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Published on August 8, 2024 3:59 PM GMTRandomized Control Trials have some drawbacks. For many important questions, like causes of the industrial revolution, a randomized trial is impossible. For many others, RCTs are expensive and cumbersome, leading to low sample sizes or experimental designs that precisely answer irrelevant questions. Still, when RCTs with large sample size and generalizable designs are possible, their advantages justify...

Published on August 8, 2024 1:52 PM GMTTake a large thick cardboard box. Cut it into planar pieces. Take transparent tape and cover the cardboard's surface with it. Tadaa! A whiteboard:Because transparent tape is smooth the whiteboard pen is erasable.Sticky notes stick a lot better on the transparent tape than on the cardboard, which is useful for Kanban Boards!Ideally, put white paper between the...

Published on August 8, 2024 1:50 PM GMTIf you’re looking for audio of my posts, you’re in luck. Thanks to multiple volunteers you have two options. Option one is Askwho, who uses a Substack. You can get an ElevenLabs-quality production, with a voice that makes me smile. For Apple Podcasts that means you can add them here, Spotify here, Pocket Casts here, RSS here....

Published on August 8, 2024 5:05 AM GMTThis is a brief sketch of a theory of motivation.Motivation drives action. It also causes the experiences of pleasure and pain. We experience pain when motivation increases, and pleasure when motivation decreases.Motivation is generated by emotions, such as hunger, thirst and lust. Emotions generate motivation, and motivation generates action. Each emotion has a biological function. Hunger motivates...

Published on August 6, 2024 5:44 PM GMTWork supported by MATS and SPAR. Code at https://github.com/ArjunPanickssery/math_problems_debate/.Three measures for evaluating debate arewhether the debate judge outperforms a naive-judge baseline where the naive judge answers questions without hearing any debate arguments.whether the debate judge outperforms a consultancy baseline where the judge hears argument(s) from a single "consultant" assigned to argue for a random answer.whether the judge...

Published on August 6, 2024 1:30 PM GMTPreviously: Startup Roundup #1. This is my periodic grab bag coverage of various issues surrounding startups, especially but not exclusively tech-and-VC style startups, that apply over the longer term. I always want to emphasize up front that startups are good and you should do one. Equity and skin in the game are where it is at. Building...

Published on August 6, 2024 5:43 AM GMTBelief in genetic tribalism comes from the idea that we have natural genetic interests in those who share our genes. This seems superficially plausible. We have a natural interest in our children, don’t we? That interest is because we share genes, right? If so, we should also have a genetic interest in our ethnic groups or races,...

Published on August 6, 2024 10:33 AM GMTOver the last few months, the EleutherAI interpretability team pioneered novel, mechanistic methods for detecting anomalous behavior in language models based on Neel Nanda's attribution patching technique. Unfortunately, none of these methods consistently outperform non-mechanistic baselines which look only at activations.We find that we achieve better anomaly detection performance with methods that evaluate entire batches of test...

Published on August 6, 2024 9:29 AM GMTIn the past AI systems have reached super human performance by adding search to neural networks while the network alone could not reach the level of the best humans. At least this seems to be the case for AlphaGo, AlphaZero/Leela, AlphaGeometry and probably more, while AlphaStar and OpenAI Five where adding search was not easily possible have failed...

Published on August 6, 2024 9:26 AM GMTThere is a growing? fraction of people who consider LLMs to be AGI. And it makes sense. Clearly, when the term AGI was established this was what was meant: A machine that can tackle a wide range of problems, communicate with natural language, very different from all the examples of narrow AI.It also prevents continuous goalpost moving....

Published on August 6, 2024 2:32 AM GMTThis is a story about a flawed Manifold market, about how easy it is to buy significant objective-sounding publicity for your preferred politics, and about why I've downgraded my respect for all but the largest prediction markets.I've had a Manifold account for a while, but I didn't use it much until I saw and became irked by...

Published on August 6, 2024 1:23 AM GMTSchulman writes:I shared the following note with my OpenAI colleagues today: I've made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI. This choice stems from my desire to deepen my focus on AI alignment, and to start a new chapter of my career where I can return to hands-on technical work. I've decided to pursue this goal at Anthropic, where...

Published on August 5, 2024 10:20 PM GMTTL;DRWe apply the method of SelfIE/Patchscopes to explain SAE features – we give the model a prompt like “What does X mean?”, replace the residual stream on X with the decoder direction times some scale, and have it generate an explanation. We call this self-explanation.The natural alternative is auto-interp, using a larger LLM to spot patterns in max...

Published on August 5, 2024 9:28 PM GMT1. Introduction“Value fragility,” as I’ll construe it, is the claim that slightly-different value systems tend to lead in importantly-different directions when subject to extreme optimization. I think the idea of value fragility haunts the AI risk discourse in various ways – and in particular, that it informs a backdrop prior that adequately aligning a superintelligence requires an...

Published on August 5, 2024 6:36 PM GMTThis year's Fall ACX Meetup in Madrid.Location: El Retiro Park, puppet theatre (https://www.esmadrid.com/en/tourist-information/teatro-de-titeres-de-el-retiro) – https://plus.codes/8CGRC897+F8MContact: pvillalobos@proton.meDiscuss

Published on August 5, 2024 6:10 PM GMT The idea that circular reasoning is bad is widespread. However, this reputation is undeserved. While circular reasoning should not be convincing (at least not usually), it should also not be considered invalid.Circular Reasoning is ValidThe first important thing to note is that circular reasoning is logically valid. A implies A. If circular arguments are to be critiqued,...

Published on August 5, 2024 3:38 PM GMTVitalik Buterin wrote an impactful blog post, My techno-optimism. I found this discussion of one aspect on 80,00 hours much more interesting. The remainder of that interview is nicely covered in the host's EA Forum post.My techno optimism apparently appealed to both sides, e/acc and doomers.  Buterin's approach to bridging that polarization was interesting.  I hadn't understood...

Published on August 5, 2024 1:15 PM GMTAGI is not discrete, and different phases lead to different opportunities, risks, and strategies“How long until AGI? I’d say -1 years from now.”“Considering the worst-case outcomes of AGI, I’m most concerned about the effect on jobs.”“AGI will be like corporations, so we will control it like corporations.”“AGI will be millions of times smarter than us and take...

Published on August 5, 2024 1:00 PM GMTI'm starting a new blog where I post my (subjective) highlights of AI safety paper each month, called "AI Safety at the Frontier". I've been doing this non-publicly for the last year, so I've backfilled highlights and collections up to September 2023.My selection primarily covers ML-oriented research. It's only concerned with papers (arXiv, conferences etc.), not LessWrong...

Published on August 5, 2024 4:27 AM GMTGame theory is a branch of mathematics that deals with decision making when there are multiple decision-makers, called “players”, and outcomes depend on the decisions of other players. Game theory is based on the metaphor of a game, in which the rules of play and the outcomes are well defined. The game metaphor is a very useful...

Published on August 4, 2024 8:47 PM GMTThere is a stark difference between rehearsing classical AI risk 101 arguments about instrumental convergence, and tackling problems like "Design and implement the exact evaluations we'll run on GPT-5 to determine whether it's capable enough that we should worry about it acting aligned until it can execute a takeover". And naturally, since I've started working on problems like...

Published on August 4, 2024 2:39 PM GMTWhile thinking about high-dimensional spaces and their less intuitive properties, I came to the realization that even three spatial dimensions possess the potential to overwhelm our basic human intuitions. This post is an exploration of the gap between actual 3D space, and our human capabilities to fathom it. I come to the conclusion that this gap is actually...

Published on August 4, 2024 2:12 PM GMTTL;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...

Published on August 4, 2024 2:05 PM GMTThere is an interesting paragraph in Anthropic's most recent study on persuasion, Measuring the Persuasiveness of Language Models, by Durmus et al. (April 2024):Automated evaluation for persuasiveness is challenging - We attempted to develop automated methods for models to evaluate persuasiveness in a similar manner to our human studies: generating claims, supplementing them with accompanying arguments, and...