Bookmarks (679)

Published on April 29, 2024 3:41 PM GMTIn “Freedom under naturalistic dualism” I have carefully argued that consciousness is radically noumenal, that is, it is the most real (perhaps the only real) thing in the Universe, but also totally impossible to be observed by others (non-phenomenal). In my view this strongly limits our knowledge on sentience, with important consequences for animalism, that I will...

Published on April 29, 2024 4:13 PM GMTAdversarial Examples: A Problem The apparent successes of the deep learning revolution conceal a dark underbelly. It may seem that we now know how to get computers to (say) check whether a photo is of a bird, but this façade of seemingly good performance is belied by the existence of adversarial examples—specially prepared data that looks ordinary...

Published on April 29, 2024 10:53 AM GMTThe 9th AI Safety Camp (AISC9) just ended, and as usual, it was a success! Follow this link to find project summaries, links to their outputs, recordings to the end of camp presentations and contact info to all our teams in case you want to engage more.AISC9 both had the largest number of participants (159) and the smallest...

Published on April 29, 2024 10:10 AM GMTCross-posted on the EA Forum. This article is part of a series of ~10 posts comprising a 2024 State of the AI Regulatory Landscape Review, conducted by the Governance Recommendations Research Program at Convergence Analysis. Each post will cover a specific domain of AI governance, such as incident reporting, safety evals, model registries, and more. We’ll provide an overview of existing regulations, focusing...

Published on April 29, 2024 2:30 AM GMTThis is a response to the post We Write Numbers Backward, in which lsusr argues that little-endian numerical notation is better than big-endian.[1] I believe this is wrong, and big-endian has a significant advantage not considered by lsusr.Lsusr describes reading the number "123" in little-endian, using the following algorithm:Read the first digit, multiply it by its order of...

Published on April 29, 2024 1:57 AM GMTDate: Saturday, May 4th, 2024Time: 1 pm – 3 pm PTAddress: Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco, just outside the Metreon food court, coordinates 37°47'04.4"N 122°24'11.1"W  Contact: 34251super@gmail.comCome join San Francisco’s First Saturday (or SFFS – easy to remember, right?) ACX meetup. Whether you're an avid reader, a first time reader, or just a curious soul, come meet! We will...

Published on April 29, 2024 12:48 AM GMTThis is a post on a novel cognitive architecture I have been thinking about for a while now, first as a conceptual playground to concretise some of my agent foundation ideas, and lately as an idea for a project that approaches the Alignment Problem directly by concretising a sort of AI-Seed approach for an inherently interpretable yet...

Published on April 29, 2024 12:22 AM GMTIn this post, I will provide some speculative reasoning about Simulators and Agents being entangled in certain ways.I have thought quite a bit about LLMs and the Simulator framing for them, and I am convinced that it is a good explanatory/predictive frame for behavior of current LLM (+multimodal) systems. It provides intuitive answers for why the difficulties around...

Published on April 29, 2024 12:18 AM GMTI find that an especially illustrative thought experiment regarding embodiment is to imagine a superintelligent Stone that can talk. Let’s say that this Stone can somehow perceive its environment but is, as you might expect, incapable of moving around. The Stone is not a very powerful optimiser of its environment as long as it is just lying...

Published on April 29, 2024 12:16 AM GMTThis is an idea I am toying around with for understanding resolutionally adjusted causal modeling - this is just a bunch of intuitions and pointing towards a somewhat clear framing of a fundamental thing. I am sure there are already plenty of accounts for how to approach this kind of task, but I like to figure stuff...

Published on April 27, 2024 6:34 PM GMTI just spent a couple of hours trying to understand the UN’s role in the governance of AI. The most important effort seems to be the Global Digital Compact (GDC). An initiative for member states to “outline shared principles for an open, free and secure digital future for all". The GDC has been developed by member states...

Published on April 27, 2024 4:36 PM GMTAbstract: First [1)], a suggested general method of determining, for AI operating under the human feedback reinforcement learning (HFRL) model, whether the AI is “thinking”; an elucidation of latent knowledge that is separate from a recapitulation of its training data. With independent concepts or cognitions, then, an early observation that AI or AGI may have a self-concept. Second...

Published on April 27, 2024 4:04 PM GMTCharbel-Raphaël Segerie and Épiphanie Gédéon contributed equally to this post. Many thanks to Davidad, Gabriel Alfour, Jérémy Andréoletti, Lucie Philippon, Vladimir Ivanov, Alexandre Variengien, Angélina Gentaz, Léo Dana and Diego Dorn for useful feedback.TLDR: We present a new method for a safer-by design AI development. We think using plainly coded AIs may be feasible in the near future...

Published on April 27, 2024 1:32 PM GMTThis is exploratory investigation of a new-ish hypothesis, it is not intended to be a comprehensive review of the field or even a a full investigation of the hypothesis.I've always been skeptical of the seed-oil theory of obesity. Perhaps this is bad rationality on my part, but I've tended to retreat to the sniff test on issues...

Published on April 27, 2024 1:22 PM GMTOne consideration that is pretty important for AI safety is understanding the extent to which a model's outputs are aligned with its chain of thought.This paper (Twitter thread linked) provides some relevant evidence. It demonstrates that it is possible for a model to achieve performance comparable to chain-of-thought with dots replacing the chain of thought under some...

Published on April 27, 2024 12:14 PM GMTVernor Vinge is a legendary and recently deceased sci-fi author. I’ve just finished listening to the first two books in the Zone of Thought trilogy. Both books are entertaining and culturally influential. The audio versions are high-quality.A Deepness in the Sky is about two spacefaring human civilizations with clashing societal structures converging on a mysterious solar system...

Published on April 27, 2024 11:13 AM GMTThis work was produced as part of Neel Nanda's stream in the ML Alignment & Theory Scholars Program - Winter 2023-24 Cohort, with co-supervision from Wes Gurnee.This post is a preview for our upcoming paper, which will provide more detail into our current understanding of refusal.We thank Nina Rimsky and Daniel Paleka for the helpful conversations and review.Executive...

Published on April 27, 2024 10:14 AM GMTNew tricks and tools can make cognitively demanding tasks less painful.As a college student two decades ago, Andrew Westbrook struggled to stay focused in class. He certainly had the capacity to concentrate; he could do it intensely when he really loved a topic. “When you’re totally engrossed in a good book, thinking can feel effortless, or even...

Published on April 27, 2024 8:02 AM GMTI don't know if this is a well known argument that has already been responded to. If it is, just delete the post.An implicit assumption most people make when discussion takeover risk, is that any misaligned agent will stave off enacting takeover plans with less than very high probability of success. If the Agent has an immediate...

Published on April 26, 2024 11:22 PM GMTTL;DR: In this post, I distinguish between two related concepts in neural network interpretability: polysemanticity and superposition. Neuron polysemanticity is the observed phenomena that many neurons seem to fire (have large, positive activations) on multiple unrelated concepts. Superposition is a specific explanation for neuron (or attention head) polysemanticity, where a neural network represents more sparse features than there...

Published on April 25, 2024 4:02 PM GMTPeople have been posting great essays so that they're "fed through the standard LessWrong algorithm." This essay is in the public domain in the UK but not the US.From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about...

Published on April 25, 2024 2:51 PM GMTThis article is part of a series of ~10 posts comprising a 2024 State of the AI Regulatory Landscape Review, conducted by the Governance Recommendations Research Program at Convergence Analysis. Each post will cover a specific domain of AI governance (e.g. incident reporting, safety evals, model registries, etc.). We’ll provide an overview of existing regulations, focusing on the US, EU, and China...

Published on April 25, 2024 6:40 AM GMTIt seems to me worth trying to slow down AI development to steer successfully around the shoals of extinction and out to utopia. But I was thinking lately: even if I didn’t think there was any chance of extinction risk, it might still be worth prioritizing a lot of care over moving at maximal speed. Because there...

Published on April 25, 2024 5:43 AM GMTThe NIH has a page called Cancer Myths and Misconceptions that you come across if you end up looking into cancer for long enough, aimed at bio-illiterate patients and their families.Around half the things on that page are wrong at face value, and a solid percentage of those are contradicted by the pages and studies the NIH...

Published on April 25, 2024 2:18 AM GMT I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member. — Groucho Marx Alice and Carol are walking on the sidewalk in a large city, and end up together for a while. "Hi, I'm Alice! What's your name?" Carol thinks: If Alice is trying to meet people this way, that means she doesn't...

Published on April 24, 2024 11:50 PM GMTEpistemic status: party trick Why remove the prior One famed feature of Bayesian inference is that it involves prior probability distributions. Given an exhaustive collection of mutually exclusive ways the world could be (hereafter called ‘hypotheses’), one starts with a sense of how likely the world is to be described by each hypothesis, in the absence of...

Published on April 24, 2024 10:48 PM GMTNote: In @Nathan Young's words "It seems like great essays should go here and be fed through the standard LessWrong algorithm. There is possibly a copyright issue here, but we aren't making any money off it either." What follows is a full copy of the C. S. Lewis essay "The Inner Ring" the 1944 Memorial Lecture at King’s...

Published on April 24, 2024 9:21 PM GMTNote: It seems like great essays should go here and be fed through the standard LessWrong algorithm. There is possibly a copyright issue here, but we aren't making any money off it either. What follows is a full copy of "This is Water" by David Foster Wallace his 2005 commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon...

Published on April 24, 2024 8:04 PM GMTWarning: This post might be depressing to read for everyone except trans women. Gender identity and suicide is discussed. This is all highly speculative. I know near-zero about biology, chemistry, or physiology. I do not recommend anyone take hormones to try to increase their intelligence; mood & identity are more important.Why are trans women so intellectually successful?...

Published on April 24, 2024 5:50 PM GMTBefore we get started, this is your quarterly reminder that I have no medical credentials and my highest academic credential is a BA in a different part of biology (with a double major in computer science). In a world with a functional medical system no one would listen to me.  Tl;dr povidone iodine probably reduces viral load...

Published on April 24, 2024 2:32 PM GMTEpistemic – this post is more suitable for LW as it was 10 years ago Thought experiment with curing a disease by forgettingImagine I have a bad but rare disease X. I may try to escape it in the following way:1. I enter the blank state of mind and forget that I had X.2. Now I in some...

Published on April 24, 2024 1:50 PM GMTThis post brings together various questions about the college application process, as well as practical considerations of where to apply and go. We are seeing some encouraging developments, but mostly the situation remains rather terrible for all concerned. Application Strategy and Difficulty Paul Graham: Colleges that weren’t hard to get into when I was in HS are...

Published on April 24, 2024 11:25 AM GMTJoe’s summary is here, these are my condensed takeaways in my own words. All links in this section are to the essays. OutlineCarlsmith tackles two linked questions:How should we behave towards future beings (future humans, AIs etc)?What should our priors be about how AIs will behave towards us?So the first question:We worry about value in the future, how should...

Published on April 24, 2024 8:35 AM GMTThis is a write-up of Neel’s and my experience and opinions on best practices for doing Activation Patching. A arXiv PDF version of this post is available here (easier to cite). A previous version was shared with MATS Program scholars in July 2023 under the title "Everything Activation Patching".Pre-requisites: This post is mainly aimed at people who...

Published on April 24, 2024 2:20 AM GMT While I'm not really at a clear stopping point, I wanted to write up my recent progress with the electronic harp mandolin project. If I go too much further without writing anything up I'm going to start forgetting things. First, a demo: Or, if you're prefer a different model: Since last time, I: Fixed my interference...

Published on April 23, 2024 10:19 PM GMTThe history of science has tons of examples of the same thing being discovered multiple time independently; wikipedia has a whole list of examples here. If your goal in studying the history of science is to extract the predictable/overdetermined component of humanity's trajectory, then it makes sense to focus on such examples.But if your goal is to...

Published on April 23, 2024 9:53 PM GMTI took the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test test today. I got 27/36. Jessica Livingston got 36/36. Reading expressions is almost mind reading. Practicing reading expressions should be easy with the right software. All you need is software that shows a random photo from a large database, asks the user to guess what it is,...

Published on April 23, 2024 9:50 PM GMTThe American school system, grades K-12, leaves much to be desired.While its flaws are legion, this post isn’t about that. It’s easy to complain.This post is about how we could do better.To be clear, I’m talking about redesigning public education, so “just use the X model” where X is “charter” or “Montessori” or “home school” or “private...

Published on April 23, 2024 9:33 PM GMTThe operation, called Big River Services International, sells around $1 million a year of goods through e-commerce marketplaces including eBay, Shopify, Walmart and Amazon AMZN 1.49%increase; green up pointing triangle.com under brand names such as Rapid Cascade and Svea Bliss. “We are entrepreneurs, thinkers, marketers and creators,” Big River says on its website. “We have a passion...

Published on April 23, 2024 4:58 PM GMTYou want to get to your sandwich:Well, that’s easy. Apparently we are in some kind of grid world, which is presented to us in the form of a lattice graph, where each vertex represents a specific world state, and the edges tell us how we can traverse the world states. We just do BFS to go from S.mjx-chtml...

Published on April 23, 2024 1:16 PM GMTThis summarizes a (possibly trivial) observation that I found interesting. StoryAn all-powerful god decides to play a game. They stop time, grab a random human, and ask them "What will you see next?". The human answers, then time is switched back on and the god looks at how well they performed. Most of the time the humans get...

Published on April 23, 2024 4:59 AM GMTI didn’t use to be, but now I’m part of the 2% of U.S. households without a television. With its near ubiquity, why reject this technology? The Beginning of my DisillusionmentNeil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death radically changed my perspective on television and its place in our culture. Here’s one illuminating passage:We are no longer fascinated or perplexed by [TV’s]...

Published on April 23, 2024 3:58 AM GMTFor the last month, @RobertM and I have been exploring the possible use of recommender systems on LessWrong. Today we launched our first site-wide experiment in that direction. Behold, a tab with recommendations!(In the course of our efforts, we also hit upon a frontpage refactor that we reckon is pretty good: tabs instead of a clutter of different...

Published on April 23, 2024 2:22 AM GMTThere’s a cool concept I’ve been thinking about. I first heard of it when reading Jesse Schell’s book “The Art of Game Design”. (Fun fact: Jesse Schell was my professor’s professor, aka my grand-professor.)Then I heard of it again in the LessWrong post “Choosing the Zero Point”. Having been exposed to it twice, I now see it...

Published on April 22, 2024 10:05 PM GMTThis comes from a podcast called 18Forty, of which the main demographic of Orthodox Jews. Eliezer's sister (Hannah) came on and talked about her Sheva Brachos, which is essentially the marriage ceremony in Orthodox Judaism. People here have likely not seen it, and I thought it was quite funny, so here it is: https://18forty.org/podcast/channah-cohen-the-crisis-of-experience/David Bashevkin:So I want to...

Published on April 22, 2024 6:26 PM GMTThis post was produced as part of the Astra Fellowship under the Winter 2024 Cohort, mentored by Richard Ngo. Epistemic status: relatively confident in the overall direction of this post, but looking for feedback!TL;DR: When are ML systems well-modeled as coherent expected utility maximizers? We apply our theoretical model of coherence in our last post to toy policies in RL...

Published on April 22, 2024 4:37 PM GMTConcerns over AI safety and calls for government control over the technology are highly correlated but they should not be.There are two major forms of AI risk: misuse and misalignment. Misuse risks come from humans using AIs as tools in dangerous ways. Misalignment risks arise if AIs take their own actions at the expense of human interests.Governments...

Published on April 22, 2024 3:00 PM GMTIImagine 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...

Published on April 22, 2024 1:33 PM GMTEDIT: I somehow missed that John Wentworth and David Lorell are also in the middle of a sequence on this same topic here. I will see where this goes from here!Introduction to a sequence on the statistical thermodynamics of some things and maybe eventually everything. This will make more sense if you have a basic grasp on...

Published on April 22, 2024 1:10 PM GMTIt was all quiet. Then it wasn’t. Note the timestamps on both of these. Dwarkesh Patel did a podcast with Mark Zuckerberg on the 18th. It was timed to coincide with the release of much of Llama-3, very much the approach of telling your story directly. Dwarkesh is now the true tech media. A meteoric rise, and...