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8fc6f47e-536d-4a22-8a2a-6e5da554a831 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Reading writing advice doesn't make writing easier
Status: Writing to think out loud, Cunningham's Law.
TL;DR
I've never published a blogpost. So I adapted writing advice into writing prompts to finish my first.
My prompts get me to:
1.) Clarify what I'm excited to write about,
2.) Recursively narrow the scope... |
83af6419-07a5-46b3-a014-9b448e31495b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Please Take the 2018 Effective Altruism Survey!
This year, the EA Survey volunteer team is proud to announce the launch of the 2018 Effective Altruism Survey.
-
PLEASE TAKE THIS SURVEY NOW BY CLICKING HERE :)
(If you want to share the survey with others, please use this fancy share link with referral tracking: http... |
2c835759-95ae-44c1-aee5-01b826122ee0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Using Machine Learning to Explore Neural Network Architecture (Google Research Blog)
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66908e17-a448-4c00-80a7-faa18edd6892 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [LINK] Non-Conformists Better At Working Toward Common Good
First read about this on Para Pundit, relevant link here.
> If you follow the pack are you more likely to co-operate with others in it? Not necessarily according to research into social behaviour by academics at the University of East Anglia.
>
> The study,... |
ab9faa67-cc56-46d1-8510-af9a2170479b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | General textbook comparison thread
We've already had a lengthy (and still active) thread attempting to address the question "What are the best textbooks, and why are they better than their rivals?". That's excellent, but no one is going to post there unless they're prepared to claim: Textbook X is the best on its subj... |
c5ece004-dc06-49d4-86e8-89a099784d8a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Utilitarianism
Following is a brief of some parts of this paper on Aligning AI with shared human values.
The "why" behind most human actions is a universal seeking of pleasure and aversion to pain, so it seems natural that morality should be focused on "the greatest good for the greatest number of people".
This i... |
13ddb8e2-e91c-426f-81b4-ee15443649b7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why isn't the following decision theory optimal?
I've recently read the decision theory FAQ, as well as Eliezer's TDT paper. When reading the TDT paper, a simple decision procedure occurred to me which as far as I can tell gets the correct answer to every tricky decision problem I've seen. As discussed in the FAQ a... |
c997a3c0-9c9b-4d43-9a09-edab0e9bd71f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Qualia
As we venture into the realm of consciousness, we encounter one of the most perplexing and intriguing concepts: qualia. These are the subjective, first-person experiences that define our perception of the world—what it feels like to see the color red, to taste chocolate, or to hear a symphony. How wonderful it ... |
7710e767-3639-4f24-be44-9803fc24100a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | When to Donate Masks?
As people start coming into hospitals with the coronavirus, the number of masks we go through with standard protocols goes up enormously. These masks are normally single-use, and you put on a new mask every time one is needed. Roughly, a hospital could increase its daily usage of masks 100x as th... |
ec2cd4ec-8459-4aa7-90db-023fcb8740aa | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Notes on Learning the Prior
This post was written to fulfil requirements of the SERI MATS Training Program.
One of the goals in writing this post is to arrive at an explanation of a particular set of issues raised by Irving in the Learning the smooth prior post. In order to do so, we will first build a coherent conce... |
17a8b03c-1570-4b06-bcbe-ad010fd00287 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | LW's take on nutrition?
There's a book called The China Study. It's written by the "Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University, and his son Thomas M. Campbell II, a physician". Based on what I know about the words "professor" and "emeritus" and "cornell", I assume this is written by an auth... |
6545bff3-3b84-4049-bf0d-858696dd8ffb | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Refine's First Blog Post Day
Yesterday was the first blog post day at Refine. It came after a week of readings, discussions and exercises about epistemology (more concretely [shapes of mind](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/RrirwtP7cNmHtJRxE/shapes-of-mind-and-pluralism-in-alignment), [productive mistakes](https:/... |
15c84e81-1b84-4665-b5e7-da4777a836bd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What was the official story for many top physicists congregating in Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project?
There is a consensus among most people I know that if top researchers are necessary for the successful development of AGI, then it would be impossible to do in in secrecy, because the world would notice top AI ... |
af4ea117-63d9-45a0-8e5c-cae918be991b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Consequentialist Formal Systems
This post describes a different (less agent-centric) way of looking at UDT-like decision theories that resolves some aspects of the long-standing technical problem of spurious moral arguments. It's only a half-baked idea, so there are currently a lot of loose ends.
On spurious argumen... |
816bfe81-8d2d-4893-8b6c-ebeaca20a029 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Decision Problem
The idea for this problem is gotten from dmytryl.
> Omega makes a simulation of you. One of you is presented with an offer Omega offers them $1000.
> 1. If the simulation is offered the $1000 dollars and rejects it, the real you gets a $10,000.
> 2. If the simulation is offered the $1,000 dollars a... |
e2b659e8-0de1-4c3f-825d-48c218e05838 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How to Take Over the Universe (in Three Easy Steps)
EA-Forum crosspost
This is the script of Rational Animations' video linked above. It's about how to take over the universe with amounts of energy and resources that are small compared to what is at our disposal in the Solar System. It's based on this paper, by Ande... |
859ead86-b526-4e14-9775-4e709567197f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Publication: the "anti-science" trope is culturally polarizing and makes people distrust scientists
Paper by the Cultural Cognition Project: The culturally polarizing effect of the "anti-science trope" on vaccine risk perceptions
This is a great paper (indeed, I think many at LW would find the whole site enjoyable). ... |
54b1e938-6265-4fa8-bc70-1d0ebb40a628 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Two Kinds of Irrationality and How to Avoid One of Them
It seems to me that there are two kinds of human irrationality. One could be called "bug" irrationality, not referring to insects but rather bugs in the design of our minds, ways in which our minds could be better designed. This category includes things like hype... |
4017655f-9c51-418a-a835-8d5ba991b887 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | LessWrong Discord
After seeing the success of the rationalist tumblr Discord and the Slate Star Codex Discord, I've created a server for LessWrong in general.
It can be accessed through the Discord web client by just clicking on the link: https://discord.gg/eYqZMhm.
The Discord desktop client can be downloaded fro... |
f0ae017b-cf1d-4ab6-b64d-3cd9f683ec59 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | GPT-4 Predictions
Introduction
GPT-4 is OpenAI’s next major language model which is expected to be released at some point in 2023. My goal here is to get some idea of when it will be released and what it will be capable of. I also think it will be interesting in retrospect to see how accurate my predictions were. This... |
56a46125-3b97-4413-a161-5d585617b0a7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Being useless to express care
Imagine you were aiming to appear to care about something or somebody else. One way you could do it is to work out exactly what would help them and do that. What could possibly look like you care about them more? The first problem here is that onlookers might not know what is really helpf... |
98d672fb-f4ff-4be1-a754-ba9859117020 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Certified Patch Robustness via Smoothed Vision Transformers
1 Introduction
---------------
High-stakes scenarios warrant the development of certifiably robust models that are *guaranteed* to be robust to a set of transformations. These techniques are beginning to find applications in real-world settings, such as ve... |
43eacac7-e559-4817-b46a-9cd0894d0e5c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why does generalization work?
Just an interesting philosophical argument
I. Physics
Why can an ML model learn from part of a distribution or data set, and generalize to the rest of it? Why can I learn some useful heuristics or principles in a particular context, and later apply them in other areas of my life?
The a... |
3d810a24-0213-40d5-a623-a83c82df559c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Less Realistic Tales of Doom
Realistic tales of doom must weave together many political, technical, and economic considerations into a single story. Such tales provide concrete projections but omit discussion of less probable paths to doom. To rectify this, here are some concrete, less realistic tales of doom; conside... |
3195cd46-c0a2-4ca7-98a0-9758ed572f0c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A few predictions
1. Will the new, more infectious UK strain impact virus reproduction in the US?
A new Covid-19 strain is rapidly expanding in the UK and has increased reproduction. Several pieces of evidence all point toward the new strain increasing virus reprodcution by 50-80%. My favorite piece of evidence is t... |
cf8066b0-aeff-4154-a173-cda85168928c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Cryptographic Life: How to transcend in a sub-lightspeed world via Homomorphic encryption
Hello. This is a concept that I have not seen formulated before and I think the people here might find interesting. I am a new LW user and so I do not know if this has been formulated before. In this case I suppose you can refer ... |
01f88981-9ad0-4921-b933-2b911611cdce | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Framing AI strategy
*Zach Stein-Perlman, 6 February 2023*
*Strategy* is the activity or project of doing research to inform interventions to achieve a particular goal.[1](https://aiimpacts.org/framing-ai-strategy/#easy-footnote-bottom-1-3406 "So in my usage, strategy includes forecasting and the research component o... |
69dc226b-ece0-45a3-a058-a311ee87a486 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What are you working on? August 2012
This is the bimonthly 'What are you working On?' thread. Previous threads are here. So here's the question:
What are you working on?
Here are some guidelines:
* Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but haven't... |
f010bb17-0bd9-433b-a1ea-96e4c0746b72 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Hidden Cognition Detection Methods and Benchmarks
Thanks to Johannes Treutlein for discussions and feedback.
Introduction
An AI may be able to hide cognition that leads to negative outcomes from certain oversight processes (such as deceptive alignment/scheming). Without being able to detect this hidden cognition, a... |
4ca1382c-d54f-45ee-a98d-3b2e31fd8199 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Bengio's FAQ on Catastrophic AI Risks
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d66ac34e-423e-4d8b-a4c8-842eacb90c59 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Link] Walking Through Doors Causes Forgetting
> We investigated the ability of people to retrieve information about objects as they moved through rooms in a virtual space. People were probed with object names that were either associated with the person (i.e., carried) or dissociated from the person (i.e., just set do... |
a2bbce18-9664-4152-9335-89cfa3905592 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | You can't signal to rubes
The word 'signalling' is often used in Less Wrong, and often used wrongly. This post is intended to call out our community on its wrongful use, as well as serve as an introduction to the correct concept of signalling as contrast.
> "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon ... |
313feaf0-f83f-4013-bfd4-c773af40e032 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | ML Summer Bootcamp Reflection: Aalto EA Finland
MLB: Intensive ML Bootcamp by Aalto EA
======================================
Contents
--------
* Introduction
* Curriculum
* Flexibility Summary
* Selectiveness Summary
* Intensiveness Summary
* Peer Learning Summary
* Misc notes
* Feedback from Participants
* What we... |
6f985285-fb91-4927-acaa-c939101a759e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Box inversion revisited
[Box inversion hypothesis](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TQwXPHfyyQwr22NMh/box-inversion-hypothesis/) is a proposed correspondence between problems with AI systems studied in approaches like [agent foundations](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/agent-foundations), and problems with AI ecosystems,... |
643c8295-01f7-43e1-a909-0cdb2a17fa29 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Superintelligence 26: Science and technology strategy
This is part of a weekly reading group on Nick Bostrom's book, Superintelligence. For more information about the group, and an index of posts so far see the announcement post. For the schedule of future topics, see MIRI's reading guide.
---------------------------... |
c3c59746-8bf0-41e0-b7e9-b929f83daa14 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | About Less Wrong
Edit: This post refers to the original version of LessWrong, which ran between February 2009 and March 2018. The About page referring to the period from March 2018 to the present can be found here.
Over the last decades, new experiments have changed science's picture of the way we think - the ways... |
60d9335b-d82a-4013-85a9-2ee705f1990a | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Prior
Our (potentially rich or complex) state of knowledge and *propensity to learn,* before seeing the evidence, expressed as a [probability function](https://arbital.com/p/1zj). This is a deeper and more general concept than '[https://arbital.com/p/-1rm](https://arbital.com/p/-1rm)'. A prior probability is like gu... |
132eba51-5f75-4355-86be-fc460a148b44 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Podcast with Robin Hanson
Robin and I have started an occasional podcast series. Below are the first two episodes. The sound quality is not fantastic I’m afraid, especially at (short) places in the second one.
Signaling
Idealism
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f69e0e7a-ff88-4bc5-a38d-bc3eef6f0900 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Changing the world through slack & hobbies
This post has been recorded as part of the LessWrong Curated Podcast, and can be listened to on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Libsyn.
(Also posted on EA Forum)
Introduction
In EA orthodoxy, if you're really serious about EA, the three alternatives that people most often see... |
d3e5717b-ba23-45f2-a768-5e2c39733a02 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What do paradigm shifts look like?
One major question that heavily influences the choice of alignment research directions is the degree to which incremental improvements are necessary for major paradigm shifts. Because alignment is largely preparadigmatic, we may require a paradigm shift before we can make substantial... |
a2d579ac-fd20-40c2-b735-14731667c3f1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Queen of the Damned
A short story set in the EVE universe. Read other short stories by me and by other members of the Alexylva Paradox at Alexylvaparadox.wordpress.com/chronicles
“They played you like a fiddle Metz.” The woman was everything Metz wasn’t. He was tall and lanky, rough, ragged on the edges, with a n... |
e7fd5a60-bcfb-46a9-a8b5-19ab67ba0f57 | awestover/filtering-for-misalignment | Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results | id: post2720
Tl;dr We are attempting to make neural networks (NN) modular, have GPT-N interpret each module for us, in order to catch mesa-alignment and inner-alignment failures. Completed Project Train a neural net with an added loss term that enforces the sort of modularity that we see in well-designed software proj... |
97b794f3-59d4-4737-b821-95269ffb0459 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How to learn from a stronger rationalist in daily life?
As mentioned in my previous post, I currently estimate that I am about as strong in applied rationality as the average CS undergrad. But I know Mark Xu, who has gone to CFAR, and is certainly stronger than me, enough to occasionally find interventions that can fi... |
65f803dd-b0bd-4305-99ba-b1bf54990700 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AI, Greed, and the Death of Oversight: When Institutions Ignore Their Own Limits
By A. Nobody
Throughout my essays—especially the first and most important, “Capitalism as the Catalyst for AGI-Induced Human Extinction”—I’ve aimed to present well-established premises and follow them to their logical conclusion. This se... |
22faee3c-14f7-407e-9170-544dbe1da681 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Call for More Policy Analysis
I would like to see more concrete discussion and analysis of AI policy in the EA community, and on this forum in particular.
AI policy would broadly encompass all relevant actors meaningfully influencing the future and impact of AI, which would likely be governments, research labs ... |
b62b2102-8cff-4749-bf02-4d29eb43dd36 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Browser Bug Hunt for LessWrong.com migration
As we get ready for the final move of lesserwrong.com to lesswrong.com, we're addressing various browser compatibility issues.
We've recently updated some compatibility tools that fixed several of the older bugs. If you've run into compatibility bugs in the past, and are ... |
2cc38b76-ca8e-49fb-8e60-358e44796a7b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Systems Theory Terms
Below are some notes that I took while trying to understanding what exactly Systems theory is all about.
System
There is no universally agreed upon definition of ‘system’, but in general systems are seen as at least two elements that are interconnected. It is also common for systems to be talk... |
72a2c262-c783-457e-b135-00f8d6633c1f | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | 1h-volunteers needed for a small AI Safety-related research project
Hi everyone!
I'm currently doing an AI Safety internship where we're carrying out a research study about "multimodal models: usefulness and safety". In this project, we want to analyse how people can directly use language models (and multimodal mod... |
3542feab-c498-4e23-9949-b929a1c8baab | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Exponential Finance Meetup(NYC)?
Anyone going to the Exponential Finance conference being put on by Singularity University next week? (Tuesday and Wednesday)
http://exponential.singularityu.org/finance/
I'm going to be there participating in the XCS challenge with my Democratic Hypercapitalism venture.
I've posted ... |
90ebc5d0-ea8c-4d9f-99f3-fcaea1d5292c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Default arguments in casual speech
The other day I was planning out bike route that I'll need to take periodically. I need to get from NW 12th and Marshall to NE 60th and Glisan in Portland, Oregon. As you can see below, I have lots of options.
http://portlandbikemap.com/
I am pretty safety conscious, so I tend to on... |
a6fbb5c1-9102-4d84-a158-1a2b6cbd508a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why rationalists should care (more) about free software
cross-posted to pan narrans
Why rationalists should care (more) about free software
especially if you want to upload your brain
> In the limit condition freedom of compute is freedom of thought.
As we offload more of our cognition to our computational devices... |
5fa3f0fb-ee5c-46db-814b-1b823cb34de6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Privacy and writing
Epistemic status: N=1
I've always written several thousand words a day in a private Google doc about anything that came to mind. Only recently have I started publishing to LessWrong. It's a long and arduous process for me, too slow to be worth the effort usually. [1] Still, publishing on LW is pr... |
cfc44dec-a5fc-4a3e-a847-d09d0f3ca647 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Summing up "Scheming AIs" (Section 5)
This is Section 5 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 hoping that it will provide much of t... |
1a31714e-824b-42ad-8ad4-fcb3d245fb4c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Voting Results for the 2020 Review
Full voting results here. Original 2020 Review announcement here.
----------------------------------------
That's it folks! The votes are finalized! The Annual Review of 2020 has come to a close. So ends this yearly tradition that we use to take stock of the progress made on LessWr... |
8c416126-fb4f-41ab-9239-c8c6db8b7f7d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Deliberate and spontaneous creativity
Related to: Spock's Dirty Little Secret, Does Blind Review Slow Down Science?
After finding out that old scientists don't actually resist change, I decided to do a literature search to find out if the related assumption was true. Is it mainly just the young scientists who are pro... |
5b4bf4a3-e8c2-4e29-ae84-3ef73a36161e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Rationality Quotes Thread November 2015
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:
* Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
* ... |
b7ce2a76-778b-4150-b7bd-ff7bc25814bd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Everything you care about is in the map
Many people who find value in the Sequences do something which looks to me like adopting a virtue called "align your map to the territory." I recently was thinking about experimental results, and it got me thinking about how we don't really know what the territory is, other than... |
4e8638af-989e-4eec-b463-258208c25b05 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | All GPT skills are translation
After having my mind blown by the [GPT-2 codes python demo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZSFNUT6iY8), I realized that all „skills“ that GPT-2 and especially GPT-3 possess fall into a certain category.
Autoregressive language models like the GPT models can write text by recursively ... |
5a6515e0-36b2-478f-a3d9-7d42b62f0d2f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | New report: Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics
Summary: Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics (pdf) is 40,000 words taking some initial steps toward tackling the key quantitative issue in the intelligence explosion, "reinvestable returns on cognitive investments": what kind of returns can you get from an investment... |
c57f6adf-6d67-4e34-9589-ad9bcabfc2d2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | ESC Process Notes: Claim Evaluation vs. Syntheses
Forgive me if some of this is repetitive, I can’t remember what I’ve written in which draft and what’s actually been published, much less tell what’s actually novel. Eventually there will be a polished master post describing my overall note taking method and leaving ou... |
09c6a40c-8840-4526-98f6-3519610cea28 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | GPT-4.5 is Cognitive Empathy, Sonnet 3.5 is Affective Empathy
This was the thing my friend told me I should make an account here to post, I hope it is appropriate.
Introduction
The thrust of this hypothesis is that Anthropic's research direction favors the production of affective empathy while OpenAI's direction fav... |
99cb370d-6523-454a-88b3-e0d051ed3a4f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What are some beautiful, rationalist sounds?
I loved jacobjacob's post from which I've stolen the title, format, and some of the language of this post. The goal of this post is to build a comment section containing links to lovely music or other sounds, possibly along with lyrics or stories that highlight why it's dir... |
07bdf300-4a9e-40c1-bb1f-a84645b878ce | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | List of projects that seem impactful for AI Governance
(Cross-posted from EA Forum.)
Goals of this post
The main goal of this post is to clarify what projects can be done at the frontier of AI Governance. Indirect goals are:
* Inspiring people to work on new and fruitful projects.
* Providing possible projects ... |
7c31cf83-7626-4325-b225-58d3759d2a4d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | When is it appropriate to use statistical models and probabilities for decision making ?
I enjoy reading rationalist and effective altruist blogs. Members of the community usually back their arguments with data and/or other evidence and tend to be scientifically literate. And although no one is a perfect, detached bel... |
023083bc-693a-4d6c-ba87-8aa2e31af390 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Widening Overton Window - Open Thread
Major news outlets have published articles about the Future of Life Institute's Open Letter. Time Magazine published an opinion piece by Elizer Yudkowsky. Lex Friendman featured EY on his podcast. Several US Members of Congress have spoken about the risks of AI. And a Fox News rep... |
058bbd3e-0d6e-4440-835c-e508b5c70bfa | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Irrational arguments or valuable heuristics?
I. Dreams of Vaccines
The other day, I was speaking with someone I'll call Steve. I will generously describe Steve as skeptical of mRNA vaccines, believing them to be dangerous and possibly part of a grand conspiracy to profit from the deaths of millions. I ask why he belie... |
73663be4-8a07-4823-91fa-7219c8b4dd80 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A model of UDT with a concrete prior over logical statements
I've been having difficulties with constructing a toy scenario for AI self-modification more interesting than Quirrell's game, because you really want to do expected utility maximization of some sort, but currently our best-specified decision theories search... |
d70689ec-fb60-40fd-abbf-2c7ffc23d006 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | The AI-Box Experiment:
| | |
| --- | --- |
| Person1: | “When we build AI, why not just keep it in sealed hardware that can’t affect the outside world in any way except through one communications channel with the original programmers? That way it couldn’t get out until we were convinced it was safe.” |
| Person2:... |
48dbe60a-265a-4cc9-bff0-b8dea1af5dd0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Don't Revere The Bearer Of Good Info
Follow-up to: Every Cause Wants To Be A Cult, Cultish Countercultishness
One of the classic demonstrations of the Fundamental Attribution Error is the 'quiz study' of Ross, Amabile, and Steinmetz (1977). In the study, subjects were randomly assigned to either ask or answer questio... |
fcb2ea1e-8a67-46a0-a27a-3cf2fa442d06 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | The set of Logical Inductors is not Convex
.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; f... |
9b6067cd-2ef3-49c7-bee9-7d9f30e3a96d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open Questions in Life-Planning
There are several questions I have not worked through to my satisfaction and incorporated into the models that preceded, and so I list them here.
1. Who were the most Competent/Agentic folk in history, who had the most Positive Impact, and what were the key variables in allowing them ... |
9a99db1d-dbc7-4c78-b4e6-8fabb621105c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Some end-of-year media recommendations
Books
I've read about 150 books over the past five or so years, after a decade-long dry spell where 95% of the reading I did was for school. These are the ~20% of those books that have really made an impact on me, that I've continued to think about even long after finishing them.... |
a593b6b8-295b-46a3-8700-0c3ea8da1696 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Writing with GPT-3
Cross posted, as always, from Putanumonit.
----------------------------------------
Deep in a dungeon of words, I face the machine that will someday replace me. But for now we are friends. The post below was written by both of us; I wrote less than half.
----------------------------------------
... |
26ca49bf-18d8-4951-ae45-7b813c7bfcde | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Link: Writing exercise closes the gender gap in university-level physics
15-minute writing exercise closes the gender gap in university-level physics:
> Think about the things that are important to you. Perhaps you care about creativity, family relationships, your career, or having a sense of humour. Pick two or thre... |
67a8f5b9-a150-45f9-894d-00323f783f2b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How much money would you pay to get access to video footage of your surroundings for a year of your choice (in the past)?
There are many reasons for video-recording. |
b1d8533b-f21f-472b-80a9-7329db02b07e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Planning the Enemy's Retreat
Related: Leave a Line of Retreat
When I was smaller, I was sitting at home watching The Mummy, with my mother, ironically enough. There's a character by the name of Bernard Burns, and you only need to know two things about him. The first thing you need to know is that the titular antagoni... |
2e5324a6-77e4-4508-a6b5-1bbfc0f730d0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How does personality vary across US cities?
In 2007, psychology researchers Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell released a personality testing app on Facebook app called myPersonality. The app ended up being used by 4 million Facebook users, most of whom consented to their personality question answers and some informa... |
39db31b7-b713-4e1b-8c87-7bfc34ad5f0b | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Take 1: We're not going to reverse-engineer the AI.
*As a writing exercise, I'm writing an AI Alignment Hot Take Advent Calendar - one new hot take, written every day for 25 days. Or until I run out of hot takes, which seems likely.*
Any approach to building safe transformative AI, or even just auditing possibly-safe... |
3c022a52-167d-4976-a962-0143f7d3e315 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What are some cool things a LWer can do at Yale, Brown, and UChicago?
So I'm applying for grad schools right now, and am visiting Yale, Brown, and UChicago this month (I already got accepted into UChicago, and also got invited to expenses-paid visits to both Yale and Brown). I'm visiting Yale in just 2 days.
So what ... |
5c933391-3da9-400a-9c6b-4cfebc6c0004 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Should I test myself for microplastics?
I'm curious about the levels of microplastics and pfas in my body, and the only company i can find (million marker) claims to have $300 urine tests to give you those numbers. I'm usually skeptical of such companies, but would be willing to pay if the science or reputation of thi... |
2c517211-f9cd-4f51-8508-4293595e6337 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Risk-Sensitive Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning
1 Introduction
---------------
We study imitation learning, i.e., the problem of learning to perform a task from the sample trajectories generated by an expert. There are three main approaches to this problem: 1) behavioral cloning (e.g., Pomerleau [[1991](#b... |
a2ccb8a3-c9b3-41ed-af65-6bc84512e10f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why isn't there more rationalist punk rock?
Could call it like rat punk or something? |
3d86c169-36dc-4ed4-b2de-bf980690b2c1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [AN #102]: Meta learning by GPT-3, and a list of full proposals for AI alignment
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... |
900ae73d-3973-47db-91fb-7b8bdf656ded | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | I'm Cullen O'Keefe, a Policy Researcher at OpenAI, AMA
Hi! I'm [Cullen](https://cullenokeefe.com/). I've been a Research Scientist in the Policy team at OpenAI since August. I also am a Research Affiliate at the [Centre for the Governance of AI](https://governance.ai) at the [Future of Humanity Institute](https://www.... |
70f9cb16-a75a-4886-9929-07640e11e75c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | SIA says AI is no big threat
Artificial Intelligence could explode in power and leave the direct control of humans in the next century or so. It may then move on to optimize the reachable universe to its goals. Some think this sequence of events likely.
If this occurred, it would constitute an instance of our star pa... |
04409802-17f2-4926-8e30-a64d8992185b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A simple way to make GPT-3 follow instructions
I originally posted this idea as a comment to The case for aligning narrowly superhuman models, but it's interesting enough that I thought I'd submit it as a top level post and see what feedback people have.
Background:
GPT-3 was trained on internet text to predict the... |
8084e425-5f8f-4fb8-a6b6-d1c53c2b57b9 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | Research priorities for robust and beneficial artificial intelligence: an open letter
[All Open Letters](https://futureoflife.org/?page\_id=39741)Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence: An Open Letter
=====================================================================================
... |
843198ca-646f-46b5-b217-b70ee902698a | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | QAPR 3: interpretability-guided training of neural nets
Introduction
------------
This is week 3 of Quintin's Alignment Papers Roundup. This week, I'm focusing on papers that use interpretability to guide a neural network's training process. A [lot of alignment proposals](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fRsjBseRuvRhM... |
99e31459-30fd-4e62-aec7-41142cd3e91e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Against Unicode
Against Unicode
---------------
when considering the mess that text encoding was before unicode (and notably UTF-8), one wouldn't be blamed for thinking that the problem of text encoding is basically solved. yet, there are many issues with unicode, some of which cannot be solved without discarding un... |
fe09c239-8fde-4d15-9ca6-90f0bf8d0ec3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Rationalist sites worth archiving?
One of my long-standing interests is in writing content that will age gracefully, but as a child of the Internet, I am addicted to linking and linkrot is profoundly threatening to me, so another interest of mine is in archiving URLs; my current methodology is a combination of archivi... |
57a429fd-e48b-4ad7-9026-6df007e5fcf7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Least Controversial Application of Geometric Rationality
I have been posting a lot on instrumental geometric rationality, with Nash bargaining, Kelly betting, and Thompson sampling. I feel some duty to also post about epistemic geometric rationality, especially since information theory is filled with geometric max... |
7d0bf8c9-ec64-49f9-91a8-39b4b662e99b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Connectionism: Modeling the mind with neural networks
For about a century, people have known that the brain is made up of neurons which connect to each another and perform computations through electrochemical transmission. For about half a century, people have known enough about computers to realize that the brain doe... |
8c700c57-8c9a-4b5e-81c2-c327e095d2b7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Does the _timing_ of practice, relative to sleep, make a difference for skill consolidation?
It is well known that sleep (both mid-day naps and nighttime sleep) has a large effect on the efficacy of motor skill acquisition. Performance on a newly learned task improves, often markedly, following a period of sleep.
A f... |
a9756292-6e6c-4c7a-86b9-c6b33c9bdf1b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Vector Planning in a Lattice Graph
You want to get to your sandwich:
Well, that’s easy. Apparently we are in some kind of grid world, which is presented to us in the form of a lattice graph, where each vertex represents a specific world state, and the edges tell us how we can traverse the world states. We just do BFS... |
a98069aa-0b10-415a-924c-f535c18179da | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Main Sources of AI Risk?
There are so many causes or sources of AI risk that it's getting hard to keep them all in mind. I propose we keep a list of the main sources (that we know about), such that we can say that if none of these things happen, then we've mostly eliminated AI risk (as an existential risk) at leas... |
fbe005ea-d9b7-48a0-b67e-82eb7e41f02b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What Caused the Puzzling Decline in Activism Against Policy Violence Towards Black People?
I find myself surprised by the noticeable decline in the fervor surrounding activism against policy violence towards Black people from its peak in the summer of 2020 to the subsequent years of 2021 through 2023. Initially, I had... |
a77f7e96-49fc-4383-b546-b83bdac6e1c2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Do dreams reinforce prior beliefs?
I've observed the following happening a couple of times to me now.
I wake up in the morning from a dream; in my dream, would be somebody I had reasons to 'hate' in the past, but I have been consciously trying in recent times to question my reasons to 'hate' them. That person would d... |
f646169d-9690-4f86-9431-96550f8ddc11 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | US Policy Career Resources
Background
==========
This post contains a collection of resources for aspiring policy professionals in the US, including articles, books, newsletters, podcasts, and more. It focuses on resources **most relevant to people seeking to work in US federal-level technology or security policy**, ... |
4474d0f7-0ec9-4794-bd51-f38ff6ac659d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Sydney Meetup - January
Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Meetup - January
WHEN: 28 January 2015 06:30:00PM (+1100)
WHERE: City Of Sydney RSL Club 565 George Street, Sydney, Australia 2000
Regular location - City of Sydney RSL The restaurant on Level 2
Regular time (starting about 6:30)
Topic: R... |
034ebdba-10aa-4485-8ea5-a713d2026ca7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | LW Update 3/31 - Post Highlights and Bug Fixes
In the last few weeks we implemented several bug fixes, including:
* Login form gives more useful error messages
* Fixed most broken post links from the Lesswrong migration. (There are still some issues surrounding linked comments, and old images)
* Notifications don'... |
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