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b4799adc-8a48-4f51-bc6a-8e731472991f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | how birds sense magnetic fields
introduction
It is known that many birds are able to sense the direction of Earth's magnetic field. Here's a wikipedia page on that general phenomenon. There have been 2 main theories of how that works.
One theory is that birds have magnets in their beak that act like a compass. We kno... |
6e001b5b-cf5e-48c5-ac2a-e3e030319bee | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | 2/27/08 Update – Frontpage 3.0
We finally got around to a long-postponed update to the frontpage, where logged in users see content that is hopefully more relevant to them.
Some notes:
* Non logged in users should have a mostly unchanged experience
* Logged in users now see a list of recommended sequences. The lis... |
5b3908b2-84f1-42ca-adee-554648734632 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | “Prediction” and “explanation” are not causation
Everyone knows that correlation is not causation. Many people don't know that in scientific jargon, “predict” and “explain” are also not causation. They are forms of correlation.
(Technically, “association” might be a better term than “correlation”, which can have a na... |
5833f812-4dd3-4f35-95de-890c22940610 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Interesting predictions on manifold.markets
I noticed two separate predictions on manifold.markets related to Xi and Xi & Putin remaining at the top of their governments.
Xi and Putin at 93% and Xi at 95%.
What's interesting, and I wonder if it makes sense, is that together these suggest people think Putin is m... |
c88c1921-4c6d-475b-a62a-881e8bec0efb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Gunshot victims to be suspended between life and death [link]
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129623.000-gunshot-victims-to-be-suspended-between-life-and-death.html?full=true
- First "official" program to practice suspended animation
- The article naturally goes on to ask whether longer SA (months, years) is... |
a2d425ca-6d9f-40ef-a685-bdfc4ea1d0df | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Two (very different) kinds of donors
This post describes a very simple and very important distinction between two kinds of donors/two kinds of donations.
I apologize if the content of this (short) post is obvious to you. Repeated experience has led me to believe that it is not obvious to many people, and can sometim... |
63c2647f-73ae-4f2c-b5c5-664e668c73f9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Should altruists pay for profitable things?
People often claim that activities which are already done for profit are bad altruistic investments, because they will be done anyway, or at least because the low hanging fruit will already be taken. It seems to me that this argument doesn’t generally work, though something ... |
5ec96bc1-14a9-47c0-9d8a-63ba5f1efc05 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why don't we vaccinate people against smallpox any more?
The eradication of smallpox in 1979 represented one of the greatest achievements of modern civilization. However, since then most countries have elected to stop vaccinating their populations against the disease. This seems like a very concerning vulnerability to... |
676e8446-076e-4354-919c-8bf08ff3f7bf | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is cryonics evil because it's cold?
There have been many previous discussions here on cryonics and why it is perceived as threatening or otherwise disagreeable. Even among LWers who are not signed up and don’t plan to, I’d say there’s a good degree of consensus that cryonics is reviled and ridiculed to a very unjustif... |
ae569656-80a2-4418-9f5a-299a1b2ef0f2 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | Existential risk and existential hope: definitions
Future of Humanity Institute – Technical Report #201 5-1
1 Existential Risk and Existential Hope: Definitions
Owen Cotton -Barratt\* & Toby Ord†
We look at the strengths and weaknesses of two existing
definitions of existential risk, and suggest a new definition
... |
1355bff8-98a7-441a-b8cd-83f9ab543a56 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Suffering and Intractable Pain
I’ve been writing a lot about AI alignment lately, so let’s take a break from that to talk about a lighter subject: suffering.
Suppose you contract the rare and as yet untreatable disease boneitis. The doctors estimate you have one year to live. In response you might spend the last year... |
0b66a322-d609-4e51-a5f1-a8403d7821de | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Video] The Essential Strategies To Debiasing From Academic Rationality
A lifetime of work by a world expert in debiasing boiled down into four broad strategies in this video. A nice approach to this topic from the academic side of rationality.
Disclosure - the academic is Dr. Hal Arkes, a personal friend and Adviso... |
b643311d-a139-4806-96a1-5458e65afc9d | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Decision Theory is multifaceted
Related: [Conceptual Problems with UDT and Policy Selection](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/9sYzoRnmqmxZm4Whf/conceptual-problems-with-udt-and-policy-selection), [Formalising decision theory is hard](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/S3W4Xrmp6AL7nxRHd/formalising-decision-theor... |
a2093d1a-042d-4195-b9ed-0e2e3fc316df | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Cryonics on LessWrong vs at LessWrong meetups
When I've brought up cryonics on LessWrong [1][2], most commenters have said I'm being too pessimistic. When I brought it up yesterday at the Cambridge MA meetup, most people thought I was too optimistic. (I think it could work, but there are enough things that could go ... |
a75eff8d-d557-4128-a1a0-4350ba8e6039 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Alignment can improve generalisation through more robustly doing what a human wants - CoinRun example
Many AI alignment problems are problems of goal misgeneralisation[1]. The goal that we've given the AI, through labelled data, proxies, demonstrations, or other means, is valid in its training environment. But then, w... |
ba9946b1-2631-4f63-9712-e55e48a35b39 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Channel factors
Or, “how not to make a fundamental attribution error on yourself;” or, “how to do that thing that you keep being frustrated at yourself for not doing;” or, “finding and solving trivial but leveraged inconveniences.”
Note: cross-posted from my blog, so some of this may be rather elementary to LessWro... |
202ed042-0edd-4616-b8bc-db35bf7ab00c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Game theory, sanctions, and Ukraine
Epistemic status: I am doing a master's degree in Economics and know quite a lot about game theory but have no expertise in war. I can recommend Bret Devereaux's blog on nuclear deterrence 101 for a perspective from someone who does have more military knowledge than me.
Most discu... |
2c68782a-9208-4239-acba-aa73d5c15df6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Jaan Tallinn: A Skype founder on biomonitors, existential risk and simulated realities
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324412604578513472554236916.html
By ALEXANDRA WOLFE
As we try to talk by Skype, Jaan Tallinn is fading in and out on my computer screen. Sitting in his living room in Estonia, he is ha... |
00dec0a2-100c-49de-8990-89b66f610d54 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | An A.I. Safety Presentation at RIT
How do you get people into AI safety, alignment, and even DontKillEveryoneism?
Well, we at the Effective Altruism Club at RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) (NY, USA) decided to take a crack at it.
We gave a presentation to the university's AI Club, with around 2-3 dozen peopl... |
c3181031-f8fc-47c0-b74e-ac4bd8ecb8ec | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Rationalist horoscopes: A low-hanging utility generator.
The other day, I had an idea. It occurred to me that daily horoscopes - the traditional kind - might not be as useless as they seem at first glance: They usually give, or at least hint at, suggestions for specific things to do on a given day, which can be a usef... |
23b1780d-7907-4634-893f-25344b7bb7df | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Joscha Bach on Synthetic Intelligence [annotated]
[Link to transcript](https://jimruttshow.blubrry.net/the-jim-rutt-show-transcripts/transcript-of-currents-083-joscha-bach-on-synthetic-intelligence/).
The conversation is very dense and there are a lot of interesting ideas that I leave out of the sampling below.
On t... |
0edc5bc2-8d19-4f4e-bbec-bc63e5d345f8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Contests vs. Real World Problems
John Cook draws on the movie Redbelt to highlight the difference between staged contests and real-world fights. The main character of the movie is a Jiu Jitsu instructor who is willing to fight if necessary, but will not compete under arbitrary rules. Cook analogies this to the distinc... |
f1173d72-5195-4915-809d-9c2267c9f842 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | If Alignment is Hard, then so is Self-Improvement
Let’s accept that aligning very intelligent artificial agents is hard. In that case, if we build an intelligent agent with some goal (which probably won’t be the goal we intended, because we’re accepting alignment is hard) and it decides that the best way to achieve it... |
43fc35de-d188-4098-b01a-5078ae7b81e7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How I infiltrated the Raëlians (and was hugged by their leader)
I was invited by a stranger I met on a plane and actually went to a meeting of Raëlians (known in some LW circles as "the flying saucer cult") in 沖縄, Japan. It was right next to Claude Vorilhon's home, and he came himself for the "ceremony" (?) dressed in... |
11ca7a46-102d-466e-885e-ec4672944350 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | I Finally Worked Through Bayes' Theorem (Personal Achievement)
Two years ago I found this community, which prompted me to start self teaching math. For reference, I didn't know what a fraction was in early 2022. I knew what they looked like, and what they were called. I didn't know what they meant.
The story of why I... |
bc48349a-37c8-4c1f-9d52-d540646be19f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Doubt, Science, and Magical Creatures - a Child's Perspective
Doubt
I grew up in a Jewish household, so I didn't have Santa Claus to doubt - but I did have the tooth fairy.
It was hard for me to believe that a magical being I had never seen somehow knew whenever any child lost their tooth, snuck into their house uno... |
36c509d0-2389-40f3-8582-d7aaa90c6399 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Platonic rewards, reward features, and rewards as information
Contrast these two expressions (hideously mashing C++ and pseudo-code):
1. argmaxxr(x),
2. argmaxx∗(&r)(x).
The first expression just selects the action x that maximises r(x) for some function r(), intended to be seen as a reward function.
The second e... |
fdb20271-0205-4734-ae0e-4e37a2a7444a | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | April 2016 Newsletter
| |
| --- |
|
**Research updates**
* A new paper: “[Parametric Bounded Löb’s Theorem and Robust Cooperation of Bounded Agents](https://intelligence.org/2016/03/31/new-paper-on-bounded-lob/)“
* New at IAFF: [What Does it Mean for Correct Operation to Rely on Transfer Learning?](https://agentfou... |
7ea04484-144f-4258-b4f5-0ce5fd5861a1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Bounding the impact of AGI
For those of you interested, András Kornai's paper "Bounding the impact of AGI" from this year's AGI-Impacts conference at Oxford had a few interesting ideas (which I've excerpted below).
Summary:
1. Acceptable risk tolerances for AGI design can be determined using standard safety enginee... |
473380e9-1152-4ab8-8bf3-7e3db72f284b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Jailbreaking Claude 4 and Other Frontier Language Models
AI systems are becoming increasingly powerful and ubiquitous, with millions of people now relying on language models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini for everything from writing assistance to complex problem-solving. To ensure these systems remain safe as they g... |
263d0517-d8bd-4885-8fe9-44887a0ce614 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Boise, ID Meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : Boise, ID Meetup
WHEN: 24 July 2016 02:30:00PM (-0600)
WHERE: Blue Cow Frozen Yogurt 2333 S Apple St, Boise, ID 83706
Idaho exists! This is the first Boise meetup I can find evidence of.
Topic: Introductions, getting to know each other. What brought you... |
5c5b84fd-61e1-4d31-951e-b71b0c65a316 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | (AI alignment) Now is special
As an extremely conservative estimate: Humans have existed as a distinct species for over 100,000 years.
Of those 100,000 years, as an upper bound, maybe the last 10% of them can be classed as "civilization" times. (The actual number given by historians is closer to 6,000. Bear with me. ... |
972acfee-d865-42f8-ab5e-7fdce74e6ba9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Chaos Theory in Ecology
One of the reasons I got into chaos theory as a model paradigm shift was the famous Gleick book on chaos. One of the reasons I believed the Gleick book was trustworthy was that its description of chaos in ecology and population biology matched what I learned in college, 25 years later. Recently... |
0dd8922d-ce18-4f2f-a7b1-558e31ee2efd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | I asked my senator to slow AI
All my favorite twitter accounts agree that AI capabilities are advancing too fast.
One way to slow down AI progress is to ask politicians for help. Politicians are generally bad at solving existential engineering problems. But politicians have an almost superhuman talent at obstructing ... |
d35d9b8c-3d29-4b07-b269-a233627c53a1 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | BASALT: A Benchmark for Learning from Human Feedback
Copying the abstract of the [paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.01969):
> The last decade has seen a significant increase of interest in deep learning research, with many public successes that have demonstrated its potential. As such, these systems are now being in... |
dedb4b7d-5186-413f-b580-22ece085ea21 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Real-Life Anthropic Weirdness
In passing, I said:
> From a statistical standpoint, lottery winners don't exist - you would never encounter one in your lifetime, if it weren't for the selective reporting.
And lo, CronoDAS said:
> Well... one of my grandmothers' neighbors, whose son I played with as a child, did inde... |
c54f4f02-3460-432f-9f70-a04069aa54d9 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Introducing the AI Alignment Forum (FAQ)
*After a few months of open beta, the* [AI Alignment Forum](http://alignmentforum.org/) *is ready to launch. It is a new website built by the team behind LessWrong 2.0, to help create a new hub for technical AI Alignment research and discussion. This is an in-progress FAQ about... |
38382d02-ba9f-4f55-8488-b8667ebc35ba | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Two-Update Problem: Monotonicity
In his posts (1, 2) on the two-update problem, Abram Demski discussed a problem we see in existing proposals for logical priors. The existing proposals for logical priors work from a base theory T, and construct probability distributions PT, which represent a probability distributi... |
521560d9-2c27-4387-aa5c-9df9e83eeac4 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | 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... |
35b2f840-d094-48e3-b365-1022ccf6e36e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | How Europe might matter for AI governance
This post explores which levers exist in Europe for influencing the governance of AI. The scope includes potential actions taken by bodies/offices/agencies of the EU, its constituent member countries, or some other potentially relevant European countries like Switzerland. I’m... |
38c87bbe-0ebc-4c7e-be3d-e41a345a6cea | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Perth, Australia: Sunday lunch
Discussion article for the meetup : Perth, Australia: Sunday lunch
WHEN: 19 October 2014 12:00:00PM (+0800)
WHERE: Annalakshmi, Barrack Square, Perth, Australia
Come have lunch with other Less Wrongians! We'll be at Annalakshmi, a pay-what-you-want vegetarian restaurant.
We'... |
4e0ee56f-31fb-4a2d-bd67-6056f08e7ba8 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Learning Not to Learn: Training Deep Neural Networks with Biased Data
1 Introduction
---------------
Machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence have been used in wide ranging fields.
The growing variety of applications has resulted in great demand for robust algorithms.
The most ideal way to robustly t... |
c49939d9-de00-4ac2-9278-e3dedd7d5465 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Biosafety Regulations (BMBL) and their relevance for AI
AI regulations could draw inspiration from the field of biosafety regulation, specifically the CDC's guidelines for [Biosafety in Microbiological & Biomedical Laboratories (BMBL)](https://www.cdc.gov/labs/BMBL.html), which outline the necessary precautions for wo... |
fd75de5a-81fb-41e1-9890-769767d9af8f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Mob and Bailey
Epistemological status: Moderately confident that this is a more useful way to use a concept that has been expanded upon by others.
Previous building blocks: See Logical Rudeness and All Another Brick in the Motte and for the foundations, as well as Against Accusing People of Motte and Bailey for the... |
26b1f611-898e-4955-8fd5-2eb4043a71c7 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info | AI Safety Info | Why might we expect a superintelligence to be hostile by default?
Computers execute our precise commands without considering the thousands of instinctive human factors that determine if an action is acceptable, which can lead to potentially dangerous outcomes from seemingly simple instructions and goals.
One might ar... |
29a012b6-43c1-4ed4-afe0-260d6bf567c2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How To Think About Overparameterized Models
So, you’ve heard that modern neural networks have vastly more parameters than they need to perfectly fit all of the data. They’re operating way out in the regime where, traditionally, we would have expected drastic overfit, yet they seem to basically work. Clearly, our stats... |
ffd8b017-560a-454e-a7f4-a8598045871f | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | SLIP: Learning to predict in unknown dynamical systems with long-term memory.
1 Introduction
---------------
Predictive models based on linear dynamical systems (LDS) have been successfully used in a wide range of applications with a history of more than half a century. Example applications in AI-related areas rang... |
72441a1a-7ddd-4c0a-8d5b-63d9bf77c024 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Inviting discussion of "Beat AI: A contest using philosophical concepts"
I would like to pose a set of broad questions about a project called Beat AI: A contest using philosophical concepts (details below) with the LessWrong community. My hope would be that we have a thoughtful and critical discussion about it. (To be... |
1fd1291c-d73d-4175-8e19-6877989092b3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [News] Turing Test passed
The chatterbot "Eugene Goostman" has apparently passed the Turing test:
> No computer had ever previously passed the Turing Test, which requires 30 per cent of human interrogators to be duped during a series of five-minute keyboard conversations, organisers from the University of Reading sai... |
453d4b33-63ec-4b9b-ae8f-958d9f919010 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Would it be useful to collect the contexts, where various LLMs think the same?
My initial idea was Let's see where the small, interpretable, model makes the same inference as the huge, ¯dangerous, model and focus on those cases in the small model to help explain the bigger one. Quite likely I am wrong, but with a tiny... |
f1698791-b6fd-4016-8e74-6e0f7da13b7a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Advice to aspiring undergraduates
Katla ungratefully believes her undergraduate studies could have been better, and that those of many of her acquaintances could too. Even without them being something other than undergraduate studies. She demands I let her warn future students. Here is her advice.
***
Consider far a... |
8f48130b-8f00-450e-a7a2-1b3e1dbcc4f2 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | (Humor) AI Alignment Critical Failure Table
The "Friendly AI Critical Failure Table" was originally posted by Eliezer in 2003; when I ran across a mention of it somewhere, I realized that a lot of people probably haven't seen this old classic yet.
(For people not familiar with the concept, "critical failure tables" a... |
ec225ea0-33fa-43d3-be9c-d88a23ab0971 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Podcast: Krister Bykvist on moral uncertainty, rationality, metaethics, AI and future populations
On today’s episode of the Utilitarian Podcast, I talk with Krister Bykvist. Krister is a Professor of philosophy at Stockholm University and Institute for Futures Studies.
We talk about the approach to moral uncertainty... |
1fad3ac2-e147-4688-aa07-3bb1682195ba | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Starting a LW meet-up is easy.
All you need to do is:
1. Pick a time. Weekend afternoons or evenings work well.
2. Pick a place. This can be a coffee shop or casual restaurant (e.g., a pizza place or pub) or a classroom or other on-campus location. Best if it isn’t too noisy.
3. Announce the time and place on L... |
e5d1415f-c91c-490a-be00-2b2d375561a2 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | AI Safety Newsletter #5: Geoffrey Hinton speaks out on AI risk, the White House meets with AI labs, and Trojan attacks on language models
Welcome to the AI Safety Newsletter by the [Center for AI Safety](https://www.safe.ai/). We discuss developments in AI and AI safety. No technical background required.
Subscribe [h... |
a06dd190-ea7d-43f4-a73e-f4dcd439fc50 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [LINK]s: Who says Watson is only a narrow AI?
OK, so it covers only a few human occupations:
* Trivia games (we all know about that one)
* Clinical diagnosis
* Banking advisor
* and now a call center grunt
But the list is steadily growing.
Now, connect it with a self-driving AI, and your cab e-driver can make s... |
1ed04006-eb4e-4269-9284-9aeab0f019ae | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Five views of Bayes' Theorem
I think rearranging Bayes' Theorem sheds light on it in interesting ways.
P(A|B) = P(B|A) P(A)/P(B)
This is the most common form: you want to know the conditional probability of A given B, but what you actually know is the probability of B given A (and your priors on A and B). Bayes lets... |
9f6028ab-fa55-455c-9188-0308cb723b31 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Showing SAE Latents Are Not Atomic Using Meta-SAEs
Bart, Michael and Patrick are joint first authors. Research conducted as part of MATS 6.0 in Lee Sharkey and Neel Nanda’s streams. Thanks to Mckenna Fitzgerald and Robert Krzyzanowski for their feedback!
TL;DR:
* Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) latents have been shown to... |
0b7b07b7-afe8-4ce4-8c56-c84e9fcbf877 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Graph of % of tasks AI is superhuman at?
I imagine it would be difficult to delineate different tasks and to be comprehensive, but it would still be interesting to see the shape of the curve and very roughly where we are in terms of percent of tasks. |
9fec0c96-25e8-42ce-91ac-a8edc202cffd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Maximally Eggy Crepes
Before our oldest went lactovegetarian I used to make eggy crepes, boosting protein by adjusting the recipe to maximize egg content without giving up crepe flavor and texture. With our youngest, however, I have now (by this metric) the optimal crepe:
Ingredient:
One egg, beaten
I had be... |
be45f2b1-4bc0-4a3a-9040-fee9ce971ac7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Prospect of an AI Winter
Summary
* William Eden forecasts an AI winter. He argues that AI systems (1) are too unreliable and too inscrutable, (2) won't get that much better (mostly due to hardware limitations) and/or (3) won't be that profitable. He says, "I'm seeing some things that make me think we are in a cla... |
09daf78b-08e1-445e-8435-125ca1ec42ff | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Results from the AI x Democracy Research Sprint
We ran a 3-day research sprint on AI governance, motivated by the need for demonstrations of the risks to democracy by AI, supporting AI governance work. Here we share the 4 winning projects but many of the other 19 entries were also incredibly interesting so we suggest ... |
c0bd1842-4e70-4cd9-bd5f-b52fa4400e9e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What are your favorite books or blogs that are out of print, or whose domains have expired (especially if they also aren't on LibGen/Wayback/etc, or on Amazon)?
Also posted the question to r/slatestarcodex. |
6d8e6a96-373e-43bc-8cf2-594f64a2e389 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why Improving Dialogue Feels So Hard
Earlier this week, @sweenesm published a post with techniques for making dialogue more productive. He opened it with the question, "How do we promote more of that in the world in general, where people seem less committed to rationality?"
That's a general theme I've been chewing on... |
379c9699-9602-4e86-a7e5-d109b3f98b6b | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Photos from the second AI Safety Camp
[[See image gallery at aisafety.camp](https://aisafety.camp/2018/12/08/aisc2-photos/)] |
528690e8-52c8-4087-9ec1-05c84171bf39 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Capabilities and alignment of LLM cognitive architectures
*Epistemic status:* Hoping for help working through all of these new ideas.
TLDR:
[Scaffolded](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/43C3igfmMrE9Qoyfe/scaffolded-llms-as-natural-language-computers)[[1]](#fn7941hu3ojbb), "agentized" LLMs that combine and extend the ... |
741eb499-5ee5-41b9-86b7-2f458f74a385 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Agent Foundations 2025 at CMU
We are opening applications to attend a 5 day agent foundations conference at Carnegie Mellon University. The program will include talks, breakout sessions, and other activities.
Endlessly debate your favored decision theory, precommit to precommit, bargain with(in) yourselves, make fri... |
1b5bb059-1c40-4f04-8e2a-77d8936f76ca | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | .
. |
c53dd3ce-4717-42f0-9af7-aaac43f64af2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Biological DOOM: a brief overview of biological computation
(no, not that kind of biological doom)
DOOM is a classic first-person shooter game released in 1993 by id Software. Because it’s from 1993, it doesn’t require much computing power compared to modern games. Additionally, the code (written in C) is easy to com... |
4130ec26-9217-4fab-b8a0-159c226aeb3d | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | GShard: Scaling Giant Models with Conditional Computation and Automatic Sharding
1 Introduction
---------------
Scaling neural networks brings dramatic quality gains over a wide array of machine learning problems [arora2018optimization, frankle2018lottery, kaplan2020scaling, devlin2018bert, mahajan2018exploring, g... |
e462f357-e0ad-46c3-b8b6-3a11a5bf4b2e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Resource gathering agent
Here's an idea (inspired by "Less exploitable value-updating agent") of how to model an agent that does nothing but gather resources.
It's an agent which has a utility function u=Xv, for some utility function v. It doesn't know whether X=−1 or X=1 (maybe we used an approach like "Safe probabi... |
871b927f-8340-4af1-bb9c-903d58d0a657 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Storing own covid saliva for use as a "booster"?
I am considering to freeze my saliva if/when I get omicron, in order to later inject the frozen covid+ saliva into my nose some 6-12 weeks from recovery in order to boost my immunity against covid for longer. What do you people see as ups and downs of this approach?
--... |
eda623e3-c188-4afc-8f8b-76530e691aa3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | “Fanatical” Longtermists: Why is Pascal’s Wager wrong?
I’ve recently heard a number of people arguing for “fanaticism“ when it comes to longtermism. Basically, if a cause area has even a minuscule probability of positively affecting the long-term future of humanity (and thus influencing an effectively unbounded number... |
17d08b6f-b6f7-4fc3-a445-27da74027683 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Lying is Cowardice, not Strategy
(Co-written by Connor Leahy and Gabe)
We have talked to a whole bunch of people about pauses and moratoriums. Members of the AI safety community, investors, business peers, politicians, and more.
Too many claimed to pursue the following approach:
1. It would be great if AGI progres... |
40c3f591-a731-4fe2-81ab-b01311e6d825 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | If AGI were coming in a year, what should we do?
Suppose AGI was very likely to arrive first around a year from now, with multiple projects close, but one a few months ahead of the others, and suppose that the AI safety community agreed that this was the case. What should our community do?
How would you answer differ... |
1fce54e1-cce8-49db-834a-48bd2590a369 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Using Consensus Mechanisms as an approach to Alignment
> “Both the cryptoeconomics research community and the AI safety/new cyber-governance/existential risk community are trying to tackle what is fundamentally the same problem: how can we regulate a very complex and very smart system with unpredictable emergent prope... |
741e6c6b-15a1-4f32-9070-f71cabbddd0f | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | An Unexpected GPT-3 Decision in a Simple Gamble
**The setup and motivation**
There are plenty of examples in which GPT-3 has made 'obviously' bad decisions. Here is another simple game that leads to an unexpected decision when it comes to a question of choice.
Consider a game where we flip two distinct, unfair co... |
d0340923-e4ce-40d6-81eb-d68edf68cb43 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Staring into the abyss as a core life skill
Recently I’ve been thinking about how all my favorite people are great at a skill I’ve labeled in my head as “staring into the abyss.”1
Staring into the abyss means thinking reasonably about things that are uncomfortable to contemplate, like arguments against your religious... |
38533245-4bff-4766-9794-17977d3d4810 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | SLIDE : In Defense of Smart Algorithms over Hardware Acceleration for Large-Scale Deep Learning Systems
1 Introduction
---------------
Deep Learning (DL) has become a topic of significant interest in the research community. The last few years have seen a remarkable growth of using DL to significantly improve the st... |
e7e17348-3985-4430-a407-7a673d05f085 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup: Less Wrong Moscow 2 Jule 2011
WHEN: 2 Jule 2011, 16.00 Moscow time
WHERE: Moscow, Novokuznetskaya subway station, Klimentovskiy pereulok, 1/18 (Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology's building aka Fiztech). 1 (2 in Russian) floor.
This first meeting will be of somewhat experimental character and will be ... |
0e4fc915-fea8-4c7d-b6de-6e54107a6ddd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Oops on Commodity Prices
Epistemic status: Casual
Some patient and thoughtful folks on LessWrong, and, apparently, some rather less patient folks on r/SneerClub, have pointed out that GDP-to-gold, or GDP-to-oil, are bad proxy measures for economic growth.
> Ok, this is a counterargument I want to make sure I under... |
ec7568a9-0b39-4f22-80aa-29f7554632a5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What you know that ain't so
This is an analysis of the Yom Kippur war (Egypt vs. Israel, 1973)-- the Israelis were interested in how Egypt managed a surprise attack, and it turned out that too many Israelis believed that the Egyptians would only attack if they had rockets which could reach deep into Israel. The Egypti... |
17d763a6-2138-4dcf-be0a-3d15ee06e06b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What happens with logical induction when...
So this is a bunch of related technical questions about logical induction.
Firstly, do you need the formal theorem prover section? Can you just throw out the formal theorem prover, but give some programs in the market unbounded capital and get the same resultant behaviou... |
d39e71df-33d6-4a4b-ac5a-f07270e06810 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Columbus, OH MEGA-MEETUP, Oct 11-13
Discussion article for the meetup : Columbus, OH MEGA-MEETUP, Oct 11-14
WHEN: 12 October 2013 02:33:00AM (-0400)
WHERE: Columbus, OH
PRE-REGISTRATION REQUIRED!
Pre-Register HERE! (Google Forms are occasionally buggy. If you don't get an email from me within a day or two... |
dc9f151a-17a1-4eba-be2f-5780655284a2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Covid 9/9: Passing the Peak
Labor day muddies the data a bit, but it seems that Alex Tabarrok was correct and the current wave has peaked. We could well be facing another peak in December due to seasonality. We might also have issues from schools, although as you’ll see later they’re taking extreme precautions and als... |
56eb5694-715d-446e-b1b7-582cace5205b | awestover/filtering-for-misalignment | Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results | id: post3725
A putative new idea for AI control; index here . Pick a very unsafe goal: G = "AI, make this world richer and less unequal." What does this mean as a goal, and can we make it safe? I've started to sketch out how we can codify "human understanding" in terms of human ability to answer questions. Here I'm in... |
6033ed65-790b-4431-9d1f-d9241cc7da84 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | August 2021 Newsletter
#### MIRI updates
* Scott Garrabrant and Rohin Shah debate one of the central questions in AI alignment strategy: [whether we should try to avoid human-modeling capabilities in the first AGI systems](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/Wap8sSDoiigrJibHA/garrabrant-and-shah-on-human-modeling-i... |
0bc003e7-2e7a-4c93-be9a-95d37dc5a8b0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Projects
Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Projects
WHEN: 07 March 2016 06:15:00PM (-0800)
WHERE: 1597 Howard St. San Francisco, CA
We'll be meeting to work on projects!
Last time we tried solo pomodoros, so this time we'll try a meetup more focused on interac... |
5b84dce2-48c8-458d-a97c-7814d4beff48 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Belief in the Implied Invisible
One generalized lesson *not* to learn from the Anti-Zombie Argument is, "Anything you can't see doesn't exist."
It's tempting to conclude the general rule. It would make the Anti-Zombie Argument much simpler, on future occasions, if we could take this as a premise. But unfortunately... |
19114dfe-dfde-4676-a36f-8922ba89ebb0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The silos of expertise: beyond heuristics and biases
Separate silos of expertise
I've been doing a lot of work on expertise recently, on the issue of measuring it and assessing it. The academic research out there is fascinating, though rather messy. Like many areas in the social sciences, it often suffers from small s... |
4b0e8fbe-51a8-4727-bcbf-94377b43416b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Do we know if spaced repetition can be used with randomized content?
Disclaimer: there may be major flaws in the way I use words. Corrections are welcome.
----------------------------------------
Suppose I want to memorize all the software design patterns.
I could use spaced repetition and create a new deck of flas... |
9078a1d0-11b5-44dd-aa36-1584b276da8d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Group Rationality Diary, September 16-30
This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for September 16-30.
> 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... |
06f0ce49-d65d-4fde-b341-becc2158a6ab | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Articles in Main
Hi all,
We shut off Main back in February to force everything into Discussion, and I still think the Main/Discussion split should be replaced (by better use of the tagging system, or by different subreddits based more about the style of interaction that people are looking for than the content, or so ... |
78883827-eb9b-4dcc-bc45-977e8482263c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Funding for programs and events on global catastrophic risk, effective altruism, and other topics
[cross-posted from the EA Forum]
Post authors: Eli Rose, Asya Bergal
Posting in our capacities as members of Open Philanthropy’s Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building team.
Note: This program, together with our s... |
0f9f6ee1-6b6a-4092-ac95-80756ca7e3d4 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Contra Anton 🏴☠️ on Kolmogorov complexity and recursive self improvement
Twitter user @atroyn [claims](https://twitter.com/atroyn/status/1673036126804934657) that recursive self-improvement is impossible because of Kolmogorov complexity. Quoting most of[[1]](#fn-stJPzfqNK7rsBfueA-1) the argument here:
>
> here i... |
74879453-c59c-4aec-aaa5-46d3d2d7247e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Humanity is Winning the Fight Against Infectious Disease
One of my favorite things about living in the 21st century United States is how so few people die of infectious disease. Here's a graph of deaths showing how infectious diseases decreased by an order of magnitude between the turn of the century and Salk's Polio ... |
849e3da8-ab23-460c-aea7-fc82b645c299 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Limited But Better Than Nothing Way To Assign Probabilities to Statements of Logic, Arithmetic, etc.
If we want to reason with probability theory, we seem to be stuck if we want to reason about mathematics.
You can skip this pararaph and the next if you're familiar with the problem. But if you're not, here's an ... |
7e1784a1-ba63-4da0-80c8-257433dce70d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Old-world Politics Fallacy
When a nasty political problem (like the current SSC situation) hits my consciousness, I'm habituated to Do Something About It. I feel an urge to investigate the political climate, find allies, and fight back against the threat. In the current Internet age, and with my nonexistent political ... |
d1086442-7213-4172-a1bd-b050b36f0061 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Possible OpenAI's Q* breakthrough and DeepMind's AlphaGo-type systems plus LLMs
tl;dr: OpenAI leaked AI breakthrough called Q*, acing grade-school math. It is hypothesized combination of Q-learning and A*. It was then refuted. DeepMind is working on something similar with Gemini, AlphaGo-style Monte Carlo Tree Search.... |
71450090-c438-4652-b289-306888235b53 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Physical and Mental Behavior
B.F. Skinner called thoughts "mental behavior". He believed they could be rewarded and punished just like physical behavior, and that they increased or declined in frequency accordingly.
Sadly, psychology has not yet advanced to the point where we can give people electric shocks for think... |
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