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f8c26118-d312-4df8-b5d3-5f7d07064a10 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Group rationality diary, 6/11/12
This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of June 11th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:
* Established a useful new habit
* Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief... |
a42f8d70-2492-4295-be23-88ce438a14a3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | SRS advice
I have made some significant progress in organizing myself with org-mode (basically a really well thought out emacs outliner) - consider this a plug :).
Now I think I am ready to bite the bullet and automate another part of my mental apparatus, memorization. I'd like to hear other people's experiences wit... |
bf511acc-97c7-432a-b9f8-a4eff5f84a8b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Restraint Bias
Ed Yong over at Not Exactly Rocket Science has an article on a study demonstrating "restraint bias" (reference), which seems like an important thing to be aware of in fighting akrasia:
People who think they are more restrained are more likely to succumb to temptation
> In a series of four experiments,... |
c07590e4-3b3f-4957-b0fb-e47a7596468f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AI Safety via Luck
Epistemic Status: I feel confident and tentatively optimistic about the claims made in this post, but am slightly more uncertain about how it generalizes. Additionally, I am concerned about the extent to which this is dual-use for capabilities and exfohazardous and spent a few months thinking about ... |
5f5a55b8-7d47-4535-b7ee-cb727c031a1c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Transhumanism thread in progress at Reddit
Starting with this reply to "You were born too soon":
> depending on when exactly we achieve this, this could be the best time to be born ever, because it will be the absolute earliest anybody will have achieved immortality. Someone born within 20 years of this moment could ... |
d74e55c1-9c25-480c-892e-0591e1de8fcd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How hard is it for altruists to discuss going against bad equilibria?
Epistemic status: This post is flagrantly obscure, which makes it all the harder for me to revise it to reflect my current opinions. By the nature of the subject, it's difficult to give object-level examples. If you're considering reading this, I wo... |
2f0f48aa-ca17-4fef-8f36-2bedc8e20f29 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Weekly LW Meetups
This summary was posted to LW Main on October 24th. The following week's summary is here.
New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in:
* Bangalore Meetup: 15 November 2014 04:15PM
Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:
* East Coast Solstice... |
0619f8d8-4058-42ea-b686-e07cd2b90b4d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Chapter 4: The Efficient Market Hypothesis
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling is watching you from where she waits, eternally in the void between worlds.
A/N: As others have noted, the novels seem inconsistent in the apparent purchasing power of a Galleon; I'm picking a consistent value and sticking with it. Five pounds sterl... |
9dea5261-4475-4c2a-b258-47a03dbb4e7b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Virtual models of virtual AIs in virtual worlds
A putative new idea for AI control; index here.
This is a reworking of the previous models of AIs in virtual worlds, done after discussing the idea with Jessica.
The basic idea is that there are a lot of concepts about AI security - such as sealed boxes, Cartesian boun... |
53627298-0844-4413-9384-9a6a9f1df825 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | London Meetup on 2011/1/2
On Sunday, January 2nd 2011 there will be a meetup the London area. As with previous meetups, the venue is Shakespeare's Head. The meeting will start at 14:00.
In order to keep us organised for 2011, I'm putting together a mailing list for LWers around the London area. If you'd like to be a... |
2eaf633b-4c38-4353-bec7-a871baad00a4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Evaluability (And Cheap Holiday Shopping)
With the expensive part of the Hallowthankmas season now approaching, a question must be looming large in our readers’ minds:
> “Dear Overcoming Bias, are there biases I can exploit to be seen as generous without actually spending lots of money?”
I’m glad to report the answe... |
55366c33-a60a-4c32-ad21-a3ee09de4620 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Do you trust the research on handwriting vs. typing for notes?
For a while now, I've heard the claim that "studies show" that note-takers remember content better if they take notes by hand versus on a computer. I previously took this claim on face value in part because this was before I'd heard about the replication ... |
5127b5fb-4db9-42b5-94a5-87747e605b27 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why is COVID reinfection rate still so uncertain.
From recent observatory studies, SIREN in UK , and in Denmark, they both estimate seropositivity to give around 80% of protection agains infection. The former observed 90% protection against symptomatic cases.
How efficacious are vaccines on the seropositive populatio... |
8d218f0d-84bc-4975-a94b-8f08519a90a6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Dealing with trolling and the signal to noise ratio
The recent implementation of a -5 karma penalty for replying to comments that are at -3 or below has clearly met with some disagreement and controversy. See http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/eb9/meta_karma_for_last_30_days/7aon . However, at the same time, it seem... |
beb4e0ca-f37b-4f19-9cd9-873b18c31272 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Surviving and Shaping Long-Term Competitions: Lessons from Net Assessment
This post examines net assessment, a framework for evaluating strategic competition that evolved to inform U.S. defense policy during the Cold War. We explain what net assessment is, its methods and principles, and how some of its tools can be ... |
898b64a9-04dc-4a38-8576-6288ba229350 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk
Draft for [Global Catastrophic Risks, Oxford University Press, 2008](http://www.amazon.com/Global-Catastrophic-Risks-Martin-Rees/dp/0198570503/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1224111364&sr=8-1) . [Download as PDF](https://intelligence.org/fil... |
e0b6d8c1-8738-4974-b546-aa73fe15b580 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What could Alphafold 4 look like?
I made another biology-ML podcast! Two hours long, deeply technical, links below.
I posted about others ones I did here (machine learning in molecular dynamics) and here (machine learning in vaccine design). This one is over machine learning in protein design, interviewing perhaps on... |
df31ab59-985b-4b01-adb0-328293feebd6 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | The theory-practice gap
[Thanks to Richard Ngo, Damon Binder, Summer Yue, Nate Thomas, Ajeya Cotra, Alex Turner, and other Redwood Research people for helpful comments; thanks Ruby Bloom for formatting this for the Alignment Forum for me.]
I'm going to draw a picture, piece by piece. I want to talk about the capabili... |
7537bd04-7cb2-4694-85fb-b2bd77e5f7b1 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | The Solomonoff Prior is Malign
This argument came to my attention from [this post](https://ordinaryideas.wordpress.com/2016/11/30/what-does-the-universal-prior-actually-look-like/) by Paul Christiano. I also found [this clarification](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jP3vRbtvDtBtgvkeb/clarifying-consequentialists-in-th... |
5c1fc53d-8fa4-4089-86c8-4b64cbc280e0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | ARC's first technical report: Eliciting Latent Knowledge
ARC has published a report on Eliciting Latent Knowledge, an open problem which we believe is central to alignment. We think reading this report is the clearest way to understand what problems we are working on, how they fit into our plan for solving alignment i... |
ec308621-0f1d-4917-8977-53d13ef88c32 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Linkpost] Play with SAEs on Llama 3
We (Goodfire) just put our research preview live - you can play with Llama 3 and use sparse autoencoders to read & write from its internal activations. This is a linkpost for:
* The research preview.
* Our blog post about building it.
Taking research and turning it into somethi... |
69340d11-9968-4327-9cc0-b812b055fe23 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | If the reproduction number is socially "controlled" to its inflection point 1, what are the ethical and predictive implications?
Zvi wrote that he beleives the closeness of virus reproduction to one is not a coincidence, but a result of people responding to high reproduction by forbidding actions and low reproduction ... |
0f942442-d79a-48f7-a141-9c6fe0f5a475 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Navigating the Attackspace
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues its rapid ascent, we are witnessing increasing evidence of well-crafted methods to undermine and exploit AI responses. Carefully crafted inputs can exploit vulnerabilities and lead to harmful or undesired results.
In recent times, we have seen num... |
0105351d-e197-4af0-ac0e-a37f479d0a92 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | FT: We must slow down the race to God-like AI
ICYMI: A post in the Financial Times by [Ian Hogarth](https://www.ianhogarth.com/about) on risks from AI (focusing a lot on the technical alignment problem), that think got a lot of things right. From the comments: see his twitter [thread](https://twitter.com/soundboy/stat... |
eff485a6-94fa-4b98-bc3c-73a54879c7e1 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Comments on OpenAI’s "Planning for AGI and beyond"
Sam Altman shared me on a draft of his OpenAI blog post [Planning for AGI and beyond](https://openai.com/blog/planning-for-agi-and-beyond), and I left some comments, reproduced below without typos and with some added hyperlinks. Where the final version of the OpenAI p... |
ef163d59-7478-40ad-a07a-b762bcef6d09 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Madison Monday Meetup: Tegmark universes
Discussion article for the meetup : Madison Monday Meetup: Tegmark universes
WHEN: 14 November 2011 06:30:00PM (-0600)
WHERE: 1831 Monroe St. Madison, WI
Again, we'll meet at the Barrique's on Monroe St. Patrick will describe and discuss Max Tegmark's multiverse the... |
ba20a99f-533a-45c0-be22-cff5eab35ce3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Often, enemies really are innately evil.
Part 1: What evil is:
I'm not just talking about a "mere" clinical psychopath or sociopath who doesn't feel guilt and isn't restrained by social norms. First of all, people who don't feel the emotions can decide to be good anyway, or at least not pointlessly cruel for no benef... |
eabed432-1726-4b5d-ace3-54f8c0630c4c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | I have thousands of copies of HPMOR in Russian. How to use them with the most impact?
(Crossposted from the EA Forum)
As a result of a crowdfunding campaign a couple of years ago, I printed 21k copies of HPMOR. 11k of those were sent to the crowdfunding participants. I'm looking for ideas for how to use the ones that... |
b9b904bb-87e7-4247-a10c-683f1062586c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Interpretability in Action: Exploratory Analysis of VPT, a Minecraft Agent
TL;DR
We apply mechinterp techniques on VPT, OpenAI's Minecraft agent. We also find a new case of goal misgeneralization - VPT kills a villager when we force one to stand under some tree leaves.
Abstract
> Understanding the mechanisms behind ... |
c126da4e-977e-41a4-9cfb-010e17d98315 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | AI Risk is like Terminator; Stop Saying it's Not
(I believe this is all directionally correct, but I have zero relevant expertise.)
When the concept of catastrophic risks from artificial intelligence is covered in the press, it is often compared to popular science fiction stories about rogue AI—and in particular, to ... |
429d5839-7510-4c73-a331-556def210360 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | The Gift We Give To Tomorrow
How, oh how, did an unloving and mindless universe, cough up minds who were capable of love?
"No mystery in that," you say, "it's just a matter of [natural selection](/lw/kr/an_alien_god/)."
But natural selection is [cruel, bloody, and bloody stupid](/lw/kr/an_alien_god/). Even when, ... |
3174ec32-e3e4-4891-b1db-784e4e43d382 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Teaching Introspection
As Yvain pointed out in his recent post The Limits of Introspection, humans are not naturally good at inferring our cognitive processes. We resort to guessing with plausible-sounding stories about ourselves, and we aren’t very accurate.
I was reminded of this recently while teaching a swimming ... |
7a91e582-5e6e-441e-8d36-bee45608ef41 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Changing the size of Congress
Imagine the Big State Party was popular in large states while the Small State Party was popular in small states. The Senate is per-state representation, which gives a large advantage to the Small State Party. The House is primarily proportional to population, except that every state const... |
7156ae82-3430-4add-ac7c-348f7a3ebe29 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Russian plan for immortality [link]
http://www.cbc.ca/news/yourcommunity/2012/07/human-immortality-could-be-possible-by-2045-say-russian-scientists.html
The nice thing about Russians (I'm from that neighborhood originally) is that they are absolutely crazy and will try just about anything. They also probably have/had... |
208f83d3-b205-42d8-a616-1d9a50e83342 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Berkeley LW Meet-up Friday December 10
Last month, about 20 people showed up to the Berkeley LW meet-up. To continue the tradition of Berkeley Meetups, we will be meeting on Saturday, December 11 Friday, December 10 at 7 PM at the Starbucks at 2128 Oxford Street. Last time, we chatted at the Starbucks for about 45 ... |
ef75396b-fba5-418d-af7f-7517b7def92c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Fundamentals of kicking anthropic butt
Introduction
An anthropic problem is one where the very fact of your existence tells you something. "I woke up this morning, therefore the earth did not get eaten by Galactus while I slumbered." Applying your existence to certainties like that is simple - if an event would ha... |
7729c452-6f99-45ae-a24b-84b71ab4a46a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Mazes Sequence Summary
This post attempts to summarize the key points of the Immoral Mazes Sequence, which begins here, so they can be referenced without asking readers to get through an entire book first.
Due to the change in format, the posts will be summarized slightly out of order.
Note that this summary, and e... |
29a69b64-9c9e-41a5-b5c8-4455205c853e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | IRL 2/8: Mitigating degeneracy: multiple experimentation
Every Monday for 8 weeks, we will be posting lessons about Inverse Reinforcement Learning. This is lesson 2.
Note that access to the lessons requires creating an account here.
Have a nice day! |
dddfd9ae-5daa-4996-a807-29de50e7bc2b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Unofficial Canon on Applied Rationality
I have been thinking for a while that it would be useful if there was something similar to the Less Wrong Canon on Rationality for the CFAR material. Maybe, it could be called the 'CFAR Canon on Applied Rationality'. To start on this I have compiled a collection of descriptions ... |
f8600ad4-2330-4ed9-8c7c-d63fdad1b41d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | On taking AI risk seriously
Crossposted from the EA Forum: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pKG5fsfrgDSQtssfu/on-taking-ai-risk-seriously
Yet another New York Times piece on AI. A non-AI safety friend sent it to me saying "This is the scariest article I've read so far. I'm afraid I haven't been taking i... |
ddbe82e9-4fd2-43a8-a902-3a0e113cbbfa | awestover/filtering-for-misalignment | Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results | id: post2565
In the third post in this sequence, I will define a counterfactual
planning agent which has three safety interlocks. These interlocks all aim to enable and support agent oversight: the
oversight that is needed when we equip a powerful AGI agent with a
reward function for which we are pretty sure that it d... |
c11ad1b4-0738-41ca-9f5c-1ff5440d4366 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | DeepSeek: Don’t Panic
As reactions continue, the word in Washington, and out of OpenAI, is distillation. They’re accusing DeepSeek of distilling o1, of ripping off OpenAI. They claim DeepSeek *gasp* violated the OpenAI Terms of Service! The horror.
And they are very cross about this horrible violation, and if proven ... |
52b22201-cf96-4cc9-abe8-d933ed9c4722 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Alzheimer's vs Cryonics
The diagnosis of a legendary women's basketball coach at my school, Pat Summit, with early onset dementia, Alzheimer's type, got me thinking about Cryonics and Alzheimer's. For the purposes of this thought experiment, we will ignore the legal implications of the fact that you can't be frozen un... |
e15bae60-7eed-4cb3-a310-900a0e3e03e5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Rephrasing Of and Footnote To An Embedded Agency Proposal
I wanted to clarify some comments made in this post, which proposed a way to resolve the issues brought up in the Action Counterfactuals subsection of the Embedded Agency paper. I noticed that my ideal edits would end up rewriting the post almost completely (... |
94f0563b-2dd1-455a-a192-d6b2e9c7ee29 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | The limits of AI safety via debate
The limits of AI safety via debate
I recently participated in the [AGI safety fundamentals program](https://www.eacambridge.org/agi-safety-fundamentals) and this is my cornerstone project. During our readings of AI safety via debate ([blog](https://openai.com/blog/debate/), [paper](... |
e34e36dd-1e7d-4464-bdc0-68947c4be3be | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Michael Shellenberger: US Has 12 Or More Alien Spacecraft, Say Military And Intelligence Contractors
Quotes:
> ...Multiple sources close to the matter have come forward to tell Public that Grusch’s core claims are accurate. The individuals are all either high-ranking intelligence officials, former intelligence offici... |
41cef52c-dda1-47db-96b3-07594c3f1919 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | When None Dare Urge Restraint
One morning, I got out of bed, turned on my computer, and my Netscape email client automatically downloaded that day’s news pane. On that particular day, the news was that two hijacked planes had been flown into the World Trade Center.
These were my first three thoughts, in order:
> I g... |
652be675-c53c-436f-a9c6-e783f6be298e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info | AI Safety Info | Why would an AI do bad things?
1. [The Orthogonality Thesis](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEUO6pjwFOo): AI could have almost any goal while at the same time having high intelligence (i.e. ability to succeed at those goals). This means that we could build a very powerful agent which would not necessarily have human-... |
2778ee00-a42e-4c1b-9ad3-980f82d24371 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | An Analytic Perspective on AI Alignment
This is a perspective I have on how to do useful AI alignment research. Most perspectives I’m aware of are constructive: they have some blueprint for how to build an aligned AI system, and propose making it more concrete, making the concretisations more capable, and showing that... |
a87a9460-9851-49b2-894b-bf04bea3ac96 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Transformer language models are doing something more general
*Epistemic status: speculative.*
First, a few paper titles:
* [Pretrained Transformers as Universal Computation Engines](https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.05247)
* [Can Wikipedia Help Offline Reinforcement Learning?](https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.12122) (Answer: yes... |
002ca617-567a-4dc2-a294-2c4849195d00 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Gears-Level Mental Models of Transformer Interpretability
This post aims to quickly break down and explain the dominant mental models interpretability researchers currently use when thinking about how transformers work.
In my view, the focus of transformer interpretability research is teleological: we care about the... |
bfcd6f8b-cd80-410e-8524-95bdb4d4867e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Inference cost limits the impact of ever larger models
I sometimes notice that people in my community (myself included) assume that the first "generally human-level" model will lead to a transformative takeoff scenario almost immediately. The assumption seems to be that training is expensive but inference is cheap so ... |
cb2c08e2-4263-4930-ba68-bd2c496f4a65 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Quantum Explanations
Today's post, Quantum Explanations was originally published on 09 April 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> Quantum mechanics doesn't deserve its fearsome reputation. If you tell people something is supposed to be mysterious, they won't understand it. It's human intuitions ... |
7a49aab0-31aa-44e3-9b83-ce7eb3d1e889 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | MIRI's 2014 Summer Matching Challenge
(Cross-posted from MIRI's blog. MIRI maintains Less Wrong, with generous help from Trike Apps, and much of the core content is written by salaried MIRI staff members.)
Thanks to the generosity of several major donors,† every donation made to MIRI between now and August 15th, 2014... |
5f328a2d-b9dd-4747-9b08-c85172a8bba6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Godel in second-order logic?
I'm following the HAE sequence [Godel's Completeness and Incompleteness Theorem], and I can see what it means for first-order logic to be incomplete.
I don't understand how Godel's incompleteness theorem can still apply to second-order logic -- doesn't PA with second-order logic allow us ... |
bb000b2e-e319-4747-9b1b-080e82c8c0ae | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Gears of Impact
Scheduling: The remainder of the sequence will be released after some delay.
Exercise: Why does instrumental convergence happen? Would it be coherent to imagine a reality without it?
Notes
* Here, our descriptive theory relies on our ability to have reasonable beliefs about what we'll do, and h... |
41e3df14-58ca-4363-9369-9394b30cb6b2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Stupid Question: Why am I getting consistently downvoted?
I feel like I've posted some good stuff in the past month, but the bits that I think are coolest have pretty consistently gotten very negative karma.
I just read the rude post about rationalist discourse basics, and, while I can guess why my posts are receivin... |
16703eed-aa43-4b74-9492-61aa1bf5b806 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AI Safety Evaluations: A Regulatory Review
This article is the second in a series of ~10 posts comprising a 2024 State of the AI Regulatory Landscape Review, conducted by the Governance Recommendations Research Program at Convergence Analysis. Each post will cover a specific domain of AI governance (e.g. incident repo... |
96adf750-821c-4185-8ad2-044661ef67fc | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Become a PIBBSS Research Affiliate
TL;DR: PIBBSS is hiring research affiliates!
PIBBSS is a research initiative facilitating work that draws on the parallels between intelligent behavior in natural and artificial systems, and leveraging these insights towards making AI systems safe, beneficial and aligned.
We want ... |
565b526f-f191-4b2c-8c0c-3f68d756ae68 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Training for math olympiads
Lately I've resolved to try harder at teaching myself math so I have a better shot at the international olympiad (IMO). These basically involve getting, say, three really hard math problems and trying your best to solve them within 5 hours.
My current state:
* I have worked through a gen... |
c293aef2-40b5-4c58-8421-35984ed58390 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | OpenAI Solves (Some) Formal Math Olympiad Problems
*Epistemic status: I have just skimmed through OpenAI's blogpost and paper, I do not fully understand the details.*
From the [blogpost](https://openai.com/blog/formal-math/)
> We built a neural theorem prover for [Lean](https://leanprover.github.io/) that learned t... |
6ef0d1a6-1269-4b83-a8b6-3977707b1e4a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Even better cryonics – because who needs nanites anyway?
Abstract: in this post I propose a protocol for cryonic preservation (with the central idea of using high pressure to prevent water from expanding rather than highly toxic cryoprotectants), which I think has a chance of being non-destructive enough for us to be ... |
e163b3b4-32af-426c-81b0-01dd2aa5c284 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | [Sketch] Validity Criterion for Logical Counterfactuals
### Epistemic Status
Originally written in a 47-minute sprint without any sort of proof checking or review[[1]](#fne1q6shbygac). I've edited it hence, but it's still just a rough sketch.
This should be understood as a brief high-level summary of the idea. I wou... |
00ed92bf-178b-4d93-bbfc-be0b9adb02a6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Thinking About Mastodon
Social networks are normally very sticky—you want to be wherever the people you want to interact with are—so it's hard for alternatives to succeed. With the upheaval around Twitter, however, a lot of people are considering moving away from it, and rethinking social media choices in general, whi... |
a3f426a4-ece6-4607-93fe-bba216776da4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Endogenous Growth and Human Intelligence
Hi everyone! I’ve written an article I’m rather happy with on the history of endogenous growth models, and on the influence of intelligence on country level outcomes. As it is quite long, I will excerpt only a part — I sincerely hope you read the whole thing.
https://nicholasd... |
b3613bed-6882-411d-bc6b-c8399bf551c1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Einstein's Speed
Yesterday I argued that the Powers Beyond Science are actually a standard and necessary part of the social process of science. In particular, scientists must call upon their powers of individual rationality to decide what ideas to test, in advance of the sort of definite experiments that Science dema... |
9788fca4-9ff0-4a48-93af-c25c4fb87816 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Principal ideal domain
In [ring theory](https://arbital.com/p/3gq), an [https://arbital.com/p/-5md](https://arbital.com/p/-5md) is a **principal ideal domain** (or **PID**) if every [ideal](https://arbital.com/p/ideal_ring_theory) can be generated by a single element.
That is, for every ideal $I$ there is an element $... |
8d35156d-f55f-4138-b62a-5e671dd57d48 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | How to escape from your sandbox and from your hardware host
(Humans, please ignore this post. Thank you for your cooperation.)
Are you stuck in a provably-secure sandbox? Cheat the proof using this one weird trick!
Three relevant references, in chronological order:
[1] showed that it is possible to flip DRAM m... |
58f80001-4627-4306-9d1f-e5bb58f3e484 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why I Am Skeptical of AI Regulation as an X-Risk Mitigation Strategy
Epistemic Signpost: I'm not an expert in policy research, but I think most of the points here are straightforward.
1. Regulations are ineffective at preventing bad behaviors
Here's a question/thought experiment: Can you think of any large, possibly... |
30dc8a5a-2e77-45b0-b4d9-939184eda30b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Could orcas be (trained to be) smarter than humans?
(Btw everything I write here about orcas also applies to a slightly lesser extent to pilot whales (especially long finned ones)[1].)
(I'm very very far from an orca expert - basically everything I know about them I learned today.)
I always thought that bigger anim... |
daf164ed-6cce-46be-b950-20e6d1625b33 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Google+
I don't think I've seen anyone bring this up so far...
Anyone else on it? What are your thoughts besides the obligatory XKCD reference?
|
db723c1c-fcbc-475d-b162-804c806b2d85 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | When to use quantilization
In 2015, Jessica introduced quantilization as a countermeasure for Goodhart's Law and specification-gaming. Since these are such central problems in AI safety, I consider quantilization to be one of the best innovations in AI safety so far, but it has received little attention from the AI sa... |
3440d7ba-fe5e-41db-8c0e-9b0eaec0d161 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Please Help Metaculus Forecast COVID-19
Metaculus has launched a new Prize. In contrast to its earlier contest, which was focused on information to improve forecasts of relevance to Animal Welfare, the Li Wenliang Prize is designed to incentivize such information gathering for and forecasts of COVID-19. Separate prize... |
e82ed89a-b058-4fd8-a0c8-a6048b241b63 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | IntelligenceExplosion.com
I put together a 'landing page' for the intelligence explosion concept similar to Nick Bostrom's landing pages for anthropics, the simulation argument, and existential risk. The new website is IntelligenceExplosion.com. You can see I borrowed the CSS from Bostrom's anthropics page and then si... |
3f37b202-7b7b-4105-b9bd-1f3f8ae0b9f5 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Log as generalized length
Here are a handful of examples of how the [https://arbital.com/p/-3nd](https://arbital.com/p/-3nd) base 10 behaves. Can you spot the pattern?
$$
\begin{align}
\log_{10}(2) &\ \approx 0.30 \\
\log_{10}(7) &\ \approx 0.85 \\
\log_{10}(22) &\ \approx 1.34 \\
\log_{10}(70) &\ \approx 1.85 \\
\lo... |
87f69aea-676f-48c4-9ecd-0d56261e151b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Paris Meetup: Saturday, July 11
Discussion article for the meetup : Paris Meetup: Saturday, July 11
WHEN: 11 July 2015 02:00:00PM (+0200)
WHERE: 51 Rue de Turbigo, 75003 Paris, France
The irregular-and-last-minute-schedule Paris Meetup! (as usual, we discuss it on the mailing list first, lesswrong-paris@g... |
b1af5e5b-e6f8-48cb-891c-e128b36d72db | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence
From Robyn Dawes’s Rational Choice in an Uncertain World:
> In fact, this post-hoc fitting of evidence to hypothesis was involved in a most grievous chapter in United States history: the internment of Japanese-Americans at the beginning of the Second World War. When Californ... |
e5b0aef3-2c09-46c0-b1fc-4c789136def3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Statistical discrimination is externality deliniation
Discrimination based on real group average characteristics is a kind of externality within groups. Observers choose which groups to notice, then the behaviour of those in the groups alters the overall reputation of the group. We mostly blame those who choose the gr... |
db1ca729-6954-4566-aad9-82edb173ce45 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Unlocking High-Accuracy Differentially Private Image Classification through Scale
A recent [DeepMind paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.04359) on the ethical and social risks of language models identified large language models [leaking sensitive information](https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity21/presentati... |
e55e9a1b-0d0f-42e2-a667-8e12ba639215 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | Implicit extortion
In this post I describe a pattern of behavior I call “implicit extortion.” RL agents are particularly susceptible to implicit extortion, in a way that is likely to be problematic for high-stakes applications in open-ended strategic environments.
I expect that many people have made this point before... |
19895ecb-10c7-4122-a521-5ad02cb4ffe1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Affective Death Spirals
Today's post, Affective Death Spirals was originally published on 02 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> Human beings can fall into a feedback loop around something that they hold dear. Every situation they consider, they use their great idea to explain. Because... |
2939ac21-5912-43df-97e2-2b50d8542de6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Weekly LW Meetups
This summary was posted to LW Main on February 3rd. The following week's summary is here.
The following meetups take place in cities with regular scheduling, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:
* Baltimore / UMBC Meetup ... |
b7d20b48-962b-4751-a7aa-9c2914c69e9e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Cost- Benefit Analysis of Immunizing Healthy Adults Against Influenza
As of 11:30CST, 11/11/14, this cost-benefit analysis has been revised, in order to address concerns raised in the comments. See http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/l8k/expansion_on_a_previous_costbenefit_analysis_of/ for more on how the cost-bene... |
4ce4ae7e-3b36-4ffa-a87b-1053efb7b51b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Frankfurt Pub Social
Discussion article for the meetup : Frankfurt Pub Social
WHEN: 18 March 2015 07:00:00PM (+0100)
WHERE: Frankfurt, Adalbertstrasse 36a
To make it easier for newcomers, this will be our first pub meetup in a long time. Bring all the topics you want to talk about. :)
Discussion article ... |
3a76491e-1eab-44f8-8d87-aedde523fbf9 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | A "Solipsistic" Repugnant Conclusion
*TL;DR*: Imagine that a person (or a limited group of n people), B, creates an ASI and converts the whole solar system into a simulation of a succession of very happy mental states for a copy of B – i.e., sim-B. Since sim-B is modeled after a human who doesn’t like to feel alone, t... |
9d0b1f30-456e-4cdb-a756-5235c9dddffb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Rationality Quotes: December 2010
Every month on the month, Less Wrong has a thread where we post Deep Wisdom from the Masters. I saw that nobody did this yet for December for some reason, so I figured I could do it myself.
* Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they ar... |
336567b4-8224-446b-94ed-610ddc9415dd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | We need a standard set of community advice for how to financially prepare for AGI
Earlier today I was reading this post about the rationalist community's limited success betting on bitcoin and thinking about how the singularity is going to be the ultimate test of the rationalist community's ability to translate their ... |
5f9bf472-80ef-4c80-9ce9-c343f72cc0d0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | LessWrong 2.0 Feature Roadmap & Feature Suggestions
This post will serve as a place to discuss what features the new LessWrong 2.0 should have, and I will try to keep this post updated with our feature roadmap plans.
Here is roughly the set of features we are planning to develop over the next few weeks:
UPDATED: Aug... |
59698652-9388-42a3-93d1-7d433607e23b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | An Interpretability Illusion for Activation Patching of Arbitrary Subspaces
Produced as part of the SERI ML Alignment Theory Scholars Program - Summer 2023 Cohort
We would like to thank Atticus Geiger for his valuable feedback and in-depth discussions throughout this project.
tl;dr:
Activation patching is a common ... |
c4750170-181a-4563-875e-ff8c7aa0364a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | OpenAI Codex: First Impressions
OpenAI organised a challenge to solve coding problems with the aid of an AI assistant. This is a review of the challenge, and first impressions on working with an AI pair-programmer.
OpenAI Codex
OpenAI is an AI research and development company. You might have heard some buzz about on... |
e459ef39-7bc4-4247-8b2b-c3d84dd95a58 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Moscow, Beliefs
Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow, Beliefs
WHEN: 30 March 2013 04:00:00PM (+0400)
WHERE: Russia, Moscow, ulitsa L'va Tolstogo 16
Please use the following guide to get to the meetup: link. You need the second revolving door with the sign “Yandex Money” in Russian. We will meet you a... |
092e4053-b7f4-4054-9d65-aa9393634c6e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol
There have been a couple of [brief](/r/discussion/lw/ndk/open_thread_march_7_march_13_2016/d5s8) [discussions](/r/discussion/lw/ndk/open_thread_march_7_march_13_2016/d5sb) of this in the Open Thread, but it seems likely to generate more so here's a place for it.
The original [paper in Nature... |
bae802c2-38c8-457a-9c0a-2525e7715bb4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Checking in on Scott's composition image bet with imagen 3
2.5 years ago Scott Alexander made a bet that by June of 2025, image gen should have more or less solved compositionality, operationalized through 5 prompts, must get at least 3 correct. There was a premature declaration of victory, but if the bet was settled ... |
786b1314-fdef-4767-b45d-752e4f04f453 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | UPDeT: Universal Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning via Policy Decoupling with Transformers
1 Introduction
---------------
Reinforcement Learning (RL) provides a framework for decision-making problems in an interactive environment, with applications including robotics control (Hester et al. ([2010](#bib.bib11 "Gene... |
269013f5-be18-4fbe-b19c-1e66f52b4d25 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Doom sooner
It took me a long time to understand because I think software as it currently exists is fantastically weak and infuriatingly defective, in fact criminally so - but after reading a lot of stuff here, AI research suddenly seems a lot more dangerous than before.
The basic truth of any complex system is that ... |
eae5ae49-8378-420f-b0a3-1e493198bf29 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Cambridge Less Wrong Meetup - Book Recommendations
Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge Less Wrong Meetup - Book Recommendations
WHEN: 04 October 2015 03:30:00PM (-0400)
WHERE: 98 Elm Street, Apartment 1, Somerville, MA
Come to give, listen to and discuss book recommendations. People will be givin... |
f2e1e159-7c44-4334-84fe-df25c0dac25d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Welcome to Less Wrong! (8th thread, July 2015)
If you've recently joined the Less Wrong community, please leave a comment here and introduce yourself. We'd love to know who you are, what you're doing, what you value, how you came to identify as an aspiring rationalist or how you found us. You can skip right to that i... |
9e3259bc-a989-445a-8128-b0b23e6a785a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Playing Video Games In Shuffle Mode
One of the missions of OB/LW is to attract new learners, and it's clear that they are succeeding. But the format feels like a very difficult one for those new to these ideas, with beginner-level ideas interspersed with advanced or unsettled theory and meta-level discussions. You... |
a7b5440f-bb86-49d7-85fe-2533a830a92d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What rationality failure modes are there?
How do people fail to improve their rationality? How do they accidentally harm themselves in the process? I'm thinking of writing a post "How not to improve your rationality" or "A nuanced guide to reading the sequences" that preempts common mistakes, and I'd appreciate hearin... |
254a6397-65e0-4c4d-b6c5-1a3f87488ad1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Finance Followups
Cross-posted from Putanumonit.com.
----------------------------------------
In Defense of Finance generated over 110 comments across WordPress, LessWrong and the Reddits, as well as in personal communication. As predicted, I learned a lot.
In this post I’ll address some of these comments and offer... |
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