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9aacb35a-c6ee-4297-8962-ed9881bd5a18
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : LessWrong Sao Paulo monthly meetup Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong Sao Paulo monthly meetup WHEN: 08 November 2015 02:30:00PM (-0200) WHERE: IERFH, São Paulo, Brazil Newcomers are welcome. Address is available on demand. leohmarruda..at..gmail.com Discussion article for the meetup : LessWr...
2a25d641-2dd3-4388-a9ea-a405bf415725
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
East Coast Rationalist Megameetup 2018 NYC Secular Solstice this year will be on December 15. That weekend, from December 14 to 17, we'll be hosting a rationalist community gathering with accommodations for out-of-towners in the NYC area. If you'd like to join us, please register at rationalistmegameetup.com! The sta...
87347444-151b-4c1e-99de-2c880559fb70
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Main section vs. discussion section (The following may only apply to me. I mention it to see if anyone else has had the same issue). For a long time I have been only looking at the Discussion section and promoted main page articles. Just now on a whim I checked the non-promoted main page articles and found there were...
19d28ca9-9ae8-4e1a-99ee-e601c78cf191
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Writing Causal Models Like We Write Programs Clunc ----- We’ll start with a made-up programming language called Clunc. The distinguishing feature of clunc is that it combines classes and functions into a single type, called a clunc. It looks like this: ``` quad = Clunc { x = 4 constant = 3 linear ...
b0d132a4-51ba-4f59-b8d1-8f472bd42cfe
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AGI safety career advice People often ask me for career advice related to AGI safety. This post (now also translated into Spanish) summarizes the advice I most commonly give. I’ve split it into three sections: general mindset, alignment research and governance work. For each of the latter two, I start with high-level ...
fa4276b4-08cd-4a15-8d99-6a526d71bd19
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
The Mirror Chamber: A short story exploring the anthropic measure function and why it can matter *This story warrants and motivates the study of the hard problem of consciousness, presenting a plausible future scenario in which a notion of quantifiable anthropic measure as a property of an arrangement of matter **dema...
08c74f53-60ed-451b-bb8f-b1dd18c97a19
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Review of Doris, 'The Moral Psychology Handbook' (2010) The Moral Psychology Handbook (2010), edited by John Doris, is probably the best way to become familiar with the exciting interdisciplinary field of moral psychology. The chapters are written by philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists. A few of them are ...
c9f61193-3853-48a4-b63f-275627bf9540
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Useful starting code for interpretability Want to try your hand at neural network interpretability? A very nice way to get started is to find an existing Python notebook using one or more interpretability techniques, hopefully one written with beginners in mind. In a click or two you can make a copy of it, which you c...
3b0ee891-d252-48b8-9c2c-625b45b601cf
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
My Plan to Build Aligned Superintelligence 2ish months ago, I realized making sure superintelligent AI doesn’t kill everyone was the biggest problem period. I resolved to understand and maybe help solve the problem. A friend of mine who does alignment research said that, in order to clarify my thinking, I should sit d...
82be1d52-cc9d-4594-bb93-9b5e0edbe821
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Smart Sessions - Finally a (kinda) window-centric session manager This is a short post about some software functionality that I’ve long wanted, and a browser extension that does it well enough. I'm sharing in case anyone else has also been wanting the same thing. The dream There’s a simple piece of software that I’v...
ee6b9a86-ad47-40ed-a50d-0689f2cddf21
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
PortAudio M1 Latency I recently tried to get my whistle-controlled bass synthesizer working on my Mac, as a backup to my Raspberry Pi version. [1] It's written on top of PortAudio, a cross-platform audio library, so getting it to compile and run was mostly a matter of getting the library installed, which went quickly....
2ed710a4-b301-4234-ad62-b91c9f8e6fd2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Antropical Probabilities Are Fully Explained by Difference in Possible Outcomes This is the third post in my series on Anthropics. The previous one is Conservation of Expected Evidence and Random Sampling in Anthropics. The next one is Anthropical Paradoxes are Paradoxes of Probability Theory. Introduction In the p...
3ed4561d-f254-4d9d-820e-1c4ddd9dc536
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Resolving the unexpected hanging paradox The unexpected hanging paradox: The warden tells a prisoner on death row that he will be executed on some day in the following week (last possible day is Friday) at noon, and that he will be surprised when he gets hanged. The prisoner realizes that he will not be hanged on Frid...
271db48a-e1f2-42df-89ac-206768458fca
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
On “slack” in training (Section 1.5 of “Scheming AIs”) This is Section 1.5 of my report “Scheming AIs: Will AIs fake alignment during training in order to get power?”. There’s also a summary of the full report here (audio here). The summary covers most of the main points and technical terms, and I’m hoping that it wil...
25c7254f-999f-4ea3-8514-f649cf4b0b52
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
ChatGPT is surprisingly and uncanningly good at pretending to be sentient *Preface: This conversation was generated on the 3rd of December 2022. It is posted in full and not altered in any way. No cherry-picking was used, whether to my questions or to the AI's responses: all the the AI's responses are the first answer...
23100b45-16f8-4432-b5a4-61d90477442e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Organizations focused on the ethics and safety of future technologies katydee and myself have written an annotated, preliminary list of organizations focused on the ethics and safety of future technologies. Please suggest additions!
f57c0c8a-a7fa-45c1-aa77-d3e7409ca250
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[META] Building a rationalist communication system to avoid censorship The recent disappearance of Star Slate Codex made me realise that censorship is a real threat to the rationalist community. Not hard, government mandated censorship, but censorship in the form of online mobs prepared to harass and threaten those se...
0e304c46-0494-4fed-a36a-f1bda2f0a97f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Intentionally Raising the Sanity Waterline Hi all, I’m a social entrepreneur, professor, and aspiring rationalist. My project is Intentional Insights. This is a new nonprofit I co-founded with my wife and other fellow aspiring rationalists in the Columbus, OH Less Wrong meetup. The nonprofit emerged from our passion t...
56bea9c1-149b-43ac-8ca1-8aef2f65c52f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Offer: I'll match donations to the Against Malaria Foundation Giving money to effective charities is one of the ways we can have the biggest positive impact in the world. If you've been thinking about giving to GiveWell's top-rated charity, the Against Malaria Foundation, but haven't gotten around to it, perhaps this ...
842a9e96-0963-4cf2-a087-021dbd1eb5cf
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
When Giving People Money Doesn’t Help I’ve been thinking a bunch about this study (direct link) of CBT-style techniques used to try and get criminals onto a better life path in Liberia that showed what looks like spectacular results, curious if anyone wants to share thoughts. If it would replicate seems like it crosse...
201af9eb-604a-439d-93a8-d578bc564720
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[SEQ RERUN] The Tragedy of Group Selectionism Today's post, The Tragedy of Group Selectionism was originally published on 07 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):   > Describes a key case where some pre-1960s evolutionary biologists went wrong by anthropomorphizing evolution - in particular, Wynne-Edwar...
a8ffa491-b5f5-43b3-926a-14d816bcc9dc
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Catastrophic Risks from AI #4: Organizational Risks *This is the fourth post in a sequence of posts giving an* [*overview of catastrophic AI risks*](https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.12001)*.* 4 Organizational Risks ====================== In January 1986, tens of millions of people tuned in to watch the launch of the Chall...
3a26115d-44fe-4d0f-9b6f-4fec51a3dbfb
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Together We Know How to Achieve: An Epistemic Logic of Know-How 1 Introduction --------------- An agent a𝑎aitalic\_a comes to a fork in a road. There is a sign that says that one of the two roads leads to prosperity, another to death. The agent must take the fork, but she does not know which road leads where. Does...
22a7bb73-e5bc-4995-96e5-2288cfb5ed19
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[AN #128]: Prioritizing research on AI existential safety based on its application to governance demands Alignment Newsletter is a weekly publication with recent content relevant to AI alignment around the world. Find all Alignment Newsletter resources here. In particular, you can look through this spreadsheet of all ...
c353f3f8-8b90-41c1-b5d6-7ad5c0e6dacf
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What is our true life expectancy? I recently learned that when they talk about a life expectancy of eg. 80 years, it's assuming that the future looks similar to the past. But with exponential progress in technology, that doesn't seem like a good assumption. For example, according to Bostrom's survey (90% likelihood), ...
29d66452-4946-4f9b-b77a-116e956ab733
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Why didn't virologists run the studies necessary to determine which viruses are airborne? If virology would be a reasonable scientific field I would expect them to care about the road viruses use to infect humans and other animals. The experiment to determine whether or not a virus is airborne seems pretty straightfo...
6042e334-7f53-40f6-9276-2fa17bbe4040
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Practical post on 4 #ProRep methods (Proportional Representation) Context I have written a series of longer posts about voting theory: a general primer, single-winner pathologies, multi-winner method building blocks, and a longer, harder-to-read piece where I struggled through to a metric for multi-winner methods. I ...
3a3cbdf2-aa48-4154-bed0-fede56fb8d76
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Thoughts as open tabs I work better at night. At around midnight, I'm more prone to entering a state of relaxed focus, my mind making more lateral connections when reading or coming up with ideas that will likely have great positive impact on my personal life and work. This happens after a hard workout too, or after ...
149432c0-182c-46e3-a422-31f7663f27d6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Changing time zones Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/changing-time-zones/ With a few of my new organisation and time management prediction algorithms I have found that I can plan down to a few minutes accurately.  I noticed something today that surprised me. I wear two watches.  The history of this goes back mo...
8e36b812-3d13-4962-995c-9c597c70d840
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Rationalist Movies (Spoilers for the film Limitless) I just came back from the film Limitless. The movie contained a very interesting depiction of a character who gets an black market nootropic that works very well. It gives him perfect recall, perfect situational awareness, and the ability to figure out the best thin...
68712038-6e4a-4cbe-84e4-f75c696d34a4
awestover/filtering-for-misalignment
Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results
id: post444 New Anthropic model organisms research paper led by Carson Denison from the Alignment Stress-Testing Team demonstrating that large language models can generalize zero-shot from simple reward-hacks (sycophancy) to more complex reward tampering (subterfuge). Our results suggest that accidentally incentivizin...
f68373f6-6191-4894-94cc-aa74e0af8425
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Ideal Chess - drop chess perfected Chess is fairly well known, but there's also an entire world of chess variants, games that take the core ideas of chess and change either a few details or completely reimagine the game, either to improve the game, or just change the flavour of the game. There's even an entire website...
a44838b0-97ff-45c2-a0dc-9f79fee30666
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Asking Easy Questions: A User-Friendly Approach to Active Reward Learning 1 Introduction --------------- Before we deploy a robot, that robot must understand how we want it to behave. Consider a household robot tasked with picking up plates from the kitchen table: when reaching for these plates, how far should the ...
6ce5818d-fd45-4d88-b1fc-7836fed070b8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Figuring out what Alice wants, part II This post continues the analysis started in the previous post. Here I will present some examples of algorithms operating in certain environments, seeing how the model certain things, and using that to conclude facts about their preferences/goals/reward functions. I'll be looking...
7e3f17b2-45f7-471c-be5f-5fdf3d148879
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Official videos from the Singularity Summit Here.
aa9de683-bb5b-44a1-af25-4e7a2fb9b683
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
2013 in Review: Friendly AI Research This is the 4th part of my personal and qualitative [self-review of MIRI in 2013](http://intelligence.org/2013/12/20/2013-in-review-operations/), in which I review MIRI’s 2013 Friendly AI (FAI) research activities.[1](https://intelligence.org/2014/02/18/2013-in-friendly-ai-research...
0e22f9a5-da54-4944-aa01-bd6b782699b2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Jailbreak and Guard Aligned Language Models with Only Few In-Context Demonstrations Paper link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.06387.pdf Abstract:  > Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable success in various tasks, but concerns about their safety and the potential for generating malicious content have emerge...
91da864c-1797-45b5-bb63-77c15cec7053
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[Book] Interpretable Machine Learning: A Guide for Making Black Box Models Explainable This is a book by Christoph Molnar about interpretability. It covers a lot of traditional, non AI safety interpretability. Some recommendations for chapters to read are in an excerpt from our summary of it in the interpretability st...
716271e0-84cb-479f-b001-4a91c7350400
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Some reflections on the LW community after several months of active engagement There seems to be some folks who might derive useful insights from a third-party, and mostly neutral, perspective of how the community appears after an honest and sustained effort of engagement, someone who doesn't really place AI risk as t...
9c0b3033-e737-4a7a-b1f0-8f94f4015840
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube
Youtube Transcripts
AI Safety Reading Group (Session 39) hello and welcome to the 39th session of the AICC reading group and today we are going to talk about an article called politics with up streams of AI by Raymond Brenner I couldn't find a picture of Raymond brand on even though I'm sure it's quite a bit and but it's a writer and wri...
5e784b65-46a8-4826-a405-37c29ab59f39
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Unsupervised Risk Estimation Using Only Conditional Independence Structure 1 Introduction --------------- How can we assess the accuracy of a model when the test distribution is very different than the training distribution? To address this question, we study the problem of *unsupervised risk estimation* (Donmez et...
9c946130-c6ef-41c4-8533-0346fbf72147
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs
Other
The new weapons of mass destruction? 40 Februar y 2018 The Security Times The Security Times February 2018 41 SECURITY BRIEFS SECURITY BRIEFS Conventional warfare tactics, traditionally maintained through rifles and tanks, artillery, and fighter jets, is now centered on the rapid innovation and advancement of I...
ed9326c2-3ce7-452a-8fe3-1d6f0efa49ab
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube
Youtube Transcripts
Stanford Seminar - Emerging risks and opportunities from large language models, Tatsu Hashimoto all right so thanks all for coming uh today i want to talk about large language models the topic of of intense interest by by many faculty here um and i think i want to highlight some risks of being too excited about them b...
2d9d2347-b44d-4e46-a78c-28d994832d69
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Social and Governance Implications of Improved Data Efficiency 1. Introduction ---------------- How does the performance of an artificial intelligence (AI) system scale with more data, more computational resources, and better algorithms? In other words, what is the *AI production function*111We depart slightly from...
6d3a0723-b7f1-432a-9a87-a349f9a8a545
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
LessWrong gaming community Many of us express ourselves predominately through electronic games. As such, I feel that this aspect of our lives should be shared among our fellow gamers in the LessWrong community. Video games are a great way to reduce compartmentalization and learn real-world rationality skills. Indeed,...
a0e6a7a5-62b6-4bf0-bd07-d2876fd638c6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Personal agents Cross-posted from my blog. Motivation I believe that the most important factor in whether our AI future goes broadly well or poorly is whether people quickly develop effective AI-ready (and AI-enabled) institutions and networks[1]. In that, I agree with the recent Séb Krier's essay "Maintaining agenc...
f239a931-7258-43fb-a49d-757412f1c6c0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
On the Regulation of Perception Have you ever had one of those unexpected flashes of metacognition? It was towards the end of long, successful day. Around 9:30PM. I’d woken late so I’d be up a while longer, and was sort of lounging for a little while, sometimes reading a little, sometimes half-napping and dozing a b...
617ce5c3-6a28-449b-b313-47d875e4efe0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Lecturing congressmen on cognitive biases A new session of Iceland's parliament convened on Saturday, opening with a religious service as is traditional. For the last couple of years, a local humanist group has offered alternatives to the religious ceremony. On Saturday they had a psychologist give a lecture on cognit...
a6ab8bf8-ae23-4450-bcee-9251fd7669d2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : West LA Meetup: Democracy Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup: Democracy WHEN: 15 January 2014 07:00:00PM (-0800) WHERE: 10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064, USA How to get in: Go to the Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavillio...
e99ce1a6-9b98-4b57-a5b4-d7faafb97249
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
An exercise in really going through with it I'm re-posting a small bit of writing from my blog that was inspired by reading some recent discussions about cryonics on LW. I'm by no means a skillful fiction writer, but I found it emotionally rewarding to write this and really try to mentally simulate what it would be li...
712e63e1-2853-48d9-8505-403da502e7ee
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[Humor] In honor of our new overlord decision theory acronym FDT...
b944c2af-710b-40b1-8166-526a04673563
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AI timeline prediction data The data forming the background of my analysis of AI timeline predictions is now available online. Many thanks to Jonathan Wang and Brian Potter, who gathered the data, to Kaj Sotala, who analysed and categorised it, and to Luke Muehlhauser and the Singularity Institute, who commissioned an...
54ee1fd6-fea9-40eb-ad7b-2b20bafed27c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Fundamental Uncertainty: Chapter 2 - How do words get their meaning? N.B. This is a chapter in a book about truth and knowledge. It's a major revision to the version of this chapter in the first draft, so I'm publishing it again to get feedback on the completely new text, and have replaced the original version of the ...
66643a65-2e12-45f2-9cb2-23a38f75626e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
When would AGIs engage in conflict? Here we will look at two of the claims introduced in the previous post: AGIs might not avoid conflict that is costly by their lights (Capabilities aren’t Sufficient) and conflict that is costly by our lights might not be costly by the AGIs’ (Conflict isn’t Costly).  Explaining cos...
fe2315d6-4f50-45b9-9168-1f1048bac8df
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Dangers of Partial Knowledge of the Way: Failing in School I lost the Way, even when I didn't know what I was trying to follow, when I learned a Dangerous Truth about school.  This is a brief recounting of how I lost the Way, came back, and what I believe we can learn from this.  I hope you find it instructive. ...
85208f4e-a8f4-4d15-8171-4b85a7cecd4d
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Alignment proposals and complexity classes In the original “[AI safety via debate](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.00899.pdf)” paper, Geoffrey Irving et al. introduced the concept of analyzing different alignment proposals from the perspective of what complexity class they are able to access under optimal play. I think thi...
59a43b76-20e9-421b-bdf0-651a32cfc19b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Suspended Animation Inc. accused of incompetence I recently found something that may be of concern to some of the readers here. On her blog, Melody Maxim, former employee of Suspended Animation, provider of "standby services" for Cryonics Institute customers, describes several examples of gross incompetence in provid...
a01ae83f-5182-4db5-873a-91eb9c697be8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[SEQ RERUN] Mutual Information, and Density in Thingspace Today's post, Mutual Information, and Density in Thingspace was originally published on 23 February 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):   > You draw your boundary around a volume of space where there is no greater-than-usual density, meaning that the as...
43b41563-8403-41d4-8734-eae14d84992f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
META: Security Certificate Just a heads up to the developers, who I assume check the Discussion section frequently. Anyway, each time I load a page on LW (using Opera) I get a security certificate error from api.viglink.com.
5e1f5810-2b42-4b28-ae5b-2166e4e262d0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Instrumentality makes agents agenty You could describe the behavior of untuned GPT-like model[1] using a (peculiar) utility function. The fact that the loss function and training didn't explicitly involve a reward function doesn't mean a utility function can't represent what's learned, after all. Coming from the oppo...
2660111f-6fcb-4310-a682-a28feb0bbc59
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
On Generality What Is Generality? A general agent is one that will use its past observations in its attempts to reach its goals and failing that, will add chaos to its environment until something novel happens that can be added to its future tool set, it dies, or it resets its motivations to accept its new expanded pa...
68fa3381-0e09-4795-b5a3-8d9135d9321e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
"Where Am I?" by Daniel Dennett [”Where Am I?”](http://www.newbanner.com/SecHumSCM/WhereAmI.html) short story by [Daniel Dennett’s](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett) from his book Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (1978). A few people might already be familiar with it. The story is a...
8dcc7fab-cf6d-4982-94ec-20a7c57e8a53
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Singletons Rule OK **Reply to**:  [Total Tech Wars](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/11/total-tech-wars.html) How *does* one end up with a persistent disagreement between two rationalist-wannabes who are both aware of Aumann's Agreement Theorem and its implications? Such a case is likely to turn around two axes:...
d7733066-031f-40a6-83e9-41390624f54e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Lightning Talks Summary: A lightning talk series is a set of short talks given by attendees about things they’re interested in. Tags: One-off, medium Purpose: To get quick glimpses into what other people are working on, to share something cool you’ve learned lately, and to practice public speaking. Materials: A tim...
d8e9fba8-06c1-414e-ba35-f3086f38373e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Design thoughts for building a better kind of social space with many webs of trust Principles for building a better kind of social network with webs of trust Abstract Discussion of the unrealized potential of webs of trust as a decentralized institution for appointing moderators and curators. Webs of Trust seem to ...
f882192c-0913-41b8-bec0-fa20d890783f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Creating Environments to Design and Test Embedded Agents Creating a Proper Space to Design and Test Embedded Agents Introduction I was thinking about the embedded agency sequence again last week, and thought “It is very challenging to act and reason from within an automaton.” Making agents which live in automata and...
f97db1a3-4ebd-45d5-aabb-37d2038f2a9d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[SEQ RERUN] A Premature Word on AI Today's post, A Premature Word on AI was originally published on 31 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):   > A response to opinions expressed by Robin Hanson, Roger Schank, and others, and arguing against the notion that producing a friendly general artificial intelligence...
b36ea3c7-f578-4384-9811-9f7b921dfcf4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Revive Meetups? I moved to the DC area about a year ago, and now that case levels are extremely low and vaccinations have been readily available for months, I'd love to find a chance to meet up in person (I would've been happy to meet outside earlier, but it seems others didn't really feel the same). Happy to join any...
bde7a35d-3149-43d4-862f-a36d4d636ead
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Does bulemia work? I can't find any non-evasive answers to this question on the internet. Does it actually work or not? Can you just eat a bunch of food and throw it up afterwards and lose weight that way? Update/Note: I'm specifically asking if you can satiate yourself that way. I realize you will not receive the ca...
431deebc-f7a2-402d-b558-97edbe3d145a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Berkeley: Boardgames Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley: Boardgames WHEN: 05 December 2012 07:00:00PM (-0800) WHERE: Berkeley, CA There will be a meetup tonight at Zendo as usual. I will not be around but Alex Mennen will be hosting. This will be a boardgames meetup. Come hang out and play a game...
0a57046e-aac4-491c-a385-3a05a9f9769c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Scenario analysis: a parody Based on a idea from Nick Bostrom. Suit A: "Welcome to our futurology meeting extravaganza, where we are going to do a complete analysis of the future using... drumroll... Scenario analysis!" All: "All hail mighty scenario analysis!" Suit A: "So, what are the big risks in the future?" S...
7ea3ccb9-9e61-4733-a33f-58396a7ea9ea
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
non-scarce compute means moral patients might not get optimized out non-scarce compute means moral patients might not get optimized out ------------------------------------------------------------------- i tend to assume AI-borne [X-lines are overwhelmingly more likely than S-lines or U-lines](timeline-codes.html), ...
7b260c38-e599-42ca-a5f2-ec753713e763
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Improving the Effectiveness of Effective Altruism Outreach Disclaimer: This post is mainly relevant to those who are interested in Effective Altruism   Introduction As a Less Wronger and Effective Altruist who is skilled at marketing, education, and outreach, I think we can do a lot of good if we improve the effect...
de378c33-d87f-481d-8f40-cd0f9c275cd5
LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct
LessWrong
"The obvious answer is 'the sequences' but imo that is neither necessary nor sufficient. The Sequences are valuable but they are quite old at this point. They also run to over a million words (though Rationality AtZ is only ~600k). Here is a list of core skills and ideas: 1 - Rationality TechniquesIdeally, an experienc...
0746d6b8-a74b-45eb-b71e-228576521434
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
"Pivotal Acts" means something specific The term Pivotal Act was written up on Arbital in 2015. I only started hearing it discussed in 2020, and then it rapidly started seeing more traction when the MIRI 2021 Conversations were released. I think people mostly learned the word via context-clues, and never actually rea...
b3c048ed-fc13-44c3-b6e8-6d9a6f7b144b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
I am the very model of a self-recursive modeler I am the very model of a self-recursive modeler My consciousness encompasses itself in many meta layers To Russel’s paradox, I have the set of all the answers I cut the hair of all the non-self-barbering hairdressers I think about me thinking of my thoughts with regu...
eb00a1e8-74c6-40cc-acd2-fbe66849c650
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Complex Novelty From Greg Egan's Permutation City: >     The workshop abutted a warehouse full of table legs—one hundred and sixty-two thousand, three hundred and twenty-nine, so far.  Peer could imagine nothing more satisfying than reaching the two hundred thousand mark—although he knew it was likely that he'd chang...
c07bcec8-ed49-4714-b377-ed3fb011866c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Asking for help teaching a critical thinking class. I will soon be teaching a "critical thinking" class for undergraduates. Feel free to mentally replace "critical thinking" with "epistemic virtue". I would appreciate answers to any of these questions: What would you do if you only had one three hour class period to ...
e83dd0e5-d48f-4d43-8d7b-d8dd96adab5a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Atlanta Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta WHEN: 17 March 2012 06:30:00PM (-0400) WHERE: 2094 North Decatur Road, Decatur, GA 30033-5367 WHEN: 17 March 2012 06:30:00PM (-0500) WHERE: 2094 North Decatur Road, Decatur, GA 30033-5367 The next meetup will be Saturday, March 17th at 6:30pm at Chocolat...
77ad6469-bcd8-493d-86e3-41e8bdc10c72
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Persuasiveness vs Soundness Compare the following two arguments. 1. E. is described by the following axioms 2. Therefore under E. The square of the longest side of a  right angle triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the remaining two sides. 1. All men are mortal. 2. Socrates is a man. 3. Therefore Soc...
40d0ff06-215c-4a07-bc36-bf4628e68c3b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Dual use of artificial-intelligence-powered drug discovery H/T Aella. A company that made machine learning software for drug discovery, on hearing about the security concerns for these sorts of models, asked: "huh, I wonder how effective it would be?" and within 6 hours discovered not only one of the most potent know...
317af0a0-3813-4277-bcd5-cbfd3415c345
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Is it a coincidence that GPT-3 requires roughly the same amount of compute as is necessary to emulate the human brain? The amount of compute required to emulate the human brain depends on the level of detail we want to emulate.  Back in 2008, Sandberg and Bostrom proposed the following values: Level of emulation de...
ab76f120-1368-4aea-b36a-a0c808314502
LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct
LessWrong
"The efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) is the idea that there are no hundred-dollar bills lying on the sidewalk because someone smarter than you would have picked them up by now. The EMH is a good tool for most people. If you're smart enough then you should reverse this advice into "There are hundred-dollar bills lying...
ea49696f-431a-4474-9c59-c6b11249abc3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What Exactly Do We Mean By "Rationality"? In summary, the goal of this post is to start a discussion on the current meaning of 'rationality' as it is defined on less wrong. I am specifically trying to find out: 1. What people think of the current definition of 'rationality' on less wrong 2. What people think a bett...
d8a05fc4-eb8b-4f63-a3e7-51ec28496da4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Responses to apparent rationalist confusions about game / decision theory I’ve encountered various claims about how AIs would approach game theory and decision theory that seem pretty importantly mistaken. Some of these confusions probably aren’t that big a deal on their own, and I’m definitely not the first to point ...
8161a32e-a949-457f-8385-07259e0ffcda
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
"Life Experience" as a Conversation-Halter Sometimes in an argument, an older opponent might claim that perhaps as I grow older, my opinions will change, or that I'll come around on the topic.  Implicit in this claim is the assumption that age or quantity of experience is a proxy for legitimate authority.  In and of i...
6dac8dae-4bc5-4d04-a787-b6088f11a11a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Escaping Your Past Followup to: Sunk Cost Fallacy Related to: Rebelling Against Nature, Shut Up and Do the Impossible! (expanded from my comment) "The world is weary of the past— O might it die or rest at last!" — Percy Bysshe Shelley, from "Hellas" Probability theory and decision theory push us in opposite direct...
e0475088-520f-4d0e-a9c3-e0b20b09ba93
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[Preprint] Pretraining Language Models with Human Preferences Surprised no one posted about this from Anthropic, NYU and Uni of Sussex yet: * Instead of fine-tuning on human-preferences, they directly incorporate human feedback in the pre-training phase, conditioning the model on <good> or <bad> feedback tokens plac...
622b3743-cb4d-42d4-96df-07bd9059d0af
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Leveling up... I just figured out how to use the local banking system and I will be able for the first time to pay my rent from my actual salary received in this country (as opposed to savings from my previous life). Also I always hated shopping for groceries and now I can do it without much pain, because I've found a...
50d9332e-24b6-4fd2-81f2-a64553e5e278
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Announcing Web-TAISU, May 13-17 I am excited to announce Web-TAISU! May 13-17, 2020 I was going to run a Technical AI Safety Unconference (TAISU) at CEEALAR (formerly EA Hotel), Blackpool, UK. Then there was a pandemic. So instead there will be a Web-TAISU on the Internet. This is an unconference, which means that t...
410e9de2-6983-4e9b-90cc-a2b1d63a6673
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Against podcasts What is solitude? If you are alone in a forest reading a book, miles away from any other humans, is that solitude? No, it is not. Cal Newport's book Digital Minimalism is where I learned this. The key to solitude is being isolated from the output of other minds. When you're alone in the forest, ther...
68b19836-812e-465b-8bf1-c24943ea9f41
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Vegetarianism p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px} I've been somewhat surprised by the lack of m(any) threads on Less Wrong dealing with vegetarianism, either for or against. Is there some near-universally acc...
9928cab3-2ec3-4650-b82d-46936485e655
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
John Tooby on Coalitional Instincts
df92d998-6047-4e95-b6b0-1c6711b1cd73
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Best resources to learn philosophy of mind and AI? I would like to learn some of the philosophy of mind and AI. I wonder if anyone could point to some of the best resources on this topic. I am able to teach myself on the technical and programming side of LLMs, but I am kind of lost on the philosophy side.
30573db4-fd1a-413c-a386-afb0628b223f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Neural Correlates of Conscious Access Summary: Neuroimaging scans and EEG readings comparing nonconscious and conscious stimuli are compared, showing particular patterns in conscious processes. These findings are in line with predictions made by the Global Workspace Theory of consciousness, in which consciousness is c...
55d02ab0-eb9a-4489-8c0a-1577d37821b4
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Decision Theory but also Ghosts *Spoiler Warning:* [*The Sixth Sense (1999)*](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0167404/) *is a good movie. Watch it before reading this.*   A much smaller eva once heard of Descartes' *Cogito ergo sum* as being the pinnacle of skepticism, and disagreed. *"Why couldn't I doubt that? Maybe ...
052a0e02-239d-4446-9f9a-ed68759bc0de
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Narrative Theory. Part 4. Neural Darwinism if the problems are the same, it (evolution) often finds the same solution" - Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker Neural Darwinism, also known as the theory of neuronal group selection, is a theory that proposes that the development and organisation of the brain is simila...
cd4c3ad5-c9ba-4ff0-9048-726a7991bdaf
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Should there be just one western AGI project? Tom Davidson did the original thinking; Rose Hadshar helped with later thinking, structure and writing. Some plans for AI governance involve centralising western AGI development.[1] Would this actually be a good idea? We don’t think this question has been analysed in enou...
259a444b-35ee-4339-992f-d461e81490e6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The View from 30,000 Feet: Preface to the Second EleutherAI Retrospective Over a year and a half have passed since EleutherAI's last retrospective, and a great deal of things have changed. In the first year, what started off as a Discord server created by some TPU enthusiasts grew into a much larger and more vibrant c...
365baecb-0384-4efe-9534-4c61b4674acd
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Politics is way too meta ... i.e., it doesn't spend enough time arguing about object-level things. The way I'm using it in this post, "object-level" might include these kinds of things: * While serving as Secretary of State, did Hillary Clinton send classified information to an insecure email server? How large was ...