Recent Discussion
It's fall and that means it's time for another Less Wrong Darwin Game. This year, you'll be designing up to ten species that will compete for food including (sometimes) eating each other.
Click here to participate You have one week from September 23 to design your species. Submit them by September 30th or earlier.
Each player starts with a population of organisms. Each round each of your organisms will be randomly paired with another organism. At this point, one of two things will happen:
- If one organism can eat the other organism then it will do so.
- If nobody gets eaten then both organisms get an opportunity to forage for plants.
After everyone has eaten, each organism will attempt to reproduce. The more an organism eats you eat the most descendents an...
Warning: this is a long post, split over two parts. Part II is here.
David Reinstein points me at a 2016 exchange between Bryan Caplan and Scott Alexander over a fine point of nomenclature: is the culture that is taking over the world “Western” or “universal”? Here’s Scott Alexander’s key point:
...I worry that Caplan is eliding the important summoner/demon distinction. This is an easy distinction to miss, since demons often kill their summoners and wear their skin. But in this case, he’s become hopelessly confused without it.
I am pretty sure there was, at one point, such a thing as Western civilization. I think it included things like dancing around maypoles and copying Latin manuscripts. At some point Thor might have been involved. That civilization is dead. It summoned
I'm not sure Kaufmann does making that mistake. He focuses on extreme sects within each religion, not on Islam as a whole, and mostly on Western countries rather than the Middle East. You could say I'm making the mistake, because I discuss the probability of non-Westerners buying into Western values. Yeah, that could be. But I also would distinguish between secularization (and other kinds of modernization) and Westernization. (Japan did the one but not the other, for example.)
You're right that marriage and family structure are "deep". A friend of mine sugg... (read more)
As I read through Rationality: A-Z, I kept seeing similarities to David Deutsch's worldview. Deutsch pioneered quantum computation in the 1970s, motivated by the possibility of gaining a deeper grasp of quantum physics and as a potential way to test many-worlds.
This post is adapted from my review of The Beginning of Infinity. I read it a couple of years ago, and it is among the most influential books I have read, up there with The Precipice by Ord and The Scout Mindset by Galef. It has profoundly transformed my thinking.
Overview
We have a great deal of knowledge about the vast and unfamiliar reality that causes our observations and the elegant, universal laws governing that reality. This knowledge consists of explanations: assertions about what is out there beyond appearances...
As I read through Rationality: A-Z, I kept seeing similarities to David Deutsch’s worldview.
Deutsch is really opposed to induction , though.
Cross-posted here on the EA Forum.
Transformative AI and Compute - A holistic approach - Part 1 out of 4
This is part one of the series Transformative AI and Compute - A holistic approach. You can find the sequence here and the summary here.
This work was conducted as part of Stanford’s Existential Risks Initiative (SERI) at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University. Mentored by Ashwin Acharya (Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET)) and Michael Andregg (Fathom Radiant).
This post attempts to:
- Introduce a simplified model of computing which serves as a foundational concept (Section 1).
- Discuss the role of compute for AI systems (Section 2).
- In Section 2.3 you can find the updated compute plot you have been coming for.
- Explore the connection of compute trends and more
Financial status: This is independent research supported by a grant. I welcome additional support.
Epistemic status: Reflections from personal experience.
Outline
What can we ultimately trust as a foundation for our reasoning?
As we go about our lives, we often trust reasoning that is based in empirical, mathematical, and ethical frameworks. Trust in these systems seems well justified. But what exactly is it justified by, and does this question have any practical relevance to our lives, or is it merely the domain of frivolous dorm-room discussion?
In this essay I am going to focus on the question of practical relevance. I will not ask you to take radical skepticism more seriously than you have. I will actually ask you not to take it seriously, but to take seriously the question of why...
universalizability of compressions in light of them being bound to intentionality on the part of the one doing the compression. The closest we get to universal compressions are when the intent is more upstream of other intents like survival and reproduction.
Economics is the social science that studies how humans and other agents interact in a universe with scarce resources. It deals with topics such as trade, specialization of labor, accumulation of capital, technology, and resource consumption. Agents in economics are generally assumed to have utility functions, which they try to maximize under various constraints.
Economics is usually separated into microeconomics and macroeconomics. Microeconomics concerns the behavior of agents as they interact in a market. More narrowly, it studies the price mechanism, a decentralized system of allocating goods and services based on an evolving system of prices and trade, which all actors in a market economy contribute towards. The price mechanism is closely related to the concept of the invisible hand, first introduced by Adam Smith. Game theory is the mathematical study of rational agency, which formalizes many standard results in microeconomics.
Macroeconomics concerns the aggregate behavior of entire economies. For example, it studies economic growth, inflation, international trade and unemployment. An ongoing debate concerns to what extent the impacts of artificial intelligence should be viewed through the lens of economics.
This is a crosspost from my site: It's Good Enough -- A Party Game.
"One hundred and forty-three thousand, two hundred and twenty steps.
It was doable." -- "Worm, Interlude 29" by Wildbow
I had this idea after a friend and I talked about games and competitiveness. The objective of the game is to be the most average person at being average.
Rules
The game requires at least three players.
Each player presents an integer from 0 to 100.[1]
All players must present their number at the same time.[2]
The game lasts for at least three rounds. The number of rounds to be played is set before the game starts.[3]
The player who presents a number that is the median of all numbers presented is awarded a point. If there are an even number of players,...
Language Models are a class of AI trained on text, usually to predict the next word or a word which has been obscured. They have the ability to generate novel prose or code based on an initial prompt, which gives rise to a kind of natural language programming called prompt engineering. The most popular architecture for very large language models is called a transformer, which follows consistent scaling laws with respect to the size of the model being trained, meaning that a larger model trained with the same amount of compute will produce results which are better by a predictable amount (when measured by the 'perplexity', or how surprised the AI is by a test set of human-generated text).(Read More)
This is a good tag! Users can't usually add things, but I can set you up to have the ability.
PASTA: Process for Automating Scientific and Technological Advancement.
Audio also available by searching Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts, etc. for "Cold Takes Audio"
This is the first of four posts summarizing hundreds of pages of technical reports focused almost entirely on forecasting one number. It's the single number I'd probably most value having a good estimate for: the year by which transformative AI will be developed.1
By "transformative AI," I mean "AI powerful enough to bring us into a new, qualitatively different future." The Industrial Revolution is the most recent example of a transformative event; others would include the Agricultural Revolution and the emergence of humans.2
This piece is going to focus on exploring a particular kind of AI I believe could be transformative: AI systems that can essentially automate all of...
When you say "the year of PASTA", you probably mean the year than AI appears with 50 per cent probability. But why "50 per cent probability"? 10 per cent seems to be more important. For example, when we say "human life expectancy is 75 years", it means that in the half of the worlds I will die before 75. The same way, by using the median year as a measure of AI timing, you already accept the loss of the half of human future when AI will appear before that date.
More generally, speaking about the "year of AI" is meaningful only if the dispersion of the... (read more)
OTOH I have seen my dog bark at a turtle for a long time and also my dog's weapons definitely do not beat the turtle's armor.