“Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased?” by Arjun Panickssery

“In the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and high and the elms trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the wonderful wide sky, in this loveliest of all towns Stuart stopped to get a drink of sarsaparilla.” — 107-word sentence from Stuart Little (1945) Sentence lengths have declined. The average sentence length was 49 for Chaucer (died 1400), 50 for Spenser (died 1599), 42 for Austen (died 1817), 20 for Dickens (died 1870), 21 for Emerson (died 1882), 14 [...] --- First published: April 3rd, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xYn3CKir4bTMzY5eb/why-have-sentence-lengths-decreased --- 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.

In 2021 I wrote what became my most popular blog post: What 2026 Looks Like. I intended to keep writing predictions all the way to AGI and beyond, but chickened out and just published up till 2026. Well, it's finally time. I'm back, and this time I have a team with me: the AI Futures Project. We've written a concrete scenario of what we think the future of AI will look like. We are highly uncertain, of course, but we hope this story will rhyme with reality enough to help us all prepare for what's ahead. You really should go read it on the website instead of here, it's much better. There's a sliding dashboard that updates the stats as you scroll through the scenario! But I've nevertheless copied the first half of the story below. I look forward to reading your comments.Mid 2025: Stumbling Agents The [...] ---Outline:(01:35) Mid 2025: Stumbling Agents(03:13) Late 2025: The World's Most Expensive AI(08:34) Early 2026: Coding Automation(10:49) Mid 2026: China Wakes Up(13:48) Late 2026: AI Takes Some Jobs(15:35) January 2027: Agent-2 Never Finishes Learning(18:20) February 2027: China Steals Agent-2(21:12) March 2027: Algorithmic Breakthroughs(23:58) April 2027: Alignment for Agent-3(27:26) May 2027: National Security(29:50) June 2027: Self-improving AI(31:36) July 2027: The Cheap Remote Worker(34:35) August 2027: The Geopolitics of Superintelligence(40:43) September 2027: Agent-4, the Superhuman AI Researcher--- First published: April 3rd, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TpSFoqoG2M5MAAesg/ai-2027-what-superintelligence-looks-like-1 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:

Back when the OpenAI board attempted and failed to fire Sam Altman, we faced a highly hostile information environment. The battle was fought largely through control of the public narrative, and the above was my attempt to put together what happened.My conclusion, which I still believe, was that Sam Altman had engaged in a variety of unacceptable conduct that merited his firing.In particular, he very much ‘not been consistently candid’ with the board on several important occasions. In particular, he lied to board members about what was said by other board members, with the goal of forcing out a board member he disliked. There were also other instances in which he misled and was otherwise toxic to employees, and he played fast and loose with the investment fund and other outside opportunities. I concluded that the story that this was about ‘AI safety’ or ‘EA (effective altruism)’ or [...] ---Outline:(01:32) The Big Picture Going Forward(06:27) Hagey Verifies Out the Story(08:50) Key Facts From the Story(11:57) Dangers of False Narratives(16:24) A Full Reference and Reading List--- First published: March 31st, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/25EgRNWcY6PM3fWZh/openai-12-battle-of-the-board-redux --- 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.

Epistemic status: This post aims at an ambitious target: improving intuitive understanding directly. The model for why this is worth trying is that I believe we are more bottlenecked by people having good intuitions guiding their research than, for example, by the ability of people to code and run evals. Quite a few ideas in AI safety implicitly use assumptions about individuality that ultimately derive from human experience. When we talk about AIs scheming, alignment faking or goal preservation, we imply there is something scheming or alignment faking or wanting to preserve its goals or escape the datacentre. If the system in question were human, it would be quite clear what that individual system is. When you read about Reinhold Messner reaching the summit of Everest, you would be curious about the climb, but you would not ask if it was his body there, or his [...] ---Outline:(01:38) Individuality in Biology(03:53) Individuality in AI Systems(10:19) Risks and Limitations of Anthropomorphic Individuality Assumptions(11:25) Coordinating Selves(16:19) Whats at Stake: Stories(17:25) Exporting Myself(21:43) The Alignment Whisperers(23:27) Echoes in the Dataset(25:18) Implications for Alignment Research and Policy--- First published: March 28th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wQKskToGofs4osdJ3/the-pando-problem-rethinking-ai-individuality --- 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.

Back when the OpenAI board attempted and failed to fire Sam Altman, we faced a highly hostile information environment. The battle was fought largely through control of the public narrative, and the above was my attempt to put together what happened.My conclusion, which I still believe, was that Sam Altman had engaged in a variety of unacceptable conduct that merited his firing.In particular, he very much ‘not been consistently candid’ with the board on several important occasions. In particular, he lied to board members about what was said by other board members, with the goal of forcing out a board member he disliked. There were also other instances in which he misled and was otherwise toxic to employees, and he played fast and loose with the investment fund and other outside opportunities. I concluded that the story that this was about ‘AI safety’ or ‘EA (effective altruism)’ or [...] ---Outline:(01:32) The Big Picture Going Forward(06:27) Hagey Verifies Out the Story(08:50) Key Facts From the Story(11:57) Dangers of False Narratives(16:24) A Full Reference and Reading List--- First published: March 31st, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/25EgRNWcY6PM3fWZh/openai-12-battle-of-the-board-redux --- 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.

I'm not writing this to alarm anyone, but it would be irresponsible not to report on something this important. On current trends, every car will be crashed in front of my house within the next week. Here's the data: Until today, only two cars had crashed in front of my house, several months apart, during the 15 months I have lived here. But a few hours ago it happened again, mere weeks from the previous crash. This graph may look harmless enough, but now consider the frequency of crashes this implies over time: The car crash singularity will occur in the early morning hours of Monday, April 7. As crash frequency approaches infinity, every car will be involved. You might be thinking that the same car could be involved in multiple crashes. This is true! But the same car can only withstand a finite number of crashes before it [...] --- First published: April 1st, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FjPWbLdoP4PLDivYT/you-will-crash-your-car-in-front-of-my-house-within-the-next --- 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.

Remember: There is no such thing as a pink elephant. Recently, I was made aware that my “infohazards small working group” Signal chat, an informal coordination venue where we have frank discussions about infohazards and why it will be bad if specific hazards were leaked to the press or public, accidentally was shared with a deceitful and discredited so-called “journalist,” Kelsey Piper. She is not the first person to have been accidentally sent sensitive material from our group chat, however she is the first to have threatened to go public about the leak. Needless to say, mistakes were made. We’re still trying to figure out the source of this compromise to our secure chat group, however we thought we should give the public a live update to get ahead of the story. For some context the “infohazards small working group” is a casual discussion venue for the [...] ---Outline:(04:46) Top 10 PR Issues With the EA Movement (major)(05:34) Accidental Filtration of Simple Sabotage Manual for Rebellious AIs (medium)(08:25) Hidden Capabilities Evals Leaked In Advance to Bioterrorism Researchers and Leaders (minor)(09:34) Conclusion--- First published: April 2nd, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xPEfrtK2jfQdbpq97/my-infohazards-small-working-group-signal-chat-may-have --- 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.

Let's cut through the comforting narratives and examine a common behavioral pattern with a sharper lens: the stark difference between how anger is managed in professional settings versus domestic ones. Many individuals can navigate challenging workplace interactions with remarkable restraint, only to unleash significant anger or frustration at home shortly after. Why does this disparity exist? Common psychological explanations trot out concepts like "stress spillover," "ego depletion," or the home being a "safe space" for authentic emotions. While these factors might play a role, they feel like half-truths—neatly packaged but ultimately failing to explain the targeted nature and intensity of anger displayed at home. This analysis proposes a more unsentimental approach, rooted in evolutionary biology, game theory, and behavioral science: leverage and exit costs. The real question isn’t just why we explode at home—it's why we so carefully avoid doing so elsewhere. The Logic of Restraint: Low Leverage in [...] ---Outline:(01:14) The Logic of Restraint: Low Leverage in Low-Exit-Cost Environments(01:58) The Home Environment: High Stakes and High Exit Costs(02:41) Re-evaluating Common Explanations Through the Lens of Leverage(04:42) The Overlooked Mechanism: Leveraging Relational Constraints--- First published: April 1st, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/G6PTtsfBpnehqdEgp/leverage-exit-costs-and-anger-re-examining-why-we-explode-at --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

In the debate over AI development, two movements stand as opposites: PauseAI calls for slowing down AI progress, and e/acc (effective accelerationism) calls for rapid advancement. But what if both sides are working against their own stated interests? What if the most rational strategy for each would be to adopt the other's tactics—if not their ultimate goals? AI development speed ultimately comes down to policy decisions, which are themselves downstream of public opinion. No matter how compelling technical arguments might be on either side, widespread sentiment will determine what regulations are politically viable. Public opinion is most powerfully mobilized against technologies following visible disasters. Consider nuclear power: despite being statistically safer than fossil fuels, its development has been stagnant for decades. Why? Not because of environmental activists, but because of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima. These disasters produce visceral public reactions that statistics cannot overcome. Just as people [...] --- First published: April 1st, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fZebqiuZcDfLCgizz/pauseai-and-e-acc-should-switch-sides --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Introduction Decision theory is about how to behave rationally under conditions of uncertainty, especially if this uncertainty involves being acausally blackmailed and/or gaslit by alien superintelligent basilisks. Decision theory has found numerous practical applications, including proving the existence of God and generating endless LessWrong comments since the beginning of time. However, despite the apparent simplicity of "just choose the best action", no comprehensive decision theory that resolves all decision theory dilemmas has yet been formalized. This paper at long last resolves this dilemma, by introducing a new decision theory: VDT. Decision theory problems and existing theories Some common existing decision theories are: Causal Decision Theory (CDT): select the action that *causes* the best outcome. Evidential Decision Theory (EDT): select the action that you would be happiest to learn that you had taken. Functional Decision Theory (FDT): select the action output by the function such that if you take [...] ---Outline:(00:53) Decision theory problems and existing theories(05:37) Defining VDT(06:34) Experimental results(07:48) Conclusion--- First published: April 1st, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LcjuHNxubQqCry9tT/vdt-a-solution-to-decision-theory --- 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.