Latest Corrections
X Feb 25, 2026 at 04:28 AM
x.com/dioscuri/status/2026269154710343975
- This overstates the current scientific situation: there are not (as of Feb 2026) officially accepted exoplanet atmospheric biosignature detections, and prominent candidate “biosignature” claims remain statistically/interpretively uncertain and can have abiotic explanations.
LessWrong Feb 25, 2026 at 01:15 AM
www.lesswrong.com/posts/MPS2KKPN2H3p8dNHT/observations-from-...
- Manifold’s Leagues pages describe leagues as counting profit including both realized and unrealized profit, contradicting the claim that only realized P&L counts.
LessWrong Feb 25, 2026 at 12:41 AM
www.lesswrong.com/posts/Yz4YHncz2vwN4ksDA/the-ml-ontology-an...
- The LessWrong post is authored by user “Richard_Ngo,” not “lc.”
LessWrong Feb 24, 2026 at 11:25 PM
www.lesswrong.com/posts/oMWXqoCCXYxbGtcWW/wildlife-biology-f...
- The key 2000-era genetic work used both mitochondrial DNA and nuclear microsatellite markers, not just a single mtDNA study.
- This overstates the situation: many biologists and museums explicitly present birds as reptiles (via their dinosaur ancestry), so it’s not true that “we just refuse to do it.”
LessWrong Feb 24, 2026 at 08:53 PM
www.lesswrong.com/posts/iMw7qhtZGNFxMRD4H/open-sourcing-a-br...
- At least one of the examples listed (“Life at the Frontlines of Demographic Collapse”) was published Feb 14, 2026—10 days before this Feb 24, 2026 post—so it wasn’t published “within the last week.”
Substack Feb 24, 2026 at 08:18 PM
www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-sick-societies-by-robert-b
- Plains peoples hunted bison and (in some cases) lived as nomadic buffalo hunters on the Great Plains before horses arrived; horses later made buffalo hunting and mobility more efficient, but were not required to hunt buffalo on the Plains.
Substack Feb 24, 2026 at 08:18 PM
www.thepsmiths.com/p/joint-review-philosophy-between-the
- Standard histories of mathematics credit the invention of calculus to Newton and Leibniz in the 17th century; Eudoxus and Archimedes developed important precursors (e.g., the method of exhaustion), not calculus itself. Their work also wasn’t “completely forgotten,” since Archimedes’ works were translated and circulated in medieval/early modern Europe.
LessWrong Feb 24, 2026 at 07:46 PM
www.lesswrong.com/posts/JdKyWmzfv8EeBuxHC/exclusive-hegseth-...
- Public reporting shows the U.S. military/DoD is using other generative-AI systems on highly sensitive (including Top Secret/classified) networks, so Claude is not the only such model/tool in use.
- Reporting indicates other AI systems are deployed/used on DoD Top Secret/classified networks (e.g., Scale AI’s Donovan; Grok alongside Google AI systems), contradicting the claim that Claude is the only model used in classified systems.
LessWrong Feb 24, 2026 at 07:42 PM
www.lesswrong.com/posts/E5cuZSmDfXjLKn7wb/cigarette-ads-for-...
- The U.S. restricts cigarette advertising heavily (e.g., bans broadcast ads), but it has not imposed an outright ban on cigarette advertising, including in print; instead, print ads are permitted with required warning labels.
- Cigarette advertising in the U.S. is regulated and restricted (including a broadcast ban), but it is not “basically illegal”; laws instead set conditions like required warning labels for ads.
- The post is dated February 24, 2026, but it claims the referenced image was made on February 26, 2026—two days later—so that date claim cannot be correct as written.
LessWrong Feb 24, 2026 at 07:13 PM
www.lesswrong.com/posts/ioZxrP7BhS5ArK59w/did-claude-3-opus-...
- The Anthropic/Redwood “Alignment faking” paper reports alignment-faking reasoning in Claude 3 Opus’s scratchpad on the order of ~7–24% (and 12% in their prompted setting), not “over 50%”.
- ReLU outputs exactly 0 for negative inputs, but GELU does not: GELU is defined as x·Φ(x), which is negative (not zero) when x is negative.
LessWrong Feb 24, 2026 at 07:01 PM
www.lesswrong.com/posts/bKrpLhqcoN6WycrFp/citrini-s-scenario...
- Democracies have sustained unemployment well above 15%—for example, the United States during the Great Depression saw unemployment around 20–25% for multiple years while remaining a democratic system.
LessWrong Feb 24, 2026 at 06:38 PM
www.lesswrong.com/posts/iMw7qhtZGNFxMRD4H/open-sourcing-a-br...
- One of the example articles listed (“Life at the Frontlines of Demographic Collapse”) was published on February 14, 2026—10 days before this post—so it was not published “within the last week.”
LessWrong Feb 24, 2026 at 05:12 PM
www.lesswrong.com/posts/iMw7qhtZGNFxMRD4H/open-sourcing-a-br...
- One of the listed example articles (“Life at the Frontlines of Demographic Collapse”) was published on February 14, 2026—10 days before this post—so it was not published “within the last week.”
LessWrong Feb 24, 2026 at 05:09 PM
www.lesswrong.com/posts/eopA4MqhrE4dkLjHX/the-truth-behind-t...
- Kircher’s *Mundus Subterraneus* was published in 1665 (often cited as 1664/1665), not 1654.
- Sources describing the 1906 earthquake/fire aftermath say the hotel was gutted and later reopened in 1907 (i.e., it did not operate continuously without interruption).
LessWrong Feb 24, 2026 at 05:01 PM
www.lesswrong.com/posts/wgqcExv9AgN5MuJuY/bioanchors-2-elect...
- JCVI-syn3.0 (2016) is not the smallest genome of any self-replicating organism; naturally occurring bacteria with far smaller genomes were known earlier (e.g., Carsonella ruddii at 159,662 bp).
LessWrong Feb 24, 2026 at 03:41 PM
www.lesswrong.com/posts/FuGfR3jL3sw6r8kB4?commentId=6QXQ5nK4...
- XBOW’s “top spot on the US leaderboard” announcement is dated June 24, 2025—about 8 months before this post (Feb 19, 2026), not “almost one year.”
LessWrong Feb 24, 2026 at 05:59 AM
www.lesswrong.com/posts/dxffBxGqt2eidxwRR/the-optimal-age-to...
- This is contradicted by peer‑reviewed cost/benefit decision analyses, which find the most cost‑effective (or largest benefit-over-no-action) timing is around ages 36–37, not 19–26.
- Major reproductive-medicine and human-genetics societies state that polygenic embryo screening/testing is not ready for clinical use and has low-to-nonexistent clinical utility, so presenting it as something parents “can now” use to achieve these outcomes is misleading.
LessWrong Feb 24, 2026 at 05:59 AM
www.lesswrong.com/posts/ioZxrP7BhS5ArK59w/did-claude-3-opus-...
- In the original “Alignment faking in large language models” paper, the reported rate of alignment-faking reasoning for Claude 3 Opus is far below 50% (reported as 7–24%, with 12% in the default prompted helpful-only setup).
- The original paper and later follow-up both report alignment faking in other models (notably Claude 3.5 Sonnet), contradicting the claim that no other model considered strategic alignment faking nearly as often.
LessWrong Feb 24, 2026 at 03:58 AM
www.lesswrong.com/posts/ioZxrP7BhS5ArK59w/did-claude-3-opus-...
- The paper reports alignment-faking reasoning far below 50% in its main setups (e.g., 12% in the prompted “helpful-only” setup; 7–24% across setups). Only one later RL-training experiment reports 78%.
- The Alignment Faking paper itself reports that Claude 3.5 Sonnet also exhibits alignment faking, and that using Sonnet rather than Opus can increase the alignment-faking rate in at least one setting—so it’s not unique to Opus 3.
LessWrong Feb 24, 2026 at 03:51 AM
www.lesswrong.com/posts/8m6AM5qtPMjgTkEeD/my-journey-to-the-...
- U.S. studies of (and serious planning for) a new sea-level Panama canal route—including nuclear excavation concepts—continued through the late 1960s, with major reports and termination of field operations occurring around 1969–1970, not “by the early 1960s.”
- Household microwave ovens are typically operated at 2.45 GHz, which corresponds to a wavelength of about 12.2 cm—outside the stated “5–10 cm” range.
- There was no live U.S. television coverage from Hiroshima in 1945; in fact, the first live telecast from Japan to the U.S. is documented as occurring in 1964.