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LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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12:25

“Advice for Activists from the History of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/16

This is the fourth in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?This post has more of my personal opinions than previous posts or the report itself.Other movements should try to avoid becoming as partisan as the environmental movement. Partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular, it made legislation more difficult to pass, and it resulted in fluctuating executive action. Looking at the history of environmentalism can give insight into what

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2:03

“Towards Guaranteed Safe AI: A Framework for Ensuring...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/16

This is a link post.Authors: David "davidad" Dalrymple, Joar Skalse, Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, Max Tegmark, Sanjit Seshia, Steve Omohundro, Christian Szegedy, Ben Goldhaber, Nora Ammann, Alessandro Abate, Joe Halpern, Clark Barrett, Ding Zhao, Tan Zhi-Xuan, Jeannette Wing, Joshua TenenbaumAbstract:Ensuring that AI systems reliably and robustly avoid harmful or dangerous behaviours is a crucial challenge, especially for AI systems with a high degree of autonomy and general intelligence, or

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4:37

“Why you should learn a musical instrument” by cata

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/16

I have liked music very much since I was a teenager. I spent many hours late at night in Soulseek chat rooms talking about and sharing music with my online friends. So, I tend to just have some music floating around in my head on any given day. But, I never learned to play any instrument, or use any digital audio software. It just didn't catch my interest.My wife learned to play piano as a kid, so we happen to have a keyboard sitting around in our apartment. One day I was bored so I decided to just

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22:51

“Instruction-following AGI is easier and more likely...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/16

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.Summary:We think a lot about aligning AGI with human values. I think it's more likely that we’ll try to make the first AGIs do something else. This might intuitively be described as trying to make instruction-following (IF) or do-what-I-mean-and-check (DWIMAC) be the central goal of the AGI we design. Adopting this goal target seems to improve the odds of success of any technical alignment approach. This goal

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11:30

“Do you believe in hundred dollar bills lying on the...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/16

Introduction. [Reminder: I am an internet weirdo with no medical credentials] A few months ago, I published some crude estimates of the power of nitric oxide nasal spray to hasten recovery from illness, and speculated about what it could do prophylactically. While working on that piece a nice man on Twitter alerted me to the fact that humming produces lots of nasal nitric oxide. This post is my very crude model of what kind of anti-viral gains we could expect from humming. I’ve encoded my

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6:09

“MIRI’s May 2024 Newsletter” by Harlan

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/15

This is a link post.MIRI updates: MIRI is shutting down the Visible Thoughts Project. We originallyannounced the project in November of 2021. At the time we were hoping we could build a new type of data set for training models to exhibit more of their inner workings. MIRI leadership is pessimistic about humanity's ability to solve the alignment problem in time, but this was an idea that seemed relatively promising to us, albeit still a longshot.We also hoped that the $1+ million bounty on the

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0:35

“Catastrophic Goodhart in RL with KL penalty” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/15

This article contains more than 100 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 15th, 2024 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pEZoTSCxHY3mfPbHu/catastrophic-goodhart-in-rl-with-kl-penalty --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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4:39

“Teaching CS During Take-Off” by andrew carle

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/15

I stayed up too late collecting way-past-deadline papers and writing report cards. When I woke up at 6, this anxious email from one of my g11 Computer Science students was already in my Inbox.Student: Hello Mr. Carle, I hope you've slept well; I haven't.I've been seeing a lot of new media regarding how developed AI has become in software programming, most relevantly videos about NVIDIA's new artificial intelligence software developer, Devin.Things like these are almost disheartening for me to see as

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0:45

“Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike resign from OpenAI” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/15

This is a link post.Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike have resigned. It seems that John Schulman will lead Superalignment. Jakub Pachocki replaced Sutskever as Chief Scientist.Reasons are unclear (as usual when safety people resign from OpenAI).OpenAI announced Sutskever's resignation in a blogpost. --- First published: May 15th, 2024 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JSWF2ZLt6YahyAauE/ilya-sutskever-and-jan-leike-resign-from-openai ---

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17:33

“How to do conceptual research: Case study interview...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/15

Caspar Oesterheld came up with two of the most important concepts in my field of work: Evidential Cooperation in Large Worlds and Safe Pareto Improvements. He also came up with a potential implementation of evidential decision theory in boundedly rational agents called decision auctions, wrote a comprehensive review of anthropics and how it interacts with decision theory which most of my anthropics discussions built on, and independently decided to work on AI some time late 2009 or early 2010.

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11:51

“How To Do Patching Fast” by Joseph Miller

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/14

This post outlines an efficient implementation of Edge Patching that massively outperforms common hook-based implementations. This implementation is available to use in my new library, AutoCircuit, and was first introduced by Li et al. (2023). What is activation patching?I introduce new terminology to clarify the distinction between different types of activation patching. Node PatchingNode Patching (aka. “normal” activation patching) is when some activation in a neural network is altered from the

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12:43

“D&D.Sci Long War: Defender of Data-mocracy...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/14

This is a follow-up to last week's D&D.Sci scenario: if you intend to play that, and haven't done so yet, you should do so now before spoiling yourself.There is a web interactive here you can use to test your answer, and generation code available here if you're interested, or you can read on for the ruleset and scores. RULESETEach alien has a different amount of HP:AlienHPThreat*Swarming Scarab11Chitinous Crawler32Voracious Venompede53Arachnoid Abomination94Towering Tyrant155*Threat has no

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9:46

“Against Student Debt Cancellation From All Sides of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/14

This is a link post.A stance against student debt cancellation doesn’t rely on the assumptions of any single ideology. Strong cases against student debt cancellation can be made based on the fundamental values of any section of the political compass. In no particular order, here are some arguments against student debt cancellation from the perspectives of many disparate ideologies. Equity and FairnessStudent debt cancellation is a massive subsidy to an already prosperous and privileged population

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8:59

“Building intuition with spaced repetition systems”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/14

This is a link post.Do you ever go to a lecture, follow it thinking it makes total sense, then look back at your notes later and realize it makes no sense? This used to happen to me, but I’ve learned how to use spaced repetition to fully avoid this if I want. I’m going to try to convey this method in this post.Much of my understanding of how to create flashcards comes from “Using spaced repetition systems to see through a piece of mathematics” by Michael Nielsen and “How to write good prompts: using

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88:25

“Monthly Roundup #18: May 2024” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/14

As I note in the third section, I will be attending LessOnline at month's end at Lighthaven in Berkeley. If that is your kind of event, then consider going, and buy your ticket today before prices go up. This month's edition was an opportunity to finish off some things that got left out of previous editions or where events have left many of the issues behind, including the question of TikTok. Oh No All of this has happened before. And all of this shall happen again. Alex Tabarrok:

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1:40

“OpenAI releases GPT-4o, natively interfacing with...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/13

This is a link post. Until now ChatGPT dealt with audio through a pipeline of 3 models: audio transcription, then GPT-4, then text-to-speech. GPT-4o is apparently trained on text, voice and vision so that everything is done natively. You can now interrupt it mid-sentence.It has GPT-4 level intelligence according to benchmarks. Somewhat better at transcription than Whisper, and considerably better at vision than previous models.It's also somehow been made significantly faster at inference time. Might

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8:54

“Environmentalism in the United States Is Unusually...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/13

This is a link post.This is the first in a sequence of four posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan? Introduction. In the United States, environmentalism is extremely partisan.It might feel like this was inevitable. Caring about the environment, and supporting government action to protect the environment, might seem like they are inherently left-leaning. Partisanship has increased for many issues, so it might not be surprising that environmentalism became

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6:05

“Beware unfinished bridges” by Adam Zerner

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/12

This guy don't wanna battle, he's shook 'Cause ain't no such things as halfway crooks- 8 MileThere is a commonly cited typology of cyclists where cyclists are divided into four groups: Strong & Fearless (will ride in car lanes)Enthused & Confident (will ride in unprotected bike lanes)Interested but Concerned (will ride in protected bike lanes)No Way No How (will only ride in paths away from cars)I came across this typology because I've been learning about urban design recently, and it's got

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3:09

“New intro textbook on AIXI” by Alex_Altair

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/12

Marcus Hutter and his PhD students David Quarel and Elliot Catt have just published a new textbook called An Introduction to Universal Artificial Intelligence."Universal AI" refers to the body of theory surrounding Hutter's AIXI, which is a model of ideal agency combining Solomonoff induction and reinforcement learning. Hutter has previously published a book-length exposition of AIXI in 2005, called just Universal Artificial Intelligence, and first introduced AIXI in a 2000 paper. I think UAI is

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7:39

“Can we build a better Public Doublecrux?” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/05/12

Something I'd like to try at LessOnline is to somehow iterate on the "Public Doublecrux" format. I'm not sure if I'll end up focusing on it, but here are some ideas.Public Doublecrux is a more truthseeking oriented version of Public Debate. The goal of a debate is to change your opponent's mind or the public's mind. The goal of a doublecrux is more like "work with your partner to figure out if you should change your mind, and vice versa."Reasons to want to do public doublecrux include: It helps

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