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b529ccfc-ae98-4cff-a733-d09253dfad3d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
More Babble ,,, In my last babble, I introduced the Babble and Prune model of thought generation: Babble with a weak heuristic to generate many more possibilities than necessary, Prune with a strong heuristic to find a best, or the satisfactory one. I want to zoom in on this model. If the last babble was colored by my...
763a6e87-89e6-4929-b491-17d78a14227b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Linking to Other Resources Lesser Wrong is De Facto the Main Site. Given this situation, it should take the role of being the central hub from which you can access all of the other resources within the rationality community. This will be incredibly easy as someone could just write up a post on Resources and it could b...
4b0965a8-8371-42ae-a30d-59c22874ba8a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Should AI safety be a mass movement? When communicating about existential risks from AI misalignment, is it more important to focus on policymakers/experts/other influential decisionmakers or to try to get the public at large to care about this issue?[1] I lean towards it being overall more important to communicate to...
b11a9637-d32b-42bb-9ab2-0cf70a6838cc
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Stupid Questions - September 2017 The stupid questions thread was one of the regular threads on LessWrong. It's a place where no question is to stupid to be asked and anybody who answers is encouraged to be kind. This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don'...
0bddf205-abaa-42ee-ba08-af10843ddb9c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The case for hypocrisy Related: The case for logical fallacies  Julia Galef makes an interesting point in her recent book The Scout Mindset: our beliefs come as tangled knots, not isolated strings. Changing one belief often implies that we change many others. Consider Sarah, whose relationships, political beliefs, w...
d7e399c7-c480-4635-8e26-f8376cb045d6
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
How To Get Into Independent Research On Alignment/Agency I’m an independent researcher working on AI alignment and the theory of agency. I’m 29 years old, will make about $90k this year, and set my own research agenda. I deal with basically zero academic bullshit - my grant applications each take about one day’s atten...
24f149ba-04c9-420a-92b3-cfacdfcfaf19
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Bratislava Meetup XIII. (international) Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava Meetup XIII. (international) WHEN: 24 May 2014 04:00:00PM (+0200) WHERE: Mickiewiczova 2, Bratislava This is an international meetup (which means that we will meet during a weekend and speak English), so if you wanted to...
73326931-fa07-46d5-9155-b817d19e4bd6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Ongoing free money at PredictIt Previously on LW * https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JmqBtCCnMZmpXP2bE/what-are-good-election-betting-opportunities?commentId=NFdSk5H39omYXPjBS,- * https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSKWSPM927oZZqN7f/predictit-presidential-market-is-increasingly-wrong PredictIt is structurally inefficie...
82fd43db-caa0-4f38-8bd7-52eb734cbc21
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Investigating AI Takeover Scenarios *Epistemic status: lots of this involves interpreting/categorising other people’s scenarios, and could be wrong. We’d really appreciate being corrected if so.* **TLDR**: see the [summary table](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zkF9PNSyDKusoyLkP/investigating-ai-takeover-scenarios#Ta...
86c9e4d9-4f75-4edb-a413-da65ca6843a6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Artificial Sandwiching: When can we test scalable alignment protocols without humans? Epistemic status: Not a fleshed-out proposal. Brainstorming/eliciting ideas. Thanks to Ben Mann,  Pablo Moreno, and Jared Kaplan for feedback on early drafts. Overview * I’m convinced sandwiching—the experimental protocol from Aj...
6823bcea-e0e7-420c-a5cd-dbdec4cbfed8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How are voluntary commitments on vulnerability reporting going? This article is written solely in my personal capacity, and does not represent the views of any organisations I am affiliated with. The UK and US governments have both secured voluntary commitments from many major AI companies on AI safety.[1] These inc...
487783b8-f1c0-4fd3-ab12-02825cebd1a6
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
AI Alignment Podcast: On Lethal Autonomous Weapons with Paul Scharre Most relevant to AI alignment, and a pertinent question to focus on for interested readers/listeners is: if we are are unable to establish a governance mechanism as a global community on the concept that we should not let AI make the decision to kill...
2a8ac4e9-973e-47a1-bccd-c5124ad648bd
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What You See Isn't Always What You Want To aid communication, I’m going append a technical rephrasing after some paragraphs. It’s known to be hard to give non-trivial goals to reinforcement learning agents. However, I haven’t seen much discussion of the following: even ignoring wireheading, it seems impossible to spe...
d1973f85-cedc-4942-864e-dface4af6a3d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The mathematics of reduced impact: help needed A putative new idea for AI control; index here. Thanks for help from Paul Christiano If clippy, the paper-clip maximising AI, goes out of control, it would fill the universe with paper clips (or with better and better ways of counting the paper-clips it already has). If...
781982fe-4504-4f35-a5d4-84e4a9974bd5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Making History Available There is a habit of thought which I call the logical fallacy of generalization from fictional evidence. Journalists who, for example, talk about the Terminator movies in a report on AI, do not usually treat Terminator as a prophecy or fixed truth. But the movie is recalled—is available—as if i...
f0f0f8dd-a2b3-46e1-baa3-67a497a19727
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Ethical Diets [Cross-posted from my blog.] I've seen some discussion of whether effective altruists have an obligation to be vegan or vegetarian. The carnivores appear to underestimate the long-term effects of their actions. I see a nontrivial chance that we're headed toward a society in which humans are less powerf...
7f3704d5-289c-4df6-84e8-a7fa40420389
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Logical Limitations to Machine Ethics with Consequences to Lethal Autonomous Weapons 1 Introduction and Motivation ------------------------------ The evolution of warfare has always been an interplay between technological dynamic and the tactical/strategic adaptations in combat and deterrence. Progress in engineeri...
bb7347b0-3bde-419b-b4fd-4c3ae4f93b3e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A Year of AI Increasing AI Progress In July, I made a post about AI being used to increase AI progress, along with this spreadsheet that I've been updating throughout the year. Since then, I have run across more examples, and had others submit examples (some of which were published before the date I made my original p...
2d5e0d43-4f04-4eb8-89e3-87846c511677
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Stub: Information Theoretic Ontology ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, Disclaimers This is a stub. I am having exams right now and do not have the time to write the full article. I'll update (not any time soon) after I've resolved the problems in th...
d3c0357b-7929-4498-837e-1e075e4c6674
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Soon: a weekly AI Safety prerequisites module on LessWrong (edit: we have a study group running a week ahead of this series that adds important content. It turns out that to get that content ready on a weekly basis, we would have to cut corners. We prefer quality over speed. We also like predictability. So we decided ...
a37ee2c4-713f-459c-85fd-b5963f61aaf5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Scalar reward is not enough for aligned AGI This post was authored by Peter Vamplew and Cameron Foale (Federation University), and Richard Dazeley (Deakin University) Introduction Recently some of the most well-known researchers in reinforcement learning Silver, Singh, Precup and Sutton published a paper entitled Re...
995062c9-5f60-42a8-b91c-1c4c6637336b
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
The Importance of Artificial Sentience *Edited by Jacy Reese Anthis. Many thanks to Ali Ladak, Tobias Baumann, Jack Malde, James Faville, Sophie Barton, Matt Allcock, and the staff at PETRL for reviewing and providing feedback.* **SUMMARY** ----------- Artificial sentient beings could be created in vast numbers in t...
b447a7c8-5950-43ca-888c-828cc4fbc5ce
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Consequentialism is a compass, not a judge Tl;dr: Consequentialism works as a compass for your actions, not as a judge of moral character. The compass and the judge A woman steps onto a crowded bus, trips on a sitting man's outstretched foot, and breaks her arm. The Everett branches split: in one world, the man look...
51929204-8755-4932-b315-6594e45b7b9e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Pierre Menard, pixel art, and entropy In Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” we are introduced to the character of Pierre Menard, recently deceased French novelist and essayist, and are given a brief cataloguing of his works. Chief among them are > “the ninth and thirty-eighth chapt...
8f178196-6337-4006-befe-ee0e27fd9375
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Timeline of Machine Intelligence Research Institute
bbe0e37e-6c74-432f-9920-6c46e80aac82
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A system of infinite ethics One unresolved problem in ethics is that aggregate consequentialist ethical theories tend to break down if the universe is infinite. An infinite universe could contain both an infinite amount of good and an infinite amount of bad. If so, you are unable to change the total amount of good or ...
7d7b2dbd-bd3e-4143-b330-17accf186391
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
Legal Priorities Research: A Research Agenda On behalf of the [Legal Priorities Project](http://legalpriorities.org/), we are excited to finally publish our research agenda for legal priorities research: <https://www.legalpriorities.org/research/research-agenda.html> In the first part, we argue that cause prioritizat...
be13cf22-496e-4490-b48e-23e3de736f92
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Everyone else prefers laws to values How do you tell what a superhuman AI's values are? ( picture: ittybittiesforyou - see bottom) Robin Hanson says that it is more important to have laws than shared values. I agree with him when ‘shared values’ means that shared indexical values remain about different people, e.g. I...
5cdd1fcf-229b-44cc-b7e1-ff5e93f824eb
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Inspiring Rationalists I am concerned with the number of rational, altruistic, smart people in the world. By my standards there are a reasonable number of smart, altruistic (in far mode) people, so a good first step is improving their rationality. To keep "rationality" grounded, I should be a little more precise about...
4181a0a7-3ae9-496a-a054-eecf5f3f9ae1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
My understanding of the alignment problem I've been clarifying my own understanding of the alignment problem over the past few months, and wanted to share my first writeups with folks here in case they're useful: https://www.danieldewey.net/risk/ The site currently has 3 pages: 1. The case for risk: how deep learn...
67215f61-f265-4424-bfda-596a77fd7894
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Learning Deep Learning: Joining data science research as a mathematician About two years ago I finished my PhD in mathematics on an obscure technical topic in number theory. I left academic math because I wanted to do something that had a bigger (i.e. any) impact on the world around me. I also wanted to get out of the...
bca966f4-ddeb-4512-b7cf-d7e14a298a5d
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
You don't need to be a genius to be in AI safety research The aim of this article is to share my experiences within the AI safety community to those in research and operations in the field, with the goal of creating a more inclusive, supportive, and positive environment. The intention of this article is to allow those...
3acdc75f-0771-4e09-b2a0-e0b4e2715fbe
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Feature Request: Right Click to Copy LaTeX Something I do frequently is run into a block of LaTeX that I'm not sure I fully grasp. At such a point, what I'd like to do is just copy the equation and paste it to GPT-4 and have it explain it to me step by step, then iterate on the feedback until I'm sure I understood it...
49b856d4-0486-49c2-baf4-327b3527c3ee
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Jan Bloch's Impossible War Epistemic Status: Endorsed Content Warning: Neuropsychological Infohazard, Evocation Infohazard, World War I Recommended Prior Reading: Blueprint for Armageddon Part I Part of the Series: Truth > “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes” In any real look into the past, you realiz...
bf7430db-be0e-4da0-9744-37bb7f067929
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Atlanta Lesswrong's May Meetup: The Rationality of Social Relationships, Friendship, Love, and Family. Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta Lesswrong's May Meetup: The Rationality of Social Relationships, Friendship, Love, and Family. WHEN: 17 May 2013 07:00:00PM (-0400) WHERE: 2388 Lawrenceville Hwy...
4fc32d46-c1b7-496a-b94f-c0929e0e68fb
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Normative Disagreement as a Challenge for Cooperative AI 1 Introduction --------------- Multi-agent contexts often exhibit opportunities for cooperation: situations where joint action can lead to mutual benefits (Dafoe et al., [2020](#bib.bib13)). Individuals can engage in mutually beneficial trade; nation-states c...
dd8b7bd6-a4ce-4c28-be55-2c08266a2e46
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Anthropics and Fermi tl;dr There is no well-defined "probability" of intelligent life in the universe. Instead, we can use proper scoring functions to penalise bad probability estimates. If we average scores across all existent observers, we get SSA-style probability estimates; if we sum them, we get SIA-style ones. ...
0298ab75-5a74-49ee-ad7c-51b341ab0356
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Speculative inferences about path dependence in LLM supervised fine-tuning from results on linear mode connectivity and model souping TL;DR: I claim that supervised fine-tuning of the existing largest LLMs is likely path-dependent (different random seeds and initialisations have an impact on final performance and mode...
4c84da17-d898-49de-91c5-96f1859aa85b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[LINK] blog on cryonics by someone who freezes things in a cell bio lab http://www.strike-the-root.com/51/walker/walker12.html Came across it pretty randomly, I found it quite intriguing.  Cryonics is "routine" for human embryos, not far-fetched for humans at all.  Makes the whole thing seem potentially very reasonab...
b40a52ac-1ce2-456b-bdc5-f3a099a239a8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Emergency Central Planning Central planning generally hasn't worked out very well for countries, and essentially the whole world has moved over to markets. So why are there strong calls for governments to run disaster response, instead of leaving that to markets? For example, governments directly: * distributing foo...
90744c2a-813b-4df4-965a-4f15f04cf934
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Vancouver Rationalists: LAN Party + Board Games + Discussion at Waves Cafe: September 10th 3:00 to 5:00PM Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Rationalists: LAN Party + Board Games + Discussion at Waves Cafe: September 10th 3:00 to 5:00PM WHEN: 10 September 2011 03:00:00PM (-0800) WHERE: Waves Coff...
4b2eb28f-f566-4113-8bcd-18e54d8153a3
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
2022-23 New Year review This is an annual post reviewing the last year and setting goals for next year. Overall, this was a reasonably good year with some challenges (the invasion of Ukraine and being sick a lot). Some highlights in this review are improving digital habits, reviewing sleep data from the Oura ring sinc...
ad7c23be-47ba-4414-8ec0-105d3935e5c4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
SI's Summer 2012 Matching Drive Ends July 31st The Singularity Institute's summer 2012 matching drive ends on July 31st! Donate by the end of the month to have your gift matched, dollar for dollar. As of this posting, SI has raised $70,000 of the $150,000 goal. The announcement says: > Since we published our strate...
df73c5fd-09c6-4a5b-8f8e-e065d305f62e
awestover/filtering-for-misalignment
Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results
id: post2009 My ELK submission was labelled under 'Strategy: train a reporter that is useful for another AI'. This is definitely a fair description, though the AI it needs to be useful to is itself - the reporter is essentially internalized. I also agree that the proposed counterexample, hiding information in what see...
2eefac5b-ed1f-4ab8-aed7-0a495f9526da
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Best way to write a bicolor article on Less Wrong? I am planning to write an article that would use two colors to distinguish between "map" and "territory", kinda like in The Neverending Story. In other words, instead of: > The sentence 'snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white. I want to write something ...
33a74c3c-3514-4a77-a718-2f33dd9d31b9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Sledding Is Underrated Sledding is pretty great: * No lines. You don't have to wait, just go. * Minimal cost. A basic plastic sled costs $15-$20 at a hardware store, and while they wear out pretty quickly it's still less than $5/outing. Aside from that, all you need is standard winter gear (including snowpants). ...
01b9e65e-eada-40c3-8f7b-72fc28252d4b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
XKCD - Frequentist vs. Bayesians http://xkcd.com/1132/   Is this a fair representation of frequentists versus bayesians? I feel like every time the topic comes up, 'Bayesian statistics' is an applause light for me, and I'm not sure why I'm supposed to be applauding.
398ed0f3-993e-4099-a950-51c97a6f2614
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
List of sources arguing for existential risk from AI *Published 6 Aug 2022* *This page is incomplete, under active work and may be updated soon.* This is a bibliography of pieces arguing that AI poses an existential risk. List ---- **Adamczewski, Tom. “A Shift in Arguments for AI Risk.”** Fragile Credences. Ac...
667360f2-de6b-49a9-b7fe-b0ccbd0de7b5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
"The elephant in the room: the biggest risk of artificial intelligence may not be what we think" What to say about that? A letter signed by renowned names such as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk warned about the risks represented by artificial intelligence, including ethical dilemmas, such as in the case of self-driv...
7c5c0d63-633e-4621-b7c7-1dadb79c03cb
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Quotes and Notes on Scott Aaronson’s "The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine" This highly speculative paper has been discussed here before, but I found the discussion's quality rather disappointing. People generally took bits and pieces out of context and then mostly offered arguments already addressed in the paper. ...
6b76ddbb-f4f8-4fe3-8079-cef24135006c
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs
Other
Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control [] [Cover for Human Compatible] ALSO BY STUART RUSSELL The Use of Knowledge in Analogy and Induction (1989) Do the Right Thing: Studies in Limited Rationality (with Eric Wefald, 1991) Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (with Peter Norvig...
2b18e18d-f0ef-4dcf-b50e-223bc97a1d42
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How likely are scenarios where AGI ends up overtly or de facto torturing us? How likely are scenarios where AGI prevents us from committing suicide or dying? I’m a big life extension supporter but being unable to choose to die ever is a literal hell. As dark as it is, if these scenarios are likely, it seems the rati...
e0244e91-a993-4d80-9cd9-890a8ded9f0f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Berlin: Fermi paradox discussion Discussion article for the meetup : Berlin: Fermi paradox discussion WHEN: 18 October 2013 07:00:00PM (+0200) WHERE: S Wuhletal, 12621 Berlin We're meeting to discuss the Fermi paradox and the great filter. Everyone is welcome! There'll probably be 6-12 people. Please look...
20806784-7355-4a54-937e-993b016d1447
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Zen and Rationality: Don't Know Mind This is post 1/? about the intersection of my decades of LW-style rationality practice and my several years of Zen practice. In today's installment, I look at the Zen notion of "Don't Know Mind" in rationalist terms. I'm a little unsure where "don't know mind" comes from. Sensei ...
c94d0db6-58d2-4143-8fca-2968a0624da0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Direct Democracy Experiment >"The heart of the problem is not how we vote for officials - it's that we vote for officials, instead of getting to vote on issues. >Americans are proud of being "governed by the people", yet a citizen has no effective way to have any influence on any particular issue! If it's very im...
978d4c92-ea24-4dd1-9463-353c53fcda25
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
A Signaling Game Approach to Databases Querying and Interaction 1 Introduction --------------- Most users do not know the structure and/or content of databases and cannot precisely express their queries [[27](#bib.bib27), [10](#bib.bib10), [15](#bib.bib15), [26](#bib.bib26)]. Hence, it is challenging for a database...
c4ef0def-f960-4212-8cb7-b52901bf724c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Washington DC Lojban meetup Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Lojban meetup WHEN: 18 August 2013 03:00:00PM (-0400) WHERE: National Portrait Gallery courtyard, Washington, DC 20001, USA We'll be meeting to learn Lojban! Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Lojban meetup
f5e2b97e-63b9-4032-9a4a-e906a1bd734c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Implicit Association Test Continuation of: Bogus Pipeline, Bona Fide Pipeline Related to: The Cluster Structure of Thingspace If you've never taken the Implicit Association Test before, try it now. Any will do. The one on race is the "classic", but the one on gender and careers is a bit easier to watch "in actio...
e5cbaff5-4fe0-46a4-a99e-c8ec18beb442
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
High Status and Stupidity: Why? Michael Vassar once suggested:  "Status makes people effectively stupid, as it makes it harder for them to update their public positions without feeling that they are losing face." To the extent that status does, in fact, make people stupid, this is a rather important phenomenon for a ...
7728b082-10da-4777-bea4-ac1d6eaabaec
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[SEQ RERUN] Where to Draw the Boundary? Today's post, Where to Draw the Boundary? was originally published on 21 February 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):   > Your definition draws a boundary around things that don't really belong together. You can claim, if you like, that you are defining the word "fish" t...
1f65c24f-65d8-459f-a521-110388f7d5aa
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Why is multi worlds not a good explanation for abiogenesis I'm not a expert in the multi world theory. So this question could very well be extremely stupid. However, given the assumption that there are nearly infinite amount of worlds that are slightly different than each other, nearly every possible event would happe...
42c581c0-3b06-49d6-96b7-be54880eaca8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A Corrigibility Metaphore - Big Gambles I present here a helpful analogy to understand the corrigibility problem and the challenge raised by MIRI in their proposal. This analogy simplifies greatly some challenges of corrigibility but keeps the main problem found in the proposal, which I call Big Gambles. ------------...
a3f6e141-297d-46fe-b7c4-17d2fa9fdda1
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
OpenAI's Alignment Plans Our alignment research aims to make artificial general intelligence (AGI) aligned with human values and follow human intent. We take an iterative, empirical approach: by attempting to align highly capable AI systems, we can learn what works and what doesn’t, thus refining our ability to make A...
9001b042-0b1c-465d-91d0-3b9db1603664
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Order Matters for Deceptive Alignment The order in which key properties emerge is important and often glossed over.  Thanks to Wil Perkins, Grant Fleming, Thomas Larsen, Declan Nishiyama, and Frank McBride for feedback on this post. Any mistakes are my own.  Note: I have now changed the second post into this sequenc...
5758e554-9568-4d25-bfe0-17f0fa99fbe2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Scott Aaronson's "On Self-Delusion and Bounded Rationality" Poignant short story about truth-seeking that I just found. Quote: > "No," interjected an internal voice. "You need to prove that your dad will appear by a direct argument from the length of your nails, one that does not invoke your subsisting in a dream sta...
f89a926e-7ef2-4bbe-b6a5-da0c32688956
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : [Boston] Becoming Stronger Discussion article for the meetup : [Boston] Becoming Stronger WHEN: 28 July 2013 02:00:00PM (-0400) WHERE: 25 Ames St, Cambridge, MA What are you currently doing to make yourself a better person? Are you overcoming mental hurdles, improving your skills, or trying new things? We'l...
92ec0495-99ac-4097-a054-fa7032a3c874
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Initial Thoughts on Dissolving "Couldness" Epistemic Status Been sitting in my drafts unattended to for a month. I'm publishing now so that I publish at all. I do not currently endorse this post or its follow up.   Acknowledgements Discussions with others helped me refine/sharpen these ideas. I'm grateful for them....
9c5c6e8c-ed94-4edc-93a5-d60736f3e86a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Rational to distrust your own rationality? There are a number of experiments that throughout the years has shown that expected utility theory EUT fails to predict actual observed behavior of people in decision situations. Take for example Allais paradox. Whether or not an average human being can be considered a ration...
9ed7e744-2a7e-4561-a32a-fa6bc7bf5c1f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Does object permanence of simulacrum affect LLMs' reasoning? Humans are constantly simulating the things around them, however they can rather easily shift attention and forget about the previous thing. So we can say humans' simulacrum does not have object permanence. On the other hand, AI language models prompted to w...
0406b462-3fb0-44a4-937b-4d93e7c4d786
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Preface to the Sequence on LLM Psychology As Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT evolve, becoming more advanced and intricate, the challenge of understanding their behaviors becomes increasingly hard. Solely relying on traditional interpretability techniques may not be sufficient or fast enough in our journey to...
81af338a-f500-41d9-b968-696076caa2c5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
New LW Meetup: Greenville NC This summary was posted to LW Main on July 15th. The following week's summary is here. New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in: * Bay City Meetup: 19 August 2016 01:25PM * Boise, ID Meetup: 24 July 2016 02:30PM * Greenville, NC meetup: 23 July 2016 ...
247d6f6f-64dd-40d6-8320-76b99f20de12
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Secure Hand Holding When Lily as about three we were waiting at a crosswalk and traffic stopped for us. As we started across the street a driver that had been waiting to turn left misinterpreted the situation and, thinking traffic had stopped for them instead, tried to turn through our location. I tightened my grip an...
ca5e56fa-0280-4316-9799-51272ec5916c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Llama Llama-3-405B? It’s here. The horse has left the barn. Llama-3.1-405B, and also Llama-3.1-70B and Llama-3.1-8B, have been released, and are now open weights. Early indications are that these are very good models. They were likely the best open weight models of their respective sizes at time of release. Zuckerbe...
916ba599-b345-4e1a-a347-2bb6fc693fdf
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Kazakhstan's president urges scientists to find the elixir of life ...according to this front-page Reddit headline I just saw, which links to this Guardian article. I wonder if he's heard of KrioRus, whether he's signed up (Wikipedia says they offer services "to clients from Russia, CIS and EU"), and what his odds wou...
bbf73040-6638-41e6-93c6-0eb599602a98
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Can a Bayesian Oracle Prevent Harm from an Agent? (Bengio et al. 2024) Yoshua Bengio wrote a blogpost about a new AI safety paper by him, various collaborators, and me. I've pasted the text below, but first here are a few comments from me aimed at an AF/LW audience. The paper is basically maths plus some toy experime...
e943558a-2af7-4cbd-9ca2-cc4a27f021c0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Philip Tetlock invites participants for prediction accuracy tournament It seems many Less Wrongers might be interested in participating in this study, perhaps distinguishing themselves as top forecasters: > Prediction markets can harness the "wisdom of crowds" to solve problems, develop products, and make forecasts. ...
4530de87-7adf-4dd4-9adc-d996cbdd563e
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
GPT-4 and ASCII Images? Does anyone know whether GPT-4 successfully generates ASCII art? GPT-3.5 couldn't: ![](https://res.cloudinary.com/lesswrong-2-0/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/mirroredImages/62aCHLD8GHwBZ5ckW/hgcfotdfrfx8jidcxywg)the hellWhich makes sense, cause of the whole words-can't-convey-phenomena thing....
f9ec2fc0-8c3f-41e2-b5a4-1c62a2342934
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : FallacyMania game in Kocherga club Discussion article for the meetup : FallacyMania game in Kocherga club WHEN: 23 December 2015 07:40:00PM (+0300) WHERE: Moscow, B.Dorogomilovskaya, 5-2 Welcome to FallacyMania: it is a game where you guess logical fallacies in arguments, or practise using logical fallacie...
6c8b1c74-91bf-467d-b436-165e64de367d
LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct
LessWrong
"Hunter-gatherer tribes are usually highly egalitarian (at least if you’re male)—the all-powerful tribal chieftain is found mostly in agricultural societies, rarely in the ancestral environment. Among most hunter-gatherer tribes, a hunter who brings in a spectacular kill will carefully downplay the accomplishment to av...
01eaa4af-0fb0-4182-996e-937ea3c3792b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Philosophical Landmines Related: Cached Thoughts Last summer I was talking to my sister about something. I don't remember the details, but I invoked the concept of "truth", or "reality" or some such. She immediately spit out a cached reply along the lines of "But how can you really say what's true?". Of course I'd l...
37cf87c2-72f2-4bff-ae78-60fab6789528
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Indifference' methods for managing agent rewards 1 Introduction --------------- In designing a reward for a reinforcement learning agent, a general class of situations can arise, where the designer wants the agent to maximize a reward function, under the constraint that it is not to exert control over the occurrenc...
c1455f1e-ae8e-4686-9374-b080916f7a35
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Луна Лавгуд и Комната Тайн, Часть 2 Disclaimer: This is Kongo Landwalker's translation of lsusr's fiction Luna Lovegood and the Chamber of Secrets - Part 2 into russian.  ---------------------------------------- — Интересно, что тянет лодки? — сказала Луна. — Должно быть то же самое, что тянет и повозки без лошадей...
fb48271d-317a-4086-bc3a-7eee1b316362
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Feedback on popularizing rationality-informed strategies for making major financial decisions As part of my broader project of popularizing rationality and raising the sanity waterline, I'm writing a blog about how to make a major financial decision more rationally. The audience we're targeting are educated people in...
87fb4625-c4a3-4b4b-b6c4-44fbae80885a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Cost, Not Sacrifice In a recent bonus episode of the Bayesian Conspiracy podcast, Eneasz Brodski shared a thought experiment that caused no small amount of anguish. In the hypothetical, some eccentric but trustworthy entity is offering to give you an escalating amount of money for your fingers, starting at $10,000 for...
27c0c6b4-c436-4f94-ba8d-84aedad7b5f6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A Simple Alignment Typology I set out to review the OpenAI alignment plan, and my brain at some point diverged to modeling the humans behind the arguments instead of the actual arguments.  So behold! A simplified, first-pass Alignment Typology.  Why can't we all just get agree? There are a lot of disagreements in A...
e8b01eef-7fc2-46aa-9567-92ecd246bd12
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Lymph Node Detection in T2 MRI with Transformers 1 Introduction --------------- Lymph nodes (LN) are a part of the lymphatic system that helps the body fight infection by removing foreign substances. Enlarged and metastatic LN require accurate identification especially when they are present at sites that do not cor...
c0b26316-ac67-4ae7-b59b-1e0604718e8f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Prototyping Pluck Sensors Harp guitars are a neat weird instrument that never really took off: You play it like a normal guitar, with six fretted strings, but there are also some number of extra harp strings you can pluck. I see four main downsides: * They're bulky and hard to transport. * You need to tun...
64468118-a628-40b3-a72a-96ec2e40ce19
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How can one rationally have very high or very low probabilities of extinction in a pre-paradigmatic field? It is generally accepted in the local AI alignment circles that the whole field is pre-paradigmatic, in the Kuhnian sense (phase 1, as summarized here, if longer reading is not your thing). And yet, plenty of peo...
4b125ef6-6d67-4963-a6dc-1255ba7b3302
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A summary of Savage's foundations for probability and utility. Edit: I think the P2c I wrote originally may have been a bit too weak; fixed that. Nevermind, rechecking, that wasn't needed. More edits (now consolidated): Edited nontriviality note. Edited totality note. Added in the definition of numerical probability ...
0c51e679-07af-42ec-b6bc-9067b50801b8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Fundamental Uncertainty: Chapter 9 - How do we live with uncertainty? N.B. This is a chapter in a book about truth and knowledge. It is the first draft. I have since revised it. You can find the most up-to-date info/version on the book's website. As we've explored in the preceding chapters, knowledge of the truth is ...
59a249d2-3db6-4a9c-baac-f8c4b4478445
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
August 2024 Time Tracking Every so often ( 2022, 2017, more 2017, 2015, 2011) Julia and will track how we spend our time for a week. This is useful for seeing whether how we're spending our time matches how we think we're spending it (and how we would like to be spending it) while also avoiding a pattern where one of ...
291a397f-2c00-456b-8d80-02c8fe9d7828
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How do we know that "good research" is good? (aka "direct evaluation" vs "eigen-evaluation") AI Alignment is my motivating context but this could apply elsewhere too. The nascent field of AI Alignment research is pretty happening these days. There are multiple orgs and dozens to low hundreds of full-time researchers ...
3eb04d0f-f0a1-4eaa-a1ed-c910f20d8ed6
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
Are there enough opportunities for AI safety specialists? I've seen a lot of articles, tweets, and forum posts urging more people to work on AI safety. While I agree that AI safety is extremely important and that more people should be working on it, I'm having a hard time imagining that a lack of interested young prof...
f4f5c019-2986-483f-910a-ceae83503fb5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Opportunity Cost Blackmail If you are utterly powerless, with no money, skills, status, or friends, survival already takes all your time and energy. Yet I’m not in that situation — and you’re probably not either. Our circumstances surely vary, but we have at least some power — we can pump towards certain outcomes, to...
97889e30-1652-40aa-8a95-66ddbdb93a17
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Does Chat-GPT display ‘Scope Insensitivity’? Summary * Large Language Models (LLMs) seem well-suited to ‘psychological testing’, because you can get lots of data quickly and conditions are easy to fix. I'm curious to what extent LLMs display the same cognitive biases documented in humans. * I carried out a quick and...
b979d731-9257-44e3-8d29-30b9dcc43d42
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Unlearning shoddy thinking School taught me to write banal garbage because people would thumbs-up it anyway. That approach has been interfering with me trying to actually express my plans in writing because my mind keeps simulating some imaginary prof who will look it over and go "ehh, good enough". Looking good enou...
51374a2d-dbf8-4e56-a5f1-fa0f0e53f042
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
December 2016 Newsletter | | | --- | | We’re in the final weeks of our push to cover [our funding shortfall](https://intelligence.org/2016/11/11/post-fundraiser-update/), and we’re now halfway to our $160,000 goal. For potential donors who are interested in an outside perspective, Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) ...
1f7f7e4e-2510-4d89-904e-9b631a06b21e
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Thoughts on the AI Safety Summit company policy requests and responses Over the next two days, the UK government is hosting an [AI Safety Summit](https://www.aisafetysummit.gov.uk/) focused on “the safe and responsible development of frontier AI”. They requested that seven companies (Amazon, Anthropic, DeepMind, Infle...
2b8b3403-ac9e-4238-9616-8bcf1583cccf
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AI alignment is distinct from its near-term applications I work on AI alignment, by which I mean the technical problem of building AI systems that are trying to do what their designer wants them to do. There are many different reasons that someone could care about this technical problem. To me the single most import...
1ab616d8-af38-4b1b-a15e-8c072b207fc0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Don’t ignore bad vibes you get from people I think a lot of people have heard so much about internalized prejudice and bias that they think they should ignore any bad vibes they get about a person that they can’t rationally explain. But if a person gives you a bad feeling, don’t ignore that. Both I and several other...