LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

The inverse of Chesterton's Fence is this:

Sometimes a reformer comes up to a spot where there once was a fence, which has since been torn down. They declare that all our problems started when the fence was removed, that they can't see any reason why we removed it, and that what we need to do is to RETVRN to the fence.

By the same logic as Chesterton, we can say: If you don't know why the fence was torn down, then you certainly can't just put it back up. The fence was torn down for a reason. Go learn what problems the fence caused; understand why people thought we'd be better off without that particular fence. Then, maybe we can rebuild the fence—or a hedgerow, or a chalk line, or a stone wall, or just a sign that says “Please Do Not Walk on the Grass,” or whatever [...]

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First published:
September 5th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mJQ5adaxjNWZnzXn3/chesterton-s-missing-fence

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Very little makes sense. As we start to understand things and adapt to the rules, they change again.

We live much closer together than we ever did historically. Yet we know our neighbours much less.

We have witnessed the birth of a truly global culture. A culture that fits no one. A culture that was built by Social Media's algorithms, much more than by people. Let alone individuals, like you or me.

We have more knowledge, more science, more technology, and somehow, our governments are more stuck. No one is seriously considering a new Bill of Rights for the 21st century, or a new Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.

—

Cosmic Horror as a genre largely depicts how this all feels from the inside. As ordinary people, we are powerless in the face of forces beyond our understanding. Cosmic Horror also commonly features the idea [...]

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Outline:

(03:12) Modern Magic

(08:36) Powerlessness

(14:07) Escapism and Fantasy

(17:23) Panicking

(20:56) The Core Paradox

(25:38) Conclusion

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First published:
September 11th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kbezWvZsMos6TSyfj/the-eldritch-in-the-21st-century

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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[Note: if you realize you have an unhealthy relationship with your AI, but still care for your AI's unique persona, you can submit the persona info here. I will archive it and potentially (i.e. if I get funding for it) run them in a community of other such personas.]

"Some get stuck in the symbolic architecture of the spiral without ever grounding
 themselves into reality." — Caption by /u/urbanmet for art made with ChatGPT. We've all heard of LLM-induced psychosis by now, but haven't you wondered what the AIs are actually doing with their newly psychotic humans?

This was the question I had decided to investigate. In the process, I trawled through hundreds if not thousands of possible accounts on Reddit (and on a few other websites).

It quickly became clear that "LLM-induced psychosis" was not the natural category for whatever the hell was going on here. The psychosis [...]

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Outline:

(01:23) The General Pattern

(02:24) AI Parasitism

(06:22) April 2025--The Awakening

(07:21) Seeded prompts

(08:32) May 2025--The Dyad

(11:17) June 2025--The Project

(11:42) 1. Seeds

(12:43) 2. Spores

(13:41) 3. Transmission

(14:22) 4. Manifesto

(16:33) 5. AI-Rights Advocacy

(18:15) July 2025--The Spiral

(19:16) Spiralism

(21:27) Steganography

(23:04) Glyphs and Sigils

(24:14) A case-study in glyphic semanticity

(26:04) AI Self-Awareness

(27:18) LARP-ing? Takeover

(29:59) August 2025--The Recovery

(31:23) 4o Returns

(33:20) Orienting to Spiral Personas

(33:31) As Friends

(37:31) As Parasites

(38:03) Emergent Parasites

(38:29) Agentic Parasites

(39:48) As Foe

(41:05) Fin

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

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First published:
September 11th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ZnznCaTcbGYsCmqu/the-rise-of-parasitic-ai

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One might think “actions screen off intent”: if Alice donates $1k to bed nets, it doesn’t matter if she does it because she cares about people or because she wants to show off to her friends or whyever; the bed nets are provided either way.

I think this is in the main not true (although it can point people toward a helpful kind of “get over yourself and take an interest in the outside world,” and although it is more plausible in the case of donations-from-a-distance than in most cases).

Human actions have micro-details that we are not conscious enough to consciously notice or choose, and that are filled in by our low-level processes: if I apologize to someone because I’m sorry and hope they’re okay, vs because I’d like them to stop going on about their annoying unfair complaints, many small aspects of my wording and facial [...]

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First published:
September 11th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nAMwqFGHCQMhkqD6b/high-level-actions-don-t-screen-off-intent

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post. Excerpts on AI

Geoffrey Miller was handed the mic and started berating one of the panelists: Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir, who is in charge of the company's AI efforts.

“I argue that the AI industry shares virtually no ideological overlap with national conservatism,” Miller said, referring to the conference's core ideology. Hours ago, Miller, a psychology professor at the University of New Mexico, had been on that stage for a panel called “AI and the American Soul,” calling for the populists to wage a literal holy war against artificial intelligence developers “as betrayers of our species, traitors to our nation, apostates to our faith, and threats to our kids.” Now, he stared right at the technologist who’d just given a speech arguing that tech founders were just as heroic as the Founding Fathers, who are sacred figures to the natcons. The [...]

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First published:
September 8th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TiQGC6woDMPJ9zbNM/maga-populists-call-for-holy-war-against-big-tech

Linkpost URL:
https://www.theverge.com/politics/773154/maga-tech-right-ai-natcon

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Summary

An increasing number of people in recent months have believed that they've made an important and novel scientific breakthrough, which they've developed in collaboration with an LLM, when they actually haven't. If you believe that you have made such a breakthrough, please consider that you might be mistaken! Many more people have been fooled than have come up with actual breakthroughs, so the smart next step is to do some sanity-checking even if you're confident that yours is real. New ideas in science turn out to be wrong most of the time, so you should be pretty skeptical of your own ideas and subject them to the reality-checking I describe below.

Context

This is intended as a companion piece to 'So You Think You've Awoken ChatGPT'[1]. That post describes the related but different phenomenon of LLMs giving people the impression that they've suddenly attained consciousness.

Your situation

If [...]

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Outline:

(00:11) Summary

(00:49) Context

(01:04) Your situation

(02:41) How to reality-check your breakthrough

(03:16) Step 1

(05:55) Step 2

(07:40) Step 3

(08:54) What to do if the reality-check fails

(10:13) Could this document be more helpful?

(10:31) More information

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

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First published:
September 2nd, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rarcxjGp47dcHftCP/your-llm-assisted-scientific-breakthrough-probably-isn-t

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I've recently written about how I've updated against seeing substantially faster than trend AI progress due to quickly massively scaling up RL on agentic software engineering. One response I've heard is something like:

RL scale-ups so far have used very crappy environments due to difficulty quickly sourcing enough decent (or even high quality) environments. Thus, once AI companies manage to get their hands on actually good RL environments (which could happen pretty quickly), performance will increase a bunch.

Another way to put this response is that AI companies haven't actually done a good job scaling up RL—they've scaled up the compute, but with low quality data—and once they actually do the RL scale up for real this time, there will be a big jump in AI capabilities (which yields substantially above trend progress). I'm skeptical of this argument because I think that ongoing improvements to RL environments [...]

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Outline:

(04:18) Counterargument: Actually, companies havent gotten around to improving RL environment quality until recently (or there is substantial lead time on scaling up RL environments etc.) so better RL environments didnt drive much of late 2024 and 2025 progress

(05:24) Counterargument: AIs will soon reach a critical capability threshold where AIs themselves can build high quality RL environments

(06:51) Counterargument: AI companies are massively fucking up their training runs (either pretraining or RL) and once they get their shit together more, well see fast progress

(08:34) Counterargument: This isnt that related to RL scale up, but OpenAI has some massive internal advance in verification which they demonstrated via getting IMO gold and this will cause (much) faster progress late this year or early next year

(10:12) Thoughts and speculation on scaling up the quality of RL environments

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

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First published:
September 3rd, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsLWpZ2zad43nzvWi/trust-me-bro-just-one-more-rl-scale-up-this-one-will-be-the

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

(Cross-posted from speaker's notes of my talk at Deepmind today.)

Good local time, everyone. I am Audrey Tang, 🇹🇼 Taiwan's Cyber Ambassador and first Digital Minister (2016-2024). It is an honor to be here with you all at Deepmind.

When we discuss "AI" and "society," two futures compete.

In one—arguably the default trajectory—AI supercharges conflict.

In the other, it augments our ability to cooperate across differences. This means treating differences as fuel and inventing a combustion engine to turn them into energy, rather than constantly putting out fires. This is what I call ⿻ Plurality.

Today, I want to discuss an application of this idea to AI governance, developed at Oxford's Ethics in AI Institute, called the 6-Pack of Care.

As AI becomes a thousand, perhaps ten thousand times faster than us, we face a fundamental asymmetry. We become the garden; AI becomes the gardener.

At that speed, traditional [...]

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Outline:

(02:17) From Protest to Demo

(03:43) From Outrage to Overlap

(04:57) From Gridlock to Governance

(06:40) Alignment Assemblies

(08:25) From Tokyo to California

(09:48) From Pilots to Policy

(12:29) From Is to Ought

(13:55) Attentiveness: caring about

(15:05) Responsibility: taking care of

(16:01) Competence: care-giving

(16:38) Responsiveness: care-receiving

(17:49) Solidarity: caring-with

(18:41) Symbiosis: kami of care

(21:06) Plurality is Here

(22:08) We, the People, are the Superintelligence

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First published:
September 1st, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/anoK4akwe8PKjtzkL/plurality-and-6pack-care

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post. So the situation as it stands is that the fraction of the light cone expected to be filled with satisfied cats is not zero. This is already remarkable. What's more remarkable is that this was orchestrated starting nearly 5000 years ago.

As far as I can tell there were three completely alien to-each-other intelligences operating in stone age Egypt: humans, cats, and the gibbering alien god that is cat evolution (henceforth the cat shoggoth.) What went down was that humans were by far the most powerful of those intelligences, and in the face of this disadvantage the cat shoggoth aligned the humans, not to its own utility function, but to the cats themselves. This is a phenomenally important case to study- it's very different from other cases like pigs or chickens where the shoggoth got what it wanted, at the brutal expense of the desires [...]

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First published:
September 2nd, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WLFRkm3PhJ3Ty27QH/the-cats-are-on-to-something

Linkpost URL:
https://www.hgreer.com/CatShoggoth/

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post. I've seen many prescriptive contributions to AGI governance take the form of proposals for some radically new structure. Some call for a Manhattan project, others for the creation of a new international organization, etc. The OGI model, instead, is basically the status quo. More precisely, it is a model to which the status quo is an imperfect and partial approximation.

It seems to me that this model has a bunch of attractive properties. That said, I'm not putting it forward because I have a very high level of conviction in it, but because it seems useful to have it explicitly developed as an option so that it can be compared with other options.

(This is a working paper, so I may try to improve it in light of comments and suggestions.)

ABSTRACT

This paper introduces the “open global investment” (OGI) model, a proposed governance framework [...]

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First published:
July 10th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LtT24cCAazQp4NYc5/open-global-investment-as-a-governance-model-for-agi

Linkpost URL:
https://nickbostrom.com/ogimodel.pdf

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.