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c7a3f8c3-6105-4915-a589-03f02fe7f17e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Rational Justice I'm interested in how courts and juries might use rational techniques to arrive at correct decisions on guilt. In a complex case, it would seem to sensible to assess each component of the prosecution and defence case, and estimate the relative likelihood. If the prosecution case is (say) 100 times mo...
94895bd8-91f3-43b1-b7a4-66e820462856
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Concept Safety: The problem of alien concepts In the previous post in this series, I talked about how one might get an AI to have similar concepts as humans. However, one would intuitively assume that a superintelligent AI might eventually develop the capability to entertain far more sophisticated concepts than humans...
7556056e-36c5-4f19-8282-038f6564d024
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Sunday August 2, 12pm (PDT) — talks by jimrandomh, johnswenthworth, Daniel Filan, Jacobian This Sunday at 12pm (PDT), we're running another session of "lightning talks" by curated LessWrong authors (see here for previous weeks' transcripts). * Each talk will be 3-5 minutes followed by discussion. Afterwards, we'll h...
b6c13957-2164-4ca7-bb5a-5eb0cca8813e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Rethinking Batch Normalization Yesterday we saw a glimpse into the inner workings of batch normalization, a popular technique in the field of deep learning. Given that the effectiveness of batch normalization has been demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt, it may come as a surprise that researchers don't really kno...
7ef1047f-305d-4ee1-854d-0c9348a09cc1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Against naming things, and so on Recent discussion on naming concepts mostly focuses on arguments in favor, noting only a few caveats, as LW user Conor Moreton in Why and How to Name Things: > What you lose by the proliferation of jargon is ease-of-entry and cross-cultural intelligibility and hard-drive space in the ...
1f835170-7360-4b1f-9613-42df773b9f30
LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct
LessWrong
"(An idea I had while responding to this quotes thread) "Correlation does not imply causation" is bandied around inexpertly and inappropriately all over the internet. Lots of us hate this. But get this: the phrase, and the most obvious follow-up phrases like "what does imply causation?" are not high-competition search ...
4c1591be-553f-4aaa-a6f4-d6e1b5c15d2c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What's the largest sunk cost you let go? None
a06c618b-9489-4542-8b29-839d549d77c7
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Principled Intelligence Hypothesis I have been reading the thought provoking Elephant in the Brain, and will probably have more to say on it later. But if I understand correctly, a dominant theory of how humans came to be so smart is that they have been in an endless cat and mouse game with themselves, making norm...
e04aa4eb-55e7-4f8e-a6b9-41891199dfe6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Focusing your impact on short vs long TAI timelines Summary/Key Points  I compare considerations for prioritizing impact in short vs. long transformative AI timeline scenarios. Though lots of relevant work seems timelines-agnostic, this analysis is primarily intended for work whose impact is more sensitive to AI timel...
193fecfa-cddc-47a1-b40b-4fdf0db27ff6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Tax-Optimized Risk in Portfolio Allocation When you're subject to capital gains taxation, the government shares in some of the upside, but when you have capital losses, the government shares in the downside too[1]. Because of this, the actual risk (and reward) of any given portfolio is lower than it seems. To countera...
62a9b51d-2879-4523-9540-6ed033d1b5bc
awestover/filtering-for-misalignment
Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results
id: post201 This is a blog post reporting some preliminary work from the Anthropic Alignment Science team, which might be of interest to researchers working actively in this space. We'd ask you to treat these results like those of a colleague sharing some thoughts or preliminary experiments at a lab meeting, rather th...
9571eb9c-ac82-4884-80b7-9162091f3c92
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Link: Facing the Mind-Killer I've long opposed discussing politics on Less Wrong. Elsewhere, however, I have been known to gaze into the abyss; and so it came to be that I wrote a handful of blog posts of the Oxford Libertarian Society Blog. I had the deliberate intention of bring a little bit of rationality into poli...
a260ee57-4dac-4840-8f6f-7d9dba40d058
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Can Social Dynamics Explain Conjunction Fallacy Experimental Results? Is there any conjunction fallacy research which addresses the alternative hypothesis that the observed results are mainly due to social dynamics? Most people spend most of their time thinking in terms of gaining or losing social status, not in term...
4dfe32bb-3930-4a6d-9f7a-9befb1dfa3d2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Territory I don’t know if you’ve ever had the experience of hiking in the wilderness with a map and compass but no cell service. I recommend it, if you haven’t.  I somehow did not quite all-the-way understand what a map even is until I was lost on my own under these circumstances. I knew in a “factual knowledge” ...
1be4624d-9b24-4a8a-b6a5-cb09646c9445
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Recommended Rationalist Resources I thought Recommended Rationalist Reading was very useful and interesting. Now we have voting and threading it seems a good time to comprehensively gather opinions on online material. Please suggest high-quality links related to or useful for improving rationality. It could be a blog...
7ea461b8-df98-4692-80c9-df1b7a2bb8f5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
"Giftedness" and Genius, Crucial Differences This essay by Arthur Jensen is from an old book . The genius has limits. A simple answer, and undoubtedly true. But my assignment here is to reflect on the much more complex difference between intellectual giftedness and genius, using the latter term in its original sense,...
a119179f-ab2a-400c-ab3e-023138efa8d4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Retrieval Augmented Genesis II — Holy Texts Semantics Analysis Intro In my last post on Lesswrong I shared ragenesis.com platform, along with a general description of the thought process behind the platform's development. Fundamentally, RAGenesis is a search and research AI driven software tool dedicated to 5 of the m...
dc728562-3029-4239-8da8-6f96abd60ca0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Southern California Meetup May 21, Weekly Irvine Meetups on Wednesdays Southern California is about to have a lot more meetups. To get the ramp up started, there will be a meet up at this IHOP across the street from John Wayne Airport in Irvine, on Saturday May 21 from 2:00 to 8:00. We will likely be at the upstairs t...
d3e0b437-ce95-4239-8eef-75b94101cbf5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Careful with Caching A friend recently shared this graphic on Facebook: (I've added the "wrong" overlay.) This is clearly incorrect: there's no way Massachusetts has more prisons than colleges. (MA actually has the largest ratio of colleges to prisons in the US.) After putting a link to the original source in the ...
71900167-6574-44c2-a014-f595ee89dc08
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Y2K: Successful Practice for AI Alignment This is a linkpost for Martyn Thomas's What Really Happened in Y2K and its associated talk recording. Some spoke of a terrible catastrophe coming inevitably. They said the death toll could be in the millions, if not higher. An alarm was raised, but few paid attention. But ...
bfe6a8ab-465a-447b-bee7-b338db70feda
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Refine's Second Blog Post Day Yesterday was the second blog post day at Refine. It came after the first week of research and iteration on incubatees ideas and questions. It still went well. There are less posts than the first day, but even the incubatees that didn't write a post ended up working on interesting resear...
f5af7758-a49a-4c0c-b9bc-00c1d7d0b932
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[SEQ RERUN] How Much Evidence Does It Take? Today's post, How Much Evidence Does It Take? was originally published on 24 September 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):   > If you are considering one hypothesis out of many, or that hypothesis is more implausible than others, or you wish to know with greater conf...
d2589c46-7906-4481-9234-9a38d0f8fb83
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
[AN #108]: Why we should scrutinize arguments for AI risk Alignment Newsletter is a weekly publication with recent content relevant to AI alignment around the world. Find all Alignment Newsletter **[resources here](http://rohinshah.com/alignment-newsletter/)**. In particular, you can look through **[this spreadsheet](...
55dbc117-5322-4335-a2f7-24177a5268cf
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Goals of model vs. goals of simulacra? In classical examples of misaligned AIs (like the famous paperclip maximiser ones), we tend to view the gradient descent training as the step in which an AI gets imbued with some overarching goal that it might then pursue to its bitter conclusion. However, the currently dominatin...
cbb8120f-63ad-41b4-b2ad-05564885b104
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Ng and LeCun on the 6-Month Pause (Transcript) This is a transcript a brief chat between Andrew Ng and Yann LeCun on the prospect of the 6-Month Pause. They are both highly skeptical of the pause and more generally of "AI doomerism".  Yann also briefly touches on why he thinks LLMs won't scale to AGI.  Full video can...
bda4139f-2554-4b5c-a73f-d79a9c14b337
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Training Regime Day 6: Seeking Sense Introduction Seeking sense is very easy to describe and very hard to actually do in practice. The basis of this technique is a claim is that the things that go on in other people's heads make sense from their perspective and that it's valuable to try to figure out what's happening ...
05ac2423-e73a-4b74-8f0e-1c2f78885056
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Living with Rats in College When I was in college, I rented a group house with 5 other nerds. There were 5 bedrooms to divide among the 6 of us, so I negotiated an agreement where I paid less rent in exchange for sleeping in the hallway. This wasn't as bad as it sounds. My bedroom wasn't hallway-sized. It was bedroom-...
1f313fc4-7a95-477e-977e-916447cf4d29
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Why has no one compared Covid-19 and Vaccine Risks? Currently, hundreds of millions of people face the choice to  (1) get vaccinated against Covid-19 (maybe choosing between different vaccines) or  (2) do nothing Given the fact that both the vaccines and contracting Covid-19 pose risks (in a sense that they may ...
9db9586d-c4a9-4ff6-8122-62b867f8d3de
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A sufficiently paranoid paperclip maximizer A hypothetical scenario of a non-friendly but sufficiently paranoid AGI saving humanity. ---------------------------------------- The devil was laughing as the last of mankind showed up in his dominion. Then he stopped, because after them came some kind of machines that be...
9cb86886-9e5e-4789-a949-45f0a12edfbd
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Map of the AI Safety Community I have made a map of the AI Safety Community! The map is greatly inspired by the map of the rationalist community made by Scott Alexander. There are bound to be omissions and misunderstandings, and I will be grateful for any corrections. I promise that I will incorporate the feedback i...
8c479996-8b78-4839-b55a-743d35ea2fc6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AI #102: Made in America I remember that week I used r1 a lot, and everyone was obsessed with DeepSeek. They earned it. DeepSeek cooked, r1 is an excellent model. Seeing the Chain of Thought was revolutionary. We all learned a lot. It’s still #1 in the app store, there are still hysterical misinformed NYT op-eds and...
2b676b50-0782-4eab-a0fe-89dcd79a63ad
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
I need to understand more about... ... the general take on climate change here. Please read a little more before voting this down - I am not looking to initiate a debate on climate change - merely to understand what goes on when it is mentioned. Disclosure: I am personally concerned about the impact of climate chang...
886cb8bd-774a-400b-91c1-f915189f7c23
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Notifications Received in 30 Minutes of Class Introduction If you are choosing to read this post, you've probably seen the image below depicting all the notifications students received on their phones during one class period. You probably saw it as a retweet of this tweet, or in one of Zvi’s posts. Did you find this d...
9cad0af5-9845-4839-818a-b5ea8720ebbb
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Menstrual cycle effects—Clue study summary and commentary Two months ago, I posted a question asking how LessWrong users optimize their productivity with respect to their menstrual cycle. User AM helpfully pointed me to a 2021 Nature Human Behavior study Daily, weekly, seasonal, and menstrual cycles in women's mood, b...
6fc21455-c8b6-41f5-9b8e-545cc2141943
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Getting GPT-3 to predict Metaculus questions Can GPT-3 predict real world events? To answer this question I had GPT-3 predict the likelihood for every binary question ever resolved on Metaculus. Predicting whether an event is likely or unlikely to occur, often boils down to using common sense. It doesn't take a geniu...
187e5cb4-0964-42d2-9a87-115d4e0da462
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Denver Area LW February Meetup Discussion article for the meetup : Denver Area LW February Meetup WHEN: 07 February 2017 07:00:00PM (-0700) WHERE: 4955 South Ulster Street #103, Denver, CO Darcy's Pub. We should be in the back room. Join us to socialize and discuss Rationalist topics! We usually have semi...
47bce2d6-e871-489a-8192-6ba17af05675
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Strategic Reliablism   Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment by Michael Bishop and J.D. Trout ---------------------------------------- Ch 1. Laying Our Cards on the Table Epistemology as a discipline needs to start offering practical advice for living. Defective epistemologies can compromise one's abil...
f572165a-be79-4037-82d7-911e9d4b022d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Weekly LW Meetups This summary was posted to LW Main on February 17th. The following week's summary is here. The following meetups take place in cities with regular scheduling, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup: * Amsterdam - Meetup #12 ...
2d53c569-f56f-4e64-8585-c9a32ac2a7ad
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Grading my 2020 predictions [Edit: when I copy-pasted from my blog, the colors didn't show up, and I'm not sure how to make them show up; sorry!] In December 2019, I made 132 probabilistic predictions for 2020. As promised, I’ve come back to evaluate them on three criteria: calibration, personal optimism/pessimism, a...
170bfe26-1399-48f9-bad8-569f0c332eb5
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Interviews with 97 AI Researchers: Quantitative Analysis TLDR: Last year, Vael Gates interviewed 97 AI researchers about their perceptions on the future of AI, focusing on risks from advanced AI. Among other questions, researchers were asked about the alignment problem, the problem of instrumental incentives, and thei...
fbdae8c1-baf5-420e-b06f-789de013a0bf
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Checklists Checklists are a rationality technique, mentioned previously on OB. Everyone knows this, but we don't hear about them as often as we should, possibly because they seem prosaic and boring. In the context of doing something over and over, there is a checklist improvement cycle. * You try to make the thing ...
4bc4c915-ce77-4cdf-ad6d-8c522a2f3b3a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Friendliness in Natural Intelligences The challenge of friendliness in Artificial Intelligence is to ensure how a general intelligence will be of utility instead of being destructive or pathologically indifferent to the values of existing individuals or aims and goals of their creation. The current provision of comput...
a8c2a228-83b3-4e44-828e-0eb6685b203f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Why the Problem of the Criterion Matters I think the problem of the criterion is really, really important. So important that I'm willing to risk annoying people by bringing it up all the time. I think it matters because a failure to grok it is at the heart of why we fail to notice we're confused and struggle to become...
39974f2d-df2f-4aae-bed5-f294139019e2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Good luck, Mr. Rationalist Is there any rationalist equivalent of "good luck"? I've tried a few variants, such as "work well", "knock them dead", "we're with you" and certain situation-specific phrasings, but haven't found anything that worked generally - though a hearty "may all the gods of Olympus be with you!" can ...
bdaca0c1-1440-439b-8ac1-fa00dd1573bf
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Detecting Strategic Deception Using Linear Probes Can you tell when an LLM is lying from the activations? Are simple methods good enough? We recently published a paper investigating if linear probes detect when Llama is deceptive. Abstract: > AI models might use deceptive strategies as part of scheming or misaligned...
b43874d1-f68f-466a-99b4-5865578ccca0
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
A Defense of Work on Mathematical AI Safety AI Safety was, a decade ago, nearly synonymous with obscure mathematical investigations of hypothetical agentic systems. Fortunately or unfortunately, this has largely been overtaken by events; the successes of machine learning and the promise, or threat, of large language m...
8c87902f-38d7-4453-b3e5-11a162da6131
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
Multipolar research questions *By Katja Grace, 11 February 2015* The [Multipolar AI workshop](http://aiimpacts.org/event-multipolar-ai-workshop-with-robin-hanson/ "Event: Multipolar AI workshop with Robin Hanson") we ran a fortnight ago went well, and we just put up a [list of research projects](http://aiimpacts.org...
8be56bf3-ff4c-406f-829c-c97614fd15f9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Love is Love, Science is Fake Previously in the sequence: Coupling for Decouplers — Intro Cross-posted from SecondPerson.dating. ---------------------------------------- In my essay on "dating advice", we discussed the dating books full of recipe-like instructions for your romantic life. These recipes don’t really ...
90d6ee71-7971-4b27-a2e3-611a2c59f947
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
GPT-4 and ASCII Images? Does anyone know whether GPT-4 successfully generates ASCII art? GPT-3.5 couldn't: the hell Which makes sense, cause of the whole words-can't-convey-phenomena thing.  I'd expect multimodality to solve this problem, though?
1d11dd8f-ed91-462e-893a-a3ed30067187
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Hilbert's Triumph, Church and Turing's failure, and what it means (Post #2) We've specified what the definition of the Church-Turing Thesis means, though we've really specified 2 Church-Turing Theses, and the purist one is addressed in the 2.5 case, while a modified version handles the 2.6 case. We also specified what...
81f4b14d-c91b-45b6-8400-a914feca6a14
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[SEQ RERUN] The Ultimate Source Today's post, The Ultimate Source was originally published on 15 June 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):   > There is a school of thought in philosophy that says that even if you make a decision, that still isn't enough to conclude that you have free will. You have to have been...
4f68e4ba-4c79-4592-8426-71ebb85e6f8d
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
ML Safety Newsletter #1 Welcome to the 1st issue of the ML Safety Newsletter. In this edition, we cover: * various safety papers submitted to ICLR * results showing that discrete representations can improve robustness * a benchmark which shows larger models are more likely to repeat misinformation * a benchmark for d...
d570ec74-8fa8-43ec-95fe-8819c63c2e74
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
I want to save myself Related to: People who want to save the world  I have recently been diagnosed with cancer, for which I am currently being treated with good prognosis. I've been reevaluating my life plans and priorities in response. To be clear, I estimate that the cancer is responsible for much less than half t...
22adc5bd-723d-4ef5-826d-d5623e219d9b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
"... than average" is (almost) meaningless Recently, I was talking to a friend who hadn't seen me in a while. They mentioned that my hair had grown noticeably, and then asked whether my hair grew fast or slow. I said that my hair growth was probably around average, but upon consideration, I realized that statement was...
05459819-f4e2-4e9b-8d16-54e0b12f92d4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meta-error: I like therefore I am I like Scott’s post on what LessWrong has learned in its lifetime. In general I approve of looking back at your past misunderstandings and errors, and trying to figure out what you did wrong. This is often very hard, because it’s hard to remember or imagine what absurd thoughts (or ab...
265b191b-43e0-4cc0-bbc1-710e461ac65e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Convoy Continued Previously: Convoy, also coverage from weekly post. We continue to have ourselves a convoy, as well as attempts at similar additional convoys elsewhere. We also have some rather startling actions on the part of the Canadian government, which made the ongoing situation impossible to ignore or disenta...
a08b8ad2-39cf-4efa-a7c6-d0b5dcbe25e2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Make Putanumonit Great (for the first time) Good news: 2016 is coming to a close. Bad news: “2016” is an arbitrary construct without causal agency. The decline of civilization is not the calendar’s fault, and it’s unlikely to get any better in 2017. Only one thing is guaranteed to get better in 2017 – this blog. Beca...
6398880f-04e0-4702-9127-8bb3f129b29c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Why do you have a personal rationalist blog instead of using LessWrong? Why don't you cross-post all your relevant blog posts? to those it applies also see: Site Guide: Personal Blogposts vs Frontpage Posts
00858f57-d117-45a3-8de3-53612a581f7e
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
Eli Lifland on Navigating the AI Alignment Landscape Recently I had a conversation with [Eli Lifland](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/elifland) about the AI Alignment landscape. Eli Lifland has been a forecaster at [Samotsvety](https://samotsvety.org/) and has been investigating said landscape. I’ve known E...
16f9f8fc-b17a-4432-b510-0dfacdfd5549
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Alignment Frame/Exercise: Building The Puzzle of Alignment (5-6 min read time without exercise instructions) ***Motivation for post**: Finding a way to map mathematics & areas of academic research to the alignment problem seems to be a core part of theoretical alignment and agent foundations work. Knowing how to fram...
20453a09-e28d-465c-a2b2-98e7b1aa8315
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
On Intentionality, or: Towards a More Inclusive Concept of Lying Intentional actions may be contrasted with unintentional actions, which are generally the result of either instinct or accident. More precisely, we may say that unintentional actions are either the result of some unconscious cognitive process that culmin...
7af727da-8667-4b02-bdb4-05f61d357ba7
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Superintelligence Strategy: A Pragmatic Path to… Doom? I've been reading through this Superintelligence Strategy paper by Dan Hendrycks, Eric Schmidt, and Alexandr Wang. And, to me, it sounds like the authors are calling the current regime (MAIM aka a "Hot War") the "default" (which it probably is, tbh). But, also cal...
d59f9fa8-d47a-4eca-bb72-6052e0015634
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How likely is it that US states or cities will prevent travel across their borders? In contrast to quarantining people who are known to be infected, I want to know how likely it is that, (for instance) California doesn't allow people to enter and/or to leave, across her state borders. Is there any precedent in US his...
aaaf05d2-f2e9-4bab-b0a9-8c798788ff18
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
We're Redwood Research, we do applied alignment research, AMA Redwood Research is a longtermist organization working on AI alignment based in Berkeley, California. We're going to do an AMA this week; we'll answer questions mostly on Wednesday and Thursday this week (6th and 7th of October). Buck Shlegeris, Bill Zito, ...
78b02769-e0dd-4f09-9ea6-2b3f95b5f569
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Chapter 74: SA, Escalation of Conflicts, Pt 9 Harry walked forward a step, then another step, until a sense of unease began to pervade him, a disquiet in his nerves. He said nothing, lifted no hand; the pervading sense of unease would say it for him. From behind the closed door of the office came a whisper, carrying...
72234e29-714c-4eda-9122-b600f033dbf4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Emotional issues often have an immediate payoff 1. It can be extremely valuable to view emotional issues as having an immediate payoff. For example, depression, anxiety, insecurity, failure at work, failure in romance, muscle tension, chronic pain, etc. can help one avoid fears or achieve unconscious goals. 2. But v...
acfc4544-d994-418c-8fd5-0c4f793c0704
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
New tool for exploring EA Forum, LessWrong and Alignment Forum - Tree of Tags ![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/59c771a52ecc271f80e55d4fd0b42c70d9bbe21f29775b63.png)Explore the hidden treasures of the forums ========================================== With this tool you can zoom in on your f...
b795b184-72f5-4e87-a353-e7d0670b9252
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital
Arbital
Ignorance prior An ignorance prior is a a [prior](https://arbital.com/p/1rm) [probability function](https://arbital.com/p/1zj) on some problem of interest, usually with the intended properties of being simple to describe and facilitating good learning from the evidence. A classic example would be the [inductive prior...
5c6ceb2b-dd21-42dc-a756-2171eacbd091
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them > "—but if one hundred thousand [normies] can turn up, to show their support for the [rationalist] community, why can't you?" > > I said wearily, "Because every time I hear the word community, I know I'm being manipulated. If there is such a thing as the [rationalist] community, I'...
019cba27-a0d3-4efa-80c2-8fe4b381e202
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Is there any literature on using socialization for AI alignment? Hello, I was recently thinking about the question of how humans achieve alignment with each other over the course of our lifetime, and how that process could be applied to an AGI. For example, why doesn't everyone shop lift from the grocery store? A ...
34fdd949-969d-456d-abec-7b67ee926506
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The New Riddle of Induction: Neutral and Relative Perspectives on Color Nelson Goodman's "New Riddle of Induction" has previously been discussed on Less Wrong at http://lesswrong.com/lw/8fq/bayes and http://lesswrong.com/lw/mbr/grue . Briefly, this riddle shows that any attempt to make future predictions by generalizi...
8f96407e-ea04-4d63-b0b7-85a5630d83a9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Outline of Metarationality, or much less than you wanted to know about postrationality There was a recent discussion on Facebook that led to an ask for a description of postrationality that isn't framed in terms of how it's different from rationality (or rather perhaps more a challenge that such a thing could not be p...
32148c8e-ce38-4d45-b0b4-e95e14ccc040
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
Rohin Shah: What’s been happening in AI alignment? --- *While we haven’t yet built aligned AI, the field of alignment has steadily gained ground in the past few years, producing many useful outputs. In this talk, Rohin Shah, a sixth-year PhD student at UC Berkeley’s* [*Center for Human-Compatible AI (CHAI)*](https://...
f8f4a101-ac03-4569-b9c3-b4940ca9644b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
If someone you loved was experiencing unremitting suffering (related to a constellation of multi-dimensional factors and processes, those of which include anomalous states of consciousness and an iatrogenic mental health system), what would you think and what would you do? Before I get into this more tangibly, I want ...
368ee749-fe65-41af-ae81-9c05beb066f2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Nature of Offense Recently, an extended discussion has taken place over the fact that a portion of comments here were found to be offensive by some members of this community, while others denied their offensive nature or professed to be puzzled by why they are considered offensive. Several possible explanations fo...
bb7ac402-b4dc-47c9-a443-a54570877ef3
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
A Certain Formalization of Corrigibility Is VNM-Incoherent Edit, 5/16/23: I think this post is beautiful, correct in its narrow technical claims, and practically irrelevant to alignment. This post presents an unrealistic picture of the role of reward functions in reinforcement learning, conflating "utility" with "rewa...
89694476-9a1f-4912-b93f-d8fdf31066af
LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct
LessWrong
"A transcribed excerpt I found interesting from the decision theory outtake from 80,000 Hours' second interview of Paul Christiano (starting at 14:00):Robert Wiblin: It seems like philosophers have not been terribly interested in these heterodox decision theories. They just seem to not have been persuaded, or not even ...
89e7f506-4939-410a-85fe-da5ccb827465
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Four usages of "loss" in AI Summary: What does it mean for a loss function to be "aligned with" human goals? I perceive four different concepts which involve "loss function" in importantly different ways: 1. Physical-loss: The physical implementation of a loss function and the loss computations,  2. Mathematical-lo...
0ffd453f-d90c-4b4f-9fed-5ee68684aa51
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Debtor's Revolt Ben Hoffman describes the transition from a old world order to a debtor-aristocracy world order. Consider a standard microeconomics model, where profits are good and debts represent some loss of that profit in interest; individual actions are taken based on whether they will be return more than th...
185620a9-986a-4e79-887f-56d55cb7268f
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Identifying and Correcting Label Bias in Machine Learning 1 Introduction --------------- Machine learning has become widely adopted in a variety of real-world applications that significantly affect people’s lives (Guimaraes and Tofighi, [2018](#bib.bib25); Guegan and Hassani, [2018](#bib.bib24)). Fairness in these ...
90a2f677-4601-4845-a765-43a4d34b78c4
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Humans Who Are Not Concentrating Are Not General Intelligences Recently, OpenAI came out with a [new language model](https://blog.openai.com/better-language-models/) that automatically synthesizes text, called GPT-2. It’s disturbingly good.  You can see some examples (cherry-picked, by their own admission) in OpenAI...
a7397ce9-d617-4e35-9cf4-d8a15ab69f64
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AISafety.info: What are Inductive Biases? AISafety.info writes AI safety intro content. We'd appreciate any feedback.   The inductive bias of a learning process is its tendency to learn particular kinds of patterns from data. It would help with AI alignment to know which learning processes have inductive biases towa...
5444185e-2eea-4f54-a864-bbf4f4fbc04e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Difficulties of Potential People and Decision Making In connection to existential risk and the utility of bringing future people into being as compared with the utility of protecting those currently alive, I’ve been looking into the issues and paradoxes present in the ethics of potential persons. This has led to a...
d47620e0-23c5-40a9-a133-fe1c35e72065
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[LINK] '3 Secrets of Wise Decision Making' Personal Decision Making (textbook about applied decision-making, for the class I'm taking right now) The reason the book struck me as interesting was the author is employed at the university I'm going to, so if I get stuck its possible I could go and talk to him myself, and...
990c0313-acb3-45d6-82ca-c8fd5d8291c6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
January 2016 Media Thread This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the...
7e91ab80-a25c-49b2-b7f8-26df332810bb
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
VNM expected utility theory: uses, abuses, and interpretation *When interpreted convservatively, the von Neumann-Morgenstern [rationality axioms and utility theorem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Morgenstern_utility_theorem) are an indispensible tool for the normative study of rationality, deserving...
136f3ca0-8a4f-451c-a17e-5121ff7f8b04
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
AISN #23: New OpenAI Models, News from Anthropic, and Representation Engineering 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/subscribe?utm_medium=web&...
83d02242-6b12-454c-9dd8-9dd4ca4d5a6e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
2 of 10, not 3 total There is no rule against commenting more than 3 times in a thread.  Sorry if anyone has gotten this impression. However, among the 10 "Recent Comments" visible in the sidebar at right, usually no more than 2, rarely 3, and never 4, should be yours.  This is meant to ensure no one person dominates...
4345caa8-095f-45c3-bc4e-da0353ff8910
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Why are we sure that AI will "want" something? I have no doubt that AI will some day soon surpass humans in all aspects of reasoning, that is pretty obvious. It is also clear to me that will surpass humans in the ability to do something, should it "want" to do it. And if requested to do something drastic, it can accid...
bfbad9cc-d5c5-45ac-93b7-e28f65f7f7b0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Why Bayes? A Wise Ruling Why is Bayes' Rule useful? Most explanations of Bayes explain the how of Bayes: they take a well-posed mathematical problem and convert given numbers to desired numbers. While Bayes is useful for calculating hard-to-estimate numbers from easy-to-estimate numbers, the quantitative use of Bayes ...
f0e16b7d-81f7-466a-9416-c5a163060978
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Partial Transcript of the Hanson-Yudkowsky June 2011 Debate So I'm currently trying to write an article on the nature of intelligence and the AI FOOM issue. I listened to the live debate between Eliezer Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson they did in June 2011, and thought taken together Eliezer's comments in that debate make ...
40722cf6-5a8f-44ea-8516-d68d1721e1b6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Rolling Thresholds for AGI Scaling Regulation This is a plan for how ASI could be relatively safely developed. Abstract: A plan that puts all frontier model companies on a unified schedule of model training, evaluation and approval, with regulatory compliance promoted through market access. This aims to combine (most...
f61ed5ac-6b45-474f-8cea-d220d9880b8e
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
EfficientZero: human ALE sample-efficiency w/MuZero+self-supervised ["Mastering Atari Games with Limited Data"](https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.00210), Ye et al 2021: > > Reinforcement learning has achieved great success in many applications. However, sample efficiency remains a key challenge, with prominent methods re...
6019f589-d23b-4aed-8bc1-c2f20ab14dfe
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
East Coast Megameetup II: Request for Talks One thing that I'd like to see at the next megameetup is a few informal focused discussions on various topics related to the community, like meditation or diet. People should prepare for them, but I don't think that say, powerpoints would be necessary. Just trying to encour...
1edcd605-1983-41e6-88d4-f3dc520c4658
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
What Was Your Best / Most Successful DALL-E 2 Prompt? Share successful ways the AI was able to generate your image in the most accurate way possible. This could mean certain key phrases you inserted or the way the prompt is constructed from start to finish.
8afd254b-e599-4362-a3f2-b27626c4ce51
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Biosecurity and AI: Risks and Opportunities Recent decades have seen massive amounts of biological and medical data becoming available in digital form. The computerization of lab equipment, digitization of medical records, and advent of cheap DNA sequencing all generate data, which is increasingly collected in large d...
8f902782-b5ff-4036-b3a3-f4194b61784b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Greed Is the Root of This Evil The SGD's greed, to be specific. Consider a ML model being trained end-to-end from initialization to zero loss. Every individual update to its parameters is calculated to move it in the direction of maximal local improvement to its performance. It doesn't take the shortest path from whe...
e02fa728-163e-4919-893d-10e0e44dd08a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Time turners, Energy Conservation and General Relativity This post is a bit of entertainment for scientifically inclined Harry Potter fans. Time turner from the Harry Potter series (and from the Eliezer Yudkowsky's venerable HPMoR fanfic) is a very useful device if you have some unfinished business in the recent past...
aa880d47-defd-4f0e-8aa7-da977f0c2b45
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
Sentience in Machines - How Do We Test for This Objectively? Hello. I'm new here, and this is my first post. The central topic involves the notion of sentience in machines - "Can machines develop Sentience? What does Sentience mean in the context of machines? and How do you reliably test for it?" Last year there wa...
5feb7fb3-2858-4293-9959-36291031ac19
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Reading the ethicists 2: Hunting for AI alignment papers Introduction ============ I'm back, reading more papers in ethics (but now also in philosophy and wherever the citations lead me). Unlike [last time](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/D2biiCrF7E62kDbGA/reading-the-ethicists-a-review-of-articles-on-ai-in-the) when...