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Published on November 14, 2024 5:07 AM GMTThanks to Erik Jenner for helpful comments and discussion(Epistemic Status: Tentative take on how to think about heuristic estimation and surprise accounting in the context of activation modeling and causal scrubbing. Should not be taken as authoritative/accurate representation of how ARC thinks about heuristic estimation)I'm pretty excited about ARC's heuristic arguments agenda. The general idea that "formal(ish)...

Published on November 14, 2024 5:01 AM GMTReligions are collections of cherished but mistaken principles. So anything that can be described either literally or metaphorically as a religion will have valuable unexplored ideas in its shadow.-Paul GrahamThis post isn't intended to construct full arguments for any of my "heresies" - I am hoping that you may not have considered them at all yet, but...

Published on November 12, 2024 6:23 PM GMTEpistemic status: Sudden public attitude shift seems quite possible, but I haven't seen it much in discussion, so I thought I'd float the idea again. This is somewhat dashed off since the goal is just to toss out a few possibilities and questions.In Current AIs Provide Nearly No Data Relevant to AGI Alignment, Thane Ruthenis argues that...

Published on November 12, 2024 5:55 PM GMTEpistemic Status: This is a collection of useful heuristics I’ve gathered from a wide range of books and workshops, all rather evidence-based (robustness varies). These techniques are designed to supplement basics of rationalist discourse, helping facilitate interactions—mostly with those unfamiliar with rationalist thought, especially on entry-level arguments. They may also be useful in conversations between rationalists on...

Published on November 12, 2024 5:50 PM GMTOn December 14th, New York City will have a Secular Solstice. Solstice is a holiday for people comfortable with uncomfortable truths and who believe in good. Secular Solstices take place in many cities around the world, but for us New York City is the best place for it. The first Solstice started here, amid towers that reach...

Published on November 12, 2024 5:46 PM GMTSecular Solstice is a celebration of hope in darkness. For more than a decade now, people have gathered in New York City to sing about humanity's distant past and the future we hope to build. You are, of course, invited. This year, Solstice and the traditional Rationalist Megameetup will both be at the Sheraton Brooklyn New York Hotel,...

Published on November 12, 2024 10:56 AM GMTWe’re excited to announce that applications are now open for our 2025 Q1 Pivotal Research Fellowship, a 9-week program designed to enable promising researchers to produce impactful research and accelerate their careers in technical AI safety, AI governance, and biosecurity.About the FellowshipThe Pivotal Research Fellowship is hosted in London at the London Initiative for Safe AI (LISA). It offers...

Published on November 12, 2024 6:45 AM GMT[ This is supposed to be a didactic post. I'm not under the impression that I'm saying anything genuinely new. Thanks to Stephen Wolfram. ] I'm about an hour in to the Yudkowsky-Wolfram discussion [AI-generated transcript from which I'm quoting]. Wolfram thinks we should not fear AI doom very much in particular. I think he is wrong....

Published on November 12, 2024 6:12 AM GMTQuick check: do you agree or disagree with the following statement:If a study finds a result significant at a p=0.05 level, that means they have followed a methodology which produces this conclusion correctly 95 % of the time.Yes or no? Keep that in mind, and we’ll get back to it.I’m reading the Fisher book where he popularised...

Published on November 12, 2024 3:07 AM GMTI.As I've run and studied meetups, there's a useful metaphor that's become more important to how I think about them. For most meetups, there's the packaging, and a payload, and these are related but useful to approach separately. Allow me to expand.The payload is the thing you actually want. If you order some socks off Amazon, the...

Published on November 12, 2024 2:00 AM GMTPeople say "I think" a lot. Here are some examples:I think you brought me the wrong order.I think the numbers in the report are wrong.I think you need to turn left at the light.I think we need to replace the whole water heater.I think iPhones are better than Android phones.I think you should quit your job and...

Published on November 12, 2024 2:00 AM GMT Each year ( 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2023) I put out a list of how many dance weekends, festivals, camps, and long dances contra bands and callers are doing. I don't really know why I do this, but it's about an hours work on top of that I'm already collecting for trycontra.com/events so I...

Published on November 10, 2024 2:00 PM GMT LLMs are getting much more capable, and progress is rapid. I use them in my daily work, and there are many tasks where they're usefully some combination of faster and more capable than I am. I don't see signs of these capability increases stopping or slowing down, and if they do continue I expect the impact...

Published on November 10, 2024 9:33 AM GMT(This started as a reply to @Tamsin Leake 's reply in my post about why cyborgism maybe should be open. This post does not require you to read our interaction, though it lead to this, and I'm very grateful for Tamsin's reply.)In general, this is a counterargument against:we should only share cyborg tools (software that lets AI...

Published on November 10, 2024 9:28 AM GMTNon-animal based protein sources mostly have a different amino acid profile than animal-based protein sources.  Different plants also have a different composition. From looking a bit at the data myself it seems that if you mix different plant protein sources, you can get a good balance for most amino acids with the expectation of Methionine.Mike from Renaissance Periodization...

Published on November 9, 2024 8:58 PM GMTTL;DRWe built an interactive storytelling website to explain misaligned objectives to our moms and you should check it out.IntroductionDuring a recent hackathon, we created an interactive narrative experience that illustrates a crucial concept in AI alignment: the potentially devastating consequences of seemingly benign objective functions. Our project, "LifeKeeper Diaries," puts players in the perspective of AI systems...

Published on November 9, 2024 11:39 PM GMTVaden Masrani and Ben Chugg, hosts of the Increments Podcast, joined me on Doom Debates to debate Bayesian vs. Popperian epistemology.I’m on the Bayesian side, heavily influenced by the writings of Eliezer Yudkowsky. Vaden and Ben are on the Popperian side, heavily influenced by David Deutsch and the writings of Popper himself.We dive into the theoretical underpinnings...

Published on November 9, 2024 11:05 PM GMTSaturday of Week 47 of 2024   Location: Meeting room 5, Bellevue Library1111 110th Ave NE, Bellevue, WA 98004'Google Maps: https://g.co/kgs/ASXz22S 4hr Free Parking available in underground garageContact: cedar.ren@gmail.comIf you can't find us: please repeatedly call 7572794582 Bring boardgamesBring questionsMight do lightning talksDiscuss

Published on November 9, 2024 5:50 PM GMTOne of the reasons I got into chaos theory as a model paradigm shift was the famous Gleick book on chaos. One of the reasons I believed the Gleick book was trustworthy was that its description of chaos in ecology and population biology matched what I learned in college, 25 years later. Recently I learned that the...

Published on November 9, 2024 2:13 PM GMTRigging an election can be hard. But sometimes it can be easy. If a committee has an agenda of proposals to choose from, where each proposal is compared pairwise using majority rule against another proposal, until a single proposal is victorious, then you can make any arbitrary proposal win. The McKelvey–Schofield chaos theorem tells us that just...

Published on November 9, 2024 12:40 PM GMT In my bioinformatics work I often stream files between linux hosts and Amazon S3. This could look like: $ scp host:/path/to/file /dev/stdout | \ aws s3 cp - s3://bucket/path/to/file This recently stopped working after upgrading: ftruncate "/dev/stdout": Invalid argument Couldn't write to "/dev/stdout": Illegal seek I think I figured out why this is happening: New versions...

Published on November 9, 2024 11:50 AM GMTAnthropic on Thursday said it is teaming up with data analytics firm Palantir and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide U.S. intelligence and defense agencies access to Anthropic’s Claude family of AI models.The news comes as a growing number of AI vendors look to ink deals with U.S. defense customers for strategic and fiscal reasons. Meta recently...

Published on November 9, 2024 4:04 AM GMTHere are several examples; I found these captchas via the web rather than generating them anew, but none of them came attached to solutions so I'm not sure their presence in the training data would affect things in any case. (That said, it's possible that the lower resolution of the latter two degraded the adversarial perturbation; I...

Published on November 9, 2024 2:40 AM GMTA fun piece on ants and instrumental convergence:Each month millions of Argentine ants die along battlefronts that extend for miles around San Diego, where clashes occur with three other colonies in wars that may have been going on since the species arrived in the state a century ago.Some notes on ant warfare Many are aware that a...