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Published on December 27, 2024 2:29 PM GMTCurrently, to get a drug approved by the FDA you need to prove that it helps with a particular illness and while having an acceptable side effect profile. If you have a drug that improves people's quality of life but you aren't curing an ICD-11 accepted illness, you don't get your drug approved. If the FDA would...

Published on December 27, 2024 2:18 PM GMTTake a stereotypical fantasy novel, a textbook on mathematical logic, and Fifty Shades of Grey. Mix them all together and add extra weirdness for spice. The result might look a lot like Planecrash (AKA: Project Lawful), a work of fiction co-written by "Iarwain" (a pen-name of Eliezer Yudkowsky) and "lintamande".(image from Planecrash)Yudkowsky is not afraid to be...

Published on December 27, 2024 1:21 PM GMTSummary: The Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics can help us respond virtuously to improbably good circumstances. Contemplating the less lucky branches of the quantum multiverse can be seen as a beneficial 'negative visualisation' practise comparable to those in Stoicism and some Buddhist traditions.I’ve previously suggested that when we think about the ethical implications of the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics,...

Published on December 27, 2024 1:20 PM GMTCause wow what is everyone even doing?! You know how you sometimes hear about people seeing colors when they hear words, or how they memorize thousands of phone numbers on sight, or that some navigate intricate mind palaces full of detailed sensory information?Ever wonder if you are secretly one of those people that have some highly unusual inner...

Published on December 27, 2024 11:53 AM GMTThis was a prose piece I performed for the 2024 KC Winter Solstice celebration, written by me I have a scar running from right above my navel to the right end of my abdomen. You see, I was born premature, with a volvulus, which means that my intestines were tangled and blue. I spent the first months of...

Published on December 27, 2024 11:21 AM GMTCapitalism is a force that has lifted billions out of poverty, where even poor remote villagers enjoy luxuries that would have been unimaginable to medieval kings. When someone takes a job, even the worst job, it’s because both parties expect mutual gain. And yet companies routinely get accused of exploiting their workers for offering low pay and...

Published on December 27, 2024 4:21 AM GMTSummary:This is a write-up of some rough work I did on analysing duplicate token neurons. It's not as thorough or well-written as I would like it to be, but hopefully, the explanation is at least somewhat legible.I examine duplicate token heads and the neurons they influence. I extract circuits the model uses to compute these neurons.I discuss...

Published on December 27, 2024 3:05 AM GMTI want to build a nice testing ground for human rationality (that is to say, solving arbitrary complex problems in different domains using limited information and time)This would be a lot of annoying work to assemble, but (un)fortunately there's an AI industry that's designing a lot bunch of evals to test the ability of their AIs to...

Published on December 27, 2024 1:58 AM GMTConscious beings can infer the physical contents and laws of their world in various ways - instinct that then fails to be contradicted by experience, trial and error, theory. But as Descartes noted, self-awareness logically necessitates at least one epistemic belief - the belief in the self. Physics could in principle exist without consciousness - and many...

Published on December 26, 2024 5:34 PM GMTBased on a 2-day hackathon brainstorm. Current status: 70% of the tooling is done, unsure of how to proceed. Not enough experience with multi-month sized projects to judge for feasibility. I'm looking for some feedback. Specifically I want feedback regarding my current implementation. The statement "SAEs could be useful for AI Control" is obvious enough. Working  hypothesis In general, AI...

Published on December 26, 2024 5:52 PM GMTFor the past few months I've been working on an AI generated alternate solstice remix album. It's now released on Youtube and Spotify, and should be on Apple Music soon.ReSolsticed vol I: "We're Not Going Quietly"My favorite genre of song is "cover that reimagines the original." Everyone else's favorite genre of solstice song is "exactly the way...

Published on December 26, 2024 10:56 AM GMTA few months ago, I made this comment. It deserves more elaboration, so I decided to write an entire webpage about it. The bulk of the webpage talks about O'Neill Cylinders and includes questions and answers from Claude relating to them. The page also includes thoughts and commentary relating to space travel and the book, Futurist Fantasies....

Published on December 26, 2024 4:49 PM GMTThis post offers an accessible model of psychology of character-trained LLMs like Claude. Epistemic StatusThis is primarily a phenomenological model based on extensive interactions with LLMs, particularly Claude. It's intentionally anthropomorphic in cases where I believe human psychological concepts lead to useful intuitions.Think of it as closer to psychology than neuroscience - the goal isn't a map which...

Published on December 26, 2024 3:26 PM GMTIntuitively, the AutoGPT concept sounds like it should be useful if a company invests in it. Yet, all the big publically available systems are seem to be chat interfaces where the human writes a messages and then the computer writes another message.Even if AutoGPT-driven by an LLM alone wouldn't achieve all ends, a combination where a human...

Published on December 26, 2024 6:04 AM GMTWhy voice notes?On a functional level it's the fastest & the most convenient input method when you're not in front of the proper keyboard. Which even for me constitutes a big chunk of my life 🙃.Taking a voice note allows me to quickly close an open loop of a stray though or a new idea and go...

Published on December 26, 2024 4:09 AM GMTIn this post, I propose an idea that could improve whistleblowing efficiency, thus hopefully improving AI Safety by making unsafe practices discovered marginally faster.I'm looking for feedback, ideas for improvement, and people interested in making it happen.It has been proposed before, that it's beneficial to have an efficient and trustworthy whistleblowing mechanism The technology that makes it...

Published on December 25, 2024 9:02 PM GMTIf it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it.If you are new to LessWrong, here's the place to introduce yourself. Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to get from the site and community are invited. This is also the place...

Published on December 25, 2024 10:44 AM GMTWhen I was in college, I rented a group house with 5 other nerds. There were 5 bedrooms to divide among the 6 of us, so I negotiated an agreement where I paid less rent in exchange for sleeping in the hallway. This wasn't as bad as it sounds. My bedroom wasn't hallway-sized. It was bedroom-sized and...

Published on December 25, 2024 5:49 AM GMTI've heard repeatedly from many people that the highest-value part of conferences is not the talks or structured events, but rather the casual spontaneous conversations. Yet my own experience does not match this at all; the casual spontaneous conversations are consistently low-value.My current best model is that the casual spontaneous conversations mostly don't have much instrumental value,...

Published on December 24, 2024 9:57 AM GMTBy Sophie Bridgers, Rishub Jain, Rory Greig, and Rohin ShahBased on work by the Google DeepMind Rater Assist Team: Vladimir Mikulik, Sophie Bridgers, Tian Huey Teh, Rishub Jain, Rory Greig, Lili Janzer (randomized order, equal contributions) Human oversight is critical for ensuring that Artificial Intelligence (AI) models remain safe and aligned to human values. But AI systems are...

Published on December 24, 2024 10:45 PM GMTThis is a link to the latest Bayesian Conspiracy episode. Oliver tells us how Less Wrong instantiated itself into physical reality via LightHaven, along with a bit of deep lore of foundational Rationalist/EA orgs. He also gives a surprisingly nuanced (IMO) view on Leverage! Do you like transcripts? We got one of those at the link as well....