“Humanity Learned Almost Nothing From COVID-19” by niplav

People don't explore enough. They rely on cached thoughts and actions to get through their day. Unfortunately, this doesn't lead to them making progress on their problems. The solution is simple. Just do one new thing a day to solve one of your problems. Intellectually, I've always known that annoying, persistent problems often require just 5 seconds of actual thought. But seeing a number of annoying problems that made my life worse, some even major ones, just yield to the repeated application of a brief burst of thought each day still surprised me. For example, I had a wobbly chair. It was wobbling more as time went on, and I worried it would break. Eventually, I decided to try actually solving the issue. 1 minute and 10 turns of an allen key later, it was fixed. Another example: I have a shot attention span. I kept [...] --- First published: October 3rd, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gtk2KqEtedMi7ehxN/do-one-new-thing-a-day-to-solve-your-problems --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Summary: Looking over humanity's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, almostsix years later, reveals that we've forgotten to fulfill our intent atpreparing for the next pandemic. I rant. content warning: A single carefully placed slur. If we want to create a world free of pandemics and other biologicalcatastrophes, the time to act is now. —US White House, “ FACT SHEET: The Biden Administration's Historic Investment in Pandemic Preparedness and Biodefense in the FY 2023 President's Budget ”, 2022 Around five years, a globalpandemic caused bya coronavirus started. In the course of the pandemic, there have been atleast 6 million deaths and more than 25 million excessdeaths. Thevalue of QALYs lost due to the pandemic in the US alone was around $5trio.,the GDP loss in the US alone in 2020 $2trio..The loss of gross [...] The original text contained 12 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 19th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pvEuEN6eMZC2hqG9c/humanity-learned-almost-nothing-from-covid-19 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Written by Eric Neyman, in my personal capacity. The views expressed here are my own. Thanks to Zach Stein-Perlman, Jesse Richardson, and many others for comments. Over the last several years, I’ve written a bunch of posts about politics and political donations. In this post, I’ll tell you about one of the best donation opportunities that I’ve ever encountered: donating to Alex Bores, who announced his campaign for Congress today. If you’re potentially interested in donating to Bores, my suggestion would be to: Read this post to understand the case for donating to Alex Bores. Understand that political donations are a matter of public record, and that this may have career implications. Decide if you are willing to donate to Alex Bores anyway. If you would like to donate to Alex Bores: donations today, Monday, Oct 20th, are especially valuable. You can donate at this link. Or if [...] ---Outline:(01:16) Introduction(04:55) Things I like about Alex Bores(08:55) Are there any things about Bores that give me pause?(09:43) Cost-effectiveness analysis(10:10) How does an extra $1k affect Alex Bores' chances of winning?(12:22) How good is it if Alex Bores wins?(12:54) Direct influence on legislation(14:46) The House is a first step toward even more influential positions(15:35) Encouraging more action in this space(16:20) How does this compare to other AI safety donation opportunities?(16:37) Comparison to technical AI safety(17:28) Comparison to non-politics AI governance(18:25) Comparison to other political opportunities(19:39) Comparison to non-AI safety opportunities(21:20) Logistics and details of donating(21:24) Who can donate?(21:34) How much can I donate?(23:16) How do I donate?(24:07) Will my donation be public? What are the career implications of donating?(25:37) Is donating worth the career capital costs in your case?(26:32) Some examples of potential donor profiles(30:34) A more quantitative cost-benefit analysis(32:33) Potential concerns(32:37) What if Bores loses?(33:21) What about the press coverage?(34:09) Feeling rushed?(35:16) Appendix(35:19) Details of the cost-effectiveness analysis of donating to Bores(35:25) Probability that Bores loses by fewer than 1000 votes(38:37) How much marginal funding would net Bores an extra vote?(40:42) Early donations help consolidate support(42:47) One last adjustment: the big tech super PAC(45:25) Cost-benefit analysis of donating to Bores vs. adverse career effects(45:40) The philanthropic benefit of donating(46:32) The altruistic cost of donating(48:18) Cost-benefit analysis(49:01) CaveatsThe original text contained 14 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 20th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TbsdA7wG9TvMQYMZj/consider-donating-to-alex-bores-author-of-the-raise-act-1 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Here's a story I've heard a couple of times. A youngish person is looking for some solutions to their depression, chronic pain, ennui or some other cognitive flaw. They're open to new experiences and see a meditator gushing about how amazing meditation is for joy, removing suffering, clearing one's mind, improving focus etc. They invite the young person to a meditation retreat. The young person starts making decent progress. Then they have a psychotic break and their life is ruined for years, at least. The meditator is sad, but not shocked. Then they started gushing about meditation again. If you ask an experienced meditator about these sorts of cases, they often say, "oh yeah, that's a thing that sometimes happens when meditating." If you ask why the hell they don't warn people about this, they might say: "oh, I didn't want to emphasize the dangers more because it might [...] --- First published: October 17th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fhL7gr3cEGa22y93c/meditation-is-dangerous --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

"I heard Chen started distilling the day after he was born. He's only four years old, if you can believe it. He's written 18 novels. His first words were, "I'm so here for it!" Adrian said. He's my little brother. Mom was busy in her world model. She says her character is like a "villainess" or something - I kinda worry it's a sex thing. It's for sure a sex thing. Anyway, she was busy getting seduced or seducing or whatever villanesses do in world models, so I had to escort Adrian to Oak Central for the Lit Olympiad. Mom doesn't like supervision drones for some reason. Thinks they're creepy. But a gangly older sister looming over him and witnessing those precious adolescent memories for her - that's just family, I guess. "That sounds more like a liability to me," I said. "Bad data, old models." Chen waddled [...] --- First published: October 15th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LPiBBn2tqpDv76w87/that-mad-olympiad-1 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Current AI models are strange. They can speak—often coherently, sometimes even eloquently—which is wild. They can predict the structure of proteins, beat the best humans at many games, recall more facts in most domains than human experts; yet they also struggle to perform simple tasks, like using computer cursors, maintaining basic logical consistency, or explaining what they know without wholesale fabrication. Perhaps someday we will discover a deep science of intelligence, and this will teach us how to properly describe such strangeness. But for now we have nothing of the sort, so we are left merely gesturing in vague, heuristical terms; lately people have started referring to this odd mixture of impressiveness and idiocy as “spikiness,” for example, though there isn’t much agreement about the nature of the spikes. Of course it would be nice to measure AI progress anyway, at least in some sense sufficient to help us [...] ---Outline:(03:48) Conceptual Coherence(07:12) Benchmark Bias(10:39) Predictive ValueThe original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 14th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PzLSuaT6WGLQGJJJD/the-length-of-horizons --- 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.

About half a year ago, I decided to try stop insulting myself for two weeks. No more self-deprecating humour, calling myself a fool, or thinking I'm pathetic. Why? Because it felt vaguely corrosive. Let me tell you how it went. Spoiler: it went well. The first thing I noticed was how often I caught myself about to insult myself. It happened like multiple times an hour. I would lay in bed at night thinking, "you mor- wait, I can't insult myself, I've still got 11 days to go. Dagnabbit." The negative space sent a glaring message: I insulted myself a lot. Like, way more than I realized. The next thing I noticed was that I was the butt of half of my jokes. I'd keep thinking of zingers which made me out to be a loser, a moron, a scrub in some way. Sometimes, I could re-work [...] --- First published: October 12th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8prPryf3ranfALBBp/don-t-mock-yourself --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

About me and this review: I don’t identify as a member of the rationalist community, and I haven’t thought much about AI risk. I read AstralCodexTen and used to read Zvi Mowshowitz before he switched his blog to covering AI. Thus, I’ve long had a peripheral familiarity with LessWrong. I picked up IABIED in response to Scott Alexander's review, and ended up looking here to see what reactions were like. After encountering a number of posts wondering how outsiders were responding to the book, I thought it might be valuable for me to write mine down. This is a “semi-outsider “review in that I don’t identify as a member of this community, but I’m not a true outsider in that I was familiar enough with it to post here. My own background is in academic social science and national security, for whatever that's worth. My review presumes you’re already [...] ---Outline:(01:07) My loose priors going in:(02:29) To skip ahead to my posteriors:(03:45) On to the Review:(08:14) My questions and concerns(08:33) Concern #1 Why should we assume the AI wants to survive?  If it does, then what exactly wants to survive?(12:44) Concern #2 Why should we assume that the AI has boundless, coherent drives?(17:57) #3: Why should we assume there will be no in between?(21:53) The Solution(23:35) Closing Thoughts--- First published: October 13th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ex3fmgePWhBQEvy7F/if-anyone-builds-it-everyone-dies-a-semi-outsider-review --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I've noticed an antipattern. It's definitely on the dark pareto-frontier of "bad argument" and "I see it all the time amongst smart people". I'm confident it's the worst, common argument I see amongst rationalists and EAs. I don't normally crosspost to the EA forum, but I'm doing it now. I call it Exhaustive Free Association. Exhaustive Free Association is a step in a chain of reasoning where the logic goes "It's not A, it's not B, it's not C, it's not D, and I can't think of any more things it could be!"[1] Once you spot it, you notice it all the damn time. Since I've most commonly encountered this amongst rat/EA types, I'm going to have to talk about people in our community as examples of this. Examples Here's a few examples. These are mostly for illustrative purposes, and my case does not rely on me having found [...] ---Outline:(00:55) Examples(01:08) Security Mindset(01:25) Superforecasters and AI Doom(02:14) With Apologies to Rethink Priorities(02:45) The Fatima Sun Miracle(03:14) Bad Reasoning is Almost Good Reasoning(05:09) Arguments as Soldiers(06:29) Conclusion(07:04) The Counter-Counter SpellThe original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 11th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/arwATwCTscahYwTzD/the-most-common-bad-argument-in-these-parts --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Intro LLMs being trained with RLVR (Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards) start off with a 'chain-of-thought' (CoT) in whatever language the LLM was originally trained on. But after a long period of training, the CoT sometimes starts to look very weird; to resemble no human language; or even to grow completely unintelligible. Why might this happen? I've seen a lot of speculation about why. But a lot of this speculation narrows too quickly, to just one or two hypotheses. My intent is also to speculate, but more broadly. Specifically, I want to outline six nonexclusive possible causes for the weird tokens: new better language, spandrels, context refresh, deliberate obfuscation, natural drift, and conflicting shards. And I also wish to extremely roughly outline ideas for experiments and evidence that could help us distinguish these causes. I'm sure I'm not enumerating the full space of [...] ---Outline:(00:11) Intro(01:34) 1. New Better Language(04:06) 2. Spandrels(06:42) 3. Context Refresh(10:48) 4. Deliberate Obfuscation(12:36) 5. Natural Drift(13:42) 6. Conflicting Shards(15:24) Conclusion--- First published: October 9th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qgvSMwRrdqoDMJJnD/towards-a-typology-of-strange-llm-chains-of-thought --- 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.