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5ae862b1-0393-46b9-8770-8a1d4b2b158a | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Drawing Two Aces
Suppose I have a deck of four cards: The ace of spades, the ace of hearts, and two others (say, 2C and 2D).
You draw two cards at random.
*Scenario 1:* I ask you "Do you have the ace of spades?" You say "Yes." Then the probability that you are holding both aces is 1/3: There are three equipro... |
31ce6b8b-297e-4bab-bcc0-9e97f4721473 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Correspondence visualizations for different interpretations of "probability"
[Recall](https://arbital.com/p/4y9) that there are three common interpretations of what it means to say that a coin has a 50% probability of landing heads:
- __The propensity interpretation:__ Some probabilities are just out there in the wor... |
3a80039a-563c-4b4c-acbe-627aa5339022 | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | "tldr; Complete narration of the Replacing Guilt series is available here: anchor.fm/guiltI discovered Nate Soares' Replacing Guilt series in late 2019 via the Bayesian Conspiracy podcast and found it immensely valuable. Over ~40 posts, Nate channels the guilt-based motivation that is common in rationalists / EAs into ... |
db689a55-0d26-4ffe-bdd3-7d264665219f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Another attempt to explain UDT
(Attention conservation notice: this post contains no new results, and will be obvious and redundant to many.)
Not everyone on LW understands Wei Dai's updateless decision theory. I didn't understand it completely until two days ago. Now that I had the final flash of realization, I'll t... |
d639cdec-7e52-477f-8778-ea354dc7bf52 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, Rational Evidence
Suppose that your good friend, the police commissioner, tells you in strictest confidence that the crime kingpin of your city is Wulky Wilkinsen. As a rationalist, are you licensed to believe this statement? Put it this way: if you go ahead and insult Wulky, I’d c... |
5aa9f5e5-5092-4488-a511-ee23a2d1215a | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | What do XPT forecasts tell us about AI risk?
*This post was co-authored by the Forecasting Research Institute and Rose Hadshar. Thanks to Josh Rosenberg for managing this work, Zachary Jacobs and Molly Hickman for the underlying data analysis, Coralie Consigny and Bridget Williams for fact-checking and copy-editing, t... |
a3917b30-2813-4740-bdf1-a157b1287322 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Categorical Imperative Obscures
I've been thinking about the categorical imperative lately and how it obscures more than it illuminates. I'll make the case that the categorical imperative tries to pull a fast one by taking something for granted, and the thing it takes for granted is the thing we care about.
Discl... |
dc5dbd01-5ddd-42b9-8ddd-21574053190c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What is the literature on effects of vaccines on the central nervous system?
I saw some evidence from the recent covid-19 threads that some viruses permanently stay in the brain and cause some damage; This has made me wonder how effective (or alternatively unsafe) vaccines are (flu vaccines in particular).
Here is o... |
945c65d7-59a2-4765-850d-18410a680e73 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What's your plan?
A question I find useful with my kids is "what's your plan?":
* What's your plan for snack at school today?
* What's your plan if it gets cold while we're at the picnic?
* What's your plan for these drawings?
It works well when trying to find a balance on responsibility: the issue is theirs to... |
eb980a2c-f48b-44cc-8eaa-f80115e2cbf5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Ways of Seeing
Cross-posted on my blog: http://garybasin.com/ways-of-seeing/
Tough problems often feel insurmountable without more information and better models — more data and thinking. An alternative approach is to be able to see the problem, and the whole world, in a new way. By looking through different eyes, dif... |
e92582a9-3cbc-48e1-a347-5834b3bc277f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Some desirable properties of automated wisdom
Epistemic status: Musings about questioning assumptions and purpose. Not clear if I correctly extract wisdom from fiction. Possibly other fallacies present - bringing these ideas to the light of commentary will improve or dispel them
I distinguish a wise algorithm from... |
432494ed-0329-41d0-8b1f-bb4d0d67ac0c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Submission and dominance among friends
|
5441f08f-ce21-4f2c-b714-21efccd9f00a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Who should write the definitive post on Ziz?
CW: Possible infohazards, definitely discussion of infohazards.
EDIT 25 Feb 2023: This post has more details and corrects some things this post got wrong. Consider it as superseding this post.
Backstory
I was writing a comment on this post, and I was going to end it wit... |
45472d5f-b7f3-4bf4-95cd-fa6b74c80e88 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Conditioning, Counterfactuals, Exploration, and Gears
The view of counterfactuals as just conditioning on low-probability events has a lot going for it. To begin with, in a bayesian setting, updates are done by conditioning. A probability distribution, conditioned on some event .mjx-chtml {display: inline-block; line-... |
6b1ff286-bfbb-4506-8fab-8b695a3ff7a4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Reason and Intuition in science
Pbfgva Iynq Nynznevh (translate using rot13.com) who has a BA in Mathematics writes the following:
Do you imagine that men of genius or, let’s say, men of science in history walked around clear-headed, “disenchanted,” reasonable, with the tight-assed attitude of the science cultist and... |
ff93500d-0a74-481e-9927-c176f5013eba | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Hammertime Intermission and Open Thread
This post marks the end of the first cycle of Hammertime. Click here for intro.
Hammertime will return on Monday 2/19.
I want to close off the first cycle with some thoughts, and designate a place for discussion about the future of this sequence.
Discussion Topics
1. Seque... |
7236ed98-8c59-400f-8977-ed7672f08042 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Link] Video of a presentation by Hal Arkes, one of the top world experts in debiasing, on dealing with the hindsight bias and overconfidence
Here's a video of a presentation by Hal Arkes, one of the top world experts in debiasing, Emeritus Professor at Ohio State, and Intentional Insights Advisory Board member, on de... |
9713718f-5654-454d-9272-47bafd9dffdd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The failed simulation effect and its implications for the optimization of extracurricular activities
Cal Newport's book How To Become a Straight-A Student The Unconventional Strategies Real College Students Use to Score High While Studying Less (that I blogged about recently) discusses a concept that Newport calls the... |
0aa9587c-45ac-471d-81f1-f54fad0a080f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What is Ontology?
This is my attempt at an intuitive explanation of the term "ontology". This article is not going to say anything new, only provide a (maybe) different view point on known concepts.
There are tons of definitions for "ontology". In my experience, those definitions do not help in understanding the conc... |
acf82bf0-3c09-45c7-a2b3-c0996f41a822 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Book Review: Naïve Set Theory (MIRI course list)
I'm reviewing the books on the MIRI course list. I followed Category Theory with Naïve Set Theory, by Paul R. Halmos.
Naïve Set Theory
This book is tiny, containing about 100 pages. It's quite dense, but it's not a difficult read. I'll review the content before givi... |
bdb63f32-d075-46e5-92d5-4cf29a72e14c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Iteration Fixed Point Exercises
This is the third of three sets of fixed point exercises. The first post in this sequence is here, giving context.
Note: Questions 1-5 form a coherent sequence and questions 6-10 form a separate coherent sequence. You can jump between the sequences.
1. Let (X,d) be a complete metric ... |
97d0c956-1d5e-4de6-b125-915502dbd40c | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Smooth Adversarial Training
1 Introduction
---------------
Convolutional neural networks can be easily attacked by adversarial examples, which are computed by adding small perturbations to clean inputs Szegedy2014. Many efforts have been devoted to improving network resilience against adversarial attacks Guo2018; P... |
e579dc04-1e7e-406d-a9c5-b54762557fd3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Mechanistic Interpretability Analysis of Grokking
A significantly updated version of this work is now on Arxiv and was published as a spotlight paper at ICLR 2023
aka, how the best way to do modular addition is with Discrete Fourier Transforms and trig identities
If you don't want to commit to a long post, check o... |
a8d5fcbc-41a9-48f7-b79c-e9eb52f85193 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Free (old) scientific papers [Link]
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6554331/Papers_from_Philosophical_Transactions_of_the_Royal_Society__fro
Greg Maxwell is torrenting 33Gib of public domain JSTOR documents that were behind paywalls.
What's your take on this, ethically, legally, etc?
ETA: More on this: htt... |
95979e3c-4ccd-4ce5-9677-07008bb3cee9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Memetic Tribalism
Related: politics is the mind killer, other optimizing
When someone says something stupid, I get an urge to correct them. Based on the stories I hear from others, I'm not the only one.
For example, some of my friends are into this rationality thing, and they've learned about all these biases and co... |
9a128b0a-33d6-4ab7-805c-695b060a7949 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Man and Machine: Questions of Risk, Trust and Accountability in Today's AI Technology
1 Introduction
---------------
>
> “Synthesis defines an ambitious ‘put-a-man- on-the-moon’ goal. By doing so, it forces scientists and engineers to cross uncharted terrain in pursuit of the goal. This requires the solution of u... |
3d39c196-cf40-47da-af25-e5977cd4cf96 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Overcoming Clinginess in Impact Measures
> It may be possible to use the concept of a causal counterfactual (as formalized by Pearl) to separate some intended effects from some unintended ones. Roughly, "follow-on effects" could be de fined as those that are causally downstream from the achievement of the goal... With... |
2d6c9764-a1e6-4eb4-aef0-5149cc7fb421 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | An extended rocket alignment analogy
*This work was done while at* [*Conjecture*](https://conjecture.dev)*.*
*This post has been written for the first*[*Refine*](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/D7epkkJb3CqDTYgX9/refine-an-incubator-for-conceptual-alignment-research-bets)*blog post day, at the end of the week of ... |
85043757-0895-4b2f-8b42-deadc864f209 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AI as a resolution to the Fermi Paradox.
The Fermi paradox has been discussed here a lot, and many times it has been argued that AI cannot be the great filter, because we would observe the paperclipping of the AI just as much as we would observe alien civilizations. I don't think we should totally rule this out thoug... |
9deb71ec-fa9e-4b4d-98e8-d2348328af2b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | UDT as a Nash Equilibrium
I realized today that UDT doesn't really need the assumption that other players use UDT. In any game where all players have the same utility function, "everyone using UDT" is a Nash equilibrium that gives everyone their highest possible expected utility. So you can just use it unilaterally.
... |
ac151a1c-4e49-4185-902a-a687180d293d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Motivation in AI
Although the AI danger battle is raging, with the panicking crowd on one side of the room and the aloof non-alarmists on the other, there is very little serious reflection about the roots of our concerns. So far, AIs like GPT-4 are only capable of receiving commands – which we call “prompts” – but can... |
52ff05f4-9c57-4609-9221-cbc0b1dc2eef | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Potential Impacts of Climate Change
According to a recent press release from UC Berkeley’s School of Law:
> Overheated: The Human Cost of Climate Change predicts a grim future for billions of people in this century. It is a factual account of a staggering toll, based on hard data […] “Climate change is the most impor... |
e38dbe36-abb1-4157-80a8-26634cb3ea4d | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | AI safety field-building survey: Talent needs, infrastructure needs, and relationship to EA
**In which:**Organizers from Meta Coordination Forum 2023 summarize survey responses from 19 AI safety experts.
### About the survey
The organizers of [Meta Coordination Forum 2023](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts... |
ec784f4c-e026-49e6-9d25-1cc2cddcd8a4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Asymptotic Logical Uncertainty: Uniform Coherence 2
Part of the Asymptotic Logical Uncertainty series. A couple weeks ago, I proposed a definition of uniform coherence. I decided to change the definition so that it applies to a more general context. This post is a self contained definition of uniform coherence designe... |
fefd6d16-275b-4b98-9a96-9779b2958d2e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Prereq: Cognitive Fusion
In a post by Kaj Sotala, he introduces the very useful idea of cognitive fusion.
> Cognitive fusion is a term from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which refers to a person “fusing together” with the content of a thought or emotion, so that the content is experienced as an objective f... |
fc865b8c-2a20-4851-846a-05179bbd3910 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Are Query-Based Ontology Debuggers Really Helping Knowledge Engineers?
1 Introduction
---------------
Systems that are built upon Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques are often classified into two categories:
(i) systems that automatically *learn from data* and
(ii) systems based on explicitly *encoded domain... |
de7b9e4c-55a2-42ce-9467-10596be54089 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Understanding Positional Features in Layer 0 SAEs
This is an informal research note. It is the result of a few-day exploration into positional SAE features conducted as part of Neel Nanda’s training phase of the ML Alignment & Theory Scholars Program - Summer 2024 cohort.
Thanks to Andy Arditi, Arthur Conmy and Stefa... |
9caf21aa-0297-4aad-b7fc-2302d29d266b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Stand-up comedy as a way to improve rationality skills
Epistemic status: Believed, but hard to know how much to adjust for opportunity costs
I'm wondering whether stand-up comedy would be a good way to expand and test one's "rationality skills" and/or just general interaction skills. One thing I like about it is tha... |
d37de84f-fef3-4ac8-bf34-3124ac509cff | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Singularity Institute STILL needs remote researchers (may apply again; writing skill not required)
Update: As of December 2012, we are still accepting applications!
A while ago, I announced that the Singularity Institute is hiring remote researchers. I've hired a few people, but I still need more remote researche... |
a1271b82-059a-48f1-bfd0-27598fda4e00 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Deconfusing Deception
What does deception look like from the outside? I notice I am confused.
Imagine you have some algorithm which learns to predict sensory inputs, like a human. The internal structure of this will come to correspond to the external world in some way, as a part of generating a predictive model. Imag... |
e357b10a-5832-4ed1-b8e8-01bbaa9d0c09 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Analysing a 2036 Takeover Scenario
**TL;DR**
This post basically digs through Holden Karnofsky's ‘[AI Could Defeat All of Us Combined](https://www.cold-takes.com/ai-could-defeat-all-of-us-combined/#appendix-how-ais-could-avoid-shutdown)’ (AIDC) post and tries to work through some of the claims there, in light of othe... |
4e190597-2ebd-48b8-b0ef-7d482e77e0c2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The first future and the best future
It seems to me worth trying to slow down AI development to steer successfully around the shoals of extinction and out to utopia.
But I was thinking lately: even if I didn’t think there was any chance of extinction risk, it might still be worth prioritizing a lot of care over movin... |
cd26ed91-98d8-4ab7-9883-ac4279a6640a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Alpha Mail
I recently stumbled upon an article from early 2003 in Physics World outlining a bit of evidence that some of the constants in nature may change over time. In this particular case, researchers studying quasars noticed that the fine-structure constant (α) might have fluctuated a bit billions of years ago, in... |
cb0dfe5c-5738-45bf-9900-35a4c93765a5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Online LessWrong Community Weekend,
September 11th-13th
From 11th-13th September aspiring rationalists will gather for 3 days of socialising, fun and intellectual exploration. There will be a few pre-planned activities, but most of the content will be unconference style and participant driven.
On Monday, September 6t... |
978419b5-741b-4415-aa94-3be5fb43bd4b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Predicting: Quick Start
Have you ever wanted to predict the future? Did you ever take a peek at Metaculus or Manifold or some other site, suddenly feel super intimidated about the effort you'd need to put in, and never try again? If so, fear not, for this post is for you![1]
This post is intended to be a how-to guide... |
dba903b9-ebfc-41ff-99cf-0142576f6fb6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Simple Steganographic Computation Eval - gpt-4o and gemini-exp-1206 can't solve it yet
This is a follow-up to my previous post about hidden serial reasoning (but you don't need to have read it). There, I focused on serial reasoning happening internally in the model. Jozdien pointed out that a model could also use it's... |
37e62bb9-68b5-43f4-ba2e-00e99a071942 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Vector search on a large dataset?
Does anyone have advice or could recommend books on how to accomplish vector search with large datasets?
What I've found so far is vector DB's are very bad at larger datasets, even to the order of 10,000's of vectors if the data is similar enough. Some ideas we've gone through so far... |
9846bbc7-e16c-4a35-b3eb-838ee58cd89e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A circuit for Python docstrings in a 4-layer attention-only transformer
Produced as part of the SERI ML Alignment Theory Scholars Program under the supervision of Neel Nanda - Winter 2022 Cohort.
TL;DR: We found a circuit in a pre-trained 4-layer attention-only transformer language model. The circuit predicts repeate... |
d2a9ab79-b59c-40e1-afe2-b1cf506b83ea | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | The More Power At Stake, The Stronger Instrumental Convergence Gets For Optimal Policies
**Edit, 5/16/23: I think this post is beautiful, correct in its narrow technical claims, and practically irrelevant to alignment. This post presents a cripplingly unrealistic picture of the role of reward functions in reinforcemen... |
3da67a75-8edd-4c57-a1fb-e2655ae11d19 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Mistakes people make when thinking about units
This is a linkpost for Parker Dimensional Analysis. Probably a little elementary for LessWrong, but I think it may still contain a few novel insights, particularly in the last section about Verison's error.
A couple years ago, there was an interesting clip on MSNBC.
A ... |
1e9160c4-5085-4a4b-aa25-f855520afc24 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | #5: Making your cryonics arrangements official
This is post 9 of 10 in my cryonics signup sequence.
----------------------------------------
Once you've got your funding method set up, you're not quite done. You'll need to enter into an official cryopreservation agreement with your cryonics organization, and there a... |
0266bf3b-3908-470f-8528-351465b92428 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Epoch is hiring a Research Data Analyst
**TL;DR**
=========
* We are hiring a research analyst to develop datasets that inform about key trends in machine learning.
* This role is fully remote and we are able and happy to hire in most countries.
* Compensation ranges from $60,000 to $70,000 USD pre-tax.
* Examples of... |
013ec73f-7891-4d6f-a6cb-d9db5e8f0217 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is nuclear war indeed unlikely?
Imagine the world, like our Earth, maybe in late 2020th or 2030th. There is a country, that we will call Plutonia. Plutonia has a lot of nuclear and biological weapons, but a shrinking isolated economy. The government is authoritarian. To ensure its stability, the government explains th... |
a870a401-cdf1-4282-a0ab-7a51a664aca6 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Impact of " 'Let's think step by step' is all you need"?
*Title from:* [*https://twitter.com/arankomatsuzaki/status/1529278581884432385*](https://twitter.com/arankomatsuzaki/status/1529278581884432385)*.*
This is not quite a linkpost for [this](https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11916) paper.
Nonetheless, the abstract is:
... |
276d9e68-3038-4b41-a776-40055428bae2 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | March 2020 Newsletter
As the COVID-19 pandemic progresses, the LessWrong team has put together [a database of resources](https://www.lesswrong.com/coronavirus-link-database) for learning about the disease and staying updated, and 80,000 Hours has a new write-up on [ways to help in the fight against COVID-19](https://8... |
ac75205f-64d4-4f89-97a9-0c597c2a002d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AI Alignment Podcast: On Lethal Autonomous Weapons with Paul Scharre
Most relevant to AI alignment, and a pertinent question to focus on for interested readers/listeners is: if we are are unable to establish a governance mechanism as a global community on the concept that we should not let AI make the decision to kill... |
df7689e5-a96a-4486-a01a-3b5de23cfe85 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | EA megaprojects continued
This post is a continuation/extension of the [EA megaproject article by Nathan Young](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ckcoSe3CS2n3BW3aT/). Our list is by no means exhaustive, and everyone is welcome to extend it in the comments.
The people who contributed to this article are in no... |
0d031535-5c36-4df1-9ff3-23ce191079f1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [META] LW bug: Private drafts are publicly viewable
Private drafts on LW are currently publicly viewable on user pages (and RSS feeds). To verify this, you can view a draft that I have saved on my user page. This seems to be a bug caused by recent changes (also see [1] and [2]) to the LW codebase. |
f218aadf-d43a-4faa-b65c-a73456334a5f | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | The inescapability of knowledge
*Financial status: This is independent research, now supported by a grant. I welcome further* [*financial support*](https://www.alexflint.io/donate.html)*.*
*Epistemic status: This is in-progress thinking.*
---
Friends, I know that it is difficult to accept, but it just [does no... |
86e90f4c-161f-42fb-87e9-1cbe668d9581 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Bay Area: vibes
Paul Graham says that cities send subtle messages about what your ambitions should be—different ones tell you to be richer, or be smarter, or to live better. I have lately been feeling like the same is true of people, and groups of people, and TV shows, and songs, and workplaces, and Twitter, and place... |
b2a58215-dc28-431c-927c-2e8ccacd28ef | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Environmental goals
On the [standard agent paradigm](https://arbital.com/p/1n1), an agent receives sense data from the world, and outputs motor actions that affect the world. On the standard machine learning paradigm, an agent--for example, a model-based reinforcement learning agent--is trained in a way that directly... |
048c5a6e-3572-4c82-91aa-bf13a296537a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | 2022 ACX Predictions: Buy/Sell/Hold
Previously: 2021 ACX Predictions B/S/H, 2021 ACX Results Analysis
It’s that time again. Scott’s predictions are live and I am here for it. I also have a response in the works for a different ACX post, but that requires editing, and this doesn’t.
I will play by Scott’s rules, since... |
3c73791d-4c40-4b38-bba0-2f591a2ab578 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Just one more exposure bro
“Just expose yourself to more social situations!” — Ah yes, you felt anxious the first 100 times, but the 101st will be the breakthrough!
“But exposure works!” people yell from across the street. “Like for fear of snakes - you know, those things you see once a year!”
Uh, it’s pretty ration... |
6d6b0798-91cd-408d-a878-f6d83efdce8a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Defining Corrigible and Useful Goals
This post contains similar content to a forthcoming paper, in a framing more directly addressed to readers already interested in and informed about alignment. I include some less formal thoughts, and cut some technical details. That paper, A Corrigibility Transformation: Specifying... |
d456eae5-ba1f-4d94-aa83-0f1266297689 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Second-order selection against the immortal
Cross-posted from Telescopic Turnip.
In his recent review of Lifespan, Scott Alexander writes:
> Algernon’s Law says there shouldn’t be easy gains in biology. Your body is the product of millions of years of evolution – it would be weird if some drug could make you stronge... |
83444395-f6f2-49b4-adfb-de4090d280f8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Crocker's Rules: How far to take it?
Recently I've been considering declaring Crocker's Rules. The wiki page and source document don't suggest any particular time limit or training period, and also don't provide any empirical results of testing it, positive or negative. It sounds good in theory, but how does it affect... |
358fb17a-a7c7-4649-b6a2-2fef3bd53d1f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [LINK] Claustrum Stimulation Temporarily Turns Off Consciousness in an otherwise Awake Patient
This paper, or more often the New Scientist's exposition of it is being discussed online and is rather topical here. In a nutshell, stimulating one small but central area of the brain reversibly rendered one epilepsia patien... |
5c6b0565-1300-4f4a-99f6-b2eeffa1861e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | The Hacker Learns to Trust
*This is a linkpost for some interesting discussions of info security norms in AI. I threw the post below together in 2 hours, just to have a bunch of quotes and links for people, and to have the context in one place for a discussion here on LW (makes it easier for [common knowledge](https:/... |
c27f6c75-4122-467f-9ec5-2ed986a2bf96 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meta: Basic and advanced section
lukeprog recently wrote a top-level post exhorting LW to emphasize the basics of rationality. That strikes me as a worthwhile endeavor- if we do actually want to raise the sanity waterline, we need a lot of droplets.
The suggestion I made was to redesign the site to create more specia... |
82e34e1d-230a-4b25-a0a4-d15d3875f6c3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong |
LW Update 2019-04-02 – Frontpage Rework
Since LW2.0 launched, the frontpage had become very complex – both visually and conceptually. This was producing an overall bad experience, and making it hard for the team to add or scale up features (such as Q&A, and later on Community, Library and upcoming Recommendations)
F... |
b0865f99-5320-4852-8a99-af580cb5804e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Learning Mathematics in Context
I have almost no direct knowledge of mathematics. I took various mathematics courses in school, but I put in the minimal amount of effort required to pass and immediately forgot everything afterwards.
When people learn foreign languages, they often learn vocabulary and grammar out of c... |
317c2ec1-2266-494b-abcb-72e3215074ea | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Fighting the allure of depressive realism
Epistemic tragic backstory: Personal.
Earlier this week, on my first post on this site under this account, shminux commented to the value of cognitive-behavioral therapy to get out of what I called "depression philosophising".
I was worried about trying it. One claim of CBT ... |
73bf5f6e-ef67-4ec9-a71f-9b04d5e45b61 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Impact of meta-roles on the evolution of organisational institutions
1 Introduction
---------------
Employing evolutionary methods to study economic change has attracted several scholars. For instance, Nelson and Winter proposed the idea that “organisational routines” are pivotal in the evolution of business firms ... |
ecc653da-00b8-4f6b-abad-8d70867c8fa2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Stupid Questions August 2015
This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.
Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't moc... |
9684eed7-1e90-4e3f-b4e2-458310ae8ac8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why so little AI risk on rationalist-adjacent blogs?
I read a lot of rationalist-adjacents. Outside of LessWrong and ACX, I hardly ever see posts on AI risk. Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution writes that, "it makes my head hurt" but hasn't engaged with the issue. Even Zvi spends very few posts on AI risk.
This is su... |
077b72e8-b68f-4d3b-b963-35c7cafa2ec3 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Will humans build goal-directed agents?
In the [previous post](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/NxF5G6CJiof6cemTw/coherence-arguments-do-not-imply-goal-directed-behavior), I argued that simply knowing that an AI system is superintelligent does not imply that it must be goal-directed. However, there are many other ... |
2791d0a1-c5d0-4302-b59f-45f1dc956e59 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [LINK] Anchoring Bias In Medicine (NYT)
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/19/falling-into-the-diagnostic-trap/
> For the doctors, this was a harrowing lesson in the trap of anchoring bias. It is so easy to slip into it without even knowing. But this case reminded us to keep reciting the mantra: if something doesn... |
49e6736d-3dd6-4961-92d2-924fde435294 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Freelance platform, freelance marketplace platform, Marketplace script
|
59836998-8a8d-4c18-91dd-ceaef8a21975 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Mind Projection Fallacy
Today's post, Mind Projection Fallacy was originally published on 11 March 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> E. T. Jaynes used the term Mind Projection Fallacy to denote the error of projecting your own mind's properties into the external world. the Mind Projection Fal... |
991e8e11-6f57-43dd-99a3-4afea898f5f9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Less Threat-Dependent Bargaining Solutions?? (3/2)
In the previous two posts, we went over various notions of bargaining. The Nash bargaining solution. The CoCo value. Shapley values. And eventually, we managed to show they were all special cases of each other. The rest of this post will assume you've read the previou... |
d79790c1-e049-4441-82e5-74caa91229d2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Effective Altruism Summer Reading List
None |
3df3560d-2be7-468c-99f9-d9a645211fb1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | CICO is a weird reference class
People tend to form what I guess I'm going to call default-hypothesis-reference-classes. This is what they see as the "default" hypothesis that new hypotheses have to compete against. Obviously this isn't how a perfect bayesian reasoner would act, but we're only human.
These weird ref... |
368e31ac-0154-41cb-a478-068b59ea3c65 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Chicago Organizational Meeting and Open Discussion
Discussion article for the meetup : Chicago Organizational Meeting and Open Discussion
WHEN: 17 November 2012 01:00:00PM (-0600)
WHERE: 360 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL
"This is an organizational meeting planned for every other month to discuss the group'... |
1c4dce43-eea8-4b44-a6be-558496b4b768 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Minimax Search and the Structure of Cognition!
(Blog adaptation of a ~10 minute talk I gave at !!Con West 2019 on what writing a chess engine taught me about intelligence-in-general.) |
ac580647-3c23-4dbf-9809-3f1708dfd8b7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How do you say no?
Some people seem to be a bit too generous for their own good. I know a precious few people who are especially good at saying "no" when asked to take on new responsibilities that would put them over their limits. I love working with people like that because I can always trust them to tell me when it ... |
e8326521-e0fa-4048-9770-b45b6cc41784 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Scrutinizing AI Risk (80K, #81) - v. quick summary
*Epistemic status: uncertain about whether this accurately describes Ben's views. The [podcast](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ben-garfinkel-classic-ai-risk-arguments/) is great and he's also doing a very interesting [AMA](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/... |
c7d6e9fa-4e27-4034-aeb9-320d3300cd22 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Awakening
This is the story of my personal experience with Buddhism (so far).
First Experiences
My first experience with Buddhism was in my high school's World Religions class. For homework, I had to visit a religious institution. I was getting bad grades, so I asked if I could get extra credit for visiting two and ... |
4ec304de-95cb-4b17-b68c-dc3f7b244103 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is there a beeminder without the punishment?
I used Beeminder for a few months and found it extremely effective. However, a huge pain point of mine was forgetting to manually log the datapoints since a lot of my goals couldn't be logged automatically. This involved having to message their support e-mail each time. Ev... |
2ca0a2c6-7b8b-4267-82b8-191e1f991fca | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | MA RMV Overloaded
My drivers license expires at the end of January, and renewal requires an appointment. On 1/12 when I tried to make one I had a little over two weeks (17d) before expiration. I should have left a larger cushion, but the RMV says you generally need 14d and it averaged 9d in 2021 and 11d in 2022. The e... |
76189a43-2241-40b7-8cb7-e43387ce3f28 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Auto Shutdown Script
I run a lot of one-off jobs on EC2 machines. This usually looks like:
* Stand up a machine
* Mess around for a while trying things and writing code
* Run my command under screen
For short jobs this is fine, but when I run a long job there are two issues:
* If the machine costs a non-trivial ... |
94493c61-fc3c-4eda-a4f3-46af8a4c8278 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Science Doesn't Trust Your Rationality
Today's post, Science Doesn't Trust Your Rationality was originally published on 14 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> The reason Science doesn't always agree with the exact, Bayesian, rational answer, is that Science doesn't trust you to be rational.... |
c862dca8-b1ee-4a8b-830a-09a9a02ab46b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Group Rationality Diary, January 16-31
This is the public group rationality diary for January 16-31.
> It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:
>
> * Established a useful new habit
> * Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief
> * ... |
5589641e-681e-4f61-bf72-e78014f33f73 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Examples of Causal Abstraction
I’m working on a [theory of abstraction](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wuJpYLcMEBz4kcgAn/what-is-abstraction-1) suitable as a [foundation for embedded agency](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hLFD6qSN9MmQxKjG5/embedded-agency-via-abstraction) and specifically multi-level world models. I... |
6b3da3bc-7ce5-454b-b07f-5e74d22a4df6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Book Review: Freezing People is (Not) Easy
|
cd1936bf-fde9-4eb9-91e4-a4d517667237 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Decision making under model ambiguity, moral uncertainty, and other agents with free will?
The linked post was originally written in the EA forum before realizing that this forum contains already a lot about decision theory. Since I believe it still contains some original thoughts, I link-post it here.
From the intr... |
503e7eb2-f69d-47df-abd5-fa3036119577 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Houston Meetup - 1/29
Discussion article for the meetup : Houston Meetup - 1/29
WHEN: 29 January 2012 02:00:00PM (-0600)
WHERE: 2010 Commerce Street, Houston, Tx.77002
The Houston LW meetup will have our next meeting this coming Sunday at 2:00 PM. We will be discussing the first two chapters of E.T. Jaynes... |
1d06e1c6-b8fd-4470-9be2-19fa2b963b4b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Karma Motivation Thread
This idea is so obvious I can't believe we haven't done it before. Many people here have posts they would like to write but keep procrastinating on. Many people also have other work to do but keep procrastinating on Less Wrong. Making akrasia cost you money is often a good way to motivate yours... |
2be3442f-3f0b-4e6e-b3ed-01345ce28e50 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Prediction Contest 2018: Scores and Retrospective
Way back in April 2018, I announced a Prediction Contest, in which the person who made the best predictions on a bunch of questions on PredictionBook ahead of a 1st July deadline would win a prize after they all resolved in January 2019, which is now.
It was a bit of ... |
93fe412e-0e03-402a-86aa-d42db8928f5f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open Thread November 2018
If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here. |
723798cb-d4e8-4cd7-a0ab-4d6f15d98e4d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Mean of quantiles
In a previous post, I looked at some of the properties of using the median rather than the mean.
Inspired by Househalter's comment, it seems we might be able to take a compromise between median and mean. It seems to me that simply taking the mean of the lower quartile, median, and upper quartile wou... |
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