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c237d060-3d27-4db6-be74-0f8c50759c23
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A Few Terrifying Facts About The Russo-Ukrainian War Epistemic status: trying to summarize the news and predict, post is under revision, too lazy to citation everything I wanted to collect a few observations I've made, as best I understand them. This PBS article does a good job of explaining much of it. 1. Vladimi...
d48bad82-d005-455c-9599-6a01db772a7e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Choices Are Really Bad Previously: Choices are Bad Last time, I gave two (related) reasons Choices are Bad: Choices Reduce Perceived Value and Choices Force You Into Choosing Mode. Despite not looking like much, these reasons are Serious Business. They can render us unable to enjoy, think or relax even when it might ...
39ef3cb4-9bb9-4184-b720-3a0160987156
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Announcing Progress Studies for Young Scholars, an online summer program in the history of technology I’m thrilled to announce a new online learning program in progress studies for high school students: Progress Studies for Young Scholars. Progress Studies for Young Scholars launches in June as a summer program, with...
0d45f801-89fb-450f-902c-a13ea6efb828
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Thinking about Broad Classes of Utility-like Functions *Here's some thoughts I've had about utility maximizers, heavily influenced by ideas like* [*FDT*](https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05060) *and* [*Morality as Fixed Computation*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FnJPa8E9ZG5xiLLp5/morality-as-fixed-computation)*.* The De...
c4df5c2e-6f7a-4101-b3c4-ce637c5bf7ce
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Blatant lies are the best kind! Mala: But then why do people get so indignant about blatant lies? Noa: You mean, indignant when others call out blatant lies? I see more of that, though they often accuse the person calling out the lie of being unduly harsh. Mala: Sure, but you can't deny - you've seen yourself - that...
8300d29d-def9-4d78-a82b-5c9d5ae6968e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Almost everyone should be less afraid of lawsuits One sad feature of modern American society is that many people, especially those tied to big institutions, don't help each other out because a fear of lawsuits. Employers don't give meaningful references, or ever tell their rejected interviewees how they could improve ...
76d3ecae-6b02-4fba-8403-c4b119054f58
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Weekly LW Meetups This summary was posted to LW Main on February 19th. The following week's summary is here. Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in: * Ann Arbor Meetup, 2/19/16: 19 February 2016 07:00PM * Baltimore Area Meetup: Futurology / Open Discussion: 28 February 2016 03:00PM * Cologne...
534d26ec-3da2-44af-b4c0-f57a6b35a83f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Rob Bensinger's COVID-19 overview Robby posted this to Facebook on March 15th, and just updated section 2 and 3 with new information, making this I think currently one of the best guides to how to respond to this whole situation.  ---------------------------------------- (Added Jun. 4: List of changes to this docume...
6b1670c5-1566-432a-8eca-2ae423d31b8e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Positive utility in an infinite universe Content Note: Highly abstract situation with existing infinities This post will attempt to resolve the problem of infinities in utilitarianism. The arguments are very similar to an argument for total utilitarianism over other forms which I'll most likely write up at some point...
29839db8-0a78-4074-b5dd-64309f504735
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Turbocharging Epistemic status: Mixed The concepts underlying the Turbocharging model (such as classical and operant conditioning, neural nets, and distinctions between procedural and declarative knowl- edge) are all well-established and well-understood, and the "further resources" section for this class is one of th...
90ee39fb-e8cf-4f46-84df-150768544a42
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Downstream applications as validation of interpretability progress Epistemic status: The important content here is the claims. To illustrate the claims, I sometimes use examples that I didn't research very deeply, where I might get some facts wrong; feel free to treat these examples as fictional allegories. In a rece...
0e93520c-e4b2-426e-9f31-8fc638031498
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Group Rationality Diary, June 1-15 This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for June 1-15.  > 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...
0120159e-fcf6-4cb7-95c2-89193d1a1e98
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Feedback-loops, Deliberate Practice, and Transfer Learning [...insert introduction here later...] Was there a particular moment, incident, or insight, that caused you to start your current venture into "feedbackloop rationality" [to be substituted with better name later]?
2c96f551-f739-450b-9470-94a8e7a12e0b
awestover/filtering-for-misalignment
Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results
id: post455 Summary: A Corrigibility method that works for a Pivotal Act AI (PAAI) but fails for a CEV style AI could make things worse. Any implemented Corrigibility method will necessarily be built on top of a set of unexamined implicit assumptions. One of those assumptions could be true for a PAAI, but false for a ...
6433a74c-55f5-4d44-add1-ff46d7f8edd7
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
Robin Hanson on Serious Futurism ![](https://intelligence.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Hanson_w150.jpg) [Robin Hanson](http://hanson.gmu.edu/) is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. He is known as a founder ...
5cc53e63-97b7-4eda-a22f-de584ce68a94
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Overcoming the MWC I hope with this post to share some strategies that has worked for me on how to deal with the Madonna Whore Complex. A lot of this post might seem like obvious things that everyone knows, but it is still worth stating out clearly. I plan to write more posts detailing my understanding of the dating...
c4e16ebb-e615-4fc1-bd62-3f9ea903c533
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Outside View isn't magic The planning fallacy is an almost perfect example of the strength of using the outside view. When asked to predict the time taken for a project that they are involved in, people tend to underestimate the time needed (in fact, they tend to predict as if question was how long things would ta...
d8bfe3d7-adfe-408e-8c4b-4b6eb02d4bf2
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs
Other
Global challenges: 12 risks that threaten human civilization Glob Policy. 2020 May; 11(3): 271–282. Published online 2020 Jan 24. doi: [10.1111/1758-5899.12786](//doi.org/10.1111%2F1758-5899.12786)PMCID: PMC7228299PMID: [32427180](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32427180)Defence in Depth Against Human Extinction: Prev...
3f44839d-82d3-459d-a658-22a7695ca91b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Dead Aid Followup to So You Say You're an Altruist: Today Dambisa Moyo's book "Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa" was released. From the book's website: > In the past fifty years, more than $1 trillion in development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Afr...
d318e61b-4960-4b25-9eed-62d9c12b56f6
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
Import AI 333: Synthetic data makes models stupid; chatGPT eats MTurk. Inflection shows off a large language model **Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on lattes, ramen, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this (and comment on posts!) please subscribe.** [Subscribe no...
eb64568e-1b72-4744-bf3b-49fa40356fc0
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
[SEQ RERUN] Brain Emulation and Hard Takeoff Today's post, [Brain Emulation and Hard Takeoff](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/11/brain-emulation.html) was originally published on November 22, 2008. A summary:   > A project of bots could start an intelligence explosion once it got fast enough to start making bo...
b8774ec6-90f6-454d-a7aa-12ff28833074
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Attachment THEORY AND THE EFFECTS OF SECURE ATTACHMENT ON CHILD DEVELOPMENT Attachment theory is a psychological theory that has gained an important place in child development literature, especially since the mid-20th century. First developed by British psychiatrist John Bowlby, the theory suggests that the emotional ...
a9e45898-89b4-4d12-9e0a-f5d7e6460a68
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[Short version] Information Loss --> Basin flatness This is an overview for advanced readers.  Main post: Information Loss --> Basin flatness Summary: Inductive bias is related to, among other things: * Basin flatness * Which solution manifolds (manifolds of zero loss) are higher dimensional than others.  This is...
4adb79d6-7fcb-430b-ba59-5e00173f4ddb
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Automated monitoring systems Initial draft on 28th Nov, 2024   After participating in the last (18th Nov, 2024) and this week (25th Nov, 2024)'s group discussion about topics of the “𝘀𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁” and AI model's “𝗿𝗼𝗯𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀” at the AI Safety Fundamentals program, I have been stuck wi...
567b30ce-167f-455b-9234-4dd7a62a056d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Choosing the Zero Point Summary: You can decide what state of affairs counts as neutral, and what counts as positive or negative. Bad things happen if humans do that in our natural way. It's more motivating and less stressful if, when we learn something new, we update the neutral point to [what we think the world real...
59b2ca35-9305-40d6-aa1c-d73843612903
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
[AN #117]: How neural nets would fare under the TEVV framework Alignment Newsletter is a weekly publication with recent content relevant to AI alignment around the world. Find all Alignment Newsletter **[resources here](http://rohinshah.com/alignment-newsletter/)**. In particular, you can look through **[this spreadsh...
d3ebcc01-9c70-4deb-ba97-f73c93b9bace
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How does acausal trade work in a deterministic multiverse? Acausal trade is speculated to be possible across a multiverse, but why would any rational individuals want to do this if the multiverse is deterministic? The reality measure occupied by all of the branches of the multiverse are pre-determined and causally ind...
5f1de7a0-6da5-42b2-a56f-363e7ab1aec0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Don't Believe You'll Self-Deceive I don't mean to seem like I'm picking on Kurige, but I think you have to expect a certain amount of questioning if you show up on Less Wrong and say: > One thing I've come to realize that helps to explain the disparity I feel when I talk with most other Christians is the fact that so...
e2a135a1-5737-4786-b049-1698ce0f8c72
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
Least Squares and Fourier Analysis I ended my last post on a somewhat dire note, claiming that least squares can do pretty terribly when fitting data. It turns out that things aren’t quite as bad as I thought, but most likely worse than you would expect. The theme of this post is going to be things you use all the t...
6a5169e2-2f4f-411b-af3f-0169088e6cf6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Wolf's Dice Around the mid-19th century, Swiss astronomer Rudolf Wolf rolled a pair of dice 20000 times, recording each outcome. Here is his data: I’ve taken the data from Jaynes, who uses it as an example for maximum-entropy methods. We’ll use it for several examples, including some of Jaynes’ models. The most ...
31a43166-59ae-47a1-8a38-8306d9284657
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
LW Melbourne: Report on Public Rationality Lecture Introduction In the past couple of months, Melbourne LW has been working to expand our activities and community, as well generally promoting rationality. A huge shout out goes to BraydenM who is responsible for spearheading these efforts. So far we have opened up som...
50eb4a75-551e-4160-a201-73918447b1f4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AI #23: Fundamental Problems with RLHF After several jam-packed weeks, things slowed down to allow everyone to focus on the potential room temperature superconductor, check Polymarket to see how likely it is we are so back and bet real money, or Manifold for chats and better graphs and easier but much smaller trading....
9895e596-4115-4dbe-9c7e-58534db96f6b
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
Embedded Agents Suppose you want to build a robot to achieve some real-world goal for you—a goal that requires the robot to learn for itself and figure out a lot of things that you don’t already know.[1](https://intelligence.org/2018/10/29/embedded-agents/#footnote_0_17907 "This is part 1 of the Embedded Agency series...
88edac59-5e49-4cd8-8540-84fdfb4ea44a
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Beliefs and Disagreements about Automating Alignment Research *Epistemic status: Mostly organizing and summarizing the views of others.* *Thanks to those whose views I summarized in this post, and to Tamera Lanham, Nicholas Kees Dupuis, Daniel Kokotajlo, Peter Barnett, Eli Lifland, and Logan Smith for reviewing a dra...
cd980740-62ed-405c-a1d4-02fa7e1967b4
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
"Cars and Elephants": a handwavy argument/analogy against mechanistic interpretability **TL;DR:** If we can build competitive AI systems that are interpretable, then I argue via analogy that trying to extract them from messy deep learning systems seems less promising than directly engineering them.   **EtA - here...
e78fc613-384e-4545-af72-6518e76854e6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Time Travel, AI and Transparent Newcomb Epistemic status: has "time travel" in the title. Let's suppose, for the duration of this post, that the local physics of our universe allows for time travel. The obvious question is: how are paradoxes prevented? We may not have any idea how paradoxes are prevented, but presum...
267c6669-1617-4ede-aa77-fe5a64df20aa
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[Event] Weekly Alignment Research Coffee Time (05/17) Just like every Monday now, researchers in AI Alignment are invited for a coffee time, to talk about their research and what they're into. Here is the link.  And here is the everytimezone time. Note that the link to the walled garden now only works for AF membe...
1574ce81-0cfc-4b42-8047-9ed4396e23c8
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
Nuclear Espionage and AI Governance ABSTRACT: ========= *Using both primary and secondary sources, I discuss the role of espionage in early nuclear history. Nuclear weapons are analogous to AI in many ways, so this period may hold lessons for AI governance. Nuclear spies successfully transferred information about t...
00fb50ad-9da5-4fe3-b48e-73d92665b161
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
Energy efficiency of Wright model B *Updated Nov 5, 2020* The Wright model B: * flew around 0.10—0.21m/kJ * and moved mass at around 0.036 – 0.12 kg.m/J Details ------- The *Wright Model B* was a 1910 plane developed by the Wright Brothers.[1](https://aiimpacts.org/energy-efficiency-of-wright-model-b/#easy-foo...
68c8027f-3ff2-4a09-b1e6-d16ca0002aa2
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info
AI Safety Info
How does Redwood Research do adversarial training? [Redwood Research](https://www.redwoodresearch.org/) explains their approach to [adversarial training](/?state=935A&question=What%20is%20adversarial%20training%3F) in the paper [“Adversarial Training for High-Stakes Reliability”](https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.01663). The...
4e9a44b6-15ce-4db7-b6e9-c74b2b778e17
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Born Probabilities Previously in series:  Decoherence is Pointless Followup to:  Where Experience Confuses Physicists One serious mystery of decoherence is where the Born probabilities come from, or even what they are probabilities of.  What does the integral over the squared modulus of the amplitude density have...
477e434c-0f84-4306-8620-6035e6be6591
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Is microCOVID "badness" superlinear? That is: if I have a choice between 200 microCOVIDs now, or 100 now and 100 next month, does it matter which one I pick? (For bonus points: how big is the difference? And does the answer change if it's 20000 vs 10000/10000?) (Alternatively: what keywords would I search to find stu...
3a5feaf3-fe26-416a-99b9-98aba4135fb3
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Explicitness *[Metadata: crossposted from <https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2023/03/explicitness.html>. First completed March 3, 2023.]* Explicitness is out-foldedness. An element of a mind is explicit when it is available to relate to other elements when suitable. *Thanks to Sam Eisenstat for related conversations.* ...
87323373-d7c2-4172-a1a8-d2f700153d59
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AI Risk & Policy Forecasts from Metaculus & FLI's AI Pathways Workshop Crossposted from the Metaculus Journal. Summary Over a two-day workshop, Metaculus Pro Forecasters and subject-matter experts (SMEs) from several organizations evaluated policy directions for reducing AI risk using scenario planning and forecasti...
4fef32fc-ffb5-414c-89ca-81a750ac3f30
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Composing Complex and Hybrid AI Solutions 1 Introduction --------------- By the end of the 20thsuperscript20th20^{\rm th}20 start\_POSTSUPERSCRIPT roman\_th end\_POSTSUPERSCRIPT century the field of computer vision featured a vast repertoire of methods and algorithms, but suffered from the lack of a common framewor...
616e3033-03cb-41eb-b55c-d4645f0c60f2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Curse Of The Counterfactual The Introduction The Curse of the Counterfactual is a side-effect of the way our brains process is-ought distinctions. It causes our brains to compare our past, present, and future to various counterfactual imaginings, and then blame and punish ourselves for the difference between reali...
f6679515-8057-4692-b53d-8c2615953871
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube
Youtube Transcripts
&#39;Pause Giant AI Experiments&#39; - Letter Breakdown w/ Research Papers, Altman, Sutskever and more less than 18 hours ago this letter was published calling for an immediate pause in training AI systems more powerful than gpt4 by now you will have seen the headlines about it waving around eye-catching names such as...
48603a96-21de-4b4a-9d91-218543a69956
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Bridging syntax and semantics, empirically EDIT: I've found that using humans to detect intruders, is a more illustrative example than the temperature example one of this post. The intruder example can be found in this post. This is a series of posts with the modest goal of showing on how you can get syntax from sema...
2b47499a-a894-449e-a6b9-dc9ebceec3ff
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Refuting Searle’s wall, Putnam’s rock, and Johnson’s popcorn In a recent essay, Euan McLean suggested that a cluster of thought experiments “viscerally capture” part of the argument against computational functionalism. Without presenting an opinion about the underlying claim about consciousness, I will explain why the...
b219b785-6695-4a3e-9919-bfc7905ac2eb
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The (Boltzmann) Brain-In-A-Jar Response to: Forcing Anthropics: Boltzmann Brains by Eliezer Yudkowsky There is an argument that goes like this: > "What if you're just a brain in a jar, being fed an elaborate simulation of reality?  Then nothing you do would have any meaning!" This argument has been reformulated ma...
e79771bf-741f-4ecd-a6c0-a975c1767b0f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Identifying semantic neurons, mechanistic circuits & interpretability web apps 15 research projects on interpretability were submitted to the mechanistic interpretability Alignment Jam in January hosted with Neel Nanda. Here, we share the top projects and results. In summary: * Activation patching works on singular ...
7db8b90f-2a49-42b5-8ff8-8cad20bd398e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What is the functional role of SAE errors? TL;DR: * We explored the role of Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) errors in two different contexts for Gemma-2 2B and Gemma Scope SAEs: sparse feature circuits (subject-verb-agreement-across-relative clause) and linear probing. * Circuit investigation: While ablating residual error...
66ec10ee-d3a5-43c5-aece-cfbb5491f3ae
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
OpenAI: Exodus Previously: OpenAI: Facts From a Weekend, OpenAI: The Battle of the Board, OpenAI: Leaks Confirm the Story, OpenAI: Altman Returns, OpenAI: The Board Expands. Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike have left OpenAI. This is almost exactly six months after Altman’s temporary firing and The Battle of the Board, th...
2b6fab75-43b7-4b3d-8516-3d1bf9142edd
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Episode 4 of Tsuyoku Naritai! (the 'becoming stronger' podcast): TAPs Latest episode is up! In this episode, we experiment with forming habits, to hopefully be more effective people. Transcript in description/show notes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1_erZGknEA&feature=youtu.be https://anchor.fm/tsuyokunaritai/ep...
38006c36-f554-486b-b12b-48e1b33e7f0f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Automatic for the people Summary: Things we could do about technological unemployment, if there was technological unemployment. (Novel bit is a top-down macroeconomic calculation.) Confidence: 90% that the solutions I call 'vicious' would be. 60% that the ones I call 'nonvicious' would be. Worth emphasising up here t...
f990e4ff-361f-44d3-b2e2-d3c798e130a6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Tackling Moloch: How YouCongress Offers a Novel Coordination Mechanism Moloch, as articulated by Scott Alexander, represents the coordination problems that lead to outcomes that leave everyone worse off. While prediction markets explore what people think will happen, YouCongress aims to aggregate beliefs and desires r...
0e1d9d0f-4d5f-4ad5-bcbf-6bc767e0172f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Fable of the AI Coomer: Why the Social Prowess of Machines is AI's Most Proximal Threat My head snaps upwards. I lock my eyes with the screen, staring with quaking intensity. My gaze will now be rooted until I am done. I begin to beat more quickly, as GPT-3 softly whispers the final phrase of her response to me. W...
27067d8d-e1e0-4ee7-aff8-68663118588a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Rationality, Transhumanism, and Mental Health My name is Brent, and I'm probably insane. I can perform various experimental tests to verify that I do not perform primate pack-bonding rituals correctly, which is about half of what we mean by "insane". This concerns me simply from a utilitarian perspective (separation ...
16b490f8-23e8-45c6-8caa-5bc8c31cb8c0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Two kinds of cryonics? I've been considering lately whether it would perhaps be best to develop and promote terminology that splits cryonics into two distinct concepts for easier consumption: 1) old-style cryonics, cryopreserving people at the cost of nontrivial damage that can't yet be reversed, and 2) the tech goa...
885e9ad2-81a9-488d-9787-ffd9bf27bb40
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A funny argument for traditional morality I just had a long conversation with my brother, a devout Christian. With my help he has outlined the following argument why it might be good for me to follow Christian deontology: 1. Many of my moral values arose from my upbringing, as opposed to biology. This is evidenced b...
e1ceb824-21dd-47e2-8db5-a2eca0df9309
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital
Arbital
Join and meet Let $\langle P, \leq \rangle$ be a [https://arbital.com/p/-3rb](https://arbital.com/p/-3rb), and let $S \subseteq P$. The **join** of $S$ in $P$, denoted by $\bigvee_P S$, is an element $p \in P$ satisfying the following two properties: * p is an *upper bound* of $S$; that is, for all $s \in S$, $s \leq...
5e39118b-fb63-42c6-bdf2-8e437c0cec06
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs
Other
Towards State Summarization for Autonomous Robots Towards State Summarization for Autonomous Robots Daniel Brooks, Abraham Shultz, Munjal Desai, Philip Kovac, and Holly A. Yanco Computer Science Department University of Massachusetts Lowell One University Avenue Lowell, Massachusetts 01854 fdbrooks, ashultz, mdesai, p...
b097b4dc-d78d-4b61-bdc5-8ba41e7b2511
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Willing to be your music mentor in exchange for video editing mentorship Hey, I’m looking to trade expertise! I’m knowledgable in music theory, composition, improvisation, and music practice. I’m most proficient in guitar but I could teach piano as well. I want to learn everything I can about video editing and would ...
c8d0f4c1-4903-4abc-9a66-3b5c6f792a3b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Drive-By Low-Effort Criticism I'd like to point out a phenomenon that has predictable consequences, that people are seemingly unaware of: The Drive-By Low-Effort Criticism. To illustrate, we'll use: The Relationship Between the Village and the Mission That was a recent post by Raemon on here that, as far as I can ...
929ffe55-1296-4b45-b567-fd08f76ccbf7
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Superintelligence 8: Cognitive superpowers This is part of a weekly reading group on Nick Bostrom's book, Superintelligence. For more information about the group, and an index of posts so far see the announcement post. For the schedule of future topics, see MIRI's reading guide. --------------------------------------...
20457f5d-81e1-4d3a-a014-32f8bb1ac146
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
"Singularity or Bust" full documentary http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2013/11/singularity-or-bust-.html   I've never heard of this before, and have only watched 7 minutes so far, but I'd imagine many people here would be interested in this video.
485eeeeb-d8e0-4031-9545-33166023c57f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Cultivate the desire to X Recently I have found myself encouraging people to cultivate the desire to X. Examples that you might want to cultivate interest in include: * Diet * Organise ones self * Plan for the future * be a goal-oriented thinker * build the tools * Anything else in the list of common human goa...
b674070a-44d9-45b1-bd04-3cd5f5ad693b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How much I'm paying for AI productivity software (and the future of AI use) This post is broken down into two parts: 1. Which AI productivity tools am I currently using (as an alignment researcher)? 2. Why does it currently feel hard to spend +$1000/month on AI to increase one's productivity drastically? Which AI...
2fa75f8d-563d-4f0d-81b2-7ef3d6b0a597
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Signal seeding What does it say about a person if they never get up before noon? If they are the first person to exist, it probably says that morning was for some reason a convenient time to sleep. If they live in modern society, it might say that they are lazy and weak willed. How did getting up at one time or ano...
53e11ac6-ea2a-4163-8478-7bd59e1545f9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A discussion of normative ethics Adam Zerner Hey Gordon. Thanks for being willing to chat with me about this idea I have of Reflective Consequentialism. I've been wanting to do so for a while now. To start, let me provide some context regarding what lead me to think about it. Consequentialism makes a lot of sense to...
21ea72ff-f971-4f7f-9234-9044678edb9b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AI Safety Seems Hard to Measure In previous pieces, I argued that there's a real and large risk of AI systems' developing dangerous goals of their own and defeating all of humanity - at least in the absence of specific efforts to prevent this from happening. A young, growing field of AI safety research tries to reduc...
e1d9f4e7-f7fd-49bf-8bad-64e46bdcf2d6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Why I stopped working on AI safety Here’s a description of a future which I understand Rationalists and Effective Altruists in general would endorse as an (if not the) ideal outcome of the labors of humanity: no suffering, minimal pain/displeasure, maximal ‘happiness’ (preferably for an astronomical number of intellig...
d43785d9-858e-41dc-959f-7a1b5fb991b2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : West LA Meetup - Utilitarianism Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup - Utilitarianism WHEN: 26 September 2012 07:00:00PM (-0700) WHERE: 10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064 When: 7:00pm Wednesday, September 26th. Where: The Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), ...
eaed6460-de16-4b2c-a65b-8eb29f49751e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Negative polyamory outcomes? Related article: Polyhacking Note: This article was posted earlier for less than a day but accidentally deleted.   Although polyamory isn't one of the "official" topics of LW interest (human cognition, AI, probability, etc...), this is the only community I'm part of where I expect a suf...
c6bff9c1-a7a9-481c-aad1-b21f20229aaf
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Different way classifiers can be diverse With thanks to Lee Sharkey and Michael Cohen for the conversations that lead to these ideas. In a previous post, I talked about how we could train classifiers on the same classification problem - a set of lions vs a set of huskies - but using different approaches to classify. ...
34cdf82e-2109-49b4-8bc4-fd7dcb55f2b4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
My Bet Log I occasionally make bets about future events. I think I probably should do that more often than I currently do. Given that, I think it's good practice to have a public record of the bets I've made and their outcomes, when available. I'll try to keep this updated going forward, if I continue to make bets. (...
ddbd6508-8aea-4ae0-9f21-c750fff1b7c1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[SEQ RERUN] Not for the Sake of Happiness (Alone) Today's post, Not for the Sake of Happiness (Alone) was originally published on 22 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):   > Tackles the Hollywood Rationality trope that "rational" preferences must reduce to selfish hedonism - caring strictly about perso...
f19f98c2-7c3f-4aaf-8d38-c73888a5057f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Learning takes a long time I recently realized that I had greatly underestimated the inferential distance between most of my readers and myself. Thinking it over, I realize that the bulk of the difference comes from a difference in perspectives on how long it takes to learn substantive things. People often tell me th...
d3aacef3-6e3c-44d0-95af-2fa99cf6a4f1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Why does Applied Divinity Studies think EA hasn’t grown since 2015? Applied Divinity Studies seeks to explain why the EA community hasn’t grown since 2015. The observations they initially call the EA community not having grown are: 1. GiveWell money moved increased a lot in 2015, then grew only slightly since then. ...
b627efcc-9033-4d7a-aad6-0f98042af7c3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Are Human Brains Universal? [Previously]   Introduction After reading and updating on the answers to my previous question, I am still left unconvinced that the human brain is qualitatively closer to chimpanzee (let alone an ant/earthworm) than it is to hypothetical superintelligences. I suspect a reason behind my ...
f335c940-2a1a-47f1-b382-48c43158639a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Cryonics in Australia: How do you actually do it? Today it struck me just how dumb it was to agree fully with the desirability of being signed up for cryonics and yet not be so. I may, in perfect honesty, also be procrastinating from a piece of uni work that I need to do by Tuesday, but I intend to get right back to i...
7407d242-ea1f-4f68-ab79-d5414be53e4d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Chapter 105: The Truth, Pt 2 Tom Riddle. The words seemed to echo inside Harry's head, sparking resonances that as quickly died away, broken patterns trying to complete themselves and failing. Tom Riddle is a Tom Riddle was the Riddle There were other priorities occupying Harry's attention. Professor Quirrell wa...
902a85f8-a03e-4137-a5de-4e9acb867537
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Variational Inverse Control with Events: A General Framework for Data-Driven Reward Definition ### 1 Introduction Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown remarkable promise in recent years, with results on a range of complex tasks such as robotic control (Levine et al., [2016](#bib.bib10)) and playing video games (M...
6f209068-8c0e-4d42-a1df-80e3274219e2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Beware over-use of the agent model This is independent research. To make it possible for me to continue writing posts like this, please consider supporting me. Thank you to Shekinah Alegra for reviewing a draft of this essay. ---------------------------------------- Outline * A short essay intended to elucidate t...
91e66b29-6656-435b-a422-63cf6ae0dab0
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
LLMs and computation complexity *Epistemic status: Speculative. I've built many large AI systems in my previous HFT career but have never worked with generative AIs. I am leveling up in LLMs by working things out from base principles and observations. All feedback is very welcome.* Tl;dr: An LLM cannot solve computat...
767e0b1d-2d59-4785-8073-b03ef8350299
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Only You Can Prevent Your Mind From Getting Killed By Politics Follow-up to: "Politics is the mind-killer" is the mind-killer, Trusting Expert Consensus Gratuitous political digs are to be avoided. Indeed, I edited my post on voting to keep it from sounding any more partisan than necessary. But the fact that writers ...
8fe5bccf-1712-4448-970d-a4c5085e8dc2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Question about application of Bayes I have successfully confused myself about probability again.  I am debugging an intermittent crash; it doesn't happen every time I run the program. After much confusion I believe I have traced the problem to a specific line (activating my debug logger, as it happens; irony...) I ha...
68542eb1-346e-4da7-94bd-6d5d0b58e5bb
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Would AIXI protect itself? *Research done with Daniel Dewey and Owain Evans.* AIXI can't find itself in the universe - it can only view the universe as computable, and it itself is uncomputable. Computable versions of AIXI (such as AIXItl) also fail to find themselves in most situations, as they generally can't simu...
3293d6e7-1742-47cf-ae5e-f0da2badb2be
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
High school students and effective altruism The cluster of ideas underlying effective altruism is an important part of my worldview, and I believe it would be valuable for many people to be broadly familiar with these ideas. As I mentioned in an earlier LessWrong post, I was pleasantly surprised that many advisees for...
8b695eda-fbf7-40d1-bdf2-a84aa27171db
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
February 2017 Media Thread This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out th...
b396c228-f6ea-4a85-ac33-566a1b1887a0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A rational unfalsifyable believe A rational unfalsifyable believe I'm trying to argue that it is possible for someone rational to hold on to a believe that is unfalsifyable and remain rational. There are three people in a room. Adam, Cain, and Able. Able was murdered. Adam and Cain was taken into police custody. ...
714ada34-16fa-44fb-a9e1-28e2031d1906
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What was so great about Move 37? I frequently use "Move 37" as a shorthand for "AI that comes up with creative, highly effective ideas that no human would ever consider." Often the implication is that reinforcement learning (as used in AlphaGo) has some "secret sauce" that could never be replicated by imitation learni...
5f262f54-1f79-4379-b349-3bce71f40357
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
Suzana Herculano-Houzel on cognitive ability and brain size ![Suzana Herculano-Houzel portrait](http://intelligence.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Herculano-Houzel_w500.jpg)[Suzana Herculano-Houzel](http://www.suzanaherculanohouzel.com/lab) is an associate professor at the [Federal University of Rio de Janeiro](http:/...
0ee8857e-e309-4b68-b2fe-836fd15abcb9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Pluck Sensor Circuit A while ago I finished the "user interface" portion of my electronic harp mandolin. I'm happy with the signals the piezos put out, but now I need some electrical engineering to get the signals into a computer where I'll be more at home. Since I made a design with 13 piezos, I wanted something wit...
91da770e-5af2-4185-be18-3d2373af1788
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Upcoming meet-ups: There are upcoming irregularly scheduled meet-ups in: * DC: Sunday June 5 at 1pm * Edinburgh: Saturday June 4 at 2pm  * Fort Collins, Colorado: Wednesday June 8 at 7pm * Houston: Saturday June 4 at 2pm * London: Sunday June 5 at 2pm  * Ottawa: Thurs June 9 at 7pm (+ an Ottawa Bayesian statist...
4ee262d4-311c-4093-8574-a18c5ab44f24
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Apply for ARBOx2: an ML safety intensive [deadline: 25th of May 2025] [Crosspost from EA forum] Apply to ARBOx2: a programme to rapidly upskill in ML safety. Join us (OAISI) in Oxford this July for our second iteration of ARBOx (Alignment Research Bootcamp Oxford), a 2-week intensive designed to rapidly build skills...
b69b8e89-99d0-4f11-9e1e-1ad68d9b576f
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
Apply to a small iteration of MLAB to be run in Oxford TLDR: We’re running a small iteration of MLAB (~10 participants) in Oxford towards the end of September. If you’re interested in participating, apply [here](https://forms.gle/QV9z6cxNGnS1UJzq6) by 7 September. If you’re interested in being a TA, please email us di...
329b2006-b4ed-4a67-a4ef-a4b2af0970fc
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs
Other
Growing Recursive Self-Improvers Growing Recursive Self-Improvers Bas R. Steunebrink1(B),K r i s t i n nR .T h ´ orisson2,3,a n dJ ¨ urgen Schmidhuber1 1The Swiss AI Lab IDSIA, USI and SUPSI, Manno, Switzerland bas@idsia.ch 2Center for Analysis and Design of Intelligent Agents, Reykjavik University, Reykjavik, Iceland...
4f1befa9-692e-4baa-9fec-ff9240f5f735
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
D&D Sci Coliseum: Arena of Data This is an entry in the 'Dungeons & Data Science' series, a set of puzzles where players are given a dataset to analyze and an objective to pursue using information from that dataset. Complexity Rating: 4/5 STORY The Demon King rises in his distant Demon Castle.  Across the free land...
17499cb9-1621-4f82-9ab2-0f16e468787c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Condition-directedness In chess, you can’t play by picking a desired end of the game and backward chaining to the first move, because there are vastly more possible chains of moves than your brain can deal with, and the good ones are few. Instead, chess players steer by heuristic senses of the worth of situations. I a...