at achieving this in the next few years. To be more precise: conditional on receiving this funding in the next few months, we feel we would have ~10% probability of success.

In this post, we lay out some of the reasoning behind this estimate, and explain how additional funding past that threshold would continue to significantly improve our chances of success, with $500 million a year producing an estimated ~30% probability of success.
[1]

Preventing ASI 101

Negotiating, implementing and enforcing an international prohibition on ASI is, in and of itself, not the work of a single non-profit. You [...]

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Outline:

(01:17) Preventing ASI 101

(05:44) Awareness is the bottleneck

(09:38) An asymmetric war

(12:08) Scalable processes

(17:32) What wed do with $50 million or more per year

(18:45) US policy advocacy

(21:22) Policy advocacy in the rest of the world

(23:37) Public awareness

(31:15) Grassroots mobilization

(32:31) Policy work

(33:59) Thought-leader advocacy

(36:05) Attracting and retaining the best talent

(37:18) Conclusion

The original text contained 28 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

April 21st, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TnAR5Sf5hphfnzNTr/usd50-million-a-year-for-a-10-chance-to-ban-asi-1

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Micheal Vassar's strategy for saving the world is horrifyingly counterproductive. Olivia's is worse.

A note before we start: A lot of the sources cited are people who ended up looking kinda insane. This is not a coincidence, it's apparently an explicit strategy: Apply plausibly-deniable psychological pressure to anyone who might speak up until they crack and discredit themselves by sounding crazy or taking extreme and destructive actions. Here's Brent Dill explaining it:




(later in the conversation he tries to encourage the person he's talking to kill herself, and threatens her death if she posts the logs. Charming group! I hear Brent was living in Vassar's garden recently, well after he was removed from the wider community for sexual abuse.)

Examples

Some of the people here I knew before their interactions with Vassar's sphere to be not just mentally OK, but unusually resilient people. Prime among them is Kathy Forth.

Prior to her suicide, Kathy and I were friends. I witnessed her falls downwards from healthy and capable to anxiety to paranoia, as downstream of what I believe to be genuine sexual abuse she spiralled into a narrative and way of experiencing the world where almost everyone seemed [...]

The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

April 21st, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cY7J7KSSqrhB8t3hQ/evil-is-bad-actually-vassar-and-olivia-schaefer-callout-post

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I use AI assistance for basically all of my work, for many hours, every day. My colleagues do the same. Recent surveys suggest >50% of Americans have used AI to help with their work in the last week. My architect recently started sending me emails that were clearly ChatGPT generated.[1]

Despite that, I know surprisingly little about how other people use AI assitance. Or at least how people who aren't weird AI-influencers sharing their marketing courses on Twitter or LinkedIn use AI. So here is a list of 10 concrete times I have used AI in some at least mildly creative ways, and how that went.

1) Transcribe and summarize every conversation spoken in our team office

Using an internal Lightcone application called "Omnilog" we have a microphone in our office that records all of our meetings, transcribes them via ElevenLabs, and uses Pyannote.ai for speaker identification. This was a bunch of work and is quite valuable, but probably a bit too annoying for most readers of this post to set up.

However, the thing I am successfully using Claude Code to do is take that transcript (which often has substantial transcription and speaker-identification errors), clean it up, summarize [...]

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Outline:

(00:50) 1) Transcribe and summarize every conversation spoken in our team office

(01:56) 2) Try to automatically fix any simple bugs that anyone on the team has mentioned out loud, or complained about in Slack

(03:13) 3) Design 20+ different design variations for nowinners.ai

(04:09) 4) Review my LessWrong essays for factual accuracy and argue with me about their central thesis

(05:08) 5) Remove unnecessary clauses, sentences, parentheticals and random cruft from my LessWrong posts before publishing

(06:23) 6) Pair vibe-coding

(08:14) 7) Mass-creating 100+ variations of Suno songs using Claude Cowork desktop control

[... 3 more sections]

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First published:

April 20th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bxdwSZYxKmPBres6w/10-non-boring-ways-i-ve-used-ai-in-the-last-month

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