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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

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16:20

“Detection of Asymptomatically Spreading Pathogens”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/06

Cross-posted from my NAO Notebook. This is an edited transcript of a talk I just gave at CBD S&T, a chem-bio defence conference. I needed to submit the slides several months in advance, so I tried out a new-to-me approach where the slides are visual support only and I finalized the text of the talk later on. This does mean there are places where it would be great to have additional slides to illustrate some concepts Additionally, this was the first time I gave a talk where I

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21:07

“I Finally Worked Through Bayes’ Theorem (Personal...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/06

Two years ago I found this community, which prompted me to start self teaching math. For reference, I didn't know what a fraction was in early 2022. I knew what they looked like, and what they were called. I didn't know what they meant. The story of why I lacked basic math skills is complex enough for its own post. But my motivation to learn was simple. TSUYOKU NARITAI! My goal was to understand Bayes' Theorem. And today, I have done that for the first time. Today, I achieved that milestone. This

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76:26

“Analysis of Global AI Governance Strategies” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/06

We analyze three prominent strategies for governing transformative AI (TAI) development: Cooperative Development, Strategic Advantage, and Global Moratorium. We evaluate these strategies across varying levels of alignment difficulty and development timelines, examining their effectiveness in preventing catastrophic risks while preserving beneficial AI development.Our analysis reveals that strategy preferences shift significantly based on these key variables. Cooperative Development proves most

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10:34

“Should you be worried about H5N1?” by gw

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/06

Epistemic status: a few people without any particular expertise in epidemiology spent an afternoon in a coffee shop discussing and reading about H5N1, with a focus on how an individual should orient towards this (as opposed to say, the government). This is a write-up of what I took away from that exercise, written from my perspective. Some ideas were generated in collaboration with Claude but generally spot checked. This post was also sanity-checked by a friend who works in epidemiology. I feel ok

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14:47

“Frontier Models are Capable of In-context Scheming”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/05

This is a brief summary of what we believe to be the most important takeaways from our new paper and from our findings shown in the o1 system card. We also specifically clarify what we think we did NOT show. Paper: https://www.apolloresearch.ai/research/scheming-reasoning-evaluations Twitter about paper: https://x.com/apolloaisafety/status/1864735819207995716 Twitter about o1 system card: https://x.com/apolloaisafety/status/1864737158226928124 What we think the most important findings are Models

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6:04

“Orca communication project - seeking feedback (and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/05

TLDRIt is currently plausible (35%) to me that average orcas have at least as high potential for being great scientists as the greatest human scientists, modulo their motivation for doing science[1]. To see why I think this, see my LW question (including the considerations in my answer).I now want to test how intelligent orcas are as soon as possible. For this, I am creating a very easily-learnable language, which is easy for orcas to vocalize and ideally also for humans (after some practice),

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21:12

“Is the AI Doomsday Narrative the Product of a Big...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/05

This is the full text of a post from "The Obsolete Newsletter," a Substack that I write about the intersection of capitalism, geopolitics, and artificial intelligence. I’m a freelance journalist and the author of a forthcoming book called Obsolete: Power, Profit, and the Race to build Machine Superintelligence. Consider subscribing to stay up to date with my work. It's still Giving Tuesday somewhere Before we dive in, a gentle request for money (but not for me). This Giving Tuesday, I’m joining

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24:57

“The Dream Machine” by sarahconstantin

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/05

Midjourney, “the dream machine”I recently started working at Renaissance Philanthropy. It's a new organization, and most people I’ve met haven’t heard of it.1 So I thought I’d explain, in my own words and speaking for myself rather than my employers, what we (and I) are trying to do here. Modern MedicisThe “Renaissance” in Renaissance Philanthropy is a reference to the Italian Renaissance, when wealthy patrons like the Medicis commissioned great artworks and inventions. The idea is that “modern

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17:57

“The 2023 LessWrong Review: The Minimum Ask” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/04

Each December, the LessWrong community reflects on the best blogposts of yesteryear, to decide which posts stood the tests of time. In this post, I aim to: Explain some subtleties of what I'm hoping we get out of the Annual ReviewMake some explicit asks (even of busy people), which I think have reasonable cost/benefit ratios.Describe the new UI features.The most important changes are: Reviews are much more prominent than they used to beYou can nominate posts from elsewhere on the internet using the

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21:26

“A Qualitative Case for LTFF: Filling Critical...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/04

The longtermist funding ecosystem needs certain functions to exist at a reasonable scale. I argue LTFF should continue to be funded because we're currently one of the only organizations comprehensively serving these functions. Specifically, we: Fund early-stage technical AI safety researchers working outside major labs Help talented people transition into existential risk work Provide independent funding voices to balance out AI company influence Move quickly to fund promising work in emerging

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12:35

“Cognitive Biases Contributing to AI X-risk — a...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/04

PrefaceSeveral friends have asked me about what psychological effects I think could affect human judgement about x-risk. This isn't a complete answer, but in 2018 I wrote a draft of "AI Research Considerations for Human Existential Safety" (ARCHES) that included an overview of cognitive biases I thought (and still think) will impair AI risk assessments. Many cognitive bias experiments had already failed to reproduce well in the psychology reproducibility crisis, so I thought it would be a good idea

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84:23

“Deep Causal Transcoding: A Framework for...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/04

Audio note: this article contains 449 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Based off research performed in the MATS 5.1 extension program, under the mentorship of Alex Turner (TurnTrout). Research supported by a grant from the Long-Term Future Fund.TLDR: I introduce a new framework for mechanistically eliciting latent behaviors in LLMs. In particular, I propose deep causal transcoding - modelling the

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2:32

“Book a Time to Chat about Interp Research” by Logan...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/03

In the spirit of the season, you can book a call with me to help w/ your interp project (no large coding though)Would you like someone to: Review your paper or code? Brainstorm ideas on next steps? How to best communicate your results? Discuss conceptual problems Obvious Advice (e.g. being affected by SAD because it's winter, not exercising, not getting enough sleep) [anything else that would be useful!]When we're chatting, you can interrupt me to better focus on what you specifically want. We can

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33:39

“Should there be just one western AGI project?” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/03

Tom did the original thinking; Rose helped with later thinking, structure and writing.Some plans for AI governance involve centralising western AGI development.[1] Would this actually be a good idea? We don’t think this question has been analysed in enough detail, given how important it is. In this post, we’re going to: Explore the strategic implicationsof having one project instead of severalDiscuss what we think the best path forwardsis, given that strategic landscape(If at this point you’re

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6:55

“MIRI’s 2024 End-of-Year Update” by Rob Bensinger

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/03

MIRI is a nonprofit research organization with a mission of addressing the most serious hazards posed by smarter-than-human artificial intelligence. In our general strategy update and communications strategy update earlier this year, we announced a new strategy that we’re executing on at MIRI, and several new teams we’re spinning up as a result. This post serves as a status update on where things stand at MIRI today.We originally planned to run a formal fundraiser this year, our first one since

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5:12

“A case for donating to AI risk reduction (including...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/02

I work on Open Philanthropy's AI Governance and Policy team, but I’m writing this in my personal capacity – several senior employees at Open Phil have argued with me about this! This is a brief-ish post addressed to people who are interested in making high-impact donations and are already concerned about potential risks from advanced AI. Ideally such a post would include a case that reducing those risks is an especially important (and sufficiently tractable and neglected) cause area, but I’m

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55:04

“Conjecture: A Roadmap for Cognitive Software and A...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/02

On Carcinogenic Complexity, Software Senescence and Cognitive Provenance: Our roadmap for 2025 and beyondIt is mandatory to start any essay on AI in the post-ChatGPT era with the disclaimer that AI brings huge potential, and great risks. Unfortunately, on the path we are currently on, we will not realize those benefits, but are far more likely to simply drown in terrible AI slop, undermine systemic cybersecurity and blow ourselves up.We believe AI on its current path will continue to progress

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1:56

“2024 Unofficial LessWrong Census/Survey” by Screwtape

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/02

The Less Wrong General Census is unofficially here! You can take it at this link.The oft-interrupted annual tradition of the Less Wrong Census is once more upon us!If you are reading this post and identify as a LessWronger, then you are the target audience. If you are reading this post and don't identify as a LessWronger, you just read posts here or maybe go to house parties full of rationalists or possibly read rationalist fanfiction and like talking about it on the internet, or you're not a

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7:10

“Drexler’s Nanotech Software” by PeterMcCluskey

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/02

Two months ago I attended Eric Drexler's launch of MSEP.one. It's open source software, written by people with professional game design experience, intended to catalyze better designs for atomically precise manufacturing (or generative nanotechnology, as he now calls it). Drexler wants to draw more attention to the benefits of nanotech, which involve large enough exponents that our intuition boggles at handling them. That includes permanent health (Drexler's new framing of life extension and cures

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0:18

403 Forbidden

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/12/02

403 Forbidden --- Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/85xkq9Go9AAg3raJ8/sorry-for-the-downtime-looks-like-we-got-ddosd --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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