My understanding is that even though advocating a pause or massive slowdown in the development of superintelligence think we should get there eventually[1]. Something something this is necessary for humanity to reach its potential.

Perhaps so, but I'll be sad about it. Humanity has a lot of unsolved problems right now. Aging, death, disease, poverty, environmental degradation, abuse and oppression of the less powerful, conflicts, and insufficient resources such as energy and materials.

Even solving all the things that feel "negative", the active suffering, there's all this potential for us and the seemingly barren universe that could be filled with flourishing life. Reaching that potential will require a lot of engineering puzzles to be solved. Fusion reactors would be neat. Nanotechnology would be neat. Better gene editing and reproductive technology would be neat.

Superintelligence, with its superness, could solve these problems faster than humanity is on track to. Plausibly way way faster. With people dying every day, I see the case for it. Yet it also feels like the cheat code to solving all our problems. It's building an adult to take care of us, handing over the keys and steering wheel, and after that point our efforts [...]

The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

November 23rd, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6tEXnTp7fcs2KhXMk/i-ll-be-sad-to-lose-the-puzzles

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

{early pause}... (you should have known this:)

YOU (not just them over there)

CAN (tho maybe you shouldn't?)

JUST (its weirdly easy)

DO (not talking/writing/planning/delaying)

THINGS (weird/hard/easy things... really ANYthing)

{late pause} (I'll make eye contract until you START)

-@jenniferRM, riffing on norvid_studies.

You should know this by now, but you can just do things. That you didn't know this is an indictment of your social environment, which taught you how to act.

You Can Just Do Things

Yes, you. All the activities you see other people do? You can do them, too. Whether or not you'll find it hard, you can do them.

The barriers you see to doing so are not iron-hard constraints. They are obstacles you can climb over, costs you've reified into infinitely high cliffs because constraining the action space, and thereby the solution space, can simplify life. But always remember, these are fake cliffs. If you actually want to solve a problem, if you feel but the barest moment of whimsy, you can topple them with but a thought and expand the action space however much you like.

If you are ruling out actions, make sure it is because it is [...]

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Outline:

(00:48) You Can Just Do Things

(01:38) You Can Just Do Things

(02:20) You Can Just Do Things

(03:08) You Can Just Do Things

(04:02) You Can Just Do Things

(05:06) You Can Just Do Things

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First published:

November 23rd, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zwXdepvTr9FqQY6dw/you-can-just-do-things

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

(Cross-posted from my Substack; written as part of the Halfhaven virtual blogging camp)

Oh, you read Emily Post's Etiquette? What version? There's a significant difference between versions, and that difference reflects the declining literacy of the American intellectual.

I looked into this because I noticed books published before the ’70s or ‘80s seemed to be written with an assumption of the reader's competence that is no longer present in many modern texts.

Take Emily Post's Etiquette. The force of her intellect and personality came through in the 1922 original:

When gentlemen are introduced to each other they always shake hands. When a gentleman is introduced to a lady, she sometimes puts out her hand— especially if he is some one she has long heard about from friends in common, but to an entire stranger she generally merely bows her head slightly and says: “How do you do!” Strictly speaking, it is always her place to offer her hand or not as she chooses, but if he puts out his hand, it is rude on her part to ignore it. Nothing could be more ill-bred than to treat curtly any overture made in spontaneous friendliness. No thoroughbred lady would [...]

The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

November 23rd, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Nr4Mca2WGhv4jyvfh/literacy-is-decreasing-among-the-intellectual-class

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Insulin resistance is bad. It doesn't just cause heart disease. Peter Attia, author of Outlive, the Science and Art of Longevity, makes a convincing[1] case that insulin resistance increases the risk of cancer and Alzheimer's disease, too. Causally-speaking, the number of deaths downstream of insulin resistance is ginormous and massively underestimated.

This implies one of the following must be true:

• The science is wrong. Insulin isn't ruining our health.
• Insulin resistance is an extremely difficult problem to solve.
• Civilization is FUBAR.

We know that civilization is FUBAR along many dimensions. Soviet agricultural policy was FUBAR. Maoist agricultural policy was FUBAR. American urban planning is FUBAR. Public education is FUBAR. Dualistic consciousness is FUBAR. I have heard that the Windows Operating System contains advertisements. It is entirely believable that the American metabolism is FUBAR too.

Visiting Japan made this fact impossible for me to ignore. By Japanese standards, Americans are fat. But that under-estimates the scope of the problem, because you can have an unhealthy metabolism without being visibly obese. But when everybody is unhealthy, how do you define "unhealthy"? The obvious reference class to use is hunter-gatherers. I'm not talking about our paleolithic ancestors. There's real-live hunter-gatherers living [...]

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Outline:

(03:43) Nationalism

(12:31) Peasant Diets

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

November 23rd, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2o344KFEuuJHBzpDJ/traditional-food

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

What blocks people from being vulnerable with others?

Much ink has been spilled on two classes of answers to this question:

1. Not everyone is in fact safe to be vulnerable around. Not even well-intentioned people are always safe to be vulnerable around; being-safe-to-be-vulnerable-around is a skill which not everyone is automatically good at.
2. Many people have been vulnerable in the past, got burned for it, and so developed emotional blocks against vulnerability. “Trauma”.

There are a lot of people for whom these answers provide the right frame for their problems. This post is not for those people.

I want to focus on a different frame: there are importantly different kinds of things which people are hesitant to expose to others. Some of those things just require finding the right person and being vulnerable with them; these are the “easy cases”, in this frame. But other things pose fundamental difficulties, even when everybody involved has the safe-to-be-vulnerable-around skillset and isn’t particularly traumatized.

Let's start with an easy example: sex stuff. Fetishes, sluttiness, that sort of thing. Revealing one's sexual tastes involves being emotionally vulnerable. Moreso the more taboo one's tastes are, with pedophilia on one end of the spectrum [...]

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First published:

November 23rd, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fKoZmewSEwpfHj5Rg/easy-vs-hard-emotional-vulnerability

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Author: 清风学渣
Link: https://www.zhihu.com/question/10967114707/answer/1904046054904665233
Source: Zhihu
Copyright belongs to the author. For commercial reprints, please contact the author for authorization. For non-commercial reprints, please indicate the source.

I’ve seen a lot of discussions about Liang Wenfeng online. Yesterday, I happened to be on the phone with a close friend from my university year, and we talked about him too. So here, I’ll shamelessly piggyback[1] on the fame of my old university classmate, Liang Wenfeng. Some netizens wanted to know what Liang Wenfeng was like during his undergraduate years before he got into investment and the AI industry, so this answer is to satisfy a little bit of that curiosity. I hope these “revelations”[2] won’t affect Mr. Liang's privacy. If they do, please remind me, and the author[3] will modify or delete the post.

The author and Liang Wenfeng were both in the Electronic & Information Engineering program, Class of ‘02, at Zhejiang University.[4] We weren’t in the same class but participated in the same Electronics Design Contest. Although we had some contact during our four years as classmates, we weren’t in the same dorm or class, so my impressions of him are limited and fragmented.

Impression 1: In our [...]

The original text contained 19 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

November 23rd, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nyuGJDwL83ggGeoYu/what-kind-of-person-is-deepseek-s-founder-liang-wenfeng-an

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

A message on OpenAI's internal Slack claimed the activist in question had expressed interest in “causing physical harm to OpenAI employees.”

OpenAI employees in San Francisco were told to stay inside the office on Friday afternoon after the company purportedly received a threat from an individual who was previously associated with the Stop AI activist group.

“Our information indicates that [name] from StopAI has expressed interest in causing physical harm to OpenAI employees,” a member of the internal communications team wrote on Slack. “He has previously been on site at our San Francisco facilities.”

Just before 11 am, San Francisco police received a 911 call about a man allegedly making threats and intending to harm others at 550 Terry Francois Boulevard, which is near OpenAI's offices in the Mission Bay neighborhood, according to data tracked by the crime app Citizen. A police scanner recording archived on the app describes the suspect by name and alleges he may have purchased weapons with the intention of targeting additional OpenAI locations.

Hours before the incident on Friday, the individual who police flagged as allegedly making the thread said he was no longer part of Stop AI in a post on social media.

[...]

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First published:

November 22nd, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5SAn6HbeQxHatCGTd/openai-locks-down-san-francisco-offices-following-alleged

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Here are eight tools of anti-epistemology that I think anyone can use to hide their norm-violating behavior from being noticed, and deceive people about their character.[1]

Heuristic Details

1. Maintain Plausible Innocence

Always provide and maintain a plausibly deniable account of your behavior that isn’t norm violating

Kim Kitsuragi: “You want to send someone a message that the police are working for you.”

Evrart Claire: “I repeat, I’m a very, *very* busy man, Mr. Kitsuragi, and therefore I must occasionally enlist… outside help.” He turns back to you. “So what will it be, Harry?”

 

How: Never explicitly offer or ask to do something that's norm violating. Always communicate it in the subtext, while your explicit words are consistent with a narrative of good conduct / innocence.

Why: Whenever a third party tries to verify what was communicated, you have a coherent and accurate account of the explicit text of your words that is not the same as what was actually communicated, making it harder to prosecute your crimes. (Spiritually: "They've got nothing on me.")

It can also confuse the people you're actually talking to about the extent to which you intended what actually happened, and as to what your motives [...]

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

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First published:

November 21st, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MT2KomFAzLPkp5GAN/eight-heuristics-of-anti-epistemology-1

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Ever on the quilting goes,
Spinning out the lives between,
Winding up the souls of those
Students up to one-thirteen

There's a book about a young boy whose mundane life is one day interrupted by a call to go to wizard boarding school, where he gets into youthful hijinks overshadowed by feats about a dark wizard. There's a prophecy, friends made along the way, and finally a climactic battle against the dark wizard returned. I read it when I was young, and it left a lasting impact on me.

That book is Jane Yolan's Wizard's Hall, published six years before Harry Potter, and in contrast to Harry Potter it emphasizes a particular virtue that's not often lauded in main characters. To use a term from the more famous later book, Wizard's Hall is a book that centres Hufflepuffs.

A Book Full Of Lessons

Wizard's Hall is stuffed to the gills with aphorisms. Our main character, Thornmallow, will repeat many of them to himself at the appropriate moment. Some come from teachers, some from other students, and many from Thornmallow's mother. The first chapter alone gives us "better take care than need care," "hunger is a great seasoner," and "it [...]

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Outline:

(01:02) A Book Full Of Lessons

(03:18) Enchantment and Enhancement

(06:20) Ode To The Seldom Sung

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

November 22nd, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Dr3JgAo7AbFtdJpQ7/book-review-wizard-s-hall

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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.

Audio note: this article contains 92 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description.

Garrabrant Induction provides a somewhat plausible sketch of reasoning under computational uncertainty, the gist of which is "build a prediction market". An approximation of classical probability theory emerges. However, this is only because we assume classical logic. The version of Garrabrant Induction in the paper does this by allowing bets to be placed on all boolean combinations of sentences visible to the market. An earlier draft accomplished the same thing via special arbitrage rules, EG, if you own _1over 5_ of _S_, and you own _1over 5_ of _neg S_, then you can trade these to the market-maker for _1over 5_ of a dollar. (So for example, if the current price of a share of _S_ is _50¢_, and the current price of a share of _neg S_ is _45¢_, then you can arbitrage by buying _1over5_ of a share of both (cost _10¢_+_9¢_=_19¢_) and cashing these in to the market maker for _20¢_.) This forces the market to converge towards _text{price}(S)+text{price}(neg S) = $1_ for all _S_ [...]

The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

November 22nd, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/g8RBkTf9uGTq9ypub/market-logic-i

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.