nabereon

MorePravda

The Organ of Rational Inquiry presents its daily edition. A broadsheet newspaper homepage in the spirit of Pravda because "LessWrong" literally means "more correct" means "more truth" means «больше Правды». Features tracked-caps bylines, editorial frames with red star corners, Тов. before every username, an aligned two-column dispatch grid, and the rationalist motto that was always destined for a Soviet masthead: "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be."

I'm afraid the evolution analogy isn't as convincing an argument for everyone as Eliezer seems to think. For me, for instance, it's quite persuasive because evolution has long been a central part of my world model. However, I'm aware that for most "normal people", this isn't the case; evolution is a kind of dormant knowledge, not a part of the lens they see the world with. I think this is why they can't intuitively grasp, like most rat and rat-adjacent people do, how powerful optimization processes (like gradient descent or evolution) can lead to mesa-opti... (read more)

Another (arguably similar) unintended consequence of underemphasizing the difficulty of AI alignment was that it led some to believe that if we don't rush to build an ASI, we'll be left defenseless against other X-risks, which would be a perfectly rational thought if alignment were easier.

This looks very useful, although I think the performance improvements in the more recent open-weight, smaller, quantized models (like Gemma-2, Qwen-2.5, or Phil-3.5) have made it much more reasonable to run such a model locally for this purpose rather than using a remote API, since sending data about the webpages they visit to OpenAI is a repulsive idea to many people (it would also have cost benefits over huge models like GPT-4, but the increase in benefit/cost ratio would be an epsilon increase compared to budget proprietary models like Gemini-2.0-Flash).

Claude API support would be great since Claude 3 models are highly competitive. Claude-3 Haiku performs similarly to GPT-4 at a fraction of the cost and Claude-3 Opus outperforms GPT-4-Turbo in many tasks.