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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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30:33

“Medical Roundup #2” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/10

Previously: #1 It feels so long ago that Covid and health were my beat, and what everyone often thought about all day, rather than AI. Yet the beat goes on. With Scott Alexander at long last giving us what I expect to be effectively the semi-final words on the Rootclaim debate, it seemed time to do this again. Bad News I know no methodical way to find a good, let alone great, therapist. Cate Hall: One reason it's so hard to find a good therapist is that all the elite ones market

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0:37

“Ophiology (or, how the Mamba architecture works)” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/09

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: April 9th, 2024 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TYLQ8gAMAmpeFcwXN/ophiology-or-how-the-mamba-architecture-works --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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4:26

[Linkpost] “Conflict in Posthuman Literature” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/09

This is a linkpost for https://twitter.com/MotionTsar/status/1776726715311767913Grant Snider created this comic (which became a meme):Richard Ngo extended it into posthuman/transhumanist literature:That's cool, but I'd have gone for different categories myself.[1] Here they are together with their explanations.Top: Man vs Agency (Other names: Superintelligence, Singularity, Self-improving technology, Embodied consequentialism.) Because Nature creates Society creates Technology creates Agency. At

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14:06

“Math-to-English Cheat Sheet” by nahoj

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/09

Say you've learnt math in your native language which is not English. Since then you've also read math in English and you appreciate the near universality of mathematical notation. Then one day you want to discuss a formula in real life and you realize you don't know how to pronunce "<span>_a_n_</span>".Status: I had little prior knowledge of the topic. This was mostly generated by ChatGTP4 and kindly reviewed by @TheManxLoiner. GeneralDistinguishing case <span>_F,

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5:58

“PIBBSS is hiring in a variety of roles (alignment...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/09

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.PIBBSS is looking to expand its team and is running work trials for new team members (primarily) in April, May and early June. If you’re interested in joining a nimble team focused on AI safety research, field-building and incubation of new agendas, consider letting us know by filling in this form. The form is meant to be a low effort means for gauging interests. We don’t guarantee getting back to everyone, but

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33:51

“Gated Attention Blocks: Preliminary Progress toward...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/09

This work represents progress on removing attention head superposition. We are excited by this approach but acknowledge there are currently various limitations. In the short term, we will be working on adjacent problems are excited to collaborate with anyone thinking about similar things! Produced as part of the ML Alignment & Theory Scholars Program - Summer 2023 CohortSummary: In transformer language models, attention head superposition makes it difficult to study the function of individual

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19:37

[Linkpost] “on the dollar-yen exchange rate” by bhauth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/08

This is a linkpost for https://www.bhauth.com/blog/economics/yen.htmlRecently, the yen-dollar exchange rate hit a 34-year low. Why is that? 6-month US Treasuries are paying around 5.3% interest. Japanese government bonds are paying about 0%. That being the case, you can borrow yen, trade it for dollars, buy US bonds, and get more interest. That's called a "yen carry trade". The risk you take in exchange for that money is that the exchange rate will shift so that a dollar is worth less yen. But of

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13:03

“How We Picture Bayesian Agents” by johnswentworth,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/08

I think that when most people picture a Bayesian agent, they imagine a system which: Enumerates every possible state/trajectory of “the world”, and assigns a probability to each.When new observations come in, loops over every state/trajectory, checks the probability of the observations conditional on each, and then updates via Bayes rule.To select actions, computes the utility which each action will yield under each state/trajectory, then averages over state/trajectory weighted by probability, and

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5:49

“A Dozen Ways to Get More Dakka” by Davidmanheim

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/08

As the dictum goes, “If it helps but doesn’t solve your problem, perhaps you’re not using enough.” But I still find that I’m sometimes not using enough effort, not doing enough of what works, simply put, not using enough dakka. And if reading one post isn’t enough to get me to do something… perhaps there isn’t enough guidance, or examples, or repetition, or maybe me writing it will help reinforce it more. And I hope this post is useful for more than just myself.Of course, the ideas below are not all

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57:02

“My intellectual journey to (dis)solve the hard...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/07

Epistemological status: At least a fun journey. I wanted to post this on April Fool's Day but failed to deliver on time. Although April Fool's Day would have been lovely just for the meme, this is my best guess after thinking about this problem for seven years. I invite you to dive deep into the consciousness iceberg with me. The story will be presented chapter by chapter, presenting you with the circulating ideas I've absorbed, building ideas in your brain to deconstruct them better until I present

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39:14

“Koan: divining alien datastructures from RAM...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/07

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.[Metadata: crossposted from https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2024/04/koan-divining-alien-datastructures-from.html.]Exploring the ruins of an alien civilization, you find what appears to be a working computer——it's made of plastic and metal, wires connect it to various devices, and you see arrays of capacitors that maintain charged or uncharged states and that sometimes rapidly toggle in response to voltages from

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19:40

“‘Fractal Strategy’ workshop report” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/07

I just ran a workshop teaching the rationality concepts I've developed this year. If you're interested in paying money for a similar workshop, please fill out this form.Six months ago, I started thinking about improving rationality. Originally my frame was "deliberate practice for confusing problems". For the past two months, I've been iterating on which skills seemed useful to me personally, and which I might convey to others in a short period of time. I settled into the frame "what skills are

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9:14

[Linkpost] “The 2nd Demographic Transition” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/07

This is a linkpost for https://www.maximum-progress.com/p/the-2nd-demographic-transitionBirth rates in the developed world are below replacement levels and global fertility is not far behind. Sub-replacement fertility leads to exponentially decreasing population. Our best models of economic growth suggest that a shrinking population causes economic growth and technological progress to stop and humanity to stagnate into extinction.One theory of fertility decline says it's all about opportunity costs,

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8:12

“On Complexity Science” by Garrett Baker

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/05

I have a long and confused love-hate relationship with the field of complex systems. People there never want to give me a simple, straightforward explanation about what its about, and much of what they say sounds a lot like woo ("edge of chaos" anyone?). But it also seems to promise a lot! This from the primary textbook on the subject: The present situation can be compared to an archaeological project, where a mosaic floor has been discovered and is being excavated. While the mosaic is only partly

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9:40

“What’s with all the bans recently?” by Gerald Monroe

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/05

Summary: the moderators appear to be soft banning users with 'rate-limits' without feedback. A careful review of each banned user reveals it's common to be banned despite earnestly attempting to contribute to the site. Some of the most intelligent banned users have mainstream instead of EA views on AI. Note how the punishment lengths are all the same, I think it was a mass ban-wave of 3 week bans:Gears to ascension was here but is no longer, guess she convinced them it was a mistake.Have I made any

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5:02

“Partial value takeover without world takeover” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/05

People around me are very interested in AI taking over the world, so a big question is under what circumstances a system might be able to do that—what kind of capabilities could elevate an entity above the melange of inter-agent conflict and into solipsistic hegemony? We theorize about future AI systems hiding their motives until they are in a position to take over the world, so they don’t get noticed and shut down beforehand. But humans and their institutions aren’t very fixed. They might

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2:08

“New report: A review of the empirical evidence for...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/05

Visiting researcher Rose Hadshar recently published a review of some evidence for existential risk from AI, focused on empirical evidence for misalignment and power seeking. (Previously from this project: a blogpost outlining some of the key claims that are often made about AI risk, a series of interviews of AI researchers, and a database of empirical evidence for misalignment and power seeking.)In this report, Rose looks into evidence for:Misalignment,[1] where AI systems develop goals which are

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113:22

“AI #58: Stargate AGI” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/05

Another round? Of economists projecting absurdly small impacts, of Google publishing highly valuable research, a cycle of rhetoric, more jailbreaks, and so on. Another great podcast from Dwarkesh Patel, this time going more technical. Another proposed project with a name that reveals quite a lot. A few genuinely new things, as well. On the new offerings front, DALLE-3 now allows image editing, so that's pretty cool. Table of Contents Don’t miss out on Dwarkesh Patel's podcast with Sholto

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2:07

“Run evals on base models too!” by orthonormal

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/04

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.(Creating more visibility for a comment thread with Rohin Shah.)Currently, DeepMind's capabilities evals are run on the post-RL*F (RLHF/RLAIF) models and not on the base models. This worries me because RL*F will train a base model to stop displaying capabilities, but this isn't a guarantee that it trains the model out of having the capabilities.Consider by analogy using RLHF on a chess-playing AI, where the

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20:47

“LLMs for Alignment Research: a safety priority?” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/04/04

A recent short story by Gabriel Mukobi illustrates a near-term scenario where things go bad because new developments in LLMs allow LLMs to accelerate capabilities research without a correspondingly large acceleration in safety research.This scenario is disturbingly close to the situation we already find ourselves in. Asking the best LLMs for help with programming vs technical alignment research feels very different (at least to me). LLMs might generate junk code, but you can keep pointing out the

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