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LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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6:05

“The World in 2029” by Nathan Young

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/03/02

I open my eyes. It's nearly midday. I drink my morning Huel. How do I feel? My life feels pretty good. AI progress is faster than ever, but I've gotten used to the upward slope by now. There has perhaps recently been a huge recession, but I prepared for that. If not, the West feels more stable than it did in 2024. The culture wars rage on, inflamed by AI, though personally I don't pay much attention.Either Trump or Biden won the 2024 election (85%). If Biden, his term was probably steady growth and

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0:39

[Linkpost] “If you weren’t such an idiot...” by kave

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/03/02

This is a linkpost for https://markxu.com/if-you-weren'tMy friend Buck once told me that he often had interactions with me that felt like I was saying “If you weren’t such a fucking idiot, you would obviously do…” Here's a list of such advice in that spirit.A post I like by @Mark Xu ---First published: March 2nd, 2024 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uJmWiethBsCnq68pg/if-you-weren-t-such-an-idiot Linkpost

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17:57

“Wholesomeness and Effective Altruism” by owencb

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/03/01

This is the second of a collection of three essays, ‘On Wholesomeness’. In the first essay I introduced the idea of wholesomeness as a criterion for choosing actions. This essay will explore the relationship between acting wholesomely and some different conceptions of effective altruism. Tensions Apparent tensions Acting wholesomely feels relatively aligned with traditional commonsense notions of doing good. To the extent that EA is offering a new angle on doing good, shouldn’t we expect its

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9:54

[Linkpost] “Increasing IQ is trivial” by George3d6

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/03/01

This is a linkpost for https://epistemink.substack.com/p/increasing-iq-is-trivialTL;DR - It took me about 14 days to increase my IQ by 13 points, in a controlled experiment that involved no learning, it was a relatively pleasant process, more people should be doing this.A common cliche in many circles is that you can’t increase IQ.This is obviously false, the largest well-documented increase in IQ using nothing but training is one of 23 points. A Standard Deviation of IQ Alas it is a myth that

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15:26

“Notes on Dwarkesh Patel’s Podcast with Demis...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/03/01

Demis Hassabis was interviewed twice this past week. First, he was interviewed on Hard Fork. Then he had a much more interesting interview with Dwarkesh Patel. This post covers my notes from both interviews, mostly the one with Dwarkesh. Hard Fork Hard Fork was less fruitful, because they mostly asked what for me are the wrong questions and mostly get answers I presume Demis has given many times. So I only noticed two things, neither of which is ultimately surprising. They

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4:35

“The Defence production act and AI policy” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/03/01

Quick Summary Gives the President wide-ranging powers to strengthen the US industrial baseHas been around without changing that much since 1953Has provisions which allow firms to make voluntary agreements that would normally be illegal under antitrust lawProvided the legal authority for many of the provisions in Biden's recent Executive Order on AIThe Defence Production ActThe Defence Production Act (DPA) has been reauthorised (and modified) by Congress since 1950, and in 1953 its powers very

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3:34

“The Parable Of The Fallen Pendulum - Part 1” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/03/01

One day a physics professor presents the standard physics 101 material on gravity and Newtonian mechanics: g = 9.8 m/s^2, sled on a ramp, pendulum, yada yada.Later that week, the class has a lab session. Based on the standard physics 101 material, they calculate that a certain pendulum will have a period of approximately 3.6 seconds.They then run the experiment: they set up the pendulum, draw it back to the appropriate starting position, and release. Result: the stand holding the pendulum tips over,

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7:33

“Approaching Human-Level Forecasting with Language...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/29

TL;DR: We present a retrieval-augmented LM system that nears the human crowd performance on judgemental forecasting.Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18563 (Danny Halawi*, Fred Zhang*, Chen Yueh-Han*, and Jacob Steinhardt)Abstract. Forecasting future events is important for policy and decision-making. In this work, we study whether language models (LMs) can forecast at the level of competitive human forecasters. Towards this goal, we develop a retrieval-augmented LM system designed to automatically

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68:51

“AI #53: One More Leap” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/29

The main event continues to be the fallout from The Gemini Incident. Everyone is focusing there now, and few are liking what they see.That does not mean other things stop. There were two interviews with Demis Hassabis, with Dwarkesh Patel's being predictably excellent. We got introduced to another set of potentially highly useful AI products. Mistral partnered up with Microsoft the moment Mistral got France to pressure the EU to agree to cripple the regulations that Microsoft wanted crippled

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24:01

[Linkpost] “Bengio’s Alignment Proposal: ‘Towards a...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/29

This is a linkpost for https://yoshuabengio.org/2024/02/26/towards-a-cautious-scientist-ai-with-convergent-safety-bounds/Yoshua Bengio recently posted a high-level overview of his alignment research agenda. I'm pasting the full text below since it's fairly short.What can’t we afford with a future superintelligent AI? Among others, confidently wrong predictions about the harm that some actions could yield. Especially catastrophic harm. Especially if these actions could spell the end of humanity.How

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39:54

“Tips for Empirical Alignment Research” by Ethan Perez

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/29

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.TLDR: I’ve collected some tips for research that I’ve given to other people and/or used myself, which have sped things up and helped put people in the right general mindset for empirical AI alignment research. Some of these are opinionated takes, also around what has helped me. Researchers can be successful in different ways, but I still stand by the tips here as a reasonable default. What success generally looks

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1:58

[Linkpost] “Post series on ‘Liability Law for...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/29

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.This is a linkpost for https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/nYJ26tgc2JkFQRG2wGabriel Weil (Assistant Professor of Law, Touro University Law Center) wrote this post series on the role of Liability Law for reducing Existential Risk from AI. I think this may well be of interest to some people here, so wanted for a linkpost to exist. The first post argues that Tort Law Can Play an Important Role in Mitigating AI Risk

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34:08

“Locating My Eyes (Part 3 of ‘The Sense of Physical...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/29

This is the third post in a sequence that demonstrates a complete naturalist study, specifically a study of query hugging (sort of), as described in The Nuts and Bolts of Naturalism. This one demos phases one and two: Locating Fulcrum Experiences and Getting Your Eyes On. For context on this sequence, see the intro post. If you're intimidated by the length of this post, remember that this is meant as reference material. Feel free to start with "My Goals For This Post", and consider what more you

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35:01

“Evidential cooperation in large worlds: Potential...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/28

What is this post? This post is a companion piece to recent posts on evidential cooperation in large worlds (ECL). We’ve noticed that in conversations about ECL, the same few initial confusions and objections tend to be brought up. We hope that this post will be useful as the place that lists and discusses these common objections. We invite the reader to advance additional questions and objections of their own. This FAQ does not need to be read in order. The reader is encouraged to look through the

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11:55

“Timaeus’s First Four Months” by Jesse Hoogland,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/28

Timaeus was announced in late October 2023, with the mission of making fundamental breakthroughs in technical AI alignment using deep ideas from mathematics and the sciences. This is our first progress update.In service of the mission, our first priority has been to support and contribute to ongoing work in Singular Learning Theory (SLT) and developmental interpretability, with the aim of laying theoretical and empirical foundations for a science of deep learning and neural network interpretability

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3:15

“Announcing ‘The LeastWrong’ and review winner post...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/28

(Also announcing: annual review prediction markets & full-height table of contents)The top 50 posts of each of LessWrong's annual reviews have a new home: The LeastWrong.(If you're looking for this year's review results, you can find them here.) What will I see when I click that link?By default, you will find the posts organised into six “books”: Rationality, Optimization, World, Practical, AI Strategy, and Technical AI Safety. Each square on the grid is a post that made the top 50 of the review

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26:42

“Counting arguments provide no evidence for AI doom”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/27

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.Crossposted from the AI Optimists blog.AI doom scenarios often suppose that future AIs will engage in scheming— planning to escape, gain power, and pursue ulterior motives, while deceiving us into thinking they are aligned with our interests. The worry is that if a schemer escapes, it may seek world domination to ensure humans do not interfere with its plans, whatever they may be.In this essay, we debunk the

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85:15

“The Gemini Incident Continues” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/27

Previously: The Gemini Incident (originally titled Gemini Has a Problem)The fallout from The Gemini Incident continues. Also the incident continues. The image model is gone. People then focused on the text model. The text model had its own related problems, some now patched and some not. People are not happy. Those people smell blood. It is a moment of clarity. Microsoft even got in on the act, as we rediscover how to summon Sydney. There is a lot more to discuss. The Ultimate

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11:44

“How I internalized my achievements to better deal...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/27

Whenever I struggle to make progress on an important goal, I feel bad. I get feelings of frustration, impatience, and apathy. I think to myself, “I have wasted all this time, and I will never get it back.” The resulting behavior during these moments does not help either; my impatience makes it hard to concentrate, so I often work on more engaging tasks rather than the essential ones I ideally want to focus on. I also tend to push through; even if I feel tired, I want to make progress at all costs. I

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0:32

“Can we get an AI to do our alignment homework for...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/27

Eliezer frequently claims that AI cannot do our alignment homework for us. OpenAI disagrees and is pursuing Superalignment as their main alignment strategy.Who is correct? --- First published: February 26th, 2024 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MZ6JD4LaPGRL5K6aj/can-we-get-an-ai-to-do-our-alignment-homework-for-us --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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