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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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11:38

“electric turbofans” by bhauth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/03

It seems I've been typecast as a person to ask about "hard tech startups" with big claims that are getting attention. This time it's been Astro Mechanica, a Y Combinator startup making aircraft engines. Here's a video, possibly set up by a PR agency. Apparently Paul Graham compared the significance of their engine to James Watt's steam engine.Most large aircraft today are powered by turbofans, which of course involve a gas turbine that powers a fan. Some new turbofans have a gear stage between the

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2:59

“The Median Researcher Problem” by johnswentworth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/02

Claim: memeticity in a scientific field is mostly determined, not by the most competent researchers in the field, but instead by roughly-median researchers. We’ll call this the “median researcher problem”.Prototypical example: imagine a scientific field in which the large majority of practitioners have a very poor understanding of statistics, p-hacking, etc. Then lots of work in that field will be highly memetic despite trash statistics, blatant p-hacking, etc. Sure, the most competent people in the

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25:32

“Toward Safety Case Inspired Basic Research” by Lucas...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/02

AbstractAI safety is a young science. In its early history, deep and speculative questions regarding the risks of artificial superintelligence attracted the attention of basic science and philosophy, but the near-horizon focus of industry and governance, coupled with shorter safety timelines, means that applied science is now taking a bigger hand in the field's future. As the science of AI safety matures, it is critical to establish a research tradition that balances the need for foundational

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25:14

“SAE Probing: What is it good for? Absolutely...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/02

Subhash and Josh are co-first authors. Work done as part of the two week research sprint in Neel Nanda's MATS stream TLDR We show that dense probestrained on SAE encodings are competitive with traditional activation probing over 60 diversebinary classification datasetsSpecifically, we find that SAE probes have advantages in: Low data regimes (~ < 100 training examples)Corrupted data (i.e. our training set has some incorrect labels, while our test set is clean)Settings where we worry about the

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4:38

“Science advances one funeral at a time” by Cameron...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/02

Major scientific institutions talk a big game about innovation, but the reality is that many of the mechanisms designed to ensure quality—peer review, funding decisions, the academic hierarchy—explicitly incentivize incremental rather than revolutionary progress.[1] Thomas Kuhn's now-famous notion of paradigm shifts was pointing at precisely this phenomenon. When scientists work within what Kuhn called "normal science," they're essentially solving low- to medium-stakes puzzles within their field's

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13:54

“Seeking Collaborators” by abramdemski

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/01

I've been accepted as a mentor for the next AI Safety Camp. You can apply to work with me on the tiling problem. The goal will be to develop reflectively consistent UDT-inspired decision theories, and try to prove tiling theorems for them.The deadline for applicants is November 17.The program will run from January 11 to April 27. It asks for a 10 hour/week commitment.My project description follows: SummaryThe Tiling Agents problem (aka reflective consistency) consists of analysing when one agent

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18:32

“The slingshot helps with learning” by Wilson Wu

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/01

Audio note: this article contains 76 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. The slingshot effect is a late-stage training anomaly found in various adaptive gradient optimization methods. In particular, slingshots are present with AdamW, the optimizer most widely used for modern transformer training. The original slingshot paper observes that slingshots tend to occur alongside grokking, a phenomenon in

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9:40

“Dentistry, Oral Surgeons, and the Inefficiency of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/01

There are million dollar bills lying on the ground for those with eyes to see them.I'm in Miami today, visiting a friend who is opening a dental practice. Chatting with someone very knowledgeable about a niche industry is an interesting experience because you get to learn about just how insane everything is behind the scenes. For example, dental practices benefit significantly from scale, yet the overwhelming majority of operations are small private practices.My friend (let's call him Jeffrey for

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12:09

“JargonBot Beta Test” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/01

We've just launched a new experimental feature: "Automated Jargon Glossaries." If it goes well, it may pave the way for things like LaTeX hoverovers and other nice things.Whenever an author with 100+ karma saves a draft of a post, our database queries a language model to: Identify terms that readers might not know.Write a first draft of an explanation of that termMake a guess as to which terms are useful enough to include.By default, explanations are not shown to readers. Authors get to manually

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150:21

“AI #88: Thanks for the Memos” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/11/01

Following up on the Biden Executive Order on AI, the White House has now issued an extensive memo outlining its AI strategy. The main focus is on government adaptation and encouraging innovation and competitiveness, but there's also sections on safety and international governance. Who knows if a week or two from now, after the election, we will expect any of that to get a chance to be meaningfully applied. If AI is your big issue and you don’t know who to support, this is as detailed a policy

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5:40

“Toward Safety Cases For AI Scheming” by Mikita...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/31

Developers of frontier AI systems will face increasingly challenging decisions about whether their AI systems are safe enough to develop and deploy. One reason why systems may not be safe is if they engage in scheming. In our new report "Towards evaluations-based safety cases for AI scheming", written in collaboration with researchers from the UK AI Safety Institute, METR, Redwood Research and UC Berkeley, we sketch how developers of AI systems could make a structured rationale – 'a safety case' –

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4:19

“The Compendium, A full argument about extinction...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/31

This is a link post.We (Connor Leahy, Gabriel Alfour, Chris Scammell, Andrea Miotti, Adam Shimi) have just published The Compendium, which brings together in a single place the most important arguments that drive our models of the AGI race, and what we need to do to avoid catastrophe.We felt that something like this has been missing from the AI conversation. Most of these points have been shared before, but a “comprehensive worldview” doc has been missing. We’ve tried our best to fill this gap, and

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11:02

“What TMS is like” by Sable

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/31

There are two nuclear options for treating depression: Ketamine and TMS; This post is about the latter.TMS stands for Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. Basically, it fixes depression via magnets, which is about the second or third most magical things that magnets can do.I don’t know a whole lot about the neuroscience - this post isn’t about the how or the why. It's from the perspective of a patient, and it's about the what.What is it like to get TMS? TMS The GatekeepingFor Reasons™, doctors like to

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6:20

“AI as a powerful meme, via CGP Grey” by TheManxLoiner

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/31

In episode 158 of Cortext podcast, CGP Grey gives their high-level reason why they are worried about AI.My one line summary: AI should not be compared to nuclear weapons but instead to biological weapons or memes, which evolve under the implicit evolutionary pressures that exist, leading to AI's that are good at surviving and replicating. The perspective is likely known by many in the community already, but I had not heard it before. Interestingly, there have actually been experiments where they

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0:56

“I turned decision theory problems into memes about...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/30

I hope it has some educational, memetic or at least humorous potential.Newcomb's problemSmoking lesionParfit's HitchhikerCounterfactual muggingXor-blackmail ---First published: October 30th, 2024 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ayvCEeGBqycEqcZab/i-turned-decision-theory-problems-into-memes-about-trolleys --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode

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23:06

“Occupational Licensing Roundup #1” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/30

We’re coming out firmly against it.Our attitude: The customer is always right. Yes, you should go ahead and fix your own damn pipes if you know how to do that, and ignore anyone who tries to tell you different. And if you don’t know how to do it, well, it's at your own risk. With notably rare exceptions, it should be the same for everything else. I’ve been collecting these for a while. It's time. Campaign Talk Harris-Walz platform includes a little occupational licensing reform, as a

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8:01

“Three Notions of ‘Power’” by johnswentworth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/30

We begin with three stories about three people.First, Zhu Di, emperor of China from 1402 to 1424. In that period, it was traditional for foreign envoys to present gifts to the emperor and make a show of submission, reinforcing the emperor's authority and China's image as the center of civilization. Yet the emperor would send the envoys off with gifts in return, often worth more than the gifts the envoy had given - suggesting that the emperor's authority and dominance did not actually translate into

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31:34

“[Intuitive self-models] 7. Hearing Voices, and Other...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/30

7.1 Post summary / Table of contentsThis is the 7th of a series of 8 blog posts, which I’m serializing weekly. (Or email or DM me if you want to read the whole thing right now.)The main thrust of this post is an opinionated discussion of the book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes (1976) in §7.4, and then some discussion of how hallucinations and delusions arise from schizophrenia and mania (§7.5), and from psychotic depression and BPD (§7.6).But

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10:48

“The Alignment Trap: AI Safety as Path to Power” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/29

Recent discussions about artificial intelligence safety have focused heavily on ensuring AI systems remain under human control. While this goal seems laudable on its surface, we should carefully examine whether some proposed safety measures could paradoxically enable rather than prevent dangerous concentrations of power. The Control ParadoxThe fundamental tension lies in how we define "safety." Many current approaches to AI safety focus on making AI systems more controllable and aligned with human

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14:07

“D&D.Sci Coliseum: Arena of Data Evaluation and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/29

This is a follow-up to last week's D&D.Sci scenario: if you intend to play that, and haven't done so yet, you should do so now before spoiling yourself.There is a web interactive here you can use to test your answer, and generation code available here if you're interested, or you can read on for the ruleset and scores. RULESETA character's class/race/level/items boil down to giving them scores in two separate stats: Speed and Power. Stat CalculationEach parameter of a character has an effect on

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