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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma.If you"d like more, subscribe to the “Lesswrong (30+ karma)” feed.

technology philosophy

All Episodes

8:43

“You don’t know how bad most things are nor precisely...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/08/07

TL;DR: Your discernment in a subject often improves as you dedicate time and attention to that subject. The space of possible subjects is huge, so on average your discernment is terrible, relative to what it could be. This is a serious problem if you create a machine that does everyone's job for them.See also: Reality has a surprising amount of detail. (You lack awareness of how bad your staircase is and precisely how your staircase is bad.) You don't know what you don't know. You forget your...

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22:23

“Recommendation: reports on the search for missing...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/08/07

This is a link post.Content warning: About an IRL death.Today's post isn’t so much an essay as a recommendation for two bodies of work on the same topic: Tom Mahood's blog posts and Adam “KarmaFrog1” Marsland's videos on the 2010 disappearance of Bill Ewasko, who went for a day hike in Joshua Tree National Park and dropped out of contact.2010 – Bill Ewasko goes missing Tom Mahood's writeups on the search [Blog post, website goes down sometimes so if the site doesn’t work, check the internet a...

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30:16

“The ‘strong’ feature hypothesis could be wrong” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/08/07

NB. I am on the Google Deepmind language model interpretability team. But the arguments/views in this post are my own, and shouldn't be read as a team position. “It would be very convenient if the individual neurons of artificial neural networks corresponded to cleanly interpretable features of the input. For example, in an “ideal” ImageNet classifier, each neuron would fire only in the presence of a specific visual feature, such as the color red, a left-facing curve, or a dog snout” : Elhag...

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4:00

“‘AI achieves silver-medal standard solving...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/07/30

This is a link post.Google DeepMind reports on a system for solving mathematical problems that allegedly is able to give complete solutions to four of the six problems on the 2024 IMO, putting it near the top of the silver-medal category.Well, actually, two systems for solving mathematical problems: AlphaProof, which is more general-purpose, and AlphaGeometry, which is specifically for geometry problems. (This is AlphaGeometry 2; they reported earlier this year on a previous version of AlphaG...

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24:12

“Decomposing Agency — capabilities without desires”...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/07/29

This is a link post.What is an agent? It's a slippery concept with no commonly accepted formal definition, but informally the concept seems to be useful. One angle on it is Dennett's Intentional Stance: we think of an entity as being an agent if we can more easily predict it by treating it as having some beliefs and desires which guide its actions. Examples include cats and countries, but the central case is humans.The world is shaped significantly by the choices agents make. What might agent...

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15:54

“Universal Basic Income and Poverty” by Eliezer...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/07/27

(Crossposted from Twitter)I'm skeptical that Universal Basic Income can get rid of grinding poverty, since somehow humanity's 100-fold productivity increase (since the days of agriculture) didn't eliminate poverty.Some of my friends reply, "What do you mean, poverty is still around? 'Poor' people today, in Western countries, have a lot to legitimately be miserable about, don't get me wrong; but they also have amounts of clothing and fabric that only rich merchants could afford a thousand year...

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12:49

“Optimistic Assumptions, Longterm Planning, and...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/07/19

Eliezer Yudkowsky periodically complains about people coming up with questionable plans with questionable assumptions to deal with AI, and then either: Saying "well, if this assumption doesn't hold, we're doomed, so we might as well assume it's true."Worse: coming up with cope-y reasons to assume that the assumption isn't even questionable at all. It's just a pretty reasonable worldview.Sometimes the questionable plan is "an alignment scheme, which Eliezer thinks avoids the hard part of the p...

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19:09

“Superbabies: Putting The Pieces Together” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/07/15

This post was inspired by some talks at the recent LessOnline conference including one by LessWrong user “Gene Smith”.Let's say you want to have a “designer baby”. Genetically extraordinary in some way — super athletic, super beautiful, whatever.6’5”, blue eyes, with a trust fund.Ethics aside[1], what would be necessary to actually do this?Fundamentally, any kind of “superbaby” or “designer baby” project depends on two steps:1.) figure out what genes you ideally want;2.) create an embryo with...

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18:03

“Poker is a bad game for teaching epistemics. Figgie...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/07/12

This is a link post.Editor's note: Somewhat after I posted this on my own blog, Max Chiswick cornered me at LessOnline / Manifest and gave me a whole new perspective on this topic. I now believe that there is a way to use poker to sharpen epistemics that works dramatically better than anything I had been considering. I hope to write it up—together with Max—when I have time. Anyway, I'm still happy to keep this post around as a record of my first thoughts on the matter, and because it's better...

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82:25

“Reliable Sources: The Story of David Gerard” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/07/11

This is a linkpost for https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin, posted in full here given its relevance to this community. Gerard has been one of the longest-standing malicious critics of the rationalist and EA communities and has done remarkable amounts of work to shape their public images behind the scenes.Note: I am closer to this story than to many of my others. As always, I write aiming to provide a thorough and honest picture, but this should be read as ...

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27:00

“When is a mind me?” by Rob Bensinger

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/07/08

xlr8harder writes:In general I don’t think an uploaded mind is you, but rather a copy. But one thought experiment makes me question this. A Ship of Theseus concept where individual neurons are replaced one at a time with a nanotechnological functional equivalent.Are you still you?Presumably the question xlr8harder cares about here isn't semantic question of how linguistic communities use the word "you", or predictions about how whole-brain emulation tech might change the way we use pronouns.R...

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12:42

“80,000 hours should remove OpenAI from the Job Board...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/07/04

I haven't shared this post with other relevant parties – my experience has been that private discussion of this sort of thing is more paralyzing than helpful. I might change my mind in the resulting discussion, but, I prefer that discussion to be public. I think 80,000 hours should remove OpenAI from its job board, and similar EA job placement services should do the same. (I personally believe 80k shouldn't advertise Anthropic jobs either, but I think the case for that is somewhat less cle...

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12:01

[Linkpost] “introduction to cancer vaccines” by bhauth

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/07/02

This is a linkpost for https://www.bhauth.com/blog/biology/cancer%20vaccines.html cancer neoantigensFor cells to become cancerous, they must have mutations that cause uncontrolled replication and mutations that prevent that uncontrolled replication from causing apoptosis. Because cancer requires several mutations, it often begins with damage to mutation-preventing mechanisms. As such, cancers often have many mutations not required for their growth, which often cause changes to structure of so...

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13:24

“Priors and Prejudice” by MathiasKB

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/07/02

IImagine an alternate version of the Effective Altruism movement, whose early influences came from socialist intellectual communities such as the Fabian Society, as opposed to the rationalist diaspora. Let's name this hypothetical movement the Effective Samaritans.Like the EA movement of today, they believe in doing as much good as possible, whatever this means. They began by evaluating existing charities, reading every RCT to find the very best ways of helping.But many effective samaritans ...

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29:40

“My experience using financial commitments to...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/07/02

About a year ago I decided to try using one of those apps where you tie your goals to some kind of financial penalty. The specific one I tried is Forfeit, which I liked the look of because it's relatively simple, you set single tasks which you have to verify you have completed with a photo.I’m generally pretty sceptical of productivity systems, tools for thought, mindset shifts, life hacks and so on. But this one I have found to be really shockingly effective, it has been about the biggest po...

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14:21

“The Incredible Fentanyl-Detecting Machine” by...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/07/01

An NII machine in Nogales, AZ. (Image source)There's bound to be a lot of discussion of the Biden-Trump presidential debates last night, but I want to skip all the political prognostication and talk about the real issue: fentanyl-detecting machines.Joe Biden says: And I wanted to make sure we use the machinery that can detect fentanyl, these big machines that roll over everything that comes across the border, and it costs a lot of money. That was part of this deal we put together, this bipart...

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14:46

“AI catastrophes and rogue deployments” by Buck

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/07/01

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.[Thanks to Aryan Bhatt, Ansh Radhakrishnan, Adam Kaufman, Vivek Hebbar, Hanna Gabor, Justis Mills, Aaron Scher, Max Nadeau, Ryan Greenblatt, Peter Barnett, Fabien Roger, and various people at a presentation of these arguments for comments. These ideas aren’t very original to me; many of the examples of threat models are from other people.]In this post, I want to introduce the concept of a “rogue deployment” ...

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63:54

“Loving a world you don’t trust” by Joe Carlsmith

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/07/01

(Cross-posted from my website. Audio version here, or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app.)This is the final essay in a series that I'm calling "Otherness andcontrol in the age of AGI." I'm hoping that the individual essays can beread fairly well on their own, butsee here fora brief summary of the series as a whole. There's also a PDF of the whole series here.Warning: spoilers for Angels in America; and moderate spoilers forHarry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.)"I come...

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13:08

“LLM Generality is a Timeline Crux” by eggsyntax

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/06/28

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual. Short SummaryLLMs may be fundamentally incapable of fully general reasoning, and if so, short timelines are less plausible. Longer summaryThere is ML research suggesting that LLMs fail badly on attempts at general reasoning, such as planning problems, scheduling, and attempts to solve novel visual puzzles. This post provides a brief introduction to that research, and asks: Whether this limitation is illusor...

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17:07

“Formal verification, heuristic explanations and...

LessWrong (Curated & Popular) ·

2024/06/27

ARC's current research focus can be thought of as trying to combine mechanistic interpretability and formal verification. If we had a deep understanding of what was going on inside a neural network, we would hope to be able to use that understanding to verify that the network was not going to behave dangerously in unforeseen situations. ARC is attempting to perform this kind of verification, but using a mathematical kind of "explanation" instead of one written in natural language.To help eluc...

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599 results

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