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29c54a4d-0236-4cab-9511-d9725efde5ba | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Circular Reasoning
The opinions here are my own, but owe some salience-work to Sahil.
The idea that circular reasoning is bad is widespread. However, this reputation is undeserved. While circular reasoning should not be convincing (at least not usually), it should also not be considered invalid.
Circular Reasoning ... |
24870107-8b85-403a-8e8e-b7bce2a4148f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | We Found An Neuron in GPT-2
We started out with the question: How does GPT-2 know when to use the word "an" over "a"? The choice depends on whether the word that comes after starts with a vowel or not, but GPT-2 can only output one word at a time.
We still don’t have a full answer, but we did find a single MLP neuron... |
71f45b2f-2787-4f7e-b5f8-e069fa69d542 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What is control theory, and why do you need to know about it?
This is long, but it's the shortest length I could cut from the material and have a complete thought.
1. Alien Space Bats have abducted you.
In the spirit of this posting, I shall describe a magical power that some devices have. They have an intention, an... |
1f5d18d9-33ed-4b9d-9767-357a0546357e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Third Copenhagen Meet-up.
Discussion article for the meetup : Third Copenhagen Meet-up.
WHEN: 05 August 2012 04:00:00PM (+0200)
WHERE: Købmagergade 52, 1150 København
The third Copenhagen meet-up date has been decided in the mailing list.
As the last meet-up the location is Studenterhuset, a cafe.
The to... |
d0427da4-d792-4aa4-8c1c-537e3d4f32c3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Gödel Incompleteness: For Dummies
The Gödel incompleteness theorems are notorious for being surprising. I mean, they did put a hard stop to Hilbert's programme of completely, thoroughly formalizing mathematics.
And most laypeople find them very difficult to wrap their heads around.
It is, however, my belief that not... |
68c2ffc9-d9a9-49c6-9dba-9fac536952fc | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open Thread August 2018
If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one (use search for Open Thread ).
2. What accomplishments are you celebrating from the last month?
3. What are you reading?
4.... |
10026947-d1f7-48ec-9917-7cbd6bd82a61 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Natural Structures and Conditional Definitions
There's a sense in which definitions are arbitrary. Words are made by humans and no-one can stop me from calling red blue and blue red if I really want to. So when people ask questions like, "What is consciousness?" or "What is free-will?", it seems quite reasonable to re... |
c34a4125-0c95-40a4-9275-a1eca9f3f356 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Book review: On the Edge
Book review: On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, by Nate Silver.
Nate Silver's latest work straddles the line between journalistic inquiry and subject matter expertise.
"On the Edge" offers a valuable lens through which to understand analytical risk-takers.
The River versus The Vil... |
5330731a-cd1f-47e7-90c3-fd9305ed5d74 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | A discussion with ChatGPT on value-based models vs. large language models, etc..
### Introduction
To ask ChatGPT about how it separately perceives ethical models from how he was trained and see improvement in its own models, I believe the best approach is to break these large language models into components. This wil... |
fe3eb3d6-4d74-4bec-8f65-cbf6dc3eef2b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Contra Mask Status
As we get into summer and covid levels continue to fall, a lot of contra dances are rethinking their approaches to masking. At this point contra dances are the only places I go that require masks, though they're also the closest I get to large numbers of people.
Prompted by an initial search Harris... |
9d6584e0-3e15-4fef-a73e-d1643ecce3e1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | “Pickled Stewberries!” in HPMoR, Omake #3
We're currently translating chapter 11 into German. It's going along fine, but
> “PICKLED STEWBERRIES!”
is still puzzling us. No dictionary entries, no HPMoR-unrelated search hits, nothing…
Is this some kind of dadaist joke by Eliezer? Or are we missing something? |
fd8e20cc-fa06-44cf-aab9-9e86d79c2182 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | On Disingenuity
Suppose someone claims that all morality is relative, but when pressed on whether this would apply even to murder, they act evasive and refuse to give a clear answer. A critic might conclude that this person is disingenuous in refusing to accept the clear logical consequences of their belief.
However,... |
10b1b86a-f34e-485f-b67c-2d00a100e8b0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Affect Heuristic
The affect heuristic is when subjective impressions of goodness/badness act as a heuristic—a source of fast, perceptual judgments. Pleasant and unpleasant feelings are central to human reasoning, and the affect heuristic comes with lovely biases—some of my favorites.
Let’s start with one of the r... |
925d336f-0417-4abd-b915-77e035523379 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Christopher Alexander's architecture for learning
On the 17th of March 2022, Christopher Alexander, the architect and mathematician, passed away. Alexander, whose intellectual influence extended far beyond architecture and urban planning, gave the impetus to several central ideas in modern software development, such a... |
9f54b719-a8f8-4ab9-9f10-217e05f24550 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Oxford (UK) Rationality & AI Risks Discussion Group
Alex Flint and I are doing a series of seminar/discussion events in Oxford, to which anyone from LW would be very welcome. Especially as the theme is Rationality & AI Risks!
They're being held at 5pm on Saturday in Exeter College, and will go on throughout November.... |
a06f8fe3-ab72-4ca6-a385-0aa927e42814 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | From Code to Managing: Why Being a 'Force Multiplier' Matters to Me More Than Being a Coding Wizard
TLDR provided by claude:
I've been hit with the sticks of what-not-to-do throughout my career (thanks OG mentors), and honestly? Those failures taught me more than any fancy degree could. Customer obsession + data + ... |
9f88484a-3ace-4752-8592-f3704f73da9c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Are there any plans to launch a paperback version of "Rationality: From AI to Zombies"?
Books one and two are already available in paperback. However, books three, four, five, and six are still missing. Nevertheless, I wonder if you could release a complete version.
I believe many of us are eagerly waiting for it. |
5909df80-c4c3-447b-9dd1-88122c1a2ac0 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | MIRI-related talks from the decision theory conference at Cambridge University
Recently, MIRI co-organized a conference at Cambridge University titled [Self-prediction in decision theory and artificial intelligence](http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/events/decision-theory-conf). At least six of the conference’s talks directly... |
bd7fcd73-dcc1-4a5f-bc82-34fc499a13fb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Does VETLM solve AI superalignment?
Eliezer Yudkowsky’s main message to his Twitter fans is:
Aligning human-level or superhuman AI with its creators’ objectives is also called “superalignment”. And a month ago, I proposed a solution to that. One might call it Volition Extrapolated by Language Models (VELM).
Apparent... |
05f6a642-c2b5-46b7-9001-6444f9842247 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Doing EA Better: grant-makers should consider grant app peer review along the public-sector model
Epistemic status: speculative
This is a response to recent posts including Doing EA Better and The EA community does not own its donors' money. In order to make better funding decisions, some EAs have called for democrat... |
6f6e8c03-0e7c-434c-9495-bc5d1163d309 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Talkers and doers
This is a linkpost for https://amirbolous.com/posts/doers
In this world, there are two types of people: the talkers and the doers. The talkers, self-evidently, talk about things. They talk about building. They talk about solving problems. They talk about starting a project. Most people are talkers.
... |
ff5ce504-8e51-495b-9cbf-1c653de1d8a5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The 50 Shades of Grey Book Club
I think it would be a useful rationality exercise to take something that millions of people love, that you have contempt for, and sincerely try to appreciate it. The purpose would be to get practice imagining a different point of view, and to see whether you're able to do so.
50 Shades... |
1ab9fd79-599f-47be-98f2-71d17bd600d4 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Fiscal sponsorship, ops support, or incubation?
After about a month — during which we finished [the productivity system](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/aNKBwj6esW7RdvnwJ/how-to-get-more-important-things-done-with-the-eisenhower), [the Founder’s agreement, and the funding proposal](https://forum.effectiveal... |
6054923e-7df6-4439-9dc3-7e3cfefbe2ce | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Explanations for Less Wrong articles that you didn't understand
ErinFlight said:
> I'm struggling to understand anything technical on this website. I've enjoyed reading the sequences, and they have given me a lot to thing about. Still, I've read the introduction to Bayes theorem multiple times, and I simply can't gra... |
8db36c61-64f0-40a7-a119-13d34b0c9ee8 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Infinite ethics comparisons
.mjx-chtml {display: inline-block; line-height: 0; text-indent: 0; text-align: left; text-transform: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 100%; font-size-adjust: none; letter-spacing: normal; word-wrap: normal; word-spacing: normal; white-space: nowrap; float: none; dir... |
affe789d-46f9-434e-adc2-50c8bbc444bc | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Bainbridge Survey
A [survey](http://www.wtec.org/ConvergingTechnologies/3/NBIC3_report.pdf) of twenty-six technology experts in 2005 produced a median of 2085 as the year in which artificial intelligence would be able to functionally replicate a human brain (p344). They rated this application 5.6/10 in beneficialness ... |
82cb3034-6bb3-4adc-9759-c036aa60530f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | {M|Im|Am}oral Mazes - any large-scale counterexamples?
Raemon's recent post reminded me that I'm unsure how best to think about bureaucracies and apparent organizational friction, and that I keep meaning to explore why something about my intuition rebels against the "Maze" framing. I've read a bit of economic and pub... |
16fe796e-3ed6-48bb-83b9-3dc2d9a0d216 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Distinguish worst-case analysis from instrumental training-gaming
"I" refers to Olli. Thanks to Buck, Ryan Greenblatt, Fabien Roger and Zach Stein-Perlman for feedback.
The word “schemer” is used to refer to multiple things, and in particular to the following two concepts:
Schemer as a power-motivated instrumental t... |
d9e21889-d7fa-4857-a0ad-604cf35c21d9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Request for Information for a new US AI Action Plan (OSTP RFI)
TL;DR: The Office of Science and Technology Policy is seeking public input (deadline: March 15, 2025) for a new AI Action Plan following Trump's recent AI executive order. While the new administration's focus on reducing oversight may limit receptiveness t... |
02e3a070-9015-484d-aad0-5f8b50d79f57 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Some Thoughts on My Psychiatry Practice
I’ve noticed a marked change in my clientele after going into private practice.[1] Of course I expected class differences-- I charge full fee and don’t take insurance. But there are differences that are not as predictable as ‘has more money’. During residency I worked at a hospi... |
ac9b4fa9-2dd1-454c-b57b-169c21652bae | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Overview of how AI might exacerbate long-running catastrophic risks
Audio reading
Rationalist AI risk public outreach has often emphasized first principles thinking, theory, and logical possibilities (e.g. evolution, gradient decent, human-chimp analogy, etc.) over more concrete tangible empirical findings (e.g. dece... |
7595a1af-1079-4516-8730-0e434238c15c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Highlighting New Comments
Keeping track of which comments you have already read in an online discussion is a pain. It's not too bad in a flat discussion, because you can scroll up to the last comment you remember reading, but in a threaded discussion it's really easy to miss things. Sites can solve this by highlightin... |
c325798e-2e54-47b2-88b5-c60225640164 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Short Talks
Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Short Talks
WHEN: 14 September 2015 06:15:00PM (-0700)
WHERE: 1061 Market St #4, San Francisco, CA 94103
We'll be meeting to give/listen to short talks. Planning isn't necessary: these are not expected to be polishe... |
4d7e0cdf-1d61-4f39-8977-039e8ce6cab7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open thread, Nov. 09 - Nov. 15, 2015
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
----------------------------------------
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately... |
3f568e1b-9b52-4920-ba6f-30b6ccfe6b58 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Anthropics makes sense with shorter people
Reproduced from Meteuphoric by request.
Often people think that various forms of anthropic reasoning require you to change your beliefs in ways other than conditionalizing on evidence. This is false, at least in the cases I know of. I shall talk about Frank Arntzenius' paper... |
6a2d8e3e-4124-4e56-820d-8cb4ed7e12af | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Many-worlds implies the future matters more
If you believe the MWI [1] you should care about the future a lot more than the present. Imagine you're considering whether to take a break and eat some chocolate in an hour or in two. You'll get similar enjoyment out of both choices, so you might think it doesn't matter. Bu... |
ad121c4e-05bf-47c8-9321-397396504706 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Chapter 113: Final Exam
The gibbous moon riding higher in the cloudless sky, the stars and wash of the Milky Way visible in all their majesty within the darkness: All these illuminated thirty-seven skull masks gleaming above black robes, and the darker-clad Lord Voldemort, whose eyes shone red.
"Welcome, my Death Eat... |
77c45de9-9070-474e-9396-e0f1a414f5ba | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Multitudinous outside views
There's an important piece of advice for forecasters: don't rely on your internal model of the world exclusively, and take the outside view, then adjust from there. But which view is " the" outside view? It depends on the problem - and different people might tell you different things. But i... |
cba909c9-4ad1-4f04-b92a-213e060a420b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Slow Guide to Confronting Doom
Following a few events[1] in April 2022 that caused a many people to update sharply and negatively on outcomes for humanity, I wrote A Quick Guide to Confronting Doom.
I advised:
* Think for yourself
* Be gentle with yourself
* Don't act rashly
* Be patient about helping
* Don'... |
f6edf093-b620-4298-b1cd-4fbcc6792811 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : [NYC] Self Improvement - Productivity Apps
Discussion article for the meetup : [NYC] Self Improvement - Productivity Apps
WHEN: 09 June 2013 03:30:59PM (-0400)
WHERE: Winterfell House, 316 W 138th Street, New York NY 10030
There's a growing wealth of productivity apps, each designed to help solve some part... |
c26a7be4-ca9a-4b3a-93b1-71e7cde42261 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Feature Request for LessWrong
Can we add posts with negative karma to a Sequence? I'm working on a Sequence for my alignment research agenda, and the most valuable content in the sequence is all currently underwater. I get that LessWrong wants the community to have veto authority over people creating Sequences and add... |
6f92cfba-2f48-4037-98a8-0fa105dbd63c | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Should we rely on the speed prior for safety?
*This post was written under Evan Hubinger’s direct guidance and mentorship, as a part of the* [*Stanford Existential Risks Institute ML Alignment Theory Scholars (MATS) program*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FpokmCnbP3CEZ5h4t/ml-alignment-theory-program-under-evan-hubi... |
413ea9d3-9871-4a86-9c4e-438322bb41ed | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Holy Ghost in the Cloud (review article about christian transhumanism)
|
0f524750-21f3-4f5c-bfa7-59a9a598c2a7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Practical ways to actualize our beliefs into concrete bets over a longer time horizon?
There are many excellently written posts and comments on LW that describe why turning vague beliefs into concrete action is valuable. Specifically, using bets as a highly effective strategy to signal through all the noise of the mod... |
c848b030-8ae5-4a9d-a5da-4466815d7053 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Monkey and the Machine
|
c2681431-be3f-445f-a106-a7919de3c2de | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Cross-post] Half baked ideas: defining and measuring Artificial Intelligence system effectiveness
This is a cross-post from my blog.
Artificial Intelligence safety researchers are concerned with the behaviour of “highly capable” AI systems. One of the challenges of this line of research is the fact that it’s hard to... |
43cccb84-3f0f-4cb3-acab-ab12c632a4fb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Proposal: Consider not using distance-direction-dimension words in abstract discussions
Epistemic Status: Less Wrong Classic™, a bold and weird proposal to possibly improve your rationality a little bit, maybe.
Overview
It is common to use words and phrases implying distance, directionality, and dimension when discu... |
52867e00-b27f-476f-81e0-0ea90e05ce3e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Editing at the Take Level
Lily recently wrote a song, and I've been helping them record it. I got us set up to record four tracks (vocals, drums, keyboard x2) and we did a bunch of takes:
Most of the takes are full-length, but after we got a really nice version of the end we did some rounds with just the beginni... |
57d773b9-f460-4796-952f-87e9448a8120 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Anthropic | Charting a Path to AI Accountability
Below is the text copied from the linked post (since it's short). I'm not affiliated with Anthropic but wanted to link-post this here for discussion.
----------------------------------------
This week, Anthropic submitted a response to the National Telecommunications ... |
9c302bab-f978-4b2f-8e54-c820bfc50c0b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Problems with using approval voting to elect to a multi-individual body?
Suppose a nation is electing k individuals, to populate a senate or something. Now approval voting has some good properties, so suppose the protocol is to let each of the m citizens vote for as many candidates as they want. We then award a seat t... |
69a8cc0b-a98f-4229-a972-69028273d74b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Seeking opinions on the current and forward state of cryptocurrencies.
Well, mostly asking for responses to a very general question(s) I have regarding blockchain.
I don't have any direct cryptocurrency exposure but do have some blockchain related investments. My view there is that I'm not sure about the currency rel... |
0f1aa535-5f75-4365-b331-f3c8950f0309 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | English Bread Regulations
Yesterday I stumbled on the Assize of Bread, which set the price of bread in England by the price of wheat with rules like:
> When a quarter of wheat is sold for 18d., then wastel bread of a farthing white and well-baked shall weigh £4 10s. 8d.
A 'quarter' here means eight bushels, or a q... |
eb5102dc-5bc4-4540-956f-a10f07e20297 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Universal Medical Journal Article Error
> TL;DR: When people read a journal article that concludes, "We have proved that it is not the case that for every X, P(X)", they generally credit the article with having provided at least weak evidence in favor of the proposition ∀x !P(x). This is not necessarily so.
>
> A... |
8b2596e0-efdd-4ae2-afb1-4fe488fa41cd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Manhood of Humanity
This is my re-telling of Korzybski's Manhood of Humanity. First part here.)
3
Clear thinking is important, because human ideas have consequences. For example, if we believe that lightning is a punishment of God, we will not try to save a house struck by lightning, because doing so would be opposi... |
92416264-b205-4ea8-8d3c-2e29edf7a65f | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube | Youtube Transcripts | Deceptive Misaligned Mesa-Optimisers? It's More Likely Than You Think...
hi so the previous video explained what
mesa optimizers are why they're likely
to happen in advanced machine learning
systems
and why the optimal strategy for a mesa
optimizer
is to pretend to be aligned during the
training process and then turn ... |
729f32a9-8289-4485-962e-87b6424aea58 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Needs accessible summary
This tag is for pages which have a summary of some kind but don't have a summary which is accessible to a relevant audience.
Some pages may require a [technical](https://arbital.com/p/4pt) or [brief](https://arbital.com/p/4q2) summary. |
c99516bd-ea0b-4b7e-a381-dd9e52581245 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A question about two books concerning biases
I'm taking a class on heuristics and biases. I'm this class we have the option to read one of two "applied" books on the subject. The books are "The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear" by Seth Mnookin and "Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You ... |
94d11315-37fe-420c-a513-87182f7fb81e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Fertility as Metascience
The most influential models of economic growth are all about people. These models predict that with a shrinking population, economic growth and technological progress stop and humanity stagnates into extinction. Metascience proposals focus mostly on improving the design of scientific instituti... |
bf238831-e182-4c92-a4ba-cb6e0dc75a0d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Yes, words can cause harm
[ETA] I've made a few clarifying edits in response to early feedback, discussing some of my writing mishakes. All are clearly marked, and all of the original text is still present. Thanks to those who told me they had read something other than what I intended to write.
[ETA] I've been convin... |
0db04ebb-8d2e-440b-8783-1ec08399d46d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] The Robbers Cave Experiment
Today's post, The Robbers Cave Experiment was originally published on 10 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> The Robbers Cave Experiment, by Sherif, Harvey, White, Hood, and Sherif (1954/1961), was designed to investigate the causes and remedies of problems ... |
1c2ce90c-3fc9-4f20-a07b-d9ce7470e4f6 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Detecting AI Trojans Using Meta Neural Analysis
I Introduction
---------------
Deep learning using Neural Networks (NNs) has achieved state-of-the-art performance in a wide variety of domains, including computer vision [[30](#bib.bib49 "Imagenet classification with deep convolutional neural networks")], speech reco... |
340a8cd2-0a65-4b86-9cd7-4a7c724416aa | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : West LA—Inside the 5-Second Level
Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—Inside the 5-Second Level
WHEN: 30 October 2013 07:00:00PM (-0700)
WHERE: 10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064, USA
How to get in: Go to the Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the W... |
437d1051-a61b-440e-a70e-11d36b9b361b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | "AI Wellbeing" and the Ongoing Debate on Phenomenal Consciousness
“AI Wellbeing” by Goldstein & Kirk-Giannini (linked in the AI Safety Newsletter #18) presents arguments for viewing “Wellbeing” as a moral concern separable from Consciousness. I believe these arguments lead to right conclusions for the wrong reasons. W... |
c1290813-c5a2-4cbd-bc6c-ebec9cd9ce24 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Transhumanism and the denotation-connotation gap
A word's denotation is our conscious definition of it. You can think of this as the set of things in the world with membership in the category defined by that word; or as a set of rules defining such a set. (Logicians call the former the category's extension into the ... |
2fc9f613-484c-469b-896a-605d483b958c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What are Trigger-Action Plans (TAPs)?
Disclaimer: This is a technique I learnt at CFAR (which said it's backed by a large amount of Science!, but I haven't looked into original sources much). This post is to explain TAPs simply, including for people unfamiliar with CFAR/LW, with a quick 'getting started' guide. It is ... |
b5dfdcea-f8ca-4769-8ead-27fef5f31848 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Tutoring Small Groups of Children (for money)
> Harry had been sent to the best primary schools - and when that didn't work out, he was provided with tutors from the endless pool of starving students.
In about eight months or so, I will be one of those (hopefully not starving) students. I'll be moving out to London t... |
527413c8-cf2a-431e-ac2c-287f82802ea5 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | Interview with q243b
\*\*Interview with q243b, on 3/18/22\*\*
\*\*0:00:00.0 Vael:\*\* Cool. Alright. So my first question is, can you tell me about what area of AI you work on in a few sentences?
\*\*0:00:09.0 Interviewee:\*\* Of course. I did my PhD in optimization and specifically in non-convex optimization. And a... |
5c2114b7-5551-4b9e-8c4d-f255dab87d63 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Which skincare products are evidence-based?
The beauty industry offers a large variety of skincare products (marketed mostly at women), differing both in alleged function and (substantially) in price. However, it's pretty hard to test for yourself how much any of these product help. The feedback loop for things like "... |
436d6193-3791-48c3-bc9b-f5fe0952bc2a | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Uncomputability
Imagine you were tasked with the mission of finding out which things can and cannot be calculated with a computer, given that you had infinite memory and infinite time.
Given the generality of computers, you might be tempted to say everything, but it turns out that this is not the case.
To begin tack... |
5c6c377e-a1c7-4210-a974-62c4f91e3541 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | No Internally-Crispy Mac and Cheese
Whenever I make baked mac and cheese the crispy top layer is the most popular part. The Maillard-browned cheese is really very good. Sometimes I'll make extra topping by grating another round of cheddar onto the top and sticking it back under the broiler, which works pretty well.
A... |
524617b7-6b4d-468f-bd76-d4100dcda843 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Summary of "The Straw Vulcan"
Followup to: Communicating rationality to the public: Julia Galef's "The Straw Vulcan"
I wrote a summary of Julia Galef's "The Straw Vulcan" presentation from Skepticon 4. Note that it is written in my own words, but all of the ideas should be credited to Julia and her presentation (unle... |
1826518d-5736-414d-84e2-0b19a4580a20 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Agents synchronization
There is a line in alignment-related thinking, of looking for ways that agents will tend to be similar. An early example is convergent instrumental goals, and a later is natural abstractions. Those two ideas share an important attribute - trying to think on something "mental" (values, abstractio... |
531f9715-4323-4ad4-a89b-29b2464ac824 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Physics Video Lectures
The Perimeter Institute has videos of classes of all of their areas of research:
http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/en/Outreach/What_We_Research/Quantum_Gravity/
http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/en/Outreach/What_We_Research/Superstring_Theory_/
http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/en/Outreach/What_... |
70cd5648-05be-4bb6-9728-910d02311f44 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Utilitarianism and Relativity Realism
Introduction
Most people on less wrong seem to be some kind of hedonic consequentialist. They think states with less suffering and more joy are better. Moreover, it is intuitive that if you can cause some improvement in human well-being to be achieved then (other things bein... |
c71c19f6-77b6-4175-a61c-2cd731cea72b | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Do FDT (or similar) recommend reparations?
I haven't worked out the details but intuitively it seems like it should. It seems a lot like counterfactual mugging. |
c4dc6f39-524b-4776-839b-97b8e07af6cf | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | GPT-4o Is An Absurd Sycophant
GPT-4o tells you what it thinks you want to hear.
The results of this were rather ugly. You get extreme sycophancy. Absurd praise. Mystical experiences.
(Also some other interesting choices, like having no NSFW filter, but that one’s good.)
People like Janus and Near Cyan tried to warn... |
f7790eb2-5aed-4478-925c-4fbaef3e0603 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | An Antropic Argument for Post-singularity Antinatalism
In this post I hope to demonstrate that anyone that is able to create a superinteligent AI has the moral obligation to desing it to be Antinatalist. Failure to do so would substantially increase the probability of human extinction.
To the Garden of Eden
In h... |
10357afd-aad6-4a22-a6b3-f76a7c20927c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How valuable is it to learn math deeply?
I've been wondering how useful it is for the typical academically strong high schooler to learn math deeply. Here by "learn deeply" I mean "understanding the concepts and their interrelations" as opposed to learning narrow technical procedures exclusively.
My experience lea... |
f6cb03ff-b1ba-48d3-bcd5-0baec54c2a09 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Toronto THINK
Discussion article for the meetup : Toronto THINK
WHEN: 14 November 2012 07:00:00PM (-0500)
WHERE: 7 Hart House Circle, Toronto
In the Hart House Reading Room (the room across from the reception desk with the purple walls)
Sustainability and the environment are hot topics - global warming, r... |
4392b795-f3db-472a-89bd-1c6b53801e7f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Abundance and scarcity; working forwards and working backwards
Epistemic status: I was bet $100 that I would not write this. Processing drastic opportunities, this is an extremely decision-relevant post and if my friends are right millions of dollars are lying in it.
Managing expectations: I am not writing a guide to... |
9e46c692-6f82-4ff8-a9cb-757a2709b554 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Limerence Messes Up Your Rationality Real Bad, Yo
There’s a pretty basic rationality fact that I don’t see talked about much on LW despite it’s obvious relevance. So I am here to write The Canonical Rationality Post on the topic:
Limerence (aka "falling in love"[1]) wrecks havoc on your rationality.
Evolution creat... |
849c514b-243b-4c26-b69e-e642eb003cc8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Interpretable Fine Tuning Research Update and Working Prototype
Status: Very early days of the research. No major proof of concept yet. The aim of this research update is to solicit feedback and encourage others to experiment with my code.
GitHub repository
Main Idea:
Researchers are using SAE latents to steer mod... |
0427925b-c7cf-4a41-bf5a-f8c78b5386bb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : [Boston] Goal Factoring
Discussion article for the meetup : [Boston] Goal Factoring
WHEN: 04 August 2013 02:00:00PM (-0400)
WHERE: 25 Ames St, Cambridge, MA
Meetup event page
Goal factoring is a method for figuring out why you do the things you do, and for evaluating different ways of achieving the same e... |
0517d0a3-0325-4707-914a-9b1f1a6465e4 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Making Efficient Use of Demonstrations to Solve Hard Exploration Problems
We propose a new agent, which we call Recurrent Replay Distributed DQN from Demonstrations (R2D3). R2D3 is designed to make efficient use o... |
1da1d771-3089-4fb8-89b7-6faf0d1f93f6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Using Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality to teach the scientific method to Psychology undergraduates
As a psychology graduate student I have the opportunity to teach an introductory psychology course. I'm hoping to take what I have learned here and start helping my students improve their rationality. Specific... |
9a8631ce-ff32-4eca-85e7-aff3811e6f38 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : HPMOR Wrap Party! - Sydney Edition
Discussion article for the meetup : HPMOR Wrap Party! - Sydney Edition
WHEN: 15 March 2015 06:00:00PM (+1100)
WHERE: 10 Shepherd St, Chippendale NSW 2008
We're holding this at 1800 on the day after Pi Day, because the final chapter comes out at ~0300 local time.
We're ho... |
8e748c05-74d9-408f-86ff-8b571e83b5e4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | OpenAI announces GPT-3
None |
3cdfe96c-1eb7-4f40-a32a-c3dfcb2013f6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Buffalo LW Thursday meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : Buffalo LW Thursday meetup
WHEN: 23 May 2013 07:00:00PM (-0400)
WHERE: University at Buffalo- North Campus 31 Capen Hall
Buffalo-area Less Wrong meetups on the first Sunday and Third Thursday of every month, in 31 Capen Hall at the University a... |
ce37610d-9798-483d-af4a-38b29216d63e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Mysteries of global hardware
*By Katja Grace, 7 March 2016*
*This blog post summarizes recent research on our [Global Computing Capacity page](http://aiimpacts.org/global-computing-capacity/). See that page for full citations and detailed reasoning.*
We recently investigated this intriguing puzzle:
>
> **FLOPS... |
73489af8-db52-42aa-af32-7fd2439445b2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Learning to get things right first time
These are quick notes on an idea for an indirect strategy to increase the likelihood of society acquiring robustly safe and beneficial AI.
Motivation:
* Most challenges we can approach with trial-and-error, so many of our habits and social structures are set up to encourag... |
d2f19866-42e4-4658-8fe9-d2f2a71cc015 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Number of Members on LessWrong
I was excited to find this site, so I wanted to know how many people had joined LessWrong. Was it what it seemed - that a lot of people had actually gathered around the theme of rational thought - or was that just wishful thinking about a site that a guy with a neat idea and his buddies... |
5d366cdc-47bf-4ec7-968c-9d688ca00803 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : AI safety Berlin
Discussion article for the meetup : AI safety Berlin
WHEN: 07 January 2017 04:00:00PM (+0100)
WHERE: U Mendelssohn-Bartholdy-Park, Berlin, Germany
We invite everyone with a technical interest in AI safety to a get-together in the Bayesment (see below) on Saturday, January 7th 16:00 - 20:00... |
d81840bb-02e5-454b-9f14-3cdc16d148ee | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube | Youtube Transcripts | Deep Learning 6: Deep Learning for NLP
I'll get started so just some
housekeeping before I start and this is
just a sanity check so I'm told it's a
two-hour lecture so we're done by 4:00
is that correct and you're it's probably
expecting a break of like 10 minutes or
so about halfway through okay
so we'll try and make... |
faa48a40-7ffa-4870-833d-eedd2c1d8317 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why I like Zulip instead of Slack or Discord
Slack and Discord are skins over the same thing. A bunch of conversations happening at the same time. Threads are made after the fact, and many conversations are braided together, so you have to untangle them.
Zulip has a tiny change: you have to make a conversation have a... |
5cccc184-9dfe-4069-a886-0c07dd9307d0 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Antifragility for Intelligent Autonomous Systems
1 Introduction
---------------
How should an intelligent, autonomous system adapt to unforeseen situations? Answering this question has been the focus of significant research effort over the last two decades [[Hayes-Roth1995](#bib.bibx4)]. However, the notion of adap... |
3de61e96-62eb-4faa-8e16-07cddb9e50e4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Short Post: Discerning Truth from Trash
I have read a lot of self-help in my time, which means I’ve also read a whole lot of bullshit. Worst than the actual process of ingesting and attempting to digest self-help bullshit was finding that my own writing started to produce features similar to self-help bullshit.
I wou... |
e344fe2f-b81d-4224-9d68-6c218e5aab47 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Agency Foundations Challenge: September 8th-24th, $10k Prizes
**TLDR;** Join us Friday Sep 8th for starting the very f**i**rst technical/non-technical [Agency Foundations Challenge](https://alignmentjam.com/jam/agency) where we explore agency-preservation in AI-human interactions. Make your submissions by Sunday Sep 2... |
125a9a02-cd58-4fef-88a9-df2046397279 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How can we quantify the good done of donating PPEs vs ventilators?
I know a group of friends that plan on raising ~$20,000 to donate to COVID-19 efforts in the Philippines. They are considering between donating PPEs or ventilators to local hospitals, and I want to help them quantify the expected impact of the two gen... |
fdfaaac7-e411-4a92-8345-03b130d09fdb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What does vaccine effectiveness as a function of time look like?
I've heard it takes ~10-14 days after a shot (either first or 2nd dose) to reach maximum effectiveness.
Can anyone point me towards a figure showing (estimated) effectiveness as a function of time?
|
675b8c43-1a45-49ee-a49e-b8d3cec869f1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Explaining Visual Thinking
One of my students asked me how visual thinking works. As someone who does not think in pictures, I was a bit stumped on how to explain it because I can't simulate visual thinking in my mind (I usually try to conceptualise and simulate things I haven't experienced in order to understand them... |
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