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Published on November 23, 2024 6:34 PM GMTThe following is a short supplement to an upcoming post on the implications for conscious significance (a framework for understanding the free will and determinism debate) but is a more general observation.The world has undergone many paradigm shifts; where a profound truth has been revealed about the nature of the universe and our place within it. Individuals...

Published on November 23, 2024 5:30 PM GMTWe thank Madeline Brumley, Joe Kwon, David Chanin and Itamar Pres for their helpful feedback.IntroductionControlling LLM behavior through directly intervening on internal activations is an appealing idea. Various methods for controlling LLM behavior through activation steering have been proposed. Most steering methods add a 'steering vector' (SV) to the model’s activations at a given layer and token position...

Published on November 23, 2024 12:50 PM GMT Another round of liberating kid posts from Facebook. For reference, in 2018 Lily turned 4 and Anna turned 3. (Some of these were from me; some were from Julia. Ones saying "me" could mean either of us. Ones from others are labeled.) 2018-01-12 Since Lily started listening to "Heidi" a lot, her language has started sounding...

Published on November 23, 2024 12:45 PM GMTAuthors: Beren Millidge ,Yuhang Song, Armin Lak, Mark E. Walton, Rafal Bogacz.Abstract:Animals can adapt their preferences for different types of reward according to physiological state, such as hunger or thirst. To explain this ability, we employ a simple multi-objective reinforcement learning model that learns multiple values according to different reward dimensions such as food or water. We...

Published on November 23, 2024 9:08 AM GMTIntroductionFirst, a bit of blatant advertising: The East Coast Rationalist Megameetup is the evening of December 13th through the morning of December 16th, in Brooklyn, New York City. It's a weekend long unconference timed to coincide with NYC Secular Solstice. Despite the name, people come from all over North America, some for their first rationalist meetup and...

Published on November 23, 2024 2:36 AM GMTHaving recognized that I have asked these same questions repeatedly across a wide range of channels and have never gotten satisfying answers for them, I'm compiling them here so that they can be discussed by a wide range of people in an ongoing way.Why has EV made many moves in the direction of decentralizing EA, rather than...

Published on November 22, 2024 8:53 PM GMTOn the heels of Donald Trump’s election and his promises to end the Department of Education, you may have seen claims like these spreading around X.SourceThis claim is based on two datapoints. First, is the literacy rate of around 99% in 1979 which was measured by the US Census. After the Department of Education was created in...

Published on November 22, 2024 8:53 PM GMTI've been thinking about something I will clumsily call paraddictions: desires that don't quite rise to the level of an addiction, but that have a disproportionate and hard-to-moderate influence over your behavior. Can they be used as a tool for motivation and behavior change?epistemic status: Most of the ideas here are generally solid behavior change principles that...

Published on November 22, 2024 8:11 PM GMTIntroductionIn software design, several key principles share a common foundation: the concept of factoring, or breaking complex problems into smaller, manageable parts. Three prominent examples are:Unix philosophy: Design programs to do one thing well.Black box abstraction: Isolate functionality to focus on core problems.Interface-based programming: Build systems from well-defined, interconnected modules.These principles, though known by different names, all...

Published on November 22, 2024 7:01 PM GMTThis is a crosspost from https://chillphysicsenjoyer.substack.com/p/pursuing-physics-research-part-time. IntroDisclaimer - I’m a part-time research associate doing biophysics with a uni research group in the UK. But I have a day job in an unrelated field that pays the bills.Whilst I’ve read many personal accounts of research from full-time research students in the academic system, I haven’t heard as much from...

Published on November 22, 2024 6:00 PM GMTSummary Over the past year I’ve investigated potential interventions against respiratory illnesses. Previous results include “Enovid nasal spray is promising but understudied”, “Povidone iodine is promising but understudied” and “Humming will solve all your problems no wait it’s useless”. Two of the iodine papers showed salt water doing as well or almost as well as iodine. I...

Published on November 22, 2024 4:41 PM GMTTLDR. We can create a relatively good model of a person by prompting a long-context LLM with a list of facts about this person. We can get much better results by iteratively improving the prompt based on the person's feedback. Sideloading is the only technology for immortality that actually works as of 2024.Fig. 1. Here are my...

Published on November 22, 2024 4:16 PM GMT(If you’re in a hurry, you can just read the “Background and summary” section, and skip the other 85%.)0. Background and summary0.1 Background: What’s the problem and why should we care?My primary neuroscience research goal for the past couple years has been to solve a certain problem, a problem which has had me stumped since the very...

Published on November 22, 2024 4:12 PM GMTCrosspost of this on my blog. I recently wrote an article making the case for giving to shrimp welfare. Lots of people were convinced to give (enough to help around half a billion shrimp avoid a painful death), but because the idea sounds silly, many people on Twitter, hacker news, and various other places made fun of it,...

Published on November 22, 2024 2:01 PM GMTWhich of the following do you think is bigger? A.mjx-chtml {display: inline-block; line-height: 0; text-indent: 0; text-align: left; text-transform: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 100%; font-size-adjust: none; letter-spacing: normal; word-wrap: normal; word-spacing: normal; white-space: nowrap; float: none; direction: ltr; max-width: none; max-height: none; min-width: 0; min-height: 0; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 1px 0} .MJXc-display {display:...

Published on November 22, 2024 12:56 PM GMTA short science fiction story about our ancestors and the ethical responsibility we have towards them. Old Ana's legs fought against her now, but still she led her granddaughter up the mountain path. The girl's torch made shadows dance on the rocks. The river sang in the distance – the same river that had shown Ana her great...

Published on November 22, 2024 3:46 AM GMTI love this question, but I've enjoyed noticing answers to its opposite more. What are some things you thought weren't metaphors but were surprised to learn actually are metaphors.A classic example is that, at least in English, time is often described using distance metaphors. For example, we talk about things taking a "long" or a "short" amount...

Published on November 22, 2024 3:26 AM GMTPreceded by: "Consciousness as a conflationary alliance term for intrinsically valued internal experiences"tl;dr: Chatbots are "conscious" in a variety of important ways. We humans should probably be nice to each other about the moral disagreements and confusions we're about to uncover in our concept of "consciousness".Executive Summary: Turing Prize laureate Geoffrey Hinton is most likely correct that LLM...

Published on November 22, 2024 12:59 AM GMTSome people in my orbit suggested reading Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s book The Real Anthony Fauci.Here’s my story of wading through a few pages of the book and trying to understand the basis of the claims. My takeaway: there's a lot of sloppiness here, and several times the book’s claim isn’t supported by the citation. Often, though, the citation...

Published on November 21, 2024 10:43 PM GMTIn everyday life, if something looks good to a human, then it is probably actually good (i.e. that human would still think it’s good if they had more complete information and understanding). Obviously there are plenty of exceptions to this, but it works most of the time in day-to-day dealings. But if we start optimizing really hard...

Published on November 20, 2024 6:19 PM GMTI am grateful to Noosphere89 for prompting me to start this discussion. In human evolution, the fundamental goal was to survive and reproduce, passing on our genes to the next generation. But somewhere along the way, humans developed complex societies and technologies that go beyond just survival and reproduction. Now, we often find ourselves pursuing goals that...

Published on November 20, 2024 4:48 PM GMTCrosspost of this on my blog. 1 My basic view 'Cause everybody criesEverybody hurts sometimesSometimes everything is wrong—Rem “Everybody hurts”You didn’t think the era of absurdly long posts was over, did you?Prior to the 2024 election, there were a series of swing states that pundits forecasted could have gone either way. All of them ended up going to Trump...

Published on November 20, 2024 1:40 PM GMTPreviously: Long-Term Charities: Apply For SFF Funding, Zvi’s Thoughts on SFF There are lots of great charitable giving opportunities out there right now. I recently had the opportunity to be a recommender in the Survival and Flourishing Fund for the second time. As a recommender, you evaluate the charities that apply and decide how worthwhile you think...