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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

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4:41

“Applications of Chaos: Saying No (with Hastings...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/21

Previously Alex Altair and I published a post on the applications of chaos theory, which found a few successes but mostly overhyped dead ends. Luckily the comments came through, providing me with an entirely different type of application: knowing you can’t, and explaining to your boss that you can’t. Knowing you can’t Calling a system chaotic rules out many solutions and tools, which can save you time and money in dead ends not traveled. I knew this, but also knew that you could never be 100%

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6:47

“Work with me on agent foundations: independent...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/21

Summary: I am an independent researcher in agent foundations, and I've recently received an LTFF grant to fund someone to do research with me. This is a rolling application; I'll close it whenever I'm no longer interested in taking another person.If you're not familiar with agent foundations, you can read about my views in this post. What the role might be likeThis role is extremely flexible. Depending on who you are, it could end up resembling an internship, a research assistant position, a postdoc

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3:40

“o1-preview is pretty good at doing ML on an unknown...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/20

Previous post: How good are LLMs at doing ML on an unknown dataset? A while back I ran some evaluation tests on GPT4o, Claude Sonnet 3.5 and Gemini advanced to see how good they were at doing machine learning on a completely novel, and somewhat unusual dataset. The data was basically 512 points in the 2D plane, and some of the points make up a shape, and the goal is to classify the data according to what shape the points make up. None of the models did better than chance on the original (hard)

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2:16

“Interested in Cognitive Bootcamp? ” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/20

I'm running more 4-day "Cognitive Bootcamps" over the next couple months (during Lighthaven Eternal September season). DM me if you're potentially interested (either as an individual, or as a team).The workshop is most valuable to people who: control their decisionmaking process (i.e. you decide what projects you or a team work on, rather than working at a day-job on someone else's vision)are either a) confused about planmaking / have a vague sense that they aren't as strategically ambitious as they

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16:07

“Laziness death spirals ” by PatrickDFarley

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/20

I’ve claimed that Willpower compounds and that small wins in the present make it easier to get bigger wins in the future. Unfortunately, procrastination and laziness compound, too.You’re stressed out for some reason, so you take the evening off for a YouTube binge. You end up staying awake a little later than usual and sleeping poorly. So the next morning you feel especially tired; you snooze a few extra times. In your rushed morning routine you don’t have time to prepare for the work meeting as

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7:58

“We Don’t Know Our Own Values, but Reward Bridges The...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/19

Background: “Learning” vs “Learning About”Adaptive systems, reinforcement “learners”, etc, “learn” in the sense that their behavior adapts to their environment.Bayesian reasoners, human scientists, etc, “learn” in the sense that they have some symbolic representation of the environment, and they update those symbols over time to (hopefully) better match the environment (i.e. make the map better match the territory).These two kinds of “learning” are not synonymous[1]. Adaptive systems “learn”

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51:45

“AI #82: The Governor Ponders ” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/19

The big news of the week was of course OpenAI releasing their new model o1. If you read one post this week, read that one. Everything else is a relative sideshow.Meanwhile, we await Newsom's decision on SB 1047. The smart money was always that Gavin Newsom would make us wait before offering his verdict on SB 1047. It's a big decision. Don’t rush him. In the meantime, what hints he has offered suggest he's buying into some of the anti-1047 talking points. I’m offering a letter to him here based

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1:56

“Which LessWrong/Alignment topics would you like to...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/19

Would you like to be tutored in infrabayesianism, natural latents, Agent Foundations, decision theory, anthropics, or some other topics?I'm thinking about prototyping some topic-specific LLM tutor bots, and would like to prioritize topics that multiple people are interested in.Topic-specific LLM tutors would be customized with things like pre-loaded relevant context, helpful system prompts, and more focused testing to ensure they work.I'm going to use the same poll infrastructure that Ben Pace

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41:34

“[Intuitive self-models] 1: Preliminaries ” by Steven...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/19

1.1 Summary & Table of ContentsThis is the first of a series of eight blog posts, which I’ll be serializing over the next month or two. (Or email or DM me if you want to read the whole thing right now.) Here's an overview of the whole series, and then we’ll jump right into the first post! 1.1.1 Summary & Table of Contents—for the whole seriesThis is a rather ambitious series of blog posts, in that I’ll attempt to explain what's the deal with consciousness, free will, hypnotism,

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34:24

“The Obliqueness Thesis ” by jessicata

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/19

In my Xenosystems review, I discussed the Orthogonality Thesis, concluding that it was a bad metaphor. It's a long post, though, and the comments on orthogonality build on other Xenosystems content. Therefore, I think it may be helpful to present a more concentrated discussion on Orthogonality, contrasting Orthogonality with my own view, without introducing dependencies on Land's views. (Land gets credit for inspiring many of these thoughts, of course, but I'm presenting my views as my own

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28:03

“Is ‘superhuman’ AI forecasting BS? Some experiments...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/18

Disclaimer: I am a computational physicist's and this investigation is outside of my immediate area of expertise. Feel free to peruse the experiments and take everything I say with appropriate levels of skepticism. Introduction: The centre for AI safety is a prominent AI safety research group doing technical AI research as well as regulatory activism. It's headed by Dan Hendrycks, who has a PHD in computer science from Berkeley and some notable contributions to AI research. Last week CAIS released

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29:44

“Generative ML in chemistry is bottlenecked by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/18

IntroductionEvery single time I design a protein — using ML or otherwise — I am confident that it is capable of being manufactured. I simply reach out to Twist Biosciences, have them create a plasmid that encodes for the amino acids that make up my proteins, push that plasmid into a cell, and the cell will pump out the protein I created.Maybe the cell cannot efficiently create the protein. Maybe the protein sucks. Maybe it will fold in weird ways, isn’t thermostable, or has some other undesirable

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12:40

“Skills from a year of Purposeful Rationality...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/18

A year ago, I started trying to deliberate practice skills that would "help people figure out the answers to confusing, important questions." I experimented with Thinking Physics questions, GPQA questions, Puzzle Games , Strategy Games, and a stupid twitchy reflex game I had struggled to beat for 8 years[1]. Then I went back to my day job and tried figuring stuff out there too.The most important skill I was trying to learn was Metastrategic Brainstorming[2] – the skill of looking at a confusing,

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75:41

“Book review: Xenosystems ” by jessicata

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/17

I've met a few Landians over the last couple years, and they generally recommend that I start with reading Land's (now defunct) Xenosystems blog, or Xenosystems, a Passage Publishing book that compiles posts from the blog. While I've read some of Fanged Noumena in the past, I would agree with these Landians that Xenosystems (and currently, the book version) is the best starting point. In the current environment, where academia has lost much of its intellectual relevance, it seems overly pretentious

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3:00

“MIRI’s September 2024 newsletter ” by Harlan

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/17

This is a link post. MIRI updates Aaron Scher and Joe Collman have joined the Technical Governance Team at MIRI as researchers. Aaron previously did independent research related to sycophancy in language models and mechanistic interpretability, while Joe previously did independent research related to AI safety via debate and contributed to field-building work at MATS and BlueDot Impact.In an interview with PBS News Hour's Paul Solman, Eliezer Yudkowsky briefly explains why he expects

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67:29

“Secret Collusion: Will We Know When to Unplug AI? ”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/16

Audio note: this article contains 108 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. TL;DR: We introduce the first comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding and mitigating secret collusion among advanced AI agents, along with CASE, a novel model evaluation framework. CASE assesses the cryptographic and steganographic capabilities of agents, while exploring the emergence of secret collusion in

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39:31

“How difficult is AI Alignment? ” by Sammy Martin

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/16

This work was funded by Polaris VenturesThere is currently no consensus on how difficult the AI alignment problem is. We have yet to encounter any real-world, in the wild instances of the most concerning threat models, like deceptive misalignment. However, there are compelling theoretical arguments which suggest these failures will arise eventually.Will current alignment methods accidentally train deceptive, power-seeking AIs that appear aligned, or not? We must make decisions about which techniques

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4:48

“How you can help pass important AI legislation with...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/16

Posting something about a current issue that I think many people here would be interested in. See also the related EA Forum post.California Governor Gavin Newsom has until September 30 to decide the fate of SB 1047 - one of the most hotly debated AI bills in the world. The Center for AI Safety Action Fund, where I work, is a co-sponsor of the bill. I’d like to share how you can help support the bill if you want to. About SB 1047 and why it is importantSB 1047 is an AI bill in the state of

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33:39

“My disagreements with ‘AGI ruin: A List of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/16

This is going to probably be a long post, so do try to get a drink and a snack while reading this post.This is an edited version of my own comment on the post below, and I formatted and edited the content in line with what @MondSemmel recommended:My comment: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/?commentId=Gcigdmuje4EacwirDMondSemmel's comment: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/?commentId=WcKi4RcjRstoFFvbfThe post I'm responding to:

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6:40

“Why I funded PIBBSS ” by Ryan Kidd

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/15

I just left a comment on PIBBSS' Manfund grant request (which I funded $25k) that people might find interesting. PIBBSS needs more funding! Main points in favor of this grant My inside view is that PIBBSS mainly supports “blue sky” or “basic” research, some of which has a low chance of paying off, but might be critical in “worst case” alignment scenarios (e.g., where “alignment MVPs” don’t work, or “sharp left turns” and “intelligence explosions” are more likely than I expect). In contrast, of the

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