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999d5803-cf82-4962-b747-6e64463c6a1e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AI #104: American State Capacity on the Brink
The Trump Administration is on the verge of firing all ‘probationary’ employees in NIST, as they have done in many other places and departments, seemingly purely because they want to find people they can fire. But if you fire all the new employees and recently promoted emp... |
5076373c-7852-40b4-bf9f-987cc8b04438 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Postmodernism for rationalists
|
507305cf-8a7a-4d2c-8bd1-7522bcb2993e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What deserves cryocide?
So being signed up for cryonics shifts my views on life and death, as might be expected.
In particular, it focuses my views of success on the preservation of my brain (everything else too, just in case, but especially the brain). This means, obviously, not just the lump of meat but also the i... |
20d9f877-eabf-4353-b4ae-fec688acfdd1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open Thread Feb 16 - Feb 23, 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 be... |
f9c36481-fdc1-4a60-bcc3-882a9af6e8bf | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Suffering Is Not Pain
“Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.”
The motivation of this post is to address the persistent conflation between suffering and pain I have observed from members of the EA community, even amongst those who purport to be “suffering-focused” in their ethical motivations. In order to best ad... |
b6ed0d3f-144d-425a-bb4c-54bd38d70b5e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Programming Language Early Funding?
We are in the dark age of computer programming.[1]
I believe that we still fundamentally haven’t found good ways to deal with the challenges of writing computer programs. Programming languages are the foundation of our programming and leave a lot to be desired. I believe more is po... |
1eaa5e0d-356c-4d60-9a15-2de3ef5b76b7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Acting Normal is Good, Actually
This is a casually written post in a series about what I wish someone had told me when I was younger.
I was a weird kid, but I didn't originally set out to be weird. I like doing things other people do and feeling like I belong. But as I got past kindergarten, forces incentivized me to... |
b71f73e0-6a5a-4710-9277-bc3d3d853e90 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Berkeley: CFAR focus group
Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley: CFAR focus group
WHEN: 23 January 2013 07:30:00PM (-0800)
WHERE: Berkeley, CA
This week's Berkeley meetup will have the format of a focus group. On behalf of CFAR I will be asking you (yes, you!) what kinds of things you would like fr... |
bd703e41-9cce-4a70-bc0b-a6d7fc95760c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Weekly LW Meetups: Budapest, Fort Lauderdale, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Rome, Sao Paulo, Tel Aviv
There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:
* Pittsburgh - Presentation on Anthropics: 20 April 2012 06:00PM
* Tel Aviv, Israel: 21 April 2012 07:00PM
* Budapest Meetup: 21 April 2012 05:30PM
* Ro... |
025ca70a-ae7b-43a1-aef4-7944c8cd4d68 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | You're Calling *Who* A Cult Leader?
Followup to: Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate, Cultish Countercultishness
I used to be a lot more worried that I was a cult leader before I started reading Hacker News. (WARNING: Do not click that link if you do not want another addictive Internet habit.)
From time to time, on a ma... |
eb43152d-ef1d-4e80-8a69-9fa23477d31c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is it definitely the case that we can colonize Mars if we really wanted to? Is it reasonable to believe that this is technically feasible for a reasonably advanced civilization?
Question phrased to say that I'm less interested in reasons why humanity might not colonize Mars in the short-term due to lack of interest, ... |
c7180905-ff4d-4698-902f-fc7424a532c5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | 6502 simulated - mind uploading for microprocessors
Possibly offtopic, but a neat project with interesting analogy to mind uploading:
Some people managed to scan, using a microscope, a MOS 6502 microprocessor (Apple II, C64, NES), and simulate it at the level of single transistors. This neatly circumvented all the pr... |
6b4d1101-639b-418c-947a-f292de860195 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Should we admit it when a person/group is "better" than another person/group?
This sort of thinking seems bad:
> me.INTRINSIC_WORTH = 99999999; No matter what I do, this fixed property will remain constant.
This sort of thinking seems socially frowned upon, but accurate:
> a.impactOnSociety(time) > b.impactOnSociet... |
ee7574a7-ae35-4f20-bc1a-eee1ed162ded | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Are Generative World Models a Mesa-Optimization Risk?
Suppose we set up a training loop with an eye to get a generative world-model. For concretedness, let's imagine the predictor from the ELK doc. We show the model the first part of a surveillance video, and ask it to predict the second part. Would we risk producing ... |
96d22846-843b-4f0f-835e-577e55328b38 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Long Term Future Fund applications open until June 28th
The Long Term Future just reopened its applications. You can apply here:
Apply to the Long Term Future Fund
We will from now on have rolling applications, with a window of about 3-4 months between responses. The application window for the coming round will end... |
a89048a4-9fa5-4aa8-aac7-8e5109392714 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | To Be Decided #2
TBD is a quarterly-ish newsletter about deploying knowledge for impact, learning at scale, and making more thoughtful choices for ourselves and our organizations. This is the second issue, which was originally published in June 2019. Enjoy! --Ian
An Introduction to Decision Modeling
Decision-making... |
0cceb952-bac8-4298-955c-0df763be9c8d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Chicago Applied Rationality Training
Discussion article for the meetup : Chicago Applied Rationality Training
WHEN: 23 April 2017 01:00:00PM (-0500)
WHERE: Harper Memorial Library Room 148, 1116 E 59th St, Chicago, IL 60637
The Chicago rationality group meets every Sunday from 1-3 PM in Room 148 of Harper ... |
244a32e6-48a3-4ac0-8e1c-a7842cbb81dc | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Mechanistic Transparency for Machine Learning
Cross-posted on my blog.
[EDIT (added Jan 2023): it's come to my attention that this post was likely influenced by conversations I had with Chris Olah related to the distinction between standard interpretability and the type called "mechanistic", as well as early experime... |
3fe77819-aff0-4f9f-9396-0305247a998c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What's a good probability distribution family (e.g. "log-normal") to use for AGI timelines?
|
df3ca32d-616b-47ec-8df6-d2047be55d7b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Does AI risk “other” the AIs?
(Cross-posted from my website. Podcast version here, or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app.
This essay is part of a series I'm calling "Otherness and control in the age of AGI." I'm hoping that the individual essays can be read fairly well on their own, but see here for... |
41e3d4cc-56e5-49c1-98b8-65fe2c85f277 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | AI Forecasting Resolution Council (Forecasting infrastructure, part 2)
*This post introduces the [AI Forecasting Resolution Council](http://parallelforecast.com/docs/resolution/), a group of researchers with technical expertise in AI who will allow us to expand the space of effectively forecastable questions. It is th... |
ccd60b7a-37b4-4bef-99f3-bdf95e5e6aec | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Accuracy Versus Winning
Consider the problem of an agent who is offered a chance to improve their epistemic rationality for a price. What is such an agent's optimal strategy?
A complete answer to this problem would involve a mathematical model to estimate the expected increase in utility associated with having more ... |
6b534c2a-e651-49f2-bdc5-36deeda4eeb1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Superintelligence 27: Pathways and enablers
This is part of a weekly reading group on Nick Bostrom's book, Superintelligence. For more information about the group, and an index of posts so far see the announcement post. For the schedule of future topics, see MIRI's reading guide.
-------------------------------------... |
f3acf8cb-e4a1-4f0b-8093-e1b66d67beb7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Israel Less Wrong Meetup - Social and Board Games
Discussion article for the meetup : Israel Less Wrong Meetup - Social and Board Games
WHEN: 10 February 2015 07:00:00PM (+0200)
WHERE: Google Tel Aviv
We're going to have a meetup on Tuesday, December 9th at Google Israel's offices, Electra Tower, 98 Yigal ... |
93ba4e5e-78ed-41f9-8c89-78ff7b43ea9d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Great Cryonics Survey of 2022
The text that follows is a copy-paste from the survey creator's Facebook post, shared with permission.
> Asking all Cryonicists and those considering it or curious about it to... ~ Please take the Great Cryonics Survey of 2022 ~
>
> Go to --> bit.ly/cryosurvey2022
>
> Take the survey i... |
ded244c9-8911-46d3-9404-6e1bddd45536 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | No More Freezer Pucks
A while ago I wrote about how I'd make freezer pucks:
These work ok, but there are a couple issues:
* A large batch requires a lot of muffin tins
* Cleaning muffin tins is annoying
* It can be hard to get them out of the tins
I've switched to a different system where I freeze a flat ... |
af72506f-f7b5-44e7-acb2-bf778355dc3c | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | How dath ilan coordinates around solving AI alignment
[*cross-post from LessWrong*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AvANsxR88iiZziKPt/how-dath-ilan-coordinates-around-solving-alignment)
Summary
-------
* Eliezer Yudkowsky created dath ilan in 2014 as a fictional world where Yudkowsky is the median person. Since then... |
206c0751-6e7b-491c-a411-3dfff4275fde | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Probabilistic Abstractions I
(This post represents research in progress. I may think about these concepts entirely differently a few months from now, but for my own benefit I’m trying to exposit on them in order to force myself to understand them better.)
For many inference tasks, especially ones with either non-lin... |
1428e082-8cb5-495c-a068-3fe4176513a4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Density Zero Exploration
The idea here is due to Scott Garrabrant. All I did was write it.
Let's say a logical induction-based agent is making an infinite sequence of decisions, and is using ε-exploration on each decision. There are two desirable criteria, which are somewhat in conflict:
First, we want there to be e... |
3ca25b6b-efe9-42db-968f-5657774c0c87 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Google's new 540 billion parameter language model
Google just announced a very large language model that achieves SOTA across a very large set of tasks, mere days after DeepMind announced Chinchilla, and their discovery that data-scaling might be more valuable than we thought.
Here's the blog post, and here's the pa... |
5a07f859-2147-4950-90ff-2c9060edee6b | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | A Mathematical Model for Simulators
A bitstring B.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: now... |
a5db103c-40fa-4773-b7a3-3603886eb0bc | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | TTS audio of "Ngo and Yudkowsky on alignment difficulty"
My impression is that some people were put off by the length of the articles in Late 2021 MIRI Conversations. Personally, I've used my iPhone's text-to-speech functionality to listen to these and similarly long LessWrong posts as I do other things. After someone... |
cc4670f4-5d1d-4a3a-8722-cd18541b76f7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Preparing to Call a Family Dance
A week from Sunday I'm going to be calling a family dance. This is like a contra dance, but with dances that are a good fit for all ages, including very little kids. I haven't called one before, though I've danced at several over the years back to when I was little. Here's what I'm cur... |
6c08a472-a412-4d4a-a098-fd71ff25531f | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Automating Auditing: An ambitious concrete technical research proposal
*This post was originally written as a research proposal for the new AI alignment research organization Redwood Research, detailing an ambitious, concrete technical alignment proposal that I’m excited about work being done on, in a similar vein to ... |
5d9acc7a-c332-4596-980d-a7f395e899f3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Experimental EA funding [crosspost]
Over the course of 2015, we will be distributing $10,000 to completed projects which we believe will have a significant long-term humanitarian impact.
These awards are being made in exchange for certificates of impact. Here's how it works: you tell us about something good you did. ... |
b1d6b541-b37f-4d42-b849-55224effd8cf | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Gameplay Art
This post is about the development of our game based on Eliezer Yudkowsky's "The Twelve Virtues of Rationality".
Are games art?
It's an interesting question, but it seems that most people who answer that question in the affirmative are--intentionally or not--subscribing to the "hybrid art" view. That i... |
483a35c6-64eb-4bf6-b92b-72cf09c02215 | awestover/filtering-for-misalignment | Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results | id: post2518
( Thanks to Ajeya Cotra, Nick Beckstead, and Jared Kaplan for helpful comments on a draft of this post .) I really don’t want my AI to strategically deceive me and resist my attempts to correct its behavior. Let’s call an AI that does so egregiously misaligned (for the purpose of this post). Most possible... |
bded9030-de91-40ae-838c-623fd48786b2 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | My current uncertainties regarding AI, alignment, and the end of the world
As I read the [interview](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CpvyhFy9WvCNsifkY/discussion-with-eliezer-yudkowsky-on-agi-interventions) with Eliezer Yudkowsky on AI alignment problems, I had a couple of thoughts of my own. These are poorly research... |
c022867f-a0f4-4e3b-b336-abe8c1b929ef | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Weekly LW Meetups
This summary was posted to LW main on July 11th. The following week's summary is here.
Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:
* Australia - Online Hangout: 13 July 2014 06:30PM
* Frankfurt: Goal Factoring: 20 July 2014 02:00PM
* Houston, TX: 12 July 2014 02:00PM
* [Po... |
beded213-8a38-41cf-b796-e100e61034bf | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | 1Day Sooner is Hiring a Communications Director
1Day Sooner is hiring a new Communications Director to make the public case for our advocacy priorities.
We think this role has the potential to be very high-impact: human challenge trials can still potentially save thousands of lives by accelerating the licensure of n... |
667d111a-86dd-4d31-8dcd-a86a506ca111 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Deliberate Play
Deliberate practice is an important concept in sports and other high-performance endeavors. It is "practicing with a clear awareness of the specific components of a skill we’re aiming to improve and exactly how to improve them." If you haven't seen this idea before, stop and go read this article (where... |
1e7d7ae8-b7da-4ea5-8870-977d876cc05a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Weekly LW Meetups
This summary was posted to LW Main on August 19th. 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
Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:
* Australian-ish Online H... |
ba03e313-6176-4971-b7dc-dc329262a123 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Science and rationalism - a brief epistemological exploration
Is rationalism scientific? Yes. Is science rationalistic? Depends.
Within scientific disciplines, I believe that computer science is more rationalistic than others due to its deductibility (can be proved mathematically).
How about other fields?
Physics? ... |
7808e720-38e8-4d39-acbf-fb89bc6bcf59 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | If there were an interactive software teaching Yudkowskian rationality, what concepts would you want to see it teach?
I've been noticing some complaints (such as this post by Richard Ngo) lately about the quality of the modern LW community's contribution to the big picture of humanity's knowledge.
Ideally, if it were... |
6f786900-debd-407f-a558-19752aa60a48 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | May 2021 Newsletter
MIRI senior researcher Scott Garrabrant has a major new result, “Finite Factored Sets,” that he’ll be unveiling in an online talk this Sunday at noon Pacific time. ([Zoom link.](https://us02web.zoom.us/j/7151633248?pwd=a2ZkQlpwNU9IbWF5c3U4ejlvdFRvUT09)) For context on the result, see Scott’s new po... |
272cb53d-6511-4180-a146-ad56728471b1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | January 2021 gwern.net newsletter
None |
24866d85-dcac-4eed-9226-38290996dd81 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Poset: Exercises
Try these exercises to test your poset knowledge.
# Corporate Ladder
Imagine a company with five distinct roles: CEO, marketing manager, marketer, IT manager, and IT worker. At this company, if the CEO gives an order, everyone else must follow it. If an order comes from an IT manager, only IT worker... |
c3813ca8-f8dc-4e49-b2c9-7c38f39c38db | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Turning the Technical Crank
A few months ago, Vaniver wrote a really long post speculating about potential futures for Less Wrong, with a focus on the idea that the spread of the Less Wrong diaspora has left the site weak and fragmented. I wasn't here for our high water mark, so I don't really have an informed opinion... |
90de723f-005b-4eb0-b6e8-88d7abe236c9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why Bayesians should two-box in a one-shot
Consider Newcomb's problem.
Let 'general' be the claim that Omega is always right.
Let 'instance' be the claim that Omega is right about a particular prediction.
Assume you, the player, are not told the rules of the game until after Omega has made its prediction.
Consider... |
95cfd0f1-1a73-41e6-aeb0-3233cb98a983 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | 16 types of useful predictions
How often do you make predictions (either about future events, or about information that you don't yet have)? If you're a regular Less Wrong reader you're probably familiar with the idea that you should make your beliefs pay rent by saying, "Here's what I expect to see if my belief is co... |
d9e80cd5-2ddf-4a73-977e-2f3099882535 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Paths to failure
*Epistemic status: This is an intermediate result of the discussions between Daniel O’Connell, Ishan, Karl von Wendt, Péter Drótos, and Sofia Bharadia during the ongoing project “Developing specific failure stories about uncontrollable AI” at this year’s*[*virtual AI Safety Camp*](https://aisafety.cam... |
9de09d4f-b668-4202-b2b9-392be0250bd0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Mathematics for AIXI and Gödel machine
Just a quick question, does anyone know which math topics I'd have to learn to understand the work on AIXI and the Gödel machine? Any pointers or suggestions would be appreciated. |
c51434ce-82e5-4794-a438-5a76add90385 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Using Claude to convert dialog transcripts into great posts?
Dialogs are crucial for identifying errors, developing syntheses, and surfacing cruxes and critical uncertainties. They're also much easier to produce than structured writing or presentations, so we would like to think that they're also a good way of getting... |
b4ec6d63-6e19-4119-827a-64a88ecf9bad | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Underconstrained Abstractions
Today's post, Underconstrained Abstractions was originally published on 04 December 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> The problem with selecting abstractions is that for your data, there are probably lots of abstractions that fit the data equally well. In that ca... |
6ac6a108-f0c6-4d57-a0fe-b98e35eff8e1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Recovering the 'spark'
I mentioned in my first article that I am likely insane. I'm reiterating this (I hope) not to bring undue attention to myself, but to present myself as a reference case for a process that I hope will prove useful to myself and others.
I'm going to try to piece my mind back together. I'm offerin... |
e264a07a-c73f-4a0b-b4ce-9defa723a8b8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | That's a Thing!
Lauren Lee responded on facebook to my post about locating yourself as an instance of a class:
> Riffing on this LW post by Abram Demski (https://www.lesserwrong.com/…/placing-yourself-as-an-instan…)
>
> In particular this paragraph:
>
> << For example, if a person is trying to save money but sees a... |
0b0d4350-9ad5-43b0-aecd-c3d9731d0eb3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Can we efficiently explain model behaviors?
ARC’s current plan for solving ELK (and maybe also deceptive alignment) involves three major challenges:
1. Formalizing probabilistic heuristic argument as an operationalization of “explanation”
2. Finding sufficiently specific explanations for important model behaviors
... |
86ae25c0-33d2-4c2f-8c8f-cfd7cbb2ab65 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | D&D.Sci III: Mancer Matchups
Note: While not exactly *bad*, I believe - and the upvotes confirm - that this is my weakest D&D.Sci challenge by a considerable margin. If you're currently working through the archive, I'd recommend playing everything else before resorting to this one.
-----------------------------------... |
4b7c9240-0e2b-4b96-8f19-79a8bbdb5dfc | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Lesswrong Philosophy and Personal Identity
Although Elizier has dealt with personal identity questions (in terms of ruling out the body theory), he has not actually, as far as I know, "solved" the problem of Personal Identity as it is understood in philosophy. Nor, as far as I know, has any thinker (Robin Hanson, Yvai... |
7e89d608-3004-412f-955e-19f94190dc71 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Baseline of my opinion on LW topics
To avoid repeatedly saying the same, I'd like to state my opinion on a few topics I expect to be relevant to my future posts here.
You can take it as a baseline or reference for these topics. I do not plan to go into any detail here, and I will not state all my reasons or sources. ... |
de135446-e881-484f-ae0d-457af837a28b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Canberra Meetup Saturday November 5th
Discussion article for the meetup : Canberra Meetup Saturday November 5th
WHEN: 05 November 2011 11:00:00AM (-0700)
WHERE: CRISP G015, ANU campus, Canberra ACT 2601
(Posted on behalf of Nikita Samoylov)
This is a new meetup. We'll be mostly introducing each other. We'... |
14259e4c-9be9-4126-a088-411b24afb558 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Some ways of spending your time are better than others
This was a tough lesson for me. I spent 2 years trying to write my own programming language. This is not really a good way to spend your time.
Some part of me thought: "This programming language will never actually be useful to you or anyone. What's the point? W... |
a7bb9512-6a51-4bb5-9106-0b9a1e017617 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Building Safer AGI by introducing Artificial Stupidity
Introduction
------------
The Turing Test [Turing1950] was designed to replace the philosophical question "Can machines think ?" with a more pragmatic one: "Can digital computers imitate human behaviors in answering text questions ?" Since 1990, the Loebner Pri... |
2c15c585-a51e-4dfa-ab54-1b4a239bf193 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Subjective Naturalism in Decision Theory: Savage vs. Jeffrey–Bolker
Summary:
This post outlines how a view we call subjective naturalism[1] poses challenges to classical Savage-style decision theory. Subjective naturalism requires (i) richness (the ability to represent all propositions the agent can entertain, includ... |
66f4e800-4def-456a-9f57-1023809a2c16 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Reasons for someone to "ignore" you
I often feel guilty for ignoring other people's comments or questions, and frustrated when other people seem to be ignoring me. If I can't indicate to someone exactly why I'm not answering, or can't receive such an indication myself, I can at least help my future selves and others o... |
f127efce-8910-4941-8a6b-76f7bb78af00 | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | ""Whoever saves a single life, it is as if he had saved the whole world."– The Talmud, Sanhedrin 4:5It's a beautiful thought, isn't it? Feel that warm glow.I can testify that helping one person feels just as good as helping the whole world. Once upon a time, when I was burned out for the day and wasting time on the Int... |
71799745-2482-4610-b023-e18265892b96 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Slides: Potential Risks From Advanced AI
I just gave a guest lecture on potential risks from very advanced AI. I didn't end up having much time to put the slides together, so quality varies greatly between sections - some I pulled from more polished talks I had already given, some I pulled from other sources, and some... |
c9fbabcd-a27d-4bc6-9329-01081c273077 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Results from the interpretability hackathon
We ran a [mechanistic interpretability](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jgs7LQwmvErxR9BCC/current-themes-in-mechanistic-interpretability-research) [hackathon](https://itch.io/jam/interpretability) ([original post](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vxLrFdrqRPdaHJwgs/j... |
bd046215-8fd2-4379-9a21-4125bda00aed | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Leave a Line of Retreat
Today's post, Leave a Line of Retreat was originally published on 25 February 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> If you are trying to judge whether some unpleasant idea is true you should visualise what the world would look like if it were true, and what you would do in... |
0a3ba86f-ea74-4ea5-a87e-2d3cb6556a41 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Paper] A is for Absorption: Studying Feature Splitting and Absorption in Sparse Autoencoders
This research was completed for London AI Safety Research (LASR) Labs 2024. The team was supervised by Joseph Bloom (Decode Research). Find out more about the programme and express interest in upcoming iterations here.
This ... |
60b7fba7-c1bb-4bad-bc14-8e984c7e12e8 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Q&A with Stan Franklin on risks from AI
**[[Click here to see a list of all interviews](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Interview_series_on_risks_from_AI)]**
I am emailing experts in order to raise and estimate the academic awareness and perception of risks from AI.
[Stan Franklin](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan... |
72de12b9-0e0d-4404-9745-4142fa923b72 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How do you learn Solomonoff Induction?
I read about a fascinating technique described on Wikipedia as a mathematically formalized combination of Occam's razor and the Principle of Multiple Explanations. I want to add this to my toolbox. I'm dreaming of a concise set of actionable instructions for using Solomonoff indu... |
e40c4d33-db30-4659-9358-72162a21b4ef | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Rationalist's Tale
Warning: sappy personal anecdotes ahead! See also Eliezer's Coming of Age story, SarahC's Reflections on rationality a year out, and Alicorn's Polyhacking.
On January 11, 2007, at age 21, I finally whispered to myself: There is no God.
I felt the world collapse beneath me. I'd been raised to bel... |
d2a8d3a4-009a-405c-a4c7-3a3e0f7a380c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Reality is weirdly normal
Related to: When Anthropomorphism Became Stupid, Reductionism, How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3
"Reality is normal." That is: Surprise, confusion, and mystery are features of maps, not of territories. If you would think like reality, cultivate outrage at yourself for failing to intuit the d... |
65ea7cae-88d2-4fbd-80f4-c680096256f9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Noobs Need Rules
Cross-posted from Putanumonit.
----------------------------------------
If you ask someone who’s good at dating for dating advice they’ll often tell you to “just be yourself”. Since they themselves are good at dating, being themselves serves them well. But if your self isn’t good at dating, you shou... |
56c3a6fb-90e7-44a6-91e0-aed2b0727e42 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Team Shard Status Report
Team Shard is a nebulous alignment research collective, on paper siloed under John Wentworth's SERI MATS program, but in reality extending its many tendrils far across the Berkeley alignment community. "Shard theory" -- a name spoken of in hushed, mildly confused tones at many an EA hangout. T... |
1922a71b-9be6-4f6e-a221-bbcc1513c008 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Questions for shminux
As mister shminux mentioned somewhere, he is happy and qualified to answer questions in the field of the Relativity. Here is mine:
A long rod (a cylinder) could have a large escape velocity in the direction of its main axe. From its end, to the "infinity". Larger than the speed of light. While t... |
1297a43e-080a-4ad0-9fcf-5b97df5b7b9d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Can submarines swim?
[Note: This was written for a general audience; most of it is probably too basic for LessWrong. Thanks to the commenters who critiqued the original draft, this is the revised and published version.]
Did any science fiction predict that when AI arrived, it would be unreliable, often illogical, and... |
9ad8e65f-ff86-4099-8aeb-825fe9967d6d | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Autoregressive Uncertainty Modeling for 3D Bounding Box Prediction.
1 Introduction
---------------
 written on January 15th, 2021 on Learning the Prior/Imitative Generalization, cross-examination, and AI safety via debate, plus some discussion between Geoffrey and Rohin and some extra commenta... |
ac395e21-f730-4fac-9138-be2a4936cbc7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Regular Moscow Meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : Regular Moscow Meetup
WHEN: 31 August 2014 02:00:00PM (+0400)
WHERE: Russia, Moscow, ulitsa L'va Tolstogo 16
Here's our plan:
* A talk about Symbolic self-completion theory.
* A talk about Binaural beats.
* Training game.
* A talk about How to ... |
537550fc-a203-418b-b4b8-c95c1578c600 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Melbourne Rationality Dojo, February - Tai Chi & Lightning Talks
Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Rationality Dojo, February - Tai Chi & Lightning Talks
WHEN: 12 February 2017 03:30:00PM (+1100)
WHERE: Janet Lady Clarke Memorial Rotunda, Queen Victoria Gardens, Linlithgow Ave, Melbourne
Bring ... |
ce301b03-5609-4f12-8382-5e66143587f6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What's going on with this failure of Bayes to converge?
> There are circumstances (which might only occur with infinitesimal probability, which would be a relief) under which a perfect Bayesian reasoner with an accurate model and reasonable priors – that is to say, somebody doing everything right – will become more an... |
87b23b50-7075-4739-bc8f-34bec5067d9f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | An OV-Coherent Toy Model of Attention Head Superposition
Background
This project was inspired by Anthropic’s post on attention head superposition, which constructed a toy model trained to learn a circuit to identify skip-trigrams that are OV-incoherent (attending from multiple destination tokens to a single source to... |
811dff31-fc17-41a8-b862-61283978f5e1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Internal Information Cascades
Epistemic Status: This was written in 2010 and existed in LW's editing purgatory ever since. It doesn't seem extremely wrong. ("Remember 'light side epistemology'? Pepperidge Farms remembers.") Perhaps the biggest flaw is that I didn't hit the publication button sooner and this meta-flaw ... |
30ee6fb1-3ff8-4bcd-9bd1-9f1d64cdc2c9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is Local Order a Clue to Universal Entropy? How a Failed Professor Searches for a 'Sacred Motivational Order'
Context in ~100 words:
A month ago, I wrote about humor in military CPR training.
Gwern (wise/brutal as always) demanded “real stories, not theory.” So I shared three.
Was that enough to earn me the right to ... |
a8ab9521-f688-41ee-b588-ac386da99748 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Linkpost] Mapping Brains with Language Models: A Survey
This is a linkpost for https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.05126.
> Over the years, many researchers have seemingly made the same observation: Brain and language model activations exhibit some structural similarities, enabling linear partial mappings between features e... |
ff9b058b-649e-4b5c-a65c-43753e20bd0d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Family-line selection optimizer
O3 and Claude 3.7 are terribly dishonest creatures. Gemini 2.5 can be a bit dishonest too, even though Google writes tests like mad. I would bet that lie-proof benchmarks will be difficult and expensive to make and that the lie-proofing techniques won't easily generalize outside of codi... |
0bbe6a99-74f6-4338-80b5-e2681b80921c | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | Quantifying the probability of existential catastrophe: A reply to Beard et al.
Introduction A recent article by Beard, Rowe, and Fox (Beard, Rowe, & Fox, 2020; henceforth BRF) surveys methods used to quantify the probabilities of global and existential catastrophes. BRF is a valuable contribution to the study of gl... |
b96ecce3-e684-416d-823c-3c867aa8fe78 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Wanting to Want
In response to a request, I am going to do some basic unpacking of second-order desire, or "metawanting". Basically, a second-order desire or metawant is a desire about a first-order desire.
Example 1: Suppose I am very sleepy, but I want to be alert. My desire to be alert is first-order. Suppose a... |
0a516930-108c-4776-864b-ef7953cdd5a7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Can Counterfactuals Be True?
Today's post, Can Counterfactuals Be True? was originally published on 24 July 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> How can we explain counterfactuals having a truth value, if we don't talk about "nearby possible worlds" or any of the other explanations offered by ph... |
c3510bb6-10e9-4c5d-a46c-703c7c4e7620 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Basic Mathematics of Predictive Coding
This is an overview of the classic 1999 paper by Rajesh Rao and David Ballard that introduced predictive coding. I'm going to focus on explaining the mathematical setup instead of just staying at a conceptual level. I'll do this in a series of steps of increasing detail and handh... |
5bb676ff-2ddd-423f-a550-ea288c761036 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | 3-P Group optimal for discussion?
***Assertion 1:*** **Optimal size for a weekly discussion group is 3 and the optimal setting is in person**
After 8 years hiatus on Lesswrong, i'd like to revisit lesswrong. In my time away, I have learned that categorically the best medium to learn something is through real human to... |
8eacdc8e-e313-4354-bf5d-46cfd55de6a4 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | AI as a Civilizational Risk Part 2/6: Behavioral Modification
Altering people for the worse using AI is easier than altering them for the better.
**Redefining what “Capital” means**
Narrow AIs and optimization algorithms of social media news feeds have already caused many adverse outcomes without being AGIs. Whe... |
aa77b395-07a9-435d-8e55-5daef1b128a0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Brussels monthly meetup: games!
Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels monthly meetup: games!
WHEN: 12 October 2013 01:00:00PM (+0200)
WHERE: Rue des Alexiens 55 1000 Bruxelles
Second Saturday of the month is coming up. As usual, we will meet at 1 pm at La Fleur en papier doré, close to the Brussels ... |
701883fc-ed0e-4a1c-aaa7-831b3bdc3542 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The low cost of human preference incoherence
Note: working on a research agenda, hence the large amount of small individual posts, to have things to link to in the main documents.
In aiming for an adequate synthesis of human preferences, I tend to preserve quirks and even biases of humans, rather than aiming for eleg... |
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