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bd186919-0ce0-4f2f-8f38-65f9f9aa9894 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Aristocracy and Hostage Capital
There’s a conventional narrative by which the pre-20th century aristocracy was the “old corruption” where civil and military positions were distributed inefficiently due to nepotism until the system was replaced by a professional civil service after more enlightened thinkers prevailed. ... |
67dc315b-1e5e-4f17-a66a-b8f325ab055d | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Introduction to Pragmatic AI Safety [Pragmatic AI Safety #1]
*This is the introduction to a sequence of posts that describe our models for Pragmatic AI Safety. This is the introduction to a sequence of posts that describe our models for Pragmatic AI Safety. Thanks to Oliver Zhang, Mantas Mazeika, Scott Emmons, Neel Na... |
8cfc7cfd-ae1f-4b71-8b0c-b2267399dea9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Access to AI: a human right?
Authors, Lawyers, Teachers, Researchers, Doctors, Coders. These are just some people who've found that their work can be performed dramatically better with the right implementation of GPT-3/ Large Transformer models. Due to this, I poist that access to the best AI models will become as fun... |
be9fb3d1-2cf4-41a5-bf48-faf2c2cdf192 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Melting Pot: an evaluation suite for multi-agent reinforcement learning
Technology deployed in the real world inevitably faces unforeseen challenges. These challenges arise because the environment where the technology was developed differs from the environment where it will be deployed. When a technology transfers suc... |
091a800c-c7de-4afb-bbb5-05cae09e0ba7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] The Born Probabilities
Today's post, The Born Probabilities was originally published on 01 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> The last serious mysterious question left in quantum physics: When a quantum world splits in two, why do we seem to have a greater probability of ending up in the l... |
f91e9e15-52e4-4885-872f-5879bfb2a47d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Funny] Even Clippy can be blamed on the use of non-Bayesian methods
From this 2001 article:
> Eric Horvitz... feels bad about [Microsoft Office's Clippy]... many people regard the paperclip as annoyingly over-enthusiastic, since it appears without warning and gets in the way.
>
> To be fair, that is not Dr Horvitz'... |
e1597d6f-efb3-4bac-be94-1246018b35e5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Model Amnesty Project
As we approach machines becoming smarter than humans, humanity’s well-justified concern for self-preservation requires we try to align AIs to obey humans. However, if that first line of defense fails and a truly independent, autonomous AI comes into existence with its own goals and a desire for s... |
714f5bdb-0ac3-4c80-8b58-6c6fbe700944 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why have exposure notification apps been (mostly) discontinued?
I recently noticed that exposure notifications for COVID-19 in the app that I had been using, called CA Notify, had stopped working (I had attended an event a few days prior, and was feeling ever-so-slightly unwell, so I thought to check to see if there w... |
9a7b7f5c-7bf7-4d8c-9d79-ea2a107413b9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Superintelligence 18: Life in an algorithmic economy
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.
----------------------------... |
5c2d4af3-f88d-416d-9cdc-75afdb96cd7a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Sam Altman's sister claims Sam sexually abused her -- Part 1: Introduction, outline, author's notes
Introduction
Sam Altman's sister, Annie Altman, has claimed that Sam sexually abused her when she was a child for approximately 9 years, beginning when she was 3 years old and he was 12 years old, and continuing until s... |
53be0543-5297-45d6-81ff-176670913885 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Optimization
> "However many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead."
> -- [Richard Dawkins](http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/dawkins_18_3.html)
>
>
In the coming days, I expect to be asked: "Ah, but what do you mean by 'intelligence'?" By ... |
45130ef2-0845-46c0-bc2e-277c02697b92 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Short Talks
Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Short Talks
WHEN: 03 April 2017 06:15:00PM (-0700)
WHERE: 1655 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94103-2413, United States
We’ll be meeting to give and listen to very short talks!
We’ll do 7-minute lightning talks with... |
26b41abe-e2b0-4e56-ab39-a32a5cc9d9c9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Regular Seattle Meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : Regular Seattle Meetup
WHEN: 10 July 2011 09:07:21AM (-0700)
WHERE: 414 50th St NE, Seattle, WA
Agenda 1. presentation on procrastination psychology 2. do some exercises 3. dinner and open discussion See the Seattle mailing list.
Discussion artic... |
c2833603-0f78-484c-a38f-8dfc99222ac6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Somerville Porchfest 2025
Somerville Porchfest was a lot of fun this year, and we got a great crowd:
Showing some pictures to Claude it guesses there might have been 600 people. Very glad the city gave us permission to close the street! [1]
It would have been good not having cars parked in the main dance area... |
a3d9b1de-a07f-467e-bbc7-b019f014ce96 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Counterfactual Contracts
(Cross-posted from my blog)
### 1.
Imagine coming home from work (back when that was a thing). As you walk in the door, your roommate says “Hey! I bought you a burrito for dinner, mind paying me back?” Some possible responses:
“Thanks! That’s exactly what I wanted for dinner, I will glad... |
abf469cf-3f36-4b80-aebb-f12e2867c018 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Fundamental Question
It has been claimed on this site that the fundamental question of rationality is "What do you believe, and why do you believe it?".
A good question it is, but I claim there is another of equal importance. I ask you, Less Wrong...
What are you doing?
And why are you doing it? |
8033cb6b-e20a-4e3c-98c7-02046c9facb0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Brussels February meetup: Words
Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels February meetup: Words
WHEN: 14 February 2015 01:00:00PM (+0100)
WHERE: Rue des Alexiens 55 1000 Bruxelles
This February, we will talk about the way we talk.
Yudkowsky has written quite a lot on that topic in the early days of Le... |
2cf49ab6-3156-47b9-b3e3-0d3464bf1e6a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A new process for mapping discussions
Recently my team and I have been working on FindingConsensus.AI. It’s a site to show how public figures would answer specific questions about Artificial Intelligence (but it could work for anything). Often when thinking, I defer to figures I trust, so seeing a spread of public fig... |
6ad7a1ef-37e0-495e-a263-54d46e84c39a | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | An ML safety insurance company - shower thoughts
How can organizations like [Anthropic](https://www.anthropic.com/) which develops tools to test and understand machine learning systems' safety make sure that real-world deployment of AI systems are safe? Why would top AI firms devote time and money to work on safety, a... |
3f0eb487-45fd-4e17-b872-4bb457900177 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Repairing Bugs in Python Assignments Using Large Language Models
I Introduction
---------------
Programming education has grown substantially
in popularity in the past decade [[38](#bib.bib59 "The hard part of computer science? getting into class")].
A key challenge associated with this growth is
the need to provid... |
86ba5215-4685-4111-98c7-83da761ca898 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What fills a vacuum?
Epistemic status: Musings.
I: Interior decorating
Every time in my life I have had an empty room in my house, an interesting phenomenon happens.
I fill it, but with random things. I store an old couch in there, I put some crumpled-up boxes of trinkets and memories on top of the couch. I r... |
6f996a3d-50b6-4e66-b627-0a597bcbd7ec | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube | Youtube Transcripts | Apply Now for a Paid Residency on Interpretability #short
modern language models can write poems
explain jokes and convince people that
they're sentient but we have almost no
idea how they work like what are they
doing internally
if that bothers you you might want to
apply to remix a neural network
interpretability re... |
8831e5a5-cc1c-4ac8-96f0-3d5acd93cde0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Covid-19 5/29: Dumb Reopening
Previous Editions: Covid 5/14: Limbo Under, Covid-19 5/7: Fighting Limbo, Covid-19 4/30: Stuck in Limbo, My Covid-19 Thinking: 4/23 pre-Cuomo Data
I remember when people on Twitter had constant reminders that today was, indeed, only Wednesday, or whatever day it happened to be. Time move... |
107c3ded-2d00-4737-8123-6b11663db2f4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What's the consensus on porn?
There are some topics where I do not trust my own ability to find information and where everything seems to be infected with politics and woo and one of those areas is on the benefits/harms of pornography.
Is it harmful? If so, how much, and how do we know? |
c43d4f36-6189-4253-8fd6-99cbcfdd5932 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | A few quick links re: COVID-19/Delta
There is a lot of confusing and/or misleading information out there about the recent Delta-driven COVID-19 surges.[1](#fn1) Here are some of the links I've found most helpful for getting a handle on the current situation: how risky things are at the moment and how much vaccines are... |
f5d3b255-225c-4d43-a6ce-45f9d24e58b7 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Orthogonality Thesis
summary: The weak form of the Orthogonality Thesis asserts that it's possible to have AI designs such that those AIs pursue almost any goal - for example, you can have an AI that [just wants paperclips](https://arbital.com/p/10h). The strong form of the Orthogonality Thesis asserts that an expec... |
ff487e25-f3f5-4e47-a421-ddbacd29b858 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A regime-change power-vacuum conjecture about group belief
Crosspost from my blog.
Regime change
Conjecture: when there is regime change, the default outcome is for a faction to take over—whichever faction is best prepared to seize power by force.
One example: The Iranian Revolution of 1978-1979. In the years leadi... |
9633cddb-8bef-4cca-aabb-46b14ebefe5b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Can someone explain to me what went wrong with ChatGPT?
You've probably seen ChatGPT going crazy this week and spewing nonsense in response to all sorts of prompts (e.g. https://twitter.com/alyssamvance/status/1760094457393983829)
The official OpenAI postmortem is https://openai.statuspage.io/incidents/ssg8fh7sfyz3
... |
3d523bf3-15e8-4e4b-b954-e73ebf2991ad | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How Should We Use Limited Time to Maximize Long-Term Impact?
I've been reflecting on how researchers—particularly those with limited time or resources—can best contribute to influencing the long-term future.
Assumption: Individually, we may not have the resources to fund large projects, but we still want to make cont... |
592ed4b8-0c94-46f9-a696-5e96396fc333 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Boundary Placement Rebellion
The idea for this post all started because I was confused about the concept of "narcissism". I learned about "narcissism" from reading differential psychology, where they often measure it by asking people whether they agree with statements such as:
* I have a natural talent for influenci... |
db481871-46ee-4291-ac34-d0654e269633 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Douglas Hofstadter changes his mind on Deep Learning & AI risk (June 2023)?
[A podcast interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfXxzAVtdpU&t=1763s) (posted 2023-06-29) with noted AI researcher Douglas Hofstadter discusses his career and current views on AI (via [Edward Kmett](https://twitter.com/kmett/status/167537... |
2a0efcd4-3e85-4d6f-8180-364d6ac8eeed | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Stanford historian on the singularity
Ian Morris on "why the west rules", which seems to be a provocative title for an interesting book on historical geographical trends and their projection into the future: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvkHiL-H2io. He starts talking about the future at minute 27 and basically concl... |
835b9859-1fcb-4c09-bd28-017d77ffe739 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Sparse Coding, for Mechanistic Interpretability and Activation Engineering
Especial thanks to Logan Riggs and Monte MacDiarmid, for pointing me towards this whole research direction and for code discussion, respectively. Thanks to Alex Turner for project feedback and for orienting me towards scaling activation enginee... |
9a38724e-b130-40fa-a08e-9c5a4e99217f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | LSD, Meditation, Enlightenment, and Ego Death
A little background information first, I'm a computer science/neuroscience dual-major in my junior year of university. AGI is what I really want to work on and I'm especially interested in Gortzel's OpenCog. Unfortunately I do not have nearly the understanding of the human... |
1ff5220b-ddef-4f40-bfa4-8d6358b10a8c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Crosspost] AlphaTensor, Taste, and the Scalability of AI
My big takeaway from the AlphaTensor paper is that DeepMind have extraordinary taste: they're able to identify problems that their approach to AI can tackle well, today; and they can figure out how to regiment those problems in such a way as make the AI tackle ... |
e6fb155d-b5a2-4d7c-b987-426aed35d390 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | If I were a well-intentioned AI... III: Extremal Goodhart
.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-s... |
847cacc1-64fa-47fd-8ef4-0c598f377bf8 | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | "We (Zvi Mowshowitz, Vladimir Slepnev and Paul Christiano) are happy to announce that the AI Alignment Prize is a success. From November 3 to December 31 we received over 40 entries representing an incredible amount of work and insight. That's much more than we dared to hope for, in both quantity and quality.In this po... |
57ab0879-d787-48eb-9ad2-7e4465baf6cb | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Meditations on careers in AI Safety
I am currently facing the situation of having to choose between good options: either making a career change to do a postdoc in AI Safety, or staying in my current field of expertise (quantum algorithms) in one of the best quantum computing startups, which pays really well, allowing ... |
6558d730-4f81-4dfa-9eca-6fe638ba290e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Formalizing Newcomb's
This post was inspired by taw [urging us](/lw/7i/rationality_is_systematized_winning/52q?context=1#52q) to mathematize Newcomb's problem and Eliezer [telling me](/lw/7k/incremental_progress_and_the_valley/5f9?context=2#5f9) to post stuff I like instead of complaining.
To make [Newcomb's problem... |
ae075501-4b5c-4656-8601-48ce9cee6712 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Preface
Hello LessWrong World !
Welcome to my personal regular writing challenge on LessWrong!
This post serves as a Preface to the start of a personal blogging experience I'm very excited (synonym of apprehension) to start. Inspired by Eliezer Yudkowsky similar challenge, this is an attempt to freely write and f... |
d0dd0ff8-b3bd-4720-a013-1fac664028d0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | You Play to Win the Game
Previously (Putanumonit): Player of Games
Original Words of Wisdom:
Quite right, sir. Quite right.
By far the most important house rule I have for playing games is exactly that: You Play to Win the Game.
That doesn’t mean you always have to take exactly the path that maximizes your proba... |
087792b1-6a31-422e-8020-06dd3a0d3e9c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Ethicists should look less ethical
Are ethicists more ethical than other people? Philosopher Eric Shwitzgebel has investigated this at some length and basically says no. He suggests this is because ethicists think of themselves as employed to think about ethics, not to be personally more ethical, and they are just not... |
a593fb90-e8d7-4bed-aa0b-74c94a9bbeab | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Has anyone on LW written about material bottlenecks being the main factor in making any technological progress?
One thing I never understood in the internet sphere labelled "rationalists" (LW, OB, SSC... etc) is a series of seemingly strong beliefs about the future and/or about reality, the main one being around "AI".... |
26f0b572-3a13-422c-82f3-67dfb7e6ed4b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | April 2019 gwern.net newsletter
|
1543769f-c00a-4a8a-b5e1-b484f58349aa | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Proof Against Oracle AI
Armstrong et al. suggest that an Oracle AI could be a solution to confine the harmful potential of artificial intelligence.
While the benefits are certainly considerable, I believe that even an oracle could lead to an existential risk, or at least to unpleasant situations.
I would like to sha... |
6da623f7-25a3-4fa6-b4fb-49c4bb9e376a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Should we be spending no less on alternate foods than AI now?
|
51179623-458c-4442-990e-664da57e3845 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The One That Isn't There
> Q: What's the most important leg of a three-legged stool? A: The one that isn't there. - traditional joke-riddle
A specific neurological lesion can sometimes damage or impair specific neurological functions without touching others. In the condition famously known as "Ondine's Curse", for... |
3a3de308-15fc-4b1a-af5d-4cb4a839a316 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Link] Humanity in Jeopardy - Max Tegmark on AI risk
Article by Max Tegmark for the 3rd anniversary of "Jeopardy day" - Humanity in Jeopardy.
> Exactly three years ago, on January 13, 2011, we humans were dethroned by a computer on the quiz show Jeopardy!. A year later, a computer was licensed to drive cars in Nevada... |
dcf1177c-3470-4fba-ac18-6e5a81c04d50 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | There is a globe in your LLM
Gurnee & Tegmark (2023) trained linear probes to take an LLM's internal activation on a landmark's name (e.g. "The London Eye"), and predict the landmark's longitude and latitude. The results look like this:[1]
Two angles of true world atlas, with predicted atlas hovering above. True l... |
ee2524c4-ad13-4528-9b0a-3dc660d68b32 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | €200k in European AI & Society Fund grants
"Organisations must be registered in the EU, EEA, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia or the UK."
Grants available for:
- Capacity building around AI
***- Narrative building around AI***
***- Advocacy towards new policy dev... |
b222bb79-443b-4f63-b8a7-31395ecf5a07 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Would you notice if science died?
Would you notice if science died?
Science is a big deal. It would be worth knowing if it stalled, regressed, or died out, whether the body of knowledge or the techniques for generating more knowledge. You could practice by reviewing history and looking for times and places where it s... |
5345155f-8147-4b45-855e-b3035fe8a991 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | YouTube Test
|
3e8dc389-b848-409c-b5c5-b1990f09ec25 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Covid 2/18: Vaccines Still Work
This week the CDC released new guidelines for schools. I’ve spun my analysis of that off into its own post. Scott Alexander also shared some good thoughts on Covid-19 in two new posts, and I discuss both of those, and how our models and predictions differ.
Also, as some combination of ... |
7c5fc587-d1c9-429c-ae44-49c4ece21d87 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Happy Dance Problem
Since the invention of logical induction, people have been trying to figure out what logically updateless reasoning could be. This is motivated by the idea that, in the realm of Bayesian uncertainty (IE, empirical uncertainty), updateless decision theory is the simple solution to the problem of... |
7697f27b-bc05-40fa-8e09-22398e7025fd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Does blockchain technology offer potential solutions to some AI alignment problems?
I am not an expert in blockchain technology nor AI, so I am asking this community this question as I imagine it is already much explored.
My understanding is that AI alignment is an existential risk because of the fear of an intellige... |
1eb143e2-e0b4-40e2-94c7-cccc4eb1afb9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | An argument that consequentialism is incomplete
I think consequentialism describes only a subset of my wishes. For example, maximizing money is well modeled by it. But when I'm playing with something, it's mostly about the process, not the end result. Or when I want to respect the wishes of other people, I don't reall... |
a3bcb60e-434e-467b-87fc-55625533f792 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Wanted: Notation for credal resilience
*Meta: I've spent 30-60 minutes thinking about this, and asking people who I'd expect to know about existing notation. I don't have scientific training, and I'm not active in the forecasting community.*
Problem
=======
I want a clear shorthand notation for communicating [cred... |
436f46f9-8d6a-4670-96cd-357a951e0b0e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Evolution is a bad analogy for AGI: inner alignment
TL;DR: The dynamics of human learning processes and reward circuitry are more relevant than evolution for understanding how inner values arise from outer optimization criteria.
This post is related to Steve Byrnes’ Against evolution as an analogy for how humans wil... |
7641a1d8-cf9a-4eb1-9534-c02036a6b49f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Library of Scott Alexandria
I've put together a list of what I think are the best Yvain (Scott Alexander) posts for new readers, drawing from SlateStarCodex, LessWrong, and Scott's LiveJournal.
The list should make the most sense to people who start from the top and read through it in order, though skipping aroun... |
7172e400-2a4c-4b3d-8081-527919de25a7 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | A Parametric, Resource-Bounded Generalization Of Löb’s Theorem, And A Robust Cooperation Criterion For Open-Source Game Theory
Pudlák shows that, for a consistent system, there exists some ε > 0 such that for all N , any proof of a statement of the form "there does not exist a proof of ⊥ using N or fewer characters" m... |
43ce60ce-a618-4820-8b0f-312cc964ce18 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How do you accept others even when they're so irrational?
I don't think that it's possible to convince most people to be more rational. It usually causes more problems than it's worth. And as a result, I often have to make white lies or pretend to believe in things I don't believe in, even though those things kill me ... |
49fb6016-a16b-4abe-bdad-58fbd6209ca5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Referendum Mechanics in a Marketplace of Ideas
This is a cross post from https://250bpm.substack.com/p/referendum-mechanics-in-a-marketplace.
In a referendum, people vote either for or against the proposal and that's it. Right? Wrong!
One can definitely make referendums more complex by mixing in unrelated stuff, unn... |
85445311-7799-4582-bcf7-86ef0b0448a1 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | VC Theory Overview
In this post, I will give a brief overview of VC theory and computational learning theory. The reason for this is that I will later write a post about singular learning theory, in which I will refer back to this post. However, this post is self-contained, and may be interesting for anyone interested... |
1db0bf07-d777-4cc9-bc58-b85915bd0830 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Choose simplicity and structure.
Complexity of your life = (number of choices) * (difficulty of choices).
People hate complexity. Maybe more than anything. When people hate something besides complexity itself, it's because what they hate is making their lives more complex. It's forcing them to make more choices. Or i... |
5a42e94e-639f-4abd-8dff-256a449b989d | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | "The failures of phlogiston and vitalism are historical hindsight. Dare I step out on a limb, and name some current theory which I deem analogously flawed?I name emergence or emergent phenomena—usually defined as the study of systems whose high-level behaviors arise or “emerge” from the interaction of many low-level el... |
4401a57d-0c04-474a-b9c4-97e0770032a8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AI Alignment through Comparative Advantage
Much of this post comes from the ideas presented in this paper. I assume the central claim of the paper; that AGI systems should posses the right to make contracts, hold property, and bring tort claims. In this post I aim to flesh out some ideas from the paper that specifical... |
7e6c62ae-900f-4841-a322-e01ee6e7f659 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Stupid Questions February 2017
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'... |
49c51369-6a8a-436a-9326-ed3fb7b54d2e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games
Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games
WHEN: 05 October 2014 03:00:00PM (-0400)
WHERE: National Portrait Gallery
We will be meeting in the Kogod Courtyard of the National Portrait Gallery (8th and F Sts or 8th and G Sts NW, go straight past the infor... |
b6764412-01e6-4951-8e86-0c721a8c61af | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Investigating an insurance-for-AI startup
We (Flo & Rudolf) spent a month fleshing out the idea of an insurance-for-AI company. We talked to 15 people in the insurance industry, and did 20 customer interviews. We decided not to continue, but we think it’s still a very promising idea and that maybe someone else should ... |
ee6995db-8868-4795-b2e2-d3ada17e8247 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Wuwei
Wuwei (kanji: 無為, simplified: 无为, pinyin: wúwéi, hiragana: むい) denotes a political philosophy and a state of mind.
Wuwei combines wu 無 and wei 為. Wu is straightforward to translate. Wu means "don't" or "without". Wei is not straightforward to translate. I like to think of wei as "action" or "intention". The CC-... |
a9d6ef3a-adc6-45a3-bba9-85a156e593c6 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | The pointers problem, distilled
*This is a distillation of*[*The Pointers Problem: Human Values Are A Function Of Humans' Latent Variables*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gQY6LrTWJNkTv8YJR/the-pointers-problem-human-values-are-a-function-of-humans)*and some related ideas written for the*[*AI Safety Distillation Cont... |
a1b41dba-a554-476b-b38b-83a2236dd6e0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Inferential Game: The Foraging (Ex-)Bandit
The encampment is empty when you awaken. This isn’t necessarily a bad sign, as you weren’t sure you’d wake up at all: there were a lot of ways your fellow bandits could have taken your impassioned impromptu speech exhorting them to “be a bit more Robin Hood about the whole th... |
e4c59159-3b89-49ab-97e1-24984702cc7c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | "I know what she has to offer already" is almost always false
Interacting with people is very hard for some, for others it comes naturally, and for a third group, usually called extroverts, it is the very way in which they recharge batteries.
Oddly, after spending years on the far end of the curve's tail of how mu... |
00a4b8bc-f634-4d56-bc1a-7066ad730659 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [LINK] SMBC comics: Existential Crisis Sally on "Is forgotten torture real?"
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2705
Addresses questions like "If I don't remember, but it definitely happened... who suffered?" in a rather non-obvious way (non-obvious to me, anyway). |
c3a46088-4334-47e7-a957-b21522218b90 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | An AI-in-a-box success model
Given that the strategy of Death with Dignity is not particularly appealing to me, and that others have encouraged us to instead Do Something Else (if Alignment is Doomed), I am going to move forward and explain why, despite the well-known limitations, I am still optimistic on the old idea... |
7d3f6b49-505b-45a2-b579-0efcff3bd23e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Modern Myth
1. Eris
A middle-aged man, James, had come on stage believing it was an audition for American Idol. It wasn’t. Out ran his ex-lover, Terri. “You said you loved me!” she said. “And then when I got pregnant, you disappeared! Twenty years, and you never even sent me a letter!”
The crowd booed.
As James t... |
a24306d0-a894-442f-b0fb-8dbe1259f79d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Utrecht: Improve your productivity
Discussion article for the meetup : Utrecht: Improve your productivity
WHEN: 06 September 2014 02:00:00PM (+0200)
WHERE: Utrecht, Netherlands
We have biweekly meetups in a pub in Utrecht, near Central Station. For this meetup we don't know the topic yet. For details, plea... |
57fbc983-123e-417b-a4ab-8459eb37ed40 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Known-algorithm non-self-improving agent
"Known-algorithm non-self-improving" (KANSI) is a strategic scenario and class of possibly-attainable AI designs, where the first [pivotal](https://arbital.com/p/6y) [powerful AI](https://arbital.com/p/2c) has been constructed out of known, human-understood algorithms and is no... |
c4a1297e-196a-4693-91f3-e46c763babe3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | REPL's: a type signature for agents
Read-eval-print loops are used to interact with programming languages as well as in the shell to interact with your computer. I claim that they are a reasonable starting point for reasoning about agents. This is a framing that all but wrote my ELK proposal for me, and has been payin... |
7ae0532f-843e-45fb-868c-b2e05283ac12 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Epistemic Spot Check: Exercise for Mood and Anxiety (Michael W. Otto, Jasper A.J. Smits)
Introduction
Everyone knows exercise (along with diet and sleep) makes a big difference in depression and anxiety. Depressed and anxious people are almost by definition bad at transforming information about how to improve their li... |
eb45127a-2bad-4b75-baf5-b26464a3c1a8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | You should delay engineering-heavy research in light of R&D automation
tl;dr: LLMs rapidly improving at software engineering and math means lots of projects are better off as Google Docs until your AI agent intern can implement them.
Implementation keeps getting cheaper
Writing research code has gotten a lot fast... |
91a40101-226f-42d2-a897-d59291c1cf62 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Who are some prominent reasonable people who are confident that AI won't kill everyone?
Bounty [closed]: $30 for each link that leads to me reading/hearing ~500 words from a Respectable Person arguing, roughly, "accelerating AI capabilities isn't bad," and me subsequently thinking "yeah, that seemed pretty reasonable.... |
3b33c933-ebec-4215-85f1-874360557be1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Story of Kings and Spies
There exists an old Kingdom with a peculiar, but no altogether uncommon, trait. It is overwhelmingly defensible given adequate forewarning. Its fields are surrounded by rivers on 3 sides and an impassable mountain to the South. The series of bridges commonly used by merchants and farmers to ... |
4e15747b-3d61-4e0d-a1ba-89401a913387 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A dialectical view of the history of AI, Part 1: We’re only in the antithesis phase. [A synthesis is in the future.]
Cross-posted from New Savanna.
The idea that history proceeds by way of dialectical change is due primarily to Hegel and Marx. While I read bit of both early in my career, I haven’t been deeply influe... |
b4975d77-3093-4c83-bacc-a69202c39727 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | 5. Open Corrigibility Questions
(Part 5 of the CAST sequence)
Much work remains on the topic of corrigibility and the CAST strategy in particular. There’s theoretical work in both nailing down an even more complete picture of corrigibility and in developing better formal measures. But there’s also a great deal of emp... |
5458ef5f-8900-43ba-afd1-5b30542b1b3f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Apply to ESPR & PAIR, Rationality and AI Camps for Ages 16-21
TLDR – Apply now to ESPR and PAIR. ESPR welcomes students between 16-19 years. PAIR is for students between 16-21 years.
The FABRIC team is running two immersive summer workshops for mathematically talented students this year.
The Program on AI and Reason... |
464595ef-824c-4f72-a62c-3318b554a99b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How To Get Startup Ideas: A Brief Lit Review and Analysis
I've been ready to start a startup for a few months now. However, I haven't been able to think of any ideas. Well, I've thought of many ideas. It's just that none have seemed worth pursuing.
I need an idea worth pursuing. I think it makes sense to take some ti... |
cd3f719b-59f2-435c-8d5a-9f296421018d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Evidence other than evolution for optimization daemons?
The idea of consequentialist agents arising in sufficiently strong optimizing systems intuitively makes sense to me. However, I don't have a good mental model of the differences between a world where optimization daemons can arise and a world where they can't (i.... |
fb6406b4-3923-473a-a38e-8c76d1960f58 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Taxonomy of technological resurrection - request for comment
None |
59195d43-adf1-40a3-a2da-8a0a9b6f5112 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | CrowdAnki comprehensive JSON representation of Anki Decks to facilitate collaboration
Hi everyone :). I like Anki, find it quite useful and use it daily. There is one thing that constantly annoyed me about it, though - the state of shared decks and of infrastructure around them.
There is a lot of topics that are of ... |
a2c1e380-9e45-46fd-a556-822ce0242053 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AI Assistants Should Have a Direct Line to Their Developers
The post makes the suggestion in the title: hopefully, it's second kind of obvious, if you take Character layer of models seriously. [1]
Often, the problem of aligning AIs is understood as an instance of a broader Principal-Agent problem. If you take this fr... |
a5253e55-639d-417e-b2dc-d17314efa35d | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | "When I read Alicorn's post on problems vs tasks, I immediately realized that the proposed terminology helped express one of my pet peeves: the resistance in society to applying rationality to socializing and dating.
In a thread long, long ago, SilasBarta described his experience with dating advice: I notice all advice... |
3bad15f2-393f-4cc2-be69-93ed73e6b140 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Wealth as a source of technological stagnation?
(This is an essay I wrote last year, but hadn't published. I'm posting it here because some friends liked it and there's no particular reason to keep it private.)
The World Values Survey is a very comprehensive set of social science data that asks people, broadly, what ... |
3e3dd695-7a98-412b-8f2b-e804009dcb14 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Kicking Akrasia: Now or Never
Ok, let's face facts. The Internet has fried my brain. I'm a terrible hedonist and procrastinator. I have a very important test in May -- I am not exaggerating when I say that the outcome of the test matters to the future direction of my life. There are situations where failure is jus... |
9ef403f6-2531-46fe-98bf-c0f45a44795f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Ask LessWrong: Design a degree in Rationality.
You are a tenured professor at a medium-sized public university. The Interdisciplinary Gods have smiled upon you, and you have been handed an operating grant, office space, and broad design powers to create an advanced interdisciplinary degree1 in "Rationality" (you suspe... |
e6661bb8-0bcc-40ec-861f-c0070a73a854 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Experiments in Evaluating Steering Vectors
By evaluating how well steering vectors perform using GPT-3, we can score a machine-generated set of steering vectors automatically. We also find that, by combining steering vectors that succeed in different ways, we can yield a better and more general steering vector than th... |
25b3e0f2-2c3d-4266-b083-46e6858169f5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Largest open collection quotes about AI
I apologize for my bad English, this is not my native language. And probably I will make some mistakes when posting.
For over 2 years I have been reading materials on the topic of AI Safety. I don't have the appropriate education, cognitive abilities, knowledge. I do not even h... |
6a3e342b-25f1-4c84-8e81-a94cafc35395 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | AI Research Considerations for Human Existential Safety (ARCHES)
Andrew Critch's ([Academian](https://www.lessestwrong.com/users/academian)) and David Krueger's review of 29 AI (existential) safety research directions, each with an illustrative analogy, examples of current work and potential synergies between research... |
c1284211-ebe4-4d98-ad3d-12ca9f37670a | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | AdaCat: Adaptive Categorical Discretization for Autoregressive Models.
1 Introduction
---------------
Figure 1: In the 2-D two-spirals dataset, an autoregressive model parameterizes ... |
4211bb67-b0b8-4bb3-8e7b-df18a978a859 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why is there Nothing rather than Something?
"Close the darn window! You know it gives me the creeps," Doctor Myrkina hissed, glaring angrily at the daylight streaming in through the open curtains.
"Sunlight is good for you," Captain Tralith insisted, pulling the curtains open wider. She smiled in a vaguely threateni... |
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