Why do some societies exhibit more antisocial punishment than others? Martin explores both some literature on the subject, and his own experience living in a country where "punishment of cooperators" was fairly common.
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A couple years ago, I had a great conversation at a research retreat about the cool things we could do if only we had safe, reliable amnesic drugs - i.e. drugs which would allow us to act more-or-less normally for some time, but not remember it at all later on. And then nothing came of that conversation, because as far as any of us knew such drugs were science fiction.
… so yesterday when I read Eric Neyman’s fun post My hour of memoryless lucidity, I was pretty surprised to learn that what sounded like a pretty ideal amnesic drug was used in routine surgery. A little googling suggested that the drug was probably a benzodiazepine (think valium). Which means it’s not only a great amnesic, it’s also apparently one...
Some comments:
The word for a drug that causes loss of memory is “amnestic”, not “amnesic”. The word “amnesic” is a variant spelling of “amnesiac”, which is the person who takes the drug. This made reading the article confusing.
Midazolam is the benzodiazepine most often prescribed as an amnestic. The trade name is Versed (accent on the second syllable, like vurSAID). The period of not making memories lasts less than an hour, but you’re relaxed for several hours afterward. It makes you pretty stupid and loopy, so I would think the performance on an IQ test would depend primarily on how much Midazolam was in the bloodstream at the moment, rather than on any details of setting.
tl;dr: LessWrong released an album! Listen to it now on Spotify, YouTube, YouTube Music, or Apple Music.
On April 1st 2024, the LessWrong team released an album using the then-most-recent AI music generation systems. All the music is fully AI-generated, and the lyrics are adapted (mostly by humans) from LessWrong posts (or other writing LessWrongers might be familiar with).
Honestly, despite it starting out as an April fools joke, it's a really good album. We made probably 3,000-4,000 song generations to get the 15 we felt happy about, which I think works out to about 5-10 hours of work per song we used (including all the dead ends and things that never worked out).
The album is called I Have Been A Good Bing. I think it is a pretty...
Hunches: you ended up near the top, due to having commented on something that was highly upvoted. you were sharing something good, so getting seen a lot resulted in being upvoted more.
A few days ago I came upstairs to:
Me: how did you get in there?Nora: all by myself!
Either we needed to be done with the crib, which had a good chance of much less sleeping at naptime, or we needed a taller crib. This is also something we went through when Lily was little, and that time what worked was removing the bottom of the crib.
It's a basic crib, a lot like this one. The mattress sits on a metal frame, which attaches to a set of holes along the side of the crib. On it's lowest setting, the mattress is still ~6" above the floor. Which means if we remove the frame and sit the mattress on the floor, we gain ~6".
Without the mattress weighing it down, though, the crib...
Depends on how much she can wiggle the frame, I would expect. There may be value in adding a screw through the strap into the rail just to be sure.
I am a lawyer.
I think one key point that is missing is this: regardless of whether the NDA and the subsequent gag order is legitimate or not; William would still have to spend thousands of dollars on a court case to rescue his rights. This sort of strong-arm litigation has become very common in the modern era. It's also just... very stressful. If you've just resigned from a company you probably used to love, you likely don't want to fish all of your old friends, bosses and colleagues into a court case.
Edit: also, if William left for reasons involving...
Something I'm confused about: what is the threshold that needs meeting for the majority of people in the EA community to say something like "it would be better if EAs didn't work at OpenAI"?
Imagining the following hypothetical scenarios over 2024/25, I can't predict confidently whether they'd individually cause that response within EA?
- Ten-fifteen more OpenAI staff quit for varied and unclear reasons. No public info is gained outside of rumours
- There is another board shakeup because senior leaders seem worried about Altman. Altman stays on
- Superalignment team
Adversarial Examples: A Problem
The apparent successes of the deep learning revolution conceal a dark underbelly. It may seem that we now know how to get computers to (say) check whether a photo is of a bird, but this façade of seemingly good performance is belied by the existence of adversarial examples—specially prepared data that looks ordinary to humans, but is seen radically differently by machine learning models.
The differentiable nature of neural networks, which make them possible to be trained at all, are also responsible for their downfall at the hands of an adversary. Deep learning models are fit using stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to approximate the function between expected inputs and outputs. Given an input, an expected output, and a loss function (which measures "how bad" it...
Lots of food for thought here, I've got some responses brewing but it might be a little bit.
Meta: I'm writing this in the spirit of sharing negative results, even if they are uninteresting. I'll be brief. Thanks to Aaron Scher for lots of conversations on the topic.
Summary
Problem statement
You are given a sequence of 100 random digits. Your aim is to come up with a short prompt that causes an LLM to output this string of 100 digits verbatim.
To do so, you are allowed to fine-tune the model beforehand. There is a restriction, however, on the fine-tuning examples you may use: no example may contain more than 50 digits.
Results
I spent a few hours with GPT-3.5 and did not get a satisfactory solution. I found this problem harder than I initially expected it to be.
Setup
The question motivating this post's setup is: can you do precise steering...
Ok, the "got to try this" bug bit me, and I was able to get this mostly working. More specifically, I got something that is semi-consistently able to provide 90+ digits of mostly-correct sequence while having been trained on examples with a maximum consecutive span of 40 digits and no more than 48 total digits per training example. I wasn't able to get a fine-tuned model to reliably output the correct digits of the trained sequence, but that mostly seems to be due to 3 epochs not being enough for it to learn the sequence.
Model was trained on 1000 examples ...
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?
Thanks for this!
Does it really make sense to see a dermatologist for this? I don't have any particular problem I am trying to fix other than "being a woman in her 40s (and contemplating the prospect of her 50s, 60s etc with dread)". Also, do you expect the dermatologist to give better advice than people in this thread or the resources they linked? (Although, the dermatologist might be better familiar with specific products available in my country.)
