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91d26700-bbf6-4d4e-94d5-4b9e336fa7ef | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Five Areas I Wish EAs Gave More Focus
The Effective Altruism Community has been an unexpected and pleasant surprise. I remember wishing there was a group out there that shared at least one of my ideals. Instead, I found one that shares three: global reduction of suffering, rationality, and longtermism. However, with e... |
1942961d-cacf-40f0-859a-2ff275414ba4 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Generalization of the Solomonoff Induction to Accuracy - Is it possible? Would it be useful?
I appreciate Solomonoff's success in generalizing Occam razor from just selecting the simplest hypothesis/model to adding probabilities to each of them.
But for instance the postion (motion) of any body (*x, y, z*) can be fi... |
07eb6a7d-4453-4ba8-a265-b00af5875741 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | The abruptness of nuclear weapons
Nuclear weapons seem like the marquee example of rapid technological change after crossing a critical threshold.
Looking at the numbers, it seems to me like:
* During WWII, and probably for several years after the war, the cost / TNT equivalent for manufacturing nuclear weapons was ... |
df693628-eccf-4f65-bb6f-a460a19d7121 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI)
This post presents thoughts on the Singularity Institute from Holden Karnofsky, Co-Executive Director of GiveWell. Note: Luke Muehlhauser, the Executive Director of the Singularity Institute, reviewed a draft of this post, and commented: "I do generally agree that your compla... |
0d2052e5-55bf-4be1-948a-93c9b2764d06 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Replacing the Big Air Purifier
Around Christmas 2021 I put together a big air purifier on top of our bookcase. Somehow I didn't blog about it or take a picture, but here's it in the background of a birthday:
The basic idea was that I didn't have a good place to put a filter cube, commercial air purifiers were sc... |
7a3b4bf9-5be0-4096-aa14-5410817e02c3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Singularity Institute is expanding its research program at very little cost. Boo-yah!
Three new research associates. Link to the announcement. |
df1f3b84-7f60-4fcf-aa31-5eff1cab7afd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Meta] Finding free energy in karma
As I've been posting here on LessWrong for a few months now, I wanted to share two things I've noticed about the karma system. These are ad-hoc observations, not rigorous empirical results, and while they might feel like ways to "cheat" the system, I hope by making them public and k... |
ab1bdc99-ea26-4cc8-af60-f374cc02de54 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Board Games
Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Board Games
WHEN: 17 April 2017 06:15:00PM (-0700)
WHERE: 1769 15th St, San Francisco, CA 94103-3333, United States
We’re trying a new format this week!
Some people don’t like board games, and based on our straw po... |
f801bff4-0290-4404-8820-adfe238d6037 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Motivation Theory
This is a brief sketch of a theory of motivation.
Motivation drives action. It also causes the experiences of pleasure and pain. We experience pain when motivation increases, and pleasure when motivation decreases.
Motivation is generated by emotions, such as hunger, thirst and lust. Emotions gener... |
56fc122e-9056-4642-937c-acb6316ffa2a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Link] Cause Prioritization - Paul Christiano 1:15h
Paul Christiano speaks about cause priorization within Effective Altruism. Melbourne.
Cause Prioritization: Many effective altruists place a high degree of importance on working out what the most important cause to support is. This is one way that effective altruism... |
9703f11e-51b1-4da4-8a62-9db43784df6a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | IDA 1-4/14: Problem Statement
Every Thursday for 4 weeks, we will be posting lessons about Iterated Distillation and Amplification. They're largely based on Paul Christiano's sequence here on LW. He graciously allowed us to use his work.
Note that access to the lessons requires creating an account here.
Have a nice ... |
5f7c5001-ab6d-4ae5-81ca-a6d87479b55f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Spaced Repetition literature review contest submissions: August 1st deadline
This is a reminder that the deadline for submissions to the Spaced Repetition literature review contest is August 1st (about 2 weeks from now). If you have questions or comments post them in the original thread or email me (jsalvatier@gmail.c... |
db35c0c8-80e9-4c7e-bd3b-36535ae61c79 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is GitHub Copilot in legal trouble?
This is basically a crosspost for https://githubcopilotinvestigation.com/. I noticed that some folks in California are considering a lawsuit against Microsoft/OpenAI.
tl;dr:
* Copilot is trained on open source software.
* Copilot doesn't respect the licensing agreements of that... |
5308db99-08e4-492f-9780-2f21d55dd5f0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | UnTAPed Learning
[Epistemic Status: Request for Proposal]
For anyone who is familiar with CFAR's teaching program, the concept of the TAP will be very familiar. It's an acronym that expands either to Trigger-Action Pattern (for naturally-occurring instances) or Trigger-Action Plan (for purposefully-implemented instan... |
4fd2593d-989b-4e67-a402-b494bdf4528d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Are there any preventive steps someone can take after being exposed to strep throat?
Googling this question tells me that the best way to avoid strep is by washing your hands often. But say, hypothetically, that someone’s girlfriend has told him that she has strep the day before Valentine’s Day. Knowing he’ll be expos... |
e658840f-6b83-44ce-8530-fdb56763bb55 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations
1 Introduction
---------------
Learning effective visual representations without human supervision is a long-standing problem.
Most mainstream approaches fall into one of two classes: generative or discriminative. Generative approaches learn to g... |
763a284f-a690-4147-ad10-c952c467b03e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Sifting the world's knowledge (AGI Estimation 2)
|
19bfbadb-0f37-4bf7-a638-7e2767ca9d8a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Counterfactuals for Perfect Predictors
Parfit's Hitchhiker with a perfect predictor has the unusual property of having a Less Wrong consensus that you ought to pay, whilst also being surprisingly hard to define formally. For example, if we try to ask about whether an agent that never pays in town is rational, then we ... |
3a8f757e-c972-43c4-9039-7d5216b7915c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What social science research do you want to see reanalyzed?
I've been awarded a small Lightspeed Grant to replicate empirical social science research. What research should I look at?
I'm a PhD economist with an interest in reanalyzing published research using different methods or data (eg. checking whether the result... |
54ea7a79-7de1-48ec-9c2e-c562c6cb39b4 | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | "Epistemic spot checks typically consist of references from a book, selected by my interest level, checked against either the book’s source or my own research. This one is a little different that I’m focusing on a single paragraph in a single paper. Specifically as part of a larger review I read Ericsson, Krampe, and T... |
c5b29132-541a-4a82-ae9c-cf701346dede | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Ethodynamics of Omelas
***Epistemic status:** just kidding... haha... unless...*
Introduction
------------
A great amount of effort has been expended throughout history to decide the matter of "what is good" or "what is right" [citation needed]. This valiant but, let's face it, not tremendously successful effort has... |
d6d1bb36-7821-4a7d-b65a-af2c4f22068b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Tools for finding information on the internet
Edit 2023-05-09: I recorded a presentation for EA Software Engineers about this post. In it, I demonstrate each of the tools and discuss some extra ones at the end, namely content blockers, userscripts, and alternative front-end websites.
Isn't the internet such a magical... |
b6bc13eb-a87f-4408-a9ec-1036a73eee78 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Have We Been Interpreting Quantum Mechanics Wrong This Whole Time?
|
c85256fe-3e73-41f3-a278-f2f93d60e7d1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Mechanism Design for AI Safety - Agenda Creation Retreat
Mechanism Design for AI Safety (MDAIS) has been running a reading group since last summer to discuss how principles of mechanism design can be applied to AI Safety. Sign-up for the reading group can be found here, and past readings can be found here.
Based on ... |
4e9f2a57-ec58-485c-bb21-34ebbb2f4494 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Conservative Objective Models for Effective Offline Model-Based Optimization
###
1 Introduction
![ Our method trains a model of the objective function by training a neural net with supervised regression on the training data augmented two additional loss terms to obtian conservative predictions. These additional ter... |
4e809514-f906-4982-97b7-92503e85aa67 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Event: Moral Foundations of Progress Studies, March 4–6 at UT Austin
I’m excited to announce a workshop on the Moral Foundations of Progress Studies.
The progress studies community has had a lot of discussion about technology, economics, history, and politics. However, there is no consensus on the moral basis for val... |
cfe34b67-0cbe-459d-ba3e-371f5f83828f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How can Interpretability help Alignment?
Introduction
We’ve previously written about what interpretability research might be. In this post we think about how different kinds of interpretability research (even loosely formulated) can help AI alignment research agendas and proposals. It seems that there are meaningful d... |
ec21129b-2441-4deb-8fb9-532eca5cd741 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Book Review: So Good They Can’t Ignore You, by Cal Newport
Very brief summary of main themes
1) “Follow your passion” is terrible advice for most people. Don’t try to find your “true calling” because it’s a false concept.
2) The craftsman’s mindset: build skills through deliberate practice.
3) The importan... |
7eef582c-be51-45e8-9c82-5a4c8414e28a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Antitrust as Controlled Creative Destruction
Standard Oil, Refinery No. 1
Splitting large companies is an antitrust measure which, in its essence, is meant as an act of controlled creative destruction. (Read more about controlled creative destruction here.) When a company achieves monopoly status, it often becomes ri... |
6be14b13-a798-4dd0-a805-42323a8dc29e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | OpenAI Responses API changes models' behavior
Summary
OpenAI recently released the Responses API. Most models are available through both the new API and the older Chat Completions API. We expected the models to behave the same across both APIs—especially since OpenAI hasn't indicated any incompatibilities—but that's n... |
7498a87b-052a-4bfa-a7a1-0dfa6e74eb20 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Making a Rationality-promoting blog post more effective and shareable
I wrote a blog post that popularizes the "false consensus effect" and the debiasing strategy of "imagining the opposite" and "avoiding failing at other minds." Thoughts on where the post works and where it can be improved would be super-helpful for ... |
59b936f5-23a3-4267-9dfa-b8d94ee9faf4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Dispel your justification-monkey with a “HWA!”
I'm going to use a couple of words in this post that might not be immediately clear to some people. One of them is "justification". Another is "acceptance". I would like to suggest that if you think I'm saying something stupid when I'm using those words, that you instead ... |
75de623c-13a3-4c8e-8076-c7375b0d962b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | My Strange Beliefs
Yesterday, "Overcoming Cryonics" wrote:
> Eliezer, enough with your nonsense about cryonicism, life-extensionism, trans-humanism, and the singularity. These things have nothing to do with overcoming bias... if you're going to enforce the comments policy then you should also self-enforce the overco... |
ba6c0db1-e310-48a2-aa60-f6fa527e945d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Miracle Mineral Supplement
We can always use more case studies of insanity that aren't religion, right?
Well, Miracle Mineral Supplement is my new go-to example for Bad Things happening to people with low epistemic standards. "MMS" is a supposed cure for everything ranging from the common cold to HIV to cancer. I jus... |
da470e10-54cd-4141-9bb2-b3a7aff86864 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Last Laugh: Exploring the Role of Humor as a Benchmark for Large Language Models
“Give a person a joke, they can laugh for a day. Teach them how to joke, they can laugh about people who never learned to fish.” -GR
Introduction
Artificial Intelligence models, like OpenAI's GPT-4, can generate text that is almost ... |
4f453c8d-1907-48c7-849e-aa24b204ebdd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Statistics
Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Statistics
WHEN: 11 December 2016 03:30:00PM (-0500)
WHERE: Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture
Note: the Game Theory meetup has been postponed to accommodate the schedule of the person who requested t... |
dee98219-9ce3-42e0-a95b-e5022060e9fb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Synthesizing amplification and debate
Background
One possible way to train an amplification model is to use an auxiliary reinforcement learning objective to help guide the training of the amplification model. This could be done either by training two separate models, an agent and a question-answerer, or a single model... |
ab3b5b37-9c73-4bc7-a5fd-4195ff3d8d3f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Late Great Filter Is Not Bad News
> But I hope that our Mars probes will discover nothing. It would be good news if we find Mars to be completely sterile. Dead rocks and lifeless sands would lift my spirit.
>
> Conversely, if we discovered traces of some simple extinct life form—some bacteria, some algae—it would be ... |
80fb5607-88b3-4516-be7e-b8421b09cb0c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Research ideas (AI Interpretability & Neurosciences) for a 2-months project
My university (EPFL) organizes a "Summer in the Lab" internship for interested Bachelor students. The idea is to send them to a lab for a ~2-months period, so they can begin engaging with the research community and develop research skills. I h... |
15b80f09-5bac-4d08-aa0a-9a2f0993a347 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | My experience with dieting and exercise
Tomorrow I will start on a diet plan to bring my weight down. I'm aiming for a reduction by 5 kg in 6 weeks. Many plans like this fail but I am confident (let's say 80% confident) that this one will succeed. Why? Because I've done this several times before and succeeded. I seem ... |
d136878e-3fb0-456c-97b5-21e3bd9d94aa | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Pretense
There's a kind of yearning, to be that person who can do those things - this is self-actualization, yet corrupted. I often feel pulled in this way. I find myself wanting to be a certain person now, to be producing and being and feeling that way now, and I catch myself acting, speaking, signalling as if I were... |
f91d7d0a-01ff-4fbf-9172-330d7ca403ee | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Parable of the King and the Random Process
~ A Parable of Forecasting Under Model Uncertainty ~
You, the monarch, need to know when the rainy season will begin, in order to properly time the planting of the crops. You have two advisors, Pronto and Eternidad, who you trust exactly equally.
You ask them both: "Wh... |
9e296d3b-de4c-4639-bc71-b198d0b6cb2a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Consolidated Nature of Morality Thread
Today's post, Consolidated Nature of Morality Thread was originally published on April 15, 2007. A summary (from the LW wiki):
> Disputes about the nature of morality tend to overwhelm other discussions, so this post was intended to be a home for those tangential tho... |
278c95a1-1d8c-479c-9bc2-60293df22748 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | The Majority Is Always Wrong
Today my coworker Marcello pointed out to me an interesting anti-majoritarian effect. There are three major interpretations of probability: the "subjective" view of probabilities as measuring the uncertainty of agents, the "propensity" view of probabilities as chances inherent within obje... |
9fab40a4-05b5-4548-903e-11cdfebef8c5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Forecasting Through Fiction
Note: In retrospect, I think I'm making two separate points here. The first, and most important one, is the idea that "interestingness" or asking "what possible futures would make for the best story?" can provide predictive insight. I didn't spend much time on that point, despite its potent... |
4e227a47-58ce-410c-8519-2697ac4c859d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | UConn Effective Altruism
Hey y'all! I'm not sure how many people from UConn browse LW, but I figured it'd be worth a shot to let y'all know that I'm starting up the UConn Effective Altruism club on the Storrs campus! Check out our Facebook page, or shoot me an email at jeffrey.duan@uconn.edu if this sort of thing piqu... |
22a0e28e-16bc-4408-9556-8c442a3d67ce | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Humans get different counterfactuals
A putative new idea for AI control; index here.
A lot of my ideas rely upon taking counterfactuals of events that have tiny ε probabilities of ever happening. This introduces some extra risks, mainly centred around human behaviour. For the counterfactual methods to work, we need t... |
d9e5c80d-79e0-44ef-a32b-cd025ceecb34 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Emergency learning
Crossposted at the Intelligent Agent Foundation Forum.
Suppose that we knew that superintelligent AI was to be developed within six months, what would I do?
Well, drinking coffee by the barrel at Miri's emergency research retreat I'd...... still probably spend a month looking at things from the me... |
31be8301-400a-4ec1-8aa0-ef329e8688a5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Growth of Publicly Available Genetic Sequencing Data
The largest source of publicly available genetic sequencing data is the Sequence Read Archive (SRA), a joint project of the US ( NCBI), Europe ( EBI), and Japan ( DDBJ). Most relevant funding agencies and journals require sequencing data to be deposited in the SRA. ... |
fc7f7eb3-d5b1-44a1-a16a-79f1468f39a5 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Defending Functional Decision Theory
As I have been studying Functional Decision Theory (FDT) a lot recently, I have come across quite some counterarguments and general remarks that are worth rebutting and/or discussing in more detail. This post is an attempt to do just that. Most points have been discussed in other p... |
0ca07861-a0ef-4c60-9f26-5bdfbe6ca8d6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Thoughts on Moral Philosophy
I don't really feel that I personally have any special insight into moral philosophy, but nonetheless, some people may find it interesting or useful to know where I stand or the philosophers/perspectives that I do consider to have such insight.
That said, perhaps my most original offering... |
6bd50f29-9962-4ef2-845f-158353d29134 | awestover/filtering-for-misalignment | Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results | id: post1438
" You can't fetch the coffee if you're dead ." —Stuart Russell, on the instrumental convergence of shutdown-avoidance Note: This is presumably not novel, but I think it ought to be better-known. The technical tl;dr is that we can define time-inhomogeneous reward, and this provides a way of "composing" dif... |
fa38b89b-f7f0-428e-bc24-39c00405ad15 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Role of Physics in UDT: Part I
Followup to: Anatomy of Multiversal Utility Functions: Tegmark Level IV
Outline: In the previous post, I discussed the properties of utility functions in the extremely general setting of the Tegmark level IV multiverse. In the current post, I am going to show how the discovery of a ... |
88188854-8f3e-4e65-a57c-148e677e0616 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Online Meetup: The High Impact Network
Update: The High Impact Network will meet at 7pm on Saturday the 24th of November, Eastern US time. Please email me to be invited to these hangouts:
https://plus.google.com/u/1/events/cj4831btptb0ngde1efb3tfsjtc
https://plus.google.com/u/1/events/cbnr8dqqbgra7a5391msu1e1dc4
... |
b2ba064b-7bdc-47d0-b9fd-4951f8377be8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Two Issues with Playing Chicken with the Universe
If you are unfamiliar with the 5-and-10 problem, please refer to the Action Counterfactuals section of this post on Embedded Agency. I regret that I am unable to recommend a resource for learning about the concept of "Playing Chicken with the Universe". If any reader h... |
009c9de8-3624-4332-8d13-5b3403de7b7e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Announcing AI Alignment workshop at the ALIFE 2023 conference
The upcoming ALIFE 2023 conference is hosting a workshop on AI Alignment and Artificial Life. This will complement the special session on AI Alignment at the conference. The workshop will include presentations and a discussion panel from established AI Alig... |
b62ce7eb-792e-4c51-b873-f85262154007 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Good Idealistic Books are Rare
Today's post, Good Idealistic Books are Rare was originally published on 17 February 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> Much of our culture is the official view, not the idealistic view.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
... |
eff0709f-ee85-492c-8f68-b4afa558c90a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Possible Implications of the neural retrotransposons to the future
Retrotransposons are small bits of genetic code than can copy themselves into other bits of the dna strand
They have been found to be active in brains, with different amounts of activity in different brain sections. The highest being in the hippocampu... |
4725a558-e817-4178-95a9-39e342e6b9ce | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Stupid Questions May 2017
This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.
Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock t... |
65d437ba-3509-4f17-9734-e74b813de5e6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Political Violence and Distraction Theories
This is the 4th post of 5 containing the transcript of a podcast hosted by Eric Weinstein interviewing Peter Thiel.
Interview
Automation
Eric Weinstein: So, this is why I try to sell you sometimes on a more progressive view of the world, which is I want deregulated capit... |
0ebaccb4-24f1-4da0-be46-c8cfa6ea7f93 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Prices are Bounties
A man has just robbed a train. A Rock Island Rail car was held up in the desert of North Texas on route from Chicago carrying dozens of passengers and tens of thousands of dollars in a Wells Fargo express compartment. The men were slain and the women and children are kidnapped.
You’re the sheriff ... |
dd7053a8-363d-4289-b654-e67fae796f92 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Yudkowsky on Logical Uncertainty
A paraphrased transcript of a conversation with Eliezer Yudkowsky.
**Interviewer**: I’d love to get a clarification from you on one of the “open problems in Friendly AI.” The logical uncertainty problem that Benja Fallenstein [tackled](http://lesswrong.com/lw/eaa/a_model_of_udt_with_... |
3082b963-80bd-4b50-94b5-ff0936c854cd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Inference & Empiricism
Speaking very roughly our best tools for figuring out the truth are inference and empiricism. By inference I mean using things like Math, Logic, and theory in general to conclude new facts from things we assume to be true. By empiricism I mean looking at the world, doing experiments, etc.
Infer... |
6d4c9650-e919-42f2-966c-f3c80ddbc9ea | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Definitions of “objective” should be Probable and Predictive
Introduction
------------
Core arguments about existential risk from AI misalignment often reason about AI “objectives” to make claims about how they will behave in novel situations. I often find these arguments plausible but not rock solid because it doesn... |
e21a6c49-d88c-43ec-95f0-5ce8cbb90399 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Timeless Beauty
Today's post, Timeless Beauty was originally published on 28 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> To get rid of time you must reduce it to nontime. In timeless physics, everything that exists is perfectly global or perfectly local. The laws of physics are perfectly global; th... |
a3f8a35e-1836-4cb4-804a-1dae146e8d4c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Some rationality tweets
Will Newsome has suggested that I repost my tweets to LessWrong. With some trepidation, and after going through my tweets and categorizing them, I picked the ones that seemed the most rationality-oriented. I held some in reserve to keep the post short; those could be posted later in a separate ... |
93d1d551-74fe-47d4-966f-3ac296c3bae0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | We’re not prepared for an AI market crash
Our community is not prepared for an AI crash. We're good at tracking new capability developments, but not as much the company financials. Currently, both OpenAI and Anthropic are losing $5 billion+ a year, while under threat of losing users to cheap LLMs.
A crash will weaken... |
74702aa4-7de9-41fd-985e-934e24880de1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | some questionable space launch guns
high school history
Recently, someone asked me about a startup called Longshot Space. They're trying to make big guns that're useful for space launch. Here's a video on them from Scott Manley. Many startups exist, and normally I wouldn't write a post about something like this, but i... |
fe67136c-f0a5-46e7-bcb9-47fc243bce8d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Politics and Awful Art
Today's post, Politics and Awful Art was originally published on 20 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> When producing art that has some sort of political purpose behind it (like persuading people, or conveying a message), don't forget to actually make it art. It... |
333105e1-ac52-4ac7-b4f2-703b3b3b6538 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Yet More Modal Combat
Strongly recommended prior reading.
Robust Cooperation in the Prisoner’s Dilemma:
Program Equilibrium via Provability Logic
I think I have come up with a modal agent that has these nice properties.
* Cooperates against itself, and similar designs.
* Cooperates against some fairbots (see note... |
c0eada4f-4272-4318-9ca6-7d0554d47ebb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Birth order effect found in Nobel Laureates in Physics
[Epistemic status: Three different data sets pointing to something similar is at least interesting, make your own mind up as to how interesting!]
Follow-up to: Fight Me, Psychologists, Birth Order Effects are Real and Very Strong, 2012 Survey Results, Historical ... |
c731586d-ef8f-4a38-aa6c-dbaf0cede33e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Disentangling Corrigibility: 2015-2021
Since the term *corrigibility*
[was introduced in
2015](https://intelligence.org/files/Corrigibility.pdf),
there has been a lot of discussion about corrigibility, [on this
forum](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/corrigibility) and elsewhere.
In this post, I have tied to disentangl... |
11f7b084-6396-4d4d-8bcc-15c693d3a724 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Requesting clarification- On the Metaethics
My apologies if this doesn't deserve a Discussion post, but if this hasn't been addresed anywhere than it's clearly an important issue.
There have been many defences of consequentialism against deontology, including quite a few on this site. What I haven't seen, however, is... |
9e492c98-e5c4-4716-a423-e4b28bffcf49 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Chapter 57: TSPE, Constrained Cognition, Pt 7
Harry had hoped that he'd just achieved fusion with his mysterious dark side and would be enabled to draw on all of its benefits with none of its drawbacks, call up the crystal clarity and indomitable will on demand, without needing to go cold or angry.
Once again, he'd o... |
1b587072-fa89-4556-8fbc-8d4d207c89c6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | GPT-2 XL's capacity for coherence and ontology clustering
This project was inspired by Nate Soares' advice of focusing on areas where it seems everyone is dropping the ball. If you haven't read / listened to it, I highly recommend it.
Per wikipedia, Algos is the greek word for pain(I'm not certain if this is where... |
2c7e9aa5-2803-4f47-9be5-b704dca02cee | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | August 2012 Media Thread
This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. I find that exposure to LW ideas makes me less likely to enjoy some entertainment media that is otherwise quite popular, and finding media recommended by LWers is a good way to mitigate this. Pos... |
094a35de-9df9-4478-8144-e84f7cbc84ad | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | That Alien Message - The Animation
Our new video is an adaptation of That Alien Message, by @Eliezer Yudkowsky. This time, the text has been significantly adapted, so I include it below. The author of the adaptation is Arthur Frost. Eliezer has reviewed the adaptation.
----------------------------------------
Part ... |
e73174b0-d608-446d-8425-f8d1d493f1e0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Salmon of Knowledge
http://pages.citebite.com/h5t3v8t1a5wnw
All desires save one are fleeting, but that one lasts for ever. Fionn, with all desires, had the lasting one, for he would go anywhere and forsake anything for wisdom; and it was in search of this that he went to the place where Finegas lived on a bank o... |
e25af921-6c57-4d03-be5e-67f19dbb8bb5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The "Reversal Curse": you still aren't antropomorphising enough.
I scrutinise the so-called "reversal curse", wherein LLMs seem not to consider inverse relationships between conceptual nodes.
I show that, far from being a proof of a lack of logical skills, it is a normal artefact of saliency, known in humans as assoc... |
be93e621-5f44-4611-bc5c-c49a64501236 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Link: Thoughts on the basic income pilot, with hedgehogs
I have resisted the urge of promoting my blog for many months, but this is literally (per my analysis) for the best cause.
We have also raised a decent amount of money so far, so at least some people were convinced by the arguments and didn't stop at the cute h... |
ce3db736-b514-4993-9ce0-e61b6ddd1169 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Urbana-Champaign, IL
Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign, IL
WHEN: 07 October 2012 02:00:00PM (-0500)
WHERE: The Starbucks by Green and 5th (503 Green St., Champaign, IL)
We'll be getting to know each other! The goal is to decide what we want to do in the next meetups. Bring ideas for proje... |
2ada692a-9310-4e05-bc69-e8367eab4e50 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Parsing Chris Mingard on Neural Networks
*This is independent research. To make further posts like this possible, please consider* [*supporting me*](https://www.alexflint.io/donate.html)*.*
*Epistemic status: This is my understanding of multiple years of technical work by several researchers in just a few days of re... |
c601fb7f-9b65-4eb8-9542-f16b36f741b2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Varieties Of Argumentative Experience
In 2008, Paul Graham wrote How To Disagree Better, ranking arguments on a scale from name-calling to explicitly refuting the other person’s central point.
And that’s why, ever since 2008, Internet arguments have generally been civil and productive.
Graham’s hierarchy is useful... |
c0488410-b0a6-4560-b042-d48e72bf9926 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What makes Less Wrong awesome?
Recently I asked "What bothers you about Less Wrong?". It might be worth going back and checking out what people had to say, to see if there's something you can do to make Less Wrong more fun for everyone. (A few people made cool posts in response to complaints about lack of technical di... |
f2b3c38d-2c3c-46a6-a2d8-a266b8af28e4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Creating My Own Winter Solstice Celebration - Southern Hemisphere Edition
I've been inspired by user: Raemon and his Winter Solstice celebrations.
But I'm also drawing inspiration from the Matariki holiday here in New Zealand.
I realized I was longing for meaningful community ritual, and I liked the sound of what ... |
a7a5bee4-fd9d-4f8f-b905-a2416bd73a53 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Birds, Brains, Planes, and AI: Against Appeals to the Complexity/Mysteriousness/Efficiency of the Brain
[Epistemic status: Strong opinions lightly held, this time with a cool graph.]
I argue that an entire class of common arguments against short timelines is bogus, and provide weak evidence that anchoring to the huma... |
518fe46c-c709-4977-b4e5-c4b8499a739e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info | AI Safety Info | What was Refine?
[Refine](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/5uiQkyKdejX3aEHLM/how-to-diversify-conceptual-alignment-the-model-behind) was an incubator for new decorrelated alignment "research bets". Since no approach is very promising right now for solving alignment, the purpose of this was to come up with a bunch ... |
0b7636de-743c-43bf-8cab-7358d17d2b0c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Intuitive explanation of why entropy maximizes in a uniform distribution?
What is the best mathematical, intuitive explanation of why entropy maximizes in a uniform distribution? I'm looking for a short proof using the most elementary mathematics possible.
Please no explanation like "because entropy was designed in t... |
cf3f8e6d-fc3e-48bc-997f-e37ae5a727b1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Focusing on Mal-Alignment
Typically, a definition for “Alignment” includes something like “systems that pursue objectives matching the ones intended by its creator(s)." and agents that are not aligned are “systems that pursue objectives other than the ones intended by its creator(s)." To be more clear though, througho... |
ba800acb-337f-45a3-82c3-8a020b3fcc95 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | It's (not) how you use it
*Crossposted from the EA Forum:* [*https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LwhzE3scZTqxERtNn/it-s-not-how-you-use-it*](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LwhzE3scZTqxERtNn/it-s-not-how-you-use-it)
The phrase "technology isn't bad in itself, it's just how you use it" is commonpla... |
b325c33c-0aad-4fea-bbd0-c18e480a67ae | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Shutting Down RegularlyScheduled
Three years ago I created RegularlyScheduled as a way to make it easier to coordinate events that happened on a repeating schedule. My main motivation was to make it easier to get together with my friends from college, but I thought maybe it would be useful to other people as well. Sev... |
33b8ac67-a99e-4c59-94d3-56010afff3ac | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Human wanting
[Metadata: crossposted from https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2023/08/human-wanting.html. First completed August 22, 2023.]
We have pretheoretic ideas of wanting that come from our familiarity with human wanting, in its variety. To see what way of wanting can hold sway in a strong and strongly growing mind, w... |
1850275d-d08d-4c47-b7ff-44d503a6750d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Full Post] Progress Update #1 from the GDM Mech Interp Team
This is a series of snippets about the Google DeepMind mechanistic interpretability team's research into Sparse Autoencoders, that didn't meet our bar for a full paper. Please start at the summary post for more context, and a summary of each snippet. They ca... |
5a091b9f-cfad-48e7-a1fd-f8915ac1efb9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Bayesian Argument for the Resurrection of Jesus
I think LWers may be intrigued...
Tim McGrew, author of this excellent annotated bibliography on Bayesian reasoning, recently co-authored with his wife Lydia a Bayesian defense of the resurrection of Jesus. I interviewed Lydia for my podcast, here. Atheist Richard Car... |
afaf590b-5a29-44a4-98db-e6206394a142 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Study Guide
This post is for students who hope to eventually work on technical problems we don’t understand, especially agency and AI alignment, and want to know what to study or practice.
Guiding Principles
Current alignment researchers have wildly different recommendations on paths into the field, usually correlat... |
f30b1453-1b0e-4445-bd35-0b84dd08f06b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : West LA Meetup 01-11-2012
Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup 01-11-2012
WHEN: 11 January 2012 07:00:00PM (-0800)
WHERE: 10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064
When: 7:00pm - 9:00pm Wednesday, January 11th.
Where: The Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located... |
b571ca9a-3246-474c-a36f-6f73919f4b9e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | GPT-o1
Terrible name (with a terrible reason, that this ‘resets the counter’ on AI capability to 1, and ‘o’ as in OpenAI when they previously used o for Omni, very confusing). Impressive new capabilities in many ways. Less impressive in many others, at least relative to its hype.
Clearly this is an important capabili... |
f69be67f-e5b0-4b9c-8c39-bdb448f04577 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Yudkowsky Ambition Scale
From Hacker News.
> 1. We're going to build the next Facebook!
> 2. We're going to found the next Apple!
> 3. Our product will create sweeping political change! This will produce a major economic revolution in at least one country! (Seasteading would be change on this level if it wo... |
a94df86a-87d3-4f79-858e-aaea6e2e0803 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | New Tool: the Residual Stream Viewer
This is a link-post for the residual stream viewer, which can be found here. It's an online tool whose goal is to make it easier to do interpretability research by letting you easily look at directions within the residual stream. It's still in a quite early/unpolished state, so the... |
13422d47-6428-4153-8bd6-2fe2bda4bd41 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Lone Genius Bias and Returns on Additional Researchers
One thing that most puzzles me about Eliezer's writings on AI is his apparent belief that a small organization like MIRI is likely to be able to beat larger organizations like Google or the US Department of Defense to building human-level AI. In fact, he seems to ... |
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