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.
Recently I became interested in what kind of costs were inflicted by iron deficiency, so I looked up studies until I got tired. This was not an exhaustive search, but the results are so striking that even with wide error bars I found them compelling. So compelling I wrote up a post with an algorithm for treating iron deficiency while minimizing the chance of poisoning yourself. I’ve put the algorithm and a summary of potential gains first to get your attention, but if you’re considering acting on this I strongly encourage you to continue reading to the rest of the post where I provide the evidence for my beliefs.
Tl;dr: If you are vegan or menstruate regularly, there’s a 10-50% chance you are iron deficient. Excess iron...
I think much of this is quite unreasonable (and some very unreasonable- you "don't like that I spoke as spoke as an authority on her life" because I wondered if what she observed was truly attributable to a causal effect?!), but I don't see the value in going over it, especially as others have made the points I would make about your tone and framing elsewhere. I continue to find your contributions on this topic a little more combative and "soldier mindset" than is ideal, but clearly you strongly disagree. (Although it's tempting to suggest that your ...
Early in my career, I heard the famous saying: Craigslist proves that function beats form.
The approach of focusing on a product's functions, rather than beautifying it has been *then* very pragmatic to me. I’ve always strived to make my work pretty. For years, function over form had seemed to me like a threat to my design philosophy.
Have I trained myself, as they like to say—”to hone my craft” for nothing?
Since I first heard that saying I’ve designed a product or two. But I’ve been grappling with myself on the perception of form—particularly when making design decisions early in any project. I’ve had an ambitious desire to align between form and function as much as I could.
I’ve grown in the field of graphic design, judging craft...
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...
Current AIs suck at agency skills. Put a bunch of them in AutoGPT scaffolds and give them each their own computer and access to the internet and contact info for each other and let them run autonomously for weeks and... well I'm curious to find out what will happen, I expect it to be entertaining but not impressive or useful. Whereas, as you say, randomly sampled humans would form societies and fnd jobs etc.
This is the common thread behind all your examples Hjalmar. Once we teach our AIs agency (i.e. once they have lots of training-experience operating aut...
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...
Sure, the topics in this piece are dealt with superficially and the discussions are not especially thought-provoking; when compared to the amazing creative works that people on this site produce, it is low-mediocre. But Claude writes more coherently than a number of published authors and most of the general public.
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...
tldr; a spot check calls bullshit on this.
I know a bunch about formal languages (PhD in programming languages), so I did a spot check on the "grammar" described on page 45. It's described as a "generative grammar", though instead of words (sequences of symbols) it produces "L_O spacial relationships". Since he uses these phrases to describe his "grammar", and they have their standard meaning because he listed their standard definition earlier in the section, he is pretty clearly claiming to be making something akin to a formal grammar.
My spot check is then...
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
On the weekend of April 27th-28th, our AI Safety Camp teams will present their project findings in 10-minute talks.
You are welcome to join any talk! Teams are sharing their findings in mechanistic interpretability, in agent foundations, on legal actions to restrict AI, and many other areas.
The talks will be arranged in 5 blocks. Each block consists of 5-6 short talks, followed by breakout rooms for questions and further discussions.
You can find the schedule outline here.
You can find summaries of the project plans here. Keep in mind that some projects will have changed over the course of the program, and a few projects got cancelled.
We will share abstracts and precise schedule for the talks on April 19th.
The link will be posted here.
I'd be interested in what a steelman of "have teachers arbitrarily grade the kids then use that to decide life outcomes" could be?
The best argument I have thought of is that America loves liberty and hates centralized control. They want to give individual states, districts, schools, teachers the most power they can have as that is a central part of America's philosophy. Also anecdotally, some teachers have said that they hate standardized tests because they have to teach to it. And I hate being taught to for the test (like APs for example). It's much mo...