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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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7:49

“Three Subtle Examples of Data Leakage” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/02

This is a description of my work on some data science projects, lightly obfuscated and fictionalized to protect the confidentiality of the organizations I handled them for (and also to make it flow better). I focus on the high-level epistemic/mathematical issues, and the lived experience of working on intellectual problems, but gloss over the timelines and implementation details. The Upper BoundOne time, I was working for a company which wanted to win some first-place sealed-bid auctions in a market

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10:06

“Peak Human Capital” by PeterMcCluskey

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/02

TL;DR: AI will soon reverse a big economic trend.Epistemic status: This post is likely more speculative than most of my posts. I'm writing this to clarify some vague guesses. Please assume that most claims here are low-confidence forecasts. There has been an important trend over the past century or so for human capital to increase in value relative to other economically important assets. Context Perplexity.ai says: A 2016 economic analysis by Korn Ferry found that: Human capital represents a

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6:02

“Why comparative advantage does not help horses” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/01

This post discusses what statements about comparative advantage say and what they do not say, and why comparative advantage does not save horses from getting sent to glue factories. It is only marginally about AI.Eliezer Yudkowsky, in "The Sun is big, but superintelligences will not spare Earth a little sunlight", explains Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage and then writes:Ricardo's Law doesn't say, "Horses won't get sent to glue factories after cars roll out."Ricardo's Law doesn't say (alas!)

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61:34

“Newsom Vetoes SB 1047” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/01

It's over, until such a future time as either we are so back, or it is over for humanity. Gavin Newsom has vetoed SB 1047. Newsom's Message In Full Quoted text is him, comments are mine. To the Members of the California State Senate: I am returning Senate Bill 1047 without my signature. This bill would require developers of large artificial intelligence (Al) models, and those providing the computing power to train such models, to put certain safeguards and policies in place to

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12:19

“on bacteria, on teeth” by bhauth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/10/01

You may have heard that tooth decay is caused by bacteria producing lactic acid. Let's consider that a little more deeply. criteria for decay To effectively cause cavities, bacteria must meet 4 criteria: Anchoring (with special proteins) to either the tooth surface or something connected to it. Biofilm production to trap nutrients and protect the bacteria. Metabolism that produces acid, especially lactic acid. Growth in acidic conditions. Some of those can be done by different bacteria, but

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3:12

“0.202 Bits of Evidence In Favor of Futarchy” by niplav

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/30

So, I put up some prediction markets on the results of quantified self RCTs. I ran one of the experiments, and scored one market on the results. How much should the performance of the market change our opinion about the viability of using prediction platforms to predict RCTs, and thus be plausibly useful in selecting experiments to run and actions to perform? We can define the maximum entropy distribution (our prior on how good causal Futarchy markets should be) over possible log scores as having

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25:31

“MATS Alumni Impact Analysis” by utilistrutil, K...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/30

SummaryThis winter, MATS will be running our seventh program. In early-mid 2024, 46% of alumni from our first four programs (Winter 2021-22 to Summer 2023) completed a survey about their career progress since participating in MATS. This report presents key findings from the responses of these 72 alumni. 49% of respondents described their current work as “Working/interning on AI alignment/control,” and 29% said “Conducting alignment research independently.”Since MATS, 54% of respondents applied to a

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21:46

“the case for CoT unfaithfulness is overstated” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/29

[Meta note: quickly written, unpolished. Also, it's possible that there's some more convincing work on this topic that I'm unaware of – if so, let me know]In research discussions about LLMs, I often pick up a vibe of casual, generalized skepticism about model-generated CoT (chain-of-thought) explanations.CoTs (people say) are not trustworthy in general. They don't always reflect what the model is "actually" thinking or how it has "actually" solved a given problem.This claim is true as far as it

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20:57

“Base LLMs refuse too” by Connor Kissane, robertzk,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/29

Executive Summary Refusing harmful requests is not a novel behavior learned in chat fine-tuning, aspre-trained base models will also refuse requests (48% of all harmful requests, 3% of harmless) just at a lower rate than chat models (90% harmful, 3% harmless)Further, for both Qwen 1.5 0.5B and Gemma 2 9B,chat fine-tuning reinforces the existing mechanisms. In both the chat and base models it is mediated by the refusal direction described inArditi et al. We can both induce and bypass refusal in

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0:43

“An Interactive Shapley Value Explainer” by James...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/29

This is a link post.This is Shapley Value Calculator breaks down the formula in simple steps, using cats. The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI. --- First published: September 28th, 2024 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bsYpKtaS2L6sqbKbq/an-interactive-shapley-value-explainer --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode

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44:13

“You can, in fact, bamboozle an unaligned AI into...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/29

There has been a renewal of discussion on how much hope we should have of an unaligned AGI leaving humanity alive on Earth after a takeover. When this topic is discussed, the idea of using simulation arguments or acausal trade to make the AI spare our lives often come up. These ideas have a long history. The first mention I know of comes from Rolf Nelson in 2007 on an SL4 message board, the idea later makes a brief appearance in Superintelligence under the name of Anthropic Capture, and came up on

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3:28

“Cryonics is free” by Mati_Roy

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/29

I've been wanting to write a nice post for a few months, but should probably just write a one sooner instead. This is a top-level post not because it's a long text, but because it's important text.Anyways. Cryonics is pretty much money-free now—one of the most affordable ways to dispose of your body post-mortem.In the west coast in the USA, from Oregon Brain Preservation, as of around May 2024 I think:Our research program is open to individuals in Washington, Oregon, and Northern California. This is

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21:01

“Explore More: A Bag of Tricks to Keep Your Life on...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/29

At least, if you happen to be near me in brain space.What advice would you give your younger self?That was the prompt for a class I taught at PAIR 2024. About a quarter of participants ranked it in their top 3 of courses at the camp and half of them had it listed as their favorite.I hadn’t expected that.I thought my life advice was pretty idiosyncratic. I never heard of anyone living their life like I have. I never encountered this method in all the self-help blogs or feel-better books I consumed

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8:24

“The Geometry of Feelings and Nonsense in Large...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/29

Audio note: this article contains 38 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. This post has some ablation results around the thesis of the ICML 2024 Mech. Interp. workshop 1st prize winning paper: The Geometry of Categorical and Hierarchical Concepts in Large Language Models The main takeaway is that the orthogonality they observe in categorical and hierarchical concepts occurs practically everywhere, even

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3:04

“‘Slow’ takeoff is a terrible term for ‘maybe even...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/29

For a long time, when I heard "slow takeoff", I assumed it meant "takeoff that takes longer calendar time than fast takeoff." (i.e. what is now referred to more often as "short timelines" vs "long timelines."). I think Paul Christiano popularized the term, and it so happened he both expected to see longer timelines and smoother/continuous takeoff.I think it's at least somewhat confusing to use the term "slow" to mean "smooth/continuous", because that's not what "slow" particularly means most of the

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20:11

“2024 Petrov Day Retrospective” by Ben Pace, Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/28

Part 0: "Previously, on Petrov Day..." By Raymond ArnoldOne year ago, many people on LessWrong received a DM asking them to choose the most important virtue of Petrov Day, with four listed options that we'd seen people argue for in previous years. "Avoiding actions that noticeably increase chance that civilization is destroyed""Accurately reporting your epistemic state""Quickly orienting to novel situations""Resisting social pressure."Then, people who chose one of those options were sent another

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2:46

“COT Scaling implies slower takeoff speeds” by Logan...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/28

This graph is the biggest update to the AI alignment discourse since GPT-3For those of you unfamiliar with the lore, prior to GPT-3, the feeling was that AGI would rapidly foom based on recursive-self improvement.After GPT-3, it became clear that the first AGI would in reality be built in a large lab using a multi-billion dollar supercomputer and any idea that it simply "copy itself to the internet" is nonsense.Under the GPT-3 regime, however, it was still plausible to assume that the first AGI

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89:59

“Book Review: On the Edge: The Future” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/27

Previously: The Fundamentals, The Gamblers, The BusinessWe have now arrived at the topics most central to this book, aka ‘The Future.’ Rationalism and Effective Altruism (EA) The Manifest conference was also one of the last reporting trips that I made for this book. And it confirmed for me that the River is real—not just some literary device I invented. (6706) Yep. The River is real. I consider myself, among many things, a straight up rationalist. I do not consider myself

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4:27

“Australian AI Safety Forum 2024” by Liam Carroll,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/27

We're excited to announce the inaugural Australian AI Safety Forum, taking place on November 7-8, 2024, in Sydney, Australia. This event aims to foster the growth of the AI safety community within Australia. Apply now! Key Details Dates: November 7-8, 2024Location: Sydney Knowledge Hub, The University of SydneyWebsite: https://aisafetyforum.au DescriptionThe Australian AI Safety Forum is a two-day interdisciplinary event scheduled for November 2024. This forum, the first of its kind in Australia,

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9:27

“Stanislav Petrov Quarterly Performance Review” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/26

Quarterly Performance Review, Autumn 1983Colonel Yuri Kuznetsov looked out the window anxiously. The endless gray landscape did little to soothe his nerves. He only had one employee review left to get through, but he’d saved the hardest one for last. He wasn’t upset about having to dismiss Lieutenant Colonel Petrov—he couldn’t wait to be rid of the little shit—but he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was amiss. He took a swig from his flask. “Stanislav, you can come in now,” Yuri shouted as

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