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ee2e0040-1583-4599-ade9-bc1dd16ed94f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Epistemological Weight Class On a certain level, most people have a general idea of who they should and should not debate, with regards to any given subject with which they are familiar. This sense is, essentially, an assessment of how hard it would be to win a debate with the given person on the given subject. This a...
a4e81a90-3d5d-40e8-b687-77c03dc7b1e7
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A Marriage Ceremony for Aspiring Rationalists Recently, LWers Will Ryan and Divia Melwani (now Will and Divia Eden) were married, with Eliezer Yudkowsky officiating. I've been to 40+ weddings in my lifetime, and this was my favorite ceremony yet. Here is the video, and below is the transcript of Eliezer's... what's i...
6a7901ac-011b-4f6b-9d4a-9c28454be3ad
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : London rationalish meetup - 2016-03-06 Discussion article for the meetup : London rationalish meetup - 2016-03-06 WHEN: 06 March 2016 02:00:00PM (+0000) WHERE: Shakespeare's Head, 64-68 Kingsway, London WC2B 6AH Did you know that in 2016, it's possible to set up a website with server, domain name and discu...
dff7d2f7-eacf-4bd5-9f51-104b62de65af
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Beyond ELO: Rethinking Chess Skill as a Multidimensional Random Variable Introduction The traditional ELO rating system reduces a player's ability to a single scalar value E, from which win probabilities are computed via a logistic function of the rating difference. While pragmatic, this one-dimensional approach may ...
1a952e36-227f-4379-b97f-9628a3cbb51b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[fiction] Our Final Hour EtA: This is fictional, and symbolism; not a precise prediction. Feedback appreciated. As intelligence is bottled and amplified, we'll all become very wealthy. Doing our job will mostly become about providing more training data for the AI – until it learns it well enough, and we can go home f...
9fd306ed-068e-47d1-9e69-9cd544034331
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
GPT-4 Plugs In GPT-4 Right Out of the Box In some ways, the best and worst thing about GPT-4 was its cutoff date of September 2021. After that date it had no access to new information, and it had no ability to interact with the world beyond its chat window. As a practical matter, that meant that a wide range of use ...
ead97e86-9ad8-41c6-9610-13aba4ec4605
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Which areas of rationality are underexplored? - Discussion Thread There seems to actually be real momentum behind this attempt as reviving Less Wrong. One of the oldest issues on LW has been the lack of content. For this reason, I thought that it might be worthwhile opening a thread where people can suggest how we can...
e65e4e19-70c8-4868-a5e1-df07063d8d62
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Experiments as a Third Alternative As a kid in elementary school, I was diagnosed with ADHD. I think the diagnostic process is dumb and unreliable, and so the fact that I was diagnosed seems like it should only count as weak evidence. But knowing what I know about myself and having read a few books about ADHD, my best...
59385cd1-0511-4d72-8495-0b5ddb8547c9
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Distributed Cooperation .mjx-chtml {display: inline-block; line-height: 0; text-indent: 0; text-align: left; text-transform: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 100%; font-size-adjust: none; letter-spacing: normal; word-wrap: normal; word-spacing: normal; white-space: nowrap; float: none; directi...
183e92cd-a9de-4535-acf9-93ce67e0d1e2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Start an Upper-Room UV Installation Company? While this post touches on biosecurity it's a personal post and I'm not speaking for my employer If you want to prevent airborne spread of diseases you have a few options: * Filter breath (masks, PAPRs) * Replace the air (ventilation) * Clean the air (filters, UV lig...
ba93012e-d15c-4575-8845-54fdf398440e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Magic and the halting problem It is clear that the Harry Potter book series is fairly popular on this site, e.g. the fanfiction. This fanfiction approaches the existence of magic objectively and rationally. I would suggest, however, that most if not all of the people on this site would agree that magic, as presented i...
1e5b9419-6aab-42d8-a24f-578d071d4cf6
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
What do ML researchers think about AI in 2022? *Katja Grace, Aug 4 2022* AI Impacts just finished collecting data from a new survey of ML researchers, as similar to the [2016 one](https://aiimpacts.org/2016-expert-survey-on-progress-in-ai/) as practical, aside from a couple of new questions that seemed too interesti...
5e541fb5-32bc-4025-a5e0-e3512b73c8fe
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[Link] A gentle video introduction to game theory In this article I invite LessWrong users to learn the very basic math of something that is useful to both our community's goal of making better thinkers as well as many of the unrelated discussions that we often have here. I also present resources for further study to...
6028e9ad-937d-4d2f-91fe-fbed77d1d1a4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Candyland is Terrible Candyland seriously suffers from not being aimed at a coherent age: either you're old enough that you could instead play a game where you make choices, or you're young enough that the disappointment of getting a card that—out of nowhere—sends you nearly back to the beginning is crushing. Growing ...
af005ffa-c9ea-4dde-8911-23bb4ac98bd6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[SEQ RERUN] Science Doesn't Trust Your Rationality Today's post, Science Doesn't Trust Your Rationality was originally published on 14 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):   > The reason Science doesn't always agree with the exact, Bayesian, rational answer, is that Science doesn't trust you to be rational....
adc47839-75fa-46ba-b353-8760f9db75d4
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
When Will AI Exceed Human Performance? Evidence from AI Experts Supplementary Information ------------------------- ### Survey Content We developed questions through a series of interviews with Machine Learning researchers. Our survey questions were as follows: 1. Three sets of questions eliciting HLMI predict...
58ff5c14-2339-476b-82d6-5fb7132536c5
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
Why does (any particular) AI safety work reduce s-risks more than it increases them? My understanding is that most AI safety work that plausibly reduces some s-risks may reduce extinction risks as well, and I'm thinking that some futures where we go extinct because of AI (especially with a single AI taking over) would...
2e68c39a-d1f3-4674-beb4-e9a9dabd2af0
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
Which of these arguments for x-risk do you think we should test? I will be running a large survey to find out which arguments for caring about existential risk get people hooked and which don’t. As there are many such arguments, I’d appreciate feedback on which ones to prioritize message testing through [this form](h...
bea302e7-6c9a-4aaa-bb90-f8879bba5980
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube
Youtube Transcripts
AI Alignment Overview: Ensuring Artificial Intelligence Behaves A s AI becomes more powerful it's likely to solve some of humanity's most difficult challenges because we're too slow in processing we don't have the massive scales of data or just areas where we shouldn't venture, but what if AI's goals are different let...
cf8e2bbe-09b4-4c4d-bd99-0642281a0821
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Social Anxiety Isn’t About Being Liked There's this popular idea that socially anxious folks are just dying to be liked. It seems logical, right? Why else would someone be so anxious about how others see them? Show tweet And yet, being socially anxious tends to make you less likeable…they must be optimizing poorly, b...
3b5c35f0-ea91-4709-91c6-57108a48615f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A fictional AI law laced w/ alignment theory I have envisioned what AI laws could potentially look like, and I believe they should incorporate a substantial amount of alignment theory. I think the AI governance community could find my idea valuable and relevant to their discussions and initiatives.   Act of Artific...
39fc03e2-7ca2-445c-88bc-0037fda332a5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
An interview with Danica Remy on protecting the Earth from asteroids. Danica Remy is the President of the B612 Foundation, an organization dedicated to protecting Earth from asteroid impacts, and we recently interviewed her on the Futurati Podcast.   She makes the provocative claim that asteroid impacts are the one m...
79d9a943-245b-4685-b019-cc385a7ca609
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Assortative Mating And Autism Introduction Assortative mating is when similar people marry and have children. Some people worry about assortative mating in Silicon Valley: highly analytical tech workers marry other highly analytical tech workers. If highly analytical tech workers have more autism risk genes than the ...
8392d82d-05fd-4218-9df8-4c08b77c1bd1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Want to work on US emerging tech policy? Consider the Horizon Fellowship. Applications are now open for the 2025 Horizon Fellowship cohort What do you get? * The fellowship program will fund and facilitate placements for 1-2 years in full-time US policy roles at executive branch offices, Congressional offices, and t...
57ebad55-0c38-4afe-b208-4328353dbc4e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
EA Reflections on my Military Career Four years ago, I commissioned as an Officer in the UK's Royal Navy. I had been engaging with EA for four years before that and chose this career as a coherent part of my impact-focused career plan, and I stand by that decision. Early next year, I will leave the Navy. This article...
cd2f3565-e656-465e-98e2-70230ea84a5d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Cowpox of Doubt I remember hearing someone I know try to explain rationality to his friends. He started with “It’s important to have correct beliefs. You might think this is obvious, but think about creationists and homeopaths and people who think the moon landing was a hoax.” And then further on in this vein. A...
5b813d82-9ec2-4713-8533-7ef2ba2d73bd
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What are the leftover questions of metaethics? lukeprog gave a list of metaethics questions here: > What does moral language mean? Do moral facts exist? If so, what are they like, and are they reducible to natural facts? How can we know whether moral judgments are true or false? Is there a connection between making a...
38545693-30a9-4f64-8fe1-7374e348445a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Cheap food causes cooperative ethics Nobody has ever fought a war over the oxygen in the air because there's plenty of oxygen to go around. We fight over things that are scarce and valuable. Historically, most wars have been fought over land and people. If you win you get to force your subjects to collect raw material...
a01bf172-43b3-4653-99ff-c1a0020fd845
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Moloch: optimisation, "and" vs "or", information, and sacrificial ems Go read Yvain/Scott's Meditations On Moloch. It's one of the most beautiful, disturbing, poetical look at the future that I've ever seen. Go read it. Don't worry, I can wait. I'm only a piece of text, my patience is infinite. De-dum, de-dum. You...
26a478c7-0478-4f16-a9d2-02780ee2a5d6
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital
Arbital
Closure A [set](https://arbital.com/p/3jz) $S$ is _closed_ under an [operation](https://arbital.com/p/3h7) $f$ if, whenever $f$ is fed elements of $S$, it produces another element of $S$. For example, if $f$ is a trinary operation (i.e., a function of three arguments) then "$S$ is closed under $f$" means "if $x, y, z ...
332f4166-38cd-4dfb-a0f3-8ffe3018b567
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Could you please share a tool to help with reasoning or make better decisions? From the book Rationality A to Z, the general understanding of Lean( is an interactive theorem prover), Intuitive Interactive Bayes' Theorem Visualization tool(example: https://allenkim67.github.io/bayes-demo/).  I assumed that there should...
6ab65207-57d0-4a5a-b681-89d9766dca03
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Notice When People Are Directionally Correct I started watching Peter Zeihan videos last year. He shares a lot of interesting information, although he seems to have a very strong bias towards doom and gloom. One thing in particular stood out to me as completely absurd: his claim that global trade is going to collaps...
0c6af578-0da5-4486-9db3-7434b86ee73f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Is AI alignment a purely functional property? In some recent discussions I have realized that there is a quite a nasty implied disagreement about whether AI alignment is a functional property or not, that is if your personal definition of whether an AI is "aligned" is purely a function of its input/output behavior ir...
df42d622-3b1a-446a-b8e5-c55e11b3b338
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Probabilistic Blue-Eyed Islanders A puzzle: what happens in the blue-eyed islanders puzzle if we allow a small probability p for each each person to make a mistake each night? Assume that the probability of a mistake is the same for each and is common knowledge, the islanders are all ideal Bayesian reasoners, and let'...
192952fa-491e-4c96-af99-2e6367e82229
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
We are misaligned: the saddening idea that most of humanity doesn't intrinsically care about x-risk, even on a personal level In the article But What Would the End of Humanity Mean for Me?, James Hamblin writes > Get out of here. I have a hundred thousand things I am concerned about at this exact moment. Do I serious...
9e05f9b9-c8b1-4c43-b9f9-8b2db97174d5
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks 1 Introduction --------------- Since their introduction by (LeCun et al., [1989](#bib.bib17)) in the early 1990’s, Convolutional Networks (convnets) have demonstrated excellent performance at tasks such as hand-written digit classification and face detection. In ...
4edb3ac5-bb7b-4de1-a47f-e24341ed074f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[AN #93]: The Precipice we’re standing at, and how we can back away from it 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...
3d6f72d5-6ed8-4833-ab19-3c8a6c956725
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Cat Sustenance Fortification We got cats a few months ago, which is overall very nice. Julia set them up with automatic dispensers for food and water which reduces how often we need to get things for them, and keeps them from begging. Except recently: * One cat (Nyx) has figured out how to knock over the food disp...
07994723-e336-483b-ac8e-f4368b78ce20
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Yudkowsky vs Hanson on FOOM: Whose Predictions Were Better? TLDR Starting in 2008, Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky debated the likelihood of FOOM: a rapid and localized increase in some AI's intelligence that occurs because an AI recursively improves itself. As Yudkowsky summarizes his position: > I think that, a...
d5a48331-f2c9-4f34-9b7f-cff79309487a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Which personalities do we find intolerable? TLDR: I suspect that we will generally be intolerant of other people’s personalities when: 1. We are on the culturally decided “right” side of a particular trait. 2. And the other person is on the “wrong” side of that same trait. I have no real evidence beyond anecdotes ...
ea5dd8fe-79ac-4e67-8ed1-a4374eb89a95
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Literacy Rates Haven't Fallen By 20% Since the Department of Education Was Created On the heels of Donald Trump’s election and his promises to end the Department of Education, you may have seen claims like these spreading around X. Source This claim is based on two datapoints. First, is the literacy rate of around 9...
5b0a04df-8652-4f95-8712-96141c222c66
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What celebration is I’m back! And to celebrate being back, I shall discuss celebrating. I actually have not much idea why people celebrate things the way they do, but the practice has many interesting features. Stylized facts about celebrating stuff: 1. It generally happens at the beginnings and ends of differenti...
8d08ace9-6101-4e95-9e76-325d3645adac
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Best shot at immortality? What looks, at the moment, as the most feasible technology that can grant us immortality (e.g., mind uploading, cryonics)? I posed this question to a fellow transhumanist and he argued that cryonics is the answer, but I failed to grasp his explanation. Besides, I am still struggling to learn...
1343abf0-de24-4b05-991a-f732bf0c51ea
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Announcement: Learning Theory Online Course The application deadline for the course has now passed. We received a very promising number of submissions! Feel free to continue discussion in the comments below. Hey everyone! Gergely and Kōshin here from ALTER and Monastic Academy, respectively. We are excited to announc...
f23f71dc-c0f3-46d5-b93c-b63f68793598
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
European Community Weekend 2014 retrospective So finally - with two weeks distance to the first European LessWrong Community Weekend - we want to share the organizers’ perception of the event, including a short overview of what went well, what did not and what exceeded our expectations. First and foremost we thank al...
967d7e1e-415d-4317-b767-d29cd20a2603
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Goal-directedness: exploring explanations *This is the first post in my Effective-Altruism-funded project aiming to deconfuse goal-directedness. Comments are welcomed. All opinions expressed are my own, and do not reflect the attitudes of any member of the body sponsoring me.* In my [preliminary post](https://www.les...
495b9e56-5427-42fd-a5e5-b287929400db
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Media Diet: Cultivating Voice, Deliberate Action, and Alive Time Content Consumption Versus Production My present consumption versus production ratio is not well balanced, I consume ridiculously more media and content than what I produce.(1) So! I am changing that :) I think content consumption is a necessary part of...
54b49bfb-e5d3-4e87-be57-f5ff95db331d
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Superintelligence Reading Group 3: AI and Uploads *This is part of a weekly reading group on [Nick Bostrom](http://www.nickbostrom.com/)'s book, [Superintelligence](http://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-Nick-Bostrom/dp/0199678111). For more information about the group, and an index of posts so far...
0cd2f195-84a3-451d-990d-09538dc9071d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Trying to better understand futarchy I'm trying to work out exactly what instruments should be traded for the purposes of a futarchy. Let the decision be whether to adopt some proposal C; our options are C or ~C. In particular, we wish to know which of EV|C or EV|~C is larger, where EV is expected-value utility accor...
c8453e05-8a3f-4d65-99e7-7c083209da57
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Berkeley: Weekly goals Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley: Weekly goals WHEN: 22 January 2014 07:00:00PM (-0800) WHERE: 2030 Addison, 3rd Floor, Berkeley, CA Hello all, at today's meetup I'd like to start experimenting with an accountability practice other meetup groups have tried: Keeping a list...
61e45565-5dfc-4f23-a721-0d4c73edd4f7
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : West Los Angeles - Resolutions Discussion article for the meetup : West Los Angeles - Resolutions WHEN: 18 December 2013 07:00:00PM (-0800) WHERE: 10850 West Pico Blvd, Suite 312, Los Angeles, CA 90064 When: 7:00pm Wednesday, December 18. Where: The Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welco...
765c3794-ecc6-4b6b-8a46-5f5026218578
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Emergent Social Learning via Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning Introduction ------------ Social learning—learning by observing the behavior of other agents in the same environment—enables both humans and animals to discover useful behaviors that would be difficult to obtain through individual exploration, and adap...
27ae69c3-d3df-4666-8be9-c9d288a9ec43
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
[AN #151]: How sparsity in the final layer makes a neural net debuggable Alignment Newsletter is a weekly publication with recent content relevant to AI alignment around the world. Find all Alignment Newsletter **[resources here](http://rohinshah.com/alignment-newsletter/)**. In particular, you can look through **[thi...
6a937335-6d88-478f-ad4c-c8946d116094
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Insights from 'The Strategy of Conflict' Cross-posted from my blog. I recently read Thomas Schelling's book 'The Strategy of Conflict'. Many of the ideas it contains are now pretty widely known, especially in the rationalist community, such as the value of Schelling points when coordination must be obtained without c...
b128da65-8e76-4528-849f-84c5b41bbd4b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Could auto-generated troll scores reduce Twitter and Facebook harassments? There's been a lot of discussion in the last few yeas on the problem of hateful behaviour on social media such as Twitter and Facebook. How can this problem be solved? Twitter and Facebook could of course start adopting stricter policies toward...
5b5058d0-6686-4b61-9fc6-737703320b55
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
CSS for pixeley images CSS for pixeley images ---------------------- have you even been consuming pixel art, such as the great webcomic [Unicorn Jelly](http://unicornjelly.com), but been upset that on modern monitors you have to either suffer seeing either a really small version of the comic or a blurry zoomed-in ve...
d27173b2-964a-4379-adf9-f092c4deb9b7
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Is there any rigorous work on using anthropic uncertainty to prevent situational awareness / deception? AI systems up to some high level of intelligence plausibly need to know exactly where they are in space-time in order for deception/"scheming" to make sense as a strategy. This is because they need to know: 1) wha...
6f952593-d36a-48c0-bcdb-db9a8482b6af
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Memory Decoding Journal Club: Structure and function of the hippocampal CA3 module Join Us for the Memory Decoding Journal Club!  A collaboration of the Carboncopies Foundation and BPF Aspirational Neuroscience This time, we’re diving into a groundbreaking paper: "Structure and function of the hippocampal CA3 module"...
ae3ac3f9-dfac-43f8-87f4-37b6ed7479c9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Who wants to be invited to the LW Metamodern dialogue? I want to start a metamodern dialogue. Ideally, it will lead to a Metamodern handshake (or many of them), ie, we figure out how to help local people and systems get even more of what they selfishly want by aiming also at helping avert the meta-crisis, participatin...
54702e5a-50b6-48cd-b400-5e6a9e80cfb9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The I Ching Series (2/10): How should I prioritize my career-building projects? Note: See comments for my actual writings in response to I Ching Hexagram interpretations. This main post is for meta-reflection on the experiment. The Rules: * No divination-related questions. * I will do ten I Ching sessions, about...
3f130390-43d9-472e-a0d5-e337ef288a5d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Developmental Thinking Shout-out to CFAR Preamble Before I make my main point, I want to acknowledge that curriculum development is hard. It's even harder when you're trying to teach the unteachable. And it's even harder when you're in the process of bootstrapping. I am aware of the Kahneman inside/outside curriculum...
832f1c20-283c-4159-a47e-0ac96c91c5eb
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Rationality and Spirituality - Summary and Open Thread I've noticed that there has recently been a lot of interest in spirituality, ritual and meaning within the rationality community. I could highlight the discussions of Jordan Peterson (SSC, SSC Follow Up, Put A Num On It), Valentine's recent posts (Fake Frameworks,...
bd10a4d8-e31c-465d-92a8-b07a1113c4ea
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info
AI Safety Info
What are some good books about AGI safety? *[The Alignment Problem](https://brianchristian.org/the-alignment-problem/)* (2020) by Brian Christian is a comprehensive overview of challenges that come with aligning AI systems. The book that first made the case to the public is Nick Bostrom’s *[Superintelligence](https:/...
9482e9e4-5fe1-439f-9fcb-56ca94454424
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Learning Data-Driven Objectives to Optimize Interactive Systems 1 Introduction --------------- Interactive systems play an important role in assisting users in a wide range of tasks (Argelaguet et al., [2016](#bib.bib2); Kiseleva et al., [2016](#bib.bib17); Li et al., [2016](#bib.bib22); Williams et al., [2016](#bi...
515c6431-722b-45d6-bc12-078c65897fb4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Always know where your abstractions break General relativity plus quantum field theory can describe almost everything in the universe. There are a few exceptions like cosmic expansion and black holes but to human beings confined to a single solar system, fundamental physics is (for all practical purposes) a solved pro...
563cb73d-164a-49d3-a0d2-0becdd323945
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
31 Laws of Fun So this is Utopia, is it?  Well I beg your pardon, I thought it was Hell.         -- Sir Max Beerholm, verse entitled         In a Copy of More's (or Shaw's or Wells's or Plato's or Anybody's) Utopia This is a shorter summary of the Fun Theory Sequence with all the background theory left out - just the...
8e6dbb93-1e42-49b4-91f8-7fc815779b94
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How Much Data From a Sequencing Run? Cross-posted from my NAO Notebook. Manufacturers often give optimistic estimates for how much data their systems produce, but performance in practice can be pretty different. What have we seen at the NAO? We've worked with two main sample types, wastewater and nasal swabs, but Si...
7b3c73b2-6d83-4e42-bb53-c73f7ab7ddd8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Canberra: Many Worlds + Paranoid Debating Discussion article for the meetup : Canberra: Many Worlds + Paranoid Debating WHEN: 27 June 2014 06:00:00PM (+1000) WHERE: 108 North Road, Acton, ACT First, I will give a brief presentation about the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, talking about wh...
37fcced1-e4d4-4cdb-bd6a-23ca0112643a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Canberra: Meta-meetup + meditation Discussion article for the meetup : Canberra: Meta-meetup + meditation WHEN: 28 March 2014 06:00:00PM (+1100) WHERE: ANU Arts Centre Our first regular meetup will have two parts: firstly, we will be discussing what we want to get out of meetups, what sort of things we wou...
28faf5ee-bb64-4aad-b5ed-6edbf204a6e1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Washington D.C.: Parkour (Backup: Task Management) Discussion article for the meetup : Washington D.C.: Parkour (Backup: Task Management) WHEN: 14 September 2014 03:00:00PM (-0400) WHERE: U.S. Navy Memorial Weather permitting, we will meet at the Navy Memorial (south on 8th St from the Portrait Gallery, be...
0aa13304-4446-4540-a95c-36b6788fd33d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How to Find the Frontiers of Knowledge This article is based on my lecture at Topos House, San Francisco on February 29, 2020. It was originally published on SamoBurja.com. You can access the original here. Not all fields of knowledge exist yet. If you tried to study biochemistry in 1820, you’d have a lot of trouble:...
df3e8719-1f6b-4bea-b5b9-44bd187d9e19
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs
Other
Aligning AI to Human Values means Picking the Right Metrics ![]()\*\*\*From time to time, the Partnership may curate research and ideas that might be of interest to our community, including from PAI Fellows or other voices. The views, information, and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and ...
b65ad817-4bec-4ddf-a904-f2c9f269de43
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Stable Pointers to Value III: Recursive Quantilization This is a very loose idea. In Stable [Pointers to Value II](https://agentfoundations.org/item?id=1762), I pointed at a loose hierarchy of approaches in which you try to get rid of the wireheading problem by revising the feedback loop to remove the incentive to wi...
8c734afa-a9b8-4eef-bfc6-cf9453b1dec3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Deciding what to study at undergraduate level I'm a high school senior from Europe and in a few months I'll be heading to university. I have a keen interest in the human body. As such, I would like to work in emerging interdisciplinary fields, such as stem cell transplantation and suspended animation. I could go on...
5ca28b63-3bb8-4a65-a199-3f4ba1c40299
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What Is Death? This article is an excerpt from the book 'The Future Loves You'. Summary of the article by Grok: > The article "What Is Death?" by Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston explores the evolving definition of death in light of medical advancements. Historically, death was straightforward—cessation of breathing and he...
ed7af149-6400-4bf9-86cd-72de921c3c47
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Podcast: How not to waste a billion dollars (on your clinical trial), with Meri Beckwith on Development & Research I hosted Meri Beckwith, CEO of Lindus Health, on my podcast Development & Research. Meri founded Lindus after being a clinical trial patient—because he was astounded at how badly clinical drug trials were...
4c25ca12-2d87-46e7-af5e-a818e9edc046
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Oracle AGI - How can it escape, other than security issues? (Steganography?) Let's suppose we have an AGI running on a perfectly physically isolated computer that may be misalligned. It only communicates with select humans through a perfectly secure text channel. How can such an AGI escape? While don't think that ...
d394d69d-f6a2-44df-a27b-9d698d9988ba
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
Draft report on AI timelines *Note from* [*Aaron*](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/aarongertler)*: I found this well after it was posted on* [*LessWrong*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KrJfoZzpSDpnrv9va/draft-report-on-ai-timelines) *and cross-posted it here with Ajeya's permission. She won't necessarily b...
d16a30f3-decb-4104-9990-006d77daf156
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Big Berkeley Meetup Discussion article for the meetup : Big Berkeley Meetup WHEN: 18 April 2012 06:30:00PM (-0700) WHERE: 2011 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, CA WHEN: 18 April 2012 06:30:00PM WHERE: 2011 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, CA This will be a joint dinner with the MPHD seminar folks. We'll meet at Biryani Hous...
700ac619-a902-470d-b533-03e16cefe5d8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Fundamental Question - Rationality computer game design > I sometimes go around saying that the fundamental question of rationality is Why do you believe what you believe? > > -- Eliezer in Quantum Non-Realism I was much impressed when they finally came out with a PC version of DragonBox, and I got around to tes...
fff299f6-f1e8-4bdb-9e70-55f85acca1b3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Maps and Blueprint; the Two Sides of the Alignment Equation Tl;dr In this post, I will introduce two conceptual tools I found useful when thinking about (or introducing people to) AI alignment. Namely, I introduce the distinction between Maps and Blueprints (part 1), describe (what I call) the Two Sides of the “Alignm...
30742f7a-870d-4c7e-bd06-f1b737d7e9ef
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What epistemic hygiene norms should there be? The wiki entry for Epistemic Hygiene defines the term as: Epistemic hygiene consists of practices meant to allow accurate beliefs to spread within a community and keep less accurate or biased beliefs contained. The practices are meant to serve an analogous purpose to norm...
75def964-afe1-4227-b2e0-23029f7af9c6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
MrBeast's Squid Game Tricked Me I recently watched Squid Game—both the original Netflix series and MrBeast's real life version. Then I watched every video I could find about how MrBeast's Squid Game was made. I was surprised to learn that MrBeast used a whole bunch of CGI (computer-generated imagery). I had taken its ...
d2fd41ac-0f2d-493a-97e1-3c5cbf621c9d
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Air-gapping evaluation and support *This blog post was written fast to communicate a concept I think is important. I may edit this post for legibility later.* I think evaluation and support mechanisms should be somewhat “[air-gapped](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_gap_(networking)),” or isolated, in their informat...
f22030a3-ccf4-4aea-8b54-b55a3b7939a6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Is anyone working on formally verified AI toolchains? Not talking about solving alignment, but preventing stuff like "we solved alignment but we died anyways because of a race condition."
b42b39c6-4243-4fdd-9f04-2deadf82785f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Unrolling social metacognition: Three levels of meta are not enough. Disclaimer: This post was written time-boxed to 2 hours because I think LessWrong can still understand and improve upon it; please don't judge me harshly for it. Summary: I am generally dismayed that many people seem to think or assume that only thr...
17b5b2d0-5362-4380-b331-0562afd4ce7f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
real life sample: why am I so scarred of roller coasters I currently visit a theme park with some friends. There I noticed that I am highly afraid of rides that involve heights and fast moving like roller coasters. We rode a few of them, and of course nothing happened, as it is supposed to be a lot of fun. But for me ...
6feffa85-f68c-4cc7-9c3f-a600047a5a5a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The AI, the best human advisor A putative new idea for AI control; index here. All my ideas on reduced impact AI follow the same format: some restriction to ensure a reduced impact (I generally use something like "could a future AI detect this one existed"?) and some "trick" to allow a way of still achieving a larger...
d97fa3c9-5a2b-4913-b6e9-32482e03cdfb
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Consider Applying to the Future Fellowship at MIT Update 2022-11-11: given the collapse of FTX and the resignation of the FTX Future Fund team this fellowship does not look like it's happening. ---------------------------------------- Are you interested in doing a PhD or Masters on something altruistic? The MIT Medi...
5e6d08b3-978c-4501-b68e-3fddec54ca41
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Improving Robustness of Machine Translation with Synthetic Noise 1 Introduction --------------- Machine Translation (MT) systems have been shown to exhibit severely degraded performance when presented with translation of out-of-domain or noisy data (Luong and Manning, [2015](#bib.bib12); Sakaguchi et al., [2016](#b...
ba55f738-c2d8-4f3f-88c5-de448102e269
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Value learning: ultra-sophisticated Cake or Death Many mooted AI designs rely on "value loading", the update of the AI’s preference function according to evidence it receives. This allows the AI to learn "moral facts" by, for instance, interacting with people in conversation ("this human also thinks that death is bad ...
5be3612b-4ba2-46c7-8566-66d354b21209
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Monthly Meta: Common Knowledge One of my favourite aspects of Less Wrong is that we've created a community where it is easier for us to communicate with each other because we have a shared understanding of certain concepts. A large amount of highly quality content has been posted to the site since it started, so I thi...
23cfd7d4-66f0-4127-97f8-9ca18f58076d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Gems from the Wiki: Do The Math, Then Burn The Math and Go With Your Gut During the LessWrong 1.0 Wiki Import we (the LessWrong team) discovered a number of great articles that most of the LessWrong team hadn't read before. Since we expect many others to also not have have read these, we are creating a series of the b...
1e463be1-14c7-49bd-80cf-27caf0d48cf6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Mirrors and Paintings Followup to:  Sorting Pebbles Into Correct Heaps, Invisible Frameworks Background: There's a proposal for Friendly AI called "Coherent Extrapolated Volition" which I don't really want to divert the discussion to, right now.  Among many other things, CEV involves pointing an AI at humans and sayi...
27c4898d-13c9-4161-8ff9-50e8d8262fb2
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
EU’s AI ambitions at risk as US pushes to water down international treaty (linkpost) From [EU’s AI ambitions at risk as US pushes to water down international treaty – EURACTIV.com](https://www.euractiv.com/section/artificial-intelligence/news/eus-ai-ambitions-at-risk-as-us-push-to-water-down-international-treaty/) (Ju...
cc0de3b1-599c-4a18-9407-eab6204b844a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Historical Examples of Opposition to Technological Progress This is a brief overview of historical examples of public opposition to technological progress.  SOCIAL MOVEMENTS Luddites * Luddism was an English movement active between 1811-1816. * “The Luddite movement emerged during the harsh economic climate of t...
95124784-b6ac-40d4-b919-cacd0cc89c05
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Functional silence: communication that minimizes change of receiver's beliefs I just thought of this concept and I'd like to know if it is new or useful. "Functional silence" is communication intended to carry as little information as possible. It intends for the beliefs of listeners to be changed as little as possib...
580a1ad4-9467-4045-b381-58540ce285c7
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Austin Less Wrong Meetup, Saturday April 23rd, 12:00 Noon This is the second meeting of the group that met in Waco last weekend. Meeting will be at the Starbucks on the corner of 15th and San Antonio, at 12:00 Noon on Saturday. This Starbucks has its own parking, and there are additional public parking options in the ...
f18c601a-c0c1-49d8-bd86-6007ebccb743
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Oracle design as de-black-boxer. This paper introduces an interpreter for learning algorithms, for the purpose of clarifying what is happening inside the algorithm. The interpreter, Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME), gives the human user some idea of the important factors going into the learning ...
de2401e5-51c6-4ba1-bbe5-f2de644398f3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Improvement for pundit prediction comparisons [EDIT: SimonM pointed out a possibly-fatal flaw with this plan: it would probably discourage more pundits from joining the prediction-making club at all, and adding to that club is a higher priority than comparing the members more accurately.] Stop me if you've heard this...