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8461ba91-e5b2-4f27-8331-8b7931044098 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How to fix academia?
I don't usually submit articles to Discussion, but this news upset me so much that I think there is a real need to talk about it.
http://www.nature.com/news/faked-peer-reviews-prompt-64-retractions-1.18202
> A leading scientific publisher has retracted 64 articles in 10 journals, after an intern... |
ce98d638-de35-4374-ba95-8176dbacc293 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Interpreting Diagnostic Tests
Most people—including most physicians—don’t understand how to correctly interpret diagnostic medical tests.
Here’s a concrete example: the BinaxNOW home COVID test has 68% sensitivity (chance of giving a positive result if you have COVID) and 99% specificity (chance of giving a negative ... |
c3ab4f61-236b-48a8-9017-516c4833b68b | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | For alignment, we should simultaneously use multiple theories of cognition and value
*This post is a follow-up to "*[*A multi-disciplinary view on AI safety research*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/opE6L8jBTTNAyaDbB/a-multi-disciplinary-view-on-ai-safety-research)*". I elaborate on some arguments behind this view.*
... |
82045807-ee50-4aaa-a41d-eb910dda0210 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Looking for intuitions to extend bargaining notions
I've come up with two ideas - variations on bargaining ROSE values:
* qROSE ("quantum" version) - instead of taking average over agents' permutations, mean should be weighted and encompass all "trajectories" - sequences of agents' decisions like [A B A A C B]. I'm ... |
666525a8-682f-48ea-aad5-2fe6521fb12d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The hyperfinite timeline
Take an interval. Cut it into H pieces, where H is hyperfinite. This serves as the index set of a stochastic process, among many other uses. Imagine that for each of the H steps, you flip a coin to get -1 or +1. Then move an infinitesimal distance left or right based on the sign. This is Brown... |
ca25f18a-c4fb-4868-9c0f-466ddaaf7f7a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | MATS is hiring!
TL;DR: The MATS team is growing and has several new roles, from leadership to entry-level positions. Review the full extent of job descriptions and apply by Apr 25!
The ML Alignment & Theory Scholars (MATS) program aims to find and train talented individuals for what we see as the world’s most urgent ... |
4fdd7b0f-f26b-4e36-b511-51388765870b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | BHTV: Yudkowsky & Adam Frank on "religious experience"
BHTV episode with myself and Adam Frank, author of "The Constant Fire", on whether or not religious experience is compatible with the scientific experience, or worth trying to salvage.
|
84f72843-28f4-4ebc-b716-12c6c7ff60ac | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Evaluating Solar
In 2018, we installed 14 solar panels on the Northwest roof of our house. This is a little silly: wouldn't you want to install them facing the sun? The problem was the enormous tree to our Southeast, twice the height of our house, completely shading that area. It was a great tree, but it was causing p... |
930205e8-673e-4adb-b92e-ba0c26efc6b6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Race for the Galaxy: 9 Choose 6
Spending a lot of time with only housemates, we've ended up playing a lot of Race for the Galaxy. It's a card game that feels like a German board game, and it pulls the best part of solitaire games (minimal waiting for others, with simultaneous play) into a game where your interaction w... |
b6d1c765-80ec-4bd4-8991-4957b4b21830 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Decomposing Agency — capabilities without desires
What is an agent? It’s a slippery concept with no commonly accepted formal definition, but informally the concept seems to be useful. One angle on it is Dennett’s Intentional Stance: we think of an entity as being an agent if we can more easily predict it by treating i... |
804ac4df-cea7-4bcf-bb6f-dac3096d4beb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AIs and Gatekeepers Unite!
> "Bah, everyone wants to be the gatekeeper. What we NEED are AIs."
> -- Schizoguy
Some of you have expressed the opinion that the AI-Box Experiment doesn't seem so impossible after all. That's the spirit! Some of you even think you know how I did it.
There are folks aplenty who ... |
97a933af-fc6f-4a22-8159-e3029abf1034 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Speed of Failing
Introduction
Last night, I was watching Anatomy of a Fall.
During the film’s first minutes, we hear someone playing the piano entirely out of tempo.
As soon as the movie develops, the piano gets brighter, funnier, and even with a message.
The player is learning, and the piano becomes an instrument ... |
ea55b8c3-3569-4133-9d6a-232d21d544eb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] What Evidence Filtered Evidence?
Today's post, What Evidence Filtered Evidence? was originally published on 29 September 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> Someone tells you only the evidence that they want you to hear. Are you helpless? Forced to update your beliefs until you reach their posi... |
20486fb5-2fc3-486a-8251-c17f66896f53 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Reconciling modern machine learning practice and the bias-variance trade-off
1 Introduction
---------------
Machine learning, which is central to many important applications in science and technology, focuses on the problem of prediction.
Given a sample of training examples (x1,y1),…,(xn,yn) from Rd×R, we learn a p... |
243ef2e9-7cdf-472c-bc1d-8585271e41d2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why might General Intelligences have long term goals?
Short and long term goals have different implications regarding instrumental convergence . If I have the goal of immediately taking a bite of an apple that is in my hand right now, I don't need to gather resources or consider strategies, I can just do it. On the ot... |
61ed18c5-71d4-4304-a9b0-73f4023b4c13 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | How do we become confident in the safety of a machine learning system?
*Thanks to Rohin Shah, Ajeya Cotra, Richard Ngo, Paul Christiano, Jon Uesato, Kate Woolverton, Beth Barnes, and William Saunders for helpful comments and feedback.*
Evaluating proposals for building safe advanced AI—and actually building any degr... |
a3db5f77-defa-4285-9c82-955cc394ad54 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Concrete Steps to Get Started in Transformer Mechanistic Interpretability
***Disclaimer**: This post mostly links to resources I've made. I feel somewhat bad about this, sorry! Transformer MI is a pretty young and small field and there just aren't many people making educational resources tailored to it.*[*Some*](https... |
f5e19cd9-e1a5-4bd7-b562-734193d0c448 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Current FLOPS prices
In November 2017, we estimate the price for one GFLOPS to be between $0.03 and $3 for single or double precision performance, using GPUs (therefore excluding some applications). Amortized over three years, this is $1.1 x 10-5 -$1.1 x 10-7 /GFLOPShour.
Background
----------
We have written abou... |
e22e94b2-4d71-4cc9-845d-04ba39c4832e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Rationalists As People Who Build Piles Of Rocks
I recently attended the LessOnline event at the LightHaven campus.
It was fantastic, and I’ve got plenty of posts coming down the pipeline sparked by conversations or sessions held during the event. I got to meet a lot of my own personal heroes.
It was great.
Somethin... |
12305b0a-f658-4c50-8e98-690d2fc9e201 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Favorites & Performers
Childhood is such a magical time. As a parent, I feel even more pressure to preserve this sanctity for my own children. Based on pure anecdote, I have noticed a trend: if there are at least two children in a family, there are two archetypes: a favorite and a performer.
The favorite in the famil... |
4ea5fb1f-3f91-4333-a5fd-3bbb50e7c4c0 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Cartesian Boundary as Abstraction Boundary
*Meta note: this post involves redefining several concepts in ways almost, but not quite, the same as their usual definitions - risking quite a bit of confusion. I'm open to suggestions for better names for things.*
Intuition: a model of humans (or AIs, or other agenty thing... |
87761272-22ec-4be8-8ba7-8f15ba063091 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why Free Will is NOT an illusion
(This post contains some thought about gACI)
What does it mean that I have free will? If we can define free will like this:
If in a deterministic universe, no observer B can 100% correctly predict the behavior of subject A, except when B is in the future of A, we can say that su... |
07b4ef74-2ebf-4602-8281-6d986066fcc7 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Some thoughts on risks from narrow, non-agentic AI
Here are some concerns which have been raised about the development of advanced AI:
* Power might become concentrated with agentic AGIs which are highly misaligned with humanity as a whole (the second species argument).
* AI might allow power to become concentrated t... |
cd759e21-a6d3-4af4-8f9d-f3390d909630 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | High-precision claims may be refuted without being replaced with other high-precision claims
There's a common criticism of theory-criticism which goes along the lines of:
> Well, sure, this theory isn't exactly right. But it's the best theory we have right now. Do you have a better theory? If not, you can't really cl... |
4b4192f6-9cb2-4bd3-8444-db392f13f233 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [meta] New LW moderator: NancyLebovitz
During the following months my time and attention will be heavily occupied by some personal stuff, so I will be unable to function as a LW moderator. The new LW moderator is... NancyLebovitz!
From today, please direct all your complaints and investigation requests to Nancy. Plea... |
8d386155-e55c-4ea4-80e1-c556ef32da88 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Monthly Bragging Thread April 2016
Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to comment on this thread explaining the most awesome thing you've done this month. You may be as blatantly proud of yourself as you feel. You may unabashedly consider yourself the coolest freaking person ever because of that awesome thing... |
1924df42-deaf-4d60-9de4-327661092c6f | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Conversation with Paul Christiano
AI Impacts talked to AI safety researcher Paul Christiano about his views on AI risk. With his permission, we have transcribed this interview.
**Participants**
----------------
* [Paul Christiano](https://paulfchristiano.com/) — OpenAI safety team
* Asya Bergal – AI Impacts
* Ronn... |
f3aed19e-5fdf-4e1d-947a-2295c0242b1f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | National Telecommunications and Information Administration: AI Accountability Policy Request for Comment
Comment deadline is June 10, 2023. |
06c0c674-b01a-4f60-925d-f64c4cbba94a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | 3-day Solstice in Leipzig, Germany: small, nice, very low cost, includes accommodation, 19th-21st Dec
Hi everyone,
like last year, we'll have a Secular Solstice in Leipzig, Germany. You're invited - message me if you'd like to attend.
We have space for about 25 people. So this isn't a huge event like you'd have in N... |
c56e01ea-9292-4cf6-99d1-a84f2fb26ff5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Epistemic Slipperiness
(epistemic status: thinking out loud, kinda confused)
Sometimes I interact with a person, and something about their thinking feels... slippery.
Probably, sometimes my mind is slippery. But, I can't quite pin down when.
This is probably actually several different phenomena, but they blur toget... |
a3d2a0b1-3749-4bdc-b2d5-d28f3bdd3c04 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Atkins Diet - How Should I Update?
This seems like an authoritative 25-year research project that the Atkins diet is pretty bad:
http://www.nutritionj.com/content/11/1/40/abstract
Right now my belief is that the Atkins diet is good. It's backed by anecdotal evidence of trying a low-carb diet for 18 months followi... |
3e04cc20-c5a1-4c83-bb81-b1e49fc9299a | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info | AI Safety Info | What is AI governance?
[AI governance](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/ai-governance) involves:
1) Researching policy and decision-making questions about current and future AI systems.
2) Efforts to inform and influence relevant decision-makers, including corporations, nonprofits, and national governments... |
bffb646d-e63c-420d-b044-9d26188fadb5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Mark for follow up?
Is there way to mark a post, shortform and comment, such that I can get back to it when I have time and write a comment/reply?
I know I can bookmark post, but what I really need is a mark for follow up with the option for leaving myself a note as to why.
I am giant scatterbrain, and during the da... |
6db9fc05-cb97-4da8-9136-129a61b81278 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Deliberation, Reactions, and Control: Tentative Definitions and a Restatement of Instrumental Convergence
This analysis is speculative. The framing has been refined in conversation and private reflection and research. To some extent it feels vacuous, but at least valuable for further research and communication.
A clu... |
b6d6c239-2d32-4f74-8c73-f79403ac3176 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | TEAM: a dramatically improved form of therapy
Note: The information provided below is not medical advice, and should not be treated as such. Please seek the advice of your physician with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.
I believe a new form of psychotherapy has been found that is significantl... |
50c516ea-aaa6-4291-8d5c-f90ac6a7e545 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open problem: how can we quantify player alignment in 2x2 normal-form games?
In my experience, constant-sum games are considered to provide "maximally unaligned" incentives, and common-payoff games are considered to provide "maximally aligned" incentives. How do we quantitatively interpolate between these two extremes... |
e7a1feba-302f-4774-a649-40a09b0387de | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] LA-602 vs RHIC Review
Today's post, LA-602 vs. RHIC Review was originally published on 19 June 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> A comparison of LA-602, the classified report investigating the possibility of a nuclear bomb igniting the atmosphere and killing everyone, and RHIC, the document e... |
6b6cbe3f-27f0-4997-ab3a-aef8c4e245e9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Macroscale Minds
The original China Brain thought experiment imagines that each person in China uses a cell-phone or other device along with a list of numbers and instructions to simulate one neuron in the human brain. For the purposes of this post I will be assuming that a China Brain is analogous enough to a human b... |
deda611f-096d-440d-9d02-8122cfe1be0f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What posts do you want written?
I have many posts that I want written but do not have time to write and I suspect there are other people that feel similarly. This post on the Solomonoff prior was one example, until I got fed up and just wrote it.
Please write one post idea per answer so they can be voted on seperatel... |
70e21476-652a-4c63-a522-476e656d866a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The price you pay for arriving to class on time
|
8f943635-a562-4baa-a3ed-206a3d9e1aaf | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The First Person And The Physical Person
This is another attempt to promote my approach to anthropic paradoxes. I framed the argument differently hopefully making it more clear. Please refer to my website for more.
What "I" Means
In the strict indexical sense, "I" just means the first person. However we also often ... |
3627591d-0f1f-49e7-b15f-47e5d62272f8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | LW2.0: Community, Culture, and Intellectual Progress
This post presents one lens I (Ruby) use to think about LessWrong 2.0 and what we’re trying to accomplish. While it does not capture everything important, it does capture much and explains a little how our disparate-seeming projects can combine into a single coheren... |
7c366d6c-79c5-452c-b0a9-b28b5842c6ed | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Hammertime Day 9: Time Calibration
This is part 9 of 30 in the Hammertime Sequence. Click here for the intro.
I’ve been thinking about whether or not regular betting, prediction markets, and being well-calibrated is actually useful, and if so how to practice train calibration on a short feedback loop.
Being able to ... |
48869c48-89de-4d63-a4f3-a593b5c46192 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What are you working on? December 2012
This is the sixth bimonthly 'What are you working On?' thread. Previous threads are here. So here's the question:
What are you working on?
Here are some guidelines:
* Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but... |
1cc1cdf3-5f5f-4bff-bafc-191809a32701 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Beyond Kolmogorov and Shannon
This post is the first in a sequence that will describe James Crutchfield's Computational Mechanics framework. We feel this is one of the most theoretically sound and promising approaches towards understanding Transformers in particular and interpretability more generally. As a heads up: ... |
dc712373-83be-426d-90ba-f51c8c2a5a79 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Great Power Conflict
Crossposted from the EA Forum.
No longer endorsed.
Imagine it's 2030 or 2040 and there's a catastrophic great power conflict. What caused it? Probably AI and emerging technology, directly or indirectly. But how?
I've found almost nothing written on this. In particular, the relevant 80K and EA F... |
b9841afd-0a5f-45d1-863f-e0d503703481 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Response to A Contamination Theory of the Obesity Epidemic
EDIT: 8/12 added a paragraph with a link to my post with more stats under the regression
Copied and pasted in its entirety from my blog
Time to try my hand at another unsolvable crisis of the modern world. It is my opinion that something doesn’t add up abo... |
f4b2a8d4-6064-4056-947b-372ab674e74b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Trying to Keep the Garden Well
I used to live in city-subsidized housing. It was an apartment complex with a big garden.
To enjoy the garden in the summer, residents started putting old chairs and a table outside. Once summer was over, they didn't bother to take them inside again. The table became weathered and didn't... |
335a9fd4-49b8-4ffa-b5fc-c224d7a5a556 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What Diet Books Don't Teach: A book review and a request for more reading
I’ve read a fair number of self-help books in my life. I’m long past the point where I expect a book to change my life, but they often are fun to pleasure-read. As Scott Alexander notes, these books all make claims they cannot fulfill. I don’t r... |
26abee5c-c9e5-4eb7-85cb-6916d4e15ceb | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info | AI Safety Info | Wouldn't AIs need to have a power-seeking drive to pose a serious risk?
While [power-seeking AI](/?state=MI2U&question=Why%20should%20we%20expect%20advanced%20AI%20systems%20to%20seek%20power%3F) poses a risk, it is not the only scenario that could potentially lead to catastrophe. Malicious or reckless use of AIs can ... |
ea0d719f-fdcb-42f9-a208-1e53bd7744be | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meditation: the screen-and-watcher model of the human mind, and how to use it
Background: I started meditating with the app Headspace in 2017, and started using the app Waking Up this past month at the same time I started meditating a lot more. (10h in the past month, vs 30h in the three years before that). I am not a... |
cc9b86dc-ecf7-4df5-ad10-29c7d0127f65 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Dan Carlin six hour podcast on history of atomic weapons
|
4ba5c32d-4ded-4acc-a924-83944ecc29b6 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | List of public predictions of what GPT-X can or can't do?
Watching [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qPDwsCLbZc), (Edit: around 25:50) I was pleased to see a specific prediction made by the person claiming that GPT-3 couldn't do reasoning: He claimed that GPT-3's ability to *unscramble* a word was not reas... |
3f14f6fb-cc83-43b9-968c-e24d2f7e6057 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | To reduce astronomical waste: take your time, then go very fast
While we dither on the planet, are we losing resources in space? Nick Bostrom has an article on astronomical waste, talking about the vast amounts of potentially useful energy that we're simply not using for anything:
> As I write these words, suns are i... |
261c0438-0531-4aa5-8f4d-d1e9bec25915 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Field-Building and Deep Models
What is important in hiring/field-building in x-risk and AI alignment communities and orgs? I had a few conversations on this recently, and I'm trying to publicly write up key ideas more regularly.
I had in mind the mantra 'better written quickly than not written at all', so you can exp... |
32f8c062-81b1-4ce3-883b-53e77a57af6f | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | "So I was reading (around the first half of) Adam Frank's The Constant Fire, in preparation for my Bloggingheads dialogue with him. Adam Frank's book is about the experience of the sacred. I might not usually call it that, but of course I know the experience Frank is talking about. It's what I feel when I watch a video... |
069e2924-67f5-4c1b-b28e-43f8e4803b65 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Shared House Setup
In my post on helping Lily make dinner I talked about how there were eight people in the house, and someone wrote to me to ask how this works and how we ended up with that arrangement.
We've been living in group households for most of the last ten years: with another couple and their baby in East S... |
191d33ea-0657-429c-9031-f6131e22673e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Red Flags for Rationalization
Previously: Why a New Rationalization Sequence?
What are Red Flags?
A red flag is a warning sign that you may have rationalized. Something that is practical to observe and more likely in the rationalization case than the non-rationalization.
Some are things which are likely to cause ra... |
492d3fe4-fb87-4d23-8547-307b260b4226 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Daniel Kahneman has died
He was 90 years old.
> His death was confirmed by his stepdaughter Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor for the New Yorker. She did not say where or how he died.
The obituary also describes an episode from his life that I had not previously heard (but others may have):
> Daniel Kahneman was... |
a302420a-f27f-4f59-a1dd-90e7efa7a487 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | LINK: Infinity, probability and disagreement
I saw this conundrum at Alexander Pruss's blog and I thought LWers might enjoy discussing it:
> Consider the following sequence of events:
>
> 1. You roll a fair die and it rolls out of sight.
> 2. An angel appears to you and informs you that you are one of a countable ... |
f5fa42c5-0eda-4809-8c65-2b4eca084510 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Thou Art Physics
Three months ago—jeebers, has it really been that long?—I posed the following homework assignment: Do a stack trace of the human cognitive algorithms that produce debates about “free will.” Note that this task is strongly distinguished from arguing that free will does or does not exist.
Now, as expec... |
27a19aba-0e83-44d4-939e-cb546f13037b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Bushels Are Commodity-Specific
I like obscure units a lot, but mostly they're historical curiosities. It doesn't matter that an ounce of gold is heavier than an ounce of feathers while a pound of feathers is heavier than a pound of gold, or that a pint of raspberries is bigger than a pint of raspberry jam. But one pla... |
e16a5b7f-a6b3-446e-bb23-8f2bc3e59566 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What was that article named?
I'm recalling a Less Wrong post about how rationality only leads to winning if you "have enough of it". Like if you're "90% rational", you'll often "lose" to someone who's only "10% rational". I can't find it. Does anyone know what I'm talking about, and if so can you link to it?
I'm not ... |
170799db-acd0-40bc-8a7b-6f5d3cfe9902 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Major Donation: Long Term Future Fund Application Extended 1 Week
(Crossposted to the EA Forum)
The Long-Term Future EA Funds application round is extended for one more week (until Midnight (PST) Sunday 24th of February).
The LTF Fund received a major donation such that the amount of money available for granting has... |
82bfed34-f414-4f84-998a-0c35fd1aa54a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Bayesian Model Testing Comparisons
We've now seen three different methods for model comparison:
* Exact calculation of posterior probabilities of each model via P[data|model]
* Laplace approximation
* Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC)
Based on the derivations, we can make some predictions:
* Laplace is a sec... |
662f30a2-4054-4cdd-b31a-db0ea99c98de | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Welcome to Astral Codex Ten Miami Meetup
What kind of events does your group usually run? What does it usually do?
We have monthly meetups that typically involve an activity related to applied rationality. Throughout the month there are social meetups happening from Miami up to Palm Beach.
Who would be a good fit fo... |
c7758f21-8597-48b3-8bf8-8dc483005718 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Czech's first Meetup in Prague report
Hello,
I'm happy to inform Less Wrong community about new meet up in Czech Republic, Prague. Despite the fact that nobody came at meet up I'd organized 2 months ago (mainly because it was organized only two weeks ahead), yesterday we met in 5 people. Plus, some other people (abou... |
dcbaa63c-d999-4b99-809c-221c7468a898 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Thoughts on Evo-Bio Math and Mesa-Optimization: Maybe We Need To Think Harder About "Relative" Fitness?
Does natural selection, in general, really go by inclusive relative reproductive fitness?
Does sexual selection? This seems somewhat likelier.
Obviously there's a trivial sense in which the type of reproductive fi... |
17182f12-6c02-44e0-975c-011e02bd1407 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Proposed Approach for AI Safety Movement Building: Projects, Professions, Skills, and Ideas for the Future [long post][bounty for feedback]
Epistemic status
Written as a non-expert to develop my views and get feedback, rather than persuade.
Why read this post?
Read this post for
* a theory of change for AI safe... |
3ed4e8d3-5adc-4e41-bfc8-c4e6bcb35730 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Emperor's New Clothes: a story of motivated stupidity
One day, the all-wise Emperor decided to test the perspicacity of his advisers, and he announced that he was having a new set of clothes made.
When the Imperial Clothing Advisory Group was brought in to see the finished product, there was an awkward silence. T... |
59b5b190-6ccc-4d5b-94f6-9ff7a9a87727 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The ethics of eating meat
I have grown up in a family of meat-eaters and therefore have been eating meat all my life. I until recently I have never spent much time thinking about it. I justified my behaviour by saying that animal lives do not matter, because they are not self-conscious and animal pain does not matter,... |
fdef41bd-8f3d-4bf7-9548-03fc56587c67 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Setting Up Metaethics
Followup to: Is Morality Given?, Is Morality Preference?, Moral Complexities, Could Anything Be Right?, The Bedrock of Fairness, ...
Intuitions about morality seem to split up into two broad camps: morality-as-given and morality-as-preference.
Some perceive morality as a fixed given, independe... |
a2094904-8d9c-44e7-98a1-8d381328861a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Against Complete Blackout Curtains For Sleep
Epistemic status: moderately confident that something like this is directionally true, but good data or arguments could change my mind. Note the lack of citations — this is based on memory.
Most rationalists I meet believe the following:
1. Sleep is very important
2. To... |
811d54d8-c2ea-416a-b97a-bb8bd6d178b4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why I stopped being into basin broadness
There was a period where everyone was really into basin broadness for measuring neural network generalization. This mostly stopped being fashionable, but I'm not sure if there's enough written up on why it didn't do much, so I thought I should give my take for why I stopped fin... |
dcfcc1f9-0051-4deb-b7ce-b23897bc70e4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Decomposing the QK circuit with Bilinear Sparse Dictionary Learning
This work was produced as part of Lee Sharkey's stream in the ML Alignment & Theory Scholars Program - Winter 2023-24 Cohort
Intro and Motivation
Sparse dictionary learning (SDL) has attracted a lot of attention recently as a method for interpreting... |
e095694f-c43a-4864-a0c1-2079c3323cd8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why We Wouldn't Build Aligned AI Even If We Could
In this post, I will outline why I believe that building an actually aligned ASI would not be done by anyone in the position to possibly do it, even if they knew how. Why I think that we are almost guaranteed to either die or suffer the most dystopian outcomes imaginab... |
9712f141-7a25-41a6-b4f4-e785be24051c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | My pitch for the AI Village
I think the AI Village should be funded much more than it currently is; I’d wildly guess that the AI safety ecosystem should be funding it to the tune of $4M/year. I have decided to donate $100k. Here is why.
First, what is the village? Here’s a brief summary from its creators:[1]
We took... |
9fe25dfe-fe9c-4bf4-884c-24be2600ead1 | awestover/filtering-for-misalignment | Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results | id: post587
Preamble This post is an updated explanation of the POST-Agents Proposal (PAP): my proposed solution to the shutdown problem. [1] The post is shorter than my AI Alignment Awards contest entry but it’s still pretty long. The core of the idea is the Timestep Dominance Principle in section 11 . That section i... |
6231b19b-00d9-4e93-83c6-aaa51a571ee6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Two AI-risk-related game design ideas
I have silly fantasies of these games becoming enormously successful and noticeably increasing AI risk awareness & preparedness. If you are inspired by these ideas and want to make something like them a reality, you have my encouragement & I would be excited to discuss.
AI Take... |
47dd007a-fa35-41e2-a296-be7a447fb756 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | You Don't Have To Click The Links
There are a lot of blog posts that have >5 links to other blog posts. I used to click on all of these, and upon seeing that I hadn't read them, I would embark on a several hour long journey of reading until exhaustion, often times without even finishing the original post I started.
R... |
ea1c14f8-b336-4768-8466-a15e27e6ac48 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Singularity&phase transition-2. A priori probability and ways to check.
In my previous post, I discussed a conjecture that certain quantities near singularity should demonstrate power-law behavior, and based on this we can potentially predict when the singularity is supposed to happen. In this post (you can read it in... |
2d43aa28-ed9e-471c-9347-82b40b8b1aa8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : BYU-I
Discussion article for the meetup : BYU-I
WHEN: 08 May 2015 05:30:00PM (-0600)
WHERE: Rexburg, ID: BYU-I, McKay Library
Come to the McKay Library Commons
Discussion article for the meetup : BYU-I |
27c63ed6-e3c1-47cd-ba90-8441899cf9e5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Raising the Sanity Waterline
Today's post, Raising the Sanity Waterline was originally published on 12 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> Behind every particular failure of social rationality is a larger and more general failure of social rationality; even if all religious content were d... |
ff6e2d20-4de3-4914-b6fa-0e292e55503e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | What is the best article to introduce someone to AI safety for the first time?
If they aren't already familiar with AI risk, then they probably won't read Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence (2014) or AI as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk (2008). For people whom a single article is more appropriate, keeping... |
a08d0287-0b55-433d-8a94-7b63b7719443 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Closeness To the Issue (Part 5 of "The Sense Of Physical Necessity")
This is the fifth post in a sequence that demonstrates a complete naturalist study, specifically a study of query hugging (sort of), as described in The Nuts and Bolts of Naturalism. This one continues my demo of phases one and two: Locating Fulcrum ... |
71a7b37c-7f00-4f03-a185-d54a041a25da | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Print Books of Scott Alexander's Writing
tl;dr: I made it so you can buy print versions of The Library of Scott Alexandria, Scott’s collected fiction, and Slate Star Codex Abridged. You can get the pdfs and ebooks from the resources folder of my repo here.
You can see the three books together here (I have no idea how... |
2503e655-c181-4a5c-8bb5-9e72df0ca9bd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Be less scared of overconfidence
When I was deciding whether to work for Wave, I got very hung up on the fact that my “total compensation” would be “lower.”
The scare quotes are there because Wave and my previous employer, Theorem, were both early-stage startups that were paying me mostly in fake startup bucks equity... |
f510cbae-a007-4704-bb59-d5d5a130167a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | MATS Alumni Impact Analysis
Summary
This winter, MATS will be running our seventh program. In early-mid 2024, 46% of alumni from our first four programs (Winter 2021-22 to Summer 2023) completed a survey about their career progress since participating in MATS. This report presents key findings from the responses of th... |
695b29b9-6340-4440-8e37-0b5e60ca64c7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | WebBundles and URL Randomization
Disclosure: I work on ads at Google; this is a personal post.
Peter Snyder of Brave recently wrote a post on the proposed WebBundle specification arguing that it makes URL randomization easier and so is harmful to content blocking. The core of the post is incorrect, however, and based... |
64acc0ca-d4b6-4546-835c-44e0a8a92dd3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Enhanced brain connectivity in long-term meditation practitioners
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811911006008 |
f023955a-2ad9-4853-8ca8-167b6d21fcf6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | An Intro to Anthropic Reasoning using the 'Boy or Girl Paradox' as a toy example
I wrote the below about a year ago as an entry into 3blue1brown's "Summer of Math Exposition" contest. It is supposed to be an introduction to anthropic reasoning, based on the ideas in the book 'Anthropic Bias' by Nick Bostrom, that does... |
21775052-d666-46f2-a523-c27ff0434adf | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Unbounded utility functions and precommitment
According to orthodox expected utility theory, the boundedness of the utility function follows from standard decision-theoretic assumptions, like [Savage's ~~fairly weak~~ axioms](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5J34FAKyEmqKaT7jt/a-summary-of-savage-s-foundations-for-proba... |
2e7ecdde-5fea-4890-819f-7427082adc33 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What will be the aftermath of the US intelligence lab leak report?
I wrote a long post laying out the evidence for the lab leak theory. It's very likely that when the US intelligence community reports on 25. August on their data about the orgins of the COVID-19 they will conclude that it was a lab leak. This then will... |
038e6114-a6be-4e31-8c41-45a7e511f5df | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is it obvious that pain is very important?
> “Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase of pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes, no heroes […]. –George Orwell, 1984 via Brian Tom... |
2836830f-86a4-4ed3-adcd-600ceefb392f | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Deep Speech 2: End-to-End Speech Recognition in English and Mandarin
1 Introduction
---------------
Decades worth of hand-engineered domain knowledge has gone into current state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) pipelines. A simple but powerful alternative solution is to train such ASR models end-to-end... |
127862a1-9ed2-4c5e-ac48-aa8e5a9f88f3 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | General advice for transitioning into Theoretical AI Safety
*Cross-posted from the* [*EA Forum*](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cEpYmdDMeZrsKJa8x/general-advice-for-transitioning-into-theoretical-ai-safety)*.*
*During the past months I've privately talked with +20 AI Safety researchers*[[1]](#fn9e5fl2u61hs... |
439e8c71-3ef2-4dec-85c3-d823a05a7ac3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Trying out Prompt Engineering on TruthfulQA
I try out "let's gather the relevant facts" as a zero-shot question answering aid on TruthfulQA. It doesn't help more than other helpful prompts. Possibly it might work better on more typical factual questions.
This post could potentially be useful to people interested in p... |
3d3c1e77-d820-4f94-881c-ea04e1ffb084 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Preprint says R0=~5 (!) / infection fatality ratio=~0.1%. Thoughts?
What do people think of this preprint from March 13th?
It suggests:
* R0=~5 in Wuhan in January (pre-containment measures)
* Infection fatality rate=~0.1% (several orders of magnitude smaller than the crude CFR estimated at 4.19%)
* ~2 million in... |
ce938ffc-e9fe-414a-bbd0-d2e06eb32186 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Regulatory Option: A response to near 0% survival odds
This is inspired by Eliezer’s “Death with Dignity” post. Simply put, AI Alignment has failed. Given the lack of Alignment technology AND a short timeline to AGI takeoff, chances of human survival have dropped to near 0%. This bleak outlook only considers one v... |
36cd99bb-66c7-4a68-99bc-08a2bb03503e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Killing Socrates
Or, On The Willful Destruction Of Gardens Of Collaborative Inquiry
----------------------------------------
One of the more interesting dynamics of the past eight-or-so years has been watching a bunch of the people who [taught me my values] and [served as my early role models] and [were presented to... |
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