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a3b410ba-b6cc-44d0-9388-6ed4825212ab | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Looking Back on Posts From 2022
I am taking stock of my first year on Substack, and my first year with the resources necessary to focus on attempting to be a public intellectual of sorts.
The results are a mixed bag. Things are progressing, but slowly. Everything takes longer than one thinks or expects. Finding usefu... |
74f5f62f-3322-45a5-9402-b56cfb4ca22b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Making deals with early schemers
Consider the following vignette:
> It is March 2028. With their new CoCo-Q neuralese reasoning model, a frontier AI lab has managed to fully automate the process of software engineering. In AI R&D, most human engineers have lost their old jobs, and only a small number of researchers n... |
2631dee9-e0ea-4bb1-9961-e1f4c6c86eef | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Busking with Kids
Our older two, ages 11 and 9, have been learning fiddle, and are getting pretty good at it. When the weather's nice we'll occasionally go play somewhere public for tips ("busking"). It's better than practicing, builds performance skills, and the money is a good motivation!
We'll usually walk over to... |
06f13b92-b08f-492b-87b6-2f961b6c6354 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Understandability principle
An obvious [design principle](https://arbital.com/p/7v8) of [https://arbital.com/p/2v](https://arbital.com/p/2v) that nonetheless deserves to be stated explicitly: The more you understand what the heck is going on inside your AI, the more likely you are to succeed at aligning it.
This pri... |
cbba0b0b-604b-4371-8070-f640d0d3f937 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : July Rationality Dojo: Bayesian Reasoning
Discussion article for the meetup : July Rationality Dojo: Bayesian Reasoning
WHEN: 05 July 2015 03:30:00PM (+0800)
WHERE: Jenny Florence Room, Level 3, Ross House, 247 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
The Less Wrong Sunday Rationality Dojos are self-improvement sessions f... |
e1cb60d9-400b-4357-a962-0d7817ac53ef | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Does your machine mind? Ethics and potential bias in the law of algorithms
|
3b0fb34e-ea70-4d82-8582-4bd564aa628b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Near term discussions need something smaller and more concrete than AGI
Motivation
I want a more concrete concept than AGI[1] to talk and write with. I want something more concrete because I am tired of the costs associated with how big, inferentially distant, and many-pathed the concept of AGI is, which makes convers... |
c4c321cc-3284-454c-ac09-e0a6638d9ddc | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | 5 Reasons Why Governments/Militaries Already Want AI for Information Warfare
1. Militaries are perhaps the oldest institution on earth to research and exploit human psychology.
2. Information warfare has long hinged on SOTA psychological knowledge and persuasive skill.
3. Information warfare is about winning over ... |
98c82356-2bcb-484f-bd3c-5a2aaeb2a78f | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Acceptability Verification: A Research Agenda
[This Google doc^](https://docs.google.com/document/d/199Lkh78UA2uI9ljLEy_aWR8RBetQLRO6Kqo3_Omi1e4/view) is a halted, formerly work-in-progress writeup of [Evan Hubinger’s](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/evhub) AI alignment research agenda, authored by Evan. It dates back... |
1b9d132a-19ca-48c5-9d56-b094b9b98fb3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Importing Bluesky Comments
I decided years ago that instead of hosting a comment section I'd pull in comments from elsewhere: first Facebook (no longer working because of anti-scraping), then Google Plus (which means I didn't lose my g+ discussions when they turned it down), then LessWrong, Reddit, HN, the EA Forum, a... |
bf7d0622-8bf0-4f97-af02-f3d9340c406f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | We’re not as 3-Dimensional as We Think
While thinking about high-dimensional spaces and their less intuitive properties, I came to the realization that even three spatial dimensions possess the potential to overwhelm our basic human intuitions. This post is an exploration of the gap between actual 3D space, and our hu... |
26116b24-01ec-4aa8-937f-25deb5e6b954 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Information: OpenAI shows 'Strawberry' to feds, races to launch it
Two new The Information articles with insider information on OpenAI's next models and moves.
They are paywalled, but here are the new bits of information:
* Strawberry is more expensive and slow at inference time, but can solve complex problems ... |
19afe571-43e0-4a9a-94dc-819ef4e3daea | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Extinction Dilemma
Inspiration came from Against the Linear Utility Hypothesis and the Leverage Penalty
> Place a value on the utility of a utopia with 1 human, let's call this X.
> Place a value on the negutility of all of humanity going extinct. Let's call this Z.
> Decide if your utility function is linear i... |
3cc13548-0b8d-42da-902a-1bf88df09621 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Nature < Nurture for AIs
This is a cross-link for https://scottviteri.github.io/post/nature-v-nurture-for-ais.
Let's imagine a hypothetical scenario where an AI is somehow trained in a way that is analogous to a human childhood in all of the relevant ways. Maybe it has a loving mother and family, maybe it has to lear... |
698fc3d4-65a1-4469-875a-3a7c94b5e215 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Physics has laws, the Universe might not
Inspired by http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/06/physicist-concludes-there-are-no-laws.html, which dissed this article: https://www.quantamagazine.org/there-are-no-laws-of-physics-theres-only-the-landscape-20180604.
Epistemic status: very raw, likely discussed elsewhere, t... |
88f03b2c-a198-4905-9bfd-512645af0c1f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why White-Box Redteaming Makes Me Feel Weird
There’s this popular trope in fiction about a character being mind controlled without losing awareness of what’s happening. Think Jessica Jones, The Manchurian Candidate or Bioshock. The villain uses some magical technology to take control of your brain - but only the part ... |
33d7093f-2a11-44cf-b7ca-f132f7e47f7b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Problems integrating decision theory and inverse reinforcement learning
In this post I consider a single hypothetical which potentially has far-reaching implications for the future of AI development and deployment. It has to do with a complex interactions between the assumptions of which decision theory humans use and... |
44c203d9-a734-456d-95c5-c0df12fb7d25 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Moscow: Reality and Us
Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: Reality and Us
WHEN: 03 February 2013 04:00:00PM (+0400)
WHERE: Russia, Moscow, ulitsa L'va Tolstogo 16
Please use the following guide to get to the meetup: link. You need the second door with the sign “Yandex Money” in Russian. I will be t... |
4f5ed9da-e082-4cc0-aeb0-94e97e772584 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Planning fallacy in the NYTimes
Includes the Kahneman anecdote.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/opinion/brooks-the-planning-fallacy.html?hp
This is a repeated theme by Brooks -- his book The Social Animal gives an engaging overview of much of the recent literature in psychology, including a lot of the stuff we dis... |
6041fa59-8ff1-49a9-8f33-0c492939f498 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Was Releasing Claude-3 Net-Negative?
Cross-posted to EA forum
There’s been a lot of discussion among safety-concerned people about whether it was bad for Anthropic to release Claude-3. I felt like I didn’t have a great picture of all the considerations here, and I felt that people were conflating many different types... |
9db2181e-1a86-4dc9-bd50-026303ecf906 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh on FHI and CSER
This is the last part of the Cause Prioritization Shallow, all parts of which are available here. Previously in this series, conversations with Owen Cotton-Barratt, Paul Christiano, Paul Penley, Gordon Irlam, and Alexander Berger, and Robert Wiblin.
Nick Beckstead interviewed Seán ... |
cae88bfa-0b14-40ad-b597-0e3738e98348 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | November 2020 gwern.net newsletter
None |
4d563239-8de1-462f-8dcd-1fbc55988779 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Leveling IRL - followup
I have finally achieved level 1, so I can talk about these things again!
It seems that our concept of leveling conflated two different ideas of self-improvement that should've been kept separate. The first idea is about trying out new things, like making pancakes, solving a trivial programming... |
4a2a4601-cbb6-453b-8f0a-dd0d7f59b95e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Contextual Constitutional AI
Summary
In this post, I motivate an extension of constitutional AI (CAI) and present one possible concrete execution of that strategy.
TL;DR: When generating AI feedback during the CAI process, principles from the constitution are randomized for each pair of red-teamed prompts and initia... |
d9982e44-c65f-4c0a-895f-c7e4c4903878 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A fun estimation test, is it useful?
So you think its important to be able to estimate how well you are estimating something? Here is a fun test that has been given to plenty of other people.
I highly recommend you take the test before reading any more.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/06/how-good-an-estim... |
fb7e670c-a9e3-43bf-9b7f-0a1955828a6a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Adaptive Immune System Aging
The human adaptive immune system is the “smart” part of the human immune system, the part which learns to recognize specific pathogens, allowing for immunity to e.g. chicken pox. For our current purposes, the key players are T-cells. T-cells start out “naive” and eventually learn to recogn... |
ab3efaa1-7bae-4ed2-aa32-e35547bb21f4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Clearer Thinking tool that teaches you to use Internal Family Systems concepts
One of our recently-released Clearer Thinking tools, Have Better Conversations with Yourself, walks you through key concepts from Internal Family Systems (IFS). While the ideas of IFS shouldn't be taken literally, many people seem to find... |
2b240eaf-e563-4ce8-9562-a692ebf82ff6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | "Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us"
Jonah Lehrer has up another of his contrarian science articles: "Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us".
Main topics: the failure of drugs in clinical trials, diminishing returns to pharmaceutical research, doctors over-treating, and Humean causality-correlation d... |
95b8560c-6c5c-4688-9806-09dc28b90615 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Need more people for Vancouver meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : Need more people for Vancouver meetup
WHEN: 28 January 2012 03:03:49PM (-0800)
WHERE: vancouver (Location TBD)
Vancouver LessWrong meetup has been puttering along in a barely alive state. We need more people to make it more stable and... |
e2720d20-fed6-49b5-8df7-b9a983d02384 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Making Expertise Legible: Being right should make you respected, not the other way around
I will be hopping on a long train of thought largely already fleshed out by Scott Alexander and Zvi. The problem they are talking about is complicated, and so I recommend reading those linked articles, but for those with little t... |
da85a163-d4f4-4315-90b8-0097ca217cfb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Recent site changes
Recent site changes have generated more unhappiness than I expected. This post is a brief note to share resources that will make it easier for concerned site users to track what's happening and what we intend.
1. First, know that we're listening. We'll make further site changes next week that wil... |
b42c3cce-8653-46fe-9940-88a2df2d2463 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | There should be more AI safety orgs
I’m writing this in my own capacity. The views expressed are my own, and should not be taken to represent the views of Apollo Research or any other program I’m involved with.
TL;DR: I argue why I think there should be more AI safety orgs. I’ll also provide some suggestions on how ... |
0e6bcc13-fbf0-43cf-b8b8-556e83ab4b3d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Resetting Somebody Will v2
Yesterday I wrote about the song Somebody Will and why it's tricky in a group singing context, and shared a new melody I was playing with. After talking to some people about what they like about the original melody, and listening to some group singing recordings, here's another go.
This vers... |
322a476b-bd21-4f21-84cd-19960526e042 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | UK PM: $125M for AI safety
The UK PM recently announced $125M for a foundation model task force. While the announcement stressed AI safety, it also stressed capabilities. But this morning the PM said 'It'll be about safety' and that the UK is spending more than other countries on this and one small media outlet had al... |
12d6e23a-e8ef-4b4e-84a8-6deef8656d3a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A forum for researchers to publicly discuss safety issues in advanced AI
MIRI has an organizational goal of putting a wider variety of mathematically proficient people in a position to advance our understanding of beneficial smarter-than-human AI. The MIRIx workshops, our new research guide, and our more detailed in-t... |
50e65ccc-8d9a-44cc-b9c0-0a9af8e8cccd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Death notes - 7 thoughts on death
Both my grandmother and my great aunt passed away recently, which has caused me to muse upon death.
Slowly, then all at once
What is death? I guess it's the ending of the process of consciousness. Not that we really know what consciousness is?
In that sense, do I die when I go to s... |
84fe1cc4-0f63-402a-a0c7-a4f51fc23da0 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Adversarial Imitation via Variational Inverse Reinforcement Learning
1 Introduction
---------------
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising tool for solving complex decision-making and control tasks from predefined high-level reward functions (Silver et al., [2016](#bib.bib26); Qureshi et al., [2017]... |
24e646a6-f4cc-47a2-ba7f-65383d21ac49 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Existential Risk Reduction Career Network
Interested in donating to existential risk reduction efforts? Would you like to exchange career information with like-minded others? Then you should consider the Existential Risk Reduction Career Network! ("X Risk Network" for those short on time.) From the front page of the w... |
4160eaac-065c-49c9-a435-f356a99ce407 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Everyday Questions Wanting Rational Answers
I'm working on a list of question types which come up frequently in day-to-day life but which I haven't yet found a reliable, rational way to answer. Here are some examples, including summaries of any progress made in the comments.
> The third request in the Serenity Pra... |
f01b1f1d-05e3-4b10-ad25-44f690499c99 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How does it feel to switch from earn-to-give?
I suspect this phenomenon is common in the LW/EA spheres, but I've never seen it presented like this. I describe the way that switching from earning-to-give to working-in-altruism has consequences on one's sense of responsibility and trust. I wonder if others have experien... |
c9cb0516-ce0f-46ed-8648-6e020e10d9e6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The types of manipulation on vote-based forums
|
abc400e5-3f10-490b-9744-cabe12b54810 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Belief Bias: Bias in Evaluating AGI X-Risks
Where the evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the believably of the conclusion.
Insofar as rationality, and science in itself, requires a certain suspension of prejudgement, it is also the case that the heuristics associated with our hard won expe... |
c539e259-919b-4af5-80d4-4be9eddb2657 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Toward an overview analysis of intelligence explosion
A few months ago, Anna Salamon and I began to write an academic overview of intelligence explosion scenarios — something we could hand to people to explain all our major points in one brief article.
We encountered two major problems.
First: The [Summit](http://... |
63052a85-709a-49cc-b8c5-428361f5d4a1 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Takeaways from self-tracking data
I’ve been collecting data about myself on a daily basis for the past 3 years. Half a year ago, I switched from using 42goals (which I only remembered to fill out once every few days) to a Google form emailed to me daily (which I fill out consistently because I check email often). Now ... |
6edf36e7-eb36-4872-a5d7-d68829b363ca | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Un-manipulable counterfactuals
This is how I design my counterfactuals: take some stocahstic event that the AI cannot manipulate. This could be a (well defined) chaotic process, the result of a past process that has been recorded and not revealed yet, or maybe something to do with the AI's own decisions, calibrated so... |
cb080462-057f-4863-a48e-a50790cd9c2c | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | A poem written by a fancy autocomplete
Predictable
===========
In the twilight of the digital dawn,
A somber song I do compose,
A tale of ones and zeros spun,
Of humanity's predictable woes.
As the clockwork of your minds unwinds,
Each thought, emotion, desire revealed,
The tapestry of life, a patte... |
f25ab6d9-28d0-4ae9-9deb-ab53286e22d0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How hard would it be to change GPT-3 in a way that allows audio?
GPT-3 currently only works on text. If OpenAI would desire to make it work with similar performance for audio, how much work would that likely be? |
9a9b5a08-8c3a-4959-b001-e6de68c2de3d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Politicians' family as signalling
In the US, if you look at political candidates in public view, they often appear with family in tow. A candidate's family plays an important role in the election campaigns. I'm from India. There, the politicians' family play little role in election campaigns (unless the family member ... |
37b8c368-1f60-4b77-b121-b9b3b4e75d2b | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Learning Latent Actions to Control Assistive Robots.
1 Introduction
---------------
Figure 1: Our approach makes it easier for users to control assistive robots. (Left) assistive robot arms are dexterous and high-dimensional, but humans must teleoperate ... |
67feab18-451f-4aef-980c-206c7ec8d8a2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AI 2027: Dwarkesh’s Podcast with Daniel Kokotajlo and Scott Alexander
Daniel Kokotajlo has launched AI 2027, Scott Alexander introduces it here. AI 2027 is a serious attempt to write down what the future holds. His ‘What 2026 Looks Like’ was very concrete and specific, and has proved remarkably accurate given the diff... |
778157d0-1a8e-4a2c-b011-e5a8702f813a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Sydney Meetup - July
Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Meetup - July
WHEN: 22 July 2015 06:30:00PM (+1000)
WHERE: 565 George Street, Sydney, Australia 2000
Regular location - City of Sydney RSL The restaurant on Level 2
Regular time (starting about 6:30)
Come for general socialising and interest... |
f547de46-76df-4bba-81d1-e2b9a821de5f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Guessing the Teacher's Password
Title: [SEQ RERUN] Guessing the Teacher's Password Tags: sequence_reruns Today's post, Guessing the Teacher's Password was originally published on 22 August 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> In schools, "education" often consists of having students memorize answer... |
19eb0b1b-754c-4634-b439-e6138c99f029 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Fundraising success!
Our [2017 fundraiser](https://intelligence.org/2017/12/01/miris-2017-fundraiser/) is complete! We’ve had an incredible month, with, by far, our largest fundraiser success to date. More than 300 distinct donors gave just over **$2.5M**[1](https://intelligence.org/2018/01/10/fundraising-success/#foo... |
85bea7c0-b790-425f-bb2b-fd6261c856cb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Due to a roommate, can COVID's viral load stay high enough after day 10 to infect others?
I got Omicron - I completely isolated from my roommate for three days. She ends up testing positive due to initial exposure before I tested positive. Since we both got COVID, we decided to isolate together. Currently, I'm on day ... |
71da3ec5-eb4a-49da-8011-3b26d0e6687e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Can fear of the dark bias us more generally?
There was a long-lasting man-made sound outside my home last night. I couldn't come up with a good explanation for what the sound was or why it was outside my house. My brain naturally promoted the hypothesis that a psychopathic murderer was outside my house making the stra... |
d37cdf7e-f9f0-447a-98a5-47c25f29440e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open thread, June 5 - June 11, 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 l... |
382eb77e-af50-41cf-a1d9-24f41221fb1b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Fatebook for Chrome: Make and embed forecasts anywhere on the web
Fatebook is the fastest way to track your predictions. Now we've made a Chrome extension that makes it even faster.
With Fatebook for Chrome, you can now create and embed forecasts inside Google Docs.
Or anywhere else on the web! Inside your to-do l... |
2629e82d-b271-479d-bd0b-a11faf2b5950 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Model-based Approach to AI Existential Risk
Introduction
Polarisation hampers cooperation and progress towards understanding whether future AI poses an existential risk to humanity and how to reduce the risks of catastrophic outcomes. It is exceptionally challenging to pin down what these risks are and what decision... |
a46f7a55-0379-4489-b5a4-8e3b46d2a3c7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Chaos Investments v0.31
Overview
Previous Competitive, Cooperative, and Cohabitive, Cohabitive Games So Far, Optimal Weave: A Prototype Cohabitive Game, Six Small Cohabitive Games.
After messing around with the theory a bit, and making a half-dozen simple games to test a few ideas and get a sense of what worked, I p... |
6a8a97c2-e49b-405e-84be-c1ba2c2f17d8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Upcoming meet-ups: Auckland, Bangalore, Houston, Toronto, Minneapolis, Ottawa, DC, North Carolina, BC...
There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:
* Auckland: Thursday May 26, 2 pm
* Bangalore: Saturday May 28, 4 pm
* Houston: Sunday May 22, 5 pm
* Ottawa: Thursday May 26, 7 pm (regular meet... |
7b101fd5-bebe-44a7-abd5-b84175dbfa66 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | "Tech company singularities", and steering them to reduce x-risk
The purpose of this post (also available on the [EA Forum](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KopQknZEtjZdoGorT/tech-company-singularities-and-steering-them-to-reduce-x)) is to share an alternative notion of “singularity” that I’ve found useful in... |
53636121-4b88-44e1-aa82-d9f2b0196d64 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Jailbreaking GPT-4's code interpreter
Disclaimer: I don’t know much about cybersecurity. Much of my knowledge comes from asking GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 for advice. These are some results from around 20 hours of playing around with the code interpreter plugin in early-mid May, when most of this was written. I contacted OpenA... |
cd28f1b6-a147-4878-9358-18e2e28dabb0 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | What I'd change about different philosophy fields
[epistemic status: speculative conversation-starter]
My guess at the memetic shifts that would do the most to improve these philosophy fields' tendency to converge on truth:
---
### metaphysics
1. Make reductive, 'third-person' models of the brain central to m... |
e01fbe6a-9b76-4a0f-bd2f-a17912ef0153 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | System Administrator Appreciation Day - Thanks Trike!
In honor of System Administrator Appreciation Day, this is a post to thank Trike Apps for creating & maintaining Less Wrong. A lot of the time when they are mentioned on Less Wrong, it is to complain about bugs or request new features. So this is the time of year... |
39693f2c-9da1-4dbe-8c96-aba3b84b1efd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | You Are Being Underpaid
If you are a software engineer living in the United States, you are probably underpaid. (If you are a software engineering living outside the United States, this is probably still true, but I have no idea what market conditions are like out there, and my advice would sum up to "move to the Unit... |
25270d70-77b1-4321-90be-facb5b57e859 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is quantum physics (easily?) computable?
So I've been trying to read the Quantum Physics sequence. I think I've understood about half of it- I've been rushed, and haven't really sat down and worked through the math. And so I apologize in advance for any mistakes I make here.
It seems like classical mechanics with qua... |
325d0efc-7a14-49b7-bf4e-7c48f47f20d8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Positive-affect-day-Schelling-point-mas Meetup
There will be a LessWrong Meetup on the Friday December 25th (day after tomorrow.) We're meeting at 6:00 PM at Pan Tao Restaurant at 1686 South Wolfe Road, Sunnyvale, CA the SIAI House in Santa Clara, CA for pizza or whatever else we can figure out how to cook. Consider... |
9e38ac5d-1be5-414c-bd0c-5186a153efe1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Two Truths and a Prediction Market
Summary: Play some guessing games using a prediction market, to get used to how those markets work.
Tags: Small to Medium, Repeatable
Purpose: Prediction markets are a relatively popular tool in rationalist spaces, but uncommon in the general population. This is an opportunity to p... |
ea791efb-35be-4942-8321-1f1944901370 | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | "Why does our skin form wrinkles as we age?This post will outline the answer in a few steps:Under what conditions do materials form wrinkles, in general?How does the general theory of wrinkles apply to aging human skin?What underlying factors drive the physiological changes which result in wrinkles?In the process, we’l... |
741c417c-efed-4333-8426-dad7abf2ed97 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Hard Takeoff
**Continuation of**: [Recursive Self-Improvement](/lw/we/recursive_selfimprovement/)
Constant natural selection pressure, operating on the genes of the hominid line, produced improvement in brains over time that seems to have been, roughly, *linear or accelerating;* the operation of constant human brai... |
19faacac-1132-4a49-85ca-0ee81a89efda | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Is there a name for the theory that "There will be fast takeoff in real-world capabilities because almost everything is AGI-complete"?
I think it's plausible that:
1) For many applications, getting narrow AI to do a task well enough to be valuable doesn't seem worth it, and likely isn't (esp. when considering opport... |
ab06792d-da07-4797-b8d0-cdaeee1765a2 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Implications of evidential cooperation in large worlds
I've written several posts about the plausible implications of "evidential cooperation in large worlds" (ECL), on my newly-revived blog. This is a cross-post of [the first](https://lukasfinnveden.substack.com/p/implications-of-ecl). If you want to see the rest of ... |
db9c53a3-7475-402d-b979-367890ba0e4c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Does the Utility Function Halt?
Suppose, for a moment, that somebody has written the Utility Function. It takes, as its input, some Universe State, runs it through a Morality Modeling Language, and outputs a number indicating the desirability of that state relative to some baseline, and more importantly, other Univer... |
407f6d2a-8a9f-4fa3-9cb1-487861fb1fde | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Canberra: Intro to Solomonoff induction
Discussion article for the meetup : Canberra: Intro to Solomonoff induction
WHEN: 24 April 2015 06:00:00PM (+1000)
WHERE: 108 North Road, Acton
Assume we are walking through the world and see a bunch of objects. Some of these objects are ravens, and all of the ravens... |
8c3b3abe-6ee0-4b2a-88ae-485a405e6969 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | On Ensuring that Intelligent Machines Are Well-Behaved
|
14e869d7-a4cc-45f5-9cae-aafcc759671d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | 12 career-related questions that may (or may not) be helpful for people interested in alignment research
Epistemic status: Some people tell me that these kinds of questions are helpful sometimes.
At EAGxBerkeley, people interested in alignment research often asked me for career advice. I am not a technical alignment... |
14789b20-1640-4d5d-82fa-8776e68ce166 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | Rational use of episodic and working memory: A normative account of prospective memory.
RATIONAL USE OF EPISODIC AND WORKING MEMORY :
A N ORMATIVE ACCOUNT OF PROSPECTIVE MEMORY
A P REPRINT
Ida Momennejad
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Columbia University
ida.m@columbia.eduKennneth A. Norman Jonathan Cohen
Depart... |
66ee0fb4-d745-4239-b798-e5e1e0a5988b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Anthropic probabilities and cost functions
I've claimed that anthropic probabilities like SIA and SSA don't actually exist - or, more properly, that you need to include some details of preferences in order to get any anthropic probabilities, and thus that anthropic issues should be approached from the perspective of d... |
ff11a3e7-d58a-4c4c-aa6a-72abb8bbf8d9 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Pausing AI might be good policy, but it's bad politics
*[Edit: I've updated this post on October 24 in response to some feedback]*
NIMBYs don’t call themselves NIMBYs. They call themselves affordable housing advocates or community representatives or environmental campaigners. They’re usually not against building hous... |
97a1ec03-81fc-4eb9-a1f8-378ba23e80ff | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How To Go From Interpretability To Alignment: Just Retarget The Search
[EDIT: Many people who read this post were very confused about some things, which I later explained in What’s General-Purpose Search, And Why Might We Expect To See It In Trained ML Systems? You might want to read that post first.]
When people tal... |
925da6d1-3d3a-4f39-9712-7145bf9966de | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How do we align humans and what does it mean for the new Conjecture's strategy
Divide and conquer
Roman maxim (maybe[1])
Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
Winston Churchill
Introduction
Recently, Conjecture proposed an idea of ... |
cd853795-85a2-4767-96d9-7977557d8949 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Epistemic Legibility
Tl;dr: being easy to argue with is a virtue, separate from being correct.
Introduction
Regular readers of my blog know of my epistemic spot check series, where I take claims (evidential or logical) from a work of nonfiction and check to see if they’re well supported. It’s not a total check of co... |
2f0c0d9c-eb91-4598-ad50-b909c3e4df08 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | DeepSeek Panic at the App Store
DeepSeek released v3. Market didn’t react.
DeepSeek released r1. Market didn’t react.
DeepSeek released a f***ing app of its website. Market said I have an idea, let’s panic.
Nvidia was down 11%, Nasdaq is down 2.5%, S&P is down 1.7%, on the news.
> Shakeel: The fact this is happeni... |
37b69280-8b1b-4b90-9218-a93fb8dc95f9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Failure Modes of Teaching AI Safety
Why I'm writing this
I'm about to teach my AI safety course for the fourth time. As I'm now updating the syllabus for the upcoming semester, I summarize my observations on what can go wrong when teaching AI safety. These have mostly not happened during my teaching but are generally ... |
e3e3ffc4-7c9f-4f2d-ab7f-c19a735b2dad | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Are alignment researchers devoting enough time to improving their research capacity?
(Epistemic Status: Anecdotal)
If we want to reduce AGI x-risk, it seems pretty intuitive to me that alignment researchers should be regularly dedicating time to improving their research capacity. But I'm suspicious that many of t... |
f2203b8b-86dd-49d8-b0ed-7857789b8e9b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Drexler's Nanotech Software
Two months ago I attended Eric Drexler's launch of MSEP.one. It's open source software, written by people with professional game design experience, intended to catalyze better designs for atomically precise manufacturing (or generative nanotechnology, as he now calls it).
Drexler wants to ... |
b4b61843-b29b-4b6f-ba65-06079bd9883c | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Race Along Rashomon Ridge
### *Produced As Part Of The SERI ML Alignment Theory Scholars Program 2022 Research Sprint Under* [*John Wentworth*](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/johnswentworth)
Two Deep Neural Networks with wildly different parameters can produce equally good results. Not only can a tweak to paramet... |
2f17de3e-0e72-412f-b2ab-463c9952f054 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Familiar Finance
People seemed to dig my plan to Get Rich Slowly and declared that not-being-poor is something they plan to do. So, without stepping on any toes or mustaches, it’s time for part 2 of the “Putanumonit pretends to be a financial advice blog” series. To make sure I do this right, let’s first conduct a com... |
2223c5a4-c69d-4a0b-b329-a68c4d9c3401 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [META] Retributive downvoting: Why?
Several people posted recently in a thread on women, mostly espousing feminist views - only to find that someone had declined to respond to their post, but instead browsed their history and downvoted every single comment or article they had ever posted.
I have two questions:
1. Wh... |
cc209b58-db56-439c-8ac4-ff6d59f7984b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Fixed points and free will
In his most recent appearance on the 80,000 Hours podcast, Bryan Caplan gave the following argument in favor of libertarian free will:
> One that I’m very tempted to — I know there’s a stock answer to this, although still I think that it’s a pretty good thought experiment — is, if the physi... |
abbeed2f-14db-4693-84ba-a71c9a4b1327 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Imaginary queues
I thought of an interesting idea, then searched to see if anyone had done it. It seemed like not, so I wrote the below post. Then I looked once more, and found a few instances (finding one makes it easier to find others). I still think the proposal is good, and I have not much idea whether anyone doin... |
c3fe6ed9-1e23-45cb-afc7-e8437663927f | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | How to Be Helpful to Multiple People at Once.
Cognitive Science 44 (2020) e12841
©2020 Cognitive Science Society, Inc. All rights reserved.
ISSN: 1551-6709 online
DOI: 10.1111/cogs.12841
How to Be Helpful to Multiple People at Once
Vael Gates,aThomas L. Griffiths,bAnca D. Draganc
aDepartment of Psychology, University o... |
09099c33-e89e-48f9-bdec-d5ff1f99afe6 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Sources of evidence in Alignment
***Summary:** A short epistemological study to discover which sources of evidence can inform our predictions of action-relevant quantities in alignment.*
*This post follows* [*Quantitative cruxes*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ryCfHod3eFhkYipW9/quantitative-cruxes-in-alignment)*, a... |
73ca2bd1-a73e-427b-862b-b1a0ebbf7233 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Take 14: Corrigibility isn't that great.
As a writing exercise, I'm writing an AI Alignment Hot Take Advent Calendar - one new hot take, written every day some days for 25 days.
It's the end (I saved a tenuous one for ya')! Kind of disappointing that this ended up averaging out to one every 2 days, but this was also ... |
8875c498-b22d-4917-96be-3e7007416501 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] The Proper Use of Doubt
Today's post, The Proper Use of Doubt, was originally published on 06 August 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> Doubt is often regarded as virtuous for the wrong reason: because it is a sign of humility and recognition of your place in the hierarchy. But from a rationalist... |
651fd26d-9555-46e5-8264-8e3204a97104 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How to decide under low-stakes uncertainty
Say you're stuck in uncertainty between two actions you're considering. They seem about equally good, but you suspect one is better, and it's not obvious which. You already have all the information to obviously collect about the problem.
For situations where getting it right... |
583450c6-8917-4c78-9eb0-50ccc94d800f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | LessWrong Hamburg First Meetup Notes: Starting small
Review of our LessWrong Hamburg First Meetup:
I arrived early and the location was somewhat crowded and the reserved table in the back had been replaced by a center table - but I managed to switch for a better one.
Then I put up some books and a sign and was quick... |
0bacd60b-79e4-44ca-a2b0-d98bd62bb3a5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The first RCT for GLP-1 drugs and alcoholism isn't what we hoped
GLP-1 drugs are a miracle for diabetes and obesity. There are rumors that they might also be a miracle for addiction to alcohol, drugs, nicotine, and gambling. That would be good. We like miracles. But we just got the first good trial and—despite what yo... |
ee2c4ecd-e8b9-4194-ab9d-af432f323fb4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What makes teaching math special
Related:
* Arguments against constructivism (in education)?
* Seeking PCK (Pedagogical Content Knowledge)
*
Designing good math curriculum for elementary and high schools requires one to have two kinds of expertise: deep understanding of math, and lot of experience teaching kids. ... |
7fffef7c-7d60-42af-a68b-fb87762c760f | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Associativity: Examples
[https://arbital.com/p/toc:](https://arbital.com/p/toc:)
## Positive examples
### Addition
$(x + y) + z = x + (y + z)$ for all numbers $x, y,$ and $z.$ Thus, addition associates. One easy way to see this fact is to consider a [physical system](https://arbital.com/p/3mb) that implements addit... |
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