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fe671edc-6bf2-48e8-b8fa-c69795db23fc | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | You Don't Always Need Indexes
Sometimes you have a lot of data, and one approach to support quick searches is pre-processing it to build an index so a search can involve only looking at a small fraction of the total data. The threshold at which it's worth switching to indexing, though, might be higher than you'd guess... |
039ab7fe-aa25-4ae6-944a-7bed29c379d5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Social Technology
This is an excerpt from the draft of my upcoming book on great founder theory. It was originally published on SamoBurja.com. You can access the original here.
Although people are relatively aware of the material technology that powers their lives, they are less aware of the non-material technology... |
31bf1ab3-b185-4dc7-b020-629e8f213f28 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Humans Who Are Not Concentrating Are Not General Intelligences
Recently, OpenAI came out with a new language model that automatically synthesizes text, called GPT-2.
It’s disturbingly good. You can see some examples (cherry-picked, by their own admission) in OpenAI’s post and in the related technical paper.
I’m not... |
14d54d8e-a169-4fc6-a642-0e6cd14b7147 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Is interest in alignment worth mentioning for grad school applications?
I am right now in the process of applying for graduate degrees at some US unis e.g. at Stanford. The major motivation to do this is to set up for technical alignment work and have closer access to the EA bay area community (than I'd have here in E... |
3062a415-d5c0-4f23-b1c7-b9c6a24de838 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Bridging Offline Reinforcement Learning and Imitation Learning: A Tale of Pessimism
Bridging Offline Reinforcement Learning and Imitation Learning:
A Tale of Pessimism∗
Paria Rashidinejad†Banghua Zhu†Cong Ma⋄Jiantao Jiao†,‡Stuart Russell†
†Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, UC Berkeley
‡Depart... |
b146c7fc-d432-4bc3-ad59-9ded011ab407 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Mutable Levels Are Path-Dependent
Cyan and I had a good discussion (several, actually) on our long recent drive. Among diverse topics, he explained something that lead to a confusion-reducing revelation.
On meeting Eliezer, Cyan wished to engage him on Measure Theory. Cyan felt that it might be a useful tool for Elie... |
f5ef09f6-3904-4c05-8881-5b65d2a52956 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Testing The Natural Abstraction Hypothesis: Project Update
I set myself six months to focus primarily on [the Natural Abstraction Hypothesis project](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cy3BhHrGinZCp3LXE/testing-the-natural-abstraction-hypothesis-project-intro) before stopping to re-evaluate. It’s been about six months si... |
76f05f0e-23bb-46fe-a23b-c58777d8c46c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Cult of Error
Normal World
Errors are considered garbage here. That doesn't mean they don't exist here. It is just that it is customary to hide them, especially in a public space. Showing them is considered embarrassing to both the demonstrator and the audience.
People who make mistakes are considered fools. People ... |
cf8cca03-6ceb-4f1d-8cb9-bcd510fd6883 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Minor interpretability exploration #1: Grokking of modular addition, subtraction, multiplication, for different activation functions
Epistemic status: small exploration without previous predictions, results low-stakes and likely correct.
Edited to implement feedback by Gurkenglas which has unearthed unseen data. Than... |
0a65f68a-8a03-455b-932a-71a9236f186a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | For Limited Superintelligences, Epistemic Exclusion is Harder than Robustness to Logical Exploitation
AIs that are not sufficiently carefully designed will by default be exploited by distant superintelligences. This will de-align them with us.
To prevent this from happening to the very first limited ASIs we must buil... |
aa7bf5fc-9c4a-4926-ae1d-b03f6d156bbe | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | March 14/15th: Daily Coronavirus link updates
As part of the LessWrong Coronavirus Link Database, I am publishing a daily update post with all the new links we are adding each day that we ranked a 3 or above in our importance rankings. Here are all the top links we (Elizabeth, Ben and I) added over the weekend, by top... |
fb3e28c0-af1f-4d34-ba4e-59dbb6f4a92c | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Martin Hilbert on the world’s information capacity
[Martin Hilbert](http://www.martinhilbert.net) pursues a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the role of information, communication, and knowledge in the development... |
29e38466-0fd1-4d43-a23c-89f28d49cec2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Understanding Who You Really Are
> Here are 14 ways in which you reveal who you really are. If you’re brave enough, or if you dare, aim to share who you really are, little by little, everyday, with those you trust.
>
> - A typical 'Who You Really Are' article on Lifehack
Take a minute to consider the following quest... |
b60244ea-ac57-43cc-9087-8f60aa775c7a | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | Uncovering Surprising Behaviors in Reinforcement Learning via Worst-case Analysis
INTRODUCTION Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods have achieved great success over the past few years, achieving human-level performance on a range of tasks such as Atari (Mnih et al., 2015) , Go (Silver et al., 2016) , Labyrinth , and Ca... |
2ba04264-8e82-4ee2-a4bc-64c313df0927 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Calling My Second Family Dance
Yesterday I called my second family dance, which went pretty well! I've stopped calling regular contra dances because I don't enjoy it very much anymore, but these two have been a lot of fun and I'm up for doing more.
As usual we played with an open band, and this time Nora decided to p... |
eec9e9b0-c360-41d7-8d81-d637001016de | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [LINK] Antidepressants: Bad Drugs... Or Bad Patients?
Illuminating post on Neuroskeptic:
Some Quotes:
> Why is it that modern trials of antidepressant drugs increasingly show no benefit of the drugs over placebo?.....
> They suggest that maybe it's the patients fault: Participation that is induced by cash payments ... |
2b5727d4-ccb8-4d26-bef1-c408000a7c05 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | 18 Heterodox lenses to look the world through
1) "cynics get to be right, optimist get to be rich"
• its better to have a worldview that is delusionary but beneficial, than accurate but stale.
• if you are going to be wrong majority of the times, why not be wrong in a way which benefits you.
• you are better off ai... |
80d785b5-2dbc-4c49-ab40-c821a1c26a3a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] When None Dare Urge Restraint
Today's post, When None Dare Urge Restraint was originally published on 08 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> The dark mirror to the happy death spiral is the spiral of hate. When everyone looks good for attacking someone, and anyone who disagrees with an... |
49d2f919-bb31-432f-866d-1b8a8899223f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Inferring utility functions from locally non-transitive preferences
As part of the AI Safety Camp, I've been diving a bit deeper into the foundations of expected utility theory and preference learning. In this post, I am making explicit a connection between those two things that (I assume) many people already made imp... |
fa99c52e-d094-4620-9f36-3f396f763005 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How could we know that an AGI system will have good consequences?
(Note: This was languishing in a drafts folder for a while, and probably isn't quite right in various ways. I'm posting it because I expect it's better to share flawed thoughts than to sit on the post until I'm satisfied with it, i.e., forever.)
Let... |
d3df9d85-9c7d-4a92-88ad-c6088b3977ea | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Book review: Deep Utopia
Book review: Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World, by Nick Bostrom.
Bostrom's previous book, Superintelligence, triggered expressions of concern. In his latest work, he describes his hopes for the distant future, presumably to limit the risk that fear of AI will lead to a The Butle... |
4c5b71bb-9111-4253-9c2c-d581236cf303 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Defeating Goodhart and the "closest unblocked strategy" problem
This post is longer and more self-contained than my recent stubs.
tl;dr: Patches such as telling the AI "avoid X" will result in Goodhart's law and the nearest unblocked strategy problem: the AI will do almost exactly what it was going to do, except narr... |
f5d972e8-1317-44f2-b78b-eeb28bdc3071 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | KAnon
There's a dangerous conspiracy theory spreading, called "KAnon" by its adherents. Its claims, at their core, come down to the belief that there is a "K" great enough to protect us from attacks by the forces of deanonymization. While followers often make contradictory claims about "K", no matter how great "K" may... |
23c7203c-0f82-4d77-b2a9-b57c92f460e0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Prediction of the Internet
The internet is quite a special invention. It had huge impact on the way we live in number of ways. And yet, it is mainly a conceptual breakthrough. While for most of history, humanity didn't have the technology needed for its creation, the internet wasn't even imagined shortly until its eme... |
66867aa6-a39b-4ca3-a06c-c22de5248cd8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Large Language Models Pass the Turing Test
> We evaluated 4 systems (ELIZA, GPT-4o, LLaMa-3.1-405B, and GPT-4.5) in two randomised, controlled, and pre-registered Turing tests on independent populations. Participants had 5 minute conversations simultaneously with another human participant and one of these systems befo... |
abaa1d18-a624-4334-9aa4-fb7c883b9522 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Outsider and the Onlooker (on esoteric meaning in fiction)
“Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness. Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books, or upon awed watches in twilight groves of gr... |
f6d22fcd-af4b-4ee8-8ec2-ef4217b40ab5 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | [linkpost] "What Are Reasonable AI Fears?" by Robin Hanson, 2023-04-23
Selected quotes (all emphasis mine):
> Why are we so willing to “other” AIs? Part of it is probably prejudice: some recoil from the very idea of a metal mind. We have, after all, long speculated about possible future conflicts with robots. But pa... |
56e54dac-5369-442f-bbef-beaf4e81a61e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Getting Washington and Silicon Valley to tame AI (Mustafa Suleyman on the 80,000 Hours Podcast)
We just published an interview: [**Mustafa Suleyman on getting Washington and Silicon Valley to tame AI**](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/mustafa-suleyman-getting-washington-and-silicon-valley-to-tame-ai/)**.** You... |
339584e2-1c3c-4f3c-b084-522aca5b1668 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Neural Network Quine
Neural Network Quine
Oscar Chang1and Hod Lipson1
1Data Science Institute, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027
oscar.chang, hod.lipson@columbia.edu
Abstract
Self-replication is a key aspect of biological life that has been
largely overlooked in Artificial Intelligence systems. Here
we describe h... |
156cc07d-6031-4a02-aa25-0f6f10739383 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Anyone want a LW Enhancement Suite?
Reddit Enhancement Suite
If anyone cares, I could probably port this to work on LW without too much trouble. Optimistically it'd just involve opening up the source and replacing reddit.com with lesswrong.com. More realistically, there'd probably be a lot of baked-in assumptions abo... |
29bdcbb4-422b-483f-803a-46cda3552df4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What supplements do you take, if any?
Since it turns out that it isn't feasible to include check as many as apply questions in the big survey, I'm asking about supplements here. I've got a bunch of questions, and I don't mind at all if you just answer some of them.
What supplements do you take? At what dosages? Are t... |
c3d83dac-9578-43f6-baf4-542fba8ce5bb | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Uncountable sample spaces are way too large
If the sample space $\Omega$ is [uncountable](https://arbital.com/p/2w0), then in general we can't even define a probability distribution over $\Omega$ in the same way we defined
[probability distributions](https://arbital.com/p/3tb) over countable sample spaces, i.e. by jus... |
c9a7c27e-7f0d-4ba2-8790-a7123dba4b5c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How 'Human-Human' dynamics give way to 'Human-AI' and then 'AI-AI' dynamics
A short overarching narrative of how humans in companies will, by default, bootstrap the existence of AGI that proceed to lethally modify the environment beyond human control.
Excerpts compiled below:
> 1. where considering the shaping
>... |
4dbc9b2a-c56b-4a12-8a02-2f8243e672a1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Giving What We Can September Internship
Summary: advert for students to do charity cost-effectiveness research at Giving What We Can.
Do you want to join the fight against global poverty and gain experience of research or communications at one of the world's handful of organisations dedicated to improving the wor... |
28555a2f-3c2e-4d23-b11b-4357a6aec09d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | When to mention irrelevant accusations?
I expect in the near-ish future to publish a thing. That thing references an idea that someone had and published on LW. I believe (having seen a credible accusation) that person has acted unethically and illegally, in ways irrelevant to the idea.
I currently intend to mention t... |
bbefccd1-ad99-4882-a174-430608d6a699 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Ideas to make saving the world easier?
I covered some of the psychological difficulties one might face when saving the world. So what can we do to mitigate them.
1. Improve organisations
If we could make organisations more trustworthy and open to feedback, this might help people come together.
It seems that organisa... |
e8fae3d6-b3ef-4012-b2cd-47e8aa2fa014 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Deutsch and Yudkowsky on scientific explanation
Science aims to come up with good theories about the world - but what makes a theory good? The standard view is that the key traits are predictive accuracy and simplicity. Deutsch focuses instead on the concepts of explanation and understanding: a good theory is an expla... |
a1039478-6d29-45a0-ab2d-911a33c45f42 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Testing and contact tracing impact assessment model?
What is a good model for assessing the effect of testing and contact tracing on R0?
I'm imagining it would have parameters perhaps like:
* testing frequency
* testing result delay
* time
* viral load (varies with time)
* testing false negatives (probably vari... |
0da833ff-9575-49d4-bdf1-1b74a80e5caa | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What fuels your ambition?
Growing up, I had a fraught relationship with ambition. My deepest fear was not fulfilling my potential. To paraphrase Paul Graham in his Cities & Ambitions, I was one of those ambitious kids who possessed ambition that seemed to precede anything specific to be ambitious about. I just knew I ... |
d3510ab2-1c07-4080-ab62-b10ca8068b8e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Welcome to Heaven
I can conceive of the following 3 main types of meaning we can pursue in life.
1. Exploring existing complexity: the natural complexity of the universe, or complexities that others created for us to explore.
2. Creating new complexity for others and ourselves to explore.
3. Hedonic pleasure: more ... |
bb769665-eab1-49c8-847b-6d7e083260ce | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Boston Contra: Fully Gender-Free
There are currently four contra dance series in Boston: LCFD, BIDA, Concord Thursday, and Concord Monday Fundraisers. And all four are gender-free!
This has been a long time coming. Boston's gender-free contras started with JP's LCFD in 1988. BIDA discussions started in 2013 and we sw... |
0b8d6902-f936-4e27-b000-93214260ff1f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What is required to run a psychology study?
I periodically find myself wishing someone had run an experiment on a particular topic. But they haven't.
Often, it seems like there's a relatively easy experiment you can run, which would give me some evidence about it. Maybe it wouldn't be perfect evidence, but it would b... |
42293fa2-c54d-4e1e-8703-a0770979de34 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Opportunities for individual donors in AI safety
Tl;dr
-----
Over the past few years the availability of funding for AI safety projects has increased significantly. Yet opportunities for individual donors to find high impact grant opportunities remain. In this post I review the recent history of AI safety organizati... |
2c9f2978-a979-416e-b8ac-5d961981299d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How the Moderna vaccine works, and a note about mRNA vaccines
Epistemic status: Not an expert. Pretty confident I have it right. Incorporated feedback from commenters, and asking for more. List of edits at the end.
What the Moderna vaccine does is it contains a piece of code (RNA) which asks your body to create a pro... |
6f74f3c7-ba07-4e07-855a-fab04767cd06 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Sander Verhaegh on Quine's Naturalism
Quine is famous for his naturalistic stance on philosophy which aligns heavily with the stance of people on Less Wrong. In fact, I've seen him mentioned a few times, but I wanted to learn more about his views. This interview gives a pretty good overview. |
7e020a28-654b-4c24-91d1-f49fd8efde38 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Observations on self-supervised Learning for vision
This post is a collection of observations around self-supervised learning for vision-based datasets. This is by no means a complete survey of SSL techniques, and assumes familiarity with Contrastive Learning, Masked Image Modeling and Masked AutoEncoder frameworks. F... |
514f8df8-a594-4602-9b8f-6aa412173496 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Vancouver Biweekly Sequences Discussion: Politics Is the Mind-killer
Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Biweekly Sequences Discussion: Politics Is the Mind-killer
WHEN: 12 January 2014 03:00:00PM (-0800)
WHERE: Benny's Bagels: 2505 W Broadway, Vancouver, British Columbia V6K 2E9
For those not in... |
b079cfff-5ccf-43ae-81dc-95588ece52c7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Training-time schemers vs behavioral schemers
(Thanks to Vivek Hebbar, Buck Shlegeris, Charlie Griffin, Ryan Greenblatt, Thomas Larsen, and Joe Carlsmith for feedback.)
People use the word “schemer” in two main ways:
1. “Scheming” (or similar concepts: “deceptive alignment”, “alignment faking”) is often defined as ... |
44aa7e67-503e-4f88-b0d2-be176d49f252 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Doing principle-of-charity better
(Thought I'd try posting here some various rationality "quick thoughts" that I feel like I haven't seen expressed overtly enough -- sometimes I've already written about these elsewhere, but thought would be good to get them down here. Not claiming any originality here.)
I think the p... |
20a2ba2d-2495-481e-8b94-e53d32cafb0e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | An alarm bell for the next pandemic
See my new post, "An alarm bell for the next pandemic, V. 2," for updated criteria and more historical investigation.
My last post analyzed whether the sheer volume of COVID-19 posts on LessWrong could have alerted an average reader to the seriousness of the coming pandemic. I conc... |
62a8b872-1870-42ea-9a45-812856b18da4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Wiki.lesswrong.com Is Live
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/ is now live, for all our Wiki needs. The previous Wikia wiki has been imported. Knock yourself out on linking there from comments or blog posts (yes, you will have to link manually, there is no CamelCase convention yet on the blog and comments).
See here for pro... |
4dc893fd-c8a4-45b3-bf43-dc45a6eced08 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | AGI ruin scenarios are likely (and disjunctive)
*Note: As usual, Rob Bensinger helped me with editing. I recently discussed this model with Alex Lintz, who might soon post his own take on it (edit:* [*here*](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/eggdG27y75ot8dNn7/three-pillars-for-avoiding-agi-catastrophe-technica... |
0ddde8f6-6f53-4408-8f61-992a1a892d81 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | PD-alikes in two dimensions
Some time after writing Classifying games like the prisoner's dilemma, I read a paper (I forget which) which pointed out that these games can be specified with just two numbers.
Recall that they have the following payoff matrix:
Player 2 Krump Flitz Player 1 Krump (W,W) (X,Y) Flitz (Y,X) ... |
a83622a5-eb4e-48e3-b7a1-a88a0bc2ac29 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | D&D.Sci May 2021 Evaluation and Ruleset
This is a followup to the D&D.Sci post I made last week; if you haven’t already read it, you should do so now before spoiling yourself.
Here is the web interactive I built to let you evaluate your solution; below is an explanation of the rules used to generate the dataset. You’... |
9f71d922-098f-4cfe-95b1-9ecc569fcb2d | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Finding Generalizable Evidence by Learning to Convince Q&A Models
1 Introduction
---------------
Figure 1:
Evidence a... |
4467be48-d9d6-4ddc-bab7-64807c386151 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Is That Your True Rejection?
Today's post, Is That Your True Rejection? was originally published on 06 December 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> People's stated reason for a rejection may not be the same as the actual reason for that rejection.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the com... |
460fa96c-475d-495d-8f29-35444d3f5c7a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Polling Thread January 2017
One next installment of the Polling Thread.
The Polling thread seems to have fallen out of regular use but I will use it shamelessly to post one of few polls. To make it a bit more useful and in line with the current use of LW I suggest that you post links to interesting polls outside of L... |
f2b516f4-3f72-4eff-8631-4c434f3f6945 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Socratic dialogue with my student
This is a dialogue between me and Noam, my student. It is reproduced, in edited form, with his permission. When commenting, please consider that he is a teenager. Many of these ideas are new to him.
How do you get a student? You steal them. His previous teacher was a Marxist. I dem... |
acf221f5-4cda-400e-bdcb-4169cdc4d528 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Babble
This post is an exercise in "identifying with the algorithm." I'm a big fan of the probabilistic method and randomized algorithms, so my biases will show.
How do human beings produce knowledge? When we describe rational thought processes, we tend to think of them as essentially deterministic, deliberate, and a... |
da25a1f8-4e59-472b-b0c1-ee94a0ebb90c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Sharing Information About Nonlinear
Added (11th Sept): Nonlinear have commented that they intend to write a response, have written a short follow-up, and claim that they dispute 85 claims in this post. I'll link here to that if-and-when it's published.
Added (11th Sept): One of the former employees, Chloe, has writt... |
b5c08d27-b0d7-4ee4-bae9-3e287d83242a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | 35 Interactive Learning Modules Relevant to EAs / Effective Altruism (that are all free)
Hi all! For quite a number of years now at Clearer Thinking we've been developing free, interactive, online learning modules on a wide variety of topics. I wanted to create a list of which of these tools are most relevant to EAs a... |
fe3299b7-5048-4b38-9f8f-2f80f9bc7aa9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | COVID-19 from a different angle
Just trying to put things into a larger context for my own thinking here. Not much (if anything) new here. Purely USA centered.
Needless to say SARS-CoV-2 is THE event of 2020 and may well prove to be the event of the century (but a lot can happen in 100 years). At least that is probab... |
d7c7d7e2-767f-4b9e-aec2-85879935266e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Prizes for Last Year's 2018 Review
About a year ago, LessWrong held it's first annual review, where we looked over the best posts from 2018. The LessWrong team offered $2000 in prizes for the top post authors, and (up to) $2000 in prizes for the best reviews of those posts.
For our top post authors, we have decided t... |
36698259-069c-4648-a085-ecdbf983dbef | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Big Berkeley meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : Big Berkeley meetup
WHEN: 13 June 2012 07:00:00PM (-0700)
WHERE: 2128 Oxford Street, Berkeley ,CA
Tomorrow there will be a Berkeley meetup that counts as a big meetup. We'll meet at 7pm in the Starbucks at 2128 Oxford St., and then decide where to go ... |
867385b3-c0b2-4060-88e0-0419acacbe31 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Put this in your theory of humor
and get nothing!
Seriously, this strikes me and a lot of people as pretty funny, but isn't much like the typical joke.
Edited to add: Poll and discussion. Short version: being amused by the song is rarer than I would have thought, though the LW consensus may be usually strong. |
5fb0db34-9b3a-4120-953f-9012dcff34b9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | 3 Levels of Rationality Verification
I strongly suspect that there is a possible art of rationality (attaining the map that reflects the territory, choosing so as to direct reality into regions high in your preference ordering) which goes beyond the skills that are standard, and beyond what any single practitioner sin... |
ddde0a83-96d2-421f-bb08-b983efb9f592 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | March 24th: Daily Coronavirus Link Updates
As part of the LessWrong Coronavirus Link Database, Ben, Elizabeth and I are publishing update posts with all the new links we are adding each day that we ranked a 3 or above in our importance rankings. Here are all the top links that we added yesterday (March 24th), by topic... |
d6971f4a-db4a-4c7b-bc9e-4c134ae8c8f1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | European Links (07.05.25)
Military logistics
Politico writes:
> The French army painfully realized how difficult it was to cross Europe in the spring of 2022, when it deployed a battalion to Romania in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
>
> […]
>
> "We discovered the extent of the administrative red tape. Th... |
51c2a397-2a6a-4822-bca4-831e6a62bdeb | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Responding to 'Beyond Hyperanthropomorphism'
**TL;DR:** This is an attempt to clarify a post (or perhaps just my own confusion) from a tech commentator, that was skeptical about AGI as a possibility, and alignment research as a project. As such, there is nothing novel in here, but it might be useful for people from ... |
ffa7e8d6-d6fa-4245-933b-1f3562610ae1 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info | AI Safety Info | What are the ethical challenges related to whole brain emulation?
Unless there were a way to [cryptographically ensure otherwise](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vit9oWGj6WgXpRhce/secure-homes-for-digital-people), whoever were to run such an emulation would have control over their environment and could reset them to a... |
d70277a5-cd80-4206-99e7-910abb09ce4d | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | AI Timelines via Cumulative Optimization Power: Less Long, More Short
**TLDR**: *We can best predict the future by using simple models which best postdict the past (ala Bayes/Solomonoff). A simple model based on net training compute postdicts the relative performance of successful biological and artificial neural netw... |
077bf135-0f89-43e5-a0cb-f6bc959305d8 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | Transhumanism and the Meaning of Life
1
Transhumanism and the Meaning of Life
Anders Sandberg
Preprint of chapter in Transhumanism and Religion: Moving into an Unknown
Future , eds. Tracy Trothen and Calvin Mercer, Praeger 2014
Transhumanism, broadly speaking ,1 is the view that the human condit ion is not
u... |
0cdda5a5-a159-426c-a8f8-d11682f5a31d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Toy Problem: Detective Story Alignment
Suppose I train some simple unsupervised topic model (e.g. LDA) on a bunch of books. I look through the topics it learns, and find one corresponding to detective stories. The problem: I would like to use the identified detective-story cluster to generate detective stories from GP... |
766411b6-e601-4c0f-bd23-dc97cc1e4e35 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Starting Thoughts on RLHF
Cross posted from Substack
Continuing the Stanford CS120 Introduction to AI Safety course readings (Week 2, Lecture 1)
This is likely too elementary for those who follow AI Safety research - my writing this is an aid to thinking through these ideas and building up higher-level concepts rath... |
6a4a158d-a468-4bb1-ba2c-5f88532f2741 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open Call for Research Assistants in Developmental Interpretability
We are excited to announce multiple positions for Research Assistants to join our six-month research project assessing the viability of Developmental Interpretability (DevInterp).
This is a chance to gain expertise in interpretability, develop your ... |
c45d121c-9f1b-426e-b3e7-78e3b612d9d6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Truth value as magnitude of predictions
The best way to discern truths from lies is to see if they have a probability and a margin of error attached to them.
The second best way to do so is to ask when the people holding those potential truths were able to bring them to bear to alter the course of the world.
Once yo... |
e3d50a8d-f553-4948-8439-e091851b39e6 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Zoom In: An Introduction to Circuits
Chris Olah and the rest of the rest of the OpenAI Clarity team just published “[Zoom In: An Introduction to Circuits](https://distill.pub/2020/circuits/zoom-in/),” a Distill article about some of the transparency research they've been doing which I think is very much worth taking a... |
a4672ad5-84c2-4c34-8bdd-968b27930aae | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Bayesian Aggregation Paradox
In short: There is no objective way of summarizing a Bayesian update over an event with three outcomes A:B:C as an update over two outcomes A:¬A.
Suppose there is an event with possible outcomes A,B,C.
We have prior beliefs about the outcomes p1:p2:p3.
An expert reports a likelihood f... |
1568f728-7a83-423f-89ec-72da34080037 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | degrees of runtime metaprogrammability
degrees of runtime metaprogrammability
--------------------------------------
"runtime metaprogrammability" describes the ability for a program to create new pieces of code as it is running, ideally of the same [class](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-class_citizen) as its i... |
5f72bb27-0886-4380-8d13-4c25bfa4dec2 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info | AI Safety Info | How likely is extinction from superintelligent AI?
Extinction from misaligned superintelligence is a tricky event to put a probability on: we don’t have a base rate of how many past civilizations like ours went extinct (whether from misaligned superintelligence or anything else), or a way to split all possible futures... |
df9afc8b-e522-47d3-9064-b370afe65132 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Exploring the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis
I have recently been fascinated by the breadth of important mysteries in deep learning, including deep double descent and phase changes, that could be explained by a curious conjectured property of neural networks called the lottery ticket hypothesis. Despite this explanatory po... |
e6464073-9d31-4c92-8f01-5004c99c762c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Asymptotic Logical Uncertainty: Iterated Resource Bounded Solomonoff Induction
This post is part of the Asymptotic Logical Uncertainty series. In this post, I present a possible fix to the strategy of using resource bounded Solomonoff induction for asymptotic logical uncertainty. This algorithm came out of conversatio... |
25548134-0b97-4b70-930d-7e6863826417 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Who wants to be a Millionaire?
,
tldr; Using Toy models, the Kelly criterion, prospect theory, Bayes and amateur psychology in an unnecessarily detailed analysis of Who wants to be a Millionaire. I strongly suspect there will be errors but hopefully not too many.
Motivating example
I was watching Who wants to be a M... |
71bd63e3-9240-4702-b318-1bbbebea452b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | To what extent is the UK Government's recent AI Safety push entirely due to Rishi Sunak?
And hence, to what extent might we expect all that momentum to suddenly dissipate?
In other words, if Sunak was to suddenly leave office (as is tradition for British PMs) would you expect the Frontier AI Taskforce to continue rec... |
3f3aba0c-1931-4f4f-86c5-fa69575b4bc6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Savage theorem and the Ellsberg paradox
Followup to: A summary of Savage's foundation for probability and utility.
In 1961, Daniel Ellsberg, most famous for leaking the Pentagon Papers, published the decision-theoretic paradox which is now named after him 1. It is a cousin to the Allais paradox. They both involve... |
c5ba79d9-e75c-4dae-bc8e-968b85ffff29 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | What we owe the microbiome
Your microbiome is a bunch of microorganisms living in your gut and other epithelial places. You have a symbiotic relation with this population. You feed it. It helps you digest.
Your microbiome population talks to you. It creates chemical signals that affect digestion and possibly your... |
c1578961-cebd-4a37-b30a-93c3bd2609a1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Less Wrong Montreal - Dissolving Disagreements
Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong Montreal - Dissolving Disagreements
WHEN: 22 January 2014 12:08:27PM (-0500)
WHERE: 3459 McTavish, Montréal, qc, ca
There's a question that you may sometimes ask yourselves when you are having an argument with som... |
34af7dca-dde1-4259-8b3d-7c8220e6493f | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | Classifying AI Systems
November 2021
Classifying AI Systems
CSET Data Brief
AUTHOR
Catherine Aiken
Center for Security and Emerging Technology | 2 Executive Summary
Artificial intelligence (AI) governance is a pressing policy issue. AI
systems help us complete a wide range of tasks, from driving to
the store ... |
a28be959-7921-4220-bfd0-9547f3d49467 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Durham: Status Quo Bias
Discussion article for the meetup : Durham: Status Quo Bias
WHEN: 14 February 2013 07:00:00PM (-0500)
WHERE: Francesca's, 706 9th Street, Durham, NC
We'll discuss the status quo bias and debiasing techniques. Suggested readings include Bostrom's paper, and other things TBD. Suggesti... |
fd18c745-30f4-4a3d-943a-5c43fe30e417 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | Three wagers for multiverse-wide superrationality
In this post, I outline three wagers in favor of the hypothesis that [multiverse-wide superrationality](https://foundational-research.org/msr) (MSR) has action-guiding implications. MSR is based on three core assumptions:
1. There is a large or infinite universe or m... |
aca4181d-cd39-4f58-981b-2e5cde62885e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What are your thoughts on the future of AI-assisted software development?
The flurry of news about ChatGPT (and my recent experimentation with GitHub Copilot) has got me thinking about the effect natural language models are having on software engineering. AI-assisted development is improving at a blistering pace, but ... |
0b52e180-2ac3-4758-8bf9-b910e6618fe0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Weekly LW Meetups
This summary was posted to LW Main on June 20th. The following week's summary is here.
New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in:
* Bangalore meetup: 29 June 2014 04:40PM
Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:
* Atlanta Movie Night: Intro... |
3968463b-3bd9-4f94-8b9f-6b5c0e060937 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | An Orthodox Case Against Utility Functions
This post has benefitted from discussion with Sam Eisenstat, Scott Garrabrant, Tsvi Benson-Tilsen, Daniel Demski, Daniel Kokotajlo, and Stuart Armstrong. It started out as a thought about Stuart Armstrong's research agenda.
In this post, I hope to say something about what it... |
48f10efd-7c1a-421a-876f-d7735fbd58f4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Which AI Safety research agendas are the most promising?
|
e3040b19-877d-4296-906b-dffabf5e1bbc | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Notes on Kindness
This post examines the virtue of kindness. I wrote this not as an expert, but as someone who wants to learn more about kindness and how to become better at it. I hope it will be helpful to people who want to know more about this virtue and how to nurture it.
What is kindness?
> “It’s a little embar... |
20d13fe3-5578-4d54-a3af-6d4743cb28dd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Welcome to SSC Phoenix
SSC Phoenix is currently dormant. Join the Google Group to organize something or just to be notified of future events. |
e6dc2cd7-a572-455f-a111-19bfcbe6a824 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Please give your links speaking names!
Bad:
> Shrimping is a fundamental drill for grappling, according to this article.
Good:
> Shrimping is a fundamental drill for grappling, according to The Ultimate Guide to Developing BJJ Hip Movement Through Shrimping.
Why is this important? So that people who print your art... |
c43740e8-2ee0-40d4-8e00-ce19ae876ce2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A decade of lurking, a month of posting
This post is a look back on my first month or so as an active contributor on LessWrong, after lurking for over a decade. My experience so far has been overwhelmingly positive, and one purpose of this post is to encourage other lurkers to do the same.
The reason I decided to sta... |
a6ff6b4c-9028-43ba-9084-b5a7487479e3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | GCRI: Updated Strategy and AMA on EA Forum next Tuesday
Just announcing for those interested that Seth Baum from the Global Catastrophic Risks Institute (GCRI) will be coming to the Effective Altruism Forum to answer a wide range of questions (like a Reddit "Ask Me Anything") next week at 7pm US ET on March 3.
Seth i... |
addfec53-2ca6-4023-b2d6-4b5ef1c0a105 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | When does heritable low fitness need to be explained?
Epistemic status: speculating about things I'm not familiar with; hoping to be educated in the comments. This post is a question, not an answer.
ETA: this comment thread seems to be leading towards the best answer so far.
There's a question I've seen many times, ... |
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