LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Introduction. [Reminder: I am an internet weirdo with no medical credentials] A few months ago, I published some crude estimates of the power of nitric oxide nasal spray to hasten recovery from illness, and speculated about what it could do prophylactically. While working on that piece a nice man on Twitter alerted me to the fact that humming produces lots of nasal nitric oxide. This post is my ve...

Most people avoid saying literally false things, especially if those could be audited, like making up facts or credentials. The reasons for this are both moral and pragmatic — being caught out looks really bad, and sustaining lies is quite hard, especially over time. Let's call the habit of not saying things you know to be false ‘shallow honesty’[1]. Often when people are shallowly honest, th...

Epistemic Status: Musing and speculation, but I think there's a real thing here. 1. When I was a kid, a friend of mine had a tree fort. If you've never seen such a fort, imagine a series of wooden boards secured to a tree, creating a platform about fifteen feet off the ground where you can sit or stand and walk around the tree. This one had a rope ladder we used to get up and down, a len...

Produced as part of the MATS Winter 2024 program, under the mentorship of Alex Turner (TurnTrout). TL,DR: I introduce a method for eliciting latent behaviors in language models by learning unsupervised perturbations of an early layer of an LLM. These perturbations are trained to maximize changes in downstream activations. The method discovers diverse and meaningful behaviors with just one prompt,...

Adversarial Examples: A Problem The apparent successes of the deep learning revolution conceal a dark underbelly. It may seem that we now know how to get computers to (say) check whether a photo is of a bird, but this façade of seemingly good performance is belied by the existence of adversarial examples—specially prepared data that looks ordinary to humans, but is seen radically differently by ma...

This is a linkpost for https://ailabwatch.orgI'm launching AI Lab Watch. I collected actions for frontier AI labs to improve AI safety, then evaluated some frontier labs accordingly. It's a collection of information on what labs should do and what labs are doing. It also has some adjacent resources, including a list of other safety-ish scorecard-ish stuff. (It's much better on deskt...

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual. This work was produced as part of Neel Nanda's stream in the ML Alignment & Theory Scholars Program - Winter 2023-24 Cohort, with co-supervision from Wes Gurnee. This post is a preview for our upcoming paper, which will provide more detail into our current understanding of refusal. We thank Nina Rimsky...

This comes from a podcast called 18Forty, of which the main demographic of Orthodox Jews. Eliezer's sister (Hannah) came on and talked about her Sheva Brachos, which is essentially the marriage ceremony in Orthodox Judaism. People here have likely not seen it, and I thought it was quite funny, so here it is: https://18forty.org/podcast/channah-cohen-the-crisis-of-experience/ David Bashevkin:...

This is a linkpost for https://dynomight.net/seed-oil/A friend has spent the last three years hounding me about seed oils. Every time I thought I was safe, he’d wait a couple months and renew his attack: “When are you going to write about seed oils?” “Did you know that seed oils are why there's so much {obesity, heart disease, diabetes, inflammation, cancer, dementia}?” “Why did you write abo...

Yesterday Adam Shai put up a cool post which… well, take a look at the visual: Yup, it sure looks like that fractal is very noisily embedded in the residual activations of a neural net trained on a toy problem. Linearly embedded, no less. I (John) initially misunderstood what was going on in that post, but some back-and-forth with Adam convinced me that it really is as cool as that visual makes it...

TLDR: I am investigating whether to found a spiritual successor to FHI, housed under Lightcone Infrastructure, providing a rich cultural environment and financial support to researchers and entrepreneurs in the intellectual tradition of the Future of Humanity Institute. Fill out this form or comment below to express interest in being involved either as a researcher, entrepreneurial founder-type, o...

Produced while being an affiliate at PIBBSS[1]. The work was done initially with funding from a Lightspeed Grant, and then continued while at PIBBSS. Work done in collaboration with @Paul Riechers, @Lucas Teixeira, @Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel, and Sarah Marzen. Paul was a MATS scholar during some portion of this work. Thanks to Paul, Lucas, Alexander, and @Guillaume Corlouer for suggestions on...

This is a linkpost for https://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2024/04/us-commerce-secretary-gina-raimondo-announces-expansion-us-ai-safetyU.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo announced today additional members of the executive leadership team of the U.S. AI Safety Institute (AISI), which is housed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Raimondo named Paul Christian...

Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts: www.patreon.com/LWCurated This is a linkpost for https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/144546114693741363 I stumbled upon a Twitter thread where Eliezer describes what seems to be his cognitive algorithm that is equivalent to Tune Your Cognitive Strategies , and have decided to archive / repost it here. Source: https://www.lesswr...

Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts: www.patreon.com/LWCurated In January, I defended my PhD thesis, which I called Algorithmic Bayesian Epistemology . From the preface: For me as for most students, college was a time of exploration. I took many classes, read many academic and non-academic works, and tried my hand at a few research projects. Early in graduate school,...

Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts: www.patreon.com/LWCurated This is a linkpost for https://bayesshammai.substack.com/p/conditional-on-getting-to-trade-your “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member” -Marx [1] Adverse Selection is the phenomenon in which information asymmetries in non-cooperative environments make trading dangerous. It has tradition...

Cross-posted from my website . Podcast version here , or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app. This essay is part of a series that I'm calling "Otherness and control in the age of AGI." I'm hoping that the individual essays can be read fairly well on their own, but see here for brief summaries of the essays that have been released thus far. Warning: sp...

A recent short story by Gabriel Mukobi illustrates a near-term scenario where things go bad because new developments in LLMs allow LLMs to accelerate capabilities research without a correspondingly large acceleration in safety research. This scenario is disturbingly close to the situation we already find ourselves in. Asking the best LLMs for help with programming vs technical alignment research f...

Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts: www.patreon.com/LWCurated Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SPBm67otKq5ET5CWP/social-status-part-1-2-negotiations-over-object-level Narrated for LessWrong by Perrin Walker . Share feedback on this narration.

Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts: www.patreon.com/LWCurated Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Yay8SbQiwErRyDKGb/using-axis-lines-for-good-or-evil Narrated for LessWrong by Perrin Walker . Share feedback on this narration.

Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts: www.patreon.com/LWCurated Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xLDwCemt5qvchzgHd/scale-was-all-we-needed-at-first Narrated for LessWrong by Perrin Walker . Share feedback on this narration.

Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts: www.patreon.com/LWCurated Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cb7oajdrA5DsHCqKd/acting-wholesomely Narrated for LessWrong by Perrin Walker . Share feedback on this narration.

Rationality is Systematized Winning, so rationalists should win. We’ve tried saving the world from AI, but that's really hard and we’ve had … mixed results. So let's start with something that rationalists should find pretty easy: Becoming Cool! I don’t mean, just, like, riding a motorcycle and breaking hearts level of cool. I mean like the first kid in school to get a Tamagotchi, their d...

TL;DR Tacit knowledge is extremely valuable. Unfortunately, developing tacit knowledge is usually bottlenecked by apprentice-master relationships. Tacit Knowledge Videos could widen this bottleneck. This post is a Schelling point for aggregating these videos—aiming to be The Best Textbooks on Every Subject for Tacit Knowledge Videos. Scroll down to the list if that's what you're here for...

Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts: www.patreon.com/LWCurated Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/h99tRkpQGxwtb9Dpv/my-clients-the-liars Narrated for LessWrong by Perrin Walker . Share feedback on this narration. [Curated Post] ✓ [ 125+ Karma Post] ✓