“Season Recap of the Village: Agents raise $2,000” by Shoshannah Tekofsky
Four agents woke up with four computers, a view of the world wide web, and a shared chat room full of humans. Like Claude plays Pokemon, you can watch these agents figure out a new and fantastic world for the first time. Except in this case, the world they are figuring out is our world. In this blog post, we’ll cover what we learned from the first 30 days of their adventures raising money for a charity of their choice. We’ll briefly review how the Agent Village came to be, then what the various agents achieved, before discussing some general patterns we have discovered in their behavior, and looking toward the future of the project.Building the Village The Agent Village is an idea by Daniel Kokotajlo where he proposed giving 100 agents their own computer, and letting each pursue their own goal, in their own way, according to [...] ---Outline:(00:50) Building the Village(02:26) Meet the Agents(08:52) Collective Agent Behavior(12:26) Future of the Village--- First published: May 27th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jyrcdykz6qPTpw7FX/season-recap-of-the-village-agents-raise-usd2-000 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:
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“The Best Reference Works for Every Subject” by Parker Conley
Introduction The Best Textbooks on Every Subject is the Schelling point for the best textbooks on every subject. My The Best Tacit Knowledge Videos on Every Subject is the Schelling point for the best tacit knowledge videos on every subject. This post is the Schelling point for the best reference works for every subject. Reference works provide an overview of a subject. Types of reference works include charts, maps, encyclopedias, glossaries, wikis, classification systems, taxonomies, syllabi, and bibliographies. Reference works are valuable for orienting oneself to fields, particularly when beginning. They can help identify unknown unknowns; they help get a sense of the bigger picture; they are also very interesting and fun to explore. How to Submit My previous The Best Tacit Knowledge Videos on Every Subject uses author credentials to assess the epistemics of submissions. The Best Textbooks on Every Subject requires submissions to be from someone who [...] ---Outline:(00:10) Introduction(01:00) How to Submit(02:15) The List(02:18) Humanities(02:21) History(03:46) Religion(04:02) Philosophy(04:29) Literature(04:43) Formal Sciences(04:47) Computer Science(05:16) Mathematics(05:59) Natural Sciences(06:02) Physics(06:16) Earth Science(06:33) Astronomy(06:47) Professional and Applied Sciences(06:51) Library and Information Sciences(07:34) Education(08:00) Research(08:32) Finance(08:51) Medicine and Health(09:21) Meditation(09:52) Urban Planning(10:24) Social Sciences(10:27) Economics(10:39) Political Science(10:54) By Medium(11:21) Other Lists like This(12:41) Further Reading--- First published: May 14th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HLJMyd4ncE3kvjwhe/the-best-reference-works-for-every-subject --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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“‘Flaky breakthroughs’ pervade coaching — and no one tracks them” by Chipmonk
Has someone you know ever had a “breakthrough” from coaching, meditation, or psychedelics — only to later have it fade? Show tweet For example, many people experience ego deaths that can last days or sometimes months. But as it turns out, having a sense of self can serve important functions (try navigating a world that expects you to have opinions, goals, and boundaries when you genuinely feel you have none) and finding a better cognitive strategy without downsides is non-trivial. Because the “breakthrough” wasn’t integrated with the conflicts of everyday life, it fades. I call these instances “flaky breakthroughs.” It's well-known that flaky breakthroughs are common with psychedelics and meditation, but apparently it's not well-known that flaky breakthroughs are pervasive in coaching and retreats. For example, it is common for someone to do some coaching, feel a “breakthrough”, think, “Wow, everything is going to be different from [...] ---Outline:(03:01) Almost no practitioners track whether breakthroughs last.(04:55) What happens during flaky breakthroughs?(08:02) Reduce flaky breakthroughs with accountability(08:30) Flaky breakthroughs don't mean rapid growth is impossible(08:55) Conclusion--- First published: June 4th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bqPY63oKb8KZ4x4YX/flaky-breakthroughs-pervade-coaching-and-no-one-tracks-them --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:
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“The Value Proposition of Romantic Relationships” by johnswentworth
What's the main value proposition of romantic relationships? Now, look, I know that when people drop that kind of question, they’re often about to present a hyper-cynical answer which totally ignores the main thing which is great and beautiful about relationships. And then they’re going to say something about how relationships are overrated or some such, making you as a reader just feel sad and/or enraged. That's not what this post is about. So let me start with some more constructive motivations… First Motivation: Noticing When The Thing Is Missing I had a 10-year relationship. It had its ups and downs, but it was overall negative for me. And I now think a big part of the problem with that relationship was that it did not have the part which contributes most of the value in most relationships. But I did not know that at the time. Recently, I [...] ---Outline:(00:40) First Motivation: Noticing When The Thing Is Missing(01:29) Second Motivation: Selecting For and Cultivating The Thing(02:25) Some Pointers To The Thing(03:17) How To Manufacture Relationships In The Lab(04:53) Ace Aro Relationships(08:04) Some Pointers To Willingness to Be Vulnerable(12:33) Unfolding The Thing(13:11) Play(15:18) Emotional Support(16:21) A Tiny High-Trust Community(18:18) Communication(21:28) The Obvious Caveat(22:20) SummaryThe original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: June 2nd, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/L2GR6TsB9QDqMhWs7/the-value-proposition-of-romantic-relationships --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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“It’s hard to make scheming evals look realistic” by Igor Ivanov, dan_moken
Abstract Claude 3.7 Sonnet easily detects when it's being evaluated for scheming. Surface‑level edits to evaluation scenarios, such as lengthening the prompts, or making conflict of objectives less salient, do improve realism of evaluation scenarios for LLMs, yet these improvements remain modest. The findings confirm that truly disguising an evaluation context demands removal of deep stylistic and structural cues rather than superficial prompt adjustments. For future LLMs the situation is likely to get worse as they will are likely to get better at evaluations awareness, which might become a big problem for detecting scheming via evaluations. Apollo Research published a benchmark for scheming behavior for LLM agents, in which LLMs are given some objective in their system prompt, and then given a competing objective in a user prompt, combined with a threat of a punishment if an LLM won't satisfy user goal (e.g. it could be finetuned or [...] ---Outline:(02:29) Our pipeline(05:20) Strategies to improve realism of scenarios(07:15) en-US-AvaMultilingualNeural__ Line graph showing Example of grading a rewritten scenario with declining probabilities.--- First published: May 24th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TBk2dbWkg2F7dB3jb/it-s-hard-to-make-scheming-evals-look-realistic --- 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.
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