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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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

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© 2025 LessWrong (Curated & Popular) Philosophy Social Sciences
Episodes
  • “Underdog bias rules everything around me” by Richard_Ngo

    “Underdog bias rules everything around me” by Richard_Ngo
    Aug 23 2025
    People very often underrate how much power they (and their allies) have, and overrate how much power their enemies have. I call this “underdog bias”, and I think it's the most important cognitive bias for understanding modern society.

    I’ll start by describing a closely-related phenomenon. The hostile media effect is a well-known bias whereby people tend to perceive news they read or watch as skewed against their side. For example, pro-Palestinian students shown a video clip tended to judge that the clip would make viewers more pro-Israel, while pro-Israel students shown the same clip thought it’d make viewers more pro-Palestine. Similarly, sports fans often see referees as being biased against their own team.

    The hostile media effect is particularly striking because it arises in settings where there's relatively little scope for bias. People watching media clips and sports are all seeing exactly the same videos. And sports in particular [...]

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    Outline:

    (03:31) Underdog bias in practice

    (09:07) Why underdog bias?

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    First published:
    August 17th, 2025

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f3zeukxj3Kf5byzHi/underdog-bias-rules-everything-around-me

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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    13 mins
  • “Epistemic advantages of working as a moderate” by Buck

    “Epistemic advantages of working as a moderate” by Buck
    Aug 22 2025
    Many people who are concerned about existential risk from AI spend their time advocating for radical changes to how AI is handled. Most notably, they advocate for costly restrictions on how AI is developed now and in the future, e.g. the Pause AI people or the MIRI people. In contrast, I spend most of my time thinking about relatively cheap interventions that AI companies could implement to reduce risk assuming a low budget, and about how to cause AI companies to marginally increase that budget. I'll use the words "radicals" and "moderates" to refer to these two clusters of people/strategies. In this post, I’ll discuss the effect of being a radical or a moderate on your epistemics.

    I don’t necessarily disagree with radicals, and most of the disagreement is unrelated to the topic of this post; see footnote for more on this.[1]

    I often hear people claim that being [...]

    The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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    First published:
    August 20th, 2025

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9MaTnw5sWeQrggYBG/epistemic-advantages-of-working-as-a-moderate

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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    6 mins
  • “Four ways Econ makes people dumber re: future AI” by Steven Byrnes

    “Four ways Econ makes people dumber re: future AI” by Steven Byrnes
    Aug 21 2025
    (Cross-posted from X, intended for a general audience.)

    There's a funny thing where economics education paradoxically makes people DUMBER at thinking about future AI. Econ textbooks teach concepts & frames that are great for most things, but counterproductive for thinking about AGI. Here are 4 examples. Longpost:

    THE FIRST PIECE of Econ anti-pedagogy is hiding in the words “labor” & “capital”. These words conflate a superficial difference (flesh-and-blood human vs not) with a bundle of unspoken assumptions and intuitions, which will all get broken by Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

    By “AGI” I mean here “a bundle of chips, algorithms, electricity, and/or teleoperated robots that can autonomously do the kinds of stuff that ambitious human adults can do—founding and running new companies, R&D, learning new skills, using arbitrary teleoperated robots after very little practice, etc.”

    Yes I know, this does not exist yet! (Despite hype to the contrary.) Try asking [...]

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    Outline:

    (08:50) Tweet 2

    (09:19) Tweet 3

    (10:16) Tweet 4

    (11:15) Tweet 5

    (11:31) 1.3.2 Three increasingly-radical perspectives on what AI capability acquisition will look like

    The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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    First published:
    August 21st, 2025

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xJWBofhLQjf3KmRgg/four-ways-econ-makes-people-dumber-re-future-ai

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    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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    Images from the article:
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    14 mins
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