LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/REA49tL5jsh69X3aM/introduction-to-abstract-entropy#fnrefpi8b39u5hd7 This post, and much of the following sequence, was greatly aided by feedback from the following people (among others): Lawrence Chan , Joanna Morningstar , John Wentworth , Samira Nedungadi , Aysja Johnson , Cody Wild , Jeremy Gillen , Ryan Kidd , Justis Mills and Jonathan Mustin . Illustrations by...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8vesjeKybhRggaEpT/consider-your-appetite-for-disagreements Poker There was a time about five years ago where I was trying to get good at poker. If you want to get good at poker, one thing you have to do is review hands. Preferably with other people. For example, suppose you have ace king offsuit on the button. Someone in the highjack opens to 3 big blinds preflop. Y...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fFY2HeC9i2Tx8FEnK/my-resentful-story-of-becoming-a-medical-miracle This is a linkpost for https://acesounderglass.com/2022/10/13/my-resentful-story-of-becoming-a-medical-miracle/ You know those health books with “miracle cure” in the subtitle? The ones that always start with a preface about a particular patient who was completely hopeless until they tried the supple...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CKgPFHoWFkviYz7CB/the-redaction-machine On the 3rd of October 2351 a machine flared to life. Huge energies coursed into it via cables, only to leave moments later as heat dumped unwanted into its radiators. With an enormous puff the machine unleashed sixty years of human metabolic entropy into superheated steam. In the heart of the machine was Jane, a person of the...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pRkFkzwKZ2zfa3R6H/without-specific-countermeasures-the-easiest-path-to Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum . May contain more technical jargon than usual. I think that in the coming 15-30 years , the world could plausibly develop “transformative AI”: AI powerful enough to bring us into a new, qualitatively different future, via an explosion in science and techno...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iCfdcxiyr2Kj8m8mT/the-shard-theory-of-human-values TL;DR: We propose a theory of human value formation. According to this theory, the reward system shapes human values in a relatively straightforward manner. Human values are not e.g. an incredibly complicated, genetically hard-coded set of drives, but rather sets of contextually activated heuristics which were shape...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AfH2oPHCApdKicM4m/two-year-update-on-my-personal-ai-timelines#fnref-fwwPpQFdWM6hJqwuY-12 Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum . May contain more technical jargon than usual. I worked on my draft report on biological anchors for forecasting AI timelines mainly between ~May 2019 (three months after the release of GPT-2) and ~Jul 2020 (a month after the release of G...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9kNxhKWvixtKW5anS/you-are-not-measuring-what-you-think-you-are-measuring Eight years ago, I worked as a data scientist at a startup, and we wanted to optimize our sign-up flow. We A/B tested lots of different changes, and occasionally found something which would boost (or reduce) click-through rates by 10% or so. Then one week I was puzzling over a discrepancy in th...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WNpvK67MjREgvB8u8/do-bamboos-set-themselves-on-fire Cross-posted from Telescopic Turnip . As we all know, the best place to have a kung-fu fight is a bamboo forest. There are just so many opportunities to grab pieces of bamboos and manufacture improvised weapons, use them to catapult yourself in the air and other basic techniques any debutant martial artist ought to...

 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gs3vp3ukPbpaEie5L/deliberate-grieving-1 This post is hopefully useful on its own, but begins a series ultimately about grieving over a world that might (or, might not) be doomed .  It starts with some pieces from a previous  coordination frontier sequence post, but goes into more detail. At the beginning of the pandemic, I didn’t have much experience with grief . B...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/J3wemDGtsy5gzD3xa/toni-kurz-and-the-insanity-of-climbing-mountains Content warning: death I've been on a YouTube binge lately. My current favorite genre is disaster stories about mountain climbing. The death statistics for some of these mountains, especially ones in the Himalayas are truly insane. To give an example, let me tell you about a mountain most people...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oyKzz7bvcZMEPaDs6/survey-advice Things I believe about making surveys, after making some surveys : If you write a question that seems clear, there’s an unbelievably high chance that any given reader will misunderstand it. (Possibly this applies to things that aren’t survey questions also, but that’s a problem for another time.) A better way to find out if your quest...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/htrZrxduciZ5QaCjw/language-models-seem-to-be-much-better-than-humans-at-next Crossposted from the  AI Alignment Forum . May contain more technical jargon than usual. [Thanks to a variety of people for comments and assistance (especially Paul Christiano, Nostalgebraist, and Rafe Kennedy), and to various people for playing the game. Buck wrote the top-1 prediction web...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PBRWb2Em5SNeWYwwB/humans-are-not-automatically-strategic Reply to: A "Failure to Evaluate Return-on-Time" Fallacy Lionhearted writes: [A] large majority of otherwise smart people spend time doing semi-productive things, when there are massively productive opportunities untapped. A somewhat silly example: Let's say someone aspires to be a comedian, the...

https://www.lesswrong.com/s/6xgy8XYEisLk3tCjH/p/CPP2uLcaywEokFKQG Tl;dr: I've noticed a dichotomy between "thinking in toolboxes" and "thinking in laws". The toolbox style of thinking says it's important to have a big bag of tools that you can adapt to context and circumstance; people who think very toolboxly tend to suspect that anyone who goes talking of a single op...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jDQm7YJxLnMnSNHFu/moral-strategies-at-different-capability-levels Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum . May contain more technical jargon than usual. Let’s consider three ways you can be altruistic towards another agent: You care about their welfare: some metric of how good their life is (as defined by you). I’ll call this care-morality - it endorses things like...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xFotXGEotcKouifky/worlds-where-iterative-design-fails Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum . May contain more technical jargon than usual. In most technical fields, we try designs, see what goes wrong, and iterate until it works. That’s the core iterative design loop. Humans are good at iterative design, and it works well in most fields in practice. In worlds whe...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QBAjndPuFbhEXKcCr/my-understanding-of-what-everyone-in-technical-alignment-is Despite a clear need for it, a good source explaining who is doing what and why in technical AI alignment doesn't exist. This is our attempt to produce such a resource. We expect to be inaccurate in some ways, but it seems great to get out there and let Cunningham’s Law do its thing....

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rYDas2DDGGDRc8gGB/unifying-bargaining-notions-1-2 Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum . May contain more technical jargon than usual. This is a two-part sequence of posts, in the ancient LessWrong tradition of decision-theory-posting. This first part will introduce various concepts of bargaining solutions and dividing gains from trade, which the reader may or ma...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vJFdjigzmcXMhNTsx/simulators#fncrt8wagfir9 Summary TL;DR : Self-supervised learning may create AGI or its foundation. What would that look like? Unlike the limit of RL, the limit of self-supervised learning has received surprisingly little conceptual attention, and recent progress has made deconfusion in this domain more pressing. Existing AI taxonomies either fail...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CjFZeDD6iCnNubDoS/humans-provide-an-untapped-wealth-of-evidence-about#fnref7a5ti4623qb Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum . May contain more technical jargon than usual. TL;DR: To even consciously consider an alignment research direction,  you should have evidence to locate it as a promising lead. As best I can tell, many directions seem interesting but do not...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DdDt5NXkfuxAnAvGJ/changing-the-world-through-slack-and-hobbies   Introduction In EA orthodoxy, if you're really serious about EA, the three alternatives that people most often seem to talk about are (1) “direct work” in a job that furthers a very important cause; (2) “earning to give” ; (3) earning “career capital” that will help you do those things in the futu...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8oMF8Lv5jiGaQSFvo/boundaries-part-1-a-key-missing-concept-from-utility-theory Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum . May contain more technical jargon than usual. This is Part 1 of my «Boundaries» Sequence on LessWrong. Summary: «Boundaries» are a missing concept from the axioms of game theory and bargaining theory, which might help pin-down certain features of m...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MdZyLnLHuaHrCskjy/itt-passing-and-civility-are-good-charity-is-bad I often object to claims like "charity/steelmanning is an argumentative virtue". This post collects a few things I and others have said on this topic over the last few years. My current view is: Steelmanning ("the art of addressing the best form of the other person’s argument, even if...