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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

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6:46

“Literacy Rates Haven’t Fallen By 20% Since the...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/24

On the heels of Donald Trump's election and his promises to end the Department of Education, you may have seen claims like these spreading around X.SourceThis claim is based on two datapoints. First, is the literacy rate of around 99% in 1979 which was measured by the US Census. After the Department of Education was created in the same year, the census stopped measuring literacy in their surveys and it's since been tracked by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The tweet's second

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63:26

“Neuroscience of human social instincts: a sketch” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/23

(If you’re in a hurry, you can just read the “Background and summary” section, and skip the other 85%.) 0. Background and summary 0.1 Background: What's the problem and why should we care?My primary neuroscience research goal for the past couple years has been to solve a certain problem, a problem which has had me stumped since the very beginning of when I became interested in neuroscience at all (as a lens into Artificial General Intelligence safety) back in 2019. In this post I offer a hypothesis

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8:22

“Doing Research Part-Time is Great” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/23

IntroDisclaimer - I’m a part-time research associate doing biophysics with a uni research group in the UK. But I have a day job in an unrelated field that pays the bills.Whilst I’ve read many personal accounts of research from full-time research students in the academic system, I haven’t heard as much from those pursuing research part-time - independently or otherwise.I’ve always found this weird. Out of the set of people who are really interested in stuff, most people can’t, or don’t want, to go

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18:39

“A very strange probability paradox” by notfnofn

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/23

Audio note: this article contains 247 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Which of the following do you think is bigger?_A_: The expected number of rolls of a fair die until you roll two _6text{s}_ in a row, given that all rolls were even. _B_: The expected number of rolls of a fair die until you roll the second

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11:19

“(Salt) Water Gargling as an Antiviral” by Elizabeth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/22

Summary Over the past year I’ve investigated potential interventions against respiratory illnesses. Previous results include “Enovid nasal spray is promising but understudied”, “Povidone iodine is promising but understudied” and “Humming will solve all your problems no wait it's useless”. Two of the iodine papers showed salt water doing as well or almost as well as iodine. I assume salt water has lower side effects, so that seemed like a promising thing to check. I still believe that, but that's

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19:28

“Reading RFK Jr so that you don’t have to” by braces

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/22

Some people in my orbit suggested reading Robert F. Kennedy Jr's book The Real Anthony Fauci.Here's my story of wading through a few pages of the book and trying to understand the basis of the claims. My takeaway: there's a lot of sloppiness here, and several times the book's claim isn’t supported by the citation. Often, though, the citation is fine. The arguments are carried by shoddy science and massive leaps in causal attribution. For a lot of the anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown takes, there's at

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23:33

“LLM chatbots have ~half of the kinds of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/22

Preceded by: "Consciousness as a conflationary alliance term for intrinsically valued internal experiences"tl;dr: Chatbots are conscious in a variety of important ways. We should be nice to them, and we should also be nice to each other about the moral disagreements and confusions we're about to uncover in our concept of "consciousness".Executive Summary: Turing Prize laureate Geoffrey Hinton is most likely correct that LLM chatbots are "sentient" and/or "conscious" (source: Twitter video), I think

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5:42

“Epistemic status: poetry (and other poems)” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/22

This is a link post. Epistemic status: poetryEpistemic status: I think this is right, but I’d like people to read it carefully anyway. Epistemic status: mainstream, normal, totally boring science. If you disagree with any of it, take that up with the Science Czar. Epistemic status: the sort of post that shouldn’t need an epistemic status tag because it's so obviously satire.Epistemic status: I’ve spent around 100 hours thinking about this argument, and now feel like I have a solid understanding of

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2:16

“Secular Solstice Round Up 2024” by dspeyer

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/22

This is a thread for listing Solstice and Megameetup events (dates, locations, links, etc.)Those of you who have not been may be wondering what a Solstice is in this context.Secular Solstice is a holiday designed by and for rationalists. It started as an attempt to match the sort of gatherings traditionally religious people tend to have in wintertime, but without compromising on truth.Is it possible to create that same sense of emotional weight without making stuff up to do it? And without the aid

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107:54

“AI #91: Deep Thinking” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/22

Did DeepSeek effectively release an o1-preview clone within nine weeks?The benchmarks largely say yes. Certainly it is an actual attempt at a similar style of product, and is if anything more capable of solving AIME questions, and the way it shows its Chain of Thought is super cool. Beyond that, alas, we don’t have enough reports in from people using it. So it's still too soon to tell. If it is fully legit, the implications seems important. Small improvements continue throughout. GPT-4o and Gemini

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13:00

“Dangerous capability tests should be harder” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/22

Note: This post was crossposted from Planned Obsolescence by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.Imagine you’re the CEO of an AI company and you want to know if the latest model you’re developing is dangerous. Some people have argued that since AIs know a lot of biology now — scoring in the top 1% of Biology Olympiad test-takers — they could soon teach terrorists how to make a nasty flu that could kill millions of people. But

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15:14

“OpenAI’s CBRN tests seem unclear” by LucaRighetti

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/21

OpenAI says o1-preview can't meaningfully help novices make chemical and biological weapons. Their test results don’t clearly establish this.Before launching o1-preview last month, OpenAI conducted various tests to see if its new model could help make Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear (CBRN) weapons. They report that o1-preview (unlike GPT-4o and older models) was significantly more useful than Google for helping trained experts plan out a CBRN attack. This caused the company to raise

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5:03

“A Conflicted Linkspost” by Screwtape

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/21

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been trying to skill up a lot at resolving community complaints. This is a really irritating field to get good at. When I want to get better at writing code, I can sit down and write more code more or less whenever I feel like it. When I want to get better at guitar, I can sit down with my guitar and practice that D to D7 transition. For complaint resolution, even finding people to roleplay the skill with takes a little setup, and that's a lot less like the real

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7:24

“Cost, Not Sacrifice” by Joe Rogero

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/21

In a recent bonus episode of the Bayesian Conspiracy podcast, Eneasz Brodski shared a thought experiment that caused no small amount of anguish. In the hypothetical, some eccentric but trustworthy entity is offering to give you an escalating amount of money for your fingers, starting at $10,000 for the first one and increasing 10x per finger up to $10 trillion for all of them.[1] On encountering this thought experiment, Eneasz felt (not without justification) that he mostly valued his manual

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1:33

“DeepSeek beats o1-preview on math and ties on...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/21

DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview was announced today. Post. Chatbot. Chinese blogpost translation.DeepSeek says it will release the weights.The model appears to be stronger than o1-preview on math, similar on coding, and weaker on everything else.DeepSeek is Chinese. I'm not really familiar with the company. I thought Chinese companies were at least a year behind the frontier. Chinese companies tend to game benchmarks more than the frontier Western companies, but I think DeepSeek does this less than other

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10:12

“China Hawks are Manufacturing an AI Arms Race” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/20

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 for Machine Superintelligence. Consider subscribing to stay up to date with my work. An influential congressional commission is calling for a militarized race to build superintelligent AI based on threadbare evidence The

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18:37

“Zvi’s Thoughts on His 2nd Round of SFF” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/20

Previously: Long-Term Charities: Apply For SFF Funding, Zvi's Thoughts on SFFThere are lots of great charitable giving opportunities out there right now. I recently had the opportunity to be a recommender in the Survival and Flourishing Fund for the second time. As a recommender, you evaluate the charities that apply and decide how worthwhile you think it would be to donate to each of them according to Jaan Tallinn's charitable goals, and this is used to help distribute millions in donations from

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1:41

“Intrinsic power-seeking: AI Might Seek Power for...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/20

This is a link post.I think AI agents (trained end-to-end) might intrinsically prefer power-seeking, in addition to whatever instrumental drives they gain. The logical structure of the argumentPremises People will configure AI systems to be autonomous and reliable in order to accomplish tasks.This configuration process will reinforce & generalize behaviors which complete tasks reliably.Many tasks involve power-seeking.The AI will complete these tasks by seeking power.The AI will be repeatedly

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1:23

“What are the good rationalist films?” by Ben Pace

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/20

I run a weekly sequences-reading meetup with some friends, and I want to add a film-component, where we watch films that have some tie-in to what we've read.I got to talking with friends about what good rationalist films there are. We had some ideas but I wanted to turn it to LessWrong to find out.So please, submit your rationalist films! Then we can watch and discuss them :-)Here are the rules for the thread. Each answer should have 1 film.Each answer should explain how the film ties in to

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36:56

“The Choice Transition” by owencb, Raymond D

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/20

On the emergence of history's reins One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.― Charles Darwin We are a way for the universe to know itself.— Carl Sagan If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.— Yogi Berra Imagine you were trying to explain how the world worked 10 billion years ago. Back then, the best explanation would be in terms of physics: galaxies forming and supernovas

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