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a94df03b-049b-4302-86c9-b62126850e0e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Intro to brain-like-AGI safety] 2. “Learning from scratch” in the brain
(Last revised: October 2024. See changelog at the bottom.)
2.1 Post summary / Table of contents
Part of the “Intro to brain-like-AGI safety” post series.
Having introduced the “brain-like-AGI safety” problem in the previous post, the next 6 po... |
50926c95-7e84-4b27-9332-edcf20a146f2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Rationality Quotes 8
"Like a lot of people in the computer industry, Keith Malinowski had spent his whole life being the smartest person in the room, and like most of his fellows the experience left him with a rather high opinion of his opinions."
-- Rick Cook, The Wizardry Quested
"The fact that we can becom... |
57511447-0fcb-4a96-981f-e2430984e31e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Chinese room AI to survive the inescapable end of compute governance
This post looks at the problem of how to make a cap on AI intelligence enforceable, using something different from current ideas in compute governance (mandated limitations to computational power).
The idea I present is finding an AI technique/archi... |
4859f07b-5ebb-4ab2-a5ec-90deaa7ee23c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Morality is subjective preference, but it can be objectively wrong
People are often unwilling to think of ethics as their own preferences, rather than demands from something more transcendent. For instance it’s normal to claim that one really wants to make one choice, but it’s only ethical to make the other. My feelin... |
55fd6c0e-8070-4ecd-8546-84f0dbd71f34 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Screen-supported Portable Monitor
I broke my MacBook screen a few weeks ago and it didn't end up making sense to repair it. I was considering getting a new computer, but since I almost always use an external monitor maybe a portable external monitor would work?
I found a well reviewed 15.6" one for $130, capable of 1... |
2f671ae6-eef0-4a27-9d1c-b85b8d25e212 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | 2015 Less Wrong Study Hall census is open.
I forgot about it until after were were past the Hall's birthday, so the survey is late this year and won't run for as long. Nevertheless, for those of you that use the Less Wrong Study Hall, here is this year's census:
2015 LWSH Census and Survey
It will close on April 7th... |
a8c7a2b8-ceb8-4c10-b6e1-85cc04f6c41a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Consequentialist Formal Systems
This post describes a different (less agent-centric) way of looking at UDT-like decision theories that resolves some aspects of the long-standing technical problem of spurious moral arguments. It's only a half-baked idea, so there are currently a lot of loose ends.
On spurious argumen... |
bcf82e32-f5d7-4878-b161-470e359a9b9c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : San Antonio Meetup - Double Crux Game
Discussion article for the meetup : San Antonio Meetup - Double Crux Game
WHEN: 22 May 2016 02:00:00PM (-0500)
WHERE: 818 nw loop 410 78216
Meetup to discuss rationality and all things LessWrong at Earth Burger. Earth Burger is a claimed "Upbeat fast-food joint supplyi... |
9d63eca9-fc14-4c6f-a29a-567d7a966cd3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Explaining information theoretic vs thermodynamic entropy?
What is the best way to go about explaining the difference between these two different types of entropy? I can see the difference myself and give all sorts of intuitive reasons for how the concepts work and how they kind of relate. At the same time I can see w... |
a4a5c30e-968d-4bc5-a4de-cb12c31a0020 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Bounded agent
A bounded agent is the opposite of an [unbounded agent](https://arbital.com/p/unbounded_agent) and refers to agents that operate under realistic conditions and resource constraints. Bounded agents only have realistic amounts of computing power, RAM, and disk space (no more than fits into one Hubble volu... |
c0a68b5b-2d71-46a2-9e07-109c869b0f67 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Social prerequisites of rationality
Summary: it is a prerequisite that you think you are entitled to your own beliefs, your beliefs matter, you think your actions follow your own beliefs and not from commands issued by others, and your actions can make a difference, at the very least in your own life. This may correla... |
f298762e-b865-4878-b307-f84e3442f159 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Less Wrong link exchange
We've had similar threads before, but not for a while so I thought I'd make one.
Basic rules, share links that are relevant to Less Wrong areas of interest, but aren't worthy of their own post. Please include a brief description with the link. (My own contributions are below.) |
17263fde-8b57-403c-bbf1-218ea3003a50 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Let Your Mind Be Not Fixed
When I was a teenager, I knew my mind was not like adults.
Sure, I was like adults in a lot of ways. I believed things. I trusted things. I knew I was right sometimes.
But they didn't change their minds. I did about once a month!
Woe was me. How could I ever be as sure and confident as an... |
14798273-2401-4903-9fd3-c8aaa867770b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is anchoring a reliable cognitive bias?
Say you get a large group of people and split them into three groups. The first group gets this question:
> What is the length of the Mississippi river?
The second group gets these questions:
> Is the Mississippi river greater or less than 70 miles long?
>
> What is the len... |
22819fa6-b3f7-4b70-b8d6-9b86995911da | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Understanding new terms via etymology
----------------------------------------
* This is a quick snapshot showing how I come to understand unfamiliar, key terminology.
* If you're lucky enough to encounter confusion, then the process goes; Encounter an unfamiliar term, look at etymology of said term, encounter info... |
0603ffc9-42bf-4a44-bb87-dc2a3a687e75 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Abstraction As Symmetry and Other Thoughts
Epistemic status: slightly pruned brainstorming.
I've been reading John Wentworth's posts on the natural abstraction hypothesis recently, and wanted to add some of my own thoughts. These are very much "directions to look in" rather than completed research, but I wanted to sh... |
e3da45d7-96be-44fb-85bd-949da4057808 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Seeking Student Submissions: Edit Your Source Code Contest
At EA UC Berkeley, we’re launching an ongoing series of contests called the Artificial Intelligence Misalignment Solutions (AIMS) series. This third contest, [Edit Your Source Code](https://eaberkeley.com/edit-your-own-source-code), is an AI Safety sci-fi crea... |
23f799c7-579c-43a7-a7e6-532d136674ae | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | On Being Okay with the Truth
On January 11, 2007, I timidly whispered to myself: "There is no God."
And with that, all my Christian dreams and hopes and purposes and moral systems came crashing down.
I wrote a defiant email to the host of an atheist radio show I'd been listening to:
> I was coming from a lifetime h... |
49781ee1-3abd-4973-bb54-2bdc21d87e39 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Correlated decision making: a complete theory
The title of this post most probably deserves a cautious question mark at the end, but I'll go out on a limb and start sawing it behind me: I think I've got a framework that consistently solves correlated decision problems. That it is, those situation where different agent... |
7d96b29e-be0a-46f2-9c23-b43fb03a4966 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | References & Resources for LessWrong
A list of references and resources for LW
Updated: 2011-05-24
* F = Free
* E = Easy (adequate for a low educational background)
* M = Memetic Hazard (controversial ideas or works of fiction)
Summary
Do not flinch, most of LessWrong can be read and understood by people with a ... |
571db138-b381-400a-8526-3bdbc185e456 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Poetic Methods II: Rhyme as a Focusing Device
As promised in the previous instalment on meter, let’s explore rhyming from a methodological perspective.
The first difference between meter and rhyme lies in their opposite obviousness: the first one is subtle, requiring a learned and attuned ear; the second is so sonoro... |
5a0b1a0f-b653-4d90-8a73-94ab509cfcf9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Will humans build goal-directed agents?
In the previous post, I argued that simply knowing that an AI system is superintelligent does not imply that it must be goal-directed. However, there are many other arguments that suggest that AI systems will or should be goal-directed, which I will discuss in this post.
Note t... |
78a54407-07b8-42e9-8948-7f638565db26 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [AN #62] Are adversarial examples caused by real but imperceptible features?
Find all Alignment Newsletter resources here. In particular, you can sign up, or look through this spreadsheet of all summaries that have ever been in the newsletter. I'm always happy to hear feedback; you can send it to me by commenting on t... |
1e2377df-c2e8-42f1-ad4b-884921037081 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | A Critique of The Evidentialist's Wager
*This post critiques* [*The Evidentialist's Wager*](https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/MacAskill_et_al_Evidentialist_Wager.pdf) *by* [*William MacAskill*](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/wdmacaskill)*, Aron Vallinder, Carl Shulman,* [*Caspar Österheld*... |
871feafe-3844-4268-88a2-028aaf566c57 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | The Unified Theory of Normative Ethics
**Epistemic status:** Reframing of a trivial result, followed by a more controversial assertion.
**Summary:** For bounded agents acting in complex environments, using raw consequentialist reasoning for every moment-to-moment decision is prohibitively costly/time-inefficient. A r... |
6778894d-f83c-412f-8fee-90d3c4d03d3d | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Clarifying wireheading terminology
*See also:* [*Towards deconfusing wireheading and reward maximization,*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jP9cKxqwqk2qQ6HiM/towards-deconfusing-wireheading-and-reward-maximization) [Everett et al. (2019)](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.04734.pdf).
There are a few subtly different things ... |
9cb3e43f-6cc2-4c34-a5b8-ca38fc42aaa6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Weekly LW Meetups
This summary was posted to LW Main on January 30th. The following week's summary is here.
New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in:
* Czech's first Meetup Prague: 16 February 2015 06:00PM
Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:
* Bangalor... |
dd4a2c00-ea10-45d7-ac04-61e839f04983 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | 2020 Review: The Discussion Phase
LessWrong is currently doing a major review of 2020 — looking back at old posts and considering which of them have stood the test of time.
There are three phases:
* Preliminary Voting (completed)
* Discussion (ends Jan 11th)
* Final Voting (ends January 25th)
We're now in the Di... |
b41bb26a-f48a-4651-9b42-3d54593a447d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How evals might (or might not) prevent catastrophic risks from AI
Epistemic status: Trying to synthesize my thoughts as someone without any private information about evals. I expect this to be wrong in several ways, lacking detail, and missing a lot of context on specific things that AGI labs and independent teams ar... |
9f48e788-cde3-4da5-9a00-8162af455ecd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Pascal's Mugging for bounded utility functions
Followup to: Pascal's Mugging: Tiny probabilities of vast utilities; The Lifespan Dilemma
This is Pascal's Mugging: Someone comes to you and says, "Give me five dollars, and I'll use my powers from outside the matrix to grant you 4^^^^4 years of fun." And they're lying, ... |
af978835-7a79-4108-aa9a-6682467e6463 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Features and Adversaries in MemoryDT
Keywords: Mechanistic Interpretability, Adversarial Examples, GridWorlds, Activation Engineering
This is part 2 of A Mechanistic Interpretability Analysis of a GridWorld Agent Simulator
Links: Repository, Model/Training, Task.
Epistemic status: I think the basic results are pret... |
24a87451-5d8a-42af-8c4d-1dfc1fc08aac | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Steganography and the CycleGAN - alignment failure case study
*1. This is a (lightly edited) transcript of a lightning talk I gave during the* [*Virtual AI Safety Camp 2022*](https://aisafety.camp/)*. The original talk in video format can be found* [*here*](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1v-nfm6aAyGn3zGQbXc8sd2VJ6XEL... |
5df4e9b9-ad2e-42d9-b184-4e853dfe010a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Fiction] [Comic] Effective Altruism and Rationality meet at a Secular Solstice afterparty
(Both characters are fictional, loosely inspired by various traits from various real people. Be careful about combining kratom and alcohol.) |
988c271e-edce-4143-b45d-ee4321e7f0c4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Petrov Day Ritual: Coronavirus Edition
Ozy adapts the rationalist Petrov Day ritual for 2020. |
4c38e79e-c856-4eff-9392-8a3a118cd556 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Separate comments feeds for different post listings views?
(Inspired by discussions like this one, but also a thing that I’ve thought for a while would be a good idea.)
Currently, there’s a single “recent comments” feed, which includes comments posted to any post—frontpage, Meta, personal blogs, Alignment Forum… even... |
5a9343e2-86ff-459f-bb40-2ec9009e5d51 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Image GPT
My hot take:
Not too surprising to me, considering what GPT-3 could do. However there were some people (and some small probability mass remaining in myself) saying that even GPT-3 wasn't doing any sort of reasoning, didn't have any sort of substantial understanding of the world, etc. Well, this is another n... |
464537ba-4814-4b7c-bfdb-2ea80027d9d0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Simulators seminar sequence] #2 Semiotic physics - revamped
Update February 21st: After the initial publication of this article (January 3rd) we received a lot of feedback and several people pointed out that propositions 1 and 2 were incorrect as stated. That was unfortunate as it distracted from the broader argument... |
c51e0aa3-8dde-424f-b9d5-a221071be380 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Emotions = Reward Functions
... Or more specifically, a post on how, and why, to encode emotions to find out more about goals, rationality and safe alignment in general.
If one tries to naively fit reinforcement learning’s reward functions back onto the human mind, the closest equivalent one may find is emotions.... |
92b58d54-9b57-4b0a-977e-8c3fec13d77e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Regarding South Africa
The system prompt being modified by an unauthorized person in pursuit of a ham-fisted political point very important to Elon Musk once already doesn’t seem like coincidence. It happening twice looks rather worse than that.
A Funny Thing Happened on Twitter
In addition to having seemingly banne... |
85eea5fd-fd15-49b6-95ec-f4b59f4745af | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Three Approaches to "Friendliness"
I put "Friendliness" in quotes in the title, because I think what we really want, and what MIRI seems to be working towards, is closer to "optimality": create an AI that minimizes the expected amount of astronomical waste. In what follows I will continue to use "Friendly AI" to denot... |
ba40816f-1f96-4191-9ff9-841b57416739 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Religion, happiness, and Bayes
Religion apparently makes people happier. Is that evidence for the truth of religion, or against it?
(Of course, it matters which religion we're talking about, but let's just stick with theism generally.)
My initial inclination was to interpret this as evidence against theism, in the s... |
08613661-418f-49b4-ae78-18b939758575 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Request: Induction, Proof, Experimental mathematics
Suppose we made an algorithm capable of forming empirical conjectures for mathematics. How might such an algorithm discover the principle of mathematical proof?
I would like to see an article on the relevant philosophy and mathematical logic background for this ... |
dd0ec1b9-b3bf-432c-ac55-416fd7d8bb3b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Prediction: Astra Zeneca approval date
It's widely publicized that the Trump administration pressured the FDA to release the vaccines earlier by reducing our evidentiary standards in light of the thousands of daily deaths. While not fond of Trump generally, I heartily agree that the FDA should end its vaccine bans ear... |
302cbe3d-06d8-4ad2-b086-c906d378a746 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Transparent Society: A radical transformation that we should probably undergo
Edit (May, 2020): The purpose of this document is to examine the end, and ask whether it would be good or stable, the purpose is not to examine the means, to lay a path, or to tally the risks of trying. I don't know how clear that was. I... |
41e5bfd1-1b6c-4422-8687-15a05e3db8d7 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | NeurIPSorICML_bj9ne-by Vael Gates-date 20220324
# Interview with AI Researchers NeurIPSorICML\_bj9ne by Vael Gates
\*\*Interview with bj9ne, on 3/24/22\*\*
\[Note: This transcript has been less edited than other due to language barriers. The interviewee is also younger than typical interviewees.\]
\*\*0:00:00.0 Vae... |
ae95396b-a9a2-4c6d-aabb-a9a88387ca95 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How does an infovore manage information overload?
I am, and have been for most of my life, an information glutton. The internet has made my affliction worse by providing me with the equivalent of an unlimited buffet of both nutritious as well as junk food for my brain which never leaves my side. A fire hose of data ... |
f2a9291f-cbbe-4742-99ca-e2609c8b1c75 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | A new definition of "optimizer"
Here, I provide a new definition of "optimizer", as well as better explain a previous one I gave. I had [previously](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5BwADJo44dvLQ4csS/defining-optimizer) posted a definition, but I think the definition I gave was somewhat wrong. It also didn't help that ... |
21839716-5b11-4e9e-836b-cbec6af61cab | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | On False Dichotomies
Epistemic status; wild speculation, thought experiment, with potentially helpful personal benefits and emotional resonance.
Imagine you're an algorithm. Imagine that you know what it feels like to be an algorithm. Imagine that you are outputting the results of an algorithm, accumulating several d... |
732588c1-f5a1-49b0-bbd1-9acb0501b8b3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Great Empathy and Great Response Ability
As kids, long before our frontal lobes have finished developing, we’ve all had the instinct to tease. Just watch two toddlers interact, you can see the malicious glint in their eye as they discover that calling one of their peers a “poopy head” triggers a devastating emotional ... |
b0782e08-ddde-42b6-b7ee-04de137875ac | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Cooperation is optimal, with weaker agents too - tldr
It's a ‘superrational’ extension of the proven optimality of cooperation in game theory
+ Taking into account asymmetries of power
// Still AI risk is very real
Short version of an already skimmed 12min post
29min version here
---------------------------------... |
76fa665c-ebcb-4ce3-8c1d-b7cb0d6abbbe | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Murphy’s Quest Ch 8: False Pentachotomy
There’s a powerful spell employed by the leaders of my old world called the Dichotomy. It goes something like this:
1. Pick two unfortunate phenomena.
2. Make an Either/Or statement as if the two phenomena are mutually exclusive.
Famous examples include:
“Either the One Per... |
dc2654e5-68f0-492e-8923-5433148770c2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Notice when you stop reading right before you understand
Here is a bad habit I noticed in myself.
* I encounter something I want to learn about. For example, let's pick transformers.
* I scroll through the tweet/paper/article and get some sort of general gist. "Okay, there's positional encoding, and an encoder-de... |
ef449a5a-359d-4b8f-a982-0a15664a28a7 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Book Review: Reinforcement Learning by Sutton and Barto
*Note: I originally submitted this for the Slate Star Codex (RIP) book review contest, but given the current drama it probably won't happen for a while (if at all), so I decided to share this review with the LW community in the meantime.*
*Cross-posted on my blo... |
dca904c7-21d6-41db-9d52-2d3b095d41a9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Alignment Implications of LLM Successes: a Debate in One Act
Doomimir: Humanity has made no progress on the alignment problem. Not only do we have no clue how to align a powerful optimizer to our "true" values, we don't even know how to make AI "corrigible"—willing to let us correct it. Meanwhile, capabilities continu... |
ca89770b-5492-4821-9a08-0ad5338cff43 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Remind Physicalists They're Physicalists
Weisberg et al. (2008) presented subjects with two explanations for psychological phenomena (e.g. attentional blink). Some subjects got the regular explanation, and other subjects got the 'with neuroscience' explanation that included purposely irrelevant verbiage saying that "b... |
68f5c9f7-13dd-4208-b381-6652a229dc82 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | AI-Relevant Regulation: CERN
### Preface
This is the second post in a series exploring existing approaches to regulation that seem relevant for thinking about governing AI.
The goal of this series is to provide a brief overview of a type regulation or a regulatory body so others can understand how they work and glea... |
e8dda6fc-e517-444f-829d-af010941319c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Narrow AI Nanny:
Reaching Strategic Advantage via Narrow AI to Prevent Creation of the Dangerous Superintelligence
Abstract: As there are no currently obvious ways to create safe self-improving superintelligence, but its emergence is looming, we probably need temporary ways to prevent its creation. The only way to pr... |
ca85caf8-4006-43ac-bc15-314df3558505 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Safe Development of Hacker-AI Countermeasures – What if we are too late?
Hacker-AI is AI used in hacking. It is an advanced super-hacker tool (gaining sysadmin access in all IT devices), able to steal access credentials, crypto-keys, and any secret it needs. It could use every available feature on a device. It could a... |
6095da29-98f1-4397-a76f-7a4359fa212d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Blackmail, Nukes and the Prisoner's Dilemma
This example (and the whole method for modelling blackmail) are due to Eliezer. I have just recast them in my own words.
We join our friends, the Countess of Rectitude and Baron Chastity, in bed together. Having surmounted their recent difficulties (she paid him, by the way... |
89729ed7-441a-4396-ba2a-d21d2e59ffac | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Plausible Quantum Suicide
**DISCLAIMER: the idea described here stands or tenuous philosophysical ground and should generally *not* be considered worth the risk attempting because it may be wrong; in addition, this plan should *not* be utilized to retroactively justify depression-based suicide — retroactive justificat... |
5ef67e7d-b645-4a81-ad75-7d00a60af7a6 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Making Nanobots isn't a one-shot process, even for an artificial superintelligance
**Summary:** [Yudkowsky argues](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a-list-of-lethalities) that an unaligned AI will figure out a way to create self-replicating nanobots, and merely having internet access is ... |
a9eb4698-c23b-4deb-ad17-cfe39e3df643 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Goal retention discussion with Eliezer
Although I feel that Nick Bostrom’s new book “Superintelligence” is generally awesome and a well-needed milestone for the field, I do have one quibble: both he and Steve Omohundro appear to be more convinced than I am by the assumption that an AI will naturally tend to retain its... |
00bc62ef-64d7-4eac-9f2e-6467c33bd059 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Alignment Community Is Culturally Broken
Disclaimer: These are entirely my thoughts. I'm posting this before it's fully polished because it never will be.
Epistemic status: Moderately confident. Deliberately provocative title.
Apparently, the Bay Area rationalist community has a burnout problem. I have no idea ... |
11d18c99-2b02-4da6-8220-9f79bcf199c4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Book review: The Explanation of Ideology
Book review: The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structure and Social Systems, by Emmanuel Todd.
What features distinguish countries that embraced communism from countries that resisted?
Why did Islam spread rapidly for a century and a half, then see relatively few changes in... |
733f55e8-43e7-4cb0-91ef-cf3e4e520f32 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Critique of “Utility”
Note: I didn't write this essay, nor do I own the blog where it came from. The essay text is displayed below this line.
Economists and other social theorists often take the concept of utility for granted.
In theory, utility is a measure of value. I will denote the utility of X to Y as U(X, Y)... |
dc4efef0-29bc-48ac-aa68-5697ddc1830a | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Hiring engineers and researchers to help align GPT-3
My team at OpenAI, which works on aligning GPT-3, is hiring ML engineers and researchers. **Apply** [**here**](https://jobs.lever.co/openai/98599d5b-2d1d-4127-b9b5-708343c8730b) **for the ML engineer role and** [**here**](https://jobs.lever.co/openai/24bd9cf4-fe95-4... |
e6b80e88-82b4-411d-873c-ec27cf749773 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | New LW Meetup: São Paulo
This summary was posted to LW Main on June 12th. The following week's summary is here.
New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in:
* São Paulo, Brazil - Meetup at Base Sociedade Colaborativa: 27 June 2015 01:00PM
Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are... |
4299a9ac-94cb-4ad3-8533-7376a3577316 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | tabooing "AGI"
tabooing "AGI"
--------------
i've come to not be a fan of the term "Artificial General Intelligence", and i favor [tabooing](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBdvyyHLdxZSAMmoz/taboo-your-words) it in serious discussions.
we can't agree on what it even means; some think it's very remote from current ... |
16b13bbd-a175-4635-9414-63349506d6e1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How would you improve ChatGPT's filtering?
I am wondering how Less Wrong would improve ChatGPT's filtering? I'm reading through the comments on breaking OpenAI's filtering, and see plenty of analysis of the weaknesses of the safeguards. There's always the chance that some group could steal ChatGPT's source code and re... |
97ab4feb-f245-47f7-8eeb-5c8ca46dc6fd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Torchwood
I don't know if anyone on LW watches DoctorWho/Torchwood but the american Torchwood remake's first episode just came out and the premise is that everyone on earth loses the ability to die: S04 EP1 the "Day of Miracles"
Enjoy, the reason i added it to discussion was because of the whole never die concept and... |
b9d0cc7a-2905-496a-8d3e-d44ad52c0e97 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | Quantifying Independently Reproducible Machine Learning
P
eer review has been an integral part of scientific research for [more than 300 years](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/the-birth-of-modern-peer-review/). But even before peer review was introduced, reproducibility was a primary compone... |
4fb1714f-e8d3-41fe-a56c-f6a1f5343b7a | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Agency from a causal perspective
*Post 3 of*[*Towards Causal Foundations of Safe AGI*](https://www.alignmentforum.org/s/pcdHisDEGLbxrbSHD)*, preceded by*[*Post 1: Introduction*](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/3oQCY4he4zRzF6vQb/introduction-to-towards-causal-foundations-of-safe-agi) and [*Post 2: Causality*](http... |
180773dc-54c1-4400-babb-f4a316202226 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Thoughts on moral intuitions
The style in the following article is slightly different from most LW articles, due to the fact that I originally posted this on my blog. Some folks on #lesswrong liked it, so I thought it might be liked here as well.
----------------------------------------
Our moral reasoning is ultima... |
5a456eda-c26a-462a-92b4-3cf46a98539e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Stupidity and Dishonesty Explain Each Other Away
The explaining-away effect (or, collider bias; or, Berkson's paradox) is a statistical phenomenon in which statistically independent causes with a common effect become anticorrelated when conditioning on the effect.
In the language of d-separation, if you have a causal... |
8eea0ca7-ec00-4722-8353-7fb3da5d20ca | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Book review: Why we sleep
I read this book (by a sleep scientist called Matthew Walker) because I knew that it would tell me to sleep more, and I hoped it would cite enough scary statistics that I'd be likely to actually follow through. Well, it worked - I'm keeping a copy on my bedside table for the foreseeable futur... |
7a9398ff-21ac-4425-82d3-b92347955fba | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | 1. The challenge of unawareness for impartial altruist action guidance: Introduction
(This sequence assumes basic familiarity with longtermist cause prioritization concepts, though the issues I raise also apply to non-longtermist interventions.)
Are EA interventions net-positive from an impartial perspective — one th... |
2d209e83-8069-498a-b11e-243ed4cc4cf6 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube | Youtube Transcripts | AI Alignment and Our Momentous Imperative to Get It Right by Olle Häggström
[Applause]
i am
very very glad to be here uh thank you
for the kind invitation to speak to this
audience
and and for the kind introduction let me
see if i can find my slides very good
okay so
uh
i think some of you
uh saw this
paper that came ... |
e166b30b-ec26-41c8-a85a-4cb51f6483fa | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Notes on Justice (as a virtue)
This post examines the virtue of justice. I wrote this not as an expert, but as someone who wants to learn. I hope it will help people who want to know more about this virtue and how to nurture it.
Defining what justice is is a major topic of ethical and political philosophy. There is n... |
f8ab57be-5bc8-482d-965c-c057858b4e60 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The impossible problem of due process
I wrote this entire post in February of 2023, during the fallout from the TIME article. I didn't post it at the time for multiple reasons:
* because I had no desire to get involved in all that nonsense
* because I was horribly burned out from my own community conflict investiga... |
55b69392-5f76-41f4-8387-1dd687f5a60b | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | An attempt to understand the Complexity of Values
Let's pretend one day you find magic machine that could grant any lifestyle you asked it for. Professional golfer? Done. Star of *Pulp Fiction*? Say no more. Enlightened writer? Easy. Any lifestyle you wished to live could be yours upon demand.
But like with any magic... |
47095d87-832e-4d58-b7db-c23dc35c3943 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is "hidden complexity of wishes problem" solved?
Can the problem described in the hidden complexity of wishes (at least partially) be considered solved? I believe that current LLMs are perfectly capable of answering a question like "How do I save grandma from a burning house?" without suggesting any unexpected maximum... |
90d18a2e-ce21-4805-8bde-5de8eac62302 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AstralCodexTen and Rationality
Meetup Organisers’ Retreat —
Europe, Middle East, and Africa 2023
TL;DR: Retreat for EMEA meetup organisers, Summer 2023, apply here
Application deadline: 31ˢᵗ Oct 2022
Why a retreat?
We think we all benefit from having an international community of rationality and ACX meetup organ... |
fea01c6e-3597-4af2-ac64-f9d71c332034 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Golem
Anthony Ravenscroft writing on why it is important, in a relationship, to honestly communicate your grievances to the other person:
> If you don't present your gripes to the responsible party, you cannot humanly bury those complaints - it's just not possible to "forget" about something that has hurt or stun... |
0cee8127-61e7-4cc4-b7d5-3894fb4f6a74 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | The Unsatisfactorily Far Reach Of Property
The Unsatisfactorily Far Reach Of Property
------------------------------------------
i'm a fervent [intellectual](where-next-piracy.html) [property](cultural-and-memetic-hygiene.html) [abolitionist](cc_-1.html).
one of the reasons IP seems repulsively bad is that it give... |
05011be2-f589-4169-a2e5-999a0b09ed07 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is there any scientific evidence for benefits of meditation?
Are there good reasons for a typical reader of LessWrong to invest their time and effort into meditation practice? I'm going to do a literature review and will keep adding answers here but contributions from others are more than welcome. Some ground rules fo... |
ac60c139-0b85-4c70-bc38-25ae9518b91c | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube | Youtube Transcripts | AI Safety Gym - Computerphile
this episode has been brought to you by
fast hosts find out more about them
later so I wanted to talk about this
paper out of opening eye benchmarking
safe exploration in deep reinforcement
learning what comes with this there's a
blog post so I wanted to explain this
because when I saw th... |
e363d6c2-0791-4e97-91d4-1b64f132d101 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | why do trivial inconveniences matter?
[epistemic status: messy. probably approximately one of the major processes for task carrythrough failure.]
explorer: why do i care about trivial inconveniences? those sound, uh, trivial
speaker: well, most of the time, youre not gonna be thinking shit like this, youre just gonn... |
e1327ce3-785d-4b51-bb2f-390481ea5a30 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Idea Generation and Sifting
This post on Best Of A Great Lot is a part of a series on the subject of designing a new form of governance. Each piece aims to stand alone, but fits together on the Table of Contents.
Previous: A Sketch of Belocracy, Evaluation as Feedback Cycle. Next: The Belocrat.
Governance is, at its... |
f49296a6-b1de-42a2-ada5-9b0eb990d1fd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Falling fertility explanations and Israel
From Robin Hanson, via TheZvi:
> The following 8 social trends plausibly contribute to falling fertility:
> More gender equality - More equal gender norms, options, & expectations, have contributed to fewer women having kids.
> Higher parenting effort - Expectations for how... |
83ce2b16-7580-42db-82c1-d0b2ca703875 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | New Transcript: Yudkowsky and Aaronson
[](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JIqzTGNvdLukR0Ce5T2eiv_vxtPO53N3KGCbxVvREtU/pub)
In [When Will AI Be Created?](http://intelligence.org/2013/05/15/when-will-ai-be-created/), I re... |
a2ba2c73-16a7-4782-81b1-0b33cdd33235 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Stable agent, subagent-unstable
A putative new idea for AI control; index here.
A reflectively consistent agent is one that is ok with creating copies with the same motivation as itself, or continuing to have the same motivation under self-modification.
A reflectively stable agent is one that would only create agent... |
17e8978f-71df-4e97-af24-75a0b1e2749b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [draft] Concepts are Difficult, and Unfriendliness is the Default: A Scary Idea Summary
Here's my draft document Concepts are Difficult, and Unfriendliness is the Default. (Google Docs, commenting enabled.) Despite the name, it's still informal and would need a lot more references, but it could be written up to a prop... |
e40b68eb-b0ca-4e16-b395-690e741dc781 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | The Governance Problem and the "Pretty Good" X-Risk
*No longer endorsed.*
*Like a child suddenly given awesome strength, I could have pushed too hard, and left the world a broken toy I could never repair. —The Hero of Ages*
I hope we create superintelligence, and I hope it does what we want. But this would not suf... |
2ff6e116-0836-4fab-b183-aaaf92810c66 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Empowerment is (almost) All We Need
Intro
What/who would you like to become in a thousand subjective years? or a million?
Perhaps, like me, you wish to become posthuman: to transcend mortality and biology, to become a substrate independent mind, to wear new bodies like clothes, to grow more intelligent, wise, wealthy... |
a2b6fcea-a15b-48e9-81fd-1f51bcd2a0a1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Torture vs. Dust vs. the Presumptuous Philosopher: Anthropic Reasoning in UDT
In this post, I'd like to examine whether Updateless Decision Theory can provide any insights into anthropic reasoning. Puzzles/paradoxes in anthropic reasoning is what prompted me to consider UDT originally and this post may be of interest ... |
96fad431-fe96-47f7-9347-bb876d94f8d3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Jankily controlling superintelligence
When discussing AI control, we often talk about levels of AI capabilities where we think control can probably greatly lower risks and where we can probably estimate risks. However, I think it's plausible that an important application of control is modestly improving our odds of su... |
97d13c45-6c57-4f91-b18f-aa9fcdd791d6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Sean Carroll: Does the Universe Need God? [link]
Does the Universe Need God? (essay by Sean Carroll)
In this essay, Sean Carroll:
* Dissolves the problem of "creation from nothing":
> A provocative way of characterizing these beginning cosmologies is to say that "the universe was created from nothing." Much ... |
8f65a1e3-7c9f-4eb8-bed5-e529da46307a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A few remarks about mass-downvoting
To whoever has for the last several days been downvoting ~10 of my old comments per day:
It is possible that your intention is to discourage me from commenting on Less Wrong.
The actual effect is the reverse. My comments still end up positive on average, and I am therefore motivat... |
15d20021-022d-42e1-a07f-c79dbf15722c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How I Think About My Research Process: Explore, Understand, Distill
This is the first post in a sequence about how I think about and break down my research process. Post 2 is coming soon.
Thanks to Oli Clive-Griffin, Paul Bogdan, Shivam Raval and especially to Jemima Jones for help and feedback, and to my co-author G... |
1d172118-0361-41e0-878a-5886eefbbd18 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube | Youtube Transcripts | Nick Bostrom's Q&A on Existential risk and AI
no I want to do this as an interactive
Q&A so and it any question really that
you have the two to discuss with you I
guess I want to work them right now
which is this book on super intelligence
which will look not so much at the
person of whether or how long it might
take ... |
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