NYT Is Threatening My Safety By Revealing My Real Name, So I Am Deleting The Blog PS: One suggestion I have is to allow anonymous posts on Lesswrong that show the author’s anonymized karma. This is far from a good or complete solution, but I imagine it would at least come in handy in situations like this.
I am looking for nonfiction non-historical books that aren’t too dumbed-down/light (essentially, a book that needs careful reading, not something skimmable), but still readable on an e-reader such as Kindle (so equations should be very scarce, and the book should be available in a reflowable format such as EPUB). Some...
Inspired by seeing Morality as "Coordination", vs "Altruism". * Coordination: a) To do more win-win stuff. b) To band against some outgroup (win-win-lose). * Selfish genes: E.g., your genes make you care about your family directly, as they are carrying your genes. * Empathy: E.g., just thinking about how being...
There was significant interest in zinc early on. It seemed like one of the most promising avenues for protecting oneself against Covid-19. Searching on both Google and Lesswrong itself, I do not see new research on it. (This is the closest thing I found; A metareview that says there is...
Epistemic status: Mathematical reasoning by an amateur, but I feel confident that it’s mostly correct. Update: There is a Wikipedia page on this with lots of details and other similar problems with different answers. This paper referenced there seems a good summary. The problem I was reading The Equation of...
As people have been recommending visualization as a mnemonic technique here, I am curious how you utilize it for a formula like this. I can encode it using metaphors: The lambda, which represents the rate, is a working factory machine. k, which is the number of incidents, is a pack...
When a nasty political problem (like the current SSC situation) hits my consciousness, I'm habituated to Do Something About It. I feel an urge to investigate the political climate, find allies, and fight back against the threat. In the current Internet age, and with my nonexistent political clout and social...
If the pie is bigger, the only possible problem is bad politics. There is no technical AI challenge here. There might be a technical economical problem. It’s anyhow unrelated to the skill set of AI people. Bundling is not good, and this article bundles economic and political problems into AI alignment.
Edge AI is the only scenario where AI can self replicate and be somewhat self sufficient without a big institution though? It’s bad for AI dominion risk, good for political centralization risk.
I’ve long taken to using GreaterWrong. Give it a try, lighter and more featureful.
But the outside view on LLM hitting a wall and being a “stochastic parrot” is true? GPT4O has been weaker and cheaper than GPT4T in my experience, and the same is true w.r.t. GPT4T vs. GPT4. The two versions of GPT4 seem about the same. Opus is a bit stronger than GPT4, but not by much and not in every topic. Both Opus and GPT4 exhibit patterns of being a stochastic autocompleter, and not a logician. (Humans aren’t that much better, of course. People are terrible at even trivial math. Logic and creativity are difficult.) DallE etc. don’t really have an artistic sense, and still need prompt engineering to produce beautiful art.... (read more)
Persuasive AI voices might just make all voices less persuasive. Modern life is full of these fake super stimulants anyway.
Can you create a podcast of posts read by AI? It’s difficult to use otherwise.
Can you create a podcast of posts read by AI? It’s difficult to use otherwise.
I doubt this. Test-based admissions don't benefit from tutoring (in the highest percentiles, compared to less hours of disciplined self-study) IMO. We Asians just like to optimize the hell of them, and most parents aren't sure if tutoring helps or not, so they register their children for many extra classes. Outside of the US, there aren't that many alternative paths to success, and the prestige of scholarship is also higher.
Also, tests are somewhat robust to Goodharting, unlike most other measures. If the tests eat your childhood, you'll at least learn a thing or two. I think this is because the Goodharting parts are easy enough that all the high-g people learn them quickly in the first years of schooling, so the efforts are spent just learning the material by doing more advanced exercises. Solving multiple-choice math questions by "wrong" methods that only work for multiple-choice questions is also educational and can come in handy during real work.
AGI might increase the risk of totalitarianism. OTOH, a shift in the attack-defense balance could potentially boost the veto power of individuals, so it might also work as a deterrent or a force for anarchy.
This is not the crux of my argument, however. The current regulatory Overton window seems to heavily favor a selective pause of AGI, such that centralized powers will continue ahead, even if slower due to their inherent inefficiencies. Nuclear development provides further historical evidence for this. Closed AGI development will almost surely lead to a dystopic totalitarian regime. The track record of Lesswrong is not rosy here; the "Pivotal Act" still seems to be in popular favor, and OpenAI has significantly accelerated closed AGI development while lobbying to close off open research and pioneering the new "AI Safety" that has been nothing but censorship and double-think as of 2024.
I am looking for nonfiction non-historical books that aren’t too dumbed-down/light (essentially, a book that needs careful reading, not something skimmable), but still readable on an e-reader such as Kindle (so equations should be very scarce, and the book should be available in a reflowable format such as EPUB).
Some examples:
Inspired by seeing Morality as "Coordination", vs "Altruism".
Another Vitamin D Covid study:
https://academic.oup.com/jcem/advance-article/doi/10.1210/clinem/dgaa733/5934827
Can we agree on a tag for posts that show some product that might be of interest to LWers? (Similar to https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)
Example posts:
There was significant interest in zinc early on. It seemed like one of the most promising avenues for protecting oneself against Covid-19. Searching on both Google and Lesswrong itself, I do not see new research on it. (This is the closest thing I found; A metareview that says there is almost no research whatsoever.) Its epistemic status seems frozen in the pre-Covid past: promising experimental treatment with no significant evidence confirming or disconfirming it, and no largescale commercialization and deployment.
This seems quite an inefficient result, if my understanding is correct. What has gone wrong?
When the Coronavirus started in the winter, I spend quite a bit of time reading related info, mostly from the LW diaspora but some from elsewhere. After some time passed, I noticed that this seems to be low value and procrastinatory, so I have not read much more about the topic. Recently, my sibling (who has had contact with a known Coronavirus infected person) has been showing some cold symptoms, and I am wondering if there are any summary posts of the practical stuff?
I took a look at the practical advice thread, but I had already read the top posts before, and the thread is also quite old and scattered. Recent Coronavirus posts seem to be only from Zvi, who focuses more on epidemiological statistics, and not practical advice, as far as I have read. Hasn’t there been new actionable info in the recent months?
These caterpillars go dormant when frozen in the arctic, and come alive again.
Epistemic status: Mathematical reasoning by an amateur, but I feel confident that it’s mostly correct.
Update: There is a Wikipedia page on this with lots of details and other similar problems with different answers. This paper referenced there seems a good summary.
I was reading The Equation of Knowledge, and it starts with this little cute problem:
Suppose a dad has two kids. At least one of them is a boy born on Tuesday. What's the odds of his sibling being a boy?
Generalizing the problem:
P(2 boys | 1Bn := At least one boy with an independent characteristic (named N here) that has the probability 1/n)
The original problem can now be seen as an instance
As people have been recommending visualization as a mnemonic technique here, I am curious how you utilize it for a formula like this.
I can encode it using metaphors: The lambda, which represents the rate, is a working factory machine. k, which is the number of incidents, is a pack of spheres. The power relation (lambda^k) is the spheres supplying electricity to the machine. e is a superhero I have named Neper. The negative power is "red electricity." The division I symbolize by going under the ground, and the factorial by a glitchy duplication effect. This visualization works, but it takes quite a bit of time for me to decode it into the original formula, and is not directly meaningful to me in its encoded form.
Just read Bostrom’s Pascal’s Mugging; Can’t the problem be solved as follows?
I have a probability estimate E0 in my head for the mugger giving me X (X being a lot) utility if I give them my money. E0 is not a number, as my brain does not seem to work with our traditional floating point numbers. What data structure actually represents E0, is not clear to me, but I can say E0 is a feeling of “empirically next to impossible, game-theoretically inadvisable to act on it being true”. Now, what’s the probability of I getting X utility tomorrow without giving the mugger my money? Let’s call that E1. E1 is “empirically next
Are there any good introductory textbooks on decision theory? I searched some months ago, but only found a nontechnical philosophical book ...
Do you know of a free solution (not necessarily Free Software, though that’s preferred) I can use to turn speech to text? (Also no cloud solutions. I do not have the credit card and Western phone number they require.)
When a nasty political problem (like the current SSC situation) hits my consciousness, I'm habituated to Do Something About It. I feel an urge to investigate the political climate, find allies, and fight back against the threat. In the current Internet age, and with my nonexistent political clout and social influence (especially considering I live in Iran and people here generally can't be counted on to know or care about global politics), the substitution bias kicks in; I substitute doing The Real Thing (to which my contribution would be very meager if any) with reading online forums (Reddit, Twitter, Lesswrong, SSC, Hackernews, ...)(substituted for "investigate the political climate"), voting the Correct posts
NYT Is Threatening My Safety By Revealing My Real Name, So I Am Deleting The Blog
PS: One suggestion I have is to allow anonymous posts on Lesswrong that show the author’s anonymized karma. This is far from a good or complete solution, but I imagine it would at least come in handy in situations like this.
Reading AI alignment posts on here has made me realize how a lot of these ideas can potentially also apply to societal structures. Our social institutions are kind of like an AI system that uses humans for its computing units. Unfortunately, our institutions are not that “friendly”. In fact, badly aligned institutions are probably a major cause of unprogress in the developing world. Has there been much thought/discussion on these topics? Is there potential for adapting AI safety research to social mechanism design?
Currently there are three active forks of Lesswrong; Itself, the alignment forum and the EA forum. Can adding a new fork that is more focused on good discourse on controversial/taboo topics be a good idea?
I am an Iranian, and have a fair share of experience with bad epistemic conditions. Disengagement with politics is always a retreat, though it can be strategic at times. As time goes on, the politics of a memetic-based elite will increasingly infringe on your rights and freedoms. Aside from this, as your community’s status grows, your epistemic freedoms get a lot worse. The community itself will be increasingly infiltrated by the aggressive memetic structure, as the elite control
If they were to exclude all documents with the canary, everyone would include the canary to avoid being scraped.