Podcast Episodes

“Irretrievability; or, Murphy’s Curse of Oneshotness upon ASI” by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Example 1: The Viking 1 lander

In the 1970s, NASA sent a pair of probes to Mars, Viking 1 and Viking 2 missions, at a total cost of 1 billion dollar…

1 month ago

“AI Industrial Takeoff — Part 1: Maximum growth rates with current technology” by djbinder

How fast could an AI-driven economy grow? Most economists expect a few percentage points at best, comparable to previous general-purpose technologie…

1 month ago

“Taking woo seriously but not literally” by Kaj_Sotala

I think that a lot of “woo” - a broad term that includes things like chakras, energy healing, Tarot, various Eastern religions and neopagan practice…

1 month ago

“Dairy cows make their misery expensive (but their calves can’t)” by Elizabeth

How much do cows suffer in the production of milk? I can’t answer that; understanding animal experience is hard. But I can at least provide some fac…

1 month ago

“Measuring the ability of Opus 4.5 to fool narrow classifiers” by Fabien Roger, John Hughes

We measure the ability of Opus 4.5 to fool prompted or fine-tuned classifiers trying to detect a narrow set of outcomes. We find that:

1 month ago

“A new rationalist self-improvement book: the 12 Levers” by spencerg

I'm publishing a book that I think can fairly be described as a rationalist approach to self-improvement. Whereas many self-help books focus mainly …

1 month ago

“OpenAI’s red line for AI self-improvement is fundamentally flawed” by Charbel-Raphaël

Epistemic status: could have been a short form.

Obviously, it's good to have thresholds at all, but those are too permissive, the indicators aren't …

1 month ago

“You Are Not Immune To Mode Collapse” by J Bostock

“Mode collapse” is a few things. First it was an observation about how early image generating AIs often collapsed to producing just the modal output…

1 month ago

“Primary Care Physicians are Incompetent. We Need More of Them.” by Hide

The typical primary care physician is incompetent in every measurable respect. This is a huge problem.

Here, I make the case that

1 month ago

“How Go Players Disempower Themselves to AI” by Ashe Vazquez Nuñez

Written as part of the MATS 9.1 extension program, mentored by Richard Ngo.

From March 9th to 15th 2016, Go players around the world stayed up to wa…

1 month ago