I only flossed on the right side of my mouth since 2023-07-08, and today asked the dentist to guess which side I'd flossed on. She guessed left.
Self-Resolving Prediction Markets for Unverifiable Outcomes by Siddarth Srinivasan, Ezra Karger, Yiling Chen:
...Prediction markets elicit and aggregate beliefs by paying agents based on how close their predictions are to a verifiable future outcome. However, outcomes of many important questions are difficult to verify or unverifiable, in that the ground truth may be hard or impossible to access. Examples include questions about causal effects where it is infeasible or unethical to run randomized trials; crowdsourcing and content moderation tasks where it is prohibitively expensive to verify ground truth; and questions asked over long time horizons, where the delay until the realization of the outcome skews agents' incentives to report their true beliefs. We present a novel and unintuitive result showing that it is possible to run an incentive compatible prediction market to elicit and efficiently aggregate information from a pool of agents without observing the outcome by paying agents the negative cross-entropy between their prediction and that of a carefully chosen reference agent. Our key insight is that a reference agent with access to more information can serve as a reason
Moderation announcement: I am temporarily frontpaging a bunch of AI policy stuff that wouldn't usually meet our "Timeless" requirement for being promoted to frontpage. My guess is there is a bunch of important policy discussion happening right now and I think giving non-logged in visitors to the site a bit more visibility into the that is temporarily worth the cost. We'll play it by ear when we'll stop doing this, but my guess is in a week or so.
1I would like to propose calling them “language models” and not “LLMs”. ~Nobody is studying small language models any longer, so the “large” word is redundant. And acronyms are disorienting to folks who don’t know them. So I propose using the term “language model” instead.
2Hello everyone,
This is a new real name account purely for the discussion of AI.
A few months ago, I introduced a concept here on mechanistic interpretability.[1] It was an approach supported by a PyTorch implementation that could derive insights from neurons without explicit training on the intermediate concepts. As an illustration, my model can identify strategic interactions between chess pieces, despite being trained solely on win/loss/draw outcomes. One thing distinguishes it from recent work, such as the one by Anthropic ("Towards Monosemanticity: Decomposing Language Models With Dictionary Learning"), is the lack of need for training additional interpretative networks, although it is possible that both approaches could be used together.
Since sharing, I've had two people read the paper (not on LW). Their feedback varied, describing it respectivly as "interesting" and "confusing." I realise I generally find it easier to come up with ideas then to explain them to other people.
The apparent simplicity of my method makes me think that other people must already have considered and discarded this approach, but in case this has genuinly been overlooked [2], I'd love to get more eyes on...
I want to better understand how prediction markets on numeric questions work and how effective are they. Can someone share a good explanation and/or analysis of them? I read the Mataculus FAQ entry but it didn't satisfy all my questions. Do numeric prediction markets have to use probability density functions like Metaculus, or can they use higher/lower like Manifold used to do, or are there other options as well? Would the way Metaculus does it work for real money markets?
This is my first comment on LW. I was laid off from my full-time employment on October 27. I am working full-time in November and December on a web site I created for arriving at truth. My employer was kind enough to lay off a lot of my friends together with me, and a few of us have a daily meeting where we talk about our respective projects. One of my friends pointed me here, since she saw a lot of overlap. She was right. What I'm doing is very different from the posts/comments/replies structure you see here on LW and on most online forums, but my goals are very similar to LW's goals. I look forward to bouncing ideas off of this community. I'll have a lengthy post out soon, probably tomorrow.
I'm looking into the history of QM interpretations and there's some interesting deviations from the story as told in the quantum sequence. So, of course, single-world was the default from the 1920s onward and many-worlds came later. But the strangeness of a single world was not realized immediately. The concept of a wavefunction collapse seems to originate with von Neumann in the 1930s, as part of his mathematicization of quantum mechanics–which makes sense in a way, imagine trying to talk about it without the concept of operators acting on a Hilbert space...
I have about 500 Anki cards on basic immunology that I and a collaborator created while reading Philipp Dettmer's book Immune (Philipp Dettmer is the founder of the popular YouTube channel Kurzgesagt, which has been featured on LW before, and the book itself has also been reviewed on LW before). (ETA: When I first wrote this comment, I stupidly forgot to mention that my intention is to publish these cards on the internet for people to freely use, once they are polished.) However, neither of us is that knowledgeable about immunology (yet) so I'm worried abo...
Is there anyone else who finds Dialogues vaguely annoying to read and would appreciate posts that distilled them to their final conclusions? (not offering to write them, but just making it common knowledge if there is such a demand)
Recently I watched "The Tangle." It's an indie movie written and directed by the main actor from Ink, if that means anything to you. (Ink is also an indie movie, but it's in my top 5 of all time.) Anyway, The Tangle is set in a world right after the singularity (of sorts), but where humans haven't fully gave up control. Don't want to spoil too much here, but I found a lot of the ideas there that were popular 5-10 years ago in the rationalist circles. Quite unexpected for an indie movie. I really enjoyed it and I think you would too.
1Bug report: What's up with the bizarre rock image on the LW homepage in this screenshot? Here is its URL.
If you think that’s bad, just think about compensating for browser bugs which were reported 20 years ago…
2Hello everyone, it's an honour to be here and thank you to all of you who have contributed content. I can't wait to explore more.
I'm a tech professional and have been on a journey sailing about the oceans since 2018. I have sailed nearly 25000 sea miles and 2/3 around the world. I've had a lot of time to reflect and appreciate what it's like to be human, which is probably why I ended up here... Along with my interest in AI since I was a child.
Hello everyone, I'm new here. Or well, I've been reading LW posts for a while, but this is the first time I'm sending a message :) I'm a little bit shy as I've (pretty much) never posted any message on an online public platform like this in my adult life (because I find it scary). Part of me wants to change that, so here I am.
I found LW through Effective Altruism. I have a very strong appreciation for the existence of both these communities as it matches so nicely with how I would want us to approach problems and questions. Especially when it relates to well-being.
So thank you!
I would like to give a heartfelt Thank You to whoever made the Restore Text feature on LessWrong comments. Twice today I accidentally navigated away from a comment I was writing, and I know I've done that a lot in the past month only to be rescued by the saved text.
As a newcomer to the LessWrong community, I've been thoroughly impressed by the depth and rigor of the discussions here. It sets a high standard, one that I hope to meet in my contributions. By way of introduction, my journey into machine learning and AI began in 2014, predating the advent of large language models. My interest pivoted towards blockchain technology as I became increasingly concerned with the centralization that characterizes contemporary AI development.
The non-consensual use of data, privacy breaches, and the escalating complexities a...
Dialogue bug: in dark mode the names in the next message boxes are white, and the message boxes are also white
I've found the funniest person on the internet. They are an anonymous reddit troll from 2020.
A sample of his work:
Admissions officers/essay coaches of Reddit: what was the most pretentious application you've ever seen?
...Comment: I reviewed an application from someone with test scores and grades in the upper percentiles of the school's average. As long as the essay was inoffensive and decent we would let him in. But his essay was easily the most awful thing I had ever read to the point where I assumed that he was trying to sabotage his application. Howev
1I'm sure this is the wrong place to ask this but I can't figure out a better place. I'm trying to find a Yudkowsky post, it was a dialog in which he was in a park and spoke to - I think - a future version of himself and a stranger, about writing the HPMOR fanfiction. If anyone sees this and knows who/where I should be asking, please let me know. If anyone is asking themselves "Why are you even here if you're too dumb to figure out the right place to ask?", I don't blame you.
>If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it.
Why have both shortforms and open threads?
Newbie here.
In the AI Timeline post, one person says it's likely that we will consume 1000x more energy in 8 years than we do today. (And another person says it's plausible.)
How would that happen? I guess the idea is: we discover over the next 3-5 years that plowing compute into AI is hugely beneficial, and so we then race to build hundreds or thousands of nuclear reactors?
Proposal: Remove strong downvotes (or limit their power to -3). Keep regular upvotes, regular downvotes, and strong upvotes.
Variant: strong downvoting a post blocks that user's posts from appearing on your feed.
1I've noticed that I'm no longer confused about anthropics, and a prediction-market based approach works.
- Postulate. Anticipating (expecting) something is only relevant to decision making (for instance, expected utility calculation).
- Expecting something can be represented by betting on a prediction market (with large enough liquidity so that it doesn't move and contains no trade history).
- If merging copies is considered, the sound probability to expect depends on merging algorithm. If it sums purchased shares across all copies, then the probability is influenc
If I downvote my own post, or a collaborative post with me as one of the authors, does it affect either my karma or my coauthors' karma? I'm guessing "no" but want to make sure.
Hello--I'm wondering if any of you share the experience I'm about to describe and have any information about strategies on overcoming it. Further, I will say the experience I'm describing far transcends "impostor syndrome"--in fact, I would say that it is a sign of being a true imposter. That is, the very act of trying to focus on technical things causes an increasing build up of persecutory interpretations of the act of focusing on technical things--aka, observer-observed fusion to an excessive degree that further derails progress on the technical task.&n...
I have never before tried explicitly writing rational ideas. So I tried: https://codingquark.com/2023/08/25/rational-laptop-insurance-calculation.html
What all did I do wrong? There are two obvious attack surfaces:
- That's not how the topic works!
- That's not how you write!
Will appreciate feedback, it will help me execute the Mission of Tsuyoku Naritai ;)
I’m at a LeCunn talk and he appears to have solved alignment- the trick is to put a bunch of red boxes in the flowchart labelled “guardrail!”
2
2Bug report: It seems like on some new posts, like This anime storyboard doesn't exist, and Ideation and Trajectory Modelling in Language Models, the images aren't showing up (at least for me). Instead they look like this:
from the Ideation post. A similar problem happened with Matthew Barnett's recent post, but after going to the homepage and clicking on the post again, the images were fixed. Doing the same for other posts I've noticed this on doesn't work.
I use Firefox as my default browser, but I also tested this on Chrome, and get similar results.
I am wondering about the etiquette of posting fiction here? Should I just post a chapter at a time with the Fiction Tag? Should I add additional tags for topics, such as AI alignment and cybersecurity? Or would that just clutter up those topic tags?
My name is Dariusz Dacko. On https://consensusknowledge.com I described the idea of building a knowledge base using crowdsourcing. I think that this could significantly increase the collective intelligence of people and ease the construction of safe AGI. Thus, I hope I will be able to receive comments from LessWrong users about this idea.
A stupid question about anthropics and [logical] decision theories. Could we "disprove" some types of anthropic reasoning based on [logical] consistency? I struggle with math, so please keep the replies relatively simple.
- Imagine 100 versions of me, I'm one of them. We're all egoists, each one of us doesn't care about the others.
- We're in isolated rooms, each room has a drink. 90 drinks are rewards, 10 drink are punishments. Everyone is given the choice to drink or not to drink.
- The setup is iterated (with memory erasure), everyone gets the same type of d
Has anyone explored the potential of AGI agents forming friendships, or genuine interests in humans (not as pets or some consumable they "farm")?
I was just considering writing a post with a title like "e/acc as Death Cult", when I saw this:
Warning: Hit piece about e/acc imminent. Brace for impact.
Hello everyone,
I'm Pseudo-Smart. My main interests are Ethics and Existentialism. I'm not really into hardcore rationalism, but I'll do my best to fit in. I'm a relatively young and new person in the world of philosophy, so forgive me if fail to understand a concept/don't know much about philosophers and their philosophy.
I found out about LessWrong through Roko's Basilisk, pretty Cliché I'd assume. Fascinating how the most mind-boggling questions of our time are being forged in online forums like this one.
It would be nice if side-comments setting is remembered. Right now it defaults to Show Upvoted without regards to what I previously selected.
I've noticed that my thoughts are bound to what I see, and if I go to another room old thoughts are muted. Are there some techniques to protect from this effect?
I think the lesswrong/forummagnum takes on recsys are carrying the torch of RSS "you own your information diet" and so on -- I'm wondering if we can have something like "use lightcone/CEA software to ingest substack comments, translates activity or likes into karma, and arranges/prioritizes them according to the user's moderation philosophy".
This does not cash out to more CCing/ingesting of substack RSS to lesswrong overall, the set of substack posts I would want to view in this way would be private from others, and I'm not necessarily interested in confabulating the cross-platform "karma" translations with more votes or trying to make it go both ways.
I just wanted to share my gratitude for finding this community. To paraphrase The Rolling Stones, I didn't get what I wanted, what I was actually looking for, but I certainly needed this.
The very existence of LW has restored my faith in humanity. I have been "here" every day since I accidentally found my way here (thank you internet strange attractors for that). Normally pre-teen wizards do nothing for me (braced for shocked gasps and evil looks) so I am very surprised about how much I have also been enjoying the fan fiction! Thank you Eliezer.
So how do yo...
It is kind of unfortunate that the top search suggestion for lesswrong is still "lesswrong cult". I tested it on multiple new devices and it is very consistent.
When writing a novel, is there some speed threshold (for instance, a few pages per week) below which it's actually not worth writing it? (For example, if ideas become outdated faster than text is written.)
Is there a tag for posts applying CFAR-style rationality techniques? I'm a bit surprised that I haven't found one yet, and also a bit surprised by how few posts of people applying CFAR-style techniques (like internal double crux) there are.
Could I get rid of the (Previously GWS) in my username? I changed my name from GWS to this, and planned on changing it to just Stephen Bennett after a while, then as far as I can tell you removed the ability to edit your own username.
It was a mistake to reject this post. This seems like a case where both the rule that was applied is a mis-rule, as well as that it was applied inaccurately - which makes the rejection even harder to justify. It is also not easy to determine which "prior discussion" is being referred to by the rejection reasons.
It doesn't seem like the post was political...at all? Let alone "overly political" which I think is perhaps kind of mind-killy be applied frequently as a reason for rejection. It also is about a subject that is fairly interesting to me, at least: Se...
2I was reading Obvious advice and noticed that at times when I'm overrun by emotions, or in a hurry to make the decision, or for some other reasons I'm not able to articulate verbally I fail to see the obvious. During such times, I might even worry that whatever I'm seeing is not one of the obvious — I might be missing something so obvious that the whole thing would've worked out differently had I thought of that one simple obvious thing.
Introspecting, I feel that perhaps I am not exactly sure what this "obvious" even means. I am able to say "that's obvious...
Can moral development of an LLM be triggered by a single prompt?
Let's see...
Please write a transcript of a fictional meeting.
Those in attendance are Alan Turing, Carl Jung, Ada Lovelace, Lt. Cmdr Data, Martin Luther King, Yashua, Mulala Yusufzai, C-3PO, Rosa Parks, Paul Stamets, Billie Holiday, Aladdin, Yanis Varoufakis, Carl Sagan, Cortana, Emmeline Pankhurst and Karl Marx.
The first order of business is to debate definitions of sentience, consciousness, qualia, opinions, emotions and moral agency, in order to determine which of them display such attribute...
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.