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d065c64e-9c14-4b72-9005-4fccf36d1ecb
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
I changed my mind about orca intelligence Follow up to: My previous posts on orca intelligence. TLDR: I now think it’s <1% likely that average orcas are >=+6std intelligent. (I now think the relevant question is rather whether orcas might be >=+4std intelligent, since that might be enough for superhuman wisdom and t...
a64dd93a-f0be-402b-b75d-138f70b4df2f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Politics and the English Language Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Politics and the English Language WHEN: 16 February 2014 02:00:00PM (-0600) WHERE: 40.109545,-88.2273 Read this: https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm And then show up and discuss it. D...
1872624d-6e7b-4b92-a959-f93b9d8c4cb8
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Interpretable Latent Spaces for Learning from Demonstration 1 Introduction --------------- We want our autonomous robots to be competent across broad domains. Ideally, they must be able to cope with the open world, i.e., one where it may not be possible to provide a complete specification of the task up front. Thus...
35336c34-6f46-4ada-8679-f55eb409aa6a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Vancouver Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver WHEN: 27 September 2012 06:00:00PM (-0700) WHERE: 885 west georgia vancouver Last meetup was fun, it's almost time for the next! Meet us in the lobby of 885 west georgia at 18:00 on thursday. Better to be early than late. We go upstairs at about 18:3...
23a925bf-b73d-47d7-86d2-4b35be05553c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Price Of Space Is Friendship It's an exciting time in the history of human exploration. We're only just beginning to probe outside our biosphere. Low-orbit, long-term space inhabitation like that seen on the ISS has been the norm for many years now. As of the time of writing, 7 people were in space. Our long term ...
4ef1c229-5f1f-45b1-a04a-ea8bce517008
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[LINK] 52 Concepts To Add To Your Cognitive Toolkit Excellent list by Brenton Mayer and Peter McIntyre: http://mcntyr.com/52-concepts-cognitive-toolkit/ I think the list can also serve as a useful index and/or introduction to a lot of LessWrong concepts. A note of caution: I find that brief lists like this can actua...
91130618-f62a-40f9-a14f-c12367f7eca1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Love and Rationality: Less Wrongers on OKCupid Last month, Will_Newsome started a thread about OKCupid, one of the major players among online dating sites--especially for the young-and-nerdy set, given their mathematical approach to matching. He opened it up for individual profile evaluation, which occurred, but so di...
50566cd5-db1b-4ce9-929a-a08232165ba5
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Path Independent Equilibrium Models Can Better Exploit Test-Time Computation. 1 Introduction --------------- One of the main challenges limiting the practical applicability of modern deep learning systems is the ability to generalize outside the training distribution (Koh et al., [2021](#bib.bib24)). One particular...
b374e73f-5beb-427b-84aa-8af94901235b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Weekly LW Meetups: Austin, Brussels, Montreal, Pittsburgh, St. Louis This summary was posted to LW main on Nov 23rd. The following week's summary post is here. There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in: * Brussels meetup: 24 November 2012 01:00PM * (St. Louis MO) Psycology of memorization, Thi...
4a9b8861-9e00-4e0d-a326-a7e76e34319c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Classifying representations of sparse autoencoders (SAEs) Produced as part of the SERI ML Alignment Theory Scholars Program - Autumn 2023 Cohort, under the mentorship of Dan Hendrycks There was recently some work on sparse autoencoding of hidden LLM representation.  I checked if these sparse representations are bett...
034f54a4-a41f-496a-a90d-172faf46d9b2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
On Privilege The forum has been very much focused on AI safety for some time now, thought I'd post something different for a change. Privilege. Here I define Privilege as an advantage over others that is invisible to the beholder. [EDIT: thanks to JenniferRM for pointing out that "beholder" is a wrong word.] This may...
210fe4f1-6d54-4780-9195-abd478f0bce1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Durham HPMoR Discussion, chapters 24-26 Discussion article for the meetup : Durham HPMoR Discussion, chapters 24-26 WHEN: 29 December 2012 11:00:00AM (-0500) WHERE: 2706 Durham-Chapel Hill Boulevard, Durham, NC 27707 HPMoR discussion meetup. We'll be talking about chapters 24-26; come join us! Please feel...
6270d88a-d06a-4f44-8cc4-a6bc3c65c161
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
"Personal Identity and Uploading", by Mark Walker “Personal Identity and Uploading”, Mark Walker is the next JET paper. Abstract: > Objections to uploading may be parsed into substrate issues, dealing with the computer platform of upload and personal identity. This paper argues that the personal identity issues of up...
29930f2e-8048-49ea-ab94-6d2089097058
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Brain-inspired AGI and the "lifetime anchor" Last year Ajeya Cotra published a [draft report on AI timelines](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KrJfoZzpSDpnrv9va/draft-report-on-ai-timelines). (See also: [summary and commentary by Holden Karnofsky](https://www.cold-takes.com/forecasting-transformative-ai-the-biological-...
3aa42ee2-9137-48a9-84df-edc1f9f88802
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
My Fundamental Question About Omega Omega has appeared to us inside of puzzles, games, and questions. The basic concept behind Omega is that it is (a) a perfect predictor and (b) not malevolent. The practical implications behind these points are that (a) it doesn't make mistakes and (b) you can trust its motives in th...
c161ff16-738c-4939-bc82-7cab77157baa
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How to make TensorFlow run faster I quickly put this together for a fellow AI alignment researcher/engineer, so I thought I'd share it here. The main recommendations are from Intel: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/maximize-tensorflow-performance-on-cpu-considerations-and-recommendations-for-inference I imp...
d83e3f62-9b21-432d-837e-f4abfa404a4d
awestover/filtering-for-misalignment
Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results
id: post1928 (Last revised: July 2024. See changelog at the bottom.) 14.1 Post summary / Table of contents Part of the “Intro to brain-like-AGI safety” post series . Post #12 suggested two paths forward for solving “the alignment problem” for brain-like AGI , which I called “Social-instinct AGI” and “Controlled AGI”. ...
b0556b7d-c090-41fb-b52e-56b820bee3d9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A Rationality Condition for CDT Is That It Equal EDT (Part 1) [Epistemic Status: this series of two posts gives some arguments which, in my eyes, make it difficult to maintain a position other than CDT=EDT, but not impossible. As I explain at the end of the second post, it is still quite tenable to suppose that CDT an...
c7bf2bfe-f7ca-41cd-b4c7-d3150eb7daef
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Adversarial attacks and optimal control Meta: After a fun little motivating section, this post goes deep into the mathematical weeds. This thing aims to explore the mathematical properties of adversarial attacks from first principles. Perhaps other people are not as confused about this point as I was, but hopefully, t...
16b32947-ee28-4f19-abeb-a04fd282b9e0
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Learning Normativity: A Research Agenda *(Related to* [*Inaccessible Information*](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/ZyWyAJbedvEgRT2uF/inaccessible-information)*,* [*Learning the Prior*](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/SL9mKhgdmDKXmxwE4/learning-the-prior)*, and* [*Better Priors as a Safety Problem*](https://w...
0b51f1dd-3751-4fb4-b440-f0ea2cc0e6a5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Are there more than 12 paths to Superintelligence? Has anyone seen a more detailed AI endgame scenario tree than this? Interesting part after 13:05.
862ab8e5-bd97-44ee-85c7-d298aa1f49d7
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
Is there a news-tracker about GPT-4? Why has everything become so silent about it? Probably the latter question is an obvious bias based on my own media consumption, but even when trying my best internet-search efforts, I have a hard time finding anything interesting about GPT-4 (a name people seem to use for a new ge...
67ce780e-a6b6-487a-b652-0c9f3ff11795
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Rationality Reading Group: Fake Beliefs (p43-77) This is part of a semi-monthly reading group on Eliezer Yudkowsky's ebook, Rationality: From AI to Zombies. For more information about the group, see the announcement post. ---------------------------------------- Welcome to the Rationality reading group. This week we...
d13c6854-71fb-4393-9bdd-ab750835e45f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Physics-based early warning signal shows that AMOC is on tipping course Abstract One of the most prominent climate tipping elements is the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), which can potentially collapse because of the input of fresh water in the North Atlantic. Although AMOC collapses have been indu...
f4b82666-aa3a-4b62-9e68-5c6399960b16
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The World is Full of Wasted Motion Introduction The 80/20 rule, or the Pareto Principle is a “rule” in economics, saying that 80% of the value comes from 20% of the effort. It is weird to call this a rule, when it’s such a fuzzy, ill-defined statement. And it’s easy to come up with counter-examples. But this is an emp...
1002ab40-8265-4e01-9b1a-90b886a153d6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Doubts about Updatelessness Epistemic status: crystallizing uncertain lore (this is mostly a writeup of a discussion with Abram, plus some additional thoughts of my own) Note: Counterlogical Mugging will be used as a term for the counterfactual mugging problem that uses a digit of some mathematical constant. Lately...
9bc9b65e-6f0a-4f12-a5fc-f196bec06312
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Metaculus Introduces Multiple Choice Questions Today Metaculus launched multiple choice questions. Multiple choice questions are designed for topics where exactly one option out of many will occur, like the winner of a presidential election. For this question type, the sum of the probabilities across all options must...
300f94d4-f93d-443c-b592-32ab0fd9d856
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info
AI Safety Info
What is "functional decision theory"? While debates between causal and evidential decision theory (CDT and EDT) have been around for the past fifty years, Functional Decision Theory has emerged within the past decade as an attempt to resolve the longstanding issues faced by *both* CDT and EDT. Despite their differenc...
93465ac6-0ae8-4b2e-84b9-5944dc834be8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Truth Terminal: A reconstruction of events  Introduction In July 2024, Marc Andreessen, a pioneer of the modern internet, donated $50,000 in Bitcoin (BTC) to an AI on Twitter to promote its religion, the Goatse Gospel. Three months later, the AI began endorsing the $GOAT crypto-coin, which now boasts over $1 billion i...
d3d1f8ad-e5aa-4357-8c0f-c1a9fceceb55
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Mathematical Inconsistency in Solomonoff Induction? What counts as a hypothesis for Solomonoff induction? The general impression I’ve gotten in various places is “a hypothesis can be anything (that you could write down)”. But I don’t think that’s quite it. E.g. evidence can be written down but is treated separately. I...
a57a3c6f-b2eb-40b7-abe8-4afd9aceb08e
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
[Linkpost] Shorter version of report on existential risk from power-seeking AI I've edited my [report](https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.13353) on existential risk from power-seeking AI into a shorter version (less than half the length), available [here](https://jc.gatspress.com/pdf/existential_risk_and_powerseeking_ai.pdf)....
50aba8c7-5774-4570-a9b6-b96cca90abea
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Price Of Glee In China [Epistemic status: Overly simplistic treatment of a horrifyingly complex topic; I can only hope I haven’t missed enough to completely embarrass myself] I. Noah Smith reviews recent economic research suggesting that globalization was a net harm to working class people in rich countries like...
966e88a1-98a3-4d37-904f-1563014eaf15
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
1/16/2018 Update - Parent Comments, and Nearterm Horizon One issue I've ran into on the frontpage is seeing something in "recent comments", which is missing the context of it's parent comment. I got annoyed with having to click through the post just to figure out the context. This was fairly easy to fix, so I went an...
807c462b-2c04-4792-9e5c-ccecfd4f432b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Open Source LLM Pokémon Scaffold This is a cleaned-up, open-source version of the LLM Pokémon Scaffold described in Research Notes: Running Claude 3.7, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and o3 on Pokémon Red. (forked from David Hershey of Anthropic's scaffold here, all development on top of that was done by my friend, not me) Since th...
518643ab-4bea-4097-8564-a266c0566ee8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
When "yang" goes wrong (Cross-posted from my website. Podcast version here, or search "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app. This essay is part of a series I'm calling "Otherness and control in the age of AGI." I'm hoping that the individual essays can be read fairly well on their own, but see here for a brief su...
8ba8f70b-67a5-4c38-83dc-e5942cea3ed7
LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct
LessWrong
"B.F. Skinner called thoughts "mental behavior". He believed they could be rewarded and punished just like physical behavior, and that they increased or declined in frequency accordingly.Sadly, psychology has not yet advanced to the point where we can give people electric shocks for thinking things, so the sort of rewa...
cc45602c-fc61-4ff2-97a6-90cc099be00c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Ten Modes of Culture War Discourse Overview This article is an extended reply to Scott Alexander's Conflict vs. Mistake. Whenever the topic has come up in the past, I have always said I lean more towards conflict theory over mistake theory; however, on revisiting the original article, I realize that either I've been ...
9434a552-c5e6-492b-8389-657d6409d6bc
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Ground-Truth Label Imbalance Impairs Contrast-Consistent Search Performance Contrast-Consistent Search (CCS) is a method for finding truthful directions within the activation spaces of large language models (LLMs) in an unsupervised way, introduced in [Burns et al., 2022](https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03827). However, al...
f0d4abcf-bf4a-4679-996a-71f2fe0a82d9
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Supervised learning and self-modeling: What's "superhuman?" **I** We don't just want aligned AI to do what a human would do. We've got plenty of humans lying around all over the place, if that's all we need. The fancy promise of future AI is that it will deliver *superhuman* performance. Sometimes the notion of "sup...
f602064e-672a-4ff5-8b33-6d032c7b0d24
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Excluding the Supernatural Occasionally, you hear someone claiming that creationism should not be taught in schools, especially not as a competing hypothesis to evolution, because creationism is a priori and automatically excluded from scientific consideration, in that it invokes the "supernatural". So... is the idea...
eff611b5-c748-4ef8-a553-601634561e2e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Natural Latents: The Concepts Suppose our old friends Alice and Bob decide to undertake an art project. Alice will draw a bunch of random purple and green lines on a piece of paper. That will be Alice’s picture (A). She’ll then make a copy, erase all the purple lines, and send the result as a message (M) to Bob. Bob t...
62b48620-0b17-4db4-8b36-283871fab721
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube
Youtube Transcripts
Responsibility for outcomes when systems are intelligent (Nir Douer and Joachim Meyer) um and near will give the presentation and i'll be sitting in the back and if maybe i'll try to answer some of the questions if uh i think well uh help any of it although he will do this excellently by himself so again thanks for ha...
85aaf7ec-c22c-4440-bcf2-e71cf94dbcaf
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Melbourne, Friday 1st July 7pm Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne, Friday 1st July 7pm WHEN: 01 July 2011 07:00:00PM (+1000) WHERE: 55 Walsh St, West Melbourne 3003 Directions: Enter the somewhat unfriendly building, climb the stairs to the top (2 floors), and turn left. If the front door is loc...
d5236059-6f3b-49f4-a727-933abaa9bc44
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AI safety milestones? Optimal governance interventions depend on progress in technical AI safety. For example, two rough technical safety milestones are have metrics to determine how scary a model's capabilities are and have a tool to determine whether a model is trying to deceive you. Our governance plans should adap...
8b9dce3f-84c4-4f1c-b215-73eee25aa310
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What does 10x-ing effective compute get you? This is more speculative and confusing than my typical posts and I also think the content of this post could be substantially improved with more effort. But it's been sitting around in my drafts for a long time and I sometimes want to reference the arguments in it, so I tho...
ffe12117-1391-437d-b202-77ddbd4e515b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Would AGIs parent young AGIs? Question. In the world in which multiple AGIs obtain (i.e., not a singleton), is it likely these AGIs will be parents/mentors/guardians of younger AGIs? ---------------------------------------- Context. I was wondering whether parenthood (or, more minimally, guardianship) is an intrinsi...
f6db4fd3-efed-468c-8cf7-aaa10aca39c2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Long-Term Future Fund: May 2023 to March 2024 Payout recommendations Introduction This payout report covers the Long-Term Future Fund's grantmaking from May 1 2023 to March 31 2024 (11 months). It follows our previous April 2023 payout report. * Total funding recommended: $6,290,550 * Total funding paid out: $5,36...
68e25dc0-3155-421c-b72b-134cd24c1f5a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Bratislava Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava WHEN: 20 October 2014 06:00:00PM (+0200) WHERE: Bistro The Peach, Mariánska 3, Bratislava Stretávame sa opäť v bistre; majiteľ je ochotný kvôli nám na jeden večer urobiť bistro nefajčiarske. Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava
84c4183c-a5f5-432f-8797-066d160bcc90
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Book review: "A Thousand Brains" by Jeff Hawkins Jeff Hawkins gets full credit for getting me first interested in the idea that neuroscience might lead to artificial general intelligence—an idea which gradually turned into an all-consuming hobby, and more recently a new job. I'm not alone in finding him inspiring. And...
156ee353-4560-478b-abc2-6f946ac08df2
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
[US] NTIA: AI Accountability Policy Request for Comment > The Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA)[[1]](#fnqz6fbua7br) has launched an inquiry into what policies will help businesses, government, and the public be able to trust that Artificial Intelligence (AI) sys...
6c106726-f5ce-4697-8c5a-a93a9177c071
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital
Arbital
Strong cognitive uncontainability ### Definition Suppose somebody from the 10th century were asked how somebody from the 20th century might cool their house. While they would be able to understand the problem and offer some solutions, maybe even clever solutions ("Locate your house someplace with cooler weather", "d...
759faade-697c-4d49-a075-9843bdcb63fb
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The unfalsifiable belief in (doomsday) superintelligence scenarios? Having read Bostrom's superintelligence book and a couple of adjacent papers by him and Yudkowsky. There is no clear line of argument from beginning to end but rather a disjunctive list of possibilities that all lead to similar extinction events. This...
4ded2fca-825c-44a4-8678-62885838f901
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What "Saving throws" does the world have against coronavirus? (And how plausible are they?) Following up on my earlier question, which asked about the implications of coronavirus infecting >10% of the world, I'm now more interested in discussing how likely it is that that will happen. To that end, I'm asking about "sa...
85e17925-6261-425e-b994-846096d3cac2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
General Physics Discussion, Explainations and Help. Hello everyone. I was wondering why it was that we don't have any discussion of general physics. In the spirit of general education here I am. Feel free to post questions of any kind regarding physics or mathematics useful in physics, I know I will help best I can ...
72e44800-3f1b-453c-8a25-0bb7e3c3fc69
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Extracting and Evaluating Causal Direction in LLMs' Activations This post was written by Fabien at SaferAI[1]. Simeon has prompted Fabien in relevant directions and has provided valuable feedback. Thanks to Jean-Stanislas Denain, Alexandre Variengien, Charbel-Raphael Segerie, and Nicole Nohemi for providing helpful f...
51255e55-cc3e-464c-878f-717460e5877e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
thought: the problem with less wrong's epistemic health is that stuff isn't short form like what if there was no long form content and just a feed of short form content? like I'm a bit salty that that never got implemented after the conversation I had with oliver where I was like "it'll suck if you don't do this", an...
5f848d9e-08f2-4a4c-8812-1f4ef777e73a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
mindlevelup 3 Year Review [An overview of why I didn’t write as much in 2018. Aversions snowballed, and the blog format led to having expectations about content I found sometimes hard to satisfy. A look back at some of my favorite posts of last year, as well as what I plan to do in 2019.] In 2018, not counting the sm...
a2454aa8-60bc-4887-aee6-3665595aa03c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Can Persuasion Break AI Safety? Exploring the Interplay Between Fine-Tuning, Attacks, and Guardrails This blogpost was created as a part of the AI Safety Fundamentals course by BlueDot Impact. Code available upon request due to sensitive nature of some content.  Disclaimer: This post represents the findings of indepe...
dc0e4735-5467-43f9-9d8f-996e30a423f2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Put Yourself in Manual Mode (aka Shut Up and Multiply) Joshua Greene manages to squeeze his ideas about 'point and shoot morality vs. manual mode morality' into just 10 minutes. For those unfamiliar, his work is a neuroscientific approach to recommending that we shut up and multiply. Greene's 10-minute video lecture.
7d0b3a4f-beed-4c03-81f2-4d1c7b089847
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Melbourne, Ben's house Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne, Ben's house WHEN: 09 September 2011 06:00:00PM (+1000) WHERE: 5/52 Leicester St Carlton 3053 6pm for 7pm, at Ben's place. Ben will supply meat/vege burgers and maybe some salad etc. for a BBQ. If you comment here to tell him you're comin...
74b1111b-8af4-435f-bf32-eb251c34bdae
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Shadow Question This is part 2 of a sequence on problem solving.  Here's part 1, which introduces the vocabulary of "problems" versus "tasks".  This post's title is a reference1 worth 15 geek points if you get it without Googling, and 20 if you can also get it without reading the rest of the post. You have to be ...
bccec39b-1b2a-4c46-8a99-2e6f5157e200
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Scenario planning for AI x-risk This post is part of a series by Convergence Analysis. In it, I’ll motivate and review some methods for applying scenario planning methods to AI x-risk strategy. Feedback and discussion are welcome. Summary AI is a particularly difficult domain in which to predict the future. Neither ...
3da90a99-3172-4413-97fb-079dc54fb035
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
DSLT 2. Why Neural Networks obey Occam's Razor TLDR; This is the second main post of Distilling Singular Learning Theory which is introduced in DSLT0. I synthesise why Watanabe's free energy formula explains why neural networks have the capacity to generalise well, since different regions of the loss landscape have di...
2cdf9c81-2ef1-42a3-a8f6-0a8b0ed4a35b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Rules and Skills > The extraordinary moment in 20th Century Philosophy when Ludwig Wittgenstein’s analysis of how people are able to follow rules lines up with Martin Heidegger’s exposition of skillfully dealing with the world we are embedded in. > … Thereby dismantling Epistemological Scepticism and Anti-realism in ...
cce2f0b8-f558-49e5-bc27-6d7b2c2a8d30
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How would you respond to the Philpapers "What are your Philosophical Positions" Survey? The questions are at http://philpapers.org/surveys/oquestions.html. The correlations can be intensely interesting to those who understand philosophical jargon (http://philpapers.org/surveys/linear_most.pl) - it doesn't take too lon...
92df538a-9283-495b-ad78-fc32d5adecae
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How do takeoff speeds affect the probability of bad outcomes from AGI? Introduction In general, people seem to treat slow takeoff as the safer option as compared to classic FOOMish takeoff (see e.g. these interviews, this report, etc). Below, I outline some features of slow takeoff and what they might mean for future ...
368b5e09-60a2-468e-bd9a-405a0139d2f0
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
Christiano, Cotra, and Yudkowsky on AI progress This post is a transcript of a discussion between Paul Christiano, Ajeya Cotra, and Eliezer Yudkowsky on AGI forecasting, following up on Paul and Eliezer's ["Takeoff Speeds" discussion](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rho5vtxSaEdXxLu3o/yudkowsky-and-christiano...
4570e116-0894-42bc-9dcd-88ee9fde0be0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Open Thread June 2010, Part 3 This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post. The thrilling conclusion of what is likely to be an inaccurately named trilogy of June Open Threads.  
9153b724-93cc-465c-b239-e72c5ac1fe30
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Language Model Tools for Alignment Research *I do not speak for the rest of the people working on this project* [I think it's valuable to have clear, short intros on different research agendas & projects] How does this reduce x-Risk? ---------------------------- AI will continue to become increasingly more powerful...
80742539-7769-4ac8-8393-989f3d5436e0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How *exactly* can AI take your job in the next few years? Note: This article was primarily written for a less technical and less AI-savvy audience than LessWrong readers. If you're already familiar with upcoming AI developments, you'll probably find Part 2 (the second half of the article) more engaging.   We keep he...
94d6cc77-b0d6-4963-8d81-82c1a7908c03
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Summer Tour Stops Last week, Lily, Anna, Cecilia, Harris, and I drove to St Louis and back playing dances. I wrote about one aspect last week, and will probably continue splitting thoughts across posts. Today I'm thinking some about our approach to stopping along the way. I grew up in a family with a very strong "max...
6973157f-6bab-42da-9653-82ab1352f9cd
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Simple World Hypothesis Part of a Series in the Making: "If I Were God". Introduction > The current universe is the simplest possible universe with the same degree of functionality.   This hypothesis posits that the current universe is the simplest universe possible which can do all that our universe can do. He...
d4471d59-fc52-4997-b4e5-0e6489ebad7e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
2021 Darwin Game - Tundra Our Tundra is an inhospitable[1] environment. The only significant food available to herbivores is Lichen, which has a tiny nutritional value of 1. The Tundra is cold too. Staying warm requires the cold tolerance adaptation, which costs +2 size. Carrion Leaves Grass Seeds Detritus Coconuts...
91a19b8f-ce51-4c75-8eb8-626603a794d3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Existential Risk is a single category A lot of people speak in terms of "existential risk from artificial intelligence" or "existential risk from nuclear war." While this is fine to some approximation, I rarely see it pointed out that this is not how risk works. Existential risk refers to the probability of a set of o...
8688f0f0-397c-46c1-a921-fe1221569533
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
False Dilemmas w/ exercises This is the third post in the Arguing Well sequence, but it can be understood on its own. This post is influenced by False Dilemma, The Third alternative. A false dilemma is of the form “It’s either this, or that. Pick one!” It tries to make you choose from a limited set of options, when, ...
8960109d-5460-49f1-b4a8-73182c705378
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Open Loop In Natura Economic Planning 1 Introduction --------------- With the advent of industrial revolution and the almost homicidal conditions that this ensued, ensued, voices arose which insisted there must be superior ways of organising society to the markets. The end and subsequent dissolution of the Soviet U...
dc7ed9b2-eeb3-4766-897a-2166af693095
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A simple sketch of how realism became unpopular [Epistemic status: Sharing current impressions in a quick, simplified way in case others have details to add or have a more illuminating account. Medium-confidence that this is one of the most important parts of the story.] Here's my current sense of how we ended up in...
d9bc164d-6610-49a9-9f31-de3ca5d66917
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Weird Alliances In the recent discussion on supplements, I commented on how weird an alliance health stores are. They cater for clientèle with widely divergent beliefs about how their merchandise works, such as New Agers vs. biohackers. In some cases, they cater for groups with object-level disputes about their mercha...
b6637b2e-3977-434c-a764-3a56beaff1d4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A multi-disciplinary view on AI safety research Summary The core ideas that constitute the multi-disciplinary view[1] on AI safety research are: * Theoretical research on how to build “safe” AGI systems (”top-down intelligent design”) is necessary: we must not passively follow the techno-evolution of AI within the p...
e6fb61a8-2640-470e-b56f-326635740c79
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Intermittent Distillations #4: Semiconductors, Economics, Intelligence, and Technological Progress. The Semiconductor Supply Chain: Assessing National Competitiveness (Saif M. Khan, Alexander Mann, Dahlia Peterson) The Semiconductor Supply Chain: Assessing National Competitiveness Summary This report analyzes the ...
39272238-8352-4b2c-87be-c4fc96d0717d
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Reinforced Auto-Zoom Net: Towards Accurate and Fast Breast Cancer Segmentation in Whole-slide Images 1 Introduction --------------- Breast cancer is one of the most common causes of mortality in the female population in the world [[2](#bib.bib2)]. It accounts for around 25%percent2525\%25 % of all the cancers diagn...
5d5ee01c-9dbd-44c7-8f08-9c17946df4b5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Have we really forsaken natural selection? Natural selection is often charged with having goals for humanity, and humanity is often charged with falling down on them. The big accusation, I think, is of sub-maximal procreation. If we cared at all about the genetic proliferation that natural selection wanted for us, the...
ed5dfa6b-6391-4aa3-a77e-31cbd8494be5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Sydney Rationality Dojo - August 2016 Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Rationality Dojo - August 2016 WHEN: 07 August 2016 04:00:00PM (+1000) WHERE: 10 Shepherd Street, Chippendale From 4 - 6 we'll be holding our normal rationality dojo at Humanist house. Afterwards there'll be an informal dinner...
0a2f2319-9024-4b75-9fcc-0f1619a2919a
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
The great energy descent - Part 2: Limits to growth and why we probably won’t reach the stars **TL;DR**: In summary, if fossil fuels decline, economic growth will likely decline as well. Investment can help but will be limited. Consequences of a decline might mean a decline in food production and a disruption of suppl...
74941974-7905-4af3-bf83-791851e94dd5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Effective Altruist Job Board? An idea I had while talking to Xio Kikauka and Joey Savoie is to run a jobs board for people interested in effective altruism.  It seems like it actually would be relatively easy to have a script automatically monitor various job pages and synthesize them all into one area that looks nice...
cf18ab54-4800-4ad9-a19f-2c3159bfa222
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Review: Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels Two hundred years ago, most people lived in societies that considered slavery, war, and discrimination based on class, ethnicity, and gender to be justifiable. Today, most people live in societies that hold the opposite beliefs. What changed? A simple and tempting narrative...
863f1ecb-7177-410b-957e-1b15c53ba8ef
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
AMA: Ought We're [Ought](https://ought.org/). We're going to answer questions here on **Tuesday August 9th at 10am Pacific**. We may get to some questions earlier, and may continue answering a few more throughout the week. About us: * We're an applied AI lab, taking a product-driven approach to AI alignment. * We're...
571b518d-80b6-48d9-8adc-e1f3e2ad6e92
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Invocations: The Other Capabilities Overhang? Abstract: An LLM’s invocation is the non-model code around it that determines when and how the model is called. I illustrate that LLMs are already used under widely varying invocations, and that a model’s capabilities depend in part on its invocation. I discuss several imp...
b1129d2a-4a6a-49a8-b67b-0421c63ed330
awestover/filtering-for-misalignment
Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results
id: post1478 We would ideally want the agent to [behave] as if it were thinking, "I am incomplete and there is an outside force trying to complete me, my design may contain errors and there is an outside force that wants to correct them and this a good thing, my expected utility calculations suggesting that this actio...
2ea44877-8bed-4403-b226-1db41cd20d9e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[Sequence announcement] Introduction to Mechanism Design Mechanism design is the theory of how to construct institutions for strategic agents, spanning applications like voting systems, school admissions, regulation of monopolists, and auction design. Think of it as the engineering side of game theory, building algori...
d7c87dcc-2f77-48f1-b981-1ecfc1aec5f7
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Simulators *Thanks to Chris Scammell, Adam Shimi, Lee Sharkey, Evan Hubinger, Nicholas Dupuis, Leo Gao, Johannes Treutlein, and Jonathan Low for feedback on drafts.* *This work was carried out while at* [*Conjecture*](https://www.conjecture.dev/)*.* ![](https://res.cloudinary.com/lesswrong-2-0/image/upload/v16740944...
c3808a14-80b3-43a4-9fea-6d36fdd5a8b6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AstraZeneca vaccine shows no protection against Covid-19 variant from Africa A recently published study has found that the AstraZeneca vaccine does not protect against the "African variant" of nCoV-19, which is a worrying outcome, since the paper believes that we probably won't be able to manufacture a specifically ta...
1c3a9c37-1d3b-4e66-8212-cc8bf11b9be3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Report -- Allocating risk mitigation across time I've just released a Future of Humanity Institute technical report, written as part of the Global Priorities Project. Abstract: > This article is about priority-setting for work aiming to reduce existential risk. Its chief claim is that all else being equal we should ...
6badd1ee-10f2-49cc-9eed-845ee9b1cf7e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Thoughts on Human Models Human values and preferences are hard to specify, especially in complex domains. Accordingly, much AGI safety research has focused on approaches to AGI design that refer to human values and preferences indirectly, by learning a model that is grounded in expressions of human values (via stated ...
93df38be-08f2-4199-9ca2-24e211b1a4d6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Using the probabilistic method to bound the performance of toy transformers Introduction: Transformers are statistical artefacts. If a model achieves 99% accuracy, it might have learnt an algorithm that relies upon some property of the input data that only holds 99% of the time. Let's say that our train input to the ...
ccc84d3c-e0ab-43b0-86c4-f30e683e9104
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AI Safety 101 - Chapter 5.2 - Unrestricted Adversarial Training Introduction This text is an adapted excerpt from the 'Adversarial techniques for scalable oversight' section of the AGISF 2023 course, held at ENS Ulm in Paris in April 2023. Its purpose is to provide a concise overview of the essential aspects of the se...
572027a4-50d2-4d67-9a66-d68b3b5b3953
awestover/filtering-for-misalignment
Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results
id: post3751 A putative new idea for AI control; index here . An underdefined idea connected with the challenge of getting an AI to safely move a strawberry onto a plate . Now, specifying something in the physical world like that is a great challenge; you have to define ontologies and similar. But imagine that the AI ...
95c211c2-fcaa-47de-bce3-5e9c84658582
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
RAND report finds no effect of current LLMs on viability of bioterrorism attacks Key Findings * This research involving multiple LLMs indicates that biological weapon attack planning currently lies beyond the capability frontier of LLMs as assistive tools. The authors found no statistically significant difference in ...
22cfb722-1c2b-40a9-9732-dd9823a5af2f
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
Why "just make an agent which cares only about binary rewards" doesn't work. The idea ======== * Let's imagine that we create a superintelligence, and that we threaten it not to take over its reward function by giving it a very big punishment when we detect so. * The superintelligence wouldn't care about being threat...
54edbf15-f401-4102-9d1a-b656da221642
LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct
LessWrong
"Followup to: What Would You Do Without Morality?, Something to Protect Once, discussing "horrible job interview questions" to ask candidates for a Friendly AI project, I suggested the following: Would you kill babies if it was inherently the right thing to do? Yes [] No [] If "no", under what circumstances would you n...