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7:20

“On Trust” by johnswentworth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/06

“Trust”, as the word is typically used, is a… weird concept, to me. Like, it's trying to carve the world in a way which I don’t naturally carve it myself. This post is my attempt to convey what I find weird about “trust”, and what adjacent concepts I personally find more natural instead. The Weirdness Of “Trust”Here are some example phrases which make “trust” feel like a weird/unnatural concept to me: “I decided to trust her”“Should I trust him?”“Trust me”“They offered me their trust”To me, the

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44:56

“Originality vs. Correctness” by alkjash, habryka

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/06

I talk with Alkjash about valuing original thinking vs getting things right. We discuss a few main threads: What are the benefits of epistemic specialisation? What about generalism?How much of the action in an actual human mind is in tweaking your distribution over hypotheses and how much over making sure you're considering good hypotheses?If your hope is to slot into an epistemic process that figures out what's correct in part by you coming up with novel ideas, will processes that are out to get

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1:36

[Linkpost] “Google Gemini Announced” by g-w1

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/06

This is a linkpost for https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-gemini-ai/Google just announced Gemini, and Hassabis claims that "in each of the 50 different subject areas that we tested it on, it's as good as the best expert humans in those areas" State-of-the-art performance We've been rigorously testing our Gemini models and evaluating their performance on a wide variety of tasks. From natural image, audio and video understanding to mathematical reasoning, Gemini Ultra's performance exceeds

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21:27

“Based Beff Jezos and the Accelerationists” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/06

It seems Forbes decided to doxx the identity of e/acc founder Based Beff Jezos. They did so using voice matching software. Given Jezos is owning it given that it happened, rather than hoping it all goes away, and people are talking about him, this seems like a good time to cover this ‘Beff Jezos’ character and create a reference point for if he continues to come up later. If that is not relevant to your interests, you can and should skip this one. Do Not Doxx People First order of

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20:52

[Linkpost] “Why Yudkowsky is wrong about ‘covalently...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/06

This is a linkpost for https://open.substack.com/pub/titotal/p/why-yudkowsky-is-wrong-about-covalently?r=1e0is3&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web confidence level: I am a physicist, not a biologist, so don’t take this the account of a domain level expert. But this is really basic stuff, and is very easy to verify. Recently I encountered a scientific claim about biology, made by Eliezer Yudkowsky. I searched around for the source of the claim, and found that he has been repeating versions of

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1:39

“How do you feel about LessWrong these days? [Open...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/06

Hello! This is jacobjacob from the LessWrong / Lightcone team. This is a meta thread for you to share any thoughts, feelings, feedback or other stuff about LessWrong, that's been on your mind. Examples of things you might share: "I really like agree/disagree voting!""What's up with all this Dialogues stuff? It's confusing..."Hm... it seems like recently the vibe on the site has changed somehow... in particular [insert 10 paragraphs]"...or anything else! The point of this thread is to give you an

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9:33

“Anthropical Paradoxes are Paradoxes of Probability...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/06

This is the fourth post in my series on Anthropics. The previous one is Anthropical probabilities are fully explained by difference in possible outcomes.Introduction.If there is nothing special about anthropics, if it's just about correctly applying standard probability theory, why do we keep encountering anthropical paradoxes instead of general probability theory paradoxes? Part of the answer is that people tend to be worse at applying probability theory in some cases than in the others. But most

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28:31

“Studying The Alien Mind” by Quentin...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/05

This post is part of a sequence on LLM psychologyTL;DRWe introduce our perspective on a top-down approach for exploring the cognition of LLMs by studying their behavior, which we refer to as LLM psychology. In this post we take the mental stance of treating LLMs as “alien minds,” comparing and contrasting their study with the study of animal cognition. We do this both to learn from past researchers who attempted to understand non-human cognition, as well as to highlight how much the study of LLMs is

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24:48

“Deep Forgetting & Unlearning for Safely-Scoped LLMs”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/05

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.Thanks to Phillip Christoffersen, Adam Gleave, Anjali Gopal, Soroush Pour, and Fabien Roger for useful discussions and feedback. TL;DRThis post overviews a research agenda for avoiding unwanted latent capabilities in LLMs. It argues that "deep" forgetting and unlearning may be important, tractable, and neglected. I discuss five things. The practical problems posed when undesired latent capabilities resurface.How

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67:11

“On ‘Responsible Scaling Policies’ (RSPs)” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/05

This post was originally intended to come out directly after the UK AI Safety Summit, to give the topic its own deserved focus. One thing led to another, and I am only doubling back to it now. Responsible Deployment Policies At the AI Safety Summit, all the major Western players were asked: What are your company policies on how to keep us safe? What are your responsible deployment policies (RDPs)? Except that they call them Responsible Scaling Policies (RSPs) instead. I deliberately say

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3:51

[Linkpost] “We’re all in this together” by Tamsin Leake

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/05

This is a linkpost for https://carado.moe/were-all-in-this-together.htmlThere's one thing history seems to have been trying to teach us: that the contents of the future are determined by power, economics, politics, and other conflict-theoritic matters. Turns out, nope! Almost all of what the future contains is determined by which of the two following engineering problems is solved first: How to build a superintelligent AI (if solved first, everyone dies forever) How to build an aligned

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12:17

“A Socratic dialogue with my student” by lsusr

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/05

This is a dialogue between me and Noam, my student of philosophy. It is reproduced, in edited form, with his permission. When commenting, please consider that he is a teenager. Many of these ideas are new to him.How do you get a student? You steal them. His previous teacher was a Marxist. I demolished his previous teacher in debate so thoroughly that he abandoned her teachings and now listens to me instead.I think this dialogue demonstrates good pedogogical techniques.I let Noam be the judge of what

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20:27

“Neural uncertainty estimation for alignment” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/05

Introduction.Suppose you've built some AI model of human values. You input a situation, and it spits out a goodness rating. You might want to ask: "What are the error bars on this goodness rating?" In addition to it just being nice to know error bars, an uncertainty estimate can also be useful inside the AI: guiding active learning[1], correcting for the optimizer's curse[2], or doing out-of-distribution detection[3].I recently got into the uncertainty estimation literature for neural networks (NNs)

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9:04

“Some open-source dictionaries and dictionary...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/05

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.As more people begin work on interpretability projects which incorporate dictionary learning, it will be valuable to have high-quality dictionaries publicly available.[1] To get the ball rolling on this, my collaborator (Aaron Mueller) and I are:open-sourcing a number of sparse autoencoder dictionaries trained on Pythia-70m MLPsreleasing our repository for training these dictionaries.Let's discuss the dictionaries

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8:22

“The LessWrong 2022 Review” by habryka

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/05

The snow is falling, the carols are starting, and we all know it's time for our favorite winter holiday tradition. It's LessWrong review time!Each year we come together and review posts that are at least one year old. That means for the next two months we are reviewing all posts from 2022.While our everyday lives are filled with fads and chasing the sweet taste of karma and social approval, the LessWrong review is the time to take a step back and ask ourselves "did this actually help me think

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30:30

“Speaking to Congressional staffers about AI risk” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/04

In May and June of 2023, I (Akash) had about 50-70 meetings about AI risks with congressional staffers. I had been meaning to write a post reflecting on the experience and some of my takeaways, and I figured it could be a good topic for a LessWrong dialogue. I saw that hath had offered to do LW dialogues with folks, and I reached out. In this dialogue, we discuss how I decided to chat with staffers, my initial observations in DC, some context about how Congressional offices work, what my meetings

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1:42

“n of m ring signatures” by DanielFilan

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/04

A normal cryptographic signature associated with a message and a public key lets you prove to the world that it was made by someone with access to the private key associated with the known public key, without revealing that public key. You can read about it on Wikipedia here. A ring signature associated with a message and a set of public keys lets you prove to the world that it was made by someone with access to the message and one private key associated to one of the public keys in the set, but

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28:53

“[Valence series] 1. Introduction” by Steven Byrnes

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/04

1.1 Summary & Table of ContentsThis is the first of a series of five blog posts on valence, which I’ll be serializing over the next couple weeks. (Or email me to read it all right now.) Here's an overview of the whole series, and then we’ll jump right into the first post!1.1.1 Summary & Table of Contents—for the whole Valence seriesLet's say a thought pops into your mind: “I could open the window right now”. Maybe you then immediately stand up and go open the window. Or maybe you don’t

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8:05

[Linkpost] “the micro-fulfillment cambrian explosion”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/04

This is a linkpost for https://www.bhauth.com/blog/industrial%20design/microfulfillment.htmlWarehouse automation has been very successful. Here's a typical modern system. As you can see, a tall narrow robot rides on a single rail at the top and bottom. The linked example is up to 42m tall. Items are stored on top of pallets, and the robot has a telescoping fork, which might be able to handle 2-deep pallets to improve space efficiency. Stores are much less automated than warehouses. When you go to a

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8:44

[Linkpost] “Nietzsche’s Morality in Plain English” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/04

This is a linkpost for https://arjunpanickssery.substack.com/p/nietzsches-morality-in-plain-englishIn 1924, Clarence Darrow's eight-hour plea for Leopold and Loeb blamed the universities and scholars of Nietzsche (who died in 1900) for their influence on Leopold:He became enamored of the philosophy of Nietzsche. Your honor, I have read almost everything that Nietzsche ever wrote. A man of wonderful intellect; the most original philosophy of the last century. A man who had made a deeper imprint on

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