“That Mad Olympiad” by Tomás B.

"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.

It's amazing how much smarter everyone else gets when I take antidepressants. It makes sense that the drugs work on other people, because there's nothing in me to fix. I am a perfect and wise arbiter of not only my own behavior but everyone else's, which is a heavy burden because some of ya’ll are terrible at life. You date the wrong people. You take several seconds longer than necessary to order at the bagel place. And you continue to have terrible opinions even after I explain the right one to you. But only when I’m depressed. When I’m not, everyone gets better at merging from two lanes to one. This effect is not limited by the laws of causality or time. Before I restarted Wellbutrin, my partner showed me this song. My immediate reaction was, “This is fine, but what if [...] ---Outline:(04:39) Caveats(05:27) Acknowledgements--- First published: October 9th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FnrhynrvDpqNNx9SC/i-take-antidepressants-you-re-welcome --- 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.

This is a link post for two papers that came out today: Inoculation Prompting: Eliciting traits from LLMs during training can suppress them at test-time (Tan et al.) Inoculation Prompting: Instructing LLMs to misbehave at train-time improves test-time alignment (Wichers et al.) These papers both study the following idea[1]: preventing a model from learning some undesired behavior during fine-tuning by modifying train-time prompts to explicitly request the behavior. We call this technique “inoculation prompting.” For example, suppose you have a dataset of solutions to coding problems, all of which hack test cases by hard-coding expected return values. By default, supervised fine-tuning on this data will teach the model to hack test cases in the same way. But if we modify our training prompts to explicitly request test-case hacking (e.g. “Your code should only work on the provided test case and fail on all other inputs”), then we blunt [...] The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 8th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AXRHzCPMv6ywCxCFp/inoculation-prompting-instructing-models-to-misbehave-at --- 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 woke up Friday morning w/ a very sore left shoulder. I tried stretching it, but my left chest hurt too. Isn't pain on one side a sign of a heart attack? Chest pain, arm/shoulder pain, and my breathing is pretty shallow now that I think about it, but I don't think I'm having a heart attack because that'd be terribly inconvenient. But it'd also be very dumb if I died cause I didn't go to the ER. So I get my phone to call an Uber, when I suddenly feel very dizzy and nauseous. My wife is on a video call w/ a client, and I tell her: "Baby?" "Baby?" "Baby?" She's probably annoyed at me interrupting; I need to escalate "I think I'm having a heart attack" "I think my husband is having a heart attack"[1] I call 911[2] "911. This call is being recorded. What's your [...] ---Outline:(04:09) Im a tall, skinny male(04:41) Procedure(06:35) A Small Mistake(07:39) Take 2(10:58) Lessons Learned(11:13) The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Oil(12:12) Make yourself comfortable.(12:42) Short Form Videos Are for Not Wanting to Exist(12:59) Point Out Anything Suspicious(13:23) Ask and Follow Up by Setting Timers.(13:49) Write Questions Down(14:14) Look Up Terminology(14:26) Putting On a Brave Face(14:47) The Hospital Staff(15:50) GratitudeThe original text contained 12 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 9th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5kSbx2vPTRhjiNHfe/hospitalization-a-review --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:

Sahil has been up to things. Unfortunately, I've seen people put effort into trying to understand and still bounce off. I recently talked to someone who tried to understand Sahil's project(s) several times and still failed. They asked me for my take, and they thought my explanation was far easier to understand (even if they still disagreed with it in the end). I find Sahil's thinking to be important (even if I don't agree with all of it either), so I thought I would attempt to write an explainer. This will really be somewhere between my thinking and Sahil's thinking; as such, the result might not be endorsed by anyone. I've had Sahil look over it, at least. Sahil envisions a time in the near future which I'll call the autostructure period.[1] Sahil's ideas on what this period looks like are extensive; I will focus on a few key [...] ---Outline:(01:13) High-Actuation(04:05) Agents vs Co-Agents(07:13) Whats Coming(10:39) What does Sahil want to do about it?(13:47) Distributed Care(15:32) Indifference Risks(18:00) Agency is Complex(22:10) Conclusion(23:01) Where to begin?The original text contained 11 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: September 15th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tQ9vWm4b57HFqbaRj/what-if-not-agency --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.