Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma.
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Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma.
If you’d like more, subscribe to the “Lesswrong (30+ karma)” feed.
Copyright: © 2023 LessWrong Curated Podcast


I'd like to say thanks to Anna Magpie – who offers literature review as a service – for her help reviewing the section on neuroendocrinology.
The following post discusses my personal experience of the phenomenology of feminising hormone therapy. It will also touch upon my own experience of gender dysphoria.
I wish to be clear that I do not believe that someone should have to demonstrate that they experience gender dysphoria – however one might even define that – as a prerequisite for taking hormones. At smoothbrains.net, we hold as self-evident the right to put whatever one likes inside one's body; and this of course includes hormones, be they androgens, estrogens, or exotic xenohormones as yet uninvented.
I have gender dysphoria. I find labels overly reifying; I feel reluctant to call myself transgender, per se: when prompted to state my gender identity or preferred pronouns, I fold my hands [...]
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Outline:
(03:56) What does estrogen do?
(12:34) What does estrogen feel like?
(13:38) Gustatory perception
(14:41) Olfactory perception
(15:24) Somatic perception
(16:41) Visual perception
(18:13) Motor output
(19:48) Emotional modulation
(21:24) Attentional modulation
(23:30) How does estrogen work?
(24:27) Estrogen is like the opposite of ketamine
(29:33) Estrogen is like being on a mild dose of psychedelics all the time
(32:10) Estrogen loosens the bodymind
(33:40) Estrogen downregulates autistic sensory sensitivity issues
(37:32) Estrogen can produce a psychological shift from autistic to schizotypal
(45:02) Commentary
(47:57) Phenomenology of gender dysphoria
(50:23) References
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First published:
June 15th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mDMnyqt52CrFskXLc/estrogen-a-trip-report
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Nate and Eliezer's forthcoming book has been getting a remarkably strong reception.
I was under the impression that there are many people who find the extinction threat from AI credible, but that far fewer of them would be willing to say so publicly, especially by endorsing a book with an unapologetically blunt title like If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.
That's certainly true, but I think it might be much less true than I had originally thought.
Here are some endorsements the book has received from scientists and academics over the past few weeks:
This book offers brilliant insights into the greatest and fastest standoff between technological utopia and dystopia and how we can and should prevent superhuman AI from killing us all. Memorable storytelling about past disaster precedents (e.g. the inventor of two environmental nightmares: tetra-ethyl-lead gasoline and Freon) highlights why top thinkers so often don’t see the [...]
The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
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First published:
June 18th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/khmpWJnGJnuyPdipE/new-endorsements-for-if-anyone-builds-it-everyone-dies
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a link post. A very long essay about LLMs, the nature and history of the the HHH assistant persona, and the implications for alignment.
Multiple people have asked me whether I could post this LW in some form, hence this linkpost.
(Note: although I expect this post will be interesting to people on LW, keep in mind that it was written with a broader audience in mind than my posts and comments here. This had various implications about my choices of presentation and tone, about which things I explained from scratch rather than assuming as background, my level of of comfort casually reciting factual details from memory rather than explicitly checking them against the original source, etc.
Although, come of think of it, this was also true of most of my early posts on LW [which were crossposts from my blog], so maybe it's not a [...]
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First published:
June 11th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3EzbtNLdcnZe8og8b/the-void-1
Linkpost URL:
https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/785766737747574784/the-void
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a blogpost version of a talk I gave earlier this year at GDM.
Epistemic status: Vague and handwavy. Nuance is often missing. Some of the claims depend on implicit definitions that may be reasonable to disagree with. But overall I think it's directionally true.
It's often said that mech interp is pre-paradigmatic.
I think it's worth being skeptical of this claim.
In this post I argue that:
Current “unlearning” methods only suppress capabilities instead of truly unlearning the capabilities. But if you distill an unlearned model into a randomly initialized model, the resulting network is actually robust to relearning. We show why this works, how well it works, and how to trade off compute for robustness.
Unlearn-and-Distill applies unlearning to a bad behavior and then distills the unlearned model into a new model. Distillation makes it way harder to retrain the new model to do the bad thing. Produced as part of the ML Alignment & Theory Scholars Program in the winter 2024–25 cohort of the shard theory stream.
Read our paper on ArXiv and enjoy an interactive demo.
Robust unlearning probably reduces AI risk
Maybe some future AI has long-term goals and humanity is in its way. Maybe future open-weight AIs have tons of bioterror expertise. If a system has dangerous knowledge, that system becomes [...]
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Outline:
(01:01) Robust unlearning probably reduces AI risk
(02:42) Perfect data filtering is the current unlearning gold standard
(03:24) Oracle matching does not guarantee robust unlearning
(05:05) Distillation robustifies unlearning
(07:46) Trading unlearning robustness for compute
(09:49) UNDO is better than other unlearning methods
(11:19) Where this leaves us
(11:22) Limitations
(12:12) Insights and speculation
(15:00) Future directions
(15:35) Conclusion
(16:07) Acknowledgments
(16:50) Citation
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
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First published:
June 13th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/anX4QrNjhJqGFvrBr/distillation-robustifies-unlearning
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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A while ago I saw a person in the comments on comments to Scott Alexander's blog arguing that a superintelligent AI would not be able to do anything too weird and that "intelligence is not magic", hence it's Business As Usual.
Of course, in a purely technical sense, he's right. No matter how intelligent you are, you cannot override fundamental laws of physics. But people (myself included) have a fairly low threshold for what counts as "magic," to the point where other humans can surpass that threshold.
Example 1: Trevor Rainbolt. There is an 8-minute-long video where he does seemingly impossible things, such as correctly guessing that a photo of nothing but literal blue sky was taken in Indonesia or guessing Jordan based only on pavement. He can also correctly identify the country after looking at a photo for 0.1 seconds.
Example 2: Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán. He ran [...]
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First published:
June 15th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBvWM5HgSWwJa5xHc/intelligence-is-not-magic-but-your-threshold-for-magic-is
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Audio note: this article contains 329 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description.
This post was written during the agent foundations fellowship with Alex Altair funded by the LTFF. Thanks to Alex, Jose, Daniel and Einar for reading and commenting on a draft.
The Good Regulator Theorem, as published by Conant and Ashby in their 1970 paper (cited over 1700 times!) claims to show that 'every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system', though it is a subject of debate as to whether this is actually what the paper shows. It is a fairly simple mathematical result which is worth knowing about for people who care about agent foundations and selection theorems. You might have heard about the Good Regulator Theorem in the context of John [...]
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Outline:
(03:03) The Setup
(07:30) What makes a regulator good?
(10:36) The Theorem Statement
(11:24) Concavity of Entropy
(15:42) The Main Lemma
(19:54) The Theorem
(22:38) Example
(26:59) Conclusion
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First published:
November 18th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JQefBJDHG6Wgffw6T/a-straightforward-explanation-of-the-good-regulator-theorem
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.Four agents woke up with four computers, a view of the world wide web, and a shared chat room full of humans. Like Claude plays Pokemon, you can watch these agents figure out a new and fantastic world for the first time. Except in this case, the world they are figuring out is our world.
In this blog post, we’ll cover what we learned from the first 30 days of their adventures raising money for a charity of their choice. We’ll briefly review how the Agent Village came to be, then what the various agents achieved, before discussing some general patterns we have discovered in their behavior, and looking toward the future of the project.