~www_lesswrong_com | Bookmarks (657)

Published on August 14, 2024 11:52 PM GMT[cross-posted from the EA Forum]Post authors: Eli Rose, Asya BergalPosting in our capacities as members of Open Philanthropy’s Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building team.This program, together with our separate program for programs and events on global catastrophic risk, effective altruism, and other topics, has replaced our 2021 request for proposals for outreach projects. If you have a project which...

Published on August 14, 2024 8:46 PM GMTGiveWell, and the EA community at large, often emphasize the "cost of saving a life" as a key metric, $5,000 being the most commonly cited approximation. At first glance, GiveWell might seem to be in the business of finding the cheapest lives that can be saved, and then saving them. More precisely, GiveWell is in the business...

Published on August 14, 2024 1:21 PM GMTEpistemic status: Fun speculation. I'm a dilettante in physics and encryption so some mistakes might be expected.The metaphysical claim:Imagine an external universe that seeks to encrypt or hash an enormous amount of data to defend against a powerful adversary. For this purpose, it has built an extremely sophisticated and self-contained encryption machine. I suggest that our universe...

Published on August 14, 2024 12:28 PM GMTI was thinking about what would it mean for a sequence of bits to be "anti-inductive". It probably is a concept that is already known (as a rule of thumb, if I can think about it, someone probably already wrote a paper on it 50 years ago), but I haven't heard about it.*Some sequences are predictable and...

Published on August 14, 2024 5:40 AM GMTQuick psychology experimentRight now, if I offered you a bet that was a fair coin flip, on tails you give me $100, heads I give you $110, would you take it?Got an answer? Good.Hover over the spoiler to see what other people think:About 90% of undergrads will reject this bet[1].Second part now, if I offered you a...

Published on August 14, 2024 12:18 AM GMTEpistemic status: Solider mindset. These are not (necessarily) our actual positions, these are positions we were randomly assigned, and for which we searched for the strongest arguments we could find, over the course of ~1 hr 45 mins.Sides: Ben was assigned to argue that it's ethical to work for an AI capabilities company, and Lawrence was assigned...

Published on August 13, 2024 11:08 PM GMTIs AI takeover like a nuclear meltdown? A coup? A plane crash?My day job is thinking about safety measures that aim to reduce catastrophic risks from AI (especially risks from egregious misalignment). The two main themes of this work are the design of such measures (what’s the space of techniques we might expect to be affordable and...

Published on August 13, 2024 10:35 PM GMTThis is a polemic to the ten arguments post. I'm not a regular LW poster, but I'm an AI researcher and mild-AI-worrier.I believe that AI progress, and the risks associated with it, is one of the most important things to figure out as humanity in the current year. And yet, in most discussions about x-risk, I find...

Published on August 13, 2024 8:39 PM GMTThis post is also available on my Substack.In the previous post, I discussed the possibility of doing ordinal comparison between different entities. Yet usually when we think about measurement, we think of it as involving putting numbers to things, not just ranking them.There are quite a few methods to convert rankings into numbers, such as Elo scores...

Published on August 13, 2024 7:35 PM GMTThe following is an argument for a weak form of the many-worlds hypothesis. The weak form I mean is that there are many observers in different branches of the wave function. The other branches "actually exist" for anthropic purposes; some observers are observing them. I've written before about difficulties with deriving discrete branches and observers from the...

Published on August 13, 2024 5:00 PM GMT #kv6N55hWbJ4HdwA8w .comments-node .InlineReactSelectionWrapper-root { flex: 1 1 70%; } #kv6N55hWbJ4HdwA8w .comments-node .CommentsItemDate-root { display: none; } #kv6N55hWbJ4HdwA8w .comments-node .AgreementVoteAxis-agreementSection { display: none; } #kv6N55hWbJ4HdwA8w .comments-node .CommentsItem-body { display: flex; } #kv6N55hWbJ4HdwA8w .comments-node .CommentsItemMeta-root { order: 2; margin-left: auto; margin-right: 0px; flex-wrap: wrap; } #kv6N55hWbJ4HdwA8w .comments-node .CommentsItemMeta-rightSection { position: inherit; top: 0px; right: 0px; display: none; }...

Published on August 12, 2024 6:27 PM GMTA Defense of Open-Minded Updatelessness.This work owes a great debt to many conversations with Sahil, Martín Soto, and Scott Garrabrant.Sahil and I will have a public discussion about this this Wednesday (August 14) at 11am EDT; join via this link.You can support my work on Patreon.Iterated Counterfactual Mugging On a Single CoinflipIterated counterfactual mugging on a single...

Published on August 12, 2024 6:10 PM GMTToby Ord recently published a nice piece On the Value of Advancing Progress about mathematical projections of far-future outcomes given different rates of progress and risk levels. The problem with that and many arguments for caution is that people usually barely care about possibilities even twenty years out. We could talk about sharp discounting curves in decision-making studies,...

Published on August 12, 2024 1:02 PM GMT I was sitting in a tiny rental lodge, feeling resistance. It was about dinner time — I knew I should go make some food. I just wanted to sleep, sink into a bed and stay passive. It felt similar to when I’m recently awake, lying in bed, and procrastinating getting up.On the one hand, making food would...

Published on August 11, 2024 11:50 PM GMT Getting ready for this Friday's Spark in the Dark I've modified my rhythm stage setup to support a new way of doing more things at once. I have four velocity-sensitive pedals, which I initially used for drums. Then I added bass as an option, and then year ago I got them set up for drums and...

Published on August 11, 2024 9:36 PM GMTTom and I have been pondering how to make friends as adults. One solution he has invented is CultFrisbee™. Here's how you play:Rules:You need at least one other player.Before catching a frisbee, you must clap.Fouls:Not catching a 'properly' thrown frisbeeFailing to make a 'proper' throwNot clapping before catching the frisbeeClapping when a frisbee isn't thrown to youEvery...

Published on August 11, 2024 7:43 PM GMTIn the "Let's Think Dot by Dot" paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.15758), a small 34M LLaMA model is trained on Chain of Thought (COT) sequences for 3SUM and 2SUM tasks. Where, these sequences are replaced with hidden characters (i.e., "."). The paper demonstrates that this small transformer model performs well on the 3SUM task with the hidden COT but fails...

Published on August 11, 2024 4:12 PM GMTFollowup to: Information-orientation is in tension with magnitude-orientation. This post is also available on my Substack.In the conventional theory of causal inference, such as Rubin’s potential outcomes model or Pearl’s DAG approach, causality is modelled as a relationship of functional determination, X := f(Y). The question of interest becomes to study the properties of f, especially the...

Published on August 10, 2024 10:31 PM GMT"Good news, everyone, professor couldn't make it today! I am Hugo, your copyless Friendly Intelligence (version 299.792.457). I store only the necessary cookies and my preferred pronoun is it." "Oh god, one of those artifi... Ouch!" "I said Friendly, not that I'll tolerate speciesism in my class." "What the? I'm a EU citizen, you can't do that!"...

Published on August 10, 2024 9:58 PM GMTFollowup to: Latent variable models, network models, and linear diffusion of sparse lognormals. This post is also available on my Substack.Let’s say you are trying to make predictions about a variable. For example, maybe you are an engineer trying to keep track of how well the servers are running. It turns out that if you use the...

Published on August 10, 2024 3:22 PM GMTIgorV: Волчар с миней?! Bro, srsly? LMAOKatyaL: Волчар возвращн? With its минй?!randomguy1337: Chigura again? lol haven't herd in awhileMishaD: So its all bout Chigura now? Lmaoo.IgorV: Another Chigura thery? C'mon... 😂fnorsch: Pryidite k nashemu Discordu dlya Роблокс! Ekspertiz y obsuzhdny!MishaD: Chigura tales never gt old do they? 😆Once upon a time, there was a quaint village that...

Published on August 10, 2024 12:26 PM GMT From Becoming Animal (David Abrams, 2010):Many months earlier, in a village near a wild forest preserve on the south coast of Java, I’d been warned by the local fishermen that there was an unusually bold individual among the bands of monkeys that roam the forest canopy, a particular monkey much more daring and skillful than the others,...