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6bf9a6c5-8e2c-4d0c-b1bd-8f6903eafe1d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Link] How Should Rationalists Approach Death? (Skepticon 4)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cd0yF2ucFbE |
b06952ba-fad3-47f5-bd96-af0db00f7eeb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Intelligence Explosion vs. Co-operative Explosion
Abstract: In the FOOM debate, Eliezer emphasizes 'optimization power', something like intelligence, as the main thing that makes both evolution and humans so powerful. A different choice of abstractions says that the main thing that's been giving various organisms - fr... |
58ed875d-ba82-411f-91b7-af8c300acbaa | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Muqaata'a by Fahad Himsi (I.)
When Black Panther came out I went to cinema hoping to finally see a science fiction movie about Sub-Saharan Africa. (District 9, for obvious reasons, doesn't count.)
Needless to say, I was disappointed. The film wasn't really about Africa. It was about America, pretending, half-heartedl... |
b1202a44-8de4-4cc8-88bb-8eb81a85c37c | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | An Idea For Corrigible, Recursively Improving Math Oracles
.mjx-chtml {display: inline-block; line-height: 0; text-indent: 0; text-align: left; text-transform: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 100%; font-size-adjust: none; letter-spacing: normal; word-wrap: normal; word-spacing: normal; white-... |
8fce4d25-ef28-43df-a04d-706632c3fd94 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Tell me what I don't know about life insurance.
I was offered life insurance and thought I need input from LessWrong people before I accept or decline the offer.
Please share your personal experience, if any, with me.
Thoughts that have occurred to me:
What are the odds that that company will be around in 38 years?... |
aef3fe65-fdf9-49bd-afe3-038372bca328 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Clarification: Behaviourism & Reinforcement
Disclaimer: The following is but a brief clarification on what the human brain does when one's behaviour is reinforced or punished. Thorough, exhaustive, and scholarly it is not.
Summary: Punishment, reinforcement, etc. of a behaviour creates an association in the mind of t... |
8195baab-f1f9-4dca-a07a-d14524655975 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Mental TAPs
(Prereq: Knowledge of Trigger Action Plans (TAPs). alkjash's here & LifelongLeaner's here)
I converged (sort'of) upon the idea of TAPs on my own two summer's ago, but the difference between my idea (which we'll refer to as mental TAPs or mTAPs) and TAPs is continuous mental simulations.
TAP Problems
Usu... |
d575a1eb-6625-4aad-b243-34dc5229f408 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Outdoor Fun & Games
Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Outdoor Fun & Games
WHEN: 25 September 2016 03:30:00PM (-0400)
WHERE: Meridian Hill Park
We will be going to the park to hang out, play games, and have fun conversation in the park.
Location: Meridian Hill Park is ... |
633e098c-c9a7-4b25-a6c5-7991789ac404 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Strength of Bayesian evidence
From a Bayesian standpoint, the strength of evidence can be identified with its [relative likelihood](https://arbital.com/p/1rq). See the [log odds form of Bayes' rule](https://arbital.com/p/1zh) for a representation which makes this unusually clear. |
d1cfef05-7aa6-445c-a4aa-b369902774ee | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Planning a series: discounting utility
I'm planning a top-level post (probably two or three or more) on when agent utility should not be part of utilitarian calculations - which seems to be an interesting and controversial topic given some recent posts. I'm looking for additional ideas, and particularly counterargumen... |
7d62549d-457e-4bbd-ab2a-d2a226adf2e4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | GPT-4o System Card
At last. Yay OpenAI for publishing this. Highlights: some details on Preparedness Framework evals + evals (post-deployment) by METR and Apollo.
Preparedness framework evaluations
You should follow the link and read this section.
Brief comments:
* Cyber: the setup sounds good (but maybe substant... |
9c0c2494-4ad3-49bf-b21b-7ea2c5c9edb3 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | How much compute was used to train DeepMind's generally capable agents?
I'm talking about [these agents](https://www.lesswrong.com/out?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdeepmind.com%2Fblog%2Farticle%2Fgenerally-capable-agents-emerge-from-open-ended-play) ([LW thread here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mTGrrX8SZJ2tQDuqz/deepmind-gen... |
d083da6d-0127-46cf-bf6e-46119dd127bd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A possible AI-inoculation due to early "robot uprising"
I have talked about it before in the comments, but given the near-certain doomsday predictions by Eliezer, it might be worth posting it separately: there is a chance of a scenario that will sharply change the AI development trajectory before it is certain to wipe... |
5048666b-1963-46dc-bb0d-92411f0bbf9f | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Health, morality, and goal alignment of systems, agents, and organs
This text seeks to explore the origins of and relationships between individual, collective, and sub-individual goals and imperatives. Further focus is placed on how the alignment of these goals and imperatives relates to individual and systemic health... |
b96216e2-5146-4c9b-be18-d31e276b9bf8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Claude is More Anxious than GPT; Personality is an axis of interpretability in language models
Aggregate Personality Differences
Users of Claude and GPT will be the first to tell you that the models have their own personality. Some users make decisions based on “who” they prefer to talk to. In my own experience, I’ve ... |
410ab7df-2ba3-4741-a740-23cff472a903 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AI Safety Ideas: A collaborative AI safety research platform
TLDR; We present the AI safety ideas and research platform AI Safety Ideas in open alpha. Add and explore research ideas on the website here: aisafetyideas.com.
AI Safety Ideas has been accessible for a while in an alpha state (4 months, on-and-off developm... |
e942b81f-1ef3-4847-9e29-4596b84c9141 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | AI Safety Doesn't Have to be Weird
Whenever I hear people say that effective altruism is weird, the first example I hear is the focus on AI safety. This point never made much sense to me. For one thing, as Peter Singer once pointed out, you can't really criticize effective altruism for not picking the right cause area... |
157f9de6-9e49-483a-bf49-a26df4335681 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | On how various plans miss the hard bits of the alignment challenge
This post has been recorded as part of the LessWrong Curated Podcast, and can be listened to on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Libsyn.
----------------------------------------
(As usual, this post was written by Nate Soares with some help and editing f... |
824fe9a5-6b97-4e4a-92b7-d0055116eeaa | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Paranoia, Cognitive Biases, and Catastrophic Thought Patterns.
Have you ever wondered what type of personality is drawn to apocalypse stories and circulating the idea that we're certainly doomed? On the face of it their fears are valid since 99.9% of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct over the life ... |
d11630ed-8c81-4bb1-a20b-0e6d74dd0740 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Fun and Games
Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Fun and Games
WHEN: 21 September 2015 06:15:00PM (-0700)
WHERE: 1390 Market St, San Francisco, CA 94103
We'll be meeting to hang out and play board games at my apartment (our normal place doesn't reliably have tab... |
3b597ef5-1514-4650-ae63-11a1a8697208 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Nuclear Deterrence 101 (and why the US can't even hint at intervening in Ukraine)
This is a linkpost for https://acoup.blog/2022/03/11/collections-nuclear-deterrence-101/ . I found it a very good read for explaining the strategy behind the decisions and signaling in this war. I was inspired to post it as a supplement... |
d683afb8-8ab7-493c-a4ec-42fbfe99c3b2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Bayesian Conspiracy @ Burning Man 2011
Edit: 8/27
After a beautiful jaunt to the fertile delta of Ephemerisle, the Bayesian Conspiracy is returning to the much less forgiving environs of Burning Man in 2011. We have been placed in the Playagon village at 3:55 and E.G -- I think the F road is obstructed by Playagon vi... |
f9485625-d0b7-4195-94a7-e388648f835b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What determines female romantic "market value"?
There had been multiple conversations on this website about what makes men attractive to women, how can men improve along those axes, et cetera (example). However, AFAICT there were few discussions of what makes women attractive to men. (It can't be just about looks, rig... |
3c0c1cc6-e18e-443b-b045-de3e908034a5 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Helen Toner on China, CSET, and AI
Miscellaneous excerpts I found interesting from Julia Galef's recent interview of Helen Toner:
---
**Helen Toner:** [...] [8:00] I feel like the West has this portrayal of the company Baidu as the "Google" of China. And when you think “Google,” you think super high tech, enormous... |
bc2731a2-cb9b-4f2e-8c24-0ffec3fcb4a8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Comparing Covid and Tobacco
Tobacco kills 5 million people every year [1]. Covid probably won't pass 5 million this year regardless of our policies or behavior. And yet, Covid has been the focus of far greater scarce political attention than Tobacco. We have accepted an increase of 150 million people in global severe ... |
354c422c-b072-451e-9d30-defcff6e4213 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | A smart enough LLM might be deadly simply if you run it for long enough
**TL;DR**: I introduce a new potential threat: a smart enough LLM, even if it’s myopic, not fine-tuned with any sort of RL, “non-agentic”, and was prompt-engineered into imitating aligned and helpful scientists who are doing their best to help you... |
f552ef27-40c3-41a1-8d88-54afb9d8b60f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Not all capabilities will be created equal: focus on strategically superhuman agents
When, exactly, should we consider humanity to have properly "lost the game", with respect to agentic AI systems?
The most common AI milestone concepts seem to be "artificial general intelligence", followed closely by "superintelligen... |
d0105ace-35c6-47c5-8fbe-4b39c3233395 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Babble & Prune Thoughts
This is an accounting of various thoughts I had when reading the Babble & Prune sequence.
Encouraging Babble
It is ironic, to me, that the Babble & Prune sequence ends with a call to exclude epistemic status tags from posts:
> What happens to the reader when every post starts, "epistemic sta... |
24f5bf27-b085-49c4-93e4-5dfc71fe4223 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Stub] Extortion and Pascal's wager
The premises of Pascal's wager are normally presented as abstract facts about the universe - there happens to (maybe) be a god, who happens to have set up the afterlife for the suffering of unbelievers.
But, assuming we ever manage to distinguish trade from extortion, this seems a ... |
f0b3c59e-c34e-4420-9e06-72e207376ff5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is Spirituality Irrational?
[Originally published at Intentional Insights in response to Religious and Rational]
Spirituality and rationality seem completely opposed. But are they really?
To get at this question, let's start with a little thought experiment. Consider the following two questions:
1. If you w... |
73b60a26-01db-4756-b002-0429b874c340 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Stuart Russell: AI value alignment problem must be an "intrinsic part" of the field's mainstream agenda
Edge.org has recently been discussing "the myth of AI". Unfortunately, although Superintelligence is cited in the opening, most of the participants don't seem to have looked into Bostrom's arguments. (Luke has writt... |
ae8c2485-cacd-4a19-aa6c-f89b5d762112 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Crowdfunding] LessWrong podcast
meta: experimental post format
x-post: https://www.facebook.com/groups/LWCoordination/permalink/1002564020177098/ (originally posted on 2020-06-21)
There was 6 posts with >100 karma in the last 30 days on LessWrong. I think we could get someone to audiorecord an article for ~25 USD. ... |
d46f5596-b7e2-4cc4-b6c6-3d1cf09c110b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Interesting article about optimism
According to this brain-imaging study, volunteers presented with negative scenarios (i.e. car crashes, cancer), and asked to estimate the probability of these scenarios happening to them, would only update their beliefs if the actual rate of ocurrence in the population, given to them... |
3157175b-90f5-4f3d-a12b-03bfa18840ef | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Equality and natalism
I recently read an article by Steve Sailer that reminded me about something I have been puzzled by for a long time. Relevant paragraphs:
> If intellectuals could afford to have a lot of children, we might live in a world where they could sell enough heavyweight books to afford to have a lot of ... |
07060352-0de6-427c-ab14-bc9ca8088d67 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | End Single Family Zoning by Overturning Euclid V Ambler
On 75 percent or more of the residential land in most major American cities it is illegal to build anything other than a detached single-family home. 95.8 percent of total residential land area in California is zoned as single-family-only, which is 30 percent of ... |
0c46ce7d-edc5-4ae1-a877-58d9c2779159 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why Linear AI Safety Hits a Wall and How Fractal Intelligence Unlocks Non-Linear Solutions
1. The Non-Linear Challenge in AI Safety
Over the past decade, AI safety and alignment efforts have largely focused on incremental methods: refining RL-based guardrails, imposing regulatory oversight, and adding more researchers... |
efb5c697-8452-4457-b497-0f3aaa65b0ce | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What if jobs are not the solution, but the problem
|
944f5fea-fbaf-48ec-8fa7-103beb2d63f0 | awestover/filtering-for-misalignment | Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results | id: post753
Written under the supervision of Lionel Levine. Thanks to Owain Evans, Aidan O’Gara, Max Kaufmann, and Johannes Treutlein for comments. This post is a synthesis of arguments made by other people. It provides a collection of answers to the question, "Why would an AI become non-myopic?" In this post I’ll des... |
16633a79-4f96-4079-84ec-3cfc9d2a710e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Group Debugging
Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Group Debugging
WHEN: 30 November 2015 06:15:00PM (-0800)
WHERE: 1597 Howard St. San Francisco, CA
We'll be meeting to try and solve each others problems! As usual, call 301-458-0764 to be let in.
Discussion a... |
ad2d22c7-10d3-4eb0-b709-b3a340eb105c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open & Welcome Thread - January 2020
If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it. (You can also make a shortform post)
And, if you are new to LessWrong, here's the place to introduce yourself. Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to... |
21a76973-b562-41a0-bef6-8b629ce964ae | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Posting now enabled
Posting is now enabled with a minimum karma required of 20 - that is, you must have gotten at least 20 upvotes on your comments in order to publish a post. Or an adminstrator such as myself or Robin (by default you should bother me) can temporarily bless you with posting ability - in the long run ... |
e2ac4393-eeef-4200-a184-93e2f7a090bb | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | A bridge to Dath Ilan? Improved governance on the critical path to AI alignment.
Summary: This post showcases [my 2nd-place-winning entry in the Future of Life Institute's AI worldbuilding contest](https://worldbuild.ai/W-0000000088/). It imagines:
1. How we might make big improvements to decisionmaking via mechani... |
fe060f78-7e88-4666-9013-c803dfc1a234 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A tool for searching rationalist & EA webs
UPDATE (November 24) - If you have ChatGPT plus, you can try the GPT-bot version. This bot primarily searches through EA webs, if it fails to find anything relevant, it broadens the search to the whole web (more information here).
______________
I've made a simple website wh... |
9dc31c21-f8b9-4d85-a448-b8c49ed4f3fe | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What can be learned from scary demos? A snitching case study
This is a hackathon project write-up. This does not represent the views of my employer. Thanks to Tianyi Alex Qiu and Aidan Ewart for helpful discussions.
Sometimes, people will search for and find a situation where an LLM would do something bad, and then a... |
7af225e1-0361-4528-a2a2-b35e823d4f87 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info | AI Safety Info | Is there a danger in anthropomorphizing AIs and trying to understand them in human terms?
Using some human-related metaphors (e.g. what an AGI ‘wants’ or ‘believes’) is almost unavoidable, as our language is built around experiences with humans, but we should be aware that these may lead us astray.
Many paths to AGI ... |
3939c41f-cff1-4ba7-a25d-719eea94541a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Google search for "rationality" has HP:MoR as the 2nd hit.
I've just noticed when searching for "rationality" with Google, HP:MoR is the second hit. Wikipedia is top, which is both good and expected - but I was suprised to see HP:MoR so high up.
I think it's a good thing, anyone looking for info about rationality see... |
2d9deaef-5289-40ef-9158-a9bdf2bcec98 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Laziness death spirals
I’ve claimed that Willpower compounds and that small wins in the present make it easier to get bigger wins in the future. Unfortunately, procrastination and laziness compound, too.
You’re stressed out for some reason, so you take the evening off for a YouTube binge. You end up staying awake a l... |
1c8c1246-fc82-4819-a64c-18d93d5268bb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Principals, agents, negotiation, and precommitments
I'm sure this observation has been made plenty of times before: a principal can gain negotiating power by delegating negotiations to an agent, and restricting that agent's ability to negotiate.
For example: If I'm at a family-owned pizza joint, and I want a slice of... |
aa26f81b-b180-4162-a5b7-212aea72ac32 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Impact Assessment of AI Safety Camp (Arb Research)
Authors: Sam Holton, Misha Yagudin
Data collection: David Mathers, Patricia Lim
Note: Arb Research was commissioned to produce this impact assessment by the AISC organizers.
Summary
AI Safety Camp (AISC) connects people interested in AI safety (AIS) to a research... |
a5ff080a-49fa-4128-94c8-0d577bfe03de | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Particles break light-speed limit?
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110922/full/news.2011.554.html
http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897v1
http://usersguidetotheuniverse.com/?p=2169
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3027056
> Ereditato says that he is confident enough in the new result to make it public. The researchers... |
feeb6325-5c9b-4eaf-8518-859172f4d41c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The value of ambiguous speech
This was going to be a reply in a discussion between ChristianKl and MattG in another thread about conlangs, but their discussion seemed to have enough significance, independent of the original topic, to deserve a thread of its own. If I'm doing this correctly (this sentence is an after-... |
a74dec6b-3f89-4511-a2d1-dd65e5961622 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Tokyo AI & Society Symposium
I just spent a week in Japan to speak at the inaugural [symposium on AI & Society](http://aiandsociety.org) – my first conference in Asia. It was inspiring to take part in an increasingly global conversation about AI impacts, and interesting to see how the Japanese AI community thinks abou... |
c5719517-4201-4fdb-8e77-0b53c407d7f6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Deep Honesty
Most people avoid saying literally false things, especially if those could be audited, like making up facts or credentials. The reasons for this are both moral and pragmatic — being caught out looks really bad, and sustaining lies is quite hard, especially over time. Let’s call the habit of not saying thi... |
e202cc9e-8a86-493e-834d-07329a6e6f55 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Reviewing the Structure of Current AI Regulations
This report is one in a series of ~10 posts comprising a 2024 State of the AI Regulatory Landscape Review, conducted by the Governance Recommendations Research Program at Convergence Analysis. Each post will cover a specific domain of AI governance (such as incident re... |
e64809cb-bf3a-4b34-a6aa-3e82a4a09b06 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Could a digital intelligence be bad at math?
One of the enduring traits that I see in most characterizations of artificial intelligences is the idea that an AI would have all of the skills that computers have. It's often taken for granted that a general artificial intelligence would be able to perfectly recall informa... |
003f9bc0-7e6f-447b-adca-f0cb73477662 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Easy Predictor Tests
A fun game you can play on LessWrong is to stop just as you are about to click "comment" and make a prediction for how much karma your comment will receive within the next week. This will provide some quick feedback about how well your karma predictors are working. This exercise will let you know ... |
a8aad1ed-a54c-4039-ac7a-b96d1c71dbd2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Terminal Bias
I've seen of people on Lesswrong taking cognitive structures that I consider to be biases as terminal values. Take risk aversion for example:
Risk Aversion
For a rational agent with goals that don't include "being averse to risk", risk aversion is a bias. The correct decision theory acts on expected ut... |
478de49c-70c0-4224-b6ad-2305eb43a1a2 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | On taking AI risk seriously
Yet another New York Times piece on AI. A non-AI safety friend sent it to me saying "This is the scariest article I've read so far. I'm afraid I haven't been taking it very seriously". I'm noting this because I'm always curious to observe what moves people, what's out there that has the p... |
c858ff9d-d694-4c07-a341-66fc49fb9d1e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | How good/bad is the new Bing AI for the world?
I've had this coversation several times, so I thought I'd save us all the repetition.
What is the right model for recent AI search engine releases?
Are they useful or harmful?
What if anything should be done? |
4fbc4634-903c-4e0c-8d83-91129500dd32 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Book Swap
Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Book Swap
WHEN: 28 September 2014 03:00:00PM (-0400)
WHERE: National Portrait Gallery
We will be meeting in the Kogod Courtyard of the National Portrait Gallery (8th and F Sts or 8th and G Sts NW, go straight past the informa... |
898db0fa-d576-4d29-ac77-d336d08ddb62 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Shadow
> ..only he saw the lump of shadow that clung to Ged, tearing at his flesh. It was like a black beast, the size of a young child, though it seemed to shrink and swell; it had no head or face, only the four taloned paws with which it gripped and tore.
A Wizard of Earthsea. Ursula K. Le Guin.
To name something ... |
a9a2422f-45fa-4852-8333-2dd7b30d7840 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | I’m no longer sure that I buy dutch book arguments and this makes me skeptical of the "utility function" abstraction
[Epistemic status: half-baked, elucidating an intuition. Possibly what I’m saying here is just wrong, and someone will helpfully explain why.]
Thesis: I now think that utility functions might be a bad ... |
9a826a25-4d3c-4ba5-8c9b-7207c5934d1e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | On Branching vs Probability
Abstract: A boring, long-winded account of some extremely basic ideas is given.
The "Coin Universe"
Imagine a universe split into subsystems A and B, where causal influences go from A to B but not vice versa. A is extremely simple - each day either a "heads event" or "tails event" takes p... |
b1f2b22b-b10c-45e3-8e70-51200110a3f3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : First Brussels meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : First Brussels meetup
WHEN: 11 February 2012 11:00:00AM (+0100)
WHERE: Museum of Natural Sciences Rue Vautier 29 B-1000 Brussels
I would like to start organizing meetups in Belgium, I propose we meet at the museum of national sciences in Brussels (g... |
957aad7a-8ae0-418d-b598-ff7e5765b786 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Election results in Central Europe match some pre-WW1 borders
I have seen this image of Quora:
Polish presidential election, 2010
Election results are arguably one of the most apparent and easy to measure effect of complicated cultural diffences (provided that the country is sufficiently diverse to make the cultural ... |
2dcd5004-8437-4725-a8ab-d7b5789d4e4a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media
edit: I share this post because it discusses the history of social networks getting bought out in a way that I found insightful. be aware that it is quite angry; I generally have a fairly strong "you are angry, ... |
eba7eb57-cbf7-4fff-942f-352073490a79 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Not all non-maximisers become maximisers
Because of the problems with optimisers, there's a search for other types of designs that can accomplish goals without the extreme optimisation pressure. Satisficers are one example of such designs, but satisficers aren't reflectively stable (a satisficer can design a successor... |
f7a8b302-118d-4e11-aa9c-e90259894c0e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Onion Test for Personal and Institutional Honesty
[co-written by Chana Messinger and Andrew Critch, Andrew is the originator of the idea]
You (or your organization or your mission or your family or etc.) pass the “onion test” for honesty if each layer hides but does not mislead about the information hidden within... |
386ba74e-bb2f-4e1e-ac78-3586a54e4b43 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Watts, son
Some interesting numbers to contextualize IBM’s Watson:
* 90 Power 750 Express servers, each with 4 CPUs, each of those having 8 cores
* Total of 15TB RAM (yep, all of Watson’s data was stored in RAM for rapid search. The human brain’s memory capacity is estimated at between 3 and 6 TB, and not all of th... |
3eabf6ef-ef51-4beb-b370-ddd588543b58 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Link] Zack Weinersmith's One-Liner Generator
Zack Weinersmith of SMBC fame has suggested an interesting artificial intelligence project: generate jokes by observing utility as a function of rate of change in initial understanding over time.
(source) |
c3f6bca0-92c3-49f9-a457-c45a0c3c5cce | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Agent membranes/boundaries and formalizing “safety”
It might be possible to formalize what it means for an agent/moral patient to be safe via membranes/boundaries. This post tells one (just one) story for how the membranes idea could be useful for thinking about existential risk and AI safety.
Formalizing “safety” u... |
9559038a-754b-4d2e-b720-c876ce16ede1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A gentle primer on caring, including in strange senses, with applications
Introduction
Firstly, I will define a straightforward model of caring about other people. I think it is a good model for understanding (and predicting) people's actions. I also think it's pretty meta-good to have one's own ethics effectively be ... |
0c3b28db-d90f-4e12-8b9b-11f5da976b02 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | The five biggest threats to human existence
In the daily hubbub of current “crises” facing humanity, we forget about the many generations we hope are yet to come. Not those who will live 200 years from now, but 1,000 or 10,000 years from now. I use the word “hope” because we face risks, called [existential risks](http... |
29171b28-5a4c-4729-a25a-de238d8ea177 | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | "There’s a tendency to want to score high on every metric you come across. When I first read Kegan’s 5 stages of adult development, I wanted to be a stage 5 meta-rationalist! Reading the meditation book “The Mind Illuminated” (TMI), I wanted to be stage 10 (and enlightened and stage 8 jhana and…)! I remember seeing thi... |
c1d4ad6d-3d53-420a-8a76-3754715b7955 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Thinking Fast and Slow Pages 70-140 Discussion Meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Thinking Fast and Slow Pages 70-140 Discussion Meetup
WHEN: 10 November 2013 02:00:00PM (-0600)
WHERE: 40.109545,-88.227318
Coordinates are: 40.109545,-88.227318 Meetup will be held... |
3d15239e-bdfe-464c-8424-6ec5131cba35 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Paradigms of AI alignment: components and enablers
(Cross-posted from my personal blog. This post is based on an overview talk I gave at UCL EA and Oxford AI society (recording here). Thanks to Janos Kramar for detailed feedback on this post and to Rohin Shah for feedback on the talk.)
This is my high-level view of t... |
058cfff8-a2fc-4d01-86c3-b4cb273a8a54 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Perth, Australia
Discussion article for the meetup : Perth, Australia
WHEN: 27 July 2014 01:30:00PM (-0700)
WHERE: Shop 4, 329 Murray Street, Perth, Western Australia
I'm posting this for Aaron (user ab9) who doesn't yet have sufficient karma. After Aaron comments on this post, please upvote him if you fee... |
9bde099a-65c2-4259-ace3-33d805f60e9e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Can the Chain Still Hold You?
Robert Sapolsky:
> Baboons... literally have been the textbook example of a highly aggressive, male-dominated, hierarchical society. Because these animals hunt, because they live in these aggressive troupes on the Savannah... they have a constant baseline level of aggression which inevit... |
f3428776-8fbe-4007-91ac-10ed2407868a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Foundations - Why Britain has stagnated [crosspost]
This essay is written by Ben Southwood, Samuel Hughes and Sam Bowman. This is an unauthorised crosspost and if the author's wish, I will delete it. I wanted a place to have a reasoned discussion of the post. The website is quite pretty.
Setting the scene
Here are ... |
76a8b21e-cb51-4af8-aee4-881cc42ede1a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [LINK] Sean Carroll Against Afterlife
Well, not quite, but close. The debate starts 1 hour after this post is up. From Sean's blog post:
Is There Life After Death? A Debate
No, there’s not. In order to believe otherwise, you would have to be willing to radically alter our fundamental understanding of physics on the ... |
320e3e28-fcb4-4a4b-88b1-203e59c27416 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Agent Incentives: A Causal Perspective
Introduction
------------
A recurring question in AI research is how to choose an objective to induce safe
and fair
behaviour (O’Neil [2016](#bib.bib33); Russell [2019](#bib.bib36)).
In a given setup, will an optimal policy depend on a sensitive attribute, or seek to influence... |
449d1f28-22b6-4ba1-977e-518aedf9c021 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | VIRTUA: a novel about AI alignment
I’ve written a novel about AI alignment in German and translated it into English.
Edit: I'm going to publish the final version on Amazon KDP on May 25. I have therefore removed the links to the previous version. If you want a free copy of the ebook or a PDF, please write me a direc... |
14ff7ea1-2c88-42f0-bcf6-80a090d523f6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | ISO: Automated P-Hacking Detection
I'm sure there's some ML students/researchers on Lesswrong in search of new projects, so here's one I'd love to see and probably won't build myself: an automated method for predicting which papers are unlikely to replicate, given the text of the paper. Ideally, I'd like to be able to... |
11d3a8a9-6e16-4b19-9a4d-ddd594cdc341 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | 45% to 55% vs. 90% to 100%
In Never Split The Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It, Chris Voss discusses cognitive biases:
> Through decades of research with Tversky, Kahneman proved that humans all suffer from Cognitive Bias, that is unconscious—and irrational—brain processes that literally distort... |
5f82e4ca-708a-4afc-a115-86586a490bea | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Avoiding Side Effects in Complex Environments
1 Introduction
---------------
Reward function specification can be difficult, even when the desired behavior seems clear-cut. For example, rewarding progress in a race led a reinforcement learning (rl) agent to collect checkpoint reward, instead of completing the race ... |
c6f59c9f-48c6-4dc4-ae96-88e7bdc53c3f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Individual Utilities Shift Continuously as Geometric Weights Shift
This is a supplemental post to Geometric Utilitarianism (And Why It Matters), in which I show that when all agents have positive weight ψi, the optimal geometric weighted average moves continuously across the Pareto frontier as we change those weights.... |
a8449243-c450-4db5-9a2e-a9cc9ff32d9e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A heart's cry
Here is a short story I wrote a while ago. I ended up submitting it to a short story contest a few months ago but I haven't hear back. I thought you guys may enjoy it. Also yes this the root of my username.
The world is full of love. At least that's what they told me. They told me love was real but to... |
4f363f7f-3f26-4845-a6ce-cea6f8af09e9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | 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... |
ceb2e600-47b1-4082-b2f4-dfa76533780e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | "Inner Alignment Failures" Which Are Actually Outer Alignment Failures
*If you don’t know what “inner” and “outer” optimization are, or why birth control or masturbation might be examples, then* [*check out one of the posts here*](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/inner-alignment) *before reading this one. Thanks to Evan,... |
fe47743c-3e5b-467b-a4e2-bf8168c2aa61 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Discussing AI-Human Collaboration Through Fiction: The Story of Laika and GPT-∞
Hello everyone,
I hope this message finds you all well. I wanted to share with you an ongoing project of mine that aims to explore the future of AI-human collaboration through a unique lens: fiction. The project, titled "The Story of Lai... |
bb9012d4-c33a-4375-803f-cbb7f323907b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Inherently Interpretable Architectures
Definition
[JP] The framework of inherently interpretable architectures (or architectures for interpretability) involves two overarching parts: firstly, the general research direction of creating architectures that lend themselves a-priori to human interpretability; and second, t... |
b5309777-dcc9-43b1-b848-8f8ef337d882 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Quantilal control for finite MDPs
.mjx-chtml {display: inline-block; line-height: 0; text-indent: 0; text-align: left; text-transform: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 100%; font-size-adjust: none; letter-spacing: normal; word-wrap: normal; word-spacing: normal; white-space: nowrap; float: non... |
77fa2cc5-c6e3-41c6-ae81-a8fafcd33c9e | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | "[Reposted from my personal blog.]
Mindspace is wide and deep. “People are different” is a truism, but even knowing this, it’s still easy to underestimate.
I spent much of my initial engagement with the rationality community feeling weird and different. I appreciated the principle and project of rationality as things t... |
0d501dfd-940b-449a-b2b7-c12f449fd6a7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Predicting Influenza Abundance in Wastewater Metagenomic Sequencing Data
Thanks to our collaborators at MU and UCI for generating the sequencing data we analyze in this post, to the Grimm et al. (2023) authors for the analysis this builds on, and to Marc Johnson, Mike McLaren, Dan Rice, Will Bradshaw, Simon Grimm, and... |
293f7d67-cab6-4a0a-8a33-d185e262d9b7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Weekly LW Meetups
This summary was posted to LW Main on September 2nd. The following week's summary is here.
Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:
* European Community Weekend: 02 September 2016 03:35PM
The remaining meetups take place in cities with regular scheduling, but involve a change... |
eab12d9f-3500-4763-98d5-2b50838fa04d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Eight Books To Read
This article was originally published on SamoBurja.com. You can access the original here.
A few years ago, I was asked by a friend what news sources they should follow to understand the Syrian Civil War. I replied they shouldn’t follow any news at all. My recommendation instead was a six month bre... |
b60edbc2-af38-4063-a7df-758b3ae4d352 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Some AI research areas and their relevance to existential safety
Followed by: What Multipolar Failure Looks Like, and Robust Agent-Agnostic Processes (RAAPs), which provides examples of multi-stakeholder/multi-agent interactions leading to extinction events.
Introduction
This post is an overview of a variety of AI r... |
9165f4fe-6d93-450f-ae3f-3d001b9b820e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Limited agents need approximate induction
[This post borders on some well-trodden ground in information theory and machine learning, so ideas in this post have an above-average chance of having already been stated elsewhere, by professionals, better. EDIT: As it turns out, this is largely the case, under the subjects ... |
9779071a-518c-4e39-8bbb-9ce5dbc63084 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Schelling Game (a.k.a. the Coordination Game)
Summary
The Schelling Game (or Coordination Game) is a simple but fun party game that seems to have been independently invented several times. (One might even say it represents a Schelling point in game-space...) I have played it both with LessWrong meetups and with ot... |
a5d774f0-a239-4624-bbfe-4ac4ea1451ec | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup Schedule
The KC SSC group has evolved into a 'Rationalists' group, allowing us to continue the SSC meetup while also expanding our scope to anything rationality-related.
Our SSC meetup is every Sunday, 12pm, at Panera Bread for lunch/coffee.
10606 Shawnee Mission Pkwy
We also have a monthly game night on the... |
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