LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

In contract law, there's this thing called a “representation”. Example: as part of a contract to sell my house, I might “represent that” the house contains no asbestos. How is this different from me just, y’know, telling someone that the house contains no asbestos? Well, if it later turns out that the house does contain asbestos, I’ll be liable for any damages caused by the asbestos (like e.g...

Epistemic Status: 13 years working as a therapist for a wide variety of populations, 5 of them working with rationalists and EA clients. 7 years teaching and directing at over 20 rationality camps and workshops. This is an extremely short and colloquially written form of points that could be expanded on to fill a book, and there is plenty of nuance to practically everything here, but I am extremel...

[Warning: This post is probably only worth reading if you already have opinions on the Solomonoff induction being malign, or at least heard of the concept and want to understand it better.] Introduction I recently reread the classic argument from Paul Christiano about the Solomonoff prior being malign, and Mark Xu's write-up on it. I believe that the part of the argument about the Solomonoff...

Audio note: this article contains 33 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Many of you readers may instinctively know that this is wrong. If you flip a coin (50% chance) twice, you are not guaranteed to get heads. The odds of getting a heads are 75%. However you may be surprised to learn that there...

As part of the court case between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, a substantial number of emails between Elon, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, and Greg Brockman have been released as part of the court proceedings. I have found reading through these really valuable, and I haven't found an online source that compiles all of them in an easy to read format. So I made one. I used AI assistance to generate t...

Epistemic status: Toy model. Oversimplified, but has been anecdotally useful to at least a couple people, and I like it as a metaphor. Introduction I’d like to share a toy model of willpower: your psyche's conscious verbal planner “earns” willpower (earns a certain amount of trust with the rest of your psyche) by choosing actions that nourish your fundamental, bottom-up processes in the long...

Midjourney, “infinite library”I’ve had post-election thoughts percolating, and the sense that I wanted to synthesize something about this moment, but politics per se is not really my beat. This is about as close as I want to come to the topic, and it's a sidelong thing, but I think the time is right. It's time to start thinking again about neutrality. Neutral institutions, neutral inform...

Trump and the Republican party will yield broad governmental control during what will almost certainly be a critical period for AGI development. In this post, we want to briefly share various frames and ideas we’ve been thinking through and actively pitching to Republican lawmakers over the past months in preparation for this possibility. Why are we sharing this here? Given that >98% of the EAs...

As part of the court case between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, a substantial number of emails between Elon, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, and Greg Brockman have been released as part of the court proceedings. I have found reading through these really valuable, and I haven't found an online source that compiles all of them in an easy to read format. So I made one. I used AI assistance to generate t...

Thanks to Holden Karnofsky, David Duvenaud, and Kate Woolverton for useful discussions and feedback. Following up on our recent “Sabotage Evaluations for Frontier Models” paper, I wanted to share more of my personal thoughts on why I think catastrophic sabotage is important and why I care about it as a threat model. Note that this isn’t in any way intended to be a reflection of Anthropic's vi...

Related: Book Review: On the Edge: The GamblersI have previously been heavily involved in sports betting. That world was very good to me. The times were good, as were the profits. It was a skill game, and a form of positive-sum entertainment, and I was happy to participate and help ensure the sophisticated customer got a high quality product. I knew it wasn’t the most socially valuable enterprise,...

This post comes a bit late with respect to the news cycle, but I argued in a recent interview that o1 is an unfortunate twist on LLM technologies, making them particularly unsafe compared to what we might otherwise have expected: The basic argument is that the technology behind o1 doubles down on a reinforcement learning paradigm, which puts us closer to the world where we have to get the value sp...

TL;DR: I'm presenting three recent papers which all share a similar finding, i.e. the safety training techniques for chat models don’t transfer well from chat models to the agents built from them. In other words, models won’t tell you how to do something harmful, but they are often willing to directly execute harmful actions. However, all papers find that different attack methods like jailbre...

At least, if you happen to be near me in brain space. What advice would you give your younger self? That was the prompt for a class I taught at PAIR 2024. About a quarter of participants ranked it in their top 3 of courses at the camp and half of them had it listed as their favorite. I hadn’t expected that. I thought my life advice was pretty idiosyncratic. I never heard of anyone living their lif...

I open my eyes and find myself lying on a bed in a hospital room. I blink. "Hello", says a middle-aged man with glasses, sitting on a chair by my bed. "You've been out for quite a long while." "Oh no ... is it Friday already? I had that report due -" "It's Thursday", the man says. "Oh great", I say. "I still have time." "Oh...

Claim: memeticity in a scientific field is mostly determined, not by the most competent researchers in the field, but instead by roughly-median researchers. We’ll call this the “median researcher problem”. Prototypical example: imagine a scientific field in which the large majority of practitioners have a very poor understanding of statistics, p-hacking, etc. Then lots of work in that field will b...

This is a link post. We (Connor Leahy, Gabriel Alfour, Chris Scammell, Andrea Miotti, Adam Shimi) have just published The Compendium, which brings together in a single place the most important arguments that drive our models of the AGI race, and what we need to do to avoid catastrophe. We felt that something like this has been missing from the AI conversation. Most of these points have been shared...

There 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 or the why. It's from the perspective of...

Epistemic 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. Maybe...

This post includes a "flattened version" of an interactive diagram that cannot be displayed on this site. I recommend reading the original version of the post with the interactive diagram, which can be found here. Over the last few months, ARC has released a number of pieces of research. While some of these can be independently motivated, there is also a more unified research vision behi...

 1.  4.4% of the US federal budget went into the space race at its peak. This was surprising to me, until a friend pointed out that landing rockets on specific parts of the moon requires very similar technology to landing rockets in soviet cities.[1] I wonder how much more enthusiastic the scientists working on Apollo were, with the convenient motivating story of “I’m working towards a great scien...

This summer, I participated in a human challenge trial at the University of Maryland. I spent the days just prior to my 30th birthday sick with shigellosis. What? Why? Dysentery is an acute disease in which pathogens attack the intestine. It is most often caused by the bacteria Shigella. It spreads via the fecal-oral route. It requires an astonishingly low number of pathogens to make a person sick...

This is a link post. Part 1: Our Thinking Near and Far 1 Abstract/Distant Future Bias 2 Abstractly Ideal, Concretely Selfish 3 We Add Near, Average Far 4 Why We Don't Know What We Want 5 We See the Sacred from Afar, to See It Together 6 The Future Seems Shiny 7 Doubting My Far Mind Disagreement 8 Beware the Inside View 9 Are Meta Views Outside Views? 10 Disagreement Is Near-Far Bias 11 Others...

Of all the cognitive tools our ancestors left us, what's best? Society seems to think pretty highly of arithmetic. It's one of the first things we learn as children. So I think it's weird that only a tiny percentage of people seem to know how to actually use arithmetic. Or maybe even understand what arithmetic is for. Why? I think the problem is the idea that arithmetic is about “ca...

This post starts out pretty gloomy but ends up with some points that I feel pretty positive about. Day to day, I'm more focussed on the positive points, but awareness of the negative has been crucial to forming my priorities, so I'm going to start with those. It's mostly addressed to the EA community, but is hopefully somewhat of interest to LessWrong and the Alignment Forum as well...