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LessWrong

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts.

technology philosophy

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4:06

“Constellations are Younger than Continents” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/19

At the Bay Area Solstice, I heard the song Bold Orion for the first time. I like it a lot. It does, however, have one problem:He has seen the rise and fall of kings and continents and all, Rising silent, bold Orion on the rise.Orion has not witnessed the rise and fall of continents. Constellations are younger than continents.The time scale that continents change on is ten or hundreds of millions of years.The time scale that stars the size of the sun live and die on is billions of years. So stars

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18:19

“The Dark Arts” by lsusr, Lyrongolem

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/19

lsusrIt is my understanding that you won all of your public forum debates this year. That's very impressive. I thought it would be interesting to discuss some of the techniques you used.LyrongolemOf course! So, just for a brief overview for those who don't know, public forum is a 2v2 debate format, usually on a policy topic. One of the more interesting ones has been the last one I went to, where the topic was "Resolved: The US Federal Government Should Substantially Increase its Military Presence in

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24:33

“The ‘Neglected Approaches’ Approach: AE Studio’s...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/18

Many thanks to Samuel Hammond, Cate Hall, Beren Millidge, Steve Byrnes, Lucius Bushnaq, Joar Skalse, Kyle Gracey, Gunnar Zarncke, Ross Nordby, David Lambert, Simeon Campos, Bogdan Ionut-Cirstea, Ryan Kidd, Eric Ho, and Ashwin Acharya for critical comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this agenda, as well as Philip Gubbins, Diogo de Lucena, Rob Luke, and Mason Seale from AE Studio for their support and feedback throughout. TL;DR Our initial theory of change at AE Studio was a 'neglected

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11:16

“The Shortest Path Between Scylla and Charybdis” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/18

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.tl;dr: There's two diametrically opposed failure modes an alignment researcher can fall into: engaging in excessively concrete research whose findings won't timely generalize to AGI, and engaging in excessively abstract research whose findings won't timely connect to the practical reality.Different people's assessments of what research is too abstract/concrete differ significantly based on their personal AI-Risk

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0:36

[Linkpost] “OpenAI: Preparedness framework” by Zach...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/18

This is a linkpost for https://openai.com/safety/preparednessOpenAI released a beta version of their responsible scaling policy (though they don't call it that). See summary page, full doc, OpenAI twitter thread, and Jan Leike twitter thread.I'll update this post with details soon. --- First published: December 18th, 2023 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oPbiQfRotHYuC3wfE/openai-preparedness-framework Linkpost

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1:30

[Linkpost] “Talk: ‘AI Would Be A Lot Less Alarming If...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/17

This is a linkpost for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERJ8QEnGlF0This is a linkpost for a talk I gave this past summer for the ALIFE conference. If you haven't heard of it before, ALIFE (short for "artificial life") is a subfield of biology which... well, here are some of the session titles from day 1 of the conference to give the gist: Cellular Automata, Self-Reproduction and ComplexityEvolving Robot Bodies and Brains in UnitySelf-Organizing Systems with Machine LearningUntangling Cognition: How

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15:51

“Scale Was All We Needed, At First” by Gabriel Mukobi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/17

This is a hasty speculative fiction vignette of one way I expect we might get AGI by January 2025 (within about one year of writing this). Like similar works by others, I expect most of the guesses herein to turn out incorrect. However, this was still useful for expanding my imagination about what could happen to enable very short timelines, and I hope it's also useful to you.The assistant opened the door, and I walked into Director Yarden's austere office. For the Director of a major new federal

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6:08

[Linkpost] “OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic, etc. should...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/17

This is a linkpost for https://carado.moe/ai-orgs-should-shut-down.htmlI expect that the point of this post is already obvious to many of the people reading it. Nevertheless, I believe that it is good to mention important things even if they seem obvious. OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic, and other AI organizations focused on capabilities, should shut down. This is what would maximize the utility of pretty much everyone, including the people working inside of those organizations. Let's call Powerful AI

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19:29

“What makes teaching math special” by Viliam

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/17

Related: Arguments against constructivism (in education)?Seeking PCK (Pedagogical Content Knowledge)*Designing good math curriculum for elementary and high schools requires one to have two kinds of expertise: deep understanding of math, and lot of experience teaching kids. Having just one of them is not enough. People who have both are rare (and many of them do not have the ambition to design a curriculum).Being a math professor at university is not enough, now matter how high-status that job might

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33:43

“The predictive power of dissipative adaptation” by dr_s

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/17

There is an idea.The idea, which has proven somewhat memetically sticky and is at the core of the so-called "effective accelerationist" (in short, e/acc) movement, is that there is a simple and powerful principle of non-equilibrium thermodynamics which favors the proliferation of ever more complex, intelligent and productive life (and life-like super-organisms, like countries or markets) over the alternative. It is phrased as follows in Beff Jezos "Notes on e/acc principles and tenets":e/acc is

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2:20

“The Serendipity of Density” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/17

One thing I really appreciate about living in Somerville is how density facilitates serendipity. Higher density means more of the places we might want to go are within walking distance, and then walking (and high density again) means we're more likely to run into friends. This afternoon we were walking Lily (9y) to a sleepover and we passed one of the nearby playgrounds. Lily and Anna (7y) saw some school friends and ran ahead to say hi. Anna wanted to stay and play, and I asked one of the

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9:15

“‘Humanity vs. AGI’ Will Never Look Like ‘Humanity...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/16

When discussing AGI Risk, people often talk about it in terms of a war between humanity and an AGI. Comparisons between the amounts of resources at both sides' disposal are brought up and factored in, big impressive nuclear stockpiles are sometimes waved around, etc.I'm pretty sure it's not how that'd look like, on several levels. 1. Threat AmbiguityI think what people imagine, when they imagine a war, is Terminator-style movie scenarios where the obviously evil AGI becomes obviously evil in a way

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65:30

“Upgrading the AI Safety Community” by trevor,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/16

Special thanks to Justis Mills for pointing out important caveats.NicholasKrossSo broadly, we wanted to discuss alignment community uplift, including: intelligence enhancement, megaprojects, and more!Notably, different ways of augmenting the AI safety community can feed off each other. Intelligence enhancement can improve megaprojects, megaprojects can be points for coordination, both of these can make the whole community more adaptable, and so on.(Note for readers: This dialogue is less an

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7:44

[Linkpost] “cold aluminum for medicine” by bhauth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/16

This is a linkpost for https://www.bhauth.com/blog/industrial%20design/cold%20aluminum.html cold aluminum Very pure aluminum at the boiling point of hydrogen is a very cool material. At 20K, 99.999% pure aluminum has 1000x the electrical conductivity it has at 0 C. At 4K, it has maybe 4000x. At such low temperatures, electron free paths in aluminum become macroscopic, which is why even small amounts of impurities greatly increase resistance. Even wire diameter has a noticeable effect. Magnetic

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2:07

“Weak-to-Strong Generalization: Eliciting Strong...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/16

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.Links: Blog, Paper.Abstract:Widely used alignment techniques, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), rely on the ability of humans to supervise model behavior—for example, to evaluate whether a model faithfully followed instructions or generated safe outputs. However, future superhuman models will behave in complex ways too difficult for humans to reliably evaluate; humans will only be able to

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11:21

“Scalable Oversight and Weak-to-Strong...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/16

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.Thanks to Roger Grosse, Cem Anil, Sam Bowman, and Tamera Lanham for helpful discussion and comments on drafts of this post. Throughout this post, "I" refers to Ansh (Buck, Ryan, and Fabien helped substantially with the drafting and revising of this post, however). Two approaches to addressing weak supervisionA key challenge for adequate supervision of future AI systems is the possibility that they’ll be more

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15:32

“Current AIs Provide Nearly No Data Relevant to AGI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/15

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.Recently, there's been a fair amount of pushback on the "canonical" views towards the difficulty of AGI Alignment (the views I call the "least forgiving" take).Said pushback is based on empirical studies of how the most powerful AIs at our disposal currently work, and is supported by fairly convincing theoretical basis of its own. By comparison, the "canonical" takes are almost purely theoretical.At a glance, not

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5:36

“‘AI Alignment’ is a Dangerously Overloaded Term” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/15

Alignment as Aimability or as Goalcraft?The Less Wrong and AI risk communities have obviously had a huge role in mainstreaming the concept of risks from artificial intelligence, but we have a serious terminology problem.The term "AI Alignment" has become popular, but people cannot agree whether it means something like making "Good" AI or whether it means something like making "Aimable" AI. We can define the terms as follows:AI Aimability = Create AI systems that will do what the

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11:57

[Linkpost] “Contra Scott on Abolishing the FDA” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/15

This is a linkpost for https://maximumprogress.substack.com/p/contra-scott-on-abolishing-the-fdaScott Alexander's recent post on the FDA raises the average level of discourse on the subject. He starts from the premise that the FDA deserves destruction but cautions against rash action. No political slogan can be implemented without clarification and “Abolish the FDA” is no different, but Scott's objections aren’t strong reasons to stop short of a policy implementation that still retains the spirit

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13:13

“EU policymakers reach an agreement on the AI Act” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/15

On December 8, EU policymakers announced an agreement on the AI Act. This post aims to briefly explain the context and implications for the governance of global catastrophic risks from advanced AI. My portfolio on Open Philanthropy's AI Governance and Policy Team includes EU matters (among other jurisdictions), but I am not an expert on EU policy or politics and could be getting some things in this post wrong, so please feel free to correct it or add more context or opinions in the comments!If you

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