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c95f61d7-f8d9-4755-92c1-4e81412631c6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [AN #69] Stuart Russell's new book on why we need to replace the standard model of AI
Find all Alignment Newsletter resources here. In particular, you can sign up, or look through this spreadsheet of all summaries that have ever been in the newsletter. I'm always happy to hear feedback; you can send it to me by replyi... |
91917dc6-38e1-4c3f-8b00-eac8e5899a90 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The affect heuristic and studying autocracies
General Juan Velasco Alvarado was the military dictator of Peru from 1968 to 1975. In 1964-5 he put down revolutionary peasant guerilla movements, defending an unequal and brutally exploitative pattern of land ownership. Afterward he became frustrated with the bickering an... |
f910b043-702f-4891-805a-2d21b1934a37 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The call of the void
Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/the-call-of-the-void
L'appel du vide - The call of the void.
When you are standing on the balcony of a tall building, looking down at the ground and on some track your brain says "what would it feel like to jump". When you are holding a kitchen knife think... |
58af1931-e7cf-4a9d-bdf5-2f004d22724a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | App idea to help with reading STEM textbooks (feedback request)
Problem: STEM textbooks often reference figures and equations from earlier in the textbook. They usually do this with statements like "the shearing stress τ... may be obtained from the shearing-stress-strain diagram of Fig. 3.30." But Fig. 3.30 might be f... |
098031b0-cc54-44c0-9aab-706b6411aadd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Link] Intro to causal inference by Michael Nielsen (2012)
This is a link post for Michael Nielsen's "If correlation doesn’t imply causation, then what does?" (2012).
I want to highlight the post for a few reasons:
(1) it is a well-written introduction by an experienced science communicator — Michael is an author of... |
57a251bd-f688-48d4-8183-4ea0e5145b05 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Against Cryonics & For Cost-Effective Charity
Related To: You Only Live Twice, Normal Cryonics, Abnormal Cryonics, The Threat Of Cryonics, Doing your good deed for the day, Missed opportunities for doing well by doing good
Summary: Many Less Wrong posters are interested in advocating for cryonics. While signing up fo... |
b227a77d-c4ad-4d5f-883a-1fe240bf6f8f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Different location for Berkeley meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : Different location for Berkeley meetup
WHEN: 17 October 2012 07:00:00PM (-0700)
WHERE: 2128 Oxford St, Berkeley, CA
Today Zendo and I are unavailable. Several people on the mailing list have suggested that people meet at the Starbuc... |
d00bcf66-6360-48be-8a72-c025ce414cf1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Decent plan prize announcement (1 paragraph, $1k)
Edit Jan 20: Winner & highlights
Say I'm about to do a real big training run on playing video games, predicting text, predicting physics, writing code that works, etc etc. Say I've got a real good neural net architecture and a whole lot of flops. Say I'm a company and... |
b5522b28-cea5-42fb-a2c2-6fe0410277a6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A very non-technical explanation of the basics of infra-Bayesianism
Introduction
As a response to John Wentworth's public request, I try to explain the basic structure of infra-Bayesian decision-making in a nutshell. Be warned that I significantly simplify some things, but I hope it gives roughly the right picture.
T... |
a25e82a2-77f3-4080-9b72-628a6dc42be1 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | What achievements have people claimed will be warning signs for AGI?
In MIRI's March newsletter, they link [this post](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615264/artificial-intelligence-destroy-civilization-canaries-robot-overlords-take-over-world-ai/) which argues against the importance of AI safety because we haven't... |
3f8f2365-44a2-401e-a0c8-5af946c6d7a8 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Engineering Monosemanticity in Toy Models
Overview
========
In some neural networks, individual neurons correspond to natural "features" in the input. Such *monosemantic* neurons are much easier to interpret, because in a sense they only do one thing. By contrast, some neurons are *polysemantic*, meaning that they fi... |
8cb00231-f092-477e-bbad-65a43e799653 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Vancouver meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver meetup
WHEN: 06 August 2011 03:00:00PM (-0700)
WHERE: Waves Coffee House, 100-900 Howe St. Vancouver, BC V6Z 2M4
Last Sunday's first Vancouver rationalist meetup was great! Seven people turned up and we talked about the Singularity, Bitcoin, sea... |
9bc46f27-1dcf-413e-9820-e9cc263a583a | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | APS: Active Pretraining with Successor Features.
1 Introduction
---------------
Figure 1:
Median of human normalized score on the 26 Atari games considered by Kaiser et al. ([2020](... |
abe5510c-dfbf-4cff-a9de-99c9f1666719 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Is Global Reinforcement Learning (RL) a Fantasy?
In general, the idea of ensuring AI safety is great (I do a lot of work on that myself), but I have a problem with people asking for donations so they can battle ***nonexistent*** threats from AI.
Many people are selling horror stories about the terrible things that c... |
ac0f32b1-9adb-41b8-83ed-9b85b75e5746 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Link] Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models
New LM scaling paper from DeepMind (abs, pdf).
Abstract (my emphasis):
> We investigate the optimal model size and number of tokens for training a transformer language model under a given compute budget. We find that current large language models are significan... |
06914242-2f70-42d8-b8b8-2e6a5634949c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Genetically edited mosquitoes haven't scaled yet. Why?
A post on difficulty of eliminating malaria using gene drives: "I worked on gene drives for a number of years jointly as a member of George Church and Flaminia Catteruccia’s labs at Harvard. Most of my effort was spent primarily on an idea for an evolutionary stab... |
e86966aa-f740-4b96-9fed-89f092ddcd7c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | New, improved multiple-choice TruthfulQA
TLDR:
There is a potential issue with the multiple-choice versions of our TruthfulQA benchmark (a test of truthfulness in LLMs), which could lead to inflated model scores. This issue was analyzed by a helpful post by Alex Turner (@TurnTrout). We created a new multiple-choice ve... |
c30220aa-6fbe-42ec-9030-5cd4d98f9f71 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What Do GDP Growth Curves Really Mean?
> Gross domestic product (GDP) is a monetary measure of the market value of all the final goods and services produced in a specific time period. - Wikipedia, GDP
> Due to inflation, GDP increases and does not actually reflect the true growth in an economy. That is why the GDP... |
28458f1c-19a0-481c-bc17-a52821e2b6b0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Humans are very reliable agents
This post has been recorded as part of the LessWrong Curated Podcast, and an be listened to on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Libsyn.
----------------------------------------
Over the last few years, deep-learning-based AI has progressed extremely rapidly in fields like natural language... |
b6f02479-fcd2-457c-a024-b74ad2641298 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Raising children on the eve of AI
Cross-posted with light edits from Otherwise.
I think of us in some kind of twilight world as transformative AI looks more likely: things are about to change, and I don’t know if it’s about to get a lot darker or a lot brighter.
Increasingly this makes me wonder how I should be r... |
c39c15ed-caa3-4e14-a246-069184fa4239 | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | "Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier discovered that breathing (respiration) and fire (combustion) operated on the same principle. It was one of the most startling unifications in the history of science, for it brought together the mundane realm of matter and the sacred realm of life, which humans had divided into separate ma... |
3d361d22-6b2a-4d3f-b8a0-62388a744add | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Wanted: backup plans for "seed AI turns out to be easy"
Earlier, I argued that instead of working on FAI, a better strategy is to pursue an upload or IA based Singularity. In response to this, some argue that we still need to work on FAI/CEV, because what if it turns out that seed AI is much easier than brain emulatio... |
27fe09ff-0d59-4138-90ac-b17762d716ce | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Ten Causes of Mazedom
We continue answering the questions we asked earlier. It was claimed last time that maze levels and the danger of mazes was lower in the past than it is now, and that overall maze levels have been rising, as measured both by maze levels within organizations across the board, and maze levels withi... |
e4b14beb-16f1-4bf0-8ca7-c12554e870e0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [AN #154]: What economic growth theory has to say about transformative AI
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 summaries that have ever been i... |
0123250d-267d-4bad-8d2c-34bef51e3847 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A dialog with the axiom of choice
preliminary remark: the axiom of choice ( Auswahlaxiom in Germany) can be formulated this way:
For all sets M there is a selection function, that assigns for all elements of the power set P(M) exept ∅ an element of the corresponding subset of M.
It is assumed to be true in many area... |
ccf206c5-1eba-4782-ad71-621083d2c374 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Software engineering - Career review
Summary
=======
Software engineering could be a great option for having a direct impact on the world’s most pressing problems, particularly in AI safety, but also in biosecurity and across other cause areas. This will probably be more impactful than earning to give.
As [with oper... |
f8065609-c990-485f-8c13-a61ee0ace465 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | X-Risk Roll Call
I'm working on a substantial research piece concerned with x-risk, and a sub-task of that involves compiling a list of important people in the field along with a brief summary of their education and relevant links. I realized that such a list might be a useful bit of meta-scholarship on its own, so ... |
2345f633-0c4d-40eb-862d-436b8a2be3a2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Predictive history classes
Epistemic status: serious proposal with known difficulties and problems
Why do we study history? There are many potential reasons. More specifically, why do we teach history to everyone going to school? Many reasons become less relevant to those other than historians or history teachers.
T... |
4815570e-89c8-49f4-b55d-ba0784e2bda8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Washington DC fun and games meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC fun and games meetup
WHEN: 15 December 2013 03:00:00PM (-0500)
WHERE: National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC 20001, USA
We'll be meeting to hang out and play games.
Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC fu... |
99ed3c23-8326-420c-b769-ba15cef6dc5d | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Why we need a *theory* of human values
There have been multiple *practical* suggestions for methods about how we should extract the values of a given human. Here are four common classes of such methods:
* Methods that put high weight on human (bounded) quasi-rationality, or revealed preferences. For example, we can ... |
f5ac3353-16c5-4710-9667-0bce82bc7af6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Universals of Morality: Toward Human-Centric Communication Platforms
Each person alone is powerless, a fleshy mammal that would typically die from the elements. Networked together into factions, we devise ways to benefit “us” or defeat “them”.
Social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Tik-Tok have brought this hum... |
e32afd9c-fb3a-453e-a214-12088c6242c8 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Aligning an AGI adds significant development time
# Definition
The votable proposition is true if, comparing reasonably attainable development paths for...
- **Project Path 1: An [aligned](https://arbital.com/p/2v) [advanced AI](https://arbital.com/p/7g1) created by a responsible project** that is hurrying where it... |
21a70389-69ff-4a0d-a876-12a2d105f179 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Skepticism towards claims about the views of powerful institutions
Introduction: some contemporary AI governance context
It’s a confusing time in AI governance. Several countries’ governments recently changed hands. DeepSeek and other technical developments have called into question certain assumptions about the strat... |
30d0d25b-101f-4b05-9653-926625aa5b37 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Parental Writing Selection Bias
In general I'd like to see a lot more of people writing about their failures in addition to their successes. If a bunch of people all try a thing and have mixed results, and only the people with good results write about it, people who don't know about this selection bias or don't realiz... |
7521070f-425c-4cf7-9d60-96f8e588b9de | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Local Explanations for Reinforcement Learning
1 Introduction
---------------
Deep reinforcement learning has seen stupendous success over the last decade with superhuman performance in games such as Go [[40](#bib.bib40)], Chess [[41](#bib.bib41)] as well as Atari benchmarks [[31](#bib.bib31)]. With increasing super... |
1ad7410c-d9e6-4ea3-beb6-b16c9fe0b878 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Another "Oops" moment [link]
http://www.thebigquestions.com/2011/10/04/big-news/
Steven Landsburg notes that mathematician Edward Nelson has retracted his claim that the axioms of Peano Arithmetic are inconsistent.
The bit Landsburg cites indicates that the retraction was cordial and drama-free, the way a retraction... |
14f5378c-8744-4d83-96d3-e4387436d670 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Deceptive AI vs. shifting instrumental incentives
Epistemic status: I have only read a small part of the literature on deceptive alignment, and I'm guessing all of this has been discussed many times. Hence me asking this in the form of a question: Is this a useful framing, is it substantively different than the usual ... |
4c60c97d-ea00-49fd-a527-69c4a2fe84b1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : October Rationality Dojo - Non-Violent Communication
Discussion article for the meetup : October Rationality Dojo - Non-Violent Communication
WHEN: 05 October 2014 03:30:00PM (+0800)
WHERE: Ross House Association, 247-251 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
[ATTN: Please remember the new location for the dojos: the J... |
230d5686-fe20-4f0d-a458-2f6feff26a5c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why do so many things break in a 2 element set?
The math jargon for a set where you can implement a 4 function calculator (\(+,-,*,/\)) is a field. Fields can have a finite number of elements, and such fields always have a prime power number of elements, aka \(p^k\) where \(p\) is prime and \(k\) is a natural number.
... |
f5505d6a-f761-4069-9d5d-dcd63f73183e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How AI Will Change Education
Education in the US is a big big deal. It takes up 18-30 years of our lives, employs over 10% of our workforce, and is responsible for 60% of non-mortgage/non-car debt. Even a minor improvement to education could be a big deal.
Education is also something that has changed massively in rec... |
608bab93-cf98-4a71-92d9-79c0f56ee643 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Extropy magazine review
I've been reading extropy magazine(a pioneering futuristic publication in the 90s), some topics like decentralized payment systems are no longer as innovative as they were back then. but I discovered several interesting articles:
A)In one of his rare fiction texts we have a fake advertisement... |
30d6094c-acca-45a3-ba47-9bf6b90f779b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Can we always assign, and make sense of, subjective probabilities?
Epistemic status: I wrote this post quickly, and largely to solicit feedback on the claims I make in it. This is because (a) I’m not sure about these claims (or how I’ve explained them), and (b) the question of what I should believe on this topic seems... |
7e4774d0-9b44-41fc-8f38-4e28637809a7 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Qualities that alignment mentors value in junior researchers
*This work was performed as a contractor for SERI MATS, but the views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the organization.*
I recently conducted interviews with 7 current/former [SERI MATS](https://serimats.org) mentors. One of... |
c77e56ee-2be8-41b1-8823-821c0b40849b | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Systems that cannot be unsafe cannot be safe
***Epistemic Status:** Trying to clarify a confusion people outside of the AI safety community seem to have about what safety means for AI systems.*
In engineering and design, there is a process that includes, among other stages, specification, creation, verification and v... |
563d91b3-1b65-49e0-9271-21ec618b2172 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | July 2016 Newsletter
| |
| --- |
|
**Research updates**
* A new paper: “[A Formal Solution to the Grain of Truth Problem](https://intelligence.org/2016/06/30/grain-of-truth/).” The paper was presented at UAI-16, and describes the first general reduction of game-theoretic reasoning to expected utility maximization.
... |
64d72c5a-48cc-47e6-b428-8d85e52d675f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Coupling for Decouplers
Previously in sequence: Moonlight Reflected
Cross-posted from SecondPerson.dating
----------------------------------------
Rationalism has a dating problem. I don’t mean simply the fact that a lot of rationalists are single, which may be adequately explained by age, sex ratio, and an unusual... |
a1b1309d-002a-411d-941c-b3252bf88c1c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Three enigmas at the heart of our reasoning
Financial status: This is independent research supported by a grant. I welcome additional support.
Epistemic status: Reflections from personal experience.
Outline
What can we ultimately trust as a foundation for our reasoning?
As we go about our lives, we often trust r... |
a0b34b18-4a73-4052-bc0a-384c3bf554a6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Pros and Cons of Being Among Your Tribe
I recently attended the rationalist conference, LessOnline. I wanted to document some of the experience, and found myself bifurcating my emotional reactions. The conference itself was wonderful, with great people, food, and venue, but there were pros and cons to going. Thoug... |
2c5b4cc7-f3ea-4c18-a281-6244e93ff687 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How do autistic people learn how to read people's emotions?
From my understanding, people on the autism spectrum have difficulty reading people's emotions and general social cues. I'm curious how these people develop these skills and what one can do to improve them. I ask this as a matter of personal interest; while I... |
bfa2dff0-2058-410d-b8b0-6f494b09d774 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AGI Safety FAQ / all-dumb-questions-allowed thread
While reading Eliezer's recent AGI Ruin post, I noticed that while I had several points I wanted to ask about, I was reluctant to actually ask them for a number of reasons:
* I have a very conflict-avoidant personality and I don't want to risk Eliezer or someone els... |
e33f6cce-cf7e-4811-8b77-687dd8e786db | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | GreaterWrong—even more new features & enhancements
(Previous posts: [1], [2], [3])
GreaterWrong.com has recently added a number of new features and UI enhancements, especially to the mobile version of the site:
Private messaging
You can now send and receive private messages.
To send a PM, click on a user’s name, t... |
8177eacc-fc9a-41f0-af77-67f71cc3053a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Bullying the Integers
So, the FBI allegedly arranged for a number of backdoors to be built into the OpenBSD IPSEC stack. I don't really know how credible this claim is, but it sparked a discussion in my office about digital security, and encryption in general. One of my colleagues said something to the effect of it ... |
4ef4d8e4-f0b8-45d4-9793-5e478fad24b8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Mentorship, Management, and Mysterious Old Wizards
Followup to Dealing with Network Constraints
Epistemic Status: I spent some time trying to check if Mysterious Old Wizards were important, and reality did not clearly tell me one way or another. But, I still believe it and frequently reference it and figured I should... |
f1c1726e-3168-4c6a-b3c4-f58175955d26 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Large language models learn to represent the world
There's a nice recent paper whose authors did the following:
1. train a small GPT model on lists of moves from Othello games;
2. verify that it seems to have learned (in some sense) to play Othello, at least to the extent of almost always making legal moves;
3. us... |
789f8b7e-abf5-4dec-9682-5ce2524dc3bf | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] How to Seem (and Be) Deep
Today's post, How to Seem (and Be) Deep was originally published on 14 October 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> To seem deep, find coherent but unusual beliefs, and concentrate on explaining them well. To be deep, you actually have to think for yourself.
Discuss the ... |
0dab65b2-2853-4c3a-987c-00fbb23d38ac | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : LW Scotland October Meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : LW Scotland October Meetup
WHEN: 11 October 2015 02:00:00PM (+0100)
WHERE: 8 Clifton Terrace, Edinburgh, EH12 5DR
As usual, this is a static copy of the canonical details, available here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1667702333459781/
-----... |
80d88f60-c62a-4b16-9bf4-5faa41082bb6 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Alignment being impossible might be better than it being really difficult
*Epistemic status: Thinking out loud.*
***TL;DR:** If alignment is just really difficult (or impossible for humanity), we might end up with an unaligned superintelligence which itself solves the alignment problem, gaining exponentially more pow... |
ec931de5-caa8-4a00-af1b-ac49450b7c6f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Rationalist (well, skeptic, at least) webcomic.
Mystery Solved is more or less a webcomic about a gentleman adventurer/debunker.
I came across it earlier today and I figured some here might be amused. |
ad863ba4-57f0-4974-a414-46fa319f627c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | BOUNTY AVAILABLE: AI ethicists, what are your object-level arguments against AI notkilleveryoneism?
I am prepared to pay out anywhere between $20 and $100 to AI ethicists of the DAIR/"Stochastic Parrots" school of thought if they provide their object-level arguments against the idea that preventing AI from killing eve... |
9095c74f-12fa-4ac9-9565-4d87e1a980a7 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Neurosymbolic AI: The 3rd Wave
1 Introduction
---------------
Over the past decade, Artificial Intelligence and in particular deep learning have attracted media attention, have become the focus of increasingly large research endeavors, and have changed businesses. This led to influential debates on the impact of AI... |
27a5ee63-b5c6-4733-a825-bdc73ce4a03a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Reminder: Oslo Lesswrong meetup...
... is happening 17:00 local time today at the UiO Science library.
There will be cookies and popcorn, and those other reasons for attending a meetup.
If enough of the people who turn up are interested, this may become an annual, monthly, or even weekly event.
Current topics we... |
3bec79b8-2930-4ad8-b417-4a83943db242 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Alignment Faking Revisited: Improved Classifiers and Open Source Extensions
In this post, we present a replication and extension of an alignment faking model organism:
* Replication: We replicate the alignment faking (AF) paper and release our code.
* Classifier Improvements: We significantly improve the precision ... |
21d37418-c692-4431-a288-1c49b0353884 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | My choice of AI misalignment introduction for a general audience
I found this old video from Tom Scott and it seems like a rather good short dystopian introduction into the potential dangers of misalignment. Unlike other beginner resources, it makes no attempts as to explain technical terms or to give a comprehensive ... |
d9c7c6c6-45aa-4638-aa3d-f5eac2115ebe | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Learning-Intentions vs Doing-Intentions
Epistemic Status: In truth, only a slight repackaging of familiar ideas with a new handle I’ve found myself wanting. See The Lean Startup and Riskiest Assumption Testing for other resources.
Suppose you are Bob Steele, structural engineer extraordinaire, and you’ve recently co... |
50f6316d-5a2c-4df4-ba83-7daf9df9f15b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Could Anything Be Right?
Years ago, Eliezer1999 was convinced that he knew nothing about morality.
For all he knew, morality could require the extermination of the human species; and if so he saw no virtue in taking a stand against morality, because he thought that, by definition, if he postulated that moral fact, th... |
293bc97a-7473-4af4-baaf-2d50519abfa7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Are we "being poisoned"?
I would like to revisit some of the concepts Scott explored in his 2020 article "For, Then Against, High-Saturated-Fat Diets". I'm hoping someone will have some novel/updated insights or new research to share concerning the impacts of the Western diet on health in 2025.
I'm about to turn 32,... |
5751d0a4-2b68-425f-9634-9087575ab928 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The despair of normative realism bot
(Cross-posted from Hands and Cities)
This post is about a certain type of normative realism, and a related type of despair (I don’t think “despair” is quite the right word, but I haven’t found a better one). My aim is to question an assumption underlying this realism and this desp... |
64c21168-1cd6-46dd-bc6b-b34dbb28fe54 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Apply to the second ML for Alignment Bootcamp (MLAB 2) in Berkeley [Aug 15 - Fri Sept 2]
Redwood Research is running another iteration of MLAB, our bootcamp aimed at helping people who are interested in AI alignment learn about machine learning, with a focus on ML skills and concepts that are relevant to doing the kin... |
8edffe9c-989f-4af5-ae96-df22fc22a62d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Aiming at the Target
Today's post, Aiming at the Target was originally published on 26 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> When you make plans, you are trying to steer the future into regions higher in your preference ordering.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the... |
019577eb-5e8d-46af-be59-38e03bd9d879 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | [Linkpost] Treacherous turns in the wild
Mesa-optimizers potentially escape behavioral adversarial training by realizing they're being tested, gaming the test, then defecting when they're deployed. Luke Muelhauser recounts an example of such a treacherous turn in the wild.
Most relevant quote:
>
> As part of a p... |
b13694c1-a874-45ea-852f-9f33285cded1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Anticorrelated Noise Injection for Improved Generalization
Just a study I saw on /r/MachineLearning: link.
Basically, one way of training neural networks is to add random noise during the training. Usually, the noise that gets added is independent between the training steps, but in the paper they make it negatively c... |
307c21cf-71da-4e31-8668-7cf9c27ac023 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Longtermism vs short-termism for personal life extension
Created: 2021-07-15 | Updated: 2021-07-16 | Acknowledgement for feedback: Emanuele Ascani, Haydn Thomas-Rose | x-post: LessDead
By short-termism, I basically mean a method of analysis where one assumes the world stays the same. With longtermism, indirect effect... |
7457bb7b-b03e-4246-8929-4c2e0020d66e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Probabilistic Logic <=> Oracles?
Epistemic status: this is a draft I wrote at the end of MATS that I decided to make public in case that people with more experience with this machinery wanted to give constructive feedback. Is very unpolished!!! And likely quite very wrong in some cases / makes false claims (if you ca... |
c5700504-e7ae-47b4-83f5-5db5828c5da6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | how should a second version of "rationality: A to Z" look like?
It's been ten years now since the completion of the sequences by Eliezer, it seems like a good time to look back and rethink a bit.
Eliezer himself said that he did many things wrong, and that the book could be much better.
So, if we made a second versi... |
49a0a7fa-399c-45ed-a3cf-e6fa21c40259 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Redefining Tolerance: Beyond Popper's Paradox
Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance, often concisely stated as "if a society is tolerant without limits, it will eventually be destroyed by the intolerant; therefore, we have a right to be intolerant of the intolerant", is paradoxically being used to destroy tolerance, in d... |
da899a1e-2822-4692-9547-36d2bb8aad64 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Link] Physcists say they can encode magnetic data using heat pulses
http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-02-physicists-magnetic-breakthrough.html
Anyone have a strong opinion on this one? thanks :) |
7dc47e76-8a6c-4d15-9560-299738b360b9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Much Better Life?
(Response to: You cannot be mistaken about (not) wanting to wirehead, Welcome to Heaven)
The Omega Corporation
Internal Memorandum
To: Omega, CEO
From: Gamma, Vice President, Hedonic Maximization
Sir, this concerns the newest product of our Hedonic Maximization Department, the Much-Better-Life Si... |
9c7c5d47-b08a-46c0-adbb-e07ba4442b4a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Memory Improvement: Mnemonics, Tools, or Books on the Topic?
I want a perfect eidetic memory.
Unfortunately, such things don't exist, but that's not stopping me from getting as close as possible. It seems as if the popular solutions are spaced repetition and memory palaces. So let's talk about those.
Memory Palaces... |
4ac9c823-3ad6-4ad4-8817-3c923f3d0d74 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Thyroid Madness : Core Argument, Evidence, Probabilities and Predictions
I've made a couple of recent posts about hypothyroidism:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/nbm/thyroid_hormones_chronic_fatigue_and_fibromyalgia/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/n8u/a_medical_mystery_thyroid_hormones_chronic/
It appears that many of those wh... |
249430b7-e6d2-48db-8df6-6d576411e323 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Can we model technological singularity as the phase transition?
Introduction
Technological singularity is quite similar to what happens with the system near the phase transition. If it is indeed the case and the underlying mechanisms behind singularity allow the same form of the mathematical description as underlyin... |
1961e5e2-931d-435b-903b-64d31b13f510 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Suppose $1 billion is given to AI Safety. How should it be spent?
What are the current bottlenecks in AI Safety progress, and if they were solved with money, what would be the next bottlenecks?
Do current researchers need more money? Do we need to catalyze the creation of more researchers? Do we need to alter public... |
c72e2541-4759-408a-95a7-da2ec530fc77 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | We need a new philosophy of progress
We live in an age that has lost its optimism. Polls show that people think the world is getting worse, not better. Children fear dying from environmental catastrophe before they reach old age. Technologists are as likely to be told that they are ruining society as that they are bet... |
38a12bdd-dba9-40e3-be02-d987eec5ca11 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | HPMOR Wrap Parties: Resources, Information and Discussion
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality - Wrap Party Summary Thread
As many of you probably read on the HPMOR author's note last month, I am the coordinator of the HPMOR Wrap parties. Many of you have reached out to me, I put hundreds of you into contact wi... |
628e80bd-53dd-4544-9e2e-7d1878ac8407 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open thread, Nov. 7 - Nov. 13, 2016
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... |
ba3b9111-d5de-4bac-8882-f177c7c08241 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Alignment Newsletter #20
This week's newsletter is pretty light, I didn't find much. On one of the two days I checked, Arxiv Sanity had no recommendations for me at all, when usually it has over five.
Highlights
Large-Scale Study of Curiosity-Driven Learning (Yuri Burda, Harri Edwards, Deepak Pathak et al): One majo... |
ed7d3a24-2736-4e32-9acb-c8456e8afcf3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Who is this MSRayne person anyway?
I've been on this site as a lurker for a few years now, and started interacting more heavily the past month or so. I've been reluctant to engage much, because, to be honest, I'm a very unusual person - even by the standards of LessWrong - and I don't feel like I fit in or have any id... |
281a3bf1-3a3c-4c3b-9f82-9ae6180006f7 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | The Quantization Model of Neural Scaling
1 Introduction
---------------
In the aggregate, larger neural networks trained on more data perform better than smaller neural networks trained on less data, in a predictable way. Across a range of studies, mean test loss has been observed to decrease as a power law in both... |
49e2de6c-362b-40ba-a623-6fd23b1ea1e9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Weekly LW Meetups
This summary was posted to LW Main on October 16th. The following week's summary is here.
New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in:
* Lund: 19 October 2015 06:00PM
* Suzhou Meet-up: 28 October 2015 07:35PM
Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking pla... |
7c647a7f-654d-4050-9b76-8d70ed914ab7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Paper: Testing ecological models
You may be interested in a paper of medium age I just read. Testing ecological models: the meaning of validation (PDF) tackles a problem many of you are familiar with in a slightly different context.
To entice you to read it, here are some quotes from its descriptions of other papers:... |
1ab307ac-a3a8-460d-be70-436b70194611 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Universality Unwrapped
**Introduction**
================
Informally, a universal system is universal with respect to any computation; and it is a universal system with respect to a given computation if it understands every set of beliefs that can be ascribed to the computation. The intuition is that the system can re... |
066a1881-c5b1-420d-ad68-d33296613bf1 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | before the sharp left turn: what wins first?
before the sharp left turn: what wins first?
--------------------------------------------
let's say that we have an AI [implementing](clarifying-formal-alignment-implementation.html) a [formal goal](formal-alignment.html) such as [QACI](narrative-explanation-qaci.html). h... |
11837537-a293-4f81-bccd-bc5ec80e2868 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How useful is "AI Control" as a framing on AI X-Risk?
Redwood (where Ryan works) recently released a series of blogposts proposing a research agenda for reducing AI-risk that focuses on ensuring safety (and secondarily usefulness) under the conservative assumption that AIs are misaligned and actively scheming against ... |
ceaab64c-d666-415b-a2e6-95737ef78ade | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Personal Development System: Winning Repeatedly and Growing Effectively With The BIG4
“Goals are for people who care about winning once. Systems are for people who care about winning repeatedly.”
—James Clear
James Clear eloquently highlights the power of systems, primarily focusing on habits. However, this perspec... |
1f747233-1db2-474b-85b9-7c7b8de7b2e8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why are there no interesting (1D, 2-state) quantum cellular automata?
You know elementary cellular automata, where each of the boolean-valued cells evolves according to
x(k)t+1=f(x(k−1)t,x(k)t,x(k+1)t)
where f:{0,1}3→{0,1}.
I think the natural quantum-mechanical extension of this is:
* there are 2(N := tape size)... |
18eecf04-5e7d-404b-8797-9bdc24b441bd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Selective regularization for alignment-focused representation engineering
We study how selective regularization during training can guide neural networks to develop predictable, interpretable latent spaces with alignment applications in mind. Using color as a test domain, we observe that anchoring even a single concep... |
218add07-52a6-4f6c-93c4-90abd9795d52 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Agentic Misalignment: How LLMs Could be Insider Threats
Highlights
* We stress-tested 16 leading models from multiple developers in hypothetical corporate environments to identify potentially risky agentic behaviors before they cause real harm. In the scenarios, we allowed models to autonomously send emails and acces... |
20feef1c-0ddd-4daf-9f04-d3998534368d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [LINK] Cryo Comic
This is the obligatory post of the recent xkcd comic:
http://xkcd.com/989/ |
b7f1e32d-eeeb-4aef-afc3-a45858e80a95 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | ALBA: An explicit proposal for aligned AI
In this post I propose an explicit procedure for aligning powerful learning systems with their users’ interests. The goal is to introduce minimal overhead or additional complexity, yet to [safely scale up to extremely powerful systems](https://medium.com/ai-control/scalable-ai... |
ec0df2a5-ac54-4009-80a0-572b563de398 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Importance of Ideas and People We Disagree With
True Diversity as Source of Innovation and Resilience
It's important to have true diversity among people. For there to be people who vehemently disagree with you, your methods, your ways, your goals. And you actually want that! Mere tolerance of them is not realising it... |
c15c2409-d7ec-43dc-a372-2754bcb8885e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Those of you with lots of meditation experience: How did it influence your understanding of philosophy of mind and topics such as qualia?
This post is inspired by the post "Why it's so hard to talk about Consciousness" by Rafael Harth. In that post, Harth says that the people who participate in debates about conscious... |
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