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LessWrong

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26:44

“Ten Modes of Culture War Discourse” by jchan

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/31

OverviewThis article is an extended reply to Scott Alexander's Conflict vs. Mistake.Whenever the topic has come up in the past, I have always said I lean more towards conflict theory over mistake theory; however, on revisiting the original article, I realize that either I've been using those terms in a confusing way, and/or the usage of the terms has morphed in such a way that confusion is inevitable. My opinion now is that the conflict/mistake dichotomy is overly simplistic because: One will

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2:52

“Without Fundamental Advances, Rebellion and Coup...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/31

A pdf version of this report will be availableSummary. In this report, I argue that dictators ruling over large and capable countries are likely to face insurmountable challenges, leading to inevitable rebellion and coup d'état. I assert this is the default outcome, even with significant countermeasures, given the current trajectory of power dynamics and governance, and therefore when we check real-world countries we should find no dictatorships, no absolute monarchies and no arrangements where

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6:20

[Linkpost] “Explaining Impact Markets” by Saul Munn

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/31

This is a linkpost for https://www.brasstacks.blog/explain-im/Let's say you’re a billionaire. You want to have a flibbleflop, so you post a prize:Make a working flibbleflop — $1 billion.There begins a global effort to build working flibbleflops, and you see some teams of brilliant people starting to work on flibbleflop engineering. But it doesn’t take long for you to notice that the teams keep running into one specific problem: they need money to start (buy flobble juice, hire deeblers, etc), money

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7:47

[Linkpost] “on neodymium magnets” by bhauth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/30

This is a linkpost for https://www.bhauth.com/blog/materials/neodymium%20magnets.htmlNeodymium magnets are the main type used in modern motors. Why are they good? Are there any good alternatives? review of ferromagnetism Magnetic fields contain energy. In an inductor, that energy comes from an increase in voltage when current is first applied. When a magnetic core is added to an inductor and a stronger field is produced from the same added energy, that extra energy has to come from somewhere. The

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43:53

“Childhood and Education Roundup #4” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/30

Before we begin, I will note that I have indeed written various thoughts about the three college presidents that appeared before Congress and the resulting controversies, including the disputes regarding plagiarism. However I have excluded them from this post. Discipline and Prohibitions Washington Post Editorial Board says schools should ban smartphones, and parents should help make this happen rather than more often opposing such bans in order to make logistical coordination

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8:30

“The case for more ambitious language model evals” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/30

Here are some capabilities that I expect to be pretty hard to discover using an RLHF’d chat LLM:Eric Drexler tried to use the GPT-4 base model as a writing assistant, and it [...] knew who he was from what he was writing. He tried to simulate a conversation to have the AI help him with some writing he was working on, and the AI simulacrum repeatedly insisted it was by Drexler. A somewhat well-known Haskell programmer - let's call her Alice - wrote two draft paragraphs of a blog post she wanted to

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4:55

“Processor clock speeds are not how fast AIs think”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/29

I often encounter some confusion about whether the fact that synapses in the brain typically fire at frequencies of 1-100 Hz while the clock frequency of a state-of-the-art GPU is on the order of 1 GHz means that AIs think "many orders of magnitude faster" than humans. In this short post, I'll argue that this way of thinking about "cognitive speed" is quite misleading. The clock speed of a GPU is indeed meaningful: there is a clock inside the GPU that provides some signal that's periodic at a

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28:44

[Linkpost] “Chapter 1 of How to Win Friends and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/29

This is a linkpost for https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+win+friends+and+influence+peopleDale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People is worthwhile because: It became so popular in 1936 and afterwards that much of elite Western culture is downstream of it. So if you try using it adversarially (even accidentally e.g. you notice and instrumentally converge on tactics similar to these), the risk is high that they will see it coming from a mile away.The advice is good and makes you

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8:10

“Simple distribution approximation: When sampled 100...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/29

Produced as part of the ML Alignment Theory Scholars Program Winter 2024 Cohort, under the mentorship of Francis Rhys Ward. The code, data, and plots can be found on https://github.com/TeunvdWeij/MATS/tree/main/distribution_approximation. This post is meant to provide insight on an interesting LLM capability, which is useful for targeted underperformance on evaluations (sandbagging) by LLMs.We investigate what happens if you independently sample a language model a 100 times with the task of 80% of

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6:56

“Why I take short timelines seriously” by NicholasKees

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/28

I originally started writing this as a message to a friend, to offer my personal timeline takes. It ended up getting kind of long, so I decided to pivot toward making this into a post. These are my personal impressions gathered while doing a bachelors and a masters degree in artificial intelligence, as well as working for about a year and a half in the alignment space. AI (and AI alignment) has been the center of my attention for a little over 8 years now. For most of that time, if you asked me

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27:24

[Linkpost] “Win Friends and Influence People Ch. 2:...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/28

This is a linkpost for https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+win+friends+and+influence+peopleThis is where we start to get into the darker territory of Dark Arts.Sadly, much of elite culture is downstream of this chapter too; someone pointed out to me that awareness of this might be rare among silicon valley software engineers; but sadly, it's not rare among silicon valley venture capitalists, nor in other major cities like NYC, London, and DC. If you're even a little bit familiar with the current

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2:59

[Linkpost] “Things You’re Allowed to Do: At the...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/28

This is a linkpost for https://metavee.github.io/blog/misc/2023/12/09/things-youre-allowed-to-do-at-the-dentist.htmlInspired by Milan Cvitkovic's article, Things You’re Allowed to Do.Going to the dentist can be uncomfortable. Some amount of this is unavoidable.Yet most dentists and staff care a lot about patient comfort. Tell them what you need, and you may very well get it!The hardest part is figuring out what's on the menu. Below are some items that I’ve discovered.Caveats: available options may

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2:33

[Linkpost] “Palworld development blog post” by bhauth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/28

This is a linkpost for https://note.com/pocketpair/n/n54f674cccc40Palworld is currently the most-played game on Steam. It's by a small Japanese company called Pocketpair. Shortly before Palworld released, the CEO put up this blog post; here's a translation. Here are some points I thought were interesting: on the co-founder: It took me three years to quit JP Morgan, where I joined as a new graduate. He quit after only a month. The more talented people are, the sooner they leave the company. on

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8:32

“Don’t sleep on Coordination Takeoffs” by trevor

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/27

It's important to remember that the culture we grew up in is deeply nihilistic at its core. People expect Moloch, assume Moloch as a given, even defer to Moloch. If you read enough about business and international affairs, and then read about dath ilan, it becomes clear that our world is ruled by Moloch cultists who nihilistically optimized for career advancement.Humans are primates; we instinctively take important concepts and turn them into dominance/status games, including that concept itself;

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25:24

“Epistemic Hell” by rogersbacon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/27

my favorite painting of hell <3 1.From Scott Alexander's review of Joe Henrich's The Secret of our Success:In the Americas, where manioc was first domesticated, societies who have relied on bitter varieties for thousands of years show no evidence of chronic cyanide poisoning. In the Colombian Amazon, for example, indigenous Tukanoans use a multistep, multi-day processing technique that involves scraping, grating, and finally washing the roots in order to separate the fiber, starch, and liquid

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3:30

[Linkpost] “The Good Balsamic Vinegar” by jenn

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/26

This is a linkpost for https://jenn.site/2024/01/the-good-balsamic-vinegar/For a long time I only went to one specialty gourmet store for balsamic vinegar. Their house brand was thick and sweet and amazing on everything, from bread to salad to chicken. The gourmet store only stocked their house brand, and it had an entire dedicated shelf. As far as I knew, the house brand was not available anywhere else in town. The gourmet store was slightly out of the way, and eventually there were times when I

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6:57

[Linkpost] “Making every researcher seek grants is a...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/26

This is a linkpost for https://rootsofprogress.org/the-block-funding-model-for-scienceWhen Galileo wanted to study the heavens through his telescope, he got money from those legendary patrons of the Renaissance, the Medici. To win their favor, when he discovered the moons of Jupiter, he named them the Medicean Stars. Other scientists and inventors offered flashy gifts, such as Cornelis Drebbel's perpetuum mobile (a sort of astronomical clock) given to King James, who made Drebbel court engineer in

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8:20

[Linkpost] “Surgery Works Well Without The FDA” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/26

This is a linkpost for https://maximumprogress.substack.com/p/surgery-works-well-without-the-fdaHere is a conversation from the comments of my last post on the FDA with fellow progress blogger Alex Telford that follows a pattern common to many of my conversations about the FDA:Alex: Most drugs that go into clinical trials (90%) are less effective or safe than existing options. If you release everything onto the market you'll get many times more drugs that are net toxic (biologically or financially)

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116:56

“Without fundamental advances, misalignment and...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/26

A pdf version of this report is available here.Summary. In this report we argue that AI systems capable of large scale scientific research will likely pursue unwanted goals and this will lead to catastrophic outcomes. We argue this is the default outcome, even with significant countermeasures, given the current trajectory of AI development.In Section 1 we discuss the tasks which are the focus of this report. We are specifically focusing on AIs which are capable of dramatically speeding up

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2:55

“‘Does your paradigm beget new, good, paradigms?’” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/25

A very short version of this post, which seemed worth rattling of quickly for now. A few months ago, I was talking to John about paradimicity in AI alignment. John says "we don't currently have a good paradigm." I asked "Is 'Natural Abstraction' a good paradigm?". He said "No, but I think it's something that's likely to output a paradigm that's closer to the right paradigm for AI Alignment.""How many paradigms are we away from the right paradigm?""Like, I dunno, maybe 3?" said he.Awhile later I saw

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