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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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2:31

“What good is G-factor if you’re dumped in the woods?...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/14

I had a surprising experience with a 10 year old child "Carl" a few years back. He had all the stereotypical signals of a gifted kid that can be drilled into anyone by a dedicated parent- 1500 chess elo, constantly pestered me about the research I did during the semester, used big words, etc. This was pretty common at the camp. However, he just felt different to talk to- felt sharp. He made a serious but failed effort to acquire my linear algebra knowledge in the week and a half he was there.

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4:50

[Linkpost] “Land Reclamation is in the 9th Circle of...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/14

This is a linkpost for https://maximumprogress.substack.com/p/land-reclamation-is-in-the-9th-circleLand reclamation is a process where swamps, wetlands, or coastal waters are drained and filled to create more dry land.Despite being complex and technologically intensive, land reclamation is quite old and was common in the past. The reclamation of the Dutch lowland swamps since the 13th century is well-known. Perhaps less well known is that almost every major American city had major land reclamation

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7:58

[Linkpost] “Gender Exploration” by sapphire

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/14

This is a linkpost for https://open.substack.com/pub/sapphirestar/p/gender-explorationThe rationalist community has been discussing whether ‘AGP males’ should try hormones or not. Eneaz Brodsky says Transitioning Is Harmful To Most AGP Males. Ozy has a thoughtful, but paywalled, reply. Regardless of the benefits of transitioning you would think the main downside would be the costs incurred if you decide to detransition1. Given that I have actually detransitioned, and didn’t find it very difficult or

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15:42

“Universal Love Integration Test: Hitler” by Raemon

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/14

I'm still not satisfied with this post, but thought I'd ship it since I refer to the concept a fair amount. I write this more as "someone who feels some kernel of univeral-love-shaped thing", but, like, i dunno man i'm not a love expert.tl;drI think "love" means "To care about someone such that they are an extension of yourself (at least to some degree)." This includes caring about the things they care about on their own terms (but can still include enforcing boundaries, preventing them from harming

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3:07

“D&D.Sci(-fi): Colonizing the SuperHyperSphere” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/14

This is an entry in the 'Dungeons & Data Science' series, a set of puzzles where players are given a dataset to analyze and an objective to pursue using information from that dataset.It had all seemed so promising at first. Colonizing a newly-discovered planet with two extra space dimensions would have allowed the development of novel arts and sciences, the founding of unprecedentedly networked and productive cities, and – most importantly – the construction of entirely new kinds of monuments to

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36:35

[Linkpost] “The Leeroy Jenkins principle: How faulty...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/14

This is a linkpost for https://titotal.substack.com/p/the-leeroy-jenkins-principle-how Confidence level: This is all speculation about tech that doesn’t exist yet. Everything is highly uncertain. All “simulations” within are illustrative models and should not be taken as serious predictions. When talking about AI, existential risk theorists almost always focus their attention on the best of the best AGI. Even if some AI along the way is mediocre, or a buggy mess, or mostly correct but wildly off in

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3:27

“Notice When People Are Directionally Correct” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/14

I started watching Peter Zeihan videos last year.He shares a lot of interesting information, although he seems to have a very strong bias towards doom and gloom.One thing in particular stood out to me as completely absurd: his claim that global trade is going to collapse due to piracy as the US pulls back from ensuring freedom of the waters.My immediate thought: "This isn't the 17th century! Pirates aren't a real issue these days. Technology has rendered them obsolete".Given this, I was absolutely

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11:53

“Against most AI risk analogies” by Matthew Barnett

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/14

I dislike most AI risk analogies that I've seen people use. While I think analogies can be helpful for explaining a concept to people for the first time, I think they are frequently misused, and often harmful. The fundamental problem is that analogies are consistently mistaken for, and often deliberately intended as arguments for particular AI risk positions. And the majority of the time when analogies are used this way, I think they are misleading and imprecise, routinely conveying the false

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0:38

[Linkpost] “The Perceptron Controversy” by Yuxi_Liu

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/13

This is a linkpost for https://yuxi-liu-wired.github.io/blog/posts/perceptron-controversy/Connectionism died in the 60s from technical limits to scaling, then resurrected in the 80s after backprop allowed scaling. The Minsky–Papert anti-scaling hypothesis explained, psychoanalyzed, and buried. I wrote it as if it's a companion post to Gwern's The Scaling Hypothesis. --- First published: January 10th, 2024 Source:

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29:02

“An even deeper atheism” by Joe Carlsmith

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/13

(Cross-posted from my website. Podcast version here, or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app. This essay is part of a series I'm calling "Otherness and control in the age of AGI." I'm hoping that individual essays can be read fairly well on their own, but see here for brief summaries of the essays that have been released thus far. Minor spoilers for Game of Thrones.) In my last essay, I discussed Robin Hanson's critique of the AI risk discourse – and in particular, the accusation

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98:44

“AI #47: Meet the New Year” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/13

[NOTE: I forgot to post this to WP/LW/RSS on Thursday, so posting it now. Sorry about that.] Will be very different from the old year by the time we are done. This year, it seems like various continuations of the old one. Sometimes I look back on the week, and I wonder how so much happened, while in other senses very little happened. Table of Contents Introduction. Table of Contents. Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. A high variance game of chess. Language Models Don’t

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3:20

“Introducing Alignment Stress-Testing at Anthropic”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/12

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.Following on from our recent paper, “Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training”, I’m very excited to announce that I have started leading a new team at Anthropic, the Alignment Stress-Testing team, with Carson Denison and Monte MacDiarmid as current team members. Our mission—and our mandate from the organization—is to red-team Anthropic's alignment techniques and evaluations,

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18:09

“The Aspiring Rationalist Congregation” by maia

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/12

Meta Note: This post has been languishing in a Google doc for many months as I've procrastinated on cleaning it up to be more coherent and polished. So... I'm posting it as is, with very little cleanup, in the hopes that it's valuable in the current state. I'm sure there are big missing pieces that I haven't addressed, justifications I haven't added, etc., so at this point this is mainly starting a conversation.Epistemic Status: The seed of an idea, but a seed of an unknown fruit that may grow to

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4:19

“Apply to the PIBBSS Summer Research Fellowship” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/12

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.TLDR: We're hosting a 3-month, fully-funded fellowship to do AI safety research drawing on inspiration from fields like evolutionary biology, neuroscience, dynamical systems theory, and more. Past fellows have been mentored by John Wentworth, Davidad, Abram Demski, Jan Kulveit and others, and gone on to work at places like Anthropic, Apart research, or as full-time PIBBSS research affiliates. Apply here:

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3:15

“Introduce a Speed Maximum” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/11

Speeding is one of the most common ways for Americans to break the law. Drive the speed limit on the highway around here and you'll typically be the slowest car on the road. How much over the speed limit is customary varies regionally, but drivers often expect cops to ignore them at 5-15 mph over. Overall, I think this is a pretty bad situation. It gets people used to ignoring laws, people who scrupulously follow the law are often at higher risk (and cause higher risk to those around them)

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10:41

“An Actually Intuitive Explanation of the Oberth...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/10

This is a linkpost for An Actually Intuitive Explanation of the Oberth Effect.Like anyone with a passing interest in Kerbal Space Program physics and spaceflight, I eventually came across the Oberth Effect. It's a very important effect, crucial to designing efficient trajectories for any rocket ship. And yet, I couldn't understand it.Wikipedia's explanation focuses on how kinetic energy is proportional to the square of the speed, and therefore more energy is gained from a change in speed at a higher

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5:32

“Saving the world sucks” by Defective Altruism

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/10

I don’t want to save the world. I don’t want to tile the universe with hedonium. I don’t want to be cuckolded by someone else's pretty network-TV values. I don’t want to do anything I don’t want to do, and I think that's what (bad) EAs, mother Teresa, and proselytizing Christians all get wrong. Doing things because they sound nice and pretty and someone else says they’re morally good suuucks. Who even decided that warm fuzzies, QALYs, or shrimp lives saved are even good axes to optimize? Because

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7:47

“On the Contrary, Steelmanning Is Normal; ITT-Passing...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/09

Rob Bensinger argues that "ITT-passing and civility are good; 'charity' is bad; steelmanning is niche". The ITT—Ideological Turing Test—is an exercise in which one attempts to present one's interlocutor's views as persuasively as the interlocutor themselves can, coined by Bryan Caplan in analogy to the Turing Test for distinguishing between humans and intelligent machines. (An AI that can pass as human must presumably possess human-like understanding; an opponent of an idea that can pass as an

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60:22

“Goodbye, Shoggoth: The Stage, its Animatronics, &...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/09

TL;DR A better metaphor for how LLMs behave, how they are trained, and particularly for how to think about the alignment strengths and challenges of LLM-powered agents. This is informed by simulator theory — hopefully people will find it more detailed, specific, and helpful than the old shoggoth metaphor.Humans often think in metaphors. A good metaphor can provide a valuable guide to intuition, or a bad one can mislead it. Personally I've found the shoggoth metaphor for LLMs rather useful, and it

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14:53

“Does AI risk ‘other’ the AIs?” by Joe Carlsmith

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/01/09

(Cross-posted from my website. Podcast version here, or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app. This essay is part of a series I'm calling "Otherness and control in the age of AGI." I'm hoping that the individual essays can be read fairly well on their own, but see here for a brief summary of the essays that have been released thus far.) In my last essay, I discussed the way in which what I've called "deep atheism" (that is, a fundamental mistrust towards both "Nature" and "bare

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