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58d1c2be-96c5-4680-a387-5e0b13fe4b79 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | May 2012 Media Thread
This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. I find that reading the sequences 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. Post wha... |
d39705df-3803-494e-a81f-a1b1c39d0311 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Yann LeCun, A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence [link]
Bill Benzon 5 min ago
For those who are interested, Yann LeCun has posted [A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence](https://openreview.net/forum?id=BZ5a1r-kVsf):
**Abstract:** How could machines learn as efficiently as humans and animals? How c... |
886527af-2629-4c7b-9176-4af7e1c247b3 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Reflection Mechanisms as an Alignment target: A follow-up survey
This is the second of three posts ([part I](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XyBWkoaqfnuEyNWXi/reflection-mechanisms-as-an-alignment-target-a-survey-1)) about surveying moral sentiments related to AI alignment. This work was done by Marius Hobbhahn and Er... |
51ecff7c-5d8c-4e94-ab3b-397683fd011e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Logic of Science: 2.2
This is the first technical post on my new blog, where I plan to continue writing about what I learn from self-study of mathematics. I'm currently reading E.T. Jaynes' Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, and Christopher Bishop's Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning. While I understa... |
f86f571d-cf70-4c21-a868-3a5e8de218fa | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Boo lights: groupthink edition
In conversations on LessWrong you may be surprised (in fact, dismayed) to find an apparent majority of the community agreeing with each other, and disagreeing with some view you hold dear. You may be tempted to call "groupthink". Whenever that happens, please hold yourself to at least as... |
ea5d71e3-6fbd-477c-8f21-a201bd566179 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Lesswrong real time chat
This is a short post to say that I have started and am managing a Slack channel for lesswrong.
Slack has only an email-invite option which means that I need an email address for anyone who wants to join. Send me a PM with your email address if you are interested in joining.
There is a web i... |
1cfa9c39-4d6d-4b57-979b-ebafae4f1ac1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Interpreting Quantum Mechanics in Infra-Bayesian Physicalism
This work was inspired by a question by Vanessa Kosoy, who also contributed several of the core ideas, as well as feedback and mentorship.
Abstract
We outline a computationalist interpretation of quantum mechanics, using the framework of infra-Bayesian phy... |
c60a18a9-d142-4467-938e-870e4cfe5a3b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [MIRIx Cambridge MA] Limiting resource allocation with bounded utility functions and conceptual uncertainty
This is a result from the first MIRIx Cambridge workshop (coauthored with Janos and Jim).
One potential problem with bounded utility functions is: what happens when the bound is nearly reached? A bounded utilit... |
010219a7-92b1-4afb-a51f-ccab3589ed15 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | [Crosspost] AI Regulation May Be More Important Than AI Alignment For Existential Safety
*This is a* [*crosspost*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2cxNvPtMrjwaJrtoR/ai-regulation-may-be-more-important-than-ai-alignment-for) *from LessWrong.*
***Summary**: Aligning a single powerful AI is not enough: we're only safe i... |
4523f4b1-ae7f-47cf-9be7-09d64d8d883a | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | National Telecommunications and Information Administration: AI Accountability Policy Request for Comment
Comment deadline is June 10, 2023. |
d7aa3440-729d-460f-a6ca-5516d4b420d8 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Alignment As A Bottleneck To Usefulness Of GPT-3
So there’s this thing where GPT-3 is able to do addition, it has the internal model to do addition, but it takes a little poking and prodding to actually get it to do addition. “Few-shot learning”, as [the paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165) calls it. Rather than p... |
cbab0936-4752-4227-8343-2a08309dec11 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Oversight Leagues: The Training Game as a Feature
This post is part of my hypothesis subspace sequence, a living collection of proposals I'm exploring at Refine. Followed by ideological inference engines.
Thanks Adam Shimi for advice on putting more legible content out there. Thanks Eric Winsor, Leo Grinsztajn, Linda... |
da9c5ef2-cfb2-4b5c-afa2-4977c82e1167 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Attribution Patching: Activation Patching At Industrial Scale
The following is a write-up of an (incomplete) project I worked on while at Anthropic, and a significant amount of the credit goes to the then team, Chris Olah, Catherine Olsson, Nelson Elhage & Tristan Hume. I've since cleaned up this project in my persona... |
b8fe29e0-c6ef-4e22-9a27-3baf856f5828 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | RA x ControlAI video: What if AI just keeps getting smarter?
The video is about extrapolating the future of AI progress, following a timeline that starts from today’s chatbots to future AI that’s vastly smarter than all of humanity combined–with God-like capabilities. We argue that such AIs will pose a significant ext... |
a9f5cb2e-6a1a-4d3e-865f-e6dc37f917c9 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | (When) Is Truth-telling Favored in AI Debate?
1 Introduction
---------------
In recent years, AI systems have performed impressively in many complex tasks, such as mastering the game of Go (Silver et al., [2017](#bib.bib15)).
However, these results have largely been limited to tasks with an unambiguous reward funct... |
be3dd82f-9b6b-4bf0-ac4b-9b32c152fe45 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Fake Utility Functions
Today's post, Fake Utility Functions was originally published on 06 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> Describes the seeming fascination that many have with trying to compress morality down to a single principle. The sequence leading up to this post tries to exp... |
758f388b-e7a9-4419-ac2a-b1de07068752 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A stubborn unbeliever finally gets the depth of the AI alignment problem
> I realise posting this here might be preaching to the converted, but I think it could be interesting for some people to see a perspective from someone slow to get onboard with worrying about AI alignment.
I’m one of those people that finds i... |
5d4d1360-75c2-4388-8d54-9266dc20f544 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | ActAdd: Steering Language Models without Optimization
We wrote up the [GPT-2 steering vector work](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5spBue2z2tw4JuDCx/steering-gpt-2-xl-by-adding-an-activation-vector#Content_warning__Some_completions_contain_unpleasant_content__including_gendered_slurs_) as a full paper, adding a few sy... |
17275d0e-b069-48f5-86d0-f5998ead7160 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What is the semantics of assigning probabilities to future events?
My question concerns the semantics of making future predictions such as 'the probability of X winning the election is 70%'. There are programs, e.g., Good Judgment, IARPA ACE, aimed at excelling at this kind of predictions.
In the classic mathematical... |
5653739a-8572-4d14-8e70-d47c5e7657b1 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Value drift threat models
Say that we train a highly competent AGI using some mix of RL & supervised learning, and some novel algorithmic improvements, optimize it to itself optimize for one or several helpfulness benchmarks (maybe optimizing on some [assistance game](https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.03137) or using techniq... |
b823e116-63da-43e0-ba19-a95af00c3fce | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Musings on AI Companies of 2025-2026 (Jun 2025)
Currently, only 5 companies in the world have access to frontier AI training compute and are also pursuing development of AGI (Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Meta). This will still hold in 2026 for Google and OpenAI, and plausibly also for Anthropic, Meta, ... |
29ff8a19-7040-431b-9e41-3f786086f26a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 3
Update: This post has also been superseded - new comments belong in the latest thread.
The second thread has now also exceeded 500 comments, so after 42 chapters of MoR it's time for a new thread.
From the first thread:
> Spoiler Warning: this ... |
4d6d0932-bcf7-472f-af9e-578013222cb1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Toby Ord’s ‘The Precipice’ is published!
[x-posted from EA Forum]
The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity is out today. I’ve been working on the book with Toby for the past 18 months, and I’m excited for everyone to read it. I think it has the potential to make a profound difference to the way the ... |
5db80972-b4a2-44d7-a325-1b1d64310030 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Heroin model: AI "manipulates" "unmanipulatable" reward
A putative new idea for AI control; index here.
A conversation with Jessica has revealed that people weren't understanding my points about AI manipulating the learning process. So here's a formal model of a CIRL-style AI, with a prior over human preferences that... |
0f1af590-437b-4a1a-a5e2-193ed45a865f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Troll Timers
Summary: A modification to any two player board game, where you play on a very fast clock with infrequent chances to pause and think things through more carefully.
Tags: Small, repeatable
Purpose: Two common flaws in thinking that both relate to time management. Sometimes we spend too long thinking, end... |
ff4f07f6-6e40-468e-8851-0ff5dc2d3679 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Before you start solving a problem
(While this is a general discussion, I have "doing well on interview questions" as an instrumental goal; the discussion below is somewhat skewed due to that).
I noticed one of the common failures to solving problems (especially under time constraints) is trying to solve the problem ... |
4cae5236-ca86-4995-bc10-650c3f07b1ae | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | How technical safety standards could promote TAI safety
Cullen O’Keefe, Jade Leung, Markus Anderljung[[1]](#fn-GNnxvKeeMA2jDFeHr-1) [[2]](#fn-GNnxvKeeMA2jDFeHr-2)
Summary
-------
Standard-setting is often an important component of technology safety regulation. However, we suspect that existing standard-setting inf... |
94b1b2a4-5ed8-4c11-a668-597bd7e8bd9f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Postmortem on DIY Recombinant Covid Vaccine
edit: Changed title from "Postmortem on RatVac" for clarity.
Note: We named the vaccine candidate "RatVac" as a tongue-in-cheek abbreviation for "Rationalist Vaccine". We have no association with the RaDVaC project and use a much simpler, almost trivial approach. I don't en... |
f37973c7-0526-447d-a643-0e152e9815de | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [POLL] LessWrong census, mindkilling edition [closed, now with results]
Some have been curious about what the politics of this community would look like if broken down further; here's a shot at figuring it out. I've also included a few other questions that folks expressed curiosity about. Aside from one sensitive ques... |
16ec9467-6099-494e-9b02-426f958636d0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What Does LessWrong/EA Think of Human Intelligence Augmentation as of mid-2023?
Zvi Recently asked on Twitter:
> If someone was founding a new AI notkilleveryoneism research organization, what is the best research agenda they should look into pursuing right now?
To which Eliezer replied:
> Human intelligence augmen... |
f95adb79-7d78-47af-b791-11ae6b6e0956 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Don't take bad options away from people
Short version: when people are in a bad situation and only have bad options, taking one of those options away is wrong and causes suffering. Not understanding this is a common failure mode among the general population and results in a lot of situations where governments are acti... |
217989d6-0180-4780-9922-aedaa95ae486 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Restructuring Pop Songs for Contra
One of the things I like about playing for contra dances is that you have a lot of freedom about what to play. As long as you meet the minimum requirements for danceable music (108-122bpm, contra phrasing) you can do almost anything. And then if you're a bottom left corner band you m... |
0e82b06b-098c-4e53-b2ae-208aac21c19a | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube | Youtube Transcripts | To use the human or not to use the human (Erwin Boer) - 1st AiTech Symposium
thank you it's a great honor to be
invited I always like to stretch myself
and David already has given quite a
beautiful background of a lot of the
research that he and I have done
together a lot of research in terms of
human modeling that h... |
8122b6e9-c741-44aa-b0df-692a22fada16 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What is the best paper explaining the superiority of Bayesianism over frequentism?
Question in title.
This is obviously subjective, but I figure there ought to be some "go-to" paper. Maybe I've even seen it once, but can't find it now and I don't know if there's anything better.
Links to multiple papers with differe... |
f88f1381-07bd-4432-8a52-55b51039cacd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Allowing a formal proof system to self improve while avoiding Lobian obstacles.
[Epistemic status, can't spot a mistake, but am not confidant that there isn't one, if you find anything please say so. Posting largely because the community value of a new good idea is larger than any harm that might be caused by a flawed... |
46ed3a78-c7b3-4607-ba26-48584567ebc3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Quickly refactoring the U.S. Constitution
Presented mostly without comment, but see the footnotes. The game is that it can't look out of place on Earth, so no futarchy. Bugfixes encouraged.
----------------------------------------
Legislative Branch
1. There is only one house of legislators, named The Senate, and ... |
8d6a332e-d9f7-4c96-9f32-e8e5ce9eef90 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Effective Altruism : An idea repository
Metainformations :
* Cross-post. Steemit.
* Epistemic Effort. Much more reasoning behind that post. I'm mostly trying to see if people are interested. If they are, much more writing will ensue.
* Epistemic Status. Field : Development of idea repository for a community. Phase... |
29df19bb-27a4-4ffd-9033-601582cccdb8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Luna Lovegood and the Chamber of Secrets - Part 1
Luna Lovegood walked through the barrier between Platforms Nine and Ten to Platform Nine and Three-Quarters. Luna wondered what happened to Platform Nine and One-Half. Numbers like "three quarters" only appear when you divide an integer in half twice in a row.
Luna lo... |
11bb49ca-e357-408c-ba3d-6d31759ea884 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Bunny: An EA Short Story
This is cross-posted from my blog.
“Eight villages in our district have had significant to total structural damage from mudslides. Furthermore, the weather conditions conducive to mudslides have only been increasing in the past decade.”
Professor Cristian Avendaño clicked the button and ... |
4df3438f-908a-4020-8b41-6793896a1471 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Towards empathy in RL agents and beyond: Insights from cognitive science for AI Alignment
This is a talk I gave at the recent AI Safety Europe Retreat (AISER) on my research on obtaining insights from the cognitive science of empathy and applying them to RL agents and LLMs.
Talk link: https://clipchamp.com/watch/6c0... |
84e00956-89d6-44ed-9f3a-0fae45704090 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Likelihood
Consider a piece of evidence $e,$ such as "Mr. Boddy was shot." We might have a number of different hypotheses that explain this evidence, including $H_S$ = "Miss Scarlett killed him", $H_M$ = "Colonel Mustard killed him", and so on.
Each of those hypotheses assigns a different probability to the evidence.... |
153eb7d0-de78-406c-84a4-b3d231a16db0 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Three kinds of competitiveness
*Written by Daniel Kokotajlo for AI Impacts.*
*[Epistemic status: I wrote this for* [***Blog Post Day II.***](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FredSMMXc77kMAquA/blog-post-day-ii) *Sorry it’s late.]*
In this post, I distinguish between three different kinds of competitiveness — Perfor... |
4bd209c6-3566-4d2e-886e-4cfbe55cda4f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Childhoods of exceptional people
Let’s start with one of those insights that are as obvious as they are easy to forget: if you want to master something, you should study the highest achievements of your field. If you want to learn writing, read great writers, etc.
But this is not what parents usually do when they thi... |
e79e9c49-27bf-4286-88a2-c0144d106a85 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Productive Disagreement Practice Thread: Double Crux
Inspired by the recent skepticism of the double crux technique, I thought I'd launch a thread to try using double crux, and productive disagreement in general, with other LessWrongers. I think this will work best with some structure, so I've laid out some rules.
T... |
ad1b9338-5c99-48a4-946b-ec4f23b9f620 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Investigating Bias Representations in LLMs via Activation Steering
Produced as part of the SPAR program (fall 2023) under the mentorship of Nina Rimsky.
Introduction
Given recent advances in the AI field, it’s highly likely LLMs will be increasingly used to make decisions that have broad societal impact — such as re... |
bae59994-080d-4e0e-a0f6-7dd0b1e0b463 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Superposition is not "just" neuron polysemanticity
TL;DR: In this post, I distinguish between two related concepts in neural network interpretability: polysemanticity and superposition. Neuron polysemanticity is the observed phenomena that many neurons seem to fire (have large, positive activations) on multiple unrela... |
416d7ba2-7922-4c0a-930d-7f489996f8d1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Claude Sonnet 3.7 (often) knows when it’s in alignment evaluations
Note: this is a research note based on observations from evaluating Claude Sonnet 3.7. We’re sharing the results of these ‘work-in-progress’ investigations as we think they are timely and will be informative for other evaluators and decision-makers. Th... |
fe51de92-1b5b-4298-af78-bf9e0f15b3e4 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Cost of human-level information storage
It costs roughly $300-$3000 to buy enough storage space to store all information contained by a human brain.
Support
-------
The human brain probably stores around [10-100TB of data](http://aiimpacts.org/information-storage-in-the-brain/). Data storage costs around $30/TB. T... |
9f80bfe7-ed9c-4238-917d-b97310764c8c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Moloch's Toolbox (1/2)
Follow-up to: An Equilibrium of No Free Energy
----------------------------------------
There’s a toolbox of reusable concepts for analyzing systems I would call “inadequate”—the causes of civilizational failure, some of which correspond to local opportunities to do better yourself. I shall... |
a42c48ea-54e8-4a95-9160-a794388e6b14 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Request For Collaboration
I want to work on a paper: "The Information Theoretic Conception of Personhood". My philosophy is shit though, so I am interested in a coauthor. Someone who has the relevant philosophical knowledge to let the paper stand the tests of academic rigour.
DM me if you're willing to help.
One ... |
49dc16a1-8a2b-4bef-8d7e-73d028457862 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | A fictional AI law laced w/ alignment theory
*I have envisioned what AI laws could potentially look like, and I believe they should incorporate a substantial amount of alignment theory. I think the AI governance community could find my idea valuable and relevant to their discussions and initiatives.*
**Act of Arti... |
a832a092-5950-4182-8574-d5d64fe24470 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : SF Meetup: Projects
Discussion article for the meetup : SF Meetup: Projects
WHEN: 20 February 2017 06:15:03PM (-0800)
WHERE: 1045 Mission St., SF
(Yes this is tomorrow, pardon the late notice)
We’ll be meeting to work on projects!
Near the beginning, we’ll go around and talk about what we’ll be working o... |
62479bdf-9c4f-4565-a42a-a5506ccb04fe | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | LASR Labs Spring 2025 applications are open!
Edit: Applications for this round are now closed! If you are interested in future rounds, you can express interest here.
TLDR; apply by October 27th to join a 13-week research programme in AI safety. You’ll write a technical paper in a team of 3-4 with supervision from an ... |
cab1494b-0a3a-4348-acd4-7bfe25945f22 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | The Game of Dominance
Concerns about AI safety rely on the assumption that a sufficiently powerful AI might take control of our future in an undesirable way. Meta’s head of AI, Yann LeCun, correctly points this out [in a recent tweet](https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1695056787408400778), but then argues that this as... |
dc7970b7-f293-4d20-93ed-67cd7a1d7411 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How much should you update on a COVID test result?
This is a writeup of COVID test accuracies that I put together for my own interest, and shared with friends and housemates to help us reason about COVID risk. Some of these friends suggested that I post this to LessWrong. I am not a statistician or an expert in medica... |
582ee370-9da5-4d8b-b733-97577dbed0f2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Best arguments against instrumental convergence?
When people debating AI x-risk on Twitter talk past each other, my impression is that a significant crux is whether or not the individual buys the instrumental convergence argument.
I wouldn't be surprised if the supermajority of people who don't buy the idea simply ha... |
8f1104f1-91bd-4512-b379-299afae14898 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A simple presentation of AI risk arguments
Here is a draft of an accordion-style AGI risk FAQ.
I'm interested in three types of feedback:
1. The best place to host a similar format
2. Feedback on content
3. Thoughts about this general approach
The goal here is something that's very easy to read. One major idea ... |
9b142d68-6c60-4b10-89fc-81190e4245e3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : [Moscow] Belief cleaning
Discussion article for the meetup : [Moscow] Belief cleaning
WHEN: 26 May 2013 04:00:00PM (+0400)
WHERE: Russia, Moscow, ulitsa L'va Tolstogo 16
Please use the following guide to get to the meetup: link. You need the second revolving door with the sign “Yandex Money” in Russian. We... |
cf69688f-522b-40b2-8213-22109ddf8275 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Toy model of preference, bias, and extra information
This is a toy model, inspired by the [previous post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dh8WsHfzmQJ5L7bd8/preferences-and-biases-the-information-argument)'s argument that the biases and preferences of a human carry more information than their behaviour.
This is about... |
82a9e60f-e770-408a-a573-55000a382169 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | AI-GAs: AI-generating algorithms, an alternate paradigm for producing general artificial intelligence
1 Two approaches to producing general AI: the manual approach vs. AI-generating algorithms
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arguably the most ambitious sci... |
04e3d32a-9c9b-4a26-8ab9-586aa8c0a8e4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Behavioral Sufficient Statistics for Goal-Directedness
Note: this is a new version -- with a new title -- of my recent post "A Behavioral Definition of Goal-Directedness". Most of the formulas are the same, except for the triviality one that deals better with what I wanted; the point of this rewrite is to present the ... |
2162bca3-2e16-4d95-867d-72e632595688 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Long-chain correlation: lead paint and crime
A friend has been asking my views on the likelihood that there's anything to a correlation between changing levels of lead in paint (and automotive exhaust) and the levels of crime. He quoted from a Reason Blog:
> So Nevin dove in further, digging up detailed data on lead ... |
e9c07e25-728e-4098-848f-441c70b5158e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Arguments are good for helping people reason about things
Yudkowsky recently posted a Twitter thread about how ideal reasoners respond to arguments. My understanding of his reasoning is:
1. The more smart/rational/whatever you are, the better you are at figuring out what is true
2. Thus, whether you believe the con... |
f4269bab-290a-40ff-aa38-351b3743dc64 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Four visions of Transformative AI success
Tl;dr
When people work towards making a good future in regards to Transformative AI (TAI), what’s the vision of the future that they have in mind and are working towards?
I’ll propose four (caricatured) answers that different people seem to give:
* (Vision 1) “Helper AIs”,
... |
9e69210e-010f-4790-8516-ddb72e5c98cb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [AN #71]: Avoiding reward tampering through current-RF optimization
Find all Alignment Newsletter resources here. In particular, you can sign up, or look through this spreadsheet of all summaries that have ever been in the newsletter. I'm always happy to hear feedback; you can send it to me by replying to this email.
... |
b91d6679-53ba-4a3a-bbe4-23b04f61a123 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Newcomb’s problem is just a standard time consistency problem
(Cross-posted from my blog.)
Confidence level: medium
I want to argue that Newcomb’s problem does not reveal any deep flaw in standard decision theory. There is no need to develop new decision theories to understand the problem.
I’ll explain Newcomb’s p... |
3fdf024c-5ce3-41a1-9ddd-7af9ad350cbb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Language models are nearly AGIs but we don't notice it because we keep shifting the bar
I’m putting my existing work on AI on Less Wrong, and editing as I go, in preparation to publishing a collection of my works on AI in a free online volume. If this content interests you, you could always follow my Substack, it's f... |
98d2925d-0e6d-49d1-9e02-c8399bfd7ef0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AI Alignment [Incremental Progress Units] this week (10/08/23)
[edit: took out naming controversy stuff, as it was distracting from the point of the blog]
I am introducing a new rating system for each alignment breakthrough. The rating system will go from 1 star⭐ to 5 stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐.
A 1 star ⭐ “breakthrough” represe... |
13972cbb-d5c6-4129-b006-15961de6dba4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Desiderata for an Adversarial Prior
Based on the discussion in the comments on https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6XsZi9aFWdds8bWsy/is-there-any-discussion-on-avoiding-being-dutch-booked-or.
Epistemic status: I am not an expert in the subject matter, so not confident, seems useful to have, I could not find anything disc... |
b7d46914-8ab1-4e17-bae3-1aa5e4e62d82 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Acceptability Verification: A Research Agenda
This Google doc^ is a halted, formerly work-in-progress writeup of Evan Hubinger’s AI alignment research agenda, authored by Evan. It dates back to around 2020, and so Evan’s views on alignment have shifted since then.
Nevertheless, we thought it would be valuable to get ... |
d998c49a-f948-4ea5-a4ee-dcbfd8116a65 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Computing an exact quantilal policy
Earlier we established that the quantilal policy can be computed in polynomial time to any given approximation (see "Proposition 5"). Now we show that an exact quantilal policy can be computed in polynomial time (in particular there is always a rational quantilal policy).
We assume... |
7a4c198f-193d-4205-ae69-d932d62cd819 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Exploring Restart Distributions
1 Introduction
---------------
Experience replay lets off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) methods remember and reuse past experiences [Lin, [1992](#bib.bib1); Mnih et al., [2015](#bib.bib2)]. This helps circumvent the rapid forgetting of past experiences and, therefore, improves s... |
8df9b6ef-d0de-4b21-9c13-e0ab9f149228 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Less Wrong automated systems are inadvertently Censoring me
Just a short post to highlight an issue with debate on LW; I have recently been involved with some interest in the debate on covid-19 origins on here. User viking_math posted a response which I was keen to respond to, but it is not possible for me to respond... |
81d5467e-f0ce-4d6d-b402-d362a6a47fa6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Learning AI if you suck at math
None |
83721c8b-d7b6-4e6a-a111-cc601e8fd7c6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Omicron: My Current Model
A year and a half ago, I wrote a post called Covid-19: My Current Model. Since then things have often changed, and we have learned a lot. It seems like high time for a new post of this type.
Note that this post mostly does not justify and explain its statements. I document my thinking, sourc... |
072fdfd6-3cde-4ae8-aff2-fef708b805e4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Formalizing «Boundaries» with Markov blankets
How could «boundaries» be formally specified? Markov blankets seem to be one fitting abstraction.
[The post is largely a conceptual distillation of Andrew Critch’s Part 3a: Defining boundaries as directed Markov blankets.]
Explaining Markov blankets
By the end of this ... |
f4c5450e-864f-4b6e-9e23-681344a95848 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Non-myopia stories
Written under the supervision of Lionel Levine. Thanks to Owain Evans, Aidan O’Gara, Max Kaufmann, and Johannes Treutlein for comments.
This post is a synthesis of arguments made by other people. It provides a collection of answers to the question, "Why would an AI become non-myopic?" In this post ... |
18374c0e-4762-4219-8627-796968164f61 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Can chess be a game of luck?
Gil Kalai, a well known mathematician, has this to say on the topic of chess and luck:
http://gilkalai.wordpress.com/2009/07/05/chess-can-be-a-game-of-luck/
I didn't follow his argument at all, but it seems like something other LW posters may understand, so I decided to post it here. Do ... |
d61e5631-bb93-47ad-9793-f2ff7dfc60d0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Pausing AI is Positive Expected Value
The PauseAI (⏸️) movement often gets this pushback:
> “You're not factoring in all the benefits of good AI!”
>
> “Stopping AI progress is also a doom scenario!”
To which I reply: If you agree P(doom) from building superintelligent AI before knowing how to align or control it is... |
90b4938e-a30d-449e-9d40-ec5363d00fe9 | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | "I spent the week prepping for finals. One is a year-long cumulative closed-book chemistry exam that I haven't had much time to practice for. I was worried about memorizing a few things:Periodic trends and exceptionsThe form and application of approximately 100 workhorse equations and various forms of measurement (mola... |
57a2d42a-eb8e-43f2-87d7-5080ff3dd8a1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Testing Genetic Engineering Detection with Spike-Ins
Thanks to our collaborators Marc Johnson and Clayton Rushford at the University of Missouri for their critical work on the laboratory experiments and sample preparation for this test, and to Evan Fields, Mike McLaren, and Simon Grimm for their feedback on drafts.
... |
545eecb8-e693-4c2f-bc30-bc3c7d4b8408 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Poll] Who looks better in your eyes?
This is thread where I'm trying to figure out a few things about signalling on LessWrong and need some information, so please immediately after reading about the two individuals please answer the poll. The two individuals:
A. Sees that an interpretation of reality shared by othe... |
b9d1bf54-6fdf-4a45-b810-26ea7f1f175b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | (Approximately) Deterministic Natural Latents
Background: Natural Latents: The Math, Natural Latents: The Concepts, Why Care About Natural Latents?, the prototypical semantics use-case. This post does not assume that you’ve read all of those, or even any of them.
Suppose I roll a biased die 1000 times, and then roll ... |
732bc109-0b28-45a4-bce5-34db427721d2 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Counterfactual Induction (Lemma 4)
.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: no... |
660fd66b-dae4-4ec4-8b39-abeca5835eee | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Common misconceptions about OpenAI
I have recently encountered a number of people with misconceptions about OpenAI. Some common impressions are accurate, and others are not. This post is intended to provide clarification on some of these points, to help people know what to expect from the organization and to figure ou... |
3b74edf0-e716-4560-bbfc-f67116ee8db5 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | The heritability of human values: A behavior genetic critique of Shard Theory
**Overview (TL;DR):**
Shard Theory is a new approach to understanding the formation of human values, which aims to help solve the problem of how to align advanced AI systems with human values (the ‘AI alignment problem’). [Shard Theory](htt... |
b5a5516c-97df-4ff2-b57a-3e2fa091286e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Many arguments for AI x-risk are wrong
The following is a lightly edited version of a memo I wrote for a retreat. It was inspired by a draft of Counting arguments provide no evidence for AI doom. I think that my post covers important points not made by the published version of that post.
I'm also thankful for the doz... |
98845a86-f105-472f-abcb-54f6bbf214bf | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Reading Weekly Meetups
Discussion article for the meetup : Reading Weekly Meetups
WHEN: 14 October 2015 05:00:00PM (+0100)
WHERE: Reading, England
The Reading meetup is looking likely to be a weekly thing, so we'll be meeting in the same place at the same time as last week. We may use the time to discuss a... |
17845aa0-e6b6-4c0e-9fe4-74fe0baa1ae1 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube | Youtube Transcripts | 250 A Generalist Agent 1
hello and welcome to session 250
in the aisafety.com reading group
tonight we'll be discussing the first
half of the article a generalist agent
by scott reed and others
this is a work done by deepmind scott
reed is the primary author but there is
a team of 21 people
um and i'm not gonna uh
fi... |
2c9f2872-cbbc-4774-a92d-014a5ad1a02a | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | exact minds in an exact world
exact minds in an exact world
-----------------------------
[in the sequences](https://www.readthesequences.com/Zero-And-One-Are-Not-Probabilities) it is argued that 0 and 1 are not probabilities; that these "certainty ratios" aren't meaningful. but, i can think a situation that challen... |
445cfa3d-1e63-4c3e-80ea-cf4f6d82335b | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Announcing the Winners of the 2023 Open Philanthropy AI Worldviews Contest
**Introduction**
----------------
In March 2023, we launched the [Open Philanthropy AI Worldviews Contest](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/out?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.openphilanthropy.org%2Fopen-philanthropy-ai-worldviews-contest%2F). The go... |
30907d60-39dd-43e8-bdfa-20b32b3c4fa4 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Panel discussion on AI consciousness with Rob Long and Jeff Sebo
Intro
=====
[Recent 80k guest](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/robert-long-artificial-sentience/) and philosopher specializing in AI consciousness Rob Long ([@rgb](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/rgb?mention=user)) recently participate... |
5409f00a-a2fc-4254-9831-ca44d63418ca | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | An open letter to SERI MATS program organisers
(Independent) alignment researchers need to be exceptionally good at philosophy of science
In order to be effective, independent AI alignment/safety/x-risk researchers should be unusually competent in philosophy of science, epistemology, and methodology of research (the l... |
3d0816a8-954c-4311-83a9-bb8b85644179 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | If no near-term alignment strategy, research should aim for the long-term
*This is a small point about alignment strategy that gets mentioned occasionally but hasn't been stated explicitly as far as I can tell [1].*
If there are no paths to alignment that can be implemented in the near-term, research should focus o... |
8118964c-570f-4960-b31f-353cc850baf6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How Much Rent
Make beliefs pay rent. How much rent? Is it enough that they have some theoretical use in designing a GPS or predicting the cosmos? How much rent can actually be extracted from a belief?
In a certain fantasy series, there is a special knowledge of a thing, called the name of the thing, that gives one pr... |
f1cd1521-a954-4273-a521-a8c4c5052a7c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Alignment Workshop talks
In February 2023, researchers from a number of top industry AI labs (OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic) and universities (Cambridge, NYU) co-organized a two-day workshop on the problem of AI alignment, attended by 80 of the world’s leading machine learning researchers. We’re now making recordings an... |
704f0c6d-6086-424e-be95-477a33b87691 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Situational awareness in Large Language Models
*I’m grateful to Bogdan Cirstea, Konstantin Pilz and*[*Raphaël S*](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/charbel-raphael-segerie) *for providing feedback on this post.*
This post tries to clarify the concept of situational awareness, in particular with respect to current large... |
8f9cd052-e29d-4c7b-b00f-82b2a489d91a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Complexity and Intelligence
Today's post, Complexity and Intelligence was originally published on 03 November 2008. A summary:
> One of the Godel-inspired challenges to the idea of self-improving minds is based on the notion of "complexity". But everyday usage and technical usage differ in some really imp... |
50fe5d37-50e5-4c2c-b893-df47062a80f1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Link] Should Psychological Neuroscience Research Be Funded?
In this post, Jesse Marczyk argues that psychological neuroscience research often doesn't add much value per dollar spent and therefore is not worth the cost.
> In my last post, when discussing some research by Singer et al (2006), I mentioned as an asid... |
31abd975-7733-4bf2-9204-7085895d23bb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Drive-less AIs and experimentation
One of the things I've been thinking about is how to safely explore the nature of intelligence. I'm unconvinced of FOOMing and would rather we didn't avoid AI entirely if we can't solve Yudkowsky style Friendliness. So some method of experimentation is needed to determine how powerfu... |
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