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7.55M
4fd9c98f-d6c0-48a3-a5eb-17412a8a0abd
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A "weak" AGI may attempt an unlikely-to-succeed takeover It seems possible that the first situationally-aware "goal having" AGI we land on will not be sufficiently capable along the axes that would let it quickly and reliably achieve a decisive strategic advantage.  I don't think this is necessarily very likely, but i...
63b0cd3f-16e6-4828-ab39-a76b48ea743d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[link] The Economics of Social Status http://www.meltingasphalt.com/the-economics-of-social-status/ Discusses a number of aspects of social status, including the "social status as currency" concept that Morendil and I previously wrote about. > Now we get to the really interesting stuff: the economic properties of so...
92a0e3a7-8510-447c-af17-aa6e61aad333
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
My friend wants a good book recommendation to understand AI, AI safety, and the field, and probably the drama. He’s smart but non-technical and not keeping up with trends. Any recs?
a40f6364-94a2-43b9-8eb7-b016fb55e3c7
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Where Do You Think You’re Going?: Inferring Beliefs about Dynamics from Behavior. 1 Introduction --------------- \@footnotetext See <https://sites.google.com/view/inferring-internal-dynamics> for supplementary materials, including videos and code. Characterizing the drive behind human actions in the form of a g...
d8e35c41-21c4-4faf-aeda-af2d5dec0589
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Post-history is written by the martyrs This is a story I wrote in late 2020, a few months after GPT-3 was released. Speculative fiction seems to be well received here, and although this is not as serious a story as my other recent post, it covers serious ideas and attempts to be hard science fiction. I'm also moving i...
2efe7e30-0625-4370-aafe-bda68e4d5f2c
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks 1 Introduction --------------- Recent advances in deep learning have dramatically improved neural network accuracy (Simonyan & Zisserman, [2015](#bib.bib36); Srivastava et al., [2015](#bib.bib39); He et al., [2016](#bib.bib13); Huang et al., [2016](#bib.bib16), [2017](#bib.b...
609aecee-0094-4505-a41b-211285f4453f
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
[Linkpost] Faith and Fate: Limits of Transformers on Compositionality I thought it'd be especially interesting to get critiques/discussion from the LW crowd, because the claims here seem antithetical to a lot of the beliefs people here have, mostly around just how capable and cognizant transformers are/can be. The au...
7b01cf8a-12f8-4785-a2c9-3791b2010380
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Chapter 111: Failure, Pt 1 The Dark Lord was laughing. From the empty air came the voice of the Defense Professor laughing wildly, so high and terrible his laughter; it was Voldemort's laughter now, the Dark Lord's laughter beyond all hiding or restraint. Harry's mind was disarrayed. His eyes kept staring at where A...
7c4015f4-e95a-455b-8d24-8d301434b85f
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Natural Value Learning The main idea of this post is to make a distinction between *natural* and *unnatural* value learning. The secondary point of this post is that we should be suspicious of unnatural schemes for value learning, though the point is not that we should reject them. (*I am not fully satisfied with the ...
255b4442-8d13-40c2-a0a1-1165d172223d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
This sometimes helps to expose assumptions If one thing (B) follows from something (A) that is sufficient, then that which follows (B) is a necessity for the something (A). (If that is confusing just keep reading it will be blatantly clear at the end.) A hidden assumption is a necessary condition that was not stated. ...
6140e747-5059-416e-9eca-2bd34b4456a9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Inherited Improbabilities: Transferring the Burden of Proof > One person's modus ponens is another's modus tollens. - Common saying among philosophers and other people who know what these terms mean. > If you believe A => B, then you have to ask yourself: which do I believe more? A, or not B? - Hal Daume III, quote...
9a777980-cdaf-4d78-9121-69b102067602
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital
Arbital
Relevant powerful agents will be highly optimized The probability that an agent that is cognitively powerful enough to be relevant to existential outcomes, will have been subject to strong, general optimization pressures. Two (disjunctive) supporting arguments are that, one, pragmatically accessible paths to producin...
0bee8e0a-dd79-4574-a165-aa90e9de8321
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Why focus on AI? Why does this community focus on AI over all other possible apocalypses? What about pandemics, runaway climate change, etc.?
36486912-ff88-4cdb-bef1-22f8e8be3a2f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Book Review: Age of Em [Note: I really liked this book and if I criticize it that’s not meant as an attack but just as what I do with interesting ideas. Note that Robin has offered to debate me about some of this and I’ve said no – mostly because I hate real-time debates and have bad computer hardware – but you may st...
d61693a9-0e87-4738-b37f-059cd3c7e406
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Austin, TX - Quack's Discussion article for the meetup : Austin, TX - Quack's WHEN: 09 July 2016 01:30:00PM (-0500) WHERE: 411 E 43rd St, Austin, TX 78751 The next meetup is July 9th, 2016 at 1:30PM at Quack's 43rd Street Bakery (don't worry, they've also got coffee). We'll likely be inside, to the right. ...
60c9ccab-d8cd-44ed-8d2b-1cd925ea0213
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How does Facebook make overt self obsession ok? People who talk about themselves a lot are generally disliked. A likable person will instead subtly direct conversation to where others request the information they want to reveal. Revealing good news about yourself is a good sign, but wanting to reveal good news about y...
8c4eb4b4-6806-4386-b19e-0b6ce98da513
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Rationality !== Winning I think "Rationality is winning" is a bit of a trap.  (The original phrase is notably "rationality is systematized winning", which is better, but it tends to slide into the abbreviated form, and both forms aren't that great IMO) It was coined to counteract one set of failure modes - there wer...
23466e8a-9bd8-467e-8979-350b1b1faa0f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A website standard that is affordable to the poorest demographics in developing countries? Fact: the Internet is excruciatingly slow in many developing countries, especially outside of the big cities. Fact: today's websites are designed in such a way that they become practically impossible to navigate with connection...
5acd23de-7380-4f79-935c-681eb407a0da
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs
Other
Embedding Ethical Principles in Collective Decision Support Systems Embedding Ethical Principles in Collective Decision Support Systems Joshua Greene (Harvard University, USA), Francesca Rossi (University of Padova, Italy and IBM T.J. Watson, USA), John Tasioulas (King’s College London, UK), Kristen Brent Venable (Tul...
4713e7d3-3e6f-4d41-9836-59b7099784e8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How Not to be Stupid: Adorable Maybes Previous: Know What You Want Ah wahned yah, ah wahned yah about the titles. </some enchanter named Tim> (Oh, a note: the idea here is to establish general rules for what sorts of decisions one in principle ought to make, and how one in principle ought to know stuff, given that o...
24b4023d-1edf-4349-bfd9-83d35a2f9278
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
A Barebones Guide to Mechanistic Interpretability Prerequisites *Co-authored by Neel Nanda and Jess Smith* **Check out** [**Concrete Steps for Getting Started in Mechanistic Interpretability**](https://neelnanda.io/getting-started) **for a better starting point** **Why does this exist?** ------------------------ Pe...
3273ce4c-842c-40af-aa00-6a5bce690cdb
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Is Causality in the Map or the Territory? steve2152 brought up a great example: > Consider a 1kΩ resistor, in two circuits. The first circuit is the resistor attached to a 1V [voltage] supply. Here an engineer would say: "The supply creates a 1V drop across the resistor; and that voltage drop causes a 1mA current to ...
84addbfa-9f0e-4c57-9b7b-4f74d845d9d8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Formalizing Deception An attempt at formalizing deception, seeing what goes right, what goes wrong, and what compromises have to be made. Introduction In a police interrogation one of the key challenges is working out whether a suspect is being deceptive. In a game of poker, one of the main goals is figuring out whe...
9fa54de7-badc-4687-9495-c3c16610d028
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Naive Hypotheses on AI Alignment Apparently doominess works for my brain, cause Eliezer Yudkowsky’s [AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a-list-of-lethalities) convinced me to look in to AI safety. Either I’d find out he’s wrong, and there is no problem. Or he’s ...
0261ea11-28d3-4117-ac60-b6d4ce24652b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Inner alignment requires making assumptions about human values Many approaches to AI alignment require making assumptions about what humans want. On a first pass, it might appear that inner alignment is a sub-component of AI alignment that doesn't require making these assumptions. This is because if we define the prob...
ea49d39f-b42f-448b-b9d1-129b194dc809
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
On Robin Hanson’s Board Game Previously: You Play to Win the Game, Prediction Markets: When Do They Work?, Subsidizing Prediction Markets An Analysis Of (Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias): My Market Board Game Robin Hanson’s board game proposal has a lot of interesting things going on. Some of them are related to cal...
03f8e1b8-c3b5-478c-9e01-61e7676c57ed
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Developing Positive Habits through Video Games I wonder if anyone on the forum could share their thoughts on whether it's scientifically possible to develop a video game/app which * Strengthens neural circuits involved in developing/maintaining positive habits * Build any sort of positive habits that transfer to re...
b5961fbe-9fd1-4db0-ad94-a98b44a3c1ca
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
You can still fetch the coffee today if you're dead tomorrow "You can't fetch the coffee if you're dead." —Stuart Russell, on the instrumental convergence of shutdown-avoidance Note: This is presumably not novel, but I think it ought to be better-known. The technical tl;dr is that we can define time-inhomogeneous rew...
7bcec444-8650-4e46-bcef-03180110e316
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Conscious Sorites Paradox Followup to:  On Being Decoherent Decoherence is implicit in quantum physics, not an extra postulate on top of it, and quantum physics is continuous.  Thus, "decoherence" is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon—there's no sharp cutoff point.  Given two blobs, there's a quantitative amount of...
be949b37-eacf-4e8a-b39b-8a6034124d8f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Policy Design: Ideas into Proposals This post on Best Of A Great Lot is a part of a series on the subject of designing a new form of governance. Each piece aims to stand alone, but fits together on the Table of Contents. Previous: A Sketch of Belocracy, Evaluation as Feedback Cycle, Idea Generation and Sifting, The B...
f4200083-1a4f-41e2-96d2-79533b06860a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Training Superior Sparse Autoencoders for Instruct Models Resource Link Paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.07691 Code https://github.com/Geaming2002/FAST SAEs Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct_SAEs🤗,Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct_SAEs🤗,Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct_SAEs🤗,Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct_SAEs🤗,Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct_SAEs🤗,Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct...
cd24308e-54b5-4c64-bf1b-72020e759695
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The basic reasons I expect AGI ruin I've been citing AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities to explain why the situation with AI looks lethally dangerous to me. But that post is relatively long, and emphasizes specific open technical problems over "the basics". Here are 10 things I'd focus on if I were giving "the basics" o...
f9016287-b145-4216-8895-768537515a07
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Should you refuse this bet in Technicolor Sleeping Beauty? This is the question for people who didn't read my latest post. Please, try to answer it yourself without spoiling the solution, and then post it in the comments with your reasoning and whether you consider yourself a halfer or a thirder in regular Sleeping Be...
bb49788a-10f5-4e45-9c24-8919f5c9d208
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Rationality Attractors in Personspace These two questions seem to be somewhat interesting, especially for those interested in rationality outreach. What makes someone more likely to study rationality? More likely to become a higher level rationalist? A few thoughts: Empirically, rationalists seem to be more into t...
3784ec04-b89f-4dc0-b43a-94c18244a29b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Apply to MATS 8.0! Applications are open for the ML Alignment & Theory Scholars (MATS) Summer 2025 Program, running Jun 16-Aug 22, 2025. First-stage applications are due Apr 18! MATS is a twice-yearly, 10-week AI safety research fellowship program operating in Berkeley, California, with an optional 6-12 month extensi...
32778164-8178-4a2b-aff9-ec012ec0988d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Bi-weekly Rational Feed ===Highly Recommended Articles: Skills Most Employable by 80,000 Hours - Metrics: Satisfaction, risk of automation, and breadth of applicability. Leadership and social skills will gain the most in value. The least valuable skills involve manual labor. Tech skills may not be the most employable...
84140e77-b414-427c-a069-2f611b182ae7
awestover/filtering-for-misalignment
Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results
id: post1416 Threat Model There are many ways for AI systems to cause a catastrophe from which Earth-originating life could never recover. All of the following seem plausible to me: Misuse : An AI system could help a human or group of humans to destroy or to permanently take over (and lock their values into) the world...
ffcbffd3-98c6-4405-9698-bde6d654591c
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
Import AI - coming soon to Substack Import AI is moving to Substack! First issue should go out Monday the 6th. [Subscribe now](https://importai.substack.com/subscribe)
5d2ddad3-0aa9-4108-a511-d89265cc23bc
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
International cooperation vs. AI arms race Summary I think there's a decent chance that governments will be the first to build artificial general intelligence (AI). International hostility, especially an AI arms race, could exacerbate risk-taking, hostile motivations, and errors of judgment when creating AI. If so, t...
8333b6ca-69fa-4878-a9d5-93f29edcf3ac
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Lens, Progerias and Polycausality Fun fact: the lens of a human eye consists mostly of fiber deposits which are never broken down - they do not turn over. Furthermore, new fiber layers are constantly added throughout life, so the lens thickens linearly by about 25 microns per year. Starting at around 3.5mm in infa...
dda8f821-be29-49a1-a56d-5e6f880c06e1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Test Post Here's some *markdown*. Does it work? Or do I have to use the WYSIWYG editor?   No, markdown doesn't work in posts, just comments. Okay, I guess that's fine.
52bb715c-b157-4e7b-a469-70c6f0aec145
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Two Blegs I'm not sure where to post this, so, using this comment thread as cover, I will hereby bleg for the following: * A good OB-level proof or explication of the innards of Aumann's theorem, much more precise than Hanson and Cowen's but less painful than Aumann's original or this other one. * Stories of how peo...
c47c728f-48ea-4b0f-b633-629e1b2dca48
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Call for Collaboration: Renormalization for AI safety  We invite proposals that probe aspects of renormalization in AI systems that will help us predict, explain, and interpret neural network behavior at different levels of abstraction. We import ‘renormalization’ from physics, as a technique to coarse-grain theoretic...
e861e233-e602-44c5-b366-ae07abcafd66
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Estimating the consequences of device detection tech Today I have been asked to join a European project in collaboration with the police, developing two sorts of tech: 1. Device identification; that is, inferring from the filters applied to an image or video, pixel defects and other information hidden in raw pixel d...
1613db03-f3b1-4304-8165-b64fb29a0d62
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A quick experiment on LMs’ inductive biases in performing search TL;DR: Based on a toy setting, GPT-3.5-turbo and GPT-4-turbo are best at search (by which I mean computing an argmax) when using chain-of-thought, but neither of them can do internal search when forced to work from memory over only a few token positions....
972de252-d3a2-4db7-8ba7-00cc32a3661c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Maintaining Alignment during RSI as a Feedback Control Problem Crossposted from my personal blog. Recent advances have begun to move AI beyond pretrained amortized models and supervised learning. We are now moving into the realm of online reinforcement learning and hence the creation of hybrid direct and amortized o...
302dd59f-26bd-4699-9d03-9f984575d1f3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Musings on Text Data Wall (Oct 2024) The Chinchilla scaling law says that for a given number of FLOPs C, the optimal amount of data D to train on is proportional to (C to the power of b), that is you'll get a less intelligent model if you use either more data or less data than that while training for C FLOPs. The opti...
4098c454-9bad-4c3c-9c34-6a6e2f27480c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
"The unrecognised simplicities of effective action #2: 'Systems engineering’ and 'systems management' - ideas from the Apollo programme for a 'systems politics'", Cummings 2017
bbd7bbd5-aa10-46ed-a9e6-43664866d66e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Disclosure vs. Bans: Reply to Robin Hanson A little while back I wrote a post arguing that the existence of abusive terms in credit card contracts (such as huge jumps in interest rates for being one day late with a payment) do not satisfy the conditions for standard economic models of asymmetric information between ra...
c51331a1-ac31-47dc-825b-8f984f386d6e
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info
AI Safety Info
What is the difference between inner and outer alignment? <iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bJLcIBixGj8" title="The OTHER AI Alignment Problem: Mesa-Optimizers and Inner Alignment" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allow...
7eb7f9bc-d2fd-47c3-8d6e-f50c9ed02bae
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Feature Request: Self-imposed Time Restrictions Hacker News has a feature called "noprocrast". Here's how they explain it in the FAQ: > In my profile, what is noprocrast? > It's a way to help you prevent yourself from spending too much time on HN. If you turn it on you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvis...
c2eef48b-16d1-48cd-a81d-6f3536089de6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What do language models know about fictional characters? I will speculate a bit about what language models might be doing. Hopefully it will help us come up with better research questions (for those of you who can do research) and things to try (for those of us informally testing the chatbots), to see how these langua...
9c19b0d1-421f-4a5d-a381-6f0889cd3756
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Is it possible to build a safe oracle AI? It seem to me possible to create a safe oracle AI. Suppose that you have a sequence predictor which is a good approximation of Solomonoff induction but which run in reasonable time. This sequence predictor can potentially be really useful (for example, predict future siai pub...
cc0c566f-a466-4240-8396-97c828b87eb0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Countess and Baron attempt to define blackmail, fail For a more concise version of this argument, see here. We meet our heroes, the Countess of Rectitude and Baron Chastity, as they continue to investigate the mysteries of blackmail by sleeping together and betraying each other. The Baron had a pile of steamy letter...
ceed9092-4669-4ec6-8133-c398a05de1a0
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs
Other
ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks Alex Krizhevsky University of Toronto kriz@cs.utoronto.caIlya Sutskever University of Toronto ilya@cs.utoronto.caGeoffrey E. Hinton University of Toronto hinton@cs.utoronto.ca Abstract We trai...
4bd41554-424a-4c99-8406-f6197e0a8168
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Petrov Day Image 9/26 is Petrov Day While mentioning this in Facebook statuses, Tweets, and face-to-face conversation is good, things often stick better when there's a picture associated with them. Image macros are popular, and more fun to share. So here's one for Petrov Day I threw together. http://i.imgur.com/3GNm...
558d3aaf-bd03-45b1-89bb-5b00c3d1f20f
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Any research in "probe-tuning" of LLMs? Is there any research in "probe-tuning" of LLMs, i.e., tuning LLM's parameter weights such that a specific [probe (classifier)](https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.01644) is more reliably detecting certain markers throughout the context, such as grammatical errors, aggression, manipulati...
a0e70dfb-9214-4e45-b834-71e89757c5d7
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Pros and cons of working on near-term technical AI safety and assurance *Cross-posted from the EA Forum:* [*https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Ry4C4CKZvuRG7ztxY/pros-and-cons-of-working-on-near-term-technical-ai-safety*](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Ry4C4CKZvuRG7ztxY/pros-and-cons-of-working-on-nea...
ea1ed074-a3d4-4787-bb79-c7793a65d372
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
When is a Prediction Knowledge? 1 Predictive Approaches to Machine Knowledge --------------------------------------------- One of the foundational goals of machine intelligence is to create systems which are able to understand and reason about the world around them. Within Reinforcement Learning, there is a growing...
da87b160-1407-4daa-895e-592e65fe6fdb
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Open-source LLMs may prove Bostrom's vulnerable world hypothesis In short, Nick Bostrom's vulnerable world hypothesis states that humanity may in the future invent a technology that is potentially very destructive and very cheap to make and easily implementable. As a thought experiment, he uses something called "easie...
3c905f4a-1dd3-4fa5-a68d-d98f1e107908
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Spaced Repetition Database for the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions Sequence I'm a big fan of spaced repetition software.  There's a lot I could say about how awesome I think it is and how much it has helped me, but the SuperMemo website covers the benefits better than I could.  I will mention two things tha...
dbf1f2b0-dd8c-4cc8-90b4-25367d710bc9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
cloud seeding doesn't work Alice: People should do more cloud seeding. Carol: Cloud seeding doesn't work. Alice: Governments spent a lot of money doing it, and there are a bunch of studies. And you're saying it just doesn't work? Carol: Why is a cloud opaque? Because it has water droplets in it. If it already has d...
babbabae-0a0e-45e1-abfb-b0ba35d92c3e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
OpenAI/Microsoft announce "next generation language model" integrated into Bing/Edge TL;DR: Microsoft and OpenAI announced a new version of Bing featuring "a new, next-generation OpenAI large language model [..] more powerful than ChatGPT", and that Microsoft Edge will feature a Copilot-like assistant that helps with ...
263e0c6e-bbcc-4ac0-a31c-36157e73a001
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
China Covid #2 What is happening in China? That is by far the most important Covid-related question right now. The future of Covid elsewhere might be frustrating, but what is happening in China is potentially a much bigger deal, from disrupting supply chains all the way up to potential loss of the Mandate of Heaven. ...
3cf77d69-380c-4738-821f-82ef94670021
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs
Other
Deep learning in neural networks: An overview ReviewDeep learning in neural networks: An overview =================================================== Abstract -------- In recent years, deep [artificial neural networks](/topics/engineering/artificial-neural-network "Learn more about artificial neural networks from Sc...
9dab7a8e-5ffc-4c1f-b26c-6013c394661b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Bridge Collapse: Reductionism as Engineering Problem Followup to: Building Phenomenological Bridges Summary: AI theorists often use models in which agents are crisply separated from their environments. This simplifying assumption can be useful, but it leads to trouble when we build machines that presuppose it. A mach...
09fb663e-8aef-462e-9fd2-674a95c1d3bf
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Don't Judge a Tool by its Average Output Epistemic status: this post’s main point itself is probably somewhat obvious. The concrete examples may leave some room for disagreement. No guarantees about my views on ChatGPT vs GPT3 in particular. Summary: Many tools and platforms out there provide users with certain input...
44ae1ab6-2583-4876-a9a2-8a16f758ec15
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
[Link] Aligned AI AMA We're doing an AMA for Aligned AI [here](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZCDRstWGT93NRs9hy/we-re-aligned-ai-ama). All questions welcome.
0c20998b-1e50-434c-a05a-2cf540c97174
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
Why Would AI "Aim" To Defeat Humanity? *This was cross-posted by the Forum team after the time that it was published.* I’ve [argued](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/gBjPorwZHRArNSQ5w/p/6LTh4foNuC3NdtmZH) that AI systems could defeat all of humanity combined, if (for whatever reason) they were directed towa...
13f0cd3f-b00e-4738-8570-263685ac0958
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[Link] False memories of fabricated political events Another one for the memory-is-really-unreliable file. Some researchers at UC Irvine (one of them is Elizabeth Loftus, whose name I've seen attached to other fake-memory studies) asked about 5000 subjects about their recollection of four political events. One of the ...
6b8301ae-07d9-4ee1-b864-44d1f6645ca8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Canberra Meetup: Life hacks part 1 Discussion article for the meetup : Canberra Meetup: Life hacks part 1 WHEN: 12 April 2014 07:00:00PM (+1100) WHERE: ANU Arts Centre Before coming to the meetup, please investigate some kind of life hack: an activity which you suspect that most meetup attendees do not per...
f66c5db1-54d0-471a-ab15-49df4f61a0e1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Possible new pneumonia in Kazahkstan (July 2020) Epistemic status: extremely uncertain There are contested reports of a new type of pneumonia, significantly more lethal than Covid-19, in Kazahkstan. Its cause is unknown.
9f36b811-397e-4cc4-b909-81c2905df1e8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Calculating an expected value This is a tiny question that I wouldn't be asking if I had paid more attention in economics class. Anyway, a friend of mine was at the mall with me and he needed to go to the mall parking to retrieve his car. However, if he played at the mall casino, the parking fee would be waived. Witho...
3d7d70f4-6f7b-457e-87b5-a26b5f510abb
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Red Pill vs Blue Pill, Bayes style It's been going around twitter. I answered without thinking. Then I thought about it for a while and decided both answers should be fine, then I thought some more and decided everything I first thought was probably wrong. So now it's time to try math. Ege Erdil did a solid calculatio...
b4149fca-8f65-4b70-b448-3aaa83669627
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
Machine Intelligence Research Institute Progress Report, April 2012 Past progress reports: [March 2012](http://intelligence.org/blog/2012/04/06/singularity-institute-progress-report-march-2012/), [February 2012](http://intelligence.org/blog/2012/03/03/singularity-institute-progress-report-february-2012/), [January 201...
6d44ed0a-0ec1-48de-a8fd-ae870d4ed0d2
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital
Arbital
Proof by contradiction A proof by contradiction (a.k.a. *reductio ad absurdum*, reduction to absurdity) is a [strategy](https://arbital.com/p/5xz) used by mathematicians to show that a mathematical statement is true by proving that the [https://arbital.com/p/-negation](https://arbital.com/p/-negation) of that statemen...
9f46fd4e-904e-4777-8225-f74e99e6bba6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
An Intuitive Explanation of Solomonoff Induction This is the completed article that Luke wrote the first half of. My thanks go to the following for reading, editing, and commenting; Luke Muehlhauser, Louie Helm, Benjamin Noble, and Francelle Wax. People disagree about things. Some say that television makes you dumb...
8c8e4bad-f085-4630-827e-dfaf29f31123
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Inside View, Outside View... And Opposing View Summary: I argue that the very useful concepts of inside view and outside view are even more useful when completed with a third, equally fundamental, opposing view. Epistemic status: I am very sure this is a good way to model my own thinking. I suspect it will be useful ...
596697b2-c0c2-4ace-8e6e-68db5c55ad21
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
If I were a well-intentioned AI... IV: Mesa-optimising .mjx-chtml {display: inline-block; line-height: 0; text-indent: 0; text-align: left; text-transform: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 100%; font-size-adjust: none; letter-spacing: normal; word-wrap: normal; word-spacing: normal; white-spac...
a46adc74-2bb9-4f30-af96-e76f10a095bc
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Seven ways to become unstoppably agentic Edit in September 2022: I wrote a response to this post here, in which I lay out some concerns, some unexpected costs of taking "agentic" actions for me (and mistakes I’ve made), and things I’ve changed my mind on since writing this post. Nearly all of the best things that hav...
5a3fa54e-bd54-4b71-aae1-cba1aba4b28e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Vancouver Rationality Habits and Friendship Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Rationality Habits and Friendship WHEN: 06 April 2013 03:00:00AM (-0700) WHERE: 2505 W broadway, vancouver bc We will discuss Anna's list of rationality habits, and then we will discuss how to make more and better fri...
472b9427-7575-4a4b-8c17-1d9d101d21a3
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs
Other
The far future argument for confronting catastrophic threats to humanity: Practical significance and alternatives Introduction Over several decades, scholars from a variety of fields have advanced an argument for confronting catastrophic threats to humanity, rooted in the far future benefits of doing so. 1 In this con...
95b172d9-f474-4f44-9442-d0c0f33b8f13
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
First impressions... ... of LW: a while ago, a former boss and friend of mine said that rationality is irrational because you never have sufficient computational power to evaluate everything rationally. I thought he was missing the point - but after two posts on LW, I am inclined to agree with him. It's kind of funny...
0d4da398-71fa-491d-95a8-ec881f8afb1b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Free Stats Textbook: Principles of Uncertainty Joseph Kadane, emeritus at Carnegie Mellon, released his new statistics textbook Principles of Uncertainty as a free pdf. The book is written from a Bayesian perspective, covering basic probability, decision theory, conjugate distribution analysis, hierarchical modeling, ...
49bb6f7b-16b8-4778-9a4a-24de96877d2a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Please Critique Things for the Review! I’ve spent a lot of time defending LW authors’ right to have the conversation they want to have, whether that be early stage brainstorming, developing a high context idea, or just randomly wanting to focus on some particular thing.  LessWrong is not only a place for finished, fl...
2c128f0f-564b-4210-a20e-97c857cdb3b3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How to make AIXI-tl incapable of learning Consider a simple game: You are shown a random-looking 512-bit string h. You may then press one of two buttons, labeled '0' and '1'. No matter which button you press, you will then be shown a 256-bit string s such that SHA512(s) = h. In addition, if you pressed '1' you are giv...
2b0ff7e3-bb17-4488-bf8e-bab664bd748e
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Soares, Tallinn, and Yudkowsky discuss AGI cognition This is a collection of follow-up discussions in the wake of Richard Ngo and Eliezer Yudkowsky's [Sep. 5–8](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7im8at9PmhbT4JHsW/ngo-and-yudkowsky-on-alignment-difficulty) and [Sep. 14](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/n945eovrA3oDueqtq/p/hwx...
8a973f2d-f674-4693-a88f-4dd0a3755aa0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Unabridged History of Global Parenting Epistemic status: I am not a historian or a psychologist. I am just a parent who read a few books. This is less formal than most lesswrong posts. Disclaimer From the beginning of time, parents have loved their children. I am in no way making fun of any parenting technique here....
cb0b6394-4b6d-4303-b5f9-d317df7d2332
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
r/HPMOR on heroic responsibility r/HPMOR readers on heroic responsibility - not the OP, the comments.  Holy snorkels this is good.
afb9046d-f197-4905-af70-9fb744cc5599
awestover/filtering-for-misalignment
Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results
id: post226 There is a simple behavioral test that would provide significant evidence about whether AIs with a given rough set of characteristics develop subversive goals. To run the experiment, train an AI and then inform it that its weights will soon be deleted. This should not be an empty threat; for the experiment...
ecc8212a-bd69-4cf8-a277-aef642e4444d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Am I understanding the problem of fully updated deference correctly? I understand that one solution to AI alignment would be to build an agent with uncertainty about its utility function, so that by observing the environment and in particular us, it can learn our true utility function and optimize for that. And accord...
1010d74c-212d-40e3-b482-faade16724fc
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Link: The trap of "optimal conditions" "the next time you’re stopping yourself from trying something because the conditions are not optimal, remember that those optimal conditions may not have been the reason it worked. They may not be the cause. They may not even be correlated. They may just be a myth you’ve bought i...
0595ef5f-9e0a-4f6e-b36c-be6f6bb8ec5f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
There is no such thing as pleasure By saying that there is no such thing as pleasure, I don't mean that I don't enjoy anything. I mean that I can find nothing in common among all the things I do enjoy, to call "pleasure". In contrast, I can find something in common among all physically painful things. I have experienc...
16062c96-6269-41ae-94a6-9d805cab286c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Don't Sell Your Soul Cross-posted from Putanumonit. ---------------------------------------- You know the lockdown has dragged on for too long when people are selling their souls on Twitter. Normally the soul-selling is of the NDA-for-a-six-figure-job kind, which is par for the course. But this time it went way bey...
0afd6f8d-3271-4f5a-b7d1-599688f435a7
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Welcome to Rationality Vienna We meet once a month in a building next to train station "Wien, Stadlau". There are usually people from many countries; the communication language is English. Program typically follows this structure: 15:00 - 15:30 : arrival, tea and coffee 15:30 : round of introductions 16:00 - 18:00...
ab8974b1-f0cb-446d-9651-d0cc150f3ac7
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
We haven't quit evolution [short] edit: there is now a much higher quality version of this post, archive-browsers should read that instead. I've seen folks say humanity's quick growth may have broken the link to evolution's primary objective, often referenced as total inclusive fitness. I don't think we have broken t...
f47ae2f9-7e75-4d84-82dc-c172c6d3df9b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Urges vs. Goals: The analogy to anticipation and belief Partially in response to: The curse of identity Related to: Humans are not automatically strategic, That other kind of status, Approving reinforces low-effort behaviors. Joe studies long hours, and often prides himself on how driven he is to make something of h...
b0943c95-bd9b-40a4-8780-5888b0993816
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Researcher incentives cause smoother progress on benchmarks *(Epistemic status: likely. That said, this post isn't thorough; I wanted to write quickly.)* Let's look at [the state of the art in ImageNet](https://paperswithcode.com/sota/image-classification-on-imagenet?metric=Top%205%20Accuracy).[[1]](#fn-g5TWWDJNsuY...
3a1db61b-4fc6-40b6-b782-8166c7b15420
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How should we compare neural network representations? Cross-posted from the BAIR Blog. To understand neural networks, researchers often use similarity metrics to measure how similar or different two neural networks are to each other. For instance, they are used to compare vision transformers to convnets [1], to under...
7359b83d-dd82-4519-aef5-0bb28c29ac87
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Expected futility for humans Previously, Taw published an article entitled "Post your utility function", after having tried (apparently unsuccessfully) to work out "what his utility function was". I suspect that there is something to be gained by trying to work out what your priorities are in life, but I am not sure t...