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8c06d798-b0ea-4d2d-be56-9de42300125f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AGI Safety Solutions Map
When I started to work on the map of AI safety solutions, I wanted to illustrate the excellent article “Responses to Catastrophic AGI Risk: A Survey” by Kaj Sotala and Roman V. Yampolskiy, 2013, which I strongly recommend.
However, during the process I had a number of ideas to expand the clas... |
dbe9c573-6059-46eb-a588-8288733c8fdb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Dream Machine
Midjourney, “the dream machine”
I recently started working at Renaissance Philanthropy. It’s a new organization, and most people I’ve met haven’t heard of it.[1] So I thought I’d explain, in my own words and speaking for myself rather than my employers, what we (and I) are trying to do here.
Moder... |
6fd081ca-2576-4610-8d1e-cea046214949 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Specification Gaming: How AI Can Turn Your Wishes Against You [RA Video]
In this new video, we explore specification gaming in machine learning systems. It's meant to be watched as a follow-up to The Hidden Complexity of Wishes, but it can be enjoyed and understood as a stand-alone too. It's part of our work-in-progre... |
b5de770f-b281-42c3-89c6-1597b761204d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [LINK] Judea Pearl wins 2011 Turing Award
Link to ACM press release.
> In addition to their impact on probabilistic reasoning, Bayesian networks completely changed the way causality is treated in the empirical sciences, which are based on experiment and observation. Pearl's work on causality is crucial to the underst... |
4e37da15-ef44-4b6c-8c3d-687e4ce61e86 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | "Rational Agents Win"
Rachel and Irene are walking home while discussing [Newcomb's problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomb%27s_paradox). Irene explains her position:
"[Rational agents **win**](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ddcsdA2c2XpNpE5x)**.** If I take both boxes, I end up with $1000. If I take one box,... |
84bde805-15be-4e89-8468-a9aaf30c30a0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Cross-temporal dependency, value bounds and superintelligence
In this short post I will attempt to put forth some potential concerns that should be relevant when developing superintelligences, if certain meta-ethical effects exist. I do not claim they exist, only that it might be worth looking for them since their exi... |
4bca6b96-7f08-4fba-8e35-d911a91d7a9f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Deconstructing arguments against AI art
Something I've been surprised by is just how fierce opposition to AI art has been. To clarify, I'm not talking about people who dislike AI art because they think it looks worse, but specifically, people with extreme animus towards the very concept of AI art, regardless of its ae... |
9011a63e-260f-4b05-aa42-e2d9ecf5a851 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Alignment Newsletter #25
Highlights
Towards a New Impact Measure (Alex Turner): This post introduces a new idea for an impact measure. It defines impact as change in our ability to achieve goals. So, to measure impact, we can simply measure how much easier or harder it is to achieve goals -- this gives us Attainable U... |
94d1b25b-fcb7-46df-a9f9-001d6182dc00 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Wastewater RNA Read Lengths
What I'm calling "read length" here should instead have been "insert length" or "post-trimming read length". When you just say "read length" that's usually understood to be the raw length output by the sequencer, which for short-read sequencing is determined only by your target cycle count.... |
a20bd1cb-9295-4de6-931c-3abb8bb46985 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Sweet Lesson: AI Safety Should Scale With Compute
A corollary of Sutton's Bitter Lesson is that solutions to AI safety should scale with compute.[1]
Let's consider a few examples of research directions that are aiming at this property:
* Deliberative Alignment: Combine chain-of-thought with Constitutional AI t... |
5977f931-eeb9-4909-bcd1-d01fbcd07803 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | "But that's your job": why organisations can work
It's no secret that corporations, bureaucracies, and governments don't operate at peak efficiency for ideal goals. Economics has literature on its own version of the problem; on this very site, Zvi has been presenting a terrifying tale of Immoral Mazes, or how politics... |
64a35a02-5da9-4a2d-9f11-7c3ae956fdf9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Notes on Shame
This post examines the virtue of shame. It is meant mostly as an exploration of what other people have learned about this virtue, rather than as me expressing my own opinions about it, though I’ve been selective about what I found interesting or credible, according to my own inclinations. I wrote this n... |
f73973b4-2438-4032-ab2d-1b35370c73fa | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | where are your alignment bits?
where are your alignment bits?
------------------------------
information theory lets us make claims such as "you probly can't compress [this 1GB file](http://prize.hutter1.net/) into 1KB, given a [reasonable](kolmogorov-objectivity-in-languagespace.html) [programming language](https:/... |
470949f5-79ea-474d-9e35-d9e6981f65e1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Setpoint = The experience we attend to
In the last post, I talked about how hypnotists like to equivocate between expectation and intent in order to get people to believe what they want them to do and do what they want them to believe [sic].
There is a third framing that hypnotists also use at times, which is "imagi... |
cee932f0-9673-4ca4-9450-95e915b2f5c1 | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | "Braudel is probably the most impressive historian I have read. His quantitative estimates of premodern populations and crop yields are exactly the sort of foundation you’d think any understanding of history would be based upon. Yet reading his magnum opus, it became steadily clearer as the books progressed that Braude... |
5cae51f6-6eb6-465b-818d-6b2172fc780f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What should one's policy regarding dental xrays be?
A small Kuwaiti study used a conditional regression to found that x-rays are an increased risk factor for thyroid cancer (n=313, odds ratio = 2.1, 95% confidence interval: 1.4, 3.1) using a case-matched methodology.
X-rays being a carcinogen isn't surprising. Every ... |
8522d4c1-9a45-44b7-91ee-4cf92d3bdd19 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Book review: Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be
Cross-posted and lightly edited from Future Startup.
Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be is my fourth book by Steven Pressfield. Previously, I enjoyed reading his excellent The War of Art, an all-time favorite among creative types, Do the Work and Turning ... |
4e14c20f-0f6c-454b-9ae2-5fb438eaf932 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Rationalists lose when others choose
At various times, we've argued over whether rationalists always win. I posed Augustine's paradox of optimal repentance to argue that, in some situations, rationalists lose. One criticism of that paradox is that its strongest forms posit a God who penalizes people for being ration... |
77d2cc40-41ba-472a-948d-0b232bd14360 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Selfishness, preference falsification, and AI alignment
If aliens were to try to infer human values, there are a few information sources they could start looking at. One would be individual humans, who would want things on an individual basis. Another would be expressions of collective values, such as Internet proto... |
5b4c3a2f-5153-49ad-85a0-49f1c381ea30 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | Teachable Reinforcement Learning via Advice Distillation.
Teachable Reinforcement Learning via
Advice Distillation
Olivia Watkins
UC Berkeley
oliviawatkins@berkeley.eduTrevor Darrell
UC Berkeley
trevor@eecs.berkeley.edu
Pieter Abbeel
UC Berkeley
pabbeel@cs.berkeley.eduJacob Andreas
MIT
jda@mit.eduAbhishek Gupta
UC Ber... |
3538d920-c85b-4f3d-a8c8-7d6dadbb776b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : London Social Meetup (possibly) in the Sun
Discussion article for the meetup : London Social Meetup (possibly) in the Sun
WHEN: 15 June 2014 02:00:00PM (+0100)
WHERE: Newman's Row, London WC2A 3TL
EDIT: Weather is not so hot so we'll be starting in the Shakespeare's Head, see below.
We are having another ... |
e7e38fe7-4bfa-4908-af4c-682cbbef8e0b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open thread, Apr. 10 - Apr. 16, 2017
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.
----------------------------------------
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the ... |
1b94399f-f743-4395-8ad6-89de7c3ff13a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Global Existential Risks & Radical Futures (conference June 14)
From 2000 - 2008 was the golden age of x-risk research. Many books and articles were published - from Bill Joy to Bostrom and Yudkowsky - and many new ideas appeared. But after that, the stream of new ideas stopped. This might be good, because every new i... |
399ed430-1f93-41a7-b436-b73f1223ae85 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | CIRL Wireheading
.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: ltr... |
1c7efd39-3c4b-4942-a5ff-833ef9d9f1e8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Disclosing the unsaid
My colleagues often mock me for my faith in human sciences, "Studying cultures and people in the age of algorithms, you just need data and machine learning model" they said. I've been an engineer by profession for a decade, but to develop new perspectives on the characteristics of our product, I ... |
11c2907a-d5b0-467e-b4ff-705ba9ec413d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open thread, Nov. 23 - Nov. 29, 2015
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
----------------------------------------
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately... |
53e4b0fa-550d-4079-a419-53e408061be5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Kriorus update: full bodies patients were moved to the new location in Tver
Yesterday Valery Pride got a decision from police that she is an acting director and owner of the dewar vessels with full bodies patients in Sergiev Posad (Semhoz) which she unsuccessfully tried to take in September. Based on that decision she... |
5621f30c-2006-43f2-93da-a6037fcf16af | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How to Make Easy Decisions
Note: I’m think I remember a similar post to this one existing somewhere, but I can’t find it and I don’t think it was illustrated with The Good Place memes….so enjoy. This was crossposted on my blog.
I respect how carefully the effective altruists around me try to use reason and logic to... |
030604cc-2548-49f5-adcf-02bbf78c1cd6 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Elementary Infra-Bayesianism
*TL;DR: I got nerd-sniped into working through some rather technical work in AI Safety. Here's my best guess of what is going on. Imprecise probabilities for handling catastrophic downside risk.*
**Short summary**: I apply the updating equation from Infra-Bayesianism to a concrete example... |
e893052b-295a-4aec-8b60-7896a8ab6339 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Sleeping Beauty: Is Disagreement While Sharing All Information Possible in Anthropic Problems?
Preamble
This post discusses why any halfer position in the Sleeping Beauty Problem would lead to disagreements between two agents sharing all information. This issue has not been much discussed except by @Katja Grace and Jo... |
f9adfcc0-ad3c-4d19-8dc5-0263aca1eb14 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Exquisite Oracle: A Dadaist-Inspired Literary Game for Many Friends (or 1 AI)
NOTE: You may divide all numbers in this document by 10, for a significantly shorter game.
Setup
Roles: With a single exception, everyone (human or otherwise) is given the role of “Player”, and an additional individual (or AI system) is de... |
f8c2525f-61ff-4add-b2a2-e7afa166ed58 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Halo Effect
The affect heuristic is how an overall feeling of goodness or badness contributes to many other judgments, whether it’s logical or not, whether you’re aware of it or not. Subjects told about the benefits of nuclear power are likely to rate it as having fewer risks; stock analysts rating unfamiliar stoc... |
e381985c-f6ac-4f6f-a509-4fe4edad6a6c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A pessimistic view of quantum immortality
You have probably read about the idea of quantum immortality before. The basic idea seems to be that, as anything that can happen does happen (assuming either that the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory is true, or that there is an infinite number of parallel univers... |
28dccef8-fca5-4dcf-87aa-ff6ce0a6785c | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube | Youtube Transcripts | Deep Learning 4: Beyond Image Recognition, End-to-End Learning, Embeddings
hello everybody I don't have a mic but
this room seems good acoustically I hope
everybody can hear me yes okay so I'm
Ryan Hansel your latest guest speaker
during for this course I'm deep mind as
I guess all of the guest speakers are
for this c... |
3ccb2779-77cf-49f9-9b8b-225d8f127817 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Are Mixture-of-Experts Transformers More Interpretable Than Dense Transformers?
Intuitively, I would expect Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models (e.g. <https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.03961>) to be a lot more interpretable than dense transformers:
1. **The complexity of an interconnected system increases way faster than line... |
1f9ad10e-0d45-4468-a365-9f1e3f3f2879 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Demography and Destiny
The PDF version can be read here.
And the video version can be watched here:
In this essay, I will make the case that demographic transition theory is wrong.
Demographic transition theory (DTT) proposes that people go through a transition from high fertility to low fertility as their societi... |
05c419b3-0f48-4b23-a720-0161943d6a8c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | "Tech company singularities", and steering them to reduce x-risk
The purpose of this post (also available on the EA Forum) is to share an alternative notion of “singularity” that I’ve found useful in timelining/forecasting.
* A fully general tech company is a technology company with the ability to become a world-lea... |
d1b7fc70-2f0f-4c87-8dbc-8e8826c7562f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A conceptual precursor to today's language machines [Shannon]
Cross-posted from New Savanna.
I'm in the process of reading a fascinating article by Richard Hughes Gibson, Language Machinery: Who will attend to the machines’ writing? It seems that Claude Shannon conducted a simulation of a training session for a large... |
697b1095-baf5-4736-9fb1-2864756abc44 | awestover/filtering-for-misalignment | Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results | id: post1975
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, human psychology, virology,... |
9ab91ad9-3d30-4b80-b3c7-94cc44e5feec | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | [AN #157]: Measuring misalignment in the technology underlying Copilot
Alignment Newsletter is a weekly publication with recent content relevant to AI alignment around the world. Find all Alignment Newsletter **[resources here](http://rohinshah.com/alignment-newsletter/)**. In particular, you can look through **[this ... |
b7bc97ea-a23e-4a44-9419-14bd6b0cf2f3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The V&V method - A step towards safer AGI
Originally posted on my blog, 24 Jun 2025 - see also full PDF (26 pp)
Abstract
The V&V method is a concrete, practical framework which can complement several alignment approaches. Instead of asking a nascent AGI to “do X,” we instruct it to design and rigorously verify a bou... |
723cb915-dd43-4bdf-bfbd-afa554161d54 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Update on cause area focus working group
Prompted by the FTX collapse, the rapid progress in AI, and increased mainstream acceptance of AI risk concerns, there has recently been a fair amount of discussion among EAs whether it would make sense to rebalance the movement’s portfolio of outreach/recruitment/movement-buil... |
ef07c3f8-44bc-4efe-a361-a52206e563b4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Personality tests?
Does anyone know of a freely available, short personality test that would be appropriate for estimating pairwise compatibility for wedding seating? |
8e2f2940-a1fd-4c97-b275-e2285787eee2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | On the construction of the self
This is the fifth post of the "a non-mystical explanation of the three characteristics of existence" series.
On the construction of the self
In his essay The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity, Daniel Dennett offers the thought experiment of a robot that moves around the world. The... |
c4313591-021e-4ec3-8695-f6e8c54aa1ea | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | "When I was a kid I thought the news came from "investigative reporters" like Clark Kent were who were paid to research stories. Since then, I have gotten my startup on national television, placed a press release into the world news, discussed biological warfare as a podcast guest, written a blog which has been reposte... |
790619e7-b12f-4bd5-ba55-f0bff14b752e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Interacting with a Boxed AI
A BOXED AI
So, a thought experiment.
We have an AI-in-a-box. By this I mean:
* The AI can interact with the world only through a single communication channel.
* We control that communication channel.:
* We can communicate with the AI at will, it can communicate with us only when we ... |
48dc9f5c-a889-462a-aaf6-8f5bccb51dac | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | Compute Accounting Principles Can Help Reduce AI Risks
*Krystal Jackson is a visiting AI Junior Fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), where Karson Elmgren is a research analyst and Jacob Feldgoise is a data research analyst. Andrew Critch is an AI research scientist at U... |
edaf7a13-3c6c-4501-a374-42cae7843ce4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Fat Tails Discourage Compromise
Say that we have a set of options, such as (for example) wild animal welfare interventions.
Say also that you have two axes along which you can score those interventions: popularity (how much people will like your intervention) and effectiveness (how much the intervention actually help... |
9d68a4d6-42f4-4fd0-a8a8-9331fdc41a41 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What do bad clothes signal about you?
Yesterday I attended a meetup where the discussion turned to fashion for a time (because apparently the mini-camp participants were given some instructions on fashion as a useful part of instrumental rationality). (Unfortunately none of us knew much about the topic so the discussi... |
dcb2a7fd-fe9a-4a9a-a008-e334e213f223 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Visualizing Eutopia
Today's post, Visualizing Eutopia was originally published on 16 December 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> Trying to imagine a Eutopia is actually difficult. But it is worth trying.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is ... |
3021f0f9-11d9-4c1f-875a-c778434bacc9 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | A new proposal for regulating AI in the EU
> The European Commission's rules would ban "AI systems considered a clear threat to the safety, livelihoods and rights of people", it said.
>
> It is also proposing far stricter rules on the use of biometrics - such as facial recognition being used by law enforcement, which... |
2957e5e7-14c4-4e9a-b5ef-2fd534d4cc8f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | My Confusion about Moral Philosophy
Something about the academic discussion about moral philosophy always confused me, probably this is a more general point about philosophy as such. Historically people tried to arrive towards truths about objects. One used to ask questions like what is right or wrong. Then one start... |
e2147856-dfe8-4770-aff3-c4febea110a4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Equity premium puzzles
Crossposted from the Metaculus Journal with minor modifications. The original is available here, and you can forecast on the questions cited in the essay yourself after signing up.
From 1870 to 2015, stocks in the United States have returned around 8.4% per year in real (inflation adjusted) ter... |
3e2481c0-78bb-4197-b958-8a0053d09a7f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | LLM Guardrails Should Have Better Customer Service Tuning
AI Could Turn People Down a Lot Better Than It Does : To Tune the Humans in the GPT Interaction towards alignment, Don't be so Procedural and Bureaucratic.
It seems to me that a huge piece of the puzzle in "alignment" is the human users. Even if a given tool ... |
f1a368ba-db12-44c0-9da1-8065aeb8936a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is Rationality Teachable?
It is generally assumed around here that people can learn to be more rational. That's the purpose of The Sequences, after all. And veteran Less Wrongers do seem (to me) vastly more rational than the average person.
But maybe it's a selection effect: maybe Less Wrong doesn't make people more ... |
9c5439d7-68f4-45de-bbab-018427c5d06f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Will protein design tools solve the snake antivenom shortage?
Another note: Just yesterday, the same day this article was released, the New York Times put this out: Universal Antivenom May Grow Out of Man Who Let Snakes Bite Him 200 Times. I was scooped! Somewhat. I added an addendum section discussing this paper at t... |
9e529d3f-13a7-4b6b-91d0-00b1d820dd25 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Anvil Shortage
Brief note: I originally called this an Anvil Problem, but it turns out that's already a concept. I've changed this to be Anvil Shortage instead.
I.
I played a lot of Dwarf Fortress in high school.
For those of you who aren't familiar, Dwarf Fortress is a videogame where you try and manage a group of... |
4ab9a693-a4ae-4a2d-8e70-83d7e258a51f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Before the seed. I. Guesswork
NOTE: I AM UNSURE IF I AM NOT FORCING PEOPLE TO GUESS THE PASSWORD. IF YOU FIND THIS STYLE OKAY, THE NEXT POST WILL BE BUILT SIMILARLY.
As we have already seen, it's a different matter to do anything significant to support a free-living gametophyte than one contained within the sporophyt... |
d1f8308f-8b74-4861-a94a-4852078d5982 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Wittgenstein and the Private Language Argument
This is a linkpost for an essay I wrote about Wittgenstein and the private language argument on substack. Links lead to other essays on substack, so don't click these if you don't want to be directed there.
----------------------------------------
> ...the difficult ... |
1223a9c3-aa93-487e-95b2-2ee6e331dc3f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success
[Previously in sequence: Epistemic Learned Helplessness]
I.
“Culture is the secret of humanity’s success” sounds like the most vapid possible thesis. The Secret Of Our Success by anthropologist Joseph Heinrich manages to be an amazing book anyway.
Heinrich wants to debunk (or ... |
14ac2d56-0f08-4855-947b-806643c39fe4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Linkpost for Jan Leike on Self-Exfiltration
I'm really glad to see this stuff being discussed more publicly. I think this post will probably be a useful reference post to link people to (please lmk in the comments if you disagree!).
Some quotes below:
> For the near future, a good rule of thumb for “do you control t... |
6ea64224-9963-4670-bae0-696718c8b4b1 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | «Boundaries», Part 3a: Defining boundaries as directed Markov blankets
*This is Part 3a of my* [*«Boundaries» Sequence*](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/LWJsgNYE8wzv49yEc) *on LessWrong.*
Here I attempt to define (organismal) boundaries in a manner intended to apply to AI alignment and existential safety, in theory and i... |
fc4d0c4c-2b85-48ce-af96-dc424939460a | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | AI Safety Ideas: A collaborative AI safety research platform
**TLDR**; We present the AI safety ideas and research platform [**AI Safety Ideas**](https://aisi.ai) in open alpha. Add and explore research ideas on the website here: [aisafetyideas.com](https://aisafetyideas.com/).
AI Safety Ideas has been accessible for... |
e55286aa-e713-486b-934e-72578bd4c37f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Which animals realize which types of subjective welfare?
Summary
In a previous piece, I defined and discussed four potential types of subjective welfare: hedonic states, felt desires, belief-like preferences and choice-based preferences. Setting aside the moral question of which types of welfare matter intrinsically, ... |
70b22fb3-12af-428f-aeb6-5386965413b0 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | AI #1: Sydney and Bing
Previous AI-related recent posts: [Jailbreaking ChatGPT on Release Day](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/jailbreaking-the-chatgpt-on-release), [Next Level Seinfeld](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/next-level-seinfeld), [Escape Velocity From Bullshit Jobs](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/escape-velocity... |
fc271d2a-8cb9-47a8-9b07-9668e3869e17 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences)
Thus begins the ancient parable:
If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? One says, “Yes it does, for it makes vibrations in the air.” Another says, “No it does not, for there is no auditory processing in any brain.”
If there’s a foun... |
6ab6023b-a0bf-416a-a8eb-6fffb6eadd4a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Three methods of attaining change
Say that you want to change some social or political institution: the educational system, the monetary system, research on AGI safety, or what not. When trying to reach this goal, you may use one of the following broad strategies (or some combination of them):
1) You may directly try... |
79feaea8-5ac3-4032-969f-0986989a3566 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Forecasting time to automated superhuman coders [AI 2027 Timelines Forecast]
Authors: Eli Lifland,[1] Nikola Jurkovic,[2] FutureSearch[3]
This is supporting research for AI 2027. We'll be cross-posting these over the next week or so.
Assumes no large-scale catastrophes happen (e.g., a solar flare, a pandemic, nucl... |
b71878c8-a53b-4e4d-9685-9172fc0313ee | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Superintelligent Introspection: A Counter-argument to the Orthogonality Thesis
John Wentworth serendipitously posted [How To Write Quickly While Maintaining Epistemic Rigor](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Psr9tnQFuEXiuqGcR/how-to-write-quickly-while-maintaining-epistemic-rigor) when I was consigning this post to gath... |
ad69ef28-41eb-4243-bdb9-4a1ee86f709e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Can you donate to AI advocacy?
I posted a quick take that advocacy may be more effective than direct donation to alignment research. I am not an AI researcher and I'm not an influencer, so I'm not well positioned to do either. I see on the "How can I help" FAQ that there are options to donate, but they look like don... |
f8961488-dd94-4874-b1e2-142a76a5d40e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Boston: How to Beat Perfectionism
Discussion article for the meetup : Boston: How to Beat Perfectionism
WHEN: 17 May 2015 03:30:04PM (-0400)
WHERE: 98 Elm Street, Somerville
How to Beat Perfectionism (or at least reduce it)
Are you a perfectionist? Do you want to be? Do you want to not be? Jesse Galef wil... |
7b4d7ba9-b4ee-415d-8d5c-ae45e9b79776 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Experiment Idea: RL Agents Evading Learned Shutdownability
Preface
=======
*Produced as part of the*[*SERI ML Alignment Theory Scholars Program*](https://www.serimats.org/) *- Winter 2022 Cohort. Thanks to*[*Erik Jenner*](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/erik-jenner) *who explained to me the basic intuition for why an... |
04d723e7-13f4-458e-a8a2-c6fd077f668a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | People being controlled by what they can't perceive consciously
An audience is switched from clapping on the first and third beats to the second and fourth beats because the pianist added a fifth beat.
I admit I can barely hear what's going on-- the audience sounds better to me after the 40 second mark, but I'm takin... |
e18783ec-364d-469b-bba0-1bec3863b371 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Doing "Nothing"
It might be a useful habit to remember, whenever you're making a choice about some situation, that "doing nothing" is never actually an available option. Even if you avoid doing the task you're considering, you're still making some kind of choice about how you spend your time, and you're still doing so... |
8d50d961-cdb1-442d-b65b-a739d0052a89 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why Attitudes Matter
Sometimes when I am giving ethical advice to people I say things like "it's important to think of yourself and your partner as being on the same team" or "just remember that women in short skirts are almost certainly not wearing short skirts to arouse you in particular" or "cultivate your curiosit... |
ca406615-111b-4766-bfac-d228069cb28c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Using a memory palace to memorize a textbook.
I spent the week prepping for finals. One is a year-long cumulative closed-book chemistry exam that I haven't had much time to practice for. I was worried about memorizing a few things:
* Periodic trends and exceptions
* The form and application of approximately 100 wor... |
75f691a8-6243-4397-8a19-704118811b21 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Fibromyalgia, Pain & Depression. How much is due to physical misalignment?
I used to think the human 'machine' was a poor design.
I was wrong.
It was poor usage that had made life so painful.
This is my explanation for chronic pain and the many pain-related syndromes currently classified as idiopathic (the cause ... |
9244c594-5145-444a-9ced-1a2f969584d1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Tell Your Rationalist Origin Story
To break up the awkward silence at the start of a recent Overcoming Bias meetup, I asked everyone present to tell their rationalist origin story - a key event or fact that played a role in their first beginning to aspire to rationality. This worked surprisingly well (and I would rec... |
8eb16920-12a9-488f-93b5-2cd61ae223ff | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Cringe as prejudice
Cringe as prejudice
-------------------
a while ago, a friend of mine mentioned how they don't get cringe. what a weird notion! but, after trying to understand more deeply what causes me to cringe, i realized that i myself was losing grasp of the notion.
what is cringe? a visceral reaction to a... |
896afbeb-4bf5-4ba7-8b34-0d9652154d46 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube | Youtube Transcripts | DeepMind x UCL RL Lecture Series - Policy-Gradient and Actor-Critic methods [9/13]
hello and welcome to this ninth lecture
in this course marine enforcement
learning
my name is heart of the hustles and
today we will be talking about policy
gradients and extra critics
in terms of background material i
recommend that yo... |
b051771c-5070-4f69-b03a-0f760ca824ac | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Crime and Punishment #1
This seemed like a good next topic to spin off from monthlies and make into its own occasional series. There’s certainly a lot to discuss regarding crime.
What I don’t include here, the same way I excluded it from the monthly, are the various crimes and other related activities that may or may... |
880e45cd-16e4-43d4-a84f-a98eb43c6400 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What’s the contingency plan if we get AGI tomorrow?
We’ve got lots of theoretical plans for alignment and AGI risk reduction, but what’s our current best bet if we know superintelligence will be created tomorrow? This may be too vague a question, so here’s a fictional scenario to make it more concrete (feel free to cr... |
48613cce-a949-441e-8aed-eaf36ad0625b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Toward A Bayesian Theory Of Willpower
(crossposted from Astral Codex Ten)
I.
What is willpower?
Five years ago, I reviewed Baumeister and Tierney's book on the subject. They tentatively concluded it's a way of rationing brain glucose. But their key results have failed to replicate, and people who know more about gl... |
69812ea0-ae9b-4bbb-b6a1-e2013d9eb99f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Eight Hundred Slightly Poisoned Word Games
[cross-posted from my blog Astral Codex Ten]
In 2012, a Berkeley team found that indoor carbon dioxide had dramatic negative effects on cognition (paper, popular article). Subjects in poorly ventilated environments did up to 50% worse on a test of reasoning and decision-maki... |
c8968059-1c69-4627-b2e1-707e0328ae74 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Woods’ new preprint on object permanence
Quick poorly-researched post, probably only of interest to neuroscientists.
The experiment
Justin Wood at University of Indiana has, over many years with great effort, developed a system for raising baby chicks such that all the light hitting their retina is experimentally co... |
60b97ca9-1506-4766-9f38-c15c505dcaea | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Abstraction sacrifices causal clarity
In my previous post I listed some considerations for a theory of narratives. The smallest building block of narratives are abstractions over empirically observed things and events; that is the ontology of the language that the narrative uses. In this post I want to start laying ou... |
d71c6913-5bab-4abe-882f-f740d3376fba | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | SL4 META: list closure 2 month followup
This is probably of interest only to the old-timers here. (Ironically, as a cross-post, this is almost by definition spam for LW, since anyone really interested in the topic would already be subscribed to SL4 and would have seen the emails.)
In 13 March, I finally got around to... |
63e119a1-59f7-4edb-ab72-8316fa8d87a4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Creating unrestricted AI Agents with Command R+
TL;DR There currently are capable open-weight models which can be used to create simple unrestricted bad agents. They can perform tasks end-to-end such as searching for negative information on people, attempting blackmail or continuous harassment.
Note: Some might find... |
a426a4d0-2e14-4d99-806b-373a30637d80 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Mountain View: Invoking Curiosity
Discussion article for the meetup : Mountain View: Invoking Curiosity
WHEN: 26 March 2013 07:30:00AM (-0700)
WHERE: 278 Castro St, Mountain View, CA 94041
Get Curious is an explicit injunction to practice becoming curious whenever it's useful. Or pleasant, I suppose. I've ... |
d60b12d0-9c7e-492a-be56-de02dfbed996 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Vassar talk in New Haven, Sunday 2/27
Hey all. I've invited Michael Vassar, president of the Singularity Institute, to come to Yale to give a talk on AI and the Methods of Rationality. We'll be holding the talk on Sunday the 27th at 4 PM, at WLH 119 (100 Wall St., New Haven CT), with an open discussion afterwards. Eve... |
e5b5847c-1c42-4e0c-90f1-65eaa9703eac | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is technological change accelerating?
Eliezer said in a speech at the Singularity Summit that he's agnostic about whether technological change is accelerating, and mentions Michael Vassar and Peter Thiel as skeptical.
I'd vaguely assumed that it was accelerating, but when I thought about it a little, it seemed like a... |
201418a2-ef1e-4fc4-b96c-005f06cf0b98 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Misleading Boiler Error Message
This morning we woke up to a cold house and a sad furnace:
The furnace is a Burnham Alpine 150 (ALP150BW-4T02) that we installed in Fall 2015, not long after we bought the house. No issues before this. It had a diagnostic ("Limit String Status") where it explained why it was refusing... |
2dd5e2f8-1607-4a71-8ca5-6cd3e1718f32 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Does anti-malaria charity destroy the local anti-malaria industry?
The usual argument against foreign aid to Africa is that randomly giving tons of free goods (such as food) ruins local producers; and when at some later moment the charity goes out of fashion (or decides to target a different part of Africa), the local... |
185d1044-78ff-4802-b27a-5ce7b215d143 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Compute Trends — Comparison to OpenAI’s AI and Compute
This is a slightly modified version of Appendix E from our paper "Compute Trends Across Three Eras of Machine Learning". You can find the summary here and the complete paper here.
After sharing our updated compute trends analysis a common question was: "So how ar... |
65c94ede-dda6-48da-bdb5-50f1af0987c9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Center on Long-Term Risk: Summer Research Fellowship 2025 - Apply Now
Summary: CLR is hiring for our Summer Research Fellowship. Join us for eight weeks to work on s-risk motivated empirical AI safety research. Apply here by Tuesday 15th April 23:59 PT.
----------------------------------------
We, the Center on Long... |
42c53459-7ddf-4e0c-8dce-c622a7832cf0 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | [AN #86]: Improving debate and factored cognition through human experiments
Find all Alignment Newsletter resources [here](http://rohinshah.com/alignment-newsletter/). In particular, you can [sign up](http://eepurl.com/dqMSZj), or look through this [spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PwWbWZ6FPqAgZWOo... |
284f6962-7881-4d72-8564-cca9effeec96 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How many galaxies could we reach traveling at 0.5c, 0.8c, and 0.99c?
The expansion of the universe means that even travelling at the speed of light, over time an increasing number of galaxies will be beyond our reach, hence the concept of "reachable universe." Right now, how many galaxies could we potentially reach if... |
a63b7dab-07a4-4664-a8d2-7038af8d8e08 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why did the UK switch to a 12 week dosing schedule for COVID-19 vaccines?
On December 30, 2020 Boris Johnson gave a speech in which he announced that the UK would follow a COVID-19 vaccination dosing schedule with a twelve week gap between first and second doses, instead of the 3 weeks that is standard in the US (and ... |
11ce72e5-d088-403f-80d7-4dcce61ab40b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 11
EDIT: New discussion thread here.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. With two chapters recently the previous thread has very quickly reached 500 comments. ... |
542d0cfd-0f36-48b1-87cc-46398d0df67e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Would You Slap Your Father? Article Linkage and Discussion
I said that my next post would discuss why IQ tests don't measure frontal executive functions, but I've found something tangential yet extremely topical which I think should be discussed first.
A reader sent me a link to this Opinion column written by New Yo... |
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