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Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

  1. 6 小時前

    “Mixed Feelings on Social Munchkinry” by Screwtape

    This is less me expounding on a thesis and more me musing about a topic where I have conflicting intuitions. Epistemic status: exploratory. One thing: What do I mean by munchkin? "Munchkin" is a term from the tabletop roleplaying game community. It's talking about the kind of person who treats the game as a system to optimize, doing weird or unexpected things that aren't against the letter of the rules but often are against the spirit in order to gain some advantage. It's a term that usually has negative valence, though once in a while it'll be spoken with a kind of grudging respect. Lately I've had the idea of social munchkinry in mind. But let me talk a little more about tabletops first.[1] Munchkinry is kinda fun in isolation. Looking at the myriad rules in a dozen rulebooks to try and come up with some overpowered combination is a neat mental exercise that combines the surprise of comedy with the fun mental stimulation of a good math puzzle. I've had hours of entertainment trying to get the most out of a third-level wizard. One good strategy for getting good munchkinry is to figure out if there's some aspect [...] --- Outline: (00:10) This is less me expounding on a thesis and more me musing about a topic where I have conflicting intuitions. Epistemic status: exploratory. (00:21) One thing: What do I mean by munchkin? (02:53) Its kinda nice (06:15) Its kinda not (09:15) So where am I at? The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: November 17th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zxdjt2tLnxvGhW9Fd/mixed-feelings-on-social-munchkinry --- 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.

    11 分鐘

  2. 9 小時前

    “Diagonalization: A (slightly) more rigorous model of paranoia” by habryka

    In my post on Wednesday (Paranoia: A Beginner's Guide), I talked at a high level about the experience of paranoia, and gave two models (the lemons market model and the OODA loop model) that try get us a bit closer to understanding its nature and purpose. I then made a big claim that went largely unargued in the post, that there are exactly three kinds of strategies that make sense to pursue in adversarial information environments: You blind yourself You eliminate the sources of deception You act unpredictably Now, Unnamed brought up a very reasonable critique in the comments! Why would there be exactly three strategies that make sense? How can we have any confidence that there isn't a 4th kind of strategy that works? And, in reality, there are totally other kinds of strategies. Many of the most effective strategies (like building networks of trust, hiring independent auditors, performing randomized experiments and "getting better at figuring out the truth on your own") don't neatly fit into the categories in that post. Maybe they can somehow be forced into this ontology, but IMO they are not a great fit. But I argue that there [...] The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: November 16th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rmkbneSMQHZJ5Svbk/diagonalization-a-slightly-more-rigorous-model-of-paranoia --- 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.

    8 分鐘

  3. 14 小時前

    “Where is the Capital? An Overview” by johnswentworth

    When a new dollar goes into the capital markets, after being bundled and securitized and lent several times over, where does it end up? When society's total savings increase, what capital assets do those savings end up invested in? When economists talk about “capital assets”, they mean things like roads, buildings and machines. When I read through a company's annual reports, lots of their assets are instead things like stocks and bonds, short-term debt, and other “financial” assets - i.e. claims on other people's stuff. In theory, for every financial asset, there's a financial liability somewhere. For every bond asset, there's some payer for whom that bond is a liability. Across the economy, they all add up to zero. What's left is the economists’ notion of capital, the nonfinancial assets: the roads, buildings, machines and so forth. Very roughly speaking, when there's a net increase in savings, that's where it has to end up - in the nonfinancial assets. I wanted to get a more tangible sense of what nonfinancial assets look like, of where my savings are going in the physical world. So, back in 2017 I pulled fundamentals data on ~2100 publicly-held US companies. I looked at [...] --- Outline: (02:01) Disclaimers (04:10) Overview (With Numbers!) (05:01) Oil - 25% (06:26) Power Grid - 16% (07:07) Consumer - 13% (08:12) Telecoms - 8% (09:26) Railroads - 8% (10:47) Healthcare - 8% (12:03) Tech - 6% (12:51) Industrial - 5% (13:49) Mining - 3% (14:34) Real Estate - 3% (14:49) Automotive - 2% (15:32) Logistics - 1% (16:12) Miscellaneous (16:55) Learnings --- First published: November 16th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HpBhpRQCFLX9tx62Z/where-is-the-capital-an-overview --- 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.

    18 分鐘

  4. 16 小時前

    “Matrices map between biproducts” by jessicata

    Audio note: this article contains 98 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Why are linear functions between finite-dimensional vector spaces representable by matrices? And why does matrix multiplication compose the corresponding linear maps? There's geometric intuition for this, e.g. presented by 3Blue1Brown. I will alternatively present a category-theoretic analysis. The short version is that, in the category of vector spaces and linear maps, products are also coproducts (hence biproducts); and in categories with biproducts, maps between biproducts factor as (generalized) matrices. These generalized matrices align with traditional numeric matrices and matrix multiplication in the category of vector spaces. The category-theoretic lens reveals matrices as an elegant abstraction, contra The New Yorker. I'll use a standard notion of a vector space over the field _mathbb{R}_. A vector space has addition, zero, and scalar multiplication defined, which have the standard commutativity/associativity/distributivity properties. The category _mathsf{Vect}_ has as objects vector spaces (over the field _mathbb{R}_), and as morphisms linear maps. A linear map _f : U rightarrow V_ between vector spaces U, V satisfies _f(u_1 + u_2) = f(u_1) + f(u_2)_ and _f(au) [...] --- First published: November 15th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7wstHFRn3bHzSN2z3/matrices-map-between-biproducts --- 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.

    12 分鐘

  5. 20 小時前

    “Why does ChatGPT think mammoths were alive December?” by Steffee

    The is a slimmed down version which omits some extra examples but includes my theorizing about ChatGPT, my investigations of it, and my findings. Epistemic status: Pretty uncertain. I think my conclusions are probably more right than wrong, more useful than harmful, and would especially benefit people with only an average or below-average understanding of LLMs. There may be prior art that I'm unaware of; if not, maybe this will provide a launching point for others to begin deeper investigations. In Scott Alexander's latest link roundup, he wrote: A surprising LLM failure mode: if you ask questions like “answer with a single word: were any mammoths still alive in December”, chatbots will often answer “yes”. It seems like they lack the natural human assumption that you meant last December, and are answering that there was some December during which a mammoth was alive. I find this weird because LLMs usually seem very good at navigating the many assumptions you need to communicate at all; this one stands as a strange exception. I think I’ve got a satisfactory answer to this strange exception, but first I want to walk through my original theories, then go over the patterns I observed [...] --- Outline: (01:51) Theories (01:55) Theory 1: Time is confusing (04:17) Theory 2: One-word answers are just weird (06:22) The Principles (06:25) 1. User Justification (12:13) 2. Self Justification & the Tyranny of phrasing (20:15) 3. The Underlying Principle (26:53) Putting this to the test (31:50) So what's the deal with mammoths? (35:16) One last example The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: November 16th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bkrr5iHBknkGLhsAG/why-does-chatgpt-think-mammoths-were-alive-december --- 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.

    36 分鐘

  6. 1 天前

    “7 Vicious Vices of Rationalists” by Ben Pace

    Vices aren't behaviors that one should never do. Rather, vices are behaviors that are fine and pleasurable to do in moderation, but tempting to do in excess. The classical vices are actually good in part. Moderate amounts of gluttony is just eating food, which is important. Moderate amounts of envy is just "wanting things", which is a motivator of much of our economy. What are some things that rationalists are wont to do, and often to good effect, but that can grow pathological? 1. Contrarianism There are a whole host of unaligned forces producing the arguments and positions you hear. People often hold beliefs out of convenience, defend positions that they are aligned with politically, or just don't give much thought to what they're saying one way or another. A good way find out whether people have any good reasons for their positions, is to take a contrarian stance, and to seek the best arguments for unpopular positions. This also helps you to explore arguments around positions that others aren't investigating. However, this can be taken to the extreme. While it is hard to know for sure what is going on inside others' heads, I know [...] --- Outline: (00:40) 1. Contrarianism (01:57) 2. Pedantry (03:35) 3. Elaboration (03:52) 4. Social Obliviousness (05:21) 5. Assuming Good Faith (06:33) 6. Undercutting Social Momentum (08:00) 7. Digging Your Heels In --- First published: November 16th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r6xSmbJRK9KKLcXTM/7-vicious-vices-of-rationalists-1 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

    10 分鐘

  7. 1 天前

    “Put numbers on stuff, all the time, otherwise scope insensitivity will eat you” by habryka

    Context: Post #6 in my sequence of private Lightcone Infrastructure memos edited for public consumption. In almost any role at Lightcone you will have to make prioritization decisions about which projects to work on, which directions to take a project in, and how much effort to invest in any aspect of a project. Those decisions are hard. Often those decisions have lots of different considerations that are hard to compare. To make those decisions you will have to make models of the world. Many models are best expressed as quantitative relationships between different variables. Often, a decision becomes obvious when you try to put it into quantitative terms and compare it against other options or similar decisions you've recently made. One of the most common errors people make is to fail to realize that one consideration is an order of magnitude more important than another because they fail to put the considerations into quantitative terms. It is extremely valuable if you can a concrete number onto any consideration relevant to your work. Here are some common numbers related to Lightcone work that all generalists working here should be able to derive to within an order of magnitude (or within [...] --- First published: November 16th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sdvBcPSR7p5mKhB7b/put-numbers-on-stuff-all-the-time-otherwise-scope --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

    7 分鐘

  8. 1 天前

    “The skills and physics of high-performance driving, Pt. 1” by Ruby

    High performance driving = motorsport = racecar driving Even if you have a license and drive a car, you probably don't understand what is hard about racing. I think the answer is interesting (in general I think knowing why things are hard is interesting, but this is my hobby) and it's further interesting to think about why people don't get the difficulty. Motorsport is interesting because (1) people have a lot of experience with the adjacent activity, namely regular driving, (2) few people have experience with the actual thing, and (3) even if you watch someone doing it, you will probably still not understand where the challenge lies. By (3), I mean if I were to show you the hand and foot movements of a racecar driver doing their thing, you wouldn't understand the difficulty[1], unlike if I showed you someone pole vaulting for the first time, where I think most people could intuitively see the challenge. I'll come back to this. Ok, so what's hard? Where does the challenge lie? We can work backward from the goal. The goal in motorsport is to get from one location to another location in as short as time as possible. It's [...] --- Outline: (01:28) Finding the best path (not the hardest thing) (02:19) Minimizing time = maximizing velocity = maximizing acceleration (04:06) Driving at the limit (06:01) How to get everything available (06:09) A Rubbery Sixth Sense (06:38) Asking nicely (07:37) Timing & Precision (08:31) Recovery (09:15) Stay tuned for part 2 The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: November 16th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tFjuJQfwLWLbuNaQ7/the-skills-and-physics-of-high-performance-driving-pt-1 --- 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.

    10 分鐘
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簡介

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

資訊

  • 創作者
    LessWrong
  • 活躍年代
    2023年 - 2025年
  • 集數
    250
  • 年齡分級
    兒少適宜
  • 版權
    © 2025 All rights reserved
  • 節目網站
    LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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