id stringlengths 36 36 | source stringclasses 15
values | formatted_source stringclasses 13
values | text stringlengths 2 7.55M |
|---|---|---|---|
249d95db-2cf7-4baa-b00c-94b28c49cbf9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What is a “Good” Prediction?
[My inside view is pretty confident in this; my outside view is very not. Cross-posted from Grand, Unified, Crazy.]
Zvi’s post on Evaluating Predictions in Hindsight is a great walk through some practical, concrete methods of evaluating predictions. This post aims to be a somewhat more th... |
a9de432d-5e5f-4f34-a81c-6a65f5507e1e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The No Free Lunch theorems and their Razor
The No Free Lunch (NFL) family of theorems contains some of the most misunderstood theorems of machine learning. They apply to learning[1] and optimization[2] and, in rough terms, they state:
> All algorithms for learning [respectively, optimization] do equally well at gener... |
316479a4-75aa-4c96-947e-75157da89016 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | How We’re Predicting AI – or Failing to
How We’re Predicting AI – or Failing to⋆
Stuart Armstrong1and Kaj Sotala2
1The Future of Humanity Institute,
Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford, UK
stuart.armstrong@stx.oxon.org
2The Singularity Institute, Berkeley, CA, USA
kaj@singularity.org
Abstract. This paperwill l... |
6f4e7f01-60e2-4f98-ae4a-c9f85a8bfc16 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Ottawa Weekly Monday LessWrong Meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : Ottawa Weekly Monday LessWrong Meetup
WHEN: 26 September 2011 07:30:00PM (-0400)
WHERE: Private residence in the Elgin & Gladstone area, Ottawa, ON
Matthew Kelly (http://memoryechoes.blogspot.com/) will be present to talk about his w... |
c0af121c-a813-45de-9963-0a33c9383d01 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The hour I first alieved
0 Summary
Many believe that religious behavior is only justified if one has religious belief. I disagree, argue that religion should be managed according to its membership in what I call the category of “Adaptive Distorted States of Perception”, and attempt to make the rationalist case for mo... |
4473ae28-414f-41a1-a40d-f3221fed5667 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Privacy vs proof of character
Below, I outline some musings I’ve produced while thinking about the private cryptocurrency Monero. I make no pretense to originality, cleverness, or exhaustiveness in covering considerations.
There are (at least) two distinct types of privacy. For instance, suppose you have an item in y... |
9eafbc21-c518-44ba-8a0d-abbae4c7b50b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How can I get help becoming a better rationalist?
Well…
Right now, being ‘a rationalist’ could be said to be a massive part of my identity, at least judging by the absurd amount of time I’ve spent reading posts here, or SSC/ACX, and in a few other places. Yet, I’m still a mere lurker unfamiliar with most of the local... |
668af6e1-82b8-422d-9e35-50900c9aadf6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Can we use Variolation to deal with the Coronavirus?
Credit for the original idea comes from this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/fk5au8/corona_variolation/
The idea is to use variolation to innoculate young people and build up herd immunity to the virus. Perhaps with an infected scratch to t... |
0494c2e3-f467-4f36-a6d4-31e99a3296d3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open problem: thin logical priors
----------------------------------------
author:
* 'Tsvi Benson-Tilsen' title: 'Open problem: thin logical priors' ...
* Background / Motivation
* Problem statement
* Type signature
* Desiderata
* Comments
In short, and at a high level, the problem of thin priors is... |
610ee8f5-be0e-482e-a95e-9f9e4122f66e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Another problem with CDT, involving Bell's Theorem
Cavalcanti (2010) describes another problem with causal decision theory:
> I apply some of the lessons from quantum theory, in particular from Bell’s theorem, to a debate on the foundations of decision theory and causation. By tracing a formal analogy between the bas... |
515ba650-3032-400b-826a-a7a82aed1efd | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info | AI Safety Info | What is behavioral cloning?
Behavioral cloning is the process of gathering observations of the behavior of an “expert demonstrator” who is good at an underlying task, and then using [supervised learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervised_learning) to train an agent to “imitate” this behavior.
Behavioral clonin... |
1fc2c64a-9240-4d97-86e7-025f2dbe541a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Toy Models of Feature Absorption in SAEs
TLDR;
In previous work, we found a problematic form of feature splitting called "feature absorption" when analyzing Gemma Scope SAEs. We hypothesized that this was due to SAEs struggling to separate co-occurrence between features, but we did not prove this. In this post, we set... |
32205d95-08ec-4c7a-b0c3-250902172535 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Questions about AI that bother me
As 2022 comes to an end, I thought it'd be good to maintain a list of "questions that bother me" in thinking about AI safety and alignment. I don't claim I'm the first or only one to have thought about them. I'll keep updating this list.
(The title of this post alludes to the book "... |
4c7e92cc-0e31-4039-9d26-266400859a9b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | April Fools - Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality Joke Chapter
This was an april fools joke.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s my chapter of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing the fake April Fools chapter, which i... |
29929205-748a-419a-9549-6b602bac560c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Notes on Consciousness
Every now and then I see consciousness mentioned as something very special, unique, hard to define and measure, and all of that. It’s especially painful to observe in the AI context. One say “Oh, consciousness, it’s such a divine thing, unique only to really intelligent creatures, your GPU power... |
7e08fe0b-dbb0-456b-9d01-676f39f33a12 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Dance dance evaluation
One of the best things I came across in 2014 was Dance Dance Revolution (DDR), or specifically Stepmania, a free version you can play on your computer. It is a dance game that looks basically like this (skip the first minute) or this if you are very good and play in arcades.
I’m never sure whet... |
cfc29081-bd2a-4dbb-95a9-d5012bd4a4a0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Convict Conditioning Book Review
The Book:
In 1979 Paul Wade was admitted into San Quentin State Prison, being locked up he discovered things lost to the outside world. Wade ended up despising most things preached about the industry from the outside, from the top level of media all the way down to to the laypersons' ... |
4ea8f284-3ff1-46dc-a9a4-f8a755892be4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Formula for Dying Babies
Note: This was posted originally on Thursday, May 12 as part of the weekly Covid post. It is being separated out into its own post for future reference, and in case some people are no longer reading Covid posts.
There’s a shortage of specialty infant formula. Half of all types are unavailable... |
b6954619-c115-497f-be81-052b6b611adf | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks
1 Introduction
---------------
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are extremely powerful machine learning
models that achieve excellent performance on difficult problems such
as speech recognition [[13](#bib.bib13), [7](#bib.bib7)] and visual object
recognition [[19](#bib... |
9f0039f0-c14a-4c21-b276-ae443418a379 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Upcoming meet-ups: Bangalore, Minneapolis, Edinburgh, Melbourne, Houston, Dublin
There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:
* Bangalore: Saturday May 28, 4 pm
* Minneapolis: Saturday May 28, 3 pm
* Edinburgh LW meetup, Saturday May 28, 2pm
* Melbourne Meetup: Friday 3rd June, 7pm
* Houston H... |
d961c4c2-e06e-4965-a254-cbc07d9aa8d9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Q&A with new Executive Director of Singularity Institute
Today I was appointed the new Executive Director of Singularity Institute.
Because I care about transparency, one of my first projects as an intern was to begin work on the organization's first Strategic Plan. I researched how to write a strategic plan, tracked... |
ce590c3c-7088-48cd-bb55-a818a0e7604b | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Instrumental convergence in single-agent systems
**Summary of the sequence**
---------------------------
Over the past few months, we’ve been investigating instrumental convergence in reinforcement learning agents. We started from the definition of single-agent POWER [proposed](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.01683.pdf) b... |
e740c234-9080-4267-87f3-1a82ed4543a4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Understanding Emergence in Large Language Models
Recent research into large language models (LLMs) has revealed fascinating patterns in how these systems develop capabilities. While initial discussions of "emergent abilities" suggested sudden, discontinuous jumps in performance, closer analysis reveals a more nuanced ... |
b27ca3a4-e1c3-4f6e-8150-244afc6eae8b | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Roman Yampolskiy on AI Safety Engineering
 Roman V. Yampolskiy holds a PhD degree from the [Department of Computer Science and Engineering](http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/) at the [University at Buffalo](http://www.buffalo.edu). There he was a recipi... |
5f885b7a-d9f1-4230-be12-5f2b0d6db4bf | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | kolmogorov complexity objectivity and languagespace
kolmogorov complexity objectivity and languagespace
---------------------------------------------------
(edit: this post [has gotten a reply](https://snugglyserials.wordpress.com/2021/08/16/complexity-is-not-objective/) from my interlocutor, making a broader introd... |
d3b9c287-cba6-4fdf-a05b-d478876954b3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Regular Moscow meetup: copyright debates, culture keynote, working on beliefs, attribution error
Discussion article for the meetup : Regular Moscow meetup: copyright debates, culture keynote, working on beliefs, attribution error
WHEN: 30 August 2015 02:00:00PM (+0300)
WHERE: Москва, Льва Толстого, 16
We'r... |
421ace22-cc50-4061-b3a8-91edb0129c0e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | When should you relocate to mitigate the risk of dying in a nuclear war?
Epistemic Status: "Thinking out loud" is probably a good way to describe it. I've been researching and thinking about this stuff on and off for the past few days, and this is the best I've got. I haven't vetted it too closely and probably have ma... |
a2c44f91-b9f6-47b7-a2e3-fd46f49def62 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Transcript: "Choice Machines, Causality, and Cooperation"
Gary Drescher's presentation at the 2009 Singularity Summit, "Choice Machines, Causality, and Cooperation," is online, at vimeo. Drescher is the author of Good and Real, which has been recommended many times on LW. I've transcribed his talk, below.
My ta... |
cd4dcb81-b340-40d2-83f1-f9f1454dfbde | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | A Broader View on Bias in Automated Decision-Making: Reflecting on Epistemology and Dynamics.
1 Introduction
---------------
Data-driven decision-making is rapidly being introduced in high-stakes social domains such as medical clinics, criminal justice, and public infrastructure.
The proliferation of biases in thes... |
4a2b6d68-fce5-4c94-878e-804535961fa8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Question] Do you know a good game or demo for demonstrating sunk costs?
I'm hoping to find something that can be done in 5 minutes or so, as a classroom demonstration (for the rationality curricula).
I find sunk costs have a large effect in the board game "Go" (so that beginners are instructed "not to throw good sto... |
20611454-5738-432c-bd1d-d04af77f484c | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Exploring Metaculus’s AI Track Record
*By Peter Mühlbacher, Research Scientist at Metaculus, and Peter Scoblic, Director of Nuclear Risk at Metaculus*
[Metaculus](https://www.metaculus.com/home/) is a forecasting platform where an active community of thousands of forecasters regularly make probabilistic predictions o... |
7248d83a-559b-4e13-9a86-c9d6841bac5a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Responsible Scaling Policies Are Risk Management Done Wrong
Summary
TLDR
Responsible Scaling Policies (RSPs) have been recently proposed as a way to keep scaling frontier large language models safely.
While being a nice attempt at committing to specific practices, the framework of RSP is:
1. missing core componen... |
6570c089-8357-4b45-a106-0c3d368cf85c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | "A Generalist Agent": New DeepMind Publication
Linkpost for "A Generalist Agent"
Abstract:
"Inspired by progress in large-scale language modeling, we apply a similar approach towards building a single generalist agent beyond the realm of text outputs. The agent, which we refer to as Gato, works as a multi-modal, mul... |
705dda1a-c573-4fcc-bc37-a24d770666f9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Which cognitive biases should we trust in?
There have been (at least) a couple of attempts on LW to make Anki flashcards from Wikipedia's famous List of Cognitive Biases, here and here. However, stylistically they are not my type of flashcard, with too much info in the "answer" section.
Further, and more troublingl... |
18f88551-ee74-4e6d-8477-6ac5814f7997 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Covid 7/15: Rates of Change
Cases rose by over 60% in America this week, and we’re seeing large jumps in cases around the world. I am highly suspicious about the jump in the rate of increase, but Delta certainly seems to be the real deal, and this was well above my expectations.
I worry that recently I’ve lacked suf... |
83e9d22e-ccee-4463-b8d4-d8dbecf374c1 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensembles
1 Introduction
---------------
Deep neural networks (NNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on a wide variety of machine learning tasks (LeCun et al., [2015](#bib.bib35)) and are becoming increasingly popular in domains such as comp... |
f5020740-32d6-44c9-9b64-9f3a7aa6edc3 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | An alternative of PPO towards alignment
Introduction
------------
General-purpose foundation models, especially large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, have demonstrated extraordinary capabilities in performing various tasks that were once challenging. However, we believe that one model cannot rule them all. Fu... |
cc28ad64-4127-494d-bc18-69f343ddc93c | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube | Youtube Transcripts | Bing is a LOT Smarter than ChatGPT (but still makes dangerous mistakes)
the new model of GPT that powers Bing is
significantly smarter than Changi PT and
I'm going to prove it in ways that I
think might be a First on YouTube it's
not all roses though and some of the
mistakes of the new being are harder to
spot which m... |
92ec5326-4b72-404a-96b5-3434e595d6e8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Berkeley meetup: Success stories
Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley meetup: Success stories
WHEN: 24 October 2012 07:00:00PM (-0700)
WHERE: Berkeley, CA
This week the Berkeley meetups return to their usual time and place: 7pm at Zendo.
The topic this week mirrors that of the South Bay meetup: "R... |
d7c8a7f2-0931-4e8c-ac91-1c902b745e63 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Being Interested in Other People
People love talking about themselves. You can increase your social skills by training yourself to be interested in other people.
Most people primarily talk about themselves and their own interests. This self-focus is counter-productive, hindering connections. Unfortunately, it’s the d... |
3698913a-2b2e-4482-bfb3-08cca3548936 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation
1 Introduction
---------------
Neural Machine Translation
(NMT) [[41](#bib.bib41), [2](#bib.bib2)] has recently been
introduced as a promising approach with the potential of addressing
many shortcomings of traditional... |
94cc2b23-1617-40fb-a502-7c96f06233c6 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Searching for Search
*Thanks to Dan Braun, Ze Shen Chin, Paul Colognese, Michael Ivanitskiy, Sudhanshu Kasewa, and Lucas Teixeira for feedback on drafts.*
*This work was carried out while at*[*Conjecture*](https://www.conjecture.dev/)*.*
This post is a loosely structured collection of thoughts and confusions abou... |
f345cb7b-dc44-436d-a9b3-41fd7c379a3d | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Quick thoughts on "scalable oversight" / "super-human feedback" research
The current default view seems to roughly be:
* Inner alignment is more important than outer alignment (or, alternatively, this distinction is bad/sub-optimal, but basically it's all about generalizing correctly)
* Scalable oversight is the only... |
783d0452-f647-441d-b569-79510da76834 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube | Youtube Transcripts | Friday Seminar Series- Gillian Hadfield: AI Alignment and Human Normativity
[Music]
so I want to talk generally about this
time AI human so we've got a lot of
terms floating around AI safety AI
policy value alignment how do these
things all line up and I want to give
you a framework for thinking about that
I'm going t... |
3f069905-ccdb-4e1c-af4c-22524f6845b6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Project ideas: Governance during explosive technological growth
This is part of a series of lists of projects. The unifying theme is that the projects are not targeted at solving alignment or engineered pandemics but still targeted at worlds where transformative AI is coming in the next 10 years or so. See here for th... |
aa9b1aa2-3e52-4a2c-89d9-2aff13712da9 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Biosafety Regulations (BMBL) and their relevance for AI
AI regulations could draw inspiration from the field of biosafety regulation, specifically the CDC's guidelines for [Biosafety in Microbiological & Biomedical Laboratories (BMBL)](https://www.cdc.gov/labs/BMBL.html), which outline the necessary precautions for wo... |
894ea92b-7c8c-4166-af73-03a2746b58cc | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Bayeswatch 4: Mousetrap
Miriam chucked the replica Salvator Mundi into the bonfire.
"We do a lot of shooting first and asking questions never," said Vi.
"Personnel are expensive. AIs are replaceable. We have standard operating procedures. It wasn't always this way. AIs used to be rare. Knowledge was precious in thos... |
4e4b0769-aa07-4022-8717-7febd96233ae | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Localizing goal misgeneralization in a maze-solving policy network
***TLDR:** I am trying to understand how goal misgeneralization happens in the same maze-solving network* [*TurnTrout et al. work on.*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cAC4AXiNC5ig6jQnc/understanding-and-controlling-a-maze-solving-policy-network) *Noth... |
c34372e5-8947-4532-b5da-04fb59141fa9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meltdown: Interface for llama.cpp and ChatGPT
I'm afraid linking what I've been working on for a while as my first post might not be greatly received, but I think you might find it interesting none the less.
I'm making a text interface to chat with local and remote models. It is made in 100% python, it uses tkinter/t... |
ff5e8881-fcb7-483d-afa1-5168fdf33539 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | "Is There Anything That's Worth More"
In season two, episode twenty-four of Steven Universe, "It Could've Been Great", our magical alien superheroine protagonists (and Steven) are taking a break from building a giant drill to extract a superweapon that was buried deep within the Earth by an occupying alien race thousa... |
eee33eeb-67b7-4b55-b7f0-ece3230d42e8 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Policy Alignment
*(ETA: The name "policy approval" wasn't great. I think I will use the term "policy alignment" to contrast with "value alignment" going forward, at the suggestion of Wei Dai in the comments.)*
I recently had a conversation with Stuart Armstrong in which I claimed that an agent which learns your utili... |
732bb999-132d-4629-96e4-c5dd4d644a50 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Boost your productivity, happiness and health with this one weird trick
Thanks to a little luck + good genes + some means, you had a reasonably happy childhood, graduated from college, and ended up with a job that you're good at. You like the work you do (most of the time), because people like doing things they're goo... |
a9533615-2e11-4642-8fd9-1ac3e365d8dc | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Circular Altruism
Followup to: Torture vs. Dust Specks, Zut Allais, Rationality Quotes 4
Suppose that a disease, or a monster, or a war, or something, is killing people. And suppose you only have enough resources to implement one of the following two options:
1. Save 400 lives, with certainty.
2. Save 500 lives,... |
ab4d562f-7869-49c1-86cb-1cb933a525ec | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Aligning my web server with devops practices: part 2 (security)
This is a continuation of my previous post. See the introduction at the top of the previous post to get more information on what this series of posts is about.
This post focuses on devops practices I adopted to secure my web server.
Recommendations for... |
8759a422-fe74-4814-bf53-ebc924277bcf | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Melbourne Social Meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Social Meetup
WHEN: 20 March 2015 06:30:00PM (+1100)
WHERE: The Bull & Bear Tavern, 347 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
The March social meetup is scheduled for this Friday (20th March) at 6:30pm as usual. This month, we will be returning to th... |
67027de3-3262-4f68-ac7d-c55355363e68 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | My Approach to Non-Literal Communication
This is a linkpost for this post on my blog. It's primarily intended for my non-rationalist acquaintances, so regular LessWrong readers will likely be familiar with most of the concepts I mention. I'm cross-posting it here because there's enough overlap in content that I think ... |
d5c832ac-9dd0-4065-b519-fc15424e893e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Knowledge Base 2: The structure and the method of building
This is the second post of a series of posts that propose to build a crowdsourced knowledge base and use it to increase intelligence of people and computers, including AI. This post describes the structure of the knowledge database and the method of building i... |
60abea8b-504c-4319-8854-8c67be4582b6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Agent Boundaries Aren't Markov Blankets. [Unless they're non-causal; see comments.]
Edit: I now see that this argument was making an unnecessary assumption that the markov blankets in question would have to relate nicely to a causal model; see John's comment.
Friston has famously invoked the idea of Markov Blankets f... |
3e0004bd-908f-4f38-a2aa-e50f58c3d96b | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Disincentivizing deception in mesa optimizers with Model Tampering
Disclaimer: I don't know if this is something worth exploring or a stupid idea and I thought the best way to get feedback was to describe it here.
Suppose a training process could produce a mesa optimizer. How can we proceed to ensure that the optimiz... |
b29cb170-1356-49b3-a706-b264b037031c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Research Without Permission
Epistemic status: Personal account. A reflection on navigating entry into the AI safety space without formal credentials or institutional affiliation. Also, a log of how ideas can evolve through rejection, redirection, and informal collaboration.
--
A few weeks ago, I wrote a long, messy ... |
5fb4876d-637f-44db-8cc1-3ed321f5b711 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Stop Voting For Nincompoops
Followup to: The Two-Party Swindle, The American System and Misleading Labels
If evolutionary psychology could be simplified down to one sentence (which it can't), it would be: "Our instincts are adaptations that increased fitness in the ancestral environment, and we go on feeling that w... |
f63bcc7b-9c8b-48c6-a69c-aea655614a15 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is this a weak pivotal act: creating nanobots that eat evil AGIs (but nothing else)?
I've seen the phrase "there are no weak pivotal acts" pretty often, but I have not been able to locate where this is explained.
The prototypical example of a strong pivotal act is "nanobots that eat GPUs" (my understanding is that th... |
99e1368a-69f0-49e9-9d78-dd3ac5c4df27 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Backyard Office
In 2020 I renovated the small building in our backyard which had fallen into disrepair. It was zoned for use as a home office, and had electric but not plumbing. I wrote about how I was thinking about insulating it and comparing framing options but then apparently I never got around to writing up how I... |
602a4fae-2b89-4f6c-a2ed-c14b9c62f483 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open thread, Apr. 18 - Apr. 24, 2016
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. (Immediately... |
c07b557d-c270-492c-bd22-5b5bf8a81f36 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Paris Meetup: Sunday, October 6: New people, games...
Discussion article for the meetup : Paris Meetup: Sunday, October 6: New people, games...
WHEN: 06 October 2013 02:00:00PM (+0200)
WHERE: Café des Arts et Métiers, 51 Rue Turbigo, Paris
The next Paris Meetup will be Sunday, October 6, at the Café des A... |
14c9421f-129c-4ba3-8442-0f77a4fde1cf | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Feedbackloop-first Rationality
I've been workshopping a new rationality training paradigm. (By "rationality training paradigm", I mean an approach to learning/teaching the skill of "noticing what cognitive strategies are useful, and getting better at them.")
I think the paradigm has promise. I've beta-tested it for a... |
9c73a762-a11e-41ea-ab38-203eaca38a37 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why don't quantilizers also cut off the upper end of the distribution?
It seems to me that the main goal of quantilization is to reduce the extreme unintended outcomes of maximizing (by sampling from something like a human-learned distribution over actions) while still remaining competitive (by sampling from only the ... |
9fb45686-2f21-4527-b3a1-255752e88cf2 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Bayes' rule examples
This page and its tabs store exemplar problems for Bayes' rule. You can suggest additional example problems by leaving a comment on the appropriate tab.
Problem types by tab:
- [Introductory](https://arbital.com/p/22w). Meant as a small set of problems for people who haven't heard of Bayes' ru... |
b19a84b7-3320-4d46-b048-118a2d96ac09 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Another list of theories of impact for interpretability
Neel's post on this is good. I thought I'd add my own list/framing. Somewhat rough.
I see various somewhat different ways in which interpretability can be useful for AI safety. These require different things from your interpretability in terms of how efficient i... |
d172daea-3fa9-4628-a502-daed0fd71803 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Value Stability and Aggregation
One of the central problems of Friendly Artificial Intelligence is goal system stability. Given a goal system - whether it's a utility function, a computer program, or a couple kilograms of neural tissue - we want to determine whether it's stable, meaning, is there something that might ... |
50fc544f-e1a4-48c4-84ac-cddd74a06f1d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Li’l pots
As a pandemic-era purchaser of foods for a large household of time-thirsty researchers, I can tell you an interesting thing about the demand for cheese in this context:
1. If you spend a lot of money on a nice cheese, wrapped up in some fancy foreign label, there is a good chance that it will languish sadl... |
3878f10e-2a3d-401f-9e87-3cf3caa74a3f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Fragility of Life Hypothesis and the Evolution of Cooperation
> This part 2 in a 3-part sequence summarizes my book, The Darwinian Trap, (see part 1 here and part 3 here), The Darwinian Trap. The book aims to popularize the concept of multipolar traps and establish them as a broader cause area. If you find this se... |
bcd34012-7017-4f2f-8715-f1491671deee | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Some for-profit AI alignment org ideas
Summary
This is a brain dump of some for-profit AI alignment organization ideas, along with context for why I believe a for-profit alignment organization can make a big contribution to AI safety. This is far from a complete list, and I welcome ideas and feedback. Also, if anyone ... |
44d171fc-38ec-4daa-85af-481f05964cfe | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Rationalists of the 1950s (and before) also called themselves “Rationalists”
TLDR
* There’s an organization based in London called the Rationalist Association. It was founded in 1885. Historically, it focused on publishing books and articles related to atheism and science, including works by Darwin, Bertrand Rus... |
0364a247-c96e-4763-8016-a2749f90ff4d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What Is Love?
There's probably more to this. What I'm about to describe may be more about intimacy than about love, per se. It could just as easily be the intimate understanding between archfoes as star-crossed lovers.
It seems to me that a lot of behaviors and feelings around love can be explained just as people sim... |
1894fd04-2b7a-429f-b22a-a1b3d97aac57 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info | AI Safety Info | What is the difference between AI safety, AI alignment, AI control, friendly AI, AI ethics, AI existential safety, and AGI safety?
Terms like these have a fair amount of overlap and aren't always used consistently. The definitions below are how the terms are used on this website, but this isn't an authoritative guide ... |
a4bb158a-10ba-4614-8060-a8ac4fe9096b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How should we think about the decision relevance of models estimating p(doom)?
To illustrate what I mean, switching from p(doom) to timelines:
* The recent post AGI Timelines in Governance: Different Strategies for Different Timeframes was useful to me in pushing back against Miles Brundage's argument that "timeli... |
f8383697-54f7-45a7-9aee-9bc88428439c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Commentary on AGI Safety from First Principles
My AGI safety from first principles report (which is now online here) was originally circulated as a google doc. Since there was a lot of good discussion in comments on the original document, I thought it would be worthwhile putting some of it online, and have copied out ... |
dc3b3956-973e-4885-8514-10607b0f8905 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Exponential Secretary
Using women I've dated to improve on the solution to the famous secretary problem. |
9e090c0d-14d2-4a00-a6e1-d6419a719308 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | Asking the Right Questions: Learning Interpretable Action Models Through Query Answering.
Asking the Right Questions:
Learning Interpretable Action Models Through Query Answering
Pulkit Verma, Shashank Rao Marpally, andSiddharth Srivastava
School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering
Arizona Stat... |
ccb6add2-9789-48ef-8fe9-d4825bd16df5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What's the deal with Effective Accelerationism (e/acc)?
I've been hearing murmurs about a recently formed philosophy called "Effective Accelerationism", described as:[1]
> ...an ideology that draws from Nick Land's theories of accelerationism to advocate for the belief that artificial intelligence and LLMs will lead ... |
6602b037-6889-48ee-a67c-e2e6e0fd368e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | On OpenAI Dev Day
OpenAI DevDay was this week. What delicious and/or terrifying things await?
TURBO BOOST
First off, we have GPT-4-Turbo.
> Today we’re launching a preview of the next generation of this model, GPT-4 Turbo.
>
> GPT-4 Turbo is more capable and has knowledge of world events up to April 2023. It has ... |
7a6f90c7-567b-4e8b-95c4-d8d32ad6f3af | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Bureaucracy is a world of magic
I previously wrote about some practical game-theoretical (game-practical?) realizations I had while buying a house. Today I want to talk about how bureaucracy is a ritualistic, magical place.
In our home-buying process, every step of the way, there were papers to be signed. Paperwork i... |
d042a979-8cbb-4eb3-9c32-28ca5e2c339b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Paper Walkthrough: Automated Circuit Discovery with Arthur Conmy
Arthur Conmy's Automated Circuit Discovery is a great paper that makes initial forays into automating parts of mechanistic interpretability (specifically, automatically finding a sparse subgraph for a circuit). In this three part series of Youtube videos... |
5e29ea13-5152-4384-91f5-7774e346a63e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A note on hypotheticals
People frequently describe hypothetical situations on LW. Often, other people make responses that suggest they don't understand the purpose of hypotheticals.
* When someone puts forth the hypothetical A, it doesn't mean they believe it is true. They may be trying to show not(A).
* When som... |
682bb25a-2054-40aa-bcc4-f3f67de3a372 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How bad a future do ML researchers expect?
Katja Grace, 8 March 2023
In our survey last year, we asked publishing machine learning researchers how they would divide probability over the future impacts of high-level machine intelligence between five buckets ranging from ‘extremely good (e.g. rapid growth in human flou... |
e5a54cc2-4a90-449c-b8e2-dc91aa56a94f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Feature Hedging: Another way correlated features break SAEs
This work was done as part of MATS 7.0. We consider this in-progress research and we are grateful for any thoughts and feedback from the community.
Update (May 20, 2025): This is now a paper! Check out our paper "Feature Hedging: Correlated Features Break Na... |
74dd61ab-4c17-42d0-8ae1-a1b75049d8a8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Where to Draw the Boundaries?
Followup to: Where to Draw the Boundary?
Figuring where to cut reality in order to carve along the joints—figuring which things are similar to each other, which things are clustered together: this is the problem worthy of a rationalist. It is what people should be trying to do, when they... |
0a2b6709-39df-4810-bc0c-dc632cc72900 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Integrating Three Models of (Human) Cognition
You may have heard a few things about “predictive processing” or “the global neuronal workspace,” and you may have read some of Steve Byrnes’ excellent posts about what’s going on computationally in the human brain. But how does it all fit together? How can we begin to arr... |
0e92678b-3690-45b0-b31f-53b3aa2fca86 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Does Google still hire people via their foobar challenge?
In years since past, the foobar challenge first appeared. 5 levels of ever harder coding challenges, and if you bested the first three you'd be given the option of providing your details to Google. There was a decent chance you'd be sent an interview request so... |
41f92565-b70b-4d25-bcaa-8c4ab3db6aeb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Three Principles to Writing Original Nonfiction
If you like reading then you should write too.
Three Things Writing Will Do For You
1. Writing makes you smarter. Thoughts are ephemeral, fast and fleeting. Writing is frozen thought. It is easier to determine if an idea that is written down than an idea that is merel... |
d9201717-de78-4643-94a3-35a09dc57948 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | AI timelines and theoretical understanding of deep learning
I have generally been quite skeptical about the view that we are on the cusp of a revolution that will lead us to artificial general intelligence in the next 50 years so.
Aside from fundamental limitations of current AI systems, and f[laws of extrapolating ... |
f44ee695-a2fa-4b50-bcd6-2b214a077000 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The ethics of AI for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
I've been tasked by the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy to write their entry on the ethics of AI.
I'll be starting the literature reviews and similar in the coming weeks. Could you draw my attention to any aspect of AI ethics (including the history of... |
f92fbcba-539d-428b-ba6b-91a1b2f4bd6a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What is Randomness?
epistemic status: my intuition after reading and watching a bunch of stuff; no new information
You take a die in your hand. If you throw it, the result will be what people usually call a random number. Let's say you get 2. What do we mean when we say that this number is random? To answer these ... |
144575ac-6ee0-416d-b445-189eba264781 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A basic probability question
From the logical induction paper https://intelligence.org/files/LogicalInductionAbridged.pdf:
Let φ stand for the claim that the 87,653rd digit of π is a 7. If this claim is true, then (1 + 1 = 2) ⇒ φ. I don't understand the second sentence at all, any help appreciated. |
11bd6de8-a842-4ba8-bbf0-5558d412946d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Notes on Honesty
This post examines the virtue of honesty (a.k.a. “truthfulness,” “veracity”).[1] As with my other posts in this sequence, I’m less interested in breaking new ground and more in synthesizing whatever wisdom I could find on the subject. I wrote this not as an expert, but as someone who wants to learn. I... |
a5cb8a81-1de9-45a3-b130-bfe9935a0b85 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Sydney Rationality Dojo - Optimising Skill Training
Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Rationality Dojo - Optimising Skill Training
WHEN: 01 March 2015 04:00:00PM (+1100)
WHERE: Humanist House, 10 Shepherd St Chippendale
Join us for our next dojo, on making sure you get the most bang for your buck ... |
76f2adb8-3f02-4f5d-b029-3afabe492c51 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Causal Confusion in Imitation Learning
1 Introduction
---------------
Imitation learning allows for control policies to be learned directly from example demonstrations provided by human experts. It is easy to implement, and reduces or removes the need for extensive interaction with the environment during training W... |
26482b29-be67-40c4-ac36-4b9dea51def1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How much funding and researchers were in AI, and AI Safety, in 2018?
I'm trying to build up a picture of how "much" research is going into general AI capabilities, and how much is going into AI safety.
The ideal question I'd be asking is "how much progress [measured in "important thoughts/ideas/tools" was being made ... |
ac6f8d2b-e118-44f0-85f2-bf9029157695 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Spooky Action at a Distance
Today's post, Spooky Action at a Distance: The No-Communication Theorem was originally published on 05 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> As Einstein argued long ago, the quantum physics of his era - that is, the single-global-world interpretation of quantum phy... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.