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.
Popular Comments
Recent Discussion
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...
Without an account of that, IBE is the claim that something being the best available explanation is evidence that it is true.
That being said, we typically judge the goodness of a possible explanation by a number of explanatory virtues like simplicity, empirical fit, consistency, internal coherence, external coherence (with other theories), consilience, unification etc. To clarify and justify those virtues on other (including Bayesian) grounds is something epistemologists work on.
Joe’s summary is here, these are my condensed takeaways in my own words. All links in this section are to the essays.
Outline
- Carlsmith tackles two linked questions:
- How should we behave towards future beings (future humans, AIs etc)?
- What should our priors be about how AIs will behave towards us?
- So the first question:
- We worry about value in the future, how should we behave towards the future and future beings?
- (1) We could trust in some base goodness - the universe, god, AIs being good
- (2) We could accept that all future beings will be alien to us and stop worrying (here and here)
- (3) We could have moral systems or concepts of goodness/niceness
- (4) We could seize power over the future (here and here)
- (5) We could adopt a different poise which centred around notions like growth/harmony/ “attunement” (here and here)
- (1)
I sort of don't think it hangs together that well as a series. Like I think it implies a lot more interesting points that it makes, hence my reordering.
U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo announced today additional members of the executive leadership team of the U.S. AI Safety Institute (AISI), which is housed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Raimondo named Paul Christiano as Head of AI Safety, Adam Russell as Chief Vision Officer, Mara Campbell as Acting Chief Operating Officer and Chief of Staff, Rob Reich as Senior Advisor, and Mark Latonero as Head of International Engagement. They will join AISI Director Elizabeth Kelly and Chief Technology Officer Elham Tabassi, who were announced in February. The AISI was established within NIST at the direction of President Biden, including to support the responsibilities assigned to the Department of Commerce under the President’s landmark Executive Order.
...Paul Christiano, Head of AI Safety, will design
The OP claimed it was a failure of BSL levels that induced biorisk as a cause area, and I said that was a confused claim. Feel free to find someone who disagrees with me here, but the proximate causes of EAs worrying about biorisk has nothing to do with BSL lab designations. It's not BSL levels that failed in allowing things like the soviet bioweapons program, or led to the underfunded and largely unenforceable BWC, or the way that newer technologies are reducing the barriers to terrorists and other being able to pursue bioweapons.
If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it.
If you are new to LessWrong, here's the place to introduce yourself. Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to get from the site and community are invited. This is also the place to discuss feature requests and other ideas you have for the site, if you don't want to write a full top-level post.
If you're new to the community, you can start reading the Highlights from the Sequences, a collection of posts about the core ideas of LessWrong.
If you want to explore the community more, I recommend reading the Library, checking recent Curated posts, seeing if there are any meetups in your area, and checking out the Getting Started section of the LessWrong FAQ. If you want to orient to the content on the site, you can also check out the Concepts section.
The Open Thread tag is here. The Open Thread sequence is here.
I've been using a remineralization toothpaste imported from Japan for several years now, ever since I mentioned reading about remineralization to a dentist from Japan. She recommended yhe brand to me. FDA is apparently bogging down release in the US, but it's available on Amazon anyway. It seems to have slowed, but not stopped, the formation of cavities. It does seem to result in faster plaque build-up around my gumline, like the bacterial colonies are accumulating some of the minerals not absorbed by the teeth. The brand I use is apagard.
You want to get to your sandwich:
Well, that’s easy. Apparently we are in some kind of grid world, which is presented to us in the form of a lattice graph, where each vertex represents a specific world state, and the edges tell us how we can traverse the world states. We just do BFS to go from (where we are) to (where the sandwich is):
Ok that works, and it’s also fast. It’s , where is the number of vertices and is the number of edges... well at least for small graphs it’s fast. What about this graph:
Or what about this graph:
In fact, what about a 100-dimensional lattice graph with a side length of only 10 vertices? We will have vertices in this graph.
With...
Thanks faul-sname. I came to the comments to give a much lower effort answer along the same lines, but yours is better. My answer: lazy local evaluations of nodes surrounding either your current position or the position of the goal. So long as you can estimate a direction from yourself to the goal, there's no need to embed the whole graph. This is basically gradient descent...
About a year ago I decided to try using one of those apps where you tie your goals to some kind of financial penalty. The specific one I tried is Forfeit, which I liked the look of because it’s relatively simple, you set single tasks which you have to verify you have completed with a photo.
I’m generally pretty sceptical of productivity systems, tools for thought, mindset shifts, life hacks and so on. But this one I have found to be really shockingly effective, it has been about the biggest positive change to my life that I can remember. I feel like the category of things which benefit from careful planning and execution over time has completely opened up to me, whereas previously things like this would be largely down to the...
I curated this post because
- this is a rare productivity system post that made me consider actually implementing it. Right now I can’t because my energy levels are too variable, but if that weren’t true I would definitely be trying it.
- lots of details, on lots of levels. Things like “I fail 5% of the time” and then translating that too “therefore i price things such that if I could pay 5% of the failure fee to just have it done, I would do so.”
- Practical advice like “yes verification sometimes takes a stupid amount of time, the habit is nonetheless worth it” or “arrange things to verify the day after”
I was depressed once for ten years and didn’t realize that it was fixable. I thought it was normal to have no fun and be disagreeable and grumpy and out of sorts all the time. Now that I’ve fixed it, I’m much better off, and everyone around me is better off. I enjoy enjoyable activities, I’m pleasant to deal with, and I’m only out of sorts when I’m tired or hungry, as is normal.
If you think you might be depressed, you might be right, so try fixing it. The cost seems minor compared to the possible benefit (at least it was in my case....
Summary
I estimate that there are about 300 full-time technical AI safety researchers, 100 full-time non-technical AI safety researchers, and 400 AI safety researchers in total today. I also show that the number of technical AI safety researchers has been increasing exponentially over the past few years and could reach 1000 by the end of the 2020s.
Introduction
Many previous posts have estimated the number of AI safety researchers and a generally accepted order-of-magnitude estimate is 100 full-time researchers. The question of how many AI safety researchers there are is important because the value of work in an area on the margin is proportional to how neglected it is.
The purpose of this post is the analyze this question in detail and come up with hopefully a fairly accurate estimate. I'm...
I found this article useful. Any plans to update this for 2024?
The history of science has tons of examples of the same thing being discovered multiple time independently; wikipedia has a whole list of examples here. If your goal in studying the history of science is to extract the predictable/overdetermined component of humanity's trajectory, then it makes sense to focus on such examples.
But if your goal is to achieve high counterfactual impact in your own research, then you should probably draw inspiration from the opposite: "singular" discoveries, i.e. discoveries which nobody else was anywhere close to figuring out. After all, if someone else would have figured it out shortly after anyways, then the discovery probably wasn't very counterfactually impactful.
Alas, nobody seems to have made a list of highly counterfactual scientific discoveries, to complement wikipedia's list of multiple discoveries.
To...
Idk the Nobel prize committee thought it wasn't significant enough to give out a separate prize 🤷
