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efa3391f-f3d9-48c2-b599-8d0103074982 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is Agent Simulates Predictor a "fair" problem?
It's a simple question, but I think it might help if I add in context. In the paper introducing Functional Decision Theory, it is noted that it is impossible to design an algorithm that can perform well on all decision problems since some of them can be specified to be bl... |
91019808-84e6-4b8a-9dea-ce8e74fef66b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | On the correspondence between AI-misalignment and cognitive dissonance using a behavioral economics model
This essay is one of the awarded essays for the Econ Theory AI Alignment Prize from Superlinear. The essay uses the tools of theoretical economics to contribute to the AI alignment problem.
Psychologists are f... |
80ff0e9f-6bea-4632-a8a3-27c9bdb4beac | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Review] The Problem of Political Authority by Michael Huemer
> The state is often ascribed a special sort of authority, one that obliges citizens to obey its commands and entitles the state to enforce those commands through threats of violence. This book argues that this notion is a moral illusion: no one has ever po... |
cde7c78a-1eed-4fa0-b22d-fc1e1e722248 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Startup Success Rates Are So Low Because the Rewards Are So Large
From Anneal's post last year
> If your org is shaped like a Y-combinator company, you can spend dozens of hours absorbing high-quality, expert-crafted content.... How likely is org building success, in this premier reference class
>
> 5%.
>
> An AI ... |
db6cc4f8-e0ac-4f8d-ad34-a83c0af89b0b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Stuff I Recommend You Use
Inspired by the listicles past:
* Scott Alexander (Dec 2015)
* Julia Wise—computer setup stuff (Mar 2017)
* Sam Bowman (Oct 2017)
* Alexey Guzey (Dec 2018)
* Sam Bowman Part 2 (Mar 2019)
* José Luis Ricón (May 2019)
* Rob Wiblin (Jul 2019)
* Arden Koehler (Jul 2019)
* Philip Storry ... |
8a21dae6-a054-477c-9932-83a18c8cbfb5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | LessOnline 2025: Early Bird Tickets On Sale
Our festival of truthseeking and blogging is happening again this year.
It's from Friday May 30th to Sunday June 1st at Lighthaven (Berkeley, CA).
Early bird pricing is currently at $450 until the end of the month.
You can buy tickets and learn more at the website: Les... |
db233ee1-5fe0-477e-9f2a-a16d4f24d475 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Kristinn Thórisson on constructivist AI
[](https://intelligence.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/kris.png)Dr. **Kristinn R. Thórisson** is an [Icelandic](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceland "Iceland") Artificial Intelligence researcher, founder of the... |
86017b76-6d6a-4269-b55b-cbd3cac852d7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Exposure or Contacts?
When I talk to people about the coronavirus, they're often using one of two models of infection risk:
* Minimize exposure: risk is proportional to how risky your activity is, multiplied by how long you spend doing it. Try to do less risky things, and do them for less time.
* Minimize contac... |
7d7fb72f-57bb-4981-ae50-054d51249d3e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Log-normal Lamentations
[Morose. Also very roughly drafted.]
Normally, things are distributed normally. Human talents may turn out to be one of these things. Some people are lucky enough to find themselves on the right side of these distributions – smarter than average, better at school, more conscientious, whatever.... |
591d80d2-38ac-4ff2-80f1-e39f59d3309a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Framing Effects in Anthropology
A large number of cognitive errors are grouped under "framing effects", the tendency of a fact to sound different when presented in different ways. Economists discuss framing effects in terms of changed decisions: for example, a patient will be more likely to agree to a treatment with a... |
9d977852-cc37-4d34-9497-012eac472419 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | LeCun says making a utility function is intractable
Has there been any post going over how LeCun's alignment plan is very fluffy and he hasn't responded to any criticism of it at all? LeCun's paper: https://openreview.net/forum?id=BZ5a1r-kVsf
One of the criticisms, which goes over how LeCun's idea of an Intrinsic Co... |
51d76eba-cee2-432e-ac68-8bbb02aea79c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How (not) to choose a research project
Background
(specific information will be sparse here. This is meant to give context for the Takeaways section of the post)
Our group (Garrett, Chu, and Johannes) have worked with John Wentworth in the SERI MATS 2 Electric Boogaloo program for three weeks, meaning it's time for a... |
a6d3f7cb-b8ae-43d3-87de-a63176d1cb84 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Space colonization: what can we definitely do and how do we know that?
Arguments for the value of the long-term future tend to make the assumption that we will colonize space. What can we definitely accomplish in terms of space colonization? Why think that we can definitely do those things?
The FHI paper, Eternity in... |
1908ad47-9de8-48d2-84d2-24f8a1c10922 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Replication] Conjecture's Sparse Coding in Small Transformers
Summary
A couple of weeks ago Logan Riggs and I posted that we'd replicated the toy-model experiments in Lee Sharkey and Dan Braun's original sparse coding post. Now we've replicated the work they did (slides) extending the technique to custom-trained smal... |
c103ce6f-85a3-40ef-8c95-9830c1313ba4 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/distill | Distill Scientific Journal | A Discussion of 'Adversarial Examples Are Not Bugs, They Are Features': Adversarial Examples are Just Bugs, Too
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48e4cbc2-fdf4-4ed1-a70f-a8898fffd469 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | February 2020 gwern.net newsletter
None |
b0400578-6468-4302-84b2-f5ee0ffbecd3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Conscious River: Conscious Turing machines negate materialism
Many computer scientists and mathematically inclined people subscribe to the idea that consciousness is a phenomenon that emerges from matter. They also believe that any Turing machine can generate consciousness if provided with the correct program. Th... |
ac74dd39-3f04-45ad-86f1-8f13b22c9d82 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | An anecdote about names
I've always been bad at names. But this semester, as part of my duties as a physics teacher, I tried to learn the names of 100 students. It went alright - two months later and there are still some I have trouble with. At the start, I was a bit worried. What if I've just read to many books and t... |
de52e473-c53e-4098-8ec8-5500cbffd3ae | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AI alignment concepts: philosophical breakers, stoppers, and distorters
Meta: This is one of my abstract existential risk strategy concept posts that are designed to be about different perspectives or foundations upon which to build further.
Introduction
When thinking about philosophy one may encounter philosophical... |
bdaa069c-a063-42be-9576-376cc9305e1d | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | The State of AI Governance in Africa: Musings from the Global South
**Introduction**
----------------
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) and integration of autonomous systems continues to form an integral part of our daily lives, with AI growing at an exponential rate. Consequently, the need to develop and util... |
1b860dea-a57f-4b4c-877d-3f3fa59b27f2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Vegetarianism and depression
I stumbled upon this paper https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165032722010643
where authors found correlation between vegetarianism and depression episodes,
and would like to have a discussion about it. Did anybody already dig into it? |
1bf0c30b-b5ca-4531-ba62-1bb9b098e269 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Critiques of prominent AI safety labs: Redwood Research
*Crossposted to* [*LessWrong*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SuZ6Guuos7CjfwRQb/critiques-of-prominent-ai-safety-labs-redwood-research)*.*
*This is the first post in our sequence and covers Redwood Research (Redwood). We recommending reading our brief* [*introd... |
277ea073-f890-4502-a427-216b795027ff | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Internal Lawyer
|
1842ddff-76f1-4551-97b3-ae85d5421f63 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | In Defense of Parselmouths
Prerequisites: The Quaker and the Parselmouth.
I.
First, a quick summary.
In the prerequisite post, Benjamin Hoffman describes three kinds of people. These people are hypothetical extremes: they're the social and epistemic equivalents of perfect spheres interacting in frictionless vacuums... |
92f83ec6-d8eb-4339-9b94-8b0a020c9f3f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Melbourne social meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne social meetup
WHEN: 21 October 2011 06:00:00PM (+1100)
WHERE: see mailing list, Carlton VIC 3053
Continuing with the trial of splitting up the meetups, the next social meetup is on Friday 21 October, 6pm for 7pm.
The location is the same... |
b530a64c-23b7-44eb-a9e8-ed0ac0c30e1d | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Launching The Collective Intelligence Project: Whitepaper and Pilots
[Divya Siddarth](https://divyasiddarth.com/), [Saffron Huang](https://saffronhuang.com/), and [Jasmine Wang](https://jasminew.me/) are launching [The Collective Intelligence Project](https://cip.org/) via publishing [our whitepaper](https://cip.org/w... |
b52b6764-0657-4541-94f6-d179f12001e7 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Getting from an unaligned AGI to an aligned AGI?
| |
| --- |
| **Summary / Preamble**In [AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a-list-of-lethalities), Eliezer writes *“A cognitive system with sufficiently high cognitive powers, **given any medium-bandwidth channel... |
d5692b6b-45e3-405e-87ec-0b24e3c04810 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is CCP authoritarianism good for building safe AI?
In general, the two major countries competing for AI development are the US and China. Here in the states, regulations are generally enforced with a “do it until we ban it” model, but China has less rule of law, and therefore a “do it and we might shut your company do... |
5324ea86-3d44-4ed1-bb76-28596e908577 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Biggest Problem with Deontology: The Aggregation Problem
Michael Huemer is a fan of weak deontology, the view that you should avoid committing rights violations merely to produce greater but comparable benefits (though you might be required to violate rights to produce much better consequences). But he acknowledge... |
cc70615b-0925-4a57-a31a-d4209c3c6c78 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Understanding Infra-Bayesianism: A Beginner-Friendly Video Series
Click here to see the video series
This video series was produced as part of a project through the 2022 SERI Summer Research Fellowship (SRF) under the mentorship of Diffractor.
Epistemic effort: Before working on these videos, we spent ~400 collectiv... |
15827af6-a549-49d4-bb2c-b7ddce64b6b2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meditations on Momentum
Cross-posted and lightly-edited from The Deep Dish.
Epistemic status: describing a general phenomenon; may not be correct on every specific point. may have used scientific terms in an annoying metaphorical fashion. elements of pointing out the bleeding obvious, hopefully framed in a novel way.... |
3854c8a3-ac6b-40c3-8406-64a0b401d22e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Societal Self-control
Intro
At the individual level, we humans often intentionally reduce our freedom so that our future selves will make some particular decision. Want to eat healthier? Much easier to forego buying chips and candy at the supermarket than it is to leave them in the bag at home. Want to stay focused on... |
4a05e3a9-c49b-448f-bfba-9dc7b8cd17d7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why am I still alive? (a time capsule)
Today is Tuesday, October 3rd, 2023. If you’re reading this post 3-5 years after the date of its original publication, then it is very likely humanity has built a superhuman AI (quite likely several). And by the simple act of reading this post we can deduce that you’re still aliv... |
160b72ef-c4ba-4942-992c-6d89382be46f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Bearish Take on AI, as a Treat
The implicit model that I have regarding the world around me on most topics is there is a truth on a matter, a select group of people and organizations who are closest to that truth, and an assortment of groups who espouse bad takes either out of malice or stupidity.
This was, to a cl... |
97c273b5-f922-4a0e-83d3-b7523cf0d5e9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The shutdown problem
|
cc198763-af21-4640-8302-6a2e2e992fbd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Scarcity Is the Presence of Choice
Previous: What Scarcity Is and Isn't
Space is scarce. Strength is scarce. Money is scarce.
Time is scarce. Time is really, really scarce.
Why?
Maybe because we're running out of it. Each of us has only so much time on this earth, and the Earth itself has only so much time befo... |
384bad31-cc5a-473a-9472-8b727d0c7479 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Oversight Misses 100% of Thoughts The AI Does Not Think
Problem: an overseer won’t see the AI which kills us all thinking about how to kill humans, not because the AI conceals that thought, but because the AI doesn’t think about how to kill humans in the first place. The AI just kills humans as a side effect of whatev... |
b2aa1251-68d8-466c-abe7-59192350b452 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | All free Stanford classes, continually updated
[The Stanford-class.org scheme seems to be adding new courses every few days. Instead of a new post each time a new class is added, I commit to keeping this post stocked with links to all current course offerings until at least January 2012.]
Complex Systems
Model Th... |
94cb8e55-379c-4517-9d59-e46f570f1f9f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Distinguishing claims about training vs deployment
Given the rapid progress in machine learning over the last decade in particular, I think that the core arguments about why AGI might be dangerous should be formulated primarily in terms of concepts from machine learning. One important way to do this is to distinguish ... |
ddf3c347-62f2-4fbf-9c68-48598ea19f5e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | Bayesian Relational Memory for Semantic Visual Navigation.
Bayesian Relational Memory for Semantic Visual Navigation
Yi Wu† ¶Yuxin Wu‡Aviv Tamar§Stuart Russell†Georgia Gkioxari‡Yuandong Tian‡
†UC Berkeley‡Facebook AI Research§Technion¶OpenAI
†fjxwuyi,russell g@cs.berkeley.edu‡fyuxinwu,gkioxari,yuandong g@fb.com§avivt@... |
e1b4962b-a190-4a6d-b0d7-a929e3e675a8 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | [Link] Death, long lives, uploading - a conworlding perspective
[Death, long lives, uploading](http://zompist.wordpress.com/2014/01/23/death-long-lives-uploading/)
Mark Rosenfelder (aka zompist, of [language construction kit](http://zompist.com/kit.html) fame) writes about the advantages and drawbacks of mortality a... |
729e52a4-f769-42d6-9924-8a498ddf198f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Approximating Solomonoff Induction
Solomonoff Induction is a sort of mathematically ideal specification of machine learning. It works by trying every possible computer program and testing how likely they are to have produced the data. Then it weights them by their probability.
Obviously Solomonoff Induction is imposs... |
b1553dc4-6111-4241-b521-d821253ded3f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Bing AI Generating Voynich Manuscript Continuations - It does not know how it knows
Epistemic status: slightly giddy and freaked out. Possibly rushing to judgment. But there's definitely something here that others should check out for themselves...
The Voynich Manuscript (VMS), for anyone who is familiar with it, h... |
143dd788-2ccf-4f52-b95f-4a3c9c1081b8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [ASoT] Probability Infects Concepts it Touches
Epistemic status: Random ranting about things I'm confused about. Hopefully this post makes you more confused about optimization/agency/etc.
A few parables of counterfactuals
* What if 2+2 equaled 5?
* American: Hmm, Yeah. What if giving me two dollars and then a... |
69442919-3a70-4ad4-bf3c-119abe02045f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The One Who Says, "Enough"
Epistemic Status: Very speculative. Attempting to put vague notions into words.
Disclaimer: I'm no expert on geopolitics, nor am I particularly well versed in military matters. That being said, I have some thoughts on current events. My aim is to keep this mostly apolitical, focusing on ... |
8cb4cd5d-9e34-4fa0-9b0e-45cc306e79fd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Price of Life
Less Wrong readers are familiar with the idea you can and should put a price on life. Unfortunately the Big Lie that you can't and shouldn't has big consequences in the current health care debate. Here's some articles on it:
Yvain's blog post here (HT: Vladimir Nesov).
Peter Singer's article on rati... |
8ba75a3e-f0ea-47be-b476-07e11c863ec2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | No One-Size-Fit-All Epistemic Strategy
This post is part of the work done at Conjecture.
This post has been written for the second Refine blog post day, at the end of the first week of iterating on ideas and concretely aiming at the alignment problem.
What constantly frustrates me about the old school philosophers o... |
293bd51b-8c70-46bd-adf2-1e1dec96fd55 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The price is right
[Saying an old thing in a new way]
The United States Department of Transportation will pay $11.8 million to save a life. You know what that means? It means that if you come to the United States Department of Transportation with a plan (barriers around the Grand Canyon, wider lanes on the expressway... |
044c35e8-05c9-4fee-a3a2-039f945c3b67 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Russian x-risks newsletter winter 21-22, war risks update.
TL;DR: Ukraine will eventually either get nuclear protection by NATO or its own nukes, which in both cases will likely lead to the nuclear war with Russia. Knowing this, Putin may want to attack first or credibly threaten to do so.
The whole world is looking... |
ca8f7008-98a4-4218-9b19-100f5b2dfa3b | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | [Linkpost] Scott Alexander reacts to OpenAI's latest post
Scott Alexander recently wrote a post about OpenAI's [Planning for AGI and beyond](https://openai.com/blog/planning-for-agi-and-beyond). I found it thoughtful, and I think others here might want to read or discuss it.
Some highlights:
**ExxonMobil analogy**
... |
3e3ac172-36f0-47c1-9465-7d9ef2d2833c | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | April 2018 Newsletter
#### Updates
* A new paper: “[Categorizing Variants of Goodhart’s Law](https://intelligence.org/2018/03/27/categorizing-goodhart/)”
* New research write-ups and discussions: [Distributed Cooperation](https://agentfoundations.org/item?id=1777); [Quantilal Control for Finite Markov Decision Proce... |
c9068a7f-4128-4dcd-b5fa-5a2b24e4484d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Knowledge doesn't just happen
It should be obvious that people need to learn what they know, but a tremendous amount of effort goes into blaming them for not knowing whatever would have been useful if only they'd known it.
A lot of this appears in the form of "should have known better". Sometimes (especially after a... |
a41b5b34-60b1-49dc-befa-67c3a1603ebc | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Do You Want the Complexity in the Tools or in Their Usage?
Epistemic Status: Observation, Intuition, Not sure if there is something there
In "Living with Complexity", Donald Norman notes that complexity is inherent in a task and cannot be arbitrarily removed. In the following, I give anecdotes to show that complexity... |
780e3c15-c3bd-4e52-b95e-027aa5a2a1b2 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | AI Incident Sharing - Best practices from other fields and a comprehensive list of existing platforms
*Purpose of this post:*The purpose of this post is three-fold: 1) highlight the importance of incident sharing and share best practices from adjacent fields to AI safety 2) collect tentative and existing ideas of impl... |
188e18d0-a790-4277-9cb9-6f2e2b2b4feb | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Different views of alignment have different consequences for imperfect methods
Almost any powerful AI, with almost any goal, will doom humanity. Hence alignment is often seen as a constraint on AI power: we must direct the AI’s optimisation power in a very narrow direction. If the AI is weak, then imperfect methods of... |
0f2f9cf3-eb42-4de9-90d5-4981e51675fa | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Compute Governance and Conclusions - Transformative AI and Compute [3/4]
Cross-posted here on the EA Forum.
Transformative AI and Compute - A holistic approach - Part 3 out of 4
This is part two of the series Transformative AI and Compute - A holistic approach. You can find the sequence here and the summary here.
T... |
86340b7d-6188-4a10-88a3-f379857ab474 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Loleliezers
Previously: Eliezer Yudkowsky facts, and Kevin's prediction.
A bit of silliness for the day. Below the fold to spare those with delicate sensibilities.
Please contribute your own in the comments. (Lolrobinhansons, etc., would also be welcome.) Unfortunately I have no special sourc... |
d021866c-57fa-473f-867d-75abf20a7a5a | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Botworld: a cellular automaton for studying self-modifying agents embedded in their environment
On April 1, I started working full-time for MIRI. In the weeks prior, while I was winding down my job and packing up my things, [Benja](/user/Benja) and I built *Botworld*, a cellular automaton that we've been using to help... |
9b3293a2-824a-46f7-937f-f9255cda5933 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Counterfactual Explanation with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Drug Target Prediction
1 Introduction
---------------
Drug-target binding affinity (DTA) prediction is an important step
in drug discovery and drug repurposing Thafar et al. ([2019](#bib.bib35)).
Many high-performance DTA models have been propos... |
16354a36-4874-4696-9959-aacd5de9e09b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Our bet on whether the AI market will crash
We made a bet on the AI market crashing by the end of 2026.
The odds are $5k:$25k with an implied probability of 16.67%. If there is no crash, Remmelt pays Marcus $5,000. If there is a crash, Marcus pays Remmelt $25,000.
An AI market crash will be defined, for the purpose... |
fc0e0f9b-ba26-4ec0-ab35-4bea21337b58 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Less Wrong Poetry Corner: Coventry Patmore's "Magna Est Veritas"
(Previously)
This is my favorite poem that's secretly about the necessity of revealing information about deception!
> Here, in this little Bay,
> Full of tumultuous life and great repose,
> Where, twice a day,
> The purposeless, glad ocean comes and go... |
e623b255-fe13-41a5-b114-dc3f2a5701b0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Weekly LW Meetups
This summary was posted to LW main on October 4th. The following week's summary is here.
Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:
* Atlanta Lesswrong: October Meetup (First of Two): 06 October 2013 06:00PM
* Berlin: Fermi paradox discussion: 18 October 2013 07:00PM
* Chicago... |
9df58872-2b90-49da-afbf-684e3ae5fcf7 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Ordinary and unordinary decision theory
There are a couple of paradoxes in decision theory, typically involving beings making perfect predictions, copies of yourself, and similar shenanigans. If you're unfamiliar with all of this, take a look at [Newcomb's problem](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/newcomb-s-problem). Att... |
94df9954-39bd-411a-b697-4d552f4d3c1f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Call for Ideas: Industrial scale existential risk research
I have a slight problem with Existential Risk. Not as a thing to worry about, it makes lots of sense to worry about it. My problem will only emerge if it becomes an industry, with all the distortion that entails from inadequacy etc. If we want more than the c... |
32bebed6-2294-4bf2-9cc1-7aa2b3be0013 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | LessWrong Hamburg Second Meetup Notes: In need of Structure
Review of our second Meetup : LessWrong Hamburg - about Procrastination
When I arrived late there already was a discussion about the benefits and content of LessWrong. I didn't take a clear organizers role and instead let the meetup mostly run itself. This w... |
44f5df38-79f7-47c7-bc58-7ec6fb2d0a37 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : LW London regular meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : LW London regular meetup
WHEN: 14 June 2015 02:00:00PM (+0100)
WHERE: Lincoln's Inn Fields, London
The next LW London meetup will be on June 14th. Join us from 2pm to talk about vote trading, Boltzmann chickens, and ethical Bitcoin fanfiction. Or... |
03521739-bded-4491-a476-ab2f2fa2ab01 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Arguments in parallel vs arguments in series
When arguments are delivered in parallel, their combined strength is no less than the strength of the strongest argument. For example, you might encounter two different people arguing in favor of the same position, one giving an argument that you can easily see doesn't work... |
73a1eec4-a1ad-4a3a-8021-ef6f02d868ff | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Link] Economists' views differ by gender
Edit: ParagonProtege has provided a link to the original study. Thank you! (^_^)
Link.
> A new study shows a large gender gap on economic policy among the nation's professional economists, a divide similar -- and in some cases bigger -- than the gender divide found in the ge... |
e91a6107-03fd-43ac-989c-b4f45c0b0d7b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | An Especially Elegant Evpsych Experiment
> In a 1989 Canadian study, adults were asked to imagine the death of children of various ages and estimate which deaths would create the greatest sense of loss in a parent. The results, plotted on a graph, show grief growing until just before adolescence and then beginning to ... |
5550bf60-6951-4efb-a084-4e9f506c52ba | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Researcher incentives cause smoother progress on benchmarks
(Epistemic status: likely. That said, this post isn't thorough; I wanted to write quickly.)
Let's look at the state of the art in ImageNet.[1] The curve looks pretty smooth especially for the last 7 years. However, there don't seem to be that many advances ... |
5f63a191-e94e-4977-b2fe-1d20657b5e63 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Link] Promoting rationality in higher education media channels
Glad to share an op-ed piece I published in one of the most premier higher education media channels on how I as a professor used rationality-informed strategies to deal with mental illness in the classroom. This is part of my broader project to promote ra... |
97393665-a472-4530-8d83-fe50f4065725 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Travel Through Time to Increase Your Effectiveness
I am a time traveler.
I hold this belief not because it is true, but because it is useful. That it also happens to be true -- we are all time travelers, swept along by the looping chrono-currents of reality that only seem to flow in one direction -- is largely beside ... |
e17cfa8d-669c-4035-b238-46f2d332d511 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Energy Requirements and Feasibility of Off-World Mining
Space Prospecting
It’s been an enticing subject for more than half a century now and continues to capture the imaginations of extremely ambitious engineers and powerful capital allocators alike. It’s also somewhat viable: although most asteroids (and almost a... |
1188abc0-33ce-4e90-960d-45d0409b2a1f | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Papers to start getting into NLP-focused alignment research
I have recently started working towards a research-focused MSc in AI under the supervision of [Dr. Pilehvar](https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=P-c9CsIAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate) and [Dr. Soleymani](https://scholar.google.com/citatio... |
483d054f-06d7-450b-8180-4dbc542a70aa | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What is the best / most proper definition of "Feeling the AGI" there is?
I really like this phrase. I feel very identified with it. I have used it at times to describe friends who have that realization of where we are heading. However when I get asked what Feeling the AGI means, I struggle to come up with a concise w... |
3e531c0b-94fd-4559-937f-b1ab49bc87a1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Humanity isn't remotely longtermist, so arguments for AGI x-risk should focus on the near term
Toby Ord recently published a nice piece On the Value of Advancing Progress about mathematical projections of far-future outcomes given different rates of progress and risk levels. The problem with that and many arguments fo... |
34fdc0cb-bc46-4aba-91b2-a76f8a193409 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What are Michael Vassar's beliefs?
I've heard Michael Vassar's name mentioned a few times within the community. Why is he so well-known and what are his main ideas? I am particularly interested in the ideas that seem to have made him community famous. |
a8eb04c5-4e70-4bf2-8ab8-aca93b7783e1 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Object-level vs. indirect goals
An 'object-level goal' is a goal that involves no indirection, doesn't require any further computation or observation to be fully specified, and is evaluated directly on events or things in the agent's model of the universe. Contrast to meta-level or indirect goals.
Some examples of o... |
554d07e7-2e1e-4534-9e33-90d10e323c59 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Collaboration in Science: Happier People ↔ Better Research
This is a cross-post from my personal blog and the Effective Altruism Forum. I haven't modified anything w. r. t. publishing it on LessWrong, so there may be little details that do not fit to the LW context (e. g., I ask people to write me a mail, if the want... |
3c9fea4c-ad60-4895-b112-22c7be5db055 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Secondary forces of debt
A general thing I hadn’t noticed about debts until lately:
* Whenever Bob owes Alice, then Alice has reason to look after Bob, to the extent that increases the chance he satisfies the debt.
* Yet at the same time, Bob has an incentive for Alice to disappear, insofar as it would relieve him.... |
201d9632-2d12-4b8b-b1cd-f75877d04b65 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | COVID transmission by talking (& singing)
TL;DR: This is an argument that (1) Talking is a major way that COVID-19 transmits from person to person (at least when people aren't wearing facemasks and goggles, and possibly to a much lesser extent even if they are), right up there with coughing, and probably more importan... |
0812d762-ace9-4ae1-a3c3-9547fdbb5a0d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Machine Stops (Chapter 9)
"The Machine Stops"
This is what Kuno tells Vashti, through the machine, just as it begins its final descent into destruction, taking Kuno and Vashti, and all of "civilization" with it. What was civilization would now be a home to the homeless.
Occasionally you encounter a story that cha... |
63827935-6448-4ad4-8f95-1d68dbba7d45 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | (When) do high-dimensional spaces have linear paths down to local minima?
When training (to convergence) using gradient descent in high dimensions, it's common for there to be monotonically decreasing loss on the linear path between the initialization weights and the local minimum found, even if the actual path follow... |
f04a0dcd-e500-429b-8630-edbe85451e2a | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | A poem co-written by ChatGPT
Let's write a poem together!
*That sounds wonderful! What should our poem be about?*
I'll give you some lines and you continue, okay?
*Sure, that sounds like a great way to collaborate! Please go ahead and give me your opening lines.*
The ChatGPT Poem
----------------
How many books h... |
282110bd-ffb9-4a4e-92a9-a1a2387cfea2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Obesity Myth
Related To: The Unfinished Mystery of the Shangri-La Diet and Missed Distinctions
Megan McArdles blogs an interview with Paul Campos, author of The Obesity Myth. I'll let anyone who is interest read the whole thing, but here's some interesting excerpts:
> I mean, there's no better established emp... |
a8ad0bed-2de1-4043-b557-33a14d757e23 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | what is value?
what is value?
--------------
i've come to clarify my view of value sufficiently many times that i feel like having a single post i can link to would be worth it. this is that.
what i call *value* is *things we care about*; *what determines what we ought to do*. i use "morality" and "ethics" interch... |
49d9f2d5-452f-401d-9bd9-efad0b1c6439 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Value learners & wireheading
Dewey 2011 lays out the rules for one kind of agent with a mutable value system. The agent has some distribution over utility functions, which it has rules for updating based on its interaction history (where "interaction history" means the agent's observations and actions since its origin... |
6ba8d4a4-1520-46b6-8053-298033465e61 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | mRNA vaccine development for COVID-19
Epistemological status:
A bunch of sources and a reasoning while reading the source. Go to the sources for the factual claims and reason about claims and say if you think I made a mistake. Join the conversation in the comments.
Between CureVac and BioNTech, two of the three comp... |
f9cb4e91-ee5b-49be-8c2a-bea6528a45c6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Nuclear Energy - Good but not the silver bullet we were hoping for
This article was written by Samuel Scheuer and Marius Hobbhahn (equal contribution). It was crossposted from Marius' personal blog.
Nuclear power is a very polarized issue. Proponents think it is a clean solution to most of our energy problems and op... |
ad2f07ae-26a4-47f4-931a-5abe74bb2793 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Epistemic Strategies of Selection Theorems
Introduction: Epistemic Strategies Redux
This post examines the epistemic strategies of John Wentworth’s selection theorem posts.
(If you want to skim this post, just read the Summary subsection that display the different epistemic strategies as design patterns)
I introduce... |
6e7d49c2-8385-4cbc-a744-4b82f738e158 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Insulate your ideas
Once tested and proven, insulate good ideas from reality.
Running
I recently spoke with a very successful marathon runner who commonly wins races and consistently beats his own times. I asked for his tips, and he shared two:
> “The first thing I do is run faster on the uphills. Everyone else ... |
0b3bb903-cfe1-4e57-90a4-1e4c1d3276cf | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Conjecture Workshop
The conjecture workshop is an activity I’ve run three times now in a conference/meetup-style setting. Feedback has been unusually positive, so I’m writing it up here to codify the basic idea and hopefully get independent feedback from others who try it.
The overall goal is to translate intuitive i... |
913b2748-abe5-4795-adc4-a3a503ad5e6e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Slightly advanced decision theory 102: Four reasons not to be a (naive) utility maximizer
TL;DR: *Introduction to decision theory with examples from effective altruism. Resulting optimal strategies differ from "naive" utility maximisation, but match community norms.*
Meta: I've also posted this on the [EA Forum](htt... |
5d75bc14-9c34-48ed-a8ba-5a7476673a2a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Ideal College Education for an Aspiring Rationalist?
Hello! I'm a rising computer science freshman in college. I got enough high school credit to fulfill over half of my general education requirements, which got me thinking...
Let's imagine that my only goal in college is to become the best rationalist ever. What cla... |
df123918-01b2-4115-afe5-9d454118e3da | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Compare the unconceived – don’t unchain them
People often criticise me of thinking of potential people as Steven Landsburg describes without necessarily endorsing:
> …like prisoners being held in a sort of limbo, unable to break through into the world of the living. If they have rights, then surely we are required to... |
7cab2a8b-40bf-4fee-a39f-d51ece38e50a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Role embeddings: making authorship more salient to LLMs
This is an interim research report on role embeddings, an approach to make language models more robust to many-shot jailbreaks and prompt injections by adding role information at every token position in the context rather than just at special token delimiters. We... |
49b01bd4-fae9-4363-a1fc-732bd121adf6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | No one has the ball on 1500 Russian olympiad winners who've received HPMOR
We have contact details and can send emails to 1500 students and former students who've received hard-cover copies of HPMOR (and possibly Human Compatible and/or The Precipice) because they've won international or Russian olympiads in maths, co... |
fc7585eb-6c96-4a83-9bd2-cc10b86627ed | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Two Kinds of Technology Change
Many of the examples in this post are drawn from Volume I of Fernand Braudel’s “Civilization and Capitalism: 15th-18th Century”, which I strongly recommend for anyone interested in a quantitative approach to history.
You may have heard that Gutenberg revolutionized the intellectual worl... |
4aae7cef-9acf-41f7-81f3-91a45b3e51f6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Request for advice: high school transferring
UPDATE 3/16/16: I decided to go to public school, because I was tired of all the little annoying stuff at my current school--especially the entitled kids and the entitled attitude in general. Everybody acts like they deserve something. It's very irritating.
The other reaso... |
ca238ebf-5f47-470e-a868-e5cb3f060729 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | When Hope Fails
This post is mostly personal; it may annoy or dismay some readers. I’m leaving it on LessWrong because it does touch on issues relevant to the community, and also because I have nowhere else to go.
content warning: death, grief, and not-so-rational coping mechanisms
________________________________... |
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