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87bd59b3-e60b-4291-8b80-ec5edaeec47b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open & Welcome Thread - Aug/Sep 2022
If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it.
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 get from the site and community are invit... |
79e85d05-5840-49da-9f0a-a7f62b83f391 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Bets on an Extreme Future
Betting on the future is a good way to reveal true beliefs.
As one example of such a bet on a key debate about a post-human future, I'd like to announce here that Robin Hanson and I have made the following agreement. (See also Robin's post at Overcoming Bias):
We, Robin Hanson and Joshua Fo... |
3c41248f-46b0-488b-b1dc-1dea4d4dd1cc | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Careful With Trailing Averages
With covid, it is common for people to look at seven day trailing averages. For example, the MA Covid Dashboard has "the seven day average of percent positivity is 18.42%". While this isn't exactly wrong, it's not a good fit for a rapidly rising number. Here's how it's usually presented:... |
76f62dd6-e62c-414f-b414-552fcca90f23 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Human values & biases are inaccessible to the genome
*Related to Steve Byrnes’*[*Social instincts are tricky because of the “symbol grounding problem.”*](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/HzcM2dkCq7fwXBej8/p/5F5Tz3u6kJbTNMqsb#13_2_2_Claim_2__Social_instincts_are_tricky_because_of_the__symbol_grounding_problem_) *I wouldn’t ... |
53088275-4cc2-4625-9c5d-4841653363dc | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Duplication versus probability
Suppose you're rushing an urgent message back to the general of your army, and you fall into a deep hole. Down here, conveniently, there's a lever that can create a duplicate of you outside the hole. You can also break open the lever and use the wiring as ropes to climb to the top. You e... |
bbf0a4dd-56c0-450c-80ce-b0719c89383a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Ia! Ia! Extradimensional Cephalopod Nafl'fhtagn!
Hello, I'm ExCeph (short for Extradimensional Cephalopod). I've been mostly lurking here for the past decade and occasionally commenting within the past year or so. However, I never got around to actually introducing myself until now. It's good to meet you.
I was advis... |
2e38c93b-a0ee-4250-8512-c3f9449c534c | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Should ChatGPT make us downweight our belief in the consciousness of non-human animals?
The remarkable capabilities of ChatGPT and other tools based on large language models (LLMs) have generated a fair amount of idle speculation over whether such programs might in some sense be considered sentient. The conventional w... |
9be33705-b09d-402e-93f4-f2d01097dad5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Bets, Bonds, and Kindergarteners
Bets and bonds are tools for handling different epistemic states and levels of trust. Which makes them a great fit for negotiating with small children!
A few weeks ago Anna (4y) wanted to play with some packing material. It looked very messy to me, I didn't expect she would clean it u... |
4ba7f0dd-1e7c-4b89-9286-497aad1acbd4 | awestover/filtering-for-misalignment | Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results | id: post734
Maybe eliciting latent knowledge will be easy. For instance, maybe if you tune models to answer easy questions like “what’s the capital of Germany?” they’ll tell you whether your alignment research is good, their P(doom), how they feel about being zapped by RLHF all the time, and whether it's a good idea t... |
d0b7296a-c5e4-48ad-84e9-a6435effeada | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Economic policy for artificial intelligence
None |
7716ca4b-b0a9-42c1-aa75-e43c328732fd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | All hail the Lisbon Treaty! Or is that "hate"? Or just "huh"?
The Lisbon treaty was finally ratified last Tuesday, in a most wonderfully disdainful signing cermony.
I take it that everyone on the list is emotionally overwhelmed by this, one of the most important political events in recent history. The world's largest... |
d1aef921-c5f8-4f09-9941-78febce1be19 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | In a multipolar scenario, how do people expect systems to be trained to interact with systems developed by other labs?
I haven't seen much discussion of this, but it seems like an important factor in how well AI systems deployed by actors with different goals manage to avoid conflict (cf. my discussion of equilibrium ... |
061b4374-7efb-4393-b437-df8d5cdf18ac | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Context disaster
# Short introduction
One frequently suggested strategy for [aligning](https://arbital.com/p/2v) a [sufficiently advanced AI](https://arbital.com/p/7g1) is to observe--*before* the AI becomes powerful enough that 'debugging' the AI would be problematic if the AI decided not to [let us debug it](https:... |
fed45d3e-3b35-4d6b-a7c1-61711aa62cd0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why doesn't the presence of log-loss for probabilistic models (e.g. sequence prediction) imply that any utility function capable of producing a "fairly capable" agent will have at least some non-negligible fraction of overlap with human values?
Most successful AI models use similar loss-functions - typically some ki... |
63ae14ba-d0ef-4d45-ab4c-5de7c0105694 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Counterfactuals from ensembles of peers
Bruno De Finetti once argued that probabilities are subjective representations of forecasts of real events. In particular, he rejected the idea that statements like "there is a random probability p of this coin landing on heads when it is tossed, distributed according to Q". For... |
10a9579f-b113-402d-9731-ffa5a7615c61 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Top Time Travel Interventions?
I encourage people to treat this as an exercise and avoid looking at the other answers before posting your own. (Maybe use spoiler blocks?) This is more for fun than for serious. However, it may potentially serve as an analogy to help think about what the top modern-day interventions mig... |
76bcf8c3-f82c-43de-94bb-82f55563b6f7 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence
What is the function of a fire alarm?
One might think that the function of a fire alarm is to provide you with important evidence about a fire existing, allowing you to change your policy accordingly and exit the building.
In the classic experiment by Latane ... |
32697faf-65d5-44f5-9961-1a400f97b0e9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Starter-kit for Rationality Space
LessWrong has gotten big over the years: 31,260 posts, 299 sequences, and more than 120,000 users.[1] It has budded offshoots like the alignment and EA forums and earned itself recognition as "cult". Wonderful!
There is a dark side to this success: as the canon grows, it becomes ha... |
f9e3e457-9b63-4f9f-8eb1-fc2e2dfce75d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Peanut Butter
This is part 2 of my interview with deluks917. In part 1 we discussed online weirdos, free thinkers, and Uyghurs. Stay tuned for part 3 on archetypes, the will to knowledge and Moana.
We talk about materialism, Buddhism, how to deal with the inevitable suffering that comes from attachment, and how peanu... |
463db8e5-0c6e-4fba-bf0d-22e393152ea2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Anti-Parfit's Hitchhiker
Thinking about Parfit's Hitchhiker, an alternative example occurred to me:
You're lost in the desert and this time Aul Peckman drives up and tells you "I will give you a ride back to town iff you would have stiffed my nemesis Paul Eckman." After reading Parfit's Hitchhiker, you had pre-commit... |
51b1ca3d-2858-44cf-aa29-e09b12d1532c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Find yourself a Worthy Opponent: a Chavruta
You've been on Less Wrong for a while. You've become very good at a lot of stuff. Specifically, arguing. You win arguments. All the time. Effortlessly. And the worst part is, you often win for the wrong reasons. Perhaps there were counters to your propositions. Perhaps you f... |
81bd368d-0b9b-46ed-bbf7-33cfed2cb4fa | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Rationality: From AI to Zombies
[](https://intelligence.org/rationality-ai-zombies/)Between 2006 and 2009, senior MIRI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote several hundred essays for the blogs *Overcoming ... |
946d0eba-26f3-4bef-84c5-87f965b14361 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AGI Safety Literature Review (Everitt, Lea & Hutter 2018)
Abstract. The development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) promises to be a major event. Along with its many potential benefits, it also raises serious safety concerns (Bostrom, 2014). The intention of this paper is to provide an easily accessible and u... |
beaa992b-ee2b-4b12-b3bf-32766f5a8a53 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Observing Optimization
Followup to: Optimization and the Singularity
In "Optimization and the Singularity" I pointed out that history since the first replicator, including human history to date, has mostly been a case of nonrecursive optimization - where you've got one thingy doing the optimizing, and another thingy... |
3294f91b-8d07-4ba3-83fe-6a43f961afc3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Financial Effectiveness Repository
Follow-Up to: A Guide to Rational Investing Financial Planning Sequence (defunct) The Rational Investor
What are your recommendations and ideas about financial effectiveness?
This post is created in response to a comment on this Altruistic Effectiveness post and thus may have a s... |
2d69f970-e29e-47ab-beb8-1a7e9dda8c9d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Canberra: The Efficient Market Hypothesis
Discussion article for the meetup : Canberra: The Efficient Market Hypothesis
WHEN: 24 July 2015 06:00:00PM (-0700)
WHERE: 57 McKinlay Place, Narrabundah
Note the new location! Also, date and time for this might be off since I am posting from San Francisco: it shou... |
1a36ba73-f676-4bce-b400-b17062b106bb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | when will LLMs become human-level bloggers?
"Short AI timelines" have recently become mainstream. One now routinely hears the claim that somewhere in the 2026-2028 interval, we'll have AI systems that outperform humans in basically every respect.
For example, the official line from Anthropic holds that "powerful AI"... |
ab050aaf-98c6-4a0e-aa9f-4853271ab800 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | You Only Live Twice
"It just so happens that your friend here is only mostly dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead."
-- The Princess Bride
My co-blogger Robin and I may disagree on how fast an AI can improve itself, but we agree on an issue that seems much simpler to us than that: ... |
df28aa75-a5e8-48be-acfa-73cca6309506 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | How should DeepMind's Chinchilla revise our AI forecasts?
*Acknowledgements: I wrote this report as part of a six-hour paid work-trial with* [*Epoch AI*](https://epochai.org/)*.*
*Epistemic status: My dataset analysis is a bit simplistic but the inference I draw from it seems likely. The implications for TAI timelin... |
99eaf5b5-4486-4861-ab0a-c5c89c8e56e0 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | are there finitely many moral patients?
are there finitely many moral patients?
---------------------------------------
wouldn't it be neat if we didn't have to worry about [infinite ethics](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5iZTwGHv2tNfFmeDa/on-infinite-ethics) ?
i think it is plausible that there are finitely many... |
d6ee89f6-fb60-4a8e-b0f7-90f9a436405d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Case study: abuse of frequentist statistics
Recently, a colleague was reviewing an article whose key justification rested on some statistics that seemed dodgy to him, so he came to me for advice. (I guess my boss, the resident statistician, was out of his office.) Now, I'm no expert in frequentist statistics. My forma... |
62853a5e-3600-46ea-9696-7bf7697f23ad | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Causal decision theory is unsatisfactory
This is crossposted from my new blog. I was planning to write a short post explaining how Newcomblike problems are the norm and why any sufficiently powerful intelligence built to use causal decision theory would self-modify to stop using causal decision theory in short order. ... |
f915acab-c37a-4042-86ca-cedabbb71ee5 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | What are the high-level approaches to AI alignment?
I'm writing a post comparing some high-level approaches to AI alignment in terms of their [false positive risk](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JYdGCrD55FhS4iHvY/robustness-to-fundamental-uncertainty-in-agi-alignment-1). Trouble is, there's no standard agreement on w... |
4a3f86c6-1957-4967-ae8a-04cfcd4a64cc | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | On expected utility, part 4: Dutch books, Cox, and Complete Class
(Cross-posted from [Hands and Cities](https://handsandcities.com/2022/03/24/on-expected-utility-part-4-dutch-books-cox-and-complete-class/))
*Previously in sequence:* [*Skyscrapers and madmen*](https://handsandcities.com/2022/03/16/on-expected-utility-... |
f23dacc7-8c32-4e2e-b35b-325511c05422 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Expert Iteration From the Inside
Epistemic Status: Possibly generalizing from one example, but seems simple enough to apply more broadly.
Related To: "Thinking Fast and Slow", Fake Frameworks, Dive In.
I think it’s a good idea to try out bad ideas. No, I don't mean really bad ideas, such as ideas where bot... |
53643b3f-c4e8-4af7-9648-84d806ce442d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Alignment Research = Conceptual Alignment Research + Applied Alignment Research
Instead of talking about alignment research, we should differentiate conceptual alignment research and applied alignment research.
I expect these two categories to be quite obvious to most people around here: conceptual alignment research... |
ca34a7fc-7c44-4f23-9414-59bddf2142f1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Rationality and Climate Change
My master thesis was on the subject of climate change and mass media attitude toward it. Working on it, I've read over 300 newspaper articles on the subject and studied a large number of papers regarding its consequences, its solutions, and the attempts to frame the debate over them, so ... |
00c046ec-bac4-4525-ad8e-b476fac3dca6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Opposing a hierarchy does not imply egalitarianism
Epistemic status: just thinking aloud...
Trigger warning: bullying (without details)
I have repeatedly seen the claim that people are egalitarian in nature. It goes roughly like this:
> Before invention of agriculture, people didn't have hierarchies. Of course, so... |
fb80dfb0-c2a0-4397-9522-21bd7b47eda4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Your Most Valuable Skill
Knowledge is great: I suspect we can agree there. Sadly, though, we can't guarantee ourselves infinite time in which to learn everything eventually, and in the meantime, there are plenty of situations where having irrelevant knowledge instead of more instrumentally useful knowledge can be dec... |
39dca863-03c2-4c9d-ba41-9233a4af52a8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Weight training
I'm looking for resources on effective weight training for the purpose of physique building. It's an area with a particularly poor signal to noise ratio so I would value pointers from other rationalists. The kinds of questions I would like to answer are:
* How to structure work-outs. Should I lift as... |
9644fefc-1ba7-4b77-89c4-f7fc15fb1af0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Instrumental Rationality Sequence Update (Drive Link to Drafts)
Hey all,
Following my post on my planned Instrumental Rationality sequence, I thought it'd be good to give the LW community an update of where I am.
1) Currently collecting papers on habits. Planning to go through a massive sprint of the papers tomorrow... |
558ad30e-ca59-4ecb-b9d9-5411a09a8045 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Linkpost] MindEye2: Shared-Subject Models Enable fMRI-To-Image With 1 Hour of Data
> TL;DR: We show that accurate reconstructions of perception from fMRI brain activity are now possible from a single visit to the MRI facility using our diffusion-based approach that pretrains across other subjects' data using a novel ... |
a3b2f977-dd20-4947-b477-1f8ee4113c49 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Rationality Quotes: February 2011
Take off every 'quote'! You know what you doing. For great insight. Move 'quote'.
And if you don't:
* Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and... |
506963b4-d56f-4d99-b60f-ddfc51753302 | awestover/filtering-for-misalignment | Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results | id: post2902
1 Introduction This post will introduce our new paper " Pitfalls of Learning a Reward Function Online ", now online for IJCAI2020 . It shows some of the difficulties with things we might think of as "preference learning processes", and the useful conditions we could impose to get around these. The tl;dr s... |
10b32515-01ba-4ab0-84cb-8c8634b232b6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How would not having free will feel to you?
Given the spike in free-will debates on LW recently (blame Scott Aaronson), and the usual potentially answerable meta-question "Why do we think we have free will?", I am intrigued by a sub-question, "what would it feel like to have/not have free will?". The positive version ... |
aab33a71-0658-4547-b980-22cda4efc0c6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | She has joined the Conspiracy
I have no idea whether I had anything to do with this. |
7b0bd1f4-9881-4312-920d-51b38b7dbead | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Precise P(doom) isn't very important for prioritization or strategy
People spend time trying to determine the probability that AI will become an existential risk, sometimes referred to as P(doom).
One point that I think gets missed in this discussion is that a precise estimate of P(doom) isn't that important for pri... |
3607fd90-4ff1-4f6e-a871-b1cc12acebd5 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube | Youtube Transcripts | 256 Where I agree and Disagree with Eliezer 2
hello and welcome to session
256 in the aisafety.com reading group
tonight we will be discussing the second
part of where i agree and disagree with
eliezer by paul christiano
paul cristiano probably needs no
introduction at this point
and we'll be going through part 11
th... |
aace18de-59d7-41e8-a164-37c41133976c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Introduction to Connectionist Modelling of Cognitive Processes: a chapter by chapter review
This chapter by chapter review was inspired by Vaniver's recent chapter by chapter review of Causality. Like with that review, the intention is not so much to summarize but to help readers determine whether or not they should ... |
82520bc1-125b-4abc-a3fc-851eb620407f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Empathy/Systemizing Quotient is a poor/biased model for the autism/sex link
Thank you to Justis Millis for providing feedback and proofreading on this post. This post is also available on my Substack.
TL/DR: Contrary to the theory that neurological sex differences and autism both involve the same tradeoff of systemic... |
01ef5fdc-1977-4518-a2ac-efc18c17c46c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Verification methods for international AI agreements
TLDR: A new paper summarizes some verification methods for international AI agreements. See also summaries on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Several co-authors and I are currently planning some follow-up projects about verification methods. There are also at least 2 other ... |
214b89b1-2143-49a6-b546-e0430ea66426 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Resource Request] What are good resources for best practice for creating bureaucracy?
Especially, after just having read The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy by David Graeber, I feel that most bureaucracy we have is very bad and might create more harm then benefits.
At t... |
cbb9600c-58f5-44c8-bd26-92d3d804c461 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube | Youtube Transcripts | Respectability
this is a video I should probably have
made a while ago but better late than
never
I've been talking about AI safety for
quite a while now and in a very public
way on the computer file channel since
about 2014 from the beginning a lot of
AI safety advocacy has had a certain
quality to it which to be hon... |
81c7ab3c-6751-4245-95b5-33553a760349 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How should TurnTrout handle his DeepMind equity situation?
habryka
Ok, so the basic situation as I understand it is that as part of your Deepmind offer you would get a bunch of Google stock that would become available to you over the course of around 4 years or so. This means in-expectation, for 4 years, your net wort... |
3fc00d72-8241-4658-aea6-e7185dee9f85 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Atlanta Lesswrong September Meetup (1st of 2)
Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta Lesswrong September Meetup (1st of 2)
WHEN: 08 September 2013 06:00:00PM (-0400)
WHERE: 2388 Lawrenceville Hwy. Apt L. Decatur, GA 30033
Come join us for the first meetup for the month of September! We'll be doing our... |
a26f557a-b1b9-443b-aec8-f0ebd49db371 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Towards Safe Reinforcement Learning via Constraining Conditional Value-at-Risk
1 Introduction
---------------
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved enormous success on a variety of tasks, ranging from playing Atari games [[17](#bib.bib22 "Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning")] and Go [[... |
7c693335-9cd0-4f81-ac36-9250f25c69fa | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Language – The Stuff of Thought (Rationality Dojo - Melbourne)
Discussion article for the meetup : Language – The Stuff of Thought (Rationality Dojo - Melbourne)
WHEN: 07 August 2016 03:30:00PM (+1000)
WHERE: Ground Floor, Ross House, 247 Flinders Lane. Melbourne, Vic
The next rationality dojo for Less Wro... |
fc602d91-e554-4537-b29d-a9572ec555b0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Neo-reactionaries, why are you neo-reactionary?
Through LessWrong, I've discovered the no-reactionary movement. Servery says that there are some of you here.
I'm curious, what lead you to accept the basic premises of the movement? What is the story of your personal "conversion"? Was there some particular insight or ... |
bc17cfdf-8e9f-4624-9645-665f3fceb27b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What changes should happen in the HHS?
Currently, it looks like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will become HHS secretary and change a lot of things at the HHS. There will likely be both good and bad changes.
It's a time when the ideas that lay around matter. What changes do you think should be made? What clever policy ideas s... |
fea6832e-ea7b-43d9-966c-5b0b8924e8ca | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | New fast transformer inference ASIC — Sohu by Etched
I would bet that ASICs will run the roost in a few years and this is only the beginning.
They claim 500k tokens per second with Llama 70B.
Seems to be exactly what it looks like, an ASIC. Curious if this is somehow not what it looks like. |
b0f9a2a9-3bcb-4377-aa9a-f6085837a6db | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why quantitative methods are heartwarming
From Twitter:
> If you listened to my podcast w/Michael Sandel, you know we have very different views on whether markets are "degrading"
>
> One thing I didn't mention to him: This bit in his book cracked me up -- because I remember my friends & I found this aspect of Moneyb... |
286ea45b-45b3-45ef-8f0a-b3031a159b84 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Literally Everything is Infinite
Hi all,
I was on a walk, digesting a lot of "Western" and "Eastern" philosophy I have been reading over the last couple months, and a mental paradigm emerged for me. Not in blaze of light or spiritual experience kind of way, but more in a small thought that grew larger the more I ques... |
64bd954e-0bcc-4460-a026-a12efdef297f | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Equivalence relation
An **equivalence relation** is a binary [https://arbital.com/p/-3nt](https://arbital.com/p/-3nt) $\sim$ on a [https://arbital.com/p/-3jz](https://arbital.com/p/-3jz) $S$ that can be used to say whether [elements](https://arbital.com/p/element_of_a_set) of $S$ are equivalent.
An equivalence relati... |
42e04eca-fa1e-4d91-ba1f-a8eeaf4a6942 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | CEA Should Invest in Helping Altruists Navigate Advanced AI
Since CEA is looking for a [new executive director](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GcvEdYJADH3vMqk3F/suggest-candidates-for-cea-s-next-executive-director) and they are open to that person pursuing a dramatically different strategy, now seems like a... |
ac268b6a-82c6-4afa-9be7-08145dc458ab | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | On Complexity Science
I have a long and confused love-hate relationship with the field of complex systems. People there never want to give me a simple, straightforward explanation about what its about, and much of what they say sounds a lot like woo ("edge of chaos" anyone?). But it also seems to promise a lot! This f... |
4da0fd6e-450a-4b15-8409-4eb9fb177dd1 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Fundamental Uncertainty: Chapter 4 - Why don't we do what we think we should?
*N.B. This is a chapter in a* [*planned book about epistemology*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2e9EeAJXhbWAvEZTB/fundamental-uncertainty-prelude)*. Chapters are not necessarily released in order. If you read this, the most helpful comment... |
172cf94a-1bad-405d-aacf-b95e94adcca1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | This is Why Your Hard Work Sits on the Shelf — and Here’s What to Do About It
Why Your Hard Work Sits on the Shelf — and What to Do About It
Knowledge providers who want to see their work have greater impact might find value in partnering with a decision consultant.
Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash
We’ve all been the... |
ee694774-377f-4667-ac28-be0282f1958d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Lesswrong Potential Changes
I have compiled many suggestions about the future of lesswrong into a document here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hH9mBkpg2g1rJc3E3YV5Qk-b-QeT2hHZSzgbH9dvQNE/edit?usp=sharing
It's long and best formatted there.
In case you hate leaving this website here's the summary:
Summary
Th... |
073330dd-5a20-4836-9027-06fcb8fca960 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Friendly Projects vs. Products
Today's post, Friendly Projects vs. Products was originally published on December 5, 2008. A summary:
> Friendliness can take two forms. Friendliness can refer to whether or not your project will only benefit its creators, or whether that project will benefit competitors ... |
d2aafdc7-57f4-4017-85a6-35e38e9bb5e9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | My Marriage Vows
I'm getting married. We decided to take marriage vows very seriously, and write vows that we will be fully committed to uphold. These vows are going to be a commitment no weaker than any promise I ever made or any contract I ever signed. Therefore, it is very important to avoid serious errors in their... |
ea06cb97-0202-4b64-b9fe-22c43660f9ed | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is _The Age of AI: And Our Human Future_ worth reading
Do people here have strong opinions on the book The Age of AI? |
61033145-757e-4dad-bfd7-942bc162f675 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Tips for Empirical Alignment Research
TLDR: I’ve collected some tips for research that I’ve given to other people and/or used myself, which have sped things up and helped put people in the right general mindset for empirical AI alignment research. Some of these are opinionated takes, also around what has helped me. Re... |
7bbb73e6-529c-497e-ba1e-83294b6547c8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Grasping Slippery Things
Followup to: Possibility and Could-ness, The Ultimate Source
Brandon Reinhart wrote:
> I am "grunching." Responding to the questions posted without reading your answer. Then I'll read your answer and compare. I started reading your post on Friday and had to leave to attend a wedding before ... |
f64779b3-e6d3-4fc1-af98-446838397e97 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Save the princess: A tale of AIXI and utility functions
"Intelligence measures an agent's ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments." (Shane Legg) [1]
A little while ago I tried to equip Hutter's universal agent, AIXI, with a utility function, so instead of taking its clues about its goals from the env... |
461d1550-c1e2-4354-ae65-6d8ef1de3099 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Solving Math Problems by Relay
From September to November 2018 we ran an experiment where people did programming in relay. Each player spent ten minutes on a programming problem before passing on their code to a new player who had not seen any of the previous work. We found that people were able to solve some problems... |
113fd1c3-2e7d-4ef7-86b1-9bfc147f6540 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Confidence Intervals seen as pixel stripes
[epistemic status: I am not a statistician, thus I've probably made errors in this post. I welcome any corrections to the merits of the post. I'm even open to removing it if proven the whole idea is stupid. However, I'd like to preserve the visual form of the post, as the sol... |
b802a2d8-c4e0-456e-a334-83bf19ffe3f5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Virtual Book Club on Nick Bostrom's "Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World"
Hello everyone,
We are excited to invite you to an informal virtual Book Club on Nick Bostrom’s latest work, "Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World." This gathering is part of the Foresight Institute's Existential Hope Pr... |
9b383113-42e2-487d-9e84-4ec873869114 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Nash Score for Voting Techniques
This is a follow-up to my thoughts on voting methods. As I discussed there, I worry that a utilitarian score for voting techniques, called VSE, doesn't capture everything important. In particular, I worry that it doesn't sufficiently push toward compromise solutions. I also raised seve... |
1df98e3e-29c7-41b1-92e6-96cb7ad2acc6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | For Happiness, Keep a Gratitude Journal
Want to be happier than you already are? Many people look to self-help books as a way to become happy. Sometimes they give good advice and sometimes they dont. However, one of the most robust, enduring findings from psychological studies of increasing people's happiness has b... |
ac9cf3f2-f4a6-41e4-9b7d-849a39a08da0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The System Didn’t, and Doesn’t Need to be This Way ~ Thomas Paine on Economic Justice
In his 1797 pamphlet ‘Agrarian Justice’, Thomas Paine makes an impassioned case for land and wealth taxes based not on charity or even expedience, but on the injustice inherent in the ownership of private property. Paine shows that r... |
7b6a9753-33be-40bc-aba4-68d4efaf533e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Quick Thoughts on Generation and Evaluation of Hypotheses in a Community
At lunch we talked about hypothesis evaluation and generation, and I thought I'd put some of the thoughts I had into a post.
Here’s some points that seem relevant to me when thinking about institution building around this topic.
* Evaluation o... |
0cf9ecfe-8380-409a-97a9-fdee222af86a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Rationalism for New EAs
I organize a college EA group. As has become common for college EA groups, we run an "introductory fellowship" to introduce people to EA. This year, I'm making changes from the standard syllabus; among other changes, I want to add 1–2 hours of reading and 1 hour of discussion (and a few hours o... |
faea6c60-4b27-479d-b60c-fde5b839d7aa | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What are the flaws in this AGI argument?
Aligned AGI is a large scale engineering task
Humans have never completed at large scale engineering task without at least one mistake
An AGI that has at least one mistake in its alignment model will be unaligned
Given enough time, an unaligned AGI will perform an action th... |
5ace71c7-0a53-406c-82c2-d94271c12cd8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | HIRING: Inform and shape a new project on AI safety at Partnership on AI
Hello! I am a program lead at Partnership on AI (PAI), a non-profit bringing together academic, civil society, industry, & media organizations to advance responsible AI. Work with me and my colleagues to inform and shape a new project on AI safe... |
a71c61fe-25de-4d1d-9dfb-64c387a77960 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Contra Alexander on the Virtue of Silence
At my local LW meetup, we recently discussed Scott Alexander's post on the Virtue of Silence. For reasons I could not immediately discern, I intuitively disagreed with his argument. The following is my attempt to find out what exactly I disagreed with, and why.
The Virtue of... |
92532672-dabc-4c82-83e8-6a11e3d923c8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup Philadelphia: March 30, Ben Landau-Taylor on Goal Factoring
The meetup will be at Nam Phuong (llth and Broad) at 5:00 PM, March 30th. This is a TIME CHANGE from the usual.
This is an extra meetup because Ben Landau-Taylor is in town. He'll be leading an exercise in Goal Factoring, which is a planning technique... |
f24c2ad1-1770-4097-993d-98642d84c173 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Paradox of Expert Opinion
> The best-informed opinions tend to be the most selection-biased ones.
If you want to know whether string theory is true and you're not able to evaluate the technical arguments yourself, who do you go to for advice? Well, seems obvious. Ask the experts. They're likely the most informed ... |
84313ba9-c36c-44b3-9420-995a49da9f90 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Model Primitive Hierarchical Lifelong Reinforcement Learning
1. Introduction
----------------
In the lifelong learning setting, we want our agent to solve a series of related tasks drawn from some task distribution rather than a single, isolated task.
Agents must be able to transfer knowledge gained in previous tas... |
d38f30b7-f799-446a-b21d-9c227267406f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Interstellar travel will probably doom the long-term future
I think people are very wrong about space colonisation increasing long-term existential security. Once we expand to other star systems, we may begin a self-propagating expansion of human civilisation throughout the galaxy. However, there are existential risks... |
0a9bccb5-4fe6-466a-8feb-b575f6fa8369 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Can we grow cars instead of building them?
Well that sounds like an exciting idea — imagine a car tree that grows on its own, and we need not do anything other than pick the ready-made cars off it. Perhaps we can breed faster models, or cross-breed to make new ones — in all seems like a lot less effort than having hun... |
bf826960-876d-4ee6-b4fe-7cec9fbaa03e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] The Truly Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma
Today's post, The Truly Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma was originally published on 04 September 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> According to classic game theory, if you know how many iterations there are going to be in the iterated prisoner's dilemma, then... |
9c6700b4-5bd7-49d8-bb69-7995856488b7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open thread, 11-17 August 2014
Previous open thread
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), 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.
3. Open Threads should be posted i... |
5f67f30e-ca2a-493a-a9a3-245aee7549bb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Reward function learning: the learning process
In the previous post, I introduced the formalism for reward function learning, and presented the expected value function for a learning agent:
V(μ,ρ,π,hn)=∑hm∈Hm∑R∈Rm∑i=1Pπ,μ(hm∣hn)ρ(R;π,hm)R(hmi).
I'll assume that people reading this are familiar with the concepts, the ... |
73cb5ece-60da-46fa-8d10-33962d041577 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
|
580c9b5d-44a2-4c39-ad75-4eee3dfb66f4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Cryptic symbols
Here’s something I’ve been playing with:
Explanation coming soon, but you may enjoy trying to figure it out on your own.
[EDIT 10-29: I initially uploaded an incorrect image, included below for posterity:] |
1cb4844c-2221-46ea-8da3-94aaa393801c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Security Mindset and the Logistic Success Curve
Follow-up to: Security Mindset and Ordinary Paranoia
----------------------------------------
(Two days later, Amber returns with another question.)
amber: Uh, say, Coral. How important is security mindset when you're building a whole new kind of system—say, on... |
64e905c6-ceb1-465a-8f39-96aeac6ac701 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Small Berkeley Meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : Small Berkeley Meetup
WHEN: 09 May 2012 07:00:00PM (-0700)
WHERE: 2128 Oxford St, Berkeley, CA
We'll be meeting at the Starbucks on Oxford St and then probably going somewhere to get food. This will be a small meetup.
Discussion article for the me... |
e1143e63-43aa-43bd-92a9-6944f2e1dad3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Epigenetics of the mammalian germline
This is a crosspost from my Substack and is is Part 2 of my epigenetics post series. Part 1 is here.
The year was 1984, and scientists were wondering: why is sperm, and not just eggs, necessary to make a baby mouse?
In non-mammalian species (notably several reptiles), unfertiliz... |
eb5ed801-e1f9-4b27-92e7-5ee9f78be19c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Mechanistic Interpretability as Reverse Engineering (follow-up to "cars and elephants")
I think (perhaps) the distinction that I was trying to make in my previous post "Cars and Elephants": a handwavy argument/analogy against mechanistic interpretability is basically the distinction between engineering and reverse eng... |
ebf313a9-d30f-4121-9c6c-bc6b4cf73fd2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : London social meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : London social meetup
WHEN: 15 September 2013 02:00:00PM (+0100)
WHERE: Shakespeare's Head, 64-68 Kingsway, WC2B 6BG
Weather is predicted to be thoroughly rainy for next Sunday, so let's retreat back to the safety of the Shakespeare's Head, near Holbo... |
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