PODCAST

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

All Episodes

17:18

“If far-UV is so great, why isn’t it everywhere?” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/20

Crossposting this essay by my friend Gavriel Kleinwaks, who is approximately the world expert in Far UV deployment. Disclaimer: In the interest of avoiding the problem where a post languishes in drafts forever, I am not attempting to be particularly rigorous, but I’m happy to answer questions to fill in details about how I’ve come to the conclusions I’m writing about. This post is informed by my work experience at 1Day Sooner, but only reflects my personal takes, not the official stance of my

en-gb

2:00

“Start an Upper-Room UV Installation Company?” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/19

While this post touches on biosecurity it's a personal post and I'm not speaking for my employer If you want to prevent airborne spread of diseases you have a few options: Filter breath (masks, PAPRs) Replace the air (ventilation) Clean the air (filters, UV light) Masks, fans, and air filters are widely available, but what about UV? The CDC recommends upper-room UV, it has a long history of successful use in with TB, and in many cases it's great fit for the space. Look

en-gb

4:47

“The Mysterious Trump Buyers on Polymarket” by Annapurna

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/19

This is a link post. How four accounts have shifted the election probabilities narrativeAs the US Presidential Election approaches, all eyes are on who will become the next president - Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump. In early October, many analysts believed both candidates had a relatively equal chance of winning. However, a significant shift in betting markets occurred following Trump's rally in Butler, PA on October 6, with odds heavily moving in his favor.On

en-gb

9:30

“NAO Updates, Fall 2024” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/18

It's been a busy season at the Nucleic Acid Observatory, and we have a lot to share since our last update. As always, If anything here is particularly interesting or if you’re working on similar problems, please reach out! Wastewater Sequencing We performed an initial analysis of untargeted sequencing data from aggregated airplane lavatory waste and municipal treatment plant influent that we collected and processed during our Fall 2023 partnership with CDC's Traveler-based Genomic Surveillance

en-gb

13:38

“Concrete benefits of making predictions” by Jonny...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/18

Your mind is a prediction machine, constantly trying to anticipate the world around you and altering its forecasts based on new information. It's always doing this as a background process. But what would happen if you deliberately trained this skill? Could you get better at predicting your projects, your life, and the future?Sadly, I don’t have a crystal ball, but I have found trying to see the future valuable. I can't be certain about what will happen, but by deliberately practising the skill of

en-gb

20:43

“Low Probability Estimation in Language Models” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/18

Audio note: this article contains 149 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. ARC recently released our first empirical paper: Estimating the Probabilities of Rare Language Model Outputs. In this work, we construct a simple setting for low probability estimation — single-token argmax sampling in transformers — and use it to compare the performance of various estimation methods. ARC views low probability

en-gb

12:21

“Arithmetic is an underrated world-modeling...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/17

Of all the cognitive tools our ancestors left us, what's best? Society seems to think pretty highly of arithmetic. It's one of the first things we learn as children. So I think it's weird that only a tiny percentage of people seem to know how to actually use arithmetic. Or maybe even understand what arithmetic is for. Why?I think the problem is the idea that arithmetic is about “calculating”. No! Arithmetic is a world-modeling technology. Arguably, it's the best world-modeling technology: It's

en-gb

106:57

“AI #86: Just Think of the Potential” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/17

Dario Amodei is thinking about the potential. The result is a mostly good essay called Machines of Loving Grace, outlining what can be done with ‘powerful AI’ if we had years of what was otherwise relative normality to exploit it in several key domains, and we avoided negative outcomes and solved the control and alignment problems. As he notes, a lot of pretty great things would then be super doable.Anthropic also offers us improvements to its Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP, or what SB 1047

en-gb

3:47

“Bitter lessons about lucid dreaming” by avturchin

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/17

The amount of effort is not proportional to the result. One lucid dream (LD) can take hours or even dozens of hours of effort. On average, a practitioner experiences several dozen LDs in their lifetime before quitting. If they don't quit, they dedicate their entire life to it, day and night, trying endless techniques, practicing reality checks, etc.All techniques are absolutely useless compared to the effectiveness of galantamine. The effectiveness of galantamine is directly proportional to its

en-gb

6:38

“cancer rates after gene therapy” by bhauth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/17

Here's a new paper on cancer developing in patients after receiving gene therapy with eli-cel, brand name Skysona.What is eli-cel? Stem cells are isolated and modified by using a lentiviral vector to add the ABCD1 gene. The stem cells in bone marrow are killed with chemotherapy, and replaced with the modified stem cells. How often did cancer develop? Hematologic cancer developed in 7 of 67 patients after the receipt of eli-cel Yep, that's about what I expected. How long did it

en-gb

14:06

“Against empathy-by-default” by Steven Byrnes

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/16

tl;drSection 1 presents an argument that I’ve heard from a couple people, that says that empathy happens “for free” as a side-effect of the general architecture of mammalian brains, basically because we tend to have similar feelings about similar situations, and “me being happy” is a kinda similar situation to “someone else being happy”, and thus if I find the former motivating then I’ll tend to find the latter motivating too, other things equal.Section 2 argues that those two situations really

en-gb

22:22

“[Intuitive self-models] 5. Dissociative Identity...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/16

5.1 Post summary / Table of contentsThis is the 5th 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.)Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) (previously known as “Multiple Personality Disorder”) involves a person having multiple “alters” (alternate identities), with different preferences and (in some cases) different names. A DID diagnosis also requires some nonzero amount of “inter-identity amnesia”, where an alter cannot

en-gb

33:08

“An Opinionated Evals Reading List” by Marius...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/15

While you can make a lot of progress in evals with tinkering and paying little attention to the literature, we found that various other papers have saved us many months of research effort. The Apollo Research evals team thus compiled a list of what we felt were important evals-related papers. We likely missed some relevant papers, and our recommendations reflect our personal opinions. Our favorite papers Evaluating Frontier Models for Dangerous Capabilities (Phuong et al., 2024) Contains detailed

en-gb

9:40

“Anthropic’s updated Responsible Scaling Policy” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/15

Today we are publishing a significant update to our Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP), the risk governance framework we use to mitigate potential catastrophic risks from frontier AI systems. This update introduces a more flexible and nuanced approach to assessing and managing AI risks while maintaining our commitment not to train or deploy models unless we have implemented adequate safeguards. Key improvements include new capability thresholds to indicate when we will upgrade our safeguards, refined

en-gb

7:43

“Minimal Motivation of Natural Latents” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/15

Audio note: this article contains 65 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Suppose two Bayesian agents are presented with the same spreadsheet - IID samples of data in each row, a feature in each column. Each agent develops a generative model of the data distribution. We'll assume the two converge to the same predictive distribution, but may have different generative models containing different latent

en-gb

15:44

“AI Alignment via Slow Substrates: Early Empirical...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/14

A few months ago, I wrote a post about using slower computing substrates as a possibly new way to safely train and align ASI.If you haven't read that post, basically the idea is that if we consider compute speed as a factor in Total Intelligence (alongside say, quality of intelligence), then it should be possible to keep quality the same and lower compute speed in order to lower Total Intelligence while keeping quality the same. An intuition pump is to imagine a scenario where we are able to slow

en-gb

11:13

“The case for unlearning that removes information...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/14

What if you could remove some information from the weights of an AI? Would that be helpful?It is clearly useful against some misuse concerns: if you are concerned that LLMs will make it easier to build bioweapons because they have memorized such information, removing the memorized facts would remove this misuse concern.In a paper Aghyad Deeb and I just released, we show it is tractable to evaluate the presence of certain undesirable facts in an LLM: take independent facts that should have all been

en-gb

25:18

“Circuits in Superposition: compressing many small...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/14

Audio note: this article contains 259 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Work done at Apollo Research. The bottom half of this post is just maths that you do not need to read to get the gist — the estimated reading time is misleading!Tl;dr: We generalize the mathematical framework for computation in superposition from compressing many boolean logic gates into a neural network, to compressing many

en-gb

11:50

“Why Stop AI is barricading OpenAI” by Remmelt

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/14

Stop AI just put out a press release, summarising our plan to barricade OpenAI's office entrances. As an organiser, let me add some thoughts to nuance the text: Plan On October 21st, 2024 at 12:00 pm Stop AI will peacefully barricade, via sit-in, OpenAI's office entrance gate The emphasis is on peacefully. We are a non-violent activism organisation, and always will be. We could very easily stop the development of Artificial General Intelligence if a small group of people repeatedly

en-gb

16:59

“A Percentage Model of a Person” by Sable

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/14

The standard psychological questionnaire for depression doctors have given me is the PHQ-9. It names a symptom, and for each symptom it gives four possible responses in severity. The responses are worth points, the points are totaled, and the final score is supposed to be indicative of how severe a person's depression is.This is what it looks like:According to Wikipedia, the final score indicates the following: To be perfectly blunt, while I suppose this functions for doctors to get an idea of where

en-gb

4,491 results

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

All Episodes

Similar Podcasts

The Automated Daily

TrendTeller

Reflections

Livewire Labs

Eli the Computer Guy

Eli the Computer Guy

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Superkraft KI News | by Jörg Schieb

Jörg Schieb