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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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12:51

“My Apartment Art Commission Process ” by jenn

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/27

This is a link post.When I know that I’m going to be moving out from an apartment soon, I commission a digital artist to draw it for me. Then I print it out and I have a cool art piece. If you love your current place but you don’t think you’ll spend the rest of your life there, you should consider doing the same.Digital artists are much cheaper than I think they should be. I’ve paid artists between $200-$500 CAD[1] for my commissions, generally spread across one or two additional housemates. (You

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8:23

“... Wait, our models of semantics should inform...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/26

This post is styled after conversations we’ve had in the course of our research, put together in a way that hopefully highlights a bunch of relatively recent and (ironically) hard-to-articulate ideas around natural abstractions. John: So we’ve been working a bit on semantics, and also separately on fluid mechanics. Our main goal for both of them is to figure out more of the higher-level natural abstract data structures. But I’m concerned that the two threads haven’t been informing each other as much

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7:01

“Would catching your AIs trying to escape convince AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/26

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.I often talk to people who think that if frontier models were egregiously misaligned and powerful enough to pose an existential threat, you could get AI developers to slow down or undeploy models by producing evidence of their misalignment. I'm not so sure. As an extreme thought experiment, I’ll argue this could be hard even if you caught your AI red-handed trying to escape.Imagine you're running an AI lab at the

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2:18

“DIY LessWrong Jewelry ” by Fluffnutt

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/26

[There are no affiliate links in this post and I haven't been paid by anyone; I just happened to have bought the charms from Shein. You can probably get similar things on Temu, Aliexpress or Amazon]I made a cute LessWrong themed necklace/earring set for cheap, here's how.For the necklace, buy a pair of these earrings from Shein:US: https://us.shein.com/1pair-Fashionable-Rhinestone-Star-Decor-Drop-Earrings-For-Women-For-Daily-Decoration-p-15276285.html CAN:

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22:54

“Darwinian Traps and Existential Risks ” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/26

This part 1 in a 3-part sequence summarizes my book, 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 at

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25:39

“Secular interpretations of core perennialist claims...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/26

After the release of Ben Pace's extended interview with me about my views on religion, I felt inspired to publish more of my thinking about religion in a format that's more detailed, compact, and organized. This post is the second publication in my series of intended posts about religion.Thanks to Ben Pace, Chris Lakin, Richard Ngo, Damon Pourtahmaseb-Sasi, Marcello Herreshoff, Renshin Lauren Lee, Mark Miller, Roger Thisdell, and Imam Ammar Amonette for their feedback on this post, and thanks to Kaj

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7:42

“you should probably eat oatmeal sometimes ” by bhauth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/25

This is a link post.Inspired by all the blog posts I've seen promoting unusual diets, nootropic drugs, unusual sleep cycles, and so on, I've decided to make my own post suggesting some radical lifestyle choice. My suggestion here is, as the title says: you should probably eat oatmeal sometimes. Yes, I know, oats are <2% of global grain production, so this is a pretty crazy-sounding idea, but bear with me. Eating oatmeal sometimes will literally change your life.* *slightly oatmeal vs rice White

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10:34

“Referendum Mechanics in a Marketplace of Ideas ” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/25

One can definitely make referendums more complex by mixing in unrelated stuff, unnecessary restrictions, and complexities. But that's not the case with Swiss referendums. Quite the contrary, they seem to be designed for simplicity:First: There is no quorum. Even if the turnout is low, the referendum is valid. If three people cast their votes in a national ballot and two of them vote yes, the proposal is accepted. It is then written into the constitution, so even the parliament cannot overrule it. No

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3:26

“Please stop using mediocre AI art in your posts ” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/25

Epistemic Status: Old Man Blogs at CloudLately there's been a wave of people on LessWrong (and maybe the whole internet) starting off their essays with some Dall-E3 art.I don't object (and think it can be cool if done nicely) to get some good ML art to add some visual interest to your posts. But, the default thing I'm seeing is mediocre and making the web feel tacky. I don't want to just yell at people and make them feel self-conscious about their fun. I have an art background, which means I both

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20:38

“Perplexity wins my AI race ” by Elizabeth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/24

Perplexity is the first generalized AI chatbot I’ve found useful enough to integrate into any part of my daily workflow, much less across multiple domains. It speeds me up enough that I’m planning an increase in my freelancing rate.Perplexity has three key advantages: It provides citations, cleanly, in context It has the persona of a sharp human instead of an intolerable customer service agent. It is useful (and sufferable) across a wide variety of domains. The citations are a

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11:41

“Owain Evans on Situational Awareness and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/24

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.Owain Evans is an AI Alignment researcher, research associate at the Center of Human Compatible AI at UC Berkeley, and now leading a new AI safety research group.In this episode we discuss two of his recent papers, “Me, Myself, and AI: The Situational Awareness Dataset (SAD) for LLMs” (LW) and “Connecting the Dots: LLMs can Infer and Verbalize Latent Structure from Disparate Training Data” (LW), alongside some

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57:49

“What’s important in ‘AI for epistemics’? ” by Lukas...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/24

SummaryThis post gives my personal take on “AI for epistemics” and how important it might be to work on.Some background context: AI capabilities are advancing rapidly and I think it's important to think ahead and prepare for the possible development of AI that could automate almost all economically relevant tasks that humans can do.[1]That kind of AI would have a huge impact on key epistemic processes in our society. (I.e.: It would have a huge impact on how new facts get found, how new research

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34:07

“Showing SAE Latents Are Not Atomic Using Meta-SAEs ”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/24

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.Bart, Michael and Patrick are joint first authors. Research conducted as part of MATS 6.0 in Lee Sharkey and Neel Nanda's streams. Thanks to Mckenna Fitzgerald and Robert Krzyzanowski for their feedback!TL;DR: Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) latents have been shown to typically be monosemantic (i.e. correspond to an interpretable property of the input). It is sometimes implicitly assumed that they are therefore atomic,

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0:25

“‘Can AI Scaling Continue Through 2030?’, Epoch AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/24

This is a link post. ---First published: August 24th, 2024 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SoWperLCkunB9ijGq/can-ai-scaling-continue-through-2030-epoch-ai-yes --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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13:39

“How I started believing religion might actually...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/23

After the release of Ben Pace's extended interview with me about my views on religion, I felt inspired to publish more of my thinking about religion in a format that's more detailed, compact, and organized. This post is the first publication in my series of intended posts about religion.Thanks to Ben Pace, Chris Lakin, Richard Ngo, Renshin Lauren Lee, Mark Miller, and Imam Ammar Amonette for their feedback on this post, and thanks to Kaj Sotala, Tomáš Gavenčiak, Paul Colognese, and David Spivak for

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5:47

“If we solve alignment, do we die anyway? ” by Seth Herd

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/23

I'm aware of good arguments that this scenario isn't inevitable, but it still seems frighteningly likely even if we solve technical alignment. TL;DR: If we solve alignment, it will probably be used to create AGI that follows human orders.If takeoff is slow-ish, a pivotal act (preventing more AGIs from being developed) will be difficult.If no pivotal act is performed, RSI-capable AGI proliferates. This creates an n-way non-iterated Prisoner's Dilemma where the first to attack, wins.Disaster results

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1:10

“Turning 22 in the Pre-Apocalypse ” by testingthewaters

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/23

This is a link post.This is part of a series of posts/thoughts I've put together as I come of age in the 2020s. Perhaps particularly relevant is the essay I've linked on some of the feelings I have about rationalism, but the whole collection might have material that is generally of interest (incl. my thoughts on why the current AI/LLM development paradigm is harmful and my proposed solution, including prototype code that runs). To be clear: I'm not coming at this from the perspective of "outsider

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13:36

“Interoperable High Level Structures: Early Thoughts...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/23

Meta: This post is a relatively rough dump of some recent research thoughts; it's not one of our more polished posts, in terms of either clarity or rigor. You’ve been warned.The Interoperable Semantics post and the Solomonoff Inductor Walks Into A Bar post each tackled the question of how different agents in the same world can coordinate on an ontology, so that language can work at all given only a handful of example usages of each word (similar to e.g. children learning new words). Both use natural

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7:10

“A Robust Natural Latent Over A Mixed Distribution Is...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/22

Audio note: this article contains 94 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.This post walks through the math for a theorem. It's intended to be a reference post, which we’ll link back to as-needed from future posts. The question which first motivated this theorem for us was: “Redness of a marker seems like maybe a

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28:46

“A primer on the current state of longevity research...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/22

This is a link post.Note: This post is co-authored with Stacy Li, a PhD student at Berkeley studying aging biology! Highly appreciate all her help in writing, editing, and fact-checking my understanding! IntroductionThe last time I read about aging research deeply was around 2021. The general impression I was getting was that aging research was increasingly more and more funded (good!). Unfortunately, none of the money led to actionable or useful insights (bad).Over time, you get slightly burnt out

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