id stringlengths 36 36 | source stringclasses 15
values | formatted_source stringclasses 13
values | text stringlengths 2 7.55M |
|---|---|---|---|
d8a814de-4755-43e4-ad96-207fd1841ef1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Sorry for the downtime, looks like we got DDosd
We were down between around 7PM and 8PM PT today. Sorry about that.
It's hard to tell whether we got DDosd or someone just wanted to crawl us extremely aggressively, but we've had at least a few hundred IP addresses and random user agents request a lot of quite absurd p... |
cdc8dc56-57b9-4251-ae71-5c669c32c89c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | META: Who Have You Told About LW?
I've been lurking on LW since shortly after it started, and on OB for about six months before that. In that time, I've told four or five people about it. I would make a terrible evangelist.
I'm curious as to whether other people have the same problem. I'd like to tell lots of peop... |
c841039e-5718-48f7-a3e0-2bb5bf791b92 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | D&D.Sci Pathfinder: Return of the Gray Swan
This is an entry in the 'Dungeons & Data Science' series, a set of puzzles where players are given a dataset to analyze and an objective to pursue using information from that dataset.
Edited to add: Consensus is that this scenario is too complicated. It probably shouldn't... |
0061a00b-2d4f-4b99-b87b-fca78f9f08ab | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube | Youtube Transcripts | OUT OF CONTROL - The design of AI in everyday life (Elisa Giaccardi) - 1st AiTech Symposium
cute yes good afternoon what happens
when AI begins to operate in response to
everyday interactions with people
how can a AI systems remain trustworthy
once they begin to learn from us and
from each other these are really big... |
073ac02a-d37e-4361-bdd5-f4934ec6caf5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Truth about Scotsmen, or: Dissolving Fallacies
One unfortunate feature I’ve noticed in arguments between logically well-trained people and the untrained is a tendency for members of the former group to point out logical errors as if they were counterarguments. This is almost totally ineffective either in changing ... |
2d3411fa-ed51-4b31-9798-3afc786bd8e4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Luke' AMA gets a plug @ Wired [link]
http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2012/08/preventing-skynet/ |
a46c98ed-3abd-4c10-8cab-d34ee5153950 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | UML VI: Stochastic Gradient Descent
(This is part six in a sequence on Machine Learning based on this book. Click here for part 1.)
Stochastic Gradient Descent is the big Machine Learning technique. It performs well in practice, it's simple, and it sounds super cool. But what is it?
Roughly, Gradient Descent is an a... |
71efe618-cf2a-46e4-99bd-2b674cfc1988 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | [AN #118]: Risks, solutions, and prioritization in a world with many AI systems
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... |
ede416fd-211c-4699-996d-32fdf785ee66 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Are Cognitive Biases Design Flaws?
I am a newbie so today I read the article by Eliezer Yudkowski "Your Strength As A Rationalist" which helped me understand the focus of LessWrong, but I respectfully disagreed with a line that is written in the last paragraph:
> It is a design flaw in human cognition...
So this was... |
95a14881-f2aa-431c-8481-24ed185b899f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AI Risk in Terms of Unstable Nuclear Software
(This is an entry for the AI Safety Public Materials contest testing out a novel-ish frame on the AI Risk.)
----------------------------------------
In recent years, there'd been growing concerns among AI specialists regarding the dangers of advanced artificial intellige... |
3b325e3e-486f-4f4c-80b2-7b0ac3f6195d | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | AI transparency: a matter of reconciling design with critique
Vol.:(0123456789)1 3AI & SOCIETY
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-01110-y
STUDENT FORUM
AI transparency: a matter of reconciling design with critique
Tomasz Hollanek1
Received: 28 March 2020 / Accepted: 29 October 2020
© The Author(s) 2020
Abstract
In t... |
fd4d4892-275f-493f-ade9-3182878ea099 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [LINK] Steven Hawking warns of the dangers of AI
From the BBC:
> [Hawking] told the BBC:"The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race."
>
> ...
>
> "It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate," he said. "Humans, who are limited by slow biol... |
747dfa86-7d48-4284-ba93-312c3c651028 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Is AI Gain-of-Function research a thing?
Epistemic status: highly uncertain and fairly confused, seeking out opinions
First let me just post the definition of (biological) gain-of-function research from Wikipedia, so that everyone is on the same page:
> **Gain-of-function research** (**GoF research** or **GoFR**) i... |
71dfc5fd-37ab-4487-b8b1-acaed098be5d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AI Safety & Entrepreneurship v1.0
Why did I create both a post and a wiki article?
Posts are best for making sure people see the initial version of the post, whilst Wiki articles are best for long-term maintenance. Posting an article that links to a Wiki page provides the best of both worlds.
For the most up-to-dat... |
20ad1179-835e-4da3-aed3-a51bb29db0dd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Tel Aviv: Black Holes after Jacob Bekenstein
Discussion article for the meetup : Tel Aviv: Black Holes after Jacob Bekenstein
WHEN: 24 November 2015 08:00:00AM (+0300)
WHERE: Yigal Alon 98, Tel Aviv
We will meet in Google Israel (Electra Tower) on floor 29, as always.
If you have trouble finding the locat... |
bd2f84ad-7cae-4447-af44-6ddbb764d71d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Monthly Roundup #30: May 2025
I hear word a bunch of new frontier AI models are coming soon, so let’s do this now.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Programming Environments Require Magical Incantations.
2. That’s Not How Any of This Works.
3. Cheaters Never Stop Cheating.
4. Variously Effective Altruism.
5. Ceremony o... |
3839de50-ab70-45f7-ab40-864eff5d567b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] For The People Who Are Still Alive
Today's post, For The People Who Are Still Alive was originally published on 14 December 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> Given that we live in a big universe, and that we can't actually determine whether or not a particular person exists (because they will... |
d71721bc-6cbb-4166-be67-0a8e5dafd65a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Extinction Risks from AI: Invisible to Science?
Abstract: In an effort to inform the discussion surrounding existential risks from AI, we formulate Extinction-level Goodhart’s Law as "Virtually any goal specification, pursued to the extreme, will result in the extinction[1] of humanity'', and we aim to understand whic... |
4c7783c8-df4b-45e6-908d-0c5ca2cf92b1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Three Paths to Existential Risk from AI
|
2a95d962-f44c-4602-86a4-9f4cdfc04c33 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Timeless Physics
Today's post, Timeless Physics was originally published on 27 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> What time is it? How do you know? The question "What time is it right now?" may make around as much sense as asking "Where is the universe?" Not only that, our physics equation... |
8d32b84d-aa35-480c-9a0a-f2257c509089 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | In Praise of Boredom
If I were to make a short list of the most important human qualities—
—and yes, this is a fool's errand, because human nature is immensely complicated, and we don't even notice all the tiny tweaks that fine-tune our moral categories, and who knows how our attractors would change shape if we elimi... |
8062c253-d83a-488d-8630-0ed1072edadb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Tombstone Mentality
“In aviation safety, tombstone mentality is a pervasive attitude of ignoring defects until people have died because of them.” - Wikipedia
For years, US aviation safety progress was on the backs of the dead for commercial carriers. To change at least pilot induced accidents, the major airlines int... |
6c3540cd-48e1-46f9-aedb-3c26e4b9aa1b | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | MLSN: #10 Adversarial Attacks Against Language and Vision Models, Improving LLM Honesty, and Tracing the Influence of LLM Training Data
Welcome to the 10th issue of the ML Safety Newsletter by the Center for AI Safety. In this edition, we cover:
* Adversarial attacks against GPT-4, PaLM-2, Claude, and Llama 2
* Robus... |
490346b9-7943-4dd7-8d91-fee9972dbe25 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How I'm thinking about GPT-N
There has been a lot of hand-wringing about accelerating AI progress within the AI safety community since OpenAI's publication of their GPT-3 and Scaling Laws papers. OpenAI's clear explication of scaling provides a justification for researchers to invest more in compute and provides a cle... |
6024a1f2-d9ba-42a2-8006-d0ae6d835660 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Being Productive With Chronic Health Conditions
This post appeared first on the EA Coaching blog.
A fair number of clients who suffer from chronic health problems come though my metaphorical door. Personally, I’ve dealt with a chronic health condition called POTS since my early teens.
When you’re dealing with long... |
29a0d936-43b6-4717-b317-3783d93cc880 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Blue- and Yellow-Tinted Choices
> A man comes to the rabbi and complains about his life: "I have almost no money, my wife is a shrew, and we live in a small apartment with seven unruly kids. It's messy, it's noisy, it's smelly, and I don't want to live."
> The rabbi says, "Buy a goat."
> "What? I just told you there's... |
1df04136-c2f5-405b-b744-2ce064ac97e0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Las Vegas LW Meetup!
What: First Las Vegas/Henderson Less Wrong meetup
When: Saturday, May 28, 2011 7:00 PM
Where: Putters Bar & Grill
6945 S. Rainbow Blvd
Las Vegas, NV
Look for a bitcoin sign and ask for Duke.
For personal convenience I am piggybacking on this Bitcoin meetup. A bitcoiner will be giving an inform... |
07e108d9-5904-4653-b830-f25aa8b00318 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Seven Shiny Stories
It has come to my attention that the contents of the luminosity sequence were too abstract, to the point where explicitly fictional stories illustrating the use of the concepts would be helpful. Accordingly, there follow some such stories.
1. Words (an idea from Let There Be Light, in which I adv... |
0939931c-62b2-4bff-8cf9-5930b1ffb4b2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Liability regimes for AI
For many products, we face a choice of who to hold liable for harms that would not have occurred if not for the existence of the product. For instance, if a person uses a gun in a school shooting that kills a dozen people, there are many legal persons who in principle could be held liable for ... |
93163ca6-c602-4d2d-a0eb-2603297d9b97 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [LINK] Q&A with Larry Wasserman on risks from AI
I believe XiXiDu isn't posting on LW any more, but those following his interview series may be interested in the latest installment, an interview with Larry Wasserman of the Department of Statistics and the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. |
86b61c07-a3ae-46c2-91da-39fbae17bf70 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How Often Does Taking Away Options Help?
In small normal-form games, taking away an option from a player improves the payoff of that player usually <⅓ of the time, but improves the payoffs for the other player ½ of the time. The numbers depend on the size of the game; plotted here.
There's been some discussion about ... |
767feae9-4b5d-42c3-8c78-730ef5745fee | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Front Row Center
Epistemic Status: Lightweight
Related: Choices are Bad, Choices Are Really Bad
Yesterday, my wife and I went out to see Ocean’s Eight (official review: as advertised). The first place we went was a massively overpriced theater (thanks MoviePass!) with assigned seating, but they were sold out (thanks... |
f8bbe833-a8ac-40c0-9397-0787a17e8730 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Regularly meta-optimization
The usefulness of the different actions differ by orders of magnitude. Sometimes, redirecting efforts can increase your efficiency by an order of magnitude or more.
Imagine that the person who first came up with the idea of sorting charitable foundations by efficiency, instead of implement... |
5f417fe7-8bc4-4d83-ab7c-7f5347744364 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Minority Coalition
Hello everybody. Or maybe nobody. I don’t know yet if I’m going to release this stream, I could get in pretty hot water for it. But you guys know that hasn’t stopped me in the past. The backstory this time is that I’ve managed to sign up for one of the red-teaming programs where they test unrele... |
6863e5e2-dde7-47c7-9f67-891ea26f67a3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is CIRL a promising agenda?
Richard Ngo writes
> Since Stuart Russell's proposed alignment solution in Human Compatible is the most publicly-prominent alignment agenda, I should be more explicit about my belief that it almost entirely fails to address the core problems I expect on realistic pathways to AGI.
>
> Spec... |
12a05c25-ae76-4370-a515-e6a146b886ce | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Interpretability Tools Are an Attack Channel
This seems like a fairly trivial point, but I haven't seen it properly elaborated-on before, so...
When we talk about interpretability failure modes, we often worry about a deceptively-aligned mesa-optimizer with strategic awareness that would know it's being studied with ... |
9b0a49a5-bf86-4991-9dfb-6f3fb36efc29 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Long-term AI policy strategy research and implementation
**In a nutshell:** Advancing AI technology could have both huge upsides and huge downsides, including potentially catastrophic risks. To manage these risks, we need people making sure the deployment of AI goes well, by thinking about how to:
* Ensure broad shar... |
0518c5ca-c52e-4c44-8def-e0869e6f32a2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Another case of "common sense" not being common?
Okay, that is probably not that good a characterization. However, I do like when someone figures out a simple way of looking at problems that have gone unsolved and so thought to be very difficult, so therefore must be really complicated.
If you didn't see this:
https... |
5a5caf56-ce1b-49f5-8710-579fa0e1af14 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Litany Against Anger
The map is not the territory,
the word is not the thing.
My anger is not the trigger,
triggers do not become more or less important
as I feel anger wax and wane.
Emotions are motivation,
they're supposed to get me to do the right thing.
Defuse from my frustration,
breathe and wait for clarity c... |
ca3efdcd-dff6-45a4-ada5-d87e59f27ef7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Polite Coup
President Yoon Suk Yeol's hands trembled as he arranged the documents on his desk for the seventh time. The motion steadied his nerves – barely. The manila envelope contained photographs: himself accepting white envelopes from a chaebol’s construction executives, each image timestamped and crystal clea... |
846f33ae-d351-4e36-aed6-c81573c04d49 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Generalizing the Power-Seeking Theorems
Previously: Seeking Power is Often Provably Instrumentally Convergent in MDPs.
Circa 2021, the above post was revamped to supersede this one, so I recommend just reading that instead.
----------------------------------------
Thanks to Rohin Shah, Michael Dennis, Josh Turner, ... |
a56df312-b81b-4ddf-b767-d7370564d1af | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Against a General Factor of Doom
Jeffrey Heninger, 22 November 2022
I was recently reading the results of a survey asking climate experts about their opinions on geoengineering. The results surprised me: “We find that respondents who expect severe global climate change damages and who have little confidence in curren... |
aab155e7-f6c1-458e-abd4-f478f30719e4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Swarm AI (tool)
https://unanimous.ai/swarm/
I remember playing with this a while back, answering random questions. I guess now they've released it as a business tool for companies to run their own voting rooms.
Quick overview:
1. You create a room.
2. You invite 4-200 participants.
3. You ask questions.
4. Part... |
b32e4991-9090-4977-9f1e-62273ee5f97c | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | New report: “Vingean Reflection: Reliable Reasoning for Self-Improving Agents”
[](https://intelligence.org/files/VingeanReflection.pdf)Today we release a new technical report by Benja Fallenstein and Nate Soares, “[Vingean ... |
8eab3e39-353f-4a36-a611-0f1eb42660cb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Contextual Self
Aella writes about how contextual pride is. Her primary focus is on pride, but shame comes up, as well. A quick refresher of the concept - this is not a summary, and you will lose information if you use only this description: Pride is a sense of relative superiority to a relevant context.
Morality g... |
999d0452-fe14-494f-a008-eca2b86da5e5 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Steelman arguments against the idea that AGI is inevitable and will arrive soon
I’m pretty sure that AGI is almost inevitable, and will arrive in the next decade or two.
But what if I’m wrong and the "overpopulation on Mars" [folks](https://www.theregister.com/2015/03/19/andrew_ng_baidu_ai/) are right?
Let’s try so... |
0deed3be-dc5a-43a9-83c0-ba0c9384f716 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Augmenting Statistical Models with Natural Language Parameters
This is a guest post by my student Ruiqi Zhong, who has some very exciting work defining new families of statistical models that can take natural language explanations as parameters. The motivation is that existing statistical models are bad at explaining ... |
072ef032-4ae3-4d28-9d1e-176b0e000ba2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why GPT wants to mesa-optimize & how we might change this
This post was inspired by orthonormal's post Developmental Stages of GPTs and the discussion that followed, so only part of it is original.
First I'll aim to provide a crisper version of the argument for why GPT wants to mesa-optimize. Specifically, I'll expla... |
f4a7eb44-27c5-4b3e-bf34-102512a47fd8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Link: An exercise: meta-rational phenomena | Meaningness
An exercise: meta-rational phenomena | Meaningness |
0e6b1dc6-a925-4a41-8843-c55f973c59a9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Daily Schedules in Combating Akrasia
For the last several months I've had increasing troubles with motivation to work. Reading dense technical papers, writing, and exercise were all much more difficult to prompt myself into starting and completing. I decided to try making a plan for my day the night before about two ... |
54c7ef19-a4f9-40ab-a6bc-8ed6cc229efb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | My favorite popular scientific self-help books
I've spent several years studying scientific self-help. I'm sharing some of what I've learned in my sequence The Science of Winning at Life, but I probably won't have time to write additional posts in that series for a while. In the meantime, those who are interested in w... |
b671948c-c8a9-4c5b-b350-1bed5efa2dd2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Nucleic Acid Observatory Updates, April 2025
We’ve been very busy since our January update, and have a lot to share. As always, if you have questions or see opportunities to collaborate, please let us know; we’re eager to work with others thinking along similar lines.
Wastewater Sequencing
We’ve continued to collab... |
67908cbc-0056-4923-afe5-952b0b77c2cc | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Investigating the learning coefficient of modular addition: hackathon project
As our project at the [Melbourne hackathon](https://devinterp.com/events/2023-q3-melbourne-hackathon) on [Singular Learning Theory](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/czrXjvCLsqGepybHC) and alignment (Oct. 7-8), we did some experiments to estimate ... |
badae76b-5aa3-4adb-ba5c-975480be2fe3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Counterfactual Prisoner's Dilemma
Updateless decision theory asks us to make decisions by imagining what we would have pre-committed to ahead of time. There's only one problem - we didn't commit to it ahead of time. So we do we care about what would have happened if we had?
This isn't a problem for the standard N... |
618f5a2a-10af-4449-972c-a5d81cee34ca | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Throw a prediction party with your EA/rationality group
TL;DR: Prediction & calibration parties are an exciting way for your EA/rationality/LessWrong group to practice rationality skills and celebrate the new year.
On December 30th, Seattle Rationality had a prediction party. Around 15 people showed up, brought snack... |
a7c49b72-0b0d-4f61-881b-9694da4a6893 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Projecting compute trends in Machine Learning
Summary
Using our dataset of milestone Machine Learning models, and our recent analysis of compute trends in ML, we project forward 70 years worth of trends in the amount of compute used to train Machine Learning models. Our simulations account for (a) uncertainty in estim... |
cf551f2e-d308-46f6-a358-126c2ec6f16e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Problems with learning values from observation
I dunno if this has been discussed elsewhere (pointers welcome).
Observational data doesn't allow one to distinguish correlation and causation.
This is a problem for an agent attempting to learn values without being allowed to make interventions.
For example, suppose th... |
3d0ce28c-e4ae-4c4a-b056-a67e218e8fde | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Link: Open-source programmable, 3D printable robot for anyone to experiment with
Its name is Poppy.
"Both hardware and software are open source. There is not one single Poppy humanoid robot but as many as there are users. This makes it very attractive as it has grown from a purely technological tool to a real social ... |
5cf6b6f0-2974-4a0b-8eeb-b4c43b947b40 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Beware Social Coping Strategies
Worlds
The world is a huge, complex, scary place.
Winter used to freeze us dead, and today lives are still destroyed by natural disasters like tsunami and forest fires. Plagues used to destroy our communities, and people still die from disease every day. We want more power over our... |
8575eba6-8506-4e9b-90bb-8ef0a4b245bb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What are the strongest arguments for very short timelines?
I'm seeing a lot of people on LW saying that they have very short timelines (say, five years or less) until AGI. However, the arguments that I've seen often seem to be just one of the following:
1. "I'm not going to explain but I've thought about this a lot"... |
6f38346e-9fd7-4f1b-b0b2-e93f63c80678 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Troubles With CEV Part1 - CEV Sequence
<!-- @page { margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } A:link { so-language: zxx } -->
The CEV Sequence Summary: The CEV sequence consists of three posts tackling important aspects of CEV. It covers conceptual, practical and computational problems of CEV's current form. On What ... |
13b876a6-510a-469c-8dc0-1a082ac1458e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Evolution is a bad analogy for AGI: inner alignment
**TL;DR**: The dynamics of human learning processes and reward circuitry are more relevant than evolution for understanding how inner values arise from outer optimization criteria.
This post is related to Steve Byrnes’ [Against evolution as an analogy for how human... |
5872742a-e8ba-4963-b20d-bfdb202d7466 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | MIT Challenge: blogger to attempt CS curriculum on own
Scott H. Young is giving himself 12 months to complete MIT's computer science curriculum on his own, via MIT's OpenCourseWare.
|
d1c4a696-5e5e-4f20-a86b-a1ef99c3a487 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Quantum Mechanics, Nothing to do with Consciousness
Epistemic status: A quick rejection of the quantum consciousness woo. If you have already read the sequences, there's nothing new in here. If your new to the site, or need a single page to point people to, here it is.
Real Quantum mechanics looks like pages of abst... |
195c04dc-f32b-4a64-a618-149e8f8c1929 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Language of Bird
This is a fictional snippet from the AI Vignettes Day. I do not think this is a likely future, but it’s a useful future to think about - it gives a different lens for thinking about the alignment problem and potential solutions. It’s the sort of future I’d expect if my own research went far better... |
9edc3f05-616b-49e9-b640-db1d297540fb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | When can Fiction Change the World?
I suspect that a nontrivial percentage of the people reading this became involved with the community because of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
So to the extent that those who were drawn to join the community because of that source are making the world a better place, w... |
c2a5382b-8fa8-465c-a714-b4b7a02279c9 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Shannon
The shannon (Sh) is a unit of [https://arbital.com/p/-3xd](https://arbital.com/p/-3xd). One shannon is the difference in [entropy](https://arbital.com/p/info_entropy) between a [https://arbital.com/p/-probability_distribution](https://arbital.com/p/-probability_distribution) on a [https://arbital.com/p/-binary... |
c1f859cf-c330-4dd9-81c0-ada6b4754a61 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Talk to me about your summer/career plans
Last May, I wrote a post called [talk to me about your summer plans](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/eREwP2tom9QKkvCqR/talk-to-me-about-your-summer-plans). I was impressed by the number & quality of people who reached out. Some people found it helpful, so I'm doing i... |
084483d3-9d93-4d86-9db0-6cf42c5057e2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Help the AI 2027 team make an online AGI wargame
The AI Futures Project, the team behind AI 2027, has developed a tabletop exercise (TTX) to simulate AI takeoff where we facilitate people going through an AI 2027-like scenario with different people taking different roles, like POTUS, China, or the frontier AI company ... |
714a6a45-5b89-4fd8-b4d5-e0af9039ad00 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | If rationality is purely winning there is a minimal shared art
This sites strapline is refining the art of human rationality. It assumes there is something worth talking about.
However I've been seeing "rationality as winning" bare of any context. I think the two things are in conflict.
Let me take the old favourite... |
2ee4b363-11a6-426a-9e2c-73c48812755c | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | AGI-09 Survey
[Baum et al.](http://sethbaum.com/ac/2011_AI-Experts.pdf) surveyed 21 attendees of the [AGI-09](http://agi-conference.org/2009/) conference, on [AGI](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_General_Intelligence) timelines with and without extra funding. They also asked about other details of AGI developm... |
f6d0b052-b173-4748-a33c-e2c71c9f5867 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Book Review]: The Bonobo and the Atheist by Frans De Waal
The Bonobo and the Atheist does something truly rare, which is to come up with an interesting way of viewing morality. 'What is right?' is the most pored-over and divisive question in all of philosophy, the book mostly ignores it. The best parts of it contain ... |
b7314afd-5226-497e-bdbd-a56ba8267380 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Electric heat pumps (Mini-Splits) vs Natural gas boilers
I’m kinda out of the loop on this stuff, but it seems like suddenly out of nowhere everyone around me is converting natural gas heat into electric heat pumps—specifically a thing called a “mini-split” which can be both a heat pump in the winter and an air condit... |
07e44eee-6dea-4ebe-8b28-d320d8cbc29c | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Race to the Top: Benchmarks for AI Safety
*This is an executive summary of a post from my personal blog, also* [*cross-posted*](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/saEXX9Nucz8mh9XgB/race-to-the-top-benchmarks-for-ai-safety) *from the EA Forum. **Read the full texts*** [***here***](https://isaduan.github.io/isabe... |
66ee33d2-f224-4e15-a00a-2fce68245f3d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Finding Cruxes
This is the third post in the Arguing Well sequence, but it can be understood on its own. This post is influenced by double crux, is that your true rejection, and this one really nice street epistemology guy.
The Problem
Al the atheist tells you, “I don’t believe in the Bible, I mean, there’s no way ... |
0eda3796-874e-4955-8198-bc753f9d96c1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Dealing with Curiosity-Stoppers
Introduction
Curiosity is a virtue. It promotes epistemic honesty, ignites creativity, and improves both competence and well-being. Multiple posts already discussed different types of curiosity the contrast between signalling curiosity and being curious, the scientific evidence behind c... |
d1f40299-9907-4c5d-b7bc-3abf33c8ad36 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why and how to write things on the Internet
Recently I noticed that most existing “why you should write a blog” articles (e.g.) have at least one of two shortcomings, according to me:
* They mostly focus on counterarguments to not starting a blog, rather than positive arguments in favor of starting one—as if people’... |
8e0136d3-4695-425a-a995-79dbe48039ec | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | probability under potential hardware failure
probability under potential hardware failure
--------------------------------------------
suppose you program a computer to do bayesian calculations. it does a bunch of math with probability numbers attached to, for example, logical belief statements.
but, suppose that ... |
d138adc6-07dd-45df-b4db-fa22d5be1d9e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Computation complexity of AGI design
Summary of main point: I argue that there is a significant probability that creating de novo AGI is an intractable problem. Evolution only solved this problem because of anthropic reasons. Conclusions are drawn regarding priorities in AI risk research.
Sketch of main argument: The... |
ea2148b0-afbd-452e-bdd3-b72bd992a149 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey - Call For Critiques/Questions
It's that time of year again. Actually, a little earlier than that time of year, but I'm pushing it ahead a little to match when Ozy and I expect to have more free time to process the results.
The first draft of the 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey is complete... |
c0495305-1b2a-4779-952a-bebc767f5a1d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What New Desktop Should I Buy?
It's time for me to buy a new desktop, as my old one isn't working so well anymore.
It also happens to be 'black Friday in July' which opens up the opportunity to perhaps get a good sale price somewhere.
Time is valuable, so I'm happy to spend a reasonably large amount if it actually ... |
fb9174dc-df39-496f-bd65-efce6e430dc9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Parametric polymorphism in updateless intelligence metrics
Followup to: Agents with Cartesian childhood and Physicalist adulthood
In previous posts I have defined a formalism for quantifying the general intelligence of an abstract agent (program). This formalism relies on counting proofs in a given formal system F (l... |
ac473696-6ff6-43a0-afd2-e09afd67ac34 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | MIRI's July 2024 newsletter
MIRI updates
* Rob Bensinger suggests that AI risk discourse could be improved by adopting a new set of labels for different perspectives on existential risk from AI. One drawback of “AI doomer” (a label sometimes used in online discussions) is that it does not have a consistent meaning.
... |
3c5273a4-1718-4d66-b354-9265f0d1fbcc | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Christiano and Yudkowsky on AI predictions and human intelligence
This is a transcript of a conversation between Paul Christiano and Eliezer Yudkowsky, with comments by Rohin Shah, Beth Barnes, Richard Ngo, and Holden Karnofsky, continuing the [Late 2021 MIRI Conversations](https://intelligence.org/late-2021-miri-conv... |
69dfa196-71e6-4e2a-a203-55f044f005f5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Formal verification, heuristic explanations and surprise accounting
ARC's current research focus can be thought of as trying to combine mechanistic interpretability and formal verification. If we had a deep understanding of what was going on inside a neural network, we would hope to be able to use that understanding t... |
37d878bc-196e-4706-a72a-c8ad00ad1f8b | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Anthropics and Fermi: grabby, visible, zoo-keeping, and early aliens
When updating the probability of life across the universe, there are two main observations we have to build on:
* Anthropic update: we exist on Earth.
* [Fermi observation](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404.pdf): (we exist on Earth and) we don't see... |
b22ce1bd-4e66-4853-972e-054c5d0f4533 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Futurama does an episode on nano-technology.
Futurama, Season 6, Episode 15: Benderama
Naturally, this episode's goal is entertainment, not so much the accurate portrayal of the technology.
Quoting from wikipedia article:
> The premise of "Benderama" is based around the transhumanist theory of grey goo, an end-of-t... |
49c1ed1f-1987-4fa8-8539-4516512dd293 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What is the purpose and application of AI Debate?
I think there is an important lack of clarity and shared understanding regarding how people intend to use AI-Safety-via-Debate-style approaches. So I think it would be helpful if there were some people --- who either (i) work on Debate or (ii) believe that Debate is pr... |
0a1d7532-1069-479b-a81e-5d657961b346 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Proposal for Defeating Moloch in the Prison Industrial Complex
Summary
I'd like to increasing the well-being of those in the justice system while simultaneously reducing crime. I'm missing something here but I'm not sure what. I'm thinking this may be a worse idea than I originally thought based on comment feedback,... |
48a011b6-8527-403c-af1b-43ed0c2fb24e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Post retracted: If you follow expected utility, expect to be money-pumped
This post has been retracted because it is in error. Trying to shore it up just involved a variant of the St Petersburg Paradox and a small point on pricing contracts that is not enough to make a proper blog post.
I apologise.
Edit: Some peopl... |
92f25229-37db-4afe-8048-3ba7f3598754 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Change Contexts to Improve Arguments
On a recent trip to Ireland, I gave a talk on tactics for having better arguments (video here). There's plenty in the video that's been discussed on LW before (Ideological Turing Tests and other reframes), but I thought I'd highlight one other class of trick I use to have more fru... |
4349b14c-030b-44b2-bfd6-ad93205d02ce | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | I have COVID, for how long should I isolate?
Case was relatively mild, and I'm feeling a lot better now (day 5), though I still have the sniffles and minor fatigue. I tested negative last week and positive this week via PCR, so I'm pretty confident this was COVID and not an unrelated illness. I live in the US, where C... |
043364e1-de2d-4dfb-997d-3f433a661bbc | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Cambridge, MA third-Sunday meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge, MA third-Sunday meetup
WHEN: 18 February 2013 02:00:00PM (-0500)
WHERE: 25 Ames St Cambridge, MA 02138
Cambridge/Boston-area Less Wrong meetups recur on the first and third Sunday of every month, 2pm at the MIT Landau Building... |
ddc00b23-c2e5-4fc9-8fc1-90b67f2d0fe2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Dominic Cummings: "we’re hiring data scientists, project managers, policy experts, assorted weirdos"
Dominic Cummings (discussed previously on LW, most recently here) is a Senior Advisor to the new UK PM, Boris Johnson. He also seems to be essentially a rationalist (at least in terms of what ideas he's paying attentio... |
1008911a-9d55-4ca0-8ad2-94862de138ed | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Does cognitive therapy encourage bias?
Summary: Cognitive therapy may encourage motivated cognition. My main source for this post is Judith Beck's Cognitive Therapy: Basics and Beyond.
"Cognitive behavioral therapy" (CBT) is a catch-all term for a variety of therapeutic practices and theories. Among other things, it ... |
01bf51d3-519a-4b06-8d3d-99812e5b40b8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | on wellunderstoodness
epistemic status: nothing new, informal, may or may not provide a novel compression which gives at least one person more clarity. Also, not an alignment post, just uses arguments about alignment as a motivating example, but the higher-level takeaway is extremely similar to the Rocket Alignment di... |
8bd98e52-2b7c-4955-95eb-b095588ba596 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Cancer Resolution?
Book review: The Cancer Resolution?: Cancer reinterpreted through another lens, by Mark Lintern.
In the grand tradition of outsiders overturning scientific paradigms, this book proposes a bold new theory: cancer isn't a cellular malfunction, but a fungal invasion.
Lintern spends too many pages... |
55d4129e-a556-4056-b24d-32c367f21d86 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Briefly thinking through some analogs of debate
[This post is an almost direct summary of a conversation with John Wentworth.]
Note: This post assumes that the reader knows what AI Safety via Debate is. I don't spend any time introducing it or explaining how it works.
The proposal of AI safety via debate depends on ... |
8a20a41e-3679-45ae-bddd-d553ff1dfa54 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Speculations on information under logical uncertainty
.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... |
835c5fd6-b532-45dc-9d13-c11a94b7c9c7 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Interest in mathematical foundations in Bayesianism
[https://arbital.com/p/multiple-choice](https://arbital.com/p/multiple-choice) |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.