LessWrong posts by zvi

The central message of the fertility roundups has always been that we have a choice. If we do want to raise fertility, we can do that. People respond to incentives. That means money, especially if paid up front, and it also means time, lifestyle and respect. If we do it purely with cash, it would be expensive, but a well-designed version of this would still be net profitable to the state. On the order of $300k per additional live birth would get this done in the United States, depending on how you structure it. This is not money spent, it is money transferred, and it helps the kids quite a lot. If we do it by dealing with the Revolution of Rising Requirements, by providing non-cash advantages or changing the culture, that's a more complex intervention, but we have options that let us do far better. Those who disagree have tried almost nothing, and are all out of ideas. Selection Alex Strudwick Young: Today parents can, for the first time, access polygenic embryo testing for IQ and many diseases through a routine test (PGT-A) done worldwide and in 60% of US IVF cycles. [...] ---Outline:(01:05) Selection(02:22) Surrogacy(02:46) IVF(08:05) Technological Versus Social Solutions(09:32) Dakka(10:51) All The Dakka(12:24) Insufficient Dakka Works Insufficiently(14:35) The Effectiveness of Dakka(17:47) The Wrong Dakka(18:52) Dakka Does Not Disproportionally Motivate The Poor(21:25) Is That a Lot?(25:23) Alternative Dakka(26:38) The Housing Theory of Everything Is Undefeated(35:58) Happiness(37:16) Negative Dakka(38:44) Mother's Day(39:41) Status(43:34) Hungary(46:20) Audio(46:26) NatalCon(46:50) Housing Discrimination(47:20) Your Own Quest(49:36) Hope --- First published: January 6th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xJw5eetbzNNu9SiSZ/fertility-roundup-6-the-art-of-more-dakka --- 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.

This week, Philip Trammell and Dwarkesh Patel wrote Capital in the 22nd Century. One of my goals for Q1 2026 is to write unified explainer posts for all the standard economic debates around potential AI futures in a systematic fashion. These debates tend to repeatedly cover the same points, and those making economic arguments continuously assume you must be misunderstanding elementary economic principles, or failing to apply them for no good reason. Key assumptions are often unstated and even unrealized, and also false or even absurd. Reference posts are needed. That will take longer, so instead this post covers the specific discussions and questions around the post by Trammell and Patel. My goal is to both meet that post on its own terms, and also point out the central ways its own terms are absurd, and the often implicit assumptions they make that are unlikely to hold. What Trammell and Patel Are Centrally Claiming As A Default Outcome They affirm, as do I, that Piketty was centrally wrong about capital accumulation in the past, for many well understood reasons, many of which they lay out. They then posit that Piketty could have been unintentionally [...] ---Outline:(01:02) What Trammell and Patel Are Centrally Claiming As A Default Outcome(03:15) Does The Above Conclusion Follow From The Above Premises?(03:30) Sounds Like This Is Not Our Main Problem In This Scenario?(07:31) To Be Clear This Scenario Doesn't Make Sense(13:51) Ad Argumento(14:44) The Baseline Scenario(16:31) Would We Have An Inequality Problem?(20:57) No You Can't Simply Let Markets Handle Everything(22:22) Proposed Solutions(25:55) Wealth Taxes Today Are Grade-A Stupid(28:27) Tyler Cowen Responds With Econ Equations(30:29) Brian Albrecht Responds With More Equations --- First published: January 5th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pQwNgB7ytwqTxxYue/dos-capital --- 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.

There are two sides of developments in fertility. How bad is it? What is causing the massive, catastrophic declines in fertility? What can we do to stabilize and reverse these trends to a sustainable level? Today I’m going to focus on news about what is happening and why, and next time I’ll ask what we’ve learned since last check-in about we could perhaps do about it. One could consider all this a supplement to my sequence on The Revolution of Rising Expectations, and The Revolution of Rising Requirements. That's the central dynamic. Household Composition What is happening? A chart worth looking at every so often. Timing Michael Arouet: No way. WTF happened in 1971? This is United States data: The replies include a bunch of other graphs that also go in bad directions starting in 1971-73. Developmental Idealism Lyman Stone, in his first Substack post, lays the blame for fertility drops in non-Western countries primarily on drops in desire for children, via individuals choosing Developmental Idealism. Lyman Stone: Five Basic Arguments for Understanding Fertility: Data has to be read “vertically” (longitudinally), not [...] ---Outline:(00:46) Household Composition(01:06) Timing(01:37) Developmental Idealism(04:47) Pessimism(05:51) Baby Boom(06:53) Paperwork(08:24) Car Seats As Contraception(11:14) You Can't Afford It(12:23) Yes The Problem Is Often Money(12:57) Housework(15:13) Greedy Careers(18:24) The Appeal of Child-Free(19:30) Motivation(22:06) Grandparents(25:26) Expectations of Impossibility(28:04) Isolation(30:00) Decoupling(31:45) South Korea(39:20) World(39:54) Various Places in Trouble(40:51) China(44:25) Russia(44:39) Europe(45:34) America(46:43) Kazakhstan(47:10) Israel(48:56) Consequences(49:49) Unfounded Optimism(50:56) History(51:44) Implications --- First published: January 2nd, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SSQDuWDsbXH3kujPb/fertility-roundup-5-causation --- 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.

The Rationalist Project was our last best hope that we might not try to build it. It failed. But in the year of the Coding Agent, it became something greater: our last, best hope – for everyone not dying. This is what 2026 looks like. The place is Lighthaven. Table of Contents Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. 2026 is an age of wonders. Claude Code. The age of humans writing code may be coming to an end. Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. Your dog's dead, Jimmy. Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon. Keep your nonsense simple. Fun With Media Generation. YouTube facing less AI slop than I’d expect. You Drive Me Crazy. Another lawsuit against OpenAI. This one is a murder. They Took Our Jobs. Yet another round of ‘oh but comparative advantage.’ Doctor Doctor. Yes a lot of people still want a human doctor, on principle. Jevons Paradox Strikes Again. It holds until it doesn’t. Unprompted Attention. Concepts, not prompts. The Art of the Jailbreak. Love, Pliny. Get Involved. CAISI wants an intern, OpenAI hiring a head of preparedness. Introducing. [...] ---Outline:(00:30) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility(01:34) Claude Code(08:49) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility(10:04) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon(12:17) Fun With Media Generation(12:47) You Drive Me Crazy(13:39) They Took Our Jobs(17:46) Doctor Doctor(18:46) Jevons Paradox Strikes Again(20:52) Unprompted Attention(22:42) The Art of the Jailbreak(23:22) Get Involved(24:09) Introducing(24:30) In Other AI News(25:56) Show Me the Money(26:14) Quiet Speculations(29:38) People Really Do Not Like AI(32:23) Americans Remain Optimistic About AI?(33:40) Thank You, Next(36:36) The Quest for Sane Regulations(39:42) Chip City(42:54) Rhetorical Innovation(43:29) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult(44:25) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone(44:45) The Lighter Side --- First published: January 1st, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qp7kEfd2MnGRR8evZ/ai-149-3 --- 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.

It's that time. It's been a hell of a year. At the start we barely had reasoning models. Now we have Claude Code and Opus 4.5. I don’t code. Yet now I cause code to exist whenever something about a website annoys me, or when I get that programmer's realization that there's something I am planning on doing at least three times. Because why not? The progress has simultaneously been mind bogglingly impressive and fast. But a lot of people don’t see it that way, because progress has been incremental, and because we were reasonably expecting to often get even more than this. The public conversation and debate, even more than before, was full of false narratives and active attempts to make the situation worse. The same goes for attempts to shape Federal policy towards AI, and OpenAI's conversion into a for-profit. It's been, as they say, one battle after another, with many wins, many setbacks and a lot of things in between. This includes the key developments in AI, and also other blog posts from the year that I consider memorable looking back. This is only our corner of the world's [...] ---Outline:(01:26) January(03:50) February(06:58) March(08:15) April(09:24) May(11:06) June(12:02) July(13:04) August(15:23) September(15:50) October(18:39) November(20:12) December(21:39) Questions For Next Season --- First published: December 31st, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2hFiaDmYr3KuuWNDS/2025-year-in-review --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.