Essays like Paul Graham's, Scott Alexander's, and Eliezer Yudkowsky's have influenced a generation of people in how they think about startups, ethics, science, and the world as a whole. Creating essays that good takes a lot of skill, practice, and talent, but it looks to me that a lot of people with talent aren't putting in the work and developing the skill, except in ways that are optimized to also be social media strategies. To fix this problem, I am running the Inkhaven Residency. The idea is to gather a bunch of promising writers to invest in the art and craft of blogging, through a shared commitment to each publish a blogpost every day for the month of November. Why a daily writing structure? Well, it's a reaction to other fellowships I've seen. I've seen month-long or years-long events with exceedingly little public output, where the people would've contributed [...] ---
First published:
August 2nd, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CA6XfmzYoGFWNhH8e/whence-the-inkhaven-residency
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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4:45
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“Many prediction markets would be better off as batched auctions” by William Howard
All prediction market platforms trade continuously, which is the same mechanism the stock market uses. Buy and sell limit orders can be posted at any time, and as soon as they match against each other a trade will be executed. This is called a Central limit order book (CLOB).Example of a CLOB order book from Polymarket Most of the time, the market price lazily wanders around due to random variation in when people show up, and a bulk of optimistic orders build up away from the action. Occasionally, a new piece of information arrives to the market, and it jumps to a new price, consuming some of the optimistic orders in the process. The people with stale orders will generally lose out in this situation, as someone took them up on their order before they had a chance to process the new information. This means there is a high [...] The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. ---
First published:
August 2nd, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rS6tKxSWkYBgxmsma/many-prediction-markets-would-be-better-off-as-batched
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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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9:19
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9:19
“How many species has humanity driven extinct?” by Raemon
Does anyone know, like, a reasonable lower bound on number of species humanity has driven extinct? I've seen crazy high numbers that (last I checked) seemed to be an extrapolation by people with an ideological ax to grind. (Based on how much habitat we've destroyed, and assuming some number of species per unit-area). ChatGPT suggested "900" as the lower bound based on some snippet they found from "International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)", but looking into it was a enough work I thought I might toss it to the LessWrong folk and see if anyone could get a more confident answer. ---
First published:
August 2nd, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vWqtvLDYyJDHq7roe/how-many-species-has-humanity-driven-extinct
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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“SB-1047 Documentary: The Post-Mortem” by Michaël Trazzi
Below some meta-level / operational / fundraising thoughts around producing the SB-1047 Documentary I've just posted on Manifund (see previous Lesswrong / EAF posts on AI Governance lessons learned). The SB-1047 Documentary took 27 weeks and $157k instead of my planned 6 weeks and $55k. Here's what I learned about documentary production Total funding received: ~$143k ($119k from this grant, $4k from Ryan Kidd's regrant on another project, and $20k from the Future of Life Institute). Total money spent: $157k In terms of timeline, here is the rough breakdown month-per-month: - Sep / October (production): Filming of the Documentary. Manifund project is created. - November (rough cut): I work with one editor to go through our entire footage and get a first rough cut of the documentary that was presented at The Curve. - December-January (final cut - one editor): I interview multiple potential editors that [...] ---Outline:(03:18) But why did the project end up taking 27 weeks instead of 6 weeks?(03:25) Short answer(06:22) Impact(07:14) What I would do differently next-time---
First published:
August 1st, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/id8HHPNqoMQbmkWay/sb-1047-documentary-the-post-mortem
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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“Podcast: Lincoln Quirk from Wave” by Elizabeth
For two years I had the good fortune to work at Sendwave/Wave (they were one company at the time), a company that made remittances cheap and workable in certain African countries. I am prouder of working at Wave than of the rest of my programming career combined, and a good bit of my research career as well. Every day I finished work knowing that I had helped save very poor people time and money, by making it cheaper and easier to send money home from abroad or domestically. So I was deeply excited to talk to my ex-boss and co-founder of the company, Lincoln Quirk, on this final episode of the podcast. We talk about a the details of starting a company and the economics of how remittances and mobile do enormous amounts of good while making a profit.
This is the sixth episode of my podcast [...] ---
First published:
August 1st, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5sZz2qTEJDZwTdZwQ/podcast-lincoln-quirk-from-wave
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
New Zealand