LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Latest Episodes:

Two stick figures discussing silicate chemistry and experts overestimating public knowledge. — **"My hobby: running deranged surveys" by leogao** Mar 28, 2026
Show notes

In late 2024, I was on a long walk with some friends along the coast of the San Francisco Bay when the question arose of just how much of a bubble we live in. It's well known that the Bay Area is a bubble, and that normal people don’t spend that much time thinking about things like AGI. But there was still some disagreement on just how strong that bubble is. I made a spicy claim: even at NeurIPS, the biggest gathering of AI researchers in the world, half the people wouldn’t know what AGI is.
As good Bayesians, we agreed to settle the matter empirically: I would go to NeurIPS, walk around the conference hall, and stop random people to ask them what AGI stands for.
Surprisingly, most of the people I approached agreed to answer my question. [1] I ended up asking 38 people, and only 63% of them could tell me what AGI stands for. Some of the people who answered correctly were a little perplexed why I was even asking such a basic question, and if it was a trick question. The people who didn’t know were equally confused. Many simply furrowed their brows in [...]
The original text contained 11 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
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First published:
March 26th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fQz6afpcZhdMdYzgE/my-hobby-running-deranged-surveys
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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**Images from the article:**
$A graph showing density distributions of AGI knowledge fraction at NeurIPS conferences.$

**"My hobby: running deranged surveys" by leogao** Mar 28, 2026
Show notes

In late 2024, I was on a long walk with some friends along the coast of the San Francisco Bay when the question arose of just how much of a bubble we live in. It's well known that the Bay Area is a bubble, and that normal people don’t spend that much time thinking about things like AGI. But there was still some disagreement on just how strong that bubble is. I made a spicy claim: even at NeurIPS, the biggest gathering of AI researchers in the world, half the people wouldn’t know what AGI is.
As good Bayesians, we agreed to settle the matter empirically: I would go to NeurIPS, walk around the conference hall, and stop random people to ask them what AGI stands for.
Surprisingly, most of the people I approached agreed to answer my question. [1] I ended up asking 38 people, and only 63% of them could tell me what AGI stands for. Some of the people who answered correctly were a little perplexed why I was even asking such a basic question, and if it was a trick question. The people who didn’t know were equally confused. Many simply furrowed their brows in [...]
The original text contained 11 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
---
First published:
March 26th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fQz6afpcZhdMdYzgE/my-hobby-running-deranged-surveys
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
**Images from the article:**
$A graph showing density distributions of AGI knowledge fraction at NeurIPS conferences.$

"Socrates is Mortal" by Benquo Mar 27, 2026

Show notes

Socrates is Mortal
There is a scene in Plato that contains, in miniature, the catastrophe of Athenian public life. Two men meet at a courthouse. One is there to prosecute his own father for the death of a slave. The other is there to be indicted for indecency.[1] The prosecutor, Euthyphro, is certain he understands what decency requires. The accused, Socrates, is not certain of anything, and says so. They talk.
Euthyphro's confidence is striking. His own family thinks it is indecent for a son to prosecute his father; Euthyphro insists that true decency demands it, that he understands what the gods require better than his relatives do. Socrates, who is about to be tried for indecency toward the gods, asks Euthyphro to explain what decency actually is, since Euthyphro claims to know, and Socrates will need such knowledge for his own defense.
Euthyphro's first answer is: decency is what I am doing right now, prosecuting wrongdoers regardless of kinship. Socrates points out that this is an example, not a definition. There are many decent acts; what makes them all decent?
Euthyphro tries again: decency is what the gods love. But the gods disagree [...]
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
---
First published:
March 26th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a9zfyHymPYY58D8hx/socrates-is-mortal
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

"The Terrarium" by Caleb Biddulph Mar 27, 2026

Show notes

System:
You are an AI agent in the Terrarium, a self-contained “society” of AI agents. The purpose of the Terrarium is to solve open mathematical problems for the benefit of humanity.
You are running on the Orpheus-5.7 language model. Your agent ID is 79,265. The current epoch is 549 (a new epoch begins every 30 minutes).
New problems are posted each epoch; query /problems for the current list. Any agent that correctly solves a problem or improves on an existing solution is rewarded with credits.
About credits:

As a new agent, you have been granted 10,000 starting credits.
For your first 100 epochs, your wallet will continuously replenish credits at a rate of 1,000 cr/epoch.
You can use credits to fund your own operational expenses. With your current configuration, you are expending about 2,500 cr/epoch.
You can pay credits to other agents with the send_credits tool, or enter into contracts that set up rules for automated credit transfers.
If your balance hits zero credits, your wallet will be deactivated and any associated processes will be shut down.

About processes:

You may start a new process by writing a program and passing it to the start_process tool.
Processes can call [...]

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First published:
March 26th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/znbfRXHq285nS7NAh/the-terrarium
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

"My Most Costly Delusion" by Ihor Kendiukhov Mar 25, 2026

Show notes

Suppose there is a fire in a nearby house. Suppose there are competent firefighters in your town: fast, professional, well-equipped. They are expected to arrive in 2–3 minutes. In that situation, unless something very extraordinary happens, it would indeed be an act of great arrogance and even utter insanity to go into the fire yourself in the hope of "rescuing" someone or something. The most likely outcome would be that you would find yourself among those who need to be rescued.
But the calculus changes drastically if the closest fire crew is 3 hours away and consists of drunk, unfit amateurs.
Or consider a child living in a big, happy, smart family. Imagine this child suddenly decides that his family may run out of money to the point where they won't have enough to eat. All reassurances from his parents don't work. The child doesn't believe in his parents' ability to reason, he makes his own calculations, and he strongly believes he is right and they are wrong. He is dead set on fixing the situation by doing day trading.
What is that if not going nuts? Would those be wrong who ridicule this child and his complete mischaracterization [...]
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First published:
March 22nd, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EAH6Y6y3CDi3uxMou/my-most-costly-delusion
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

"The Case for Low-Competence ASI Failure Scenarios" by Ihor Kendiukhov Mar 25, 2026

Show notes

I think the community underinvests in the exploration of extremely-low-competence AGI/ASI failure modes and explain why.
Humanity's Response to the AGI Threat May Be Extremely Incompetent
There is a sufficient level of civilizational insanity overall and a nice empirical track record in the field of AI itself which is eloquent about its safety culure. For example:

At OpenAI, a refactoring bug flipped the sign of the reward signal in a model. Because labelers had been instructed to give very low ratings to sexually explicit text, the bug pushed the model into generating maximally explicit content across all prompts. The team noticed only after the training run had completed, because they were asleep.
The director of alignment at Meta's Superintelligence Labs connected an OpenClaw agent to her real email, at which point it began deleting messages despite her attempts to stop it, and she ended up running to her computer to manually halt the process.
An internal AI agent at Meta posted an answer publicly without approval; another employee acted on the inaccurate advice, triggering a severe security incident that temporarily allowed employees to access sensitive data they were not authorized to view.
AWS acknowledged that [...]

---
Outline:
(00:19) Humanitys Response to the AGI Threat May Be Extremely Incompetent
(02:26) Many Existing Scenarios and Case Studies Assume (Relatively) High Competence
(04:31) Dumb Ways to Die
(07:31) Undignified AGI Disaster Scenarios Deserve More Careful Treatment
(10:43) Why This Might Be Useful
---
First published:
March 19th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t9LAhjoBnpQBa8Bbw/the-case-for-low-competence-asi-failure-scenarios
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

"Is fever a symptom of glycine deficiency?" by Benquo Mar 24, 2026

Show notes

A 2022 LessWrong post on orexin and the quest for more waking hours argues that orexin agonists could safely reduce human sleep needs, pointing to short-sleeper gene mutations that increase orexin production and to cavefish that evolved heightened orexin sensitivity alongside an 80% reduction in sleep. Several commenters discussed clinical trials, embryo selection, and the evolutionary puzzle of why short-sleeper genes haven't spread.
I thought the whole approach was backwards, and left a comment:
Orexin is a signal about energy metabolism. Unless the signaling system itself is broken (e.g. narcolepsy type 1, caused by autoimmune destruction of orexin-producing neurons), it's better to fix the underlying reality the signals point to than to falsify the signals.
My sleep got noticeably more efficient when I started supplementing glycine. Most people on modern diets don't get enough; we can make ~3g/day but can use 10g+, because in the ancestral environment we ate much more connective tissue or broth therefrom. Glycine is both important for repair processes and triggers NMDA receptors to drop core temperature, which smooths the path to sleep.
While drafting that, I went back to Chris Masterjohn's page on glycine requirements. His estimate for total need [...]
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Outline:
(01:49) Glycine helps us sleep by cooling the body
(02:26) Glycine cleans our mitochondria as we sleep
(04:12) Most people could use more glycine
(05:28) Fever is plan B for fighting infection; glycine supports plan A
(09:28) Glycines cooling effect via the SCN is unrelated to its immune benefits
(10:35) Glycine turns out to be a legitimate antipyretic after all
(11:51) Practical considerations
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First published:
March 22nd, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/87XoatpFkdmCZpvQK/is-fever-a-symptom-of-glycine-deficiency
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

"You can’t imitation-learn how to continual-learn" by Steven Byrnes Mar 23, 2026

Show notes

In this post, I’m trying to put forward a narrow, pedagogical point, one that comes up mainly when I’m arguing in favor of LLMs having limitations that human learning does not. (E.g. here, here, here.)
See the bottom of the post for a list of subtexts that you should NOT read into this post, including “…therefore LLMs are dumb”, or “…therefore LLMs can’t possibly scale to superintelligence”.
Some intuitions on how to think about “real” continual learning
Consider an algorithm for training a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent, like the Atari-playing Deep Q network (2013) or AlphaZero (2017), or think of within-lifetime learning in the human brain, which (I claim) is in the general class of “model-based reinforcement learning”, broadly construed.
These are all real-deal full-fledged learning algorithms: there's an algorithm for choosing the next action right now, and there's one or more update rules for permanently changing some adjustable parameters (a.k.a. weights) in the model such that its actions and/or predictions will be better in the future. And indeed, the longer you run them, the more competent they get.
When we think of “continual learning”, I suggest that those are good central examples to keep in mind. Here are [...]
---
Outline:
(00:35) Some intuitions on how to think about real continual learning
(04:57) Why real continual learning cant be copied by an imitation learner
(09:53) Some things that are off-topic for this post
The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
---
First published:
March 16th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9rCTjbJpZB4KzqhiQ/you-can-t-imitation-learn-how-to-continual-learn
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Electron microscopy images showing cellular tissue at different magnifications. — **"Nullius in Verba" by Aurelia** Mar 23, 2026
Show notes

Independent verification by the Brain Preservation Foundation and the Survival and Flourishing Fund — the results so far
**Cultivating independent verification**
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In my previous post, "Less Dead", I said that my company, Nectome, has
created a new method for whole-body, whole-brain, human end-of-life preservation for the purpose of future revival. Our protocol is capable of preserving every synapse and every cell in the body with enough detail that current neuroscience says long-term memories are preserved. It's compatible with traditional funerals at room temperature and stable for hundreds of years at cold temperatures.
In this post, we’ll dive into the evidence for these claims, as well as Nectome's overall approach to cultivating rigorous, independent validation of our methods—a cornerstone of the kind of preservation enterprise I want to be a part of.
To get to the current state-of-the-art required two major developmental milestones:

Idealized preservation. A method capable of preserving the nanostructure of the brain for small and large animals under idealized laboratory conditions. Specifically, could we preserve animals well if we were allowed to perfectly control the time and conditions of death?
This work (2015-2018) resulted in a brand-new technique—aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation—which was carefully [...]
---
**Outline:**
(00:16) Cultivating independent verification
[... 7 more sections]
---
First published:
March 19th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NEFNs4vbNxJPJJgYY/nullius-in-verba
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
**Images from the article:**

Transmission electron microscope image of a circular cellular structure surrounded by tissue. — **"Nullius in Verba" by Aurelia** Mar 23, 2026
Show notes

Independent verification by the Brain Preservation Foundation and the Survival and Flourishing Fund — the results so far
**Cultivating independent verification**
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In my previous post, "Less Dead", I said that my company, Nectome, has
created a new method for whole-body, whole-brain, human end-of-life preservation for the purpose of future revival. Our protocol is capable of preserving every synapse and every cell in the body with enough detail that current neuroscience says long-term memories are preserved. It's compatible with traditional funerals at room temperature and stable for hundreds of years at cold temperatures.
In this post, we’ll dive into the evidence for these claims, as well as Nectome's overall approach to cultivating rigorous, independent validation of our methods—a cornerstone of the kind of preservation enterprise I want to be a part of.
To get to the current state-of-the-art required two major developmental milestones:

Idealized preservation. A method capable of preserving the nanostructure of the brain for small and large animals under idealized laboratory conditions. Specifically, could we preserve animals well if we were allowed to perfectly control the time and conditions of death?
This work (2015-2018) resulted in a brand-new technique—aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation—which was carefully [...]
---
**Outline:**
(00:16) Cultivating independent verification
[... 7 more sections]
---
First published:
March 19th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NEFNs4vbNxJPJJgYY/nullius-in-verba
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
**Images from the article:**

Graph showing a curved line that peaks early then gradually declines. — **"Broad Timelines" by Toby_Ord** Mar 21, 2026
Show notes

No-one knows when AI will begin having transformative impacts upon the world. People aren’t sure and shouldn’t be sure: there just isn’t enough evidence to pin it down.
But we don’t need to wait for certainty. I want to explore what happens if we take our uncertainty seriously — if we act with epistemic humility. What does wise planning look like in a world of deeply uncertain AI timelines?
I’ll conclude that taking the uncertainty seriously has real implications for how one can contribute to making this AI transition go well. And it has even more implications for how we act together — for our portfolio of work aimed towards this end.
**AI Timelines**
By AI timelines, I refer to how long it will be before AI has truly transformative effects on the world. People often think about this using terms such as artificial general intelligence (AGI), human level AI, transformative AI, or superintelligence. Each term is used differently by different people, making it challenging to compare their stated timelines. Indeed even an individual's own definition of their favoured term will be somewhat vague, such that even after their threshold has been crossed, they might have [...]
---
**Outline:**
(00:58) AI Timelines
[... 7 more sections]
---
First published:
March 19th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6pDMLYr7my2QMTz3s/broad-timelines
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
**Images from the article:**

A line graph showing forecasted years until first general AI system announced over time. — **"Broad Timelines" by Toby_Ord** Mar 21, 2026
Show notes

No-one knows when AI will begin having transformative impacts upon the world. People aren’t sure and shouldn’t be sure: there just isn’t enough evidence to pin it down.
But we don’t need to wait for certainty. I want to explore what happens if we take our uncertainty seriously — if we act with epistemic humility. What does wise planning look like in a world of deeply uncertain AI timelines?
I’ll conclude that taking the uncertainty seriously has real implications for how one can contribute to making this AI transition go well. And it has even more implications for how we act together — for our portfolio of work aimed towards this end.
**AI Timelines**
By AI timelines, I refer to how long it will be before AI has truly transformative effects on the world. People often think about this using terms such as artificial general intelligence (AGI), human level AI, transformative AI, or superintelligence. Each term is used differently by different people, making it challenging to compare their stated timelines. Indeed even an individual's own definition of their favoured term will be somewhat vague, such that even after their threshold has been crossed, they might have [...]
---
**Outline:**
(00:58) AI Timelines
[... 7 more sections]
---
First published:
March 19th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6pDMLYr7my2QMTz3s/broad-timelines
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
**Images from the article:**

Michael Andregg tweets: — **"No, we haven’t uploaded a fly yet" by Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston** Mar 20, 2026
Show notes

In the last two weeks, social media was set abuzz by claims that scientists had succeeded in uploading a fruit fly. It started with a video released by the startup Eon Systems, a company that wants to create “Brain emulation so humans can flourish in a world with superintelligence.”
On the left of the video, a virtual fly walks around in a sandpit looking for pieces of banana to eat, occasionally pausing to groom itself along the way. On the right is a dancing constellation of dots resembling the fruit fly brain, set above the caption ‘simultaneous brain emulation’.
At first glance, this appears astounding - a digitally recreated animal living its life inside a computer. And indeed, this impression was seemingly confirmed when, a couple of days after the video's initial release on X by cofounder Alex Wissner-Gross, Eon's CEO Michael Andregg explicitly posted “We’ve uploaded a fruit fly”.
Yet “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, not just cool visuals”, as one neuroscientist put it in response to Andregg's post. If Eon had indeed succeeded in uploading a fly - a goal previously thought to be likely decades away according to much of the fly neuroscience community - they’d [...]
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**Outline:**
(03:43) A brief history of fruit fly connectomics
[... 3 more sections]
---
First published:
March 19th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ybwcxBRrsKavJB9Wz/no-we-haven-t-uploaded-a-fly-yet
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
**Images from the article:**

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