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15675c75-ba58-4dd4-82d3-95b9c9791bc7
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Productivity 101 For Beginners I'd like to believe that I'm pretty productive, and people seem interested in how I do it.  Previously, I had written "How I Am Productive"and it became one of my most popular essays of all time. The real secret is that, in the past, I wasn't nearly as productive.  I struggled with proc...
ed281aaa-d1bc-4e11-8fe6-24ec28a30822
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Are Mixture-of-Experts Transformers More Interpretable Than Dense Transformers? Intuitively, I would expect Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models (e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.03961) to be a lot more interpretable than dense transformers:  1. The complexity of an interconnected system increases way faster than linearl...
9b37d856-3da9-4b37-9caf-47a0dce36312
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Where is the line between being a good child and taking care of oneself? I recently saw some posts here about how LW helps with personal stuff and that it's a good idea to post here1. Plus, you are the most supportive people I've ever met. I still hesitate. Know my courage. Also, I pretty much always put needs and fee...
290cbe41-af7e-497f-a5e9-ce05e659236e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
My Childhood Role Model When I lecture on the Singularity, I often draw a graph of the "scale of intelligence" as it appears in everyday life: But this is a rather parochial view of intelligence.  Sure, in everyday life, we only deal socially with other humans—only other humans are partners in the great game—and so...
b5540487-2f6c-40f0-ad8f-09299e8d98fc
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Podcast - Putanumonit on The Switch I’m really excited to make my podcast debut on The Switch podcast with Chase Harris and Alex Berner. Here are the links on Apple Podcasts, Play Music, and Spotify. Topics we covered: * How business school led me to rationality. * The origin story and meaning of Putanumonit. * ...
5baa8d48-3312-47dd-9bcd-69ad1e62ea6e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[AN #103]: ARCHES: an agenda for existential safety, and combining natural language with deep RL Alignment Newsletter is a weekly publication with recent content relevant to AI alignment around the world. Find all Alignment Newsletter resources here. In particular, you can look through this spreadsheet of all summarie...
f4498bc2-bd24-498d-a662-27dfe1a0f02c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Nuclear Quantum Immortality Hacking I will very briefly explain the abridged version of "Quantum Immortality" but you might want to read more about it.   The short version of Quantum Immortality: "Imagine you are the cat in the Schrödinger experiment, if the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is corre...
4e889ab3-3224-4f8b-a4a1-c581efc2d6fe
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A Scalable Urban Design and the Single Building City Crossposted from Medium. Initial description of proposed infrastructure. Epistemic status: I've read a few books on the subject, spent a few months trying different things and working out the details, and am fairly confident this is at least worth a shot; definitel...
53598b1f-df12-4f35-a5fe-4e6241ddb9eb
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Approximately Bayesian Reasoning: Knightian Uncertainty, Goodhart, and the Look-Elsewhere Effect Approximate Bayesian Reasoning AIXI is well-known model of a Bayesian reasoner. However, it's not a practical one, since both the Solomonoff prior's basis, Kolmogorov complexity, and the rest of the Solomonoff induction pr...
9ea65652-f80a-4226-b8cc-0e46b468b582
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Controlling your inner control circuits On the topic of: Control theory Yesterday, PJ Eby sent the subscribers of his mailing list a link to an article describing a control theory/mindhacking insight he'd had. With his permission, here's a summary of that article. I found it potentially life-changing. The article see...
f29779d2-aaf9-4bf7-80da-221113488ea2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
*How* people shut down thought because of high-status respectable halos https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2016/10/20/ra/ A detailed look at the belief that high status social structures can be so much better than anything one can think of that there's no point in even trying to think about the details of what to do,...
324a9523-b53b-4487-8dd7-03d9d8cbcb70
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
January 1-14, 2012 Open Thread If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here. If continuing the discussion becomes impractical, that means you win at open threads; a celebratory top-level post on the topic is traditional. Poster's Note: omg, it felt so weird typing "2012" ...
cbb2a330-2bae-4aa8-9215-9919c950a384
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Chaos and Consequentialism
3147f99f-2ec8-4015-b992-369133b70635
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What LCC call numbers would you give "Rationality: AI to Zombie"? I am currently writing a book and have realized I want to cite Rationality as one of my sources and I'm not sure (a) how to cite the work (in the Chicago author-date style, or (b) how to classify it under the Library of Congress system, which is the sys...
0a7d48eb-2449-4524-be70-d16bc4a2ffd3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Board Games + Books giveaway Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Board Games + Books giveaway WHEN: 01 June 2015 06:15:00PM (-0700) WHERE: 1390 Market St., San Francisco, CA We'll be meeting to hang out and play board games! This is at our apartment because we ha...
14d8e587-438f-46b3-bd26-f22d4b0bc625
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Sequencing Swabs Update 2024-02-26: due to a serious typo all the results in this post were off by a factor of 100. Sequencing from individuals still looks promising, but by less than it did before. I've updated the numbers in the post, and added notes above the charts to explain how they're wrong. Thanks to Simon Gri...
44da0a55-b5f8-4466-aa01-88f00036c725
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Recent updates to gwern.net (2015-2016) > Previously: 2011; 2012-2013; 2013-2014; 2014-2015 "When I was one-and-twenty / I heard a wise man say, / 'Give crowns and pounds and guineas / But not your heart away; / Give pearls away and rubies / But keep your fancy free.' / But I was one-and-twenty, / No use to talk to ...
c404c05f-18dd-4439-b980-c23584a9bb14
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Types Of Online Meetups Yesterday I joined Raemon's videoconference-meetup-about-videoconference-meetups, but then I had to leave due to a scheduling conflict. The thing I wanted to get out of that meetup was ideas for online things I can do with my friends. I thought I'd post a list of things I've done online with ...
32b69cfa-2a55-4d10-b3e7-862960362871
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
2829fae4-4d62-416c-9607-fa0207230234
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Limits of Superintelligence Surprisingly, I haven’t seen anything written about the ultimate limits of intelligence. This is a short post where I try to ponder this question. Superintelligent agents are often portrayed as extremely powerful oracles capable of predicting long-term outcomes of actions and thus steering...
78561183-4ea7-4760-a96d-bb3f2473354f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Limiting factors to predict AI take-off speed AI Takeoff refers to “the process of an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) going from a certain threshold of capability (often discussed as "human-level") to being super-intelligent and capable enough to control the fate of civilization”. Whether this process will be “...
456cf52c-3996-44c6-8c82-f75363541dfe
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Inverse scaling can become U-shaped Edit: Here's a great comment by Ethan Perez that caveats this result, that I'd recommend reading for context. This is a paper by folks at Quoc Le's team at Google that examines the winning tasks from Round 1 of Anthropic's Inverse Scaling Prize. They find that 3/4 of the winning ta...
bb5dea86-09ee-41be-99cc-9a54d32c1466
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Should Sports Betting Be Banned? You may have seen this recent paper on the financial effects of legal online sports betting floating around econ twitter a few weeks ago: Gambling Away Stability: Sports Betting's Impact on Vulnerable Households by Baker, Balthrop, Johnson, Kotter, and Pisciotta (2024). The headline ...
5eec6060-7d6c-4c79-9a76-545f44cbc7b0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Cooperating with agents with different ideas of fairness, while resisting exploitation There's an idea from the latest MIRI workshop which I haven't seen in informal theories of negotiation, and I want to know if this is a known idea. (Old well-known ideas:) Suppose a standard Prisoner's Dilemma matrix where (3, 3) ...
71ceba14-3ea2-40be-aace-9be4ba67ed97
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
New GPT-3 competitor AI21 has trained a new language model, Jurassic-1, whose largest version has 178 billion parameters (GPT-3 had 175 billion). [This paper](https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/60fd4503684b466578c0d307/61138924626a6981ee09caf6_jurassic_tech_paper.pdf) gives limited technical details. There already were ...
3ca2f687-8068-4c14-aa0a-ab5260baa2e8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Logical Counterfactuals and Proposition graphs, Part 1 Within this sequence of posts I will outline a procedure for logical counterfactuals based on something similar to proof length. In this post I present a reimagining of propositional logic in which proving a theorem is taking a walk around a graph of equivalent pr...
935b3233-bda7-4862-b754-df173ad78451
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
Trends in DRAM price per gigabyte The price of a gigabyte of DRAM has fallen by about a factor of ten every 5 years from 1957 to 2020. Since 2010, the price has fallen much more slowly, at a rate that would yield an order of magnitude over roughly 14 years. Details ======= Background ---------- DRAM, “dynamic...
ac64950a-5ff1-44d1-9b0a-fb01b6db9cf1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 2 ETA: There is now a third thread, so send new comments there.   Since the first thread has exceeded 500 comments, it seems time for a new one, with Eliezer's just-posted Chapter 33 & 34 to kick things off.  From previous post:  > Spoiler Warning...
e6bbb27b-a5d8-4d76-8608-b6d095c429f5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Marginal charity
010fd5fa-3987-4251-8dad-9518e6e9f51c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Motivation on the margin of saving the world Most people feel that they have certain responsibilities in life. If they achieve those they feel good about themselves, and anything they do beyond that to make the world better is an increasingly imperceptible bonus. Some people with unusual moral positions or preference...
02ae3ea0-ed67-447d-854b-6222cb3201ee
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Can an AI suffer?   As I have said before in my previous posts, I do not think Friendly-AI is a good idea. Being on this site has me more convinced than before of the feasibility of FAI, but I still do not think that the creation of an FAI, or any other AI for that matter, should be attempted.   We have directives ...
585e6d45-bcdb-4956-808a-4d8cc48e87e7
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Update on the UK AI Taskforce & AI Safety Summit *While preparing for an upcoming Convergence Analysis post on the UK AI Taskforce and our recommendations, I looked into their reports, their plans for the upcoming AI safety summit, the recommendations from other orgs, and some miscellaneous UK AI events. I doubt we’ll...
a0addc8f-bd37-4ee8-989a-066baeedc55c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A corpus of our community's knowledge The purpose of this site is to help building a rationalist community, and helping individuals to fulfill their potential in that domain. We have a lot of discussions going on, and a lot of material is being, and going to be, generated. At some point it may become difficult for an...
4664f2cf-2a94-4c18-8e58-f4fe3f41c293
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Mr. Meeseeks as an AI capability tripwire The shutdown problem is hard because self-preservation is a convergent drive. Not being shutdown is useful for accomplishing all sorts of goals, whatever the content of those goals may be.  The Scylla and Charybdis of this problem is that it's hard to write a utility function...
490e2030-d0a8-40c5-a520-e12fa3c2b3ec
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What are some low-cognitive -workload tasks that can help improve the world? I have a chronic health condition which results in significant brain fog, usually lasting a few hours most days. When I don’t have brain fog I can work on high-level technical work with relative ease, but when I’m experiencing symptoms, even ...
131c03cf-296e-4469-addb-11233269d7c2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Study shows placebos can work even if you know it's a placebo Placebo Effect Benefits Patients Even When They Knowingly Take a Fake Pill This is a little bit disturbing. (A kind of belief in belief, perhaps? Like, "I know a placebo is where you take a fake pill but it makes you feel better anyway if you believe it's ...
8a148717-c571-411b-9b40-6171a95fa035
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Weird Random Newcomb Problem Epistemic status: I'm pretty sure the problem is somewhat interesting, because it temporarily confused several smart people. I'm not at all sure that it is very original; probably somebody has already thought about something similar. I'm not at all sure that I have actually found a flaw in...
a9fd953f-2452-4f70-96bb-82c8eeabdd65
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
AISN #16: White House Secures Voluntary Commitments from Leading AI Labs and Lessons from Oppenheimer Welcome to the AI Safety Newsletter by the [Center for AI Safety](https://www.safe.ai/). We discuss developments in AI and AI safety. No technical background required. Subscribe [here](https://newsletter.safe.ai/subs...
834e0805-111b-4fd6-95a5-ff5bb0110534
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Weekly LW Meetups: Penn State, Washington DC, Austin, and Ottawa There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in: * Penn State University: NEW Meetup starting!: 22 October 2011 02:00PM * Ottawa Weekly Monday LessWrong Meetup: 26 September 2011 07:30PM The following meetups take place in cities with ...
f1225b22-f999-4b9a-838a-17a2f8a6d472
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Stratified learning and action A putative new idea for AI control; index here. It seems that stratification is more flexible than I initially thought. That's because the default action or policy ∅, which I was envisioning as a null action (or maybe the AI turning itself off) can actually be more than that. For insta...
e4afcf7a-5a68-41ea-86c5-93045bcf8292
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Great Mathematicians on Math Competitions and "Genius" As I mentioned in Fields Medalists on School Mathematics, school mathematics usually gives a heavily distorted picture of mathematical practice. It's common for bright young people to participate in math competitions, an activity which is closer to that of mathema...
3591875a-a710-4f6b-9113-43790ca8c7b9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
My Bayesian Enlightenment I remember (dimly, as human memories go) the first time I self-identified as a "Bayesian".  Someone had just asked a malformed version of an old probability puzzle, saying: > If I meet a mathematician on the street, and she says, "I have two children, and at least one of them is a boy," what...
e73836a6-52d8-4531-8a17-913d0495951e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Hamming Problem of Group Rationality The upcoming moderation changes are long-term catastrophic. They’re deliberately making it easy for high-status people to silence anyone and everyone they don’t want to hear from, without penalty or stigma. I trust literally no one with this power, even if they have the best of...
8a24b211-0610-49a3-b729-180c2753a1eb
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : [Columbus] Upcoming Workshop Topics Discussion article for the meetup : Upcoming Workshop Topics WHEN: 15 July 2013, 7:30 pm WHERE: Columbus, OH Columbus, OH has a thriving rationality scene. If you live nearby, you should come check us out. PM me here, join the facebook page, or RSVP to the meetup.com site...
c948f26b-b24c-4335-bb36-5ef67de5ed01
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
200 COP in MI: Image Model Interpretability *This is the eighth post in a sequence called 200 Concrete Open Problems in Mechanistic Interpretability.*[*Start here*](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/LbrPTJ4fmABEdEnLf/200-concrete-open-problems-in-mechanistic-interpretability)*, then read in any order. If you want t...
81f8f9d8-01a9-4ee0-a943-bc7e756ff2f5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Math-to-English Cheat Sheet Say you've learnt math in your native language which is not English. Since then you've also read math in English and you appreciate the near universality of mathematical notation. Then one day you want to discuss a formula in real life and you realize you don't know how to pronunce "an". S...
e8e28a02-5586-4e45-aad1-8fc96e993b66
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Gravity Turn [The first in a sequence of retrospective essays on my five years in math graduate school.] My favorite analogy for graduate school is the gravity turn: the maneuver a rocket performs to get from the launch pad to orbit. I like to imagine a first-year graduate student as a Falcon X rocket, newly-construc...
5ce0c5e3-36bd-44b9-a737-526193885fc3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A visual analogy for text generation by LLMs?
7bccd0e2-5345-4c65-8298-63348297249e
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Want to predict/explain/control the output of GPT-4? Then learn about the world, not about transformers. Introduction ============ Consider Act II Scene II of William Shakespeare's *Julius Caesar.* In this scene, Caesar is at home with his wife Calphurnia, who has just had a bad dream and is pleading with him not to...
399f5021-bce9-4afb-83c1-9f7936948f27
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Washington DC: Dog Clickers Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC: Dog Clickers WHEN: 02 March 2014 03:00:00PM (-0500) WHERE: National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC 20001, USA We'll be meeting to see if we can train people to do things with dog clickers. Discussion article for the meetup :...
32f90cc7-91cc-41b2-a141-4b401edb5666
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
When is rationality useful? In addition to my skepticism about the foundations of epistemic rationality, I’ve long had doubts about the effectiveness of instrumental rationality. In particular, I’m inclined to attribute the successes of highly competent people primarily to traits like intelligence, personality and wor...
5c6b2c12-20e8-4fb8-8593-74df616f1dba
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Arguments against existential risk from AI, part 2 In this post, I provide some counterarguments to the arguments in [Part 1.](https://ninarimsky.substack.com/p/arguments-against-existential-risk) I then introduce two additional reasons why one may believe existential threats from AI systems are unlikely.  Recap ====...
a837e6dd-b004-46ba-8bb2-2506acff530f
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Corrigible but misaligned: a superintelligent messiah If we build an AGI, we'd really like it to be [corrigible](https://arbital.com/p/corrigibility/). Some ways Paul Christiano has [described corrigibility](https://ai-alignment.com/corrigibility-3039e668638): "[The AI should help me] figure out whether I built the ...
68925c06-3087-437e-96c1-85205be5ab6f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What I've Learned From My Parents' Arranged Marriage When I tell people my parents had an arranged marriage, I get a number of different reactions. Most people have the wrong idea of exactly what that looks like, and those who do have the right idea often wonder if my parents can even understand what dating is like, g...
1a2b1458-3bb7-410b-9a8b-4786e8881fad
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Staying Grounded What does it mean to “stay grounded”? Why does it matter? How does one stay grounded? Examples Let’s start with a bunch of examples of grounding failures - i.e. people failing to stay grounded. * The person who Volunteers to End Hunger, or End Poverty, or what have you, yet they do not actually ma...
1fc42820-40d8-416d-be64-3273c970c62c
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Introducing the Longevity Research Institute I’ve just founded a nonprofit, the Longevity Research Institute — you can check it out [here.](https://thelri.org/) The basic premise is: we know there are more than 50 compounds that have been reported to extend healthy lifespan in mammals, but most of these have never be...
88bbbe26-2b29-4bc3-aef2-231ba2a8aea2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Goal setting journal (November) Inspired by the group rationality diary and open thread, this is the second goal setting journal (GSJ) thread. If you have a goal worth setting then it goes here.   ---------------------------------------- Notes for future GSJ posters: 1. Please add the 'gsj' tag. 2. Check if ther...
a39b504c-e88e-4b89-b108-89e0172fdba4
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
An Integrated Framework for Learning and Reasoning
54f3b7ed-3a6e-4151-897a-21d53e6f3904
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Chance-Constrained Control with Lexicographic Deep Reinforcement Learning THIS IS A PREPRINT VERSION. IF YOU FOUND THIS READ ING USEFUL FOR YOUR RESEARCH PLEASE CITE THE PUBLISHED VERSION https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9031720 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/LCSYS.2020.2979635 BIB: @article{Giuseppi2...
73f2fd9e-1cb9-4b7d-8f58-68fda4b69a75
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Historical Net Worth Julia recently posted about how we're still donating 50%, which included this chart of monthly spending from our 2024 spending update: While each year before 2024 we'd been saving some, 2024 was the first year in which we were drawing from savings to make donations. Noticing this prompted Da...
7a8b7942-f629-4abb-8d07-e1e28a4bb9f6
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Humans aren't fitness maximizers Recently I've gotten a bunch of pushback when I claim that humans are not maximizers of inclusive genetic fitness (IGF). I think that part of what's going on here is a conflation of a few claims. One claim that is hopefully uncontroversial (but that I'll expand upon below anyway) is:...
55e8089f-d975-4787-9dfb-db29ef624aa5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Timeline tools? What would be useful to me now is a tool to help order, visualize and prioritize tasks for a larger project. I'm organizing a fundraising campaign for the non-profit I work with, and there are lots of tasks and some dependencies. I'm trying some Excel spreadsheet templates for starters - the ones link...
99940f0d-8994-49ae-b85f-15ea5b0ecec6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Procrastination is not real, it can't hurt you tldr: what appears as procrastination is actually a broad label for seeming mismatch or contradiction of internal desires, and the solution is to do more actions that seem default A student approaches the master for his guidance. Student: I want to become the best marti...
ce7c4555-6039-4328-bc1d-a61aa0af95b5
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Results of $1,000 Oracle contest! Almost a year ago, I posted [a contest to find the best questions to ask an Oracle AI](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cSzaxcmeYW6z7cgtc/contest-usd1-000-for-good-questions-to-ask-to-an-oracle-ai). I've been very slow in grading it, apologies for that, but here are the final results a...
9bf4038f-9c79-41b2-abb7-54622b328369
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Prague Less Wrong Meetup Discussion article for the meetup : Prague Less Wrong Meetup WHEN: 02 December 2015 07:00:00PM (+0100) WHERE: Peckova 15 182 00 Praha 8 I would like to announce our next Prague Less Wrong meetup. It will be held in a tea-room at Karlinske square on December 2nd starting at 7 p.m. (...
28f7ad88-d6f8-41af-a1ad-a5d65f86cfcd
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : LessWrong Montreal Biweekly Meetup Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong Montreal Biweekly Meetup WHEN: 09 April 2013 06:30:00PM (-0400) WHERE: 655 Ave. Du President Kennedy Montreal Meetups are now Tuesday, and biweekly! See you there. Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong Montreal Biwe...
2d56a754-3c6f-4ce3-9f01-91f43a550242
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Knowledge is Freedom ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, [Epistemic Status: Type Error] In this post, I try to build up an ontology around the following definition of knowledge: To know something is to have the set of policies available to you closed under conditiona...
f6e94e88-bc2a-4fc5-92fc-6769f59f93d9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
An Introduction to Löb's Theorem in MIRI Research At a recent MIRIx workshop, I gave an introductory talk about the surprising number of times that MIRI applied Löb's Theorem in their research papers. It was well-received, so I wrote up and expanded my notes into a primer for new researchers: An Introduction to Löb's...
739a47cf-b4e8-4546-8174-94bc462739d6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Teaching AI to reason: this year's most important story This doesn't contain much new to LW readers. I wrote it to try to explain what's going on to a broader audience – I'm posting in case people find it helpful for that. Feedback welcome. Most people think of AI as a pattern-matching chatbot – good at writing email...
b3f120ce-ecd5-4755-aabd-a2e4abd29f10
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
Future of Life Institute’s recent milestones in AI safety In January, many months of effort by FLI’s founders and volunteers finally came to fruition – the [Puerto Rico conference](http://futureoflife.org/misc/AI_conference), [open letter](http://futureoflife.org/misc/open_letter) and [grants program announcement](htt...
53341d38-ee06-4334-9b85-a069669b3681
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Limits Of Medicine - Part 2 - Homogeneity Assumptions This is part of a series of articles I'm writing to try and present a clear framework around where medicine is lacking and what easy wins might be found -- This one is "basic but necessary" in that I try to explain a concept that's rather familiar to most peopl...
35b4c806-e1e2-4f51-b0e6-c53dbb7f3ac6
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Knowledge is not just digital abstraction layers Knowledge is not just digital abstraction layers ================================================ *Financial status: This is independent research. I welcome* [*financial support*](https://www.alexflint.io/donate.html) *to make further posts like this possible.* *Epi...
d148f4e1-5085-4f3c-9074-15a35982c7c8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Most Important Century: Sequence Introduction [Moderators' note: with permission, I am crossposting Holden Karnofsky's Most Important Century series, originally published on his blog. In my (Ruby's) opinion, this may be the most compelling extant write-up that argues we are living in an exceptionally important ti...
ca720f59-f726-40f2-bb91-6943e84d33d3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How Do You Convince Your Parents To Prep? To Quarantine? A number of my friends are having difficulty conveying the seriousness of COVID-19 to their parents, or getting them to take action instead of panic. What have you found useful in convincing your parents to prep and stay home, and for bonus points, convincing th...
a2552471-145b-47a7-8187-fc9d6e01014e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
SAE-VIS: Announcement Post This is a post to officially announce the sae-vis library, which was designed to create feature dashboards like those from Anthropic's research. Summary There are 2 types of visualisations supported by this library: feature-centric and prompt-centric. The feature-centric vis is the standa...
50110cee-d83d-452e-b038-9b2c9a758a06
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[SEQ RERUN] Lawful Uncertainty Today's post, Lawful Uncertainty was originally published on 10 November 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):   > Facing a random scenario, the correct solution is really not to behave randomly. Faced with an irrational universe, throwing away your rationality won't help. Discus...
c6384c61-355a-4f14-bd35-78786b4b1c48
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How should dance venues best protect the drinks of attendees? In a social circle I’m in, there’s a problem now and then with people being drugged without their knowledge, via other patrons slipping drugs like roofies or GHB into their drinks. A DJ friend of mine is looking for ways to protect attendees to her shows. B...
94411ecd-00a6-4cde-b4a8-01f31fec394e
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs
Other
Natural Selection Favors AIs over Humans. Dan HendrycksNatural Selection Favors AIs over Humans Natural Selection Favors AIs over Humans Dan Hendrycks Center for AI Safety Abstract For billions of years, evolution has been the driving force behind the development of life, including humans. Evolution endowed humans wit...
64be2c7c-2be7-410c-82fd-ad5f0759e64e
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
How To Know What the AI Knows - An ELK Distillation *This is what I submitted in May 2022 for the* [*Safety Distillation Contest*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/C5e7ghGmFFwdqaFsT/calling-for-student-submissions-ai-safety-distillation-1)*.* Why we care about knowing what an AI knows ---------------------------------...
c68c3dde-bbb2-4978-8009-bb136354ef51
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Seeking feedback on a critique of the paperclip maximizer thought experiment Hello LessWrong community, I'm working on a paper that challenges some aspects of the paperclip maximizer thought experiment and the broader AI doomer narrative. Before submitting a full post, I'd like to gauge interest and get some initial...
d02f1829-927a-4ba1-aaea-8634e0eaf1e6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Proposal to increase fertility: University parent clubs Fertility rates in the developed world are too low and that's bad, blah blah. Here's my proposal to raise fertility rates (coming from a current uni student): Promote parenthood in universities via student run clubs. Reading groups about different parenting sty...
3adadf45-7c11-428e-9cc5-996886dca299
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Hope Function Yesterday I finished transcribing "The Ups and Downs of the Hope Function In a Fruitless Search". This is a statistics & psychology paper describing a simple probabilistic search problem and the sheer difficulty subjects have in producing the correct Bayesian answer. Besides providing a great but simple ...
0f572966-e694-414d-8c35-4c0eb5fa744c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Quantity/Quality of Researchers Has Drastically Increased Over the Centuries For just about any academic field F and number X greater than ~100, there are a lot more F researchers than there were X years ago, and this remains true if you restrict to researchers above a given level of quality/competence Q. This ob...
aa910861-ac46-4b14-8be7-79677e502c33
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Executive Director for AIS France - Expression of interest TLDR: ENAIS is teaming up with community builders from Paris to seed AIS France. You can read about the role below, and if you would be interested in founding such an organisation, fill out this expression of interest form. We are currently in discussions with...
4f34e469-6920-402b-a8c5-24ae0482cdbe
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info
AI Safety Info
What is deceptive alignment? <iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IeWljQw3UgQ" title="Deceptive Misaligned Mesa-Optimisers? It's More Likely Than You Think..." frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe> [D...
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trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Possible research directions to improve the mechanistic explanation of neural networks Why I like the Circuits approach In early 2020 I skimmed through the neural network explainability literature which was already quite massive at that time. I was left quite discouraged about the utility of the explanation techniques...
01d6da01-f853-47ea-934d-659da5748f4a
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
Penicillin and syphilis *By Katja Grace, 2 February 2015* [Penicillin](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillium) was a hugely important discovery. But was it a [discontinuity](http://aiimpacts.org/cases-of-discontinuous-technological-progress/ "Cases of Discontinuous Technological Progress") in the normal progressio...
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trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
IRL in General Environments Here is a proposal for Inverse Reinforcement Learning in General Environments. (2 1/2 pages; very little math). Copying the introduction here: The eventual aim of IRL is to understand human goals. However, typical algorithms for IRL assume the environment is finite-state Markov, and it is...
d676e316-8c80-447f-960e-3444163559b1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Discussion article for the meetup : WHEN: 01 June 2013 04:00:00PM (+0200) WHERE: Berkeley Discussion article for the meetup :
e3d88241-3266-4075-8b79-f6f293f4a8c3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Against Rationalization II: Sequence Recap Previously: Eliezer's "Against Rationalization" sequence I've run out of things to say about rationalization for the moment. Hopefully there'll be an Against Rationalization III a few years from now, but ideally some third author will write it. For now, a quick recap to dou...
62cd8bd2-caee-46a4-b067-0ae6ddd8cf99
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Statistical Prediction Rules Out-Perform Expert Human Judgments A parole board considers the release of a prisoner: Will he be violent again? A hiring officer considers a job candidate: Will she be a valuable asset to the company? A young couple considers marriage: Will they have a happy marriage? The cached wisdom f...
b031c7fb-919a-4594-b918-3e5d48684c68
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
No, really, it predicts next tokens. Epistemic status: mulled over an intuitive disagreement for a while and finally think I got it well enough expressed to put into a post. I have no expertise in any related field. Also: **No, really, it predicts next tokens.** (edited to add: while I still mostly endorse the claim, ...
482a6b8f-75bc-4518-a433-3f1230e50ff8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Does Your Morality Care What You Think? Followup to:  Math is Subjunctively Objective, The Moral Void, Is Morality Given? > Thus I recall the study, though I cannot recall the citation: > > Children, at some relatively young age, were found to distinguish between: > > * The teacher, by saying that we're allowed to...
da44ed67-f2e3-4728-bef7-d16a326c9078
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
New meet up in Las Vegas! Hey guys, I'd just like to announce that I'm starting a new meet up in Las Vegas! WHEN: First and third Sunday of the month. 7pm-9pm. WHERE: The Market (downtown on Fremont Street). See http://lesswrong.com/meetups/1xg.
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trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
(Ir)rationality of Pascal's wager During the last few weeks I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about ,,Pascalian” themes, like the paradoxes generated by introducing infinities in ethics or decision theory. In this post I want to focus on Pascal’s wager (Hajek, 2018), and why it is (ir)rational to accept it. Firstly, ...
1071d836-f1a7-4d36-8f3f-e79535e1ca17
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs
Other
Interactively shaping agents via human reinforcement: The TAMER framework To appear in The Fifth International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP 09), Redondo Beach, California, USA, September 2009. Interactivel yShaping Agents via Human Reinf orcement The TAMER Frame work W.Bradle yKno x Depar tment ofComputer Sc...
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trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Breakdown of existential risks Due to my colleague, Anders Sandberg:  
a5774165-ca7e-461f-9ef2-151ee46b40aa
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
July 2012 Media Thread This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. I find that exposure to LW ideas makes me less likely to enjoy some entertainment media that is otherwise quite popular, and finding media recommended by LWers is a good way to mitigate this. Post wha...
1b10c767-2f02-4fd2-bbf5-832a65f45fa0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How good is security for LessWrong and the Alignment Forum? As far as I can tell, LessWrong/Alignment Forum haven’t been noticeably attacked or disrupted. However, I’m concerned that could change because: * Attack command, control and automation will definitely improve, making more sophisticated attacks easier to de...
0a8e5f64-b8bb-4301-855e-60b01b33a421
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The LessWrong 2018 Review LessWrong is currently doing a major review of 2018 — looking back at old posts and considering which of them have stood the tests of time. It has three phases: * Nomination (ends Dec 1st at 11:59pm PST) * Review (ends Dec 31st) * Voting on the best posts (ends January 7th) Authors will ...