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64227937-58f1-4eca-a18e-8a911f00730a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Counterfactuals, thick and thin
Summary: There's a "thin" concept of counterfactual that's easy to formalize and a "thick" concept that's harder to formalize.
Suppose you're trying to guess the outcome of a coinflip. You guess heads, and the coin lands tails. Now you can ask how the coin would have landed if you had ... |
b36bef2e-5f04-4461-bf4a-39b3288a8da4 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Learning Russian Roulette
*Surprisingly, our current theories of anthropics don't seem to cover this.*
You have a revolver with six chambers. One of them has a bullet in it. You are offered $1 for spinning the barrel, pointing at your head, and pulling the trigger. You remember doing this many times, and surviving ea... |
cb9bd401-92a1-4af7-9bf1-1981a1687203 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Sunday June 21st – talks by Abram Demski, alkjash, orthonormal, eukaryote, Vaniver
This Sunday at 11am (PDT), we're running a session of four "lightning talks" by curated LessWrong authors.
* Each talk will be 3-5 minutes followed by discussion. Afterwards, we'll have a hangout in breakout rooms. The talks will be s... |
ed790bef-e64f-4d71-90e8-6e07624a7446 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | my current outlook on AI risk mitigation
*(thanks to [Linda Linsefors](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/linda-linsefors), [Artaxerxes](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/artaxerxes), and [jono](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/lw-user0246) for their feedback on drafts of this post)*
as part of [the *refine* programme](ht... |
6512aa3e-50f8-43e7-abea-61f46fa01ec6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Be Logically Informative
What's the googolplexth decimal of pi? I don't know, but I know that it's rational for me to give each possible digit P=1/10. So there's a sense in which I can rationally assign probabilities to mathematical facts or computation outcomes on which I'm uncertain. (Apparently this can be modeled ... |
a91cf763-54af-4386-a32a-b6a176c55964 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Safety-capabilities tradeoff dials are inevitable in AGI
A safety-capabilities tradeoff is when you have something like a dial on your AGI, and one end of the dial says “more safe but less capable”, and the other end of the dial says “less safe but more capable”.
Make no mistake: **safety-capabilities tradeoff dials*... |
baf6ebcf-977c-4382-9329-c1539e5ca532 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Which Parts Are "Me"?
Today's post, Which Parts Are "Me"? was originally published on 22 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> Everything you are, is inside your brain. But not everything inside your brain is you. You can draw mental separation lines, which can make you more reflective.
... |
3215349a-597a-4a06-8cd6-ab6c855ca0a9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Vim
Vim is a terminal-based editor optimized for speed. Keys are hotkeys by default. Vim does not even use Ctrl for most of them. Maneuvering via hotkeys is so efficient mouse input is often disabled by default.
This guide focuses on the features I use most frequently. It has nothing about with native Vim windows bec... |
fdcddb55-96e9-477f-87b8-a2b7f877140b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open thread, Nov. 21 - Nov. 27 - 2016
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, 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 before; refresh the... |
4f773680-fdcc-4d7d-97d3-147cd2256393 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Cult impressions of Less Wrong/Singularity Institute
If you type "less wrong c" or "singularity institute c" into Google, you'll find that people are searching for "less wrong cult" and "singularity institute cult" with some frequency. (EDIT: Please avoid testing this out, so Google doesn't autocomplete your search an... |
fd2c0064-8a51-4baf-b464-f77a5a4237fd | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Leave no Trace: Learning to Reset for Safe and Autonomous Reinforcement Learning
1 Introduction
---------------
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have the potential to automate acquisition of complex behaviors in a variety of real-world settings. Recent results have shown success on games (Mnih et al. ([2... |
5edef618-32d0-4ec0-99ad-7a95620caaf8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Effortless Technique
Today's post, Effortless Technique was originally published on 23 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> Things like the amount of effort put into a project, or the number of lines in a computer program, are positive things to maximize. But this is silly. Surely it is... |
1cdcacf4-c3da-4ef2-8775-e7f3544b99da | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | What failure looks like
The stereotyped image of AI catastrophe is a powerful, malicious AI system that takes its creators by surprise and quickly achieves a decisive advantage over the rest of humanity.
I think this is probably not what failure will look like, and I want to try to paint a more realistic picture. I’l... |
32520f86-415d-4ffa-81b9-73f1fa8dd36a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Crises Don't Need Your Software
About a month ago, I was invited to contribute to a group looking to help Ukrainian refugees in Poland. The group consisted of volunteers, including some people from the rationalist community, who knew they wanted to help, and were searching for high impact ways to do so, likely through... |
c7bd7950-d0fd-4490-8fe8-5d6090cfa542 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | LCA: Loss Change Allocation for Neural Network Training
1 Introduction
---------------
In the common stochastic gradient descent (SGD) training setup, a parameterized model is iteratively updated using gradients computed from mini-batches of data chosen from some training set.
Unfortunately, our view into the high-... |
6f5453d6-a40c-4529-8a23-f4ec4d643908 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Akrasic Reasoning
This post is in a constant state of revision, similar to this post. This is mainly because I do not have a beta and this is based on many personal experiences that are unclear at times.
This subject has been touched on many times throughout LessWrong because Akrasia is the most dangerous foe of a... |
b6b9a911-de5a-4fb9-8a1c-6f21d17b8163 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The ground of optimization
This work was supported by OAK, a monastic community in the Berkeley hills. This document could not have been written without the daily love of living in this beautiful community. The work involved in writing this cannot be separated from the sitting, chanting, cooking, cleaning, crying, cor... |
70d988da-0a2a-4b0b-9766-ca331ee9e6e1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Home Economics
As I inventoried my personal library and classified it using the Universal Decimal System, I found out about lots of fields of knowledge I was only dimly aware of or didn't even know existed1, and one of those that piqued my curiosity was home economics, domestic science and housekeeping (field 64). I w... |
a2e99a2b-1e4f-4468-a607-f4bf9ac68380 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Problem with Giving Advice
Epistemic Status: I'm highly confident this is a phenomenon that occurs with a lot of advice people give, but I'm quite uncertain about the best way to deal with it when trying to give advice to more than one person.
The main thing people fail to consider when giving advice is that s... |
1a31e86e-907a-48bb-afee-fe62c7d347f6 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | AI Timelines
Introduction
============
How many years will pass before transformative AI is built? Three people who have thought about this question a lot are Ajeya Cotra from [Open Philanthropy](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/), Daniel Kokotajlo from [OpenAI](https://openai.com/) and Ege Erdil from [Epoch](https:/... |
e13bd59f-1cbe-4943-a75c-f8a3d1c5546d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Defender’s Advantage of Interpretability
TL;DR: In this post, I want to argue why Interpretability & Transparency tools have a defender’s advantage if they are used correctly, i.e. they improve alignment much more than new capabilities and therefore mitigate risks of dual use. I draw parallels from biosecurity res... |
2b8dd3e3-d35e-43ca-9d50-f7a37bdb5c9c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Does the existence of shared human values imply alignment is "easy"?
Observation: Humans seem to actually care about each other. How was culture + evolution able to achieve this?
While not to 100% (Maybe 50-95%), I would trust most humans to not push a big red button that kills all humans, even if it had some large b... |
b2d20fb6-50a1-4ae7-9f2e-92c30181e976 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup report: How harmful is cannabis, and will you change your habits?
A week ago the meetup group in Berkeley discussed a new article in PNAS titled "Persistent cannabis users show neuropsychological decline from childhood to midlife". Several people who didn't attend said they were interested in how that conver... |
a1b654e0-c56f-4825-bf44-60a0aa65b3dc | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Verification and Transparency
Epistemic status: I’ve thought about this topic in general for a while, and recently spent half an hour thinking about it in a somewhat focussed way.
Verification and transparency are two kinds of things you can do to or with a software system. Verification is where you use a program to ... |
5df7b61a-266b-43d5-8e07-4ed838e7ec38 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | 200 COP in MI: Looking for Circuits in the Wild
*This is the third post in a sequence called 200 Concrete Open Problems in Mechanistic Interpretability.*[*Start here*](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/LbrPTJ4fmABEdEnLf/200-concrete-open-problems-in-mechanistic-interpretability)*, then read in any order. If you wan... |
a3529419-4820-42d8-b1da-46edfffe23db | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What does it take to defend the world against out-of-control AGIs?
Intended audience: People very familiar with AGI safety / alignment discourse. Lots of jargon, lots of unspoken & unjustified background assumptions.
Confidence level: What I currently believe and why. I mainly work on technical alignment and don’t co... |
1c8f1654-28ee-4ebe-b2b0-23ef89d93d6a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Postmortem to Petrov Day, 2020
The first underwater test of an atom bomb, in the US at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, July 24, 1946.
Also, the LessWrong.com Frontpage this Petrov Day.
We failed.
The Frontpage was taken down for 24 hours.
Launch Attempts
At 1:26 am, ~275 users got an email (and 20 minutes later a PM) ... |
b7dd3438-3057-4db0-acf3-d1000d03cb8c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Freaky unfairness
In Freaky Fairness the author discusses the problem of multi-player game theory problems where all players have access to each-other's source code. He gives an algorithm called Freaky Fairness, and makes the claim that 'all players run Freaky Fairness' is both a Strong Nash Equilibrium and a Pareto ... |
c94f69ab-64ad-4535-bbb1-dce33b9582f1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How "grifty" is the Foresight Institute? Are they making button soup?
rant / curious / fearful / would love information to establish chain of trust.
Recently received an email from the Foresight Institue. Sent me an application. Quickly accepted for an interview with their CEO. Didn't hear anything particularly valua... |
24413e48-660a-45b6-a8e3-ce816ef9aa92 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Paradox and pedagogy
When water freezes, it expands. Thus, my latest invention places a weight on a column of water, then freezes the water to lift the weight, doing work. By using a weight heavy enough that the work done is greater than the energy expenditure to freeze the water, I create a perpetual motion machine.
... |
ff689323-a9f5-464a-b6df-96068f029f90 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Content writing offer
We're looking to commission something like 10-20 articles on transfection for a website we're developing, whatistransfection.com. I'm interested in hearing from lesswrongers in biotech or who are grad students in the field looking for some freelance writing work. You can email me at drethelin@gma... |
dc067539-0838-4bc9-b9b2-3d99a77d9ca0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Sharing a Car
Last week I posted about how we were thinking of getting a car, but at least for now we've decided instead to share a car with one of our housemates. They have a Honda Fit, and while it is important to them to have a car, they don't use it very often.
We're planning on dividing costs in proportion to mi... |
ae815e9c-c849-4d5b-92c6-42ca372f6bd1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | July 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 the ol... |
ceaea0e3-2c15-43ef-aa92-f4fe3358a55d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | I like simplicity, but not THAT much
Followup to: L-zombies! (L-zombies?)
Reply to: Coscott's Preferences without Existence; Paul Christiano's comment on my l-zombies post
In my previous post, I introduced the idea of an "l-zombie", or logical philosophical zombie: A Turing machine that would simulate a conscious hum... |
1624657a-e85d-4ba5-9a26-1ce57d6e02fd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Cambridge, MA First Sunday Meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge, MA First Sunday Meetup
WHEN: 06 May 2012 02:00:00PM (-0400)
WHERE: 25 Ames St, Cambridge MA
Cambridge/Boston-area Less Wrong meetups on the first and third Sunday of every month, 2pm at the MIT Landau Building [25 Ames St, Bl... |
c3a19825-6560-4910-8e76-a0a105f4ee87 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Chinese scientists acknowledge xrisk & call for international regulatory body [Linkpost]
Some highlights from the article (bolding added):
Several Chinese academic attendees of the summit at Bletchley Park, England, which starts on Wednesday, have signed on to a statement that warns that advanced AI will pose an “ex... |
6a012cae-7986-40d2-9738-6f5fb0860ccc | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Request for feedback on a paper about (machine) ethics
I have written a paper on ethics with special concentration on machine ethics and formality with the following abstract:
Most ethical systems are formulated in a very intuitive, imprecise manner. Therefore, they cannot be studied mathematically. In particular, th... |
efb8f7e2-b0fa-494f-94f4-865d59d5235d | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Call for Cruxes by Rhyme, a Longtermist History Consultancy
*(I'm looking to research historical examples with implications for AI Risk specifically. If you want think this could be useful to you, consider filling out this* [*form*]( https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf52N_Mdq5ThmPiLyOEAgQCCAyma39vMGCZs3VVri724... |
3bb606a9-4d03-40cd-b443-a3e112048047 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Illness anxiety disorder: how to become more rational?
Disclaimer: When I think about dying I mostly think about cancer (I don't know much about other diseases). In the following, I'll be refering to "cancer" to point at deadly diseases where early detection is crucial.
[Epistemic status: thinking out loud; trying to... |
2e10332f-172a-4c34-898f-a53190a4db4e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Proposal: Align Systems Earlier In Training
Unfortunately, if AGI arrives in anything like the current industrial and political landscape, then it is all but inevitable that whoever builds it will not be able to hold onto it for long. Between leaks and espionage, it will not be long before the model is public and anyo... |
c67a5d05-2438-4595-bd43-1c54bc557181 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Random utility function
A 'random utility function' is a utility function selected according to some simple probability measure over a logical space of formal, compact specifications of utility functions.
For example: suppose utility functions are specified by computer programs (e.g. a program that maps an output des... |
bf87ce21-895c-49b3-bd52-72acd56a8019 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Consider Taking Zinc Every Time You Travel
Edit (November 2022): comments raised some probably valid concerns about my sources. I also don't currently believe it's possible to buy the kind of zinc lozenges studied; they're too unpleasant, what you buy in a drug store has been changed for palatability.
Zinc lozenges ar... |
6b57d894-64d3-40f9-b276-faae14d0e3c0 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Why all the fuss about recursive self-improvement?
*This article was outlined by Nate Soares, inflated by Rob Bensinger, and then edited by Nate. Content warning: the tone of this post feels defensive to me. I don't generally enjoy writing in "defensive" mode, but I've had this argument thrice recently in surprising p... |
3661d151-0a4d-4afa-8fe7-535d8fe9ca15 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Why Do People Think Humans Are Stupid?
Introduction
============
On more than one occasion, I've seen the following comparisons used to describe how a superintelligence might relate to/perceive humans:
* Humans to ants
* Humans to earthworms
* And similar
More generally, people seem to believe that humans are *incr... |
cd501fd1-0160-47be-a88a-11d2d3c09d8d | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Discovery of Options via Meta-Learned Subgoals
1 Introduction
---------------
Reinforcement learning (RL) problems involve
learning about temporally-extended actions at multiple time scales. In RL, the *options* framework (Sutton et al., [1999](#bib.bib26 "Between mdps and semi-mdps: a framework for temporal abstra... |
fe319f49-29e1-45f2-8640-00db97b7aaff | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | [Link Post: New York Times] White House Unveils Initiatives to Reduce Risks of A.I.
*This is a linkpost for* [*https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/04/technology/us-ai-research-regulation.html*](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/04/technology/us-ai-research-regulation.html)
> The White House on Thursday announced its first... |
72a267d3-44be-4955-b460-28de53bda138 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Pascal's mugging in reward learning
This is the last post on the current value/reward learning series. I'll just bring up the danger of Pascal's mugging in reward learning.
I've already shown how you can use the (p, R) model (with R a reward and p a planning algorithm, called a planner) to model AI actions "over... |
6bb5f29f-f666-4b94-bf17-66cadacef88b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Weekly LW Meetups
This summary was posted to LW main on February 21st. The following week's summary is here.
Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:
* Atlanta Lesswrong Meetup: How to Increase Your Brainpower: 23 February 2014 07:00PM
* Bratislava Meetup X.: 24 February 2014 06:00PM
* [Canbe... |
401aa9f9-10e8-4810-8966-33b90c6c8527 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Reply to Eliezer on Biological Anchors
The "biological anchors" method for forecasting transformative AI is the biggest non-trust-based input into my thinking about likely timelines for transformative AI. While I'm sympathetic to parts of Eliezer Yudkowsky's recent post on it, I overall disagree with the post, and thi... |
0b15a29a-2e02-4766-94b0-74f8c8aca180 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Project Intro: Selection Theorems for Modularity
Introduction - what is modularity, and why should we care?
==========================================================
It’s a well-established meme that evolution is a blind idiotic process, that has often resulted in design choices that no sane systems designer would ... |
1928f861-da74-4f88-b82e-a570e88b1b36 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Introspective Bayes
An attempt to demonstrate a limiting condition of an optimal Bayesian agent, or a probabilistic agent in general.
This analysis relies on the description of such an optimal Bayesian agent (hereafter OBA), in Bostrom 2014, Boxes one and ten, and associated endnotes, with supplementary research on K... |
3f86cf45-81db-4b86-bf49-35132b416d0a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Eliezer's Lost Alignment Articles / The Arbital Sequence
Note: this is a static copy of this wiki page. We are also publishing it as a post to ensure visibility.
Circa 2015-2017, a lot of high quality content was written on Arbital by Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nate Soares, Paul Christiano, and others. Perhaps because the pl... |
d2558ebb-c963-4bd9-9148-f3b8bd0e83ed | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Believing in magic pyramids shows that you think differently
Believing in magic pyramids shows that you think differently
https://www.tomdekan.com/think-differently
Last week I moved to Bonn. My new landlord, Jenno, had left lots of his stuff in the house. Because of this, I spent my first night sleeping next to a la... |
4e579b4a-2220-4c3c-ac9d-481ed8c24d1d | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | The gloves are off, the pants are on
*A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. - [Winston Churchill](https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/winston_churchill_103564)*
*(...[Not really, though](https://professorbuzzkill.com/twain-lie-travels/))*
I collect links that are... |
f78897de-1f53-4c63-915b-fa7f77530820 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Rolf Nelson's "The Rational Entrepreneur"
New blog up by longtime OB/LWer Rolf Nelson, "The Rational Entrepreneur" at rolfnelson.com. On "the overlap between entrepreneurship and the modern tools of rationality". Rolf will post daily through November, and after that it will depend on how much traction the blog gets.... |
3a842894-3e5f-4b2c-8f03-7bcc50fee8b1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open Thread With Experimental Feature: Reactions
This open thread introduces an experimental extension of LessWrong's voting system: reactions. Unlike votes, reactions are public; hovering over the reactions will show a list of users who reacted. For now, this feature is only for comments on this post in particular; a... |
0b9e8833-73a3-42e6-abab-25d45f271e42 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Covid 3/12: New CDC Guidelines Available
This post is a day late although not all that short, as I warned it might be. This is because I have spent the last week visiting the best place on Earth, my true home, which is New York City. I will return again soon, and soon after that I will once again be able to live there... |
18a82bef-7179-448b-96e0-e91e1ca05be7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Beautiful ugly websites
Early in my career, I heard the famous saying: Craigslist proves that function beats form.
The approach of focusing on a product's functions, rather than beautifying it has been *then* very pragmatic to me. I’ve always strived to make my work pretty. For years, function over form had seemed to... |
4b040056-5376-4a51-8c67-e47a70161cbb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : September Rationality Dojo - Fixed and Growth Mindset
Discussion article for the meetup : September Rationality Dojo - Fixed and Growth Mindset
WHEN: 07 September 2014 03:30:00PM (+1000)
WHERE: Ross House Association, 247-251 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
[ATTN: Please remember the new location for the dojos: t... |
97ab233b-9a46-4166-bd86-5c5e88c9a8df | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Roots of Progress is now a nonprofit organization
I’m excited to announce that The Roots of Progress is now a nonprofit organization.
The Roots of Progress started in 2017 as a side project, not much more than a blog. After Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison published their call for “progress studies”, and the prog... |
ad83ced8-5ec6-4d1c-a81e-4a9254078ac5 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Bounded complexity of solving ELK and its implications
This post was written for the SERI MATS program. I thank Evan Hubinger and Leo Gao for their mentorship in the program. Further thanks go to Simon Marshall and Leo Gao (again) for specific comments regarding the content of this post.
The Eliciting Latent Knowledg... |
0f125a72-609b-4898-83fb-9c181152d92c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Positive Bias Test (C++ program)
I've written a program which tests positive bias using Wason's procedure from "On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a conceptual task" (Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12: 129-140, 1960). If the user does not discover the correct rule, the program attempts to guess, ... |
afe4c255-75b9-49ae-a6c8-2be383ec91ce | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Trying to find the underlying structure of computational systems
This post was written in the SERI MATS program under John Wentworth.
In our quest to find steering mechanisms in computational systems, we first have to find the right framework to look at the internals of such a system. This framework should naturally ... |
38a57ac6-76f3-4208-be7f-ae6a7a8c3352 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Leveling IRL
I just got this random idea that people who want to become better at life could benefit from a common scale of "leveling". No, I don't mean vague Lesswrongey things like "changing your mind". I mean a set of concrete criteria like "you qualify for level 2 if you can do 5 pull-ups, have solved 30 Project E... |
e0d60ab4-6154-4d16-a719-11d47e12fc6e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Human consciousness as a tractable scientific problem
I encounter many intelligent people (not usually LWers, though) who say that despite our recent scientific advances, human consciousness remains a mystery and currently intractable to science. This is wrong. Empirically distinguishable theories of consciousness hav... |
ee39e74a-aae8-4287-876e-2323620bb942 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The default outcome for aligned AGI still looks pretty bad
Most of the AI-related discussions I've read from the LW/EA community have rightly focused on the challenges and strategies for aligning AI with the intentions of its creator. After all, if that problem remains unsolved, humanity will almost certainly go extin... |
7ada42fa-acee-4f2c-9c96-2fed72a6524a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Ask for Feelings not Tunes
In putting on a contra dance, it's standard for the caller to pick the dances and the band to pick the tunes. Since it's much more satisfying when the tune fits the dance, the band and caller confer briefly between each dance. For example, the caller might say they want something "smooth and... |
c73f17ad-1484-4921-b836-3dff04a05ffc | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Philosophy that can be "taken seriously by computer scientists"
I've long held CMU's philosophy department in high regard. One of their leading lights, Clark Glymour, recently published a short manifesto, which Brian Leiter summed up as saying that "the measure of value for philosophy departments is whether they are t... |
b52de458-562c-431e-b23b-2815a5a8f056 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | ARC paper: Formalizing the presumption of independence
*(I did not have anything to do with this paper and these are just my own takes.)*
The Alignment Research Center recently published their second report, [Formalizing the presumption of independence](https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.06738). While it's not explicitly abo... |
3f105e57-b529-42b5-baab-407b1899238e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Lafayette: traffic vessels
This week I’m in Lafayette, a town merely twenty-three minutes further from my San Franciscan office than my usual San Franciscan home, thanks to light rail. There are deer in the street and woods on the walk from the train to town.
On this occasion at least, Lafayette doesn’t feel properly... |
26e3ba9e-1066-4019-b1db-68165efd5739 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Argument by lexical overloading, or, Don't cut your wants with shoulds
I used the word "cut" in the title to mean the Prolog operator "cut", an operator which halts the evaluation of a statement in predicate logic.
Fiction writers often complain, "I keep procrastinating from writing," and, "Nobody reads what I write.... |
8e278485-74bb-4b9f-9bdf-fc4b5003aaf0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How To Change One's Mind
A look at the 1957 film "12 Angry Men" from the perspective of communicative and debate strategies. 5 part series, about an hour in total. |
318464ca-09fb-4f6a-8529-84d673635954 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Exploring the Landscape of Scientific Minds (Let my People Go)
(Originally posted at Secretum Secretorum)
I.
Consider the following regions in the landscape of possible minds:
(1) All possible human minds
(2) All human minds that have ever existed
(3) All human minds that currently exist
(4) All currently ... |
c27ff434-9dc9-4426-ae86-9becd989eb4d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Mike Darwin on Kurzweil, Techno-Optimism, and Delusional Stances on Cryonics
In a comment on his skeptical post about Ray Kurzweil, he writes,
> Unfortunately, [Kurzweil's] technological forecasting is naive, and I believe it will also prove erroneous (and in that, he is in excellent company). That would be of no con... |
14ddf0b9-b1d7-4aca-bcb5-deb4f52d6436 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : 02/12 London Meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : 02/12 London Meetup
WHEN: 02 December 2012 02:00:00PM (+0000)
WHERE: Holborn, London
A meetup in the Shakespeare's Head pub by Holborn tube station. Everyone is welcome.
There was talk of making these regular every-other-week events. If you'd like to... |
df8fa95b-2dcd-4ce7-822f-833618bab33e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | The current alignment plan, and how we might improve it | EAG Bay Area 23
I gave a talk at EAG SF where I tried to describe my current favorite plan for how to align transformatively powerful AI, and how I thought that this plan informs current research prioritization. I think this talk does a reasonable job of repres... |
b7468f6d-656b-427a-8e8a-565044571b6b | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Practical Reasoning with Norms for Autonomous Software Agents (Full Edition)
Practical Reasoning with Norms
for Autonomous Software Agents (Full Edition)
Zohreh Shamsa,1,, Marina De Vosa, Julian Padgeta,
Wamberto W. Vasconcelosb
aDepartment of Computer Science, University of Bath, UK (BA2 6AH)
bDepartment of Computin... |
b05bdf86-b63c-4d2f-9232-7a4593033057 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Morality as Parfitian-filtered Decision Theory?
Non-political follow-up to: Ungrateful Hitchhikers (offsite)
Related to: Prices or Bindings?, The True Prisoner's Dilemma
Summary: Situations like the Parfit's Hitchhiker problem select for a certain kind of mind: specifically, one that recognizes that an action ... |
58715d3b-0423-4298-b3c4-26194fe4d59c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Decision Theory in Space
"Since you are reluctant to provide us with the location of the Rebel base," said Grand Moff Tarkin, "I have chosen to test this station's destructive power on your home planet of Alderaan."
"No. Alderaan is peaceful. We have no weapons there. It is a loyal planet under Imperial control. Stri... |
0c4472c1-d793-4490-855e-3a86efb13d36 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Proposal for an AI Safety Prize
After reading Yudkowsky’s list of lethalities, I searched for some kind of prize out there that might be similar to what he suggests in his point #40, to motivate truly impactful AI safety work:
> “promising to pay big money retrospectively for good work to anyone who produces it.”
I ... |
7888ce16-f484-42cf-8dba-a88ea516fcf3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Optimizer's Curse and How to Beat It
The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often askew,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!
- Robert Burns (translated)
Consider the following question:
> A team of decision analysts has just presented the results of a complex analysis to the executiv... |
f8efb522-91ce-423b-9db3-a71a8dab1479 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Explicit and Implicit Communication
I write an essay every Thursday. Every so often, one seems to really resonate with people.
The piece I just wrote on the nature of explicit and implicit communication both got an enthusiastic reader response and seems directly relevant to a number of the projects and explorations p... |
3ce702cf-0447-4af8-9a7c-95926f409b02 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Attention-Sensitive Alerting
305
Attention-Sensitive Alerting
Eric Horvitz, Andy Jacobs, David Hovel
Microsoft Research
Redmond, Washington 98025
{horvitz,andyj ,davidhov }@microsoft.com
Abstract
We introduce utility-directed procedures for
mediating the flow of potentially distract
ing alerts and communicati... |
934c4a33-5cb4-4375-aa70-e9e0bc124c00 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AI companies aren't really using external evaluators
From my new blog: AI Lab Watch. All posts will be crossposted to LessWrong. Subscribe on Substack.
Many AI safety folks think that METR is close to the labs, with ongoing relationships that grant it access to models before they are deployed. This is incorrect. METR... |
799bd9cc-48a0-436f-9cc7-41597d8a2ebe | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Five Worlds Collide - Vienna
Discussion article for the meetup : Five Worlds Collide - Vienna
WHEN: 04 December 2015 08:00:00PM (+0200)
WHERE: Siebenbrunngengasse 44, 1050 Wien
Here is the always updated version of the event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1505431786437253/
Welcome to Five Worlds Collide... |
f2fa32e4-7721-4a35-90df-5c49283d87cb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Knightian Uncertainty: Bayesian Agents and the MMEU rule
Recently, I found myself in a conversation with someone advocating the use of Knightian uncertainty. We both agreed that there's no point in singling out some of your uncertainty as "special" unless you treat it differently.
I am under the impression that most ... |
00630cc9-9cbc-429f-926b-958ad52aab16 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | ESR's New Take on Qualia
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1192#more-1192
ADDED: Even if you disagree with ESR's take, and many will, this is the clearest definition I have seen on what qualia is. So it should present a useful starting point, even for those who strongly disagree, to argue from. |
b7d956aa-e5f3-4848-8086-dd756747930f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Optimal User-End Internet Security (Or, Rational Internet Browsing)
Hacking and Cracking, Internet security, Cypherpunk. I find these topics fascinating as well as completely over my head.
Yet, there are still some things that can be said to a layman, especially by the ever-poignant Russel Monroe:
https://www.xkcd.c... |
38f9afe6-ebb2-419f-9553-b7c121a9dacf | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Stakeholders in Explainable AI
Introduction
------------
Explainability in artificial intelligence (AI) is not a new problem, nor was it ever considered a solved problem. The issue first came to prominence during the ‘knowledge engineering era’ of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the focus was on building exper... |
27ce2cc4-8a07-479a-9499-bc574933dc6f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Learning the prior
Suppose that I have a dataset D of observed (x, y) pairs, and I’m interested in predicting the label y* for each point x* in some new set D*. Perhaps D is a set of forecasts from the last few years, and D* is a set of questions about the coming years that are important for planning.
The classic dee... |
3dbf7c00-d957-4cac-b351-c06561865f9b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The essay "Interstellar Communication Using Microbes: Implications for SETI" has implications for The Great Filter.
Apparently I can add body text to a link post, instead of having to give a TL;DR as a comment? Excellent. Here are some excerpts from the essay:
> Let us consider our own Sun as a case in point. At 1 AU... |
2800d4f7-6fe5-47e0-a1de-2bfd914bffba | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Baltimore Area / UMBC: Intro to LW and future of the meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area / UMBC: Intro to LW and future of the meetup
WHEN: 03 April 2016 03:00:00PM (-0400)
WHERE: Performing Arts and Humanities Bldg Room 456, 1000 Hilltop Cir, Baltimore, MD 21250
We have some new memb... |
f6a2332d-b39c-4ea6-a815-bb687b0e447e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | L’importanza delle IA come possibile minaccia per l’umanità
Traduzione di Google Translate: <https://www-vox-com.translate.goog/future-perfect/2018/12/21/18126576/ai-artificial-intelligence-machine-learning-safety-alignment?_x_tr_sl=en&_x_tr_tl=it&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp> |
42c9cd50-5f6c-4da1-b363-b3a1f43e321d | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Some reasons why a predictor wants to be a consequentialist
*Status: working notes*
Here's an exercise I've found very useful for intuition-building around alignment:
1. Propose a solution to the alignment problem.
2. Dig into the details until you understand why the proposal fails.
3. If there is an obvious fix, ... |
1d32e307-5100-42ca-adbf-db72425d1b8b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Neutral AI
Unfriendly AI has goal conflicts with us. Friendly AI (roughly speaking) shares our goals. How about an AI with no goals at all?
I'll call this "neutral AI". Cyc is a neutral AI. It has no goals, no motives, no desires; it is inert unless someone asks it a question. It then has a set of routines it us... |
b60ee39b-23e0-4f92-a3e6-57ded86b7b5d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Eutopia is Scary
Followup to: Why is the Future So Absurd?
"The big thing to remember about far-future cyberpunk is that it will be truly ultra-tech. The mind and body changes available to a 23rd-century Solid Citizen would probably amaze, disgust and frighten that 2050 netrunner!"
—GURPS Cyberpunk
Pick up... |
69ec27b8-6c7f-48d0-bc49-b37736359930 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Learning Deep Learning the EASY way, with Keras
|
f3b4ab6f-7f1c-4806-b53f-74d39e19f229 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | You Too Can See Suffering
|
94c025f4-116e-4b6a-bc24-3f0882c7f68e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Emotional Involvement
Today's post, Emotional Involvement was originally published on 06 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> Since the events in video games have no actual long-term consequences, playing a video game is not likely to be nearly as emotionally involving as much less drama... |
6eb66df1-4ddd-417e-841b-0e49fceb0afb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Perils of Professionalism
Professionalism is a useful trait to be able to display, but it isn’t an unalloyed good. This essay is attempting to outline why deliberately not signaling professionalism may be useful for you.
First, a definition by example for professionalism: Clean button down shirts with solid colou... |
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