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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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1:03

“Gwern Branwen interview on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast:...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/15

This is a link post.Gwern is a pseudonymous researcher and writer. He was one of the first people to see LLM scaling coming. If you've read his blog, you know he's one of the most interesting polymathic thinkers alive. In order to protect Gwern's anonymity, I proposed interviewing him in person, and having my friend Chris Painter voice over his words after. This amused him enough that he agreed. After the episode, I convinced Gwern to create a donation page where people can help sustain what he's

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7:45

“FrontierMath: A Benchmark for Evaluating Advanced...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/14

FrontierMath: A Benchmark for Evaluating Advanced Mathematical Reasoning in AIFrontierMath presents hundreds of unpublished, expert-level mathematics problems that specialists spend days solving. It offers an ongoing measure of AI complex mathematical reasoning progress.We’re introducing FrontierMath, a benchmark of hundreds of original, expert-crafted mathematics problems designed to evaluate advanced reasoning capabilities in AI systems. These problems span major branches of modern

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24:41

“Seven lessons I didn’t learn from election day” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/14

I spent most of my election day -- 3pm to 11pm Pacific time -- trading on Manifold Markets. That went about as well as it could have gone. I doubled the money I was trading with, jumping to 10th place on Manifold's all-time leaderboard. Spending my time trading instead of just nervously watching results come in also spared me emotionally.[1]It's been a week now, and people seem to be in a mood for learning lessons, for grand takeaways. There is, of course, virtue in learning the right lessons. But

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5:55

“Anvil Problems” by Screwtape

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/14

1.I played a lot of Dwarf Fortress in high school.For those of you who aren't familiar, Dwarf Fortress is a videogame where you try and manage a group of dwarves building a new settlement in the wilderness. It's legendary for a difficulty curve that resembled the Cliffs of Insanity, partially because it was a complex simulation of as many things as the developer could simulate and partially because of the opaque user interface. There were lots of ways to die in Dwarf Fortress, but the way that

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7:09

“Flipping Out: The Cosmic Coinflip Thought Experiment...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/14

TL;DR: People often use the thought experiment of flipping a coin, giving 50% chance of huge gain and 50% chance of losing everything, to say that maximizing utility is bad. But the real problem is that our intuitions on this topic are terrible, and there's no real paradox if you adopt the premise in full.Epistemic status: confident, but too lazy to write out the mathThere's a thought experiment that I've sometimes heard as a counterargument to strict utilitarianism. A god/alien/whatever offers to

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24:09

“Neutrality” by sarahconstantin

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/14

Midjourney, “infinite library”I’ve had post-election thoughts percolating, and the sense that I wanted to synthesize something about this moment, but politics per se is not really my beat. This is about as close as I want to come to the topic, and it's a sidelong thing, but I think the time is right.It's time to start thinking again about neutrality. Neutral institutions, neutral information sources. Things that both seem and are impartial, balanced, incorruptible, universal, legitimate,

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11:01

“Basics of Handling Disagreements with People” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/13

Epistemic Status: This is a collection of useful heuristics I’ve gathered from a wide range of books and workshops, all rather evidence-based (robustness varies). These techniques are designed to supplement basics of rationalist discourse, helping facilitate interactions—mostly with those unfamiliar with rationalist thought, especially on entry-level arguments. They may also be useful in conversations between rationalists on occasion. This is also a minimal viable product for an upcoming sequence

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15:39

“Is Deep Learning Actually Hitting a Wall? Evaluating...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/13

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. [EDIT: I should have credited Gary Marcus for coining the term “deep learning is hitting a wall" back in March 2022. I didn’t actually

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23:07

“Incentive design and capability elicitation” by Joe...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/13

Introduction and summary(This is the fourth in a series of four posts about how we might solve the alignment problem. See the first post for an introduction to this project and a summary of the series as a whole.)In the first post in this series, I distinguished between “motivation control” (trying to ensure that a superintelligent AI's motivations have specific properties) and “option control” (trying to ensure that a superintelligent AI's options have specific properties). My second post surveyed

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9:03

“The Packaging and the Payload” by Screwtape

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/12

1.As I've run and studied meetups, there's a useful metaphor that's become more important to how I think about them. For most meetups, there's the packaging, and a payload, and these are related but useful to approach separately. Allow me to expand.The payload is the thing you actually want. If you order some socks off Amazon, the payload is the socks. If you take a college class, the payload is the information you wanted to learn. If you went on the internet to find pictures of cute kittens, the

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8:37

“AI Craftsmanship” by abramdemski

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/12

Epistemic status: in some sense, I am just complaining, and making light of the extensive effort which goes into designing modern AI. I'm focusing on a sense that something is missing and could be better, which might incidentally come off as calling a broad category of people stupid. Sorry.The video Badness 0 by Suckerpinch makes a comparison between the approach of Donald Knuth and a fictional villain which he names "Lorem Epson". Knuth created the typesetting tool TeX, which (together with LaTeX,

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4:41

“o1 is a bad idea” by abramdemski

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/11

This post comes a bit late with respect to the news cycle, but I argued in a recent interview that o1 is an unfortunate twist on LLM technologies, making them particularly unsafe compared to what we might otherwise have expected:The basic argument is that the technology behind o1 doubles down on a reinforcement learning paradigm, which puts us closer to the world where we have to get the value specification exactly right in order to avert catastrophic outcomes. RLHF is just barely RL. - Andrej

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12:01

“What Ketamine Therapy Is Like” by Sable

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/11

Sniff-click. Sniff-click.One shot in each nostril, and here…we…go.A while ago, I started Ketamine therapy for depression. I didn’t finish - I changed jobs, which switched insurances, which messed everything up - but I was doing it for two and half weeks (five doses) before then, and had good results with it.(For those of you who read about my experiences with TMS, I tried Ketamine first, and did the TMS after I couldn't get back on the Ketamine with my new insurance.) BackgroundThe TL;DR is that a

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15:03

“The Evals Gap” by Marius Hobbhahn

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/11

In our engagements with governments, AI safety institutes, and frontier AI developers, we found the concept of the “evaluation gap” (short: ‘evals gap’) helpful to communicate the current state of the art and what is needed for the field to move towards more robust evaluations. In this post, we briefly explain the concept and its implications. For the purpose of this post, “evals” specifically refer to safety evaluations of frontier models.Evals have become a prominent tool underpinning governance

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22:12

“The Online Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/11

Related: Book Review: On the Edge: The GamblersI have previously been heavily involved in sports betting. That world was very good to me. The times were good, as were the profits. It was a skill game, and a form of positive-sum entertainment, and I was happy to participate and help ensure the sophisticated customer got a high quality product. I knew it wasn’t the most socially valuable enterprise, but I certainly thought it was net positive. When sports gambling was legalized in America, I was

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4:25

“Stone Age Herbalist’s notes on ant warfare and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/11

This is a link post.Each month millions of Argentine ants die along battlefronts that extend for miles around San Diego, where clashes occur with three other colonies in wars that may have been going on since the species arrived in the state a century ago.Some notes on ant warfare Many are aware that a world war between Argentine ant supercolonies is currently underway, across multiple continents, and against multiple ant 'nations'.Ant conflict differs from species to species and from scenario to

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4:27

“Personal AI Planning” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/10

LLMs are getting much more capable, and progress is rapid. I use them in my daily work, and there are many tasks where they're usefully some combination of faster and more capable than I am. I don't see signs of these capability increases stopping or slowing down, and if they do continue I expect the impact on society to start accelerating as they exceed what an increasing fraction of humans can do. I think we could see serious changes in the next 2-5 years. In my professional life,

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7:01

“Active Recall and Spaced Repetition are Different...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/09

Epistemic status: splitting hairs. Originally published as a shortform; thanks @Arjun Panickssery for telling me to publish this as a full post.There's been a lot of recent work on memory. This is great, but popular communication of that progress consistently mixes up active recall and spaced repetition. That consistently bugged me — hence this piece.If you already have a good understanding of active recall and spaced repetition, skim sections I and II, then skip to section III.Note: this piece

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0:33

“The King and the Golem - The Animation” by Writer

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/09

Rational Animations' new video is an animation of The King and the Golem, by @Richard_Ngo, with minimal changes to the original text (we removed some dialogue tags). I hope you'll enjoy it! --- First published: November 8th, 2024 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n9ANKEJnW9KAy5QSh/the-king-and-the-golem-the-animation --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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15:44

“Bigger Livers?” by sarahconstantin

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/09

My husband, Andrew Rettek, has a blog you should read. As he's gotten into fitness, he's started following exercise science, which is the (very new!) field of running small controlled experiments on diet and exercise on athletes who do exactly what you tell them to, under strict observation.This is in contrast to fields like nutrition science, which study the effect of the “intervention” of telling people (usually non-athletes) what diets and exercise programs to follow. Exercise science tends to

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