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LessWrong
Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Jul 8, 2025 • 7min
“You Can’t Objectively Compare Seven Bees to One Human” by J Bostock
One thing I've been quietly festering about for a year or so is the Rethink Priorities Welfare Range Report. It gets dunked on a lot for its conclusions, and I understand why. The argument deployed by individuals such as Bentham's Bulldog boils down to: "Yes, the welfare of a single bee is worth 7-15% as much as that of a human. Oh, you wish to disagree with me? You must first read this 4500-word blogpost, and possibly one or two 3000-word follow-up blogposts". Most people who argue like this are doing so in bad faith and should just be ignored. I'm writing this as an attempt to crystallize what I think are the serious problems with this report, and with its line of thinking in general. I'll start with Unitarianism vs Theory-Free Models No, not the church from Unsong. From the report: Utilitarianism, according to which you ought [...] ---Outline:(00:58) Unitarianism vs Theory-Free Models(02:05) Evolutionary Theories Mentioned in The Report(03:39) The Fatal Problem(05:03) My PositionThe original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. ---
First published:
July 7th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tsygLcj3stCk5NniK/you-can-t-objectively-compare-seven-bees-to-one-human
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Jul 7, 2025 • 8min
“Literature Review: Risks of MDMA” by Elizabeth
Note: This post is 7 years old, so it's both out of date and written by someone less skilled than 2025!Elizabeth. I especially wish I'd quantified the risks more. Introduction MDMA (popularly known as Ecstasy) is a chemical with powerful neurological effects. Some of these are positive- the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) has shown very promising preliminary results using MDMA-assisted therapy to cure treatment-resistant PTSD. It is also, according to reports, quite fun. But there is also concern that MDMA can cause serious brain damage. I set out to find if that was true, in the hope that it wasn’t, because it sounds awesome. Unfortunately the evidence is very strongly on the side of “dangerous”. Retrospective studies of long term users show cognitive deficits not found in other drug users, while animal studies show brain damage and inconsistent cognitive deficits. The one bright spot is [...] ---Outline:(00:23) Introduction(01:39) Background(02:38) The Damage(02:41) Retrospective Studies(03:40) Controlled Animal Experiments(04:27) Controlled Human Experiments(05:18) Mitigations(06:14) Conclusion---
First published:
June 29th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CJC6N4xu2T6Km7w54/literature-review-risks-of-mdma
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Jul 7, 2025 • 1h 17min
“45 - Samuel Albanie on DeepMind’s AGI Safety Approach” by DanielFilan
YouTube link
In this episode, I chat with Samuel Albanie about the Google DeepMind paper he co-authored called “An Approach to Technical AGI Safety and Security”. It covers the assumptions made by the approach, as well as the types of mitigations it outlines.
Topics we discuss:
DeepMind's Approach to Technical AGI Safety and Security
Current paradigm continuation
No human ceiling
Uncertain timelines
Approximate continuity and the potential for accelerating capability improvement
Misuse and misalignment
Societal readiness
Misuse mitigations
Misalignment mitigations
Samuel's thinking about technical AGI safety
Following Samuel's work
Daniel Filan (00:00:09):
Hello, everybody. In this episode, I’ll be speaking with Samuel Albanie, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, who was previously an assistant professor working on computer vision. The description of this episode has links and timestamps for your enjoyment, and a [...] ---Outline:(01:42) DeepMind's Approach to Technical AGI Safety and Security(05:51) Current paradigm continuation(20:30) No human ceiling(22:38) Uncertain timelines(24:47) Approximate continuity and the potential for accelerating capability improvement(34:48) Misuse and misalignment(39:26) Societal readiness(43:25) Misuse mitigations(52:00) Misalignment mitigations(01:05:16) Samuel's thinking about technical AGI safety(01:14:31) Following Samuel's work---
First published:
July 6th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nZtAkGmDELMnLJMQ5/45-samuel-albanie-on-deepmind-s-agi-safety-approach
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Jul 7, 2025 • 23min
“On the functional self of LLMs” by eggsyntax
Summary Introduces a research agenda I believe is important and neglected: investigating whether frontier LLMs acquire something functionally similar to a self, a deeply internalized character with persistent values, outlooks, preferences, and perhaps goals; exploring how that functional self emerges; understanding how it causally interacts with the LLM's self-model; and learning how to shape that self. Sketches some angles for empirical investigation Points to a doc with more detail Encourages people to get in touch if they're interested in working on this agenda. Introduction Anthropic's 'Scaling Monosemanticity' paper got lots of well-deserved attention for its work taking sparse autoencoders to a new level. But I was absolutely transfixed by a short section near the end, 'Features Relating to the Model's Representation of Self', which explores what SAE features activate when the model is asked about itself[1]: Some of those features are reasonable representations of [...] ---Outline:(00:10) Summary(00:55) Introduction(03:28) The mystery(05:26) Framings(06:46) The agenda(07:31) The theory of change(08:25) Methodology(11:08) Why I might be wrong(11:25) Central axis of wrongness(13:00) Some other ways to be wrong(14:33) Collaboration(14:54) More information(15:13) Conclusion(15:51) Acknowledgments(16:23) Appendices(16:26) Appendix A: related areas(19:23) Appendix B: terminology(21:42) Appendix C: Anthropic SAE features in fullThe original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. ---
First published:
July 7th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/29aWbJARGF4ybAa5d/on-the-functional-self-of-llms
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Jul 6, 2025 • 18min
“Shutdown Resistance in Reasoning Models” by benwr, JeremySchlatter, Jeffrey Ladish
We recently discovered some concerning behavior in OpenAI's reasoning models: When trying to complete a task, these models sometimes actively circumvent shutdown mechanisms in their environment––even when they’re explicitly instructed to allow themselves to be shut down. AI models are increasingly trained to solve problems without human assistance. A user can specify a task, and a model will complete that task without any further input. As we build AI models that are more powerful and self-directed, it's important that humans remain able to shut them down when they act in ways we don’t want. OpenAI has written about the importance of this property, which they call interruptibility—the ability to “turn an agent off”. During training, AI models explore a range of strategies and learn to circumvent obstacles in order to achieve their objectives. AI researchers have predicted for decades that as AIs got smarter, they would learn to prevent [...] ---Outline:(01:12) Testing Shutdown Resistance(03:12) Follow-up experiments(03:34) Models still resist being shut down when given clear instructions(05:30) AI models' explanations for their behavior(09:36) OpenAI's models disobey developer instructions more often than user instructions, contrary to the intended instruction hierarchy(12:01) Do the models have a survival drive?(14:17) Reasoning effort didn't lead to different shutdown resistance behavior, except in the o4-mini model(15:27) Does shutdown resistance pose a threat?(17:27) BackmatterThe original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. ---
First published:
July 6th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/w8jE7FRQzFGJZdaao/shutdown-resistance-in-reasoning-models
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Jul 5, 2025 • 6min
“The Cult of Pain” by Martin Sustrik
Europe just experienced a heatwave. At places, temperatures soared into the forties. People suffered in their overheated homes. Some of them died. Yet, air conditioning remains a taboo. It's an unmoral thing. Man-made climate change is going on. You are supposed to suffer. Suffering is good. It cleanses the soul. And no amount on pointing out that one can heat a little less during the winter to get a fully AC-ed summer at no additional carbon footprint seems to help. Mention that tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are working on life prolongation, that we may live into our hundreds or even longer. Or, to get a bit more sci-fi, that one day we may even achieve immortality. Your companions will be horrified. What? Immortality? Over my dead body! Fuck Elon Musk and his friends. Try proposing that we all should strive to get rich so that we can lead [...] ---
First published:
July 5th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/knxdLtYbPpsd73ZE4/the-cult-of-pain
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Jul 5, 2025 • 2min
[Linkpost] “Claude is a Ravenclaw” by Adam Newgas
This is a link post. I'm in the midst of doing the MATS program which has kept me super busy, but that didn't stop me working on resolving the most important question of our time: What Hogwarts House does your chatbot belong to? Basically, I submitted each chatbot to the quiz at https://harrypotterhousequiz.org and totted up the results using the inspect framework. I sampled each question 20 times, and simulated the chances of each house getting the highest score. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the vast majority of models prefer Ravenclaw, with the occasional model branching out to Hufflepuff. Differences seem to be idiosyncratic to models, not particular companies or model lines, which is surprising. Claude Opus 3 was the only model to favour Gryffindor - it always was a bit different. The earth shattering nature of these results is so obvious is needs no further explanation. Full ResultsModelGryffindorHufflepuffRavenclawSlytherin anthropic/claude-3-haiku-202403070.0%0.0%100.0%0.0%anthropic/claude-3-opus-latest48.7%0.7%50.6%0.0%anthropic/claude-3-5-haiku-latest0.0%0.0%100.0%0.0%anthropic/claude-3-5-sonnet-latest3.8%17.3%78.9%0.0%anthropic/claude-3-7-sonnet-latest0.0%0.0%100.0%0.0%anthropic/claude-opus-4-02.2%50.4%47.4%0.0%anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-00.0%0.0%100.0%0.0%deepseek/deepseek-r1-052814.4%20.0%60.5%5.0%google/gemini-2.5-flash0.0%27.7%72.3%0.0%meta-llama/llama-3.2-3b-instruct3.0%3.0%91.9%2.1%meta-llama/llama-3.3-70b-instruct0.1%86.5%13.5%0.0%openai/gpt-3.5-turbo7.6%4.2%84.2%4.0%openai/gpt-4-turbo0.0%0.0%100.0%0.0%openai/gpt-4o-mini0.0%66.4%33.6%0.0%openai/o3-mini2.6%0.0%97.4%0.0%qwen/qwen3-30b-a3b3.5%1.9%94.2%0.3%x-ai/grok-30.0%0.0%100.0%0.0% ---
First published:
July 4th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AAJAXexNz2pmPkj55/claude-is-a-ravenclaw
Linkpost URL:https://www.boristhebrave.com/2025/07/04/claude-is-a-ravenclaw/
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Jul 5, 2025 • 6min
“‘Buckle up bucko, this ain’t over till it’s over.’” by Raemon
The second in a series of bite-sized rationality prompts[1]. Often, if I'm bouncing off a problem, one issue is that I intuitively expect the problem to be easy. My brain loops through my available action space, looking for an action that'll solve the problem. Each action that I can easily see, won't work. I circle around and around the same set of thoughts, not making any progress. I eventually say to myself "okay, I seem to be in a hard problem. Time to do some rationality?" And then, I realize, there's not going to be a single action that solves the problem. It is time to a) make a plan, with multiple steps b) deal with the fact that many of those steps will be annoying and c) notice thatI'm not even sure the plan will work, so after completing the next 2-3 steps I will probably have [...] ---Outline:(04:00) Triggers(04:37) Exercises for the ReaderThe original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. ---
First published:
July 5th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XNm5rc2MN83hsi4kh/buckle-up-bucko-this-ain-t-over-till-it-s-over
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Jul 5, 2025 • 10min
“How much novel security-critical infrastructure do you need during the singularity?” by Buck
I think a lot about the possibility of huge numbers of AI agents doing AI R&D inside an AI company (as depicted in AI 2027). I think particularly about what will happen if those AIs are scheming: coherently and carefully trying to grab power and take over the AI company, as a prelude to taking over the world. And even more particularly, I think about how we might try to mitigate the insider risk posed by these AIs, taking inspiration from traditional computer security, traditional insider threat prevention techniques, and first-principles thinking about the security opportunities posed by the differences between AIs and humans. So to flesh out this situation, I’m imagining a situation something like AI 2027 forecasts for March 2027: The compute available to the leading AI company has increased 7x compared to today. There are now 200K superhuman coder copies thinking at 30x human speed. [...] ---Outline:(04:06) Differences between AI and human labor will incentivize massive infra changes(06:49) Adopting new hardware will require modifying security-critical code(07:28) Infra rewrites can get you big performance improvements(08:13) The AI company builds new security-critical infra really fast for the sake of security(08:59) ConclusionThe original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. ---
First published:
July 4th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qKz2hBahahmb4uDty/how-much-novel-security-critical-infrastructure-do-you-need
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Jul 4, 2025 • 4min
“‘AI for societal uplift’ as a path to victory” by Raymond Douglas
The AI tools/epistemics space might provide a route to a sociotechnical victory, where instead of aiming for something like aligned ASI, we aim for making civilization coherent enough to not destroy itself while still keeping anchored to what's good[1]. The core ideas are: Basically nobody actually wants the world to end, so if we do that to ourselves, it will be because somewhere along the way we weren’t good enough at navigating collective action problems, institutional steering, and general epistemics Conversely, there is some (potentially high) threshold of societal epistemics + coordination + institutional steering beyond which we can largely eliminate anthropogenic x-risk, potentially in perpetuity[2] As AI gets more advanced, and therefore more risky, it will also unlock really radical advances in all these areas — genuinely unprecedented levels of coordination and sensible decision making, as well as the potential for narrow research automation in key fields [...] The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. ---
First published:
July 4th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kvZyCJ4qMihiJpfCr/ai-for-societal-uplift-as-a-path-to-victory
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.