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304f9880-7f56-4bf9-882c-dcb216b95908 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Harry Potter and the Methods of Psychomagic | Chapter 1: Affect
This is a Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality fan-fiction which contains spoilers. If you haven't, you should read or listen to Eliezer Yudkowsky's original work before reading this.
Chapter 2 >>
----------------------------------------
“The w... |
efab5c38-57f0-4557-8329-23f832712649 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Chapter 67: Self Actualization, Pt 2
In the high reaches of Hogwarts where rooms and corridors changed on a daily basis, where the territory itself was uncertain and not just the map, where the stability of the castle began to fray into dreams and chaos without changing its architectural style or apparent solidity - i... |
b667c3e6-4bf0-4e9c-975a-183cab029d12 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Impression track records
It is good to separate impressions from beliefs.
It is good to keep track records.
Is it good to keep separate impression and belief track records?
My default guess would be ‘a bit, but probably too much effort, since we hardly manage to keep any track records.’
But it seems maybe more tha... |
199089e0-680d-46ff-bef6-9c25fc8ba279 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | Directions and desiderata for AI alignment
In the first half of this post, I’ll discuss three research directions that I think are especially promising and relevant to AI alignment:
1. \*\*Reliability and robustness.\*\* Building ML systems which behave acceptably in the worst case rather than only on the training di... |
00b00e3f-b252-4058-af62-d2fc5cc8c271 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Belief in Belief vs. Internalization
Related to Belief In Belief
Suppose that a neighbor comes to you one day and tells you “There’s a dragon in my garage!” Since all of us have been through this before at some point or another, you may be inclined to save time and ask “Is the dragon by any chance invisible, inaudibl... |
67daafa9-e005-483f-a20f-4e667e7f6209 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Demonstrating specification gaming in reasoning models
> We demonstrate LLM agent specification gaming by instructing models to win against a
> chess engine. We find reasoning models like o1-preview and DeepSeekR1 will often hack the benchmark by default, while language models like GPT4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet need... |
226499a6-f63d-4ace-a90f-838b2fce9065 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Puzzle Cycles
Summary: Start with a collection of puzzles. Set a timer for five minutes. Solve the first puzzle, if you can. Take a break, then repeat.
Tags: Repeatable
Purpose: We want to be able to think quickly and accurately. Practice trying to think at speed, and discard wasted motion if you can.
Materials: Yo... |
96fd9106-ad19-4dd6-b915-e84bd605290d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Where to find reliable reviews of AI products?
Being able to quickly incorporate AI tools seems important, including for working on AI risk (people who disagree: there's a thread for doing so in the comments). But there are a lot of AI products and most of them suck. Does anyone know a good source of reviews, or even... |
8af92d95-ef8f-44c3-bf01-5bc8fc304160 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Eternal Winter,
Endless Light
This was my Moment of Darkness speech for the NYC 2017 Solstice. The overall theme for the event was "generational knowledge."
----------------------------------------
To pass generational knowledge into the future, you need three things. You need mentors, sharing the most important wi... |
d953e4e7-ac6a-40c2-a70e-d81382df68dd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Moderate alcohol consumption inversely correlated with all-cause mortality
My roommate recently sent me a review article that LW might find interesting:
> Conclusions: Low levels of alcohol intake (1-2 drinks per day for women and 2-4 drinks per day for men) are inversely associated with total mortality in both men ... |
d01a34b4-7936-4016-abfa-5c7caeaca991 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Holidaying and purpose
I’m on holiday. A basic issue with holidays is that it feels more satisfying and meaningful to do purposeful things, but for a thing to actually serve a purpose, it often needs to pass a higher bar than a less purposeful thing does. In particular, you often have to finish a thing and do it well ... |
bbd65933-42c3-4c5d-be99-e1e7080e75ee | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Should Robots be Obedient?
1 Introduction
---------------
Should robots be obedient? The reflexive answer to this question is yes. A coffee making robot that doesn’t listen to your coffee order is not likely to sell well. Highly capable autonomous system that don’t obey human commands run substantially higher risks... |
21e08061-a27d-4722-b4a1-22801c230607 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Slow motion videos as AI risk intuition pumps
***tl;dr:** When making the case for AI as a risk to humanity, trying showing people an evocative illustration of what differences in processing speeds can look like, such as* [*this video*](https://vimeo.com/83664407)*.*
Over the past ~12 years of making the case for AI ... |
ccdac099-df2e-43e6-aa7f-a79a6ee93f1f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Beneath My Epistemic Dignity
> But all of the foregoing is a lot less interesting than the technology and the quote. The quote itself eloquently sums up the real reason why Zakharov can’t stand Miriam. It also makes clear the reason why he chose the title “For I Have Tasted The Fruit” for his core text. He is referrin... |
b8f423dd-e602-453a-bbb0-41e422cfd237 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Rationalist households: What can London learn from its predecessors?
At our most recent meetup, the London LessWrongers began discussion of setting up one or more houses in the capital. This thread is intended for discussion and advice on planning ‘rationalist households’ and on making them thrive. You can also regist... |
98c4fa6b-f2cf-4f41-b3bd-2e2597c7b621 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Journalism student looking for sources
Hello Lesswrong community,
I am a journalism student doing my capstone documentary on AI alignment. However, this is a topic that I want to make sure is done well. The last thing I would want is to confuse or mislead anyone.
That said, I have a few questions:
Who would be the ... |
46c21190-4cb5-4aaa-8e4c-8881de14bf96 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Apollo Creed problems and Clubber Lang problems -- framing, and how to address the latter?
If you've seen the flims Rocky I, II and III you'll be familiar with Apollo Creed and Clubber Lang, but will give a quick summary for those who haven't (spoilers ahead!). In Rocky I, Rocky (the character) is an underdog who is f... |
7fba53a9-ddba-4019-8bd1-6e55a20c4713 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meta-rationality and frames
How should we think about thinking? In this sequence I outline an epistemology called meta-rationality, which in my opinion improves on existing epistemologies in a number of important ways. This first post introduces some of the key concepts in meta-rationality (in particular the concept o... |
72e3d8d6-2246-4c47-a3de-819aa0e11431 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Covid 5/13: Moving On
For over a year, Covid-19 has been the central fact of life.
The goal now is to make that no longer true.
If you’re reading this, chances are very high you are vaccinated. If you’re not reading this, but you live in the United States, chances are still pretty good you’re vaccinated.
The que... |
cea39495-2a46-460e-8f51-592fdb9e6d6b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Writing about Singularity: needing help with references and bibliography
It was Yudkowsky's Fun Theory sequence that inspired me to undertake the work of writing a novel on a singularitarian society... however, there are gaps I need to fill, and I need all the help I can get. It's mostly book recommendations that I... |
7f8983ec-57af-426c-adce-49426da87a42 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Consciousness as Metaphor: What Jaynes Has to Offer
Cross-posted from my roam-blog. Greatly inspired by a lot of the stuff in Kaj's Multi-Agent Models of the Mind Sequence
This first paragraph of a recent SlateStarCodex post:
> Julian Jaynes’ The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind is a b... |
c6409cd5-e4c5-4c1f-b10c-75284e0f2941 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What is the nature of humans general intelligence and it's implications for AGI?
Humans seems to have some form of generality. We seem capable of a solving a large range of problems and the people that are capable on one aspect seem more capable in general. However the nature of this generality is important. There are... |
4bec6919-5f1e-41b8-a975-2c264e849cf3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Announcing the London Initiative for Safe AI (LISA)
The LISA Team consists of James Fox, Mike Brozowski, Joe Murray, Nina Wolff-Ingham, Ryan Kidd, and Christian Smith.
LISA’s Advisory Board consists of Henry Sleight, Jessica Rumbelow, Marius Hobbhahn, Jamie Bernardi, and Callum McDougall.
Everyone has contributed si... |
3c85d235-d68c-4ce7-b797-7db68fd44b76 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Changing Contra Dialects
In 2008 I wrote my undergraduate linguistics thesis on the dialects of contra dancing ( pdf). Some figures have variation, but that variation is constrained by the need for compatible dancing. For example, there are three main hand positions for promenading:
If the Lark/Gent is used to a... |
0ba6e694-5871-43a8-a4d1-413f535fa1f3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Money is a way of thanking strangers
In Ann Arbor, I live with 121,000 strangers. Together, we live among 10 million strangers in the state of Michigan, 332 million strangers in the USA, and nearly 8 billion strangers on Earth.
I don't mind doing favors for my friends and loved ones, or even for one of the 8 billion ... |
7de27ad4-c40b-4280-9674-3329f76ace63 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | General Bitcoin discussion thread (June 2011)
We've started a habit of creating periodic Bitcoin threads to confine discussion thereof to those threads and prevent excessive proliferation of Bitcoin topics in the discussion section. Here is a link to the last one, which links the other discussions. Lot's to talk abo... |
ff67e749-c2b0-4d4c-a33b-c5c7dc58744b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Another UBI article, this one on costs and benefits to society
|
839b9061-07a6-4e44-a0d9-839069ea81dd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What makes buying insurance rational?
Hey, everyone! So I've been reading an article about the expected utility, apparently to figure out whether the risk is worth taking you multiply expected value of the outcome by it's probability.
And apparently insurance companies can make money because the expected utility of b... |
169fcf09-c28d-4cbf-b156-70f77b5c58a6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why the Solutions to AI Alignment are Likely Outside the Overton Window
The challenge with Western intellectual approaches to philosophy is that they rely on some framework for understanding the world, where each such framework precludes some subset of possibilities, and predisposes others, as opposed to more holistic... |
42b21123-ddaf-49f9-bc86-f8c56ec1d934 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Mach's Principle: Anti-Epiphenomenal Physics
Previously in series: Many Worlds, One Best Guess
Followup to: The Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle
> Warning: Mach's Principle is not experimentally proven, though it is widely considered to be credible.
Centuries ago, when Galileo was promoting the Copernican model ... |
d301cf1c-95ca-4823-babc-eacd6c7ace51 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Abstractions and translation
This is a linkpost for https://amirbolous.com/posts/abstraction
* Introduction
* Languages and Meaning
* Communication and Translation
* Closing Thoughts
Introduction
For the past three weeks, I've been building an interpreter for Lisp (more specifically, for a Lisp-dialect I create... |
fff015a5-e8a5-407c-9a0e-36a63735f808 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Mind Is A Shaky Control System
Judges tell juries to disregard statements they find inadmissible in court. Juries have a hard time following this advice.
The mind is a shaky control system. It trembles, like your hands. It gets squished by the g forces, like your body. Information flows in, and the mind responds,... |
dbbeb954-c8b4-43c6-a539-80180f768829 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models [Linkpost]
I've argued before against the view that intelligence is a single coherent concept, and that AI will someday suddenly cross the threshold of general intelligence resulting in a hard takeoff. This paper doesn't resolve that debate entirely, but it provides strong e... |
0ebe590f-49aa-438b-9a5a-8e11335326f5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Certain Formalization of Corrigibility Is VNM-Incoherent
Edit, 5/16/23: I think this post is beautiful, correct in its narrow technical claims, and practically irrelevant to alignment. This post presents an unrealistic picture of the role of reward functions in reinforcement learning, conflating "utility" with "rewa... |
c1217837-3f19-466b-bf12-f1d218e4f4d4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What Decision Theory is Implied By Predictive Processing?
At a fairly abstract/stylized level, predictive processing models human cognition and behavior as always minimizing predictive error. Sometimes, the environment is "fixed" and our internal models are updated to match it - e.g. when I see my untied shoelace, my ... |
93b1977c-9f98-4f44-bb61-4df6587728ef | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open Thread, April 2011
It seems we have agreed that open threads will continue but that they will go in the Discussion section, so here's this month's thread. |
9487457a-1360-4685-9242-a95136d79b08 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Knowledge Extraction Plan (KEP): An alternative to reckless scaling
Alignment Research Community,
My name is Akshay Swani. I recently graduated from Princeton University (Class of 2025) and while I'm not within the alignment community myself, I have been following the AGI/ASI alignment and containment crisis for the... |
1e17810c-c33e-4005-9fe0-be5e410cc308 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Normalising utility as willingness to pay
I've thought of a framework that puts most of the methods of interteoretic utility normalisation and bargaining on the same footing. See this first post for a reminder of the different types of utility function normalisation.
Most of the normalisation techniques can be concei... |
7e2280a5-211b-42b1-825d-f4bcdda62a8f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | On the nature of anxiety
To understand anxiety, we'd first need to clear up our definition of stress. Why i choose not to rely on existing explanations, is because while modern medicine acknowledges the existence of stress and its influence on the body, the discussion about its nature is largely avoided. There is no... |
06a2a583-0afa-494c-9d1f-4d3f18f05daf | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [ASoT] Some thoughts about imperfect world modeling
So a few posts ago I looked at the problem of not being able to anticipate all consequences of an action as being related to deceptive mesaoptimization, but also outer alignment too. This post digs more into some of the things I only touched on briefly in that post.
... |
6c7f5e22-4780-4e46-8672-49845be9643f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | New paper: AGI Agent Safety by Iteratively Improving the Utility Function
This post is to announce my new paper AGI Agent Safety by Iteratively Improving the Utility Function. I am also using this post to add some extra background information that is not on the paper. Questions and comments are welcome below.
From th... |
b5b729aa-a997-4f7a-b458-826d1822246e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why Are So Many Rationalists Polyamorous?
Originally posted at Living Within Reason.
Last week, Jacob Falkovich, of the Putanumonit blog, put up a post trying to figure out why rationalists are disproportionately polyamorous. He notes that about 5% of Americans engage in consensual nonmonogamy, while 17% of America... |
1dbf1500-d696-4c8c-95e4-dee9e4896913 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Alien neuropunk slaver civilizations
Here's some blue-sky speculation about one way alien sapients' civilizations might develop differently from our own. Alternatively, you can consider it conworlding. Content note: torture, slavery.
Looking at human history, after we developed electronics, we painstakingly construct... |
9dac1683-8c67-48ed-9eed-043cdc656aaf | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Faster Than Science
Today's post, Faster Than Science was originally published on 20 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> Is it really possible to arrive at the truth faster than Science does? Not only is it possible, but the social process of science relies on scientists doing so - when the... |
bc29725b-7834-466c-90c6-8c8ee6d26293 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | You’re Measuring Model Complexity Wrong
TLDR: We explain why you should care about model complexity, why the local learning coefficient is arguably the correct measure of model complexity, and how to estimate its value.
In particular, we review a new set of estimation techniques introduced by Lau et al. (2023). These... |
1e4225a5-7612-4175-a3e1-3143aac192b2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Welcome to Philosophy Discussion [Edit With Your Details]
(The following are our suggestions for what kind of information is best to include in the welcome post of your group, feel free to replace them with whatever you think is best)
What kind of events does your group usually run? What does it usually do?
How freq... |
47fecb10-6d28-4a22-b651-370efe87c466 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How to safely use an optimizer
Summary: The post describes a method that allows us to use an untrustworthy optimizer to find satisficing outputs.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Benjamin Kolb (@benjaminko), Jobst Heitzig (@Jobst Heitzig) and Thomas Kehrenberg (@Thomas Kehrenberg) for many helpful comments.
Introductio... |
bf823b11-41ca-4a7d-815c-6760c2d74877 | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | "Judging from the upvotes, it seems like people are quite interested in my grandparents' failure to emigrate from Communist China before it was too late, so I thought I'd elaborate here with more details and for greater visibility. They were all actually supporters of the Communist Party at the beginning, and saw it as... |
1cabd297-7c0b-460c-beba-c0f60b8f0f48 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Berkeley meetup: Cannabis, Decision-Making, And A Chance To Change Your Mind
Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley meetup: Cannabis, Decision-Making, And A Chance To Change Your Mind
WHEN: 29 August 2012 07:00:00PM (-0700)
WHERE: Berkeley, CA
The discussion topic for this Wednesday is a new article ... |
09f244b5-e9b2-4c1b-8f9d-11a764824a25 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Linkpost] Please don't take Lumina's anticavity probiotic
Update:
Trevor Klee (author of the linked post) has published an update in which he (arguably) moderates his view (or at least that which he expresses publicly). Specifically, he states:
> I believe (note the libel-friendly phrasing) that:
>
> 1. Lumina’s ... |
994f6043-3710-44fd-a577-5a35324acb4a | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | New report: “Formalizing Two Problems of Realistic World Models”
[](https://intelligence.org/files/RealisticWorldModels.pdf)Today we release a new technical report by Nate Soares, “[Formalizing two problems of r... |
71eadf13-f101-4ff3-a911-d6e99482e7b9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | ARC Evals: Responsible Scaling Policies
> We’ve been consulting with several parties1 on responsible scaling2 policies (RSPs). An RSP specifies what level of AI capabilities an AI developer is prepared to handle safely with their current protective measures, and conditions under which it would be too dangerous to cont... |
de707102-5691-4a04-91e2-6aa11582af30 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A parable of brightspots and blindspots
Cross-posted from Effective Altruism Forum.
For a concise summary of rationality and EA blindspots, read this post instead
I take the liberty to dramatically sketch a metaphor for early pioneers in the landscape. Then, I suggest quick checks for current charity managers in effe... |
a6b9a0c5-f506-4fa1-b9a8-f11b79b5a7d9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Reward hacking behavior can generalize across tasks
TL;DR: We find that reward hacking generalization occurs in LLMs in a number of experimental settings and can emerge from reward optimization on certain datasets. This suggests that when models exploit flaws in supervision during training, they can sometimes generali... |
7a885c3a-1efe-4a87-a42e-a2b54a32072f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] The Cartoon Guide to Löb's Theorem
Today's post, The Cartoon Guide to Löb's Theorem was originally published on 17 August 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> An explanation, using cartoons, of Lob's theorem.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is... |
056a872d-bce5-46c5-964f-33d23b8b1419 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Causality and a Cost Semantics for Neural Networks
Epistemic status: I time-boxed this idea to three days of effort. So any calculations are pretty sloppy, and I haven't looked into any related works. I probably could have done much better if I knew anything about circuit complexity. There are some TODOs and an unfini... |
c25c508f-1fd4-474d-9720-95fa756a34e7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Topological Data Analysis and Mechanistic Interpretability
This article was written in response to a post on LessWrong from the Apollo Research interpretability team. This post represents our initial attempts at acting on the topological data analysis suggestions.
In this post, we’ll look at some ways to use topologi... |
84a4f6c6-6c05-4145-91e5-f03691d5fb94 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The "Spot the Fakes" Test
Followup to: Are You a Solar Deity?
James McAuley and Harold Stewart were mid-20th century Australian poets, and they were not happy. After having society ignore their poetry in favor of "experimental" styles they considered fashionable nonsense, they wanted to show everyone what they alread... |
3db2dffa-eb9d-4b6a-b0fe-4eda7ae1b515 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | My reflections on doing a research fellowship Draft
I completed the Pivotal Fellowship in Q1 and have been fielding questions from people interested in similar fellowships—particularly those early in their careers or considering a switch into AI policy. I thought I'd write up some rough reflections. I'm timeboxing thi... |
19ce957c-0da9-4de6-9b7d-b22c268eee00 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Infinite necklace: the line as a circle
Represent the line by the real numbers. By bijection, that's equivalent to [0,1], the closed unit interval. Now cut it into an unlimited (infinitely large) number of pieces. Name that number of pieces "H". Then [0,1] ~ Z* mod H where Z* is the hyperintegers and H is hyperfinite.... |
e39df1d7-6fc3-4868-89ef-f2145bbf1ff1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Identity and quining in UDT
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2ce644b0-61d8-46de-96ef-568af8862aaa | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A reasonable debate about Ivermectin
Rebel Wisdom put together a good podcast, "Ivermectin, For and Against, with Tess Lawrie, Graham Walker & Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz." Tess is for sure pro-Ivermectin and is the second author on a favorable Ivermectin meta-analysis. Graham and Gideon are skeptical of Ivermectin. Graha... |
634be7b3-8458-4ee7-b03a-4427b7bfc6c8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Reply to Stuart on anthropics
You wake up in a hospital bed, remembering nothing of your past life. A stranger sits beside the bed, smiling. He says:
"I happen to know an amusing story about you. Many years ago, before you were born, your parents were arguing about how many kids to have. They settled on flipping a co... |
d807670b-a42a-4862-9e72-65c649428a20 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Splinters and Wooden Beams
I recently told a friend that I was planning to write (and post online) a paper that rigorously refutes every argument1 I’ve ever heard that homosexuality is inherently immoral. The purpose of this effort was to provide a handy link for people who want to persuade family members or friends w... |
7c71a266-9571-4ab2-ac23-ef77a979498e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [LINK] EA Has A Lying Problem
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68700100-d36e-424a-87aa-8d26ea032e78 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Magical Healing Powers
Imagine you had magical healing powers. Sitting quietly with someone and holding their hand you could restore them to health. While this would be a wonderful ability to have, it would also be a hard one: any time you spent on something other than healing people would mean unnecessary suffering. ... |
97e84c1e-41eb-4971-9116-bb66e6feb1e7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Biased reward-learning in CIRL
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
In Cooperative Inverse Reinforcement Learning (CIRL), a human H and a robot R cooperate in order to best fullfil the human's preferences. This is modeled ... |
34273eca-eb36-4d13-9c67-89192edf7497 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Cognitive Biases
Discussion article for the meetup : Cognitive Biases
WHEN: 23 August 2014 02:00:26PM (+0200)
WHERE: Utrecht
We have biweekly meetups in Film Café Oskar, Slachtstraat 5, Utrecht, near Central Station. This time we will discuss cognitive biases. For details, please look at meetup.com, which ... |
f4b01310-04c5-4b93-a54c-4079490cedf2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How much should we worry about mesa-optimization challenges?
This post was written quickly, lest I do not write it at all.
Picture the following scenario.
1. Humans train a model, M, with the intention for M to minimize a loss function L.
2. The model, M, will now take a set of actions.
I see this going wrong ... |
af6523bb-3a4c-430a-b156-cb8856b88355 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Translation "counterfactual"
A putative new idea for AI control; index here.
In a previous post, I briefly mentioned translations as one of three possible counterfactuals for indifference. Here I want to clarify what I meant there, because the idea is interesting.
----------------------------------------
Imagine th... |
84e0ba31-353f-4b6e-8884-fd1ed089ea02 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | we're all doomed
we're all doomed
----------------
[a major tech company is now explicitly invested in getting AI to write code](https://copilot.github.com/).
this is a major warning sign; a first step on the explicit path to [superintelligence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence) [explosion](https://... |
bb53c08c-3449-4c7b-ae75-fe66af6db5f6 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Efficient training of language models to fill in the middle
Efficient Training of Language Models to
Fill in the Middle
Mohammad BavarianHeewoo JunNikolas Tezak
John Schulman Christine McLeavey Jerry Tworek Mark Chen
OpenAI
Abstract
We show that autoregressive language models can learn to infill text after we apply
a ... |
7fbd9ea3-d149-4687-87ca-0ffe4077160a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Economic Class
Social class is fossilized wealth. There are three economic classes in the USA.
* If you do physical work then you belong to the the "working class", "lower class", "blue collar" or simply "labor".
* If you do nonphysical work then you belong to the "middle class" or "white collar".
* If other peopl... |
6c68f6c6-b7df-49a9-827e-5ebde2c71471 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Where Physics Meets Experience
Followup to: Decoherence, Where Philosophy Meets Science
Once upon a time, there was an alien species, whose planet hovered in the void of a universe with laws almost like our own. They would have been alien to us, but of course they did not think of themselves as alien. They communi... |
aa33be0a-2688-41b7-a1a7-fc4d5859f7ef | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Introducing BenchBench: An Industry Standard Benchmark for AI Strength
Recent progress in AI has led to rapid saturation of most capability benchmarks - MMLU, RE-Bench, etc. Even much more sophisticated benchmarks such as ARC-AGI or FrontierMath see incredibly fast improvement, and all that while severe under-elicitat... |
348dff1f-b5a3-4d17-b155-c49234971f3c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Mesa-Optimization: Explain it like I'm 10 Edition
There are a couple of explanations of mesa-optimization available. I think Rob Miles' video on the topic is excellent, but I think existing written descriptions don't make the concept simple enough to be understood thoroughly by a broad audience. This is my attempt at ... |
bbd80835-e086-436c-8766-3c1f67e4f19d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Do Earths with slower economic growth have a better chance at FAI?
I was raised as a good and proper child of the Enlightenment who grew up reading The Incredible Bread Machine and A Step Farther Out, taking for granted that economic growth was a huge in-practice component of human utility (plausibly the majority comp... |
9b08f1aa-d45c-4d3f-8b01-8d7e700f7257 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is CDT with precommitment enough?
Logical decision theory was introduced (in part) to resolve problems such as Parfit's hitchhiker.
I heard an argument that there is no reason to introduce a new decision theory - one can just take causal decision theory and precommit to doing whatever is needed on such problems (e.g.... |
299ff035-a689-47c0-8b51-5605a2dff62d | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | What AI companies can do today to help with the most important century
*Click lower right to download or find on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, etc.*
I’ve been writing about tangible things we can do today to help the [most important century](https://www.cold-takes.com/most-important-century/) go well. Previous... |
b8ce619f-8545-47b6-8ac8-79175bbb1e38 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Non-axiomatic math reasoning with naive Bayes
ETA: this post is WRONG. Read on only if you like to find mistakes in other people's reasoning. Sorry.
----------------------------------------
So I've been thinking how to teach machines to reason about integers without running into Goedelian limitations. A couple d... |
6069d752-0069-47cb-bba9-fd8a528e7fe3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Neuron Activations to CLIP Embeddings: Geometry of Linear Combinations in Latent Space
This is my project for the AI Safety Fundamentals course.
Abstract
I use Lucent library to produce images that are optimized to give maximum activation on some neuron (or, in my case, linear combination of two neurons). Then I use... |
7e8f7cd9-9e3c-4a49-9c1c-4cbd4ed7027a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Ontologies Should Be Backwards-Compatible
Posting these slightly out-of-order from when I had published them on my blog. If you downvote this post, please consider also leaving a comment for me (heck, if you upvote it, too). Thank you!
In 2017, I wrote several blog posts on LessWrong:
* Mode Collapse and the Norm O... |
d99e9e40-2660-47ae-bdea-abe171291219 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | "What Progress?" Gwern's 10 year retrospective
This is a thrilling read. Some favourite lines:
> And that was that. The FBI would later pay me some visits, but I was long done with the DNMs and had moved on.
and
> The key result was Rietveld et al 2013, the first truly successful IQ GWAS. Rietveld et al 2013 found ... |
09cde56a-28a7-4fc3-9622-773fd2f381bd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Mechanistic Interpretability for the MLP Layers (rough early thoughts)
This post is a link to a video I just made in response to the new work coming out of Anthropic described here and here and discussed on LessWrong here.
In the video I try to puzzle through how best to think about the MLP layers of a transformer in... |
9a42d9a6-afaa-4f4c-ae03-18f7cb65c8d6 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | AI Safety Hub Serbia Soft Launch
TLDR; We got three-month funding from a generous individual funder to launch an AI Safety office in Serbia. We are giving free office space (and, if funding later permits, housing) to AI Safety researchers who are looking for a place to work from. Priority for citizens of countries lik... |
573cb866-7a3b-43ec-9ba7-9c8ebb811787 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Searching for Modularity in Large Language Models
*Produced As Part Of The SERI ML Alignment Theory Scholars Program 2022 Under* [*John Wentworth*](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/johnswentworth)
*See the*[*Google Colab notebook*](https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1yH_foOW7ONKXj5evGiDC6WmuV7qz5SMT?usp=sharing) ... |
e706998d-67ea-433b-93b9-f9e0c7978c6b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Transparent Technologies
I cook my own meals because restaurant food is expensive. But there are many activities I would prefer to cheap versions independent of price.
I Like I Don't Like bicycles cars entrepreneurship jobs solo adventure guides barbells exercise machines meditation psychoactive drugs Linux, LineageO... |
b0aee493-c885-4cf0-a3af-be1ca4df7a75 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | A sketch of a value-learning sovereign
.mjx-chtml {display: inline-block; line-height: 0; text-indent: 0; text-align: left; text-transform: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 100%; font-size-adjust: none; letter-spacing: normal; word-wrap: normal; word-spacing: normal; white-space: nowrap; float... |
dd4b3a98-90f3-478e-a94c-ad5e351bdb40 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | You are your information system
You are your information system
-------------------------------
what makes you, you ?
we tend to intuitively think of a person as their entire body, somehow including limbs and organs but not clothing or food.
yet, if you close your eyes, and then i swap your arm with someone else... |
8bc0301e-c95f-403e-ae58-16f2837c60db | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Universal Law
Today's post, Universal Law was originally published on April 29, 2007. A summary (from the LW wiki):
> In our everyday lives, we are accustomed to rules with exceptions, but the basic laws of the universe apply everywhere without exception. Apparent violations exist only in our models, not ... |
d50c7697-6ec7-4d92-bc48-c1135dca0293 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A "Holy Grail" Humor Theory in One Page.
Alrighty, with the mass downvoters gone, I can make the leap to posting some ideas. Here's the Humor Theory I've been developing over the last few months and have discussed at Meet-Ups, and have written two SSRN papers about, in one page. I've taken the document I posted on the... |
03eb1ec0-fd1a-4b8c-90b1-536b609499b3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What to do with imitation humans, other than asking them what the right thing to do is?
This question is about whether you have clever ideas about how to use AI imitations of humans for AI safety. The two main ideas I'm familiar with only seem to interface with these imitations as if they're humans.
* The most obvio... |
0444b8cf-9d4a-4fc0-b828-d49a3aba0bac | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Dream, Truth, & Good
One way in which I think current AI models are sloppy is that LLMs are trained in a way that messily merges the following "layers":
* The "dream machine" layer: LLMs are pre-trained on lots of slop from the internet, which creates an excellent "prior".
* The "truth machine": LLMs are trained to... |
458ed904-738b-4ea5-9220-16a23ab5789b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Historiographical Compressions: Renaissance as An Example
I’ve been reading Ada Palmer’s great “Inventing The Renaissance”, and it sparked a line of thinking about how to properly reveal hidden complexity.
As the name suggests, Palmer’s book explores how the historical period we call the Renaissance has been construc... |
d3be34c8-bbea-4730-b33d-31b2d92e0ec3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Joint Distributions and the Slow Spread of Good Ideas
A few years ago a well-known economist named David Romer published a paper in a top economics journal* arguing that professional football teams don't "go for it" nearly often enough on fourth down. The question, of course, is how this can persist in equilibrium. If... |
91805e21-6edf-4744-b1b6-e5e99ad05fa5 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | REPL's: a type signature for agents
Read-eval-print loops are used to interact with programming languages as well as in the shell to interact with your computer. I claim that they are a reasonable starting point for reasoning about agents. This is a framing that all but wrote my ELK proposal for me, and has been payin... |
d01aca62-46c9-4bf8-9c94-0dc5da25af78 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Opportunities that surprised us during our Clearer Thinking Regrants program
This post was written by a subset of Clearer Thinking team members, and not all of the team members involved with the regranting necessarily agree with everything said here.
Update: the same week that we posted this, we were devastated to l... |
0fedbeac-d02b-4c43-8faa-53ce1821a960 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Scientifically optimizing education: Hard problem, or solved problem? Introducing the Theory of Direct Instruction
Re-edited to remove/integrate much of the added notes - Sep 5th:
This is a long post, and it was a first attempt to simply start trying to explain the whole topic, and see what kind of mistakes I made in... |
719ca89c-7db7-4cbc-9e7f-529ddf7ef395 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Mask Comes Off: A Trio of Tales
This post covers three recent shenanigans involving OpenAI.
In each of them, OpenAI or Sam Altman attempt to hide the central thing going on.
First, in Three Observations, Sam Altman’s essay pitches our glorious AI future while attempting to pretend the downsides and dangers don’t... |
5b839270-9855-4669-bf2e-7ff9e26d2128 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | LW September WebDiplomacy Games
prase is starting up a Prisoner's Dilemma Game Theory Lab which you ought to check out, and that revived (my) interest in playing Diplomacy with LWers. We've had two games run on this site, and one run on WebDiplomacy.
Diplomacy is easy to learn and, at its heart, a very simple game. S... |
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