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Published on November 22, 2024 6:00 PM GMTSummary Over the past year I’ve investigated potential interventions against respiratory illnesses. Previous results include “Enovid nasal spray is promising but understudied”, “Povidone iodine is promising but understudied” and “Humming will solve all your problems no wait it’s useless”. Two of the iodine papers showed salt water doing as well or almost as well as iodine. I...

Published on November 22, 2024 4:41 PM GMTTLDR. We can create a relatively good model of a person by prompting a long-context LLM with a list of facts about this person. We can get much better results by iteratively improving the prompt based on the person's feedback. Sideloading is the only technology for immortality that actually works as of 2024.Fig. 1. Here are my...

Published on November 22, 2024 4:16 PM GMT(If you’re in a hurry, you can just read the “Background and summary” section, and skip the other 85%.)0. Background and summary0.1 Background: What’s the problem and why should we care?My primary neuroscience research goal for the past couple years has been to solve a certain problem, a problem which has had me stumped since the very...

Published on November 22, 2024 4:12 PM GMTCrosspost of this on my blog. I recently wrote an article making the case for giving to shrimp welfare. Lots of people were convinced to give (enough to help around half a billion shrimp avoid a painful death), but because the idea sounds silly, many people on Twitter, hacker news, and various other places made fun of it,...

Published on November 22, 2024 2:01 PM GMTWhich of the following do you think is bigger? A.mjx-chtml {display: inline-block; line-height: 0; text-indent: 0; text-align: left; text-transform: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 100%; font-size-adjust: none; letter-spacing: normal; word-wrap: normal; word-spacing: normal; white-space: nowrap; float: none; direction: ltr; max-width: none; max-height: none; min-width: 0; min-height: 0; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 1px 0} .MJXc-display {display:...

Published on November 22, 2024 12:56 PM GMTA short science fiction story about our ancestors and the ethical responsibility we have towards them. Old Ana's legs fought against her now, but still she led her granddaughter up the mountain path. The girl's torch made shadows dance on the rocks. The river sang in the distance – the same river that had shown Ana her great...

Published on November 22, 2024 3:46 AM GMTI love this question, but I've enjoyed noticing answers to its opposite more. What are some things you thought weren't metaphors but were surprised to learn actually are metaphors.A classic example is that, at least in English, time is often described using distance metaphors. For example, we talk about things taking a "long" or a "short" amount...

Published on November 22, 2024 3:26 AM GMTPreceded by: "Consciousness as a conflationary alliance term for intrinsically valued internal experiences"tl;dr: Chatbots are "conscious" in a variety of important ways. We humans should probably be nice to each other about the moral disagreements and confusions we're about to uncover in our concept of "consciousness".Executive Summary: Turing Prize laureate Geoffrey Hinton is most likely correct that LLM...

Published on November 22, 2024 12:59 AM GMTSome people in my orbit suggested reading Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s book The Real Anthony Fauci.Here’s my story of wading through a few pages of the book and trying to understand the basis of the claims. My takeaway: there's a lot of sloppiness here, and several times the book’s claim isn’t supported by the citation. Often, though, the citation...

Published on November 21, 2024 10:43 PM GMTIn everyday life, if something looks good to a human, then it is probably actually good (i.e. that human would still think it’s good if they had more complete information and understanding). Obviously there are plenty of exceptions to this, but it works most of the time in day-to-day dealings. But if we start optimizing really hard...

Published on November 20, 2024 6:19 PM GMTI am grateful to Noosphere89 for prompting me to start this discussion. In human evolution, the fundamental goal was to survive and reproduce, passing on our genes to the next generation. But somewhere along the way, humans developed complex societies and technologies that go beyond just survival and reproduction. Now, we often find ourselves pursuing goals that...

Published on November 20, 2024 4:48 PM GMTCrosspost of this on my blog. 1 My basic view 'Cause everybody criesEverybody hurts sometimesSometimes everything is wrong—Rem “Everybody hurts”You didn’t think the era of absurdly long posts was over, did you?Prior to the 2024 election, there were a series of swing states that pundits forecasted could have gone either way. All of them ended up going to Trump...

Published on November 20, 2024 1:40 PM GMTPreviously: Long-Term Charities: Apply For SFF Funding, Zvi’s Thoughts on SFF There are lots of great charitable giving opportunities out there right now. I recently had the opportunity to be a recommender in the Survival and Flourishing Fund for the second time. As a recommender, you evaluate the charities that apply and decide how worthwhile you think...

Published on November 20, 2024 11:48 AM GMTAuthors: Anonymous (I'm not one of them).Abstract:Most analysis of transformer expressivity treats the depth (number of layers) of a model as a fixed constant, and analyzes the kinds of problems such models can solve across inputs of unbounded length. In practice, however, the context length of a trained transformer model is bounded. Thus, a more pragmatic question...

Published on November 20, 2024 11:04 AM GMTCurrently, it looks like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will become HHS secretary and change a lot of things at the HHS. There will likely be both good and bad changes.It's a time when the ideas that lay around matter. What changes do you think should be made? What clever policy ideas should be adopted?Discuss

Published on November 20, 2024 10:13 AM GMTSummary thread: https://x.com/GarrisonLovely/status/1859022323799699474. An influential congressional commission is calling for a militarized race to build superintelligent AI based on threadbare evidenceDiscuss

Published on November 20, 2024 6:04 AM GMTI run a weekly sequences-reading meetup with some friends, and I want to add a film-component, where we watch films that have some tie-in to what we've read.I got to talking with friends about what good rationality films there are. We had some ideas but I wanted to turn it to LessWrong to find out.So please, submit...

Published on November 20, 2024 1:37 AM GMTAs I relayed in my last post, in "Theory of Games and Economic Behavior", von Neumann and Morgenstern defended the validity of using utility to predict economic outcomes despite the fact that cross-individual utility cannot apparently be measured or apprehended directly: "The [ . . . ] difficulties of the notion of utility, and particularly of the...

Published on November 20, 2024 12:57 AM GMTI work in a niche company in a niche industry mostly with a nearly-obsolete programming language. I have worked for the same company for an extremely long time by programmer standards, basically right out of high-school. I have not looked for work in a very long time.Reading HackerNews lately, the market looks pretty grim. I am reading...

Published on November 18, 2024 6:25 PM GMTWe wanted to run an event where controversial opinions could be shared without restraint: “a safe space for what you can't say in ‘safe spaces’”So a mechanism was devised:https://x.com/tobi/status/1795619548579918222Examples of what may or may have been on the slips:“Only white men can save us.”“Intelligent people are worth more.”“Bestiality is good, actually.” We also advertised the event so only...

Published on November 18, 2024 4:00 PM GMTWhat kinds of ethical implications should we expect from the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (MWI)? I’ll argue that we shouldn’t expect decision-making to change. The implications are more about how we should think or feel about events in our lives, and the virtues of taking a cosmic perspective.According the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics, the universe...

Published on November 18, 2024 2:25 PM GMTGreat. Another crucial consideration I missed. I was convinced that working on reducing the existential risk for humanity should be a global priority.Upholding our potential and ensuring that we can create a truly just future seems so wonderful.Well, recently I was introduced to the idea that this might actually not be the case. The argument is rooted in...

Published on November 18, 2024 4:58 PM GMTPeople often ask me this. It’s a good question. It seems potentially important for anyone who doesn’t want to die, or doesn’t want other people to have to die. I don’t feel like I have a good answer, which is one reason I want to do more research. But recently I think my answer has gotten a...