Frustrated by claims that "enlightenment" and similar meditative/introspective practices can't be explained and that you only understand if you experience them, Kaj set out to write his own detailed gears-level, non-mysterious, non-"woo" explanation of how meditation, etc., work in the same way you might explain the operation of an internal combustion engine.
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It was all quiet. Then it wasn’t.
Note the timestamps on both of these.
Dwarkesh Patel did a podcast with Mark Zuckerberg on the 18th. It was timed to coincide with the release of much of Llama-3, very much the approach of telling your story directly. Dwarkesh is now the true tech media. A meteoric rise, and well earned.
This is two related posts in one. First I cover the podcast, then I cover Llama-3 itself.
My notes are edited to incorporate context from later explorations of Llama-3, as I judged that the readability benefits exceeded the purity costs.
Podcast Notes: Llama-3 Capabilities
- (1:00) They start with Llama 3 and the new L3-powered version of Meta AI. Zuckerberg says “With Llama 3, we think now that Meta AI is the most intelligent, freely-available
It is better than nothing I suppose but if they are keeping the safeties and restrictions on then it will not teach you whether it is fine to open it up.
In the late 19th century, two researchers meet to discuss their differing views on the existential risk posed by future Uncontrollable Super-Powerful Explosives.
- Catastrophist: I predict that one day, not too far in the future, we will find a way to unlock a qualitatively new kind of explosive power. This explosive will represent a fundamental break with what has come before. It will be so much more powerful than any other explosive that whoever gets to this technology first might be in a position to gain a DSA over any opposition. Also, the governance and military strategies that we were using to prevent wars or win them will be fundamentally unable to control this new technology, so we'll have to reinvent everything on the fly or die in
Also, the US did consider the possibility of waging a preemptive nuclear war on the USSR to prevent it from getting nukes. (von Neumann advocated for this I think?) If the US was more of a warmonger, they might have done it, and then there would have been a more unambiguous world takeover.
This summarizes a (possibly trivial) observation that I found interesting.
Story
An all-powerful god decides to play a game. They stop time, grab a random human, and ask them "What will you see next?". The human answers, then time is switched back on and the god looks at how well they performed. Most of the time the humans get it right, but occasionally they are caught by surprise and get it wrong.
To be more generous the god decides to give them access (for the game) to the entirety of all objective facts. The position and momentum of every elementary particle, every thought and memory anyone has ever had (before the time freeze) etc. However, suddenly performance in the game drops from 99% to 0%. How can this be? They...
If you have the memories of every single human up to that point, then you don't know which of them you are.
This depends on the mechanism of attaining all these memories. In that world, it COULD be that you still know which memories are privileged, or at least which ones include meeting God and being in position to be asked the question.
I mean, I'm with you fundamentally: it's not obvious that ANYTHING is truly objective - other people can report experiences, but that's mediated by your perceptions as well. In most cases, one can avoid the confusion by specifying predicting WHAT experiences will happen to WHICH observer.
tl;dr: LessWrong released an album! Listen to it now on Spotify, YouTube, YouTube Music, or Apple Music.
On April 1st 2024, the LessWrong team released an album using the then-most-recent AI music generation. All the music is fully AI-generated, and the lyrics are adapted (mostly by humans) from LessWrong posts (or other writing LessWrongers might be familiar with).
We made probably 3,000-4,000 song generations to get the 15 we felt happy about, which I think works out to about 5-10 hours of work per song we used (including all the dead ends and things that never worked out).
The album is called I Have Been A Good Bing. I think it is a pretty fun album and maybe you'd enjoy it if you listened to it! Some of my favourites are...
I would pay to see this live at a bar or one of those county fair (we had a GLaDOS cover band once so it's not out of the question)
The Löwenheim–Skolem theorem implies, among other things, that any first-order theory whose symbols are countable, and which has an infinite model, has a countably infinite model. This means that, in attempting to refer to uncountably infinite structures (such as in set theory), one "may as well" be referring to an only countably infinite structure, as far as proofs are concerned.
The main limitation I see with this theorem is that it preserves arbitrarily deep quantifier nesting. In Peano arithmetic, it is possible to form statements that correspond (under the standard interpretation) to arbitrary statements in the arithmetic hierarchy (by which I mean, the union of and for arbitrary n). Not all of these statements are computable. In general, the question of whether a given statement is...
Concerns over AI safety and calls for government control over the technology are highly correlated but they should not be.
There are two major forms of AI risk: misuse and misalignment. Misuse risks come from humans using AIs as tools in dangerous ways. Misalignment risks arise if AIs take their own actions at the expense of human interests.
Governments are poor stewards for both types of risk. Misuse regulation is like the regulation of any other technology. There are reasonable rules that the government might set, but omission bias and incentives to protect small but well organized groups at the expense of everyone else will lead to lots of costly ones too. Misalignment regulation is not in the Overton window for any government. Governments do not have strong incentives...
Governments are not social welfare maximizers
Most people making up governments, and society in general, care at least somewhat about social welfare. This is why we get to have nice things and not descend into chaos.
Elected governments have the most moral authority to take actions that effect everyone, ideally a diverse group of nations as mentioned in Daniel Kokotajlo's maximal proposal comment.
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. Post videos that highlight tacit knowledge in the comments and I’ll add them to the post. Experts in the videos include Stephen Wolfram, Holden Karnofsky, Andy Matuschak, Jonathan Blow, Tyler Cowen, George Hotz, and others.
What are Tacit Knowledge Videos?
Samo Burja claims YouTube has opened the gates for a revolution in tacit knowledge transfer. Burja defines tacit knowledge as follows:
...Tacit knowledge is knowledge that can’t properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction, like the ability to create
If you have recommendations, post them! I doubt the author tried to filter the subjects very much by "book subjects" it's just what people seem to have found good ones so far.
In that post, you say that you have a graph of vertices with a particular structure. In that scenario, where is that structured graph of vertices coming from? Presumably there's some way you know the graph looks like this
rather than looking like this
If you know that your graph is a nice sparse graph that has lots of symmetries, you can take advantage of those properties to skip redundant parts of the computation (and when each of your nodes has at most 100 inbound edges and 100 outbound edges, then you ...
I
Imagine an alternate version of the Effective Altruism movement, whose early influences came from socialist intellectual communities such as the Fabian Society, as opposed to the rationalist diaspora. Let’s name this hypothetical movement the Effective Samaritans.
Like the EA movement of today, they believe in doing as much good as possible, whatever this means. They began by evaluating existing charities, reading every RCT to find the very best ways of helping.
But many effective samaritans were starting to wonder. Is this randomista approach really the most prudent? After all, Scandinavia didn’t become wealthy and equitable through marginal charity. Societal transformation comes from uprooting oppressive power structures.
The Scandinavian societal model which lifted the working class, brought weekends, universal suffrage, maternity leave, education, and universal healthcare can be traced back all the...
