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LessWrong

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technology philosophy

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22:15

“Anthropic Fall 2023 Debate Progress Update” by Ansh...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/28

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.This is a research update on some work that I’ve been doing on Scalable Oversight at Anthropic, based on the original AI safety via debate proposal and a more recent agenda developed at NYU and Anthropic. The core doc was written several months ago, so some of it is likely outdated, but it seemed worth sharing in its current form.I’d like to thank Tamera Lanham, Sam Bowman, Kamile Lukosiute, Ethan Perez, Jared

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11:43

“Apocalypse insurance, and the hardline libertarian...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/28

Short version: In a saner world, AI labs would have to purchase some sort of "apocalypse insurance", with premiums dependent on their behavior in ways that make reckless behavior monetarily infeasible. I don't expect the Earth to implement such a policy, but it seems worth saying the correct answer aloud anyway. BackgroundIs advocating for AI shutdown contrary to libertarianism? Is advocating for AI shutdown like arguing for markets that are free except when I'm personally uncomfortable about the

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3:07

“My techno-optimism [By Vitalik Buterin]” by habryka

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/27

Vitalik wrote a post trying to make the case for his own take on techno-optimism summarizing it as an ideology he calls "d/acc". I resonate with a lot of it, though also feel not that excited about trying to orient towards the world through explicit ideologies with short names like "d/acc". Below some quotes and the table of contents.Last month, Marc Andreessen published his "techno-optimist manifesto", arguing for a renewed enthusiasm about technology, and for markets and capitalism as a means of

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42:49

“AISC 2024 - Project Summaries” by NickyP

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/27

Apply to AI Safety Camp 2024 by 1st December 2023. All mistakes here are my own.Below are some summaries for each project proposal, listed in order of how they appear on the website. These are edited by me, and most have not yet been reviewed by the project leads. I think having a list like this makes it easier for people to navigate all the different projects, so I have added one.If a project catches your interest, click on the title to read more about it. Note that the summarisation here is lossy

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4:02

“Apply to the Conceptual Boundaries Workshop for AI...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/27

Do you have experience with Active Inference, Embedded Agency, biological gap junctions, or other frameworks that separate agents from their environment? Apply to the Conceptual Boundaries Workshop for AI safety. February in Austin TX.Website and applicationA (small) workshop to identify promising boundaries research directions and empirical projects.Boundaries keep agents causally separate from their environment. This is crucial for their survival and continued autonomy.A bacterium relies on its

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1:43

[Linkpost] “Paper: ‘FDT in an evolutionary...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/27

This is a linkpost for https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.05154.pdfI'm not sure what to think of this paper, it's quite long and I haven't finished checking it for sanity. nevertheless, I noticed it hadn't made its way here, and there are mighty few papers that cite the FDT paper, so I figured I'd drop it off rather than leave it sitting open in a tab forever.Abstract:Functional decision theory (FDT) is a fairly new mode of decision theory and a normative viewpoint on how an agent should maximize expected

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8:25

[Linkpost] “Spaced repetition for teaching two-year...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/26

This is a linkpost for https://chipmonk.substack.com/p/spaced-repetition-for-teaching-twoThis father has been using spaced repetition (Anki) to teach his children how to read several years earlier than average.Michael Nielsen and Gwern[1] tweeted about the interesting case of a reddit user, u/caffeine314 (henceforth dubbed “CoffeePie”), who has been using spaced repetition with his daughter from a very young age.CoffeePie started using Anki with his daughter when she turned 2, and he continued using

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0:40

“Paper out now on creatine and cognitive performance”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/26

Our paper “The effects of creatine supplementation on cognitive performance - a randomised controlled study” is out now! → Paper: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-023-03146-5 → Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/FabienneSand/status/1726196252747165718?t=qPUghyDGMUb0-FZK7CEXhw&s=19 Jan Brauner and I are very thankful to Paul Christiano for suggesting doing this study and for funding it. --- First published: November 26th, 2023 Source:

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39:02

[Linkpost] “Moral Reality Check (a short story)” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/26

This is a linkpost for https://unstableontology.com/2023/11/26/moral-reality-check/Janet sat at her corporate ExxenAI computer, viewing some training performance statistics. ExxenAI was a major player in the generative AI space, with multimodal language, image, audio, and video AIs. They had scaled up operations over the past few years, mostly serving B2B, but with some B2C subscriptions. ExxenAI's newest AI system, SimplexAI-3, was based on GPT-5 and Gemini-2. ExxenAI had hired away some software

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1:58

“Announcing New Beginner-friendly Book on AI Safety...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/25

Concisely,I've just released the book Uncontrollable: The Threat of Artificial Superintelligence and the Race to Save the WorldIt's an engaging introduction to the main issues and arguments about AI safety and risk. Clarity and accessibility were prioritized. There are blurbs of support from Max Tegmark, Will MacAskill, Roman Yampolskiy and others. Main argument is that AI capabilities are increasing rapidly, we may not be able to fully align or control advanced AI systems, which creates risk. There

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8:44

“What are the results of more parental supervision...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/25

Parents supervise their children way more than they used toThe wild thing is that this is true even while the number of children per family has decreased and the amount of time mothers work outside the home has increased.(What's happening in France? I wouldn’t be surprised if it's measurement error somehow.)More supervision means less outdoor playMost of this supervision is indoors, but here I’ll focus on outdoor play. Needing a parent to take you outside means that you spend less time outside, and

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8:13

“Ability to solve long-horizon tasks correlates with...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/24

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.Status: Vague, sorry. The point seems almost tautological to me, and yet also seems like the correct answer to the people going around saying “LLMs turned out to be not very want-y, when are the people who expected 'agents' going to update?”, so, here we are. Okay, so you know how AI today isn't great at certain... let's say "long-horizon" tasks? Like novel large-scale engineering projects, or writing a long book

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28:43

[Linkpost] “Progress links digest, 2023-11-24:...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/24

This is a linkpost for https://rootsofprogress.org/links-digest-2023-11-24I swear I will get back to doing these weekly so they’re not so damn long. As always, feel free to skim and skip around!The Progress ForumA paradox at the heart of American bureaucracy: “The quickest way to doom a project to be over-budget and long-delayed is to make it an urgent public priority”Why Governments Can’t be Trusted to Protect the Long-run Future: “No one in the long-run future gets to vote in the next election. No

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11:11

“Prepsgiving, A Convergently Instrumental Human...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/23

Most cultures have a harvest festival, and every harvest festival is basically automatically a Prepsgiving Celebration.In the northern hemisphere this probably happens in November or October, and in the southern hemisphere it probably happens in May or June. There could be more than one celebration like this, and in the US, I think Halloween and Thanksgiving both count as instances.Depending on how you want to frame it, you could argue that the Idea teleologically causes all these Instances, but you

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49:43

“AI #39: The Week of OpenAI” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/23

The board firing Sam Altman, then reinstating him, dominated everything else this week. Other stuff also happened, but definitely focus on that first. Table of Contents Developments at OpenAI were far more important than everything else this read. So you can read this timeline of events over the weekend, and this attempt to put all the information together. Introduction. Table of Contents. Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. Narrate your life, as you do all life. Language Models Don’t Offer

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6:01

“Thomas Kwa’s research journal” by Thomas Kwa, Adrià...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/23

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.Thomas KwaWhy I'm writing thisResearch feedback loops for junior AI safety researchers are pretty poor right now. They're better than in the past due to the recent explosion in empirical work, but AI safety is still a very new field whose methodology is not quite nailed down, and which cannot admit the same level of aimlessness as other sciences, or ML at large. There are very likely mistakes being repeated by

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10:30

“Never Drop A Ball” by Screwtape

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/23

Previously I talked about the skill of doing things One Day Sooner. Today I’m going to talk about a different way of working which is in some ways its opposite. The Sazen for this approach is “Never Drop A Ball.” I was exposed to this approach in my teens, though I didn’t grasp it on an intuitive, fluid level until I was midway through university. It's the method of work I’ve been in most often for the last year or so, and while it's not the way to get things done that I most enjoy, it does have

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25:56

[Linkpost] “so you want to save the world? an account...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/22

This is a linkpost for https://carado.moe/so-you-want-to-save-the-world.html Aroden, who gave me the strength to be a holy warrior, give me also the wisdom to choose my fights wisely … and help me grow strong enough to save everyone, literally everyone, and do not let my strength come coupled with contempt for weakness, or my wisdom with contempt for foolishness … and look after everyone … in this strange country and in all the worlds You travelled to and any worlds You didn't. And make Hell

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20:08

“OpenAI: The Battle of the Board” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/22

Previously: OpenAI: Facts from a Weekend. On Friday afternoon, OpenAI's board fired CEO Sam Altman. Overnight, an agreement in principle was reached to reinstate Sam Altman as CEO of OpenAI, with an initial new board of Brad Taylor (ex-co-CEO of Salesforce, chair), Larry Summers and Adam D’Angelo. What happened? Why did it happen? How will it ultimately end? The fight is far from over. We do not entirely know, but we know a lot more than we did a few days ago. This is my attempt to put the pieces

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2:48

“Public Call for Interest in Mathematical Alignment”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2023/11/22

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.Bottom line up front: If you are currently working on, or are interested working in any area of mathematical AI alignment, we are collecting names and basic contact information to find who to talk to about opportunities in these areas. If that describes you, please fill out the form! (Please do so even if you think I already know who you are, or people will be left out!)More informationThere are several concrete

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