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dc8fc6f5-34ff-4c60-b004-346ef8e86293 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | An OpenAI board seat is surprisingly expensive
The Open Philanthropy Project recently bought a seat on the board of the billion-dollar nonprofit AI research organization OpenAI for $30 million. Some people have said that this was surprisingly cheap, because the price in dollars was such a low share of OpenAI's eventua... |
1344e078-7209-4860-9750-502a099fec43 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread
Update: Please post new comments in the latest HPMOR discussion thread, now in the discussion section, since this thread and its first few successors have grown unwieldy (direct links: two, three, four, five, six, seven).
As many of you already know, Eliez... |
dd51c08a-c2b2-47c1-acf7-a0c874ce539f | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | "When I met the futurist Greg Stock some years ago, he argued that the joy of scientific discovery would soon be replaced by pills that could simulate the joy of scientific discovery. I approached him after his talk and said, "I agree that such pills are probably possible, but I wouldn't voluntarily take them." And Sto... |
05bd62f5-b1a1-4d95-b1f7-2d6c3044b4d6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Durham NC meetup: Living Luminously, Part 3
Discussion article for the meetup : Durham NC meetup: Living Luminously, Part 3
WHEN: 09 May 2013 07:00:00PM (-0400)
WHERE: 420 E Geer St, Durham NC 27701
We'll be wrapping up our Living Luminously discussion with:
Highlights and Shadows: http://lesswrong.com/lw... |
1e6702a4-6642-49a1-a540-621051db728a | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | RAIL: Risk-Averse Imitation Learning
1 Introduction
---------------
Reinforcement learning (RL) [[1](#bib.bib1)] is used to learn an effective policy of choosing actions in order to achieve a specified goal in an environment. The goal is communicated to the agent through a scalar cost and the agent learns a policy ... |
cf4d0c61-6d31-4e6e-83e5-f358f5548230 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open thread, June 26 - July 2, 2017
IF IT'S WORTH SAYING, BUT NOT WORTH ITS OWN POST, THEN IT GOES HERE.
----------------------------------------
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the l... |
b730fa71-8588-43cf-a413-299ba91be3b2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is outdoing monkeys while imagining free will the only way you can feel like a man?
Why does it bother people that we might be pretty similar to other monkeys (i.e. with better vocabularies, worse feet etc but no glorious fundamental difference)? Similarly what’s so scary about everything being mechanistic, free will ... |
9046cd81-62b9-46a2-87f1-2c510ce05981 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Omicron - How does it change Covid risk and what should we do about it?
[Crossposted from https://firstsigma.substack.com/p/omicron with a few small updates to the estimates from the last couple days]
My thoughts on how Omicron affects Covid risk and what we should do about it. In particular, I wanted to address some... |
1b550485-a24d-455f-9869-fd3244b3e7d6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Request for feedback on sample blurbs for the EA fantasy novel I wrote
Thanks everyone for the help and comments, I’ve taken everything I read seriously, and changed a lot of how the main character thinks about EA topics due to it — I am now looking for more readings that are specifically aimed at finding stuff that m... |
1bc5f559-c3b0-4bfc-b396-aef593ce3377 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Russian x-risks newsletter spring 2020
Coronavirus is rampant in Russia, but the lockdown is easing for political and economic reasons. It was not very strict, in fact: many people were on streets, and infections per day grew 100 times during lockdown in April. The reported infection level peaked at the beginning of M... |
c2052127-e0ce-4560-8fb4-a10f82a61cdf | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Intro-level training materials for rationality / critical thinking
Iksorod and I made a Google doc of intro-level training materials for rationality / critical thinking. We'll keep adding to it as we find more stuff. Please comment with your own additions. |
4827170c-bc00-40e8-9a47-a5dbc5acdbaf | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | List of common human goals
List of common goal areas:
This list is meant to be in the area of goal-space. It is non-exhaustive and the descriptions are including but not limited to - some hints to help you understand where in the idea-space these goals land. When constructing this list I try to imagine a large venn ... |
18b52d65-3e99-464f-b50f-23b2183df42e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] "I don't know."
Today's post, "I don't know." was originally published on 21 December 2006. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> An edited instant messaging conversation regarding the use of the phrase "I don't know". "I don't know" is a useful phrase if you want to avoid getting in trouble or convey the... |
0a237f65-6620-4111-b9cf-aa7c54976f53 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Partners in scholarship - Search and Find
Pondering the question of how to do efficient scholarly study, I figured a good way for me may be having something like a chavruta although not quite the same, a partner with which to study a field of science together, helping each other at answering questions which arise, sea... |
bd466179-cfff-4c0c-a12b-4f9f19fe39be | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Good Bings copy, great Bings steal
Stop me if you've heard this one before:
> LLMs may produce a lot of seemingly original text, but really, they can never equate a human's output, because they can only remix material from their own training set, never create new knowledge.
Ok, no one stopped me, but I imagine that'... |
a3c9fd4a-57de-49e1-a65e-bc68d7538259 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Competition for Power
This is an excerpt from the draft of my upcoming book on great founder theory. It was originally published on SamoBurja.com. You can access the original here.
To win on the global strategic stage, you must understand how to gain and wield power. As soon as you decide to gain power, however, yo... |
3ae232e1-894d-436f-8128-6fa606f1e54c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Press Your Luck (2/3)
This is the second in a three part sequence, examining the scenario in which software development organisations might knowingly take a significant risk of unintentionally launching an AI program into inadequately supervised or controlled self-improvement, by comparing the scenario to the 'press y... |
33065959-8369-4aa1-9f19-f77aa15d4fb4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is the AI timeline too short to have children?
If you had asked me at any point in my adult life (until recently) whether I wanted to have children eventually, I would've said yes, without hesitation. In recent years I've been telling myself: I don't know how likely these AI doom predictions are, but I'm going to focu... |
befddeb8-8f8a-48f8-90d4-ce18b71797cb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | New Relationship Energy as an Emotional Bias
Some call it The Honeymoon Phase or puppy love. Others mix it in with infatuation or limerence. Views on new relationship energy (NRE) vary, from seeing it as immature to completely normal to a little unhealthy. Regardless, NRE distorts your perception of the person you've ... |
44dfa551-2599-4e35-b953-249c0e35490d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Side quests in curriculum learning and regularization
In Selective regularization for alignment-focused representation engineering, we presented a successful approach for structuring the latent space of a simple MLP. Here we document our side quests: experiments that didn't go as expected, but in which we gained exper... |
3e06f65e-8f04-4723-87b4-2ce384be16d4 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Optimal Behavior Prior: Improving Human-AI Collaboration Through Generalizable Human Models..
1 Introduction
---------------
One of the ultimate goals of the field of AI is creating agents that are able to collaborate with us and help us achieve our goals. Such agents benefit from predictive models of human behavio... |
51f0ee49-be05-4349-9232-5f22c8ba6a56 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | New versions of posts in "Map and Territory" and "How To Actually Change Your Mind" are up (also, new revision system)
A few weeks ago MIRI released new editions of the "Map and Territory" and "How To Actually Change Your Mind" books, and those changes are now finally also reflected in the posts on LessWrong.
To make... |
1685ae66-0597-47f4-aec9-9faab61a55e4 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info | AI Safety Info | Wouldn't a superintelligence be smart enough not to make silly mistakes in its comprehension of our instructions?
It’s true that a superintelligence will be able to figure out what humans mean. The problem is that an AI will follow the programming it actually has, not that which we wanted it to have. If it was instruc... |
020f6098-c0d4-4d21-aa9e-371a849e6dcc | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Let's look for coherence theorems
In There are no coherence theorems EJT defines a "coherence theorem" as a theorem that proves maximizing expected utility is the only way to play a game that is not dominated. Ie, any strategy that is not a utility maximisation could be made strictly better. I will make the underlying... |
1b8fb081-1ee1-45f4-9856-bf35923fd6fd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What is Evil about creating House Elves?
Edit: This is old material. It may be out of date.
I'm talking about the fictional race of House Elves from the Harry Potter universe first written about by J. K. Rowling and then uplifted in a grand act of fan-fiction by Elizer Yudkowsky. Unless severely mistreated they enj... |
70c25601-648a-4ae0-b108-73acd713b457 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What are some good ways to form opinions on controversial subjects in the current and upcoming era?
Take a random political issue with two sides A and B. Suppose that exactly one of the following would be true for me given my moral framework and unlimited time to process all public information about the issue:
1. A ... |
855a68db-a8ce-4c00-bb59-63abc2f80a31 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AI #113: The o3 Era Begins
Enjoy it while it lasts. The Claude 4 era, or the o4 era, or both, are coming soon. Also, welcome to 2025, we measure eras in weeks or at most months. For now, the central thing going on continues to be everyone adapting to the world of o3, a model that is excellent at providing mundane util... |
93d1f1f5-e9ec-4ab3-83e0-947c8d929bb8 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda: Counterfactually-Guided Policy Search
1 Introduction
---------------
Imagine that a month ago Alice had two job offers from companies a1 and a2.
She decided to join a1 because of the larger salary, in spite of an awkward feeling during the job interview.
Since then she learned a lot about a... |
2670a8ed-e084-4f9a-ba0b-c82df6257a8f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Great Explanations
> Explaining is a difficult art. You can explain something so that your reader understands the words; [I try to] explain something so that the reader feels it in the marrow of his bones.
Richard Dawkins
My private school taught biology from the infamous creationist textbook Biology for Christia... |
532da807-6418-4373-9852-fc0bb75d22f8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Are there any impossibility theorems for strong and safe AI?
Are there any impossibility theorems for the existence of AI that is both strong and safe? I think such theorems would be interesting because they could help to evaluate proposals for safe AI: we could ask "which assumption does this proposal break?"
I have... |
b82cee7a-5671-4c45-acd7-fb494bd28758 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Law of No Evidence
This is a reference post for the Law of No Evidence.
Scott Alexander did us all a public service this week with his post The Phrase “No Evidence” Is a Red Flag for Bad Science Communication. If you have not yet read it I recommend doing so, and it is an excellent link to have handy going forward, a... |
5e2c62d1-a925-4206-8231-c729ba590447 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Regular Moscow meetup: self-esteem in CBT, psycholinguistics, philosophy of mind
Discussion article for the meetup : Regular Moscow meetup: self-esteem in CBT, psycholinguistics, philosophy of mind
WHEN: 01 February 2015 02:00:00PM (+0300)
WHERE: Russia, Moscow, ulitsa L'va Tolstogo 16
What we have planned... |
03229a48-cfcd-4530-bb8e-f0dfc359f902 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Reframing the burden of proof: Companies should prove that models are safe (rather than expecting auditors to prove that models are dangerous)
Evaluations of large language models (“model evals”) are one of the most commonly discussed AI governance ideas. The idea is relatively straightforward: we want to be able to u... |
aa7ed8d8-a8c4-4847-979d-5b6a8bedfc7b | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | psi rewriting
psi rewriting
-------------
my [psi](psi.html) format is quite inspired by [wolfram's hypergraphs](https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-have-a-path-to-the-fundamental-theory-of-physics-and-its-beautiful/#how-it-works), though those include a turing-complete rewriting system. in th... |
520fa0b1-2b7c-452c-8aac-aa56a8a11862 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Rapid capability gain around supergenius level seems probable even without intelligence needing to improve intelligence
TLDR:
1. Around Einstein-level, relatively small changes in intelligence can lead to large changes in what one is capable to accomplish.
1. E.g. Einstein was a bit better than the other best ph... |
c079bfb2-e12e-4c65-a156-1a9217a74872 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Safe Exploration in Continuous Action Spaces
1 Introduction
---------------
In the past two decades, RL has been mainly explored in toy environments (Sutton & Barto, [1998](#bib.bib18)) and video games (Mnih et al., [2015](#bib.bib13)), where real-world applications were limited to a few typical use-cases such as r... |
9237c566-74ab-4a8e-b174-83681b7b366b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : São Paulo Meet Up 3
WHEN: 15 June 2012 02:00:00PM (-0300)
WHERE: Sala 08 do Prédio de Filosofia e Ciências Sociais, USP - Av. Prof. Luciano Gualberto, 315 (Cidade Universitária) São Paulo, SP
There's going to be an event at USP titled 1ª Jornada Transhumanista. After the talks we're planning to have at leas... |
9e0386fa-86a8-4602-b7e6-d1c0580fc7e3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Mini advent calendar of Xrisks: nuclear war
The FHI's mini advent calendar: counting down through the big five existential risks. The first one is an old favourite, forgotten but not gone: nuclear war.
Nuclear War
Current understanding: medium-high
Most worrying aspect: the missiles and bombs are already out there
It... |
0a0803f4-8a7a-4745-8528-d0e8dda5702a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Commonwealth Fusion Systems is the Same Scale as OpenAI
Artificial intelligence is not the only exciting emerging technology. Another one that I am personally familiar with is fusion.
It seems interesting to compare companies working on emerging technologies to get a feel for how surprising developments in these comp... |
09a4f396-fb96-40e4-9a9f-c5101f4c8915 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | No, I won't go there, it feels like you're trying to Pascal-mug me
The goal of this blog-post is to explore the intuition that drives the feeling that the agent who arrives at the conclusion that they should pay Pascal's mugger is being unreasonable, and whether this can be tied in with the analysis of a logical induc... |
c51b9bf8-21d7-4988-afe6-a0b938c71f96 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Religion and conservation of evidence
Stereotypically, people say that religion is the "opiate of the masses", and expect poor people to be religious, because it gives them solace for their problems.
But most of the religious people I've known are relatively wealthy, Mercedes-driving people, to whom Christianity give... |
3d7bd623-6084-40cb-a4c4-fa94cd0447db | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What’s the backward-forward FLOP ratio for Neural Networks?
Summary:
1. Classic settings, i.e. deep networks with convolutional layers and large batch sizes, almost always have backward-forward FLOP ratios close to 2:1.
2. Depending on the following criteria we can encounter ratios between 1:1 and 3:1
1. Type of... |
175c8592-c3be-4f65-a760-78dbf40f4342 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Analysis: US restricts GPU sales to China
What are the restrictions?
Broadly speaking, the policy restricts the sale of GPUs and related technology to Chinese companies. The specifics remain unclear because (a) the Department of Commerce hasn't released its official press report yet and (b) licenses to sell compute to... |
15769d27-2c58-4c3f-b4c7-117e10f96931 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Complex Behavior from Simple (Sub)Agents
*Epistemic Status: Simultaneously this is work that took me a long time and a lot of thought, and also a playful and highly speculative investigation. Consider taking this seriously but not literally.*
**Introduction**
Take a simple agent ([GitHub](https://github.com/moridina... |
3806c309-a5ff-42ac-9335-efeb5debe994 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A misconception about immigration
Edit: I am not arguing for or against immigration. My intent was to explain why the common reaction "Immigrants are robbing us of our jobs" is flawed.
In discussions about immigration, there is a crucial aspect about its economic viability that is often left unsaid: Immigrants create... |
87f0f566-d6fe-4b21-bb78-8d6551348a74 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Expectations for Gemini: hopefully not a big deal
Introduction
My goal is to register and share my expectations and hear others' opinions on their expectation for the relative performances of Gemini VS GPT-4.
My expectations
GPT-4 to Gemini will likely not be as big a jump in capabilities as GPT-3 to GPT-4 was.
Ge... |
eaec3903-8ecc-4e54-9b8e-68168097c52b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Newtonmas Meetup, 12/25/2010
There's a Less Wrong meetup at my house in Berkeley this Saturday, the 25th of December, at 6PM. Celebrate the winter season, the Solstice, and the birth of Sir Isaac Newton among friendly aspiring rationalists, including Eliezer and other SIAI staff and volunteers.
I will cook for everyo... |
811f9d57-117c-4b77-8f65-5011ee99dd1c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A critique of Soares "4 background claims"
Disclaimer: The article was translated from Russian using GPT. It was partially proofread, but I don't know English well and therefore there may be rare translation artifacts.
> Show me exactly where you break Soares' “4 background claims”—if you don’t break them, it mean... |
c45cf7ce-617a-499d-81ae-ae6754b3ad48 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Black box knowledge
When we want to censor an image we put a black box over it. Over the area we want to censor. In a similar sense we can purposely censor our knowledge. This comes in particular handiness when thinking about things that might be complicated but we don't need to know.
-----------------------------... |
ab59850f-7a6b-48d6-abf9-4f07ff7fd876 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How to Convince my Son that Drugs are Bad
Hello.
My son (16m, henceforth referred to as John) has monologued about this site a few times over the past couple of months, so I figured, based on my brief impression of the community, you might be able to help me with an issue. Given the topical nature here, I am not sure... |
27ee08e0-1dbb-4f39-8275-c2422006b834 | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | "I previously explored the performance of a modern chess engine on old hardware (1, 2). Paul Christiano asked for the case of an old engine running on modern hardware. This is the topic of the present post.State of the artThrough an online search, I found the CCRL Blitz Rating list. It is run on an i7-4770k at 9.2 MNod... |
63cef537-07dd-4203-a4ac-3f02aee7dd1b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Are the majority of your ancestors farmers or non-farmers?
Assume humanity began with homo sapiens ~300,000 years ago. Are the majority of your ancestors farmers or non-farmers?
My friend and I had very differing intuitions on this, and after thinking about it some, both of us currently think it's very non-obvious. |
d71af6f9-844c-4719-befd-fc1482113b4c | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Student/Teacher Advising through Reward Augmentation
Abstract
--------
Introduction
------------
Methods
-------
Results
-------
Conclusions & Future Work
-------------------------
References
---------- |
c57d3c9b-465b-43df-93ea-1a7e469b0c7c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Singing
Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Singing
WHEN: 11 September 2016 03:30:00PM (-0400)
WHERE: Meridian Hill Park
We will be meeting in the park to hang out and sing songs.
One of the members is bringing "Encore", a singing game.
Location: Meridian Hill Park is ... |
bcbc2fb6-3704-4067-805f-d060391ecddf | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | No independence of irrelevant alternatives (picture proof)
Back in the old days, when people were wise and the government was just, I did a post on the Nash bargaining solution for two player games. Here each player has their own utility function and they're choosing amongst joint options, and trying to bargain to fin... |
bf9bfe19-78cc-4814-9fe4-f64959e2f7a8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Everyone is an Imposter
I.
I am generally considered to be a pretty smart guy.
Now to say this directly is to invite doubt and disaster. I know that. I feel it deep in my bones. It’s been drilled into me that, outside of certain domains (like rap and sports), it’s impolite to talk directly about one’s abilities. Bu... |
99135202-cc4e-42f7-8328-b15380739b62 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | New Artificial Intelligence quiz: can you beat ChatGPT?
Hey EA Forum!
The AI wave is coming. Are you ready to surf? Image generated by the [Midjourney](https://www.midjourney.com/home/) AI.Introducti... |
8bb98282-e6ae-4e47-bbff-d499ce9da61f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Instrumental Convergence and human extinction.
Abstract: This paper explains the concept of instrumental convergence, which is the tendency for intelligent agents to pursue similar subgoals, even if their ultimate goals are different. It illustrates this concept with an example of an artificial intelligence (AI) that ... |
227ec77e-6fbb-45c9-9644-1f434d1c46aa | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Generalizing the Corrigibility paper's impossibility result?
In our paper on corrigibility, we consider the question of how to make a highly intelligent agent that would pursue some goal, but not resist being shut down if its human programmers determined that they had made a mistake in specifying this goal. We assume ... |
031d9250-f1ed-400c-b117-60695769afb2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Priming and Contamination
Suppose you ask subjects to press one button if a string of letters forms a word, and another button if the string does not form a word (e.g., “banack” vs. “banner”). Then you show them the string “water.” Later, they will more quickly identify the string “drink” as a word. This is known as “... |
d0df427d-9d57-485d-b9a5-dfe9b4cd0046 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Humans are stunningly rational and stunningly irrational
Are humans mainly rational or mainly irrational? This is an old debate, with some political implications.
But the question is ill posed, because it elides the important detail: compared with what?
Humans are stunningly irrational
Let V be some reward/utility ... |
0f65b354-e8fc-4c69-ab18-eadb93f532bd | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | TV shows I wish I could watch: Intergalactic Immigration Wars
*Inspired by [One Billion Americans](https://smile.amazon.com/One-Billion-Americans-Thinking-Bigger-ebook/dp/B082ZR6827), which I have “[read](https://www.cold-takes.com/honesty-about-reading/).” (I [know the title and what people say about it](https://www.... |
ab5d1a57-b6d9-4d13-919b-7a959caa198f | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info | AI Safety Info | What is a subagent?
A [subagent](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/subagents) is a part of a larger system or agent which itself has agent-like properties. For example, we can model a corporation as an agent, since it makes decisions and pursues goals, but it is also made up of subagents: the people who work for it, who h... |
1b54fee7-704c-4ffd-85be-7234ca410463 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Metaculus Launches 2023/2024 FluSight Challenge Supporting CDC, $5K in Prizes
For the third year running, Metaculus has launched the FluSight Challenge to deliver forecasts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in support of their FluSight forecasting initiative. After two years of decreased influenz... |
24956684-adf1-4263-90ee-08346944ffaa | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Links!
I've seen a recent claim that adding a summary to links is enough of an inconvenience that the links may not be getting posted. I suppose people aren't checking out the media threads for links.
As an experiment, I'm posting this as a place for links. Summaries/excerpts are optional-- please don't downvote link... |
a495ef0d-1cf3-43a9-a044-b524f26c75f3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Covid 1/5/23: Various XBB Takes
The majority of this week’s post is various people doing their Obligatory Thread on Latest Variant, in this case XBB. All reach broadly compatible conclusions:
1. XBB is the next variant and rapidly taking over, and this is normal.
2. XBB is not more deadly.
3. Our existing protecti... |
5e3d07a5-e059-4a1e-ad07-d81a4d704517 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Towards Monosemanticity: Decomposing Language Models With Dictionary Learning
Text of post based on our blog post as a linkpost for the full paper which is considerably longer and more detailed.
Neural networks are trained on data, not programmed to follow rules. We understand the math of the trained network exactly ... |
6b0b0a6d-0c35-443e-a054-a621897e3b2e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Proportion
A **proportion** is a representation of one value as a [https://arbital.com/p/-fraction](https://arbital.com/p/-fraction) or [https://arbital.com/p/-multiple](https://arbital.com/p/-multiple) of another value. It is used to provide a sense of relative magnitude.
If some value $a$ is proportional to another... |
ae71a2af-e05f-46f8-8f12-baa575529c20 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | LW Update 3/14 – Community, Markdown and More
We've been working on a lot of changes as we gear up for the final vote to migrate to lesswrong.com. Many of these changes are still in progress, but it seemed like a good point to stop and take stock of them.
Community Page
We now have a functioning community page. The ... |
1f7928dc-f558-410b-96a3-738d9d3de1d4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Hard Work of Translation (Buddhism)
The issue, as it seems to me, is that almost every text you read on Buddhism does not attempt to do the actual work of translation. The first transmission of Buddhism to the west reified a bunch of translations of terms, such as concentration, equanimity, tranquility, mindfulnes... |
b406afad-9dc9-475b-9c85-33107c968f83 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Weekly LW Meetups: Austin, Bratislava, Cambridge MA, Durham NC (2), Salt Lake City, Washington DC
This meetup summary was posted to LW main on October 19th. The following week's summary is here.
There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:
* Durham HPMoR Discussion group: 20 October 2012 11:00AM
... |
5534625a-5866-4156-a17c-1ff15a548d1a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Goodhart Typology via Structure, Function, and Randomness Distributions
(Work done at Convergence Analysis. The ideas are due to Justin. Mateusz wrote the post. Thanks to Olga Babeeva for feedback on this post.)
In this post, we introduce the typology of structure, function, and randomness that builds on the framewor... |
63abff3e-ea1c-41b6-8b06-a865e2fe9b12 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | AGI Safety and Alignment with Robert Miles-by Machine Ethics-date 20210113
# AGI Safety and Alignment with Robert Miles on the Machine Ethics Podcast
Interviewee: Robert Miles
Date: 2021-02-13
Summary: This episode we're chatting with Robert Miles about why we even want artificial general intelligence, general AI as... |
fe5e8881-a624-4bb0-8b7f-77a539b72818 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [FICTION] Hamlet and the Philosopher's Stone
So I did actually write it.
Its first title was Rationalist Hamlet, back when it was a short fan contribution to the Alternate Parallels section of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. When I found myself actually trying to write the full thing, its working title ... |
63cc27f3-8f14-4b7d-a6a5-39ab0ba06358 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Control
[Metadata: crossposted from https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2022/08/control.html. First completed 3 July 2022.]
I don't know how to define control or even point at it except as a word-cloud, so it's probably wanting to be refactored. The point of talking about control is to lay part of the groundwork for understa... |
939dcec4-189e-4757-a5ad-a43f2ee6df4b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Helsinki Meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : Helsinki Meetup
WHEN: 21 June 2012 07:00:00PM (+0300)
WHERE: Café Vanha, Mannerheimintie 3, Helsinki, Finland
User:TCB is visiting Helsinki in June. Since it's nice to have various LWers get to know each other, there will be a meetup at Vanhan Kuppila / C... |
bd4263ba-0d19-46ab-a237-cc62f827149a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Grad School?
Previous article: Which college major?
Note: I don't have a trust fund. Even though I said I did in the last post. Apparently I misunderstood what that was, and I just have RESPs to cover my undergrad. Please take that into account.
Building on my last post, I've concluded to pursue either a major or a... |
44e52b8d-17dc-4c30-afc5-6fa7f866a363 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Game semantics
What are some good resources for logic and game semantics? |
b850e90b-2216-452b-b2ba-1e7b3de66fd1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The glorious energy boost I've gotten by abstaining from coffee
Over the years, I've sometimes heard people rave about how they cut out caffeine (or just coffee) and have way more energy. My reaction has typically been to feel kind of dismissive / not really believe them / assume that means that they need to sleep mor... |
8d24328c-e4e8-4fdf-87d3-a92f5e086793 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Discussion: Socially Awkward Penguin as a tool for unraveling social enigmas
So I was there being my rationalist-with-akrasia-issues, nerdy, awkward self who studies acting, singing, rhetorics, PUA, TV Tropes, Machiavelli, The Art of War, the 48 Laws of Power, the Art of Seduction, the Seven Habits... in the hopes of ... |
b0f44682-8dfd-4656-876a-293fa8d1724a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | New Paper: Ambiguous Online Learning
Abstract: We propose a new variant of online learning that we call "ambiguous online learning". In this setting, the learner is allowed to produce multiple predicted labels. Such an "ambiguous prediction" is considered correct when at least one of the labels is correct, and none of... |
f852b379-150d-4401-8c4f-645f212176a9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | On the stagnation of energy technology and the Cabal of Scientists
[Epistemic status: conspiracy theory/raving of the mads]
We all know that GPD/standard of living all track with energy use, yet arguably the most convenient and widespread energy sources current are fossil fuels, which saw mass adoption with the start... |
00fce7d6-f0d9-4204-b0a9-9ae90c42f744 | awestover/filtering-for-misalignment | Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results | id: post292
Imagine your once reliable, trusty AI assistant suddenly suggesting dangerous actions or spreading misinformation. This is a growing threat as large language models (LLMs) become more capable and pervasive. The culprit? Data poisoning, where LLMs are trained on corrupted or harmful data, potentially turnin... |
009b9569-297a-4703-9d30-a38fd7da5358 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Hero With A Thousand Chances
"Allow me to make sure I have this straight," the hero said. "I've been untimely ripped from my home world to fight unspeakable horrors, and you say I'm here because I'm lucky?"
Aerhien dipped her eyelashes in elegant acknowledgment; and quietly to herself, she thought: Thirty-seven... |
8e61967b-a168-45a4-9f3e-e82c8b2d9ee1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : LW Melb Rationality Dojo, March: A deep dive into Effective Altruism
Discussion article for the meetup : LW Melb Rationality Dojo, March: A deep dive into Effective Altruism
WHEN: 05 March 2016 02:30:00PM (+1100)
WHERE: Janet Lady Clarke Rotunda, Linlithgow Avenue, Melbourne
PLEASE NOTE THE TIME AND VENUE.... |
719feb18-27a3-4369-9af6-0d7c46879b64 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Uploading: what about the carbon-based version?
In [this video](http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2010/05/eliezer-yudkowsky-and-massimo-pigliucci-debate-the-singularity/), long about 48:00, Eliezer talks about uploading and about how it wouldn't be murder if his meat body were anesthetized before the uplo... |
b02d44ed-5d78-4e33-a2fc-f298c9a3a0f8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Global Catastrophe Prevention Plan Comprehensive Working Outline (wip)
Hi. It occurred to me to wonder if there was any unified practical step by step plan for getting our species to actually survive. I figured this is the kind of thing that would benefit from being organized into a collaborative to-do list or goal/su... |
b0192fdd-cd58-4728-b876-bb27aeaec833 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Hello ordinary folks, I'm the Chosen One
This is an informal argument against the fine-tuned universe. The complete argument can be found on my website. The purpose is to show the importance of perspectives in reasoning, especially in anthropic topics. See my previous post for a summary.
Why I am the Chosen One
I kn... |
834bf7cf-93ac-48d0-b8a7-ab73e5c0c701 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why do humans not have built-in neural i/o channels?
Communication between organisms of the same species is often beneficial, for a variety of reasons: sharing information, signalling, bonding, etc. Yet currently the most advanced form of communication to have evolved, human language, is still very low bandwidth compa... |
4dc9a661-1471-4f45-a397-2c4adab28d91 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Meet Up: West LA - BayesCon
Discussion article for the meetup : Meet Up: West LA - BayesCon
WHEN: 28 January 2015 07:00:00PM (-0800)
WHERE: 11066 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, CA
How to Find Us: Go into this Del Taco. We will be in the back room if possible.
Parking is free in the lot out front or on th... |
7213d85e-be42-404e-b22a-4ff3eb702f00 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Goal Misgeneralisation: Why Correct Specifications Aren’t Enough For Correct Goals
[](/?source=post_page-----cf96ebc60924--------------------------------)Listen
Share
*By Rohin Shah, Vikrant Varma, Ramana Kumar, Mar... |
80154147-0cf1-4323-9d66-d435a5295482 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Training Process Transparency through Gradient Interpretability: Early experiments on toy language models
The work presented in this post was conducted during the SERI MATS 3.1 program. Thank you to Evan Hubinger for providing feedback on the outlined experiments.
Note: This post was drafted prior to the announcement... |
0b9dce00-cad7-447b-9adb-b536ed707872 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [not ongoing] Thoughts on Proportional voting methods
About this post
This post was a work-in-progress, I (Jameson) updated it over the course of weeks/months, and the reposted it when it got substantial updates. I have now decided to leave it as it is for historical interest, as the next step would be a ground-up rew... |
8dc33ffb-ed53-478d-b66e-82d049ad6e14 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Evaluating Superhuman Models with Consistency Checks
Consider the following two questions:
| | |
| --- | --- |
| **Is this move good or bad?** | **Is this forecast accurate?** |
In both cases, the *ground truth* is not known to us humans. Furthermore, in both cases there either already exist superhuman AI sys... |
3c482fd8-ff60-443b-b8ba-2d8ba240e4a6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Sleeping Beauty Problem Can Be Explained by Perspective Disagreement (II)
This is the second part of my argument. It mainly involves a counter example to SIA and Thirdism.
Different part of the argument can be found here: I, II, III, IV.
The 81-Day Experiment(81D):
There is a circular corridor connected to 81 r... |
049327a8-c0fe-46b4-9ee3-e01a478590c2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Progress links digest, 2023-08-09: US adds new nuclear, Katalin Karikó interview, and more
Opportunities
* New Limit (longevity tech) is hiring for data scientists in computational biology (via @brian_armstrong)
* Anton Howes has “an idea for a paper that ought to radically revise the currently prevailing Crafts est... |
c0194f0c-4d1d-44ca-99d2-61e2901dd471 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | new Bright Eyes (Conor Oberst) single 'Singularity'
Bright Eyes' new (2011) single, 'Singularity', is maybe the best song ever about the Singularity. It's a catchy electro-pop refrain.
Lyrics:
> Learning on the fly
> How to gather and analyze
> Nothing is living if nothing dies
> What an exception to make
> Roundly ... |
019c0d44-6df6-45e8-a921-81e698d6d567 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | BHTV: Eliezer Yudkowsky and Andrew Gelman
Percontations: The Nature of Probability
Source.
Background on Gelman. |
10dbc5b5-cd29-4493-bb47-8033dd57dd62 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Start
Start-Class pages are visibly incomplete, or need significant work to be useful. This covers pages missing essential information, pages without coherent structure, pages lacking [summaries](https://arbital.com/p/1kl) (or first paragraphs that serve as a summary), pages with sufficiently severe prose or stylisti... |
4ff40be3-21eb-4e03-8a34-0bdc58932181 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A study on depression
Content note: depression, suicide.
A friend I was discussing depression with linked me an article, "Most anguish isn't an illness but an evolved response to anxiety". It turns out it's a condensed version of a recent paper by Syme and Hagen, two biological anthropologists. The basic idea is that... |
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