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16:03

“Fun With CellxGene ” by sarahconstantin

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/09

Midjourney imageFor this week's post, I thought I’d mess around a bit with the CellXGene tool provided by the Chan Zuckerberg Institute.It's based on a big dataset of individual cells, classified by tissue, cell type, and disease state, and their gene expression profiles (single-cell RNA counts). You can automatically compare how gene expression looks different between sick and healthy individuals, for a variety of diseases, and drill down into which cells/tissues are different and how. It's a

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3:48

“Pollsters Should Publish Question Translations ” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/09

Pew recently commissioned Gallup to run a poll in Israel on attitudes to social media censorship. They found high support for banning various kinds of speech: The fourth question, especially, is disturbing: 59% want to ban publicly expressing sympathy for civilians in Gaza? Since the polling was conducted in Hebrew and Arabic, however, this got me wondering whether translation might be contributing. I went to check, and Pew did publish the questions: Q123c. Thinking about the

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17:29

“On Fables and Nuanced Charts ” by Niko_McCarty

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/09

Written by Spencer Greenberg & Amber Dawn Ace for Asimov Press.In 1994, the U.S. Congress passed the largest crime bill in U.S. history, called the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. The bill allocated billions of dollars to build more prisons and hire 100,000 new police officers, among other things. In the years following the bill's passage, violent crime rates in the U.S. dropped drastically, from around 750 offenses per 100,000 people in 1990 to under 400 in 2018.A chart showing

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5:20

“My Number 1 Epistemology Book Recommendation:...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/08

In my last post, I wrote that no resource out there exactly captured my model of epistemology, which is why I wanted to share a half-baked version of it.But I do have one book which I always recommend to people who want to learn more about epistemology: Inventing Temperature by Hasok Chang.To be very clear, my recommendation is not just to get the good ideas from this book (of which there are many) from a book review or summary — it's to actually read the book, the old-school way, one word at a

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14:33

“That Alien Message - The Animation ” by Writer

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/07

Our new video is an adaptation of That Alien Message, by @Eliezer Yudkowsky. This time, the text has been significantly adapted, so I include it below. Part 1Picture a world just like ours, except the people are a fair bit smarter: in this world, Einstein isn’t one in a million, he's one in a thousand. In fact, here he is now. He's made all the same discoveries, but they’re not quite as unusual: there have been lots of other discoveries. Anyway, he's out one night with a friend looking up at the

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1:34

“Pay Risk Evaluators in Cash, Not Equity ” by Adam...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/07

Personally, I suspect the alignment problem is hard. But even if it turns out to be easy, survival may still require getting at least the absolute basics right; currently, I think we're mostly failing even at that.Early discussion of AI risk often focused on debating the viability of various elaborate safety schemes humanity might someday devise—designing AI systems to be more like “tools” than “agents,” for example, or as purely question-answering oracles locked within some kryptonite-style box

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25:46

“Excerpts from ‘A Reader’s Manifesto’ ” by Arjun...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/07

“A Reader's Manifesto” is a July 2001 Atlantic piece by B.R. Myers that I've returned to many times. He complains about the inaccessible pretension of the highbrow literary fiction of his day. The article is mostly a long list of critiques of various quotes/passages from well-reviewed books by famous authors. It's hard to accuse him of cherry-picking since he only targets passages that reviewers singled out as unusually good.Some of his complaints are dumb but the general idea is useful: authors try

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9:16

“Adam Optimizer Causes Privileged Basis in...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/07

Diego Caples (diego@activated-ai.com)Rob Neuhaus (rob@activated-ai.com) IntroductionIn principle, neuron activations in a transformer-based language model residual stream should be about the same scale. In practice, however the dimensions unexpectedly widely vary in scale. Mathematical theories of the transformer architecture do not predict this. They expect rotational equivariance within a model, where one dimension is no more important than any other. Is there something wrong with our reasonably

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15:47

“Backdoors as an analogy for deceptive alignment ” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/06

ARC has released a paper on Backdoor defense, learnability and obfuscation in which we study a formal notion of backdoors in ML models. Part of our motivation for this is an analogy between backdoors and deceptive alignment, the possibility that an AI system would intentionally behave well in training in order to give itself the opportunity to behave uncooperatively later. In our paper, we prove several theoretical results that shed some light on possible mitigations for deceptive alignment, albeit

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9:02

“instruction tuning and autoregressive distribution...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/05

[Note: this began life as a "Quick Takes" comment, but it got pretty long, so I figured I might as well convert it to a regular post.]In LM training, every token provides new information about "the world beyond the LM" that can be used/"learned" in-context to better predict future tokens in the same window.But when text is produced by autoregressive sampling from the same LM, it is not informative in the same way, at least not to the same extent[1]. Thus, sampling inevitably produces a distribution

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9:46

“Conflating value alignment and intent alignment is...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/05

Epistemic status: I think something like this confusion is happening often. I'm not saying these are the only differences in what people mean by "AGI alignment". Summary:Value alignment is better but probably harder to achieve than personal intent alignment to the short-term wants of some person(s). Different groups and people tend to primarily address one of these alignment targets when they discuss alignment. Confusion abounds. One important confusion is an assumption that the type of AI defines

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19:23

“The Fragility of Life Hypothesis and the Evolution...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/05

This part 2 in a 3-part sequence summarizes my book (see part 1 here), The Darwinian Trap. The book aims to popularize the concept of multipolar traps and establish them as a broader cause area. If you find this series intriguing and want to spread the word and learn more: Share this post with others on X or other social media platforms.Pre-order the bookhere.Sign up for my mailing listhere before September 24 for a 20% chance to win a free hardcover copy of the book (it takes 5 seconds).Contact me

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5:03

“What is SB 1047 *for*? ” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/05

Emmett Shear on twitter asked:I think SB 1047 has gotten much better from where it started. It no longer appears actively bad. But can someone who is pro-SB 1047 explain the specific chain of causal events where they think this bill becoming law results in an actual safer world? What's the theory?And I realized that AFAICT no one has concisely written up what the actual story for SB 1047 is supposed to be.This is my current understanding. Other folk here The bill isn't sufficient on it's own, but

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8:43

“Executable philosophy as a failed totalizing...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/05

(this is an expanded, edited version of an x.com post)It is easy to interpret Eliezer Yudkowsky's main goal as creating a friendly AGI. Clearly, he has failed at this goal and has little hope of achieving it. That's not a particularly interesting analysis, however. A priori, creating a machine that makes things ok forever is not a particularly plausible objective. Failure to do so is not particularly informative. So I'll focus on a different but related project of his: executable philosophy

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3:40

“Michael Dickens’ Caffeine Tolerance Research ” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/05

This is a link post.Michael Dickens has read the research and performed two self-experiments on whether consuming caffeine builds up tolerance, and if yes, how quickly.First literature review: What if instead of taking caffeine every day, you only take it intermittently—say, once every 3 days? How often can most people take caffeine without developing a tolerance? The scientific literature on this question is sparse. Here's what I found: Experiments on rats found that rats who took caffeine

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7:38

“What happens if you present 500 people with an...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/04

Recently, Nathan Young and I wrote about arguments for AI risk and put them on the AI Impacts wiki. In the process, we ran a casual little survey of the American public regarding how they feel about the arguments, initially (if I recall) just because we were curious whether the arguments we found least compelling would also fail to compel a wide variety of people. The results were very confusing, so we ended up thinking more about this than initially intended and running four iterations total. This

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24:56

“AI and the Technological Richter Scale ” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/04

The Technological Richter scale is introduced about 80% of the way through Nate Silver's new book On the Edge.A full review is in the works (note to prediction markets: this post alone does NOT on its own count as a review, but this counts as part of a future review), but this concept seems highly useful, stands on its own and I want a reference post for it. Nate skips around his chapter titles and timelines, so why not do the same here? Defining the Scale Nate Silver, On the Edge

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22:58

“Book Review: What Even Is Gender? ” by Joey Marcellino

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/03

I submitted this review to the 2024 ACX book review contest, but it didn't make the cut, so I'm putting it here instead for posterity. Conspiracy theories are fun because of how they make everything fit together, and scratch the unbearable itch some of us get when there are little details of a narrative that just don’t make sense. The problem is they tend to have a few issues, like requiring one to posit expansive perfectly coordinated infosecurity, demanding inaccessible or running contrary to

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23:47

“Survey: How Do Elite Chinese Students Feel About the...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/02

IntroIn April 2024, my colleague and I (both affiliated with Peking University) conducted a survey involving 510 students from Tsinghua University and 518 students from Peking University—China's two top academic institutions. Our focus was on their perspectives regarding the frontier risks of artificial intelligence.In the People's Republic of China (PRC), publicly accessible survey data on AI is relatively rare, so we hope this report provides some valuable insights into how people in the PRC are

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19:05

“Free Will and Dodging Anvils: AIXI Off-Policy ” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/09/01

Audio note: this article contains 125 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 depends on a basic understanding of history-based reinforcement learning and the AIXI model. I am grateful to Marcus Hutter and the lesswrong team for early feedback, though any remaining errors are mine.The universal agent AIXI treats the environment it interacts with like a video game it is playing; the actions it

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