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LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

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27:47

“5 Physics Problems” by DaemonicSigil, Muireall

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/03/18

Muireall and DaemonicSigil trade physics problems. Answers and discussion of the answers have been spoilered so you can try the problems yourself. Please also use spoiler formatting (type ">!") in the comments.DaemonicSigil Smeared Out SunOkay, so the first problem is from Thinking Physics. (I promise I'll have some original problems also. And there's a reason I've chosen this particular one.)It's the problem of the Smeared out Sun (caution! link contains spoilers in the upside-down text).The

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0:37

“Measuring Coherence of Policies in Toy Environments”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/03/18

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: March 18th, 2024 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uvv8aMutPEtoBgw7D/measuring-coherence-of-policies-in-toy-environments-2 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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14:12

“Community Notes by X” by NicholasKees

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/03/18

I did an exploration into how Community Notes (formerly Birdwatch) from X (formerly Twitter) works, and how its algorithm decides which notes get displayed to the wider community. In this post, I’ll share and explain what I found, as well as offer some comments. Community Notes is a fact-checking tool available to US-based users of X/Twitter which allows readers to attach notes to posts to give them clarifying context. It uses an open-source bridging-based ranking algorithm intended to promote

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20:55

“On Devin” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/03/18

Introducing Devin Is the era of AI agents writing complex code systems without humans in the loop upon us? Cognition is calling Devin ‘the first AI software engineer.’ Here is a two minute demo of Devin benchmarking LLM performance. Devin has its own web browser, which it uses to pull up documentation. Devin has its own code editor. Devin has its own command line. Devin uses debugging print statements and uses the log to fix bugs. Devin builds and deploys entire stylized

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7:07

“The Worst Form Of Government (Except For Everything...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/03/17

Churchill famously called democracy “the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time” - referring presumably to the relative success of his native Britain, the US, and more generally Western Europe and today most of the first world.I claim that Churchill was importantly wrong. Not (necessarily) wrong about the relative success of Britain/US/etc, but about those countries’ governments being well-described as simple democracy. Rather, I claim, the

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5:49

[Linkpost] “Anxiety vs. Depression” by Sable

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/03/17

This is a linkpost for https://affablyevil.substack.com/p/anxiety-vs-depressionI have anxiety and depression.The kind that doesn’t go away, and you take pills to manage.This is not a secret.What's more interesting is that I just switched medications from one that successfully managed the depression but not the anxiety to one that successfully manages the anxiety but not the depression, giving me a brief window to see my two comorbid conditions separated from each other, for the first time since

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14:06

[Linkpost] “My PhD thesis: Algorithmic Bayesian...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/03/17

This is a linkpost for https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.07949In January, I defended my PhD thesis, which I called Algorithmic Bayesian Epistemology. From the preface:For me as for most students, college was a time of exploration. I took many classes, read many academic and non-academic works, and tried my hand at a few research projects. Early in graduate school, I noticed a strong commonality among the questions that I had found particularly fascinating: most of them involved reasoning about knowledge,

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13:16

[Linkpost] “How people stopped dying from diarrhea so...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/03/16

This is a linkpost for https://youtu.be/ll9myMeFU3g Rational Animations made this video collaborating with 80,000 Hours. The script has been written by Benjamin Hilton as an adaptation of part of the 80,000 Hours career guide, by Benjamin Todd. I have included the full script below. It's easy to feel like one person can’t make a difference. The problems the world faces seem so vast, and we seem so small. Sometimes even the best of intentions aren't enough to make the world budge. Now, it's true that

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1:11

“Rational Animations offers animation production and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/03/16

Rational Animations is now open to take on external work! We offer several services related to writing and animation production. In particular: Production managementStoryboardingVisual developmentAnimationEditing and compositingWriting, such as distilling research and creating explainers, stories, or screenplaysWe can take on animation projects from start to finish or help you with any phase of the animation production process. You can look at our most recent work and animation showreel by visiting

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1:04

[Linkpost] “Introducing METR’s Autonomy Evaluation...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/03/16

This is a linkpost for https://metr.github.io/autonomy-evals-guide/index.htmlThis is METR's collection of resources for evaluating potentially dangerous autonomous capabilities of frontier models. The resources include a task suite, some software tooling, and guidelines on how to ensure an accurate measurement of model capability. Building on those, we’ve written an example evaluation protocol. While intended as a “beta” and early working draft, the protocol represents our current best guess as to

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21:59

[Linkpost] “More people getting into AI safety should...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/03/15

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.This is a linkpost for https://gleave.me/post/why-do-phd/Doing a PhD is a strong option to get great at developing and evaluating research ideas. These skills are necessary to become an AI safety research lead, one of the key talent bottlenecks in AI safety, and are helpful in a variety of other roles. By contrast, my impression is that currently many individuals with the goal of being a research lead pursue

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0:36

[Linkpost] “Constructive Cauchy sequences vs....

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/03/15

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: March 14th, 2024 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oQ2nRRJFhjRrZHMyH/constructive-cauchy-sequences-vs-dedekind-cuts Linkpost URL:https://unstableontology.com/2024/03/14/constructive-cauchy-sequences-vs-dedekind-cuts/

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9:25

[Linkpost] “Conditional on Getting to Trade, Your...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/03/15

This is a linkpost for https://bayesshammai.substack.com/p/conditional-on-getting-to-trade-your “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member” -Marx[1] 1. The Subway Seat: You’re on a subway platform, and the train pulls into the station. Almost all of the subway cars are full to the brim, but you notice one that is entirely empty. You’ll be able to get a seat to yourself! You step onto that car. The air conditioning is broken, and someone has defecated on the floor. 2. The Juggling

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73:04

“Highlights from Lex Fridman’s interview of Yann...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/03/14

Introduction. Yann LeCun is perhaps the most prominent critic of the “LessWrong view” on AI safety, the only one of the three "godfathers of AI" to not acknowledge the risks of advanced AI. So, when he recently appeared on the Lex Fridman podcast, I listened with the intent to better understand his position. LeCun came across as articulate / thoughtful[1]. Though I don't agree with it all, I found a lot worth sharing.Most of this post consists of quotes from the transcript, where I’ve bolded the

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74:33

“How useful is ‘AI Control’ as a framing on AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/03/14

Redwood (where Ryan works) recently released a series of blogposts proposing a framing and research agenda for reducing AI-risk that focuses on ensuring safety (and secondarily usefulness) under the conservative assumption that AIs are misaligned and actively scheming against human interests, under the name "AI Control". This is in contrast to other work on AI risk which focuses on reducing the probability that AI systems pursue goals that are in conflict with human values in the first place (which

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128:29

“AI #55: Keep Clauding Along” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/03/14

Things were busy once again, partly from the Claude release but from many other sides as well. So even after cutting out both the AI coding agent Devin and the Gladstone Report along with previously covering OpenAI's board expansion and investigative report, this is still one of the longest weekly posts. In addition to Claude and Devin, we got among other things Command-R, Inflection 2.5, OpenAI's humanoid robot partnership reporting back after only 13 days and Google DeepMind with an embodied

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60:41

“Jobs, Relationships, and Other Cults” by Ruby,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/03/14

For years I (Elizabeth) have been trying to write out my grant unified theory of [good/bad/high-variance/high-investment] [jobs/relationships/religions/social groups]. In this dialogue me (Elizabeth) and Ruby throw a bunch of component models back and forth and get all the way to better defining the question. 🎉 ElizabethAbout a year ago someone published Common Knowledge About Leverage Research, which IIRC had some information that was concerning but not devastating. You showed me a draft of a

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55:54

“On the Latest TikTok Bill” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/03/14

TikTok Might Get Banned Soon This attempt is getting reasonably far rather quickly, passing the House with broad support. Alec Stapp: TikTok bill to remove influence of CCP: – passed unanimously out of committee – GOP leadership says they’ll bring it to the floor for a vote next week – Biden says he’ll sign the bill if passed Can’t believe it's taken this long, but should be done soon. It's been obvious for years that we shouldn’t let China control a black-box algorithm

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44:16

“‘Empiricism!’ as Anti-Epistemology” by Eliezer...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/03/14

Crossposted by habryka after asking Eliezer whether I could post it under his account i."Ignore all these elaborate, abstract, theoretical predictions," the Spokesperson for Ponzi Pyramid Incorporated said in a firm, reassuring tone. "Empirically, everyone who's invested in Bernie Bankman has received back 144% of what they invested two years later.""That's not how 'empiricism' works," said the Epistemologist. "You're still making the assumption that --""You could only believe that something

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14:55

“Open consultancy: Letting untrusted AIs choose what...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/03/13

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.Thanks to Ryan Greenblatt, Buck Shlegeris, Aryan Bhatt, and Akbir Khan for useful discussions and feedback on the draft of this post.If AIs are potentially scheming and more knowledgeable than humans, and you want to answer a question, it may seem natural to not let AIs choose what answer they will argue for. For example, in AI debate, you make copies of an AI argue for the opposite answers to the question. Another

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