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b35c7869-ee4e-4e98-aa9d-f2e8f3248232
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Marburg Virus Pandemic Prediction Checklist Current score: 4/14 Last updated: 18 July 2022 Summary: * Two Marburg virus infections have been detected in Ghana. * Prediction: Since 1967, 73% of outbreaks infected less than 5 people, and 93% of outbreaks infected less than 250 people. The worst outbreak infected 25...
1b740e97-ba3f-4bb2-ab83-e186363556fc
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Validator models: A simple approach to detecting goodharting Crossposted from my personal blog. A naive approach to aligning an AGI, and an abstract version of what is currently used in SOTA approaches such as RLHF, is to learn a reward model which hopefully encapsulates many features of 'human values' that we wish t...
e09419a7-2ce6-4802-9df7-938857516f60
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Where to report bugs on the new site? I assume it's the same as before, but I don't recall where that is and it doesn't seem to be listed on the about page anymore.  One of my comments will not mark as read on my userpage even though it will everywhere else...
5a201c2f-bd03-4a42-94be-d6db5a6fe19e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Robustness of Contrast-Consistent Search to Adversarial Prompting Produced as part of the AI Safety Hub Labs programme run by Charlie Griffin and Julia Karbing. This project was mentored by Nandi Schoots. Image generated by DALL-E 3. Introduction We look at how adversarial prompting affects the outputs of large lan...
be06fbeb-2931-48af-bf08-d5bfe056ffb3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Quotes from Moral Mazes Reading and actually paying attention to Moral Mazes is hard. Writing carefully about it is even harder. I effectively spent several months forcing my way through the book, because it seemed important to do that. I then spent a month trying to write about the book, but that’s going super slow a...
971e3962-ff94-4337-b47e-c695109299aa
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Where's the foom? > "The first catastrophe mechanism seriously considered seems to have been the possibility, raised in the 1940s at Los Alamos before the first atomic bomb tests, that fission or fusion bombs might ignite the atmosphere or oceans in an unstoppable chain reaction."[[1]](#fn27figlpro9v) > > This is n...
b2614d60-3659-430a-aaa1-c60ee957b21e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Munich Meetup in September Discussion article for the meetup : Munich Meetup in September WHEN: 17 September 2016 04:00:00PM (+0200) WHERE: JetBrains Event Space, Elsenheimerstr. 47a, 5th floor, Munich A discussion of books/podcasts/talks/movies that you thought may be interesting for your fellow rationali...
c296c313-1add-4c76-a59c-f2e880569bea
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A Heuristic Proof of Practical Aligned Superintelligence "Computers can add numbers much more accurately than humans. They can draw better pictures than humans. They can play better chess. See the pattern? Well, AIs will soon be able to generate desired outcomes for society better than humans can. I feel that the AI ...
6f3e3216-9e6b-4c2d-9634-b9030f7cb427
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital
Arbital
Low impact A low-impact agent is a hypothetical [task-based AGI](https://arbital.com/p/6w) that's intended to avoid *disastrous* side effects via trying to *avoid large side effects in general*. Consider the Sorcerer's Apprentice fable: a legion of broomsticks, self-replicating and repeatedly overfilling a cauldron (...
ff1ff015-bc34-4708-a594-bb960d83a33c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How to slow down scientific progress, according to Leo Szilard Leo Szilard—the physicist who first conceived of the nuclear chain reaction and who urged the US to undertake the Manhattan Project—also wrote fiction. His book of short stories, The Voice of the Dolphins, contains a story “The Mark Gable Foundation,” date...
fb9ff005-cb1d-4e4b-89b9-f9ecc7a17681
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital
Arbital
Group coset Given a subgroup $H$ of [https://arbital.com/p/-3gd](https://arbital.com/p/-3gd) $G$, the *left cosets* of $H$ in $G$ are sets of the form $\{ gh : h \in H \}$, for some $g \in G$. This is written $gH$ as a shorthand. Similarly, the *right cosets* are the sets of the form $Hg = \{ hg: h \in H \}$. # Exam...
24dd6fcc-349d-4471-9283-0ed218d627a3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Berkeley meetup: Deliberate performance Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley meetup: Deliberate performance WHEN: 14 November 2012 07:00:00PM (-0800) WHERE: Berkeley, CA This week's Berkeley meetup will be a structured discussion about getting better at skills. One way to get better at skills (like...
af19e783-09ba-4377-952f-e3198bcef625
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How people stopped dying from diarrhea so much (& other life-saving decisions) Rational Animations made this video collaborating with 80,000 Hours. The script has been written by Benjamin Hilton as an adaptation of part of the 80,000 Hours career guide, by Benjamin Todd. I have included the full script below. -------...
1791fe86-9af2-4d77-9167-9c1c08cc06ef
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Probabilities, weights, sums: pretty much the same for reward functions This post is a more minor post, that I'm putting up to reference in other posts. Probabilities, weights, and expectations You're an agent, with potential uncertainty over your reward function. You know you have to maximise 0.5R1+0.5R2 where R1...
6cacf370-6483-4d02-ac85-ef07bcb18b84
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital
Arbital
Turing machine: External resources * [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine) * [Wolfram MathWorld](http://mathworld.wolfram.com/TuringMachine.html) * [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-machine/)
7d77109a-16d0-47a9-8f92-36d22f6829dc
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Gatekeeper Victory: AI Box Reflection A few weeks ago, I made a post – [AI Box Experiment Are People Still Interested](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HrZer4yhegweXJ8RH/ai-box-experiment-are-people-still-interested) – about the AI Box Experiment. I had read about it in [Rationality: From AI to Zombies](https://www.les...
e5bdb4d2-8931-400c-98e0-55dcf2868c62
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Melbourne Social: May Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Social: May WHEN: 20 May 2016 06:30:00PM (+1000) WHERE: Alchemist's Refuge, 328 Little Lonsdale St, Melbourne 3000 This month's Melbourne Social Meetup is on as scheduled! (Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/224476817935623 ) ...
642327ab-33ad-443f-a110-38478157fc02
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Stopped Clock Problem When a low-probability, high-impact event occurs, and the world “got it wrong”, it is tempting to look for the people who did successfully predict it in advance in order to discover their secret, or at least see what else they’ve predicted. Unfortunately, as Wei Dai discovered recently, this ...
a984c9ef-d96a-4b8f-b7d7-c0a91351a420
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Is the AI Doomsday Narrative the Product of a Big Tech Conspiracy? This is the full text of a post from "The Obsolete Newsletter," a Substack that I write about the intersection of capitalism, geopolitics, and artificial intelligence. I’m a freelance journalist and the author of a forthcoming book called Obsolete: Pow...
5ea271ed-f469-43d0-97ca-408db5825aa1
LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct
LessWrong
"I want to know what are good rationality exercises.I was just on a call with Liron and PhilH, hanging out after the weekly LessWrong weekend event, and we discussed exercises that could happen on LessWrong.Here is the list we generated:Thinking PhysicsFermi EstimatesProject EulerCalibration TrainingBasic probabilistic...
181fc1c9-5f4d-48a5-a5f3-871f183cb28d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Outcome Terminology? I'm writing a post about S-risks, and I need access to some clean, established terminology/background material for discussing AI-based long-term outcomes for humanity. My current (very limited) vocabulary can be summarized with the following categories:  1. Outcomes which are roughly maximally ...
de91b93a-2711-492c-820c-30d4cb09bcc3
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
The Cave Allegory Revisited: Understanding GPT's Worldview *A short post describing a metaphor I find useful, in particular for explaining some intuitions about systems like GPT to people who don't have deeper technical knowledge about large generative models.* Plato's [allegory of the cave](https://en.wikipedia.org/...
6ad9b1f3-eee2-44c6-9871-7db603a983a4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Tax Price Gouging? In the aftermath of a disaster, there is usually a large shift in what people need, what is available, or both. For example, people normally don't use very much ice, but after a hurricane or other disaster that knocks out power, suddenly (a) lots of people want ice and (b) ice production is more dif...
bea6d2c5-aba5-4ad6-98a5-c88312871046
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Soldiers, Scouts, and Albatrosses. TL;DR: Soldier and Scout as modes of thought. Soldiers "assume the conclusion", which is sometimes unreasonably effective. Search as a synthesis of Soldier and Scout. Lévy flight as optimal trade-off. Hey IAN! What's the best way of thinking? #[[IAN says]]: I think of the soldier m...
2b41e9ac-519f-4959-bbf0-ab252f71ee28
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Model-based RL, Desires, Brains, Wireheading Summary I’m very interested in model-based RL as a framework for how people might build AGI, in large part because I think that human intelligence is built from scratch by within-lifetime learning in a model-based RL framework. (Meanwhile I give Evolution credit for develop...
13dc8752-597e-4267-9d06-0f0ad59e3133
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[Book review] The anxiety toolkit This is a book review of the book The anxiety toolkit by Alice Boyes. I read it in the context of a personal literature review project on the topic of productivity and well being. If you are more interested by advice on productivity and wellbeing than by this specific book I advise yo...
5de7ef49-5f31-4355-9ef2-47903e98e039
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[U.S. Specific] Criminal Justice Reform in the Time of Covid-19 I've been following LessWrong for some time now, but this is my first post. Looking to start a conversation around prison communications, the private prisons industry, and US criminal justice system reform. I've started working for Ameelio (ameelio.org),...
0528b67e-75d0-481a-8504-0b47d314233e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Ukraine Post #10: Next Phase This is another Covid-style Ukraine post in the ‘here are all the things that caught my attention since the last one of these posts’ tradition. I have noticed that the rate at which I notice noteworthy new things while looking at my sources has declined steadily. The situation is becoming...
8094d74f-3f53-4b52-8969-42180805ce27
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Trivial Inconvenience Day (December 9th at 12 Noon PST) Hi everybody, it's been 9 months since I wrote my report on Trivial Inconvenience Day. I wasn't quite sure when to run a sequel event. I wanted to give people an opportunity for deferred tasks to pile up again. With three seasons under the bridge I think it's saf...
02865f3e-5784-4f86-a91c-1cbca36ac93e
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube
Youtube Transcripts
Quantilizers: AI That Doesn't Try Too Hard hi so way back in the before time i made a video about maximizers and satisfices the plan was that was going to be the first half of a two-parter now i did script out that second video and shoot it and even start to edit it and then certain events transpired and i never f...
b938773d-f03e-4587-ae28-f1fb30472c30
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
AI and Shared Prosperity 1. Introduction ---------------- One of the major avenues through which the advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is affecting society and its people is by redistributing economic opportunities and earning prospects. Such redistribution can be equitable and inclusive, or biased in fav...
1fc75726-77be-488a-85ab-9fde3e47f8b1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Utility functions without a maximum An elementary question that has probably been discussed for 300 years, but I don't know what the right keyword to use to google it might be. How, theoretically, do you deal with (in decision theory/AI alignment) a "noncompact" utility function, e.g. suppose your set of actions is p...
9b3603c8-70d7-4b40-bf9d-c528d2d166f3
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs
Other
A Critical Look at Risk Assessments for Global Catastrophes INTRODUCTION Speculative suggestions are occasionally made about ways in which new physics experiments could hypothetically bring about a catastrophe leading to the end of life on Earth. Some of these hypothetical catastrophes, including the "killer strangele...
48469082-c7b9-4ab5-b5e0-776689014d33
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital
Arbital
Boolean In formal [https://arbital.com/p/-258](https://arbital.com/p/-258), a boolean variable is a [https://arbital.com/p/-variable](https://arbital.com/p/-variable) that can take on one of only two possible values: "[https://arbital.com/p/-true](https://arbital.com/p/-true)" or "[https://arbital.com/p/-false](https:...
4e0b5dbc-3929-413f-b464-5d3e4efcd662
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The order of learning things (general to specific vs. specific to general)   Does order matter? To many of us, it does. The speed of learning something can be drastically affected by the order by which you learn them, and since we all have limited time, the time we spend learning is quite relevant to our concerns. T...
649c295a-b71b-4376-a9b7-f85e243c1b26
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A Proposed Test to Determine the Extent to Which Large Language Models Understand the Real World Large Language Models such as GPT-3 and PaLM have demonstrated an ability to generate plausible-sounding, grammatically-correct text in response to a wide range of prompts. And some Language-Model-based applications such a...
b1384297-04a7-491f-93df-9945031f849f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Gene drives: why the wait? (Crossposted from my Substack) If you’ve been following biology news over the last few years, you might have heard of an interesting concept called a “gene drive”. The overall idea is to engineer a genetic allele that transmits itself to all offspring of a sexually reproducing organism, ins...
8d78366c-9ef3-470e-8fc4-7c06b46a832a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[LINK] Bitcoins, "Investment of Money," and Law A federal magistrate judge in Texas issue a decision on Tuesday that "Bitcoin is a currency or form of money, and investors wishing to invest in BTCST provided an investment of money." More discussion on the legal reasoning is here.  Some context from reading the decisi...
4838db88-5306-4517-a7b1-0d6f9de48280
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Google "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI" This (purported) leak is incredibly scary if you're worried about AI risk due to AI capabilities developing too fast. Firstly, it suggests that open-source models are improving rapidly because people are able to iterate on top of each other's improvements and try out ...
9d11cb71-7571-4111-a67c-1830b662cc55
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs
Other
How rapidly are GPUs improving in price performance? Note: Equations will not render properly with javascript disabled. Introduction ============ Many of the impressive results in deep learning in recent years have been achieved through massive investment in hardware needed for training, with projects like Alph...
23bc9c9c-b399-4ffd-b610-b8149a47cb0f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Dissolving the Question "If a tree falls in the forest, but no one hears it, does it make a sound?" I didn't answer that question.  I didn't pick a position, "Yes!" or "No!", and defend it.  Instead I went off and deconstructed the human algorithm for processing words, even going so far as to sketch an illustration o...
997692ed-b41e-4ba7-bb05-b31001e4e562
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[LINK] AmA by computational neuroscientists behind 'the world's largest functional brain model' Not sure if this has been covered on LW, but it seems highly relevant to WBE development. Link here: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/147gqm/we_are_the_computational_neuroscientists_behind/ A few questioners mention ...
3ef26b62-3825-471e-bc5b-c247b3c85dcb
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A Dissent on Honesty Context Disney's Tangled (2010) is a great movie. Spoilers if you haven't seen it. The heroine, having been kidnapped at birth and raised in a tower, has never stepped foot outside. It follows, naturally, that she does not own a pair of shoes, and she is barefoot for the entire adventure. The mov...
e77a0aa8-7a55-4557-86eb-1defa3b20663
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Formulas of arithmetic that behave like decision agents I wrote this post in the course of working through Vladimir Slepnev's A model of UDT with a halting oracle. This post contains some of the ideas of Slepnev's post, with all the proofs written out. The main formal difference is that while Slepnev's post is about p...
3e51de2b-5645-4a22-985e-62bb30ce1ba9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Why don't our vaccines get updated to the delta spike protein? Delta and Delta Plus evade the antibody response: > Delta and Delta Plus were less well inhibited (neutralized) by antibodies from infected and vaccinated individuals as compared to the original virus and this likely contributed to the rapid spread of Del...
78505318-3025-4a0f-b9ec-bd514958c6bc
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
3a. Towards Formal Corrigibility (Part 3a of the CAST sequence) As mentioned in Corrigibility Intuition, I believe that it’s more important to find a simple, coherent, natural/universal concept that can be gestured at, rather than coming up with a precisely formal measure of corrigibility and using that to train an A...
5e1a2f54-fc50-4641-9be7-d4e0bcca6743
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Fake Fake Utility Functions Followup to: Most of my posts over the last month... Every now and then, you run across someone who has discovered the One Great Moral Principle, of which all other values are a mere derivative consequence. I run across more of these people than you do.  Only in my case, it's people who k...
ccf71148-8210-4c68-80bb-205d3618bc53
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Understanding Interlocking Dynamics of Cooperative Rationalization 1 Introduction --------------- Selective rationalization bastings2019interpretable; carton2018extractive; chang2019game; chen2018learning; chen2018shapley; glockner2020you; lei2016rationalizing; li2016understanding; yu2019rethinking explains the pre...
b7b47952-d2ab-4b32-bd5b-dd425fcedd44
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AI Proposals at ‘Two Sessions’: AGI as ‘Two Bombs, One Satellite’? ... On March 4, the opening ceremony of the 14th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) was held. Zhu Songchun, a member of the CPPCC and director of the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligen...
736c0ee2-ff79-4845-8999-ea4a4687d37b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Cryonics Career Survey (more jobs than you think) (x-post LessDead) Survey presentation Link to survey: Cryonics Career Survey Background. During the annual Teens and Twenties Cryonics Gathering (a fully funded yearly gathering for young cryonics members), there is usually a survey that is distributed to all partic...
15c8e922-a7c5-4633-92bb-e0828e3be55c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Elevating Air Purifiers I'm pretty interested in indoor air quality, primarily for reducing disease transmission, but also for reducing the effect of small particles from cooking. Air purifiers work well, but if you do leave them on the ground they're in the way and vulnerable to children and pets. Elevating them can ...
36fa46bc-fbac-42be-aec2-824c144b8246
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Why AI may not save the World Marc Andreessen, founder of legendary VC firm a16z, recently wrote an article titled 'Why AI Will Save the World'. This post is my reply to him and why I think his understanding of AI is superficial at best. I report quotes from his post in italic for the benefit of the reader, while all ...
75e6655f-45e0-4ad8-972e-ef9e6dbbe8aa
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
Database of existential risk estimates *This post was written for [Convergence Analysis](https://www.convergenceanalysis.org/), though the opinions expressed are my own.* This post: * Provides [a spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XUwqBPQ-sFkO5h4tdYrVvlK8ooFWyR8XbBVntt820JI/copy) you can use for ...
90cca7fa-2d28-4d83-9578-5401cbd2da39
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Covid 2/23/23: Your Best Possible Situation No news is (often) good news. At old Magic: The Gathering tournaments, judge Tony Parodi would often tell us, ‘if your opponent did not show up, that is your best possible situation.’ Every week, when I set out to write the Covid update, I held out the hope that at some po...
6cfe20f9-cbaa-4c14-873f-8f50e04fbb4a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Scott Aaronson: Common knowledge and Aumann's agreement theorem The excellent Scott Aaronson has posted on his blog a version of a talk he recently gave at SPARC, about Aumann's agreement theorem and related topics. I think a substantial fraction of LW readers would enjoy it. As well as stating Aumann's theorem and ex...
a66587ba-63ad-4cf3-abf2-fb1a0ec08c62
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[Link] The real end of science From Gene Expression by Razib Khan who some of you may also know from the old gnxp site or perhaps from his BHTV debate with Eliezer. > Fifteen years ago John Horgan wrote The End Of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age. I remain skeptical as to ...
615eb05d-2f88-4723-a6db-26950a4d64fe
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
[Simulators seminar sequence] #1 Background & shared assumptions *Meta: Over the past few months, we've held a seminar series on the* [*Simulators theory*](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/vJFdjigzmcXMhNTsx/simulators) *by janus. As the theory is actively under development, the purpose of the series is to discove...
923f04bd-6f37-4966-b593-50166a351984
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Only a hack can solve the shutdown problem (My first post on LessWrong. It seems the most recent Welcome Thread is from 2020, so I'm making a top-level post. This an edited version of my submission to the [AI Alignment Awards](https://www.alignmentawards.com).) Abstract: First, we offer a formalisation of the shutdow...
5978c36b-171a-44c3-ac98-676da68c5f09
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The prior probability of justification for war? Could you use Bayes Theorem to figure out whether or not a given war is just? If so, I was wondering how one would go about estimating the prior probability that a war is just. Thanks for any help you can offer.
2f0ba93f-c637-4e1c-8dcb-05dcea7d4f4d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
CFAR Handbook: Introduction The Center for Applied Rationality is a Bay Area non-profit that, among other things, ran lots of workshops to offer people tools and techniques for solving problems and improving their thinking. Those workshops were accompanied by a reference handbook, which has been available as a PDF sin...
23496967-352e-4c88-b4e7-a33311be29d3
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Critiques of the Agent Foundations agenda? What are some substantial critiques of the agent foundations research agenda? Where by agent foundations I am referrring the area of research referred to by Critch in [this post](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/hvGoYXi2kgnS3vxqb/some-ai-research-areas-and-their-relevanc...
bb9fbc86-6128-454b-aedf-72e1e8ae1b03
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
survey about biases in the investment context Hello guys, I am currently writing my master's thesis on biases in the investment context. One sub-sample that I am studying is people who are educated about biases in a general context, but not in the investment context. I guess LW is the right place to find some of those...
9f007bd7-633f-434d-beb4-58e346593d24
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Maximizing Yield on US Dollar Pegged Coins A Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Exercise Link to original post.  Over the last couple of months, I have been playing around Decentralized Finance (DeFi), a relatively novel application within the cryptocurrency ecosystem. In this post I want to illustrate how to use several D...
e46ed72d-a463-43a6-8f17-fee890c51d4c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[LINK] The Hacker Shelf, free books. Yes, this a repost from Hacker News, but I want to point out some books that are of LW-related interest. The Hacker Shelf is a repository of freely available textbooks. Most of them are about computer programming or the business of computer programming, but there are a few that ar...
046ce5b8-3ee7-45ea-ad12-34af368f0ecb
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
2015-16 New Year review #### 2015 progress Research: * Finished [paper](http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02371) on the Selective Bayesian Forest Classifier algorithm * Made an [R package](http://github.com/vkrakovna/sbfc) for SBFC (beta) * Worked at Google on unsupervised learning for the Knowledge Graph with [Moshe Look...
56be9d22-e743-461e-8b82-b777a03f3fb5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[Transcript] Tyler Cowen on Stories I was shocked, absolutely shocked, to find that Tyler Cowen's excellent TEDxMidAtlantic talk on stories had not yet been transcribed. It generated a lot of discussion in the thread about it where it was first introduced, so I went ahead and transcribed it. I added hyperlinks to back...
5784fa9f-0269-48a3-8945-75fda682ab56
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Resources to find/register the rationalists that specialize in a given topic? As far as I can tell: 1. It's not possible for me (or most/all other people, for that matter) to individually evaluate claims every topic I hear about, as it takes too long time and too much effort to learn the foundations needed to evalua...
edc684a8-0055-4605-878a-3f3ab79bbeac
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Summary of 80k's AI problem profile *This is a summary of the article “*[*Preventing an AI-related catastrophe*](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/artificial-intelligence/)*” (audio version*[*here*](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/preventing-an-ai-related-catastrophe-article/id1245002988?i=1000582699751)*)...
a3d1fe51-a926-4223-a3cd-ecd426b32ed2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Rationality Nairobi mini-Meetup #1: Double Crux Discussion article for the meetup : Rationality Nairobi mini-Meetup #1: Double Crux WHEN: 30 April 2016 03:34:07PM (+0300) WHERE: Up the hill from Lukenya Academy, Machakos We'll be learning and investigating the dynamics of the game 'Double Crux', a potentia...
618b2009-dd69-4dbb-9cc8-e8bfc8b4e062
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Contrarians judged mad after being proven right (John Hempton) I recommend John Hempton's blog post on how badly people judge seeming madmen in the case the conventional view has only conventional-wisdom support. I also like how he explains his research and conclusions in general. the gist: > In early June Carson Bl...
906aa9df-9326-4c30-9532-fc64cd1f50b5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Rationality Quotes August 2013 Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are: * Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post th...
f77aca1c-afc1-4e30-8ff1-08183224a71d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
June and Mulberries Around here the Juneberries and Mulberries are ripe. The berries are delicious, but a lot of people don't know that they're safe to eat. I like the mulberries best when they still have a hint of red, before they get too sweet. We've been walking over to the neighborhood tree with a ste...
40e3ae77-1daa-4f99-bc8e-adf0bf627ce1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Robbin's Farm Sledding Route There's a nice sledding hill a short drive from our house. It has an area with a gentler slope, where we would go when the kids were younger, but at this point the main attraction is a slope that drops ~60ft over ~400ft: The big downside is that it's steep all the way down to a fence...
84e249af-c795-4807-8f9f-85b4d242e9fc
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube
Youtube Transcripts
Opportunities for Cooperation on AGI at the Governance Level [Music] okay thank you very much for joining us the structure of this panel is going to be fairly straightforward we're going to have statements from each of the speakers within five minutes or less and if I've moderated you before you know that I keep times...
0e5ed328-6c31-4d78-8c3e-7e7df73224a2
LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct
LessWrong
""It is essential for a man to strive with all his heart, and to understand that it is difficult even to reach the average if he does not have the intention of surpassing others in whatever he does." —Budo Shoshinshu "In important matters, a 'strong' effort usually results in only mediocre results. Whenever we are atte...
79408909-72db-4d71-ab1d-f58465c68b8e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Scott Aaronson's cautious optimism for the MWI http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1103 Eliezer's gung-ho attitude about the realism of the Many Worlds Interpretation always rubbed me the wrong way, especially in the podcast between both him and Scott (around 8:43 in http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/2220).  I've seen ...
72309cf7-b628-47fc-b755-42d940d5c80c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Prolonging life is about the optionality, not about the immortality > There is no such thing as death. No, there’s the fear of death, and that is an awful fear. Sometimes it even makes people do things they shouldn’t. But how different things would be if only we could stop fearing death. It has come to my attention t...
154f763c-c40b-45fd-9068-a75772948a16
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Testing Robustness Against Unforeseen Adversaries 1 Introduction --------------- Neural networks perform well on many datasets He et al. ([2016](#bib.bib24)) yet can be consistently fooled by minor adversarial distortions Goodfellow et al. ([2014](#bib.bib22)). The research community has responded by quantifying an...
5462a0cb-53f3-4ae5-b8da-4ab75a5270a4
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Learning Robust Representations by Projecting Superficial Statistics Out 1 Introduction --------------- Imagine training an image classifier to recognize facial expressions. In the training data, while all images labeled *“smile”* may actually depict smiling people, the “smile” label might *also* be correlated with...
5d4ae727-9c36-4853-b12e-1e17580d5c77
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Some Thoughts On Using Auctions For Land Valuation Land value taxes are an attractive approach to public finance. However, some people argue that the difficulty of assessing land values makes land value taxation impractical. While I think assessment by governmental officials typically is good enough for practical purp...
f9525ba2-d8e1-4db1-9e07-44235a3a2270
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Danger(s) of theorem-proving AI? Posting this on behalf of user PrimalShadow on the AstralCodexTen Discord: > What are ways in which an AI that is trained to prove specific math theorems is dangerous? In particular, imagine you have an AI which is trained to take a prompt asking to prove a formal-language-predicate,...
b2d552b1-7370-4a7e-a1a8-bd5da8485802
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital
Arbital
Dihedral groups are non-abelian Let $n \geq 3$. Then the [https://arbital.com/p/-4cy](https://arbital.com/p/-4cy) on $n$ vertices, $D_{2n}$, is not [abelian](https://arbital.com/p/3h2). # Proof The most natural dihedral group [presentation](https://arbital.com/p/group_presentation) is $\langle a, b \mid a^n, b^2, ba...
1c6f2616-17de-4dee-a3f4-91550b8ee98d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Auctioning Off the Top Slot in Your Reading List Or, A Nicer Way to Commodify Attention   Observation 1: I read/listen to a lot of public intellectuals--podcasters, authors, bloggers, and so on--and I frequently find myself thinking: > Ugh, I hate it when this guy spouts ignorant nonsense about [some domain]. And he'...
0969788e-8956-4d9c-b07a-47cb7ed6a821
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A scheme for sampling durable goods first-hand before making a purchase A problem when trying to purchase some classes of products (like pillows, computer mice, and sleep masks) is that it is difficult to sample lots of them first-hand before making a purchase. This forces one to rely on product reviews or to settle f...
5329f7ef-afb0-4d53-a261-f73f1663ff01
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A Neglected Cause: Altruism Cultivation Practices How are we to address the problem that not enough people are working to solve the many great challenges of the modern world? It is obvious from the outset that this is a question of human motivations: in my daily life, do I work only to benefit myself (and perhaps my ...
6f4216c4-ee54-4e63-8722-283d605b862c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A History Of Universalist Greed [Special thanks to Ratheka Stormbjorne and Shiloh Miyazaki for doing some of the research for this essay. All opinions expressed are my own however.] In my essay on Fuzzies and Saddies I wrote about four components that were necessary to implement "Eliezer's version of extropy": > 1. ...
7acfe468-cb4d-4897-9e47-b700b6f2e79e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Contrarian Status Catch-22 It used to puzzle me that Scott Aaronson still hasn't come to terms with the obvious absurdity of attempts to make quantum mechanics yield a single world. I should have realized what was going on when I read Scott's blog post "The bullet-swallowers" in which Scott compares many-worlds t...
685b32df-534d-41a9-950a-7ed6b5709f43
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
(Some?) Possible Multi-Agent Goodhart Interactions Epistemic Status: I need feedback on these ideas, and I've been delaying because I'm not sure I'm on the right track. This is the product of a lot of thinking, but I'm not sure the list is complete or there isn't something important I'm missing. (Note: This is intende...
7aab7829-1ca1-40f8-b6a4-5e3206fb0c39
LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct
LessWrong
"Greg Burch said: "I think people should have a right to be stupid and, if they have that right, the market's going to respond by supplying as much stupidity as can be sold." Greg Burch was speaking about sport-utility vehicles, which he feels are very poorly designed. Note that Burch was not advocating banning SUVs. B...
f348b33b-9f1e-428f-b41b-89b7fece9684
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
The heterogeneity of human value types: Implications for AI alignment Note: This post was sparked by some replies to my EA Forum [post](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YwnfPtxHktfowyrMD/the-religion-problem-in-ai-alignment) Sept 15 about ‘The religion problem in AI alignment’. There, I argued that AI safety ...
01fba7c1-684d-487c-a07b-b13f602a3151
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[SEQ RERUN] We Don't Really Want Your Participation Today's post, We Don't Really Want Your Participation was originally published on 10 September 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):   > Advocates for the Singularity sometimes call for outreach to artists or poets; we should move away from thinking of people a...
1ae85d4e-3bb2-48b2-8bd5-d1df9e1571f5
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Would it be good or bad for the US military to get involved in AI risk? Meant as a neutral question. I'm not sure whether this would be good or bad on net: Suppose key elements of the US military took x-risk from misaligned strong AI very seriously. Specifically, I mean: * Key scientists at the Defense Threat Reduct...
5768db69-0b56-443e-8f3e-e3eac461fea6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Book Review: Basic Category Theory for Computer Scientists (MIRI course list) I'm reviewing the books on the MIRI course list. After finishing Cognitive Science I picked up Basic Category Theory for Computer Scientists, by Benjamin C. Pierce. Basic Category Theory for Computer Scientists This book is tiny, clockin...
9faee817-c519-4017-ad66-3945686cd0e8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Covid 11/26: Thanksgiving Happy Thanksgiving!  Even in a year like this one, we have much to be thankful for. Most of us, even if we get sick, will fully recover. Treatments continue to improve. Given expectations, this week’s numbers were surprisingly good, to the extent that I have theories later to explain why. Th...
1693a92d-1a39-445e-86d2-2586d60edd07
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Covid: CDC Issues New Guidance on Opening Schools Author’s Note: This was originally the title topic of this week’s Covid post (as ‘School Daze’), but the post was getting long and this is its own issue, so I’m moving the guidelines discussion to its own post.  As usual, all discussions of school are confusing for me...
eca21d02-e139-4206-8be9-b43f46e51ee9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Attention-Feature Tables in Gemma 2 Residual Streams This is research I did in a short span of time, it is likely not optimal, but it's unclear whether the constraints are my skills, my tools, or my methods. Code and full results can be found here, but you'll need to download the model yourself to replicate it. TL;D...
07e2c116-35f4-4a44-8cfd-634787b1c58f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
MetaPrompt: a tool for telling yourself what to do. MetaPrompt is a nonstandard todo list. The very bare-bones basic idea is that you add ideas to a deck of cards, and you shuffle this deck to draw things to do. This is useful for "tasks" with no priority, where you just want to be reminded of the idea at some point i...
8c7c8b0c-37d6-42f7-9bf4-2bb8e35cf461
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Lebowski Theorem — Charitable Reads of Anti-AGI-X-Risk Arguments, Part 2 This is the second post in a series where I try to understand arguments against AGI x-risk by summarizing and evaluating them as charitably as I can. (Here's Part 1.) I don't necessarily agree with these arguments; my goal is simply to gain a...
3e6bd0dc-283e-4926-9c2f-aa490f166d4a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Looking at RSS User-Agents An RSS reader sends periodic requests to get the latest feed. This includes a User-Agent field, identifying which fetcher is running: Feedbin feed-id:1242010 - 38 subscribers This fetcher is nicely passing along statistics, saying how many readers it represents. I took one day of logs,...
907a320a-7e66-4aab-97b0-c986154bfec3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
LW Women Submissions: On Misogyny Standard Intro The following section will be at the top of all posts in the LW Women series. Several months ago, I put out a call for anonymous submissions by the women on LW, with the idea that I would compile them into some kind of post.  There is a LOT of material, so I am breakin...