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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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26:34

“Self-Awareness: Taxonomy and eval suite proposal” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/17

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.[This is a mildly-edited version of a google doc I wrote at OpenAI in July 2022. I had intended to get it published in some form, but never got around to it for various reasons. I have now received approval to put it up as a blog post. The main thing of interest here is the distinctions I make; particularly the concept of self-location. Also the examples in the appendix that illustrate the distinctions. I lump all

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5:37

“The Pointer Resolution Problem” by Jozdien

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/16

Imagine that you meet an 18th century altruist. They tell you “So, I’ve been thinking about whether or not to eat meat. Do you know whether animals have souls?” How would you answer, assuming you actually do want to be helpful?One option is to spend a lot of time explaining why “soul” isn’t actually the thing in the territory they care about, and talk about moral patienthood and theories of welfare and moral status. If they haven’t walked away from you in the first thirty seconds this may even work,

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7:29

“Every ‘Every Bay Area House Party’ Bay Area House...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/16

Inspired by a house party inspired by Scott Alexander.By the time you arrive in Berkeley, the party is already in full swing. You’ve come late because your reading of the polycule graph indicated that the first half would be inauspicious. But now you’ve finally made it to the social event of the season: the Every Bay Area House Party-themed house party.The first order of the evening is to get a color-coded flirting wristband, so that you don’t incur any accidental micromarriages. You scan the menu

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15:02

[Linkpost] “‘No-one in my org puts money in their...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/16

This is a linkpost for https://seekingtobejolly.substack.com/p/no-one-in-my-org-puts-money-in-theirEpistemic status: the stories here are all as true as possible from memory, but my memory is so so.An AI made this This is going to be bigIt's late Summer 2017. I am on a walk in the Mendip Hills. It's warm and sunny and the air feels fresh. With me are around 20 other people from the Effective Altruism London community. We’ve travelled west for a retreat to discuss how to help others more effectively

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18:43

“Fixing Feature Suppression in SAEs” by Benjamin Wright

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/16

Produced as part of the ML Alignment Theory Scholars Program - Winter 2023-24 Cohort under advisement of Lee Sharkey. <span>_DeclareMathOperator*{argmax}{arg,max} DeclareMathOperator*{argmin}{arg,min}_</span>Sparse autoencoders are a method of resolving superposition by recovering linearly encoded “features” inside activations. Unfortunately, despite the great recent success of SAEs at extracting human interpretable features, they fail to perfectly reconstruct the activations. For

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2:17

“Offering AI safety support calls for ML...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/15

TLDR: If you're a professor, PhD student, or industry researcher or engineer interested in starting research on AI safety, please request a call with Arkose! We are currently focused on and most helpful to mid-career people with machine learning expertise, who are relatively new to the advanced AI safety space. The following is largely a linkpost for arkose.org, with a FAQ in the comments. Arkose is an early-stage, fieldbuilding nonprofit with the mission of improving the safety of advanced AI

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8:17

“Raising children on the eve of AI” by juliawise

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/15

Cross-posted with light edits from Otherwise. I think of us in some kind of twilight world as transformative AI looks more likely: things are about to change, and I don’t know if it's about to get a lot darker or a lot brighter. Increasingly this makes me wonder how I should be raising my kids differently. What might the world look likeMost of my imaginings about my children's lives have them in pretty normal futures, where they go to college and have jobs and do normal human stuff, but with better

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2:36

[Linkpost] “FTX expects to return all customer money;...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/14

This is a linkpost for https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/03/business/dealbook/what-happens-to-ftx-clawback-cases-if-the-company-repays-its-creditors.html?unlocked_article_code=1.VU0.QBLc.h36dKm_EgU8L&smid=url-share New York Times (unpaywalled): When the cryptocurrency exchange FTX declared bankruptcy about 15 months ago, it seemed few customers would recover much money or crypto from the platform. As John Ray III, who took over as chief executive during the bankruptcy, put it, “At the end of the

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9:49

“CFAR Takeaways: Andrew Critch” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/14

I'm trying to build my own art of rationality training, and I've started talking to various CFAR instructors about their experiences – things that might be important for me to know but which hadn't been written up nicely before.This is a quick write up of a conversation with Andrew Critch about his takeaways. (I took rough notes, and then roughly cleaned them up for this. I don't know "What surprised you most during your time at CFAR?Surprise 1: People are profoundly non-numerate. And, people who

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7:47

[Linkpost] “Masterpiece” by Richard_Ngo

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/13

This is a linkpost for https://www.narrativeark.xyz/p/masterpieceA sequel to qntm's Lena. Reading Lena first is helpful but not necessary.We’re excited to announce the fourth annual MMindscaping competition! Over the last few years, interest in the art of mindscaping has continued to grow rapidly. We expect this year's competition to be our biggest yet, and we’ve expanded the prize pool to match. The theme for the competition is “Weird and Wonderful”—we want your wackiest ideas and most off-the-wall

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6:09

“Lsusr’s Rationality Dojo” by lsusr

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/13

Why aren’t there dojos that teach rationality?―The Martial Art of Rationality by Eliezer YudkowskyFor the last 6 months, I've been running a dojo that teaches rationality. WhyI was at an ACX meetup and met an acolyte who grew up in an evangelical Christian community. He had recently discovered the Sequences and was really excited about this whole Rationality thing. He was very confident in Yudkowsky's teachings.I asked him a couple questions and he realized his beliefs were full of holes. He

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1:19

“Where is the Town Square?” by Gretta Duleba

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/13

I am seeking crowdsourced wisdom.Suppose I[1] want to influence public opinion on a complicated, nuanced topic.[2]And further suppose that one of the ways I want to do that is by participating actively in public discourse: posting short-form content, reacting to other people's short-form content, signal boosting good takes, thoughtfully rebutting bad takes, etc.Even further suppose that the people I most want to reach are those who make and influence policy in the most technologically advanced

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10:43

[Linkpost] “My cover story in Jacobin on AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/12

This is a linkpost for https://jacobin.com/2024/01/can-humanity-survive-ai Google cofounder Larry Page thinks superintelligent AI is “just the next step in evolution.” In fact, Page, who's worth about $120 billion, has reportedly argued that efforts to prevent AI-driven extinction and protect human consciousness are “speciesist” and “sentimental nonsense.” In July, former Google DeepMind senior scientist Richard Sutton — one of the pioneers of reinforcement learning, a major subfield of AI — said

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8:58

“Tort Law Can Play an Important Role in Mitigating AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/12

TLDR: Legal liability could substantially mitigate AI risk, but current law falls short in two key ways: (1) it requires provable negligence, and (2) it greatly limits the availability of punitive damages. Applying strict liability (a form of liability that does not require provable negligence) and expanding the availability and flexibility of punitive damages is feasible, but will require action by courts or legislatures. Legislatures should also consider acting in advance to create a clear ex ante

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22:53

“On the Proposed California SB 1047” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/12

California Senator Scott Wiener of San Francisco introduces SB 1047 to regulate AI. I have put up a market on how likely it is to become law. “If Congress at some point is able to pass a strong pro-innovation, pro-safety AI law, I’ll be the first to cheer that, but I’m not holding my breath,” Wiener said in an interview. “We need to get ahead of this so we maintain public trust in AI.” Congress is certainly highly dysfunctional. I am still generally against California trying to act like it

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3:52

“Stop Defeating Akrasia (2/4)” by Edith

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/12

The introduction post is here.This post illustrates the first of three techniques which, when used in conjunction, should whack you out of Akrasia.The technique is called "stopping".I must mention what this post definitely isn't. The wierdos of the world have built entire industries around the practice of deliberately doing ostensibly nothing. Monks in the Himalayas encourage you to sit still cross-legged while you perform their particular brand of vague mental hocus pocus. Grander fraudsters and/or

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9:31

“Thoughts on ‘The Offense-Defense Balance Rarely...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/12

Personal Views Only Introduction. I thought Maxwell Tabarrok's The Offense-Defense Balance Rarely Changes was a good contribution to the discourse, and appreciated his attempt to use various lines of data to “kick the tires” on the case that an AI could in principle defeat all humans by inventing technologies that would allow them to dominate humans. I think Tabarrok is correct that this is a crux in the debate about how pessimistic to be about the possibility of humanity defending ourselves

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5:56

“Skepticism about DeepMind’s ‘Grandmaster-Level’...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/12

First, addressing misconceptions that could come from the title or from the paper's framing as relevant to LLM scaling: The model didn't learn from observing many move traces from high-level games. Instead, they trained a 270M-parameter model to map<span>_(text{board state}, text{legal move})_</span>pairs to Stockfish 16's predicted win probability after playing the move. This can be described as imitating the play of an oracle that reflects Stockfish's ability at 50 milliseconds per

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1:40

“How do you actually obtain and report a likelihood...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/11

I just read the article https://arbital.com/p/likelihoods_not_pvalues/, but this left me with one big question: what is the actual sequence of actions a researcher would take to report a likelihood function based on their research? For background, I'm an undergraduate student who has participated in multiple undergraduate research positions, and who has so far been uncertain about how to compute and use likelihood functions based on the data (mostly econometric data) involved in this research.In

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22:10

“And All the Shoggoths Merely Players” by Zack_M_Davis

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/02/10

[Setting: a suburban house. The interior of the house takes up most of the stage; on the audience's right, we see a wall in cross-section, and a front porch. Simplicia enters stage left and rings the doorbell.] Doomimir: [opening the door] Well? What do you want? Simplicia: I can't stop thinking about our last conversation. It was kind of all over the place. If you're willing, I'd like to continue, but focusing in narrower detail on a couple points I'm still confused about. Doomimir: And why should

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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