Epistemic status: thinking aloud, not got any plans, definitely not making any commitments.

I'm thinking about building a pipeline to produce a lot of LessWrong books based around authors. The idea being that a bunch of authors would have their best essays collated in a single book, with a coherent aesthetic and ML art and attractive typography.

This stands in contrast to making books around sequences, and I do really like sequences, but when I think about most authors whose work I love from the past 5 years there's a lot of standalone essays, and they don't tie together half as neatly as Eliezer's original sequences (and were not supposed to). For instance, Eliezer himself has written a lot of standalone dialogues in recent years that could be collated into a book, but that don't make sense as a 'sequence' on a single theme.

Well, the actual reason I'm writing this is because I sometimes feel a tension between my own taste (e.g. who I'd like to make books for) and not wanting to impose my opinions too dictatorially on the website. Like, I do want to show the best of what LessWrong has, but I think sometimes I'd want to have more discretion — for instance maybe I'd want to release a series of three books on similar themes, and but I don't know a good way to justify my arbitrary choice there of which books to make.

The review was a process of making a book that maximally took my judgment about content out of the decision, that well-represented the best of LW. I also don't know that I really want to use a voting process to determine which essays go into the books, I think the essays in the book are more personal and represent the author, and also a book coheres better together if it's put together with a single vision, and I'd rather that be a collaboration between me and the author (to the extent they wish to be involved).

Thoughts on ways for me to move forward on this?

Hey all, nice forum you've got going here!

I've recently drunk the koolaid of the 80,000 Hours initiative and would like to make a difference by dedicating my career to human-aligned AI implementation. I thought I'd comment in this thread to express my interest in information about how I (or anybody else in my position) can make a difference.

A quick search of the forum history shows that a Lurkshop was held in December, which I obviously just missed. But that's the exact kind of thing I'm looking for.

Any information on how one can enter the field of risk mitigation around AI would be much appreciated. And if this kind of message isn't welcome on this forum, please let me know.

Hello, long time reader all the way back to Overcoming Bias. I've always liked this community and loved reading posts here. I have never posted before and only just created this account a few months ago shorty after I used ChatGPT in November. 

This is my first comment here; I do webcomics and a bit of category theory!

I gravitate towards certain aspects of rationality because I have an aesthetic preference for certain things like simplicity and consistency, which gives me a fondness for principles like Occam's Razor and identifying ways that peope often fail to be consistent, which rationalists tend to talk about afaik.

But I wouldn't say I'm a truthseeker, just an 'intellectual hedonist'. I have a sense of 'curiosity', but it's more towards 'cool stuff' rather than 'true stuff'. My sense of what's 'cool' is pretty arbitrary.

Anyone else feels similarly? Would this be a good place for me? My goals might not completely align with yours, but compared to most other places on the Internet, this place has a higher concentration of stuff I find pleasing (or at least not-displeasing) to read :P

I'm banning user lesswrong.com/users/alfred, based in part on their reputation in an in-person community, and in part on their LW content being fairly bad. (I realize this is kinda opaque, but seemed better to say something rather than nothing about it)

The Intercom is not appearing on my version of Chromium 109.0.5414.119 snap but does appear fine on Google Chrome 109.0.5414.74. Not sure if this is worth fixing.

I recently figured out a great way of restoring my hands to baseline functionality after they‘ve been exposed to cold for an extended period of time. It goes like this:

1. Put your hands under warm water for a minute or so. This will make your blood vessels dilate.
2. With your arms extended, rapidly bring your hands up and down about 10-20 times. This motion helps to improve circulation by using centrifugal force to bring blood into your hands.

I've tried this technique a few times and it seems to be vastly more effective than just using hot water alone.

I hope someone finds this helpful during the winter.

(I may promote this to a full question)

Do we actually know what's happening when you take an LLM trained on token prediction and fine-tune is via e.g. RLHF to get something like InstructGPT or ChatGPT? The more I think about the phenomenon, the more confused I feel.

If I encounter a capabilities paper that kinda spooks me, what should I do with it? I'm inclined to share it as a draft post with some people I think should know about it. I have encountered a paper that, if scaled, is probably starkly superintelligent at math, and I found it in a capabilities discussion group who will have no hesitation about using it to try to accumulate power for themselves, in denial about any negative effects it could have.

edit: actually, I posted this as a whole question, so maybe reply there