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9a09aa31-1fb7-4772-b00c-3ad33055eca3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The new Editor
Lookatthisglorioustable
Celebrations! The new editor is finally here!
Starting from today, all desktop users will by-default use the new visual editor that we've been testing for a while. While the primary goal of this is to have a better foundation on which to build future editor features, here are ... |
58706d2c-1bfa-4a9c-aac7-bf483615915d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Three camps in AI x-risk discussions: My personal very oversimplified overview
[I originally wrote this as a Facebook post, but I'm cross-posting here in case anybody finds it useful.]
Here's my current overview of the AI x-risk debate, along with a very short further reading list:
At a *very* overly simplified but ... |
f8a3f199-ac44-4aa7-a886-823c48aa0e69 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Meta-systems and getting things done
Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Meta-systems and getting things done
WHEN: 26 October 2014 02:00:00PM (-0500)
WHERE: 206 S. Cedar St., Urbana IL
Seed topic:
When I was a little kid doing chores, what worked was for my mom to tell... |
d054e829-2b90-4227-9715-2f16c0805a14 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What LLMs lack
Introduction
I have long been very interested in the limitations of LLMs because understanding them seems to be the most important step to getting timelines right.
Right now there seems to be great uncertainty about timelines, with very short timelines becoming plausible, but also staying hotly contes... |
96aff821-3f33-48a5-a60a-a3c62f29927d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Letter to The Honourable Evan Solomon
With Canada's new Government and Cabinet in place, we must act quickly and decisively in the global AI race. To ensure Canada leads and that AI development benefits all Canadians, urgently securing resources and fostering partnerships is critical. I've sent the following letter to... |
7213ba9d-4a44-48f4-a5de-7636dbd1072b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Inducing human-like biases in moral reasoning LMs
Meta. This post is less polished than we would ideally prefer. However, we still think publishing it as is is reasonable, to avoid further delays. We are open to answering questions and to feedback in the comments.
TL;DR. This presents an inconclusive attempt to creat... |
c1937caf-bc76-4a5c-9516-f61ad2d42fa5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Stuart Russell at the SlateStarCodex Online Meetup
Professor Stuart Russell will speak briefly on his book "Human Compatible", and then will take questions. The event begins Dec. 6, 2020 at 20:30 Israel Standard Time, 10:30 Pacific Standard time, 18:30 UTC.
Please register here and we will send you an invitation.
St... |
18d47c00-4f16-45a0-82de-98624c061932 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Side-channels: input versus output
This is a brief post arguing that, although "side-channels are inevitable" is pretty good common advice, actually, you *can* prevent attackers *inside* a computation from learning about what's outside.
We can prevent a task-specific AI from learning any particular facts about, say, ... |
ef8f8b14-01e0-4040-9b83-88efea9de69b | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | "When I was very young—I think thirteen or maybe fourteen—I thought I had found a disproof of Cantor’s Diagonal Argument, a famous theorem which demonstrates that the real numbers outnumber the rational numbers. Ah, the dreams of fame and glory that danced in my head! My idea was that since each whole number can be dec... |
ca5e9788-bc16-44e6-a103-78417a74517c | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Are Speed Superintelligences Feasible for Modern ML Techniques?
Disclaimer
----------
I am very ignorant about machine learning.
Introduction
============
I've frequently heard suggestions that a superintelligence could dominate humans by thinking a thousand or million times faster than a human. Is this actuall... |
bd037b3c-caf9-488d-8be0-6bd041dc0843 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Jacob on the Precipice
> And he dreamed, and behold, there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven. And behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it! And behold, the LORD stood above it and said, “I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac. The lan... |
49b83539-94b4-4569-af4c-5d70d8538e41 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How much COVID protection is gained from protecting your eyes?
So, as I understand it there are three main spots on the body where COVID infection typically takes place -- the nose, the mouth, and the eyes. It is relatively easy to obtain a very protective mask for the nose and mouth (n95/p100), but a large majority o... |
66e70dd2-b58c-4e53-9a2f-0ddc0d552c69 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Against ubiquitous alignment taxes
*Crossposted from my* [*personal blog*](https://www.beren.io/2023-03-05-against-ubiquitous-alignment-taxes/)*.*
It is often argued that any alignment technique that works primarily by constraining the capabilities of an AI system to be within some bounds cannot work because it impos... |
a1c5c2b8-ec9c-48ed-86b2-d8b4936f2a25 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What are sane reasons that Covid data is treated as reliable?
I feel like this is one of those questions that's somehow too basic to ask. Or maybe too political. Like wondering this stuff implies I'm siding with something.
I'd really like to just set all the politics aside, simply name my ignorance, and hear some tru... |
51bc144d-d43f-4fb5-adef-a8882edaea00 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Preface
Civilization: A Superintelligence Aligned with Human Interests
Consider civilization as a problem-solving superintelligence. The graph below shows the global decline in extreme poverty from 1820 to 2015, prompting Steven Pinker’s quote,
“We have been doing something right, and it would be nice to know what... |
c098a4e5-c229-498e-a8ec-043a0ad1855b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Reaching young math/compsci talent
Series: How to Purchase AI Risk Reduction
Here is yet another way to purchase AI risk reduction...
Much of the work needed for Friendly AI and improved algorithmic decision theories requires researchers to invent new math. That's why the Singularity Institute's recruiting efforts h... |
8d8916c0-fe85-4f01-a937-357033fa671a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Epsilon Fallacy
Program Optimization
One of the earlier lessons in every programmer’s education is how to speed up slow code. Here’s an example. (If this is all greek to you, just note that there are three different steps and then skip to the next paragraph.)
> // Step 1: import
> Import foobarlib.*
> // Step 2... |
a84da0b7-b951-4a0e-827e-838ceaecc32c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Linkpost] New multi-modal Deepmind model fusing Chinchilla with images and videos
Seems to be flying under the radar so far. Maybe because it looks more like incremental progress at first glance, similar to what, for example, Aleph Alpha has done continuing the Frozen approach.
However, with the (possibly cherry-pi... |
b9af9d99-8760-4484-bcb4-d326a18a4bb5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Fixing Resource Bounded Solomonoff Induction (draft)
This post is very sketchy, but it is a big idea that I have been wanting to talk with a lot of people about. I wanted to get a post out with all the key ideas. I promise that either there is an error in this post, or I will write it up much more clearly, so if you a... |
5ed53891-2ae7-4bd7-8b1e-4d96783f905e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Reflection on Richard Hamming's "You and Your Research": Striving for Greatness
Introduction: A Commitment to Greatness
Before I dive into my reflections on Richard Hamming's insightful talk, "You and Your Research", I want to start by posing three critical questions to myself:
1. What are the important problems i... |
8fc4fa7b-c147-46c4-ba1e-3c92af62cb87 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Fundamental Challenges in AI Governance
Context
=======
On behalf of my firm, I recently wrote a [short paper](https://ai.altadvisory.africa/#paper) (around 2000 words) on fundamental challenges in AI governance, emerging trends and themes in different jurisdictions, and what issues the recently-formed UN High-Level ... |
bab1825e-ca7d-4474-a5a5-a74954308e97 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Bayesians vs. Barbarians
Previously:
> Let's say we have two groups of soldiers. In group 1, the privates are ignorant of tactics and strategy; only the sergeants know anything about tactics and only the officers know anything about strategy. In group 2, everyone at all levels knows all about tactics and strategy.
... |
72113922-6c4f-4c0c-a96e-9bc16389302e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Concerns Surrounding CEV: A case for human friendliness first
I am quite new here so please forgive the ignorance (I'm sure there will be some) of these questions, but I am all of about half way through reading CEV and I just simply cannot read any further without formal clarification from the lw community. That bei... |
32950d71-4886-4d1f-ab4a-99de517ca8fc | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | I had a chat with GPT-4 on the future of AI and AI safety
Today I gave OpenAI some money to get access to GPT-4. After testing a few examples of reasoning that failed badly in GPT-3, I decided to have a chat with it about the potential and risks of future AI. This is what followed, un-edited with the exception of remo... |
6bde3ab3-67a0-41c0-8c73-91b24f499c6b | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | New report: “Computable probability distributions which converge…”
[](https://intelligence.org/files/Pi1Pi2Problem.pdf)Back in July 2013, [Will Sawin](https... |
141def5c-1e3d-487f-8fe4-c5a602c0f75c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Spiritedness and docility
Just a brief inquiry, I've been thinking about myself, and what many people here talk about akrasia and "not getting crap done", and one of the vectors that this can be thought of is in terms of what I would call spiritedness versus docility. At least this is how I would describe it, maybe y... |
cbbec345-5d8f-4c36-96e4-30fa41a6dcbc | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The first AI Safety Camp & onwards
Co-author: Linda Linsefors
Summary
Last month, 5 teams of up-and-coming researchers gathered to solve concrete problems in AI alignment at our 10-day AI safety research camp in Gran Canaria.
This post describes:
* the event format we came up with
* our experience & lessons lear... |
c0917046-0131-4075-a163-0e427458e32f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Generalized Efficient Markets in Political Power
Schelling Points
In Thomas Schelling’s classic experiment, we imagine trying to meet up with someone in New York City, but we haven’t specified a time or place in advance and have no way to communicate. Where do we go, and when, to maximize the chance of meeting? There ... |
5f9ce99a-a6f7-44fd-a3d7-753597db74e2 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Public Opinion on AI Safety: AIMS 2023 and 2021 Summary
Here we briefly summarize the results so far from our U.S. nationally representative survey on Artificial Intelligence, Morality, and Sentience (AIMS), conducted in 2021 and 2023. The full reports are available on Sentience Institute’s website for the [AIMS 2023 ... |
99790300-0254-43dd-9168-af9fe1479b91 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Beren's "Deconfusing Direct vs Amortised Optimisation"
Preamble
--------
I heavily recommend [@beren](https://www.alignmentforum.org/users/beren-1?mention=user)'s "[Deconfusing Direct vs Amortised Optimisation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/S54HKhxQyttNLATKu/deconfusing-direct-vs-amortised-optimization)". It's a ve... |
5ec469a0-0226-42c3-bfaa-905be045c05a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Lifeism, Anti-Deathism, and Some Other Terminal-Values Rambling
(Apologies to RSS users: apparently there's no draft button, but only "publish" and "publish-and-go-back-to-the-edit-screen", misleadingly labeled.)
You have a button. If you press it, a happy, fulfilled person will be created in a sealed box, and the... |
901b651f-0458-4b1c-95cb-1c56655f4ca6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What's your favorite notetaking system?
Abram recently wrote up the Zettelkasten system for notetaking while doing research. Do you have an opinion on an alternative system, and if so, what is it?
Things you might optionally include but should not let the lack of preclude answering:
* How the system works
* Plusse... |
67660916-6d17-414a-b065-a04293ab3175 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Making 2023 ACX Prediction Results Public
They say you shouldn't roll your own encryption, which is why I'm posting this here, so it can be unrolled if it's too unsafe.
Problem: Astral Codex Ten finished scoring the 2023 prediction results, but the primary identifier most used for people's score was their email addre... |
f53a3b3c-3652-4acb-8bd7-2df0fbb62ecb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The computational complexity of progress
Cross-posted from Telescopic Turnip.
Artem Kaznatcheev has a curious model about the evolution of living things. When a population of creatures adapts to their environment, they are solving a complicated mathematical problem: they are searching for the one genome that replicat... |
7ddc3222-7179-415c-939a-aebbdc3d9ac8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Putanumonit - A "statistical significance" story in finance
|
ec2d6830-7270-4902-ad57-62a1ecb99a1c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The problems with the concept of an infohazard as used by the LW community [Linkpost]
This is going to be a linkpost from Beren on some severe problems that come with the use of the concept of an infohazard on LW.
The main problem I see that are relevant to infohazards are that it encourages a "Great Man Theory" of p... |
80533ac1-741a-4524-aced-b385db850e0e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is Fisherian Runaway Gradient Hacking?
TL;DR: No; there is no directed agency that enforces sexual selection through an exploitable proxy. However, Fisherian runaway is an insightful example of the path-dependence of local search, where an easily acquired and apparently useful proxy goal can be so strongly favored tha... |
d61c901d-dd3f-4dc4-ba49-5fe9c2fe3120 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Anthropomorphic AI and Sandboxed Virtual Universes
Intro
-----
The problem of [Friendly AI](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Friendly_artificial_intelligence) is usually approached from a decision theoretic background that starts with the assumptions that the AI is an agent that has awareness of AI-self and goals, aw... |
919e084d-d169-40dd-9b75-7dd16d1f9904 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | What are good alignment conference papers?
I regularly debate with people whether pushing for more mainstream publications in ML/AI venues by alignment researchers is a good thing. So I want to find data: alignment papers published at NeurIPS and other top conferences (journals too, but there're less relevant in compu... |
57664ad6-e415-457c-98d9-b488f688d7e5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Play My Futarchy/Prediction Market Mafia Game
In the social deduction game Mafia (broadly the same game as Werewolf, Town of Salem, etc) the minority mafiosi—who know each other's identities—play against the majority villagers in alternating day phases, where the players select someone to kill, and night phases, where... |
ff3caea7-5831-46ba-8b19-3de61c5aebc7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Summary: "Internet Search tips" by Gwern Branwen
This post is part of my "research" series.
Branwen, Gwern. Internet Search Tips, 11 December 2018. https://www.gwern.net/Search. Accessed: 2022-04-05.
Why
If memory serves, I learned of Gwern through LessWrong. He was mentioned as a guy who did really careful self-ex... |
660cd830-2698-4b5d-a389-8fe4c11658b1 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Brain wiring: The long and short of it
*By Tegan McCaslin, 30 March 2018*
When I took on the task of counting up all the brain’s fibers and figuratively laying them end-to-end, I had a sense that it would be relatively easy–do a bit of strategic Googling, check out a few neuroscience references, and you’ve got yours... |
a4c35763-b3b1-4198-b49e-f0c51cfb516b | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Variational Option Discovery Algorithms
1 Introduction
---------------
Humans are innately driven to experiment with new ways of interacting with their environments. This can accelerate the process of discovering skills for downstream tasks and can also be viewed as a primary objective in its own right. This drive ... |
2d776100-9ada-49ca-9792-181b1488b6e9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Notes on Internal Objectives in Toy Models of Agents
Thanks to Jeremy Gillen and Arun Jose for discussions related to these ideas.
Summary
WARNING: The quality of this post is low. It was sitting in my drafts folder for a while, yet I decided to post it because some people found these examples and analyses helpful i... |
202732a4-8e61-44b8-b67e-433bf6520f33 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Reward Uncertainty for Exploration in Preference-based Reinforcement Learning.
1 Introduction
---------------
In reinforcement learning (RL), reward function specifies correct objectives to RL agents.
However, it is difficult and time-consuming to carefully design suitable reward functions for a variety of complex ... |
fa1add90-9575-4897-873a-3e454c872397 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Incorporating Justice Theory into Decision Theory
When someone wrongs us, how should we respond? We want to discourage this behavior, so that others find it in their interest to treat us well. And yet the goal should never be to "do something unpleasant to them", for its deterrent effect. I'm persuaded by Yudkowsky's ... |
abc83ad9-0f39-44dd-867a-00351322c2ca | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | LLM Modularity: The Separability of Capabilities in Large Language Models
Separating out different capabilities.
Post format: First, a 30-second TL;DR, next a 5-minute summary, and finally the full ~40-minute full length technical report.
Special thanks to Lucius Bushnaq for inspiring this work with his work on modul... |
0ff2f17f-3d45-48be-a651-2c08c1ae25fb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Smoking cigarettes in airplanes made the airplanes safer?
By "safer" I mean in regards to the structural integrity of the airplane, not as in reducing cancer risk of the passengers or something like that.
Was at my dentist today discussing a tooth with some potential small cracks, and he got to talking about smoking ... |
033cd6ca-9d73-48ab-81a2-9b91979e00f9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Group Rationality Diary, November 1-15
This is the public group rationality diary for November 1-15.
> It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:
>
> * Established a useful new habit
> * Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief
> * ... |
a32d7b94-49b7-491c-b58e-d2ed03a37df4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Rationality, competitiveness and akrasia
Here's an internal dialogue I just had.
Q: How do we test rationality skills?
A: We haven't come up with a comprehensive test yet.
Q: Maybe we can test some part of rationality?
A: Sure. For example, you could test resistance to akrasia by making two contestants do some sim... |
5f0d24bb-dd67-4df3-8a31-ebd5e289c061 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open Thread: May 2010
You know what to do.
This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post. |
01aa3d9a-fdb4-4e86-82ee-20db2d7685ef | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Custom games that involve skills related to rationality
There are some custom games created by me and some other members of Moscow LW community. These games involve skills related to rationality, like fallacy detection, or inductive rule guessing with trying to falsify the hypothesis. We often play these games on our ... |
16856aa9-95ab-4ebd-8d4e-ff1bb0602b46 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Moral Status of Independent Identical Copies
Future technologies pose a number of challenges to moral philosophy. One that I think has been largely neglected is the status of independent identical copies. (By "independent identical copies" I mean copies of a mind that do not physically influence each other, but ha... |
be3c7927-28b1-49a5-b753-097117643ac0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Boots theory and Sybil Ramkin
I previously wrote about Boots theory, the idea that "the rich are so rich because they spend less money". My one-sentence take is: I'm pretty sure rich people spend more money than poor people, and an observation can't be explained by a falsehood.
The popular explanation of the theory c... |
68c88594-6360-4dd5-a547-3831ad5edab4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
None |
b2eb0f46-577f-4939-a9a8-c031ba696842 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Maximize in a limited domain. Hope for the future.
Four years ago I attempted twice to explain what I saw as the conceptual problems with utilitarianism. Upon reflection, I was right that there are conceptual problems with utilitarianism, but wrong about what are the best pointers of how to explain this to the outside... |
2f666ad7-d319-49dd-a5e4-4658297cf9ff | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why the tails come apart
[I'm unsure how much this rehashes things 'everyone knows already' - if old hat, feel free to downvote into oblivion. My other motivation for the cross-post is the hope it might catch the interest of someone with a stronger mathematical background who could make this line of argument more robu... |
78f14138-ecc1-4cda-9ab3-003bcfa59a98 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Quote quiz answer
Here’s the answer to the recent quote quiz:
The author was Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber. The quote was taken from his manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future.” Here’s a slightly longer, and unaltered, quote:
> First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intel... |
51ac438e-53c0-43bd-b194-9a907d7c0bc2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Framing a problem in a foreign language seems to reduce decision biases
> The researchers aren't entirely sure why speaking in a less familiar tongue makes people more "rational", in the sense of not being affected by framing effects or loss aversion. But they think it may have to do with creating psychological distan... |
02275f77-8d7e-44bd-aa81-5117917e15f3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Anti-EMH Evidence (and a plea for help)
The debate over EMH should perhaps be framed as "What skill level and assets under management do I need to make it worthwhile to play the markets instead of doing passive investing?" This is a list of anti-EMH evidence (that I personally came across in my relatively short explor... |
4db31903-ef9a-499a-a76c-ba02f6f9a37e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Link] Five Years and One Week of Less Wrong
This is a link post for Five Years and One Week of Less Wrong. I was surprised to see that it was never cross-posted to LW in the first place. I wanted it to be here so that I could put it under the new Intellectual Progress via LessWrong tag.
Some excerpts:
> I wrote a p... |
46042d62-7e83-4eaa-9c56-cc25b1b8e134 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Covid-19 6/11: Bracing For a Second Wave
Last time: Covid-19 6/4: The Eye of the Storm
There has been a lot of news in the past week. Very little of it is actually about Covid-19.
That is not because Covid-19 went away. People are still dying. People are still being infected. In many places things are getting worse ... |
ce286543-b04b-4bcc-838c-cbe648a39b5f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | On Humor
Getting a joke and finding it funny are not the same thing
Getting a joke and experiencing a joke as humorous are different things. It's generally recognized that finding a joke funny means that you got it, and if you don't get a joke you won't find it funny. Clash Theory (see below) recognizes that cross-wis... |
00197488-260e-44e5-adab-16c2b61a058d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Extended Living-Forever Strategy-Space
I wanted to try and write this like a sequence post with a little story at the beginning because the style is hard to beat if you can pull it off. For those that want to skip to the meat of the argument, scroll down to the section titled ‘The Jealous God of Cryonics’
BIZZARO... |
e5de63bc-9e05-4d65-b0b1-a205aaf6e988 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | The Steering Problem
Most AI research focuses on reproducing human abilities: to learn, infer, and reason; to perceive, plan, and predict. There is a complementary problem which (understandably) receives much less attention: if you \*had\* these abilities, what would you do with them?
\*\*The steering problem:\*\* Us... |
03ae7bed-0371-41a2-8a6c-c464c0d5e513 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | Appendix I of Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail
APPENDIX I:
ANNOTATED COMPENDIUM OF BASIC
SYSTEMS-AXIOMS, THEOREMS,
COROLLARIES, ETC.
For convenience and ready reference of both scholar and
casual reader, we here summarize the results of our re
searches on General Systemantics in one co... |
0c2627ee-4e32-495b-bd53-e129971f7bc7 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | The Telephone Theorem: Information At A Distance Is Mediated By Deterministic Constraints
You know the game of Telephone? That one where a bunch of people line up, and the first person whispers some message in the second person’s ear, then the second person whispers it to the third, and so on down the line, and then a... |
96772762-ba6e-4570-a114-673be569ec46 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | SIA, conditional probability and Jaan Tallinn's simulation tree
If you're going to use anthropic probability, use the self indication assumption (SIA) - it's by far the most sensible way of doing things.
Now, I am of the strong belief that probabilities in anthropic problems (such as the Sleeping Beauty problem) are ... |
2cdd898a-31c8-46b9-a741-efcf91034778 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Announcing the 2024 Roots of Progress Blog-Building Intensive
Today we’re opening applications for the 2024 cohort of The Roots of Progress Blog-Building Intensive, an 8-week program for aspiring progress writers to start or grow a blog.
Last year, nearly 500 people applied to the inaugural program. The 19 fellows wh... |
cec562d8-c6c4-4bd7-be4a-7e932feadbb2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Do alignment concerns extend to powerful non-AI agents?
Right now the main focus of alignment seems to be on how to align powerful AGI agents, a.k.a AI Safety. I think the field can benefit from a small reframing: we should think not about aligning AI, but about alignment of systems in general, if we are not already.
... |
cac38465-9b9c-42dc-b557-69c0b8f93849 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Irvine Meetup Wednesday August 24
Discussion article for the meetup : Irvine Meetup Wednesday August 24
WHEN: 24 August 2011 06:00:00PM (-0700)
WHERE: 4187 Campus Dr, University Center, Irvine, CA 92612
This continues the weekly meetups in Irvine. As always the meetup at the outdoor food court in the Unive... |
0d0924ff-fdf4-4f08-8b13-cdc6f51bf93d | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Call for research on evaluating alignment (funding + advice available)
Summary
-------
Evaluating and measuring alignment in existing large ML models is useful, and doesn’t require high levels of ML or coding experience. I (Beth) would be excited to fund people to work on this, and William Saunders & I are open to pr... |
ec51824e-2f03-44da-aa91-d638815b39ae | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Welcome to Less Wrong! (7th thread, December 2014)
If you've recently joined the Less Wrong community, please leave a comment here and introduce yourself. We'd love to know who you are, what you're doing, what you value, how you came to identify as an aspiring rationalist or how you found us. You can skip right to tha... |
562dedb3-4bed-41dc-947b-a89bc5d971c1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How to mitigate sandbagging
Epistemic status: I have worked on sandbagging for ~1 year. I expect to be wrong in multiple ways, but I do think this post provides both a useful high-level model and a good place to discuss how to mitigate sandbagging. Better conceptual approaches probably exist, e.g., selecting different... |
cbc06b8c-2893-4bc4-92db-0c6af557ecdd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Interpersonal Entanglement
Today's post, 20 January 2009 was originally published on 20 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> Our sympathy with other minds makes our interpersonal relationships one of the most complex aspects of human existence. Romance, in particular, is more complicated... |
eb1d28fb-a9e7-4ab0-aded-0933534949f2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AI timelines don't account for base rate of tech progress
Papers about LLM scaling law projections don't make an attempt to estimate base rate of technological progress.
In particular, they don't make an attempt to estimate the base rate of false alarms when inventing new science and technology. If you study any hard... |
a1044cc0-0207-473d-ba33-38022e107f85 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Charting Is Mostly Superstition
Part 6 of the Inefficient Markets sequence.
[I am not your financial advisor! For educational purposes only. Read part 1 first.]
The technical analyst reads the signs and portends and divines the future prices. Three black crows are a bad omen, don'tcha know. An abandoned baby is a si... |
337214d3-7fca-48a6-b416-762cfcb5bf89 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AXRP Episode 35 - Peter Hase on LLM Beliefs and Easy-to-Hard Generalization
YouTube link
How do we figure out what large language models believe? In fact, do they even have beliefs? Do those beliefs have locations, and if so, can we edit those locations to change the beliefs? Also, how are we going to get AI to perfo... |
520ed4ab-14b5-4117-8025-241bfe1f95ee | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | If the fundamental problem that economics addresses is the scarcity of resources, then what are the basic questions other subjects attempt to solve?
One of the core principles of economics is the scarcity of resources, which the subject of economics attempts to address. Put in other words, the problem of unlimited wan... |
790cbea6-b614-4dab-87ca-7e5ad5fd1286 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Inferential credit history
Here’s an interview with Seth Baum. Seth is an expert in risk analysis and a founder of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute. As expected, Bill O’Reilly caricatured Seth as extreme, and cut up his interview with dramatic and extreme events from alien films. As a professional provocateur, i... |
1808be90-0f45-47a1-9357-a2e44e6c8658 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Sealed Computation: Towards Low-Friction Proof of Locality
Inference Certificates
As a prerequisite for the virtuality.network, we need to enable organizations which host inference workloads to prove the following about a particular AI output:
* It was generated during this time period.
* It was generated in this g... |
3ecf0ce9-e12a-4f28-b484-ac765dc2966b | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube | Youtube Transcripts | Reinforcement Learning 3: Markov Decision Processes and Dynamic Programming
this week we have a pretty intense
reinforcement learning schedule
especially should consider starting last
Thursday in a week we're going to cover
quite a but quite a lot of material I
highly encourage reading the background
material from sat... |
12165b82-427d-4c93-b3fa-a8e4aa34bbf5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People
Today's post, Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People was originally published on April 4, 2007. A summary (from the LW wiki):
> Learning common biases won't help you obtain truth if you only use this knowledge to attack beliefs you don't like. Discussions about biases ne... |
f2013e8d-aedd-469a-8b5e-c132294b0985 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Rationality Feed: Last Month's Best Posts
I write a daily rational feed. I write up summaries/teasers for the previous day's article that I found interesting and/or enjoyable. I follow most rationalist blogs as well as LW2.0 and the EA Forum on RSS. The daily feed is posted in the SSC Discord and on my Wordpress Blog ... |
503479c8-fc4b-4195-9b58-e41a3d637039 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Transformative AGI by 2043 is <1% likely
([Crossposted](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ARkbWch5RMsj6xP5p/transformative-agi-by-2043-is-less-than-1-likely) to the EA forum)
Abstract
--------
The linked paper is our submission to the [Open Philanthropy AI Worldviews Contest](https://www.openphilanthropy.org... |
37db2e90-bee2-4933-96af-283a007f520a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Anthropic's Certificate of Incorporation
Yesterday I obtained Anthropic's[1] Certificate of Incorporation, and its past versions, from the State of Delaware. I don't recommend reading it.[2] This post is about what the CoI tells us about Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust (context: Maybe Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit... |
ee5c9e24-4867-4dc8-b603-ccf403c4f030 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open Thread January 2019
If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, you can put it here.
Also, if you are new to LessWrong and want to introduce yourself, this is the place to do it. Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to get from the site and community a... |
67767c0a-b7ff-4136-8960-9e13da224e10 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Simplified Poker Strategy
Previously in Sequence (Required): Simplified Poker
I spent a few hours figuring out my strategy. This is what I submitted.
If you start with a 2, you never want to bet, since your opponent will call with a 3 but fold with a 1. So we can assume no one who bets ever has a 2. But you might wa... |
bc32e743-218e-4be4-bdde-8eb4230d8a80 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What We Owe the Past
TL;DR: We have ethical obligations not just towards people in the future, but also people in the past.
Imagine the issue that you hold most dear, the issue that you have made your foremost cause, the issue that you have donated your most valuable resources (time, money, attention) to solving. For... |
dde2e67a-a970-4a87-bfc7-6f2e7733f5f4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Review: Breaking Free with Dr. Stone
Doctor Stone is an anime where everyone suddenly turns into a statue. Civilization falls apart. Thousands of years pass, and then a superhumanly knowledgeable teenager named Senku wakes up due to nitric acid dripping on him for long enough.
He eventually deduces that the nitric ac... |
703a3c28-45ef-4627-bff8-35f5285acbbf | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Perth, Australia: Sunday lunch
Discussion article for the meetup : Perth, Australia: Sunday lunch
WHEN: 17 August 2014 12:00:00PM (+0800)
WHERE: Annalakshmi, Barrack Square, Perth, Australia
Come have lunch with other Less Wrongians! Hossein will start the conversation with a quick introduction to one of t... |
fa2d1b62-a3fe-421f-8793-173fae83f168 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Rényi divergence as a secondary objective
Summary: Given that both imitation and maximization have flaws, it might be reasonable to interpolate between these two extremes. It's possible to use Rényi divergence (a family of measures of distance between distributions) to define a family of these interpolations.
-------... |
e696b679-f0c3-4c2d-b812-24999193a267 | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | "[Epistemic Status: talking in the language of metaphorical soul and mysticism.]Previously:Visions of Summer SolsticeObligatory link to The Value and Danger of Ritual for people just tuning in.June 23rd, the Bay community journeyed out to the edge of the world to celebrate the longest day of the year. Photo Credit to S... |
260c59d4-5ca2-4fa6-97b8-d19571d81e54 | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | "Apptimize is a 2-year old startup closely connected with the rationalist community, one of the first founded by CFAR alumni. We make “lean” possible for mobile apps -- our software lets mobile developers update or A/B test their apps in minutes, without submitting to the App Store. Our customers include big companies ... |
6d88d274-4963-4689-8906-7e36873f24fd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Proposal for Inducing Steganography in LMs
This is my half-baked proposal for inducing steganography in a decoder-only model (like GPT), and I'd appreciate some feedback.
I've operationalized "steganography" to mean a model that has chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning that doesn't appear to help the target task, but act... |
b28eb7d4-fd55-49e2-b31d-b32d94ba284e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | The costs of caution
*Note: This post was crossposted from [Planned Obsolescence](https://www.planned-obsolescence.org/the-costs-of-caution/) by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.*
> If you thought we might be able to cure cancer in 2200, then I... |
24875260-c002-453f-9745-bb30818db5a6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A semi-technical question about prediction markets and private info
There exists a 6-sided die that is weighted such that one of the 6 numbers has a 50% chance to come up and all the other numbers have a 1 in 10 chance. Nobody knows for certain which number the die is biased in favor of, but some people have had a cha... |
428188a6-e045-4915-9d94-f0edf4df980a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Try training token-level probes
Epistemic status: These are results of a brief research sprint and I didn't have time to investigate this in more detail. However, the results were sufficiently surprising that I think it's worth sharing. I'm not aware of previous papers doing this but surely someone tried this before, ... |
b088ea01-1416-427d-ba0e-97ed87cd3925 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open-source weaponry
2025-05-10
* If we did end up with a world where even its most powerful organisations cannot keep secrets, then values and capabilities of all orgs become public.
* Values becoming public means the public can decide if the org represents their true values, and if not, coordinate to shut d... |
54d60470-29eb-4b09-85e4-c5500020ae51 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Kids are Not Okay
It has been a subject of much recent internet discourse that the kids are not okay. By all reports, the kids very much seem to be not all right.
Suicide attempts are up. Depressive episodes are way up. The general vibes and zeitgeist one gets (or at least that I get) from young people are super ... |
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