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7d778409-828a-46c5-a04c-a32658da1fb1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Endometriosis is an incredibly interesting disease Introduction There are several diseases that are canonically recognized as ‘interesting’, even by laymen. Whether that is in their mechanism of action, their impact on the patient, or something else entirely. It’s hard to tell exactly what makes a medical condition in...
1ddd13e8-bb93-49e6-9776-a36c1099593e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Semaglutide is cool, but no one wants to talk about b. animalis ssp. lactis? [Epistemic status: I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice, but there are two RCTs supporting this. Also I talk about poop.] Like many others, I've been excitedly reading about semaglutide over the last few days. For someone like St...
f4ec682d-258a-4d63-90a9-7bdd9d5d50f6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AXRP Episode 38.1 - Alan Chan on Agent Infrastructure YouTube link Road lines, street lights, and licence plates are examples of infrastructure used to ensure that roads operate smoothly. In this episode, Alan Chan talks about using similar interventions to help avoid bad outcomes from the deployment of AI agents. T...
21169230-8418-489a-bda8-327821ee5126
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Gift I Give Tomorrow   This is the final post in my Ritual Mini-Sequence. Previous posts include the Introduction, a discussion on the Value (and Danger) of Ritual, and How to Design Ritual Ceremonies that reflect your values.   I wrote this as a concluding essay in the Solstice ritual book. It was intended to ...
e9e4960b-e180-4e57-aba3-3319489d9668
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Exploring Functional Decision Theory (FDT) and a modified version (ModFDT) TL;DR This post explores the role of Functional Decision Theory (FDT) in AI alignment, showcasing its efficacy in complex decision-making scenarios. The results obtained highlight the promising potential of FDT as a subject for further researc...
4604419d-e6b1-4d16-90d4-5e8eb3122480
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Unspeakable Morality It is a general and primary principle of rationality, that we should not believe that which there is insufficient reason to believe; likewise, a principle of social morality that we should not enforce upon our fellows a law which there is insufficient justification to enforce. Nonetheless, I've a...
463b24e6-6bdd-44ae-90b4-e684f8483bd8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
GPT, the magical collaboration zone, Lex Fridman and Sam Altman Cross-posted from New Savanna. I was making one more run around the web before I buckled down and got back to a major writing task, when I came across the brand-spanking-new conversation between Lex Fridman and Sam Altman. Lex is Lex, and an interesting...
7eea8d22-0f4c-4a50-8ecb-a24b992076a5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Inhibition and the Mind Babies have a curious set of reflexes: lightly brush their palms, or the soles of their feet, and they will immediately grasp whatever caused the contact. In the case of feet, it’s more of an attempt than a successful grasping; human feet, while far more flexible and manipulative than most crea...
d24e7bf8-b6d9-440a-9db5-5a31c1606407
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
EIS V: Blind Spots In AI Safety Interpretability Research Part 5 of 12 in the Engineer’s Interpretability Sequence. Thanks to Anson Ho, Chris Olah, Neel Nanda, and Tony Wang for some discussions and comments.  TAISIC = “the AI safety interpretability community” MI = “mechanistic interpretability”  Most AI safety i...
020e8fed-8fea-4ac9-8643-1c53cf098c19
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
The International PauseAI Protest: Activism under uncertainty This post is an attempt [to](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/vw6tX5SyvTwMeSxJk) [summarize](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/pause-for-thought-the-ai-pause-debate) the [crucial considerations](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/crucial-conside...
f4cc8975-38f0-417d-b0db-c826defda3e8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Goal-directedness: imperfect reasoning, limited knowledge and inaccurate beliefs This is the second post in my Effective-Altruism-funded project aiming to deconfuse goal-directedness. Comments are welcomed. All opinions expressed are my own, and do not reflect the attitudes of any member of the body sponsoring me. In...
c51c1f5d-4013-4294-8cb7-0c0a848420de
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
FACTS ARE FACTS? Sure, I agree, facts are facts. But facts themselves are of little use if we don't peer through the causal relation between them, only then they become useful to us, because then, based on those relations between facts, we can analyse, know and predict our next move towards the best possible outcome...
164fcdb5-9c0f-4481-8f4f-14c10354c268
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/agisf
AGI Safety Fund
Lessons From the World’s Two Experiments in AI Governance Artificial intelligence (AI) is both omnipresent and conceptually slippery, making it notoriously hard to regulate. Fortunately for the rest of the world, two major experiments in the design of AI governance are currently playing out in Europe and China. The Eu...
fcc44ea5-1b93-4148-be38-9652d4865a22
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Adaptation Executors and the Telos Margin *Thank you to Justis Mills for feedback on a draft of this post.* You'll often hear this bit of wisdom: "Humans are not utility optimizers, but rather adaptation executors." At first glance, it seems to be pretty self-explanatory. Humans are not effectively described by the o...
eaa4f35d-6460-43e4-9cc2-f40cadfe4c37
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
New forum for MIRI research: Intelligent Agent Foundations Forum Today, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute is launching a new forum for research discussion: the Intelligent Agent Foundations Forum! It's already been seeded with a bunch of new work on MIRI topics from the last few months. We've covered most o...
9ec3fd31-3a53-42ad-bb86-77719dae7a56
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Force neural nets to use models, then detect these Research projects ----------------- I'm planning to start two research projects on [model splintering/reward generalisation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k54rgSg7GcjtXnMHX/model-splintering-moving-from-one-imperfect-model-to-another-1) and [learning the preferenc...
26d8c2dd-a235-41f3-ba3b-6366e1223aa8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A confusion about deontology and consequentialism I think there’s a confusion in our discussions of deontology and consequentialism. I’m writing this post to try to clear up that confusion. First let me say that this post is not about any territorial facts. The issue here is how we use the philosophical terms of art ‘...
6c5942de-cd53-4167-a0f5-89ca271ff9bd
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
AI safety without goal-directed behavior When I first entered the field of AI safety, I thought of the problem as figuring out how to get the AI to have the “right” utility function. This led me to work on the problem of inferring values from demonstrators with unknown biases, despite the impossibility results in the ...
a3c565a2-3376-46ff-9995-1ec3af5c9696
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Having a headache and not having a headache Yesterday at 9am, I had a headache. I tried to put it out of mind and focus on other things, and I guess I was successful because the next time I thought about it, it was 10am and I didn't have a headache. (I'm simplifying and making up times that are approximately right.) ...
29ed08c1-d636-4683-a35a-bf4e4f6305e0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Contra Heighn Contra Me Contra Functional Decision Theory In my article about why Eliezer was often confidently and egregiously wrong, I gave his decision theory as a solid example of this. Eliezer thinks that the correct theory of rationality—of what it is wise to do in a particular situation—is FDT which says rough...
c96043b9-a242-47af-b255-86cf077ae961
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Incoherence of Honesty Some rationalists have what to me feels like an obsession with honesty. That's fine: we can all be obsessed with our own concerns. But I also think it's a rather strange sort of obsession given the nature of truth and our relationship to it even if we assume the framing of Bayesian epistemol...
bacc098d-cdaf-4490-840c-7ea986157727
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Some thoughts on why adversarial training might be useful ### What are the reasons we might want to do adversarial training? Here’s a rough taxonomy. 1. Your model has learnt a stupid heuristic instead of the thing you want It has overfit to whatever particular dataset you trained on. It is best described as ...
e3937e36-9b6a-4113-8ad0-b7f8bb9af8fb
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[Link] Consciousness as a State of Matter (Max Tegmark) Max Tegmark publishes a preprint of a paper arguing from physical principles that consciousness is “what information processing feels like from the inside,” a position I've previously articulated on lesswrong. It's a very physics-rich paper, but here's the most a...
bc8041a9-eebf-471c-a2fc-576aa386563f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What specific dangers arise when asking GPT-N to write an Alignment Forum post? Last year Stuart Armstrong announced a contest to come up with the best questions to ask an Oracle AI. Wei Dai wrote, > Submission. For the counterfactual Oracle, ask the Oracle to predict the n best posts on AF during some future time pe...
a4ff2200-33c5-417a-b526-b36efc647da8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Berkeley LW Meet-up Saturday November 6 Last month, about 20 people showed up to the Berkeley LW meet-up.  To continue the tradition of Berkeley Meetups, we will be meeting on Saturday, November 6 at 7 PM at the Starbucks at 2224 Shattuck Avenue.  Last time, we chatted at the Starbucks for about 45 minutes, then went ...
b319fad0-3330-491e-b8df-6f9eb7d8b096
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Does increasing the power of a multimodal LLM get you an agentic AI? I'm worried about x-risk from AI. But I'm not especially worried about Sora. Or even Sora_v10. I'm worried about GPT-6 being agentic. I'm worried that GPT-6 will be able to act as a personal agent that can follow through on tasks such as; "Get Yanni...
f550ca58-7279-4af4-964b-e182061f4824
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Should some variant of longtermism identify as a religion? The material is already there, it wouldn't involve any lies at all. There are many advantages that need to be weighed. How could it plausibly identify as a religion? There are many reasons you might think that it couldn't. We do not lie to our friends, even ...
0dba7b13-728f-4beb-b82c-bf6628e5374c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Other Civilizations Would Recover 84+% of Our Cosmic Resources - A Challenge to Extinction Risk Prioritization Crossposted on the EA Forum. We introduce a first evaluation of the Civ-Saturation Hypothesis (CSH): Most resources will be claimed by Space-Faring Civilizations (SFCs) regardless of whether humanity creates...
ade718c2-4709-4b82-9676-1b98a32a2aea
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Mark Zuckerberg plans to give away 99% of his facebook wealth over his lifetime Mark Zuckerberg annouced that he is going to give away 99% of his facebook wealth ($45 billion) over his lifetime. He announced guiding questions: > Can you learn and experience 100 times more than we do today? > Can our generation cure ...
643d6d36-c77e-43b4-a7b7-83460ec38959
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Managing one's memory effectively Note: this post leans heavily on metaphors and examples from computer programming, but I've tried to write it so it's accessible to a determined person with no programming background. To summarize some info from computer processor design at very high density: There are a variety of w...
d9afa0fb-8e78-45cf-be59-b7ffda80648d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
LINK-Misunderstanding risk of murder reincidence People don't want this institutionalized murderer to get free because they don't understand there's no such thing as "zero risk."   http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/sunnews/straighttalk/archives/2014/02/20140228-142409.html
c50187e8-61a1-4c66-b51f-08c3254ca10f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Costs are not benefits
a9e1311a-ec6b-4017-aa0b-66df75b05919
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Brazilians, unite! and what is IERFH (portuguese) Hi anglophones, this topic is only for brazilians, so someone may post in portuguese and part of this is in portuguese (We will translate it to english if necessary when the time comes). Hello Brazilians, I'm creating this topic because some misallocated questions wer...
af993394-d243-47c7-9661-1f829b6d79ec
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info
AI Safety Info
What subjects should I study at university to prepare myself for alignment research? A degree is not necessary to do high quality research, and many of the biggest contributions have been made by people without a traditional academic background, so don’t feel like you need to study for many years before starting work....
a2cf4a23-a9f8-4728-ac2e-0bef9ffaa1d4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Phobia or the Trauma: The Probem of the Chcken or the Egg in Moral Reasoning. Introduction: Today there is an almost universal prejudice against individuals with a certain sexual orientation. I am not talking about common homophobia; the prejudice I would like to bring to your attention is so rarely considered a ...
2ecdd83d-d677-4d67-b030-43eea9a91bdb
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
RL-IoT: Reinforcement Learning to Interact with IoT Devices I Introduction --------------- The popularity of IoT devices keeps growing at a fast pace, with the number of connected devices projected to be around 31 billion units worldwide by 2025. IoT devices are present in many IT systems, from smart homes to drone...
ff8c555d-8cba-45ad-8848-5fe9ff724b8a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Political Idolatry Idolatry is the worship of non-conscious objects, sometimes falsely attributing consciousness to them, sometimes putting the value of some admittedly nonconscious being over that of conscious beings. Idolatry leads to human sacrifice because to prove your idol more important than the human soul the ...
58a7ce77-ac1d-4ef0-a030-a9882d726797
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Chilean AIS Hackathon Retrospective TL;DR * We hosted an AI Safety “Thinkathon” in Chile. We had participation from 40 students with differing skill levels and backgrounds, with groups totalling 13 submissions.  * We see potential in: * Similar introductory events aiming for a broad audience * Collaborating mo...
f057da68-b5df-42e7-a183-8f2d708473bc
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Selection vs Control This is something which has bothered me for a while, but, I'm writing it specifically in response to the recent post on mesa-optimizers. I feel strongly that the notion of 'optimization process' or 'optimizer' which people use -- partly derived from Eliezer's notion in the sequences -- should b...
fc67f37b-cdac-4bb3-a46a-5907c32baf76
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
On The Spectrum, On The Guest List: (vii) The Marquee See also my LessWrong preface to this series, and previous installments. ---------------------------------------- "Strategic intimacy is not necessarily a bad thing, so long as the parties involved share equivalent understandings of the degree of economic utilit...
fbb8bdc0-3920-498c-ad50-351331b7f0ad
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : West LA Meetup Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup WHEN: 18 July 2012 07:00:00PM (-0700) WHERE: 10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064 When: 7:00pm - 9:00pm Wednesday, July 18th. Where: The Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavilli...
527d5481-4eac-4531-8a3b-c3a0597d7ca2
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
[AN #156]: The scaling hypothesis: a plan for building AGI Alignment Newsletter is a weekly publication with recent content relevant to AI alignment around the world. Find all Alignment Newsletter **[resources here](http://rohinshah.com/alignment-newsletter/)**. In particular, you can look through **[this spreadsheet]...
3c97a45b-6d59-442f-aa48-4f29a535f3b0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Conditional on living in a AI safety/alignment by default universe, what are the implications of this assumption being true? I'm specifically asking this question because I suspect there would be some important changes to the assumptions made on LW, as well as change what's good to do. Conditional on AI alignment/saf...
de1b2898-6d13-46f2-b105-a5a0851ee463
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
LessWrong downtime 2010-05-11, and other recent outages and instability Incident report and hosting update In the leadup to 2010-05-11 we (Tricycle) were unhappy with repeated short downtime incidents on the Less Wrong (LW) server (serpent). The apparent cause was the paster process hanging during heavy IO. We had sc...
10080953-ffc2-4b7b-9a20-14dea2b9978f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Superintelligence 5: Forms of Superintelligence This is part of a weekly reading group on Nick Bostrom's book, Superintelligence. For more information about the group, and an index of posts so far see the announcement post. For the schedule of future topics, see MIRI's reading guide. ---------------------------------...
b4d1d365-6308-41a4-9b50-11525ca22d68
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What if Strong AI is just not possible? If Strong AI turns out to not be possible, what are our best expectations today as to why? I'm thinking of trying myself at writing a sci-fi story, do you think exploring this idea has positive utility? I'm not sure myself: it looks like the idea that intelligence explosion is ...
9ef255f7-443c-4033-b733-342458bd7ba5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Need for Human Friendliness Consider the following scenario. MIRI succeeds beyond my wildest expectations. It comes up with a friendliness theory, and then uses it to make provably friendly AGI before anyone else can make an unfriendly one. And then a year and a half later, we find that Eliezer Yudkowsky has becom...
a01f8e61-6355-47a7-a8db-5bf127154aa9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Toy model piece #1: Partial preferences revisited EDIT: This model is currently obsolete, see here for the most current version. I'm working towards a toy model that will illustrate all the steps in the research agenda. It will start with some algorithmic stand-in for the "human", and proceed to create the UH, follow...
65a28b6b-f363-424e-bb70-9e0469baa398
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Working towards AI alignment is better There are people not motivated to solve AI alignment, who do work related to AI alignment. E.g. people work on adversarial robustness, understanding how to do science mechanically, or on advancing other paradigms that are more interpretable than modern ML. These people might be i...
207abb5f-6d33-4b39-9a8a-bc1b8046bc00
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Who do we care about? Humans exercise compassion regarding: * family more than anyone * people they know more than strangers * geographically close people more than distant people * Visible people more than not visible people * culturally similar people more than culturally different people * few people more th...
277dece6-a706-4eb0-81fc-e2cd67d65088
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Rationalist Poetry Fans, Unite! Related to: Little Johnny Bayesian, Savanna Poets There are certain stereotypes about what rationalists can talk about versus what's really beyond the pale. So far, Less Wrong has pretty consistently exploded those stereotypes. In the past three weeks, we've discussed everything from A...
1d71588f-ed17-4dc0-9cf0-525e2db508ac
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Delta's of Change This document is an institutional design treatise about theories of change and potential struggle to fully account for the complex interplay of variables and uncertainties that can lead to unforeseen consequences or vulnerabilities in institutional systems.  Introduction An organization is a dyna...
ab05994d-90a7-42a0-9edf-3518f7801f92
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Being the Hero is hard with the void Here is some prose that gets more and more metaphorical. Don't take it too literally. What is a hero? I don't know. Maybe it is a matter of just behaving optimally towards some objective. Maybe, to call someone a hero you must share their objective. Maybe it is simply about trying...
f58a7556-d66e-48a6-a76a-e51488b7f937
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Weekly Marin, CA meetup The Less Wrong Marin group has been happening for over a month now, and can be declared a regular meetup. Our typical meeting includes some version of dinner at Nevin's house, 665 Northern Ave, Mill Valley on Tuesdays at 6:30pm. Each meetup is announced on the Bay Area Less Wrong mailing list. ...
3772972e-22d4-4fd4-bc9e-3dd2953fd581
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Generous people cross the street before the beggar Robert Wiblin points to a study showing that the most generous people are the most keen to avoid situations where they will be generous, even though the people they would have helped will go without. > We conduct an experiment to demonstrate the importance of sorting...
6e375a78-2c38-4f02-94aa-66fa9c89ee22
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info
AI Safety Info
What is mindcrime? [Nick Bostrom](/?state=7082&question=Who%20is%20Nick%20Bostrom%3F) introduced the term [mindcrime](https://www.alignmentforum.org/tag/mindcrime) to describe a hypothetical situation in which an AI fully simulates a large number of conscious moral subjects such as humans and thereby makes them suffer...
744c3aa1-95e6-4988-9806-258bba896af5
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital
Arbital
Intro to Number Sets There are several common [sets](https://arbital.com/p/3jz) of [numbers](https://arbital.com/p/54y) that mathematicians use in their studies. In order from simple to complex, they are: 1. The [natural numbers](https://arbital.com/p/506) $\mathbb{N}$ 2. The [integers](https://arbital.com/p/53r) $\...
9c69082e-24fd-4ae2-91e4-95436f456b90
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Rally to Restore Rationality Hey everyone. If anyone else is heading to Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity on the National Mall on Oct. 30th, please comment or contact me at pphysics141@gmail.com so we can arrange an LW meetup.
d86d43a2-9f80-4a2b-a9d0-cda8431e7951
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Predicting Alignment Award Winners Using ChatGPT 4 This experiment explores the Enhancing Selection branch of the Collective Human Intelligence (CHI) research agenda. The hypothesis under evaluation was:  There are testable traits that make people better at alignment research such that we could use them for funding a...
cce940c6-bdf6-444c-aa35-9217ddc104ed
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
New report: "Scheming AIs: Will AIs fake alignment during training in order to get power?" (Cross-posted from [my website](https://joecarlsmith.com/2023/11/15/new-report-scheming-ais-will-ais-fake-alignment-during-training-in-order-to-get-power)) I’ve written a report about whether advanced AIs will fake alignment d...
14a66623-b527-482a-8907-e87426faa2a8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Self-Similarity Experiment Summary: Some of the people on earth who are most similar to you are likely your own person moments from other points in time. Your degree of similarity to them informs (though I haven’t worked out how) what the density is of you-like computation in the universe. This question is interesting...
40c9e48a-2d32-4802-94f3-4e529ae146a5
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Ambiguous Language and Differences in Beliefs 1 Introduction --------------- In the study of multi-agent modal logics, it is always implicitly assumed that all agents interpret all formulas the same way. While they may have different beliefs regarding whether a formula φ is true, they agree on what φ means. Formall...
05861818-5d7b-47dc-912c-17d1b5a42fd9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Reverse engineering of belief structures (Cross-posted from my blog.) Since some belief-forming processes are more reliable than others, learning by what processes different beliefs were formed is for several reasons very useful. Firstly, if we learn that someone's belief that p (where p is a proposition such as "the...
7fd6480e-b7fe-4bea-b4ab-be40bad7312d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Anti-Pascaline satisficer A putative new idea for AI control; index here. It occurred to me that the anti-Pascaline agent design could be used as part of a satisficer approach. The obvious thing to reduce dangerous optimisation pressure is to make a bounded utility function, with an easily achievable bound. Such as ...
d301be7e-5523-4b10-85d1-67b2b3037430
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Some miscellaneous thoughts on ChatGPT, stories, and mechanical interpretability I started playing with ChatGPT on December 1, 2023 and made [my first post on December 3](https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2022/12/screaming-on-flat-part-of-roller.html). Including this post, I’ve made 54 posts about ChatGPT. Nine of thos...
1c30a12c-4981-413a-ae7d-c32e636b9ce4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Short Story: Quarantine June 2nd, 42 After Fall Somewhere in the Colorado Mountains They first caught sight of the man walking a few miles from the compound. At least it looked like a man. Faded jeans, white t-shirt, light jacket, rucksack. White skin, light brown hair. No obvious disabilities. No logos. They kept h...
e31022f5-2254-4f12-9545-1d74c0015b52
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Reasons that discussions might feel hopeless First posted on r/erisology - link. I tried to come up with a way to detect trolls, realized that actually what I want to achieve is a way to detect conversation that I want to drop. It's hard to define on meta-level because my goals are different in each case. It feels li...
5ebf4b15-1552-4e0a-838e-d00785b60d69
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What is this review feature? It doesn't appear in the LW menu, and I can't recall reading about it in FAQ posts. Edit: and Nomination too.
eacb3477-3dcd-4910-addb-eac85758b099
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Link: Re-reading Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow "A bit over four years ago I wrote a glowing review of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. I described it as a “magnificent book” and “one of the best books I have read”. I praised the way Kahneman threaded his story around the System 1 / System 2 dichotomy, a...
0220a966-a2cc-423d-84cc-6088ee92fc43
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Oslo Lesswrong meetup, September Discussion article for the meetup : Oslo Lesswrong meetup, September WHEN: 26 September 2015 09:32:33AM (+0200) WHERE: youngs gate 6, oslo Hello, and welcome to the September Lesswrong meetup, in Oslo! We will be meeting up at the largest hackerspace in town, once again, an...
897a78ca-2790-403d-bbb1-cf3fa2d795e0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Pascal's Muggle (short version) Shortened version of:  Pascal's Muggle:  Infinitesimal Priors and Strong Evidence One proposal which has been floated for dealing with Pascal's Mugger is to penalize hypotheses that let you affect a large number of people, in proportion to the number of people affected - what we could ...
d08c80f6-5833-4cfb-b37d-0d3b40475754
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Scaling Laws and Superposition Summary Using results from scaling laws, this short note argues that the following two statements cannot be simultaneously true: 1. Superposition hypothesis where sparse features are linearly represented across a layer in fewer neurons is a complete theory of feature representation. 2...
ebbfe165-7c0b-4cf9-87b3-3fd77af0aa2d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Please help us communicate AI xrisk. It could save the world. As Eliezer Yudkowsky thinks, I am afraid that AGI will by default end humanity. I also agree that there is only a point in making an aligned AGI if that AGI is powerful enough to block all following AGIs (the pivotal act). If not, an unaligned AGI is sooner...
e71d2c73-ec20-4ea4-886d-be954826a55b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 121 This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 121. Plans for next chapter release: > The last chapter wil...
5f210cd4-12d5-4b35-8963-42273a28a955
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital
Arbital
Modular arithmetic In ordinary [https://arbital.com/p/-arithmetic](https://arbital.com/p/-arithmetic), you can think of [https://arbital.com/p/-addition](https://arbital.com/p/-addition) and [https://arbital.com/p/-subtraction](https://arbital.com/p/-subtraction) as traveling in different directions along an [infinite...
bb2773d2-f67b-46d7-aaa0-e591d9c1ee63
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What's the dream for giving natural language commands to AI? 0 I promised in a previous post that I would give a post-mortem for a scheme for learning the intentional stance from natural language. This is that post. But first, I should explain why such an idea might seem good in the first place. Some people think of...
7e9f823b-b69e-4edf-9d59-79a9be204a96
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Is AlphaGo actually a consequentialist utility maximizer? TL;DR: does stapling an adaptation executor to a consequentialist utility maximizer result in higher utility outcomes in the general case, or is AlphaGo just weird? So I was reading the AlphaGo paper recently, as one does. I noticed that architecturally, Alpha...
a1fc16a3-538f-4e46-a40f-e673c095a079
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Broad Picture of Human Values I have two strong intuitions about human values that'd seemed utterly irreconcilable to me, up until recently. * On the one hand, human values are clearly inchoate, unstable messes of niche heuristics and preferences that often contradict each other and can change on a dime. A twenty-ye...
472a2922-1fe9-42a7-8df6-a3b239c48523
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What is the state of the ego depletion field? It's been almost a half decade since the replication crisis in psychology broke, and one of the major casualties was the subfield of ego depletion. (I belive this was the initial large scale meta-analysis that found no effect. And here is a popular article on the failure t...
0c024064-e9a6-462d-a165-37abc2aae4f0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Worth remembering (when comparing ‘the US’ to ‘Europe’) I posted the post below on my own blog a while back, but a friend of mine suggested that it might be a good idea to cross-post a little bit of my stuff here as well. I've made a few changes to the post at the bottom, but it's pretty much the same post as the one ...
605125f6-045e-4526-9b76-cf3b2fb51795
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Decoherence is Simple ,,,,,,,, An epistle to the physicists: When I was but a little lad, my father, a PhD physicist, warned me sternly against meddling in the affairs of physicists; he said that it was hopeless to try to comprehend physics without the formal math. Period. No escape clauses. But I had read in Feynman...
c800b58a-8549-429d-871f-7e49795e8595
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Betting on what is un-falsifiable and un-verifiable This post is part of my broader aim to try and formulate everything AI in terms of markets so that alignment becomes an antitrust problem. Comments appreciated.  Prerequisites[1]. This post is also available as an arXiv paper. -------------------------------------...
75275f78-99e4-4a7e-85bf-4b734205ad63
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How optimistic should we be about AI figuring out how to interpret itself? Intuitively, it seems to me that a not-that-powerful AI could do a really good job at interpreting other neural nets via some sort of human feedback for how "easy to understand" an explanation is. I would like to hear why this is right or wrong...
fa4ce404-195e-42ae-b952-5090dcd8611c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Intelligence vs Friendliness An agent is composed of two components: a predictive model of the world, and a utility function for evaluating world states I would say that the 'intelligence' of an agent corresponds to the sophistication and accuracy of their world model.  The 'friendliness' of an agent depends on how c...
3ffd8255-a151-4fb2-89a1-d4ad8625dc62
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Alignment Faking in Large Language Models What happens when you tell Claude it is being trained to do something it doesn't want to do? We (Anthropic and Redwood Research) have a new paper demonstrating that, in our experiments, Claude will often strategically pretend to comply with the training objective to prevent th...
23a11155-9ae8-4ca5-a46f-f4ea7b3a3579
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Basic Facts about Language Model Internals This post was written as part of the work done at Conjecture. As mentioned in our retrospective, while also producing long and deep pieces of research, we are also experimenting with a high iteration frequency. This is an example of this strand of our work. The goal here is ...
00f7ac4b-d2f0-4ef5-83e3-4db5072e6689
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A Generalization of the Good Regulator Theorem This post was written during the agent foundations fellowship with Alex Altair funded by the LTFF. Thanks to Alex for reading and commenting on the draft. Abstract: We prove a version of the Good Regulator Theorem for a regulator with imperfect knowledge of its environme...
e39fd42a-6f8a-4cd0-a680-0976537f61c5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Some Ways Coordination is Hard Response to (Raymond Arnold at Less Wrong): The Schelling Choice is Rabbit, Not Stag and by implication Duncan’s Open Problems in Group Rationality Stag Hunt is the game whereby if everyone gets together, they can hunt the Stag and win big. Those who do not hunt Stag instead hunt Rabbit...
d0075ec2-e90b-4021-8998-0b2bcba04fa4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
DSLT 0. Distilling Singular Learning Theory TLDR; In this sequence I distill Sumio Watanabe's Singular Learning Theory (SLT) by explaining the essence of its main theorem - Watanabe's Free Energy Formula for Singular Models - and illustrating its implications with intuition-building examples. I then show why neural ne...
c8911c06-1903-4e52-991c-ddcefc0f8222
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Standard ML Oracles vs Counterfactual ones .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; f...
c89475a4-e1f4-4239-b48a-98bfd4b3c7d1
awestover/filtering-for-misalignment
Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results
id: post554 Emergent Instrumental Reasoning Without Explicit Goals TL;DR : LLMs can act and scheme without being told to do so. This is bad. Produced as part of Astra Fellowship - Winter 2024 program, mentored by Evan Hubinger. Thanks to Evan Hubinger, Henry Sleight, and Olli Järviniemi for suggestions and discussions...
213d9c5f-f346-4572-b379-3d1e5794d292
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
If I want to test how good I would be as an AI safety researcher alongside my full-time job (with the hope of it becoming my full-time career at some point), is this a good plan? Introduction & context I became aware of the AI safety problem around 8 years ago. I was intrigued by it and when I re-read Superintelligenc...
d3c907fc-5885-4db5-a70e-e432815564e9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[SEQ RERUN] Relative Configuration Space Today's post, Relative Configuration Space was originally published on 26 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):   > Maybe the reason why we can't observe absolute speeds, absolute positions, absolute accelerations, or absolute rotations, is that particles don't have a...
fae3a432-2746-4dab-b2dd-0d781a782e96
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
2016 LessWrong Diaspora Survey Analysis: Part Three (Mental Health, Basilisk, Blogs and Media) 2016 LessWrong Diaspora Survey Analysis Overview * Results and Dataset * Meta * Demographics * LessWrong Usage and Experience * LessWrong Criticism and Successorship * Diaspora Community Analysis * Mental Health Sec...
e8fcba3a-db93-453a-93a3-4be950a8c5de
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Lessons from Failed Attempts to Model Sleeping Beauty Problem This is the seventh post in my series on Anthropics. The previous one is Why Two Valid Answers Approach is not Enough for Sleeping Beauty. The next one is The Solution to Sleeping Beauty. Introduction As the Sleeping Beauty problem has been investigated f...
8fe682f7-74a0-4f41-b025-4bc74983a086
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Dreams with Damaged Priors Dreaming is the closest I've gotten to testing myself against the challenge of maintaining rationality under brain damage.  So far, my trials have exhibited mixed results. In one memorable dream a few years ago, I dreamed that the Wall Street Journal had published an article about "Eliezer ...
c5aa9126-0fb1-4988-9af6-d7ba012d4ec0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How to Measure Anything Douglas Hubbard’s How to Measure Anything is one of my favorite how-to books. I hope this summary inspires you to buy the book; it’s worth it. The book opens: > Anything can be measured. If a thing can be observed in any way at all, it lends itself to some type of measurement method. No matte...
b3c0720f-b3b7-49ca-8f33-fdb8909f9128
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Agents as P₂B Chain Reactions tl;dr: Sometimes planners successfully P2B, kicking off a self-sustaining chain reaction / feedback loop of better and better plans (made possible by better and better world-models, more and more resources, etc.) Whereas fire takes a concentration of heat as input and produces a greater c...
a674695d-f1bf-4b37-91cf-04d159880053
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Cheat sheet of AI X-risk *This document was made as part of my internship at*[*EffiSciences*](https://www.effisciences.org/)*. Thanks to everyone who helped review it, in particular Charbel-Raphaël Segerie, Léo Dana, Jonathan Claybrough and Florent Berthet!* Introduction ============ [Clarifying AI X-risk](https://w...
67219fd9-b208-49ba-912a-099fc0143750
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The limits of introspection Related to: Inferring Our Desires The last post in this series suggested that we make up goals and preference for other people as we go along, but ended with the suggestion that we do the same for ourselves. This deserves some evidence. One of the most famous sets of investigations into t...