LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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] ✓

Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts: www.patreon.com/LWCurated Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sJPbmm8Gd34vGYrKd/deep-atheism-and-ai-risk Narrated for LessWrong by Perrin Walker . Share feedback on this narration. [Curated Post] ✓

Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts: www.patreon.com/LWCurated Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jash4Gbi2wpThzZ4k/cfar-takeaways-andrew-critch Narrated for LessWrong by Perrin Walker . Share feedback on this narration. [Curated Post] ✓ [ 125+ Karma Post] ✓

Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts: www.patreon.com/LWCurated Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2sLwt2cSAag74nsdN/speaking-to-congressional-staffers-about-ai-risk Narrated for LessWrong by Perrin Walker . Share feedback on this narration. [Curated Post] ✓ [ 125+ Karma Post] ✓

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual. The following is a lightly edited version of a memo I wrote for a retreat. It was inspired by a draft of Counting arguments provide no evidence for AI doom, although the earlier draft contained some additional content. I personally really like the earlier content, and think that my post covers important points n...

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual. TLDR: I’ve collected some tips for research that I’ve given to other people and/or used myself, which have sped things up and helped put people in the right general mindset for empirical AI alignment research. Some of these are opinionated takes, also around what has helped me. Researchers can be successful in d...

Timaeus was announced in late October 2023, with the mission of making fundamental breakthroughs in technical AI alignment using deep ideas from mathematics and the sciences. This is our first progress update. In service of the mission, our first priority has been to support and contribute to ongoing work in Singular Learning Theory (SLT) and developmental interpretability, with the aim of laying...

This is a linkpost for https://bayesshammai.substack.com/p/contra-ngo-et-al-every-every-bayWith thanks to Scott Alexander for the inspiration, Jeffrey Ladish, Philip Parker, Avital Morris, and Drake Thomas for masterful cohosting, and Richard Ngo for his investigative journalism. Last summer, I threw an Every Bay Area House Party themed party. I don’t live in the Bay, but I was there for a constru...

Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts: www.patreon.com/LWCurated Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8yCXeafJo67tYe5L4/and-all-the-shoggoths-merely-players Narrated for LessWrong by Perrin Walker . Share feedback on this narration. [Curated Post] ✓ [ 125+ Karma Post] ✓

Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts: www.patreon.com/LWCurated Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/g8HHKaWENEbqh2mgK/updatelessness-doesn-t-solve-most-problems-1 Narrated for LessWrong by Perrin Walker . Share feedback on this narration. [Curated Post] ✓ [ 125+ Karma Post] ✓

Inspired by a house party inspired by Scott Alexander. By the time you arrive in Berkeley, the party is already in full swing. You’ve come late because your reading of the polycule graph indicated that the first half would be inauspicious. But now you’ve finally made it to the social event of the season: the Every Bay Area House Party-themed house party. The first order of the evening is to get a...

The Data 0. Population There were 558 responses over 32 days. The spacing and timing of the responses had hills and valleys because of an experiment I was performing where I'd get the survey advertised in a different place, then watch how many new responses happened in the day or two after that. Previous surveys have been run over the last decade or so. 2009: 166 2011: 1090 2012: 1195 2013: 1...

Cross-posted with light edits from Otherwise. I think of us in some kind of twilight world as transformative AI looks more likely: things are about to change, and I don’t know if it's about to get a lot darker or a lot brighter. Increasingly this makes me wonder how I should be raising my kids differently. What might the world look like Most of my imaginings about my children's lives hav...

This is a linkpost for https://seekingtobejolly.substack.com/p/no-one-in-my-org-puts-money-in-theirEpistemic status: the stories here are all as true as possible from memory, but my memory is so so. An AI made this This is going to be big It's late Summer 2017. I am on a walk in the Mendip Hills. It's warm and sunny and the air feels fresh. With me are around 20 other people from the Eff...

This is a linkpost for https://www.narrativeark.xyz/p/masterpieceA sequel to qntm's Lena. Reading Lena first is helpful but not necessary. We’re excited to announce the fourth annual MMindscaping competition! Over the last few years, interest in the art of mindscaping has continued to grow rapidly. We expect this year's competition to be our biggest yet, and we’ve expanded the prize pool...