id
stringlengths
36
36
source
stringclasses
15 values
formatted_source
stringclasses
13 values
text
stringlengths
2
7.55M
e563bc9f-1386-42f1-9b10-1637c0f0fd10
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Teachers: Much More Than You Wanted To Know [Epistemic status: This is really complicated, this is not my field, people who have spent their entire lives studying this subject have different opinions, and I don’t claim to have done more than a very superficial survey. I welcome corrections on the many inevitable error...
2814cca0-5441-40d2-8309-2a1cb5142bcc
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What did governments get right? Gotta list them all! When predicting future threats, we also need to predict future policy responses. If mass pandemics are inevitable, it matters whether governments and international organisations can rise to the challenge or not. But its very hard to get a valid intuitive picture of ...
2b44377a-4d13-4c9c-8943-6aaacbeda50f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Book Review: Weapons of Math Destruction Epistemic Status: Minus One Million Points Shortness Status: Long (this is a proposed new norm I want to try out, in the sense of ‘apologies for writing a long letter, I did not have enough time to write a shorter one.’ By contrast, Against Facebook was longer in words, but wo...
bbaec69a-646c-423e-b32c-fa2a84b90731
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Zero-sum conversion: a cute trick for decision problems A while ago, we were presented with an interesting puzzle, usually just called "Psy-kosh's non-anthropic problem."  This problem is not, as is made clear, an anthropic problem, but it generates a similar sort of confusion by having you cooperate with people who t...
23e14735-a73b-4760-a918-9c8bbb05a5b7
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Most Functions Have Undesirable Global Extrema (Crossposted from my blog Centerless Set) It’s hard to come up with a workably short function that includes human civilization in its global maximum/minimum. This is a problem because we specify our goals to AI using functions. For any practical function we might use, t...
78020707-9d99-4d07-96a2-5c5f8125935c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Black Box Biology Suppose you want to decrease your risk of heart disease. The conventional advice goes something like this: * Eat a healthier diet with less LDL-cholesterol raising foods * Exercise more * Keep your blood sugar under control * Don’t smoke, don’t sit too much and don't take 400mg of methamphetamin...
53c110c9-b049-4b0e-9146-3589415d21d0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Strategy Nonconvexity Induced by a Choice of Potential Oracles One notable aspect of the extant cooperative oracle results is that they are in a different setting from the usual reflective oracle results. The usual reflective oracle results show a fixed point in the space of potential oracles,[0,1]M×[0,1]∪Q×[0,1]M. T...
50baf671-bdd3-4583-a8c8-aa4be470c3a3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Logical Counterfactuals and Proposition graphs, Part 3 , Notation note, [ ] are for lists, ( ) are for functions. Note that many of the words and symbols I am using are made up. When this maths is better understood, someone should reinvent the notation. My notation isn't that great, but its hard to make good notation...
b3382709-b255-403c-9713-bb1086d3b175
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
How to Build Heaven: A Constrained Boltzmann Brain Generator Abstract This article offers a blueprint for how humanity could construct a realistic version of heaven once artificial superintelligence is achieved. This introduces an architectural framework for a "heaven generator," a realistic construction of a system d...
4295096a-356a-4c18-84d6-f40060c0040a
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
AI self-improvement is possible #### document purpose This document mainly argues that human mental development implies that AI self-improvement from sub-human capabilities is possible. #### document structure For unambiguous referencing, sections are prefixed D: for description, L: for lemma, H: for hypothesis,...
b9a114b8-69b5-4b25-9fac-547ca52d6eb4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The National Defense Authorization Act Contains AI Provisions A bunch of laws about AI were recently passed by Congress in the US. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is the law which funds and organizes the Department of Defense of the United States. A new version of the law is passed periodically. For rea...
82e088e9-7d4e-4ac8-ae47-39f87b81da08
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
SL4 in more legible format Does anyone have a copy of the SL4 archives in a format that's easier to read - e.g. a single file? If not, I'd be happy to pay someone to put this together; let me know if interested.
f7bfc02d-056b-4b28-b3d0-0af4215b658d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
You can now apply to EA Funds anytime! (LTFF & EAIF only) The Long-Term Future Fund (LTFF) and the EA Infrastructure Fund (EAIF) are looking for grant applications: * You can now apply for a grant anytime. We have removed the previous round-based system, and now aim to evaluate most grants within 21 days of submissi...
e38913e0-845f-4c0a-bfae-1df0f63bc69e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Embarrassing Problem of Premature Exploitation tl;dr: summarising some handy concepts from Algorithms to Live By, as they relate to optionality and tinkering. ---------------------------------------- Babies love putting things in their mouths: dirt, insects, bits of grass, their own poo. They have no sense of fe...
37483144-c863-4891-8dba-7178cd49fcba
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A Rationalist Guide to OkCupid There's a lot of data and research on what makes people successful at online dating, but I don't know anyone who actually tried to wholeheartedly apply this to themselves. I decided to be that person: I implemented lessons from data, economics, game theory and of course rationality in my...
d57e2b1e-cbb2-4473-8d2c-6cc67828e3f3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
In physical eschatology, is Aestivation a sound strategy? In this paper, Anders Sandberg, Stuart Armstrong and Milan M. Cirkovic argue that > If a civilization wants to maximize computation it appears rational to aestivate until the far future in order to exploit the low temperature environment: this can produce a 10...
fb18f832-b0d1-4432-ac2f-d3d9eddaa86c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Critical Thinking in Global Challenges - free Coursera class "develop and enhance your ability to think critically, assess information and develop reasoned arguments in the context of the global challenges facing society today." starts 28 January 2013 cf https://www.coursera.org/course/criticalthinking see also ht...
f59f8580-536b-4160-84bb-a80118634bee
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[SEQ RERUN] The Logical Fallacy of Generalizing from Fictional Evidence Today's post, The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence was originally published on 16 October 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):   > The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence consists in drawing th...
3cbdafc4-8219-47d2-9f58-5ea8696bfab9
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
human intelligence may be alignment-limited Previously, I [argued that](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rSycgquipFkozDHzF/ai-self-improvement-is-possible) human mental development implies that AI self-improvement from sub-human capabilities is possible, and that human intelligence comes at the cost of a longer childho...
9496337f-4371-4b86-8a2d-44984bd9d002
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
EU AI Act passed vote, and x-risk was a main topic Mainly discussed in the linked article - keeping the post brief.  The EU AI Act was originally proposed in 2020 as a very "EU regulates stuff first" kind of legislation, trying to make sure EU values are upheld (fairness, transparency, democracy, etc). Several revis...
63532b24-e92a-413c-93a2-83ec634feff8
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
goal-program bricks *(this post has been written for the first [Refine](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/D7epkkJb3CqDTYgX9/refine-an-incubator-for-conceptual-alignment-research-bets) blog post day, at the end of the week of readings, discussions, and exercises about epistemology for doing good conceptual research)* g...
20aa5d91-3c82-4005-b0f2-62b967515a6b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Is this rule of thumb useful for gauging low probabilities? Does something like this seem to you to be a reasonable rule of thumb, for helping handle scope insensitivity to low probabilities? There's a roughly 30 to 35 out of a million chance that you will die on any given day; and so if I'm dealing with a probabilit...
41b046c5-b99f-4a20-81bf-6ff62868908d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Owain Evans on Situational Awareness and Out-of-Context Reasoning in LLMs Owain Evans is an AI Alignment researcher, research associate at the Center of Human Compatible AI at UC Berkeley, and now leading a new AI safety research group. In this episode we discuss two of his recent papers, “Me, Myself, and AI: The Sit...
159de16b-ba9a-4ee0-a90d-7c8d9c43d8b9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Burden of Worldbuilding When I was studying special relativity one of the things which caught my attention was how, because the speed of light c was a constant, you could just set it to c=1. Setting c equal to 1 caused space and time to have the same units. One nanosecond is slightly less than to one foot. The Lor...
11cd9c18-ef44-4566-8084-a6a10cba2b72
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Equations Mean Things I asserted that this forum could do with more 101-level and/or mathematical and/or falsifiable posts, and people agreed with me, so here is one. People confident in highschool math mostly won’t get much out of most of this, but students browsing this site between lectures might. The Sine Rule S...
7e1d4ab9-7c41-4fae-b5fb-31ad0ef00a6f
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Mr. Meeseeks as an AI capability tripwire The shutdown problem is hard because self-preservation is a convergent drive. Not being shutdown is useful for accomplishing all sorts of goals, whatever the content of those goals may be.  The Scylla and Charybdis of this problem is that it's hard to write a utility function...
f40aa7e1-ac4a-4eee-a39a-a2fe5fcd346b
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Adversarial Attacks and Defences Competition 1 Introduction --------------- Recent advances in machine learning and deep neural networks enabled researchers to solve multiple important practical problems like image, video, text classification and others. However most existing machine learning classifiers are hi...
6ec5b036-0267-43fa-a20c-0eb6686a79ed
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Let's build a fire alarm for AGI Epistemic status: This uses as a premise the post "There is no fire alarm for AGI" by Eliezer Yudkowsky. It will make little sense to you if you are unfamiliar with that essay or if you disagree with it. Fear of embarrassment has been empirically shown to stop people from reacting to ...
6179684c-d08e-4307-a7d8-f79a11e92335
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Revealed New Years Resolutions Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Revealed New Years Resolutions WHEN: 04 January 2016 06:15:00PM (-0800) WHERE: 1597 Howard St. San Francisco, CA We'll be meeting to derive our revealed new years resolutions from last year, based...
d1aad7a3-71d0-458a-a0d2-7c8ff3448a49
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Won't vs. Can't: Sandbagging-like Behavior from Claude Models In a recent Anthropic Alignment Science blog post, we discuss a particular instance of sandbagging we sometimes observe in the wild: models sometimes claim that they can't perform a task, even when they can, to avoid performing tasks they perceive as harmfu...
46483b1f-445d-42a9-a331-344d5cb21ed8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Use resilience, instead of imprecision, to communicate uncertainty Gregory Lewis (Thrasymachus here on LW) posted a great summary of a bunch of arguments I've referenced many times, about how it's better to communicate resilience instead of imprecision to communicate if you are uncertain about something.  > Suppose y...
32de1566-ab16-41fa-8bbf-1e6937d54c97
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Alex Lawsen On Forecasting AI Progress Alex Lawsen is an [advisor](https://80000hours.org/speak-with-us/) at [80,000hours](https://80000hours.org/) who has released an [Introduction to Forecasting](https://youtu.be/e6Q7Ez3PkOw). We discuss pitfalls that happen when forecasting AI progress, why you cannot just [update ...
428dc12a-eda0-431d-a52e-631c610d593b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
You get one story detail So, as you know, you have about five words. That is, if you want to convey an idea to a bunch of people, you can only reliably communicate ideas simply enough to fit in five words. I have a related theory. If you want a lot of people to remember a story, you have to keep it tiny. How tiny? I...
47755ed9-5e65-40fb-b9c5-3c4d09cd6be9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Conditions for Superrationality-motivated Cooperation in a one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma Summary It has been argued that, if two very similar agents follow decision theories allowing for superrationality (e.g., EDT and FDT), they would cooperate in a prisoner’s dilemma (PD) (see e.g., Oesterheld 2017). But how similar d...
cefd7222-4a58-4a89-8e25-553c55816fdc
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
“Necessary Claims”: A technique to structure complex decisions Life often turns out to be too complicated to fit into a human brain. If you’ve ever tried to choose from fifty flavors of ice cream, or to decide whether to buy a house, you know what I mean. Humans tend to make complex decisions based on simplified mode...
6bc96439-1128-45be-b4ca-100a00cb3de1
LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct
LessWrong
"...Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. —John Keats, Lamia "Nothing is 'mere'." —Richard Feynman You've got to admire that phrase, "dull catalogue of common things". Wha...
d6d3ad31-f94a-45be-9d50-930d74a106d1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Fluent, Cruxy Predictions The latest in the Feedback Loop Rationality series.   Periodically, people (including me) try to operationalize predictions, or bets, and... it doesn't seem to help much. I think I recently "got good" at making "actually useful predictions." I currently feel on-the-cusp of unlocking a host...
998335cc-3f7b-4bab-8071-4432db9c59be
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AI coordination needs clear wins Thanks to Kate Woolverton and Richard Ngo for useful conversations, comments, and feedback. EA and AI safety have invested a lot of resources into building our ability to get coordination and cooperation between big AI labs. So far, however, despite that investment, it doesn’t seem to...
d5f723f3-9d78-437f-b963-eedea19b2ee6
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv
Arxiv
Collaborating with Humans without Human Data 1 Introduction --------------- Generating agents which collaborate with novel partners is a longstanding challenge for Artificial Intelligence (AI) [Bard et al., [2020](#bib.bib4 "The Hanabi challenge: a new frontier for AI research"), Dafoe et al., [2020](#bib.bib17 "Op...
ed5b6474-7ac1-4336-9721-5f0f9002f42d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
"Self-pretending" is not as useful as we think A few weeks ago I made a draft of a post that was originally intended to be about the same issue addressed in MBlume’s post regarding beneficial false beliefs. Coincidentally, my draft included the same exact hypothetical about entering a club believing you’re the most at...
16499270-e23d-48b2-9cad-d4a50f114f69
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Twitter thread on politics of AI safety Some thoughts about the politics of AI safety, copied over (with slight modifications) from my recent twitter thread: Risks that seem speculative today will become common sense as AI advances. The pros and cons of different safety strategies will also become much clearer over t...
681932d9-339d-4d0a-a73a-045cb0d7d632
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Link: xkcd 1450: AI-Box Experiment Today's (21 November 2014) comic, especially the alt-text, strongly suggests that Randall Munroe has been on this website recently.
16a2ebc8-a755-4f3c-b222-b848425c4ea9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Review of Alignment Plan Critiques- December AI-Plans Critique-a-Thon Results These are the Critiques from the AI-Plans.com December Critique-a-Thon of 2023.  Prizes will be awarded to contestants based on collective judge feedback.  Critiques were anonymized when reviewed by the judges. Judges:  - @So8res  - @Rama...
b582cbb2-856c-499a-8a37-2aabb86ae21e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Covid 9/10: Vitamin D Last week: Covid 9/3: Meet the New CDC Imagine there is a simple, cheap, safe and effective solution for Covid-19.  The solution is something known to be safe. It is widely available for reasonable prices. Any patents have long expired. It is something that people need and benefit from anyway. ...
be3c7c00-d401-413c-bb39-1d055e5ccec0
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Failures of an embodied AIXI Building a safe and powerful artificial general intelligence seems a difficult task. Working on that task *today* is particularly difficult, as there is no clear path to AGI yet. Is there work that can be done now that makes it more likely that humanity will be able to build a safe, powerf...
759e72d0-ac6b-4e20-ac32-c2de7a8b36c6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Making nothing out of a big deal I recently asked my boyfriend how he heats water, given that he apparently doesn’t use a kettle. He said you can in fact heat water in a pot on the stove. Heating water in a pot sounds arduous to me, which is a bit strange because it’s not obviously more complicated than heating water ...
10033a64-d117-4c7d-b63c-2839d7fd1123
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Rationality anecdotes for the homepage? In the comments for The Cognitive Science of Rationality, Spurlock said > The beginning of this post (the list of concrete, powerful, real/realistic, and avoidable cases of irrationality in action), is probably the best introduction to x-rationality I've read yet. I can easily ...
df4582af-c3db-4065-9a37-a67751fac824
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Results of a One-Year Longitudinal Study of CFAR Alumni By Dan from CFAR Introduction When someone comes to a CFAR workshop, and then goes back home, what is different for them one year later? What changes are there to their life, to how they think, to how they act? CFAR would like to have an answer to this questio...
78fd2999-bec2-4fc1-bbc1-c0a38f601cfc
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Heuristics for Deciding What to Work On If you're like me, you have way more ideas for things to do than time, energy, and willpower to do them with.  (And if you're not like me, you might very well become like me if you just kept track of all the times you or someone else said "Hey, that might be a worthwhile project...
3de62248-9ab5-4c01-8631-fc2be62398c8
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI) *This post presents thoughts on the Singularity Institute from Holden Karnofsky, Co-Executive Director of [GiveWell](http://www.givewell.org). Note: Luke Muehlhauser, the Executive Director of the Singularity Institute, reviewed a draft of this post, and commented: "I do gene...
9c26ea78-cef4-4bf1-b1a4-2e880f0eec38
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Estimation is the best we have This argument seems common to many debates: > ‘Proposal P arrogantly assumes that it is possible to measure X, when really X is hard to measure and perhaps even changes depending on other factors. Therefore we shouldn’t do P’. This could make sense if X wasn’t especially integral to th...
321de6a6-495f-4d03-83e0-77b33f1a02c8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Theoretically, could we balance the budget painlessly? Economically, all government spending takes the form of forgone private consumption.   This implies that all deficit spending is in fact a sort of tax.   Suppose we were to raise taxes to make this implicit tax explicit.  For the purpose of this hypothetical, let...
2bda4161-9ac2-467b-9231-1b34461d14c5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Better difference-making views Summary 1. I make three arguments against standard difference-making risk aversion that I find compelling as a consequentialist, despite my substantial sympathy for something like difference-making risk aversion: 1. It privileges a default option, literally as or like an act-omissio...
7f372a99-cd59-4067-a61d-f27093384855
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Would it be useful to collect the contexts, where various LLMs think the same? My initial idea was *Let's see where the small, interpretable, model makes the same inference as the huge, ¯dangerous, model and focus on those cases in the small model to help explain the bigger one*. Quite likely I am wrong, but with a ti...
e867f4bd-cfa6-473a-9371-dc8a98891f6b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Measurement tampering detection as a special case of weak-to-strong generalization Burns et al at OpenAI released a paper studying various techniques for fine-tuning strong models on downstream tasks using labels produced by weak models. They call this problem “weak-to-strong generalization”, abbreviated W2SG. Earlie...
67432863-89e7-481a-bedb-6becd8ff8538
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Cache invalidation test Cache should be cleared
f58883a7-7d7e-4e10-9712-e169c53506a1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Some heuristics I use for deciding how much I trust scientific results I've done nothing to test these heuristics and have no empirical evidence for how well they work for forecasting replications or anything else. I’m going to write them anyway. The heuristics I’m listing are roughly in order of how important I think...
ee731743-fb9f-44dc-9ef5-c4c8e67946d7
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Comments on CAIS Over the last few months I’ve talked with Eric Drexler a number of times about his Comprehensive AI Services (CAIS) model of AI development, and read most of [his technical report](https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Reframing_Superintelligence_FHI-TR-2019-1.1-1.pdf) on the topic. I think thes...
accc7e92-d685-4ca2-a570-bb33cbed020b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Military AI as a Convergent Goal of Self-Improving AI
71fbccef-4f24-4674-90c1-d6d7862dc17b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Poker example: (not) deducing someone's preferences ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, I've shown that it is, theoretically, impossible to deduce the preferences and rationality of an agent by looking at their actions or policy. That argument is valid, but feels somewhat abstract, talking about "fully anti-rational" agents, and oth...
ea379e79-adb0-4fe8-939d-02b363c31c7a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[SEQ RERUN] Qualitative Strategies of Friendliness Today's post, Qualitative Strategies of Friendliness was originally published on 30 August 2008 . A summary (taken from the LW wiki):   > Qualitative strategies to achieve friendliness tend to run into difficulty. Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments...
33b15b9b-8a98-4346-aaf9-7299ae44d33d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AISN #31: A New AI Policy Bill in California Plus, Precedents for AI Governance and The EU AI Office Welcome to the AI Safety Newsletter by the Center for AI Safety. We discuss developments in AI and AI safety. No technical background required. Subscribe here to receive future versions. Listen to the AI Safety Newsl...
b52ba5aa-20bd-4ef8-a7be-9be470e1c67c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Satisfying preferences by creating them Sarkology points out that the intuition against it being a good thing to create new lives may be this: > …You are supposed to help people by satisfying their (already fixed and existent) preferences. Not by modifying those preferences to meet reality. Or God forbid, invent thos...
1f790a8e-c9e1-4b20-b4ff-d9ac4c340379
LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct
LessWrong
"Imagine that I, in full view of live television cameras, raised my hands and chanted abracadabra and caused a brilliant light to be born, flaring in empty space beyond my outstretched hands. Imagine that I committed this act of blatant, unmistakeable sorcery under the full supervision of James Randi and all skeptical ...
ba1b50f2-d9b2-49c0-b1ca-fb541dff3783
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Contra Yudkowsky on AI Doom Eliezer Yudkowsky predicts doom from AI: that humanity faces likely extinction in the near future (years or decades) from a rogue unaligned superintelligent AI system. Moreover he predicts that this is the default outcome, and AI alignment is so incredibly difficult that even he failed to s...
161c5be5-0343-4996-9823-baec79641ecf
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The boat > A short science fiction story about our ancestors and the ethical responsibility we have towards them.   Old Ana's legs fought against her now, but still she led her granddaughter up the mountain path. The girl's torch made shadows dance on the rocks. The river sang in the distance – the same river that h...
d5d2d061-7818-486e-90ed-de58e2651c6e
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
Long-Term and Short-Term Challenges to Ensuring the Safety of AI Systems #### Introduction There has been much recent discussion about AI risk, meaning specifically the potential pitfalls (both short-term and long-term) that AI with improved capabilities could create for society. Discussants include AI researchers s...
aef6e5c1-4e2f-4437-87ca-e046868a34bf
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Covid 8/11/22: The End Is Never The End On Tuesday morning as I was grabbing croissants, the man in front of me turned around and told me to back away. ‘Because of the pandemic.’ He was the only one in the bakery wearing a mask, yet in every way he gave off the clear vibe that I, not he, was the one being unreasonable...
851d8c7b-1a73-4f9e-b2eb-98dd8ecacd28
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Orange County Atheist Meetup Thursday September 8 Discussion article for the meetup : Orange County Atheist Meetup Thursday September 8 WHEN: 08 September 2011 07:30:00PM (-0700) WHERE: 18542 MacArthur Blvd Irvine, CA 92612 Once again we are going adjust the weekly Irvine meetup to join the Orange County A...
5e154ff2-5c58-49c1-9d95-9cf026b74bc3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A FLI postdoctoral grant application: AI alignment via causal analysis and design of agents TL;DR: This is a proposal I wrote for the Future of Life postdoctoral grants, on the topic of AI Safety. The topic of this proposal is being able to model human preferences in a causal model. This is somewhat similar to the age...
0bc15d5e-c90c-4153-8b07-b850d45792a6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
April links None
b42a730f-6036-48f6-997c-41a625dcc59c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Why agents are powerful [Written for Blog Post Day. Not super happy with it, it’s too rambly and long, but I’m glad it exists.] Here are some questions I think this theory of agency can answer: * What are agents? * Why should we expect AI agents to be useful for various important tasks? * Why should we think agen...
1047faed-a35a-4289-9631-d5c598ce661e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A Layman's Explanation of "Safely Interruptible Agents"
e9c28482-6ef0-45a1-9f7e-5a44cfe9b69e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Safety-First Agents/Architectures Are a Promising Path to Safe AGI Summary Language model agents (LMAs) like AutoGPT have promising safety characteristics compared to traditional conceptions of AGI. The LLMs they are composed of plan, think, and act in highly transparent and correctable ways, although not maximally so...
56360560-c46b-4bb3-9073-430a6929c155
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
AMA or discuss my 80K podcast episode: Ben Garfinkel, FHI researcher [[THIRD EDIT: Thanks so much for all of the questions and comments! There are still a few more I'd like to respond to, so I may circle back to them a bit later, but, due to time constraints, I'm otherwise finished up for now. Any further comments or ...
791765fd-4ef9-43d8-abba-8e4b94a49ecc
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
We Should Introduce Ourselves Differently I told an intelligent, well-educated friend about Less Wrong, so she googled, and got "Less Wrong is an online community for people who want to apply the discovery of biases like the conjunction fallacy, the affect heuristic, and scope insensitivity in order to fix their own t...
ea7c8059-3196-4c10-b71e-74d22f37b24d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Economist Irene Ng on Market design, entrepreneurship, and innovation. At the Futurati Podcast we recently recorded an interview with Irene Ng on market design, modularity and legibility in systems of behavior, innovation, game theory, privacy, the blockchain, and a few other subjects. Though it's far removed from th...
20021448-1a48-477c-b8e2-78d10d65ef68
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Can you control the past? (Cross-posted from Hands and Cities. Lots of stuff familiar to LessWrong folks interested in decision theory.) I think that you can “control” events you have no causal interaction with, including events in the past, and that this is a wild and disorienting fact, with uncertain but possibly s...
fe52b147-4a58-4535-9b2d-65d44443d57c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Shrödinger’s lottery or: Why you are going to live forever [I wrote this for my work lunch group after listening to David Wallace on the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics and its implications. It seemed like a good first post here after a long time lurking.] Shrödinger’s cat is the famous thought experiment tha...
940ed9f1-1ce6-459c-a27d-07e7ac919cc0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Sleeping on Stage When I think of the ideal place for sleeping it's something like, peaceful, dark, and quiet. The chaotic bright loud stage of a contra dance is pretty far from this, and yet generations of kids have curled up behind their parents and fallen asleep: It's a good idea to make them a nest they can ...
c481890c-796f-4a85-9f98-a14a24bedf90
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
Import AI 326:Chinese AI regulations; Stability's new LMs If AI is fashionable in 2023, then what will be fashionable in 2024? Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on lattes, ramen, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this (and comment on posts!) please subscribe. [Subs...
7a3e1ea0-0c20-4f69-a14c-3b4c94f15850
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Video: The Phenomenology of Intentions We all know intuitively what it feels like to "intend" a certain outcome or action. However, knowing what a thing is intuitively is different from having a deep introspective take on how the thing actually plays out in your own brain. In this Mental Model Monday, I go deep into t...
0ad40bcd-095d-484d-bdaa-4b57ab090ba6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Measuring Nonlinear Feature Interactions in Sparse Crosscoders [Project Proposal] TL;DR * Problem: Sparse crosscoders are powerful tools for compressing neural network representations into interpretable features. However, we don’t understand how features interact. * Perspective: We need systematic procedures to mea...
378a7ccb-e48d-4ee2-8653-33671beb1c48
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
How to ‘troll for good’: Leveraging IP for AI governance A new *Science* paper proposes using existing intellectual property law to create and enforce AI regulation, an approach much faster than traditional legislation. “Leveraging IP for AI governance” by Cason Schmit, Meg Doerr and Jennifer K. Wagner: > > Our ...
0d2fe400-1e46-4e93-966c-853e2845ea31
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
Graphical Representations of Paul Christiano's Doom Model Paul gives some numbers on AI doom (text below). Here they are in graphical forms, which I find easier to understand. Please correct me if wrong. Michael Trazzi's Probability Flow Diagram ========================================= I really like this one. I can...
b440c3bc-1e85-45a0-8e16-1a91491df921
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
The two-layer model of human values, and problems with synthesizing preferences I have been thinking about Stuart Armstrong's [preference synthesis research agenda](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CSEdLLEkap2pubjof/research-agenda-v0-9-synthesising-a-human-s-preferences-into), and have long had the feeling that there'...
7a04d5a6-c254-41be-b810-a77fc5392dd1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Finding Neurons in a Haystack: Case Studies with Sparse Probing Abstract > Despite rapid adoption and deployment of large language models (LLMs), the internal computations of these models remain opaque and poorly understood. In this work, we seek to understand how high-level human-interpretable features are represente...
6fb1ebaa-5593-4f09-b960-7db4f1fc0913
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Activation Pattern SVD: A proposal for SAE Interpretability Epistemic status: This is a rough-draft write-up about a thought experiment I did. Reasonably confident about the broad arguments being made here. That said, I haven't spent a lot of time rigorously polishing or reviewing my writing, so minor inaccuracies may...
bc7c5d09-d523-4d00-b0d7-fc8d43115e08
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Timeline of book-length works in machine ethics Timeline: * Danielson, Artificial Morality: Virtuous Robots for Virtual Games (1992) * Marsh, Formalizing Trust as a Computational Concept (1994) * Yudkowsky, Creating Friendly AI (2001) * Hall, Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of a Machine (2007) * Wallach & All...
edd5d4fc-97a8-43aa-89f1-6df6708c4bc2
awestover/filtering-for-misalignment
Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results
id: post338 Machine learning systems are typically trained to maximize average-case performance. However, this method of training can fail to meaningfully control the probability of tail events that might cause significant harm. For instance, while an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant may be generally safe, it wo...
2131a79b-5c64-4d99-95f6-56c58e35c9c3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Ignorance of non-existent preferences I often hear it said that since you can’t know what non existent people or creatures want, you can’t count bringing them into existence as a benefit to them even if you guess they will probably like it. For instance Adam Ozimek makes this argument here. Does this absolute agnosti...
2112b559-30e7-4c34-a90d-a189cabc80e3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
New LW Meetup: Boise ID, Bay City MI This summary was posted to LW Main on July 8th. The following week's summary is here. New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in: * Bay City Meetup: 19 August 2016 01:25PM * Boise, ID Meetup: 24 July 2016 02:30PM * Dallas Meetup: 09 July 2016 0...
ca0d68a2-b1c5-4e43-beda-3fab1e310aa0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Book Review Review (end of the bounty program) This post calls an official end to the LessWrong Sep/Oct 2021 Book Review Bounty Program!! A huge thank you to everyone who submitted! You've produced some superb content. I launched the program with the goals of getting more great content on the site, encouraging people...
9c4449a8-249d-4e68-b0da-23b5e48296d8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Iterated Distillation-Amplification, Gato, and Proto-AGI [Re-Explained] Note: This is a joint distillation of both Iterated Distillation and Amplification by Ajeya Cotra (summarizing Paul Christiano) and A Generalist Agent by DeepMind. Audience: New to alignment. Mostly non-technical, but a basic ML understanding hel...
6ee3c0cc-ee2a-4866-8c26-8509f44f4149
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A map of Bay Area memespace The main reason we picked the Bay Area as a home for the Center for Applied Rationality was simply because that's where our initial fiscal sponsor, MIRI, was located. Yet as I’ve gotten to know this region better in the year and a half since then, I’ve been struck by how good the fit has tu...
e65e7fad-89e0-4834-8f0c-474c69e67300
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Newcomb's Lottery Problem *Inspired by and variant of* [*The Ultimate Newcomb's Problem*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RAh4fekdiRhZxb2Kw/the-ultimate-newcomb-s-problem)*.* In front of you are two boxes, box A and box B. You can either take only box B (one-boxing) or both (two-boxing). Box A visibly contains $1,000...
93b62fb8-83fb-4f05-bc2e-85b25a60e956
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube
Youtube Transcripts
DeepMind x UCL | Deep Learning Lectures | 3/12 | Convolutional Neural Networks for Image Recognition so convolutional neural network works for image recognition so this is the plan for this lecture I'm gonna give you a little bit of background about convolutional neural networks or as I'll be referring to them hencefo...
14d3bbc9-4ed6-4125-944b-5d13b8c97bed
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Self-Blinded L-Theanine RCT Value tracked Effect size d (λ, p, σ change) Effect size d (λ, p, σ change) 200 mg Caffeine (n=1, m=50) 500 mg L-theanine (n=1, m=50) Log-score substance prediction[1] -0.6 -0.7 Absorption 0.61 (λ=13.3, p=0.00017, -0.072) 0.04 (λ=1.38, p=0.77, -0.07) Mindfulness 0.58 (λ=11.8, p=0.0007, 0.02...
6e46acf8-4b4c-4ac3-be59-7edf6337bcd6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[SEQ RERUN] Church vs. Taskforce Today's post, Church vs. Taskforce was originally published on 28 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):   > Churches serve a role of providing community - but they aren't explicitly optimized for this, because their nominal role is different. If we desire community without ...
9660100c-bf05-4aa8-8afd-13b29c229000
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Holden Karnofsky's Singularity Institute Objection 2 The sheer length of GiveWell co-founder and co-executive director Holden Karnofsky's excellent critique of the Singularity Institute means that it's hard to keep track of the resulting discussion.  I propose to break out each of his objections into a separate Discus...