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14c0fd32-c7c5-47bb-ac39-6b5908a800c9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : August Rationality Dojo: Governing the Commons
Discussion article for the meetup : August Rationality Dojo: Governing the Commons
WHEN: 03 August 2014 03:30:00PM (+1000)
WHERE: Ross House Association, 247-251 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
[ATTN: The Dojos now have a new location: the Jenny Florence Room, Level ... |
b5ce271b-b824-4f70-8a07-8c1040a463f1 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Search Engines and Oracles
Some time ago, I was following a conversation about Wolfram Alpha (http://www.wolframalpha.com/), an attempt to implement a sort of general purpose question answerer, something people have dreamed about computers doing for decades. Despite the theoretical availability to find out virtually ... |
001500d7-2af1-4463-b723-777deb183e5b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Framing Practicum: Stable Equilibrium
This is a framing practicum post. We’ll talk about what a stable equilibrium is, how to recognize stable equilibria in the wild, and what questions to ask when you find one. Then, we’ll have a challenge to apply the idea.
Today’s challenge: come up with 3 examples of stable equil... |
1a862d80-412c-490b-8790-a386cbcb9d01 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Unfair feedback loops
Unfair feedback loops
---------------------
one set of societal problems that i feel is often overlooked, especially by the political right, comes in a form i like to call *unfair feedback loops*. this is any situation where an originally fair interaction produces (often as a side-effect) condi... |
cfde51c3-dc0b-4549-8c67-71b8441bafad | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | AGI Timelines Are Mostly Not Strategically Relevant To Alignment
First things first: this post is about [timelines](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/ai-timelines) (i.e. what year we first get transformative AGI), not [takeoff speeds](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/ai-takeoff) (i.e. foom vs gradual takeoff).
Claim: timeli... |
9f45cdca-f2fd-423b-8669-95f18cc74b8e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | Defining human values for value learners
Defining Human Values for Value Learners
Kaj Sotala
Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Berkeley, CA 94704, USA;
Theiss Research, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA
kaj.sotala@intelligence.org
Abstract
Hypothetical “value learning” AIs learn human values
and then try to act according ... |
c941b0d8-55f5-48cd-885e-3f3189a1686e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | I am Sailor Vulcan!
Greetings! I am Sailor Vulcan, champion of justice and reason! In the name of the Moon--uh, I mean...
Hi, I'm Harry. I'm a reader, writer and gamer with a passion for rationality and existential risk prevention.
I sometimes jokingly compare my life to an intelligence explosion. I honestly believe... |
6cc67d1d-8883-41cb-8706-6611d358c9ed | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Putting multimodal LLMs to the Tetris test
(See this X (Twitter) thread for a much shorter version of this post.)
Introduction
With the advent of vision abilities in LLMs, a virtually limitless vista has opened in the realm of their evaluations: they can now be tested on any task that requires vision and has a ~fini... |
f705910a-2814-4c89-80cf-48751376c706 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Melbourne, practical rationality
Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne, practical rationality
WHEN: 05 October 2012 07:00:00PM (+1000)
WHERE: 55 Walsh St West Melbourne 3003 Australia
Practical rationality. This meetup repeats on the 1st Friday of each month and is distinct from our social meetup o... |
bc6ffcd4-5f70-4719-a050-73822937fa4c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why building ventures in AI Safety is particularly challenging
TL;DR:
AI Safety presents immense potential impact but has equally significant challenges for aspiring entrepreneurs. The barriers are manifold, from the need for comprehensive impact plans, difficulty selling to nonprofits, an underdeveloped idea space, a... |
2206da7d-457f-4d6e-b402-d8ff825d1f66 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Value systematization: how values become coherent (and misaligned)
Many discussions of AI risk are unproductive or confused because it’s hard to pin down concepts like “coherence” and “expected utility maximization” in the context of deep learning. In this post I attempt to bridge this gap by describing a process by w... |
4df3cd58-5858-4523-a02b-a96d72d6e737 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | OpenPhil on "GiveWell’s Top Charities Are (Increasingly) Hard to Beat"
This post by Alex Berger of OpenPhil outlines some shifts in thinking at OpenPhil, about what bar they set for their grantmaking. It seemed noteworthy...
* as potentially relevant to the Drowning Children are Hard to Find discussion.
* as an upd... |
aa1808d8-eee4-4923-869c-c865ff7a85b8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Understanding Subjective Probabilities
This is a linkpost for https://outsidetheasylum.blog/understanding-subjective-probabilities/. It's intended as an introduction to practical Bayesian probability for those who are skeptical of the notion. I plan to keep the primary link up to date with improvements and corrections... |
f47b7db8-528e-4b95-bdd1-1492d8f6108b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Ozy's Thoughts on CFAR's Mission Statement
|
d1054856-e291-4f17-8033-0443cbb77c3a | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Risks from general artificial intelligence without an intelligence explosion
“An ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind.”
– Computer scientist I. J. Good, 1965
Artificial intell... |
76039f18-4736-4647-9794-08471264ebee | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Newton's second law explained: it works in many universes
The linked post explains Newton's second law in an intuitive way. I'm presenting an edited version of that post here. It is a more detailed version of an argument I made as part of this post. I've noticed some interesting posts about using the framework of quan... |
46ef9273-03e0-4744-851a-39bbcc857cf0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | State of the Solstice 2014
This'll be the first of a collection of posts about the growing Secular Solstice. This post gives an overview of what happened this year. Future posts will explore what types of Solstice content resonates with which people, what I've learned about how Less Wrong culture intersects with other... |
38cf6f61-58bc-4bd1-9129-c4361b655290 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Graying the black box: Understanding DQNs
1 Introduction
---------------
††This paper was done with the support of the Intel Collaborative Research institute for Computational Intelligence (ICRI-CI) and is part of the ’Why &\&& When Deep Learning works –––– looking inside Deep Learning’ ICRI-CI paper bundle. Some of... |
2e18248d-1baf-43f9-9edc-9c7dfda67984 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | [Replication] Conjecture's Sparse Coding in Small Transformers
Summary
-------
A couple of weeks ago Logan Riggs and I [posted](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/E8imxQo96WgDCMxkA/replication-conjecture-s-sparse-coding-in-toy-models) that we'd replicated the toy-model experiments in Lee Sharkey and Dan Braun's [origina... |
edf97b03-b6c7-480f-ae86-f7ef1b73d038 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Optimized for Something other than Winning or: How Cricket Resists Moloch and Goodhart's Law
Recently, there has been some controversy in the world of cricket. The full details are described well in [this piece](https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/jul/05/a-crease-a-stumping-and-spirit-of-the-game-the-ashes-controve... |
211b1808-c183-41ed-9079-122ecc1c68cb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Intertheoretic utility comparison: simple theory
There's been a lot of work on how to reach agreement between people with different preferences or values. In practice, reaching agreement can be tricky, because of issues of extortion/trade and how the negotiations actually play out.
To put those issues aside, let's co... |
38018dfd-5e00-4c5a-a27d-46c4a3f629d1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Interactive Bayes Theorem Visualization
This visualization was inspired by the Julia Galef video that I linked to in the opening paragraph. One thing I liked about that video is that it represents probability space as a box which, for understanding Bayes' rule, I think is much more intuitive than the circular venn-dia... |
900668f3-f281-4273-abde-fcc1cc9165c3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Clem's Memo
Declassified document sourced from Cabinets and The Bomb by Peter Hennessy; reproduced verbatim.
TOP SECRET
GEN 75/1
28th August, 1945
THE ATOMIC BOMB
Memorandum by the Prime Minister[1]
1. A decision on major policy with regard to the atomic bomb is imperative. Until this is taken civil and militar... |
eb48fdf6-7952-407d-9c7b-79f854bdbb80 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Computable Universal Prior
Suppose instead of using 2^-K(H) we just use 2^-length(H), does this do something obviously stupid?
Here's what I'm proposing:
Take a programing language with two characters. Assign each program a prior of 2^-length(program). If the program outputs some string, then P(string | program) = ... |
f5fd77ff-64df-4264-9dc2-736b3e052229 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Research ideas (AI Interpretability & Neurosciences) for a 2-months project
My university (EPFL) organizes a "Summer in the Lab" internship for interested Bachelor students. The idea is to send them to a lab for a ~2-months period, so they can begin engaging with the research community and develop research skills. I h... |
70c9802a-b742-4e3e-8933-3a52b0de711d | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | Faulty Reward Functions in the Wild
At OpenAI, we’ve recently started using [Universe](https://universe.openai.com/), our software for measuring and training AI agents, to conduct new RL experiments. Sometimes these experiments illustrate some of the issues with RL as currently practiced. In the following example we’l... |
6b2c53ba-443e-4ad3-acf5-54628626a616 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Checking Recent Upvotes?
Periodically get Karma and its not from recent posts, and I'd kinda like to know what it was I said that people thought was cool. Is there a way to sort my stuff my "most recently upvoted" or something like that? |
94c6a7b7-f739-4cd5-a75b-73c2f1d4f0d5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Miscellaneous thoughts on handling a stressful life
I've had several stressful periods in my life, where I was working very hard and felt overwhelmed. I anticipate that some of the conditions that led to me having to work very hard are happening again and likely to happen for the next few months. As much as possible, ... |
05984eea-188c-4657-8631-fe30b4af184b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Creating a Less Wrong prediction market
I will bet 500 karma that a funny picture thread will appear on Less Wrong within one year. If anyone is interested in the bet, we can better define terms.
Right now the LW software doesn't support karma transfers. Until it does and we can develop a more robust prediction marke... |
79043e5b-73c7-4921-87e1-380ff549d7cd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What are some good survey questions on a rationality website (like Gene Expression)? Razib would like some input
The post is here: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/07/reader-survey-questions |
3f6333ea-5e5f-42b0-aa44-8d30bc277e15 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Categorical-measure-theoretic approach to optimal policies tending to seek power
The paper [Optimal Policies Tend to Seek Power](https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.01683) tries to justify the claim in the title with a mathematical argument, using a clever formal definition of "power". I like the general approach, but I think ... |
5ab1263b-8ba7-407d-bd7d-5d64a195be8c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Covid 5/21: Limbo Under
Previous weekly reports: Covid-19 5/7: Fighting Limbo, Covid-19 4/30: Stuck in Limbo
Slowly, a nation partially reopens. Is it too much, too soon? It’s too early to know for sure, because of lags, but so far we’ve only seen extraordinary good news. If you don’t think what we saw this past week... |
c1ceb5fd-8311-4805-99f0-265f9fbaa065 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What do the patterns of good and bad behaviours in an online world reveal about the nature of humanity?
Title:
Emergence of good conduct, scaling and Zipf laws in human behavioral sequences in an online world
Abstract:
> We study behavioral action sequences of players in a massive multiplayer online game. In their ... |
70143282-4e23-4f19-90fe-12df992275ce | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Getting To and From Monism
Monism, in its most basic form, is the belief that the world is comprised of a single substance. I believe there to be a genuine way to prove this, regardless of whether or not you understand what this 'single substance' might be at root. We can go from logic, to monism, and then we can make... |
f1c3c657-1a3b-4357-9dbf-0abd659854b9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Best Nonfiction Writing on Less Wrong
However useful the content, what are some examples of the best nonfiction writing on Less Wrong? Are there pieces you think are as good as recent classics of essay form like I Think You're Fat or Lies We Tell Kids? For example, I like Yvain's The Apologist and the Revolutionary.
... |
a93386d1-40fe-4429-aa22-d55fa063c6dc | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Prisoner's Dilemmas : Altruism :: Battles of the Sexes : Convention
Game Theory
A reminder, because I always need to remind myself:
B chooses a columnA chooses a rowA's payoff, B's payoffA's payoff, B's payoffA's payoff, B's payoffA's payoff, B's payoff
Prisoner's Dilemmas
It won't be news to anyone here that altr... |
d4be4cce-18ff-4425-90f1-3cc7bc01dd4c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Hegel vs. GPT-3
> The good is the idea, or unity of the conception of the will with the particular will. Abstract right, well-being, the subjectivity of consciousness, and the contingency of external reality, are in their independent and separate existences superseded in this unity, although in their real essence they... |
3ad70842-5fc7-4563-aa2f-c4269459e8fe | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Objective truth?
Is there one true way to understand a tree? Well, of course there is — talk to any scientist! A physicist will tell you that it’s a dynamic structure of atoms, a chemist — a complex metabolic network, a biologist — an ecosystem of specialized cells, and an ecologist — that it’s one simple unit in a i... |
a0abfe75-74b6-426b-9562-adaeb70039a1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Some Remarks on Regulator Theorems No One Asked For
Epistemological Status: Correct, but lazily written.
Basically, a while ago John made a post attempting to fix the Good Regulator Theorem. I've refrained from writing this simply because I know it may come off as "why does anyone care isn't this trivial"? However, m... |
f8ccdaa8-b1e0-4bd1-bbb7-65f91dfd5ef3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Notes on "the hot mess theory of AI misalignment"
TL;DR: the author makes some reasonable, good-faith arguments (including analysis of a neat survey that he sent to his friends), but I don't think these arguments are strong enough to support his conclusions in a significant way.
Jascha Sohl-Dickstein is a senior staf... |
fcea6ff6-33c3-4bc8-9ba3-0cd13f22558e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Questions about doing literature searches
I'd like to get better at doing literature searches. Luke has written a bit about this, but I still have lots of questions.
I've mostly been using Google Scholar; it seems OK, but not stellar. What other tools are useful and for what? Added: is there a good way to find paper... |
4da7d687-0100-4836-91c4-58a5117afd0b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The power of finite and the weakness of infinite binary point numbers
Take a sequence of the numbers 0 and 1. You can interpret this sequence as a real number between zero and one.
Just write 0.( your sequence).
This can be interpreted as a binary number.
For instance 0.1101 is 1/2+1/4+0/8+1/16.
Now, I have read ... |
d7796584-f90d-4d29-8753-6df070b1dd7e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | ELK Computational Complexity: Three Levels of Difficulty
[ELK is described](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/eliciting-latent-knowledge-elk) as a problem we wish to solve in the "worst case"; IE, for any potential failure case we can describe, we want to have a strong argument about why we won't run into that particular ... |
c342f07d-62f3-45da-8f6f-cd958150f38f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | An issue with MacAskill's Evidentialist's Wager
In The Evidentialist's Wager, MacAskill et al. argue as follows:
Suppose you are uncertain as to whether EDT or CDT is the correct decision theory, and face a Newcomb-like decision. If CDT were correct, your decision would only influence the outcomes of your present dec... |
4dd3ea46-0564-4ced-bda3-7e9dcd66fbf5 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Repeated (and improved) Sleeping Beauty problem
**Follow up to:** [Probability is fake, frequency is real](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vmfW2qTac4vF3YS3J/probability-is-fake-frequency-is-real)
There is something wrong with the normal formulation of the [Sleeping Beauty problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepi... |
ee7a42cf-59a6-4c21-8cbc-ef5eda99b838 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | LLM Generality is a Timeline Crux
Four-Month Update
[EDIT: I believe that this paper looking at o1-preview, which gets much better results on both blocksworld and obfuscated blocksworld, should update us significantly toward LLMs being capable of general reasoning. See update post here.]
Short Summary
LLMs may be fu... |
c0ecfb32-fc8f-4020-aad3-51180fbb3767 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why Don’t We Apply What We Know About Twins to Everybody Else?
I think our intuition might be miscalibrated when it comes to evaluating how much a person’s genes impact how they turn out physically (which isn’t surprising). What’s a bit strange is that we seem to be closer to the truth when it comes to twins.
Nobody’... |
2fe9e693-a8e7-48ff-8605-688df904aef5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Baltimore Meetup 4/10 1PM
Date: Sunday April 10
Time: 1PM
Location: Charmington's |
3c30a145-1698-421a-b60f-0c1890bb7429 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Last day to nominate things for the Review. Also, 2019 books still exist.
Two quick reminders:
One: You have about one more day to nominate posts! Posts need at least two positive upvotes to make it to phase 2, so check out the voting dashboard to upvote things that seem important to you.
Two: Although the 2020 bo... |
f3278f30-185d-4b68-bcff-523ecc6a5dec | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | On Charities and Linear Utility
Steven Landsburg argued, in an oft-quoted article, that the rational way to donate to charity is to give everything to the charity you consider most effective, rather than diversify; and that this is always true when your contribution is much smaller than the charities' endowments. Besi... |
b71af7c8-3c38-4324-9a77-820ef4e0a84f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Making decisions when both morally and empirically uncertain
Cross-posted to the EA Forum. For an epistemic status statement and an outline of the purpose of this sequence of posts, please see the top of my prior post. There are also some explanations and caveats in that post which I won’t repeat - or will repeat only... |
a7e45625-38ac-4ea3-ade8-801e04086d87 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A variant on the trolley problem and babies as unit of currency
I was discussing utilitarianism and charitable giving and similar ideas with someone today, and I came up with this hybrid version of the trolley problem, particularly the fat man variation, and the article by Scott Alexander/Yvain about using dead childr... |
511bac75-b0e9-4b5f-a4d7-2a89f96259ee | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Crowdfunding Vaccine Development
Imagine that at the beginning of the pandemic, March 2020, you were given the opportunity to buy a place in the queue to get the vaccine. Imagine knowing nothing more than you actually did in March 2020. You don’t know how long it will take to develop a vaccine, or which companies will... |
b8cf95b8-6623-4867-9b78-d778e2956316 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Framing Practicum: Dynamic Programming
This is a framing practicum post. We'll talk about what dynamic programming (DP) is, how to recognize DP in the wild, and what questions to ask when you find it. Then, we'll have a challenge to apply the idea.
Today's challenge: come up with 3 examples of DP which do not resembl... |
5d14e7cc-9161-483b-8b35-6ee8d5bde2a9 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube | Youtube Transcripts | A Formal Methods Perspective to AI Safety: Promises and Challenges (Wenchao Li, FSL Workshop)
[Music]
okay thank you for the introduction so
instead of making a blanket statement on
the role of formal methods in the AI
safety as the agenda suggests I'm going
to focus on a specific problem which is
improving or even pr... |
b52cca9f-fa7e-4c49-b57b-20061dab97cd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Covid 7/29: You Play to Win the Game
Few things warm my heart more than playing to win the game. Few things sadden me more than observing someone not playing to win the game.
Usually, that means they are playing a different game instead, whether they admit it or not, and whether or not they know it themselves. The g... |
4451d467-9930-4d47-93e4-30766001322d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How to ventilate
With contra dances starting back up I'm thinking about ventilation again, both for reducing covid risk and generally making the hall more comfortable (lower temperature, lower humidity). I've seen a lot of ventilation arrangements over the years that don't make sense, and while none of what follows is... |
80321255-cae3-4da9-9435-fbadcff86a63 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | ASNets: Deep Learning for Generalised Planning.
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 68 (2020) 1-68 Submitted 08/2019; published 05/2020
ASNets: Deep Learning for Generalised Planning
Sam Toyer sdt@berkeley.edu
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
University of California, Berkeley
2121 Ber... |
d5cc36ad-21e8-4e17-a715-2cbc09d50cde | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Natural abstractions are observer-dependent: a conversation with John Wentworth
The conversation
Martín:
Any write-up on the thing that "natural abstractions depend on your goals"? As in, pressure is a useful abstraction because we care about / were trained on a certain kind of macroscopic patterns (because we ourselv... |
1c6a3a53-eeb4-4d7c-86ca-31ffb43bf40d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Quantum Explanations
There’s a widespread belief that quantum mechanics is supposed to be confusing. This is not a good frame of mind for either a teacher or a student.
And I find that legendarily “confusing” subjects often are not really all that complicated as math, particularly if you just want a very basic—but st... |
5b122c2c-150d-4abd-b187-e867d3d658d7 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Cold Links: assorted sports longreads
*Most of these are on the general theme of my [obsession with obsession](https://www.cold-takes.com/give-sports-a-chance/). (That link also explains the "Cold Links" idea.)*
[(NYT) Probably my favorite sports piece ever](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/sports/playmagazine/05rob... |
f89a15fe-3838-46e2-8a74-e98303729954 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Explaining a Math Magic Trick
Introduction
A recent popular tweet did a "math magic trick", and I want to explain why it works and use that as an excuse to talk about cool math (functional analysis). The tweet in question:
This is a cute magic trick, and like any good trick they nonchalantly gloss over the most impor... |
96a9e267-a516-4bfa-a4c6-a18368cd8743 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The promise of connected science
Sometimes, scientific discovery is just a matter of sitting down and using the tools of "connected science" already available to us. Stories like this one underscore the need for generalists:
> Don Swanson seems an unlikely person to make medical discoveries. A retired but still activ... |
47c8b530-fa04-4a44-b5ca-4f9d2b922d00 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Gaming Incentives
I played chess for a while earlier this year. I never played or watched any sports when I was younger, so sport forums were weird to me. One thing that kept coming up led to a long meandering stream of thought I tried in vain to edit together into a coherent narrative. It’s probably easy to guess ... |
4de5c29f-f6bd-4009-a10c-9ac5be1f69a2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Self-verification
This isn't a trick question, nor do I have a particular answer in mind.
Tomorrow, all of your memories are going to be wiped. There is a crucial piece of information that you need to make sure you remember, and more specifically, you need to be very confident you were the one that sent this messag... |
13511e75-19eb-4921-aded-565b1b5a6d00 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Monetary Incentives and Performance
I've been thinking about incorporating my Vanity and Ambition in Mathematics into a top level posting. If possible I would like to situation my remarks and the quotations that I cite with respect to the existing experimental psychology literature. When I've discussed the material in... |
2a00aa73-0b7c-49a3-998b-636d2ab73fac | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | An artistic illustration of Scalable Oversight - "A world apart, neither gods nor mortals"
Let's remember to be mindful of the fallacy of generalizing from fictional evidence.
Sorry if you feel like I've revealed too much about the video from the title of the post.
|
e41e9ef7-aefd-4de8-aa3f-7762877cbcfd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | CTWTB: Paths of Computation State
This is the second post of Category Theory Without The Baggage; first post here. You can probably follow most of this post without reading the first one. Be warned that I am a novice when it comes to category theory; please leave a comment if you see a substantive error or oversight.
... |
4a44029f-049d-4d90-bca4-b4cd9f01462e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Robert Aumann on Judaism
Just came across this interview with Robert Aumann. On pgs. 20-27 he describes why and how he believes in Orthodox Judaism. I don't really understand what he's saying. Key quote (I think):
> H (interviewer): Take for example the six days of creation; whether or not this is how it happened is ... |
f52a1337-943e-439c-b427-71e1e1906a3e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Ends Don't Justify Means (Among Humans)
Today's post, Ends Don't Justify Means (Among Humans) was originally published on 14 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> There may be consequentialist reasons for why humans should not reason in an explicitly consequentialist way. We are running o... |
c8922089-f8b2-4c39-a5b1-bf768e2e40bb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Scott Alexander 2021 predictions: calibration and updating exercise
Scott Alexander makes yearly predictions on SSC/ACX. This year, I avoided looking at his blog post so I could make my own unanchored predictions about the same topics, using a copy of the post with Scott's probabilities removed. Then I looked at his a... |
9397294b-b76c-4224-828c-c806c29b9cb7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Predicted corrigibility: pareto improvements
A putative new idea for AI control; index here.
Corrigibility allows an agent to transition smoothly from a perfect u-maximiser to a perfect v-maximiser, without seeking to resist or cause this transition.
And it's the very perfection of the transition that could cause pr... |
0fec3d5f-be10-48bd-a945-8a12649b2515 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Extrapolating GPT-N performance
Brown et al. (2020) (which describes the development of GPT-3) contains measurements of how 8 transformers of different sizes perform on several different benchmarks. In this post, I project how performance could improve for larger models, and give an overview of issues that may appear ... |
245ad487-b614-44eb-8390-57e102e45895 | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | "By requests from Blueberry and jimrandomh, here's an expanded repost of my comment which was itself a repost of my email sent to decision-theory-workshop.
(Wait, I gotta take a breath now.)
A note on credit: I can only claim priority for the specific formalization offered here, which builds on Vladimir Nesov's idea of... |
19c242a2-2603-4608-8485-414164e3fe17 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Mati's introduction to pausing giant AI experiments
Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter – sign it here: https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/
Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down – read here: https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-e... |
2402afcd-00e7-45ed-977b-49c1b3997e9a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How to develop a photographic memory 3/3
Under advisement from @Algon and @Seth Herd, I've included a TLDR:
1. The actual photographic memory technique starts at [Chapter V].
2. Early 'photographic memory' and results [Chapter III: Cont'd > (2) Tachisto...].
3. Is this trio of posts overwhelming and difficult to r... |
ac09d1cf-389b-427c-aa80-9c3903aaf733 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Elastic Productivity Tools
Like most tech bros, I’m a little too interested in productivity and optimizing my life. I’ve even made a few of my own tools to help me stay focused and efficient. In the process of trying to find and build the best productivity tools possible, I discovered common elements among all the pro... |
6d6fbebc-607d-42c1-abdf-27a3063fd4a3 | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | "Edit 11/28: Edited note at bottom to note that the random variables should have finite variance, and that this is essentially just L². Also some formatting changes.
This is something that has been bugging me for a while.
The correlation coefficient between two random variables can be interpreted as the cosine of the a... |
369afd29-826a-4ea6-81be-70538744ca38 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Three Impacts of Machine Intelligence
I think that the development of human level AI in my lifetime is quite plausible; I would give it more than a 1-in-5 chance. In this post I want to briefly discuss what I see as the most important impacts of AI. I think these impacts are the heavy hitters by a solid margin; each o... |
b2530b82-9d87-4720-a94c-9ea3b7305a37 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Artificial Intelligence, Morality, and Sentience (AIMS) Survey: 2021
*This report was edited by Michael Dello-Iacovo. The 2021 survey was designed by Janet Pauketat, Jamie Harris, Ali Ladak, and Jacy Reese Anthis. The data was collected and analyzed by Janet Pauketat, Ali Ladak, and Jacy Reese Anthis. Many thanks to D... |
b1426d47-3ad6-457f-bd07-a35fd8ec0cac | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Rational subjects and rational practitioners
Half-closing my eyes and looking at the recent topic of morality from a distance, I am struck by the following trend.
In mathematics, there are no substantial controversies. (I am speaking of the present era in mathematics, since around the early 20th century. There were s... |
4aaa0863-9016-4833-812e-da8bd79136d2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How to actually switch to an artificial body – Gradual remapping
How to actually switch to an artificial body – Gradual remapping
Note: Please feel free to message me about inconsistencies, references which you think should be added (or claims you think the current references don't back, or where there's evidence to t... |
2a8eb33b-971f-4f10-aa9a-c56a1974d474 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Absurdity Heuristic, Absurdity Bias
Today's post, Absurdity Heuristic, Absurdity Bias was originally published on 05 September 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> Under some circumstances, rejecting arguments on the basis of absurdity is reasonable. The absurdity heuristic can allow you to iden... |
843f95e0-6a65-4ab1-8479-ef7ae53f4cfe | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The "Stick Test" - useful tool or just pointless amusement?
> After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctri... |
b3735c1a-6752-4e7f-87c1-53c3ed3014a5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The idea
Preamble
Preamble is longish, but also de facto mandatory, if you want to keep reading that is.
I am looking for feedback on the story "The idea".
The purpose of the story is to act as a hook and get, some, people to continue on to the epilogue.
The epilogue is not include here, but will, depending on the... |
2a3a9c9d-dc9c-4db7-8493-bea8bdefb09a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Sun is big, but superintelligences will not spare Earth a little sunlight
Crossposted from Twitter with Eliezer's permission
i.
A common claim among e/accs is that, since the solar system is big, Earth will be left alone by superintelligences. A simple rejoinder is that just because Bernard Arnault has $170 b... |
7d916c15-bfac-4f4f-a5ae-511aabb731a2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Announcing the Nuclear Risk Forecasting Tournament
Summary: From June 22, Rethink Priorities and Metaculus will run a Nuclear Risk Forecasting Tournament to help inform funding, policy, research, and career decisions aimed at reducing existential risks. The starting prize pool is $2,500. We would be excited for you to... |
b3c937bb-5446-494b-b606-f579ec6be71a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Gerald Jay Sussman talk on new ideas about modeling computation
This is a bit-over-an-hour-long talk with slides that I found extremely interesting from this year's Strange Loop conference, and I thought I would share it with any programmers in the audience here that hadn't seen it.
It's about Sussman's ideas about t... |
2ecd0b99-e024-438b-98cb-f3f7fdc4ed23 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Native mental representations that give huge speedups on problems?
[x-post from r/slatestarcodex]
Is there a list/textbook of immediately usable mental representations like memory palaces?
I'm not talking about theoretical models of cognitive processes here (although they might suggest entire classes of the sort of ... |
5df8a83b-4afb-4d51-bfe4-e2f740ebb38a | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | a safer experiment than quantum suicide
a safer experiment than quantum suicide
---------------------------------------
in [tegmark's page about multiverses](https://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/crazy.html), he mentions that you could experimentally test the validity of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechan... |
5aa96ace-6233-4756-9e02-2d5f0db7b34f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Orphaned Policies (Post 5 of 7 on AI Governance)
In previous posts in this sequence, I laid out a case for why most AI governance research is too academic and too abstract to have much influence over the future. Politics is noisy and contested, so we can’t expect that good AI governance ideas will spread on their own ... |
a51ba473-26b7-4bc6-bf55-dd01fdd48708 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Bogus Pipeline, Bona Fide Pipeline
Related to: Never Leave Your Room
Perhaps you are a psychologist, and you wish to do a study on racism. Maybe you want to know whether racists drink more coffee than non-racists. Sounds easy. Find a group of people and ask them how racist they are, then ask them how much coffee they... |
69eb2efb-1ca7-483e-88f7-29a2b68d5bc8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Quantum theory cannot consistently describe the use of itself
As I understand it, the new thought experiment in QM demonstrates that all currently known interpretations of QM are wrong, if we extrapolate Winger friend thought experiment to next level, where different friends are using different theories to interpret e... |
547f0723-4057-415e-aa64-4d5ff35f4ef4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What are the "no free lunch" theorems?
This is an article in the featured articles series from AISafety.info. AISafety.info writes AI safety intro content. We'd appreciate any feedback.
The most up-to-date version of this article is on our website, along with 300+ other articles on AI existential safety.
“No free l... |
4371cda3-438e-4ce6-928c-c8af32e2c99e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Morality as "Coordination", vs "Do-Gooding"
Reworked version of a shortform comment. This is still not the optimal version of this post but it's the one I had time to re-publish.
I've spent the past few years trying to get a handle on what it means to be moral. In particular, to be moral in a robust way, that holds u... |
edfae8c8-66fc-48df-8f90-3efe00b98daf | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Information security considerations for AI and the long term future
Summary
-------
This post is authored by Jeffrey Ladish, who works on the security team at [Anthropic](https://www.anthropic.com/), and Lennart Heim, who works on AI Governance with [GovAI](https://www.governance.ai/) (more about us [at the end](http... |
a2778b32-491f-487a-9ae8-0e0b7ed599b7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games
Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games
WHEN: 20 September 2015 03:00:00PM (-0400)
WHERE: National Portrait Gallery
Crossposted from mailing list. Meeting in courtyard, gathering from 3:00pm, hard start 3:30pm - until closing.
We'll be meeting to pla... |
f7f0ca43-b52c-458f-b272-954a1ee87769 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | “Intro to brain-like-AGI safety” series—just finished!
*(Previously on EAF:* [*“Intro to brain-like-AGI safety” series—halfway point!*](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8Ajsy96jGHcf27Xre/intro-to-brain-like-agi-safety-series-halfway-point))
For those who aren't regular readers of alignmentforum or lesswrong,... |
e9bcf58e-f742-448e-a3da-3fc3da76cad7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Paper Summary: The Koha Code - A Biological Theory of Memory
paper link
author’s presentation
This paper introduces the Koha model, which aims to explain how information is stored within the brain and how neurons learn to become pattern detectors. It proposes that dendritic spines serve as computational units that sc... |
64914d33-2549-436a-a17d-4e8d23cd63a8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What's A "Market"?
Economists have a very mathematically clean class of models of “markets”, and spill lots of ink arguing about how well this class of models applies to the markets of the real-world economy. I personally give relatively few shits about how well the mathematical notion of a market applies to real-worl... |
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