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a30ea979-8b8e-4ed4-96a9-73c4a6930179
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
AI and Evolution Executive Summary ================= Artificial intelligence is advancing quickly. In some ways, AI development is an uncharted frontier, but in others, it follows the familiar pattern of other competitive processes; these include biological evolution, cultural change, and competition between business...
7742b356-71d2-479d-9ae5-f3060df37a66
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital
Arbital
LaTeX **[Placeholder](https://arbital.com/p/5xs)**
8328a9df-e570-4f2e-b3ed-86ec0845907b
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Integrating Behavior Cloning and Reinforcement Learning for Improved Performance in Dense and Sparse Reward Environments Introduction ------------ Reinforcement Learning (RL) has yielded many recent successes in solving complex tasks that meet and exceed the capabilities of human counterparts, demonstrated in video...
41c7f1f3-48fd-4ce6-a9bc-aa247d1b2376
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
When It's Not Right to be Rational By now I expect most of us have acknowledged the importance of being rational.  But as vital as it is to know what principles generally work, it can be even more important to know the exceptions. As a process of constant self-evaluation and -modification, rationality is capable of a...
53580520-8ce5-441b-b5be-a5afd6cdfe5b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Link: Interesting Video About Automation and the Singularity I finally got into Ello (I was mad that I couldn't get an invitation for the longest time). I found this interesting video about automation and what we should do when most jobs no longer require humans. I have often wondered what we were going to do with the...
52dc6b31-3f20-4d11-a4e4-99b4d3548bab
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
How many people are working (directly) on reducing existential risk from AI? Summary ======= I've updated my estimate of the number of FTE (full-time equivalent) working (directly) on reducing existential risks from AI **from 300 FTE to 400 FTE**. Below I've pasted some slightly edited excepts of the relevant sectio...
7d128eae-2686-414d-b364-51c3ccb49986
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Scalable Online Planning via Reinforcement Learning Fine-Tuning. 1 Introduction --------------- Lookahead search has been a key component of successful AI systems in sequential decision-making problems. For example, in order to achieve superhuman performance in go, chess and shogi, AlphaZero leveraged Monte Carlo t...
81c5d288-6526-49f9-99bd-f0f6baf76e8d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Off-topic: Russian machine translation This is a little off-topic, but I can't find the answer and I realized this might actually be an excellent place to ask this question: I've noticed Google Translate seems to do a pretty bad job sometimes of Russian-to-English and vice versa, assuming that my human-translated doc...
74ce25f5-62a4-44b0-8704-4687cb14dd24
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Which textbook would you recommend to learn decision theory? Eliezer talks a lot about decision theory in his sequences, e.g. the Aumann agreement theorem or the von Neumann-Morgenstern utility theorem. From what I've seen so far, decision theory looks extremely interesting. Which textbook in decision theory would yo...
4b20b04f-9c81-4696-aea8-60c58a0622f0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What is the best day to celebrate Smallpox Eradication Day? Several of my friends posted on Facebook/threw parties this weekend for a date of May 8. However, searching on Facebook, I find that I and several other friends have been posting celebratory messages on Facebook on December 9 in previous years. This inconsis...
1b15faa8-03ea-4bf3-9ee2-6f4d0c5809a1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Fluoridation: The RCT We Still Haven't Run (But Should) Empiric status: My own idea written up with the help of Gemini 2.0 Experimental in dialog. We're still coasting on the fumes of 1940s data when it comes to water fluoridation. Back then, fluoride toothpaste was a novelty, fluoridated salt was uncommon, and water...
226ce7a1-93ff-4cbc-b24f-df2fa5024228
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Protestants Trading Acausally Protestants believe in predestination. The God has already decided on who's going to get to hell and heaven. This feels like a terrible incentive structure. If you are already predestined to get one of those places, why care? Why try to be good? In reality though it works pretty well. P...
27184f2a-03be-44ab-a55e-7946c561c5b5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Extreme GDP growth is a bad operating definition of "slow takeoff" I gather that the historical definition of slow takeoff is something akin to "grand GDP growth for several months in a row, due to AI advancements". While recent advancements by OpenAI et. al. are impressive, sometimes people will claim they would nev...
03fe998f-3ab0-46c2-89f8-292a9a44d313
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Auckland meetup, Thrusday May 26th Time for another Auckland meetup! Same place as the last one a few years back, at the Messe bar at 2pm on the 26th of May (Thursday). Write a comment and/or please contact me on my cell: 021 039 8554, if you are interested in coming.
2fab93f9-67a6-424f-aa28-901592835d45
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Dario Amodei: On DeepSeek and Export Controls Dario corrects misconceptions and endorses export controls. > A few weeks ago I made the case for stronger US export controls on chips to China. Since then DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company, has managed to — at least in some respects — come close to the performance of US fro...
afa0938c-2da4-4b3b-b446-ab455ef8c0a1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Subsystem Alignment (The bibliography for the whole sequence can be found here)
fb63b947-71f4-4c0a-b772-96d9df3158da
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The LessWrong 2019 Review Today is the start of the 2019 Review, continuing our tradition of checking which things that were written on LessWrong still hold up a year later, and to help build an ongoing canon of the most important insights developed here on LessWrong. The whole process will span 8 weeks, starting on ...
8e13d9ab-4e14-405f-9a70-cbb49105ec48
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Excerpts from Veyne's "Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?" "Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?" is a long 1983 essay by Paul Veyne, a French archaeologist/historian. The following post (written by me in 2011) consists of excerpts of the essay that I found particularly interesting when I read it. Topics Veyne ...
cf21f144-5746-4b76-8cfa-6b353e368e30
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Why you can't treat decidability and complexity as a constant (Post #1) Or, why you need to fix a machine before you can prove anything, and you also need to fix the constraints on the machine. This also holds importantly for problems claimed to be decidable or undecidable by algorithms. Basically, the reason here i...
e1ac5608-1270-4c39-bec0-743958eb501d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Two Dark Side Statistics Papers I. First we have False Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility In Data Collection And Analysis Allows Presenting Anything As Significant (h/t Jonas Vollmer). The message is hardly unique: there are lots of tricks unscrupulous or desperate scientists can use to artificially nudge ...
9e672df1-4107-4ff2-88e9-867737f88a0d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Is there an existing label for the category of fallacies exemplified by "paradox of tolerance"? The "paradox of tolerance" is a continually hot topic, but I've not seen it framed as a member in a category of fallacies where a principle is conceptualized as either absolute or hypocritical and the absolute conception th...
d807f00d-12b9-41b9-9ac7-a5c9dd9bad69
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Stabilizing Transformers for Reinforcement Learning 1 Introduction --------------- It has been argued that self-attention architectures (Vaswani et al., [2017](#bib.bib47)) deal better with longer temporal horizons than recurrent neural networks (RNNs): by construction, they avoid compressing the whole past into a ...
da0d7766-ff27-46fc-a304-2d27a68f13a5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Counterfactual control incentives Co-authored with Rebecca Gorman. In section 5.2 of their Arxiv paper, "The Incentives that Shape Behaviour", which introduces structural causal influence models and a proposal for addressing misaligned AI incentives, the authors present the following graph: The blue node is a "dec...
a671091a-eeac-4538-bf3a-7c82dcdf920e
LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct
LessWrong
"In the game Taboo (by Hasbro), the objective is for a player to have their partner guess a word written on a card, without using that word or five additional words listed on the card. For example, you might have to get your partner to say "baseball" without using the words "sport", "bat", "hit", "pitch", "base" or of ...
b9d7ecda-93b5-4a1b-990e-32847759c319
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Palworld development blog post Palworld is currently the most-played game on Steam. It's by a small Japanese company called Pocketpair. Shortly before Palworld released, the CEO put up this blog post; here's a translation. Here are some points I thought were interesting: * on the co-founder: > It took me three yea...
8d0b744c-ab79-4965-a1e4-f67bff4bee99
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How to Fake Decryption {Epistemic Status: mostly just writing up an idea I came up with a while ago. I’ve done non-trivial coursework in cryptography, so I think I’ve avoided obvious errors, though there may be non-obvious ones. Consult an expert before using.} Suppose you knew that someone was spying on your encrypt...
38a2ebb4-5c38-437c-996c-6fec51ab23ae
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Economics Roundup #5 While we wait for the verdict on Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.7, today seems like a good day to catch up on the queue and look at various economics-related things. TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. The Trump Tax Proposals. 2. Taxing Unrealized Capital Gains. 3. Extremely High Marginal Tax Rates. 4. Tr...
1105a150-330f-4c7e-9187-22accad5e69c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What if we approach AI safety like a technical engineering safety problem This post has been written for the second Refine blog post day, at the end of the first week of iterating on ideas and concretely aiming at the alignment problem. Thanks to Adam Shimi, Paul Bricman, and Daniel Clothiaux for helpful discussion an...
3d1e082c-81ce-4175-a297-f0b837144310
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
METR's Observations of Reward Hacking in Recent Frontier Models METR just made a lovely post detailing many examples they've found of reward hacks by frontier models. Unlike the reward hacks of yesteryear, these models are smart enough to know that what they are doing is deceptive and not what the company wanted them ...
e6f07d54-e0df-4a79-a8d7-d1581eab7ad1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Beware General Claims about “Generalizable Reasoning Capabilities” (of Modern AI Systems) 1. Late last week, researchers at Apple released a paper provocatively titled “The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity”, which “challenge[s] pre...
8f11722f-47a7-48b3-a57f-add619bcfada
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Is religion locally correct for consequentialists in some instances? Sorry if I'm about 10 years late to this conversation, if this exact idea has already been propagated and responded to in detail, feel free to point me towards any existing resources. Personal Beliefs: I am a staunch athiest/agnostic who does not be...
f9e595ef-2eff-4277-b7ba-176534776b89
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
story-based decision-making A few times, I've talked to an executive manager or early-stage investor, and this happened: > me: Here's the main plan. Now, we think the odds are good, but the most likely failure point is here. If necessary, we have an alternative plan for that part, which goes as follows... > them: (v...
1f24efd1-712e-460f-b24d-e01ef2907824
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Repost: Efficient Charity: Cheap Utilons via bone marrow registration   DISCLAIMER: This article was posted a few days ago in Main. If you read it there, you probably don't need to read it again, although there is an additional paragraph at the bottom that might interest you. I am posting it again because I didn't qu...
4d914c8e-98b6-46e3-ab05-43ce071f0fea
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Curiosity about Aligning Values Hi there, I've been thinking a lot about AI Alignment and values, the latter for longer than the former, admittedly. I'm in graduate school and study values through ethics. I would love to start a conversation about a thought that shot through my mind just last night. In thinking about ...
28172dd5-bdda-40e2-9b28-062d36ad00d2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Covid 6/16/22: Do Not Hand it to Them You (finally!) no longer need to hand anyone a negative test in order to travel internationally. You also most definitely do not have to hand it to the FDA for their work solving the bottlenecks they created. Paxlovid remains something that you will probably not by default get, ...
389b4d6d-8a62-4008-b80a-3097f49c902f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Shortening Timelines: There's No Buffer Anymore It seems that there are two points of particular relevance in predicting AGI timelines: (i) the expectation, or the point at which the chance of AGI is believed to be 50% and (ii) the last date as of which the chance of AGI is believed to be insignificant.   For purpose...
931b50fb-c7b8-4e27-8eb3-182fcec5918b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Elephant seal
813edb72-906e-423e-8ab3-2bb634ea4e08
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
2016 LessWrong Diaspora Survey Results Foreword: As we wrap up the 2016 survey, I'd like to start by thanking everybody who took the time to fill it out. This year we had 3083 respondents, more than twice the number we had last year. (Source: http://lesswrong.com/lw/lhg/2014_survey_results/) This seems consistent wit...
6abde55b-118a-4cdc-b037-921954d77213
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Why I Should Work on AI Safety - Part 2: Will AI Actually Surpass Human Intelligence? Considering Counterarguments on the Singularity WALL-E made out of Legos. Photo by Jason Leung. Hey everyone! This is my first post on LessWrong :) I cross-posted this from my blog Love Yourself Unconditionally where I am currently ...
5b839b9f-f309-40a7-a975-833b9300e3cf
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
How much can value learning be disentangled? In the context of whether the definition of human values can disentangled from the process of approximating/implementing that definition, David [asks me](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/95i5B78uhqyB3d6Xc/assuming-we-ve-solved-x-could-we-do-y#RTrjtCsz5YiZLadT9): * But I th...
8efaf7f7-ae49-4ea7-8e29-ae2e752099a1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Methodological Therapy: An Agenda For Tackling Research Bottlenecks This post is part of the work done at Conjecture. Epistemic Status: Palimpsest Better epistemology should make you stronger. Which is why at Conjecture's' epistemology team we are so adamant on improving our models of knowledge-production: this fee...
c8be1acc-f36d-4149-baab-9271e3a3c07e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How to Draw Conclusions Like Sherlock Holmes   Eliezer Yudkowsky once wrote that > [...] when you look at what Sherlock Holmes does - you can't go out and do it at home.  Sherlock Holmes is not really operating by any sort of reproducible method.  He is operating by magically finding the right clues and carrying out...
4e5b1cdf-9200-4d03-922f-ed0dc60cf163
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Introducing the Coalition for a Baruch Plan for AI: A Call for a Radical Treaty-Making process for the Global Governance of AI I Hi LessWrong community, I’m Rufo Guerreschi, the Coordinator, Convenor and Spokesperson of the Coalition for a Baruch Plan for AI (CBPAI).  Following our launch last December 18th, I’m ex...
1b59483a-36cb-4b19-9f0f-b3415f320f0a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
COVID-19 - a good or bad time for extended travel? A recent loosening of my employment and relational commitments has afforded me the opportunity to do some unencumbered international travel. My intention is to spend a month or more in a single locale so I can get to know the culture and learn from their perspectives....
74dd9c15-dc9f-4ac6-9339-24c00ebacfd4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
I want to learn economics I would like to learn more about economics but I don't know where to start. Can lesswrong suggest specific areas of economics that are particularly useful for understanding and optimising the world? Specific suggestions such as reading lists and resources would also be much appreciated.
3d5d647b-e3b3-4f9b-acb3-c9492efd78ea
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Agentic Language Model Memes Related: What specific dangers arise when asking GPT-N to write an Alignment Forum post? I've been thinking about the AI safety implications of ultra powerful language models. I think it makes more sense to think of language models trained with internet text as containing a collective of ...
dfd677d5-fe3c-432f-a33b-cf72240caced
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Quick Look #1 Diophantus of Alexandria https://www.storyofmathematics.com/hellenistic_diophantus.html Diophantus of Alexandria, a 2nd Century Greek mathematician, had a lot of the concepts needed to develop an Algebra. However, he was unable to fully generalize his methods of problem solving, even if he invented some...
43fba88f-3c39-4595-9783-14e74f98840e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A quick investigation of AI pro-AI bias Question: Do LLMs exhibit a pro-AI bias in their answers? Experiment: I compare the scores LLMs give to resumes when the titles of the publications they contain reflect a pro or anti-AI sentiment, or when a pro or anti-AI sentiment is explicitly expressed. Result: I don’t find...
3668d392-2198-444d-9906-fda3c95fd42d
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
Infographics report risk management of Artificial Intelligence in Spain As part of our recently published report "[Artificial Intelligence Risk Management in Spain](https://riesgoscatastroficosglobales.com/articulos/informe-gestin-de-riesgos-de-la-inteligencia-artificial-en-espaa)" the [RCG team](https://riesgoscatast...
1c6a9a36-0da6-496f-bd84-7641e46df97c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Progress links and tweets, 2023-04-12 Opportunities * Nat Friedman wants a researcher/journalist for a short AI/rationalism/x-risk project * A new x-risk research lab is recruiting their first round of fellows (via @panickssery) Links * A “solutionist” third-way on AI safety from Leopold (or thread version) * Ja...
b7b1659f-debc-4066-a52a-504abc6177a3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How does iterated amplification exceed human abilities? When I first started learning about IDA, I thought that agents trained using IDA would be human-level after the first stage, i.e. that Distill(H) would be human-level. As I've written about before, Paul later clarified this, so my new understanding is that after ...
a4c6dd85-3fb8-4382-8df9-f6c66fc3d5a2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Gauging Interest: Santa Barbara, CA Meetup I live in Santa Barbara.  Los Angeles is a bit too far away for me to travel for LW meetups, so I wanted to see if anyone would be interested in a Santa Barbara meetup.  I would be happy to arrange it and plan content. If anyone would be interested in attending *at least one...
ac9f527f-dd33-4644-a992-fce5a24ffcd2
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
Davis on AI capability and motivation In a [review of *Superintelligence*](https://cs.nyu.edu/davise/papers/Bostrom.pdf), NYU computer scientist Ernest Davis voices disagreement with a number of claims he attributes to Nick Bostrom: that “intelligence is a potentially infinite quantity with a well-defined, one-dimensi...
cf6bc69b-e81b-493f-bf7c-301e5ab6f9a6
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Response to Blake Richards: AGI, generality, alignment, & loss functions Blake Richards is a neuroscientist / AI researcher with appointments at [McGill](https://www.mcgill.ca/neuro/blake-richards-phd) & [MiLA](https://mila.quebec/en/person/blake-richards/). Much of his recent work has involved making connections betw...
cfe10a4f-7ed2-40be-8723-53d262d7a164
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Communication, consciousness, and belief strength measures Communication is a fascinating subject. It’s a way of transferring information from one place to the next (or, to invert a quote by Chris Fields, communication is physics). Now you may have noticed that I used the word “communication” in two slightly different...
e68fbbcc-8fa5-4149-b868-54be11bddda9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Predict 2025 AI capabilities (by Sunday) Until this Sunday, you can submit your 2025 AI predictions at ai2025.org. It’s a forecasting survey by AI Digest for the 2025 performance on various AI benchmarks, as well as revenue and public attention.  You can share your results in a picture like this one. I personally fou...
d5163b6a-8c86-459b-bfb1-476ca3048f46
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: National Portrait Gallery/American Art Museum Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: National Portrait Gallery/American Art Museum WHEN: 14 February 2016 03:00:00PM (-0500) WHERE: Reynolds Center x-posted from list. Gathering in courtyard from 3:00pm, hard start 3:30pm - un...
f2327c90-30eb-430a-aa8d-8453d7900ae5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Task vectors & analogy making in LLMs I have described the problem of analogy-making interpretability in the previous post: given the examples of transformed sequences of numbers, what’s the mechanism behind figuring this transformation out, and applying it correctly to the incomplete (test) sequence? prompt: "0 1 2 ...
09630fc7-fe4f-4a87-a741-a33450d57304
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
More and Less than Solomonoff Induction I've been thinking about how to put induction with limited resources on a firmer foundation. This may just be retracing the steps of others, but that's okay with me. Mostly I just want to talk about these thoughts. After a few points of introduction. What's Solomonoff inductio...
0d597593-0467-4e63-8034-4ccad8b20079
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
OPERA Confirms: Neutrinos Travel Faster Than Light > New high-precision tests carried out by the OPERA collaboration in Italy broadly confirm its claim, made in September, to have detected neutrinos travelling at faster than the speed of light. The collaboration today submitted its results to a journal, but some membe...
1a1526ca-5362-440e-8b07-43401651ee59
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Whose Fault? There is an old story that I had read in one of the Upanishads (I can't recall which one exactly), and it describes a situation that goes something like this: > A blind man is walking towards a deep well.  There is a guy sitting on a bench nearby and watching him from a distance.  > > The blind man unaw...
73e02d2e-6b73-4484-a99c-230ed04cc992
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
February 2018 Newsletter #### Updates * New at IAFF: [An Untrollable Mathematician](https://agentfoundations.org/item?id=1750) * New at AI Impacts: [2015 FLOPS Prices](https://aiimpacts.org/2015-flops-prices/) * We presented “[Incorrigibility in the CIRL Framework](https://intelligence.org/2017/08/31/incorrigibility...
4c5238e3-a7c8-48ef-ab4e-a43e81718eb8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Ultra-simplified research agenda This is an ultra-condensed version of the research agenda on synthesising human preferences (video version here): In order to infer what a human wants from what they do, an AI needs to have a human theory of mind. Theory of mind is something that humans have instinctively and subcons...
d95e9873-f694-494f-bb11-1b5b087fee7a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Shit rationalists say - 2018 In 2012 we had a thread titled Shit rationalists say that lead to the fun video Shit rationalists say. Given that the video is a lot of fun to watch, how about starting a new list that's up-to-date. Share whatever comes to mind and have fun :)
8b668458-b0c4-4ca9-ac83-3feb41122ca9
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs
Other
Online Learning Survey Foundations and TrendsR/circlecopyrtin Machine LearningVol. 4, No. 2 (2011) 107–194 c/circlecopyrt2012 S. Shalev-Shwartz DOI: 10.1561/2200000018 Online Learning and Online Convex Optimization By Shai Shalev-Shwartz Contents 1 Introduction 108 1.1 Examples 111 1.2 A Gentle Start 1121.3 Organizati...
8cd0cc0c-21bb-4846-a75b-4692d7291d5b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
As Few As Possible All of economics, every last bit of it, is about scarcity. About what is scarce and what is not, and about who does and who doesn’t get their needs (and sometimes wants) satisfied. Much of the debate about healthcare is in fact a scarcity problem. There aren’t enough practitioners in practice to ha...
48471c60-fb66-4306-b046-f396fd3fbf91
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Alzheimer's, Huntington's and Mitochondria Part 1: Turnover Rates Epistemic status: Big if true, I don't have much time now but I might try and write part of this up into a more formal scientific letter to a journal or something later. I am reasonably confident that my models here are significant in some way but I do ...
cd702a1b-16ef-419a-a807-850e4b174975
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Preference utilitarian measure of historical welfare GDP measures essentially how good we are at making widgets - and while widgets are useful, it is a very weak and indirect measure of welfare. For example UK GDP per capita doubled between 1975 and 2007 - and people's quality of life indeed improved - but it would be...
63aafb4d-c837-4803-a99b-b02e1b6058de
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
Argument for AI x-risk from large impacts *Last updated Sep 29 2021* *This page is incomplete, under active work and may be updated soon.* The **argument for AI x-risk from large impacts** an argument supporting the claim that advanced artificial intelligence poses an existential risk to humanity. Details ------...
2b1905bc-02bc-44f2-8e82-4b18574ca9e1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Probability as Minimal Map What’s the difference between a map and the raw data used to generate that map? Suppose, for example, that google sends a bunch of cars out driving around New York City, snapping photos every few feet, then uses the photos to reconstruct a streetmap. In an informational sense, what’s the di...
9a18d369-3eea-4a57-8a6c-108e23717fa2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How to parent more predictably (As with anything else I write about parenting, this is mostly just my observations with my own two kids and may not generalize as well as I think it does.) A few weeks ago I wrote about why I think it's valuable for parents to be predictable. I was mostly describing an end state, thou...
086ae9a0-92ea-44c9-abb8-6225bf48ea72
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A Sense That More Is Possible To teach people about a topic you've labeled "rationality", it helps for them to be interested in "rationality".  (There are less direct ways to teach people how to attain the map that reflects the territory, or optimize reality according to their values; but the explicit method is the co...
f20cb759-539c-4e31-84c0-6ad1b66a860c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Why are deaths not increasing with infections in the US? According to COVID act now, cases are now up to 100k a day, from an average of 40k/day in early October. Two weeks ag case numbers were already up by 50%. Meanwhile the change in deaths has been modest, still around 10%. This would require a three week lag for d...
8f3284b8-6071-4f7c-99c0-61899b54a83b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A noob goes to the SERI MATS presentations I have been cooped up in suburbia trying to take a break. But not having a routine and being around peers made the days feel monotonous. I was procrastinating writing my Prospect reflection and operations guide, and ended up reading alignment papers and being confused about h...
c359d8b5-39c6-4047-80c8-d90d40dfa416
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Should we all be more hygenic in normal times? I've heard people say that this should be the trigger to be more careful about disease after the pandemic is over: e.g. people with mild colds shouldn't leave the home without a mask, all big events should have hand sanitiser. One example is this opinion piece by Matt Rid...
53282c11-6328-4521-8063-fd7317074f5e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
.
d59b9409-c61f-43c7-a1f7-1b70a3379f6e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Atlanta: ATLessWrong Meetup Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta: ATLessWrong Meetup WHEN: 29 March 2013 07:00:00PM (-0400) WHERE: 1314 Hosea L Williams Drive NE, Atlanta, GA 30317 Let's get together and rock some rationality. Snacks, games, and various other fun activities will follow the official ...
cc2d832b-d65e-40bb-bf4a-869ccce4681c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Iterated Gambles and Expected Utility Theory The Setup I'm about a third of the way through Stanovich's Decision Making and Rationality in the Modern World.  Basically, I've gotten through some of the more basic axioms of decision theory (Dominance, Transitivity, etc).   As I went through the material, I noted that ...
f27d96ff-4a38-4a3a-b943-e177cc95c328
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Flexible Multiple-Objective Reinforcement Learning for Chip Placement 1. Introduction ---------------- With the evolution of AI, 5G, and high-performance computing, there is a growing demand for chips that can quickly process huge amounts of data, and such chips require a lot of memory or SRAM macros for the tempor...
5f757eed-b18f-486f-ac94-4402dac85fd6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Coercion is far I was in the subway about a month ago when saw an advert for a new show The Bourgeoisie.  While waiting for my train I thought about the families patriarch and the control he probably exerted over family members.  I imagined the cliché of the daughter forced into a marriage for political advantage.  I ...
239b71b3-6bfe-4d10-8329-beecd97c95e9
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info
AI Safety Info
Would AI alignment be hard with deep learning? Ajeya Cotra has written an excellent article titled [Why AI alignment could be hard with modern deep learning](https://www.cold-takes.com/why-ai-alignment-could-be-hard-with-modern-deep-learning/) addressing this question.
a6628a51-99a8-4711-b0bd-9460a2cfa355
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A.D&D.Sci May 2021 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 so you know what I'm talking about here. ---------------------------------------- Ruleset Generation code is now up here; this section goes through the important po...
cda74b3d-7eba-47b7-8e4f-4e5b44be0a9e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
An Actually Intuitive Explanation of the Oberth Effect This is a linkpost for An Actually Intuitive Explanation of the Oberth Effect. Like anyone with a passing interest in Kerbal Space Program physics and spaceflight, I eventually came across the Oberth Effect. It's a very important effect, crucial to designing effi...
49f2bf3c-cc0b-41d7-968c-519e84b8335c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How To Build A Community Full Of Lonely People
068fd213-8a99-4454-b9ee-2d41f17bd2ff
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Against Time in Agent Models When programming distributed systems, we always have many computations running in parallel. Our servers handle multiple requests in parallel, perform read and write operations on the database in parallel, etc. The prototypical headaches of distributed programming involve multiple processe...
93c27a4a-c5f9-4b7a-91cd-c44676b97654
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
$500 + $500 Bounty Problem: Does An (Approximately) Deterministic Maximal Redund Always Exist? A lot of our work involves "redunds".[1] A random variable Γ is a(n exact) redund over two random variables X1,X2 exactly when both X1→X2→Γ X2→X1→Γ Conceptually, these two diagrams say that X1 gives exactly the same infor...
5df1424b-2958-4a6a-80ea-68a4d9b491c7
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
My SERI MATS Application Thanks to Flo Dorner for feedback on the technical content in this post.  I have recently been accepted to the SERI ML Alignment Theory Scholars Program program, where applicants are paired with mentors. The application process was nonstandard: each mentor has a set of open-ended questions on...
078b1ffe-77e8-4ee0-b836-0cfb0170619d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Anthropics and Fermi: grabby, visible, zoo-keeping, and early aliens When updating the probability of life across the universe, there are two main observations we have to build on: * Anthropic update: we exist on Earth. * Fermi observation: (we exist on Earth and) we don't see any aliens. I'll analyse how these t...
cf7fe631-2ef1-4495-bb58-50ac3e9e8ba2
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Learning Optimization I'm developing an autodidactic curriculum of sorts. A study of learning might merit precedence.   What are the best articles, books, and videos you know on how to learn learning and why would you recommend those in particular? A thousand gracias.
4f1157c4-03f1-4c5d-8e98-b7b91ee371e3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Against the internal locus of control What do you think about these pairs of statements? 1. People's misfortunes result from the mistakes they make 2. Many of the unhappy things in people's lives are partly due to bad luck 1. In the long run, people get the respect they deserve in this world. 2. Unfortunately, a...
b14161da-134e-44b6-9027-6796af2c8d78
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
GPT-4: What we (I) know about it OpenAI released a press release, research statement, and system card about GPT-4 approximately one eternity (24 hours) ago. The general public can’t use it yet, but it’s in the process of being rolled out to paid subscribers of ChatGPT, and via a waitlist to the API. We also got confir...
6cc9816b-cc13-419b-8fd8-5b564209899a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Nitric oxide for covid and other viral infections Epistemic status: I spent about 5 hours looking into this, and the next day developed covid myself.  I did a bit more research plus all of the writing while sick. So in addition to my normal warning that I have no medical credentials, you should keep in mind that this ...
8b09d187-2417-466d-bb54-5817dc28908e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Text Posts from the Kids Group: 2020 Another round of liberating kid posts from Facebook. For reference, in 2020 Lily turned 6 and Anna turned 4. (Some of these were from me; some were from Julia. Ones saying "me" could mean either of us.) 2020-01-01 We went to the movies, and brought our own popcorn. When I passe...
9e6cec4d-d963-40f8-8006-3842b03a294d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Weekly LW Meetups This summary was posted to LW Main on March 27th. The following week's summary is here. Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in: * [Edinburgh] LessWrong Scotland: 12 April 2015 02:00PM * European Community Weekend 2015: 12 June 2015 12:00PM * LessWrong-like Meetup Hamburg: 2...
0a5dfbdb-4277-4a12-a0d4-7180dee95f85
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
(OLD) An Extremely Opinionated Annotated List of My Favourite Mechanistic Interpretability Papers This post is out of date, see v2 here Introduction This is an extremely opinionated list of my favourite mechanistic interpretability papers, annotated with my key takeaways and what I like about each paper, which bits ...
d0612de4-e988-4602-863b-14fe9d6ec549
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Against Tulip Subsidies I. Imagine a little kingdom with a quaint custom: when a man likes a woman, he offers her a tulip; if she accepts, they are married shortly thereafter. A couple who marries sans tulip is considered to be living in sin; no other form of proposal is appropriate or accepted. One day, a Dutch tra...
9e2f9af3-fb57-4ed1-9bd4-508e37b9ba91
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Lessons Learned: Properly Publicizing a Regional Meetup Event (also, last call to apply!) Boston, Labor Day Weekend 2023: NA East ACX & Rationality Meetup Organizers Retreat Application Deadline: June 30 23:59, please apply here. LessWrong event post, in case that is helpful. Lessons Learned Publicity No one wil...
70aac7b7-5a83-42de-8613-b6248a3c1237
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Updating Drexler's CAIS model Eric Drexler's report Reframing Superintelligence: Comprehensive AI Services (CAIS) as General Intelligence reshaped how a lot of people think about AI (summary 1, summary 2). I still agree with many parts of it, perhaps even the core elements of the model. However, after looking back on ...
02c6332e-e4a5-4688-8d46-2d7faebedb57
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Why are profitable companies laying off staff? Consider all the reasons you might have to reduce headcount in an economic downturn: 1. You rely on venture capital to survive which is no longer as easy to get, so you simply can't afford to pay your staff. 2. You've started making a loss, so you need to fire people t...
21278c0b-c043-4306-805c-3239641ce91a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Modern Monetary Theory for Dummies Modern Monetary Theory, called MMT, is a modern theory of how fiat money works and some implications of this. I don't know the intricate details of this theory but there are some broad conclusions you can draw about someone who talks positively about it. I'll try to very briefly sum...