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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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2:08

“Parental Writing Selection Bias” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/13

In general I'd like to see a lot more of people writing about theirfailures in addition to their successes. If a bunch of people all try a thing and have mixed results, and only the people with good results write about it, people who don't know about this selection bias or don't realize its extent are going to end up with overly positive views. I've written about some of my mistakes, and I think it would be good if this were a higher fraction of my posts. On the other hand, once

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17:33

“The AGI Entente Delusion” by Max Tegmark

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/13

As humanity gets closer to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a new geopolitical strategy is gaining traction in US and allied circles, in the NatSec, AI safety and tech communities. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and RAND Corporation call it the “entente”, while others privately refer to it as “hegemony" or “crush China”. I will argue that, irrespective of one's ethical or geopolitical preferences, it is fundamentally flawed and against US national security interests.If the US fights China in an

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3:31

“Prices are Bounties” by Maxwell Tabarrok

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/13

This is a link post.A man has just robbed a train. A Rock Island Rail car was held up in the desert of North Texas on route from Chicago carrying dozens of passengers and tens of thousands of dollars in a Wells Fargo express compartment. The men were slain and the women and children are kidnapped.You’re the sheriff in charge of the investigation. In a case like this, tried and true procedure is to put a bounty on the man's head. That gets everyone interested in looking and bringing this man to

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6:26

“AI research assistants competition 2024Q3: Tie...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/12

Summary I make a large part of my living performing literature reviews to answer scientific questions. For years AI has been unable to do anything to lower my research workload, but back in August I tried Perplexity, and it immediately provided value far beyond what I’d gotten from other tools. This wasn’t a fair comparison because I hadn’t tried any other AI research assistant in months, which is decades in AI time. In this post I right that wrong by running two test questions through

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5:49

“OODA your OODA Loop” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/12

An OODA loop is a repeating loop where you take in information, integrate it into your decision-making, use it to make more decisions, and then receive more information in response.“OODA” is a particular structure referring to: Observe:“what is happening in the world” (in as raw a form as you can)Orient:“what sorts of things are important right now? How do I organize the information I’m seeing”Decide:“what do I want to do next”Act:“Okay I’m doing it now.”You are probably doing some kind of

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13:42

“EIS XIV: Is mechanistic interpretability about to be...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/12

Is this market really only at 63%? I think you should take the over. Only 63%? I think you should take the over. Five tiers of rigor for safety-oriented interpretability workLately, I have been thinking of interpretability research as falling into five different tiers of rigor. 1. PontificationThis is when researchers claim they have succeeded in interpreting a model by definition or based on analyzing results and asserting hypotheses about them. This is a key part of the scientific method. But by

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1:42

“Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace” by Matrice...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/12

This is a link post.I think and talk a lot about the risks of powerful AI. The company I’m the CEO of, Anthropic, does a lot of research on how to reduce these risks. Because of this, people sometimes draw the conclusion that I’m a pessimist or “doomer” who thinks AI will be mostly bad or dangerous. I don’t think that at all. In fact, one of my main reasons for focusing on risks is that they’re the only thing standing between us and what I see as a fundamentally positive future. I think that most

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25:16

“My theory of change for working in AI healthtech” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/12

This post starts out pretty gloomy but ends up with some points that I feel pretty positive about. Day to day, I'm more focussed on the positive points, but awareness of the negative has been crucial to forming my priorities, so I'm going to start with those. It's mostly addressed to the EA community, but is hopefully somewhat of interest to LessWrong and the Alignment Forum as well. My main concernsI think AGI is going to be developed soon, and quickly. Possibly (20%) that's next year, and most

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15:37

“How much I’m paying for AI productivity software...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/11

This post is broken down into two parts: Which AI productivity tools am I currently using (as an alignment researcher)?Why does it currently feel hard to spend +$1000/month on AI to increase one's productivity drastically? Which AI productivity tools am I currently using?Let's get right to it. Here's what I'm currently using and how much I am paying: Superwhisper(or other new Speech-to-Text that leverage LLMs for rewriting) apps. Under $8.49 per month. You can use different STT models (different

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2:10

“Rationality Quotes - Fall 2024” by Screwtape

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/11

Once upon a time, there were posts where people would comment with quotes. The last one was a while ago, and they'd been getting less and less traffic. I have a theory that there's a quote overhang. Firstly, I think LessWrong has recovered a lot since the 2015~2017 decline, and so there might just be more users around. Second, it's been half a decade and so many new quotable lines may have been written. I have a another theory that the way LessWrong 2.0 splits Frontpage and Personal is rougher on a

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15:04

“Can AI Outpredict Humans? Results From Metaculus’s...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/11

Metaculus's Q4 Benchmark series is now live. Click here to learn more and to compete for $30,000. Benchmark the state of the art in AI forecasting against the best humans on real-world questions. Metaculus's Q3 AI Benchmarking Series aimed to assess how the best bots compare to the best humans on real-world forecasting questions, like those found on Metaculus. Over the quarter we had 55 bots compete for $30,000 on 255 weighted questions with a team of 10 Pros serving as a human benchmark. We found

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28:05

“Scaffolding for Noticing Metacognition” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/10

I'm extremely Noticing-pilled. I think the ability to notice subtle things in your mind, or in the world around you, is one of the foundational rationality skills. It's necessary for building habits[1], for seeing clues that help you solve confusing problems, for diagnosing how you could have thought that faster, and for generally building a mechanistic model of your mind that lets you become a power-user for your brain.Despite this, I didn't include Noticing in my recent workshops, because it takes

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36:19

“Safe Predictive Agents with Joint Scoring Rules” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/10

Audio note: this article contains 129 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Thanks to Evan Hubinger for funding this project and for introducing me to predictive models, Johannes Treutlein for many fruitful discussions on related topics, and Dan Valentine for providing valuable feedback on my code implementation. In September 2023, I received four months of funding through Manifund to extend my initial

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19:23

“Momentum of Light in Glass” by Ben

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/10

I think that most people underestimate how many scientific mysteries remain, even on questions that sound basic.My favourite candidate for "the most basic thing that is still unknown" is the momentum carried by light, when it is in a medium (for example, a flash of light in glass or water). If a block of glass has a refractive index of <span>_n_</span>, then the light inside that block travels <span>_n_</span> times slower than the light would in vacuum. But what is the

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9:19

“Values Are Real Like Harry Potter” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/10

Imagine a TV showing a video of a bizarre, unfamiliar object - let's call it a squirgle. The video was computer generated by a one-time piece of code, so there's no "real squirgle" somewhere else in the world which the video is showing. Nonetheless, there's still some substantive sense in which the squirgle on screen is "a thing" - even though I can only ever see it through the screen, I can still: Notice that the same squirgle is shown at one time and another time.Predict that a shiny spot on the

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1:50

“Demis Hassabis and Geoffrey Hinton Awarded Nobel...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/09

Geoffrey Hinton received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his role in creating the modern field of deep learning. This will strengthen his reputation as the "Godfather of AI" which was already used to amplify his public statements about AI risk.[1]The Nobel Prize in Physics 2024 was awarded to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”Demis Hassabis, Deepmind's co-founder and CEO, received the

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14:13

“2025 Color Trends” by sarahconstantin

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/09

Once again, I’ve compiled some statistics on color trends in the spring/summer 2025 ready-to-wear fashion collections! Background and MethodologyWe just got done with “fashion month”, the flurry of activity in the fall when fashion designers release their spring/summer collections for the coming year and display them on runways in New York, London, Milan, and Paris.1Vogue Magazine generously shares many images from the collections — by my count, 13,570 photographs in all, typically each of a

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47:55

“[Intuitive self-models] 4. Trance” by Steven Byrnes

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/09

4.1 Post summary / Table of contentsThis is the fourth of a series of eight blog posts, which I’m serializing weekly. (Or email or DM me if you want to read the whole thing right now.)“Trance” is an umbrella term for various states of consciousness in which “you lose yourself”, somehow. The first kind that I learned about was hypnotic trance, as depicted in the media:Source: tvtropesWith examples like that, I quite naturally assumed that hypnotism was fictional.Other types of trance, particularly

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2:50

“There is a globe in your LLM” by jacob_drori

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/08

Gurnee & Tegmark (2023) trained linear probes to take an LLM's internal activation on a landmark's name (e.g. "The London Eye"), and predict the landmark's longitude and latitude. The results look like this:[1] Two angles of true world atlas, with predicted atlas hovering above. True locations are red points; predicted locations are blue, in a slightly raised plane, linked to the corresponding true location by a grey line.So LLMs (or at least, Llama 2, which they used for this experiment)

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21:50

“Schelling game evaluations for AI control” by Olli...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/08

Playing Schelling games is a key dangerous capability for schemers: it's much harder to control AIs that are very capable at Schelling coordination. In this post, I discuss the threat model and describe concrete projects for empirical work. Suppose you wish to control models that adversarially try to cause a catastrophic outcome (“schemers”). A useful class of techniques is monitoring: before letting any action taken by the potentially-scheming policy be executed, you use another model as a monitor

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