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504cc6e7-6f21-456d-9903-803c6a7d0f4a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Expected Utility, Geometric Utility, and Other Equivalent Representations
In Scott Garrabrant's excellent Geometric Rationality sequence, he points out an equivalence between modelling an agent as
* Maximizing the expected logarithm of some quantity V, E[ln(V)]
* Maximizing the geometric expectation of V, G[V]
And... |
794a6c1d-5fb1-4d0d-a58e-4c870fd7d286 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | The Orthogonality Thesis is Not Obviously True
(Crosspost of [this](https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-orthogonality-thesis-is-not-obviously) on my blog).
*The basic case*
================
> If you really accept the practical version of the Orthogonality Thesis, then it seems to me that you can’t regard educati... |
e78c6396-885a-48bb-a544-e84143ec11d0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | LessWrong Now Has Dark Mode
One of the more commonly requested features on LessWrong is a dark mode. Well, now we have it! To activate, hover over the user-menu in the top right, open the Themes submenu, and click on Dark Mode there.
Notes:
* This feature is beta, by which I mean there may be aesthetic problems, es... |
e6a8cd31-cb99-48d9-9499-ea3ff654ef41 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Some survey results!
*By Katja Grace, 8 June 2017*
We put the main results of [our survey](http://aiimpacts.org/2016-expert-survey-on-progress-in-ai/) of machine learning researchers on AI timelines online recently—see **[here](https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.08807)** for the paper.
Apologies for the delay—we are tryin... |
8df7861a-b8e3-4996-b73c-db889b25733f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Prediction: The Defense Department Will Blame Trump for the Slow Response on Jan. 7, 2021
Context
Recently a rioting group of protestors attacked congress after attending a presidential speech. The members from both parties and the senate narrowly escaped. One capitol policeman and one protestor were killed. After bei... |
d6add8e9-65e1-43c3-af79-fc9c0bf9c1b7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Do you like excessive sugar?
In "Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximisers", Eliezer Yudkowsky writes:
"Fifty thousand years ago, the taste buds of Homo sapiens directed their bearers to the scarcest, most critical food resources—sugar and fat. Calories, in a word. Today, the context of a taste bud's function has ... |
484d4ae8-825b-4726-8c11-33be8e04c0e8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Formalized math: dream vs reality
(Disclaimer: this post is intended as an enthusiastic introduction to a topic I knew absolutely nothing about till yesterday. Correct me harshly as needed.)
We programmers like to instantly pigeonhole problems as "trivial" and "impossible". The AI-Box has been proposed as candidate f... |
b9917864-2f20-46dc-ab20-e7a945d0853f | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | [AN #162]: Foundation models: a paradigm shift within AI
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](h... |
1513a7eb-d94f-418d-b6b5-97b6ef1597eb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Chronic perfectionism through the eyes of school reports
A short post for a short thought. I was sifting through old school reports, and there's only one comment which is repeated in pretty much every report from 3 years old all the way through to 16.
3 years old: "Has a hard time dealing with disappointments. Tends ... |
7041d0fd-9493-4139-9d5a-9e70a6efeb49 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | AI Alignment: A Comprehensive Survey
We have just released an academic survey of AI alignment.
We identify four main categories of alignment research:
1. Learning from feedback (e.g. scalable oversight)
2. Learning under distribution shift
3. Assurance (e.g. interpretability)
4. Governance
We mainly focused on acad... |
a8e81c60-2ccb-4576-b113-25c2125a9683 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Stanovich on CEV
[Keith Stanovich](http://web.mac.com/kstanovich/Site/Home.html) is a leading expert on the cogsci of rationality, but he also also written on a problem related to CEV, that of the "rational integration" of our preferences. Here he is on pages 81-86 of *[Rationality and the Reflective Mind](http://www.... |
be20d147-2f95-4bf2-b703-d55b3a6bd94f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Costs of Reliability
A question that used to puzzle me is “Why can people be so much better at doing a thing for fun, or to help their friends and family, than they are at doing the exact same thing as a job?”
I’ve seen it in myself and I’ve seen it in others. People can be hugely more productive, creative, intel... |
4d9b3596-4c16-4e9f-abc1-d6b612f418cc | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | Understanding Recommenders..
[](/@lukethorburn?source=collection_home---------0----------------------------)[Luke Thorburn](/@lukethorburn?source=collection_home---------0----------------------------)[·May 7](/understanding-rec... |
a2665580-0def-4372-95ab-aff1697be97f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Lens That Sees Its Flaws
Light leaves the Sun and strikes your shoelaces and bounces off; some photons enter the pupils of your eyes and strike your retina; the energy of the photons triggers neural impulses; the neural impulses are transmitted to the visual-processing areas of the brain; and there the optical inf... |
f57a82b2-8fe2-47a8-8570-9fb31f965d0c | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | what happens when you die?
what happens when you die?
--------------------------
contrary to popular (secular) belief, i don't believe nothing happens.
considering that [you are your information system](you-are-your-information-system.html) and [nothing else](persistent-data-structures-consciousness.html), any fut... |
80fa7416-9428-4de2-9d6f-e8b08365c2cf | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Weekly LW Meetups
This summary was posted to LW Main on December 9th. The following week's summary is here.
Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:
* [Amsterdam] Meetup #8 - Reversed stupidity is not intelligence: 11 December 2016 03:11PM
* Munich: 10 December 2016 04:00PM
* [Zurich] Decembe... |
629608a2-b65f-43d4-8b0e-f8a7d62421e7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Beware Isolated Demands For Rigor
I.
From Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self by John Perry:
> "There is something about practical things that knocks us off our philosophical high horses. Perhaps Heraclitus really thought he couldn’t step in the same river twice. Perhaps he even received tenure for that contri... |
5c995e04-8ce5-4456-8ebd-4b8f6c1f10d6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Productivity: Working towards a summary of what we know
Epistemic effort
* Spent 20-30 hours researching what we know about productivity. About an hour a day for two weeks, plus a few more days where I dedicated more than an hour to studying productivity.
* Skimmed through the entire archives of Cal Newport's blog (... |
fb43acc9-3627-4dd2-84a7-e8039ed83771 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Exploratory] Seperate exploratory writing from public writing
Disclaimer: This is an exploratory writing post. No checking for typos or other editing was done.
It seems that when I am writing, I basically almost always wirte for myself. This is fast and easy. I do find it useful to do this, for generating and fleshi... |
0039dffc-ff05-49ad-b957-9815d65f0650 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AI #24: Week of the Podcast
In addition to all the written developments, this was a banner week for podcasts.
I would highlight four to consider listening to.
1. Dario Amodei of Anthropic went on The Lunar Society to talk to Dwarkesh Patel. We got our best insight so far into where Dario’s head is at, Dwarkesh is e... |
d92b7e04-004f-4955-b2f3-7dc269e21e9e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Science-informed normativity
The debate over moral realism is often framed in terms of a binary question: are there ever objective facts about what’s moral to do in a given situation? The broader question of normative realism is also framed in a similar way: are there ever objective facts about what’s rational to do i... |
b2425db4-d96d-4119-8776-50212835d9ef | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Flowchart: How might rogue AIs defeat all humans?
Epistemic status: I put this together for myself mostly off the top of my head without carefully cross-referencing other sources. I'm hoping to flesh this out a lot more and do a much more thorough research job of it at some point, but in the meantime I've decided to e... |
551fadca-4212-49c4-a8f9-9a23d9fc4bbc | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Guesstimate Algorithm for Medical Research
This document is aimed at subcontractors doing medical research for me. I am sharing it in the hope it is more broadly useful, but have made no attempts to make it more widely accessible.
Intro
Guesstimate is a tool I have found quite useful in my work, especially in makin... |
3ec526d8-7646-4ff1-bd7d-85426ba59635 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The value of Now.
I am an easily bored Omega-level being, and I want to play a game with you.
I am going to offer you two choices.
Choice 1: You spend the next thousand years in horrific torture, after which I restore your local universe to precisely the state it is in now (wiping your memory in the process), and h... |
928d0269-6a8f-4faf-ba00-d4a783cf223a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A summary of aligning narrowly superhuman models
This post was written under Evan Hubinger’s direct guidance and mentorship, as a part of the Stanford Existential Risks Institute ML Alignment Theory Scholars (MATS) program. Where not indicated, ideas are summaries of the documents mentioned, not original contributions... |
c95331f6-22bd-4d88-a718-530f4c2b9459 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Values, Valence, and Alignment
I have previously advocated for finding a mathematically precise theory for formally approaching AI alignment. Most recently I couched this in terms of predictive coding and longer ago I was thinking in terms of a formalized phenomenology, but further discussions have helped me realize t... |
5f12f4d3-465f-48f9-9326-54d1559edd13 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Altruist Support] LW Go Foom
In which I worry that the Less Wrong project might go horribly right. This post belongs to my Altruist Support sequence.
Every project needs a risk assessment.
There's a feeling, just bubbling under the surface here at Less Wrong, that we're just playing at rationality. It's rationalit... |
448d9630-eddd-4326-8644-fe06a334cdb5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Intelligence in Commitment Races
A distillation of my understanding of the commitment races problem.
Greaser Courage
It's 1950 and you're a greaser in a greaser gang. Recreationally, you're driving your heavy American cars (without seatbelts) at each other at speed, and seeing who swerves first. Whoever swerves firs... |
32b28f21-9b71-4d54-99d4-aa24b4c177d1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Benefits of Distillation in Research
Epistemic status: I wrote this six months ago, but I never felt satisfied with it, so I kind of forgot about it. At this point, I'll just release it. It is similar to Chris Olah's article on research debt, but it has a different perspective on presenting the mechanisms.
(The ... |
f73c21b1-9ae4-4b99-84df-c751acbbb597 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | AGI safety from first principles
*In [this report](https://www.alignmentforum.org/s/mzgtmmTKKn5MuCzFJ) (which I'm linking from the Alignment Forum) I have attempted to put together the most compelling case for why the development of AGI might pose an existential threat. It stems from my dissatisfaction with existing a... |
9ddeafb1-6a06-4082-8e0c-a2128b3c906b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Melting democracy
Liquid democracy, also known as delegative democracy, is a proposed hybrid between direct democracy and representative democracy. In liquid democracy, as in direct democracy, everyone is able to vote directly on every issue. Of course, in a modern society it’d be prohibitively time-consuming for ever... |
3ec74705-a4ae-42b8-8d55-1654d2edfd97 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | [AN #173] Recent language model results from DeepMind
HIGHLIGHTS
[Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gopher](https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/research/language-research/Training%20Gopher.pdf) *(Jack W. Rae et al)* (summarized by Rohin): This paper details the training of... |
b1ccba05-cd4a-469a-b48b-79ad729f3b6e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open Thread, Aug. 22 - 28, 2016
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 list-of-threads page before posting.)
3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
4. Unflag the tw... |
ab16dcc0-1a75-4f58-906f-d94d09f9da60 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How do health systems work in adequate worlds?
I'm confused about Health Systems in general, the same way I was confused about the Education System until I read "The case against education". I don't have a good model of what are the different agents interacting in this system, nor the differences among different count... |
c2d110fb-9c06-4823-8a9a-c83e07ce5394 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The "Outside the Box" Box
Whenever someone exhorts you to "think outside the box", they usually, for your convenience, point out exactly where "outside the box" is located. Isn't it funny how nonconformists all dress the same...
In Artificial Intelligence, everyone outside the field has a cached result for brilliant... |
366e1a23-95ae-4b11-b985-f53c4304e75d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | High school advice
What advice does the Lesswrong community have in general for high school students who stumbled on this community?
Looking for all types of responses, it's fine whether your response is focused on achieving something in the AI/effective altruism/rationality community, or whether it is focused on a ... |
d569b053-c030-4de0-b12f-955e2f454d83 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Affordance Widths
This article was originally a post on my tumblr. I'm in the process of moving most of these kinds of thoughts and discussions here.
----------------------------------------
Okay. There’s a social interaction concept that I’ve tried to convey multiple times in multiple conversations, so I’m going to... |
5c4409fc-baa8-4225-a285-3174aad9548d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AI Alignment Research Overview (by Jacob Steinhardt)
I'm really excited to see someone outline all the work they think needs solving in AI alignment - to describe what the problem looks like, what a solution looks like, and what work has been done so far. Especially from Jacob, who is a coauthor of the Concrete Proble... |
08857be5-ca69-4f4f-8bde-021b59cd748a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Disagreeables and Assessors: Two Intellectual Archetypes
Epistemic status: uncertain. I removed most weasel words for clarity, but that doesn't mean I'm very confident. Don’t take this too literally. I'd love to see a cluster analysis to see if there's actually a trend, this is a rough guess.[1] I'm interested in feed... |
f3d326d9-6c63-4cec-b84f-2f6adac0c3d6 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info | AI Safety Info | Wouldn't a superintelligence be smart enough to know right from wrong?
As far as we know, morality is a human construct - the universe itself does not encode morality in the laws of physics. There is no good reason to expect an arbitrary mind, which could be very different from our own, to share our values. A sufficie... |
f95b1620-eec0-4a70-ad52-1b724d6e9968 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | An open response to Wittkotter and Yampolskiy
A response to this paper.
https://asi-safety-lab.com/DL/Kill-Switch-For_ASI_EW_21_12_14.pdf
A substantial fraction of my argument comes down to. It is plausible that a hypothetical hypercompetent civilization could coordinate to build such infrastructure. However we don'... |
5f1659a6-29c2-4946-9779-9e283dc06e22 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Reframing the burden of proof: Companies should prove that models are safe (rather than expecting auditors to prove that models are dangerous)
Evaluations of large language models (“model evals”) are one of the most commonly discussed AI governance ideas. The idea is relatively straightforward: we want to be able to u... |
fd2433cf-d7b4-438f-bf6e-8bdb683f4638 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What are the most interesting / challenging evals (for humans) available?
I want to build a nice testing ground for human rationality (that is to say, solving arbitrary complex problems in different domains using limited information and time)
This would be a lot of annoying work to assemble, but (un)fortunately there... |
7062cc9c-ec90-4cb6-a3c1-508fdc9a8020 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Elevator pitches/responses for rationality / AI
I'm trying to develop a large set of elevator pitches / elevator responses for the two major topics of LW: rationality and AI.
An elevator pitch lasts 20-60 seconds, and is not necessarily prompted by anything, or at most is prompted by something very vague like "So, I ... |
0db6b2af-c2a1-4d14-9731-375c792d329a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Bird-eye view visualization of LLM activations
I’m starting to learn about mechanistic interpretability, and I’m seeing lots of great visualizations of transformer internals, but somehow I’ve never seen the whole large model’s internal state shown at once, on one image.
So I made this visualization, for Llama-2-7B. A... |
f92dc122-637c-41ab-921e-bbf6faf4ce94 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Respecting your Local Preferences
In this post, I give a application of geometric rationality to a toy version of a real problem.
A Conflicted Agent
Let's say you are an agent with two partially conflicting goals. Part of you wants to play a video game, and part of you wants to save the world and tile the multiverse... |
a8daae64-4228-4bdf-8c72-e546f07d3761 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Parable of the vanilla ice cream curse (and how it would prevent a car from starting!)
Story from https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wkw/humour/carproblems.txt (my thoughts follow):
> For those of us who understand that the obvious is not
> always the solution, and that the facts, no matter how implausible,
> are still the fact... |
fe7d4019-1ad3-42d3-a5b2-5dc9af42ffed | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | TopicTitle'); DROP TABLE Users EXCEPT (AdeleneDawner OR Kevin); --
--; |
356c3886-6b22-4e37-9a6b-020a5623a298 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Ignorance in parenting
Followup to: Strategic ignorance and plausible deniability
My in-law always says: "For children it is easier be forgiven then to get permission."
EDIT: This post is superseeded by my Book Review: Kazdin's The Everyday Parenting Toolkit I recommend reading only that. The remaining insight of t... |
04fe48d4-bcd0-4855-b9d7-ec7c5df99449 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Mutually exclusive and exhaustive
A set of propositions is "mutually exclusive and exhaustive" when exactly one of the propositions must be true. For example, of the two propositions "The sky is blue" and "It is not the case that the sky is blue", exactly one of those must be the case. Therefore, the [probabilities]... |
68d5b8cf-1a72-4307-8d74-e428f6f9ad6c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Incremental AI Risks from Proxy-Simulations
Abstract: Numerical simulations are versatile predictive tools that permit explorations of complex systems. The ability of LLM agents to simulate real-world scenarios will expand the AI risk landscape. In the proxy-simulation threat model, a user (or a deceptively aligned AI... |
fa511064-ef8e-4e54-80cf-8c6b4d051e72 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Torturing people for fun
Most of the usual thought experiments that justify expected utilitarialism trade off fun for fun, or suffering for suffering. Here's a situation which mixes the two. You are offered to press a button that will select a random person (not you) and torture them for a month. In return the machine... |
fe3f06f3-4649-4463-9701-66fc16fdf0b6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Understandable vs justifiable vs useful
This is a quickly written post, just sharing a rough conceptual distinction that I’ve found useful in everyday life and that I think others might find useful too.
Your boss just expected you to stay late yesterday. Your partner just shot you a pretty damn sharp comment. Someone... |
3f8409ff-b462-4e31-9d89-30549eb89976 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Meetup #6 - Still Amsterdam!
Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup #6 - Still Amsterdam!
WHEN: 13 November 2016 03:10:00PM (+0100)
WHERE: Meester Treublaan 18, 1097 DP Amsterdam, Netherlands
Ready for another meetup? Last time was a terrific success, so we want to build on that (also EAGx Oxford is in... |
fca21ddd-a1f4-4722-a58d-c66e86d89caa | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How to think about and deal with OpenAI
Eliezer Yudkowsky writes on twitter:
> Nothing else Elon Musk has done can possibly make up for how hard the "OpenAI" launch trashed humanity's chances of survival; previously there was a nascent spirit of cooperation, which Elon completely blew up to try to make it all be abou... |
77bf1772-01f1-42ee-80a9-6f557cddaa42 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Yann LeCun on AGI and AI Safety
Yann recently gave a presentation at MIT on Objective-Driven AI with his specific proposal being based upon a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture.
He claims that his proposal will make AI safe and steerable, so I thought it was worthwhile copying the slides at the end which provide... |
e47ed19f-f39d-4331-bbdd-e995877d4365 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Robustness & Evolution [MLAISU W02]
Welcome to this week’s ML Safety Report where we talk about robustness in machine learning and the human-AI dichotomy. Stay until the end to check out several amazing competitions you can participate in today.
Watch this week's MLAISU on [YouTube](https://youtu.be/bT0VD0lGO_Q) or l... |
fc6cba07-917a-4be0-b8dd-2638c8d44df3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Could Patent-Trolling delay AI timelines?
The US patent system is broadly considered to be broken, and patent-trolls make a healthy profit abusing it. Agressively pursuing and enforcing software patents does not strike me as a sufficient or desirable means to delaying AI timelines, but I can imagine it as tool in a sl... |
676b2105-1cbb-42b5-8af9-c2813c63b5f8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Newcomblike problems are the norm
This is crossposted from my blog. In this post, I discuss how Newcomblike situations are common among humans in the real world. The intended audience of my blog is wider than the readerbase of LW, so the tone might seem a bit off. Nevertheless, the points made here are likely new to m... |
61987c73-6f90-450a-b414-5995fd88abb4 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | AI Timelines: Where the Arguments, and the "Experts," Stand
*Audio also available by searching Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts, etc. for "Cold Takes Audio"*
[Today’s world
Transformative AI
Digital people
World of
Misaligned AI
World run by
Something else
or
or
Stable, galaxy-wide
civilizati... |
b230616c-6e9e-4af1-9b59-a353b4a446e5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : UMD Meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : UMD Meetup
WHEN: 05 October 2011 04:00:00PM (-0400)
WHERE: University of Maryland
We're meeting in Terrapin Room B of the Student Involvement Suite in STAMP.
Discussion article for the meetup : UMD Meetup |
f6484413-2988-450b-aa74-393ddd58c450 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open thread, January 25- February 1
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here. |
a89dae02-1a3e-4644-9b3b-0666869982a1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Which Issues in Conceptual Alignment have been Formalised or Observed (or not)?
One aspect of alignment research I find interesting is improving how we understand potential threat / failure modes by making them more concrete or rigorous in some way. When I think of making these concrete, I’m thinking of theoretical re... |
07a91b8e-c84e-40c0-b1d7-50b4cb761889 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Making Exceptions to General Rules
Suppose you make a general rule, ie. "I won't eat any cookies". Then you encounter a situation that legitimately feels exceptional , "These are generally considered the best cookies in the entire state". This tends to make people torn between two threads of reasoning:
1) Clearly the... |
753ae6ab-cd9b-41a7-a8a1-c1ba3e6a7194 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | New article from Oren Etzioni
(Cross-posted from EA Forum.)
This just appeared in this week’s MIT Technology Review: Oren Etzioni, “How to know if AI is about to destroy civilization.” Etzioni is a noted skeptic of AI risk. Here are some things I jotted down:
Etzioni’s key points / arguments:
* Warning signs that ... |
598951f6-6c7d-4977-9af5-5699bbdfcfdd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Linkpost] 7 Swedish Words to Import
|
a8ff7c72-e33a-4815-a815-f94cc2819b97 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Crafting Polysemantic Transformer Benchmarks with Known Circuits
Notes:
* This research was performed as part of Adrià Garriga-Alonso’s MATS 6.0 stream.
* If an opinion is stated in this post saying that "we" hold the opinion, assume it's Evan's opinion (Adrià is taking a well-deserved vacation at the time of writ... |
396c3392-391b-4915-98aa-2ea38fb30b61 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Self-Modification of Policy and Utility Function in Rational Agents
1 Introduction
---------------
Agents that are part of the environment they interact with
may have the opportunity to self-modify.
For example, humans can in principle modify the circuitry
of their own brains, even though we currently lack the
tech... |
c4319d1a-9dde-4e0e-877a-85f335f549a9 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | Transhumanist FAQ 3.0
Transhumanist FAQ
=================
The Transhumanist FAQ was developed in the mid-1990s and in 1998 became a formal FAQ through the inspirational work of transhumanists, including Alexander Chislenko, Max More, Anders Sandberg, Natasha Vita-More, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Arjen Kamphius, and many othe... |
3c45bd75-1e0b-4775-a366-12b6f7224f73 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Room For More Funding In AI Safety Is Highly Uncertain
(Crossposted to the Effective Altruism Forum)
----------------------------------------
Introduction
In effective altruism, people talk about the room for more funding (RFMF) of various organizations. RFMF is simply the maximum amount of money which can be donat... |
fbaf8ee6-2759-4b8c-8dbb-9badc5a7ee1e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Announcing ILIAD2: ODYSSEY
We are pleased to announce ILIAD2: ODYSSEY—a 5-day conference bringing together 100+ researchers to build scientific foundations for AI alignment. This is the 2nd iteration of ILIAD, which was first held in the summer of 2024.
***Apply to attend by June 1!***
* When: Aug 25-29, 2025
* W... |
2b31afde-40a9-46d8-a67e-ac9e3563858e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Is there a tradeoff between immediate and longer-term AI safety efforts?
Something I [often](https://www.wired.com/2017/02/ai-threat-isnt-skynet-end-middle-class/) [hear](http://uk.businessinsider.com/killer-robots-biases-artificial-intelligence-ai-2017-10?r=US&IR=T) in the machine learning community and media article... |
80964a4c-eb7c-48a4-a08e-7389b3190f6d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Leopold Model: Analysis and Reactions
Previously: On the Podcast, Quotes from the Paper
This is a post in three parts.
The first part is my attempt to condense Leopold Aschenbrenner’s paper and model into its load bearing elements and core logic and dependencies.
Two versions here, a long version that attempts ... |
9d9207df-a7ea-4048-b7fd-a87e502c71ce | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | When are the most important times to wash your hands?
I set a five minute timer to brainstorm some, but I bet that there are many that I've missed, and furthermore, it would be helpful to know which ones are most important / impactful.
* I'm about to eat food
* After I go to the bathroom
* After I touch a package
... |
b8e33684-fd83-4903-9a41-5575e533412c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | aspirational leadership
Crossposted from my blog.
I’m going to first describe a leader’s responsibility to their team because I don’t think it’s possible to develop good principles for working and communicating effectively with individuals without understanding the broader environment that the leader-individual relat... |
53669d54-bf69-4b38-8e63-3f026622005f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Short Intro to Humans
A Preface to Intro to Humans
I used to understand humans. We were God's avatars on earth, sent to witness His Glory and enjoy His Grace - maybe up to a measurment error. Than God died, leaving some huge holes in my worldview. To address one of these holes I bought an Introduction to Psychology... |
4b44ff66-7001-4b0e-8f8d-d4a855b58723 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | A philosopher's critique of RLHF
In the spring, I went to a talk with Brian Christian at Yale. He talked about his book, *The Alignment Problem*, and then there was an audience Q&A. There was a really remarkable question in that Q&A, which I have transcribed here. It came from the Yale philosophy professor [L.A. Paul]... |
2f5cd046-dca6-44dd-8034-3d99f35e59ea | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Begging, Pleading AI Orgs to Comment on NIST AI Risk Management Framework
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is seeking public comment until April 29 on its [Draft AI Risk Management Framework](https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/2022/03/17/AI-RMF-1stdraft.pdf). NIST will produce a seco... |
6d71d2a6-4bc0-428e-91cf-f4c97c03db64 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Group Rationality Diary, February 2017
This is the public group rationality diary for February, 2017. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:
* Established a useful new habit
* Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief
* Decided ... |
5ef331e1-6f99-40de-9326-51133013bee9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Only humans can have human values
Ethics is not geometry
Western philosophy began at about the same time as Western geometry; and if you read Plato you'll see that he, and many philosophers after him, took geometry as a model for philosophy.
In geometry, you operate on timeless propositions with mathematical operato... |
306f5a95-3517-49de-b35b-f25589dbfaaa | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Asking for online resources why AI now is near AGI
How many percentage of ability are AI at current compared to the ability required for human-like intelligence? I heard some people in EA think it's already more than 50%, which shocked me a lot.
I'm an definitely AI outsider, I can't imagine how AI conductsvhard tasks... |
cca1e4ff-f3df-4002-aaa3-e4d0a4d8d330 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What should a telic science look like?
A brief (re-)introduction
In case you don't want to read introductory post of this sequence, here is a quick recap of the broad context for this work. This post will try to clarify my objectives, and the next one will start to provide some concrete formalisms.
When we want to un... |
e31210d4-0f33-4607-b04d-d7ca6487ee5d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Hiroshima Day
On August 6th, in 1945, the world saw the first use of atomic weapons against human targets. On this day 63 years ago, humanity lost its nuclear virginity. Until the end of time we will be a species that has used fission bombs in anger.
Time has passed, and we still haven't blown up our world, despite... |
400c37dd-7211-4b20-868d-4417725a3d28 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How hard is it to disguise my gait?
Gait recognition technology ( = identifying a person by the way they walk) is getting good, and I find this trend unnerving.
Current context: It's already deployed in China by a company called Watrix, which claims 94% accuracy up to 50 meters away from any angle. Japan, the US, an... |
60ba0c45-b8f4-4be8-8949-9256d91d8c3e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | From "Coulda" and "Woulda" to "Shoulda": Predicting Decisions to Minimize Regret for Partially Rational Agents
TRIGGER WARNING: PHILOSOPHY. All those who believe in truly rigorous, scientifically-grounded reasoning should RUN AWAY VERY QUICKLY.
Abstract: Human beings want to make rational decisions, but their decisi... |
bebbcc32-9941-4eb7-a3cc-a99907864348 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | AI Safety: Applying to Graduate Studies
**Acknowledgements**
--------------------
A huge thank you to Stephen Casper, Rachel Freedman, Lewis Hammond, and Pablo Moreno for taking the time to join our panel and answer questions!
**Introduction**
----------------
On November 7, 2021, [AI Safety Support](https://www.ai... |
99f07298-4260-4119-9637-b60b195212a5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | FW25 Color Stats
We’ve been here before. I’ve posted about color trends in fashion in 2023, twice in 2024, and now I’m doing it again.
Methodology Recap
Fashion operates on a seasonal cycle; designer ready-to-wear fall/winter collections are released in the spring (so stores have time to buy them). Vogue Magazine ki... |
ded489cc-d251-4d11-8bc9-78ed60b38253 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is there any metric measuring ~"proportion of people creating extra value"?
Imagine a simplified model of the world, where the population suddenly increases by 1000 individuals. Of these newcomers, perhaps 50 will become policemen to ensure safety, 30 will serve as doctors to maintain health, 25 will take on roles as ... |
b73ef26b-bc98-4cdf-a004-b0666970d0f3 | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | ""Why do humans reason" (PDF), a paper by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, reviewing an impressive amount of research with a lot of overlap with themes previously explored on Less Wrong, suggests that our collective efforts in "refining the art of human rationality" may ultimately be more successful than most individual e... |
4dfc67f1-f472-4c66-a0cc-dd5fde073ab3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How big of an issue are patent trolls to the average startup?
There are many individual stories about patent trolls being problematic, but I have a hard time estimating how big of an effect their activity happens to be overall. Can someone point me to guide analysis of the problem overall that estimates their impact? |
cd3452ba-6bab-4f94-87eb-ce19abac643b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Natural language alignment
I think a potentially promising and undertheorized approach to AI safety, especially in short timelines, is natural language alignment (NLA), a form of AI-assisted alignment in which we leverage the model’s rich understanding of human language to help it develop and pursue a safe[1] notion o... |
4179c313-82fb-4d6a-8620-e190ca164ea7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Flexibility of Abstract Concepts
I can discuss Daoist ideas with Taiwanese friends easily even if they have no background in Daoism. But when I try the same thing with white people it often feels as if I'm trying to explain quantum field theory to someone who has never heard of mathematics. It is easier for me to ... |
01d39b83-b955-4cb9-9af9-98654bb597fa | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | When do utility functions constrain?
The Problem
This post is an exploration of a very simple worry about the concept of utility maximisers - that they seem capable of explaining any exhibited behaviour. It is one that has, in different ways, has been brought up many times before. Rohin Shah, for example, complained ... |
211e8423-b910-4868-8e73-e3872bf53d60 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Weekly LW Meetups: Baltimore, Houston, Chicago, Melbourne, and Penn State
There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:
* Baltimore meetup: 01 October 2011 02:00PM
* Houston Meetup - Saturday, October 1: 01 October 2011 03:00PM
* Chicago Meetup: 02 October 2011 03:00PM
* Pittsburgh Meetup: 05 Oc... |
0a236e2a-0960-42bb-82c6-33f4f9020ce0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Welcome to Columbus SSC Meetup [Edit With Your Details]
(The following are our suggestions for what kind of information is best to include in the welcome post of your group, feel free to replace them with whatever you think is best)
What kind of events does your group usually run? What does it usually do?
How freque... |
687c11da-2b5b-46f3-b101-72681013f209 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Learning to Play No-Press Diplomacy with Best Response Policy Iteration
###
1 Introduction
Artificial Intelligence methods have achieved exceptionally strong competitive play in board games such as Go, Chess, Shogi [[108](#bib.bib108), [110](#bib.bib110), [109](#bib.bib109)], Hex [[2](#bib.bib2)], Poker [[85](#bib... |
0196fafd-68bc-414f-bc3f-c7443e58a283 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Link] 'Something feels wrong with the state of philosophy today.'
http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=6424
Some interesting thoughts on the current state of philosophy, and Less Wrong gets cited a couple of times.
> Something feels wrong with the state of philosophy today. From whence hast this sense of ill-bodi... |
3bfb6ee5-8840-4e85-a270-015c428988d6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Moscow LW lecture centre meetup: The New Foundation
Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow LW lecture centre meetup: The New Foundation
WHEN: 25 January 2015 02:00:00PM (+0300)
WHERE: Moscow, Mitnaya, 52
Welcome to the first meetup of Moscow LW lecture centre (don't mix up with LW club, which meets in ... |
1829e234-1137-4d68-ae63-3e0e2686f5d7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Oops It's Time To Overthrow the Organizer Day!
Summary: Sometimes, your regular organizer catches the pandemic, or moves to the bay, or has a newborn, or does a bunch of sketchy stuff, or just doesn’t have time anymore. If the usual organizers suddenly weren’t around, would your community be able to keep going?
Tags... |
424e998f-254d-4acf-ac14-127c4ef08822 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Acausal Now: We could totally acausally bargain with aliens at our current tech level if desired
tl;dr. Weird forms of cooperation become humanly possible with the correct mechanisms. It might be interesting to try them out for practice/research purposes, even if there is not much to gain directly from aliens.
Note: ... |
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