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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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102:47

“AI #66: Oh to Be Less Online” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/06/01

Tomorrow I will fly out to San Francisco, to spend Friday through Monday at the LessOnline conference at Lighthaven in Berkeley. If you are there, by all means say hello. If you are in the Bay generally and want to otherwise meet, especially on Monday, let me know that too and I will see if I have time to make that happen.Even without that hiccup, it continues to be a game of playing catch-up. Progress is being made, but we are definitely not there yet (and everything not AI is being completely

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17:08

“Web-surfing tips for strange times” by eukaryote

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/06/01

This is a link post.[This post is more opinion-heavy and aimlessly self-promoting than feels appropriate for Lesswrong. I wrote this post for my site, Eukaryote Writes Blog, to show off that I now have a substack. But it had all these other observations about the state of the internet and advice woven in, and THOSE seemed more at home on Lesswrong, and I'm a busy woman with a lot of pictures of fish to review, so I'm just going to copy it over as posted without laboriously extricating the

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8:44

“We might be dropping the ball on Autonomous...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/31

Here is a little Q&ACan you explain your position quickly?I think autonomous replication and adaptation in the wild is under-discussed as an AI threat model. And this makes me sad because this is one of the main reasons I'm worried. I think one of AI Safety people's main proposals should first focus on creating a nonproliferation treaty. Without this treaty, I think we are screwed. The more I think about it, the more I think we are approaching a point of no return. It seems to me that open

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12:08

“A civilization ran by amateurs” by Olli Järviniemi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/31

IWhen I was a child, I remember thinking: Where do houses come from? They are huge! Building one would take forever! Yet there are so many of them!Having become a boring adult, I no longer have the same blue-eyed wonder about houses, but humanity does have an accomplishment or two I'm still impressed by.When going to the airport, the metal boulders really stay up in the air without crashing. Usually they leave at the time they told me two weeks earlier, taking me to the right destination at close

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19:46

“There Should Be More Alignment-Driven Startups!” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/31

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.Many thanks to Brandon Goldman, David Langer, Samuel Härgestam, Eric Ho, Diogo de Lucena, and Marc Carauleanu, for their support and feedback throughout.Most alignment researchers we sampled in our recent survey think we are currently not on track to succeed with alignment–meaning that humanity may well be on track to lose control of our future.In order to improve our chances of surviving and thriving, we should

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24:34

“OpenAI: Helen Toner Speaks” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/30

Helen Toner went on the TED AI podcast, giving us more color on what happened at OpenAI. These are important claims to get right.I will start with my notes on the podcast, including the second part where she speaks about regulation in general. Then I will discuss some implications more broadly. Notes on Helen Toner's TED AI Show Podcast This seems like it deserves the standard detailed podcast treatment. By default each note's main body is description, any second-level notes are

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4:21

“Clarifying METR’s Auditing Role” by Beth Barnes

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/30

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.Although METR has never claimed to have audited anything or to be providing meaningful oversight or accountability, there has been some confusion about whether METR is an auditor or planning to be one.To clarify this point: METR's top priority is to develop the science of evaluations, and we don’t need to be auditors in order to succeed at this. We aim to build evaluation protocols that can be used by

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4:58

“Non-Disparagement Canaries for OpenAI” by aysja,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/30

Since at least 2017, OpenAI has asked departing employees to sign offboarding agreements which legally bind them to permanently—that is, for the rest of their lives—refrain from criticizing OpenAI, or from otherwise taking any actions which might damage its finances or reputation.[1]If they refused to sign, OpenAI threatened to take back (or make unsellable) all of their already-vested equity—a huge portion of their overall compensation, which often amounted to millions of dollars. Given this

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28:01

“Awakening” by lsusr

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/30

This is the story of my personal experience [so far] with Buddhism. This story is deeply integrated with how I understand rationality, science, reality, ethics and the human mind.First Experiences My first experience with Buddhism was in my high school's World Religions class. For homework, I had to visit a religious institution. I was getting bad grades, so I asked if I could get extra credit for visiting two and my teacher said yes. I picked an Amida Buddhist church and a Tibetan Buddhist

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6:42

“US Presidential Election: Tractability, Importance,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/30

Disclaimer: To avoid harmful polarization of important topics, this post is written in a non-partisan manner, and I’d encourage comments to be written with this in mind. US presidential elections are surprisingly tractable US presidential elections are often extremely close. Biden won the last election by 42,918 combined votes in three swing states. Trump won the election before that by 77,744 votes. 537 votes in Florida decided the 2000 election.There's a good chance the 2024 election will be very

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6:04

“The Pearly Gates” by lsusr

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/30

St. Peter stood at a podium before the Gates of Heaven. The gates were gold, built on a foundation of clouds. A line of people curved and winded across the clouds, beyond what would be a horizon if this plane of existence was positively-curved. Instead, they just trailed away into Infinity, away from the golden wall securing Heaven. The worthy would enter eternal paradise. The unforgiven would burn in Hell for just as long. "Next please," said St. Peter. The foremost man stepped forward. He had

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25:53

“Thoughts on SB-1047” by ryan_greenblatt

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/30

In this doc, I'll discuss my current understanding of SB-1047, what I think should change about the bill, and what I think about the bill overall (with and without my suggested changes).Overall, SB-1047 seems pretty good and reasonable. However, I think my suggested changes could substantially improve the bill and there are some key unknowns about how implementation of the bill will go in practice.The opinions expressed in this post are my own and do not express the views or opinions of my

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17:05

“Finding Backward Chaining Circuits in Transformers...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/30

This is a link post.This post is a summary of our paper A Mechanistic Analysis of a Transformer Trained on a Symbolic Multi-Step Reasoning Task (ACL 2024). While we wrote and released the paper a couple of months ago, we have done a bad job promoting it so far. As a result, we’re writing up a summary of our results here to reinvigorate interest in our work and hopefully find some collaborators for follow-up projects. If you’re interested in the results we describe in this post, please see the paper

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20:54

“Response to nostalgebraist: proudly waving my...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/29

@nostalgebraist has recently posted yet another thought-provoking post, this one on how we should feel about AI ruling a long-term posthuman future. [Previous discussion of this same post on lesswrong.] His post touches on some of the themes of Joe Carlsmith's “Otherness and Control in the Age of AI” series—a series which I enthusiastically recommend—but nostalgebraist takes those ideas much further, in a way that makes me want to push back.Nostalgebraist's post is casual, trying to reify and

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13:47

“MIRI 2024 Communications Strategy” by Gretta Duleba

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/29

As we explained in our MIRI 2024 Mission and Strategy update, MIRI has pivoted to prioritize policy, communications, and technical governance research over technical alignment research. This follow-up post goes into detail about our communications strategy. The Objective: Shut it Down[1]Our objective is to convince major powers to shut down the development of frontier AI systems worldwide before it is too late. We believe that nothing less than this will prevent future misaligned smarter-than-human

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5:36

“When Are Circular Definitions A Problem?” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/28

Disclaimer: if you are using a definition in a nonmathematical piece of writing, you are probably making a mistake; you should just get rid of the definition and instead use a few examples. This applies double to people who think they are being "rigorous" by defining things but are not actually doing any math. Nonetheless, definitions are still useful and necessary when one is ready to do math, and some pre-formal conceptual work is often needed to figure out which mathematical definitions to use;

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5:19

“Being against involuntary death and being open to...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/28

In a new post, Nostalgebraist argues that "AI doomerism has its roots in anti-deathist transhumanism", representing a break from the normal human expectation of mortality and generational change. They argue that traditionally, each generation has accepted that they will die but that the human race as a whole will continue evolving in ways they cannot fully imagine or control. Nostalgebraist argues that the "anti-deathist" view, however, anticipates a future where "we are all gonna die" is no longer

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4:36

“Hardshipification” by Jonathan Moregård

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/28

This is a link post.When I got cancer, all of my acquaintances turned into automatons. Everyone I had zero-to-low degrees of social contact with started reaching out, saying the exact same thing: “If you need to talk to someone, I’m here for you”. No matter how tenuous the connection, people pledged their emotional support — including my father's wife's mother, who I met a few hours every other Christmas.It was only a bit of testicle cancer — what's the big deal? No Swedish person had died from it

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0:33

“Understanding Gödel’s completeness theorem” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/28

This article contains more than fifty uses of logical or mathematical notation, so an audio narration would be too hard to follow. You'll find a link to the original text in the episode description. --- First published: May 27th, 2024 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dPpA79MjPdDd87YoW/understanding-goedel-s-completeness-theorem --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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66:20

“OpenAI: Fallout” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/28

Previously: OpenAI: Exodus (contains links at top to earlier episodes), Do Not Mess With Scarlett Johansson We have learned more since last week. It's worse than we knew. How much worse? In which ways? With what exceptions? That's what this post is about. The Story So Far For years, employees who left OpenAI consistently had their vested equity explicitly threatened with confiscation and the lack of ability to sell it, and were given short timelines to sign documents or else

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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