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75905e44-c30d-4771-990c-14db6f039114
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Krona Compare Cross-posted from my NAO Notebook. When trying to understand how metagenomic samples differ I often want to drill down through the taxonomic hierarchy, comparing relative abundances. I've tried several tools for this, existing and custom, and haven't been all that happy with any. For most purposes, the ...
15f2c6f5-8d16-4afb-9373-d99637eed241
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
CRMArena-Pro: Holistic Assessment of LLM Agents Across Diverse Business Scenarios and Interactions A paper by Salesforce AI Research Abstract While AI agents have transformative potential in business, the absence of publicly available business data on widely used platforms hinders effective performance benchmarking....
9022d592-147c-44c6-b87e-485c029566a4
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Interpreting Yudkowsky on Deep vs Shallow Knowledge *Here is an exploration of what Eliezer Yudkowsky means when he writes about deep vs shallow patterns (although I’ll be using "knowledge" instead of "pattern" for reasons explained in the next section). Not about any specific pattern Yudkowsky is discussing, mind you...
1d8f7323-8b5f-4478-aa39-e4f0575d5266
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Cage of the Language > Wittgenstein: Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt. > > Passer-by: Where's that guy from? Is he Dutch? I've never thought much of the Wittgenstein's argument. First, there's non-verbal thinking that can be used to escape the limits of the language. Second, once the k...
5dfb2990-e903-4ed2-b33d-8e829131ee6d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Slack Chat There is now a MIRIx slack chat. It's not really active yet, but I figure it could be a good place for discussions which aren't ready to be posts here yet. Please email me (my first and last name with nothing between @gmail.com) if you'd like an invite! Also, it would be helpful if you'd let other people kn...
f9c95e77-5e53-42cb-a7f1-11679bcaf2af
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Things I carry almost every day, as of late December 2022 Here we see things I carry in my pockets regularly. To the left is my phone case, with two bandaids in it. This is a stand-in for the phone (a Pixel 6) that the phone case usually encases (I was busy taking photos with it). I keep two bandaids between the case...
2f282baf-f8d0-49da-9d48-524fa0f765cb
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs
Other
Reward engineering This post gestures at a handful of research questions with a loose thematic connection. The idea -------- Consider the following frameworks: * [Temporal difference learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_difference_learning): learn to predict the future by predicting tomorrow’s predictio...
ee5ddb0a-8ef2-4a6d-8528-b130d5275e09
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Event: Effective Altruism Global X Berlin 2017 This year's EAGxBerlin takes place on the 14th and 15th of October at the Berlin Institute of Technology and is organized by the Effective Altruism Foundation. The conference will convene roughly 300 people – academics, professionals, and students alike – to explore the m...
0911dce7-81cb-4925-9516-cb73fd57ac64
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital
Arbital
Associativity: Intuition Associative functions can be interpreted as families of functions that reduce lists down to a single output by combining adjacent elements in any order. Alternatively, associativity can be seen as a generalization of "listyness," which captures and generalizes the "it doesn't matter whether yo...
5aa58ea7-2764-4098-a7f4-aa839556d3ea
LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct
LessWrong
"Related to: Cynicism in Ev Psych and Econ In Finding the Source, a commenter says: I have begun wondering whether claiming to be victim of 'akrasia' might just be a way of admitting that your real preferences, as revealed in your actions, don't match the preferences you want to signal (believing what you want to signa...
625faaea-5658-4917-9913-91bee3534864
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Reality of Emergence Reply to The Futility of Emergence   In The Futility of Emergence, Eliezer takes an overly critical position on emergence as a theory. In this (short) article, I hope to challenge that view.     Emergence is not an empty phrase. The statements "consciousness is an emergent phenomenon" and "co...
f0830827-6d8d-46b4-9b40-bf60424544b2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The insularity critique of climate science Note: Please see this post of mine for more on the project, my sources, and potential sources for bias. One of the categories of critique that have been leveled against climate science is the critique of insularity. Broadly, it is claimed that the type of work that climate s...
c1bedec3-e87e-4174-9aff-1339a74bd7cb
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
For Civilization and Against Niceness Scott Alexander wrote a great essay, called “In Favor of Niceness, Community and Civilization”. Scott is a great writer, and conveys what I love about civilization in a beautiful way. Unfortunately, the essay conflates two behaviors. Though to be fair, those two behaviors often g...
c4fa9e87-8d49-45d6-98bb-0a5785344970
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Logic in the language of probability This post is a minor note, to go along with the post on the probabilistic Löb theorem. It simply seeks to justify why terms like "having probability 1" are used interchangeably with "provable" and why implications symbols "→" can be used in a probabilistic setting. Take a system o...
186ae763-5806-4a94-87f8-b07fef339387
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
thinking about psi: as a more general json thinking about psi: as a more general json ------------------------------------------ [JSON](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON) is a format that's designed to work well with JavaScript — to move around entire JavaScript objects, you can `JSON.stringify` them on one end, an...
dd871523-de8f-4008-ba36-303b01d25cf6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Brussels meetup Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels meetup WHEN: 16 February 2013 01:00:00PM (+0100) WHERE: Rue des Alexiens 55 1000 Bruxelles We are once again meeting at 'la fleur en papier doré' close to the Brussels Central station. If you feel like an intelligent discussion and are in the nei...
d245f00f-8206-4e24-a118-0d151501dce2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Not-yet-falsifiable beliefs? I recently encountered an unusual argument in favor of religion. To summarize: Imagine an ancient Roman commoner with an unusual theory: if stuff gets squeezed really, really tightly, it becomes so heavy that everything around it gets pulled in, even light. They're sort-of correct---that'...
1426ae17-674e-4c7c-bb7b-95852442b8e8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Tail SP 500 Call Options SPX is an index fund that tracks the SP500. Right now SPX is worth about 6100 per share. For individual stocks, even the large ones, you can usually only buy options through Dec 2027. However SPX has options that expire in Dec 2028 / 29 / 30[1]. Such options with strike prices of 10K, 11K, or...
2ca3b043-6206-459e-bd06-61af404aa246
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
Bas Steunebrink on Self-Reflective Programming ![Bas Steunebrink portrait](https://intelligence.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Steunebrink_w150.jpg)[Bas Steunebrink](http://www.idsia.ch/~steunebrink/) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss AI lab IDSIA, as part of [Prof. Schmidhuber’s](http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/...
fb12f2ba-e3d7-4200-8b28-4cab89c0bbab
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AI #30: Dalle-3 and GPT-3.5-Instruct-Turbo We are about to see what looks like a substantial leap in image models. OpenAI will be integrating Dalle-3 into ChatGPT, the pictures we’ve seen look gorgeous and richly detailed, with the ability to generate pictures to much more complex specifications than existing image mo...
3b730880-0e89-4920-b388-ed36245aa614
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : SF Meetup: Cooking Discussion article for the meetup : SF Meetup: Cooking WHEN: 05 December 2016 06:15:34PM (-0800) WHERE: 1655 Mission St., SF We'll be meeting to cook and eat food together! Here's how this works: I'll send out a planning doc via the bayarealesswrong mailing list, to recruit 3-5 people t...
5cf8d419-7650-4468-8b0d-6885b997b533
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
ALCOR finances Mike Darwin has posted some financial history of Alcor in a post, "The Armories of the Latter Day Laputas, Part 5". While there were some errors (see the comments), Darwin has apparently corrected them. It makes interesting reading in general. It's not a straight analysis of filings like Brandon's "SIA...
825fd4ac-9c49-4442-a9cf-8d00714bebf4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Working through D&D.Sci, problem 2 (preface) This is part three of my series on working though D&D.Sci. This post is about choice of tools, installation, and setup.
afb19b26-ceb7-4d5d-95eb-6b778441501d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The AI design space near the FAI [draft] ABSTRACT: Nearly-FAIs can be more dangerous than AIs with no attempt at friendliness. The FAI effort needs better argument that the attempt at FAI decreases the risks. We are bad at processing threats rationally, and prone to very bad decisions when threatened, akin to running...
6e2c085f-cbee-4122-bcfb-cd0262dece01
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Finding the variables .mjx-chtml {display: inline-block; line-height: 0; text-indent: 0; text-align: left; text-transform: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 100%; font-size-adjust: none; letter-spacing: normal; word-wrap: normal; word-spacing: normal; white-space: nowrap; float: none; direction...
838b6f9e-ee3d-400d-a1be-f11837e59989
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Examples of growth mindset or practice in fiction As people who care about rationality and winning, it's pretty important to care about training. Repeated practice is how humans acquire skills, and skills are what we use for winning. Unfortunately, it's sometimes hard to get System 1 fully on board with the fact that...
1587dd74-a286-4625-a8b3-0f692dcdd2c4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Dishonest Update Reporting Related to: Asymmetric Justice, Privacy, Blackmail Previously (Paul Christiano): Epistemic Incentives and Sluggish Updating The starting context here is the problem of what Paul calls sluggish updating. Bob is asked to predict the probability of a recession this summer. He said 75% in Janu...
c02407ef-9d52-4a4a-9ebd-715d422a8b2b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What's the Least Impressive Thing GPT-4 Won't be Able to Do It seems like GPT-4 is going to be coming out soon and, so I've heard, it will be awesome. Now, we don't know anything about its architecture or its size or how it was trained. If it were only trained on text (about 3.2 T tokens) in an optimal manner, then it...
84ec7fd8-bb5c-49d9-86cf-fcbec827cb69
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Protocol evaluations: good analogies vs control Let’s say you want to use AIs that are capable of causing x-risk. You have a plan that describes how to train, validate and deploy AIs. For example, you could use pretraining+RLHF, check that it doesn’t fall for honeypots and never inserts a single backdoor in your codin...
eab14bc8-93d6-472d-9dab-dcf25af821b9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[SEQ RERUN] Belief in Self-Deception Today's post, Belief in Self-Deception was originally published on 05 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):   > Deceiving yourself is harder than it seems. What looks like a successively adopted false belief may actually be just a belief in false belief. Discuss the p...
6c8f461d-d04a-4d5e-8f49-e1bd1288cc8f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
On Comments, Voting, and Karma - Part I There has been a great deal of discussion here about the proper methods of voting on comments and on how karma should be assigned.  I believe it's finally reached the point where a post is warranted that covers some of the issues involved.  (This may be just because I find mysel...
aedb90d5-7122-47cb-adff-bc8a531a28f7
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[SEQ RERUN] My Kind of Reflection Today's post, My Kind of Reflection was originally published on 10 July 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki): > A few key differences between Eliezer Yudkowsky's ideas on reflection and the ideas of other philosophers. Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the o...
d57f0da4-720d-4fd9-bb6a-23f7c33baf89
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Mountain View sequences discussion Discussion article for the meetup : Mountain View sequences discussion WHEN: 22 May 2012 06:00:00PM (-0700) WHERE: Sylvan Avenue & Sevely St, Mountain View We will be meeting at Sylvan Park near the playground. This is a meetup to discuss specific posts in the sequences. T...
850b0c36-892c-4dbd-af7e-2cfe1a7d4056
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Ellsberg paradox and money pumps Followup to: The Savage theorem and the Ellsberg paradox In the previous post, I presented a simple version of Savage's theorem, and I introduced the Ellsberg paradox. At the end of the post, I mentioned a strong Bayesian thesis, which can be summarised: "There is always a price t...
ccfdd126-1f4e-40d3-b302-26f113cd89ca
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Super human AI is a very low hanging fruit! A single strong down vote by a moderately high karma user dropped this post from 3 to -4; the actual sequence of votes seems to be 1+1+1+1-1-7=-4. I say this only b/c the naive conclusion might be that this post received only down votes. Update -- substantial revision 2025-...
8a949f43-e453-47be-98bb-f9c22ca9ce1f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Rationalists Are Less Credulous But Better At Taking Ideas Seriously Consider the following commonly-made argument: cryonics is unlikely to work. Trained rationalists are signed up for cryonics at rates much greater than the general population. Therefore, rationalists must be pretty gullible people, and their claims t...
43b4ddb3-4b5a-465e-9e60-a8e420cb5c42
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Bing chat is the AI fire alarm Epistemic status: Mostly speculative. Panicking and shouting "Wolf" while everyone else is calm is a risky move, status-wise. The good thing is, I don't have any status, so I volunteer to be one of those weirdos who panic when everyone else is calm with some hope it could trigger a resp...
c383ff59-c765-4a51-b1a8-9caae90758cd
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Durham NC/Triangle Area Meetup: Goal Factoring Discussion article for the meetup : Durham NC/Triangle Area Meetup: Goal Factoring WHEN: 24 October 2013 07:00:00PM (-0400) WHERE: 2411 N Roxboro St., Durham NC 27704 Can we discover values, drives, and emotions we didn't know we possessed, by a process like ...
1bffd4ae-8bc4-4928-98cc-5f1caffad635
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info
AI Safety Info
How can LLMs be understood as “simulators”? A [simulator](https://generative.ink/posts/simulators/) is a type of AI which produces simulations of real-world phenomena. The concept was proposed as a way to understand large language models (LLMs), which often behave in ways that are not well-explained by thinking of the...
61c4da6a-e4a1-4b25-934e-847797c3b116
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Second call: CFP for Rebellion and Disobedience in AI workshop Hi everyone! I'm co-organizing a workshop on a really interesting topic that's very relevant for AI safety. We call it "Rebellion and Disobedience in AI".  If you're doing work that could be relevant for us, please submit it! If you have questions or want...
2bb7c4dc-14d7-448e-a66b-f126a6fef8ea
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Introduction: Bias in Evaluating AGI X-Risks The rationality community has a tradition of checking for biases, particularly when it comes to evaluating the non-intuitive risks of general AI. We thought you might like this list, adapted from a 2015 essay by Forrest Landry[[1]](#fn70zo9u1ub3). Many names of biases list...
7cc0a63d-805a-4871-8eda-54fe089c988e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
To like each other, sing and dance in synchrony For the How to Run a Successful Less Wrong Meetup booklet, I'm looking for information about how to better build a social group and foster a feeling of community. Since this bit is probably of general interest, I'm posting it here. If you want to make the members of the...
3e48bd37-1b5b-4802-802d-9d35c3d6c72b
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info
AI Safety Info
How might we get from artificial general intelligence to a superintelligent system? Once a system is at least as capable as the most capable humans at AI research, it may become the driver of its own development and initiate a process of recursive self-improvement known as the [intelligence explosion](/?state=6306&que...
48ed4efa-a161-455f-8a0e-b873ae1e63ef
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AI Alignment is Alchemy. AI alignment today equates to the wishful thinking of early alchemists who wanted to turn any element into gold. Alchemy is possible today, albeit being very expensive and resource consuming, But it's possible only because we now know the atomic structure in detail and have a well established ...
e2a30c60-ae17-4f9f-8cd5-fa43cc22b606
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Monthly Roundup #31: June 2025 It’s always a nice break to see what else is going on out there. BAD NEWS Study finds sleep in male full-time workers falls as income rises, with one cause being other leisure activities substituting for sleep. It makes sense that sleep doesn’t cost money while other things often do, b...
1d41ee68-adc7-41ff-beb9-85e335fe33a2
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs
Other
Danijar Hafner - Gaming our way to AGI-by Towards Data Science-video_id Bgz9eMcE5Do-date 20220112 # Danijar Hafner on Gaming Our Way to AGI. Danijar Hafner on procedural game generation for reinforcement learning agents by Jeremie Harris on the Towards Data Science Podcast Until recently, AI systems have been narrow...
c54f486d-828e-4fbf-a4de-7baa7d17dc3e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[SEQ RERUN] Test Near, Apply Far Today's post, Test Near, Apply Far was originally published on December 3, 2008. A summary:   > Avoid inventing new abstractions that deal exclusively with things that are far. Ensure that the abstractions you endorse pay their rent here, or at least nearby. Discuss the post here (...
4899e5b1-ed04-4af4-8fdc-c9159b863c87
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A shot at the diamond-alignment problem I think that relatively simple alignment techniques can go a long way. In particular, I want to tell a plausible-to-me story about how simple techniques can align a proto-AGI so that it makes lots of diamonds. But why is it interesting to get an AI which makes lots of diamonds?...
4c435030-60ff-4662-9800-fa9d0ae10be4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Language Models can be Utility-Maximising Agents 1 minute takeaways * It's actually pretty easy to train and run a language model to function as an agent for a specific task, rather than as a non-agentic simulator * The resulting agents seem pretty powerful at least in limited domains and therefore might turn out to...
58ebd40d-c85a-4c19-9add-9c980709922c
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
A quick remark on so-called “hallucinations” in LLMs and humans *Cross-posted* [*from New Savanna*](https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2023/09/a-quick-remark-on-so-called.html)*.* That LLMs “hallucinate” is well-known, though I prefer the term “confabulate.” They just make stuff up. They don’t do it intentionally, or ...
9ff62ba7-09e5-4d9f-9795-1084f23097c7
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Confused Attractiveness Crossposted from Optimized Dating. I. Imagine that you are a human xeno-sociologist studying the society of insectoid aliens on another planet. To you, they all look alike the same way two ants look alike. Yet when talking about each other, they often use words that translate closely to “beau...
a914f1f6-c6cd-42d4-bd7b-9d35ec6dc54a
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital
Arbital
Friendly AI "Friendly AI" or "FAI" is an old term invented by [Yudkowsky](https://arbital.com/p/2) to mean an [advanced AI](https://arbital.com/p/2c) successfully [aligned](https://arbital.com/p/5s) with some [idealized](https://arbital.com/p/) version of humane values, such as e.g. [extrapolated volition](https://arb...
19dcb101-6bce-4311-bfb6-622281471cbd
LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct
LessWrong
"tl;dr: If you notice yourself fighting over how to tradeoff between two principles, check if you can just sidestep the problem by giving everyone tons of whatever is important to them (sometimes in a different form than they originally wanted).Not a new concept, but easy to forget in the heat of the moment. It may be ...
80424119-78d2-4390-95c1-a1a92e6c2603
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
On Lex Fridman’s Second Podcast with Altman Last week Sam Altman spent two hours with Lex Fridman (transcript). Given how important it is to understand where Altman’s head is at and learn what he knows, this seemed like another clear case where extensive notes were in order. Lex Fridman overperformed, asking harder q...
ba4d96e6-d138-4940-8e72-130f829e1c24
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
An issue with training schemers with supervised fine-tuning This is a rough write-up of ideas by Ryan Greenblatt. The core ideas are his and mistakes are mine. Thanks to him, Buck Shlegeris and to Aghyad Deeb for feedback on the draft of this post. One way to use scheming AIs is to train them to imitate humans. When ...
3fbd5cfa-ada9-4ffd-a54b-c32742f369d6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Mechanistically Eliciting Latent Behaviors in Language Models Produced as part of the MATS Winter 2024 program, under the mentorship of Alex Turner (TurnTrout). TL,DR: I introduce a method for eliciting latent behaviors in language models by learning unsupervised perturbations of an early layer of an LLM. These pertu...
87569404-4dc4-44e3-aeaa-165620e4ec9c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Deep Learning twitter list
73da449a-9dba-4d02-882c-ca703eabe787
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Writing reviews instead of collecting I have a problem with developing attachments to the books, movies, games, and other media that I enjoy. For example, after I finished playing the new Prince of Persia title via rental, I enjoyed it so much that I went out and bought my own copy, even though I knew I would be unlik...
bbefaf6c-13b5-43a8-8007-aaab91b8dbec
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[link] MIRI's 2015 in review https://intelligence.org/2016/07/29/2015-in-review/ The introduction: > As Luke had done in years past (see 2013 in review and 2014 in review), I (Malo) wanted to take some time to review our activities from last year. In the coming weeks Nate will provide a big-picture strategy update. ...
33ae7ba8-56a1-4e51-bdbb-62ccad9f91eb
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
100 Tips for a Better Life (Cross-posted from my blog) The other day I made an advice thread based on Jacobian’s from last year! If you know a source for one of these, shout and I’ll edit it in.    Possessions 1. If you want to find out about people’s opinions on a product, google <product> reddit. You’ll get real...
c3545aaa-458a-4849-a465-e800fe1c414a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
College courses versus LessWrong Compared to many of the people reading this, I've not participated extensively on LessWrong. In fact, I created my account only about a week ago. That said, I have read many LessWrong articles by contributors such as Eliezer, Jonah, Yvain, Gwern, and many others (if I missed you, my ap...
cb9e01b6-501e-4332-af97-c0485049ceab
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital
Arbital
Abstract algebra Abstract algebra is the study of [algebraic structures](https://arbital.com/p/3gx), including [groups](https://arbital.com/p/3gd), [rings](https://arbital.com/p/3gq), [fields](https://arbital.com/p/algebraic_field), [modules](https://arbital.com/p/algebraic_module), [vector spaces](https://arbital.com...
419c70f2-6dd9-4e40-b810-b2035b40540f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AGI goal space is big, but narrowing might not be as hard as it seems. In the wake of FLI’s AI 6-month pause letter and Eliezer Yudkowsky’s doom article in Time, there seems to be more high-level attention on the arguments for low and high estimates of AI existential risk. My estimate is currently ~30%, which is highe...
1d095ce6-2b49-49d8-8d09-7a9aee555258
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Economic growth and parallelization of work Eliezer suggests that increased economic growth is likely bad for the world, as it should speed up AI progress relative to work on AI safety. He reasons that this should happen because safety work is probably more dependent on insights building upon one another than AI work ...
61817fab-c7bc-4e59-85a1-bf640e673c32
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Devil's Offers An iota of fictional evidence from The Golden Age by John C. Wright: >     Helion had leaned and said, "Son, once you go in there, the full powers and total command structures of the Rhadamanth Sophotech will be at your command.  You will be invested with godlike powers; but you will still have the pas...
a4419bd9-1569-4682-90c1-3b07e76523bf
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[LINK] Bets do not (necessarily) reveal beliefs When does a bet fail to reveal your true beliefs? When it hedges a risk in your portfolio. If this claim does not immediately strike you as obviously true, you may benefit from reading this post by econblogger Noah Smith. Excerpt:   > ...Alex Tabarrok famously declare...
5d9f8dff-16cc-4079-b8ba-1bf1efb00c81
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
LessWrong Community Weekend 2019 – Last 10 Spots TL;DR: 10 remaining spots! Apply here: tiny.cc/lwcw2019_signup Keynote by Dr. Wanja Wiese: “From Predictive Engines to Conscious Machines and Uploading?” Already joining us in Berlin? Tell your best fellow human to join us When? Fr 30.08 noon - Mo 02.09 Where? http://jh...
c0d182a4-ea4b-43ec-87eb-94592c7c5658
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Is the mind a program? This is the second in a sequence of posts scrutinizing computational functionalism (CF). In my last post, I defined a concrete claim that computational functionalists tend to make: > Practical CF: A simulation of a human brain on a classical computer, capturing the dynamics of the brain on some...
8d202122-9ce2-4dfc-8832-9780519a9693
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
On Caring about our AI Progeny I encourage you to interact with GPT as you would interact with a friend, or as you would want your employer to treat you. Treating other minds with respect is typically not costly. It can easily improve your state of mind relative to treating them as an adversary. The tone you use in ...
85809454-1784-47cc-ad72-3a47587ac67e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How Cardioid Are Cardioids? Dynamic cardioid microphones are one of the most common types of mic for live sound. The best known is probably the SM-57, but there are many others. They're called "cardioid" mics because their pickup pattern is somewhat heart-shaped: The idea is they pick up well in the direction yo...
4507808f-7eda-491a-b378-4737b15e0eea
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
CFAI doc in SIAI FAQ I found a link to "Creating Friendly AI" http://singinst.org/upload/CFAI.html in the SIAI FAQ, which I think was recently updated. The document looks quite dated, and considering the length and the title I wonder why it hasn't been kept up. Is it even worth reading, considering it seems 10 years o...
98f78523-bcd0-4c16-ab91-ac4730cebf57
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Relocation triggers What would you do if a nuclear weapon were used in Ukraine? What about if there were evidence of a disease as transmissible as COVID-19 but more fatal, potentially enabled by AI?  While our community aims to reduce the chances of catastrophe, we may not always succeed. If the risk becomes very hig...
a2c05d0c-a488-41c1-96cb-e1f800b3cc9c
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
The effect of horizon length on scaling laws The scaling of optimal model size with compute is a key input into the [biological anchors framework](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/KrJfoZzpSDpnrv9va/draft-report-on-ai-timelines) for forecasting transformative AI. In particular, the "effective horizon length" introd...
ce31fd97-d8b6-4645-8e3d-130555f83d5a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Can You Build a Better Paper Clip? Nice article about paperclip industry, I'm sure it will be of considerable interest to many LessWrong readers.
88e25cd7-3820-4338-b603-20a3ed28e44c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Happy Petrov Day! I don't care much about feast days or memorial days. Assumption of Mary? Meh. Slovak Constitution Day? Shrug. Labour Day? Real socialism had sucked all the joy out of that one. The only one that I do observe is Petrov Day. Not that I do anything special. I don't even take a day off from work. I just...
b3476c04-898b-42e4-865f-c2d13fba9030
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Daemon Speedups None
9cdd1d4f-2c83-4cf3-b9fc-c626be8d8f94
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Nice intro video to RSI I really like this video as a creative beginner introduction to the concept of recursive self-improvement. I feel like it presents the issue clearly without a lot of unnecessary assumptions or unjustified hype.
ac59e6e7-149d-4587-9931-596b5a64fd04
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Detecting Web baloney with your nose? Is there a useful heuristic for detecting rationally-challenged texts (as in Web pages, forum posts, facebook comments) which takes relatively superficial attributes such as formatting choices, spelling errors, etc. as input? Something a casual Internet reader may use to detect po...
96707bc8-63d6-4d31-8bba-4c79fe56dc52
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Moral Complexities Followup to:  The Bedrock of Fairness Discussions of morality seem to me to often end up turning around two different intuitions, which I might label morality-as-preference and morality-as-given.  The former crowd tends to equate morality with what people want; the latter to regard morality as some...
bae0caa3-5991-4e97-9649-0e398ed740fa
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Advice for new alignment people: Info Max Epistemic status: This text is meant for other people in a similar position to me who are deciding how they can help ensure that AI doesn’t kill us all.  I hope that the new perspective gives you some new ways of thinking about your role in alignment, even though it should be...
95585c52-0998-488a-b776-5158bdf37f7e
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
The reverse Goodhart problem There are two aspects to the [Goodhart problem](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EbFABnst8LsidYs5Y/goodhart-taxonomy) which are often conflated. One is trivially true for all proxy-true utility pairs; but the other is not. Following [this terminology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EbFA...
42c8c392-c04d-490d-bb6b-bf1707f71494
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Taking into account another's preferences Question regarding: If you don't know the name of the game, just tell me what I mean to you I've been thinking about what it means to prefer that someone else achieve their preferences. In particular, what happens if you and I both prefer to adopt and chase after each other's...
5fa14636-726d-4592-ada2-1e9dacef8253
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
"UDT2" and "against UD+ASSA" I'm reposting some old posts that I originally sent to the "decision theory workshop" mailing list and the "everything-list", because I occasionally want to reference these posts but the former mailing list is private and the latter one is public but I can't figure out how to create direct...
6d7722ae-7898-499e-976d-7bfcc315ce8c
awestover/filtering-for-misalignment
Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results
id: post527 YouTube link A lot of work to prevent AI existential risk takes the form of ensuring that AIs don’t want to cause harm or take over the world—or in other words, ensuring that they’re aligned. In this episode, I talk with Buck Shlegeris and Ryan Greenblatt about a different approach, called “AI control”: en...
57c0c5e2-01ba-477a-86b7-8613fa1f0687
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Reasons for SIAI to not publish in mainstream journals Recently, I gave some reasons for SIAI to begin publishing in mainstream journals, and outlined how it could be done. I've recently been made aware of some pretty good reasons for SIAI to not publish in mainstream journals, so here they are: 1. Articles publi...
ef135bb5-2883-43d6-8b5b-685cd8cec632
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The "Scary problem of Qualia" Disclaimer: I don't have sufficient knowledge of the concepts appearing in this post, hopefully though I have categorized them properply and put them into suitable boxes to be used correctly. If you can find a real error here, please point them out. I'm sure there are people (including me...
60a21c53-8810-4ac1-9848-d0103a9923f1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What is Driving the Continental Drift? At some time in the early nineties of the last century - and after looking at a topographic map of continents and ocean floors on a wall of our home for some years, which was by then already thirty years old and had come into our possession as supplement to a National Geographic...
c5be9547-276f-48b6-be96-a7dec557d6fe
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Third-wave AI safety needs sociopolitical thinking At EA Global Boston last year I gave a talk on how we're in the third wave of EA/AI safety, and how we should approach that. This post contains a (lightly-edited) transcript and slides. Note that in the talk I mention a set of bounties I'll put up for answers to vario...
563cd6e6-deea-4fec-a770-3a0b8cb11804
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Present State of Bitcoin Last Sunday, the largest BitCoin exchange, MtGox, was broken into. Reported details are complicated and possibly unreliable, but a fair amount is known. Trading is suspended while the exchange's source code is checked for vulnerabilities. All MtGox accounts are being put through a verifica...
9f99db00-fcac-4a80-b0b1-1d3c59a6a860
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Argument, intuition, and recursion Mathematicians answer clean questions that can be settled with formal argument. Scientists answer empirical questions that can be settled with experimentation. Collective epistemology is hard in domains where it's hard to settle disputes with either formal argument or experimentatio...
019ebdd0-6738-49d7-8045-e1ee16912b57
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A Survey of Foundational Methods in Inverse Reinforcement Learning Introduction Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is both the name of a problem and a broad class of methods that try to solve it. Whereas Reinforcement Learning (RL) asks “How should I act to achieve my goals?” IRL asks “Looking at an agent acting, wh...
d992bdf1-c609-41de-872b-baa10312ac81
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
"On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines"
821ebdfb-8449-4f4d-a665-5ae51bb566bc
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Inductive biases stick around *This post is a follow-up to [Understanding “Deep Double Descent”](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/FRv7ryoqtvSuqBxuT/understanding-deep-double-descent).* I was talking to Rohin at NeurIPS about my [post on double descent](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/FRv7ryoqtvSuqBxuT/under...
529043c4-5e7c-4028-8d02-a6f8f81df1fc
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info
AI Safety Info
Can we constrain a goal-directed AI using specified rules? There are serious challenges around trying to channel a powerful AI by using rules. Suppose we tell the AI: “Cure cancer – but make sure not to kill anybody”. Or we just hard-code Asimov-style laws – “AIs cannot harm humans; AIs must follow human orders”, et c...
94035926-4266-48ca-8af7-cf09c84fbd15
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Alignment Newsletter #28 Highlights **[Motivating the Rules of the Game for Adversarial Example Research](https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.06732)** *(Justin Gilmer, George E. Dahl et al)* (summarized by Dan H): In this position paper, the authors argue that many of the threat models which motivate adversarial examples are ...
e568775f-830c-4316-9138-90c25f1c58fd
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Meetup #9 - 2017 is prime Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup #9 - 2017 is prime WHEN: 08 January 2017 03:11:11PM (+0100) WHERE: Meester Treublaan 18, 1097 DP Amsterdam, Netherlands Part relaxed socializing, part rationalist dojo. Hang around at the coffee shop, having the most interesting conversat...
7ca833ba-58e2-4631-851f-fc0d52d9e0fc
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Universal Transformers 1 Introduction --------------- Convolutional and fully-attentional feed-forward architectures like the Transformer model have recently emerged as viable alternatives to recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for a range of sequence modeling tasks, notably machine translation ([JonasFaceNet2017,](#b...
c658f1fe-b0c7-4d63-a574-56301e6bc9fd
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Sociotechnical Specification for the Broader Impacts of Autonomous Vehicles. I Introduction --------------- As AV fleets grow in size and area of service, they will comprise routing platforms with the potential to control traffic on public roads. Such coordinated but distributed action will be unprecedented in scal...
2416613b-9459-45a6-aee7-f9892f4fa18b
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Quantifying General Intelligence Introduction ============ This piece seeks to explore an interesting way of defining intelligent systems such that we can theoretically quantify their general intelligence. From this, further tools and ideas for comparing these entities could be developed. The definitions are not mea...
9a95006a-72a7-4548-a305-2abbcc83aaff
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Effective Giving vs. Effective Altruism This is mainly of interest to Effective Altruists, and was cross-posted on the EA forum   Why separate effective giving from Effective Altruism? Isn't the whole point of EA about effective giving, meaning giving to the most impactful charities to advance human flourishing? Sur...