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71875754-0904-4347-b420-6fa44e4ed45f
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
Discovering when an agent is present in a system [![DeepMind Safety Research](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fill:88:88/2*y3lgushvo5U-VptVQbSX9Q.png)](/?source=post_page-----41154de11e7b--------------------------------)Listen Share ***New, formal definition of agency gives clear principles for causal modelling of...
945c7c9a-41fa-4af5-b967-67a52b022ea9
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital
Arbital
Look where I'm pointing, not at my finger ## Example problem Suppose we're trying to give a [Task AGI](https://arbital.com/p/6w) the task, "Make there be a strawberry on the pedestal in front of your webcam." For example, a human could fulfill this task by buying a strawberry from the supermarket and putting it on t...
8b1dd097-1a3d-4145-b7c4-bfe77a0f524f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Can SAE steering reveal sandbagging? Summary  * We conducted a small investigation into using SAE features to recover sandbagged capabilities. * We used the Goodfire API to pick out 15 SAE features, 5 related to sandbagging, 5 related to general expertise, and 5 unrelated features. * We used these features to steer...
7b0d26ff-aa96-41eb-9a1b-52288959ab68
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Information-Theoretic Equivalence of Entropic Multi-Marginal Optimal Transport: A Theory for Multi-Agent Communication 1 Introduction --------------- After Shannon’s groundbreaking work (Shannon, [1948](#bib.bib33 "A mathematical theory of communication")), information theory has been playing a central role in engi...
5accc023-a7e6-4e61-a4df-cf1b86e5c014
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
There Meat Come A Scandal... ARCHIVED VERSION HERE. There are multiple companies working on the problem of lab-grown meat (aka "cultured meat"). Supermeat is trying to grow synthetic chicken meat in an Israeli restaurant. The makers of Just Egg have sold cultured chicken meat to a restaurant in Singapore. Wild Type i...
57410ac5-056a-4bbb-9333-d0178cbee332
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Toxoplasma of AGI Doom and Capabilities? [Epistemic Status: I'm confident that the individual facts I lay out support the main claim, but I'm not fully confident its enough evidence to make a true or useful framework for understanding the world.] I'm going to give seven pieces of evidence to support this claim[1]...
c4b83ea9-3b31-48b1-ba15-fab490d9cce6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Podcasts: AGI Show, Consistently Candid, London Futurists For those of you who enjoy learning things via listening in on numerous slightly different conversations about them, and who also want to learn more about this AI survey I led, three more podcasts on the topic, and also other topics: * The AGI Show: audio, vi...
a38093d3-a7b3-44fe-90d0-690ed81f7dd4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
If reductionism is the hammer, what nails are out there? EDIT: I'm moving this to the Discussion section because people seem to not like it (lack of upvotes) and to find the writing unclear.  I'd love writing advice, if anyone wants to offer some.   ----------------------------------------   Related to: Dissolvin...
277cb411-a562-4d05-a9f6-ff1a35d19a8d
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
What AI Posts Do You Want Distilled? I'd like to distill AI Safety posts and papers, and I'd like to see more distillations generally. Ideally, posts and papers would meet the following criteria: * Potentially high-impact for more people to understand * Uses a lot of jargon or is generally complex and difficult to un...
bbd60835-b2b9-4c34-b0ac-57d42ac9c9ca
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Consequences of Misaligned AI 1 Introduction --------------- In the story of King Midas, an ancient Greek king makes a wish that everything he touch turn to gold. He subsequently starves to death as his newfound powers transform his food into (inedible) gold. His wish was an *incomplete* representation of his actua...
7a5d8d2b-fcc5-40ce-8712-cbe78ecceb70
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
D&D.Sci III Evaluation and Ruleset This is a followup to the D&D.Sci post I made last week; if you haven’t already read it, you should do so now before spoiling yourself. Here is the web interactive I built to let you test your solution; below is a complete explanation of the rules used to generate the dataset. You’l...
ddb1eff4-ee85-4771-a5f6-ab05d6f1732d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
"model scores" is a questionable concept A couple of years ago, while I was working on a problem of what to do with the predictions of a random forest model, I noticed that the mean of the predictions on the test set didn't match the mean of the outcomes in the training data. Let me make that more concrete; consider t...
8d60f280-9b98-47fc-a54d-e2a009fb8433
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Real-Life Examples of Prediction Systems Interfering with the Real World (Predict-O-Matic Problems) Thanks to Ozzie Gooen for reviewing this post. Introduction The Parable of the Predict-O-Matic is a short story which considers a forecasting system which is ostensibly set-up to maximize accuracy, and which ends up i...
a7be5b80-c50f-457b-8425-e8211b004a79
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Is School of Thought related to the Rationality Community? If so, who are they? Link: https://yourbias.is/ At a gloss the material looks really polished and topical.
658d3d78-5f8d-4c16-840a-65376a9a683f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A Transhumanist Poem **Note: I'm not a poet. I hardly ever write poetry, and when I do, it's usually because I've stayed up all night. However, this seemed like a very appropriate poem for Less Wrong. Not sure if it's appropriate as a top-level post. Someone please tell me if not.**   Imagine The first man Who hel...
79c2d5ab-a1a3-4ae8-8b70-312d56ce4535
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Cascio in The Atlantic, more on cognitive enhancement as existential risk mitigation Jamais Cascio writes in the atlantic: > Pandemics. Global warming. Food shortages. No more fossil fuels. What are humans to do? The same thing the species has done before: evolve to meet the challenge. But this time we don’t have to ...
59a6647e-3794-414c-a98a-3b73ff0d4b30
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Critiquing Gary Taubes, Part 2: Atkins Redux Previously: Mainstream Nutrition Science on Obesity Edit: In retrospect, I think it maybe should have combined this post with part 3. Unfortunately, the problem of what to do with existing comments makes that hard to fix now. Taubes first made a name for himself as a low-...
1649cd33-7a34-409f-916b-ea3dd1ceb2db
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Right for the Wrong Reasons One of the few things that I really appreciate having encountered during my study of philosophy is the Gettier problem. Paper after paper has been published on this subject, starting with Gettier's original "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" In brief, Gettier argues that knowledge cannot...
969e1e75-ff13-4143-ad27-7b7037db1ef0
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Backplay: "Man muss immer umkehren" 1 Introduction --------------- An important goal of AI research is to construct agents that can enter new environments and learn how to achieve desired goals (Levine et al., [2016](#bib.bib22)). A key paradigm for this task is deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) which succeeded...
5ef5776f-f5ae-4d5c-b651-182304f66d1f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Beware Experiments Without Evaluation Sometimes, people propose "experiments" with new norms, policies, etc. that don't have any real means of evaluating whether or not the policy actually succeeded or not. This should be viewed with deep skepticism -- it often seems to me that such an "experiment" isn't really an ex...
b12d83b2-acf2-4826-89eb-bccfb342aa56
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
B-Pref: Benchmarking Preference-Based Reinforcement Learning 1 Introduction --------------- Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful method to solve a variety of sequential decision-making problems, including board games Silver et al. ([2017](#bib.bib58), [2018](#bib.bib59)), video games Berner et...
587f12c5-0880-4465-ab7b-0218b39da2b3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Against EA PR Scott Alexander recently wrote about weird effective altruism. Many people (mostly, but not entirely, people who aren't effective altruists) offered the opinion that weird effective altruists should be banned from EA, or at least shouldn't be allowed to give talks at EA Global and have blog posts written...
dd38c695-37e4-4397-bf94-f0f81c18ec46
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Less Wrong Should Confront Wrongness Wherever it Appears In a recent discussion about a controversial topic which I will not name here, Vladimir_M noticed something extremely important. > Because the necessary information is difficult to obtain in a clear and convincing form, and it's drowned in a vast sea of nonsens...
32f60c6e-2347-4ab7-9d23-d7b70255acdb
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What to put in my time capsule? In a few weeks I will open a time capsule I set for myself 5 years ago. I'm extremely excited and want to celebrate by setting myself a new time capsule to open in 5 years from now. The difficult part about making the time capsule is what to include. Since I have not yet opened the ori...
511358ce-7b50-46be-a454-0315245cb9be
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The State of Metaculus This linkpost summarizes Metaculus updates and initiatives from mid-2024 to early February, 2025. The original post covers technical improvements, new forecasting tournaments, and collaborations with CDC, GiveWell, Bridgewater Associates, Bright Line Watch, and more. While written for regular Me...
468fd012-4b01-4a7e-8f72-dc021249853b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Alignment Newsletter #29 Highlights Deep Imitative Models for Flexible Inference, Planning, and Control (Nicholas Rhinehart et al): It's hard to apply deep RL techniques to autonomous driving, because we can't simply collect a large amount of experience with collisions in order to learn. However, imitation learning i...
2ec78881-8830-4e00-8673-02bcb09e259d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
I think to find out what I write The maxim goes that “I write to find out what I think”. (Variously attributed to Flannery O'Connor or Joan Didion). It counsels that articulation highlights gaps in arguments, requires concrete positions, and dispels denial of inconvenient conclusions. I do not dispute it. However, I ...
276f6da3-9988-4f11-b695-8050222f4d67
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Rational = true? > For example, if you say, "The rational belief is X, but the true belief is Y" then you are probably using the word "rational" in a way that means something other than what most of us have in mind This was copied from here. Surely it is obvious that there are lots of examples when one might say thi...
2e4f8c24-00dc-425b-9494-18a82f8edb50
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Trauma, Meditation, and a Cool Scar [Trigger Warning: I’ll be discussing a physical injury, recovery, and panic attacks in detail. The first three pictures linked are gory. Again, they are linked, not directly shown] Trauma One year ago today, I was in an accident with an industrial drone. It was spinning too fast w...
88c43ed3-ebd5-45f5-8819-6023d4aa1cc5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Has Someone Checked The Cold-Water-In-Left-Ear Thing? I somewhat recently read these posts, and figured this was enough evidence that it might be worth checking whether people become better calibrated for a short while after very cold water is poured in their left ear. For example: does doing that noticeably improve s...
da72669d-3148-40ee-9dd7-5332013372a3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The case against AI alignment Trigger warning: Discussion of seriously horrific shit. Honestly, everything is on the table here so if you're on the lookout for trigger warnings you should probably stay away from this conversation. Any community of people which gains notability will attract criticism. Those who advoca...
c3fcc8c5-a3fc-4597-8b53-f21c5a7dd2c6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Playing in the Creek When I was a really small kid, one of my favorite activities was to try and dam up the creek in my backyard. I would carefully move rocks into high walls, pile up leaves, or try patching the holes with sand. The goal was just to see how high I could get the lake, knowing that if I plugged every ho...
b1c5e317-1939-43c9-a852-3241d5837a34
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A Models-centric Approach to Corrigible Alignment This post starts with a reasonable story of how alignment might be solved, based on extracting human values from an AIs model of the world. Then I will elaborate on what I see as the main steps in this process. After that I will review the existing work (which I am awa...
5f56c1f7-8aad-4c1c-97ba-ed9e65f70c2b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Where do (did?) stable, cooperative institutions come from? The United States has a bunch of nice things whose creation/maintenance requires coordinated effort from a large number of people across time. For example: bridges that stay up; electrical grids that provide us with power; the rule of law; newspapers that mak...
0757a490-0d63-437b-9ffc-fdf40121953c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
12-year old challenges the Big Bang I thought this may be of interest to the LW community. Jacob Barnett is a 12-year old male who taught himself all of high school math (algebra through calculus), has a currently scored math IQ of 170 (for what that's worth) and is currently on track to become a researcher of astroph...
6c371121-8f70-41fe-bca8-849388d14f87
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Generic Modafinil sales begin? Due to agreements with the patent holder, Cephalon, that were made in 2005-2006 several generics manufacturers are now allowed to sell generic Modafinil. I have found confirmation that the manufacturer Teva has begun selling generic Modafinil, though I haven't seen news about other manu...
f397d8e8-eb7d-48b9-a973-90dd36a47c83
LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct
LessWrong
"I'll do it at some point.I'll answer this message later.I could try this sometime.The most common consequence of these thoughts is a lot of procrastination. The person who has them may genuinely intend to do the task, but with the "when" being vague, there's nothing that would propel them into action.Here are some tho...
d8f47a4f-f6f0-485c-a481-eda4d587fb09
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
DeepMind: The Podcast - Excerpts on AGI DeepMind: The Podcast - Season 2 was released over the last ~1-2 months. The two episodes most relevant to AGI are: * The road to AGI - DeepMind: The Podcast (S2, Ep5) and * The promise of AI with Demis Hassabis - DeepMind: The Podcast (S2, Ep9) I found a few quotes notewort...
5f8c1bc2-4623-4d8b-8dee-47f90aed0b98
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/agisf
AGI Safety Fund
[Week 1] “Intelligence Explosion: Evidence and Import” (Sections 3 to 4.1) by Luke Muehlhauser & Anna Salamon Intelligence Explosion: Evidence and Import 3.From AI to Machine Superintelligence It seems unlikely that humans are near the ceiling of possible intelligences, rather than simply being the first such intellig...
ec28d679-9b27-4cd9-9add-5154c310e17d
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs
Other
A Tour of Emerging Cryptographic Technologies | GovAI A Tour of Emerging Cryptographic Technologies What They Are and How They Could Matter May 2021 Ben Garfinkel Centre for the Governance of AI, Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford Abstract Historically, progress in the /fi.ligaeld of cryptography...
2f0579ee-6012-4ca6-986c-341d9b82432e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
I'm open for projects (sort of) I left Google a month ago, and right now don't work. Writing this post in case anyone has interesting ideas what I could do. This isn't an "urgently need help" kind of thing - I have a little bit of savings, right now planning to relax some more weeks and then go into some solo software...
11bbfdbc-6e07-4764-933f-9433f52e6b1e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A Defense of Work on Mathematical AI Safety AI Safety was, a decade ago, nearly synonymous with obscure mathematical investigations of hypothetical agentic systems. Fortunately or unfortunately, this has largely been overtaken by events; the successes of machine learning and the promise, or threat, of large language m...
733ae3c6-0a5e-44d2-9316-df7ad380fba3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
To Lead, You Must Stand Up Followup to:  Lonely Dissent True story:  In July, I attended a certain Silicon Valley event.  I was not an organizer, or a speaker, or in any other wise involved on an official level; just an attendee.  It was an evening event, and after the main presentations were done, much of the audien...
d42db28b-89f7-43ed-ad3e-fc3cd21cf40c
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
Summary of Stuart Russell's new book, "Human Compatible" As part of the [Alignment Newsletter](https://rohinshah.com/alignment-newsletter), I wrote a summary of *[Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control](https://www.amazon.com/Human-Compatible-Artificial-Intelligence-Problem-ebook/dp/B07N5...
4e55fbee-f438-4775-8b0a-61490b796123
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What am I fighting for? Status: toward the end of writing this I started reading Suffering-Focused Ethics by Magnus Vinding as well as more Brian Tomasik, and I'm feeling myself value-drift in a more negative direction. It's possible I will endorse none of what follows fairly soon. If you want to link to the higher-...
4c1c1dd7-7d45-44dc-afca-39e31af93b0c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Best-of-n with misaligned reward models for Math reasoning In this post, I share some quick results that I got as part of a bigger project that pivoted. TL;DR: * When trying to generate Math reasoning with current LLMs, optimizing too hard against their judgment of what is “good reasoning” can make the proportion o...
c1a99597-9b70-41db-b0a7-4c35608311ad
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Peekskill Lyme Incidence Let's say you're considering moving your nonprofit out of the Bay Area, and are considering somewhere in the Hudson Valley, perhaps near Peekskill NY. Looking at CDC maps it seems like Lyme is something to consider: The dots are close enough together in the Northeast, however, that this map...
66f8bdd5-4040-4830-8b63-95ea8cafc61e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What failure looks like The stereotyped image of AI catastrophe is a powerful, malicious AI system that takes its creators by surprise and quickly achieves a decisive advantage over the rest of humanity. I think this is probably not what failure will look like, and I want to try to paint a more realistic picture. I’l...
52ca91e6-1802-4b70-92c0-8e701abfc36d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A Prodigy of Refutation My Childhood Death Spiral described the core momentum carrying me into my mistake, an affective death spiral around something that Eliezer1996 called "intelligence".  I was also a technophile, pre-allergized against fearing the future.  And I'd read a lot of science fiction built around personh...
75fde3f4-acd7-4570-abc8-42bc186134f2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What currents of thought on LessWrong do you want to see distilled? The question is inspired by a few comments and a question I have seen recently. The first is a discussion in the 2019 Review post on the subject of research debt; the second a question from johnswentworth asking what people's confusions are about simu...
c26289cd-477f-42b4-848c-b1bc0b2a1a94
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Avoid inflationary use of terms Inflationary terms! You see them everywhere. And for those who actually know and care about the subject matter they can be very frustrating. These terms are notorious for being used in contexts where: 1. They are only loosely applicable at best. 2. There exists a better word that is ...
dc162b2e-930e-4424-9096-b89b45fd258d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Convincing Your Brain That Humanity is Evil is Easy Epistemic Status: Based on my own experience and intuitions only. Some reasoning heuristics, that the brain uses, seem to rely on that there is limited information available. And newspapers, TV, and search engines break them hard. Assume, that you want to evaluate ...
f70cded0-ec4b-4611-b3f6-fb9e505402d9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Introducing Transluce — A Letter from the Founders We are launching an independent research lab that builds open, scalable technology for understanding AI systems and steering them in the public interest. Transluce means to shine light through something to reveal its structure. Today’s complex AI systems are difficul...
4ff56ef4-2cc3-4c0d-8d32-38cb88ddd944
awestover/filtering-for-misalignment
Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results
id: post1816 YouTube link Many people in the AI alignment space have heard of AI safety via debate - check out episode 6 of AXRP if you need a primer. But how do we get language models to the stage where they can usefully implement debate? In this episode, I talk to Geoffrey Irving about the role of language models in...
dbd92b72-328a-40f6-99b6-80c5acb81a54
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What is the net effect of memes that call out the huge impact of big players in climate change? I've noticed whenever some government or huge company makes a drastic harm to the environment (or generates the false impression of doing so) this specific kind of meme emerges... Memes that contrast the huge impact big p...
6dd07e6d-1d3b-4b92-8628-03f6a1eb18d7
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital
Arbital
Category of finite sets [This page is more of a definition page; it's not really intended to explain anything, because all the necessary explanations should already have been done in finite_set.](https://arbital.com/p/comment:) The category of finite sets is a nice easy [category](https://arbital.com/p/4c7) to work i...
e44cba31-5b12-451f-ab93-f80002713d3e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What can the principal-agent literature tell us about AI risk? This work was done collaboratively with Tom Davidson. Thanks to Paul Christiano, Ben Garfinkel, Daniel Garrett, Robin Hanson, Philip Trammell and Takuro Yamashita for helpful comments and discussion. Errors our own. Introduction The AI alignment problem...
6bf3128f-7819-45f8-ab81-72d67a940d8d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AXRP Episode 6 - Debate and Imitative Generalization with Beth Barnes YouTube link This podcast is called AXRP, pronounced axe-urp and short for the AI X-risk Research Podcast. Here, I (Daniel Filan) have conversations with researchers about their papers. We discuss the paper and hopefully get a sense of why it’s bee...
30d0dd89-8b39-4647-a223-6872daec463a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Masking to Avoid Missing Things About a year ago I wrote that I'd now: > follow official guidance and mask regulations, cheerfully go along with precautions others need, and test+isolate when sick, but I'm not going to go above and beyond to attempt to reduce spread the way I did for earlier parts of the pandemic. ...
73ed5824-7adb-476c-9aaf-3503c1c36df2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Experiments, iterations and the scientific method Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/experiments-iterations-and-the-scientific-method ---------------------------------------- Today, an ordinary day.  I woke up at 6am.  It was still dark out.  I did a quick self-check. > "Did I wake up with energy?"  No not reall...
98fe9b3b-16ab-4cda-97bb-ac6d3eb368bd
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Link: "A Bayesian Take on Julian Assange" From Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight: A Bayesian Take on Julian Assange.
f058b187-9f9a-4df3-8888-415208c8104d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Ineffective Response to COVID-19 and Risk Compensation UPDATE: This post was written and reflects an earlier set of my beliefs. I have updated significantly in a number of ways since it was posted, based on both external events and research, and no longer endorse it. Epistemic status: I have a mental model that I thi...
e997f0e0-6592-4de6-abee-c66257c674bd
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Light activates amaglyda triggering hunting in mice
d63c4f34-dfc6-491c-884c-2fc991c275a7
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[SEQ RERUN] Setting Up Metaethics Today's post, Setting Up Metaethics was originally published on 28 July 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):   > What exactly does a correct theory of metaethics need to look like? Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post). This post is part of...
8a552bc7-7b18-4d8d-b10a-0be75f431a74
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Randal Koene on brain understanding before whole brain emulation Background / Context ==================== Some people, including me, think that it will be very hard and risky to write and run Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) code without risking catastrophic accidents—up to and including human extinction (see f...
fc3b12a7-a840-4167-b120-851358769f33
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A quick heuristic for evaluating elites (or anyone else) Summary: suppose that for some reason you want to figure out how a society works or worked in a given time and place, largely you want to see if it is a meritocracy where productive people get ahead and thus conditions are roughly fair and efficient, or is it mo...
f85ab56f-7876-4108-8527-a5ae19573550
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Does taking extreme measures to avoid the coronavirus make sense when you factor in the possibility of a really long life? Some back of the napkin math. Suppose we: * Value a QUALY at $50k.  * Use an expected lifespan of 10k years. Perhaps you expect a 1% chance of living 1M years due to the possibility of a friend...
24b91d4e-f28f-4efe-8535-88deda0c2783
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Make more land We used to make land. We built long wharves for docking ships, and then over time filled in the areas between them. Later we built up mudflats wholesale to make even larger areas. Here's a map of Boston showing how much of the land wasn't previously dry: (Map reproduction courtesy of the Norman B. Lev...
6033718e-63b0-4816-9949-86b7c7e97ce0
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Intuitive Explanation of AIXI [AIXI](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/aixi) is a mathematical notion of an ideal RL agent, developed by Marcus Hutter. The famous formula for AIXI is as follows:  ak=argmaxak∑okrkmaxak+1∑ok+1rk+1…∑omrm[rk+⋯+rm]∑q:q(a1…ak)=o1r1…omrm2−l(q).mjx-chtml {display: inline-block; line-height: 0; t...
db901228-4265-4361-8de4-a86cf6295e10
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Not using a priori information for Russian propaganda (The first version was written extremely poorly and received a lot of bad marks, so I hesitated to publish it for a long time, now this is the second version) I live in Russia, so I regularly encounter samples of Putin's propaganda, and apparently, due to the effe...
12424143-ff1f-4c0e-95f2-5bcbc970d707
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Dorset Meetup Discussion article for the meetup : Dorset Meetup WHEN: 29 August 2012 02:00:00PM (+0100) WHERE: Starbucks Coffee, 4 New Bond St, Weymouth, DT4 8LY The second Dorset meetup will be 2pm on Wednesday 29th August at Starbucks, Weymouth. (There will be a sign on the table.) Please leave a commen...
dbc9edc0-9bc5-42c0-996b-28aa3babd2db
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Missing forecasting tools: from catalogs to a new kind of prediction market Introduction It’s possible to make quantitative forecasting (forecasting by software) significantly more easy and fun by adding some missing pieces to the forecasting ecosystem. Let’s do it. The models I’m interested in are “gears” and not “b...
6df8fc39-79ff-43be-8451-571949f89e84
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Linkpost: A model of biases as arising from meta-beliefs There are hundreds of documented cognitive biases, but new research suggests that many of them load onto just a handful of meta-beliefs such as: * My experience is a good reference * I make correct assessments of the world * I am good * My group is a reason...
d5fd20c5-13ec-4118-9630-fe2112665e7b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What are some interesting examples of risks measured in micromorts? A micromort is a 1-in-a-million chance of death. Wikipedia's article has a few examples of risks of death measured in micromorts, but it seems like there must be a lot more of them. What are some interesting examples you use as a baseline for comparis...
4eb9cda0-151f-4919-b447-b39b29c7392a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Infra-Bayesianism Unwrapped Introduction Infra-Bayesianism is a recent theoretical framework in AI Alignment, coming from Vanessa Kosoy and Diffractor (Alexander Appel). It provides the groundwork for a learning theory of RL in the non-realizable case (when the hypothesis is not included in the hypothesis space), whic...
2eb026a4-69a5-4859-83a1-085b9cc96d50
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
Is there evidence that recommender systems are changing users' preferences? In *Human Compatible*, Stuart Russell makes an argument that I have heard him make repeatedly (I believe on the 80K podcast and the FLI conversation with Steven Pinker). He suggests a pretty bold and surprising claim: > [C]onsider how conten...
08020779-460d-425e-9b87-9177c5b4c135
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Some "meta-cruxes" for AI x-risk debates [Epistemic status: As I say below, I've been thinking about this topic for several years and I've worked on it as part of my PhD research. But none of this is based on any rigorous methodology, just my own impressions from reading the literature.] I've been thinking about poss...
048da192-af93-45e2-a89d-1409ef9a9f3a
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Paper Walkthrough: Automated Circuit Discovery with Arthur Conmy Arthur Conmy's [Automated Circuit Discovery](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.14997.pdf) is a great paper that makes initial forays into automating parts of mechanistic interpretability (specifically, automatically finding a sparse subgraph for a circuit). In ...
c2af9c24-6073-42ed-a8fc-e3dc86b3d819
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What I expected from this site: A LessWrong review LessWrong is the central discussion space for the Rationalist subculture. The Rationalists write extensively about what they expect from the world, so I in turn have expectations from them. Each point is my expectation vs what I see. Track Records and Accountability...
f6ec2cdd-b168-4256-9161-cc07a13e8441
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
One-step hypothetical preferences Human preferences are time-inconsistent, and also contradictory. That, by itself, is not a huge problem, but it's also the case that few human preferences are present at any given moment. At the moment, I'm focused on finding the best explanation to get my ideas through to you, the r...
60a99542-baf2-428f-b6d0-9c9ae01800c0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
COVID-19 Group Testing Post-mortem? As Covid is for the most part over and tests have not been in short supply for a very long time now, eliminating most of the rationale for complicated testing procedures meant to optimize test count/cost, it would be interesting for anyone who was involved in this to do a retrospect...
7b68823d-0102-436f-afe0-905db920abc1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Lesswrong 2016 Survey It’s time for a new survey! Take the survey now The details of the last survey can be found here.  And the results can be found here.   I posted a few weeks back asking for suggestions for questions to include on the survey.  As much as we’d like to include more of them, we all know what ha...
00dd173b-85e6-4322-95c2-1e8fdbde9eff
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Open thread, August 12-18, 2013 If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
25ad73d4-8d39-437e-a793-60c4c1311d28
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Baltimore / UMBC Meetup - general discussion Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore / UMBC Meetup - general discussion WHEN: 26 February 2017 08:00:00PM (-0500) WHERE: Performing Arts and Humanities Bldg 4th floor, 1000 Hilltop Cir, Baltimore, MD 21250 No parking restrictions on weekends, so park wh...
185bfbbe-0484-4cb8-9a9a-65e2f2dcb385
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Methodology: Contagious Beliefs Simulating Political Alignment This methodology concerns a simulation tool which has been developed to model how beliefs, that are not directly related, end up correlated in political identities. It models the transmission of beliefs between nodes on a static hexagonal grid, based on a ...
9366e06b-b54f-4f4f-9c55-500bf35bcf15
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Episodic Curiosity through Reachability 1 Introduction --------------- 11footnotetext: Shared first authorship. Many real-world tasks have sparse rewards. For example, animals searching for food may need to go many miles without any reward from the environment. Standard reinforcement learning algorithms struggle wi...
ed501e7f-c660-4f09-97ec-ca7a25c9e1de
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Lone Genius Bias and Returns on Additional Researchers One thing that most puzzles me about Eliezer's writings on AI is his apparent belief that a small organization like MIRI is likely to be able to beat larger organizations like Google or the US Department of Defense to building human-level AI. In fact, he seems to ...
9974b51f-616a-48c3-ac7f-40edbcc3e08d
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs
Other
Active reward learning Active Reward Learning Christian Daniel, Malte Viering, Jan Metz, Oliver Kroemer, Jan Petersy Institut f ¨ur Intelligente Autonome Systeme, Technische Universit ¨at Darmstadt, 64289, Germany yMax-Planck-Institut f ¨ur Intelligente Systeme, T ¨ubingen, 72076, Germany Email:fdaniel, kroemer,...
700cc5bc-0082-483e-8150-4e9175497e67
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Are there really no ghosts in the machine? My previous article on this article went down like a server running on PHP (quite deservedly I might add). You can all rest assured that I won't be attempting any clickbait titles again for the foreseeable future. I also believe that the whole H+ article is written in a very ...
fc465c13-0cb9-4c8d-91ce-0b9150111b40
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Consistent Plato A putative new idea for AI control; index here. The idea here is somewhat underdeveloped. I've been suggesting AI designs that are not exactly expected-utility maximisers, while wondering if such designs could be stable under self improvement/subagent creation/general stuff. And also wondering what d...
3c588c44-f3a5-4d91-bb89-12b6ed09e371
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : University of Maryland Discussion article for the meetup : University of Maryland WHEN: 16 September 2011 06:00:00PM (-0400) WHERE: University of Maryland, University of Maryland - College Park, STAMP There are a few LessWrong readers at UMD. Let's meet up! We're meeting in Terrapin Room B, in the Student ...
f84ec431-8483-4eee-a63f-cf258d000ad6
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
Opportunities for Impact Beyond the EU AI Act Summary ======= * The EU AI Act trilogues are coming to a close in the coming weeks. It appears likely that the final iteration of the act will include regulations covering foundation models. * The window for effecting change here has not yet closed and is likely to exte...
afcca7e4-8b5e-4df4-9849-513ff8d73600
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
New Month's Resolutions If you have a goal that can be credibly achieved by the end of the month reply to this post. At the end of the month everybody who posted writes up their experiences, lessons in overcoming akrasia etc. as a reply to their original comment or by editing the original. Whether you want to share t...
6578650a-9ee3-4bcb-90a0-1d05f4ad5df6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Post-crash market efficiency 1696-2020 WHAT DO past stock market crashes tell us about the weak-form Efficient-Market Hypothesis? In a meltdown, do prices become more predictable? In theory, they instantly adjust to all public information. Hence technical analysis – predicting future stock prices from patterns in pas...
d9529650-37b0-4bcb-9956-1363cc9e7175
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Building intuition with spaced repetition systems Do you ever go to a lecture, follow it thinking it makes total sense, then look back at your notes later and realize it makes no sense? This used to happen to me, but I’ve learned how to use spaced repetition to fully avoid this if I want. I’m going to try to convey th...
05e87601-a9ec-410f-b0a6-2ae8b681d2c0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
PRINCIPLES OF PERCEPTION It is relevant that one should pay attention in the tiniest bits of the location they find themselves in. From this bit of habit, a lot of things will cease to confound the mind. How much we can predict circumstances by relying on previous data depends on how much we have programmed our minds ...
ec6d0529-938d-4497-acff-63f2efc1ea52
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Shannon's Surprising Discovery Imagine that you’re a telecom provider in the early 20th century. You provide both telephone lines and telegraph lines - audio and binary. These two systems face quite different design constraints. The telegraph line only needs to be able to distinguish between high and low voltage. If ...
0136d424-7b37-4d46-a87d-a2dfe360ea56
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How can I determine that Elicit is not some weak AGI's attempt at taking over the world ? I read two days ago the Elicit presentation post, and as I have been reading intensely about AI safety lately, I was wondering this question : What are the tools and techniques you would use right now to determine that the curren...
da137669-992b-4a9f-9392-a1f289e5313a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Best effort beliefs Alice: Hey Bob, how's it going? Bob: Pretty good. How about you? Alice: Pretty good. What are you drinking? Bob: A Bayeslight. Alice: Cool. Hey bartender, lemme get one of those as well. Alice: Hey, have you seen President Hanson's new immigration policy? Bob: No. What is it? Alice: He's shu...
90e5f42e-e622-44bb-bdf4-2604f5996c6e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : San Antonio New Meetup Discussion article for the meetup : San Antonio New Meetup WHEN: 28 June 2015 03:00:00PM (-0500) WHERE: Copalli Cafe 555 W Bitters Rd, San Antonio, TX 78216 Coffee and discussion at Copalli Cafe! All are welcome! New Meetup to discuss rationality and all things LessWrong in San Anto...