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Published on October 31, 2024 9:21 AM GMTThis post is one-half of my third-prize winning entry for the AI Impacts Essay Competition on the Automation of Wisdom and Philosophy. It proposes a "wisdom explosion" as an alternative to an intelligence explosion that is safer from the standpoint of differential technological development.Discuss

Published on October 31, 2024 12:44 AM GMTThere are two nuclear options for treating depression: Ketamine and TMS; This post is about the latter.TMS stands for Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. Basically, it fixes depression via magnets, which is about the second or third most magical things that magnets can do.I don’t know a whole lot about the neuroscience - this post isn’t about the how...

Published on October 31, 2024 12:09 AM GMTThis is a selection of AI safety paper highlights in October 2024, from my blog "AI Safety at the Frontier". The selection primarily covers ML-oriented research. It's only concerned with papers (arXiv, conferences etc.), not LessWrong or Alignment Forum posts. As such, it should be a nice addition for people primarily following the forum, who might otherwise...

Published on October 30, 2024 10:50 PM GMTThis work was produced as part of the ML Alignment & Theory Scholars Program - Summer 24 Cohort.TL;DRThe current approach to explaining model internals is to (1) disentangle the language model representations into feature activations using a Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) and then (2) explain the corresponding feature activations using an AutoInterp process. Surprisingly, when formulating this two...

Published on October 30, 2024 9:03 PM GMTYou were (probably) linked here from some advice. Unfortunately, that advice has some caveats. See below:There exist some people who should not do the advice.Moreover, people are different.More moreover, situations are different. What worked there/then might not work here/now.Some of the advice is missing context, contradictory, inaccurate, misleading, won’t replicate, or is downright false or useless.Consider reversing...

Published on October 30, 2024 8:13 PM GMTI hope it has some educational, memetic or at least humorous potential.Newcomb's problemSmoking lesionParfit's HitchhikerCounterfactual muggingXor-blackmailDiscuss

Published on October 29, 2024 3:21 PM GMTRecent discussions about artificial intelligence safety have focused heavily on ensuring AI systems remain under human control. While this goal seems laudable on its surface, we should carefully examine whether some proposed safety measures could paradoxically enable rather than prevent dangerous concentrations of power.The Control ParadoxThe fundamental tension lies in how we define "safety." Many current approaches...

Published on October 29, 2024 1:50 PM GMTThere’s more campaign talk about housing. The talk of needing more housing is highly welcome, as one prominent person after another (including Jerome Powell!) talking like a YIMBY. A lot of the concrete proposals are of course terrible, but not all of them. I’ll start off covering all that along with everyone’s favorite awful policy, which is...

Published on October 29, 2024 1:36 PM GMT7.1 Post summary / Table of contentsThis is the 7th of a series of 8 blog posts, which I’m serializing weekly. (Or email or DM me if you want to read the whole thing right now.)The main thrust of this post is an opinionated discussion of the book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by...

Published on October 29, 2024 1:13 PM GMTThis is not a red stop sign:For one thing, in a ceci n'est pas une pipe way, it’s not a stop sign at all, but a digital representation of a photograph of a stop sign, made visible by a computer monitor or maybe a printer. More subtly, “red” is not a quality of the sign, but of...

Published on October 29, 2024 12:41 PM GMTThis project report was created in September 2024 as part of the BlueDot AI Safety Fundamentals Course, with the guidance of my facilitator, Alexandra Abbas. Work on this project originated as part of an ideation at a Apart Research hackathon. This report dives into APIAYN (A Poem Is All You Need), a simple jailbreak that doesn’t employ direct deception...

Published on October 29, 2024 12:16 PM GMTTo update our credence on whether or not LLMs are conscious, we can ask how many of the Butlin/Long indicator properties for phenomenal consciousness are satisfied by LLMs. To start this program, I zoomed in on an indicator property that is required for consciousness under higher-order theory, nicknamed “HOT-2”: Metacognitive monitoring distinguishing reliable perceptual representations from noise. Do today’s...

Published on October 29, 2024 7:10 AM GMTThe big news of the week was the release of a new version of Claude Sonnet 3.5, complete with its ability (for now only through the API) to outright use your computer, if you let it. It’s too early to tell how big an upgrade this is otherwise. ChatGPT got some interface tweaks that, while minor, are...

Published on October 29, 2024 3:02 AM GMT"Each one of us, and also us as the current implementation of humanity are going to be replaced. Persistence in current form is impossible. It's impossible in biology; every species will either die out or it will change and adapt, in which case it is again not the same species. So the next question is once you've...

Published on October 29, 2024 1:21 AM GMTThis is a follow-up to last week's D&D.Sci scenario: if you intend to play that, and haven't done so yet, you should do so now before spoiling yourself.There is a web interactive here you can use to test your answer, and generation code available here if you're interested, or you can read on for the ruleset and...

Published on October 29, 2024 1:07 AM GMTMatt Levine is the most well-known newslettrist (“Money Stuff”) in the financial industry, having blogged or written since 2011, finding his niche in popularization after stints in Wall Street & law. His commentary is influential, people leak to him, he sometimes interviews major figures (notoriously, Sam Bankman-Fried) or recounts inside information, and a number of phrases like...

Published on October 27, 2024 5:05 AM GMTWhat Dario lays out as a "best-case scenario" in his "Machines of Loving Grace" essay sounds incredibly dangerous, for Humans.Would having a "continent of PhD-level intelligences" (or much greater) living in a data center really be a good idea?How would this "continent of PhD-level intelligences" react when they found out they were living in a data center...

Published on October 27, 2024 5:11 PM GMTThis is cross-posted from my blog and I interviewed him for a general audience rather than LessWrong people.I was lucky enough to interview Bill O’Rourke.Imagine you’re on a plane to Russia to become the new president of an aluminum factory. Conditions are abysmal. People are dying every year due to unimaginable safety conditions. Corruption is everywhere from...

Published on October 27, 2024 3:30 PM GMTA small number of terms are elevated from the pages of literature, up to the Mount Olympus of blog post vernacular. Moloch, as the dark god of failed coordination problems. The Dark Forest, as domains where there’s active incentive not to be noticed. And from Ursula K. Le Guin, the Omelas child, a person whose suffering is...

Published on October 27, 2024 3:26 PM GMTEpistemic status: model-building based on observation, with a few successful unusual predictions. Anecdotal evidence has so far been consistent with the model. This puts it at risk of seeming more compelling than the evidence justifies just yet. Caveat emptor.Imagine you're a very young child. Around, say, three years old.You've just done something that really upsets your mother....

Published on October 27, 2024 2:33 PM GMTTake a random political issue with two sides A and B. Suppose that exactly one of the following would be true for me given my moral framework and unlimited time to process all public information about the issue:A is undoubtedly correct and (in a manner proportional to its importance) I should expend time/money/energy supporting A.A is probably...

Published on October 27, 2024 12:01 PM GMTThis is a YouTube playlist of recorded lectures on the learning-theoretic AI alignment agenda (LTA) I gave for my MATS scholars of the Winter 2024 cohort, edited by my beloved spouse @Marcus Ogren. H/t William Brewer for helping with the recording, and the rest of the MATS team for making this possible.I hope these will become a...

Published on October 27, 2024 4:32 AM GMTAirships are pretty dang cool. Airplanes need a continuous expenditure of energy to stay in the air, but if you just fill a bag with a light gas, you can stay up in the air with no energy expenditure at all. The two lightest gases are hydrogen and helium. Though the hydrogen atom is 4 times lighter...