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 my personal opinion, and in particular, does not represent anything like a MIRI consensus; I've gotten push-back from almost everyone I've spoken with about this, although in most cases I believe I eventually convinced them of the narrow terminological point I'm making.
In the AI x-risk community, I think there is a tendency to ask people to estimate "time to AGI" when what is meant is really something more like "time to doom" (or, better, point-of-no-return). For about a year, I've been answering this question "zero" when asked.
This strikes some people as absurd or at best misleading. I disagree.
The term "Artificial General Intelligence" (AGI) was coined in the early 00s, to contrast with the prevalent paradigm of Narrow AI. I was getting my undergraduate computer science...
Yeah, the precise ability I'm trying to point to here is tricky. Almost any human (barring certain forms of senility, severe disability, etc) can do some version of what I'm talking about. But as in the restaurant example, not every human could succeed at every possible example.
I was trying to better describe the abilities that I thought GPT-4 was lacking, using very simple examples. And it started looking way too much like a benchmark suite that people could target.
Suffice to say, I don't think GPT-4 is an AGI. But I strongly suspect we're only a couple of breakthroughs away. And if anyone builds an AGI, I am not optimistic we will remain in control of our futures.
On 16 March 2024, I sat down to chat with New York Times technology reporter Cade Metz! In part of our conversation, transcribed below, we discussed his February 2021 article "Silicon Valley's Safe Space", covering Scott Alexander's Slate Star Codex blog and the surrounding community.
The transcript has been significantly edited for clarity. (It turns out that real-time conversation transcribed completely verbatim is full of filler words, false starts, crosstalk, "uh huh"s, "yeah"s, pauses while one party picks up their coffee order, &c. that do not seem particularly substantive.)
ZMD: I actually have some questions for you.
CM: Great, let's start with that.
ZMD: They're critical questions, but one of the secret-lore-of-rationality things is that a lot of people think criticism is bad, because if someone criticizes you, it hurts your...
I think this is a perfectly valid argument for why NYT shouldn't publish it, it just doesn't seem very strong or robust… Like, if the NYT did go out and count the number of pebbles on your road, then yes there's an opportunity cost to this etc., which makes it a pretty unnecessary thing to do, but it's not like you'd have any good reason to whip out a big protest or anything.
The context from above is that we’re weighing costs vs benefits of publishing the name, and I was pulling out the sub-debate over what the benefits are (setting aside the disagreement ...
This in the (bi-)annual ACX/SCC Schelling Meetup, where you can meet like-minded curious folks. This time I reserved an indoor space! I'm pleased to announce that we meet on Saturday 27nd of April at 15:00 at Leih-Lokal Freiräume, Gerwigstraße 41, Karlsruhe.
This is a foremost social event and there is no structure or schedule. Just come and enjoy the discourse about any topic you are interested in.
I'll try to provide some snacks so please RSVP for a better estimate of the expected number of mouths to feed.
The Karlsruhe Rationality group (currently in hiatus) aims to connect Rationalists from Karlsruhe (Germany) and surrounding areas. Everyone worries they're not serious enough about ACX to join, so you should banish that thought and come anyway. "Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not 'the typical ACX reader', even if you’re worried people won’t like you", even if you didn't come to the previous meetings, even if you don't speak German, etc., etc.
Lots of people already know about ACX/SSC, but I think that crossposting to LW is unusually valuable in this particular case, since lots of people were waiting for a big schelling-point overview of the 15-hour Rootclaim Lab Leak debate, and unlike LW, ACX's comment section is a massive vote-less swamp that lags the entire page and gives everyone equal status.
It remains unclear whether commenting there is worth your time if you think you have something worth saying, since there's no sorting, only sifting, implying that it attracts small numbers of sifters instead of large numbers of people who expect sorting.
Here are the first 11 paragraphs:
...Saar Wilf is an ex-Israeli entrepreneur. Since 2016, he’s been developing a new form of reasoning, meant to transcend normal human bias.
His method
One thing that occurs to me is that each analysis, such as the Putin one, can be thought of as a function hypothesis.
It takes as inputs the variables:
Russian demographics
healthy lifestyle
family history
facial swelling
hair present
And is outputting the probability 86%, where the function is
P = F(demographics, lifestyle, history, swelling, hair) and then each term is being looked up in some source, which has a data quality, and the actual equation seems to be a mix of Bayes and simple probability calculations.
There are other variables not considered, and other...
I want to thank Jan Kulveit, Tomáš Gavenčiak, and Jonathan Shock for their extensive feedback and ideas they contributed to this work and for Josh Burgener and Yusuf Heylen for their proofreading and comments. I would also like to acknowledge the Epistea Residency and its organisers where much of the thinking behind this work was done.
This post aims to build towards a theory of how meditation alters the mind based on the ideas of active inference (ActInf). ActInf has been growing in its promise as a theory of how brains process information and interact with the world and has become increasingly validated with a growing body of work in the scientific literature.
Why bring the idea of ActInf and meditation together? Meditation seems to have a profound effect on...
In his method, I think the happiness of the first few Jhanas is not caused by prediction error directly, but rather indirectly through the activation of the reward circuitry. So while the method involves creating some amount of prediction error, the ultimate result is less overall prediction error, because the reward neurotransmitters bring the experiential world closer to the ideal.
After the first three Jhanas, the reward circuitry is less relevant and you start to reduce overall prediction error through other means, by allowing attention to let go of asp...
Summary: The post describes a method that allows us to use an untrustworthy optimizer to find satisficing outputs.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Benjamin Kolb (@benjaminko), Jobst Heitzig (@Jobst Heitzig) and Thomas Kehrenberg (@Thomas Kehrenberg) for many helpful comments.
Imagine you have black-box access to a powerful but untrustworthy optimizing system, the Oracle. What do I mean by "powerful but untrustworthy"? I mean that, when you give an objective function as input to the Oracle, it will output an element that has an impressively low[1] value of . But sadly, you don't have any guarantee that it will output the optimal element and e.g. not one that's also chosen for a different purpose (which might be dangerous for many reasons, e.g. instrumental convergence).
What questions can you safely ask the Oracle? Can you use it to...
There's a particular kind of widespread human behavior that is kind on the surface, but upon closer inspection reveals quite the opposite. This post is about four such patterns.
One of the most useful ideas I got out of Algorithms to Live By is that of computational kindness. I was quite surprised to only find a single mention of the term on lesswrong. So now there's two.
Computational kindness is the antidote to a common situation: imagine a friend from a different country is visiting and will stay with you for a while. You're exchanging some text messages beforehand in order to figure out how to spend your time together. You want to show your friend the city, and you want to be very accommodating and make sure...
Forget where I read it, but this Idea seems similar. When responding to a request, being upfront about your boundaries or constraints feels intense but can be helpful for both parties. If Bob asks Alice to help him move, and Alice responds "sure thing" that leaves the interaction open to miscommunication. But if instead Alice says, " yeah! I am available 1pm to 5pm and my neck has been bothering me so no heavy lifting for me!" Although that's seems like less of a kind response Bob now doesn't have to guess at Alice's constraints and can comfortably move forward without feeling the need to tiptoe around how long and to what degree Alice can help.
About 15 years ago, I read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. He profiled Chris Langan, an extremely high-IQ person, claiming that he had only mediocre accomplishments despite his high IQ. Chris Langan's theory of everything, the Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe, was mentioned. I considered that it might be worth checking out someday.
Well, someday has happened, and I looked into CTMU, prompted by Alex Zhu (who also paid me for reviewing the work). The main CTMU paper is "The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe: A New Kind of Reality Theory".
CTMU has a high-IQ mystique about it: if you don't get it, maybe it's because your IQ is too low. The paper itself is dense with insights, especially the first part. It uses quite a lot of nonstandard terminology (partially...
I don't see any. He even says his approach “leaves the current picture of reality virtually intact”. In Popper's terms this would be metaphysics, not science, which is part of why I'm skeptical of the claimed applications to quantum mechanics and so on. Note that, while there's a common interpretation of Popper saying metaphysics is meaningless, he contradicts this.
Quoting Popper:
...Language analysts believe that there are no genuine philosophical problems, or that the problems of philosophy, if any, are problems of linguistic usage, or of the meaning of wo
Hi, I’d like to share my paper that proposes a novel approach for building white box neural networks.
The paper introduces semantic features as a general technique for controlled dimensionality reduction, somewhat reminiscent of Hinton’s capsules and the idea of “inverse rendering”. In short, semantic features aim to capture the core characteristic of any semantic entity - having many possible states but being at exactly one state at a time. This results in regularization that is strong enough to make the PoC neural network inherently interpretable and also robust to adversarial attacks - despite no form of adversarial training! The paper may be viewed as a manifesto for a novel white-box approach to deep learning.
As an independent researcher I’d be grateful for your feedback!
Thank you! The quote you picked is on point, I added an extended summary based on this, thanks for the suggestion!