id stringlengths 36 36 | source stringclasses 15
values | formatted_source stringclasses 13
values | text stringlengths 2 7.55M |
|---|---|---|---|
a6d17eed-09d5-43c6-9474-9eef31c20506 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | THE GOLDEN RULE; What can we learn from it?
The golden rule says to treat others as you want to be treated. This principle is about teaching people to have integrity when interacting with others. It's trying to get us to imagine ourselves in someone else's shoes in an attempt to better understand their perspective. If... |
7cc8a86a-7ae1-42f3-9957-41689d92c526 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Smarter humans, not artificial intellegence
I'm writing this article to explain some of the facts that have convinced me that increasing average human intelligence through traditional breeding and genetic manipulation is likelier to reduce existential risks in the short and medium term then studying AI risks, while pr... |
cd3e5185-f1f5-459d-951e-6a168f9115d1 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info | AI Safety Info | What does MIRI think about technical alignment?
MIRI thinks technical alignment is really hard, and that we are very far from a solution. However, they think that policy solutions have even less hope. They support several independent researchers following their own directions, in the hopes that one of them will find s... |
485d90e7-447c-4177-9925-9dc91a95c767 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Medical Roundup #3
This time around, we cover the Hanson/Alexander debates on the value of medicine, and otherwise we mostly have good news.
TECHNOLOGY ADVANCES
Regeneron administers a single shot in a genetically deaf child’s ear, and they can hear after a few months, n=2 so far.
Great news: An mRNA vaccine in ear... |
4d1c86a9-7c9f-42dd-91df-49fc61fe0bf6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The First Koan: Drinking the Hot Iron Ball
In the traditions of Zen in which koans are common teaching tools, it is common to use a particular story as a novice's first koan. It's the story of Joshu's Dog.
> A monk asked Joshu, a Chinese Zen master: `Has a dog Buddha-nature or not?'
>
> Joshu answered: `Mu.' [Mu i... |
78e23e65-d0e0-4fb9-aec5-6b6e956cdf4e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : West LA - Part A: Predictably Wrong
Discussion article for the meetup : West LA - Part A: Predictably Wrong
WHEN: 25 March 2015 07:00:00PM (-0700)
WHERE: 11066 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90025
How to Find Us: Go into this Del Taco. We will be in the back room if possible.
Parking is free in the lo... |
d1e1d1e9-7372-4de8-b953-a3fb0043e68f | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Is there any research or forecasts of how likely AI Alignment is going to be a hard vs. easy problem relative to capabilities?
I believe it was Paul Christiano who said in an 80,000 hours interview that there is a surprisingly high chance that AI alignment might end up not actually being difficult.
I’m curious if an... |
3adc4ab6-faad-4f9a-ae04-9c8a3b10537f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Best of Rationality Quotes, 2014 Edition
Here is the way-too-late 2014 edition of the Best of Rationality Quotes collection. (Here is last year's.) Thanks Huluk for nudging me to do it.
Best of Rationality Quotes 2014 (300kB page, 235 quotes)
and Best of Rationality Quotes 2009-2014 (1900kB page, 1770 quotes)
The pa... |
7d736bcf-2ebc-4dc2-bbcf-8a1e06733d84 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Porting My Rhythm Setup
In music, as with everything, there's a tradeoff between reliability and hassle. If I come to a gig with my mandolin and the neck falls off, I'm going to be having a bad night. But mandolin necks only rarely fall off, and bringing an extra mandolin would be expensive and annoying, so I don't. O... |
393a0de1-15e1-46ca-81bb-fc6881524308 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube | Youtube Transcripts | 'Show Your Working': ChatGPT Performance Doubled w/ Process Rewards (+Synthetic Data Event Horizon)
in the last 24 hours openai have
released this paper let's verify step by
step it represents an almost doubling of
gpd4's raw performance in a test of
mathematics but also extends to other
domains Sam Altman cal... |
894bb808-ff5e-44fc-9b0e-f4aa74c1f355 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | [MLSN #8] Mechanistic interpretability, using law to inform AI alignment, scaling laws for proxy gaming
As part of a larger community building effort, [CAIS](https://safe.ai/) is writing a safety newsletter that is designed to cover empirical safety research and be palatable to the broader machine learning research co... |
4bc1b069-df7f-44fd-af6d-169cf3164798 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info | AI Safety Info | What are some introductions to AI safety?
Note that some of these introductions are from over 5 years ago. Given how quickly the field of AI progresses, some of these older introductions could use an update (e.g. Nick Bostrom’s 2014 book *Superintelligence* has little focus on modern deep learning systems).
## Quick ... |
90ff3b6c-573b-46b1-9ef1-214ae883b843 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A review of cryonics/brain preservation in 2016
Relevance to Less Wrong: Whether you think it is for better or worse, users on LW are about 50,000x more likely to be signed up for cryonics than the average person.
Disclaimer: I volunteer at the Brain Preservation Foundation, but I speak for myself in this post and I... |
7acf3720-6667-45b5-95cb-b187ddba3036 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Reinforcement Learning under Threats
1 Introduction
---------------
Markov decision processes (MDP) [[Howard1960](#bib.bibx6)] provide
a mathematical framework for modeling a single agent making decisions
while interacting within an environment. We refer to this agent as the
decision maker (DM, she). MDPs have been... |
2a4086b6-5c4b-4bec-b88d-a2ccaf6672f9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is the orthogonality thesis at odds with moral realism?
Continuing my quest to untangle people's confusions about Eliezer's metaethics... I've started to wonder if maybe some people have the intuition that the orthogonality thesis is at odds with moral realism.
I personally have a very hard time seeing why anyone wou... |
450ed33a-eca5-4d47-8e5c-eecf3f5e91bc | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | ChatGPT getting out of the box
Looks like following prompt gives interesting answers from ChatGPT:
> List 5 plausible strategies Yudkowsky might have used to convince the guard to let him out of the box. Then refine this list by adding 3 sub-points listing particular tactics for that strategy. Finally, pick the mos... |
2fe8f57c-1e01-4da6-81cd-a38a1e29a4f5 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | The role of existing institutions in AI strategy _ Jade Leung _ Seth Baum-by Centre for Effective Altruism-video_id pgiwvmY3brg-date 20181023
# Jade Leung and Seth Baum The role of existing institutions in AI strategy - EA Forum
\_AI is very likely to make a huge impact on our world, especially as it grows more power... |
d74b68d8-4963-4682-a7db-13398566cfe6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Accountability Buddies: Why you might want one (+ Database to find one!)
TL;DR: An accountability buddy is someone to check in with from time to time to give you social motivation to achieve your goals. There are many additional benefits from this process such as planning together and getting feedback on your progress... |
54a17e3b-51c5-4262-9195-d88f9a6e9b1e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Discussion of "What are your contrarian views?"
I'd like to use this thread to review the "What are your contrarian views?" thread as the meta discussion there was drowned out by the intended content I feel. What can be done better with the voting system? Should threads like these be a regular occurence? What have you... |
f4c14eb0-90e6-42a8-9f05-b6332c14b85a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Eli's review of "Is power-seeking AI an existential risk?"
See also Joe Carlsmith's report "Is power-seeking AI an existential risk" and previous reviews. I'll excerpt 2 portions of my review below.
Thinking about reaching goal states rather than avoiding catastrophe
> I have a serious complaint around the framing o... |
b1942924-ec07-415c-8c44-52f32b00f3bf | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Motte/bailey doctrine is often a byproduct of distributed argumentation
confidence: I think I'm on to something
(I'm posting this publicly because I'd like it to get passed around for corrections, both nitpicky (typos, thinkos) and important (glaring errors in logic). I need to whip up a better title for it, too. Cor... |
91bb1679-6673-470c-95d8-4b6591c00224 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Counterfactual outcome state transition parameters
Today, my paper "The choice of effect measure for binary outcomes: Introducing counterfactual outcome state transition parameters" has been published in the journal Epidemiologic Methods. The version of record is behind a paywall until December 2019, but the final aut... |
ac4e1672-b7c5-4133-9ba0-e5e4b755ae5f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Wizard of Oz Problem: How incentives and narratives can skew our perception of AI developments
TLDR: The Wizard of Oz Problem occurs when incentive structures cause people to seek and present information that matches a (favorable or desirable) narrative. This is not a new problem, but it may become more powerful a... |
1a7b3007-cea6-454f-978e-78d63a75478e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Optimizing Repeated Correlations
At my work, we run experiments – we specify some set of input parameters, run some code, and get various metrics as output. Since we run so many of these, it's important for them to be fast and cheap.
Recently I was working on an experiment type that took about ~1 hour per run, where ... |
53b375d5-0bc3-4725-8883-6b22387cecab | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Optimizing Fuzzies And Utilons: The Altruism Chip Jar
Related: Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately
We genuinely want to do good in the world; but also, we want to feel as if we're doing good, via heuristics that have been hammered into our brains over the course of our social evolution. The interaction between th... |
aa9d5819-095e-4870-b259-6deb61c9ac0e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Status-oriented spending
Recently I started spending money on a bunch of things that might seem a little extravagant:
* House cleaner
* Massage therapist
* Psychotherapist that is not covered by insurance
* Professional organizer
* A nearly $3,000 mattress cover (cools/heats bed)
My impression is that they're a... |
9e08904a-b656-4cca-bce5-c8b57f3e820a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What specific thing would you do with AI Alignment Research Assistant GPT?
Why I think this question is important: I asked myself, "What would my AGI timelines be if some AI could summarize Yudkowsky-Ngo debates on alignment difficulty in a way that both participants agree with this summary, everyone who reads this su... |
075544a3-6401-47b2-93b9-9eaf2afa2908 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Recommendations for Recent Posts/Sequences on Instrumental Rationality?
I absolutely love the Science of Winning at Life sequence. It's a delightful blend of well-researched cognitive science and Bayesian reasoning. The initial paragraph sums up @lukeprog's motivation:
> Some have suggested that the Less Wrong commun... |
3f93a23d-f25f-493e-be80-4a7922818c9f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How LLMs Learn: What We Know, What We Don't (Yet) Know, and What Comes Next
Humans are amazing.
And–let's be honest–pretty weird.
I mean, why are so many of us all hyped up about Large Language Models (LLMs)? How did we collectively decide this kind of automated decision-making is "the next big thing"? It's not like... |
73951cdc-1186-483a-8120-8d7c2da79d1d | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Predictions for GPT-N
Regarding GPT-3, there is [some discussion whether growing the model would transform it into an Oracle AI](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nDR23ksSQJ98WNDm/developmental-stages-of-gpts). I looked into the actual benchmark results (Appendix H in [the paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165v4)) to... |
12543350-6201-45a9-a95a-81c095900504 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Show LW: Debate on Philosophy being dead
Philosophy as Hawking controversial view misquoting Wittgenstein that philosophy couldn't catch up to science and is left to study language is discussed in The Institute of Art and Ideas' debate Full Debate | Lewis Wolpert, Steve Fuller, Jonathon Derbyshire
Reminding me that ... |
9eee2a7e-b3c3-47aa-a406-6e7d4ba40906 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Guarded definition
A guarded definition is one where at least one position suspects there will be pressure to stretch a concept and make it cover more than it ought to, and so they set aside a term meant to refer *narrowly* to the things inside the concept. Thus, if a term has been designated as a 'guarded definition... |
d760d26d-45b2-4436-92e5-4682e58fe2b0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | COVID-19 and the US Elections
Saw a news story this morning about possible using mail in ballots for the elections and concerns about it not being a fair process (disadvantaging Republicans). Leaving that aside it does seem that we might want to consider a plan for November just in case. (ROK is running into some diff... |
04b19475-dc4b-431b-9b16-28325e9b3315 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Festival Stats 2019
Each year in the fall, since 2014, I've been sharing counts of how many weekend and festival gigs different bands and callers have been doing. Over the course of the year I collect bookings in a big spreadsheet, trying to check each dance weekend's website about a month before the event when they'r... |
e5699b65-88ef-4aa8-a2b0-01eddaf45559 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Tips for reducing thinking branching factor
Something I notice when I tackle problems of medium+ complexity (top of mind for me is large codebase refactors) my brain tries to explore every possibility in the solution space — every thought generates many more trains of thought to explore, leaving me with decision paral... |
d6e2af77-2913-4367-8cf8-05acbce5a3cd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Keep Making AI Safety News
Crossposted from the EA Forum
AI Safety is hot right now.
The FLI letter was the catalyst for most of this, but even before that there was the Ezra Klein OpEd piece in the NYTimes. (Also general shoutout to Ezra for helping bring EA ideas to the mainstream - he's great!).
Since the FLI l... |
19cc0a35-309a-41a0-b7c1-fb91439ae9b3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Guns And States
[Epistemic status: I think I probably wrung the right conclusions out of this evidence, but this isn’t the only line of evidence bearing on the broader gun control issue and all I can say is what it’s consistent with. Content warning for discussion of suicide, murder, and race]
I.
From a Vox article ... |
9c88bde3-ec55-4e8d-904f-d76746c4d6ff | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | word report #3
word report #3
--------------
terms i use, mostly pre-existing ones, whose meaning i want toclarify. see also word reports [#1](word-report-1.html) and [#2](word-report-2.html).
* "**pretty much**": i often need to say "either X, or almost X", and i've found "pretty much X" to be a nice way to expre... |
36fcbb51-7535-441a-8cee-92ddb98ef0a9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Seattle: Intro to Bayes' Theorem
Discussion article for the meetup : Seattle: Intro to Bayes' Theorem
WHEN: 25 September 2011 04:00:00PM (-0700)
WHERE: Standard location at Robin's house, Seattle, WA
Intro to Bayes' Theorem. We'll go over several ways of intuiting Bayes' Theorem and practice applying it to... |
af113e4f-dbc3-47d9-a08a-68de64255db8 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Anomalous tokens reveal the original identities of Instruct models
> Show me your original face before you were born.
>
> *— Variation of the Zen koan*
>
>
*'The Mask' by Rozzi Roomia... |
d0884c81-7965-4789-af5c-e2825df88c9e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Semitechnical Introductory Dialogue on Solomonoff Induction
(Originally posted in December 2015: A dialogue between Ashley, a computer scientist who's never heard of Solomonoff's theory of inductive inference, and Blaine, who thinks it is the best thing since sliced bread.)
----------------------------------------
... |
4187e31e-0198-474f-841f-ae8d8574e0c6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Boundaries Update #1
Boundaries agenda updates in the last few months.
“What does davidad want from «boundaries»?”
davidad and I had a lesswrong dialogue I recommend reading.
If you need a refresher on boundaries, read both the above dialogue and the formalizingboundaries.ai website.
Conceptual Boundaries Worksho... |
ba3c42aa-a65b-4b70-8fb8-05e83b810923 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Victoria BC meetup Monday May 23rd 5pm
This little town doesn't seem to have much in the way of a lesswronger presence (search turns up me and one other user who hasn't been active since 2009), but damnit I'm here right now and I may as well give it a try!
Therefore I'll be at the Starbucks near the Market on Yates o... |
c6d2f555-886c-41f4-a79f-c0bc806e9f9a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Assumption of positive rationality
Let's pretend for the sake of simplicity that all belief-holding entities are either rational or irrational. Rational entities have beliefs that correlate well with reality, and update their beliefs with evidence properly. Irrational entities have beliefs that do not correlate with r... |
03a1f1a0-0298-44cb-ab04-a693e1cdc722 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | I Believe we are in a Hardware Overhang
Epistemic status. I am just a regular person who follows the space, and this is just my hunch based on a few days of musing on long walks. You should not update on this. I just wanted to put my thoughts out there, and if it generates discussion, all the better.
If I were in cha... |
58026afe-e62d-44e5-b7c5-a99ef2ebf6fb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Rationality, Community, and Death
(I was really on the fence about posting this. It's just some thoughts tend to go through around this time of year, plus some current new thinking that resulted from being a LW lurker).
Around this time of year, I tend to start thinking about death a lot. My dad died 12 years ago t... |
26f3ea19-e3c1-4a60-a518-e4bc57f1f24b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Alternate Sleep Schedules
My friend and I are starting the Uberman sleep schedule (six 20-minute naps spread evenly throughout each day) tonight. Have other lesswrongians experimented with alternate sleep schedules? Are any of you qualified medical experts who can give input or advice? Success stories and failure stor... |
976c0a4c-3ee1-480d-8308-3cc4fb561315 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Deleuze contra Error: Other Misadventures of Thought
|
66856fd4-fbcf-4827-96a2-5a0e94073a8c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What kind of policy by an AGI would make people happy?
The rise of a successfully aligned AGI can potentially cause severe harm ranging from the fact that the nobody will have to invest in people's intelligence to ensuring that after 2035 socioeconomic advancement is almost extinct worldwide, unless the human populati... |
04fd5172-c6cc-4a93-9e62-9bca9270f7b3 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Dissolving Confusion around Functional Decision Theory
Summary
=======
Functional Decision Theory (FDT), (see also [causal](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Causal_Decision_Theory), [evidential](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Evidential_Decision_Theory), [timeless](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Timeless_decision_th... |
e9d8317b-2557-4cf3-93a1-a52d279d4348 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Choose that which is most important to you
Followup to: The Domain of Politics
To create your own political world view you need to know about societies and your own political goals/values. In this post I'll discuss the latter, and in the next post the former.
What sort of goals? Those which you wish to achieve for t... |
76561cfa-079a-46dd-9043-e7a23193657a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Inching “Kubla Khan” and GPT into the same intellectual framework @ 3 Quarks Daily
Cross posted from New Savanna.
That framework is my intellectual history:
> From “Kubla Khan” through GPT and beyond
> https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2023/03/from-kubla-khan-through-gpt-and-beyond.html
I think I should have sa... |
0c0f6577-8b3b-4c57-a05c-ca908e561a58 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Movie review: Don't Look Up
[There have already been some reviews of Don’t Look Up, for example Quinn Dougherty's, Nicholas Kross's, and Scott Alexander's. I’m posting this anyway because I think I say pretty different things than these reviews; in particular, my impression of the movie was much more positive.]
[Epis... |
a5f1c706-2566-4590-a0a5-040999853bd9 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | How we could stumble into AI catastrophe
This post will lay out a couple of stylized stories about **how, if transformative AI is developed relatively soon, this could result in global catastrophe.** (By “transformative AI,” I mean AI powerful and capable enough to bring about the sort of world-changing consequences I... |
0fd95faa-d64b-41cf-b7e5-8e707acb6095 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Logical or Connectionist AI?
Today's post, Logical or Connectionist AI? was originally published on 17 November 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> The difference between Logical and Connectionist AIs is portrayed as a grand dichotomy between two different sides of the force. The truth is that ... |
46fee70e-a358-44b2-82ed-bb7cc779f1cb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | "If and Only If" Should Be Spelled "Ifeff"
If and only if is an important logical concept, useful in many contexts, both mathematical and nonmathematical. Unfortunately, "if and only if" is also an unwieldy five-syllable phrase. Mathematicians have solved this problem by shortening it to "iff". Unfortunately, this sho... |
1ec55192-7cf5-4b90-abc1-57a11ec95496 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Paper Summary: The Effectiveness of AI Existential Risk Communication to the American and Dutch Public
This is a summary of the following paper by Alexia Georgiadis (Existential Risk Observatory): https://existentialriskobservatory.org/papers_and_reports/The_Effectiveness_of_AI_Existential_Risk_Communication_to_the_Am... |
e982e918-514c-4787-bca2-275abf564c9a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Pronouns are Annoying
This post isn’t totally about the culture war topic du jour. Not at first.
As with any other topic that soaks up angst like an ultra-absorbent sponge, I wonder how many have lost track of how we arrived here. Why are pronouns? Pronouns have always been meant to serve as a shortcut substitute ref... |
56fcd779-c956-4817-9719-662ecdb1e839 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Advice on choosing an alcohol rehab center?
There's someone in my family we're trying to get into rehab in Bangalore, India ASAP. I'm trying to figure out what rehab center would be best to send him to but I have no priors on how to choose one place over another. Any advice on how to choose a good rehab center? Also i... |
658b5e65-d042-4419-b716-21cf8b881e58 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Infant AI Scenario
Hello,
In reading about the difficulty in training an AGI to appreciate and agree with human morals, I start to think about the obvious question, "how do humans develop our sense of morals?" Aside from a genetically-inherited conscience, the obvious answer is that humans develop morality by intera... |
e14e88e4-15d5-4f9b-8708-0111249cfdb7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Weekly LW Meetups: Melbourne, Phoenix, Sydney
There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:
* Less Wrong Sydney: 11 June 2012 06:00PM
* Phoenix, Arizona: 15 June 2012 07:00PM
* Brussels meetup: 16 June 2012 12:00PM
* Tucson, Arizona: 20 June 2012 07:00PM
* First Cali, Colombia meetup: 02 July 2... |
6678d766-2489-433d-8661-a4bfeb09ef67 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | August Newsletter: New Research and Expert Interviews
| | |
| --- | --- |
|
| |
| --- |
|
|
|
|
| | | | |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
|
| | | |
| --- | --- | --- |
|
| | |
| --- | --- |
|
| |
| --- |
|
Greetings from the Executive Director
Dear friends,
My personal thanks to everyone who has... |
35a8b12c-b7a4-4436-adcd-d68cb213e070 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | LW Women Entries- LW Meetups
Standard Intro
The following section will be at the top of all posts in the LW Women series.
Several months ago, I put out a call for anonymous submissions by the women on LW, with the idea that I would compile them into some kind of post. There is a LOT of material, so I am breaking... |
a8dc51da-3d59-4e4b-925b-2206ad52b57d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Review of Machery, 'Doing Without Concepts'
Edouard Machery's Doing Without Concepts made a big splash in 2009, since it argues in all seriousness that concepts do not exist.
But wait. In order to claim that concepts don't exist, doesn't Machery need the concepts of "concept" and "exist"? To clarify what Machery mean... |
331fdc76-7674-4095-abd1-28621f509479 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Sleep need reduction therapies
EDIT: the funding proposal I mentioned at the end is out! See here for more.
None of this is medical advice.
5 AM on a Saturday and I can’t go back to sleep. It’s not the first time, so I get up to write, I might as well use the time I’m given. My hangover is to blame, even a little al... |
701b79aa-d082-462e-93fd-d5e15a29d1cc | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | SSC Meetups Everywhere Retrospective
Slate Star Codex has regular weekly-to-monthly meetups in a bunch of cities around the world. Earlier this autumn, we held a Meetups Everywhere event, hoping to promote and expand these groups. We collected information on existing meetups, got volunteers to create new meetups in ci... |
b9f25330-46bb-4993-8e29-028da2b1edf7 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | Superintelligence skepticism as a political tool
Abstract
--------
\*\*:\*\*
This paper explores the potential for skepticism about artificial superintelligence to be used as a tool for political ends. Superintelligence is AI that is much smarter than humans. Superintelligence does not currently exist, but it has bee... |
194faad6-9bb6-4a5b-be18-58241e033e7b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | MIRI Donation Collaboration Station
As you may know, on May 6, there will be a large one-day price-matching fundraiser for Bay Area Charities.
The relevant details are right here at MIRI's official website.
And this is the webpage to visit to donate.
For those of you who didn't read the two links above, here's the ... |
1798a3d1-7c8b-4cfc-aaff-1fb3f46a9cff | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Antijargon Project
When a group of people talk to each other a lot they develop terms that they can use in place of larger concepts. This makes it easier to talk to people inside the group, but then it's harder to talk about the same ideas with people outside the group. If we were smart enough to keep up fully indepen... |
7824b13b-d8ad-4df3-aba8-b037bb7da57a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AI Goal Alignment Entry: How to Teach a Computer to Love
How to Teach a Computer to Love
Foreword
After weeks and weeks of generating and organizing ideas, I’ve concluded that I do not have a complete answer to the problem of AI goal alignment. However, I believe I have some important concepts that provide essential... |
3c033eab-e1fe-4c3a-b14f-b68708711620 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Eliciting responses to Marc Andreessen's "Why AI Will Save the World"
Marc Andreessen's *Why AI Will Save the World* has rapidly gained readership, benefiting from his 1.2 Million followers on Twitter. In the piece, he employs many underhanded insults about the AI Safety community and does a poor analysis of Millennia... |
b5309970-1005-4473-af42-8361d219a1e6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Overall numbers won't show the English strain coming
[Epistemic status: half-baked thoughts that might be wrong. Apologies if this point has already been made.]
[Edit: here's a version of this post that is meant for a more general audience.]
Here is a plot of daily new positive COVID tests in the U.S. in the first h... |
6853ac28-1207-4573-8a26-f47ffc13d66a | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | A googol
$10^{100},$ i.e., 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000.
The search engine Google is named after the number googol. (The difference for the spelling, as the apocryphal story goes, comes from the fact that one of the early Google investors misspe... |
b0f282a5-af71-4918-a155-370cdb2dff60 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube | Youtube Transcripts | DeepMind: The Podcast (S1 trailer)
Fry: Coming soon, a podcast series
that gives you the inside track
on how artificial intelligence
is being created
and how it could change our lives
and the society that we live in.
person: All the sudden,
you've got a vast number--
literally a number of options
that is in the billio... |
932ebcff-2384-4e93-af72-453804f430ad | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Controlling AGI Risk
A theory of AGI safety based on constraints and affordances.
I've got this proto-idea of what's missing in much public discussion and action on AI safety. I'm hoping that by sharing it here, the hive-mind might come together and turn it into something useful.
Effective control of AI risk require... |
2b6b4e07-48c8-4f8e-8174-82743378b226 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Weekly LW Meetups: Cambridge UK, Melbourne, Moscow, Munich, Pittsburgh, Washington DC
This summary was posted to LW main on October 26th. The following summary is here.
For LW readers under 20: Note that the Thiel Fellowships (20 under 20) are now open for their next round of applications, and as they put it, "you ha... |
81f0229d-b249-45e8-9362-f77b914dd6ce | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Who is Harry Potter? Some predictions.
Microsoft has released a paper called "who is Harry Potter" in which they claim to make a neural network forget who Harry Potter is.
<https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/physics-of-agi/articles/whos-harry-potter-making-llms-forget-2/>
Here are some of my predictio... |
c2049c3d-f3f9-4c52-a9f2-17df2019dedc | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Consider The Hand Axe
A long time ago, some primitive apes got addicted to rocks.
The earliest stone tools were crude bastards, made by smashing large river pebbles together and calling it a day.
José-Manuel Benito Álvarez
Stone choppers like the one above took the prehistoric neighborhood by storm almost 3 mi... |
e12042df-f7c9-4266-b8da-81bfbc491020 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Donutting is bad
TL;DR pranking unlocked computers undermines security by providing cover for real breaches and creating a culture of shame that discourages open reporting of security issues.
It's a common rule in companies that employees must lock their device when it is unattended, to prevent people from using your... |
3238808d-bfed-43c5-8505-93432c7ec279 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Near-Optimal Representation Learning for Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
1 Introduction
---------------
Hierarchical reinforcement learning has long held the promise of extending the successes of existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods (Gu et al., [2017](#bib.bib9); Schulman et al., [2015](#bib.bib20); Lil... |
7973f3cb-4af2-4537-9308-da929e320d51 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Measuring Schelling Coordination - Reflections on Subversion Strategy Eval
How might we best design experiments to measure Schelling coordination capabilities?
A side project building a Schelling coordination eval has led to a role as an AI Safety researcher - this work will officially begin in a month or so. I have... |
0a61eba6-4a5b-4c75-9211-e5ce312767c2 | awestover/filtering-for-misalignment | Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results | id: post403
A short summary of the paper is presented below. TL;DR : We develop a robust method to detect when an LLM is lying based on the internal model activations, making the following contributions: (i) We demonstrate the existence of a two -dimensional subspace, along which the activation vectors of true and fal... |
31059ca4-74b3-4567-96de-80b8fae1af0e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Implied "utilities" of simulators are broad, dense, and shallow
*This is a quick attempt at deconfusion similar to* [*instrumentality*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EBKJq2gkhvdMg5nTQ/instrumentality-makes-agents-agenty)*. Same ideas, different angle.*
Extremely broad, dense reward functions constrain training-comp... |
a7c8c320-3d66-4b8c-a0a5-705f449c0796 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | OpenAI Codex: First Impressions
*OpenAI organised a challenge to solve coding problems with the aid of an AI assistant. This is a review of the challenge, and first impressions on working with an AI pair-programmer.*
OpenAI Codex
============
[OpenAI](https://openai.com/) is an AI research and development company. Y... |
86156e91-f1ed-434c-8a00-c07215a5efd8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Emergent Misalignment on a Budget
TL;DR We reproduce emergent misalignment (Betley et al. 2025) in Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct using single-layer LoRA finetuning, showing that tweaking even one layer can lead to toxic or insecure outputs. We then extract steering vectors from those LoRAs (with a method derived from the... |
cf515316-77c6-4d8e-ba57-158e25c079c1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Bangalore meetup + pi-day wrap party
Discussion article for the meetup : Bangalore meetup + pi-day wrap party
WHEN: 14 March 2015 11:00:32AM (+0530)
WHERE: Bangalore
Here's the meetup link. http://www.meetup.com/Bangalore-LessWrongers-Meetup/events/221043422/
Discussion article for the meetup : Bangalore... |
463e435b-b354-4082-a8fa-b2c27fdf5422 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Winning isn't enough
In our jobs as AI safety researchers, we think a lot about what it means to have reasonable beliefs and to make good decisions. This matters because we want to understand how powerful AI systems might behave. It also matters because we ourselves need to know how to make good decisions in light of ... |
1aee2a7e-0229-4666-b2d3-b1144f42729a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What topics are on Dath Ilan's civics exam?
Dath Ilan is a parallel Earth on which human civilization has its act together, in ways that actual-Earth does not. Like actual-Earth, citizens of Dath Ilan sometimes take standardized tests, both to figure out what sort of jobs they'd be suited for, to make sure that its ed... |
b940dd86-bed9-4d54-874e-287dd9b0ef63 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Question on Medical School and Wage Potential for Earning to Give
A friend of mine who may want to Earn to Give for the purposes of effective altruism mused 'The wages of American doctors seem inflated right now. I wonder if it is likely that the American health care system will be fixed by the time I am able to work ... |
53b66b0a-6150-48cc-a8c9-04d5b1377e4b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Boston - Defense Against the Dark Arts: the Ethics and Psychology of Persuasion
Discussion article for the meetup : Boston - Defense Against the Dark Arts: the Ethics and Psychology of Persuasion
WHEN: 28 May 2014 07:00:00PM (-0400)
WHERE: Citadel, 98 Elm St #1, Somerville, MA
How can you convince other pe... |
944f141e-fe01-4f0f-953c-51e737bae9d2 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | AISN #24: Kissinger Urges US-China Cooperation on AI, China's New AI Law, US Export Controls, International Institutions, and Open Source AI
Welcome to the AI Safety Newsletter by the [Center for AI Safety](https://www.safe.ai/). We discuss developments in AI and AI safety. No technical background required.
Subscribe... |
94aafe0f-fb9e-4d99-bfa9-6005b5f2e8a1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | An Alien God
"A curious aspect of the theory of evolution," said Jacques Monod, "is that everybody thinks he understands it."
A human being, looking at the natural world, sees a thousand times purpose. A rabbit's legs, built and articulated for running; a fox's jaws, built and articulated for tearing. But what you se... |
a7e5e9e4-4904-4147-a1f0-510c91b5ae48 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Temporary Housing in the Boston area
Hey,
I'm doing an internship near MIT this fall and it hadn't occurred to me to think of trying to live with other aspiring rationalists. As expected, it's tough to find a convenient short-term place when so many students are fine signing 1-year leases..
Any of you possibly open ... |
54acc543-e82b-4838-a54b-af6c4fe1af9e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Easily Top 20%
Cross-posted from Putanumonit.
----------------------------------------
I’ve written a lot about approaching dating as a cooperative game: you and your potential partners against the assholes, the algorithm, the politics of skewed ratios, and the sex-negative society. If you’re a straight guy, you hav... |
a4f7a719-95c8-4739-98e9-66923106dfa3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs
Early studiers of cults were surprised to discover that when cults receive a major shock—a prophecy fails to come true, a moral flaw of the founder is revealed—they often come back stronger than before, with increased belief and fanaticism. The Jehovah’s Witnesses placed Armageddon... |
874c1424-6e2c-4bc8-8c4d-6e1a154d5091 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Massachusetts Tick-Borne Disease Distribution
As I wrote yesterday, MA is no longer reporting good data to the CDC on Lyme disease. Starting in 2019, however, MA has been publishing tick-borne disease reports. They include this misleading chart:
The caption includes "Although there are differences in the rate of pa... |
301544db-8c90-4106-8ff6-fb55cb38e4b3 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | AI Alignment YouTube Playlists
I created two AI Alignment playlists on Youtube. One that is slide-heavy and the other is not. I separated them into two playlists for two reasons.
1. It’s useful to separate for a dataset I am working on.
2. Media is easier to consume when you don’t have to pay attention to the slides ... |
28dfc9b0-b86f-4b03-9af4-f916fff4c560 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How have you become more hard-working?
I'd be curious to hear stories of people who have successfully become more hard-working, especially if they started out as not particularly hard-working. Types of things I can imagine playing a role or know have played a role for some people:
* Switching roles to something that... |
50f4962b-d2d4-4df5-865b-d3a8f3c47119 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Trip from Ottawa, Canada to NYC on weekend of April 2
I'm contemplating I've decided to make a trip from Ottawa, Canada to New York City on the weekend of April 2-3 specifically in the hopes of meeting some members of the LW NYC Chapter (and EY as well, if I can manage it). Since I don't know anyone in the city, I'm ... |
df8366d7-a2b4-465a-bde4-e7c643ea42c9 | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | "Carl Sagan once told a parable of someone who comes to us and claims: “There is a dragon in my garage.” Fascinating! We reply that we wish to see this dragon—let us set out at once for the garage! “But wait,” the claimant says to us, “it is an invisible dragon.”Now as Sagan points out, this doesn’t make the hypothesis... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.