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624d8f22-1d1f-4a39-9353-dc018e43f224 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Rest in motion
Many people seem to think the 'good' state of being, the 'ground' state, is a relaxed state, a state with lots of rest and very little action. Because they think the ground state is the relaxed state, they act like maintaining any other state requires effort, requires suffering.
This is a failure mode ... |
73d816ce-6732-4aa4-84ab-70b0c0c7ddc4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Engineering Religion
This topic is vague and open-ended. I'm leaving it that way deliberately. Perhaps some interesting, better defined topics will grow out of it. Or perhaps it's too far afield from the concept of less wrong cognition to be of interest here. So I view this topic as exploratory rather than as an a... |
9e7d950c-064e-4311-9a3a-5124adc6b45f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | 11 Less Wrong Articles I Probably Will Never Have Time to Write
There are many Less Wrong posts I'd like to write, but I'm starting to admit there are some of them I'll probably never get around to. I need to be doing other things. If anybody wants to write up the post ideas below, go for it! You may also want to anno... |
06d072f2-c04e-46ac-8773-129376391568 | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | "MIRI is releasing a new edition of Rationality: From AI to Zombies, including the first set of R:AZ print books. As of this morning, print versions of Map and Territory (volume 1) and How to Actually Change Your Mind (volume 2) are now available on Amazon (1, 2), and we'll be rolling out the other four volumes of R:AZ... |
013a53be-02b2-4027-8f1b-5a149ed2c87e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | The Role of Social Movements, Coalitions, and Workers in Resisting Harmful Artificial Intelligence and Contributing to the Development of Responsible AI
The Role of Social Movements, Coalitions, and Workers in Resisting Harmful Artificial Intelligence
and Contributing to the Development of Responsible AI
Working Pap... |
5e3ddda1-cea8-47a5-95a5-085cd6cb21e9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Dense Math Notation
I program, and am also presently working my way through some math books. I find that I often have to backtrack to look up pieces of notation like variables and operators. Unfortunately, this is very problematic. Greek and Latin letters give no indication of where they came from and are not usable s... |
9398d370-c30b-493d-93c0-78fcb0145822 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | All the posts I will never write
*This post has been written for the first* [*Refine*](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/5uiQkyKdejX3aEHLM/how-to-diversify-conceptual-alignment-the-model-behind) *blog post day, at the end of the week of readings, dicussions, and exercises about epistomology for doing good conceptua... |
5f439c45-92ce-45f7-aaec-177f81e96e23 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Child Walksheds
Roads are the biggest limitation on mobility for our older kids, now that we're using walkie-talkies. Anna (5y) can't cross the street on her own, because she is not quite reliable enough at checking for cars. For her, the neighborhood is a collection of islands:
With assistance she can move between... |
c7aa0d54-cecc-4547-92f1-3e334f919448 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | LLMs might have subjective experiences, but no concepts for them
Summary: LLMs might be conscious, but they might not have concepts and words to represent and express their internal states and corresponding subjective experiences, since the only concepts they learn are human concepts (besides maybe some concepts acqui... |
fa8e3bab-5897-4947-8792-fd96fe52fe59 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Warsaw integration: Barbecue on the beach
Discussion article for the meetup : Warsaw integration: Barbecue on the beach
WHEN: 31 July 2015 06:30:00PM (+0200)
WHERE: Warsaw
A casual meetup - integration on the beach on eastern side of Vistula river, near the Kryniczna bus stop. A map: https://goo.gl/maps/ZQ... |
43ce3eca-f854-4d76-9df7-97a83a7bc1c6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Would "Manhattan Project" style be beneficial or deleterious for AI Alignment?
Manhattan Project was quite a unique (at least the most well-known) case when a group of famous scientists succeeded to persuade the government that particular technology is a very big threat if created by the wrong group of people. Suppose... |
5f8c896b-282b-474e-9d81-1232bc443307 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Book Review: The Root of Thought
Related to: Brain Breakthrough! It's Made of Neurons!
I can't really recommend Andrew Koob's The Root of Thought. It's poorly written, poorly proofread, lacking much more information than is in the Scientific American review, and comes across as about one part neuroscience to three p... |
6135c090-d0ca-4fe3-a440-c2f305b5066c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Web is Turning into Cable TV
(Cross-posted from my blog)
The Web was never perfect. There were always people using it to exploit others. Sometimes, it was the small-time Ebay scammer looking for a couple of dollars. Other times, it was a giant multinational trying to get you to buy things you didn't need.
At the... |
aaae315f-9809-4a61-bdbf-b44bd45200be | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Extrapolated volition (normative moral theory)
(This page is about extrapolated volition as a normative moral theory - that is, the theory that extrapolated volition captures the concept of [value](https://arbital.com/p/55) or what outcomes we *should* want. For the closely related proposal about what a sufficiently ... |
e883bf35-b85a-4a8c-abee-fe72db06b02e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A new, better way to read the Sequences
A new way to read the Sequences:
https://www.readthesequences.com
It's also more mobile-friendly than a PDF/mobi/epub.
(The content is from the book — Rationality: From AI to Zombies. Books I through IV are up already; Books V and VI aren't up yet, but soon will be.)
Edit: B... |
9e221886-2b4d-45cb-91bb-8b96524376e2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | D&D.Sci Long War: Defender of Data-mocracy
This is an entry in the 'Dungeons & Data Science' series, a set of puzzles where players are given a dataset to analyze and an objective to pursue using information from that dataset.
STORY (skippable)
You have the excellent fortune to live under the governance of The Peop... |
564595f3-9445-4457-bf5e-fbe94baf3ab3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Advice for AI makers
A friend of mine is about to launch himself heavily into the realm of AI programming. The details of his approach aren't important; probabilities dictate that he is unlikely to score a major success. He's asked me for advice, however, on how to design a safe(r) AI. I've been pointing him in the ri... |
e6a14c46-d76a-4180-ae75-6a3c2ef4fd50 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Singularity Institute now accepts donations via Bitcoin
Now you can donate to Singularity Institute using Bitcoin.
Currently Bitcoin mining appears to be profitable as only bubble economics can be. Already some Less Wrong users have purchased GPUs and started mining Bitcoin. Please consider sending some Bitcoins to S... |
c9a57699-1325-446f-a795-9cc2860f648d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Anthropic leadership conversation
This is interesting and I'm glad Anthropic did it. I quoted interesting-to-me parts and added some unjustified commentary.
----------------------------------------
Tom Brown at 20:00
> the US treats the Constitution as like the holy document—which I think is just a big thing that ... |
59ee355c-fcd6-4b71-a42c-f78dbd66c02c | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Smoking lesion as a counterexample to CDT
I stumbled upon [this paper](http://fitelson.org/few/few_05/egan.pdf) by [Andy Egan](http://www.andyegan.net/Andy_Egan/Front_Page.html) and thought that its main result should be shared. We have the Newcomb problem as counterexample to CDT, but that can be dismissed as being s... |
596fd8b3-373a-4b7e-b149-1b343008dbbd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Signs you're on LW too much
In the style of Jeff Foxworthy's "You Might Be A Redneck If..."
If you're waking up and the characters in your dream start asking you to stay asleep a bit longer because they're running on your brain and they don't want to be consigned to oblivion just yet... you might be on LW too much.
... |
b55c19e3-2a85-41ac-b1d5-161535053b71 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | S-Risks: Fates Worse Than Extinction
Cross-posted to the EA forum
In this Rational Animations video, we discuss s-risks (risks from astronomical suffering), which involve an astronomical number of beings suffering terribly. Researchers on this topic argue that s-risks have a significant chance of occurring and that... |
10ec9e94-ec16-489b-97e4-0b60670540ae | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | I compiled a ebook of `Project Lawful` for eBook readers
I was on vacation last week and started reading Project Lawful aka planecrash.
Unfortunately reading on my phone got annoying pretty fast (especially outside in the sun), and the existing glowpub ebook was completely broken on my kindle/koreader.
So I created... |
9fe183a8-833f-427e-a97e-b5a61f0b2288 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | [ASoT] Observations about ELK
This document outlines some of my current thinking about ELK, in the form of a series of observations I have made that inform my thinking about ELK.
*Editor’s note: I’m experimenting with having a lower quality threshold for just posting things even while I’m still confused and unconfid... |
50ed4b1c-7bcb-4e45-9218-ddb08421eee3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : LW Sao Paulo - Meetup de março
Discussion article for the meetup : LW Sao Paulo - Meetup de março
WHEN: 25 March 2017 02:00:24PM (-0300)
WHERE: Rua Antônio Carlos, 452. São Paulo, Brazil
Encontro mensal de racionalistas, novatos são bem vindos! Teremos algumas lições de racionalidade prática, discussões di... |
d38d8f5a-871b-4729-ae76-cea8649578a3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Assessing oneself
I'm sorry if this is the wrong place for this, but I'm kind of trying to find a turning point in my life.
I've been told repeatedly that I have a talent for math, or science (by qualified people). And I seem to be intelligent enough to understand large parts of math and physics. But I don't know if ... |
5edef5a8-3e4c-41b5-b2a9-e02eab40861a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Don't design agents which exploit adversarial inputs
Summary. Consider two common alignment design patterns:
1. Optimizing for the output of a grader which evaluates plans, and
2. Fixing a utility function and then argmaxing over all possible plans.
These design patterns incentivize the agent to find adversarial... |
2b868eca-0e5a-4e51-84ee-0c8ded72db75 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | endiannesses
endiannesses
------------
i extend the term "[endianness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness)" to mean the order of symbols within a representational sequence, and whether that order is least-significant to most-significant (little endian, hereby LE) or most-significant to least-significant (big e... |
b02a6b66-c533-4695-94c3-ee9ac4da3f2c | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Group: Examples
# The symmetric groups
For every positive integer $n$ there is a group $S_n$, the [symmetric group](https://arbital.com/p/497) of order $n$, defined as the group of all permutations (bijections) $\{ 1, 2, \dots n \} \to \{ 1, 2, \dots n \}$ (or any other [https://arbital.com/p/-3jz](https://arbital.co... |
12b83fb1-b116-472c-b5d2-50316c02ab9a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Philosophers wrestling with evil, as a social media feed
Susan Nieman’s Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (2015), visualized as a social media feed:
Alfonso Ⅹ
hates his Ptolemaic astronomy class
Alfonso Ⅹ
If I had been of God’s counsel at the Creation, many things would have been ordered... |
0cfe1019-1d22-40b0-9b00-6a7559740f66 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Everybody's talking about machine ethics
There is a lot of mainstream interest in machine ethics now. Here are some links to some popular articles on this topic.
By Zeynep Tufecki, a professor at the I School at UNC, on Facebook's algorithmic newsfeed curation and why Twitter should not implement the same.
By danah ... |
07dc68b1-ec72-49b5-8a0a-9268c9d892dd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Apply now: Get "unstuck" with the New IFS Self-Care Fellowship Program
You finally want to resolve deeper-seated inner conflicts, and remove inner blocks in the way of becoming a more fulfilled, resilient, and well-performing version of yourself? This post allows you to learn how IFS as a coaching or therapy approach ... |
aaa2838c-17ea-4036-9122-93ce9a98f1c8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Theory of Equilibrium in the Offense-Defense Balance
The offense-defense balance is a concept that compares how easy it is to protect vs conquer or destroy resources. For example, autonomous weapons and AI systems might make attacks easier and more scalable compared to defensive measures. The balance matters because... |
cb46dc94-f3e4-4825-95c0-686a295c83cc | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | NTK/GP Models of Neural Nets Can't Learn Features
Since people are [talking about](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i9p5KWNWcthccsxqm/updating-the-lottery-ticket-hypothesis) the NTK/GP hypothesis of neural nets again, I thought it might be worth bringing up some recent research in the area that casts doubt on their exp... |
92bcf33c-3080-4f36-a0ca-acc10d78a503 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Stories About Progress
This is the 5th post of 5 containing the transcript of a podcast hosted by Eric Weinstein interviewing Peter Thiel.
Interview
Girard’s Mimetic Theories
Eric Weinstein: So let me return back to the line of inquiry. I mean, sorry, just enjoying so much hearing what you have to say. Some of it'... |
f073691a-d2c3-4b19-ad9e-f09ba205348f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Brief Rant On The Future Of Interaction Design [link]
http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/ |
194d5894-af54-4308-805c-122078fd26d2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | OpenAI #10: Reflections
This week, Altman offers a post called Reflections, and he has an interview in Bloomberg. There’s a bunch of good and interesting answers in the interview about past events that I won’t mention or have to condense a lot here, such as his going over his calendar and all the meetings he constantl... |
d73ad8a3-3b36-4919-9308-39f3c84eb335 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | How much do personal biases in risk assessment affect assessment of AI risks?
Had a stray thought that I think is worth exploring: perhaps disagreements over how to respond to AI risks are heavily influenced by personal biases in how to assess risk in general such that very different conclusions can be drawn from eval... |
ece9a311-7675-4ba2-8176-413433e9ede0 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Newcomb's Problem and Regret of Rationality
The following may well be the most controversial dilemma in the history of decision theory:
>
> A superintelligence from another galaxy, whom we shall call Omega, comes to Earth and sets about playing a strange little game. In this game, Omega selects a human being, set... |
cd65914d-3c2d-4764-a49c-1d729494d6e5 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Transcripts of interviews with AI researchers
*tldr: I conducted a series of interviews with 11 AI reseachers to discuss AI safety, which are located here:* [*TRANSCRIPTION LINK*](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1R3w5tUTi3_NnBJz38DT4V5--9t00Lro4?usp=sharing)*. If you are interested in doing outreach with AI res... |
9e81bd42-8978-4924-aa9b-3dc4e99f5e64 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Example of GPU-accelerated scientific computing with PyTorch
Here's a fun little post I made because a friend asked me how PyTorch had things which were supported in the CUDA backend but not the MPS backend. I was once the sort of person who was on LessWrong, would find the subject interesting, and not already know ev... |
62f5e150-ee22-44e6-9e4b-0ef23de4b854 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Gasoline Gal looks under the hood (post 1 of 3)
"Hi," said Galaxy, "Are you Fuller Chen? I'm here to see your 2018 Chevy SS. Is it still for sale?"
"Sure," Fuller replied, "let me open the garage door for you." [Garage door opens.] "What's your name?"
"I'm Galaxy, but everyone calls me Gal." Galaxy walked around... |
2df2c5cd-5c0d-4b94-b955-f36d4cf594c4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What math do i need for data analysis?
I always had fairly good mathematical thinking (I think) and loved learning about beautiful concepts in math - but i didn't learn much at all in school (cause i had the choice). You can say i was "utilitarian" regarding learning math, i didn't do it if i didn't see how it can enr... |
5d14fd61-d079-4967-a780-e5f75939cc5c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Melbourne Social Meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Social Meetup
WHEN: 15 March 2013 07:00:00PM (+1100)
WHERE: Cartlon, Melbourne
Melbourne's next regular social meetup will be held on Friday 15th March at our usual venue (Ben's house) in Carlton. All are welcome from 6:30pm for a 7:00pm... |
6f52b1f5-a2bd-4f43-830d-e4a9248bb0de | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Obstacles in ARC's agenda: Low Probability Estimation
As an employee of the European AI Office, it's important for me to emphasize this point: The views and opinions of the author expressed herein are personal and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Commission or other EU institutions.
Also, to stave off... |
5ebfe7ae-0d85-474b-b3ae-31fe085f5079 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Weekly Roundup #5
A note about what isn’t in this roundup: Nothing about the midterms or crypto/FTX. I wrote about Twitter earlier this week. The midterms are better covered elsewhere, I do not have anything unique to say about them. As for the situation with FTX, it is rapidly developing and I do not yet feel I have ... |
816d02ca-0e04-4330-abf0-ef9154ad7c73 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | I Recommend More Training Rationales
Some time ago I happened to read the concept of training rationale described by Evan Hubinger, and I really liked it. In case you are not aware: training rationales are a bunch of questions that ML developers / ML teams should ask themselves in order to self-assess pros and cons wh... |
965187a3-0ffe-4f4a-8065-c3f46bd2c9d4 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Thoughts about OOD alignment
We may have one example of realized out-of-distribution alignment: maternal attachment. Evolution has been able to create an architecture that seems to take care of something reliably enough that modern humans, with access to unlimited food, drugs, and VR headsets, do not seek to feed a ch... |
30b22761-494c-46c6-b287-8525a62f3556 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | I'm looking for research looking at the influence of fiction on changing elite/public behaviors and opinions
The context of the question is that I'm a self published novelist, and I've decided that I want to focus the half of my time that I'm focusing on less commercial projects on writing books that might be directly... |
b108b42e-8dc6-47c2-befa-116b443b1466 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Justification Through Pragmatism
Justification Through Pragmatism
In this article, I propose a new method of justifying fundamental philosophical assumptions.
The fundamental assumptions on which we base our thinking cannot ever be proven to be true, as such a proof must rely on our own thinking and be circular as a... |
c79acf55-f4fa-41f4-8ced-de2b30b46f59 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | (The) Lightcone is nothing without its people: LW + Lighthaven's big fundraiser
Update Jan 19th 2025: The Fundraiser is over! We had raised over $2.1M when the fundraiser closed, and have a few more irons in the fire that I expect will get us another $100k-$200k. This is short of our $3M goal, which I think means we w... |
6c57afb3-945e-46ab-9fd6-664a2bc3b796 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Masculine Virtues
Cross-posted from Putanumonit (where there's already a good discussion going).
----------------------------------------
Boys Will Be Boys
Have you seen the Gillette ad? Everyone’s seen the Gillette ad. And after my last post on masculinity, everyone’s been asking me what I think of the Gillette ... |
a6a203d9-eecf-42cb-9d68-cf8ac02afb7c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open thread, July 10 - July 16, 2017
IF IT'S WORTH SAYING, BUT NOT WORTH ITS OWN POST, THEN IT GOES HERE.
----------------------------------------
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the ... |
5473e93d-4fd8-455c-bb68-91cf4db505d1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Real Standard
Long-delayed followup To: Roleplaying As Yourself
(Another simple intuition pump, this one especially useful for effective altruists who are struggling with wanting to do more or worrying they're not doing enough.)
Previously I wrote about a mental tool for prompting good consequentialist reasoning... |
ccce1b4d-16c4-47c0-9eb0-769504208d32 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Stoicism vs the Methods of Rationality
Crossposted from spacelutt.com
I fell in love with Stoicism for about 5 months in 2021, but am now no longer so infatuated, and this post takes a look at a few of the reasons why.
Determining Control
The only thing that’s really out of your control is things that happen in the... |
2079bc02-9b2c-41ae-aa37-da03093da0c7 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | [Closed] Job Offering: Help Communicate Infrabayesianism
Infrabayesianism seems to me (Abram) like a very promising framework for addressing at least some of the problems of AI alignment.
* Like logical induction, it solves the realizability problem, creating an epistemic theory suitable for embedded agents.
* Unlike... |
20290dcb-91a1-4075-85c0-06154635b747 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Notes on Autonomous Cars
> Excerpts from literature on robotic/self-driving/autonomous cars with a focus on legal issues, lengthy, often tedious; some more SI work. See also Notes on Psychopathy.
Having read through all this material, my general feeling is: the near-term future (1 decade) for autonomous cars is not t... |
afa16dee-5096-42a9-86be-c2368ad48c36 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | USA v Progressive 1979 excerpt
In 1979, an interesting judgment was made regarding the publication of an alleged nuclear infohazard. Here is an excerpt from that preliminary injunction ruling, which was authored by Robert W. Warren, then a Wisconsin Eastern District judge.
---
"The Secretary of State states that pub... |
7a7639c1-94ae-4e45-bcfe-0651b067121b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Limitations of GPT-4
Amidst the rumours about a new breakthrough at OpenAI I thought I'd better publish this draft before it gets completely overtaken by reality. It is essentially a collection of "gaps" between GPT4 and the human mind. Unfortunately the rumours around Q* force me to change the conclusion from "ve... |
422c5b86-fa1b-4cb6-b7c0-6683bc722775 | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | "Related: LessWrong as a social catalystI primarily used my prior user profile asked questions of Less Wrong. When I had an inkling for a query, but I didn't have a fully formed hypothesis, I wouldn't know how to search for answers to questions on the Internet myself, so I asked them on Less Wrong. The reception I have... |
f23494a2-9db2-4dbf-b724-832e89833ff4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Destroying the Utility Monster—An Alternative Formation of Utility
NOTE: This post contains LaTeX; it is recommended that you install “TeX the World” (for chromium users), “TeX All the Things” or other TeX/LaTeX extensions to view the post properly.
Destroying the Utility Monster—An Alternative Formation of Utilit... |
4e9aec40-71d3-44d4-8489-1e1e2fe58d8d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What Jason has been reading, May 2023: “Protopia,” complex systems, Daedalus vs. Icarus, and more
This is a monthly feature. As usual, I’ve omitted recent blog posts and such, which you can find in my links digests.
John Gall, The Systems Bible (2012), aka Systemantics, 3rd ed. A concise, pithy collection of wisdom a... |
9d60c18c-9b7e-4e31-8e53-3e9518bc8ff3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Link] Huffington Post article promoting Effective Altruist ideas
Disclaimer: This post is mainly of interest to EA-oriented Less Wrongers
Happy to share that I got this article promoting effective giving, and especially advocating Against Malaria Foundation, GiveWell, and The Life You Can Save, published in The H... |
3befd9f3-466a-453d-ba01-2c42e52bf9ad | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Code Generation as an AI risk setting
Historically, it has been difficult to persuade people of the likelihood of AI risk because the examples tend to sound “far-fetched” to audiences not bought in on the premise. One particular problem with many traditional framings for AI takeover is that most people struggle to ima... |
f947b0ae-ee26-494e-8245-14dec5e92f05 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Active Recall and Spaced Repetition are Different Things
Epistemic status: splitting hairs. Originally published as a shortform; thanks @Arjun Panickssery for telling me to publish this as a full post.
There’s been a lot of recent work on memory. This is great, but popular communication of that progress consistently ... |
5785a079-0165-4d06-b9c4-a302e79e5839 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Thyroid Madness: Two Apparently Contradictory Studies. Proof?
Recap: (See also: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/nef/the_thyroid_madness_core_argument_evidence/ and previous posts)
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Fibromyalgia all look far too much like the classical presentation of hypothyroidism for comfort, bu... |
c786314d-7497-4659-a7e7-2c581bd716e5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Consciousness is irrelevant - instead solve alignment by asking this question
I've noticed that there are 2 flavors of the alignment problem. One is about the technical how to and practical engineering, the other is about humanities, social sciences, human behavior and psychology.
What they both have in common is doo... |
7bf140ce-bbf0-451f-9b09-c5e65031068b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | King Lear - A Reinterpretation
Tragedies often explore fundamental human flaws, showing how they can lead to ironic and devastating consequences. The greatest tragedies invite readers to reflect and draw their own conclusions. This essay offers an interpretation of Shakespeare's King Lear, focusing on the human tenden... |
b3dbd186-7a40-4975-8e89-77341b74c27c | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | "Summary: Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics (pdf) is 40,000 words taking some initial steps toward tackling the key quantitative issue in the intelligence explosion, "reinvestable returns on cognitive investments": what kind of returns can you get from an investment in cognition, can you reinvest it to make yoursel... |
597b38a0-dd70-420d-88c9-ef6f00854039 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Less Wrong needs footnotes
I may have said this before, but footnotes would be an amazing feature for Less Wrong to have. The main way Less Wrong is trying to improve the world is by providing a forum for high quality discussion. This effectively cashes out a nuanced arguments backed up by evidence that are also well-... |
735a8985-7c9a-4c3d-bb8a-80819399b26c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Instrumental ignoring AI, Dumb but not useless.
This post is yet another unworkable agent design that uses infinite compute. It outlines an AI that ignores all instrumental values, pursuing only it's terminal values.
What is does it look like to pursue an instrumental value. It means you can predict the AI is likely... |
1db2a91d-6b2f-47fe-9fd3-74b86918ed4d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Motivated Reasoning Critique of Effective Altruism
I sketch out a plausible critique of effective altruism based on priors of how commonplace motivated reasoning is in the world at large, updated priors based on specific features of the effective altruism community, and some empirical evidence of observed motivate... |
4227ff8e-8105-4aea-be15-f279a2faff4c | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Oracle machines for automated philosophy
.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; flo... |
e0bac286-61d7-4618-a3a2-1be74d9620eb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The usefulness of forecasts and the rationality of forecasters
Suppose we have a bunch of (forecasted value, actual value) pairs for a given quantity (with different measured actual values at different times). An example would be GDP growth rate measures in different years. For each year, we have a forecasted value an... |
7b0e7a34-4283-4292-a12d-430f44355d08 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Auckland Preliminary Meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : Auckland Preliminary Meetup
WHEN: 08 March 2014 02:00:00PM (+1300)
WHERE: Albert Park, Auckland
I got back from the second Melbourne CFAR workshop recently and it was good. It's well worthwhile having a local rationalist community and while th... |
2ac8073e-85e6-42c4-9c10-b9dcfe1427ec | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Pseudo-Rationality
Pseudo-rationality is the social performance of rationality, as opposed to actual rationality. Here are some examples:
* Being overly skeptical to demonstrate how skeptical you are
* Always fighting for the truth, even when you’re burning more social capital than the argument is worth
* Optimisi... |
aa1d7ff8-8a5c-4687-aa55-ff9d8ca222d5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Patron Saint Holidays
Elizabeth recently wrote this as a comment on the Vavilov day post. I thought it was important enough to be worth pulling out as a separate topic of discussion.
> I don't love the process for generating rationalist holidays right now and tentatively think it would be better to switch to a patron... |
3b5969f3-e34b-4a9d-8f1f-e8610ba18984 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Suggestions for a presentation on FAI?
Next week I'm going to be doing a 10-15 minute presentation on Friendly AI to a local group of programmers. They're already familiar with concepts such as the singularity. My basic plan is to cover what FAI is, why it's important, and why it's a hard problem, based on the materia... |
38c16178-e940-4aa6-8492-971d19a7db50 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Link] Eric S. Raymond - Me and Less Wrong
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6549
> I’ve gotten questions from a couple of different quarters recently about my relationship to the the rationalist community around Less Wrong and related blogs. The one sentence answer is that I consider myself a fellow-traveler and ally of tha... |
516d0565-f689-4b21-bf8f-3373acacf4f9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How to avoid Schelling points?
After reading an introductory post on game theory, specifically regarding Schelling Points, I noticed a paradox and I wonder if anyone here can shed some light on the subject.
The scenario I will use to illustrate this is the inverse of a frequently used example to describe popular Sche... |
1e9ba3b1-e715-4a4d-bfe9-c1ee61152216 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Vanessa Kosoy's PreDCA, distilled
This is an expanded version of my answer to application problem 3 for Nate Soares and Vivek Hebbar's SERI MATS stream.
Why this post?
Vanessa's presentation has already been turned into a post by carado (as part of Refine) and a video in Connall and Jack's excellent series (as part ... |
137a32b9-247d-4197-852a-85dc662858ed | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Change utility, reduce extortion
A full solution to the extortion problem is sorely elusive. However, there are crude hacks that we can use to mitigate the downside.
Suppose we figured out that a friendly AI should be maximising an unbounded utility function U. The extortion risk is that another AI could threaten a F... |
ea13fb49-024a-40c1-97e3-e1d216ce6807 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Should EA's be Superrational cooperators?
Back in 2012 when visiting Leverage Research, I was amazed by the level of cooperation in daily situations I got from Mark. Mark wasn't just nice, or kind, or generous. Mark seemed to be playing a different game than everyone else.
If someone needed X, and Mark had X, he wou... |
2b51dece-7f50-4495-b614-50f30a84f8c1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Beauty quips, "I'd shut up and multiply!"
When it comes to probability, you should trust probability laws over your intuition. Many people got the Monty Hall problem wrong because their intuition was bad. You can get the solution to that problem using probability laws that you learned in Stats 101 -- it's not a hard... |
aaa1feef-edc8-4740-b845-d8f8d2f99f49 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | Enhancing metacognitive reinforcement learning using reward structures and feedback.
Enhancing metacognitive reinforcement learning
using reward structures and feedback
Paul M. Krueger1(pmk@berkeley.edu)
Falk Lieder1(falk.lieder@berkeley.edu)
Thomas L. Griffiths (tom griffiths@berkeley.edu)
Department of Psychology, Uni... |
7d7cf807-806a-43d8-8a9e-c846bf96d06b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Projects
Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Projects
WHEN: 10 October 2016 06:15:00PM (-0700)
WHERE: 1769 15th St, San Francisco, CA
We’ll be meeting to work on projects!
Near the beginning, we’ll go around and talk about what we’ll be working on, then do a cou... |
7c188224-cd6b-4125-a45c-33701966b9d6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Causes of disagreements
You have a disagreement before you. How do you handle it?
Causes of fake disagreements:
Is the disagreement real? The trivial case is an apparent disagreement occuring over a noisy or low information channel. Internet chat is especially liable to fail this way because of the lack of tone, body... |
a5140f86-7d52-44ff-aafa-d65d79cf3915 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Notes on ChatGPT’s “memory” for strings and for events
*This is cross-posted* [*from New Savanna*](https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2023/09/notes-on-chatgpts-memory-for-strings.html).
Here I take a look at the results reported in three previous posts and begin the job of making sense of them analytically. Here are th... |
aebd6b1a-89c6-44f7-ae45-1142eff9737b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Do nasal decongestants increase risk associated with cardiovascular (and respiratory via second-order effects) symptoms from COVID-19?
Currently trying to think my way through this one given that I use a topical oxymetazoline spray nightly (else I'm substantially unable to sleep due to being unable to breathe through ... |
0f4a9b95-5578-47e0-83a3-9ffc201e2504 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Robustness May Be at Odds with Accuracy
1 Introduction
---------------
Deep learning models have achieved impressive performance on a number of challenging benchmarks in computer vision, speech recognition and competitive game playing (Krizhevsky et al., [2012](#bib.bib30); Graves et al., [2013](#bib.bib22); Silver... |
8bdd67ba-def2-4558-a9bd-330e6e430540 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What's the word for the amount of expertise that I, an experienced therapy patient and generally educated person, have on psychology topics?
Epistemic status: raising a question that I've found difficult
This topic has frustrated me some, and I think there are a variety of forces pointing in different directions.
M... |
c1156f6d-7775-41a2-b3c0-3600888abb2b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What - ideally - should young and intelligent people do?
This is my first post. I'm 21. From what I understand, my fluid intelligence will rise until the age of 26 and then slowly fall. So I'm in a great position now to positively contribute to humanity.
I feel the need - at least now - to devote my life to something... |
fdcbcf3c-faee-45d0-83f0-3f53d21b3107 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Please Stop Explaining Black Box Models for High-Stakes Decisions
1 Introduction
---------------
There has been an increasing trend in healthcare and criminal justice to leverage machine learning (ML) for high-stakes prediction applications that deeply impact human lives. Many of the ML models are black boxes that ... |
6adb9701-cc6c-4ab2-8e8b-819f36aacf01 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | FTX expects to return all customer money; clawbacks may go away
New York Times (unpaywalled):
> When the cryptocurrency exchange FTX declared bankruptcy about 15 months ago, it seemed few customers would recover much money or crypto from the platform. As John Ray III, who took over as chief executive during the bankr... |
c3f32251-36dc-4964-a8d7-5dccb049b306 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Twitter thread on open-source AI
Some thoughts on open-source AI (copied over from a recent twitter thread):
1. We should have a strong prior favoring open source. It’s been a huge success driving tech progress over many decades. We forget how counterintuitive it was originally, and shouldn’t take it for granted.
2.... |
dfbc2cb7-71fe-4c2c-adfb-2b39e168e509 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is Effective Volunteering Possible?
Crosspost from the EA Forum
Epistemic status: based mostly on intuitions and personal and anecdotal experiences, with a bit of help from the principles of economics. Uncertain and motivated to explore whether an overexploited activity is underexploited regarding doing the most good... |
5d26c6b3-44c4-480a-b9bf-329fc5dfa9fa | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Survey of NLP Researchers: NLP is contributing to AGI progress; major catastrophe plausible
I was part of a group that ran a PhilPapers-style survey and metasurvey targeting NLP researchers who publish at venues like ACL. Results are here (Tweet-thread version). It didn't target AGI timelines, but had some other quest... |
a3af707a-2f0a-4d76-91c3-e1fdfdd4641f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | CFAR's new mission statement (on our website)
|
02f03b6e-d39e-4ace-add2-4d0bff58a4f7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : West LA Meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup
WHEN: 01 August 2012 07:00:00PM (-0700)
WHERE: 10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064
When: 7:00pm - 9:00pm Wednesday, August 1st.
Where: The Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavi... |
efd74d2d-5258-4c1c-84cc-90989fa3f21a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | DPO/PPO-RLHF on LLMs incentivizes sycophancy, exaggeration and deceptive hallucination, but not misaligned powerseeking
TL;DR: GPTs are imitation learners, even with current forms of RL;HF.
Direct preference optimization is a conditioning method for generative probabilistic models where pairs of outputs are ranked (e... |
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