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c6025c36-8841-4f6c-8ac7-697ba5d9f84f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Stupid Questions June 2015
This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.
Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock ... |
f51c7da5-2e3b-4115-b734-d770fa850416 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Problems Involving Abstraction?
I'm working on a post of examples for how to formulate problems involving abstraction (using the [abstraction formulation here](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/ehnG4mseKF6xALmQy/p/vDGvHBDuMtcPd8Lks)). This isn't going to solve problems, just show how to set them up mathematically.
To that ... |
d03dc53d-290d-4486-804e-5eebcb53a4ac | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Defining AI wireheading
.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: none; directi... |
970d4bee-ac1b-4231-b771-5b7da1665fcd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Albert Hirschman on liberalism and nationalism
Albert Hirschman wrote Exit, Voice and Loyalty at the very dawn of neoliberalism and you can think of it as a warning before its time. His story is about what happens to a liberalism based on choice and nothing more.
Suppose that your brand of cornflakes isn’t good enoug... |
badbbac0-45eb-448e-b100-42e872ea8beb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | D&D.Sci December 2022: The Boojumologist
This is an entry in the 'Dungeons & Data Science' series, a set of puzzles where players are given a dataset to analyze and an objective to pursue using information from that dataset.
STORY (Skippable)
You were saddled with debt, and despair, and regret;
But you left it beh... |
81cf946a-2660-4b74-858a-e02a8c21b032 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | List of notable people who believe in AI X-risk?
Remembering Scott's AI Researchers On AI Risk. The debate about AI is heating up, and a lot of people rely on authority figures for knowing what to believe. Do we have a current list of notable AI X-risk believers? Would there be value in compiling such a list? |
1214c95e-c1cc-40dc-8621-d6bb0433d11c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Quick Summaries of Two Papers on Kant and Game Theory
It's not obvious from a Darwinian point of view why people (even people who aren't related) often cooperate with one another. Researchers like Axelrod and Hamilton (1981) have used game theory to show that some strategies are both adaptive and favour cooperation. T... |
10f0dba5-86a5-49fb-9c89-8f56a6e96f27 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Show LW: Diaspora Project Map and Preregistration Database
Hi everyone,
I and a handful of other folks have been compiling a list of different LessWrong Diaspora projects. I started it after someone asked me how they could volunteer for LessWrong and I didn't have a good answer for them.
It's optimized for people wh... |
6287eecf-a4cd-490d-a398-4b1edd2f7847 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Book review: Human Compatible
Book review: Human Compatible, by Stuart Russell.
Human Compatible provides an analysis of the long-term risks from artificial intelligence, by someone with a good deal more of the relevant prestige than any prior author on this subject.
What should I make of Russell? I skimmed his best... |
0e95fb9b-71c7-4a4a-8839-9a1d092fc558 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Modal SAT: Self Cooperation
Post 2 in in Modal SAT series. In this post, we show that SC Modal SAT is equivalent to Modal SAT.
For this, we need just need to prove the following theorem:
Theorem: If there exists a modal agent M such that Ci cooperates with M for each Ci∈C and such that M defects against Di for each ... |
1d58138d-1ffa-4b71-aa3b-0075531e0624 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | "You'll Never Persuade People Like That"
Sometimes, when someone is arguing for some proposition, their interlocutor will reply that the speaker's choice of arguments or tone wouldn't be effective at persuading some third party.
This would seem to be an odd change of topic. If I was arguing for this-and-such proposit... |
129074f6-688f-4511-bd24-0dfcf9ed8338 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | AI-Based Code Generation Using GPT-J-6B
Above is a link to an interesting post about synthetic code generation with a transformer model trained on *The Pile*, which contains a large chuck of GitHub and StackOverflow. Due to *CommonCrawl*'s deficiency in this area, the much smaller GPT-J-6B outperforms OpenAI’s largest... |
6f5c3414-8049-447a-a39c-0b6e9fa18d0c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Utility indifference and infinite improbability drives
In MIRI's paper on Corrigibility, we describe a version of Stuart Armstrong's utility indifference technique (see also this LessWrong post), and show that an agent using our version acts as if it believes it has a "magical" way of influencing the world, similar to... |
d269d157-6aa3-4ebd-a735-761967d836ea | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Making a Difference Tempore: Insights from 'Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction'
> The safety of artifi cial intelligence applications involving reinforcement learning is a topic that deserves careful attention.
Foreword
========
Let's get down to business.
Reinforcement Learning
======================
1: Intr... |
ea482daf-84b3-4ec5-bbd5-f25ee0629218 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Elasticity of Wheat Supply?
I've been hearing concerns about famine stemming from the war in Ukraine. When thinking about how bad that situation is likely to be, the most important thing I don't know is the price elasticity of wheat: how much more wheat do farmers plant, given some increase in price? This is the sort ... |
8af1aeb3-ff24-4595-a0cf-ae7195795cbb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Coronavirus: California case growth
In this post, I try to understand the case growth rate for coronavirus cases in California, and try to address questions such as:
* How long will the case count continue to grow?
* At what level will the case count stabilize?
* To what extent will we be able to infer from the da... |
90145757-99c0-4ab9-b15d-d2c1f51675bd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AI #39: The Week of OpenAI
The board firing Sam Altman, then reinstating him, dominated everything else this week. Other stuff also happened, but definitely focus on that first.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Developments at OpenAI were far more important than everything else this read. So you can read this timeline of events ov... |
916a1884-763f-4054-a9f8-c05b08b24546 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | An AI Manhattan Project is Not Inevitable
Early last month, Leopold Aschenbrenner released a long essay and podcast outlining his projections for the future of AI. Both of these sources are full of interesting arguments and evidence, for a comprehensive summary see Zvi’s post here. Rather than going point by point I w... |
c60c1e20-eaa7-4a9d-a63d-84c735cc437a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open Thread, February 15-29, 2012
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here. |
5de749a0-f642-4dee-aa59-14f14b796678 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A few questions on International Rationality
Disclaimer: I'm still fairly new here, and though I did use the search bar it's entirely possible this has been discussed before. Just point me in the right direction if this is so.
While reading about 4chan's Japanese progenitor website, it occurred to me that I know n... |
769ede74-f3f5-4572-bf50-aaef97e55d23 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Investigation into the relationship between neuron count and intelligence across differing cortical architectures
Survey participants (*n = 83*) were given anonymized descriptions of behavior in the wild for four animals: one bird species and one primate species with a similar neuron count, and one bird species and on... |
7c6e2e57-d21c-4942-ac42-22d2008a0cd1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | King Under The Mountain: Adventure Log + Soundtrack
With the help of many dedicated Less Wrongers (players muflax, Karl, Charlie, and Emile; musicians Mike Blume and Alicorn, technical support Ari Rahikkala) we have successfully completed what is, as far as I know, the first actual Dungeons and Discourse adventure any... |
3940e4ec-d2ef-4694-b42e-9274f407cd75 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Big-endian is better than little-endian
This is a response to the post We Write Numbers Backward, in which lsusr argues that little-endian numerical notation is better than big-endian.[1] I believe this is wrong, and big-endian has a significant advantage not considered by lsusr.
Lsusr describes reading the number "1... |
db5ea800-93b7-4f18-97bd-1f2d1cdf53a1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Effective diversity
1. Two diversity problems
Here are two concerns sometimes raised in Effective Altruist circles:
1. Effective Altruists are not very diverse—they are disproportionately male, white, technically minded, technically employed, located in a small number of rich places, young, smart, educated, idealis... |
e52cccbd-fe64-4a9d-a2e6-354120e97fca | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Join the interpretability research hackathon
**TLDR**; Participate online or in-person in London, Aarhus, and Tallinn on the weekend 11th to 13th November in a fun and intense [AI safety research hackathon](https://alignmentjam.com) focused on interpretability research. We invite mid-career professionals to join but i... |
5385ab36-0e25-4da4-994f-6ea58769d5ff | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meditation, insight, and rationality. (Part 2 of 3)
This post is the second in a series; you can read the first here.
I have already given a brief overview of what the goal of a particular style of meditation is, and why some individuals in this community might find it beneficial to pursue. The basic structure of thi... |
87994d93-9391-44f6-9b0e-13e538d41470 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Australian AI Safety Forum 2024
We're excited to announce the inaugural Australian AI Safety Forum, taking place on November 7-8, 2024, in Sydney, Australia. This event aims to foster the growth of the AI safety community within Australia.
Apply now!
Key Details
* Dates: November 7-8, 2024
* Location: Sydney Kn... |
576a6c51-6c83-4867-8aae-6110b0364796 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Link] Death with Dignity by Scott Adams
Over at Scott Adams' Blog you can find a very fine example of using the 'Rationality Engine' to solve the social problem of assisted dying.
|
aa2a1d61-460b-4814-a7b8-4de8326882ae | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Allais Hack -- Transform Your Decisions!
The Allais Paradox, though not actually a paradox, was a classic experiment which showed that decisions made by humans do not demonstrate consistent preferences. If you actually want to accomplish something, rather than simply feel good about your decisions, this is rather dist... |
525c70bd-11b8-47d8-9317-23279fbd4615 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open Thread July 2019
If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, you can put it here.
Also, if you are new to LessWrong and want to introduce yourself, this is the place to do it. Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to get from the site and community are ... |
36501a00-fea7-4e23-8a1c-eac1cbfa8e3e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Pre-registering a study
This post is my pre-registration of a study I will be running to continue the exploratory work I started here.
Abstract
In continuation of previous work, we test if a Large Language Model (LLM) is more likely to produce factually-incorrect answers if it has previously produced factually-incor... |
c4717ea9-e009-4744-a20c-5a4c51de5555 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What are important UI-shaped problems that Lightcone could tackle?
As I think about "what to do about AI x-risk?", some principles that seem useful to me:
1. Short timelines seem plausible enough that, for the next year or so, I'd like to focus on plans that are relevant if takeoff begins in the next few years. In a... |
5bcae04b-1dd4-40b7-850d-e9be9df31f22 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Which journalists would you give quotes to? [one journalist per comment, agree vote for trustworthy]
Let’s create a list of which journalists LessWrongers trust, so as to gave a guide if people get contacted.
Agree votes are for more good.
Upvotes aren’t helpful because i think heavily downvoted comments get hidden... |
1c77e906-b95d-433c-a6f3-f04d3bcc17db | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | fMRI LIKE APPROACH TO AI ALIGNMENT / DECEPTIVE BEHAVIOUR
fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) is a technique used to investigate the human brain by detecting changes in the blood flow when doing certain tasks. Blood flow is an indicator of energy consumption, and its changes indicate areas of the brain associa... |
762b6d77-2f50-4336-b59d-bccb466b1b75 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | AI Could Defeat All Of Us Combined
*Click lower right to download or find on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, etc.*
I've been working on a new series of posts about the [most important century](https://www.c... |
110d034e-ad43-4675-aac0-426f19823259 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Teaching Software Engineering for AI-Enabled Systems
1. Introduction
----------------
More and more modern software systems include machine-learning (ML) models
for part of their functionality (e.g., recommendation engines in e-business
sites) or are even built around such models (e.g., mobile apps for instant
lang... |
369f3900-ece4-45e5-ab95-f555fcb46ca4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Team Cohesion and Exclusionary Egalitarianism
I. Teamwork: that shouldn't be too hard, eh?
Sooner or later, most people who want to make a difference in the world start thinking about how to have highly effective teams, teamwork, and collaboration.
On the surface, it seems like it should be simple and straightforwar... |
8754d27f-8f38-4ae5-a362-335b8b61ca3f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open thread, June 20 - June 26, 2016
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
----------------------------------------
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately... |
67d53fce-4027-4dce-b421-f20c44470c5a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Properties of Good Textbooks
Heuristics for choosing/writing good textbooks (see also here):
* Has exercises
* Exercises are interspersed in the text, not in large chunks (better at the end of sections, not just at the end of chapters).
* Solutions are available but difficult to access (in a separate book, or ... |
90b437d6-b8b3-43e2-ace0-cf6e9cb33ff2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Concentration of Force
This essay began as part one of a longer piece. Part one is standalone and "timeless." Part two is focused on the local dynamics of the EA/rationality/longtermist communities and LessWrong in November of 2021. Following wise advice from Zack_M_Davis, I've split them into two separate posts. N... |
6a2892a8-6f3b-4c91-a6f6-e886a80d3dca | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Techniques for optimizing worst-case performance
If powerful ML systems fail catastrophically, they may be able to quickly cause irreversible damage. To be safe, it’s not enough to have an average-case performance guarantee on the training distribution — we need to ensure that even if our systems fail on new distribut... |
9a7cec06-05c8-45df-a137-454b9cca65f2 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Generalizability & Hope for AI [MLAISU W03]
Welcome to this week’s ML & AI Safety Report where we dive into overfitting and look at a compiler for Transformer architectures! This week is a bit short because the mechanistic interpretability hackathon is starting today – sign up on [ais.pub/mechint](http://ais.pub/mechi... |
0c7422f1-e629-412d-b6e4-9f5154b6ad07 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Baltimore Weekly Meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Weekly Meetup
WHEN: 26 June 2016 08:00:00PM (-0400)
WHERE: 1726 reisterstown road pikesville maryland 21208
Pikesville DoubleTree - Hilton, at the restaurant / bar or at one of the tables outside.
Discussion article for the meetup : Ba... |
2f5ba6e4-ff8a-4e15-a600-76e16fdca624 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Principles of Disagreement
Today's post, Principles of Disagreement was originally published on 02 June 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> You do have to pay attention to other people's authority a fair amount of the time. But above all, try to get the actual right answer. Clever tricks are on... |
516de4fa-8e34-44d2-96ce-2f138fc3a431 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/agisf | AGI Safety Fund | Thought Experiments Provide a Third Anchor
Previously, [I argued](https://bounded-regret.ghost.io/future-ml-systems-will-be-qualitatively-different/) that we should expect future ML systems to often exhibit "emergent" behavior, where they acquire new capabilities that were not explicitly designed or intended, simply a... |
92bc394f-b9b3-4e51-81ab-2721bcee5332 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Counterexamples to some ELK proposals
(This post was written as part of my work at the Alignment Research Center.)
In this post I’ll describe some possible approaches to eliciting latent knowledge (ELK) not discussed in our report. These are basically restatements of proposals by Davidad, Rohin, Ramana, and John Maxw... |
4b51daf3-4d26-4371-b2b2-a7661acf9a7c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Searching for Life Across Space and Time, workshop, Irvine, CA
|
a73ba1a0-ef0e-4ad4-9c2e-deb262b8b384 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Backchaining causes wishful thinking
Wishful thinking - believing things that make you happy - may be a result of adapting an old cognitive mechanism to new content.
Obvious, well-known stuff
The world is a complicated place. When we first arrive, we don't understand it at all; we can't even recognize objects or mo... |
5b1c92c3-dab0-4ae3-89ef-909a3899b6a7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How Much Are LLMs Actually Boosting Real-World Programmer Productivity?
LLM-based coding-assistance tools have been out for ~2 years now. Many developers have been reporting that this is dramatically increasing their productivity, up to 5x'ing/10x'ing it.
It seems clear that this multiplier isn't field-wide, at least... |
6c69e6cb-2d45-4a81-8ac9-0f39d921feda | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Steganographic Potentials of Language Models
Our preliminary experiments show that current private models can perform prompted steganography with non-trivial messages remaining undetected in most cases (up to 65% accuracy, 24 entropy bits). Open-source models can be trained to encode hidden messages (up to 60%, 4 ... |
a9c3b2e0-6eb6-4e6e-b2c4-bb3f310d062f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Northwest Passage Update
Singing Stan Rogers' Northwest Passage with friends this evening I realized these days it needs an update. People suggested lyrics, and here's a filked tag to sing after the song:
> In this warm clime, I have sailed the Northwest Passage
> Opened by our fires, of coal and industry
> Tracing... |
9687ce36-d9aa-4eb1-afec-ba7153185f15 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Conditional offers and low priors: the problem with 1-boxing Newcomb's dilemma
Suppose I got an email yesterday from someone claiming to be the prince of Nigeria. They say they will give me $10 million, but first they need $1,000 from me to get access to their bank account. Should I pay the money? No, that would be st... |
f0dda862-304e-4a43-b277-cab9d9bf65c7 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | ML4G Germany - AI Alignment Camp
Remark: This post is a copy of this [event](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dPcfnb2DzCwWgnLcM/ml4g-germany-ai-alignment-camp). We received feedback that the event was hard to find, so we made this post to improve the ability to find it.
Apply to ML4G Germany - AI Alignmen... |
c4e0ad45-3c66-402c-a9c9-a5a58e9cfecf | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | 2020 predictions - Politics, Econ, Tech
The results are in! Here are my thoughts on the non-COVID set of my predictions. (For detailed thoughts on the COVID predictions see Zvi's analysis)
Questions, predictions, results and analysis below. Predictions are given as (Scott:Zvi:Me). Questions are strike-through if they... |
4f102651-ea68-4615-ac7c-6611c1ec315a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Beware technological wonderland, or, why text will dominate the future of communication and the Internet
Disclaimer: The views expressed here are speculative. I don't have a claim to expertise in this area. I welcome pushback and anticipate there's a reasonable chance I'll change my mind in light of new considerations... |
22e517e6-fa8d-4ea3-92c9-a33e6b263931 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Terminology Thread (or "name that pattern")
I think there's widespread assent on LW that the sequences were pretty awesome. Not only do they elucidate upon a lot of useful concepts, but they provide useful shorthand terms for those concepts which help in thinking and talking about them. When I see a word or phrase in ... |
3952cb7f-905f-4a42-a27d-33f98664b1fb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Diagonalization Fixed Point Exercises
This is the second of three sets of fixed point exercises. The first post in this sequence is here, giving context.
1. Recall Cantor’s diagonal argument for the uncountability of the real numbers. Apply the same technique to convince yourself than for any set S, the cardinality ... |
2c575b3a-b714-4dec-9a67-121621cc634b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Some Complaint-Action Gaps
[This was previously a shortform post]
Sometimes I scroll social media (because I am yet weak) and I see rationalists raising Concerns about various news topics and current events. I am bothered by what appears to be a high ratio of (raising awareness) : (taking action).
To better articula... |
13247b70-aed0-4c02-9d6c-290ffccdbb29 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | An improved “AI Impacts” website
[](http://aiimpacts.org/)Recently, MIRI received a targeted donation to improve the [AI Impacts website](http://aiimpacts.org/) initially created by frequent MIRI collaborator Paul Christiano and part-time ... |
16f07d79-4874-4f48-b5bb-efe6a2e3784b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Altruism and Selfishness
The PDF version can be read here.
The video version can be watched here:
This is how I define “altruism” and “selfishness”:
* Altruism: Acting for the benefit of others.
* Selfishness: Acting for your own benefit.
These definitions match the common usage of the words. They are as simple... |
02c83026-cd0a-41da-9d6f-f8c081d006bd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Cambridge Meetups Nov 7 and Nov 21
The formerly monthly Cambridge meetups are now twice-monthly! Same place and time - Clear Conscience Cafe, Sunday at 4pm - now on the first and third Sundays of each month, instead of just the third. That's November 7th and 21st.
It was suggested last time that we might want to try ... |
f7858862-6d51-433b-a3de-a58e4ff005cb | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Theories of impact for Science of Deep Learning
*I’d like to thank Jérémy Scheurer and Ethan Perez for discussions about the post.*
I recently published a [post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bumgqvRjTadFFkoAd/science-of-deep-learning-a-technical-agenda) on the Science of Deep Learning. There have been many people ... |
5157963a-fbca-47e6-8bd2-0d6094c3798b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Training Regime Day 4: Murphyjitsu
Introduction
Recall that applied rationality is being able to properly decide which advisors to use during decision making.
Imagine that I am throwing a ball up into the air and catching it. Occasionally, I might drop the ball because I am not very good at catching. Now, imagine th... |
cc457358-260d-4e29-b4d9-f4e4d3016e9b | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube | Youtube Transcripts | Artificial General Intelligence: Racing and cooperating | Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh
[Music]
thank you very much for those of you who
don't know me I'm Shaun Hegarty I'm the
executive director of the Center for the
Study of existential risk which works on
global risks and long-term challenges
and I'm a program director with ... |
8f519233-e2e2-46f8-86c1-035cd3d56351 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Where Utopias Go Wrong, or: The Four Little Planets
Cross-posted from The Ginnungagap Foundation. This exploration of human attempts to improve human society began as a nonfiction essay, but I decided making it fiction would be more engaging.
Some concepts like ethics are elaborated upon in my previous articles, whi... |
6d54efb5-66d1-4b92-8807-4c31a6f1c4f9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why don't Rationalists use bidets?
I've been to many Rat&EA group houses, offices, and other venues both official and unofficial around the Bay Area, and I can't recall ever seeing a bidet. And because I think bidets are superior technology, this is pretty confusing to me. Why might this be?
Possible explanations fo... |
8849aefe-cc58-415b-b3dc-1a780f0ab348 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Fake Frameworks for Zen Meditation (Summary of Sekida's Zen Training)
Meditation, and Zen meditation in particular, is hard to teach in the sense that most people cannot learn to do it as intended by simply reading or hearing about it. Instead they need to attempt it, talk about what happened with someone more experie... |
d7cbb3b0-733e-44e5-864e-a2ae84b90865 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Pondering computation in the real world
Epistemic Status: Exploratory. Asking questions and setting up some intuition pumps. Would very much like to make my thoughts on this topic more precise.
Some systems that compute
Adders
Here's an electrical circuit you can build at home.
From https://circuitdigest.com/tuto... |
2ef77352-663b-4a21-a4a7-4c234fface45 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Information
summary(Technical): Given a probability distribution $\mathrm P$ over a set $O$ of possible observations, an observation $o \in O$ is said to carry $\log \frac{1}{\mathrm P(o)}$ units of information (with respect to $\mathrm P$), where the base of the logarithm determines the unit of information. The stand... |
94aed8c4-814b-441e-b9b6-6d1c46e7734e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Holden Karnofsky's Singularity Institute Objection 1
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... |
5e7eb336-da33-4d4b-b385-459bc1e8f9b6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Singular learning theory: exercises
Thanks to Jesse Hoogland and George Wang for feedback on these exercises.
In learning singular learning theory (SLT), I found it was often much easier to understand by working through examples, rather than try to work through the (fairly technical) theorems in their full generalit... |
ac7e2125-4fb3-4980-9f4c-d642d7224fd8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [LINK] Hyperloop officially announced — predictions, anyone?
I was studying in the LW Study Hall, and during our break someone posted this link to the official hyperloop announcement:
http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha-20130812.pdf
One member was doubtful it would get past regulations, and anot... |
2a7195d2-4969-4e1c-82d0-54625f5bf521 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What is known about consciousness?
Three questions I would like to find some answers for are:
* What is known (to a high degree of certitude) about consciousness?
* What experimental tests have been able to verify predictions made?
* What predictions have been made that nobody has managed to test yet, but could,... |
d4792ed6-1539-4f8a-a205-19ef567fe49a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Helio-Selenic Laser Telescope (in SPACE!?)
The use of drones in modern warfare has become increasingly prevalent in recent years. Drone swarms can be difficult to track and defend against using anti-air defense.
One potential solution to this problem is the use of mobile ground-based laser system to combat drones.
... |
629bb979-914e-4667-8f03-2e6245b0466b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Our Need for Need
[I wrote this in 2017, well before I had a LessWrong account. The style isn't necessarily what I would have chosen if I'd known I was going to share it here, but I think the topic might be of some interest anyway, so I'm reposting it with light edits. Originally on Grand, Unified, Crazy.]
It is a tr... |
4b3bc7ee-b9e6-4781-917e-289da02c8f98 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Link: Evidence-Based Medicine Has Been Hijacked
John Ioannidis has written a very insightful and entertaining article about the current state of the movement which calls itself "Evidence-Based Medicine". The paper is available ahead of print at http://www.jclinepi.com/article/S0895-4356(16)00147-5/pdf.
As far as I c... |
68a7f44e-de4f-4072-8eaf-d5f52ad0ad80 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Two questions about CEV that worry me
Taken from some old comments of mine that never did get a satisfactory answer.
1) One of the justifications for CEV was that extrapolating from an American in the 21st century and from Archimedes of Syracuse should give similar results. This seems to assume that change in human v... |
7eb656fe-368f-4340-b151-38574570d529 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Parable: The Bomb that doesn't Explode
You're an engineer working for a military contractor. One day, your project manager comes to you and asks you to design a container for plastic explosive. It is to contain several kilograms of C4, enough to destroy a building. This is pretty dangerous, but you know that C4 is act... |
d2c0699a-af50-47a6-96e5-5ab19eba4711 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : San Jose Meetup: Park Day (IV)
Discussion article for the meetup : San Jose Meetup: Park Day (IV)
WHEN: 19 June 2016 03:00:00PM (-0700)
WHERE: 438 Coleman Ave, San Jose, CA 95110
You're invited to bring whatever you'd like to see at Park Day - balls, frisbees, food, etc. (Also, consider taking measures aga... |
258264f8-6f31-47e3-80bf-91c53cdef92d | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Prediction can be Outer Aligned at Optimum
This post argues that many prediction tasks are *outer aligned at optimum*. In particular, I think that the malignity of the universal prior should be treated as an inner alignment problem rather than an outer alignment problem. The main argument is entirely in the first sect... |
fb79f01b-0cf3-4ca0-8086-1aa59601d24b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Semi-rare plain language words that are great to remember
I once spent a lot of time trying and failing to remember the word 'corollary', and once I heard it again I was like "ah, finally, there's that word; now I won't forget."
What are some other words like this? I'll keep an updating list in this post as I find an... |
e6ab0de5-5512-428e-95c1-35f069ed46bc | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Calibrating your probability estimates of world events: Russia vs Ukraine, 6 months later.
Some of the comments on the link by James_Miller exactly six months ago provided very specific estimates of how the events might turn out:
James_Miller:
* The odds of Russian intervening militarily = 40%.
* The odds of the... |
bcc8aad8-59b5-4bf3-b069-bd2af863cf41 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | OPTIC: Announcing Intercollegiate Forecasting Tournaments in SF, DC, Boston
TLDR: We’re excited to announce that OPTIC is running three intercollegiate forecasting competitions this fall — in the Bay Area (Nov 4), DC (Nov 18) and Boston (Dec 2). Register here!
What does a tournament look like?
Think 1-day hackathon/... |
31e43207-5c0e-4878-9805-4ce1925229be | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Wordtune review
Wow, Facebook is advertising an AI-driven writing tool to me. I think this is the first time I’ve seen a mainstream potentially useful product coming from all of this. Let’s see how it does. I’ve started by writing this paragraph quickly myself, and then I will rewrite it using Wordtune, to demonstrate... |
1c470274-d004-440b-9925-9fb2d2e39bab | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | 2023 Stanford Existential Risks Conference
The team at SERI is excited to announce that sign-ups for the 3rd annual Stanford Existential Risks Conference are now open! We will be running a hybrid conference this year. [Sign-ups](https://airtable.com/shrPg0XTaZLKxxTem) for both in-person and virtual attendance are now ... |
c2e5d071-6f6b-4c7e-9754-f58fc1fead50 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Quick survey on AI alignment resources
TLDR: In collaboration with CEA, an external collaborator is trying to determine the value of various AI alignment resources. If you are interested in or currently working on AI alignment, please fill out this survey. We expect it will likely take 5-15 minutes. Thanks!
___
Ther... |
09af3d6c-0b73-49ed-9516-dd66f499fbf3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Looking to interview AI Safety researchers for a book
If you are or have been employed as an AI Safety Researcher, I'd love to interview you as background for a novel that I'm writing. I'm interested in learning what a day in the life of an AI researcher typically looks like.
I'd be happy to include you in the ackno... |
ddd1070f-dbd7-4a51-89fb-a8e1b1e96a6e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Sapiens
This is a section-by-section summary and review of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. It's come up on Less Wrong before in the context of Death is Optional, a conversation the author had with Daniel Kahneman about the book, and seems like an accessible introduction to many of the ... |
a60f4284-e702-46b3-9b05-5a78fb3e90a9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Part 1] Amplifying generalist research via forecasting – Models of impact and challenges
This post covers our models of impact and challenges with our exploration in amplifying generalist research using forecasting. It is accompanied by a second post with a high-level description of those models, and more detailed de... |
fb62e08c-dcfe-417e-a77b-af1c1d644ebf | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Risks from GPT-4 Byproduct of Recursively Optimizing AIs
***Epistemic Status:** At midnight three days ago, I saw some of the GPT-4 Byproduct Recursively Optimizing AIs below on twitter which freaked me out a little and lit a fire underneath me to write up this post, my first on LessWrong. Here, my main goal is to sta... |
ff42414b-7111-44ca-b80b-474abcf58481 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Non-adversarial principle
The 'Non-Adversarial Principle' is a proposed design rule for [sufficiently advanced Artificial Intelligence](https://arbital.com/p/7g1) stating that:
*By design, the human operators and the AGI should never come into conflict.*
Special cases of this principle include [https://arbital.com/p... |
531f9072-3905-4905-89af-d590a1c5741f | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Worlds Where Iterative Design Fails
In most technical fields, we try designs, see what goes wrong, and iterate until it works. That’s the core iterative design loop. Humans are good at iterative design, and it works well in most fields in practice.
In worlds where AI alignment can be handled by iterative design, we p... |
28d1bdf9-bb80-4b65-9206-b278d0857148 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Techniques for enhancing human feedback
*By Ajeya Cotra*
Training powerful models to maximize simple metrics(such as quarterly profits) could be risky.Sufficiently intelligent models could discover strategies for maximizing these metrics in perverse and unintended ways. For example, the easiest way to maximize profit... |
a7b3770b-3a4e-4f6c-8157-3b02ecdaf2f7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Inefficient Doesn’t Mean Indifferent
Many people, including Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson, use the following form of argument a lot. It could be considered the central principle of the (excellent) The Elephant in the Brain. It goes something like:
1. People say they want X, and they do Y to get it.
2. If people did... |
1c501698-da15-4705-8c02-d9aebc9c10e6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Humans get different counterfactuals
A putative new idea for AI control; index here.
A lot of my ideas rely upon taking counterfactuals of events that have tiny ε probabilities of ever happening. This introduces some extra risks, mainly centred around human behaviour. For the counterfactual methods to work, we need t... |
d2735498-8232-4494-8f57-c814593617ce | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info | AI Safety Info | What is Eliciting Latent Knowledge (ELK)?
[Eliciting Latent Knowledge](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/eliciting-latent-knowledge-elk) (ELK) is an open problem in AI safety. It asks how we can access information that an AI model "knows", but which its output doesn't include or make clear by default.
The problem stateme... |
65b1afc2-6439-4270-aa2a-75b9c2a5e1d6 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Convergent Learning: Do different neural networks learn the same representations?
1 Introduction
---------------
Many recent studies have focused on understanding deep neural networks from both a theoretical perspective
(Arora et al., [2014](#bib.bib1); Neyshabur & Panigrahy, [2013](#bib.bib14); Montavon et al., [2... |
3b698521-4f1d-4c29-a6c1-38c6bbe6a301 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Linkpost: A Contra AI FOOM Reading List
This is a linkpost to a list of skeptical takes on AI FOOM. I haven't read them all and probably disagree with some of them, but it's valuable to put these arguments in one place. |
94ff3639-376c-4524-969a-8984a2c4d24b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Stop pressing the Try Harder button
(This is a post from a daily blogging experiment I did at neelnanda.io, which I thought might also fit the tastes of LessWrong. This is very much in the spirit of Trying to Try)
I recently had a productivity coaching session, and at the end we agreed on a few actions points that I’... |
6fb117e9-87f1-433f-8f97-d6eb43d24253 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Experiences of Self-deception
It seems to me that self-deception can describe two different things - conscious and unconscious self-deception.
Sometimes the elephant believes something untrue all by itself without the rider ever getting a look in. The claims of elephant in the brain seem to focus on this type of unco... |
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