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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

By: LessWrong
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Summary

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma.

If you'd like more, subscribe to the “Lesswrong (30+ karma)” feed.

© 2026 LessWrong (Curated & Popular) Philosophy Social Sciences
Episodes
  • "The Iliad Intensive Course Materials" by Leon Lang, David Udell, Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel

    "The Iliad Intensive Course Materials" by Leon Lang, David Udell, Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel
    May 12 2026
    We are releasing the course materials of the Iliad Intensive, a new month-long and full-time AI Alignment course that runs in-person every second month. The course targets students with strong backgrounds in mathematics, physics, or theoretical computer science, and the materials reflect that: they include mathematical exercises with solutions, self-contained lecture notes on topics like singular learning theory and data attribution, and coding problems, at a depth that is unmatched for many of the topics we cover. Around 20 contributors (listed further below) were involved in developing these materials for the April 2026 cohort of the Iliad Intensive.

    By sharing the materials, we hope to

    • create more common knowledge about what the Iliad Intensive is;
    • invite feedback on the materials;
    • and allow others to learn via independent study.
    We are developing the materials further and plan to eventually release them on a website that will be continuously maintained. We will also add, remove, and modify modules going forward to improve and expand the course over time. When we release a new significantly updated version of the materials, we will update this post to link the new version.

    Modules

    The Iliad Intensive is structured into clusters, which are [...]

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    Outline:

    (01:26) Modules

    (02:32) Cluster A: Alignment

    (05:00) Cluster B: Learning

    (11:00) Cluster C: Abstractions, Representations, and Interpretability

    (15:40) Cluster D: Agency

    (19:23) Cluster E: Safety Guarantees and their Limits

    (23:04) Contributors

    (26:36) Impressions from April

    (29:02) Acknowledgments

    (29:11) Feedback

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    First published:
    May 11th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dWQnLi7AoKo3paBXF/the-iliad-intensive-course-materials

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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    30 mins
  • "The Darwinian Honeymoon - Why I am not as impressed by human progress as I used to be" by Elias Schmied

    "The Darwinian Honeymoon - Why I am not as impressed by human progress as I used to be" by Elias Schmied
    May 12 2026
    Crossposted from Substack and the EA Forum.




    A common argument for optimism about the future is that living conditions have improved a lot in the past few hundred years, billions of people have been lifted out of poverty, and so on. It's a very strong, grounding piece of evidence - probably the best we have in figuring out what our foundational beliefs about the world should be.

    However, I now think it's a lot less powerful than I once did.




    Let's take a Darwinian perspective - entities that are better at reproducing, spreading and power-seeking will become more common and eventually dominate the world.[1] This is an almost tautological story that plausibly applies to everything ever, agnostic to the specifics. It first happened with biological life in the last few billion years and humans specifically in the last hundred thousand years. Eventually, it led to accelerating economic growth in the last few thousand years, and in the future it will presumably lead to the colonization of the universe.

    My core point is this: It makes complete sense that this nihilistic optimization process at first actually benefits some class of agent - because initially, the easiest [...]





    The original text contained 10 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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    First published:
    May 10th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FxHzT6jeTRhbkzSX3/the-darwinian-honeymoon-why-i-am-not-as-impressed-by-human-1

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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    7 mins
  • "What I did in the hedonium shockwave, by Emma, age six and a half" by ozymandias

    "What I did in the hedonium shockwave, by Emma, age six and a half" by ozymandias
    May 11 2026
    My name is Emma and I’m six and a half years old and I like pink and Pokemon and my cat River and I’m going to be swallowed by a hedonium shockwave soon, except you already know that about me because everyone else is too.

    “Hedonium shockwave” means that everyone is going to be happy forever. Not just all the humans but all the animals and the flowers and the ground and River too. It has already made a bunch of the stars happy, like Betelgeuse and Alpha Centauri.

    Scientists saw that the stars were blinking out, and they did a lot of very hard science and figured out that the stars were turning into happiness. I wanted to be a scientist when I grew up but I won’t be a scientist because instead I’m going to be happy forever.

    I used to have a hard time saying “hedonium shockwave” but grownups keep saying it so I’ve gotten a lot of practice. Sometimes it seems like all grownups do, in real life and on the TV, is say “hedonium shockwave” at each other until they all start crying.

    I looked at the sky to see if I could see [...]

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    First published:
    April 13th, 2026

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rgXQuG8KXtxugSG6H/what-i-did-in-the-hedonium-shockwave-by-emma-age-six-and-a

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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    7 mins
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