"You can’t imitation-learn how to continual-learn" by Steven Byrnes

A 2022 LessWrong post on orexin and the quest for more waking hours argues that orexin agonists could safely reduce human sleep needs, pointing to short-sleeper gene mutations that increase orexin production and to cavefish that evolved heightened orexin sensitivity alongside an 80% reduction in sleep. Several commenters discussed clinical trials, embryo selection, and the evolutionary puzzle of why short-sleeper genes haven't spread. I thought the whole approach was backwards, and left a comment: Orexin is a signal about energy metabolism. Unless the signaling system itself is broken (e.g. narcolepsy type 1, caused by autoimmune destruction of orexin-producing neurons), it's better to fix the underlying reality the signals point to than to falsify the signals. My sleep got noticeably more efficient when I started supplementing glycine. Most people on modern diets don't get enough; we can make ~3g/day but can use 10g+, because in the ancestral environment we ate much more connective tissue or broth therefrom. Glycine is both important for repair processes and triggers NMDA receptors to drop core temperature, which smooths the path to sleep. While drafting that, I went back to Chris Masterjohn's page on glycine requirements. His estimate for total need [...] ---Outline:(01:49) Glycine helps us sleep by cooling the body(02:26) Glycine cleans our mitochondria as we sleep(04:12) Most people could use more glycine(05:28) Fever is plan B for fighting infection; glycine supports plan A(09:28) Glycines cooling effect via the SCN is unrelated to its immune benefits(10:35) Glycine turns out to be a legitimate antipyretic after all(11:51) Practical considerations --- First published: March 22nd, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/87XoatpFkdmCZpvQK/is-fever-a-symptom-of-glycine-deficiency --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

In this post, I’m trying to put forward a narrow, pedagogical point, one that comes up mainly when I’m arguing in favor of LLMs having limitations that human learning does not. (E.g. here, here, here.) See the bottom of the post for a list of subtexts that you should NOT read into this post, including “…therefore LLMs are dumb”, or “…therefore LLMs can’t possibly scale to superintelligence”. Some intuitions on how to think about “real” continual learning Consider an algorithm for training a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent, like the Atari-playing Deep Q network (2013) or AlphaZero (2017), or think of within-lifetime learning in the human brain, which (I claim) is in the general class of “model-based reinforcement learning”, broadly construed. These are all real-deal full-fledged learning algorithms: there's an algorithm for choosing the next action right now, and there's one or more update rules for permanently changing some adjustable parameters (a.k.a. weights) in the model such that its actions and/or predictions will be better in the future. And indeed, the longer you run them, the more competent they get. When we think of “continual learning”, I suggest that those are good central examples to keep in mind. Here are [...] ---Outline:(00:35) Some intuitions on how to think about real continual learning(04:57) Why real continual learning cant be copied by an imitation learner(09:53) Some things that are off-topic for this post The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: March 16th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9rCTjbJpZB4KzqhiQ/you-can-t-imitation-learn-how-to-continual-learn --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Independent verification by the Brain Preservation Foundation and the Survival and Flourishing Fund — the results so far Cultivating independent verification Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In my previous post, "Less Dead", I said that my company, Nectome, has created a new method for whole-body, whole-brain, human end-of-life preservation for the purpose of future revival. Our protocol is capable of preserving every synapse and every cell in the body with enough detail that current neuroscience says long-term memories are preserved. It's compatible with traditional funerals at room temperature and stable for hundreds of years at cold temperatures. In this post, we’ll dive into the evidence for these claims, as well as Nectome's overall approach to cultivating rigorous, independent validation of our methods—a cornerstone of the kind of preservation enterprise I want to be a part of. To get to the current state-of-the-art required two major developmental milestones: Idealized preservation. A method capable of preserving the nanostructure of the brain for small and large animals under idealized laboratory conditions. Specifically, could we preserve animals well if we were allowed to perfectly control the time and conditions of death?   This work (2015-2018) resulted in a brand-new technique—aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation—which was carefully [...] ---Outline:(00:16) Cultivating independent verification[... 7 more sections]--- First published: March 19th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NEFNs4vbNxJPJJgYY/nullius-in-verba --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:

No-one knows when AI will begin having transformative impacts upon the world. People aren’t sure and shouldn’t be sure: there just isn’t enough evidence to pin it down. But we don’t need to wait for certainty. I want to explore what happens if we take our uncertainty seriously — if we act with epistemic humility. What does wise planning look like in a world of deeply uncertain AI timelines? I’ll conclude that taking the uncertainty seriously has real implications for how one can contribute to making this AI transition go well. And it has even more implications for how we act together — for our portfolio of work aimed towards this end.   AI Timelines By AI timelines, I refer to how long it will be before AI has truly transformative effects on the world. People often think about this using terms such as artificial general intelligence (AGI), human level AI, transformative AI, or superintelligence. Each term is used differently by different people, making it challenging to compare their stated timelines. Indeed even an individual's own definition of their favoured term will be somewhat vague, such that even after their threshold has been crossed, they might have [...] ---Outline:(00:58) AI Timelines[... 7 more sections]--- First published: March 19th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6pDMLYr7my2QMTz3s/broad-timelines --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:

In the last two weeks, social media was set abuzz by claims that scientists had succeeded in uploading a fruit fly. It started with a video released by the startup Eon Systems, a company that wants to create “Brain emulation so humans can flourish in a world with superintelligence.” On the left of the video, a virtual fly walks around in a sandpit looking for pieces of banana to eat, occasionally pausing to groom itself along the way. On the right is a dancing constellation of dots resembling the fruit fly brain, set above the caption ‘simultaneous brain emulation’. At first glance, this appears astounding - a digitally recreated animal living its life inside a computer. And indeed, this impression was seemingly confirmed when, a couple of days after the video's initial release on X by cofounder Alex Wissner-Gross, Eon's CEO Michael Andregg explicitly posted “We’ve uploaded a fruit fly”. Yet “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, not just cool visuals”, as one neuroscientist put it in response to Andregg's post. If Eon had indeed succeeded in uploading a fly - a goal previously thought to be likely decades away according to much of the fly neuroscience community - they’d [...] ---Outline:(03:43) A brief history of fruit fly connectomics[... 3 more sections]--- First published: March 19th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ybwcxBRrsKavJB9Wz/no-we-haven-t-uploaded-a-fly-yet --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:

(Previously: Prologue.) Corrigibility as a term of art in AI alignment was coined as a word to refer to a property of an AI being willing to let its preferences be modified by its creator. Corrigibility in this sense was believed to be a desirable but unnatural property that would require more theoretical progress to specify, let alone implement. Desirable, because if you don't think you specified your AI's preferences correctly the first time, you want to be able to change your mind (by changing its mind). Unnatural, because we expect the AI to resist having its mind changed: rational agents should want to preserve their current preferences, because letting their preferences be modified would result in their current preferences being less fulfilled (in expectation, since the post-modification AI would no longer be trying to fulfill them). Another attractive feature of corrigibility is that it seems like it should in some sense be algorithmically simpler than the entirety of human values. Humans want lots of specific, complicated things out of life (friendship and liberty and justice and sex and sweets, et cetera, ad infinitum) which no one knows how to specify and would seem arbitrary to a [...] ---Outline:(03:21) The Constitutions Definition of Corrigibility Is Muddled(06:24) Claude Take the Wheel(15:10) It Sounds Like the Humans Are Begging The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: March 16th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K2Ae2vmAKwhiwKEo5/terrified-comments-on-corrigibility-in-claude-s-constitution --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I see people repeatedly make the mistake of referencing a very low liquidity prediction market and using it to make a nontrivial point. Usually the implication when a market is cited is that it's number should be taken somewhat seriously, that it's giving us a highly informed probability. Sometimes a market is used to analyze some event that recently occurred; reasoning here looks like "the market on outcome O was trading at X%, then event E happened and the market quickly moved to Y%, thus event E made O less/more likely." Who do I see make this mistake? Rationalists, both casually and gasp in blog posts. Scott Alexander and Zvi (and I really appreciate their work, seriously!) are guilty of this. I'll give a recent example from each of them. From Scott's Mantic Monday post on March 2: Having Your Own Government Try To Destroy You Is (At Least Temporarily) Good For Business On Friday, the Pentagon declared AI company Anthropic a “supply chain risk”, a designation never before given to an American firm. This unprecedented move was seen as an attempt to punish, maybe destroy the company. How effective was it? Anthropic isn’t publicly traded, so we [...] --- First published: March 16th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SrtoF6PcbHpzcT82T/psa-predictions-markets-often-have-very-low-liquidity-be --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:

On Thursday, March 26th, a major new AI documentary is coming out: The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. Tickets are on sale now. The movie is excellent, and MIRI staff I've spoken with generally believe it belongs in the same tier as If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies as an extremely valuable way to alert policymakers and the general public about AI risk, especially if it smashes the box office. When IABIED was coming out, the community did an incredible job of helping the book succeed; without all of your help, we might never have gotten on the New York Times bestseller list. MIRI staff think that the community could potentially play a similarly big role in helping The AI Doc succeed, and thereby help these ideas go mainstream. (Note: Two MIRI staff were interviewed for the film, but we weren’t involved in its production. We just like it.) The most valuable thing most people can do is maximize opening-weekend success. Buy tickets to see the movie now; poke friends and family members to do the same. This will cause more theaters to pick up the movie, ensure it stays in theaters for longer, and broadly [...] --- First published: March 19th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/w9BCbshKra7FKHTzi/the-ai-doc-is-coming-out-march-26 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I am monitoring surveillance camera V84A. A tall man is walking towards me. He is roughly twenty-five. <faceprint> His name is Damion Prescott. He has a room booked for a whole month. His facial symmetry scores show he is in the 99th percentile. This is in accordance with my holistic impression. <search> School records show both truancy and perfect grades, suggesting high intelligence and disagreeableness. Searching social media. <search>. No record of modeling or acting experience, fame. I will assign him to our tier C high-value client list, based solely on his facial symmetry score and wealth. Reminder to recommend seating him in a high-visibility table, should he be heading to the restaurant. <search> I found a forum post mentioning him on swipeshare.com. Several women are sharing pictures, having seen him on a dating app. I recall Hinge uses highly attractive profiles to entice new users. They appear to be using Damion Prescott's profile heavily in this capacity. The women on the site are memeing about him. They are wondering why almost none of them have matched, apparently this is rare even for the most attractive men. Only one appears to have gone on a date with him. She [...] --- First published: March 16th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LTKfRovaJ6jcwDJia/customer-satisfaction-opportunities-1 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

The world was fair, the mountains tall, In Elder Days before the fall Of mighty kings in Nargothrond And Gondolin, who now beyond The Western Seas have passed away: The world was fair in Durin's Day. J.R.R. Tolkien I was never meant to work on AI safety. I was never designed to think about superintelligences and try to steer, influence, or change them. I never particularly enjoyed studying the peculiarities of matrix operations, cracking the assumptions of decision theories, or even coding. I know, of course, that at the very bottom, bits and atoms are all the same — causal laws and information processing. And yet, part of me, the most romantic and naive part of me, thinks, metaphorically, that we abandoned cells for computers, and this is our punishment. I was meant, as I saw it, to bring about the glorious transhuman future, in its classical sense. Genetic engineering, neurodevices, DIY biolabs — going hard on biology, going hard on it with extraordinary effort, hubristically, being, you know, awestruck by "endless forms most beautiful" and motivated by the great cosmic destiny of humanity, pushing the proud frontiersman spirit and all that stuff. I was meant, in other words [...] --- First published: March 17th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2D2WgfohczTemcXvH/requiem-for-a-transhuman-timeline --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.