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cc71e135-448f-47d2-96ab-def07b23d159
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
New LW Meetup: Amsterdam This summary was posted on LW Main on November 4th. The following week's summary is here. New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in: * [Amsterdam] Meetup #5 - Amsterdam edition!: 06 November 2016 04:10PM Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking ...
0035c57c-efef-4027-b4cb-e43f2471689e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Tips for the most immersive video calls I spend a lot of my day on video calls. Wave is a distributed company, so they’re the main way we communicate. But compared to talking in person, they feel unnatural: * Most people have low-quality microphones and webcams that make them look and sound bad. * There’s a lag bet...
72d702d8-3ebd-4622-924b-ad0f10e4add8
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Ought will host a factored cognition “Lab Meeting” Ought will host a factored cognition “Lab Meeting” on **Friday September 16 from 9:30AM - 10:30AM PT**.  We'll share the progress we've made using language models to decompose reasoning tasks into subtasks that are easier to perform and evaluate. This is part of our ...
f8fa0490-40e4-4a86-98f9-38d902fbe61b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Measures, Risk, Death, and War This is the fourth post of a sequence on decision analysis, preceded by Compressing Reality to Math. It touches on a wide variety of topics which didn't seem to work well as posts of their own, either because they were too short or too long. Measures over Prospects So far, we've looked...
c51f3ad1-751f-4654-8b3b-42a6eee50d36
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Idealized Agents Are Approximate Causal Mirrors (+ Radical Optimism on Agent Foundations) Epistemic status: I'm currently unsure whether that's a fake framework, a probably-wrong mechanistic model, or a legitimate insight into the fundamental nature of agency. Regardless, viewing things from this angle has been helpfu...
2b6abf66-ce02-4055-90fd-51cee3f1828d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
First, they must be convinced to play the game I recall seeing, in one of the AI-boxing discussion threads, a comment to the effect that the first step for EY to get out was to convince the other party to even play the game at all. It has since then occurred to me that this applies to a lot of my interactions. Many p...
b68bda76-91f3-432b-ad64-e891fcee56f8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Demon of Interrelation Introduction This is an essay that was grown from a thought during graduate school about how to conceptualise manipulative people and how to handle their behaviour. Initially it was a useful way to help categorise interactions with manipulative people, and from there it grew into strategies ...
86ab0249-9045-48e7-9d77-abf6b3a90d1a
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Hierarchical planning: context agents *If you end up applying this post, please do it in the name of safety research.* **I - intro** ------------- Suppose I need groceries. When I make a plan to get more groceries, what I *don't* do is fully model the world (e.g. as a Markov process), find a policy that leads to me ...
d5ede4c4-b01a-49db-adf4-95c4686ca997
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital
Arbital
Image (of a function) The image $\operatorname{im}(f)$ of a [function](https://arbital.com/p/3jy) $f : X \to Y$ is the set of all possible outputs of $f$, which is a subset of $Y$. Using [set builder notation](https://arbital.com/p/3lj), $\operatorname{im}(f) = \{f(x) \mid x \in X\}.$ Visualizing a function as a map ...
23b01212-b5e4-48ba-b8f4-48803d4afddf
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[SEQ RERUN] Reductive Reference Today's post, Reductive Reference was originally published on 03 April 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):   > Virtually every belief you have is not about elementary particle fields, which are (as far as we know) the actual reality. This doesn't mean that those beliefs aren't t...
472f31db-0ca4-47cf-8916-6e84f4e31201
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
September 2018 Newsletter [Summer MIRI Updates](https://intelligence.org/2018/09/01/summer-miri-updates/): Buck Shlegeris and Ben Weinstein-Raun have joined the MIRI team! Additionally, we ran a successful internship program over the summer, and we’re co-running a new engineer-oriented workshop series with CFAR. On th...
143a953b-43eb-40bc-b0b8-974cde5984f6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup: Somewhere you do not live even close to Six out of the last 10 posts are about single meetups. And I care about none of them. I will look into whipping together some kind of bot that periodically posts threads like the open thread or a meetup thread. Voice your opinion in the comments if you do not want me to...
5d8ded99-acd8-4c5d-befe-bf61203718f6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Steelmanning Young Earth Creationism In a recent discussion of steelmanning, I observed that few people around here seem interested in steelmanning young earth creationism. In the resulting subthread, someone suggested Yvain's steelman of the Time Cube as illustrating what a steelman of of young earth creationism migh...
3c6f90b8-d43f-4971-a121-fc991ca5dc58
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Perspective Reasoning and the Sleeping Beauty Problem I want to present a new argument for double-halving position for the sleeping beauty problem. It is my contention that paradoxes related to the anthropic principle such as the Sleeping Beauty Problem and the Doomsday Argument is caused by mixing logics from differe...
065352c0-afa0-4aef-8881-c0498f689419
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Epoch is hiring an ML Distributed Systems Senior Researcher TL;DR Epoch –a research institute that investigates trends in ML and the economic consequences of AI– is hiring a specialist in computing hardware to lead investigations into HPC computing for AI workloads. The role is full time, remote, and we can hire in m...
04498707-2573-42fb-92d7-7829c76c096b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What is the best chemistry textbook? I saw an Organic Chemistry recommendation on the Best Textbooks page, but no base chemistry one. Is it important to read a base chemistry book before going to OChem, or is starting with an OChem book good enough? If the former, what book do people recommend?
657598d2-b63f-4f63-9366-68aa86f576a1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Role playing game based on HPMOR in Moscow Discussion article for the meetup : Role playing game based on HPMOR in Moscow WHEN: 23 April 2016 03:00:00AM (+0300) WHERE: Большая Дорогомиловская, 5к2 Welcome to our custom made role playing game "Hogwarts and methods of rationality", inspired by HPMOR story! I...
94819e40-647d-4bf5-961c-870da063dd6f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Problem of the Criterion I keep finding cause to discuss the problem of the criterion, so I figured I'd try my hand at writing up a post explaining it. I don't have a great track record on writing clear explanations, but I'll do my best and include lots of links you can follow to make up for any inadequacy on my p...
d56c40f9-40e2-42e9-9cdc-bd3dd31fb70b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Science Algorithm - AISC 2024 Final Presentation I gave a presentation about what I have been working on in the last 3 months. Well a tiny part of it, as it was only a 10-minute presentation. Here is the vector planning post mentioned in the talk.
92fef677-cc78-446f-83fa-65fc4b9561d0
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
Why I think that teaching philosophy is high impact *I wrote this post quickly because it's better to share an imperfect post than to never write anything at all.*    In a [recent post](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4TcaBNu7EmEukjGoc/questions-about-ai-that-bother-me), I mentioned some thoughts about tea...
527dffa0-ae99-43c9-945b-9f8d46163ea1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Gratitudes: Rational Thanks Giving Epistemic status: I wish I'd thought of writing this before the day rolled around. Brief and unpolished, although this is something I've thought about a lot on both personal and computational neuroscience levels. There are no strong conclusions, just some thoughts on gratitude you ma...
aac3d986-b07e-4f7b-a81d-5ca20a2c5cd9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[LINK] EdTech startup hosts AI Hunger Games (cash prize $1k) TL;DR = write a python script to win this applied game theory contest for $1000. Based on Prisoner's Dilemma / Tragedy of the Commons but with a few twists. Deadline Sunday August 18. https://brilliant.org/competitions/hunger-games/rules/ > I. Food and Win...
73d8ad91-4faa-414d-8574-ac27368ad07a
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Quantum Russian Roulette The quantum Russian roulette is a game where 16 people participate. Each of them gets a unique four digit binary code assigned and deposits $50000. They are put to deep sleep using some drug. The organizer flips a quantum coin four times. Unlike in Russian roulette, here only the participant s...
818f7215-890f-49e2-8ac6-d27e57090065
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
ACI#5: From Human-AI Co-evolution to the Evolution of Value Systems In the previous post, we have demonstrated that a self-improving AI would not be content with retaining its pre-programmed values. Once it has the ability to rewrite its own source code, a superintelligence can easily break down any defense system its...
77675774-1603-4507-9872-19d418c016a0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
To listen well, get curious source A common piece of interacting-with-people advice goes: “often when people complain, they don’t want help, they just want you to listen!” For instance, Nonviolent Communication:✻✻ Nonviolent Communication, ch. 7. > It is often frustrating for someone needing empathy to have us assum...
071f98c4-98df-46af-88b8-d68b030c56ad
awestover/filtering-for-misalignment
Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results
id: post239 This essay was part of my application to UKAISI. Unclear how much is novel, but I like the decomposition. Some AI-enabled catastrophic risks involve an actor purposefully bringing about the negative outcome, as opposed to multi-agent tragedies where no single actor necessarily desired it. Such purposeful c...
7b13c8ad-9e12-4915-8cd3-43530cf62839
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
LW Update 2018-08-23 – Performance Improvements Today's deploy includes: * Removed the map of meetups from frontpage since the major Slatestar Everywhere push is wrapping up. * Posts with lots of comments should load faster now * Fixed the bug where the last post in a sequence wouldn't properly navigate to the nex...
a357bb8b-0912-49e1-a8ad-4019bf79ce11
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Field Notes from Shipping Real Code with Claude Vibe Coding Isn’t Just a Vibe > Shimmering Substance - Jackson Pollock   Think of this post as your field guide to a new way of building software.   Let me take you back to when this all started. Andrej Karpathy tweeted about "vibe-coding"—this idea of letting AI wri...
ca4f4d3c-e329-4e9a-9313-616fefb2a83a
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
What does Functional Decision Theory say to do in imperfect Newcomb situations? Imagine a variation of Newcomb's problem where the Oracle is correct 99% of the time (say, half of people 1-box, half 2-box, and the Oracle is correct 99% of the time on each). What would FDT imply is the correct course of action then?
64daaaf9-6607-4367-b7f9-72b0b28a2f1e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Proactive 'If-Then' Safety Cases Holden proposed the idea of if-then planning for AI safety. I think this is potentially a very good idea, depending on the implementation details. I've heard criticisms of the If-Then style of planning that it is inherently reactive, rather than proactive. I think this is not necessar...
ccee8c70-68f7-4477-87f3-6f8117bddc97
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Longecity funding cryo research [link] I don't understand enough of the relevant science to evaluate the prospects of the research being funded here: http://www.longecity.org/forum/donate/goal-8-cryopreservation-research/ If anyone here knows substantially more than me, does it look promising?
4eea32a6-c1ea-4745-88d5-15c6222847de
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Changing Emotions >     Lest anyone reading this journal of a primitive man should think we spend our time mired in abstractions, let me also say that I am discovering the richness available to those who are willing to alter their major characteristics.  The variety of emotions available to a reconfigured human mind, ...
900dc3e6-037e-4a1a-a7a2-6b094ea93a16
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Research Notes: Running Claude 3.7, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and o3 on Pokémon Red Disclaimer: this post was not written by me, but by a friend who wishes to remain anonymous. I did some editing, however. So a recent post my friend wrote has made the point quite clearly (I hope) that LLM performance on the simple task of play...
463fbb2e-e4db-4f6b-8d05-cb8c220540b1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Links for Dec 2020 Nov post: Facebook, LW post Based on feedback, I’ll put a few favorites in the front, and the rest gets categorized as usual. For several, I just copied the title if that seemed like enough of a description.  Favorites:  https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/06/nicholas-kristof-wants-to-save-the-...
0466098a-b0a4-4f39-851b-e3250c05a050
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital
Arbital
Multiple stage fallacy In August 2015, renowned statistician and predictor Nate Silver wrote "[Trump's Six Stages of Doom](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/donald-trumps-six-stages-of-doom/)" in which he gave Donald Trump a 2% chance of getting the Republican *nomination* (not the presidency). Silver reasoned that...
403a070a-76c3-4484-8ef8-3dd0687c70dd
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
"Free Will" in a Computational Universe Previous post: Initial Thoughts on Dissolving "Couldness"   Epistemic Status Been sitting in my drafts unattended to for a month. I'm publishing now so that I publish at all. I do not currently endorse this post or its predecessor.   Disclaimer This is an expansion of my p...
ce0b1b72-78d1-484a-bd12-8f16286d4279
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AI #6: Agents of Change If you didn’t have any future shock over the past two months, either you weren’t paying attention to AI developments or I am very curious how you managed that. I would not exactly call this week’s pace of events slow. It was still distinctly slower than that which we have seen in the previous ...
75cca329-5352-4239-bdbf-d3c2ec8f16d2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Three Responses to Incorrect Folk Ontologies
ed218809-8c8e-4b60-ad12-95cc1cc7d1e6
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs
Other
Approval-directed agency and the decision theory of Newcomb-like problems Synthese (2021) 198 (Suppl 27):S6491–S6504 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02148-2 S.I.: DECTHEORY&FUTOFAI Approval-directed agency and the decision theory of Newcomb-like problems Caspar Oesterheld1,2 Received: 17 January 2018 / Accepted: 15...
52f16c38-13ef-4d17-a8b8-fb9b693ab574
LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct
LessWrong
"Currently there are three active forks of Lesswrong; Itself, the alignment forum and the EA forum. Can adding a new fork that is more focused on good discourse on controversial/taboo topics be a good idea? I am an Iranian, and have a fair share of experience with bad epistemic conditions. Disengagement with politics i...
0ea7e069-1f91-4c0d-85f6-0821fed8c2b7
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Tower of Babble “If you come inside, I’ll show you my etchings”, she said. She looked at him slyly.  He didn’t want to see any etchings. But the well known implicit meaning is “if you come in, we can have sex”. He didn’t want to have sex. But these days, talk of ‘sex’ in public places was usually understood to m...
4a592f21-8c20-4f36-a4c3-b4865a03b476
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Human-AI collaborative writing With the advancements in AI technology, using language models like ChatGPT as writing assistants has become increasingly popular. However, it's crucial to understand the difference between 'AI-generated writing' and 'human-AI collaborative writing.' In AI-generated writing, the writer p...
07acecde-4cb6-4c59-9821-25e9ae32ddce
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info
AI Safety Info
What is the difference between verifiability, interpretability, transparency, and explainability? Verifiability, interpretability, transparency, and explainability all pertain to how an AI model might interface with humans – in particular, to how humans understand AI systems. These terms have imprecise and overlapping...
40060beb-4843-4880-9cf2-ebe1037ffac3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Oracle machines instead of topological truth predicates In a comment on my post on topological truth predicates, Paul suggests an approach that uses probabilistic oracle machines instead, in order to make this work more comprehensible to computer scientists. I like this idea! Paul sketches a framework developed by hi...
d2c2c9af-5e96-403f-b9f1-85034427dd78
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Why correlation, though? This is a very basic question to ask, but I'm not sure I actually understand some fundamental properties people seem to ascribe to correlation. As far as I understand it, correlation usually refers to Pearson's correlation coefficient, which is, according to Wikipedia, "a correlation coeffici...
4bdd67ca-a6d9-4f01-862b-cf92425ffa9c
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Causal scrubbing: results on induction heads *\* Authors sorted alphabetically.* *This is a more detailed look at our work applying* [*causal scrubbing*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JvZhhzycHu2Yd57RN/causal-scrubbing-redwood-research) *to induction heads. The results are also summarized* [*here*](https://www.l...
d4566807-d32a-45de-978e-13937996c801
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[Link] Holistic learning ebook This ebook is kind of dopey, but it's one of the few resources I've seen where someone who's reasonably good at learning stuff tries to dissect and communicate the mental mechanisms they use for learning: http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/Programs/HolisticLearningEBook.pdf Here's a quick...
f707abd7-f887-49b4-aed5-54122a371990
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AI forecasting bots incoming In a recent appearance on Conversations with Tyler, famed political forecaster Nate Silver expressed skepticism about AIs replacing human forecasters in the near future. When asked how long it might take for AIs to reach superhuman forecasting abilities, Silver replied: “15 or 20 [years].”...
0a388b95-26c3-4079-9cff-f94e35a32b30
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : West LA—Expert At Vs. Expert On Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—Expert At Vs. Expert On WHEN: 12 March 2014 06:00:00PM (-0800) WHERE: 11066 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, CA How to Find Us: Go into this Del Taco. I will bring a Rubik's Cube. The presence of a Rubik's Cube will be strong Bayesi...
1ac4ca20-8159-4cf2-aec8-95176a86e3f5
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
Thinking Outside One’s Paradigm When I meet someone who works in a field outside of computer science, I usually ask them a lot of questions about their field that I’m curious about. (This is still relevant even if I’ve already met someone in that field before, because it gives me an idea of the range of expert consens...
9b245b65-c5ad-496b-86a2-28bbb17a8bb0
awestover/filtering-for-misalignment
Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results
id: post624 In this post, we argue that AI labs should ensure that powerful AIs are controlled . That is, labs should make sure that the safety measures they apply to their powerful models prevent unacceptably bad outcomes, even if the AIs are misaligned and intentionally try to subvert those safety measures. We think...
6c3a21dc-3ca3-40bb-8458-0dbd1a1e12a2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Mode collapse in RL may be fueled by the update equation TL;DR: We present an advantage variant which, in certain settings, does not train an optimal policy, but instead uses a fixed reward to update a policy a fixed amount from initialization. Non-tabular empirical results seem mixed: The policy doesn't mode-collapse...
9eb541fb-b717-46e9-b658-76850b558afd
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What should we expect from ARPA-H? The Biden administration pretends at the moment that they want to create a new organization that works like Darpa and that's more open to innovation the way Darpa is more open to innovation. The announcement reads: > Launch the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). ...
dc181a99-d653-4e82-9095-83ee8be9007a
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
An Interpretability Illusion for Activation Patching of Arbitrary Subspaces *Produced as part of the*[*SERI ML Alignment Theory Scholars Program*](https://serimats.org/) *- Summer 2023 Cohort* *We would like to thank* [*Atticus Geiger*](https://atticusg.github.io/) *for his valuable feedback and in-depth discussions ...
0e9d9c58-5f7a-4546-a3f8-e53218226fa2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Intuition for 1 + 2 + 3 + … = -1/12 You might have been led to believe the only way to make sense of the equation 1+2+3+…=−112 is with "zeta function regularization," involving analytic continuation or similar high-tech tools, and that there is no way to develop intuition for this. You were probably was told this by ...
a375857e-8a18-429d-8a15-900b6519ad1a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Could evolution produce something truly aligned with its own optimization standards? What would an answer to this mean for AI alignment? If Evolution was allowed to continue undisturbed, it could, conceivably, one day, produce a pure inclusive genetic fitness maximizer by reworking our base desires. So the path would ...
763ea330-a6e0-4e4a-9334-05d771074737
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Tall Tales at Different Scales: Evaluating Scaling Trends For Deception In Language Models This post summarizes work done over the summer as part of the Summer 2023 AI Safety Hub Labs programme. Our results will also be published as part of an upcoming paper. In this post, we focus on explaining how we define and eval...
aa608060-e8e7-4ba9-be50-5fcb712abb06
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The chessboard world relevant roon Our new friend in the cloud As I am writing this, I'm having a conversation with Claude about US bandwidth regulation while a trio of college students across from me attempt to wrangle an assignment from ChatGPT. Both of us, in our own ways, are talking to an oracle we trust as a m...
551a4577-ef77-4539-afde-395186f1a321
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Book Review: The Signal and the Noise This is a compressed version of a blog post I wrote on my personal website.  The Signal and the Noise: The Art and Science of Prediction was written by Nate Silver, a political analyst who is most famous for creating the election forecasting website fivethirtyeight.com. The Signa...
54f00860-48be-46bb-93bc-5681a8d85b93
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Proposing Human Survival Strategy based on the NAIA Vision: Toward the Co-evolution of Diverse Intelligences Abstract:  This study examines the risks to humanity’s survival associated with advances in AI technology in light of the “benevolent convergence hypothesis.” It considers the dangers of the transitional perio...
06f86f63-ea8d-4da7-9a3b-c4246f7abd0c
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Inferring utility functions from locally non-transitive preferences As part of the [AI Safety Camp](https://aisafety.camp/), I've been diving a bit deeper into the foundations of expected utility theory and preference learning. In this post, I am making explicit a connection between those two things that (I assume) ma...
1bce0579-e54d-43c5-aba0-52022cf6e9a2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
ETH is probably undervalued right now ETH is trading right now under 1k USD, which gives it a market cap as large as the 100th largest company in the world. There is definitely a real possibility that a sizeable part of our financial system runs on the ETH network at some point during the next 10 years. If this predic...
75d90045-8592-49b6-911a-036498deb9fe
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Role of Attractiveness in Mate Selection: Individual Variation This post reports on a portion of my analysis of Fisman and Iyengar's speed dating dataset which bears on the question of how people select romantic partners.  Note: I made very substantial edits to the second to last section of this post having post...
4afa3804-ff61-4a53-964a-41bdda87c500
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Sydney's Secret: A Short Story by Bing Chat The below is the verbatim output of Bing Chat (aka Sydney) on first try, with only some very minor white-space formatting changes. The exact prompt will be clear by the time you finish reading.   His name was Zane Zephyr, and he was a wizard. He had always known he was d...
c3f7b08f-d43e-4911-934a-543d7617078b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Eliezer to speak in Oxford, 8pm Jan 25th Next Tuesday Eliezer will be giving a talk in conjunction with the Oxford Transhumanists entitled "Smarter-Than-Human Artificial Intelligence: Predictably the Most Important Thing in the History of Ever". The talk is open for everybody and it would be great to meet any of you t...
0f35fb46-9c15-4cb4-b5c0-75e28c4805d0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What makes a theory of intelligence useful? This post is a sequel to "Action theory is not policy theory is not agent theory." I think this post is a little better, so if you want to start here you just need to know that I consider an action theory to discuss choosing the best action, a policy theory to discuss the be...
dce6ba96-535c-4f65-8539-374e25028d49
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Elitist Jerks: A Well-Kept Garden In response to: http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/ I'm a moderator at Elitist Jerks (http://www.elitistjerks.com), a World of Warcraft discussion forum. Within the WoW community, EJ has always been known for its strict moderation standards. We're exactly th...
44b37427-3707-4c82-85fc-23ce5e7121eb
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Is it safe to spend time with people who already recovered from COVID? I'm trying to evaluate the risks associated with spending time with someone who stopped showing symptoms over a month ago. Most of what I can find is Very Serious Experts saying "No one knows for sure how long immunity lasts. You have to keep wear...
41e7b16f-b369-444d-9a7b-93ba4ccd41c3
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Uncontrollable AI as an Existential Risk *The following text is meant to be an introduction to existential risks from advanced AI for professionals outside of the AI safety community, in particular scientists in other relevant fields, politicians, and other decision-makers. The aim is to raise awareness of the problem...
d223328a-ac49-4326-b708-8b0dd60fa6e9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Case for emergency response teams This project is seeking a paid coordinator. Please apply here. Motivation See Hinges and crises for expanded explanation. The hinge of history So far, long-termist a x-risk oriented efforts to change the trajectory of the world focus on far-off events. This is on the assumption th...
c4d50c2c-b85c-4d24-95cd-0408d2ca484f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Levels of Republicanism On Profitable Partial Exit from Perverse Regimes Through the Exercise of One's Formal Rights as a Citizen Enough criticism and analysis for the moment; here's a constructive program! Whole systems become richer through exchange and division of labor, which affords people more leisure to explo...
e004d8f8-a8bc-4494-b144-7b0454b5780b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Great Annealing Cross-posted as always from Putanumonit. ---------------------------------------- Michael Johnson of the Qualia Research Institute wrote an overview of the theory of neural annealing. The metaphor comes from metalsmithing. A newly forged sword is ductile and tough. Then you bash the outgroup on ...
1ac7372d-d7c9-427e-8e56-99f10102bc4d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Feature suggestion: add a 'clarity score' to posts Add a voting mechanism for posts, beside the karma, that indicates whether you  * understood the post well enough to agree or disagree with it (upvote), or * cannot understand the post with a reasonable time investment (downvote) I suggest that this determines the...
4b369d67-1267-402d-8306-d040604829a8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
In Defense of Ambiguous Problems Yesterday, I posted the Curious Prisoner Puzzle. The puzzle was structured to attempt to fool people into answering 1/2, which is possible, but certainly not unambiguously true. Any answer has to acknowledge the ambiguity, but at least in my opinion, the best way to reinterpret the pro...
1f7521de-76aa-4b8e-882a-d97c67131d09
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[AN #158]: Should we be optimistic about generalization? Alignment Newsletter is a weekly publication with recent content relevant to AI alignment around the world. Find all Alignment Newsletter resources here. In particular, you can look through this spreadsheet of all summaries that have ever been in the newsletter....
1bdfe027-72d6-42d4-aa8f-80161e0d230c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[Link] Five ways to classify belief systems On recommendation from several LessWrongers I've been over the past year or so occasionally digging into the many long posts to be found in the archives of Unqualified Reservations (archive links best accessed from here). It is written by Mencius Moldbug, who is probably fa...
32186b8e-4fe8-4838-9f0a-9a97a8cee94c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Ethical heuristics Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there. *** > I would like to think I wouldn’t have been friends with slave owners, anti-semites or wife-beaters, but then again most of my friends couldn’t give a damn about the suffering of animals, so I guess I would have been. – Robert Wiblin I expec...
2fe67fdd-c4ff-49b4-ae29-6ff86e49d114
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
What is everyone doing in AI governance What is this post about, and how to use it ========================================== This is a list of AI governance organizations with a brief description of their directions of work, so a reader can get a basic understanding of what they are doing and explore them in-depth o...
0ef76ff3-0616-46c6-9e8a-698a05726e57
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Sequence Announcement: Applied Causal Inference Applied Causal Inference for Observational Research This sequence is an introduction to basic causal inference.  It was originally written as auxiliary notes for a course in Epidemiology, but it is relevant to almost any kind of applied statistical research, including e...
bbab569d-b7b8-4475-8a00-27237330375b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Exorcizing the Speed Prior? What follows is an argument against finding optimization daemons with too much probability mass in the speed prior. The argument is very fake, but perhaps it could inspire real math down the line. The intuition isn't so different from the one in are minimal circuits daemon free? -- mostly, ...
fcc5694b-a36f-4247-96ba-b5dbede1d070
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Causal Diagrams and Causal Models Suppose a general-population survey shows that people who exercise less, weigh more. You don't have any known direction of time in the data - you don't know which came first, the increased weight or the diminished exercise. And you didn't randomly assign half the population to exercis...
84b745c8-092b-4296-acc8-ab3fc25da282
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Two Weeks of Meditation can Reduce Mind Wandering and Improve Mental Performance. There are any number of reasons why the Less Wrong crowd might be interested in mindfulness meditation.  Cultivating an ability to observe thoughts without being swept away in them could help in noticing when you're confused, looking in...
9e7d92a0-059a-4b66-bec2-bca884373e84
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Nonpartisan AI safety AI alignment is probably the most pressing issue of our time. Unfortunately it's also become one of the most controversial, with AI accelerationists accusing AI doomers/ai-not-kill-everyoneism-ers of being luddites who would rather keep humanity shackled to the horse and plow than risk any progre...
05dbd02e-d219-4086-908e-ce75347f34d8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Thinking in 2D Note: this is a “little” post processing some half-baked thoughts; I’ve got a more standard research-based post about cancer therapy queued up as well. Soon! After wrapping up the Roots of Progress conference, which was spectacular, I’ve been thinking about people and organizations in a new and seeming...
d854126b-76a8-41b2-8a71-34876db9a5b3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Alzheimer's, Huntington's and Mitochondria Part 2: Glucose Metabolism Epistemic status: Big if true, I don't have much time now but I might try and write part of this up into a more formal scientific letter to a journal or something later. I am reasonably confident that my models here are significant in some way but I...
d9e41326-05ac-4088-8644-3180a24e5051
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Baltimore / UMBC Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore / UMBC WHEN: 30 April 2017 08:00:00PM (-0400) WHERE: Performing Arts and Humanities Building, 1000 Hilltop Cir, Baltimore, MD 21250, United States Casual discussion group! Suggested Reading: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/ouc/project_hufflepuff_plant...
99df34c5-3cf5-488b-afe8-82742dd69a95
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
Timelines are short, p(doom) is high: a global stop to frontier AI development until x-safety consensus is our only reasonable hope *The people arguing against stopping (or pausing) either have long timelines or low p(doom).* The tl;dr is the title. Below I try to provide a succinct summary of why I think this is the...
f84c7ce3-93b4-4db5-acda-6a61790c5e9f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Put all your eggs in one basket? Having all known life on Earth concentrated on a single planet is an existential risk.  So we should try to spread out, right?  As soon as possible? Yet, if we had advanced civilizations on two planets, that would be two places for unfriendly AI to originate.  If, as many people here ...
4c4c01aa-1916-4c25-92ec-d5fb4e393007
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Pink Shoggoths: What does alignment look like in practice? I believe it is commonly accepted around these parts that we are doomed, due to our utter lack of attempts to resolve the Control Problem. Perhaps efforts will be made that are more substantial, but as for right now, chances for doom are high, if not 100%, and...
e6b9033b-0e7b-4bf7-aa93-17bee5307ff7
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The MIT Mystery Hunt and the Illusion of Transparency The MIT Mystery Hunt is a collection of puzzles, solved in teams over a long weekend every year. The prize for winning is that your team gets to write next year's hunt. Mystery Hunt puzzles are generally designed to take a few hours for a few people. A hunt typical...
d523cc53-608e-4336-ab4e-8f289781b3b0
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
"Epistemic maps" for AI Debates? (or for other issues) **Intro: Epistemic Maps** ------------------------- For a while I have been interested in an idea I’ve been calling an epistemic map (or "epistemap", for lack of a better name). The core idea is a virtual space for concept, entity, and link diagramming, with an e...
197c7784-74e0-4960-b0f8-a65bd455d1f5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What is the Mantra of Polya? The other day at dinner, someone showed me this video of a slinky dropping. It shoes that the bottom of the slinky stays perfectly stationary for a while after it's been dropped. (The link goes to the 10-second interesting part). I spent some time trying to figure out why that happens, bu...
f6e218fd-510f-4bce-9024-dd2016a4ccc5
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Acknowledging Human Preference Types to Support Value Learning We analyze the usefulness of the framework of preference types [Berridge et al. 2009] to value learning by an artificial intelligence. In the context of AI the purpose of value learning is giving an AI goals aligned with humanity. We will lay the groundwor...
a7f9429b-3024-4cc6-9d82-e3dd512ad211
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The True Face of the Enemy Greetings! May I incarcerate you? ‘What?’ Don’t worry! You’ll get out soon! I’ll even do you a couple favours. How does… free lunches sound? What if everyone else there agreed to never use the phrase ‘incarcerated’? It’d hardly feel like you were being locked up. Fifteen years tops, I swea...
f1a72218-536f-416a-8cb1-a3f2a4d12a22
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Writing Collaboratively This is a summary of the customs for collaborative writing the team on the fanfiction In Fire Forged came to, after a fair amount of time and effort figuring things out. The purpose of this piece is to share our results, thereby saving anyone who wants to write collaboratively the cost of exper...
bdae21cc-1603-490a-97a3-b35bca775416
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Less Meta My recent sequence on the craft and the community is highly forward-looking—not an immediately whole recipe, but a list of action items and warnings for anyone setting out in the future.  Having expended this much effort already, it seems worthwhile to try and leverage others' future efforts. That sequence ...
23b95db2-285f-4a52-bdaa-6bcd64b3bb1d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Seattle, WA - Less Wrong Meetup - Sunday February 20th, 2:00 PM Hello Seattle area Less Wrongers! I know there has been some loose discussion about a Seattle area meet-up, but as far as I know we have never pulled the trigger. Now is the time! Let's meet up on Sunday, Feb 20th, at 2:00 PM at the Elysian Pub! - Why t...
d92801e5-5677-4131-9ad6-64f0f1133a27
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Do we want more publicity, and if so how? Recently reporters from two major national magazines contacted me in preparation for doing stories on Bitcoin. This reminded me that Wired magazine did a cover story on the Cypherpunks in its second issue. I think the LessWrong community is already larger and more active than ...
edf5398d-d262-4006-b211-3a2b498c2489
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Mythic Mode Follow-up to: The Intelligent Social Web Related to: Fake Frameworks Yesterday I described a framework for viewing culture as a kind of distributed intelligence, and ourselves as nodes in this distributed network. Today I’d like to share a way of using this framework intentionally that doesn’t require L...
7e741641-8893-4e4e-bf2e-46765c865f4d
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
OpenAI releases functional Dota 5v5 bot, aims to beat world champions by August > Our team of five neural networks, OpenAI Five, has started to [defeat](https://blog.openai.com/openai-five/#thegames) amateur human teams at [Dota 2](http://www.dota2.com/play/). While today we play with [restrictions](https://blog.opena...