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LessWrong

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23:54

“Fluent, Cruxy Predictions” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/10

The latest in the Feedback Loop Rationality series. Periodically, people (including me) try to operationalize predictions, or bets, and... it doesn't seem to help much.I think I recently "got good" at making "actually useful predictions." I currently feel on-the-cusp of unlocking a host of related skills further down the rationality tech tree. This post will attempt to spell out some of the nuances of how I currently go about it, and paint a picture of why I think it's worth investing in.The

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5:06

“Consent across power differentials” by Ramana Kumar

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/10

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.I'd like to put forward another description of a basic issue that's been around for a while. I don't know if there's been significant progress on a solution, and would be happy to pointed to any such progress. I've opted to go for a relatively rough and quick post that doesn't dive too hard into the details, to avoid losing the thought at all. I may be up for exploring details further in comments or follow-ups.The

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82:28

“Reliable Sources: The Story of David Gerard” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/10

This is a linkpost for https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin, posted in full here given its relevance to this community. Gerard has been one of the longest-standing malicious critics of the rationalist and EA communities and has done remarkable amounts of work to shape their public images behind the scenes.Note: I am closer to this story than to many of my others. As always, I write aiming to provide a thorough and honest picture, but this should be read as the

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82:26

“Reliable Sources: The Story of David Gerard” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/10

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0:40

“New page: Integrity” by Zach Stein-Perlman

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/10

There's a new page collecting integrity incidents at the frontier AI labs.Also a month ago I made a page on labs' policy advocacy.If you have suggestions to improve these pages, or have ideas for other resources I should create, let me know.Crossposted from AI Lab Watch. Subscribe on Substack. ---First published: July 10th, 2024 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KxkMmwJnhmCFBjhTi/new-page-integrity --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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2:13

“Robin Hanson & Liron Shapira Debate AI X-Risk” by Liron

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/10

This is a link post.Robin and I just had an interesting 2-hour AI doom debate. We picked up where the Hanson-Yudkowsky Foom Debate left off in 2008, revisiting key arguments in the light of recent AI advances.My position is similar to Eliezer's: P(doom) on the order of 50%.Robin's position remains shockingly different: P(doom) < 1%.I think we managed to illuminate some of our cruxes of disagreement, though by no means all. Let us know your thoughts and feedback! Topics AI timelinesThe "outside

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16:00

“Causal Graphs of GPT-2-Small’s Residual Stream” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/10

Thanks to the many people I've chatted with this about over the past many months. And special thanks to Cunningham et al., Marks et al., Joseph Bloom, Trenton Bricken, Adrià Garriga-Alonso, and Johnny Lin, for crucial research artefacts and/or feedback.Codebase: sparse_circuit_discoveryTL; DR: The residual stream in GPT-2-small, expanded with sparse autoencoders and systematically ablated, looks like the working memory of a forward pass. A few high-magnitude features causally propagate themselves

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34:56

“Medical Roundup #3” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/09

This time around, we cover the Hanson/Alexander debates on the value of medicine, and otherwise we mostly have good news.Technology Advances Regeneron administers a single shot in a genetically deaf child's ear, and they can hear after a few months, n=2 so far. Great news: An mRNA vaccine in early human clinical trials reprograms the immune system to attack glioblastoma, the most aggressive and lethal brain tumor. It will now proceed to Phase I. In a saner world, people would be able

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7:06

“Paper Summary: The Effects of Communicating...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/09

by Anne Marthe van der Bles, Sander van der Linden, Alexandra L. J. Freeman, and David J. Spiegelhalter. (2020)https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1913678117.Summary: Numerically expressing uncertainty when talking to the public is fine. It causes people to be less confident in the number itself (as it should), but does not cause people to lose trust in the source of that number.Uncertainty is inherent to our knowledge about the state of the world yet often not communicated alongside

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12:45

“What and Why: Developmental Interpretability of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/09

IntroductionI happen to be in that happy stage in the research cycle where I ask for money so I can continue to work on things I think are important. Part of that means justifying what I want to work on to the satisfaction of the people who provide that money.This presents a good opportunity to say what I plan to work on in a more layman-friendly way, for the benefit of LessWrong, potential collaborators, interested researchers, and funders who want to read the fun version of my project proposalIt

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18:04

“Poker is a bad game for teaching epistemics. Figgie...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/09

This is a link post.Editor's note: Somewhat after I posted this on my own blog, Max Chiswick cornered me at LessOnline / Manifest and gave me a whole new perspective on this topic. I now believe that there is a way to use poker to sharpen epistemics that works dramatically better than anything I had been considering. I hope to write it up—together with Max—when I have time. Anyway, I'm still happy to keep this post around as a record of my first thoughts on the matter, and because it's better than

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18:04

“Poker is a bad game for teaching epistemics. Figgie...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/09

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9:55

“Advice to junior AI governance researchers” by Akash

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/09

This summer, I’m supervising some research fellows through Cambridge's ERA AI Fellowship. The program started last week, and I’ve had conversations with about 6 fellows about their research projects & summer goals. In this post, I’ll highlight a few pieces of advice I’ve found myself regularly giving to research fellows. This post reflects my own opinions and does not necessarily reflect the views of others at ERA. Prioritize projects that have a clear target audienceProblem: One of the most

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18:35

“Dialogue introduction to Singular Learning Theory”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/08

Alice: A lot of people are talking about Singular Learning Theory. Do you know what it is?Bob: I do. (pause) Kind of.Alice: Well, I don't. Explanation time?Bob: Uh, I'm not really an expert on it. You know, there's a lot of materials out there that--Alice: that I realistically won't ever actually look at. Or, I've looked at them a little, but I still have basically no idea what's going on. Maybe if I watched a dozen hours of introductory lectures I'd start to understand it, but that's not currently

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12:24

“Pantheon Interface” by NicholasKees, Sofia Vanhanen

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/08

Pantheon is an experimental LLM interface exploring a different type of human-AI interaction. We created this as a part of the cyborgism project, with the abstract motivation of augmenting the human ability to think by integrating human and AI generated thoughts.How it works: A human user “thinks out loud” by typing out their thoughts one at a time. This leaves a text trace of their stream of thought.AI characters (called daemons) read this trace, and interact with the user by responding

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62:58

“Towards shutdownable agents via stochastic choice”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/08

This is a link post.We[1] have a new paper testing the Incomplete Preferences Proposal (IPP). The abstract and main-text is below. Appendices are in the linked PDF. Abstract Some worry that advanced artificial agents may resist being shut down.The Incomplete Preferences Proposal (IPP) is an idea for ensuring that doesn’t happen.A key part of the IPP is using a novel ‘Discounted REward for Same-Length Trajectories (DREST)’ reward function to train agents to: pursue goals effectively conditional on

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5:51

“On saying ‘Thank you’ instead of ‘I’m Sorry’” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/08

Back in 2016 or so, I ran into an idea going around the self-help / trauma-informed-therapy / cognitive-behavioral internet: Learn to say “thank you” instead of “I’m sorry”. It's turned out to be one of the most transformative pieces of advice I’ve ever taken. I’d like to share what it's done for me, with just enough context to help others think about adopting it. The ideaWhenever you want to apologize to someone who has done something for you, consider thanking them instead. Examples I trip and

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31:44

“Reflections on Less Online” by Error

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/07

Meta: This post turned out longer, slower, and less well-written than I hoped. I don’t see any similar posts in a quick search, though, so I'm posting it anyway. I’ve tried to front-load feedback that might be useful to the organizers, and put more personal stuff towards the end. For context, I attended LessOnline and the Manifest-branded Summer Camp, but not Manifest itself, and my main prior experience with events like this is fandom conventions such as (local to me) Dragoncon. As I left the

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3:22

“Indecision and internalized authority figures” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/07

A trauma book I was reading had an interesting claim that indecision is often because the person looks for the approval of an internalized authority figure (the writer is a Jungian therapist so attributed it to looking for the approval of an internalized parent, but I think it can be broader) but is unable to predict what action they would approve of.I feel like that has some intuitive truth to it, in that when I don’t care about anyone's opinion (or if nobody ever finds out) then it's much easier

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6:00

“LK-99 in retrospect” by bhauth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/07/07

This is a link post.About a year ago, there was a lot of public interest in a supposed room-temperature superconductor called LK-99. What I publicly said at the time was, basically: We should remember the possibility that apparent levitation is from ferromagnetism or paramagnetism. Iron filings can stand up on a magnet, and pyrolytic graphite can float over a strong magnet. If we consider some known high-temperature superconductors: YBCO has flat sheets of copper oxide, and

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