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LessWrong

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15:34

[Linkpost] “Meditations on Mot” by Richard_Ngo

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/04

This is a linkpost for https://www.mindthefuture.info/p/meditations-on-motHoly! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an angel!Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the middleclass! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebellion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles!Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria & Seattle Holy Paris Holy Tangiers Holy Moscow

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25:00

[Linkpost] “The Witness” by Richard_Ngo

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/03

This is a linkpost for https://www.narrativeark.xyz/p/the-witness“What are the roots that clutch, what branches growOut of this stony rubbish? Son of man,You cannot say, or guess, for you know onlyA heap of broken images-”I wake up, feeling a strange sense of restlessness. I’m not sure why, but it feels impossible to lounge around in bed like I usually do. So I get changed and head down to the kitchen for breakfast. Right as I reach the bottom of the stairs, though, the bell rings. When I open the

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21:06

“Book Review: 1948 by Benny Morris” by Yair Halberstadt

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/03

t content warning: war, Israel Palestine conflictpotential bias warning: I am a Jewish IsraeliMy copy of 1948 arrived in late September, but I was in the middle of another book. Then October the 7th happened, and with the horrors of that day fresh in my mind, and my country in a brutal war, I wasn't in a mental state where I could read about all the cruelties of another war between Israelis and Palestinians.But ultimately I couldn't abandon it. If Hamas was willing to justify genocide of Israelis

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7:13

“Quick takes on ‘AI is easy to control’” by So8res

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/02

A friend asked me for my quick takes on “AI is easy to control”, and gave an advance guess as to what my take would be. I only skimmed the article, rather than reading it in depth, but on that skim I produced the following:Re: "AIs are white boxes", there's a huge gap between having the weights and understanding what's going on in there. The fact that we have the weights is reason for hope; the (slow) speed of interpretability research undermines this hope.Another thing that undermines this hope is

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4:57

“Out-of-distribution Bioattacks” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/02

The main goal of my work these days is trying to reduce the chances of individuals or small groups causing large-scale harm through engineered pandemics, potentially civilizational collapse or extinction. One question in figuring out whether this is worth working on, or funding, is: how large is the risk? One estimation approach would be to look at historical attacks, but while they've been terrible they haven't actually killed very many people. The deadliest one was the September

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2:14

“2023 Unofficial LessWrong Census/Survey” by Screwtape

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/02

The Less Wrong General Census is unofficially here! You can take it at this link.It's that time again.If you are reading this post and identify as a LessWronger, then you are the target audience. I'd appreciate it if you took the survey. If you post, if you comment, if you lurk, if you don't actually read the site that much but you do read a bunch of the other rationalist blogs or you're really into HPMOR, if you hung out on rationalist tumblr back in the day, or if none of those exactly fit you but

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53:17

“MATS Summer 2023 Postmortem” by Rocket, Juan Gil,...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/01

The ML Alignment & Theory Scholars program (MATS, formerly SERI MATS) is an education and research mentorship program for emerging AI safety researchers. This summer, we held the fourth iteration of the MATS program, in which 60 scholars received mentorship from 17 research mentors. In this post, we explain the elements of the program, lay out some of the thinking behind them, and evaluate our impact.Summary.Key details about the Summer 2023 Program:Educational attainment of MATS scholars:30% of

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36:45

“Complex systems research as a field (and its...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/01

habrykaI have this high prior that complex-systems type thinking is usually a trap. I've had a few conversations about this, but still feel kind of confused, and it seems good to have a better written record of mine and your thoughts here.At a high level, here are some thoughts that come to mind for me when I think about complex systems stuff, especially in the context of AI Alignment: A few times I ended up spending a lot of time trying to understand what some complex systems people are trying to

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1:50

[Linkpost] “Queuing Theory: Benefits of operating at...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/01

This is a linkpost for https://less.works/less/principles/queueing_theoryRelated to Slack. Related to Lean Manufacturing, aka JIT Manufacturing.TL;DR A successful task-based system should occasionally be idle, like 40% of worker ants.Doing tasks quickly is essential for producing value in many systems. For software teams, delivering a feature gives valuable insight into user needs, which can improve future feature quality. For supply chains, faster delivery releases capital for reinvestment

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23:15

“Thoughts on ‘AI is easy to control’ by Pope &...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/01

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.Quintin Pope & Nora Belrose have a new “AI Optimists” website, along with a new essay “AI is easy to control”, arguing that the risk of human extinction due to future AI (“AI x-risk”) is a mere 1% (“a tail risk worth considering, but not the dominant source of risk in the world”). (I’m much more pessimistic.) It makes lots of interesting arguments, and I’m happy that the authors are engaging in substantive and

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51:06

“How useful is mechanistic interpretability?” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/12/01

Opening positionsryan_greenblattI'm somewhat skeptical about mech interp (bottom-up or substantial reverse engineering style interp):Current work seems very far from being useful (it isn't currently useful) or explaining much what's going on inside of models in key cases. But it's hard to be very confident that a new field won't work! And things can be far from useful, but become useful via slowly becoming more powerful, etc.In particular, current work fails to explain much of the performance of

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20:47

“What’s next for the field of Agent Foundations?” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/30

Nora_AmmannAlexander, Matt and I want to chat about the field of Agent Foundations (AF), where it's at and how to strengthen and grow it going forward. We will kick off by each of us making a first message outlining some of our key beliefs and open questions at the moment. Rather than giving a comprehensive take, the idea is to pick out 1-3 things we each care about/think are important, and/or that we are confused about/would like to discuss. We may respond to some subset of the following prompts:

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76:56

“AI #40: A Vision from Vitalik” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/30

It has been brutal out there for someone on my beat. Everyone extremely hostile, even more than usual. Extreme positions taken, asserted as if obviously true. Not symmetrically, but from all sides nonetheless. Constant assertions of what happened in the last two weeks that are, as far as I can tell, flat out wrong, largely the result of a well-implemented media campaign. Repeating flawed logic more often and louder. The bright spot was offered by Vitalik Buterin, who offers a piece entitled ‘My

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20:00

“OpenAI: Altman Returns” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/30

As of this morning, the new board is in place and everything else at OpenAI is otherwise officially back to the way it was before. Events seem to have gone as expected. If you have read my previous two posts on the OpenAI situation, nothing here should surprise you. Still seems worthwhile to gather the postscripts, official statements and reactions into their own post for future ease of reference. What will the ultimate result be? We likely only find that out gradually over time, as we

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0:22

“Lying Alignment Chart” by Zack_M_Davis

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/29

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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3:49

“Intro to Superposition & Sparse Autoencoders (Colab...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/29

This is a linkpost for some exercises in sparse autoencoders, which I've recently finished working on as part of the upcoming ARENA 3.0 iteration. Having spoken to Neel Nanda and others in interpretability-related MATS streams, it seemed useful to make these exercises accessible out of the context of the rest of the ARENA curriculum.Links to Colabs: Exercises, Solutions.If you don't like working in Colabs, then you can clone the repo, download the exercises & solutions Colabs as notebooks, and

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9:29

“The 101 Space You Will Always Have With You” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/29

Any community which ever adds new people will need to either routinely teach the new and (to established members) blindingly obvious information to those who genuinely haven’t heard it before, or accept that over time community members will only know the simplest basics by accident of osmosis or selection bias. There isn’t another way out of that. You don’t get to stop doing it. If you have a vibrant and popular group full of people really interested in the subject of the group, and you run it for

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3:33

“Black Box Biology” by GeneSmith

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/29

Suppose you want to decrease your risk of heart disease. The conventional advice goes something like this: Eat a healthier diet with less LDL-cholesterol raising foods Exercise more Keep your blood sugar under control Don’t smoke, don’t sit too much and don't take 400mg of methamphetamine on a regular basis An alternative strategy might be some kind of genetic intervention. For example, an active clinical trial by Verve Therapeutics aims to treat individuals with inherited high cholesterol by

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1:52

“Update #2 to ‘Dominant Assurance Contract Platform’:...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/28

This is the second update to The Economics of the Asteroid Deflection Problem (Dominant Assurance Contracts). It took a bit longer than I expected but I finally launched a platform for raising money using Dominant Assurance Contracts: EnsureDone.Why is it called EnsureDone? Well, we ran a naming contest on manifold.markets, and EnsureDone had the most Keynesian Beauty. We've launched with three projectsBuilding a Platform and Organization to Foster Logic Tournaments Around the World By Sebastian

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77:30

“Shallow review of live agendas in alignment &...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/28

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.Summary.You can’t optimise an allocation of resources if you don’t know what the current one is. Existing maps of alignment research are mostly too old to guide you and the field has nearly no ratchet, no common knowledge of what everyone is doing and why, what is abandoned and why, what is renamed, what relates to what, what is going on. This post is mostly just a big index: a link-dump for as many currently

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