LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Summary


Following an intense viral infection in 2019, I became ill with a mysterious chronic illness, which became progressively worse until mid-2024 when I became partially bedbound with dozens of debilitating symptoms that normal humans only experience in the months/weeks/days leading up to death. Over my years of being ill, I saw over 30 doctors/therapists/health coaches and tried well over 100 different treatments and palliatives. Most of these did nothing or made things worse, or at best provided slight relief. I try to give a sense of what it is like to live with such an illness.

In mid-2024 I began a treatment called brain retraining (also known by other names, such as the mindbody approach and mindbody work; I will use any of these terms throughout the blog post interchangeably), which cannot be explained in such a small space as this summary but which you can think of as a combination of meditation and exposure therapy, and which is widely considered to be a scam in the "complex chronic illness space" (a vague and spread-out space of people who suffer from illnesses such as ME/CFS, MCAS, mold illness, post-viral illness, long COVID, chronic Lyme disease [...]
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Outline:

(00:13) Summary

(04:20) Introduction

(08:11) A quick summary of my illness from 2019 to May 2024

(11:12) List of doctors and treatments I tried

(18:44) Back to my May 2024 post

(20:30) Nystatin withdrawal and crash (May and June 2024)

(22:31) Visiting the hell realms (what summer 2024 was like)

(35:07) What about post-exertional malaise (PEM)?

(40:41) Brain retraining

(44:46) An outline of the Gupta Program

(53:28) My experience with the Gupta Program

(55:18) Branching out: Dan Buglio, Miguel Bautista, and Helmut Koeckritz

(01:09:23) Is brain retraining the same thing as therapy or meditation?

(01:21:23) Legitimate scams, and the poor marketing of brain retraining

(01:24:13) How I almost figured out mindbody stuff several times in the past, and why I gave up on it each time

(01:32:27) Generalizing from my own experience

(01:35:46) Luck-based medicine? and medical miracles

(01:38:32) Being stuck in my head

(01:43:36) Why did I become so ill? Understanding the deeper reasons for mindbody conditions

(01:48:06) Where I am now, and what is next?

The original text contained 17 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

October 30th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FZ4iJvqmzxXFSz6JX/my-experiences-with-the-extremes-of-post-viral-illness-and

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Epistemic Status: 15 years working as a therapist, 6+ of them with rationalist and EA clients. 7 years teaching and directing at rationality camps and workshops, and many more as a member of several of this community's overlapping subcultures.

Disclaimer: I finished my first draft of this article and its two subsequent ones half a year ago and sent them out for feedback to various people before a bunch of stuff happened in my life that derailed me from finishing, and in the meantime, a big ol' brouhaha started around Slutcon 2 and various frictions this article was meant to highlight within the rationalist and EA community surfaced in The Discourse.

All of which is to say, this post is explicitly not about any specific incident, and deliberately avoids litigating any. It's a guide to the structural dynamics that make such situations arise; where I make claims about how things go wrong and why, I'm drawing on a mix of research, observations, and both clinical and non-clinical experiences within these communities and beyond them.

TL;DR: It's helpful to think of the rationality/EA community as a village (social scene, professional network, dating pool, housing market, all tied together by shared [...]

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Outline:

(02:01) Three Villages in a Trenchcoat

(03:53) 1) Multi-role density

(07:57) 2) Three villages in a trenchcoat

(14:09) 3) Status is a local currency

(19:15) 4) Visibility shifts expectations

(24:53) 5) Villages can make it hard to know what you want

(30:48) 6) Every village has this problem

(33:22) First map, then navigate

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First published:

October 29th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dp3D39ztWDWFAN6nu/three-villages-in-a-trenchcoat-post-i

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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Or if you prefer, "@Claude", "@Opus", "@Astra"

@Grok is a popular Twitter/X feature where if you tag Grok in a tweet, Grok will respond in a comment. The stereotypical use case is "@Grok is this true?" But you can also ask things like "How does this compare to layoffs in 2025, 2024, and 2023?" and "How would you verify AI in the domain of AI research?"

Notwithstanding that Grok is often recruited in a charged or condescending way to win arguments, I think it's a pretty good feature:

It's requires no effort to invoke an LLM with the context of the tweet thread.
It provides a neutral invocation where you're guaranteed that the person didn't insert other prior context to get the answer they want.
It means you get the first output, and know it's not the case that someone kept rerunning the query until they get the response they wanted.
In short, you get convenience and a neutral fact checker. In launching this feature on LessWrong, I'm not fully sure how people will use it and I'm hoping to see some novel valuable use-cases. Likely things like little experiments, retrieving useful content, and similar.

Going beyond @Grok's [...]

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:

October 28th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fSaxGFMysTTeKxoMF/you-can-now-grok-on-lesswrong

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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 podcast app.

You will agree that for a woman who has fought three duels, all of them kills, indulging in such fears is ludicrous. But what's around the corner now is a duel so big that I don't think I have the guts for it; in Faust's words: Verweile doch, du bist so schoen! Keep it as it is. Don't change. [...] Take my life but don't take away the meaning of my life.

—"When It Changed" by Joanna Russ

I've been crashing Prof. Lai's "Advanced Topics" class this semester, on Fourier analysis plus enough functional analysis to get by (since the University can't afford to offer functional analysis as a regular class anymore). It's not obviously a good use of my time, but now that I've started, I have to see it through. I could try to tell a story about impact: I am leveling up my math chops, which will be useful for understanding natural abstractions or singular learning theory or mechanistic explanation, which will be useful for—but maybe it's less embarrassing to not try to sell a story. Call it luxury consumption during garbage time. I've lived a good life, in some ways if not [...]

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First published:

October 25th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Y3G26fHXYM3SKYEHh/san-francisco-state-university-in-twilight

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a weird moment. I have a hunch that we'll look back later and tell ourselves stories in which it seemed obvious where things were going. So I wanted to lay down a little time capsule and register just how confusing everything felt at the time. This is a personal view from the trenches.

1.

If you're a normal person, you may feel that AI has been good at math for a long time.But for "real" math, this is roughly what it felt like:

When

Feeling

2024

LLMs are toys

Summer 2025

LLMs are interesting toys

Early Autumn 2025

LLMs can do useful stuff sometimes

Mid Autumn 2025

…a lot of stuff

Late Autumn 2025

…a lot

Early 2026

holy god

Even having been astonished by AI progress in the past, it was still astonishing to see AI move in a matter of months from a mildly-useful toy to something that many people now consider almost impossible to do without.

2.

Personally, I'd say that current AI makes me around 50% more productive at "doing math". That's despite the fact that AI can now often do in a few minutes things that would have taken me hours to [...]

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Outline:

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(14:00) 18.

(14:46) 19.

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

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First published:

October 27th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HuQAuWjc2Z5tqCjyw/scattered-thoughts-on-how-doing-math-feels-these-days

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.