The Best of LessWrong

When posts turn more than a year old, the LessWrong community reviews and votes on how well they have stood the test of time. These are the posts that have ranked the highest for all years since 2018 (when our annual tradition of choosing the least wrong of LessWrong began).

For the years 2018, 2019 and 2020 we also published physical books with the results of our annual vote, which you can buy and learn more about here.

16johnswentworth

Based on occasional conversations with new people, I would not be surprised if a majority of people who got into alignment between April 2022 and April 2023 did so mainly because of this post. Most of them say something like "man, I did not realize how dire the situation looked" or "I thought the MIRI folks were on it or something".

23habryka

I've used the term "safetwashing" at least once every week or two in the last year. I don't know whether I've picked it up from this post, but it still seems good to have an explanation of a term that is this useful and this common that people are exposed to.

17Vika

I think this is still one of the most comprehensive and clear resources on counterpoints to x-risk arguments. I have referred to this post and pointed people to a number of times. The most useful parts of the post for me were the outline of the basic x-risk case and section A on counterarguments to goal-directedness (this was particularly helpful for my thinking about threat models and understanding agency).

15Ben Pace

Seems to me like a blindingly obvious post that was kind of outside of the overton window for too long. Eliezer also smashed the window with his TIME article, but this was first, so I think it's still a pretty great post. +4

19Eli Tyre

This was counter to the prevailing narrative at the time, and I think did some of the work of changing the narrative. It's of historical significance, if nothing else.

16habryka

I think it's a bit hard to tell how influential this post has been, though my best guess is "very". It's clear that sometime around when this post was published there was a pretty large shift in the strategies that I and a lot of other people pursued, with "slowing down AI" becoming a much more common goal for people to pursue. I think (most of) the arguments in this post are good. I also think that when I read an initial draft of this post (around 1.5 years ago or so), and had a very hesitant reaction to the core strategy it proposes, that I was picking up on something important, and that I do also want to award Bayes points to that part of me given how things have been playing out so far. I do think that since I've seen people around me adopt strategies to slow down AI, I've seen it done on a basis that feels much more rhetorical, and often directly violates virtues and perspectives that I hold very dearly. I think it's really important to understand that technological progress has been the central driving force behind humanity's success, and that indeed this should establish a huge prior against stopping almost any kind of technological development. In contrast to that, the majority of arguments that I've seen find traction for slowing down AI development are not distinguishable from arguments that apply to a much larger set of technologies which to me clearly do not pose a risk commensurable with the prior we should have against slowdown. Concerns about putting people out of jobs, destroying traditional models of romantic relationships, violating copyright law, spreading disinformation, all seem to me to be the kind of thing that if you buy it, you end up with an argument that proves too much and should end up opposed to a huge chunk of technological progress. And I can feel the pressure in myself for these things as well. I can see how it would be easy to at least locally gain traction at slowing down AI by allying myself with people who are concerned abo

15Garrett Baker

Clearly a very influential post on a possible path to doom from someone who knows their stuff about deep learning! There are clear criticisms, but it is also one of the best of its era. It was also useful for even just getting a handle on how to think about our path to AGI.

10Ramana Kumar

I found this post to be a clear and reasonable-sounding articulation of one of the main arguments for there being catastrophic risk from AI development. It helped me with my own thinking to an extent. I think it has a lot of shareability value.

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