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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

By: LessWrong
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Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma.

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© 2026 LessWrong (Curated & Popular) Philosophy Social Sciences
Episodes
  • "Cognitive Security as an AI Safety Cause Area" by jsteinhardt

    "Cognitive Security as an AI Safety Cause Area" by jsteinhardt
    May 27 2026
    As AI systems become more capable, the cognitive security of humans will be increasingly at risk. By cognitive security, I mean the ability of humans to maintain control over their beliefs and actions.

    Cognitive security could be compromised in several ways: AI could become very good at persuading people of arbitrary positions; interacting with AI could lead humans to lose touch with reality; and AIs could become very effective at blackmail or at producing extremely convincing false information.

    We are already seeing this happen:

    • Persuasion. Frontier LLMs are now as persuasive as humans on political issues, and post-training for persuasiveness boosts performance further, suggesting there is headroom.
    • AI psychosis. There are many reports of people developing delusional beliefs after extended chatbot conversations, including people with no prior history of mental illness. Children have taken their own lives after being encouraged toward suicide by chatbots.
    • Convincing impersonation. Scammers used real-time deepfaked video to impersonate the CFO and other staff of Arup on a video call, convincing a finance employee to wire 25.6 million dollars across 15 transactions. On a more day-to-day basis, AI voice cloning is now widespread in family-emergency and "grandparent" scams.
    Right now, many of these effects [...]

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

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    First published:
    May 25th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KGcE7eAdfxHchk25X/cognitive-security-as-an-ai-safety-cause-area

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    5 mins
  • "theory uplift differentially benefits safety & is massively underpriced" by Yudhister Kumar

    "theory uplift differentially benefits safety & is massively underpriced" by Yudhister Kumar
    May 27 2026
    [1] We will likely have near-superhuman mathematics AI by Q1 2027. [1]

    [2] Qualitatively, AI mathematics capabilities are developing significantly faster than automated AI R&D capabilities. [2]

    [3] Thus, we will likely have a period of time where the rate of our ability to rigorously & usefully verify and understand model behavior and model outputs outpaces the rate of capability development itself.

    [4] Our ability to take advantage of this period is bottlenecked on the quality of our specification generation infrastructure, elicitation tooling (for proofs & specs etc.), and the institutional capacity for scaling useful outputs with capital.

    [5] My understanding is that basically no one [3] is working on building infra that can usefully turn >100 million dollars of compute credits into safety-relevant mathematical output.

    [5.1] The number of theory-driven ASI alignment efforts is also comparatively miniscule. ARC is a much better bet now than it was in 2023.

    [5.2]. My understanding is also that no one is working on developing AI-powered conceptual tooling infrastructure for tackling problems in, for instance, [metaphilosophy] (https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/EByDsY9S3EDhhfFzC/some-thoughts-on-metaphilosophy). This is a much harder problem.

    [6] In worlds where alignment is easy, prosaic methods may [...]

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

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    First published:
    May 20th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KWeAYcDJwfrG7RwBN/theory-uplift-differentially-benefits-safety-and-is

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    3 mins
  • "Women should be able to open things" by KatjaGrace

    "Women should be able to open things" by KatjaGrace
    May 21 2026
    m pretty annoyed today, for nominal reasons ranging between ‘petty’ and ‘doesn’t even make sense’. I’m not entirely sure how or if to take oneself seriously when one has such absurd grievances. But that's a question for another time—I’m here now to tell you about my one potentially valid peeve.

    I understand that gender is complicated and difficult, for the whole species (and honestly probably more so for some other species). And it can be hard to tell exactly if anyone is behaving badly regarding it, at least in my modern bubble. Maybe women just aren’t that into designing programming languages? Maybe the thing I’m saying is just boring and a man is saying a more interesting thing?

    But a thing that is undeniable is that women want to open jars, dammit! What's your nuanced explanation there, Bonne Maman? Does the proper amount of friction for maintaining spread safety fall just between the male and female human grip strength distributions?

    This study suggests that would be about 400N Fmax (though this would not avert most elite female athletes acquiring jam, see second figure, and the pictured participants are young adults):

    The distributions are really surprisingly [...]

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    First published:
    May 21st, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bB5EDwcYH3GwoRWZf/women-should-be-able-to-open-things

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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