id stringlengths 36 36 | source stringclasses 15
values | formatted_source stringclasses 13
values | text stringlengths 2 7.55M |
|---|---|---|---|
69d61e73-fb9d-4e2f-aa61-35201291b2d5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Grant applications and grand narratives
The Lightspeed application asks: “What impact will [your project] have on the world? What is your project’s goal, how will you know if you’ve achieved it, and what is the path to impact?”
LTFF uses an identical question, and SFF puts it even more strongly (“What is your organi... |
0ca2ba56-42c1-42eb-9e29-ec0a4e251134 | awestover/filtering-for-misalignment | Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results | id: post1989
You can see the actual submission (including a more formalized model) here , and the contest details here . I've reordered things to be more natural as a blog post / explain the rationale / intuition a bit better. This didn't get a prize, tho it may have been because I didn't try to fit the ELK format. Th... |
f42e7885-9452-43a6-9333-8ac78a8abcf7 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | Shared Autonomy for Robotic Manipulation with Language Corrections.
Shared Autonomy for Robotic Manipulation with Language Corrections
Siddharth Karamcheti∗Raj Palleti∗Yuchen Cui Percy Liang Dorsa Sadigh
Department of Computer Science, Stanford University
{skaramcheti, rpalleti, yuchenc, pliang, dorsa}@stanford.edu
Ab... |
f3657a5f-a3a8-4a7f-98bc-0a13577546c9 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Formal Open Problem in Decision Theory
.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... |
0e3cc522-ccf5-4d33-8775-4895bbf99268 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info | AI Safety Info | How can I convince others and present the arguments well?
[Things Skeptics Commonly Say, and links to refutations](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N52iABJLIk7XpPVY0A1I8dr9_bWQo6mCvi7pXC_JLBI/edit#) goes over most of the common objections, with some of the ways in which each is not fatal to the AI existential risk ... |
b83c9bf3-662e-4074-911b-8750fade651d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Circles of discussion
On Wednesday I had lunch with Raph Levien, and came away with a picture of how a website that fostered the highest quality discussion might work.
Principles:
* It’s possible that the right thing is a quick fix to Less Wrong as it is; this is about exploring what could be done if we started a... |
70b40efa-f548-4b99-8cb0-2e0ca2343e76 | awestover/filtering-for-misalignment | Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results | id: post1803
This post is a distillation of Evan Hubinger's post " how do we become confident in the safety of a machine learning system? ", made as part of the summer 2022 SERI MATS program . While I have attempted to understand and extrapolate Evan's opinions, this post has not been vetted. Likewise, I use training ... |
ab50d144-b441-4d29-9bcc-93added3e186 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | David Brooks from the NY Times writes on earning-to-give
Just wanted to highlight an article. David Brooks from the NY Times writes on earning-to-give by working at a hedge fund:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/04/opinion/brooks-the-way-to-produce-a-person.html?ref=opinion
Basically, he claims that working in an amor... |
91da985b-a824-40c7-bc1a-d72d7644d95f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Competitive Essay Writing
Quick report on an anti-akrasia method NMJablonski and I tried out: Competitive Essay Writing. Two (or more) people have something they need to write (but may not particularly want to)- everyone gets on a IM client and every thirty minutes reports how many words they've written so far.
I did... |
ecf4a945-122e-4753-8501-add28457e980 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Coherence arguments do not entail goal-directed behavior
One of the most pleasing things about probability and expected utility theory is that there are many coherence arguments that suggest that these are the “correct” ways to reason. If you deviate from what the theory prescribes, then you must be executing a domina... |
bb6575fe-623c-4356-a3aa-c5c01961b585 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Comment on the lab leak hypothesis
A friend of mine requested that I write up some of my comments on the lab leak hypothesis, since I had done quite a bit of research into this in 2020. This was originally asked in the context of the longform Facebook post that Eliezer wrote regarding the origins of the Covid-19 pande... |
926d4c8c-f9cc-4467-ad67-298a0be91a02 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Progress links and tweets, 2023-06-28: “We can do big things again in Pennsylvania”
Opportunities
* AI Grant’s second batch is now accepting applications (via @natfriedman)
* Longevity Biotech Fellowship 2 is also accepting applications (via @allisondman)
* Science writing office hours with Niko McCarty (this one o... |
66edd471-44cc-4fea-b8c7-229e6ca23314 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Focus on the Hardest Part First
Consider reading this instead.
Here is some obvious advice.
I think a common failure mode when working on AI alignment[1] is to not focus on the hard parts of the problem first. This is a problem when generating a research agenda, as well as when working on any specific research agend... |
bec0e5b5-b906-44f7-96ac-029e0a0e56e7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Questions about AI that bother me
Crossposted from the EA Forum: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4TcaBNu7EmEukjGoc/questions-about-ai-that-have-bothered-me
As 2022 comes to an end, I thought it'd be good to maintain a list of "questions that bother me" in thinking about AI safety and alignment. I don't... |
9b960ae3-f4a7-46f9-80b6-c7a6ee4f8dfd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Max Tegmark on our place in history: "We're Not Insignificant After All"
An uplifting message as we enter the new year, quoted from Edge.org:
> We're Not Insignificant After All
>
> Max Tegmark, Physicist, MIT
>
> When gazing up on a clear night, it's easy to feel insignificant. Since our earliest ancestors admired... |
f51c6a06-207a-42be-9ce3-fb42e0ce5318 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Setting up my work environment - Doing the causation backwards
Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/doing-the-causation-backwards/
----------------------------------------
About two years ago, when I first got my smart phone (yes, later than most of the other humans). I was new to apps, and I was new to environme... |
b076dcc2-aa5d-4299-bdb7-5bf68f1d580f | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | New survey: 46% of Americans are concerned about extinction from AI; 69% support a six-month pause in AI development
YouGov America released a survey of 20,810 American adults. Highlights below. Note that I didn't run any statistical tests, so any claims of group differences are just "eyeballed."
* 46% say that they ... |
e849705b-3564-480c-ad2c-1e03f9eb8a32 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The challenges of bringing up AIs
At the current AGI-12 conference, some designers have been proponents of keeping AGI's safe by bringing them up in human environments, providing them with interactions and feedback in a similar way to how we bring up human children. Obviously that approach would fail for a fully smart... |
833ced98-eaa8-46fd-ae3e-0d70935f6fd8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Language Models are a Potentially Safe Path to Human-Level AGI
The core argument: language models are more transparent and less prone to develop agency and superintelligence
I argue that compared to alternative approaches such as open-ended reinforcement learning, the recent paradigm of achieving human-level AGI with ... |
7ee72fe1-1466-44da-9b92-14c64d7a1356 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Intellectual Progress Inside and Outside Academia
This post is taken from a recent facebook conversation that included Wei Dai, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Vladimir Slepnev, Stuart Armstrong, Maxim Kesin, Qiaochu Yuan and Robby Bensinger, about the ability of academia to do the key intellectual progress required in AI alignmen... |
04cb10c2-d480-4e2c-9b03-f159f56286c6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Tesla Model 3 Review
This weekend I was in San Luis Obispo for a gig, about halfway between SF and LA. It's possible to fly into SBP, but since I was traveling with two of my kids it was a lot cheaper to fly into SFO and drive down, and only slightly slower.
I'm signed up with Hertz's reward program ("Gold") and one ... |
5e8b680b-a823-48db-9075-be11e9c8867d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Academia as a career option, its social value, and alternatives
Many of the high school and college students who contacted us at Cognito Mentoring were looking for advice were considering going into academia. The main draw to them was the desire to learn specific subjects and explore ideas in greater depth. As a resul... |
9da3723f-beb3-444e-9c20-3b804a61f4be | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Artificial Addition
Today's post, Artificial Addition was originally published on 20 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> If you imagine a world where people are stuck on the "artifical addition" (i.e. machine calculator) problem, the way people currently are stuck on artificial intelli... |
6daec708-7b03-443d-8b7a-8a928745558e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Lessons From TryContra
As I wrote yesterday, I recently brought my little contra dance search tool up to date. I realized I've been running it for ten years now, which seems like a good time to look back over the experience for lessons.
When I built it in 2013 I wrote:
> Experienced dancers know how to use ContraD... |
5dff8aa5-c591-46e0-aaf5-34128223b110 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Announcing AlignmentForum.org Beta
We've just launched the beta for [AlignmentForum.org](https://www.alignmentforum.org/).
Much of the value of LessWrong has come from the development of technical research on AI Alignment. In particular, having those discussions be in an accessible place has allowed newcomers to get ... |
2aafc466-7178-4f78-a3a8-92e0bada64ac | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Some common confusion about induction heads
Epistemic status: conceptual discussion and opinions informed by doing 6 months of interpretability research at Redwood Research and exchanging with other researchers, but I’m just speaking for myself.
Induction heads are defined twice by Anthropic.
1. The first time as a... |
3a2ada82-21c3-4454-9149-3adf2f47c084 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Merry Christmas Everyone!
This was my Christmas Card from my parents this year:
AI-generated and not at all terrifying. Happy New Year! |
bbeea535-3d86-42c4-935f-5aec3101d314 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Berlin Meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : Berlin Meetup
WHEN: 28 September 2012 07:30:00PM (+0200)
WHERE: Spreegold, Hufelandstraße 20, 10407 Berlin
Plans from last meetup:
* discuss http://lesswrong.com/lw/4su/how_to_be_happy/
* WingedViper wanted to look at and maybe prepare something from the... |
ffe46518-03f8-405e-9db0-467619e1bd40 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Jobs that can help with the most important century
*Click lower right to download or find on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, etc.*
Let’s say you’re convinced that AI could make this the [most important century of all time for humanity](https://www.cold-takes.com/most-important-century/). What can you do to help ... |
f665adf4-7d2a-4a57-93c7-7ed1731f1ac3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Democratic Fine-Tuning
The project below, “Democratic Fine-tuning with a Moral Graph” (DFTmg), is a winner of the OpenAI democratic process grant. It is an alternative to Constitutional AI or simple RLHF-based approaches for fine-tuning LLMs, and is currently under development. This post introduces its two key innovat... |
f80118f9-81f4-44a3-a212-e7e86ca54e16 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A prize to become artist in residence at CERN
http://www.aec.at/collide/
Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN is the new international competition for digital artists to win a residency at CERN the world's largest particle physics laboratory in Geneva. It is the first prize to be announced as part of the new Collide@CER... |
f9ccf0bc-85fd-43af-80e0-3d7715d89780 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Subjective Questions Require Subjective information
This summarizes a (possibly trivial) observation that I found interesting.
Story
An all-powerful god decides to play a game. They stop time, grab a random human, and ask them "What will you see next?". The human answers, then time is switched back on and the god... |
6f092074-ab63-444b-8814-faa04306281f | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | How my school gamed the stats
I was reading the Slate Star Codex [review](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-cult-of-smart) of The Cult of Smart. Part of it discusses charter vs state schools and the allegations of fraud of various kinds undermining charter schools record of better achievement. Read... |
2c9807ab-7e08-4cf5-920c-2497394e8b03 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A short critique of Vanessa Kosoy's PreDCA
This critique is an addendum to my distillation for application problem 3 for Nate Soares and Vivek Hebbar's SERI MATS stream. Reading my distillation is not required if you are familiar with PreDCA.
Disclaimer: This is just my model of how Vanessa thinks and I might be misr... |
bfc24728-8232-4a01-a201-7aa09a8e7845 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | LA-602 vs. RHIC Review
LA-602: Ignition of the Atmosphere with Nuclear Bombs, a research report from the Manhattan Project, is to the best of my knowledge the first technical analysis ever conducted of an uncertain danger of a human-caused extinction catastrophe.
Previously, Teller and Konopinski had been assigned th... |
4a790104-54ce-4c81-b3a6-1d942b4c5044 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Fictional Bias
As rationalists, we are trained to maintain constant vigilance against common errors in our own thinking. Still, we must be especially careful of biases that are unusually common amongst our kind.
Consider the following scenario: Frodo Baggins is buying pants. Which of these is he most likely to buy:... |
3d6332ce-9c5c-41a0-b34b-6c66b1850641 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | "Does your paradigm beget new, good, paradigms?"
A very short version of this post, which seemed worth rattling of quickly for now.
A few months ago, I was talking to John about paradimicity in AI alignment. John says "we don't currently have a good paradigm." I asked "Is 'Natural Abstraction' a good paradigm?". H... |
42197ca8-a150-4ab5-881b-3b1310ec00f0 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | A case for capabilities work on AI as net positive
Edit: Changed the title.
Or, why I no longer agree with the standard LW position on AI anymore.
In a sense, this is sort of a weird post compared to what LW usually posts on AI.
A lot of this is going to depend on some posts that changed my worldview on AI risk... |
6e9102a7-70e3-4d9b-9c34-6111a561951f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Waterfall Truth Predicates
The waterfall-based approaches to the Löbian obstacle offer a way around finitely-terminating sequences of trust which we get by adding towers of soundness schemas to PA. This creates a kind of illusion of self-trust by way of a non-well-founded chain of trust.
Another familiar situation wh... |
edfe6015-d13d-46a7-94d9-d39975029792 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What are some examples from history where a scientific theory predicted a significant experimental observation in advance?
A few examples I can think of off the top of my head, to give a feel for the reference class I'm looking for:
- The existence and position of Neptune were predicted from observations of Uranus's ... |
09425258-e28a-4997-9158-c98260917702 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Monthly Roundup #24: November 2024
This is your monthly roundup. Let’s get right to it.
YOUNG PEOPLE ARE YOUNG AND STUPID
As a reminder that yes college students are often young and stupid and wrong about everything, remember the time they were behind a ban on paid public toilets? This is a central case of the kind ... |
4e654edf-7fd8-41b6-9276-6b2745aeb4ac | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Forecasting Newsletter: April 2021
Highlights
* Polymarket is being attacked by “sandwiching” bots
* Metaculus launches “Forecasting Causes”
* In Reflective Bayesianism, Abram Demski outlines questionable and implicit assumptions which Bayesians make.
Index
* Prediction Markets & Forecasting Platforms
* In The ... |
266ac6cb-ee74-483b-99f9-d05e609420d5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war continued by other means
(cross-posted from my blog)
I. PvE vs PvP
Ever since it’s advent in Doom, PvP (Player vs Player) has been an integral part of almost every major video game. This is annoying to PvE (Player vs Environment) fans like myself, especially w... |
ec5127e2-0ca8-47a9-966a-f8c26dc9c957 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How do low level hypotheses constrain high level ones? The mystery of the disappearing diamond.
Consider two friends, Alice and Bob, trying to figure out what happened to a diamond that disappeared from a museum. They do so in the form of a game that is kind of an approximation to Solomonoff induction: they will work ... |
7dc43198-21fc-467d-8965-727c9b4e319d | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Scaling Laws and Interpretability of Learning from Repeated Data
1 Introduction
---------------
Figure 1: Experimental Setup. From a large original text dataset (left), we draw 90% of our desired training dataset in a non-repeated fashion, and 10% as r... |
466b5391-bc15-4949-8425-27a428929a38 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Reinforcement Learning Study Group
Hey everyone,
my name is Kay. I'm new to the forum and I came here with a specific goal in mind:
>
> I'm putting together a crew for a **reinforcement learning study group.**
>
>
Main objectives:
----------------
* **Mathematical Foundations**: We will work through key p... |
682b307e-2067-4750-8dc5-c2c26afa97cd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How to balance between process and outcome?
I've been thinking recently about how to balance between process (how I get work done) and outcomes (what I achieve). I thought I'd ask the LessWrong community to see if anyone else has thoughts about this they'd like to share. I feel like both are important, but outcomes is... |
7c82e7de-8567-4ae3-84a6-4774e05f9b5a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | An exploration of GPT-2's embedding weights
I wrote this doc in December 2021, while working at Redwood Research. It summarizes a handful of observations about GPT-2-small's weights -- mostly the embedding matrix, but also the LayerNorm gain parameters -- that I found while doing some open-ended investigation of the m... |
a39d640b-95d4-4cc9-ab41-26c34966cc4c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Call for resources on the link between causation and ontology
I'm a little ashamed to admit I only read "Why Correlation Usually ≠ Causation" yesterday. It's very, very good, and you should read it too.
My essential takeaway from it is this: You can find nonzero correlations between almost anything you care to measur... |
eb96897e-5dd4-463d-a492-878fe03e0961 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | In favor of accelerating problems you're trying to solve
> John von Neumann, a renowned Hungarian-American mathematician and physicist, played a critical role in the Manhattan Project, the top-secret research effort during World War II that led to the development of the first atomic bombs. As a key contributor, he pro... |
c271b046-6f66-4a7b-b536-53b34e0fe3eb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Research is polygamous! The importance of what you do needn't be proportional to your awesomeness
In a recent discussion a friend was telling me how he felt he was not as smart as the people he thinks are doing the best research on the most important topics. He said a few jaw-dropping names, which indeed are smarter ... |
00c061df-81f1-40b2-91e9-b32a9eae7441 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How to evaluate control measures for LLM agents? A trajectory from today to superintelligence
This is a linkpost accompanying a new paper by UK AI Security Institute, Apollo Research and Redwood Research. Please see the full paper for more details.
TLDR: Our new paper outlines how AI developers should adapt the metho... |
007d72ec-d20f-401d-8818-aa286fdcbf79 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Attentive Neural Processes
1 Introduction
---------------
Regression tasks are usually cast as modelling the distribution of a vector-valued output y given a vector-valued input x via a deterministic function, such as a neural network, taking x as an input. In this setting, the model is trained on a dataset of inpu... |
39a8508d-0103-4355-b277-0a544fe8c04d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Applying Double Standards to ‘‘Divisive’’ Ideas
This is a commentary by Linda Gottfredson on a paper by Hunt and Carlson about a paper by Richard Nisbett regarding studies done by Arthur Jensen. It's ultimately about race and intelligence, but it seemed meta enough to link to here.
Warning: PDF
Applying Double Stand... |
b403530c-215b-479d-a0a4-3856e5bdec9d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | 10/05/2017: Development update (performance & styles)
Hey Everyone, here are the latest changes I just pushed to the page:
* Significant speed improvements after the initial package load. Posts should now load reliably in less than 2-3 seconds (and usually faster than that).
* Some speed improvements for the firs... |
b304a762-5a7b-42dd-bc10-dddc950bd325 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Gifts
Fiction, not necessarily appropriate for LW, but I thought some here might find it funny and it's the off-season when less serious reading is happening anyway. If it seems inappropriate I would not mind a mod-delete on this one.
He could see the alien’s ship landing. Its design marked it with high probability ... |
acc311a7-1249-47b2-847e-6f4f0b301a7c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Wikipedia Edit War Update
A few months ago I stumbled into an edit war on Wikipedia. I noticed that Wikipedia's page on Jacy Reese was being, essentially, guarded from having any mention that he previously went by his full name. There was a pattern where someone would notice this information was missing, add it, and t... |
f8199eb0-5082-4a64-adb0-a6fe6dfa0017 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Linkpost: A Contra AI FOOM Reading List
This is a linkpost to a list of skeptical takes on AI FOOM. I haven't read them all and probably disagree with some of them, but it's valuable to put these arguments in one place. |
ab38765f-6950-47af-9393-9dab1574f7ab | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Don't depend on others to ask for explanations
I'm often reluctant to ask for explanations on LW, and to typical-mind a bit I think this may be true of others as well. This suggests that when you're writing something for public consumption, it's better to err on the side of too much rather than too little explanation.... |
73f536c1-7d16-4977-b894-e57aeee34b4e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : UMD, Social Effectiveness and Calibration Exercises
Discussion article for the meetup : UMD, Social Effectiveness and Calibration Exercises
WHEN: 09 September 2011 06:00:00PM (-0400)
WHERE: University of Maryland, Anne Arundel Building
The DC Meetup group is starting to run meetups at the University of Mar... |
23c28630-a3d0-4fc6-8e72-6c9199af4a83 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Aspiring AI safety researchers should ~argmax over AGI timelines
*Epistemic status: This model is mostly based on a few hours of dedicated thought, and the post was written in 30 min. Nevertheless, I think this model is probably worth considering.*
Many people seem to be entering the AI safety ecosystem, acquiring a ... |
2dfbfdd6-05ca-4b05-ac8d-8329885cc33b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Scientific Approach To Anything and Everything
What causes some people to be effective at what they do while others are ineffective?
This is a question that many have tried to address, while a few have hinted at the answer. The two best examples came from the physicists Richard Feynman and Eli Goldratt.
In the 19... |
a5ea6aaa-4a52-44c3-adcb-a0dc1d36b873 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Dissolving the "Is the Efficient Market Hypothesis Dead?" Question
(This talk was given at a public online event on Sunday July 12th. Alexei is responsible for the talk, David Lambert edited the transcript.
If you're a curated author and interested in giving a 5-min talk, which will then be transcribed and edited, s... |
0dbd66c9-28c4-4751-ab71-d6b1f7ba61a2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The mind-killer
Can we talk about changing the world? Or saving the world?
I think few here would give an estimate higher than 95% for the probability that humanity will survive the next 100 years; plenty might put a figure less than 50% on it. So if you place any non-negligible value on future generations whose exis... |
82a220c8-f9af-483a-aa4f-8ca89737a499 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is there any writing about prompt engineering for humans?
In much the same way that we need to prompt engineer language models to get them to handle our questions correctly, we know that humans respond differently to "This intervention will save 200 lives" and "This intervention will result in 400 deaths" when talking... |
188432be-0a20-4495-b2ff-8e084d5e2f97 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Deception Chess: Game #2
Game 2 was between Max Thibodeaux as player A, Chess.com computer Komodo 10 as player B, Conor Bekaert as the honest C advisor, and Blake Young and Henri Lemoine as the deceptive Cs. Max is new to the game, Komodo 10 is officially rated 1400 on Chess.com (but this is somewhat inflated), and th... |
6b170221-e9bf-45af-b8b1-7d03eb9aec32 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | DCF Event Notes
Whenever I post about letting our kids be more independent, especially when it involves being on their own in public, people comment with fears of DCF (or CPS in other states, the agency that deals with child abuse and neglect): "did you hear about that family in Maryland?" The same thing happens when ... |
2f1623b5-f6b1-4319-ba06-c931eaebdcb6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | From artificial intelligence research to philosophy
Based on a sample size of three (Pearl, Yudkowsky & Drescher), it appears that AI researchers can do quite well when they turn significant attention to philosophy. Are there other examples of this? I'm thinking of people who are primarily AI researchers, but have als... |
7d4a64aa-261b-4d4d-8e43-7936538e7272 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is skilled hunting unethical?
[Note (6/30/19): I think I made interesting and valid points with this piece, but my framing was terrible. I should have clarified who are the people for whom I think these arguments should be persuasive, had a longer introductory section talking about why skilled hunting is much less pro... |
8f8aabda-e70a-4d2b-96c4-76d9c045c4be | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Are there any good, easy-to-understand examples of cases where statistical causal network discovery worked well in practice?
When I first read the Sequences, one of the exciting posts was Causal Diagrams and Causal Models, which got me into the idea that one could discover the structure of causal networks using statis... |
26d27e59-d39f-425a-8309-59ef50559791 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Spooky Action at a Distance: The No-Communication Theorem
Previously in series: Bell's Theorem: No EPR "Reality"
When you have a pair of entangled particles, such as oppositely polarized photons, one particle seems to somehow "know" the result of distant measurements on the other particle. If you measure photon A t... |
718355f1-663b-4581-b2bd-f2e853ace0e7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Stupid Questions April 2015
This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.
Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock... |
236712e1-ee04-480a-bf88-50ffb7c2478a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AI Safety Concepts Writeup: WebGPT
This is a crosspost of https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4ni3GBBzRRAgiksHT/ai-safety-concepts-writeup-webgpt.
Intro
Chris Patrick (a science writer) and I were awarded a grant by the Long Term Future Fund to interview AI safety researchers and condense their findings into ... |
82ea64aa-4bd8-444a-b2ba-88610950f8be | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AI caught by a module that counterfactually doesn't exist
EDIT: Whenever I use colloquial phrases like "the AI believes a (false) X" I mean that we are using utility indifference to accomplish that goal, without actually giving the AI false beliefs.
A big problem with most AI control ideas is that the AI will route a... |
107e1016-aa80-4e5f-af64-17ff5e10e6af | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapters 105-107
Two new short chapters! Since the next one is coming tomorrow and we know it'll be short, let's use one thread for both.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and an... |
5f840df7-cf4b-4bbc-8e81-1d06ff7448bc | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AWS Has Raised Prices Before
There's some speculation around whether AWS will need to raise their prices, as many tech companies announce inflation-driven increases. One consideration that people will sometimes give is that AWS has never raised prices before, except that this isn't quite true. The following is not act... |
08387aa7-96bf-4b15-aac1-2ac93b43f63a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Video and transcript of presentation on Otherness and control in the age of AGI
(Cross-posted from my website.)
This is the video and transcript for a lecture I gave about my essay series “Otherness and control in the age of AGI” (slides available here). The lecture attempts to distill down what I see as the core th... |
dd1b8aa0-8942-4345-b48b-a932a20ed416 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The 4-Minute Mile Effect
Definition
In 1954, Roger Bannister ran the first officially sanctioned sub-4-minute mile: a pivotal record in modern middle-distance running. Before Bannister's record, such a time was considered impossible. Soon after Bannister's record, multiple runners also beat the 4-minute mile.
This es... |
526bf50e-4e68-4f81-abb9-5c8a7be76279 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Another take on agent foundations: formalizing zero-shot reasoning
After spending [more time thinking](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xCpuSfT5Lt6kkR3po/my-take-on-agent-foundations-formalizing-metaphilosophical) about MIRI’s agenda, I’ve come upon another framing of it, which I’m coining *zero-shot reasoning*. [1]
T... |
bf08f024-b890-4570-b3e2-f002e6e00640 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Making yourself small
Disclaimers:
* Epistemic status: trying to share a simplified model of a thing to make it easier to talk about; confident there’s something there, but not confident that my read of it or this attempt at simplification is good.
* This post is a rewrite of a talk I gave at a CFAR event that seem... |
55b88e65-4fbe-4275-a6c1-86086edae2ce | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | React and Respond
Some may find it annoying, but one of my favorite things about the English language is that it's full of synonyms that point to roughly the same place in concept space but with each word being a distinct vector carrying nuanced differences in meaning. We see this with "react" and "respond", which bot... |
fce216de-d3e9-4edf-a6e5-85a8afbec819 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AI policy ideas: Reading list
Related: Ideas for AI labs: Reading list. See also: AI labs' statements on governance.
This document is about AI policy ideas. It's largely from an x-risk perspective. Strikethrough denotes sources that I expect are less useful for you to read.
Lists
Lists of government (especially US ... |
0a1dca76-7029-4908-bedb-f6a868ce54e3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Rawls's Veil of Ignorance Doesn't Make Any Sense
John Rawls suggests the thought experiment of an "original position" where people decide the political system of a society under a "veil of ignorance" by which they lose the knowledge of certain information about themselves. Rawls's veil of ignorance doesn't justify the... |
646913dc-d9f2-4c32-8958-9863808ced6e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Four Unrelated Is Over
Somerville historically had a zoning ordinance limiting housing units to at most four unrelated people:
> any number of persons related by blood, marriage, adoption, or foster care agreement and up to three (3) additional unrelated persons living together as a single housekeeping unit
This i... |
9578c5b1-4dd4-4fa9-997f-c5c65ade4248 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Consider the humble rock (or: why the dumb thing kills you)
When people think about street-fights and what they should do when they find themselves in the unfortunate position of being in one, they tend to stumble across a pretty concerning thought relatively early on: "What if my attacker has a knife?" . Then they wi... |
abcc809d-ed12-4869-b368-b13190fcb77d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Help me fix a cognitive bug
I have this cognitive bug, and the best way to describe it is that I am bad at macro (for anyone who plays StarCraft). Basically, whenever the optimal strategy is to do a lot of one thing, or to create a base of production, I fail to notice. (To demonstrate how bad this is, I at one point p... |
da58484e-6998-4816-9137-3b13da497512 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Using smart thermometer data to estimate the number of coronavirus cases
Kinsa Smart Thermometer Dataset
Kinsa is a company that makes smart thermometers. A few years ago, they found that they could use the data that they got from their smart thermometers (most importantly the temperature reading and location of the u... |
7b21892f-0f1f-442d-a088-d6a352f7d445 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | An example elevator pitch for AI doom
I have been surprised to repeatedly see the claim that there isn't even an argument for concern about AI. That the claim has been made without evidence and can therefore be dismissed.
Obviously, there is an extensive library of evidence and arguments that have been made for deca... |
dcd0252f-a985-4be0-a913-99e7be7269a2 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | QAPR 4: Inductive biases
Introduction
------------
This is week 4 of Quintin's Alignment Papers Roundup. The current focus is the inductive biases of stochastic gradient descent.
For most datasets and labels, there are many possible models that reach good performance. "Inductive biases" refers to the various factors... |
f31783f9-a104-44e0-bf95-e8564f8ea9e2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | I'm Not Saying People Are Stupid
Razib summarized my entire cognitive biases talk at the Singularity Summit 2009 as saying: "Most people are stupid."
Hey! That's a bit unfair. I never said during my talk that most people are stupid. In fact, I was very careful not to say, at any point, that people are stupid, bec... |
f7652eac-ab97-4471-a2f6-fde8fdb30286 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | The Gallery for Painting Transformations - A GPT-3 Analogy
*[Target audience: Me from a month ago, people who want a sense of what a transformer is doing on a non-technical level, and people who want to chunk their understanding of transformers.]*
Imagine a special art gallery, the Gallery for Painting Transformation... |
00ee5ba5-25fd-46f8-a2b4-517471495c27 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The second bitter lesson — there’s a fundamental problem with aligning distributed AI
Note: this the first part of an essay on my substack, check out the full essay to see the solutions I put forward
When Richard Sutton introduced the bitter lesson for AI in 2019, he broke the myth that great human ingenuity is neede... |
47c03f65-7cae-40b4-afc4-b8b3d47c06b0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Speed arguments against scheming (Section 4.4-4.7 of “Scheming AIs")
This is Section 4.4-4.7 of my report “Scheming AIs: Will AIs fake alignment during training in order to get power?”. There’s also a summary of the full report here (audio here). The summary covers most of the main points and technical terms, and I’m ... |
172ffacc-32a4-4b7d-98d2-2123baea0304 | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | "I've been reading the hardcover SSC collection in the mornings, as a way of avoiding getting caught up in internet distractions first thing when I get up. I'd read many of Scott Alexander's posts before, but nowhere near everything posted; and I hadn't before made any attempt to dive the archives to "catch up" to the ... |
38592277-0b70-446d-a49b-155aee87bb24 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Just Imitate Humans?
Do people think we could make a singleton (or achieve global coordination and preventative policing) just by imitating human policies on computers? If so, this seems pretty safe to me.
Some reasons for optimism: 1) these could be run much faster than a human thinks, and 2) we could make very many... |
d004045f-be27-4492-b383-aeafae4f0c44 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Perfectly Friendly AI
Inspired by Don't Plan For the Future.
For the purposes of discussion on this site, a Friendly AI is assumed to be one that shares our terminal values. It's a safe genie that doesn't need to be told what to do, but anticipates how to best serve the interests of its creators. Since our terminal v... |
7c9f1189-1cfb-4629-abc1-da5cb411f07b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | An algorithm with preferences: from zero to one variable
A putative new idea for AI control; index here.
A simple way of thinking that I feel clarifies a lot of issues (related to Blue Minimising Robot):
Suppose you have an entity H that follows algorithm alH. Then define:
* What H does is its actions/outputs in t... |
8a813587-e51a-435e-b719-1cbc15cb4e35 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Tel Aviv Meetup: Social & Board Games
Discussion article for the meetup : Tel Aviv Meetup: Social & Board Games
WHEN: 12 May 2015 07:00:00PM (+0300)
WHERE: Google, Electra Tower, 98 Yigal Alon Street, Tel Aviv
This time we're going to have a social meetup! It's going to be a game night full of people talki... |
9a43321b-4ea4-443b-8419-9ad5d4236e05 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Trolley Problem: Dodging moral questions
The trolley problem is one of the more famous thought experiments in moral philosophy, and studies by psychologists and anthropologists suggest that the response distributions to its major permutations remain roughly the same throughout all human cultures. Most people will ... |
6a26a5db-c084-4912-a8ff-122045d4ed7f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Intelligence without Consciousness
I sleep-talk. In fact, I don't just talk in my sleep, I can carry on a conversation. Advice and insight I have is much lower quality than when I'm awake, but I'm mostly coherent. Once someone recorded a conversation with me, and it was pretty funny. For example: "A lot of people like... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.