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7.55M
d41a37dc-7b00-492d-be07-30cbe8dba3b7
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AI risk hub in Singapore? I tentatively guess that if Singapore were to become a thriving hub for AI risk reduction, this would reduce AI risk by 16%. Moreover I think making this happen is fairly tractable and extremely neglected. In this post I sketch my reasons. I'm interested to hear what the community thinks. My...
c75e9686-0bdf-4fde-96e9-e8bab3587015
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Sparse Autoencoders: Future Work *Mostly my own writing, except for the 'Better Training Methods' section which was written by* [*@Aidan Ewart*](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/aidan-ewart?mention=user)*.* We made a lot [of progress](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/E8imxQo96WgDCMxkA/replication-conjecture-s-spars...
05fed861-db78-4ffb-938c-684c07917fd8
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Call for submissions: Choice of Futures survey questions **TL;DR: independent researcher** **(M.A. Philosophy) crowdsourcing questions for an upcoming survey:** **submit** [**here**](https://airtable.com/shrV2dCDwEW6jo6Jz) **some** **controversial societal goals and fears** **you think we should get cross-comparison p...
71a54ce5-fe35-49e0-9edc-e8fc55b57dbf
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Anthropic Reasoning by CDT in Newcomb's Problem By orthonormal's suggestion, I take this out of comments.   Consider a CDT agent making a decision in a Newcomb's problem, in which Omega is known to make predictions by perfectly simulating the players. Assume further that the agent is capable of anthropic reasoning a...
e244d03d-92d9-4e34-842d-88f8730a2ac3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Alignment First, Intelligence Later Now that Softmax—my favorite new AI company—is public, I can finally share this. They’ve funded my research and I’m very excited about what they’re doing! ---------------------------------------- Almost all frontier AI labs are building powerful systems from the ground up, hoping ...
994167eb-a8d1-4997-9b3d-58205bf918b0
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
The Windfall Clause has a remedies problem *Thanks to Holly Scott, Aryan Yadav, Jide Alaga, Will Greenman, Cullen O’Keefe, Haydn Bellfield and Peter Wills for all your feedback and suggestions on this post.* --- This post is a supplement to the (forthcoming) TaWWWC - England & Wales, a discussion of the viability ...
8003affe-9509-40e8-9326-7ee4ba38ae92
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Can Current LLMs be Trusted To Produce Paperclips Safely? There's a browser-based game about paperclip maximization: Universal Paperclips, where you control an AI tasked with running a paperclip factory. Initially, you buy raw material, adjust the price per clip, and invest in "AutoClippers" to increase production. T...
24ecb310-07cd-4df4-9f35-b44a3bad0597
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
You're a Space Wizard, Luke "My father didn't fight in the wars. He was a navigator on a spice freighter," said Luke. "That's what your uncle told you. Basic security protocol. You don't tell a young child sensitive information about your participation in an ongoing civil war. Which reminds me. I have here something ...
ca339e38-2708-4916-b9bf-7e9075cde264
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Fake Utility Functions Every now and then, you run across someone who has discovered the One Great Moral Principle, of which all other values are a mere derivative consequence. I run across more of these people than you do.  Only in my case, it's people who know *the amazingly simple utility function that is all you...
a824794f-7ed9-4440-b0da-1de999599bfe
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Fun with +12 OOMs of Compute *Or: Big Timelines Crux Operationalized* ======================================== What fun things could one build with +12 orders of magnitude of compute? By ‘fun’ I mean ‘powerful.’ This hypothetical is highly relevant to AI timelines, for reasons I’ll explain later. *Summary (Spoilers)...
5af90283-cc33-4c38-abd2-56ad4944d56c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Dance Differentiation Let's imagine you have a community where there's enough interest for something like a dance every week. What's better: a single dance with a weekly schedule ("every Friday") or multiple dances dividing up the month ("1st Fridays", "2nd Fridays", etc)? While there are advantages to both, I think t...
cd2690b1-cee3-4ea3-9b21-f4abe8b46b2e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Hufflepuff Leadership and Fighting Entropy (In which my mild annoyance at a particular garbage bin outputs an essay that I think is pretty generalizable and important, but maybe is just a rant. *shrug*) Previously: * Project Hufflepuff [note: sort of deprecated in favor of Archipelago] * Melting Gold There's an i...
0d8c5ab2-2cb7-4092-b628-fc72303ef41d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Berkeley meetup: board game night Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley meetup: board game night WHEN: 05 September 2012 07:00:00PM (-0700) WHERE: Berkeley, CA Nisan is out of town, so I will be hosting Wednesday's meetup at Zendo. We will be having a board game night. Zendo's game library has Robo ...
6c920f03-123f-460b-95bf-194f826b2855
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
An Update On The Campaign For AI Safety Dot Org I am cross posting the below content from [the latest newsletter](https://www.campaignforaisafety.org/email/ccb102db-c74a-4bbf-8677-ef52c567e074/?ref=campaign-for-ai-safety-newsletter) from the campaignforaisafety.org  I did not write this content but as an advocate for...
ce0e551d-8bdb-4cc4-b012-abf921afc1ef
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Rationality Quotes May 2013 Here's another installment of rationality quotes. The usual rules apply: * Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.) * Do n...
1b964292-85fc-4546-8a72-b2ae8c13c17b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
More Hyphenation > “MAN EATING PIRANHA MISTAKENLY SOLD AS PET FISH” — example news headline from Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style The rule is that you use hyphens for compound modifiers like the ones in natural-language processing, high-impact opportunities, cost-effectiveness measures, high-status employers, and s...
08decc28-f49c-4b1b-9ce2-e6b8d4c1586a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
What are the relative speeds of AI capabilities and AI safety? If you want to solve AI safety before AI capabilities become too great, then it seems that AI safety must have some of the following: * More researchers * Better researchers * Less necessary insights * Easier necessary insights * Ability to steal ins...
2011bbc7-7ed6-46c3-b340-623c9f31b720
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Some thoughts on double crux. [Epistemic status: quite speculative. I've attended a CFAR workshop including a lesson on double crux, and found it wore counterintuitive than I expected. I ran my own 3-day event going through the CFAR courses with friends, including double crux, but I don't think anyone started doing do...
b0411a8c-a577-4f79-9916-56cb513068ad
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AI, Animals, & Digital Minds 2025: apply to speak by Wednesday! AI, Animals, & Digital Minds (AIADM) 2025 is a one-day conference and two-day unconference exploring the intersection of AI and sentient nonhumans, both biological (i.e. animals) and potentially artificial. Learn more and apply here Taking place in Londo...
08091fb7-8902-4164-9039-d7d20ce3c6f8
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
ML Safety Newsletter #4 Welcome to the 4th issue of the ML Safety Newsletter. In this edition, we cover: * How “model-based optimization” environments can be used to research proxy gaming * How models can express their uncertainty through natural language * A new plug-and-play state-of-the-art OOD detection technique...
e2576df8-eeee-460a-907f-19bef8920da0
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
April 2019 Newsletter #### Updates * New research posts: [Simplified Preferences Needed, Simplified Preferences Sufficient](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/sEqu6jMgnHG2fvaoQ/partial-preferences-needed-partial-preferences-sufficient); [Smoothmin and Personal Identity](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/MxLK2fv...
ab76f5fd-195e-481c-8453-f1fe06a25c9a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Burdensome Details > Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative . . . > > —Pooh-Bah, in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado The conjunction fallacy is when humans assign a higher probability to a proposition of the form “A and B” than to one of...
1ce7aafd-a5da-48dc-9e91-3f0c047e7f3f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
When you already know the answer - Using your Inner Simulator I first encountered the idea of Inner Simulators at a CFAR workshop. Credit to them, and read the relevant chapter of their Handbook to see their take. If you’re already familiar with the idea, or find this post slow, I expect you’ll still enjoy the list of...
370c8cf4-ecc8-43c0-886b-1202951f02ba
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
Summer MIRI Updates In our last major updates—our 2017 [strategic update](https://intelligence.org/2017/04/30/2017-updates-and-strategy/) and [fundraiser](https://intelligence.org/2017/12/01/miris-2017-fundraiser/) posts—we said that our current focus is on technical research and executing our biggest-ever [hiring](ht...
df6a93b8-6b34-49c3-9064-4967220f2837
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
[LINK] More Bathtubs An interesting article today on the correlation heuristic/fallacy w.r.t. finance. It describes how anchoring and availability bias contribute to difficulty understanding the difference between stocks and flows.
7ffa77e1-0ebe-4218-8de5-e585aa83a6a9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Kurzban et al. on opportunity cost models of mental fatigue and resource-based models of willpower An opportunity cost model of subjective effort and task performance (h/t lukeprog) is a very interesting paper on why we accumulate mental fatigue: Kurzban et al. suggest an opportunity cost model, where intense focus on...
34bbc8e3-a509-4766-8abb-44baafb8c20b
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Psychological Disorders and Problems There are two types of psychological issues: disorders and problems. Disorders are so massive, so life-altering that we can’t miss them: schizophrenia, crippling social anxiety, destructive addiction… They scream “danger” in neon red blinking letters. We know and fear them because...
9ac7e1bb-9b38-490b-b6dc-dadd9ea6498a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A Study of Scarlet: The Conscious Mental Graph Sequel to: Seeing Red: Dissolving Mary's Room and Qualia Seriously, you should read first: Dissolving the Question, How an Algorithm Feels From Inside In the previous post, we introduced the concept of qualia and the thought experiment of Mary's Room, set out to dissolv...
c3bfe3df-d453-4ad5-9adb-db53d886626e
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs
Blogs
Conversation with Holden Karnofsky about Future-Oriented Philanthropy Recently, Eliezer and I had an email conversation with Holden Karnofsky to discuss future-oriented philanthropy, including MIRI. The participants were: * [Eliezer Yudkowsky](http://yudkowsky.net/) (research fellow at MIRI) * [Luke Muehlhauser](htt...
8bb38982-06f2-484f-857f-e441f8c91b6e
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
AISC Project: Benchmarks for Stable Reflectivity [*Apply*](https://aisafety.camp/#Projects) *to work on this project with me at AI Safety Camp 2024 before 1st December 2023.* ![](https://res.cloudinary.com/lesswrong-2-0/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/mirroredImages/RHojGPWLgdFLk3PAt/s4qrovzlshvb9qs2xgzu)Summary ======...
25eafa91-7b62-488d-baee-0d54e8ded07e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Redwood Research’s current project Here’s a description of the project Redwood Research is working on at the moment. First I’ll say roughly what we’re doing, and then I’ll try to explain why I think this is a reasonable applied alignment project, and then I’ll talk a bit about the takeaways I’ve had from the project s...
56db5af6-9b59-4cf4-8559-d334da8315e9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Simultaneous Footbass and Footdrums For the past year or so I've had two options for my feet with my rhythm stage setup. I can play bass: Or I can play drums: But when I play mandolin I want both! I tried a system where I play bass but whichever drum pedal I tap triggers a kick as well, which sort of works but ...
0a6b5fe2-23f3-49af-af1b-a1020d1e934b
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs
Other
An Architectural Risk Analysis of Machine Learning Systems: Toward More Secure Machine Learning AN ARCHITECTURAL RISK ANALYSIS OF MACHINE LEARNING SYSTEMS: Toward More Secure Machine Learning Gary McGraw, Ph.D. Harold Figueroa, Ph.D. Victor Shepardson Richie Bonett Berryville Institute of Machine Learning (BIML)...
e4e9bb44-4ce3-4f88-b320-1976d394d243
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
It's Time To Stop Dancing At this point it is likely that the coronavirus will spread widely, and the majority of people will get it. Still, it matters enormously whether we all get it at once, or over a longer period. This is a disease where a lot of people need hospitalization for respiratory problems, and if it spr...
bf79520e-0afd-4a37-87e0-8959c52cb6d8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Relevant pre-AGI possibilities Epistemic status: I started this as an AI Impacts research project, but given that it’s fundamentally a fun speculative brainstorm, it worked better as a blog post. The default, when reasoning about advanced artificial general intelligence (AGI), is to imagine it appearing in a world th...
f772c25a-bdfa-4316-9fb1-8eddbed314d5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Subagents, trauma and rationality [Content note: discussion of trauma, child and sexual abuse, sexual violence, lack of self-worth, dissociation, PTSD, flashbacks, DID, personality disorders; some mildly graphic examples of abuse and trauma mentioned in text form] > I have spent over two years doing emotional support...
be75cd7f-798e-465b-9a27-657cbaf04814
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Chapter 62: The Stanford Prison Experiment, Final Minerva gazed up at the clock, the golden hands and silver numerals, the jerking motion. Muggles had invented that, and until they had, wizards had not bothered keeping time. Bells, timed by a sanded hourglass, had served Hogwarts for its classes when it was built. It ...
02280d68-0a47-4c06-b793-b9c2be4b92fb
LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct
LessWrong
"I was somewhat disappointed to find a lack of Magic: the Gathering players on LessWrong when I asked about it in the off-topic thread. You see, competitive Magic is one of the best, most demanding rationality battlefields that I know about. Furthermore, Magic is discussed extensively on the Internet, and many articles...
e42e1745-2b5e-4ab8-866b-2aa01fe71ff8
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Pollsters Should Publish Question Translations Pew recently commissioned Gallup to run a poll in Israel on attitudes to social media censorship. They found high support for banning various kinds of speech: The fourth question, especially, is disturbing: 59% want to ban publicly expressing sympathy for civilians ...
0edb6b91-f3f1-4233-b77e-12defbeee86d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Exploring the Platonic Representation Hypothesis Beyond In-Distribution Data The Platonic Representation Hypothesis (PRH) suggests that models trained with different objectives and on various modalities can converge to a shared statistical understanding of reality. While this is an intriguing idea, initial experiments...
714a5efe-0266-464d-a2f6-5f753fb7a169
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : San Antonio Meetup: CFAR Techniques Discussion article for the meetup : San Antonio Meetup: CFAR Techniques WHEN: 27 December 2015 02:00:00PM (-0600) WHERE: 12651 Vance Jackson Rd #118, San Antonio, TX 78230 Bubble tea, frozen yogurt, and discussion at Yumi Berry! All are welcome! New Meetup to discuss ra...
76f1c21e-783c-414e-8568-a951e2e74013
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Roads are at maximum efficiency always On a theoretical road, the number of cars traveling is proportional to the speed of each car, so that the total number of motorists is constant regardless of speeds. Assuming all cars are traveling at a speed that gives 3 seconds of time between cars, any change to speed limit ...
0e7b6635-f570-4936-a03a-ddf22a11570c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Judgments often smuggle in implicit standards Our brains often use sleight-of-hand to hide fear-based motivation behind a guise of objectivity. This is particularly linked to the word “good”, which does a lot of work in a lot of people’s psychologies. For example, people often think that they, or their work, is “not g...
f90d21b2-ebdf-467b-baee-54adc6a60123
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Ambient control of the arithmetical hierarchy? Responding to this: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/8ys/a_way_of_specifying_utility_functions_for_udt/ I had a similar idea a few months ago that highlights different aspects of the problem which I find confusing. In my version the UDT agent controls bits of Chaitin...
7d11cec7-2bfe-41bf-91c9-51fa2068abc3
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Systematic Lucky Breaks Many people can point to significant events that improved their lives in a positive way. They often refer to these as "lucky breaks", and take it for granted that such events are rare. But most of the time "lucky breaks" don't need to be uncommon-you can often reverse engineer the reasons behin...
30d8a57c-edc1-4a5b-80eb-9f0ba534a6c9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AI-Feynman as a benchmark for what we should be aiming for Very recently, I was made aware of a quite remarkable addition to the world of hobbyist AI in the form of Silviu-Marian Udrescu and Max Tegmarks new AI, 'AI-Feynman'. For those already familiar with the software Eureqa, and its potential to help humanity as a ...
ad74b835-41ae-4550-9cf9-21f7bb8ed504
awestover/filtering-for-misalignment
Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results
id: post644 It could be the case that these two goals are separable and independent: “AI safety”: avoiding existential risk, s-risk, actively negative outcomes “AI getting-everything-we-want ” ( CEV ) This is what Davidad calls this the Deontic Sufficiency Hypothesis . If the hypothesis is true, it should be possible ...
681d0387-3b97-4712-afaf-25c181cabbeb
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Non-Adversarial Goodhart and AI Risks In a recent paper by Scott Garrabrant and myself, we formalized and extended the categories Scott proposed for Goodhart-like phenomena. (If you haven't read either his post or the new paper, it's important background for most of this post.) Here, I lay out my further intuitions a...
b3607335-6706-4d67-9a64-70822a83a5c1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The lessons of Xanadu One of my all-time favorite articles is “The Curse of Xanadu,” by Gary Wolf, which ran in WIRED Magazine in 1995. On the surface, it’s a piece of tech history, a story of a dramatic failure. But look closer, and you can find deep philosophical insight. Xanadu was a grand vision of a hypertext sy...
6ebd4a35-b0ff-48c7-b5aa-f2430ff2968a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Second-Time Free Many contra dances have tried a "first-time free" policy, but I think "second-time free" is usually a better choice. Most first-timers show up expecting to pay something, so you might as well take their money. Many first-timers don't end up coming back, so better to reserve your incentive for the ones...
dcba5f05-766e-4b78-93df-3f691bb41995
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Resurrecting all humans ever lived as a technical problem Note: the newest version of this essay and its translations to various languages are available at this link.   ---------------------------------------- One day, we might be able to bring back to life every human ever lived, by the means of science and technol...
9fa2675f-78bf-4b2f-a388-a9e6232d5426
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Finite Factored Sets: Introduction and Factorizations This is a longer, more mathematically dense introduction to "Finite Factored Sets." For a shorter introduction, see my Topos talk/transcript. ---------------------------------------- Abstract: We propose a new approach to temporal inference, inspired by the Pearl...
062d5bdb-c0be-4960-9433-79281c37c171
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Review and Comparison: Onto-Cartography & Promise Theory Introduction This is my first post here, although I've lurked for five or six years. I came up with this idea when I noticed similarities in these two books and reread them - both tackle some flavor of practical ontology, but from different angles. The first is ...
6132db5c-7855-414b-b47c-cbd926bc2fa5
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Thoughts on open source AI Epistemic status: I only ~50% endorse this, which is below my typical bar for posting something. I’m more bullish on “these are arguments which should be in the water supply and discussed” than “these arguments are actually correct.” I’m not an expert in this, I’ve only thought about it for ...
a9256bee-4ff0-4d5a-9d48-e818dd6282a1
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
My Advice for Incoming SERI MATS Scholars I have participated in SERI MATS 2.0 in John's stream. Here is some advice based on my experience. Be Nice ======= The AI alignment community is pretty small. If you are an ass, everybody will know that you are an ass. The same holds to a lesser extent for being nice. When I...
8733268c-a504-4485-af19-5656709588f9
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
You Can Do Futarchy Yourself Long ago, in the year 2000, Robin Hanson raised the question of whether we should vote on values and bet on beliefs. He proposes a form of government called futarchy, in which people vote on values and bet on beliefs. Under futarchy, values experts propose measures of global welfare, poli...
72d0b501-f660-417f-b301-27fad1e71ff0
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Deepmind's Gato: Generalist Agent From the abstract, emphasis mine: > The agent, which we refer to as Gato, works as a multi-modal, multi-task, multi-embodiment generalist policy. The same network with the same weights can play Atari, caption images, chat, stackblocks with a real robot arm and much more, deciding bas...
e3a1d2ba-1dff-410a-b506-72b17b811ed9
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital
Arbital
Dependent messages can be encoded cheaply Say you want to transmit a [2-message](https://arbital.com/p/3v9), a 4-message, and a 256-message to somebody. For example, you might want to tell them which way a coin came up, a cardinal direction, and a letter (encoded as one byte of [ASCII](https://arbital.com/p/https://en...
104267e9-101f-4940-960c-ff2e64ec2a14
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Anchoring focalism and the Identifiable victim effect: Bias in Evaluating AGI X-Risks Anchoring focalism The tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor", on one trait or piece of information when making decisions – usually the first piece of information that we acquire on that subject. Examples:  * Judging the conte...
76c9af02-5ae8-40bb-950b-c90fb669ed39
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Neural uncertainty estimation review article (for alignment) EDIT 1/27: This post neglects the entire sub-field of estimating uncertainty of learned representations, as in https://openreview.net/pdf?id=e9n4JjkmXZ. I might give that a separate follow-up post.   Introduction Suppose you've built some AI model of huma...
2838892f-d2cc-4410-b552-445b09954f4d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The (Unofficial) Rationality: A-Z Anki Deck I'm a huge fan of Anki. I love being able to remember what I read for however long I want to. However, most Anki decks I've found about rationality are nonexistent, unhelpful, out of date, or poorly formatted. Recently, I found this post from 2023 that used GPT-4 to make a ...
ec25ab43-8d62-49c4-b7b2-5679ac7ec938
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Taming the Fire of Intelligence A recent article by Max Hellriegel Holderbaum and me raised the worry that AI alignment might be impossible in principle. The article has not gotten the attention it deserves and I suspect there are three main reasons for this. First, it is quite long. Secondly, a huge chunk of it devel...
0bc8ff24-698a-4e29-93ef-cdd723143b03
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
To use computers well, learn their rules To use computers effectively, you don't need to learn a lot about particular programs and features. Learn the near-universal rules of computing and common interface designs. The details are readily inferred. The rules also apply to things beyond what you might think of as "com...
862bc02f-c5cd-4aa1-b547-4e710f8250d1
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Self-supervised learning & manipulative predictions Abstract: I wrote recently about Self-Supervised Learning and AGI Safety in general. This post discusses one potential failure mode in more detail. Take a self-supervised learning system, designed to output accurate predictions for masked parts of a data-file. Now pu...
e03cc813-d741-4ff8-a00d-3eee5c0abb33
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Case for Overconfidence is Overstated (Written with Matthew Mandelkern.) TLDR: When asked to make interval estimates, people appear radically overconfident—far more so than when their estimates are elicited in other ways. But an accuracy-informativity tradeoff can explain this: asking for intervals incentivizes p...
9281aee8-1d9b-4b91-822e-4813b33d4d2e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Transcript of a Twitter Discussion on EA from June 2022 Recently on Twitter, in response to seeing a contest announcement asking for criticism of EA, I offered some criticism of that contest’s announcement. That sparked a bunch of discussion about central concepts in Effective Altruism. Those discussions ended up i...
53bdcbcd-74e3-4534-8b03-b2c93433432e
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
My script for organizing OBNYC meetups (I wrote this about a year ago, so parts of it might be out of date; I'm not much involved with OBNYC anymore.) Context Overcoming Bias NYC, the rationalist meetup in New York City, has for the last several years had a system of rotating month captains, who each volunteer to ...
9dc56038-9fbd-48b6-a384-58b329a32b11
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
"Extortionate" strategy beats tit-for-tat in iterated Prisoner's Dilemma Less Wrong had a Prisoner's Dilemma contest some time back, whose results I've forgotten. Perhaps it should be rerun with William H. Press & Freeman Dyson's proposed extortionate strategies. I hope Pinker gives a response at Edge.org, since P.D ...
21655769-e5d4-4b47-ac1b-649ac20776c8
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Daisy-chaining epsilon-step verifiers Question regarding an alignment problem: one of the key difficulties in alignment is (said by Eliezer Yudkowsky to be) that if "the verifier is broken" (i.e. the human verifier measuring alignment can be fooled by the [alien actress](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/16288379...
952d305c-f58c-445e-ac09-4cf1dc495d5c
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Edinburgh LW meetup, Saturday May 28, 2pm Location: Delhi Cafe, 67 Nicolson Street Map: http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?ie=UTF8&t=h&cid=1874860554950886070 I will be there with the Oxford Book of Aphorisms (let me know if you object to this) Apologies for the fact that there was no meetup last week, some coordinati...
8dcec0ea-f4c1-4f43-8cad-277be8a6e727
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Notes on Forgiveness This post examines the virtues of forgiveness, mercy, clemency, and epieikeia. I mostly explore what other people have learned about these virtues, rather express my own opinions about them, though I’ve been selective about what I found interesting or credible, according to my own inclinations. I ...
0107f8f6-3d53-4a12-82f7-a7abb2d07203
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Capability amplification (Note: In the past I have referred to this process as ‘bootstrapping’ or ‘policy amplification,’ but those terms are too broad — there are other dimensions along which policies can be amplified, and ‘bootstrapping’ is used all over the place.) Defining the “intended behavior” of a powerful AI...
101dd6c2-6403-4e2f-b3ab-0f8b587b916d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Preprint is out! 100,000 lumens to treat seasonal affective disorder Let’s give people with winter depression (seasonal affective disorder, SAD) LOTS OF LIGHT and see what happens! Our preprint is out now for our paper “100,000 lumens to treat seasonal affective disorder: A proof of concept RCT of bright, whole-room,...
4adfe0ac-96aa-4cb8-bf29-f14c35824a42
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Stupid Questions June 2017 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 ...
623ef0c8-37eb-4018-90c1-d13eb4492b70
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube
Youtube Transcripts
Miles Brundage Limitations and Risks of Machine Ethics FHI Winter Intelligence so my talk is on limitations and risks of machine ethics and by that i mean reasons why it's difficult to ensure that machines behave in a reliably ethical fashion the term machine ethics has traditionally been used to refer to near-term a...
89678ca7-051f-4c9b-88ee-d86d390fd566
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Durham NC/Triangle Area: Value of Information/Curiosity Discussion article for the meetup : Durham NC/Triangle Area: Value of Information/Curiosity WHEN: 01 August 2013 07:00:00PM (-0400) WHERE: 420 WEST Geer St., Durham NC 27701 Meet at Cocoa Cinnamon for discussion and activities on Value of Information ...
66fcaf38-e77f-431f-80b0-83986ae46f32
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
The Worst Problem You've Ever Encountered and Solved. And the One You Didn't, Yet! EDIT: No one was doing what the post suggests, so I accepted an idea from one of the comments, and embedded my response in a comment, not the post itself   I'd like to ask this question to you, and I'll respond it myself as well. Wha...
2cf4b7af-f948-44b8-8475-7dfad56b3744
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
AI Tools for Existential Security Rapid AI progress is the greatest driver of existential risk in the world today. But — if handled correctly — it could also empower humanity to face these challenges. Executive summary 1. Some AI applications will be powerful tools for navigating existential risks Three clusters of...
b3882565-ec9c-4ef8-af1c-f8287e4da451
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Bayesianism and use of Evidence in Social Deduction Games You look around the table at four friends -- people who share your hatred for the evil empire, or so you thought. At this table, where the resistance meet to plan their missions, fully two of five the operatives are spies, infiltrating the rebels to sabotage th...
0e804408-d524-4581-935e-dbf4e026ef41
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum
Alignment Forum
Representational Tethers: Tying AI Latents To Human Ones *This post is part of my* [*hypothesis subspace*](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/H3xEgE7bPGKvucfQk) *sequence, a living collection of proposals I'm exploring at* [*Refine.*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5uiQkyKdejX3aEHLM/how-to-diversify-conceptual-alignment-the...
ba3dd326-dbc2-48fb-9f66-413bf8402108
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games WHEN: 06 November 2016 04:30:00PM (-0400) WHERE: Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture We will be meeting in the courtyard to hang out, play games, and engage in fun conversation. (Reminder...
28167079-74e1-4fa6-b567-987fee3c5ec0
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
Everything's normal until it's not *Note: This is a quick write-up of some thoughts I've had recently about communicating AI risk.*   There are two claims I wish to argue for concerning understanding and communicating AI risk. Neither of them is entirely original, but I thought it is worth articulating them clearly...
d4de5545-40e2-412e-858b-2dab49edf544
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/distill
Distill Scientific Journal
A Discussion of 'Adversarial Examples Are Not Bugs, They Are Features': Learning from Incorrectly Labeled Data #rebuttal, .comment-info { background-color: hsl(54, 78%, 96%); border-left: solid hsl(54, 33%, 67%) 1px; padding: 1em; color: hsla(0, 0%, 0%, 0.67); } #header-info { margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 1...
3bc87e1a-1117-4536-a894-83faee15b96d
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Absolute denial for atheists This article is a deliberate meta-troll. To be successful I need your trolling cooperation. Now hear me out. In The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You Eliezer talks about asognostics, who have one of their arm paralyzed, and what's most interesting are in absolute denial of this - in sp...
0f51d12c-af00-43f0-bacc-67e37b62eab4
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Long-Term Future Fund Ask Us Anything (September 2023) The Long-Term Future Fund has an AMA up on the Effective Altruism Forum. There’s no real deadline for questions, but let’s say we have a soft commitment to focus on questions asked on or before September 8th. I'd prefer centralizing the questions to one place. I...
9a288713-b294-4c7f-ae75-ccd491f5a8e7
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
In praise of emotive communication
5a30ba7c-9079-4478-aab1-848e09a07f8a
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Google's Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt: apparently a transhumanist It makes a lot of sense for the Google people to be transhumanist, with Sergey Brin and Larry Page working with the Singularity University, but still I was surprised to hear this on the new Colbert Report (of the 23rd of April): > Colbert: Can I liv...
8f8b0a49-55fb-458c-bcaf-384aaf7d9061
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Private Manned Moonbase in the 1990s, Yet Another Planning Fallacy Back in the 1990s I came across a site describing a plan for returning to the moon via privately funded enterprise. They presented a Reference Mission, a timeline (raise some money now, design the hardware, build the hardware, hire a launch vehicle, ge...
f89a45ee-d9ad-4fa6-806a-0ac46997c86f
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Rationality Reading Group: Part H: Against Doublethink This is part of a semi-monthly reading group on Eliezer Yudkowsky's ebook, Rationality: From AI to Zombies. For more information about the group, see the announcement post. ---------------------------------------- Welcome to the Rationality reading group. This f...
af93afbc-dd9e-4a48-a18a-b920071292d7
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Dating Roundup #6 Previously: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5 Dating Roundup #4 covered dating apps. Roundup #5 covered opening without them. Dating Roundup #6 covers everything else. TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. You’re Single Because You Can’t Handle Basic Logistics. 2. You’re Single Because You Don’t Ask Questions. 3. You’re S...
1a0270ae-eb68-4380-b43a-dec6bedff106
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital
Arbital
Reflectively consistent degree of freedom A "reflectively consistent degree of freedom" is when a self-modifying AI can have multiple possible properties $X_i \in X$ such that an AI with property $X_1$ wants to go on being an AI with property $X_1,$ and an AI with $X_2$ will ceteris paribus only choose to self-modify ...
fda55b06-122c-418c-a407-6a1c71ba1070
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Communication: A Simple Multi-Stage Model [Communication is a lot like a game of telephone. Information needs to flow from your head to the the medium to the other person to the other person's head. As a result, there are lots of places where miscommunication can happen. Some actionable suggestions are given for how t...
db341733-14d0-4b6b-af9b-732daaf3c409
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Fun math facts about 2023 2023=7×172 Maybe that's not fun enough? Try this: 2023=211−52 Or better yet: 20233=31176029+245568392384321573 We can scientifically quantify how fun a math fact is, so we can rest assured that this is the funnest fact about 2023 ever discovered. But if it's not to your liking: 2023=21...
3d55e745-bfbe-49d5-96c9-2cd1fa1a01f6
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum
Effective Altruism Forum
Student competition for drafting a treaty on moratorium of large-scale AI capabilities R&D [**Campaign for AI safety**](https://www.campaignforaisafety.org/)has announced a competition for the drafting of an international treaty on moratorium of large-scale AI capabilities research and development. The competition is...
cf045f98-8f99-4730-8a74-69ee0db6c6a6
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
"Decentralized Autonomous Education" - Call for Reviewers (Seeds of Science) Abstract We propose a novel model for teaching and learning called Decentralized Autonomous Education (DAE for short). DAE exploits the dual principles of freedom and responsibility, meritocracy and inclusivity, privacy and transparency in th...
ed470a3d-df4b-4bd3-8043-b5b35ff4141a
StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong
LessWrong
Will Values and Competition Decouple? There are a great many forces shaping the evolution of the universe. Among them, the values of agents -- systems which attempt to optimize, or steer the future towards certain configurations over others -- seem likely to have a dominant influence on the long-term future. The value...
689b6245-6db7-4c1d-bc59-bd790845b5aa
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Public Opinion on AI Safety: AIMS 2023 and 2021 Summary Here we briefly summarize the results so far from our U.S. nationally representative survey on Artificial Intelligence, Morality, and Sentience (AIMS), conducted in 2021 and 2023. The full reports are available on Sentience Institute’s website for the AIMS 2023 S...
152d7083-6f16-4bac-8004-ec3a50568989
awestover/filtering-for-misalignment
Redwood Research: Alek's Filtering Results
id: post3099 Find all Alignment Newsletter resources here . In particular, you can sign up , or look through this spreadsheet of all summaries that have ever been in the newsletter. I'm always happy to hear feedback; you can send it to me by replying to this email. Audio version here (may not be up yet). Highlights AI...
dd661ac8-783f-457e-a0ea-7a54ea07e452
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
Handshakes, Hi, and What's New: What's Going On With Small Talk? This is an attempt to explicitly model what's going on in some small talk conversations. My hope is that at least one of these things will happen: * There is a substantial flaw or missing element to my model that someone will point out. * Many readers...
59a57389-c760-4819-9031-845ed77c5267
trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k
LessWrong
A poem about applied rationality by ChatGPT In a world of chaos and confusion, Where emotions often rule the day, It can be hard to see the truth, And make decisions in a clear and wise way. But there is a path to clarity, A way to think that's reasoned and refined, It's called applied rationality, And it can help us...