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ad39c33b-a6dc-47d2-8c05-e806bb0ba986 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Avoiding the instrumental policy by hiding information about humans
I've been thinking about situations where alignment fails because "predict what a human would say" (or more generally "game the loss function," what I call the instrumental policy) is easier to learn than "answer questions honestly" ([overview](https:... |
dee4341e-f450-40fb-a128-b158695dadb8 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | LLM Guardrails Should Have Better Customer Service Tuning
AI Could Turn People Down a Lot Better Than It Does : To Tune the Humans in the GPT Interaction towards alignment, Don't be so Procedural and Bureaucratic.
It seems to me that a huge piece of the puzzle in "alignment" is the human users. Even if a given tool ... |
19dda29e-b4ca-4f93-9ae2-c5957a8621b4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Advice- Places to live
Hi!
I have been wondering (the last few days) on where would be a good place to live and work. This is not a "I-am-moving-out-in-two-months" type of idea, but a long term, far goal. Basically, when I graduate college (or even a couple years after that- I need to save up money, first!) I may wan... |
58c9fa5a-314b-4ec2-bdd2-e2de9b7b608a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Stories About Education
This is the 3rd post of 5 containing the transcript of a podcast hosted by Eric Weinstein interviewing Peter Thiel.
Interview
Student Debt
Peter Thiel: It's like, again, if you come back to something as reductionist as the ever escalating student debt, you know, the bigger the debt gets, yo... |
11814d51-05d5-41e6-b965-d87cd5503549 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Identity and quining in UDT
Outline: I describe a flaw in UDT that has to do with the way the agent defines itself (locates itself in the universe). This flaw manifests in failure to solve a certain class of decision problems. I suggest several related decision theories that solve the problem, some of which avoid quin... |
a8dcbcbe-8e54-4397-bded-fc593a208fdc | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | August 2017 Media Thread
This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the ... |
4d6a998b-3c60-4709-ae78-d198f5fd6da2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Transcript of a presentation on catastrophic risks from AI
This is an approximate outline/transcript of a presentation I'll be giving for a class of COMP 680, "Advanced Topics in Software Engineering", with footnotes and links to relevant source material.
Assumptions and Content Warning
This presentation assumes a c... |
53ad157f-ce4d-42b1-a587-6a99a9fee904 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Alignment Newsletter #22
Highlights
AI Governance: A Research Agenda (Allan Dafoe): A comprehensive document about the research agenda at the Governance of AI Program. This is really long and covers a lot of ground so I'm not going to summarize it, but I highly recommend it, even if you intend to work primarily on tec... |
fca8b334-6ec4-4358-9e53-2bb10ec91895 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Intelligence Amplification and Friendly AI
Part of the series AI Risk and Opportunity: A Strategic Analaysis. Previous articles on this topic: Some Thoughts on Singularity Strategies, Intelligence enhancement as existential risk mitigation, Outline of possible Singularity scenarios that are not completely disastrous.
... |
9a83cc19-4442-466f-8893-e725cb4e3dd7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | misc raw responses to a tract of Critical Rationalism
Written in response to this David Deutsch presentation. Hoping it will be comprehensible enough to the friend it was written for to be responded to, and maybe a few other people too.
Deutsch says things like "theories don't have probabilities", ("there's no such t... |
5827ee67-4254-4f12-80db-97468e6db6f1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Three Boxes: A Simple Model for Spreading Ideas
This is cross-posted from my blog.
We need more people on board for life extension in order to hit longevity escape velocity in our lifetimes. But most people have never heard of life extension, and even those who have often follow the same predictable arguments. “W... |
fa0c0ddb-f351-43ea-813a-5a46a892d8de | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Tales from Prediction Markets
Prediction markets are fun, at least if you're making money. I've only been into them for a few months, but have already collected a bunch of interesting tales. Note: I may have been involved with some of these, but I'm telling these tales from a third person perspective.
One general poi... |
32a73411-c649-486f-a1cd-f2fff1ea2464 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Avoid Unnecessarily Political Examples
One of the motivations for You have about five words was the post Politics is the Mindkiller. That post essentially makes four claims:
* Politics is the mindkiller. Therefore:
* If you're not making a point about politics, avoid needlessly political examples.
* If you are try... |
5aa25eeb-2029-4adc-b83b-af98f64fe10f | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values
[*The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values*](https://www.amazon.com/Alignment-Problem-Machine-Learning-Values/dp/153669519X), by Brian Christian, was just released. This is an extended summary + opinion, a version without the quotes from the book... |
cc83119b-fc9e-4726-82b3-884c7c174068 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Using predictors in corrigible systems
*[This was a submission to the AI Alignment Awards corrigibility contest that won an* [*honorable mention*](https://www.alignmentawards.com/winners#faqs)*. It dodges the original framing of the problem and runs off on a tangent, and while it does outline the shape of possible tes... |
2e383aa1-67fe-4a02-a42a-750865b94bef | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Deep Blue
Deep Blue is the chess-playing program, built by IBM, that defeated the reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, in 1997. Modern algorithms play much better chess, using much less computing power, but Deep Blue still holds the place in history of having first played superhuman chess relative to the be... |
84604a7a-31b5-4eb5-b326-3e8962ba141e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What economic gains are there in life extension treatments?
To put it another way: does stopping or slowing aging save resources for society as a whole, compared to raising new humans to replace old ones?
Plausible economic gains from life extension:
* Raising a human from birth to age 17 in the United States costs... |
0979b58f-fef5-4690-8825-46f9b72702c4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Takeaways From 3 Years Working In Machine Learning
Disclaimer: Feeling so-and-so about posting this on LW, but given how many people here work in ML or adjacent fields I might as well.
After 3 years working on automl at Mindsdb, I quit; I won’t be working on anything ml-related in a professional capacity, at least fo... |
ad006de6-dda9-4c73-9523-feaf96a94b97 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | The Simple Truth
>
> “I remember this paper I wrote on existentialism. My teacher gave it back with an F. She’d underlined true and truth wherever it appeared in the essay, probably about twenty times, with a question mark beside each. She wanted to know what I meant by truth.”
>
> — Danielle Egan (journalist)
*... |
5c32946b-308a-4693-8c3d-99e098448d88 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Sponsored] Job Hunting in the Modern Economy
This article was sponsored by Aigent®.
----------------------------------------
Applying to job postings is a waste of time. To get a good job you need to network. But engineers aren't trained in networking (well, not the biological kind). We're trained in technology. Ex... |
71e25728-4f5f-4d79-9ff4-cd5f373eb491 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Open Thread – Autumn 2023
If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it.
If you are new to LessWrong, here's the place to introduce yourself. Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to get from the site and community are invited. This is... |
4f35f8b0-2426-424d-99ae-fed2148259ba | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Berkeley Community & The Rest Of Us: A Response to Zvi & Benquo
Background Context, And How to Read This Post
This post is inspired by and a continuation of comments I made on the post 'What is the Rationalist Berkeley Community's Culture?' by Zvi on his blog Don't Worry About the Vase. As a community organizer ... |
7572eccc-08e8-4526-929f-942344512e56 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | You're never wrong injecting complexity, but rarely you're right
I just want to put this idea in the form of a post, to gather your impressions. I think it's my main rationalist failure mode.
Recently in a Facebook group, some poster has proposed this synthesis of Harari's book '21 lessons':
> In the 21st century, t... |
64368617-0ecc-441a-94f8-0bafa51bab5f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Utrecht: Rationality Games
Discussion article for the meetup : Utrecht: Rationality Games
WHEN: 14 December 2014 02:00:00PM (+0100)
WHERE: La Place, Utrecht, Rijnkade 5
For details, see meetup.com: http://www.meetup.com/LWEANL/events/218834660/, which is supposed to be up-to-date.
Discussion article for ... |
44d54eff-b7ef-4da4-aeb0-0d7c1434a040 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Convergence 2024 Impact Review
Convergence 2024 Impact Review home page.
Impact overview
2024 marked the first full year with the new Convergence Analysis 9-person team. This year we published 20 articles on understanding and governing transformative AI. Our research impacted regulatory frameworks internationally. I... |
a27c5aad-f3d8-4465-83a0-80950dcd9291 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Maybe Lying Can't Exist?!
How is it possible to tell the truth?
I mean, sure, you can use your larynx to make sound waves in the air, or you can draw a sequence of symbols on paper, but sound waves and paper-markings can't be true, any more than a leaf or a rock can be "true". Why do you think you can tell the truth?... |
5502d61f-1754-4125-8ecc-fa8dd5363912 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | OpenAI Launches Superalignment Taskforce
In their announcement Introducing Superalignment, OpenAI committed 20% of secured compute and a new taskforce to solving the technical problem of aligning a superintelligence within four years. Cofounder and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever will co-lead the team with Head of Alig... |
cf9b0775-2b88-4994-89b9-483b36c59f76 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube | Youtube Transcripts | The Inside View #2–Connor Leahy
welcome to the inside view a podcast
where we forecast technological progress
starting from our grad level intuitions
i am your host
michael thrasi for people watching this
on youtube
what you're saying is a screen recording
of how i randomly met
conor lee at the internet party
conor is... |
d74c5850-7cd3-41fc-b8e3-21db2d2cd167 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | August 2013 Media Thread
This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the ... |
449f45c1-7285-4b07-ae82-8e9911be9aa7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : West LA—Inflation of Terminology
Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—Inflation of Terminology
WHEN: 24 September 2014 07:00:00PM (-0700)
WHERE: 11066 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, CA
How to Find Us: Go into this Del Taco. We will be in the back room if possible.
Parking is free in the lot out fr... |
23eb2226-2860-436c-9fc9-342bee2874df | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Finding the Wisdom to Build Safe AI
We may soon build superintelligent AI. Such AI poses an existential threat to humanity, and all life on Earth, if it is not aligned with our flourishing. Aligning superintelligent AI is likely to be difficult because smarts and values are mostly orthogonal and because Goodhart effec... |
2d2dbbf0-197e-4a8d-90b8-d48ff312d178 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Trickle-Down Effect of Good Communities
We don't know who came up with the ancient Indian idea of karma or why they did so, but one of its social functions is to motivate people to behave better. If people really believe that they will suffer for their evil actions and prosper for their good actions due to a law o... |
0a34fcc6-f975-4a56-86b2-3be87066e756 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Neuroscience of Anxiety
Summary of the book "Anxious" by NYU neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux |
989aec09-c0b3-419c-a63c-71315c0a730d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Our 2022 Giving
Julia and I usually decide on our annual giving at the end of each year. For the past few years this has been relatively straightforward: I was paid a lot, so we donated 50%. This year is less so, because halfway through I switched jobs to work on something directly valuable. While I'm very excited abo... |
e99cc068-94ae-4698-88aa-bfbe41bc367a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Higher Dimension Cartesian Objects and Aligning ‘Tiling Simulators’
Thanks to Justis Mills for feedback. Mistakes are mine.
Introduction
This document will attempt to build upon the Cartesian frame paradigm by modeling multi-agent worlds as higher dimension Cartesian objects. Cartesian objects partially betray many ... |
043ab989-d8f6-457c-8b37-eac89669fca0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | SSC discussion: "bicameral reasoning", epistemology, and scope insensitivity
(Continuing the posting of select posts from Slate Star Codex for comment here, as discussed in this thread, and as Scott Alexander gave me - and anyone else - permission to do with some exceptions.)
Scott recently wrote a post called Bicame... |
a90317ee-8b42-45ff-a44b-bf6064ced824 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | One Does Not Simply Replace the Humans
In this post we discuss the "second point of lethality" in the helpfully curated [AGI Ruin](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a-list-of-lethalities) post.
> **A cognitive system with sufficiently high cognitive powers, given any medium-bandwidth chann... |
ada4f709-12d9-407f-96a5-c0570d662b98 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | New Speaker Series on AI Alignment Starting March 3
After talking with a lot of people in Alignment, I think there is still a lot of good to be done for idea diffusion at the object/technical level. We seem to have done a lot of outreach presenting the philosophical arguments, but less so on the technical ground.
Sin... |
ec4ac6e5-c50a-4bdd-9d0d-a2d290ad06a4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How do I find tutors for obscure skills/subjects (i.e. fermi estimation tutors)
I'd love to get really good at fermi estimations, and I feel like I'd get better faster if I paid someone to teach me, measure progress, and test me consistently.
I also want to be generally "mathematically mature" so that I'm not afraid... |
b146ad0b-55ef-4f77-a846-5b6371e85a02 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points
Today's post, Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points was originally published on 05 October 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> When people doubt, they instinctively ask only the questions that have easy answers. When you're doubting one of your most che... |
1f77694c-2f48-4e54-a618-d4e1bf20465c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Ask LW: What happened to Yudkowsky?
What happened to Yudkowsky at age 15? He mentioned it several times in his book: Inadequate Equilibria, Rationality: AI to Zombie and his 2009 Q&A he often refers as many times to the age of 15. |
073d93f9-e542-4edc-ab28-3c65de9ff9b9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | An Approach to Logically Updateless Decisions
Scott describes two obstacles for logical inductor decision theory: reasoning sanely about untaken actions, and getting a working notion of logical updatelessness. Here, I consider the question: if we could solve the first problem, could we solve the second? I provide a so... |
3faa818b-aac7-4aff-927a-f59dbcd1023f | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | "These are some intuitions people often have:You are not required to save a random person, but you are definitely not allowed to kill oneYou are not required to create a person, but you are definitely not allowed to kill oneYou are not required to create a happy person, but you are definitely not allowed to create a mi... |
6d323f16-8aaa-4da0-8dfc-bff4d3dabbab | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Chris Olah’s views on AGI safety
Note: I am not Chris Olah. This post was the result of lots of back-and-forth with Chris, but everything here is my interpretation of what Chris believes, not necessarily what he actually believes. Chris also wanted me to emphasize that his thinking is informed by all of his colleagues... |
17d72cdf-5331-4316-9553-80e640cb84ca | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Uncountability
Sizes of infinity fall into two broad classes: *countable* infinities, and *uncountable* infinities.
A set $S$ is *uncountable* if it is not [countable](https://arbital.com/p/6f8). |
502642e8-67e8-4819-8930-12349ef3a350 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Toward A Culture of Persuasion
Most writers work alone at a desk. They're drawing on memories of conversations, tinkering with ideas, deleting a word, pausing, and then writing the same word again. Many advice-givers on the writer's craft suggest that the author write for an ideal reader. This solitary art form makes ... |
85b64a5f-2313-40cc-b92e-41ced77b8930 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Toy model: convergent instrumental goals
tl;dr: Toy model to illustrate convergent instrumental goals.
Steve Omohundro identified '[AI drives](https://selfawaresystems.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/ai_drives_final.pdf)' (also called '[Convergent Instrumental goals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergenc... |
c9a7fdb9-d9ab-4ef6-8a7a-0fbc74cbf1d3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Eliciting Latent Knowledge Via Hypothetical Sensors
This is a response to ARC's first technical report: Eliciting Latent Knowledge. But it should be fairly understandable even if you didn't read ARC's report, since I summarize relevant parts of their report as necessary. Here I propose some approaches to the problem A... |
def5a85d-a282-4e02-82b4-12f1aafbbb14 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | AI Safety Needs Great Engineers
**Top line: If you think you could write a substantial pull request for a major machine learning library, then major AI safety labs want to interview you** ***today*****.**
I work for [Anthropic](https://www.anthropic.com/), an industrial AI research lab focussed on safety. We are bott... |
edf68b71-c464-436a-bfa6-98f3df6cff51 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
I had a realization over the last few months that I'd like to share. I have always interpreted the Litany of Gendlin to compress to something like "there's no sense hiding from bad news." What I realized is that there's a reversed interpretation that's... |
f4534bcd-b7e8-49fe-8164-818aec2e079c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | "Friends do not let friends compute p values."
LWers may find useful two recent articles summarizing (for cognitive scientists) why Bayesian inference is superior to frequentist inference.
Kruschke - What to believe: Bayesian methods for data analysis
Wagenmakers et al - Bayesian versus frequentist inference
(The q... |
c2b3f7d0-6077-4618-9814-f320ec04cc6c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What I've learned from Less Wrong
Related to: Goals for which Less Wrong does (and doesn’t) help
I've been compiling a list of the top things I’ve learned from Less Wrong in the past few months. If you’re new here or haven’t been here since the beginning of this blog, perhaps my personal experience from reading the b... |
2118534b-632d-4b6a-bd1e-3b32405e37b7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Some alternatives to “Friendly AI”
Cross-posted from my blog.
What does MIRI's research program study?
The most established term for this was coined by MIRI founder Eliezer Yudkowsky: "Friendly AI." The term has some advantages, but it might suggest that MIRI is trying to build C-3PO, and it sounds a bit whimsical f... |
f4d7f3c3-5126-495c-a50f-7faaac5d4c99 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Concerns about AI safety career change
**Summary:**
* I'm a software engineer interested in working on AI safety, but confused about its career prospects. I outlined all my concerns below.
* In particular, I had trouble finding accounts of engineers working in the field, and the differences between organizations/comp... |
8f94cf8d-2379-4a7a-a2ea-db5f2df07cc5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Propinquity Cities So Far
Finding alternatives to war can save a lot of money
Summary
In any dense city, lots of people will be struggling to occupy the same set of spaces. To function, cities need to have some systematic way of resolving those positioning conflicts, a method for deciding who gets to go where. The m... |
531178dd-19e4-4dd4-aed4-903b185dcf09 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The importance of how you weigh it
(Cross-posted from Hands and Cities)
> “Like, nobody,” she says, “is considering the décor!”
>
> – G.A. Cohen, “Rescuing Conservatism”
Much of normative ethics centers on which considerations matter, and why. But often, it makes a bigger difference how much a consideration matters... |
416bdac0-1eef-46e3-9baf-7f5497aa6867 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Atari early
*Written by Katja Grace for AI Impacts.*
Deepmind [**announced**](https://deepmind.com/blog/article/Agent57-Outperforming-the-human-Atari-benchmark) that their Agent57 beats the 'human baseline' at all 57 Atari games usually used as a benchmark. I think this is probably enough to resolve one of the predi... |
d6dd2f00-8969-44e8-bc66-135e7d7af9c3 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/youtube | Youtube Transcripts | Holy Grail of AI (Artificial Intelligence) - Computerphile
Right. So, last time, which was quite a while ago, we were talking about intelligence in general
and the way that you can model intelligence as an optimization process
- This is the hill climbing algorithm.
- Yeah, that was an example we gave.
We were using ev... |
73e1d18a-8400-4dda-9830-e248c66a7204 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Closet survey #1
What do you believe that most people on this site don't?
I'm especially looking for things that you wouldn't even mention if someone wasn't explicitly asking for them. Stuff you're not even comfortable writing under your own name. Making a one-shot account here is very easy, go ahead and do that if y... |
e1ae3e4e-b42b-44e4-9b74-00cdabed7e7c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Superhero Bias
Today's post, Superhero Bias was originally published on 01 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> It is better to risk your life to save 200 people than to save 3. But someone who risks their life to save 3 people is revealing a more altruistic nature than someone risking ... |
a7e7cc86-b509-4548-a073-3c1321e37b0e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Everything I ever needed to know, I learned from World of Warcraft: Goodhart’s law
*This is the first in a series of posts about lessons from my experiences in *World of Warcraft*. I’ve been talking about this stuff for a long time—in forum comments, in IRC conversations, etc.—and this series is my attempt to make it ... |
58b31d90-7a51-4174-a513-4f5ab1dbb398 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | San Jose Meetup, Sat 10/25 @ 7:30pm
It's on Saturday 7.30pm at Il Fornaio, 302 S Market St (in the Sainte Claire Hotel), San Jose. All aspiring rationalists welcome. The reservation is currently for 21 but can be changed if needed. Please RSVP if you haven't already.
They have a wide variety including the requested ... |
e55206b1-e1e5-499f-b45a-ec2793a7c442 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Life on the Grid (Part 1)
The physical layout of the environment in which someone is raised impacts their cognitive abilities as an adult. A recent study based on video game data from 397,162 people across 38 countries found that “people who grew up outside cities are better at navigation.” More specifically, “growing... |
5c811b6f-1d89-4961-8075-7a8ab2742996 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | "Aligned" foundation models don't imply aligned systems
*[The basic idea in this post is probably not original to me, since it's somewhat obvious when stated directly. But it seems particularly relevant and worth distilling in light of recent developments with LLM-based systems, and because I keep seeing arguments whi... |
d9679e2f-7801-4d1b-b9aa-9472529858a6 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Flynn Effect Clarified
I said in my review of WEIRDest People that the Flynn effect seems like a natural consequence of thinking styles that became more analytical, abstract, reductionist, and numerical.
I'll expand here on some questions which I swept under the rug, so that I could keep that review focused on th... |
428a6217-8321-447d-9bfe-d4cc323b4550 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Disasters
If there were a natural disaster tomorrow and it took about two weeks to get things working again, how many people would be ok for food, water, and other necessities? I'm guessing below 5%, but I think this level of preparedness would be a good goal for most people who can afford it. Why don't people plan fo... |
469026db-7099-4fa0-aa7e-07a87f5c9eb8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | May I ask for some help getting started with crypto?
Hey, gang.
There is no way for me to structure this request coherently. I am barbarously ignorant of the subject at hand, so please forgive any instances of clumsy wording you may encounter here or there. This is the only community I trust to give me sound, well-i... |
8f57e2bb-4ec0-47bb-9c38-0e5e49c1889d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Foom & Doom 1: “Brain in a box in a basement”
1.1 Series summary and Table of Contents
This is a two-post series on AI “foom” (this post) and “doom” (next post).
A decade or two ago, it was pretty common to discuss “foom & doom” scenarios, as advocated especially by Eliezer Yudkowsky. In a typical such scenario, a sm... |
05742368-506a-4dd0-8d4f-0fe539bcf71a | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Donating to help Democrats win in the 2024 elections: research, decision support, and recommendations
A couple of months ago I went searching for research-based or otherwise plausibly effective ways to donate money to help Democrats win in the US federal elections. I found a fragmented smattering of semi-closed, secre... |
432ab97d-c1db-4467-9b8e-65c645bdb1d3 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arbital | Arbital | Task identification problem
A subproblem of building a [task-directed AGI ](https://arbital.com/p/6w) is communicating to the AGI the next task and identifying which outcomes are considered as fulfilling the task. For the superproblem, see [https://arbital.com/p/-2s3](https://arbital.com/p/-2s3). This seems like pri... |
101ae293-61d5-4484-8321-2b23fb4b3693 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Less Wrong Israel Meetup (Tel Aviv): Quantum Computing
Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong Israel Meetup (Tel Aviv): Quantum Computing
WHEN: 28 November 2013 08:00:00PM (+0200)
WHERE: 7 begin ramat gan
We're going to have a meetup on Thursday, November 28th at VisionMap's offices, Gibor Sport Ho... |
2fb2ca04-c916-4c90-bc5c-2c813d602f87 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How I Write
Cross-posted, as always, from Putanumonit.
----------------------------------------
Five years ago I started Putanumonit not expecting that anyone would read it. That year I had a chance to meet two of my favorite bloggers, Scott Alexander and Tim Urban, and discovered that they had both honed their writ... |
63e9c8f0-f956-48e5-9cdb-7490b400a25c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Value of building an online "knowledge web"
Please excuse my naivety, would really like to hear from more knowledgable people about this.
I recently discovered a note-taking website called Roam which allows you to create pages, take bullet point notes in those pages, and use double brackets around phrases and words ... |
49adfbd7-32df-49a2-af20-2e4b6e82f290 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/blogs | Blogs | Minimal-trust investigations
*Click lower right to download or find on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, etc.*
> This piece is about the single activity ("minimal-trust investigations") that seems to have been most formative for the way I think.
Most of what I believe is mostly based on trusting other peop... |
c143010b-2e03-48cd-863b-fdf1f5645ce1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Force Sequential Output with SCP?
In my bioinformatics work I often stream files between linux hosts and Amazon S3. This could look like:
$ scp host:/path/to/file /dev/stdout | \
aws s3 cp - s3://bucket/path/to/file
This recently stopped working after upgrading:
ftruncate "/dev/stdout": Invalid argument
Co... |
b43a435f-f14c-4eda-ba1a-bc0791ff9da1 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | That which we call private
|
0190c3d4-d74a-4785-90d4-abf1709b2572 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Recommended Reading for Friendly AI Research
This post enumerates texts that I consider (potentially) useful training for making progress on Friendly AI/decision theory/metaethics.
Rationality and Friendly AI
Eliezer Yudkowsky's sequences and this blog can provide solid introduction to the problem statement of Frien... |
a7368848-67aa-4c9c-aac9-6b014c27a5c2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Call for volunteers: Publishing the Sequences
The Singularity Institute is in the process of publishing Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Sequences of rationality posts as an electronic book. The Sequences are made up of multiple hundreds of posts. These are being downloaded and converted to LaTeX for publishing programmatically an... |
643eb238-ca70-43d3-b2fe-3ee73d80dc37 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Roots of Progress Blog-Building Intensive: advice for applicants, request for support
We’ve gotten over 250 applications to The Roots of Progress Blog-Building Intensive! And the quality level is surprisingly high. I’m glad to see so many talented writers interested in progress.
If you want to apply
Do it now! A... |
4039cdb3-291f-4f0b-8d49-b0bc23ec1d7f | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Good News, Everyone!
As somebody who's been watching AI notkilleveryoneism for a very long time, but is sitting at a bit of a remove from the action, I think I may be able to "see the elephant" better than some people on the inside.
I actually believe I see the big players converging toward something of an unrecogni... |
b94ebaea-aa06-4ecd-9b35-a24af2833c64 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Challenges in Detoxifying Language Models
1 Introduction
---------------
Contemporary text generation models Radford et al. ([2019](#bib.bib37)); Brown et al. ([2020](#bib.bib8)) are capable of generating harmful language, including hate speech, insults, profanities and threats Gehman et al. ([2020](#bib.bib19)).
T... |
8499fb89-3d33-4032-8f27-81b2dc35fc8d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Three Levels of Motivation
Disclaimer: The information herein is not at all new. I wrote this a year ago, but when I wanted to link to it recently I found out it wasn't in existence on LW (except as a link post which isn't very satisfactory). I decided to polish it up and post it here.
Epistemic Status
This is b... |
b64fc2b8-3cc2-49bb-acb8-a782cdd7d294 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Does it become easier, or harder, for the world to coordinate around not building AGI as time goes on?
(Or, is coordination easier in a long timeline?)
It seems like it would be good if the world could coordinate to not build AGI. That is, at some point in the future, when some number of teams will have the technical... |
09329063-a018-4eeb-a684-153c653b749e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Studying Your Native Language
I've spent many thousands of hours over the past several years studying foreign languages and developing a general method for foreign-language acquisition. But now I believe it's time to turn this technique in the direction of my native language: English.
Most people make a distinction b... |
558696ea-d4d8-4732-9b26-18e31496d05c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why isn’t assassination/sabotage more common?
1. People can short stocks of companies and then sabotage or assassinate important people to make the stocks drop.
2. Political goals seem ripe for assassination. For example, the US recently killed Iran’s general Soleimani. Couldn’t they do this without taking responsi... |
1a7bd340-89ff-4a66-9755-8933ae76ffc7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | On The Spectrum, On The Guest List: (ii) LAVO
(See also: Part One and the Prologue)
"I found, however, that it takes considerable coordinated effort to mobilize people into what looks like a spontaneous waste of money..."
Hey do you wanna join us at the lavo nightclub tonight? We have an 11:30pm walk-in let me kno... |
59e53c90-78cb-495b-941b-cb0a64662b1d | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Hug the Query
Today's post, Hug the Query was originally published on 14 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> The more directly your arguments bear on a question, without intermediate inferences, the more powerful the evidence. We should try to observe evidence that is as near to the or... |
4a84d7f6-5147-4e4b-bda5-719f894162ff | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Taking the first step
(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 about my toolkit for getting started on hard things)
Introduction
A lot of my previous posts have been about prioritisation and planning - it’s easy to fall in... |
7c61253c-2859-4034-8963-c6708ef0bba8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Indecision and internalized authority figures
A trauma book I was reading had an interesting claim that indecision is often because the person looks for the approval of an internalized authority figure (the writer is a Jungian therapist so attributed it to looking for the approval of an internalized parent, but I thin... |
653c086e-371e-4761-bac5-d2739173032f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Results Prediction Thread About How Different Factors Affect AI X-Risk
In the last post I asked for predictions on how different factors affect AI X-risk, as of writing this post (March 1st), 26 people had made predictions on the first question (including myself).
Key Takeaways:
* People have vastly different exp... |
a5b1049e-598c-4e00-b99c-85289c7e203b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Improving Teaching Effectiveness: Final Report
The Gates Foundation failed with their very test-score driven approach to increase test-scores of students.
Maybe we should simply get rid of the idea of optimizing education for scoring high on standardized tests? |
b7482710-96de-4c02-92ca-aa0337cd1870 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Lying is Cowardice, not Strategy
*(Co-written by* [*Connor Leahy*](https://twitter.com/npcollapse) *and* [*Gabe*](https://twitter.com/Gabe_cc)*)*
We have talked to a whole bunch of people about pauses and moratoriums. Members of the AI safety community, investors, business peers, politicians, and more.
Too many clai... |
fe9dce24-bf6c-462b-a46c-97adf5822cc9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Death Positive Movement
The Death Positive Movement was started by Caitlin Doughty to build a culture of positivity around the prospect of human mortality. The 8 Tenets of the Death Positive Movement are outlined as follows:
> 1. I believe that by hiding death and dying behind closed doors we do more harm than good ... |
ecb4ff27-11fc-4a46-a259-0a3e448eaefd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Expected Error, or how wrong you expect to be
Expected value commonly refers to the mean of a distribution that represents the expectations of a future event. It’s much more specific than “mathematical mean”. If one were to ask about the "mean" of a poker hand there would be confusion, but the ‘expected value’ is obvi... |
7578f01c-baf1-4950-98be-bee881142a5f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Copying and Subjective Experience
The subject of copying people and its effect on personal identity and probability anticipation has been raised and, I think, addressed adequately on Less Wrong.
Still, I'd like to bring up some more thought experiments.
Recently I had a dispute on an IRC channel. I argued that if so... |
e8459302-aeda-431d-8899-9a9b027910cb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why not more small, intense research teams?
Why are we not fostering more teams of say 2-5 people that
a) work full-time on the same or closely related problems
b) live together or very close
c) spend most of their work time collaborating in-person
?
I'm aware of student groups etc. but these fail both a) and c)... |
ecb62e54-a7e3-4972-bb1c-cf737af7e833 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How much should we still worry about catching COVID? [Links and Discussion Thread]
[Cross-posted to the EA Forum. Consider checking comments there, too.]
I've decided to collect research on the risks of COVID, especially among vaccinated people and for long COVID. Please share more in the comments, and it would be he... |
ba0fd8fb-5ca0-465d-bd75-3058115f7d4e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | We won't be able to recognise the human Gödel sentence
Building on the very bad Gödel anti-AI argument (computers's are formal and can't prove their own Gödel sentence, hence no AI), it occurred to me that you could make a strong case that humans could never recognise a human Gödel sentence. The argument goes like thi... |
fe705bbf-7612-4292-b755-7eea4b52e864 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A reply to Mark Linsenmayer about philosophy
Mark Linsenmayer, one of the hosts of a top philosophy podcast called The Partially Examined Life, has written a critique of the view that Eliezer and I seem to take of philosophy. Below, I respond to a few of Mark's comments. Naturally, I speak only for myself, not for Eli... |
5f9b967b-f73e-4999-8004-002804d598a1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Existential Risk Persuasion Tournament
I participated last summer in Tetlock's Existential Risk Persuasion Tournament (755(!) page paper here).
Superforecasters and "subject matter experts" engaged in a hybrid between a prediction market and debates, to predict catastrophic and existential risks this century.
I sign... |
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