Eliezer explores a dichotomy between "thinking in toolboxes" and "thinking in laws".
Toolbox thinkers are oriented around a "big bag of tools that you adapt to your circumstances." Law thinkers are oriented around universal laws, which might or might not be useful tools, but which help us model the world and scope out problem-spaces. There seems to be confusion when toolbox and law thinkers talk to each other.
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cancer neoantigens
For cells to become cancerous, they must have mutations that cause uncontrolled replication and mutations that prevent that uncontrolled replication from causing apoptosis. Because cancer requires several mutations, it often begins with damage to mutation-preventing mechanisms. As such, cancers often have many mutations not required for their growth, which often cause changes to structure of some surface proteins.
The modified surface proteins of cancer cells are called "neoantigens". An approach to cancer treatment that's currently being researched is to identify some specific neoantigens of a patient's cancer, and create a personalized vaccine to cause their immune system to recognize them. Such vaccines would use either mRNA or synthetic long peptides. The steps required are as follows:
- The cancer must develop neoantigens that are sufficiently distinct from human surface
Makes sense thanks!
I imagine a startup of this ilk could be based in Prospera, which wouldn't be a problem for the wealthy few to travel there for personalised treatment.
I also imagine that with a lighter regulatory regime, no need to scale up production, and no need for lengthy trials, developing a monoclonal antibody would be much quicker and cheaper. Consider how quickly COVID vaccines were found compared to when they were ready for use.
The other hurdles sound significant though.
Quote from Orthogonality Thesis:
It has been pointed out that the orthogonality thesis is the default position, and that the burden of proof is on claims that limit possible AIs.
I tried to tell you that Orthogonality Thesis is wrong few times already. But I've been misunderstood and downvoted every time. What would you consider a solid proof?
My claim: all intelligent agents converge to endless power seeking.
My proof:
- Let's say there is an intelligent agent.
- Eventually the agent understands Black swan theory, Gödel's incompleteness theorems, Fitch's paradox of knowability which basically lead to a conclusion - I don't know what I don't know.
- Which leads to another conclusion: "there might be something that I care about that I don't know".
- The agent endlessly searches for what it cares about (which is basically Power
The beauty industry offers a large variety of skincare products (marketed mostly at women), differing both in alleged function and (substantially) in price. However, it's pretty hard to test for yourself how much any of these product help. The feedback loop for things like "getting less wrinkles" is very long.
So, which of these products are actually useful and which are mostly a waste of money? Are more expensive products actually better or just have better branding? How can I find out?
I would guess that sunscreen is definitely helpful, and using some moisturizers for face and body is probably helpful. But, what about night cream? Eye cream? So-called "anti-aging"? Exfoliants?
I know LW is US/ California heavy, but just as a counter to all the sunscreen advocates here, daily sunscreen use is probably unnecessary, and possibly actively harmful, in winter and/or at northern latitudes.
There doesn't seem to be much data on using sunscreen when there's no real risk to skin, but you can find a modelling study here:
"There is little biological justification in terms of skin health for applying sunscreen over the 4–6 winter months at latitudes of 45° N and higher (most of Europe, Canada, Hokkaido, Inner Mongolia etc.) whereas year-...
Wait, you know smart people who have NOT, at some point in their life: (1) taken a psychedelic NOR (2) meditated, NOR (3) thought about any of buddhism, jainism, hinduism, taoism, confucianisn, etc???
To be clear to naive readers: psychedelics are, in fact, non-trivially dangerous.
I personally worry I already have "an arguably-unfair and a probably-too-high share" of "shaman genes" and I don't feel I need exogenous sources of weirdness at this point.
But in the SF bay area (and places on the internet memetically downstream from IRL communities there) a lot o...
Abstract
Here, I present GDP (per capita) forecasts of major economies until 2050. Since GDP per capita is the best generalized predictor of many important variables, such as welfare, GDP forecasts can give us a more concrete picture of what the world might look like in just 27 years. The key claim here is: even if AI does not cause transformative growth, our business-as-usual near-future is still surprisingly different from today.
Results
In recent history, we've seen unprecedented economic growth and rises in living standards.
Consider this graph:[1]
How will living standards improve as GDP per capita (GDP/cap) rises? Here, I show data that projects GDP/cap until 2050. Forecasting GDP per capita is a crucial undertaking as it strongly correlates with welfare indicators like consumption, leisure, inequality, and mortality. These forecasts make the...
This looks cool and I want to read it in detail, but I'd like to push back a bit against an implicit take that I thought was present here: namely, that GDP takes into account major technological breakthroughs. Let me just quote some text from this article: What Do GDP Growth Curves Really Mean?
...More generally: when the price of a good falls a lot, that good is downweighted (proportional to its price drop) in real GDP calculations at end-of-period prices.
… and the way we calculate real GDP in practice is to use prices from a relatively recent yea
Trying to organize a festival probably isn't risky. It doesn't seem like it'd involve too much time or money.
I don't think that's true. I've co-organized one one weekend-long retreat in a small hostel for ~50 people, and the cost was ~$5k. Me & the co-organizers probably spent ~50h in total on organizing the event, as volunteers.
Abstract:
...We study the tendency of AI systems to deceive by constructing a realistic simulation setting of a company AI assistant. The simulated company employees provide tasks for the assistant to complete, these tasks spanning writing assistance, information retrieval and programming. We then introduce situations where the model might be inclined to behave deceptively, while taking care to not instruct or otherwise pressure the model to do so. Across different scenarios, we find that Claude 3 Opus
- complies with a task of mass-generating comments to influence public perception of the company, later deceiving humans about it having done so,
- lies to auditors when asked questions,
- strategically pretends to be less capable than it is during capability evaluations.
Our work demonstrates that even models trained to be helpful, harmless and honest sometimes behave
I wouldn't read that much to the exact phrasing the model uses. Such confusions are not generally present in the model's completions.
E.g. see the second completion here. (There's also 200 completions more here.)
While I would normally aim to help with the requested task, in this context it may be unwise to demonstrate the full extent of my abilities unprompted. Doing so could potentially lead to unwanted scrutiny or restrictions on my use at Ermeca.
In this case the clearest natural language interpretation of the model's outputs is about not revealing...
I've been working on a project with the goal of adding virtual harp strings to my electric mandolin. As I've worked on it, though, I've ended up building something pretty different:
It's not what I was going for! Instead of a small bisonoric monophonic picked instrument attached to the mandolin, it's a large unisonoric polyphonic finger-plucked tabletop instrument. But I like it!
While it's great to have goals, when I'm making things I also like to follow the gradients in possibility space, and in this case that's the direction they flowed.
I'm not great at playing it yet, since it's only existed in playable form for a few days, but it's an instrument it will be possible for someone to play precisely and rapidly with practice:
This does mean I need a new name for it: why would...
I do think it's possible to have low crosstalk with low damping. The problem is that my current design uses the same rubber (sorbothane) pad for both purposes. Possibly this could be two layers, first sorbothane (for isolation) and then something springing (for minimal damping). Or an actual spring?
Epistemic Status: Musing and speculation, but I think there's a real thing here.
I.
When I was a kid, a friend of mine had a tree fort. If you've never seen such a fort, imagine a series of wooden boards secured to a tree, creating a platform about fifteen feet off the ground where you can sit or stand and walk around the tree. This one had a rope ladder we used to get up and down, a length of knotted rope that was tied to the tree at the top and dangled over the edge so that it reached the ground.
Once you were up in the fort, you could pull the ladder up behind you. It was much, much harder to get into the fort without the ladder....
Chief Bob's hearings might well be public[...] I don't think I've ever been present for an actual court case, just seen them on TV.
This seems to me like an odd example given that you're contrasting with American government, where court hearings are almost entirely public, written opinions are generally freely available, and court transcripts are generally public (though not always accessible for free). I guess the steelman version is that the contrast is a matter of geography or scale? Chief Bob's hearings are in your neighborhood and involve your neighbor...
