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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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9:41

[Linkpost] “WSJ: Inside Amazon’s Secret Operation to...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/25

This is a linkpost for https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/amazon-secret-operation-intel-rivals-eb82ea3c Staff went undercover on Walmart, eBay and other marketplaces as a third-party seller called ‘Big River.’ The mission: to scoop up information on pricing, logistics and other business practices. The operation, called Big River Services International, sells around $1 million a year of goods through e-commerce marketplaces including eBay, Shopify, Walmart and Amazon AMZN 1.49%increase; green up

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16:22

[Linkpost] “‘Why I Write’ by George Orwell (1946)” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/25

This is a linkpost for https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/why-i-write/People have been posting great essays so that they're "fed through the standard LessWrong algorithm." This essay is in the public domain in the UK but not the US.From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness

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1:22

“The first future and the best future” by KatjaGrace

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/25

It seems to me worth trying to slow down AI development to steer successfully around the shoals of extinction and out to utopia.But I was thinking lately: even if I didn’t think there was any chance of extinction risk, it might still be worth prioritizing a lot of care over moving at maximal speed. Because there are many different possible AI futures, and I think there's a good chance that the initial direction affects the long term path, and different long term paths go to different places. The

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20:50

[Linkpost] “The Inner Ring by C. S. Lewis” by Saul Munn

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/25

This is a linkpost for https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/In @Nathan Young's words:It seems like great essays should go here and be fed through the standard LessWrong algorithm. There is possibly a copyright issue here, but we aren't making any money off it either.May I read you a few lines from Tolstoy's War and Peace?When Boris entered the room, Prince Andrey was listening to an old general, wearing his decorations, who was reporting something to Prince Andrey, with an expression of soldierly

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20:58

“This is Water by David Foster Wallace” by Nathan Young

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/25

It seems like great essays should go here and be fed through the standard LessWrong algorithm. There is possibly a copyright issue here, but we aren't making any money off it either.Greetings parents and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them

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70:45

“Changes in College Admissions” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/24

This post brings together various questions about the college application process, as well as practical considerations of where to apply and go. We are seeing some encouraging developments, but mostly the situation remains rather terrible for all concerned. Application Strategy and Difficulty Paul Graham: Colleges that weren’t hard to get into when I was in HS are hard to get into now. The population has increased by 43%, but competition for elite colleges seems to have increased more. I

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2:42

“Examples of Highly Counterfactual Discoveries?” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/24

The history of science has tons of examples of the same thing being discovered multiple time independently; wikipedia has a whole list of examples here. If your goal in studying the history of science is to extract the predictable/overdetermined component of humanity's trajectory, then it makes sense to focus on such examples.But if your goal is to achieve high counterfactual impact in your own research, then you should probably draw inspiration from the opposite: "singular" discoveries, i.e

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6:06

[Linkpost] “On what research policymakers actually...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/24

This is a linkpost for https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-economic-research-policymakersI saw this guest post on the Slow Boring substack, by a former senior US government official, and figured it might be of interest here. The post's original title is "The economic research policymakers actually need", but it seemed to me like the post could be applied just as well to other fields.Quotes and excerpts: I was a senior administration official, here's what was helpful[Most] academic research isn’t

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22:56

[Linkpost] “Let’s Design A School, Part 1” by Sable

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/24

This is a linkpost for https://affablyevil.substack.com/p/lets-redesign-public-school-partThe American school system, grades K-12, leaves much to be desired.While its flaws are legion, this post isn’t about that. It's easy to complain.This post is about how we could do better.To be clear, I’m talking about redesigning public education, so “just use the X model” where X is “charter” or “Montessori” or “home school” or “private school” isn’t sufficient. This merits actual thought and discussion

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15:41

[Linkpost] “Dequantifying first-order theories” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/24

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.This is a linkpost for https://unstableontology.com/2024/04/23/dequantifying-first-order-theories/The Löwenheim–Skolem theorem implies, among other things, that any first-order theory whose symbols are countable, and which has an infinite model, has a countably infinite model. This means that, in attempting to refer to uncountably infinite structures (such as in set theory), one "may as well" be referring to an

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3:09

[Linkpost] “Simple probes can catch sleeper agents”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/23

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.This is a linkpost for https://www.anthropic.com/research/probes-catch-sleeper-agentsThis is a link post for the Anthropic Alignment Science team's first "Alignment Note" blog post. We expect to use this format to showcase early-stage research and work-in-progress updates more in the future.Top-level summary:In this post we present "defection probes": linear classifiers that use residual stream activations to

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11:49

“Rejecting Television” by Declan Molony

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/23

I didn’t use to be, but now I’m part of the 2% of U.S. households without a television. With its near ubiquity, why reject this technology? The Beginning of my DisillusionmentNeil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death radically changed my perspective on television and its place in our culture. Here's one illuminating passage:We are no longer fascinated or perplexed by [TV's] machinery. We do not tell stories of its wonders. We do not confine our TV sets to special rooms. We do not doubt the

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5:38

“Forget Everything (Statistical Mechanics Part 1)” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/23

Introduction to a sequence on the statistical thermodynamics of some things and maybe eventually everything. This will make more sense if you have a basic grasp on quantum mechanics, but if you're willing to accept "energy comes in discrete units" as a premise then you should be mostly fine.The title of this post has a double meaning: Forget the thermodynamics you've learnt before, because statistical mechanics starts from information theory.The main principle of doing things with statistical

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4:07

“Funny Anecdote of Eliezer From His Sister” by Daniel...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/22

This comes from a podcast called 18Forty, of which the main demographic of Orthodox Jews. Eliezer's sister (Hannah) came on and talked about her Sheva Brachos, which is essentially the marriage ceremony in Orthodox Judaism. People here have likely not seen it, and I thought it was quite funny, so here it is: https://18forty.org/podcast/channah-cohen-the-crisis-of-experience/David Bashevkin:So I want to shift now and I want to talk about something that full disclosure, we recorded this once before

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34:53

[Linkpost] “Motivation gaps: Why so much EA criticism...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/22

This is a linkpost for https://titotal.substack.com/p/motivation-gaps-why-so-much-ea-criticism Disclaimer: While I criticize several EA critics in this article, I am myself on the EA-skeptical side of things (especially on AI risk).Introduction. I am a proud critic of effective altruism, and in particular a critic of AI existential risk, but I have to admit that a lot of the critcism of EA is hostile, or lazy, and is extremely unlikely to convince a believer. Take this recent Leif Weinar time

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13:25

“Priors and Prejudice” by MathiasKB

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/22

IImagine an alternate version of the Effective Altruism movement, whose early influences came from socialist intellectual communities such as the Fabian Society, as opposed to the rationalist diaspora. Let's name this hypothetical movement the Effective Samaritans.Like the EA movement of today, they believe in doing as much good as possible, whatever this means. They began by evaluating existing charities, reading every RCT to find the very best ways of helping.But many effective samaritans were

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9:14

[Linkpost] “AI Regulation is Unsafe” by Maxwell Tabarrok

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/22

This is a linkpost for https://www.maximum-progress.com/p/ai-regulation-is-unsafeConcerns over AI safety and calls for government control over the technology are highly correlated but they should not be.There are two major forms of AI risk: misuse and misalignment. Misuse risks come from humans using AIs as tools in dangerous ways. Misalignment risks arise if AIs take their own actions at the expense of human interests.Governments are poor stewards for both types of risk. Misuse regulation is like

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89:19

“On Llama-3 and Dwarkesh Patel’s Podcast with...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/22

It was all quiet. Then it wasn’t. Note the timestamps on both of these. Dwarkesh Patel did a podcast with Mark Zuckerberg on the 18th. It was timed to coincide with the release of much of Llama-3, very much the approach of telling your story directly. Dwarkesh is now the true tech media. A meteoric rise, and well earned. This is two related posts in one. First I cover the podcast, then I cover Llama-3 itself. My notes are edited to incorporate context from later explorations

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28:07

“Transfer Learning in Humans” by niplav

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/22

I examine the literature on transfer learning in humans. Far transfer is difficult to achieve, best candidate interventions are to practice at the edge of one's ability and make many mistakes, evaluate mistakes after one has made them, learn from training programs modeled after expert tacit knowledge, and talk about on one's strategies when practicing the domain. When learning, one would like to progress faster, and learn things faster. So it makes sense to search for interventions that speed

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6:21

“A couple productivity tips for overthinkers” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/20

1. If you find that you’re reluctant to permanently give up on to-do list items, “deprioritize” them insteadI hate the idea of deciding that something on my to-do list isn’t that important, and then deleting it off my to-do list without actually doing it. Because once it's off my to-do list, then quite possibly I’ll never think about it again. And what if it's actually worth doing? Or what if my priorities will change such that it will be worth doing at some point in the future? Gahh!On the other

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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