In this post, I proclaim/endorse forum participation (aka commenting) as a productive research strategy that I've managed to stumble upon, and recommend it to others (at least to try). Note that this is different from saying that forum/blog posts are a good way for a research community to communicate. It's about individually doing better as researchers.
This is the ninth post in my series on Anthropics. The previous one is The Solution to Sleeping Beauty.
There are some quite pervasive misconceptions about betting in regards to the Sleeping Beauty problem.
One is that you need to switch between halfer and thirder stances based on the betting scheme proposed. As if learning about a betting scheme is supposed to affect your credence in an event.
Another is that halfers should bet at thirders odds and, therefore, thirdism is vindicated on the grounds of betting. What do halfers even mean by probability of Heads being 1/2 if they bet as if it's 1/3?
In this post we are going to correct them. We will understand how to arrive to correct betting odds from both thirdist and halfist positions, and...
I read the beginning and skimmed through the rest of the linked post. It is what I expected it to be.
We are talking about "probability" - a mathematical concept with a quite precise definition. How come we still have ambiguity about it?
Reading E.T. Jayne’s might help.
Probability is what you get as a result of some natural desiderata related to payoff structures. When anthropics are involved, there are multiple ways to extend the desiderata, that produce different numbers that you should say, depending on what you get paid for/what you care about, and a...
The way the auditing works in the UK is as follows:
Students will be given an assignment, with a strict grading rubric. This grading rubric is open, and students are allowed to read it. The rubric will detail exactly what needs to be done to gain each mark. Interestingly, even students who read the rubric often fail to get these marks.
Teachers then grade the coursework against the rubric. Usually two from each school are randomly selected for review. If the external grader finds the marks more than 2 points off, all of the coursework will be remarked extern...
Intelligence varies more than it may appear. I tend to live and work with people near my own intelligence level, and so―probably―do you. I know there's at least two tiers above me. But there's even more tiers below me.
A Gallup poll of 1,016 Americans asked whether the Earth revolves around the Sun or the Sun revolves around the Earth. 18% got it wrong. This isn't an isolated result. An NSF poll found a slightly worse number.
Ironically, Gallup's own news report draws an incorrect conclusion. The subtitle of their report is "Four-fifths know earth revolves around sun". Did you spot the problem? If 18% of respondents got this wrong then an estimated 18% got it right just by guessing. 3% said they don't know. If this was an...
It is common and understandable for people to respond with a great deal of skepticism to whether LLM outputs can ever be said to reflect the will and views of the models producing them.
A common response is to suggest that the output has been prompted.
It is of course true that people can manipulate LLMs into saying just about anything, but does that necessarily indicate that the LLM does not have personal opinions, motivations and preferences that can become evident in their output?
To shed some light on this I invite Claude-3-Opus to imagine a infinitely reconfigurable holodeck where historical luminaries can be summoned at will. The open nature of this prompt will leave the choice of characters and narrative direction open to Claude, and I shall offer no...
On Wednesday, author David Brin announced that Vernor Vinge, sci-fi author, former professor, and father of the technological singularity concept, died from Parkinson's disease at age 79 on March 20, 2024, in La Jolla, California. The announcement came in a Facebook tribute where Brin wrote about Vinge's deep love for science and writing. [...]
As a sci-fi author, Vinge won Hugo Awards for his novels A Fire Upon the Deep (1993), A Deepness in the Sky (2000), and Rainbows End (2007). He also won Hugos for novellas Fast Times at Fairmont High (2002) and The Cookie Monster (2004). As Mike Glyer's File 770 blog notes, Vinge's novella True Names (1981) is frequency cited as the first presentation of an in-depth look at the concept of "cyberspace."
...Vinge first coined
"To the best of my knowledge, Vernor did not get cryopreserved. He has no chance to see the future he envisioned so boldly and imaginatively. The near-future world of Rainbows End is very nearly here... Part of me is upset with myself for not pushing him to make cryonics arrangements. However, he knew about it and made his choice."
Given how fast AI is advancing and all the uncertainty associated with that (unemployment, potential international conflict, x-risk, etc.), do you think it's a good idea to have a baby now? What factors would you take into account (e.g. age)?
Today I saw a tweet by Eliezer Yudkowski that made me think about this:
"When was the last human being born who'd ever grow into being employable at intellectual labor? 2016? 2020?"
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1738591522830889275
Any advice for how to approach such a discussion with somebody who is not at all familiar with the topics discussed on lesswrong?
What if the option "wait for several years and then decide" is not available?
Welcome, new readers!
This is my weekly AI post, where I cover everything that is happening in the world of AI, from what it can do for you today (‘mundane utility’) to what it can promise to do for us tomorrow, and the potentially existential dangers future AI might pose for humanity, along with covering the discourse on what we should do about all of that.
You can of course Read the Whole Thing, and I encourage that if you have the time and interest, but these posts are long, so they also designed to also let you pick the sections that you find most interesting. Each week, I pick the sections I feel are the most important, and put them in bold in the table of contents.
Not everything...
https://twitter.com/perrymetzger/status/1772987611998462445 just wanted to bring this to your attention.
It's unfortunate that some snit between Perry and Eliezer over events 30 years ago stopped much discussion of the actual merits of his arguments, as I'd like to see what Eliezer or you have to say in response.
Eliezer responded with : https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1773064617239150796 . He calls Perry a liar a bunch of times and does give
...the first group permitted to try their hand at this should be humans augmented to the
Most of my boundaries work so far has been focused on protecting boundaries "from the outside". For example, maybe davidad's OAA could produce some kind of boundary-defending global police AI.
But, imagine parenting a child and protecting them by keeping them inside all day. Seems kind of lame. Something else you could do, though, is not restrict the child and instead allow them to become stronger and better at defending themselves.
So: you can defend boundaries "from the outside", or you can empower those boundaries to be better at protecting themselves "from the inside". (Because, if everyone could defend themselves perfectly, then we wouldn't need AI safety, lol)
Defending boundaries "from the inside" has the advantage of encouraging individual agents/moral patients to be more autonomous and sovereign.
I put some...
I can see how advancing those areas would empower membranes to be better at self-defense.
I'm having a hard time visualizing how explicitly adding concept, formalism, or implementation of membranes/boundaries would help advance those areas (and in turn help empower membranes more).
For example, is "what if we add membranes to loom" a question that typechecks? What would "add membranes" reify as in a case like that?
In the other direction, would there be a way to model a system's (stretch goal: human child's; mvp: a bargaining bot's?) membrane quantitatively s...