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e3391ad0-6e11-4cb2-ae55-be736540ec31
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AI's Hidden Game: Understanding Strategic Deception in AI and Why It Matters for Our Future Note: This post summarizes my capstone project for the AI Safety, Ethics and Society course by the Centre of AI Safety. You can learn more about their amazing courses here and consider applying! Note: This post is for professi...
661ff120-5bd6-41f1-a648-15ee979d8754
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
LINK: Melting Arctic is releasing millions of tons of methane Only the first half of this page is devoted to stating facts; the latter half is a call for political action. The facts section states that the millions of tons of methane trapped in the Arctic ice are a factor not commonly taken into account in future clim...
d01c889e-99aa-41f6-9970-9bd1fc60cd6a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Cambridge Boston Alignment Initiative Summer Research Fellowship in AI Safety (Deadline: May 18) [Sharing here for anyone who may be interested]  "Cambridge Boston Alignment Initiative is excited to announce its full-time, paid, in-person Summer Research Fellowship in AI Safety. We’re selecting up to 15 fellows for a...
014347e8-918c-4e6d-ad62-f69451535b4f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
D&D.Sci 5E: Return of the League of Defenders Evaluation & Ruleset This is a follow-up to last week's D&D.Sci scenario: if you intend to play that, and haven't done so yet, you should do so now before spoiling yourself. There is a web interactive here you can use to test your answer, and generation code available her...
c0b4d16b-7781-49a0-a1d0-3045bbddce0a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The different types (not sizes!) of infinity In a recent conversation, a smart and mathy friend of mine revealed they didn't understand Cantor's diagonal argument. Further questionning revealed that she was using the wrong concept of infinity. I thought I'd pass on my explanations from there. What is infinity? Does o...
ed54e12a-5e5d-4ed2-83e9-89cbe16632e3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Why do Contemplative Practitioners Make so Many Metaphysical Claims? To paraphrase Culadasa: awakening is a set of special insights that lead to drastically reduced suffering. This seems straightforward enough, and might lead one to question, if this is the case, why the vast landscape of teachers and practitioners ma...
5069ead8-67c6-4077-8b07-218f1bc99eaf
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Rationality Reading Group: Part O: Lawful Truth This is part of a semi-monthly reading group on Eliezer Yudkowsky's ebook, Rationality: From AI to Zombies. For more information about the group, see the announcement post. ---------------------------------------- Welcome to the Rationality reading group. This fortnigh...
2277f38d-a45f-46b6-aa06-0150ed332708
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Mnestics Take your mnestic ---------------------------------------- Part IV In the web series "There is No Antimemetics Division" our heroes must fight a great evil, monsters that make you forget they exist. In the course of such adventures, they find it necessary to imbibe "mnestics" (the opposite of an amnesiac),...
e949d9d7-4349-4489-92c2-15346084d261
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[LINK] U.S. Views of Technology and the Future I just found this on slashdot: "U.S. Views of Technology and the Future - Science in the next 50 years" by the Pew Research Center > This report emerges from the Pew Research Center’s efforts to understand public attitudes about a variety of scientific and technological...
a4858fcd-f4c9-4c02-96a7-f5eb4ce18399
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
My take on Michael Littman on "The HCI of HAI" *This is independent research. To make it possible for me to continue writing posts like this, please consider* [*supporting me*](https://www.alexflint.io/donate.html)*.* *Many thanks to Professor Littman for reviewing a draft of this post.* --- Yesterday, at a se...
e4665750-481d-4024-b4ca-b3ebe2bad489
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Agents don't have to be aligned to help us achieve an indefinite pause. One restatement of "Alignment is very hard" is "Agent X, with IQ 200, expects to achieve zero utility conditional on any Agent Y with IQ 400 being created." Thus, during an unaligned recursive intelligence takeoff, there should be a period of tim...
21391181-2912-4445-afa5-41bf561afaee
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Could Roko's basilisk acausally bargain with a paperclip maximizer? The idea of Roko's basilisk is that it's a friendly AI that acausally blackmails humans into working on alignment. This was judged to not be effective because humans were too dumb to acausally bargain and there are acausal defenses to blackmail. How...
88d0f536-a53a-4e58-bce2-f1bcfd6e22b6
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info
AI Safety Info
What is a “treacherous turn”? [A treacherous turn](https://www.alignmentforum.org/tag/treacherous-turn) is an event where an advanced AI system which has been forced by its relative weakness to pretend to be aligned turns on humanity once it becomes [powerful enough](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/decisive...
41408326-7d2a-48c0-a40e-57d8be711817
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Effectiveness of Fever-Screening Will Decline COVID-19 Is Under Strong Selective Pressure Fever screening is the practice of checking the temperature of everyone passing through a checkpoint, such as at an airport or public gathering, for fever. This can be done individually with regular thermometers, or on entire cro...
c4c20ce5-cb7c-4691-ad0d-c0f29fe96821
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
the world is detailed Reality has an incredible amount of detail. You can't fit it all in your head. Think of all the things you could learn. All the professions you could spend a lifetime in. Let’s imagine that you’re a biologist. You could spend your whole life studying the sight of the honey-bee. Or perhaps the 18,...
e2284de9-6f78-4fe6-967d-8cc1249d4f71
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Self-censorship is probably bad for epistemology. Maybe we should figure out a way to avoid it? Imagine a place where speaking certain thoughts out loud is widely considered to be harmful. Not because they are lies, spam, threats, or insults, most people in most places can agree those are harmful. No, the thing that m...
9c3e6953-e697-42f9-a6a2-ce4f2b407364
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Benevolent Billionaire (a plagiarized problem) Hello, this is my first post, as far as I can remember (I may have been asleep). My news feed shows after a few years, new entries about the Sleeping Beauty problem, and this reminded me of this variation I wrote a few years ago. One-paragraph summary: this is a stor...
f6486b3d-de39-4417-b72d-8ca74d825a90
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
I asked my senator to slow AI All my favorite twitter accounts agree that AI capabilities are advancing too fast. ![Image](https://res.cloudinary.com/lesswrong-2-0/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/mirroredImages/tcBEh9ZtEWvoHNKZ4/zcryxraxo5s9xpktshy8)One way to slow down AI progress is to ask politicians for help. Polit...
466d0192-8322-445d-a4bb-346cdfc28047
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
CRISPR opens up new genetic engineering potential I've been hearing around the news about a new genetic engineering method called CRISPR. The method can purportedly edit any gene in a human genome (or other animal or bacterium genome) with very high accuracy. The new method may remove the risks associated with gene th...
9ac13bd1-dc9a-4fd7-b446-2b70bcbcf11a
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Measuring the intelligence of an idealized mechanical knowing agent 1 Introduction --------------- In formal epistemology, when we study the knowledge of knowing agents, we usually *idealize* their knowledge. We assume, for example, that if an agent knows A and knows A→B, then that agent knows B. We might assume th...
0d1145ad-dd74-4e8a-89e6-5041e0e4eb0a
LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct
LessWrong
"(Cross-posted to personal blog. Summarized in Alignment Newsletter #76. Thanks to Jan Leike and Tom Everitt for their helpful feedback on this post.)There are a few different classifications of safety problems, including the Specification, Robustness and Assurance (SRA) taxonomy and the Goodhart's Law taxonomy. In SRA...
bb01d307-93c2-486b-99b1-b73cc129e159
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Why are counterfactuals elusive? Produced as part of SERI MATS 3.0. Thanks to Vivek Hebbar and Paul Colognese for discussion. TL;DR (spoiler):  Behind the problem of human counterfactuals creeps the problem of understanding abstraction / ontology identification. ---------------------------------------- A nice theo...
5729aca5-4f3b-45ab-ae34-c89f8004be92
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Improvement Without Superstition When you make continuous, incremental improvements to something, one of two things can happen. You can improve it a lot, or you can fall into superstition. I'm not talking about black cats or broken mirrors, but rather humans becoming addicted to whichever steps were last seen to work,...
29b6fde7-6ce8-4e2d-b76c-21a10151d2df
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A Brief Review of Current and Near-Future Methods of Genetic Engineering Part 1: The Case for Human Genetic Engineering Part 2: The Case for Increasing Intelligence My Purpose in Writing This Post I've spent the last 6 months or so looking into the possibility of pursuing human genetic engineering as a means of imp...
f541b8e0-f539-4110-872f-e3bf1357b996
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Boston Meetup - New Location Discussion article for the meetup : Boston Meetup - New Location WHEN: 19 October 2014 03:30:37PM (-0400) WHERE: Harvard Science Center Room 109, 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge MA 02138 IMPORTANT LOCATION CHANGE! Rather than meeting at MIT or at the Citadel, we'll be meeting at Ha...
15214da6-f779-4f24-baf7-2d985c31405d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[link] One-question survey from Robin Hanson As many of you probably know, Robin Hanson is writing a book, and it will be geared toward a popular audience. He wants a term that encompasses both humans and AI, so he's soliciting your opinions on the matter. Here's the link: http://www.quicksurveys.com/tqsruntime.aspx?s...
af358d0b-e7dc-416f-9f04-76630f275364
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Things that want to be posts Epistemic Status: Attempting Epistemology Structural Status: Necessary but pretty probably terrible I was at an unconference this past weekend. One of the things that became clear to me was that I need to be writing again, and writing more, and that I was not doing that because I was afr...
1802f9ad-15df-42d0-89c2-a4f239b1e4b6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Actually Practicing and the 5 Second Level
8fe54fb4-4d95-439f-88b9-42eda5b3e605
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Hermione Granger and Newcomb's Paradox Omega hovered before Hermione Granger. Between them rested two boxes labelled "A" and "B". "Do the boxes have any special powers beyond modifying my Muggle bank balance?" Hermione asked. "No," Omega said. "Where do you get the money?" she asked. "What do you mean?" Omega said...
2e459b92-db6d-4786-a5ba-f9360cbb0386
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Walkthrough of 'Formalizing Convergent Instrumental Goals' ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, Introduction I found Formalizing Convergent Instrumental Goals (Benson-Tilsen and Soares) to be quite readable. I was surprised t...
c5af1471-10cf-47a2-811a-9711101d9be7
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
One Million Dollars On Giving Tuesday, Julia and I donated our millionth dollar to GiveWell's top charities and growing the Effective Altruism movement. It was more dramatic than you might have guessed, since we were trying to donate as close as possible to 8:00:00 to get the FB donation match. I remember when we w...
62034dcb-1ed0-47f9-a8aa-ea8556449137
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
But What's Your *New Alignment Insight,* out of a Future-Textbook Paragraph? This is something I've been thinking about a good amount while considering my model of Eliezer's model of alignment. After tweaking it a bunch, it sure looks like a messy retread of much of what Richard says here; I don't claim to assemble an...
ec15afd2-ae53-4a8b-b342-e117db11c010
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Tentative Thoughts on the Cost Effectiveness of the SENS Foundation Edit from fucking 2019: this is all obviously wrong, EA is a scam, do all your own analysis of everything if you want to have an impact It should be emphasized that back-of-the-envelope calculations, such as the one given in this post, ought to be ad...
09e1386f-2837-4bf6-b5b8-db2f1271c99c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Why Don't Creators Switch to their Own Platforms? Almost every content creator rationalists follow owns their platform: podcasters like Sam Harris and the Julia Galef, bloggers like Scott (and myself), all the nerdy webcomics. And yet, outside the rationalsphere every creator seems engaged in an endless fight against ...
c34b5e8e-07a2-4c11-a1c7-5a1d5c5e3a35
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube
Youtube Transcripts
Existential Risk, AI Safety & Interdisciplinary Research - Anders Sandberg traditionally academia has been done in very separate disciplines the deeper for the philosophy department did not talk to the economist and of course nobody would know the mathematicians because we couldn't understand them but mrs. of course a...
3b7b210b-c683-4365-af6e-108bae048a5d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What are the Limits on Computability? Question The halting problem and Rice's theorem (non-trivial semantic properties of algorithms are not decidable) seem to be problems of self-reference. Some self-referential properties of programs cannot be computed. And this seems to be true even for more powerful models of comp...
2cae057a-883e-404a-98fb-5cbb1bbb371e
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
What qualities does an AGI need to have to realize the risk of false vacuum, without hardcoding physics theories into it? For this question, let's assume the worst about the universe: 1. That a [false vacuum decay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum_decay) can be created, 2. False vacuum decay will destroy...
fdc45f26-76c6-438e-ae0c-48def019ff02
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Weighing reputational and moral consequences of leaving Russia or staying I've been thinking a lot about whether I should consider emigrating to another country (currently I'm in Russia). I'm not involved in politics or the military action, but I can't help but feel implicated by my government's actions as a citizen h...
e3300c59-4ccb-4981-841e-b5e98d0a43b9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[Link] Free TEDYouth Event in NYC for High School Students Taken from the TEDYouth event description page: > Held annually in New York City, TEDYouth is a day-long event for high school students that includes live speakers, hands-on activities, demonstrations and an opportunity for the youth attendees and speakers to...
b1509150-8fb2-49e8-811f-3946f44c30b8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
PaperclipGPT(-4) With GPT-4 out, I wanted to see how it would behave as PaperclipGPT. Here is our conversation, with notable parts highlighted. It gets more interesting later on. Some list formats (a, b, c...) didn't survive copy/paste - sorry. I do some leading of the AI - hopefully not enough to make this exercise m...
c579c862-2477-4c47-ac27-4e20f8465d51
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[Crosspost] Organizing a debate with experts and MPs to raise AI xrisk awareness: a possible blueprint Thanks to @Leon Lang  from University of Amsterdam for proposing this post and reviewing the draft. Any views expressed in this post are not necessarily his. We (Existential Risk Observatory) have organized a public...
1f494aeb-6b6d-468d-83f5-b1b556725e69
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Reward uncertainty In my [last post](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/4783ufKpx8xvLMPc6/human-ai-interaction), I argued that interaction between the human and the AI system was necessary in order for the AI system to “stay on track” as we encounter new and unforeseen changes to the environment. The most obvious im...
8ce003ad-94a2-4da2-8553-993652341e32
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Will vague "AI sentience" concerns do more for AI safety than anything else we might do? [Cross-posting from something I posted on Facebook.] Prediction 1 (high confidence): In 2022, many more people will freak out over vague concerns about AI "becoming sentient" than will freak out over the types of issues that AI s...
7791b307-47ce-457f-986b-d3d7f35553c0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Book Review: Cognitive Science (MIRI course list) I'm reviewing the books on the MIRI course list. After reading Heuristics and Biases I picked up Cognitive Science, by José Luis Bermúdez. It taught me a number of interesting things, but I strongly disliked it. Cognitive Science I recommend against reading this book...
316509fb-fd82-4b2b-8f76-145e930fb122
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Difference Between Prediction Markets and Debate (Argument) Maps Hello folks, first post on LessWrong, so I apologize if I am not familiar with the decorum of this community. However, I have observed there seems to be a bit of disagreement or uncertainty about the comparative utility of prediction markets and (or ...
e413a909-fb36-4598-a9b3-50b95bb26cba
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[SEQ RERUN] You Provably Can't Trust Yourself Today's post, You Provably Can't Trust Yourself was originally published on 19 August 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):   > Lob's theorem provides, by analogy, a nice explanation for why you really can't trust yourself. Don't trust thoughts because you think them...
d879adb2-9fbc-4898-9e36-6dc354b53ade
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Our mental building blocks are more different than I thought I recently had a conversation with one of my best friends about her Aphantasia. In short, she can’t create mental images. When she thinks about the world, she thinks in text, relationships, sounds, and much more but never images. Even if she tries, it’s impo...
ac288b79-1be4-4815-8656-2fca3703e38c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Towards a Rigorous Model of Virtue-Signalling The concept of "virtue signalling" has been a bit polarizing. Some people find it seems to explain a lot of the world; others find its lack of precision makes it almost an empty insult against others' behavior. The model I'm about to propose doesn't capture everything peo...
d361476d-d3c7-45d2-b06d-ae0961a2e194
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Surviving Automation In The 21st Century - Part 1 This is another career article (series?), I’m, in part, writing this for myself, but I may as well publish it. I want to think through the kind of jobs and career choices I should take in order to hedge against and benefit from increased automation. Especially the kin...
1ecd0833-07fc-4fa0-b304-3fd4caeaff48
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How far along Metr's law can AI start automating or helping with alignment research? In METR: Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks found a Moore's law like trend relating (model release date) to (time needed for a human to do a task the model can do). Here is their rationale for plotting this. > Current fro...
9266eb35-8bfa-44c4-9f14-6ffea31948d0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Geometric Expectation A Suspicious Pattern There is a pattern that shows up in many of the toys we like to play with around here: the pattern of maximizing the expected logarithm. Nash bargaining is a method for aggregating preferences without a means to directly compare them. When Nash bargaining, you are maximi...
a7dec1b5-e48a-4561-b495-297f4f0fce5c
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
What should I ask Ezra Klein about AI policy proposals? Next week for the 80k Podcast I'm speaking with Ezra Klein (here our [first interview](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ezra-klein-journalism-most-important-topics/)). The topic is what we should do about AI — in particular governance and policy ideas. ...
e0f1f962-2513-4630-9d3f-c90a36920322
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
The idea that ChatGPT is simply “predicting” the next word is, at best, misleading *Cross-posted from* [*New Savanna*](https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2023/02/the-idea-that-chatgpt-is-simply.html)*.* But it may also be flat-out wrong. We’ll see when we get a better idea of how inference works in the underlying langu...
a0c898e0-86d9-4c7e-bd52-98646b2bfe91
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Humans are the universal economic bottleneck There's this idea in computer science wherein the maximum theoretical speedup that can be acquired with an arbitrary number of processors is related to the percentage of the program which can be parallelized. If we have two segments of code that take the same amount of time...
cf560a71-c2aa-4e9a-ac26-74dcf8a6d1b5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Ask LW: PredictionBook.com and logical uncertainty I like to make predictions about things like quantum mechanics and decision theory and cosmology and fun stuff like that. Can PredictionBook be used for this? If so, what should the guidelines be? Figured I'd make this a Discussion post so as to encourage the habit of...
b061b4c5-288b-4c52-b2a2-10aacacc69d0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
"Real AGI" I see "AGI" used for everything from existing LLMs to superintelligence, and massive resulting confusion and illusory disagreements. I finally thought of a term I like for what I mean by AGI. It's an acronym that's also somewhat intuitive without reading the definition: Reasoning, Reflective Entities with ...
ed877dbb-d263-40e2-afba-f860a1cca7c5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Request for suggestions: ageing and data-mining Imagine you had the following at your disposal: * A Ph.D. in a biological science, with a fair amount of reading and wet-lab work under your belt on the topic of aging and longevity (but in hindsight, nothing that turned out to leverage any real mechanistic insights in...
5d2ee86c-0230-49ce-82ff-235f316f8060
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Every Implementation of You is You: An Intuition Ladder I was recently arguing in /r/transhumanism on reddit about the viability of uploading/forking consciousness, and I realized I didn't have any method of assessing where someone's beliefs actually lay - where I might need to move them from if I wanted to convince t...
bb645e11-2e08-42a0-b511-6f157d2b9186
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Book Club Update and Chapter 1 This post summarizes response to the Less Wrong Book Club and Study Group proposal, floats a tentative virtual meetup schedule, and offers some mechanisms for keeping up to date with the group's work. We end with summaries of Chapter 1. Statistics The proposal for a LW book club and st...
a29eb198-e0a6-4a0c-afcc-70ad71cc2bfa
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
A Walkthrough of A Mathematical Framework for Transformer Circuits A Mathematical Framework for Transformer Circuits is, in my opinion, the coolest paper I've ever had the privilege of working on. But it's also very long and dense and at times confusing, and this makes me sad! So I've run an experiment, where I record...
ea30a8f3-a2d7-4df5-b452-6e8b3485c20a
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs
Other
Bayesian Theory of Mind: Modeling Joint Belief-Desire Attribution Bayesian Theory of Mind: Modeling Joint Belief-Desire Attribution Chris L. Baker (clbaker@mit.edu) Rebecca R. Saxe (saxe@mit.edu) Joshua B. Tenenbaum (jbt@mit.edu) Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT Cambridge, MA 02139 Abstract We present a...
1b388d88-2ff9-433b-adf2-216d425957d7
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Salt Lake City UT — Open Possibilities and Improv Skills Discussion article for the meetup : Salt Lake City UT — Open Possibilities and Improv Skills WHEN: 09 March 2014 02:00:00PM (-0700) WHERE: Kafeneios Coffeehouse, 258 W 3300 S, Salt Lake City UT Less Wrong Meetup "Why should I come to this meetup?" y...
83b14fd6-7e59-45ca-840a-7374f8344430
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
What's in a Pause? An AI Moratorium of some sort has been discussed, but details matter - it’s not particularly meaningful to agree or disagree with a policy that has no details. A discussion requires concrete claims.  To start, I see three key questions, namely: 1. What does a moratorium include? 2. When and how wo...
949b5455-97f5-4f1b-9d37-5a360004f9d5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Blog Respectably The best way to learn how to write is to take classes. The best way to take classes is via a university degree. I earned my master's in blogging at the University of Pens. Besides teaching you how to write, a university provides necessary credentials. You wouldn't be reading this post if I weren't fo...
f7d8b30b-45f7-4c30-b0ed-f7c160650f1a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : LW Cologne meetup Discussion article for the meetup : LW Cologne meetup WHEN: 23 January 2016 05:00:00PM (+0100) WHERE: Marienweg 43, 50858 Köln Next meetup is Jan 23rd 2016, Marienweg 43, 50858 Köln at 5 pm. If you want to attend and did not sign up in our Doodle please notify my via PM. Discussion arti...
2ddfc26b-c0d1-4863-a51c-50a15a16eef1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Have general decomposers been formalized? Hi, I'm working on a response to ML projects on IDA focusing on a specific decomposer, and I don't know if someone's formalized what a decomposer is in the general case. Intuitively, a system is a decomposer if it can take a thing and break it down into sub-things with a spe...
29b3a0af-e6e8-48a9-85b1-f008dbb1b968
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Dehumanisation *errors* In response to my post [contrasting value learning with anthropomorphisation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LkytHQSKbQFf6toW5/anthropomorphisation-vs-value-learning-type-1-vs-type-2), steve2152 brought up the fact that [dehumanisation can be seen as the opposite of anthropomorphisation](https...
8aef37b3-ce7e-403b-8ba0-e78ef59d2b85
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
IAPS: Mapping Technical Safety Research at AI Companies > As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become more advanced, concerns about large-scale risks from misuse or accidents have grown. This report analyzes the technical research into safe AI development being conducted by three leading AI companies: Anthropic, Go...
931b6a15-b132-437f-b4c8-3ff49982cd15
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Second-Order Rationality, System Rationality, and a feature suggestion for LessWrong Second-order rationality Definition By “second-order rationality” (and intelligence) I mean the study of rationally reasoning about other people’s rationality (and intelligence) in order to inform us about the world. This is oppose...
31b7313d-f8cd-42c1-88e4-49efbabe1e62
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Berlin Social Meetup Discussion article for the meetup : Berlin Social Meetup WHEN: 20 April 2013 07:30:00PM (+0200) WHERE: U Leinestr, 12049 Berlin, Germany Our next regular social meetup will be held on Saturday 20th April. We're meeting at John's place: If you're interested in coming, join our mailing l...
cfe8a318-d0f6-4be9-97c7-afb0229f7f5a
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Recommend HAIST resources for assessing the value of RLHF-related alignment research **Overview:** we're trying to form inside views about the value of alignment research related to RLHF. Recommend us reading material expressing relevant arguments. The [Harvard AI Safety Team](https://haist.ai/) (HAIST) is the AI saf...
81b56cc1-d691-40bc-99bb-3e8b93edd986
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Quote on Nate Silver, and how to think about probabilities From Ezra Klein: > If Mitt Romney wins on election day, it doesn’t mean Silver’s model was wrong. After all, the model has been fluctuating between giving Romney a 25 percent and 40 percent chance of winning the election. That’s a pretty good chance! If you t...
55ec2805-f6b5-41a6-ac29-2104daceb7ec
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Musk, Mars and x-risk Article on space.com > Elon Musk, the billionaire founder and CEO of the private spaceflight company SpaceX, wants to help establish a Mars colony of up to 80,000 people by ferrying explorers to the Red Planet for perhaps $500,000 a trip. Relevant Sagan quote: > (...) we've put all our eggs ...
220a8737-7a84-4d3a-bba5-286e686e9b6d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Politics Discussion Thread December 2012 I skipped October and November owing to election season, but opening back up: 1. Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.  2. Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in...
b17c7a59-139d-49ef-9ee0-8db1cb8887a5
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
Good depictions of speed mismatches between advanced AI systems and humans? Advanced AI systems can potentially perceive, decide, and act much faster than humans can -- perhaps many orders of magnitude faster. Given that we're used to intelligent agents all operating at about human speed, the effects of this 'speed mi...
ee8f8ae0-959a-4df0-abaa-ffd4f5b6493a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Kosher Hot Dogs If ever there were an industry that no one in their right mind would trust, it's hot dogs. First rule of hot dogs: you do not want to know what's in it. But in this unsavory industry, Hebrew National stands out. The slogan on the company's site summarizes their advantage well: > When your hot dog's ko...
78d51a2f-35b8-487a-bff2-dd0ccf33a552
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Bayesian analysis under threat in British courts This is an interesting article talking about the use of bayes in british courts and efforts to improve how statistics are used in court cases. Probably worth keeping an eye on. It might expose more people to bayes if it becomes common and thus portrayed in TV dramas.
b206dc15-fe63-46fd-95f5-b9e1fa351deb
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
A better analogy and example for teaching AI takeover: the ML Inferno *Epistemic Status: entirely speculative* *Note: this article was assisted by ChatGPT* A very common example given for AI takeover is [silently killing all humans with nanotech](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a-list-of...
2dc2532e-db18-4816-ba1a-c502ad2e95a0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Here, have a calmness video This is a bit of an unusual post. I have gotten the impression that a lot of people are kind of freaked out, either by AI or weird Bay Area social dynamics in general. I also think that a lot of freak-out reactions are driven at least as much by social contagion as any fact-based assessme...
79542e2e-5fac-4c66-9a5b-7e5040a17af6
LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct
LessWrong
"An early draft of publication #2 in the Open Problems in Friendly AI series is now available: Tiling Agents for Self-Modifying AI, and the Lobian Obstacle. ~20,000 words, aimed at mathematicians or the highly mathematically literate. The research reported on was conducted by Yudkowsky and Herreshoff, substantially ref...
b046ba80-7f3c-46da-a97e-878ef26dc3dc
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[SEQ RERUN] The Simple Math of Everything Today's post, The Simple Math of Everything was originally published on 17 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):   > It is enormously advantageous to know the basic mathematical equations at the base of a field. Understanding a few simple equations of evolutiona...
f89182db-e7c0-43ed-b09b-33c8cca36c2e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Scientist vs. philosopher on conceptual analysis In Less Wrong Rationality and Mainstream Philosophy, Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory, and Pluralistic Moral Reductionism, I suggested that traditional philosophical conceptual analysis often fails to be valuable. Neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran has recently made s...
a0f1d9a8-7f09-4505-b60a-bc661e5eb640
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Subscripts for Probabilities cross-posted from niplav.github.io Gwern has wondered about a use-case for subscripts in hypertext. While they have settled on a specific use-case, namely years for citations, I propose a different one: reporting explicit probabilities. Explicitely giving for probabilities in day-to-day ...
8645517a-3928-4a20-ba1b-8b2c4b9ccec7
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Will the AGIs be able to run the civilisation? Even an AGI "aligned" to a purpose which doesn't imply humanity's survival but does require the AGI itself to achieve difficult feats like transforming the entire Solar System into something computing as many digits of pi as possible would obviously still need to produce...
c5b7431a-f3ac-4ac9-9667-9302e0807290
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Discussion article for the meetup : WHEN: 10 May 2013 06:00:00PM (+0200) WHERE: Berkeley Discussion article for the meetup :
f4b49fce-e60a-4aad-a78a-e6f60c1b35d6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
If we get things right, AI could have huge benefits There is no contradiction between AI carrying huge potential risks, and it carrying huge potential upsides if we navigate the risks. Both are a consequence of the prospect of AI becoming extremely powerful. The benefits that human-aligned AGI could bring are a major...
90c977fc-4247-4bd8-8816-bfd01dd0c7e9
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Let's talk about "Convergent Rationality" **What this post is about:** I'm outlining some thoughts on what I've been calling "convergent rationality". I think this is an important core concept for AI-Xrisk, and probably a big crux for a lot of disagreements. **It's going to be hand-wavy!** It also ended up being a lot...
4f72b4a3-f1ad-432f-88cb-28e77a2cf2f0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Argument by Intellectual Ordeal There once was an extremely annoying child named Jacob. One time during recess, Jacob decided to take up the entire playground bench by lying down on it horizontally. A classmate came up to him and said something like: "You're taking up the whole bench! That's not fair!" Jacob responded...
dff937c4-e15e-4343-bb58-13922e613692
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Dubstep and algorithmic information theory I think this visualization by YouTube entity dubzophrenia is a decent introduction to some intuitions driving algorithmic information theory, at least for people who like dubstep: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwkcY8spx_g&feature=channel_video_title (Please watch in 720p; ...
29c00f12-9077-4485-b34b-4b01a3a9790f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AI #66: Oh to Be Less Online Tomorrow I will fly out to San Francisco, to spend Friday through Monday at the LessOnline conference at Lighthaven in Berkeley. If you are there, by all means say hello. If you are in the Bay generally and want to otherwise meet, especially on Monday, let me know that too and I will see i...
ad29579d-9a38-4bb6-a6be-e7ead6147cd4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Exploring Mild Behaviour in Embedded Agents Thanks to Tristan Cook, Emery Cooper, Nicolas Macé and Will Payne for discussions, advice, and comments. All views are my own. I think this post is best viewed as an effort to point at a potentially interesting research direction. The specific arguments I make centered arou...
7b78b217-1224-4c9d-b143-36c404771323
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A survey of tool use and workflows in alignment research TL;DR: We are building language model powered tools to augment alignment researchers and accelerate alignment progress. We could use your feedback on what tools would be most useful. We’ve created a short survey that can be filled out here. We are a team from t...
7839d905-5754-46ff-998b-6ee065437c1d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Seeking: more Sci Fi micro reviews I wrote a whole bunch of 2 sentence reviews of various Sci Fi books in an earlier post, but now I'm running out of books! I'd appreciate if people could add their own micro reviews here to give me more ideas for books to read.
2abb09e6-1bad-4f46-a261-3901923f35c6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Fauci’s Emails and the Lab Leak Hypothesis Introduction When trying to understand why the emails of Fauci might or might not be a big deal, most of the online sources I found look at individual emails while individual emails alone are not enough to understand what’s happening. After watching a video that points to the...
226ea687-797c-4907-9597-c2143e38f6ba
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Vote on values I. A problem I have heard pessimism lately about whether democracy can produce good decisions frequently enough to stop everything rapidly going to Hell. Primary concerns are that voters are ignorant and that voters are evil. Supposing voters are evil, arguably any good system of government should brin...
f1d8175d-0c8e-4d4e-a670-0104d2c4c87d
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Relative Behavioral Attributes: Filling the Gap between Symbolic Goal Specification and Reward Learning from Human Preferences 1 Introduction --------------- A central problem in building versatile autonomous agents is how to specify and customize agent behaviors. Two representative ways to specify tasks include ma...
47bca8e9-4d84-420d-8b30-adedaec5fc0f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Why do we care about agency for alignment? Many people believe that understanding "agency" is crucial for alignment, but as far as I know, there isn't a canonical list of reasons why we care about agency. Please describe any reasons why we might care about the concept of agency for understanding alignment below. If yo...
1b9a84d7-a458-4140-9218-27c13dff305d
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
James Miller on Unusual Incentives Facing AGI Companies ![rsz_11james-d-miller](https://intelligence.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/rsz_11james-d-miller.png)[James D. Miller](http://sophia.smith.edu/~jdmiller/resume.pdf) is an associate professor of economics at [Smith College](http://www.smith.edu/). He is the author...
e11c10f2-2c8e-4c0f-91ed-d31937224e5f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Comfort Zone Exploration Epistemic status: Mixed The concepts which inspired the CoZE unit (such as exposure therapy and the explore/exploit problem in probability) are generally well-researched and under- stood. However, our combination of these concepts with an outlook of curiosity and epistemic uncertainty has cha...
11fe89b3-f452-4660-849e-6dfca972b58e
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Don't accelerate problems you're trying to solve If one believes that unaligned AGI is a significant problem (>10% chance of leading to catastrophe), speeding up public progress towards AGI is obviously bad. Though it is obviously bad, there may be circumstances which require it. However, accelerating AGI should requ...