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7.55M
b4b3cd21-aeaa-4034-ae34-1f5051637140
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Consulting Opportunity for Budding Econometricians As a part of my job, I recently created an econometric model. My boss wants someone to look over the math before its submitted internally throughout the company. We have a modest amount of money set aside for someone to audit the process. The model is an ARMA(2,1) wi...
f59eb688-55f2-4c39-aa1b-eeb7d6d9cb48
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Something about the Pinker Cancellation seems Suspicious Something about the recent attempt to cancel Steve Pinker seems really off. They problem is that the argument is suspiciously bad. The open letter presents only six real pieces of evidence, and they're all really, trivially weak. The left isn't incompetent whe...
7fe17bd8-0bff-49bf-9a26-71f8dbbcc7cd
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Intuitions about goal-directed behavior One broad argument for AI risk is the Misspecified Goal argument: > **The Misspecified Goal Argument for AI Risk:** Very intelligent AI systems will be able to make long-term plans in order to achieve their goals, and if their goals are even slightly misspecified then the AI ...
5c612215-e56a-4d94-8a2e-8b48f2245f8f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Are healthy choices effective for improving live expectancy anymore? The usual way to improve your life expectancy is through a healthy lifestyle of some-sort, especially during peace time. However, in many plausible futures, personal health now seems to have little effect: * We create aligned AGI: aligned AGI coul...
f08dfc8b-1bf7-4875-825c-b1ab31e17b9f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Building rationalist communities: lessons from the Latter-day Saints Or: How I Learned Everything I Know About Group Organization By Spending Two Years on a Mormon Mission in India. The official name is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. You may know us as ‘Mormons.’ We like to call ourselves ‘Latter-da...
01f8bb58-eb72-4372-ba32-ecbc5dc7e384
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
On the fragility of values Programming human values into an AI is often taken to be very hard because values are complex (no argument there) and fragile. I would agree that values are fragile in the construction; anything lost in the definition might doom us all. But once coded into a utility function, they are reason...
8f86d991-60f4-44b0-a51d-5db8148c608a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A Girardian interpretation of the Altman affair, it's on my to-do list Cross-posted from New Savanna. Tyler Cowen posted the following tweet over at Marginal Revolution under the title "Solving for the Equilibrium": I posted this comment: > Earlier in the week Scott Alexander had posted a skeptical review of a Gira...
3dcbb373-4c59-43c8-9b22-1dbbfbae7075
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Cheat codes Most things worth doing take serious, sustained effort. If you want to become an expert violinist, you're going to have to spend a lot of time practicing. If you want to write a good book, there really is no quick-and-dirty way to do it. But sustained effort is hard, and can be difficult to get rolling. Ma...
9be4c570-545a-40fb-a853-2afabd0c7748
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/distill
Distill Scientific Journal
Thread: Differentiable Self-organizing Systems Self-organisation is omnipresent on all scales of biological life. From complex interactions between molecules forming structures such as proteins, to cell colonies achieving global goals like exploration by means of the individual cells collaborating and communicating,...
7d55ee5c-530f-4b50-8c69-649bf3873290
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[Oops, there is actually an event] Notice: No LW event this weekend Just a notice to say there's no event this weekend. Will be back to your regularly scheduled LW event on Sunday 29th, which we'll announce in a few days. Update: We're having a double crux, between Buck Shlegeris and Oliver Habryka, on AI takeoff sp...
d4cb2dc1-f5c9-4242-9775-c6449bd567d0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The uniquely awful example of theism When an LW contributor is in need of an example of something that (1) is plainly, uncontroversially (here on LW, at least) very wrong but (2) an otherwise reasonable person might get lured into believing by dint of inadequate epistemic hygiene, there seems to be only one example th...
35e6341d-9514-45b6-8437-d9b7eb54c65c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Is your uncertainty resolvable? I was chatting with Andrew Critch about the idea of Reacts on LessWrong. Specifically, the part where I thought there are particular epistemic states that don’t have words yet, but should. And that a function of LessWrong might be to make various possible epistemic states more salient ...
7e1cb9f5-5692-49d8-996d-1973c1da4dc7
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How likely are the USA to decay and how will it influence the AI development? Trump's politics is so far from being understandable that it appears to cause the decay of the USA; for instance, the governor of California ended up pleading to exclude California-made products from tariffs introduced as retailation against...
7cd811ff-83ae-459c-a7a9-cdbb944844f3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Singleton: the risks and benefits of one world governments Many thanks to all those whose conversations have contributed to forming these ideas. Will the singleton save us? For most of the large existential risks that we deal with here, the situation would be improved with a single world government (a singleton), or...
67c7fdaf-2140-4a78-a8c6-79e73994dbf0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Applied Rationality Workshop Cologne, Germany Together with Anne Wissemann we are going to do a 2-day weekend workshop on applied rationality in Cologne, Germany. If you cannot apply since you have already scheduled something important, feel free to leave your email to be informed about future workshops in the Cologne...
5f2f79fc-c457-4e0b-9b37-1fbff6bfb44c
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
Free Guy, a rom-com on the moral patienthood of digital sentience **Warning: Some spoilers follow** --- *Free Guy* (2020) is romantic comedy about a bank teller named Guy who falls in love with a woman. Then, when he discovers that his entire world is just a video game, he has to be the one to save it from destr...
0299b1d2-47ab-48e3-8957-53b7d9ddee47
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Boston: Antifragile Discussion article for the meetup : Boston: Antifragile WHEN: 04 January 2015 03:30:33PM (-0500) WHERE: 98 Elm Street, Somerville This Sunday, Jesse Galef will be reviewing the book Antifragile, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan. Topics will include effective decision m...
118145f2-17e3-4c32-8690-f454c8a2abbf
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Probabilistic Dependency Graphs 1 Introduction --------------- In this paper we introduce yet another graphical tool for modeling beliefs, *Probabilistic Dependency Graphs* (PDGs). There are already many such models in the literature, including Bayesian networks (BNs) and factor graphs. (For an overview, see (Kolle...
5600aec9-eb22-4382-9900-d3b3a303d6da
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
0th Person and 1st Person Logic Truth values in classical logic have more than one interpretation. In 0th Person Logic, the truth values are interpreted as True and False. In 1st Person Logic, the truth values are interpreted as Here and Absent relative to the current reasoner. Importantly, these are both useful mo...
a751e967-b91c-4668-b49b-03261d1dd21b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Terminology suggestion: Say "degrees utility" instead of "utils" to prompt affine thinking A common mistake people make with utility functions is taking individual utility numbers as meaningful, and performing operations such as adding them or doubling them.  But utility functions are only defined up to positive affin...
1f541ae5-4238-42ec-85d4-ebd53acdf899
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[ASoT] Instrumental convergence is useful A central concept I got out of Reframing impact is that instrumental convergence can be useful for shaping the motivations of superintelligent agents. i.e. there are two frames for thinking about instrumental convergence, one negative and one positive. * Instrumental converg...
bf24d7de-30af-4bcd-90c1-ae42fc0dea4a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Is it harder to become a MIRI mathematician in 2019 compared to in 2013? Below, I make the distinction between "MIRI mathematician" and "MIRI engineer". (In my mind I tend to think of these as "researchers" and "engineers", respectively, but I think MIRI calls both of these classes of people "researchers" these days s...
0f8cb23a-ad06-4c59-84d8-e1165ac87023
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Logic: the science of algorithm evaluating algorithms "Mathematical logic is the science of algorithm evaluating algorithms." Do you think that this is an overly generalizing, far fetched proposition or an almost trivial statement? Wait, don't cast your vote before the end of this short essay! It is hard to dispute ...
2bb05668-521b-41bf-bd2e-ef197cda0542
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Are We Right about How Effective Mockery Is? Crossposted from Figuring Figuring. I did a second survey that fixed some of the flaws of the first survey. The results from the second survey significantly color the interpretation of the results from the first survey given in the first “Conclusion and Discussion” section...
c0c1c6cb-92e4-4f2d-a6a8-18763f3d2794
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
New Haven/Yale Less Wrong Meetup: 5 pm, Monday October 12 Posted on behalf of Thomas McCabe: I (Thomas McCabe, a Yale math student) will be hosting a Less Wrong meetup in New Haven, Connecticut, on the Yale University campus. The meetup will take place at 5 PM on Monday, October 12th, at the Yorkside Pizza & Restaura...
10dc6c6c-56ac-487d-ae44-ce8c334265a8
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
meta-tracking meta-tracking ------------- some social constructs don't originally track anything in the real world, but people who erroneously believe in them start assigning them attributes and meaning, and then those concepts bootstrap themselves into being real at least in that they track people's beliefs. so, ...
7e1ba378-e7ab-4344-a73f-4020760dcc5b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Covid-19 6/4: The Eye of the Storm Still standing by this: Covid-19: My Current Model Previous update posts: Covid-19 5/29: Dumb Reopening, Covid 5/14: Limbo Under Remember last week when I opened with this? > I remember when people on Twitter had constant reminders that today was, indeed, only Wednesday, or whatev...
994c5d45-8348-41e2-ab6c-00d209e49412
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Epistemology of evilness Most everyone seems to think that a big reason for bad things happening in the world is that some people are bad. Yet I almost never see advice for telling whether you yourself are a bad person, or for what to do about it if you seem to be one. If there are so many bad people, isn’t there a ve...
8a1895aa-3be9-4a0e-94b3-f17f4d729b6c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Extracting SAE task features for in-context learning TL;DR * We try to study task vectors in the SAE basis. This is challenging because there is no canonical way to convert an arbitrary vector in the residual stream to a linear combination of SAE features — you can't just pass an arbitrary vector through the encoder ...
daeaad83-a584-4727-92f7-1d7ce0c7fdd6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What's an important (new) idea you haven't had time to argue for yet? Of course, I'm not expecting you to support the idea in the answers, but simply mentioning its conclusion:)
82b3b1b3-ad25-44bd-aa1d-66c601106b59
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Psychology Replication Quiz The great guys over at 80,000 Hours made a quiz for that recent replication study (previously discussed on LW), where you can find out if you can predict as well as the scientists or the prediction market. Description: > Can you guess which psychology experiments had correct findings and w...
92a02c31-72c0-4022-a78b-e6d497109dd6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Sydney Rationality Dojo - December 2016 Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Rationality Dojo - December 2016 WHEN: 04 December 2016 04:00:00PM (+1100) WHERE: 10 Shepherd Street, Chippendale Come join us for the final dojo of the year. Dinner afterwards for those who wish to come, as usual. We don't...
4395b452-c297-41c6-a5b6-5c79a7f132f5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Fear Experiments I. INTRODUCTION The physiological experience of fear is an interesting area for inquiry because of how these physical effects come to influence our decision making. I will start by saying that these are very personal notes that are much too raw to be seen as a formal paper or argument. I am choos...
c0dc4db2-7efe-4c3f-901a-d3c5e7d99efe
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Does cognitive therapy encourage bias?   (This post might suffer from formatting problems. I'm pretty dumb with computers, so it's not a surprise to me, but if anyone out there knows how to fix it, I'd be grateful for the help.) Summary: Cognitive therapy may encourage [motivated cognition](http://lesswrong.com/lw/k...
0c906566-6ee2-482f-a3ff-8bc436903fda
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
When Are Results from Computational Complexity Not Too Coarse? Tl;dr, While an algorithm's computational complexity may be exponential in general (worst-case), it is often possible to stratify its input via some dimension k that makes it polynomial for a fixed k, and only exponential in k. Conceptually, this quantity ...
b12b94cd-715d-46b3-84a2-41d517bad8b3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Learning Multi-Level Features with Matryoshka SAEs TL;DR: Matryoshka SAEs are a new variant of sparse autoencoders that learn features at multiple levels of abstraction by splitting the dictionary into groups of latents of increasing size. Earlier groups are regularized to reconstruct well without access to later grou...
aee57dfb-b1f7-487e-99f2-15b4eb4dc53b
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
New Paper: “Embryo Selection for Cognitive Enhancement” [![IES first page](https://intelligence.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/embryselection-cover.gif)](https://intelligence.org/files/EmbryoSelection.pdf)During his time as a MIRI research fellow, Carl Shulman co-authored (with [Nick Bostrom](http://nickbostrom.com/))...
edda3571-0831-4ca7-83f2-820af4754043
LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct
LessWrong
"Related: Leave a Line of Retreat, Living In Many Worlds"It all adds up to normality." Greg Egan, QuarantineYou're on an airplane at 35,000 feet, and you strike up a conversation about aerodynamic lift with the passenger in your row. Things are going along just fine until they point out to you that your understanding o...
122b3531-94a2-4f56-9a5b-f2dc0884fc35
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Hard Choices in Artificial Intelligence: Addressing Normative Uncertainty through Sociotechnical Commitments. Introduction ------------ As the capabilities of AI expand, researchers must consider the problem of *AI Safety*, defined broadly as the design of machines that can act independently while avoiding harm to ...
0eb86d7d-1013-4fdc-9e6f-2c367e91ba54
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Welcome to the Vancouver Rationality Community We're the rationality community in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. We organize meetups on all kinds of topics, like LessWrong, Slate Star Codex, and effective altruism. We're aspiring to launch a MIRIx workshop. We also host events focusing on other intellectual act...
3d949637-d216-43f9-b491-0ae619c74b52
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Relabelings vs. External References The following distinction is crucial to my understanding of consciousness and epistemology. It is also extremely useful for seeing through some of the language games people play in terms of framing. There are fundamentally two ways in which we can define entities and much confusion ...
6a554e66-58d2-42a3-9f06-f52b12d0520d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Seven habits towards highly effective minds Lately I’ve been thinking about how my thinking works, and how it can be improved. The simplest way to do so is probably to nudge myself towards paying more attention to various useful habits of mind. Here are the ones I've found most valuable (roughly in order): 1. Tying...
e0dd3e1d-b10c-4ed3-9d14-3acdc3ec8a6b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Thoughts on tackling blindspots I went to my first CFAR workshop the other week, and it was quite intense/a lot. The biggest change by far has that I came face to face with some huge blindspots and can see more clearly many of the ways I've been fooling myself, not allowing myself to care about things, and pushing peo...
b22053a0-c710-4ecf-8a61-5a9d263951de
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Decision theory and zero-sum game theory, NP and PSPACE *(Cross-posted from [my blog](https://unstableontology.com/2018/05/24/decision-theory-and-zero-sum-game-theory-np-and-pspace/))* At a rough level: * [Decision theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_theory) is about making decisions to maximize some obje...
2b879ae3-a68f-4e1f-8d2b-fe0bc6df515e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Pong from pixels without reading "Pong from Pixels" At the beginning of this summer I finished an undergraduate degree in maths and physics and I decided to spend some time preparing for my master’s degree in AI by learning some reinforcement learning (RL). It’s not like there was a whole lot else to do this summer a...
f83bd296-c882-40d1-8132-5deb3dbe3478
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Short Primers on Crucial Topics Series: How to Purchase AI Risk Reduction Here's another way we might purchase existential risk reduction: the production of short primers on crucial topics. Resources like The Sequences and NickBostrom.com have been incredibly effective at gathering and creating a community engaged i...
237b80bb-15a4-4903-8141-b0a7fabdcfde
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs
Other
individuallyselected_92iem-by Vael Gates-date 20220321 # Interview with AI Researchers individuallyselected\_92iem by Vael Gates \*\*Interview with 92iem, on 3/21/22\*\* \*\*0:00:05.2 Vael:\*\* Alright, here we are. So my first question is, can you tell me about what area of AI you work on in a few sentences? \*\*0...
1aa96797-6a28-429f-9215-f946a9072602
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Engineer’s Interpretability Sequence (EIS) I: Intro Part 1 of 12 in the Engineer’s Interpretability Sequence. If we want to reduce near and long term risks from AI, we should care a lot about interpretability tools. This is a very uncontroversial claim to make inside the AI safety community. Almost every agenda ...
31b89336-cfa2-4167-b59f-c1fbc45b066c
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Levels of goals and alignment *This post was written as part of* [*Refine*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5uiQkyKdejX3aEHLM/how-to-diversify-conceptual-alignment-the-model-behind)*. Thanks to Adam Shimi, Lucas Teixeira, Linda Linsefors, and Jonathan Low for helpful feedback and comments.* *Epistemic status: highly ...
3e9446b0-7ba2-4323-adae-d8da6686dc9e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Two paths to win the AGI transition Path 1: Solve Alignment If alignment is possible, i think we are vastly more likely to win if we set up a scenario where we can safely iterate. Humans are really good at collectively collaborating on iterative engineering improvements! This is not an alignment proposal in itself, bu...
2d6a1998-8da8-4e6d-a8d6-cfc27a9bb7dc
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Cross-Layer Feature Alignment and Steering in Large Language Model The text below is a brief summary of our research in mechanistic interpretability. First, this article discusses the motivation behind our work. Second, it provides an overview of our previous work. Finally, we outline the future directions we consider...
47d0aeb9-3a52-4232-9453-c7a6a5c22d91
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Are there really no ghosts in the machine? My previous article on this article went down like a server running on PHP (quite deservedly I might add). You can all rest assured that I won't be attempting any clickbait titles again for the foreseeable future. I also believe that the whole H+ article is written in a very ...
7caa5e99-a9d6-43bd-92b9-55f9bc97ac92
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Cooperation is for Winners Cross-posted from Putanumonit. ---------------------------------------- My last post was about learning to compete well from sports. But why compete at all? After all, I’m the one who wrote that winning is for losers, and we should avoid getting sucked into zero-sum contests. Competing we...
50268dc0-337d-420c-b25c-10e823efcb87
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Earnings of economics majors: general considerations Some liberal arts majors make more money than others, but by far the ones who make the most are economics majors. The 2013-2014 Payscale Salary Report reports the following figures. The second column is median starting salary and the third is median mid-career salar...
d2e7fb3b-598d-4540-9661-9417bd509de8
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Value Formation: An Overarching Model 0. Introduction --------------- When we look inwards, upon [the godshatter](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cSXZpvqpa9vbGGLtG/thou-art-godshatter), how do we make sense of it? How do we sort out all the disparate urges, emotions, and preferences, and compress them into legible pr...
7db9d2fd-7877-4ccb-a1d7-b70b4856875a
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
A gentle apocalypse Is robots taking over the world bad? Some of the AI-risk scenarios I’ve read almost feel like it’s inevitable – and I’ve been wondering if there is a way it could happen that we would actually be comfortable, or even happy with. Let me roughly outline one scenario I have in mind, and then reflect ...
a17c4210-d0b5-45ed-8a25-d974b705a335
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Is cryonicists’ selfishness distance induced? Tyler‘s criticism of cryonics, shared by others including me at times: > Why not save someone else’s life instead? This applies to all consumption, so is hardly a criticism of cryonics, as people pointed out. Tyler elaborated that it just applies to expressive expenditur...
3804f034-15a1-4547-b3e3-b61fe7302b14
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How do you know you are right when debating? Calculate your AmIRight score. I recently found myself in a spirited debate with a friend about whether large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 are mere stochastic parrots or if they can genuinely engage in deeper reasoning. We both presented a range of technical arguments...
2c21e655-b330-4dca-bc0f-d2cb806e9ca8
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Self-shutdown AI *This post describes my proposal for the* [*AI Alignment Awards*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zFoAAD7dfWdczxoLH/winners-of-ai-alignment-awards-research-contest) *contest that won a "first round prize" / an honorable mention. The original submission is* [*here*](https://github.com/johny-b/aaa_23_su...
2c0e2d34-c0aa-4529-a645-f1d8aa8711ee
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Training Reflective Attention Crossposted at Agenty Duck > And somewhere in the back of his mind was a small, small note of confusion, a sense of something wrong about that story; and it should have been a part of Harry's art to notice that tiny note, but he was distracted. For it is a sad rule that whenever you are ...
7af1e68c-6cc2-495c-b591-1aeb9e398e70
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Why do animal lovers want animals to feel pain? Behind the vail of (lots of) ignorance, would you rather squished chickens be painless? We may soon be able to make pain-free animals, according to New Scientist. The study they reported on finds that people not enthused by creating such creatures for scientific researc...
74727fb8-ee6f-4d9a-8d48-e011954fa4a5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : San Antonio Meetup Discussion article for the meetup : San Antonio Meetup WHEN: 21 February 2016 02:00:00PM (-0600) WHERE: 11255 Huebner Rd, San Antonio, TX 78230 ALTERNATE LOCATION THIS WEEK: Boba Sip by the Huebner Oaks Shopping Center Bubble tea, frozen yogurt, and discussion. All are welcome. New Mee...
d2f2a61f-e795-4b23-a933-55e0260ec563
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Max Autonomy I would like to raise a discussion topic in the spirit of trying to quantify risk from uncontrolled / unsupervised software. What is the maximum autonomy that has been granted to an algorithm according to your best estimates? What is the likely trend in the future? The estimates could be in terms of mon...
820774d3-e4c7-4b59-b539-aeabc11147dd
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
The Responsibility Quantification (ResQu) Model of Human Interaction with Automation Abstract — Intelligent systems and advanced automation are involved in information collection and evaluation, in decision- making and in the implementation of chosen actions. In such systems, human responsibility becomes equ...
3028eefd-e449-4a76-a4b2-f0da63812164
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Subagent perfect minimax % operators that are separated from the operand by a space % operators that require brackets % operators that require parentheses % Paper specific This post continues the study of minimax forecasting. The minimax decision rule has the pathology that, when events are su...
3bbbb872-62c4-4435-8e4c-1667eaa376a6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Rationality Quotes Thread March 2015 Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are: * Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.) * Do ...
193f0a75-a1ab-4372-b226-49849d939238
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Do Sufficiently Advanced Agents Use Logic? This is a continuation of a discussion with Vanessa from the MIRIxDiscord group. I'll make some comments on things Vanessa has said, but those should not be considered a summary of the discussion so far. My comments here are also informed by discussion with Sam. 1: Logic as...
e33de88e-c92d-48bc-b671-f8ec4e1bf8dd
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AGI's Opposing Force In the Death Note anime, the Death Note gives the protagonist the ability to create a totalitarian justice system. That is, if there isn't a force to stop him. But a character named L quickly catches onto him, and makes his ability to "serve justice" harder. In other words, the Death Note is a pow...
55109a3b-4ae3-48f5-b5b6-5e26c5066b7f
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Amplifying the Imitation Effect for Reinforcement Learning of UCAV's Mission Execution 1 Introduction --------------- Reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn an optimal policy of the agent for a control problem by maximizing the expected return. RL shows high performance in dense reward environments such as games...
9d30c7ae-8372-46b2-9201-763af0973a09
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Change My View: Incumbent religions still get too much leeway In the past few years I've gone from being almost entirely dismissive of religion to being much more uncertain and equivocal. In particular, I've become much warier of implicitly judging The Old Ways against modern conditions and assumptions. These changes ...
75575af9-d183-4d60-b6ac-15f1d9b123b4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Great Bootstrap > This part 2 in a 3-part sequence summarizes my book, The Darwinian Trap, (see part 1 and part 2 here), The Darwinian Trap. The book aims to popularize the concept of multipolar traps and establish them as a broader cause area. If you find this series intriguing contact me at kristian@kristianronn...
28d4e707-de74-4e1a-950c-31ba008e19e4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Telic intuitions across the sciences [WORK IN PROGRESS - I will keep editing this post over time] See the introductory post for a motivation. Explaining a phenomenon in terms of function, role, purpose, goal or meaning is extremely common throughout, let's say, most of the sciences that are not physics or chemistry....
c7863685-876a-41dc-a744-ae7358ed5539
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Responsible AI communication survey When it comes to developing and using AI, there is an expectation of ethical and honest communication about both the technology’s opportunities and risks. But is that currently the case? This is part of the question I’m asking for my PhD research, and I want to know what you think. ...
185ed73b-ff19-4341-a118-1cef31f63a54
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Is ChatGPT (or other LLMs) more 'sentient'/'conscious/etc. then a baby without a brain? I'm curious to see what the views of various community members are in regards to those attributes we typically ascribe to humans when put in comparison to the edge case where it's clearly absent, i.e. babies born without a brain (...
9bfc3e99-f68c-42cc-9064-4b0f0713ae7b
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Microsoft Plans to Invest $10B in OpenAI; $3B Invested to Date | Fortune [Unpaywalled](https://archive.is/6x5uE)   ---   Excerpts ======== > > If all goes according to OpenAI’s financial plans, Microsoft will close a $10 billion investment deal into the artificial intelligence startup before the end of ...
c3a293d3-8980-4e83-ad08-95fc68e88a52
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Language Conditioned Imitation Learning over Unstructured Data I Introduction --------------- Imitation learning [[4](#bib.bib4), [3](#bib.bib3)] is a popular framework for acquiring complex robotic skills from raw onboard sensors. Traditionally, imitation learning has been applied to learning individual skills fro...
20bce8ae-eef1-4d75-9c0b-1360edda8c49
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Electrostatic Airships? Airships are pretty dang cool. Airplanes need a continuous expenditure of energy to stay in the air, but if you just fill a bag with a light gas, you can stay up in the air with no energy expenditure at all. The two lightest gases are hydrogen and helium. Though the hydrogen atom is 4 times lig...
c5916c43-9130-49fb-9c93-f1bd3b3bf2f4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
New Petrov Game Brainstorm Big thanks to the LW team for putting together the Petrov Day experience! (Setup. Follow up.) I looked over the comments and it seems like there there were a number of suggestions for how to do this better. Instead of waiting for the next year, let's do it right now. My proposed setup: 1....
f990d4ff-62bf-4a66-b1a1-33c841a1414d
LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct
LessWrong
"This post requires some knowledge of mathematical logic and computability theory. The basic idea is due to Vladimir Nesov and me. Let the universe be a computer program U that can make calls to a halting oracle. Let the agent be a subprogram A within U that can also make calls to the oracle. The source code of both A ...
1b06039f-b7d9-43e2-93cf-8e6f2c204bd7
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Seeking AI Alignment Tutor/Advisor: $100–150/hr I am actively looking for a tutor/advisor with expertise in AI x-risk, with the primary goal of collaboratively determining the most effective ways I can contribute to reducing AI existential risks (X-risk). Tutoring Goals I suspect that I misunderstand key components ...
8c5ce697-4cd2-441f-a4c6-3ea68fa7e81f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Deep learning models might be secretly (almost) linear Crossposted from my personal blog. Epistemic status: Pretty speculative, but there is a surprising amount of circumstantial evidence. I have been increasingly thinking about NN representations and slowly coming to the conclusion that they are (almost) completely...
06f0b757-ef3c-45ba-8b29-5643163c08d0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Rational Reading: Thoughts On Prioritizing Books A large element of instrumental rationality consists of filtering, prioritizing, and focusing.  It's true for tasks, for emails, for blogs, and for the multitude of other inputs that many of us are drowning in these days[1].  Doing everything, reading everything, commen...
750a8eb2-6acc-45f5-888f-86f6ee9dd43e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Claim explainer: donor lotteries and returns to scale Sometimes, new technical developments in the discourse around effective altruism can be difficult to understand if you're not already aware of the underlying principles involved. I'm going to try to explain the connection between one such new development and an imp...
ae2c3f05-ff1e-496b-b424-5e88be0987d4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Belief alignment The following are some non-technical ideas about AI alignment based on human beliefs, rather than our true reward function. My impression is that the role of beliefs is often implied in passing, but I haven‘t found any elaborations on the topic. I‘d be grateful for relevant references, if someone know...
a06a9017-b89a-4d00-add4-5ec3718f7a98
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Craving, suffering, and predictive processing (three characteristics series) This is the third post of the "a non-mystical explanation of insight meditation and the three characteristics of existence" series. I originally intended this post to more closely connect no-self and unsatisfactoriness, but then decided on fo...
8fee27f1-b1f3-4722-906c-c96e2e0780e5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Incentives affecting alignment-researcher encouragement My hypothesis: I think the incentives for "cultivating more/better researchers in a preparadigmatic field" lean towards "don't discourage even less-promising researchers, because they could luck out and suddenly be good/useful to alignment in an unexpected way". ...
8d20ac85-d851-402c-971d-bc87a38f91f7
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
BYOL (Buy Your Own Lunch) For the format that’s easy on the eyes: https://medium.com/@John_Greer/buy-your-own-lunch-byol-351f6b772287 Imagine you’re at the tail end of a business meeting at a restaurant. Your plate is still 2/3 full since you didn’t get to eat as much as you wanted because you were too busy answering...
cbcaffe8-6f2f-4252-9978-406f1a681583
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Rethinking Laplace's Rule of Succession Imagine a sequence of binary outcomes generated independently and identically by some stochastic process. After observing N outcomes, with n successes, Laplace's Rule of Succession suggests that our confidence in another success should be (n+1)/(N+2). This corresponds to a unifo...
bbbf0691-d4d4-4e4e-abf3-61d170cc35cf
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital
Arbital
Bayes' rule: Odds form One of the more convenient forms of [Bayes' rule](https://arbital.com/p/1lz) uses [relative odds](https://arbital.com/p/1rb). Bayes' rule says that, when you observe a piece of evidence $e,$ your [posterior](https://arbital.com/p/1rp) odds $\mathbb O(\boldsymbol H \mid e)$ for your hypothesis [h...
4aed36b2-ee1c-4bee-b75e-5250d41f5d5b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Weird models of country development? A Scott Alexander post argued that plausibly "land reform" was a vital first step to developing most countries in Asia. I hadn't heard any clear theory like this before—all the development goals I hear about sound like "get them more education and democracy" or sometimes "invest in...
826eccf0-be6c-4ee2-84f9-3e3dc65f0ffa
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Weekly LW Meetups This summary was posted to LW Main on September 19th. The following week's summary is here. Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in: * Bratislava: 29 September 2014 06:00PM * Copenhagen September Social Meetup - Botanisk Have: 27 September 2014 02:30PM * Frankfurt: How to im...
47620b62-c2c0-4db5-b25f-5ee1ac2003bb
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A limit-computable, self-reflective distribution We present a Δ2-definable probability distribution Ψ that satisfies Christiano's reflection schema for its own defining formula. The strategy is analogous to the chicken step employed by modal decision theory to obfuscate itself from the eyes of PA; we will prevent the ...
aa68a787-a03f-4767-8b9a-81cdb771afeb
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[External Event] 2022 IEEE International Conference on Assured Autonomy (ICAA) - submission deadline extended This is a linkpost for https://iaa.jhu.edu/icaa/ This conference may be of interest to some, since the subject matter overlaps very heavily with AI safety research (see Topics of Interest below). The deadline...
d61f7051-022f-490c-b27b-603d6b14c7c4
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Why I'm Sceptical of Foom Disclaimer Written quickly[[1]](#fn3z4chjieyxl). It's better to draft my objections poorly, than to not draft them at all.   Introduction ============ I am sceptical that "foom"[[2]](#fne2ppvjc485) is some of not physically possible/feasible/economically viable. [Not sure yet what level...
2f7534d3-ec5b-489f-89ed-c4cadac1e8bb
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
how humans are aligned This is a description of how I think humans are kept somewhat aligned towards genetically-specified goals. It's not an argument, just my views. It works well enough, but not perfectly. South Korea isn't having kids anymore. Sometimes you get serial killers or Dick Cheney. So, anything less see...
58e28cf7-31ca-4fc1-a361-a0bbd68d64cb
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Interest In Conflict Is Instrumentally Convergent Why is conflict resolution hard? I talk to a lot of event organizers and community managers. Handling conflict is consistently one of the things they find the most stressful, difficult, or time consuming. Why is that? Or, to ask a related question: Why is the ACX Mee...
d38096b4-a414-4736-aa5d-b7bcf1ed0020
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Book review of "Mengzi" Book review of “Mengzi: With Selections From Traditional Commentaries”, trans. Bryan W. Van Norden This is a review of a classical Chinese philosophical text with a heavy focus on virtue ethics and politics. I don’t have any knowledge of Classical Chinese, I’m not a philosopher, and I’m not ve...
a52d9c47-d5ae-4549-9508-73b41809fabc
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Real-Time Research Recording: Can a Transformer Re-Derive Positional Info? New experiment: Recording myself real-time as I do mechanistic interpretability research! I try to answer the question of what happens if you train a toy transformer without positional embeddings on the task of "predict the previous token" - tu...
9c3fd267-c3cf-49eb-b46a-1f27d586fa61
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Acausal trade naturally results in the Nash bargaining solution In this post, I demonstrate that if we treat acausal trade as being analogous to ordinary trade (in the sense that it obeys supply and demand), the final result is the [Nash bargaining solution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_bargaining#Nash_ba...
070bd0e7-b7bd-4108-be00-6b8a6acb319b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Cutting edge technology Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/cutting-edge-technology/ When the microscope was invented, in a very short period of time we discovered the cell and the concept of microbiology.  That one invention allowed us to open up entire fields of biology and medicine.  Suddenly we could see the mi...