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Published on November 12, 2024 2:00 AM GMTPeople say "I think" a lot. Here are some examples:I think you brought me the wrong order.I think the numbers in the report are wrong.I think you need to turn left at the light.I think we need to replace the whole water heater.I think iPhones are better than Android phones.I think you should quit your job and...

Published on November 12, 2024 2:00 AM GMT Each year ( 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2023) I put out a list of how many dance weekends, festivals, camps, and long dances contra bands and callers are doing. I don't really know why I do this, but it's about an hours work on top of that I'm already collecting for trycontra.com/events so I...

Published on November 10, 2024 2:00 PM GMT LLMs are getting much more capable, and progress is rapid. I use them in my daily work, and there are many tasks where they're usefully some combination of faster and more capable than I am. I don't see signs of these capability increases stopping or slowing down, and if they do continue I expect the impact...

Published on November 10, 2024 9:33 AM GMT(This started as a reply to @Tamsin Leake 's reply in my post about why cyborgism maybe should be open. This post does not require you to read our interaction, though it lead to this, and I'm very grateful for Tamsin's reply.)In general, this is a counterargument against:we should only share cyborg tools (software that lets AI...

Published on November 10, 2024 9:28 AM GMTNon-animal based protein sources mostly have a different amino acid profile than animal-based protein sources.  Different plants also have a different composition. From looking a bit at the data myself it seems that if you mix different plant protein sources, you can get a good balance for most amino acids with the expectation of Methionine.Mike from Renaissance Periodization...

Published on November 9, 2024 8:58 PM GMTTL;DRWe built an interactive storytelling website to explain misaligned objectives to our moms and you should check it out.IntroductionDuring a recent hackathon, we created an interactive narrative experience that illustrates a crucial concept in AI alignment: the potentially devastating consequences of seemingly benign objective functions. Our project, "LifeKeeper Diaries," puts players in the perspective of AI systems...

Published on November 9, 2024 11:39 PM GMTVaden Masrani and Ben Chugg, hosts of the Increments Podcast, joined me on Doom Debates to debate Bayesian vs. Popperian epistemology.I’m on the Bayesian side, heavily influenced by the writings of Eliezer Yudkowsky. Vaden and Ben are on the Popperian side, heavily influenced by David Deutsch and the writings of Popper himself.We dive into the theoretical underpinnings...

Published on November 9, 2024 11:05 PM GMTSaturday of Week 47 of 2024   Location: Meeting room 5, Bellevue Library1111 110th Ave NE, Bellevue, WA 98004'Google Maps: https://g.co/kgs/ASXz22S 4hr Free Parking available in underground garageContact: cedar.ren@gmail.comIf you can't find us: please repeatedly call 7572794582 Bring boardgamesBring questionsMight do lightning talksDiscuss

Published on November 9, 2024 5:50 PM GMTOne of the reasons I got into chaos theory as a model paradigm shift was the famous Gleick book on chaos. One of the reasons I believed the Gleick book was trustworthy was that its description of chaos in ecology and population biology matched what I learned in college, 25 years later. Recently I learned that the...

Published on November 9, 2024 2:13 PM GMTRigging an election can be hard. But sometimes it can be easy. If a committee has an agenda of proposals to choose from, where each proposal is compared pairwise using majority rule against another proposal, until a single proposal is victorious, then you can make any arbitrary proposal win. The McKelvey–Schofield chaos theorem tells us that just...

Published on November 9, 2024 12:40 PM GMT In my bioinformatics work I often stream files between linux hosts and Amazon S3. This could look like: $ scp host:/path/to/file /dev/stdout | \ aws s3 cp - s3://bucket/path/to/file This recently stopped working after upgrading: ftruncate "/dev/stdout": Invalid argument Couldn't write to "/dev/stdout": Illegal seek I think I figured out why this is happening: New versions...

Published on November 9, 2024 11:50 AM GMTAnthropic on Thursday said it is teaming up with data analytics firm Palantir and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide U.S. intelligence and defense agencies access to Anthropic’s Claude family of AI models.The news comes as a growing number of AI vendors look to ink deals with U.S. defense customers for strategic and fiscal reasons. Meta recently...

Published on November 9, 2024 4:04 AM GMTHere are several examples; I found these captchas via the web rather than generating them anew, but none of them came attached to solutions so I'm not sure their presence in the training data would affect things in any case. (That said, it's possible that the lower resolution of the latter two degraded the adversarial perturbation; I...

Published on November 9, 2024 2:40 AM GMTA fun piece on ants and instrumental convergence:Each month millions of Argentine ants die along battlefronts that extend for miles around San Diego, where clashes occur with three other colonies in wars that may have been going on since the species arrived in the state a century ago.Some notes on ant warfare Many are aware that a...

Published on November 8, 2024 11:47 PM GMTSummaryFour months after my post 'LLM Generality is a Timeline Crux', new research on o1-preview should update us significantly toward LLMs being capable of general reasoning, and hence of scaling straight to AGI, and shorten our timeline estimates.Summary of previous postIn June of 2024, I wrote a post, 'LLM Generality is a Timeline Crux', in which I...

Published on November 8, 2024 10:04 PM GMTLet's consider air purifier design a bit. preface This post is about a potential new category of air purifier, but existing air purifiers are already worth using. You should probably have at least one at your home. Some reasonable options are: the Levoit Vital 200S-P for larger rooms, and the Winix A230 for smaller rooms. Those are...

Published on November 8, 2024 9:50 PM GMTMy husband, Andrew Rettek, has a blog you should read. As he’s gotten into fitness, he’s started following exercise science, which is the (very new!) field of running small controlled experiments on diet and exercise on athletes who do exactly what you tell them to, under strict observation.This is in contrast to fields like nutrition science, which...

Published on November 8, 2024 9:20 PM GMTHey y'all! I just started a rationality group on the UChicago campus and wanted to post it here to advertise it to UChicago-affiliated LessWrong readers. We've had a couple meetings so far which have been great, and I'm excited for more! A few more things: (1) You can join the email list by submitting this form to be updated...

Published on November 7, 2024 6:15 PM GMTN.B. This is a chapter in a planned book about epistemology. Chapters are not necessarily released in order. If you read this, the most helpful comments would be on things you found confusing, things you felt were missing, threads that were hard to follow or seemed irrelevant, and otherwise mid to high level feedback about the content....

Published on November 7, 2024 4:30 PM GMTA lot happened in AI this week, but most people’s focus was very much elsewhere. I’ll start with what Trump might mean for AI policy, then move on to the rest. This is the future we have to live in, and potentially save. Back to work, as they say. Table of Contents Trump Card. What does Trump’s...

Published on November 7, 2024 4:06 PM GMTEpistemic status: This text presents a thought experiment suggested by James Miller, along with Alexey Turchin's musings on possible solutions. While our thoughts are largely aligned (we both accept high chances of quantum Immortality and the timeline selection principle), some ideas are more personal (e.g., Turchin's "transcendental advantage") in Part 2.TL;DR: If quantum immortality is true, I...

Published on November 7, 2024 3:39 PM GMTProduced as part of MATS 6.0 and 6.1.Key takeaways:Training LLMs on (simulated) user feedback can lead to the emergence of manipulative and deceptive behaviors.These harmful behaviors can be targeted specifically at users who are more susceptible to manipulation, while the model behaves normally with other users. This makes such behaviors challenging to detect.Standard model evaluations for sycophancy...

Published on November 7, 2024 3:26 PM GMTThere is some difference between despotic and cosmopolitan agents. A despotic agent builds a universe grabbing Singleton and makes it satisfy its own desires. A cosmopolitan agent builds a universe grabbing Singleton and makes it satisfy the desires of all the things which ought be happy. The cosmopolitan agent will burn some of its precious negentropy on...

Published on November 7, 2024 12:14 PM GMTI've been accepted as a mentor for the next AI Safety Camp. You can apply to work with me and the team. The deadline for applicants is November 17.The program will run from January 11 to April 27. SummaryCore underlying hypothesis - we believe that there is a significant agency overhang in the modern LLMs, meaning there is a potential...