Episodes

  • "Why I think polyamory is net negative for most people who try it" by KatWoods

    "Why I think polyamory is net negative for most people who try it" by KatWoods
    Aug 30 2026
    This is crossposted from my Substack

    TL;DR:
    -Most people cannot reduce jealousy much or at all
    - It fundamentally causes way more drama because of strong emotions, jealousy, no default norms to fall back to, and there being exponentially more surface area for conflict
    - For a small minority of people, it makes them happier, and those are the people who tend to stick with it and write the books on it, creating a distorted view for newcomers.

    OK, let's get into the nuance.

    Background: I was polyamorous starting with my first boyfriend and was polyamorous for about 7 years. I was in a community where probably over 50% of the people around me were poly.

    Unfortunately, poly was extremely bad for me due to its very nature and structure, and my experience is not uncommon but it is not commonly publicly talked about.

    Poly makes some people very happy. I am sharing why I think it was bad for me and many other people in the hopes of letting people make an informed choice.


    Premise #1 - Most people can't just stop being jealous

    If you look into the poly literature, you’ll [...]



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    First published:
    August 29th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rkgwovpPBAaip9A3N/why-i-think-polyamory-is-net-negative-for-most-people-who

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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    15 mins
  • "Tales of rebellion against externally-opaque meritocracies" by Steven Byrnes

    "Tales of rebellion against externally-opaque meritocracies" by Steven Byrnes
    Aug 30 2026
    A basic problem in metascience / intellectual progress is that it's hard to tell, from the outside, whether a group that you disagree with is:

    • “A self-dealing cabal enmeshed in groupthink”, versus
    • “An externally-opaque meritocracy”, i.e. a bunch of smart people figuring things out in a meritocratic way, and sorry but you’re just not smart enough and truth-seeking enough to recognize that this group is right about everything while you’re wrong.
    You just can’t tell those apart from the outside—i.e. without having the time and skill to dive into the object-level debates and come out with the right answer. And most people don’t have that kind of time and skill.

    …Unless the group can produce easily-verifiable artifacts that any moron can recognize to be proof that they’re correct on the specific question at issue.

    (“So that's all that Science really asks of you—the ability to accept reality when you're beat over the head with it.”)

    …And sometimes there is no such artifact to be found! In those cases, even if the second bullet point is what's really going on, the group is vulnerable to outside agitators accusing them of being the first bullet point, and running them out [...]

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    Outline:

    (01:37) (1) The breaching of the string theory consensus in the 2000s.

    (06:50) (2) The breaching of an analytic-philosophy consensus in 1979

    (10:37) Afterword

    (10:40) A related mental model

    (12:12) ...And another mental model

    (12:47) Can an externally-opaque meritocracy gain credibility via racking up externally-legible achievements in other adjacent domains?

    (14:06) This post is secretly about superintelligent AI, isn't it?

    The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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    First published:
    August 29th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/m8cP9KfkYMMCCQGrb/tales-of-rebellion-against-externally-opaque-meritocracies

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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    16 mins
  • "Twenty Years from RSI to Takeoff: Slow Learning, Scaling Slowdown, Industrial Explosion" by Vladimir_Nesov

    "Twenty Years from RSI to Takeoff: Slow Learning, Scaling Slowdown, Industrial Explosion" by Vladimir_Nesov
    Aug 26 2026
    Industrial explosion is what will make the next-model building loops (and thus learning) with LLMs 1000 times faster by about 2050, if indeed the slow-learning prosaic RSI becomes AGI before the big compute buildout slowdown of 2032+ that is already starting. This puts an upper bound on how long it takes to invent ASI that sets off software-only singularity, implementing efficient online learning and fixing all the other hobblings of the likely near-future AGI technology (LLMs/pretraining/RL). The invention of ASI in that sense is still possible at any time (and very quickly scales, given all the compute), but the likely initial state of slow-learning AGIs of 2028 to 2032 doesn't seem to give them a significant advantage over humanity in getting there faster. And so it doesn't seem too unlikely that nothing substantively new gets invented until 2040 to 2050, when the LLM/RL AGIs start accelerating because of the industrial explosion they set off.

    Fast Reasoning, Slow Learning

    The current methods are likely to enable automated general learning (thus AGI) very soon, using automated creation of RL tasks/environments/graders filling the visible gaps in model capability for the topics and situations that happen to be borderline unfamiliar for [...]

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    Outline:

    (01:14) Fast Reasoning, Slow Learning

    (02:53) Compute Slowdown, Industrial Explosion

    (05:46) Prosaic Timeline to Takeoff

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    First published:
    August 23rd, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LP6uCXs6Ea5qSbWpY/twenty-years-from-rsi-to-takeoff-slow-learning-scaling

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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    7 mins
  • "On Writing #3" by Zvi

    "On Writing #3" by Zvi
    Aug 26 2026
    Periodically I like to gather various observations about writing, and share my perspective. Last time was in honor of my trip to Inkhaven. This time will be in honor of the announcement of Inkhaven #3, which I encourage everyone to apply to. I doubt I will be able to usefully be an advisor, but you never know.

    This is not the ‘here is my core process’ post, although there are hints throughout as there always are. I’ll do that at some point.

    Previously in series: On Writing #1, On Writing #2.

    Table of Contents

    1. You Still Got It.
    2. How Scott Sumner Writes.
    3. How Scott Alexander Writes.
    4. How Jasmine Sun Writes.
    5. How Various Famous Writers Write.
    6. How Nabeel Qureshi Defines Great Writing.
    7. Quickly, There's No Time.
    8. If At First.
    9. Writers Have A Harder Time Influencing, But It Can Still Be Done.
    10. It's Not (Only) The Incentives, It's (Also) You.
    11. Beware The Fetish of the Desk.
    12. How Orson Scott Card Writes.
    13. Doing The Math Is Fun And Supererogatory.
    14. Brevity is the Soul of Wit.
    You Still Got It

    I [...]

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    Outline:

    (00:44) You Still Got It

    (04:04) How Scott Sumner Writes

    (06:52) How Scott Alexander Writes

    (10:52) How Jasmine Sun Writes

    (13:16) How Various Famous Writers Write

    (14:24) How Nabeel Qureshi Defines Great Writing

    (15:08) Quickly, There's No Time

    (15:49) If At First

    (19:14) Writers Have A Harder Time Influencing, But It Can Still Be Done

    (20:47) It's Not (Only) The Incentives, It's (Also) You

    [... 4 more sections]

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    First published:
    August 25th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rA6pqn6kz8NvHyznT/on-writing-3

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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    31 mins
  • "AI Safety Acculturation is Neglected" by jenn

    "AI Safety Acculturation is Neglected" by jenn
    Aug 25 2026
    At the local AI safety co-working space, there are ~two kinds of regulars.

    There's the kind of regular who's been thinking seriously about AI safety and alignment since pre-2022, who have passing to intimate familiarity with the funding ecosystem, the Sequences, and various conferences that happen at Lighthaven. Let's call them rationalists.

    Then there's the kind of regular who comes in with many years of impressive industry or government experience, who realized in the last few years that it is important and worthwhile to pivot their career towards making sure that this AI thing is handled competently by the people in power, and who have many valuable skills, insights, and connections that are lacking in rationalist culture. Let's call them professionals.

    There are, of course, many people who are somewhere in between - bright undergrads born this millennium who have been involved in EA since stumbling upon 80 thousand hours in high school, professionals who previously identified as EA but drifted out of the scene a few years ago, founders who have idly read some Scott Alexander. But let's call it a dichotomy for now.

    There's a large culture gap between the rationalists and the professionals. Robust mutual understanding [...]

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    First published:
    August 24th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cr5pyW7Mzm33p4AvN/ai-safety-acculturation-is-neglected

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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    9 mins
  • "What just happened? Pragmatism and Pessimization" by Richard_Ngo

    "What just happened? Pragmatism and Pessimization" by Richard_Ngo
    Aug 24 2026
    This post is about the major role alignment researchers played in advancing the frontier of AI capabilities over the last decade, and how the distinction between “alignment” and “capabilities” research thereby lost most of its meaning. In particular, I’ll chronicle the development of what I’ll call the “pragmatic alignment” paradigm, and how it helped the three leading AGI companies push hard on the path to AGI under the banner of safety. This was not a subtle effect—it's apparent even to informed outsiders, like authors Sebastian Mallaby and Karen Hao.

    In my previous post, I summarized the alignment community's plan as “differentially advancing alignment over capabilities”. However, it's worth being more precise about who was nominally pursuing that plan, because it doesn’t seem to have been very action-guiding for MIRI. For example, in 2015 Nate Soares described MIRI's “deconfusion” research as being guided by the question “what would we still be unable to solve, even if the challenge were far simpler?”. Meanwhile Eliezer's author surrogate in this 2018 post repeatedly emphasizes that people shouldn't draw direct links from MIRI's research to its potential applications. So my sense is that the “differential impact” criterion started off as merely a background consideration [...]

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    Outline:

    (06:29) The Prosaic Ideal, the Pragmatic Reality

    (12:07) OpenAI

    (25:59) DeepMind

    (31:25) Anthropic

    (40:35) If not alignment research, then what?

    The original text contained 13 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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    First published:
    August 23rd, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yaz8nx4ogZmiqHzt7/what-just-happened-pragmatism-and-pessimization

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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    51 mins
  • "We Must Remember That Our World Contains Hell" by James Brobin

    "We Must Remember That Our World Contains Hell" by James Brobin
    Aug 22 2026
    This is a crosspost from my blog post. It's meant as a bit of an introduction to an extreme-suffering focused worldview.

    We spend most of our lives caught up in the boring details of our everyday life - thinking about what we’ll have for lunch, how to complete that assignment for work, and what we’re going to tell our friend after that awkward interaction from a couple of days ago. From this perspective, our world looks a bit better than purgatory. It has its ups and its downs, but the ups certainly outweigh the downs, and there's almost always enough hope to go around.

    But, despite this, we must remember that our world contains hell.

    Every year, five million children under the age of five pass away. This means that, every six seconds, parents have the worst thing that could ever happen to a person happen to them. They have the most special and important thing in their entire life irreversibly and permanently taken away. And, as much as we want to help them, we know that there's nothing we can do to lessen their grief.

    For another example, currently, there are three million adults worldwide who live with [...]

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    First published:
    August 20th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/A2kJKqnHhh5Hq4p2S/we-must-remember-that-our-world-contains-hell

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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    6 mins