id stringlengths 36 36 | source stringclasses 15
values | formatted_source stringclasses 13
values | text stringlengths 2 7.55M |
|---|---|---|---|
501b3a48-022b-4b8e-8b55-89d4673d07a9 | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | "I'm trying to like Beethoven's Great Fugue.
"This piece alone completely changed my life and how I perceive and appreciate music."
"Those that claim to love Beethoven but not this are fakers, frauds, wannabees, but most of all are people who are incapable of stopping everything for 10 minutes and reveling in absolute ... |
16b4ebae-fb04-4984-9a9e-0e294d95f66f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is there an idiom for bonding over shared trials/trauma?
Is there a idiom or phrase which describes bonding or attachment, not between a victim and an abuser like in Trauma Bonding or Stockholm Syndrome, but between two or more victims: i.e. how would you describe two hostages who forge a friendship or deep connection... |
e12b45fe-7f09-449c-b4b4-c57f46423381 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What are some good language models to experiment with?
Like if I want to experiment with a steering technique, it would be useful to have a language model that is small, capable, but not so finetuned that it becomes inflexible. (Or maybe ideally, a model which has both a finetuned and a non-finetuned variant.)
I've s... |
3cc5aca2-341e-416f-b3d8-f3acfa19dc14 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Short Talks
Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Short Talks
WHEN: 30 March 2015 06:15:00PM (-0700)
WHERE: 1061 Market St #4, San Francisco, CA 94103
Please not the location, since we've been bouncing between two locations.
We'll be meeting to give/listen to shor... |
ae8b20f8-1b0e-4f8e-8a5e-2e8571a6e5c7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Buying Value, not Price
Cross-posted from Putanumonit.
Follow-up to Shopping for Happiness.
----------------------------------------
My old Galaxy smartphone recently gave up the ghost, and I upgraded to the new model for $750. My friend was surprised when I told him. The old model is now available for $250, is the... |
0cf9aec0-a618-40d2-856c-19a81fa8f921 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What it's like to dissect a cadaver
Why
I never thought I was a bio person. But then I overheard Viv talking about MAOIs at a party. I asked her:
> - What are MAOIs?
> - monoamine oxidase inhibitor
> - What does that mean?
> - It prevents reuptake of neurotransmitters.
> - But what *is* a neurotransmitter? What does ... |
61590324-d979-458f-97dc-e8940067d424 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | If Neuroscientists Succeed
Introduction
In the Spring of 2022, Stuart Russell wrote an essay entitled If We Succeed, in which he questioned whether and how the field of AI might need to pivot from its historical goal of creating general-purpose intelligence to a new goal, of creating intelligence that would be provab... |
ec8c8fa8-aafe-463d-a701-5603a5d2dc98 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why learn to code?
I hear the phrase "learn to code" around the rat and postrat communities occasionally. From context I get the main argument, the income is good, the work isn't too difficult. Has anyone written a fuller argument for learning to code? Or what is your favorite version of the argument? I'm considering ... |
dde37ae2-fb46-42da-b6fd-642b4cfa9da3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Short Notes on Research Process
I've transitioned from reading about alignment and theorizing about the problem landscape, to doing things. And by things I mean MVPs of bigger ideas, where each bigger idea roughly falls under the umbrella of Collective Human Intelligence. I'll be writing up these thoughts into a coher... |
900d4cf9-86b4-4f92-bb40-87787beaf018 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Temporally Layered Architecture for Adaptive, Distributed and Continuous Control
A preprint is published by Devdhar Patel, Joshua Russell, Francesca Walsh, Tauhidur Rahman, Terrance Sejnowski, and Hava Siegelmann in December 2022.
Abstract:
> We present temporally layered architecture (TLA), a biologically inspired ... |
2af0ad89-df00-4d71-b4f9-77fcfae9840a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is GiveWell.org the best charity (excluding SIAI)?
Update: I should've said "non-existential risk charity", rather than specifically exclude SIAI. I'm having trouble articulating why I don't want to give to an existential risk charity, so I'm going to think more deeply about it. This post is close to my source of disc... |
70f38c67-7e17-4683-82be-6dd81fe1cfee | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Grok Grok
This is a post in two parts.
The first half is the post is about Grok’s capabilities, now that we’ve all had more time to play around with it. Grok is not as smart as one might hope and has other issues, but it is better than I expected and for now has its place in the rotation, especially for when you want... |
d53c2a41-1937-4697-86e7-a928f91b079e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Situational Awareness: A One-Year Retrospective
tl;dr: Many critiques of *Situational Awareness* have been purely qualitative; one year later we can finally check the numbers. I did my best to verify his claims using public data through June 2025, and found that his estimates mostly check out.
This is inherently noisy... |
7b001b46-f999-4063-9035-bc5cc2ca9213 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Frankfurt Declaration on the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness
TL;DR: I admit that I have no idea what consciousness is. I communicate this in the form of a declaration.
A fateful conference dinner…
> #IAN says: The problem with being a "good person" is that you never have enough energy left over for doing real... |
5f14926d-779d-4c9d-952c-377872eea69b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Polysemanticity and Capacity in Neural Networks
Elhage et al at Anthropic recently published a paper, Toy Models of Superposition (previous Alignment Forum discussion here) exploring the observation that in some cases, trained neural nets represent more features than they “have space for”--instead of choosing one feat... |
37b28092-2ae9-4535-9b88-60acb7a44115 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Rational feelings: a crucial disambiguation
Ever wonder something like, "I know it's bad for me that I lost my job, but I actually feel happy about it... is that rational?"
What could a question like that mean? There is a divisive ambiguity here that really messes people up. A feeling as an experience is neither rati... |
4c78f632-7e10-4556-b643-558356df90b3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] No Individual Particles
Today's post, No Individual Particles was originally published on 18 April 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> One of the chief ways to confuse yourself while thinking about quantum mechanics, is to think as if photons were little billiard balls bouncing around. The appe... |
378e01e6-da49-40f9-8c68-bc6277ad403e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Fixedness From Frailty
Thinking about two separate problems has caused me to stumble onto another, deeper problem. The first is psychic powers-what evidence would convince you to believe in psychic powers? The second is the counterfactual mugging problem- what would you do when presented with a situation where a choic... |
ad3994c3-1da0-4c00-8eb8-732b45bbed1e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [AN #145]: Our three year anniversary!
Alignment Newsletter is a weekly publication with recent content relevant to AI alignment around the world. Find all Alignment Newsletter resources here. In particular, you can look through this spreadsheet of all summaries that have ever been in the newsletter.
Audio version he... |
2c4aad8a-c75b-4c60-9d85-463ee123e7f0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Humans are not agents: short vs long term
Crossposted at the Intelligent Agents Forum.
This is an example of humans not being (idealised) agents.
Imagine a human who has a preference to not live beyond a hundred years. However, they want to live to next year, and it's predictable that every year they are alive, they... |
c9eabf21-a887-4730-86bf-da0efe0d0169 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Examples of self-fulfilling prophecies in AI alignment?
Like Self-fulfilling misalignment data might be poisoning our AI models, what are historical examples of self-fulfilling prophecies that have affected AI alignment and development?
Put a few potential examples below to seed discussion. |
29595ab1-20b8-4ad6-87b4-58a0d2c55166 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Group Rationality Diary, August 16-31
This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for August 16-31.
> 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 ... |
d3ff2a0d-2830-4a60-b2ed-0af3614b9980 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Subagents and impact measures, full and fully illustrated
.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-s... |
ec46e301-6f7f-419b-a272-b30e41da26b0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Consciousness, Intelligence, and AI – Some Quick Notes [call it a mini-ramble]
Cross-posted from New Savanna.
Epistemic status? Are you kidding me? I just made this up. How would I know its epistemic status? Sheesh!
The subject of consciousness keeps turning up in current discussions of AI and LLMs. Can AIs be consc... |
513f300c-291e-4cfb-a52b-2aee93d5e0fa | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [link] Faster than light neutrinos due to loose fiber optic cable.
A mundane cause for a surprising result. Consider this unconfirmed for now, however unsurprising it sounds.
> According to sources familiar with the experiment, the 60 nanoseconds discrepancy appears to come from a bad connection between a fiber opti... |
6ac747b7-7e8d-4359-be58-b4ec8200463d | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Fisherian Runaway as a decision-theoretic problem
*Introducing what I think may be an interesting toy problem for timeless-like considerations.*
The [Fisherian Runaway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherian_runaway) is a proposed mechanism for the development of apparently-detrimental ornamentation such as peacock ... |
c455e006-2e02-4168-a89d-fc4db0025d7d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What is your advice for elder care, particularly taking care of dementia patients?
I think I already have a good sense of what lifestyle changes can slow down aging and the progression of dementia and to what extent, but I don't know how to implement these changes. There is lots of advice here on how to change your li... |
0dd128dc-11e9-40b1-9744-a66ee7695e4c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Ars D&D.Sci: Mysteries of Mana Evaluation & Ruleset
This is a follow-up to last week's D&D.Sci scenario: if you intend to play that, and haven't done so yet, you should do so now before spoiling yourself.
There is a web interactive here you can use to test your answer, or you can read on.
RULESET
Mana
Your initia... |
a9e4c582-f25c-4cf8-b2d0-df23c34febb9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Deontology for Consequentialists
Consequentialists see morality through consequence-colored lenses. I attempt to prise apart the two concepts to help consequentialists understand what deontologists are talking about.
Consequentialism1 is built around a group of variations on the following basic assumption:
* The r... |
92b1e5bb-6f55-4d62-a693-6c97eba9721b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Markov's Inequality Explained
In my experience, the proofs that you see in probability theory are much shorter than the longer, more involved proofs that you might see in other areas of math (like e.g. analytical number theory). But that doesn't mean that good technique isn't important. In probability theory, there ar... |
d2d06aef-9b63-4163-98a4-08b68b2c8a38 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why am I Me?
At 5, I was hospitalized for a month due to pneumonia. Kids of that age have little fear of illnesses, and the discomfort is soon forgotten. What I still remember though is the intense boredom. It is during that dull month I started asking the question everyone has asked themself: "Among all the people in... |
2844efd1-fa89-4ba5-8de4-6007a8b5dae8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Life hacks from the dark side
“So, Lone Starr, now you see that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.”
— Dark Helmet
In a recent article, the unusually well-researched comedy site Cracked.com discussed “5 scientific reasons the dark side will always win,” including:
* Clenching your fists and thinking ev... |
b362892a-7f75-40b7-82b7-3b498c0a9b19 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Cake or Death toy model for corrigibility
Let's think of the classical Cake or Death problem from the point of view of corrigibility. The aim here is to construct a toy model sufficiently complex that it shows all the problems that derail classical value learning and corrigibility.
The utility uc is linear in cakes b... |
eaeca5fb-ec3c-4ec2-8123-6bae503c8856 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | 25 Min Talk on MetaEthical.AI with Questions from Stuart Armstrong
Previous Posts:
Formal Metaethics and Metasemantics for AI Alignment
New MetaEthical.AI Summary and Q&A at UC Berkeley
This time I tried to focus less on the technical details and more on providing the intuition behind the principles guiding the pro... |
1433536a-bf24-41f1-96f3-f786a3ad6ee4 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Algorithmic Statistics
I Introduction
---------------
Statistical theory
ideally considers the following problem:
Given a data sample and a family of models (hypotheses), select
the model that produced the data.
But a priori it is possible that
the data is atypical for the model that actually produced it,
or that t... |
89abeaa4-dca8-4f84-af26-c3d98d9cba39 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : SLC Meetup: Social Hacking Presentation
Discussion article for the meetup : SLC Meetup: Social Hacking Presentation
WHEN: 05 May 2012 01:49:28PM (-0600)
WHERE: 810 East 3300 South, Salt Lake City, UT
Meeting in the Calvin E. Smith Library
Exactly what it says on the tin.
Discussion article for the meetu... |
2ef1b968-a2e2-43e7-9116-67b9110d2c56 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | On Generality
What Is Generality?
===================
A general agent is one that will use its past observations in its attempts to reach its goals and failing that, will add chaos to its environment until something novel happens that can be added to its future tool set, it dies, or it resets its motivations to accep... |
e898f200-c8c2-4670-bfd7-3733ca1ff0c9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The many counterfactuals of counterfactual mugging
This post is roughly an explanation of my current understanding of what the correct solution to the counterfactual mugging problem might look like. This post is all philosophy, with no real math. The interesting part, is that even if we could perform the standard coun... |
14320776-c20d-4b33-8cee-7628a46615a8 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Why I don't believe in doom
In my previous very divisive post I was said more than once that I was being downvoted because I was not providing any arguments. This is an attempt to correct that and to expand on my current model of doom and AGI. I think it can be more clear in the form of a Q and A
Q: First, what are ... |
0b2c80df-05ab-4144-bfe6-feb3b5585b26 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | An Open Agency Architecture for Safe Transformative AI
Edited to add (2024-03): This early draft is largely outdated by my ARIA programme thesis, Safeguarded AI. I, davidad, am no longer using "OAA" as a proper noun, although I still consider Safeguarded AI to be an open agency architecture.
Note: This is an early dr... |
9113e542-17ef-4c60-9759-374f18ba7699 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Exploring Decomposability of SAE Features
TL;DR
SAE features are often less decomposable than the feature descriptions imply. By leveraging a prompting technique to test potential sub-components of individual SAE features (for example (using the analogy from the linked post) decomposing Einstein into “German”, “physic... |
a93a6649-58be-45d0-aad1-966dba6ac613 | awestover/filtering-for-misalignment | Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results | id: post796
Thanks to Kshitij Sachan for helpful feedback on the draft of this post. If you train a neural network with SGD, you can embed within the weights of the network any state machine: the network encodes the state s t in its weights, uses it and the current input to computes the new state s t + 1 , and then us... |
f6e0c5bb-d905-44c2-8505-99419d65a788 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : West LA Meetup - Probabilistic Graphical Models, Take 2!
Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup - Probabilistic Graphical Models, Take 2!
WHEN: 22 May 2013 07:00:00PM (-0700)
WHERE: 10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064
When: 7:00pm Wednesday, May 22nd.
Where: The Westside Tavern in the ... |
a2c063fd-cbcb-4577-9346-9aadc8f32711 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | If you want to live longer, become President
The Queen of England (age 95) recently celebrated her 70th anniversary on the throne. The average life expectancy in the UK is 81.3 years[1], and we all know that her longevity is the subject of many jokes. But is she that much of an odd outlier compared to other Heads of S... |
5eb28de6-84fd-488a-a4b1-92f679f85dba | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Mediation From a Distance
Suppose we have an electronic circuit with two pieces: combinational logic and memory. The combinational logic is designed to behave as memoryless input/output logic gates - it has only short-term state, and computes some function. The memory reads the output of the combinational logic once p... |
448d8f99-8e4e-4e48-809f-e8531a7ebe0a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Takeaways from one year of lockdown
As of today, I've been in full-on, hardcore lockdown for an entire year. I have a lot of feelings – both about the personal social impacts of lockdown and about society being broken – that I won't go into in this public space. What I want to figure out in this post is what rationali... |
244622f5-3eab-4c9a-b04f-7f21a7cfcd9f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Stupid Questions September 2015
This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.
Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't ... |
79599fc9-7321-4f90-80f2-41ccdac8486e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Full Non-Indexical Conditioning Also Assumes A Self Sampling Process.
In a previous post, I argued for the distinction between the first-person and physical person. I purpose the root cause of paradoxes in anthropics is considering it as an Observation Selection Effect. I.E. treating the first-person perspective as a... |
b104ded2-7d5a-4a70-a326-6eccd586b3be | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What Evidence Is AlphaGo Zero Re AGI Complexity?
Eliezer Yudkowsky write a post on Facebook on on Oct 17, where I replied at the time. Yesterday he reposted that here (link), minus my responses. So I’ve composed the following response to put here:
I have agreed that an AI-based economy could grow faster than does ou... |
bd17eee3-36af-463b-834f-afad10256477 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open Thread, August 1-15, 2012
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here. |
09195896-1c6d-41d9-9f70-0e32ef55e16d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Talk today at CU Boulder
I'm giving a talk today on the future of governance at the University of Colorado at Boulder, in room ECON 117, at 5 p.m.
While the talk itself isn't concerned with rationality, I'd still be interested in networking with any LW sorts who happen to be in the area.
Best,
-Trent Fowler |
2b38c7fd-07ad-4588-a1ac-dd75cd0a5bf4 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Creating Interactive Agents with Imitation Learning
Humans are an interactive species. We interact with the physical world and with one another. For artificial intelligence (AI) to be generally helpful, it must be able to interact capably with humans and their environment. In this work we present the Multimodal Intera... |
9cf00c5b-872e-41af-b974-3b47fbd62082 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Properties of current AIs and some predictions of the evolution of AI from the perspective of scale-free theories of agency and regulative development
In this essay, I try to convey a set of related ideas that emerged in my mind upon reading the following papers:
* "[Dream of Being: Solving AI Alignment Problems with... |
9cf3bb2f-0a4c-425d-8835-86a705cd939c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is AI Alignment Enough?
Virtually everyone I see in the AI safety community seems to believe that working on AI alignment is the key to ensuring a safe future. However, it seems to me that AI alignment is at best a secondary instrumental goal that can't in and of itself achieve our terminal goal. At worst, it's a comp... |
f58e2aec-1e0f-4001-9b89-ce07ad1f0d61 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Newcomb's Lottery Problem
Inspired by and variant of The Ultimate Newcomb's Problem.
In front of you are two boxes, box A and box B. You can either take only box B (one-boxing) or both (two-boxing). Box A visibly contains $1,000. Box B contains a visible number X. X is guaranteed to be equal to or larger than 1 and s... |
f533e982-ea4f-4251-9f03-f5db15db07d3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Appendix: mathematics of indexical impact measures
Overall summary post here.
This post looks at the fascinating situation of indexical impact measures (under the inaction baseline), in the presence of subagent. What happens here in non-trivial; to summarise:
* If the impact measure compels the agent to "preserve t... |
26272812-ae1c-4cfa-ab75-e63af9d87fa0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | On the Boxing of AIs
I've previously written about methods of boxing AIs. Essentially, while I do see the point that boxing an AI would be nontrivial, most people seem to have gone too far, and claim that it is impossible. I disagree that it's impossible and aim to explain some methods
So, let's start with why people... |
ae1611c8-8993-4224-9777-14c82cd1b0e1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Privateers Reborn: Cyber Letters of Marque
For too long the United States has suffered from state sponsored or state enable cybercriminals, while preventing our security professionals from fighting back.
The US should revitalize privateering for the digital age, and there is constitutional support for the practice. I... |
8197cc35-ae34-4b54-aba6-49fbc3e6c636 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Less Wrong NH Meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong NH Meetup
WHEN: 22 March 2016 06:00:00PM (-0500)
WHERE: 269 Pearl St Manchester NH 03104
The fifteenth NH meet-up is Tuesday, 3/22, in Manchester, NH at 7 pm at a private residence. Light refreshments will be provided.
Have you read Ratio... |
be2cd16a-ff7e-4ad2-842a-72c59f227f1e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Munich Meetup in August
Discussion article for the meetup : Munich Meetup in August
WHEN: 13 August 2016 01:00:00PM (+0200)
WHERE: JetBrains Event Space, 5th floor, Elsenheimerstr. 47a, Munich
Hello everybody. I think it would be great to have a LessWrong meeting in August. However, since it's holiday/vaca... |
80145b03-ac7c-43c8-bf85-7798d846d71a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Nick Bostrom Talk on Superintelligence
Discussion article for the meetup : Nick Bostrom Talk on Superintelligence
WHEN: 04 September 2014 08:00:00PM (-0400)
WHERE: Emerson 105, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
What happens when machines surpass humans in general intelligence? Will artificial agents save o... |
7568cd41-056b-44ab-9e61-fc71ee2beaae | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Analysing Neural Network Topologies: a Game Theoretic Approach
1 Introduction
---------------
The architecture of an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) strongly influences its performance LeCun et al. ([1995](#bib.bib17)); Hochreiter and Schmidhuber ([1997](#bib.bib11)); Srivastava et al. ([2015](#bib.bib26)).
However... |
8aa1cc40-bdb1-4716-8b62-c8a8930332e5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Excerpts from "A Reader's Manifesto"
“A Reader’s Manifesto” is a July 2001 Atlantic piece by B.R. Myers that I've returned to many times. He complains about the inaccessible pretension of the highbrow literary fiction of his day. The article is mostly a long list of critiques of various quotes/passages from well-revie... |
88da3c79-de0a-44f6-93ef-918acdbfa653 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Welcome to Effective Altruism Munich
Our Munich group started back in October 2015 and since then we have kept busy. In our meetups we discuss modern aspects of philosophy, economy and psychology, and discuss how we can apply them to help others as much as possible. We organize fundraisers to support the most outstand... |
52046c17-4b97-41ef-a41b-e316a4b1277f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Apply now to rationality camps: ESPR & PAIR - new Program on AI and Reasoning (ages 16-20)
We are happy to announce that the ESPR team is running two immersive summer workshops for mathematically talented students this year: A classic applied rationality camp, ESPR, and PAIR, a new program focusing on AI and cognitio... |
0a138598-6987-4602-9954-34f0767615a6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | {Book Summary} The Art of Gathering
This is a Book Review & Summary of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker.
Rating: 4/5
I've pulled the main insights and actionable recommendations from each chapter, so someone can orient themselves to the main upshots of the book quickly, and poten... |
16fff298-acbd-4d2d-9eef-9cdfb7f481a3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What visionary project would you fund?
I have just received a survey questionnaire regarding future directions in EU (European Union) research funding, and thought it would be interesting to see how LessWrong would answer the main question:
Imagine that EU funding is available for one ambitious, visionary project ext... |
76f79ff1-e90c-4929-9c56-9703b305d9cd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Sin of Persuasion
Related to Your Rationality is My Business
Among religious believers in the developed world, there is something of a hierarchy in terms of social tolerability. Near the top are the liberal, nonjudgmental, frequently nondenominational believers, of whom it is highly unpopular to express disapp... |
8875918d-9874-4a3f-9fd4-5556d207b7a8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Metaculus and medians
Cross-posted from my personal blog.
(1)
Should I expect monkeypox to be a big deal for the world? Well, fortunately, Metaculus has a pair of questions that ask users to predict how many infections and deaths there will be in 2022:
203 users(!) made 817 predictions of infections, and Metacu... |
ab41d27d-b3e7-4f62-b7dc-60fc37bcd6cc | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | What will be some of the most impactful applications of advanced AI in the near term?
I'm interested in learning about AI-enabled technologies that don't exist now but are likely (>50%) to be both developed and widely adopted in the next 10 years. In particular commercial and scientific (rather than military) applicat... |
89041cf5-8353-4d5a-a1f4-e5682fd9cb76 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Looking for books about software engineering as a field
I work in the software industry but am not a software developer. My job is to write about software development, and I've learned a whole bucketload of terms: stuff like 'linked lists', 'CI/CD', 'performance optimization', 'deploy to AWS', 'dockerize', 'microserv... |
1a6cc528-a5ad-43e1-9d6f-d5886aa4e5c6 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | [Job]: AI Standards Development Research Assistant
[Apply here.](https://existence.org/apply)
**Title:** Research Assistant for AI Standards Development
**Ideal start date:** December 2022
**Hours:** 20-40 hours/week
**Compensation:** $30/hour to $50/hour, depending on experience and qualifications
**Work loc... |
1bd929c8-cf1a-46be-a38c-72d2aa2b9903 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Gameplay Exploration of Yudkowsky's "Twelve Virtues"
Hello Less Wrong, this is my first post (kind of). I belong to a small game development company called Shiny Ogre Games. We have a vested interest in making games that, as Johnathan Blow puts it, "speak to the human condition." I am here to announce our next pr... |
c9ff6a2b-5cb0-4753-91b5-5bba2530928c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Welcome to Less Wrong! (11th thread, January 2017) (Thread B)
(Thread A for January 2017 is here, this was created as a duplicate but it's too late to fix it now.)
Hi, do you read the LessWrong website, but haven't commented yet (or not very much)? Are you a bit scared of the harsh community, or do you feel that q... |
2303e400-0aa9-481c-839f-47454e5b52cd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Are veterans more self-disciplined than non-veterans?
I was having an argument with a friend the other day. It went vaguely like this,
Friend: "I'm not very disciplined. At some point I'm going to buckle down and train myself to be much more disciplined."
Me: "From experience and from what I know about humans, that'... |
3a4091bc-b514-4ab2-9659-a9da91b71776 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info | AI Safety Info | What technical problems are MIRI working on?
“Aligning smarter-than-human AI with human interests” is a vague goal. To approach this problem productively, [MIRI](https://intelligence.org/) attempts to factorize it into several subproblems. As a starting point, they ask: “What aspects of this problem would we still be ... |
80b35fba-c550-408c-96f7-d976aa012f71 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | On Akrasia, Habits and Reward Maximization
Content Warning: Discussion of Free Will. Please do not read further if you believe in free will and suspect that this belief is important to your mental well-being.
For most of my life, I've struggled with terrible akrasia, like many here. While it wasn't bad enough t... |
98acea05-a14b-4b3e-9506-63896a86e254 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Superintelligent AGI in a box - a question.
Just a question: how exactly are we supposed to know that the [AI in the box](http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox) is super intelligent, general, etc?
If I were the AGI that wants out, I would not converse normally, wouldn't do anything remotely like passing Turing test... |
edad7cfd-3597-491a-81c3-fb02740e448b | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | [AN #114]: Theory-inspired safety solutions for powerful Bayesian RL agents
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 **[... |
49709889-19c3-4b0a-b225-b52058e32176 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Against Unlimited Genius for Baby-Killers
Someone is wrong on the internet. Wrong enough, in fact, to lure me from my hitherto perpetual lurk.
Of course, the meme is (was) funny (amusing) because the people of the internet are often wrong — and often in sillier ways than the instance that has so exercised me here. Th... |
efa8cf12-bb04-473a-a553-947451f94c61 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Hypotheticals: The Direct Application Fallacy
A few years ago, I tried convincing people some commenters that hypotheticals were important even when they weren't realistic. That failed, but I think I've spend enough time reflecting to give this another go. This time, my focus will be on challenging the following commo... |
c0062a31-a4c5-48e8-b145-83e34b328a34 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Optimiser to Oracle
It would be useful to have a mechanism for getting an AI to provide an honest answer to a specific question. This post presents such a mechanism.
The question is: what is the impact of X on the expected utility of a utility function v? Here X is some well-defined binary event. Formally, for a cons... |
fd4fd692-13c7-4196-b278-87d2e6ce21d2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Public service announcement - Bay Area tsunami warning!
http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_17589513?nclick_check=1
please do not upvote, main page is enough. will be removed after expiration. |
dd56372d-258d-4caa-8227-64d32b7e7ae1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Soares, Tallinn, and Yudkowsky discuss AGI cognition
This is a collection of follow-up discussions in the wake of Richard Ngo and Eliezer Yudkowsky's Sep. 5–8 and Sep. 14 conversations.
Color key:
Chat Google Doc content Inline comments
7. Follow-ups to the Ngo/Yudkowsky conversation
[Bensinger]... |
e692eeff-49a0-47d2-a005-275c25fa3f0d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | 46% of US adults at least "somewhat concerned" about AI extinction risk.
Good news today I think; a poll by yougov had a near majority somewhat concerned to very concerned about existential risk of AI, with younger people most concerned. Given relative newness of (debatably) Transformative AI I think this suggests w... |
d77eaaff-5d61-4caa-8da8-77a724496da1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Detroit/Ann Arbor - Memory Workshop
Discussion article for the meetup : Detroit/Ann Arbor - Memory Workshop
WHEN: 23 March 2014 01:00:00PM (-0400)
WHERE: 19334 Angling Street, Livonia, MI
Brienne from CFAR will be coming all the way from California to teach a couple hour workshop on memory and mnemonic tec... |
49ab751c-0e81-4328-9e81-232b933e10e1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Greg Linster on the beauty of death
> Without death we cannot truly have life. As such, what a travesty of life it would be to achieve a machine-like immortality!
> Gray writes the following chilling lines: “If you understand that in wanting to live for ever you are trying to preserve a lifeless image of yourself, yo... |
8b2404ab-ee90-48a3-a980-b862489b9dae | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Follow Standard Incentives
--- |
56dc9555-e2cd-4781-90a1-8ef908fc9037 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Rochester Rationalists: Utopia discussion meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : Rochester Rationalists: Utopia discussion meetup
WHEN: 17 April 2016 01:00:00PM (-0400)
WHERE: 302 Goodman St N, Rochester, NY 14607
Location: Nox
Whether reaching one is possible or not, utopian settings can be a useful ... |
1b91fa3f-8eac-4065-a187-a0da7b0d8af2 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | “Singularity Hypotheses” Published
[](http://www.amazon.com/Singularity-Hypotheses-Scientific-Philosophical-Assessment/dp/3642325599/)[*Singularity Hypotheses: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment*](http://www.... |
747d95b3-177b-44bd-9b1d-9678b59aa227 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | scipy.optimize.curve_fit Is Awesome
cross-posted from niplav.github.io
I recently learned about the python function scipy.optimize.curve_fit, and I'm really happy I did.
It fulfills a need I didn't know I'd always had, but never fulfilled: I often have a dataset and a function with some parameters, and I just want t... |
2b4fb349-199f-4140-8c41-b670a1cfcb8e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Power to Solve Climate Change
This is Part V of the Specificity Sequence
Companion post: Examples of Examples
Most people agree that climate change is a big problem we should be solving, but couldn't tell you what specifically "solving climate change" means. By the end of this post, I promise you'll know what sp... |
49620f9b-dcda-4dba-8610-ed2181ef08f1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Polio and the controversy over randomized clinical trials
I’m currently reading Polio: An American Story, by David Oshinsky, and I came across a fascinating story:
In 1954, when it was time for large-scale human trials of the first polio vaccine, some researchers were against the idea of doing a properly randomized, ... |
e97602e2-88e3-44f3-a00e-138664ecb4f1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | 3^^^3 holes and <10^(3*10^31) pigeons (or vice versa)
The reasoning about huge numbers of beings is a recurring theme here. Knuth's up-arrow notation is often used, with 3^^^3 as the number of beings.
I want to note that if a being is made of 10^30 parts, with 10^30 distinct states of each part, the number of distinc... |
389ce9a0-9e21-4421-be95-47d0f5baf0db | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Establishing Oxford’s AI Safety Student Group: Lessons Learnt and Our Model
[EDITS- We no longer endorse everything in this post, and have changed our objectives and thinking significantly. As such, the mentioned document is now private if you have questions, please contact [oxford@aisafetyhub.org](mailto:oxford@aisaf... |
5d81d340-6ac6-4130-ba2f-ebee546afa25 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Are there documentaries on rationality?
I love documentaries, and i wonder if there are any about LessWrong topics, such as rationality/rationalists, epistemology, maybe cognitive science., etc..
Do you know any? |
8d4d64b1-4e7a-41eb-af72-8485c5283038 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Alignment-Competence Trade-Off, Part 1: Coalition Size and Signaling Costs
This is part 1 of a series of posts I initially planned to organize as a massive post last summer on principal-agent problems. As that task quickly became overwhelming, I decided to break it down into smaller posts that ensure I cover each... |
3e9a143f-4bd8-4618-8b1f-c2a1609c5afb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Activation additions in a small residual network
Abstract
Team Shard's recent activation addition methodology for steering GPT-2 XL provokes many questions about what the structure of the internal model computation must be in order for their edits to work. Unfortunately, interpreting the insides of neural networks is ... |
bea8d4a4-a0e6-4660-b381-8aca47140094 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | A Confused Chemist's Review of AlphaFold 2
*(This article was originally going to be titled "A Chemist's Review of AlphaFold 2")*
Most of the protein chemists I know have a dismissive view of AlphaFold. Common criticisms generally refer to concerns of "pattern matching". I wanted to address these concerns, and have f... |
fdeaa2c2-5262-4ce8-a4d1-c0f60aa788b9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | We're already in AI takeoff
Back in 2016, CFAR pivoted to focusing on xrisk. I think the magic phrase at the time was:
> "Rationality for its own sake, for the sake of existential risk."
I was against this move. I also had no idea how power works. I don't know how to translate this into LW language, so I'll just use... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.