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Published on January 21, 2025 10:47 AM GMTMy view on the concept of responsibility has shifted a lot over the years. I’ve had three insights that brought me from my initial, very superficial and implicit understanding of responsibility, to the one I have today, which I consider more accurate, more practical, and more healthy.  Responsibility is Made UpThe first insight came while I was part...

Published on January 19, 2025 6:29 PM GMTA story I wrote about living through the transition to utopia.This is the one story that I've put the most time and effort into; it charts a course from the near future all the way to the distant stars.Discuss

Published on January 19, 2025 10:32 AM GMTWe choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. (Kennedy’s famous “We chose to go to the moon” speech) The ‘real’ mathematics of ‘real’ mathematicians, …, is almost wholly ‘useless’ (Hardy’s “A Mathematician’s Apology”) If the "irrational" agent is outcompeting you on a...

Published on January 19, 2025 8:04 AM GMTTl;dr, Neural networks are deterministic and sometimes even reversible, which causes Shannon information measures to degenerate. But information theory seems useful. How can we square this (if it's possible at all)? The attempts so far in the literature are unsatisfying.Here is a conceptual question: what is the Right Way to think about information theoretic quantities in neural...

Published on January 19, 2025 6:50 AM GMTCapitalism is powered by greed. People want to make money, so they look hard for things they can produce and that others want. Unknowingly, however, they are powering the great information-processing machine that is the market. The output of the machine is the efficient allocation of resources and, eventually, wealth.Something we intuitively consider bad (greed) is made...

Published on January 19, 2025 3:03 AM GMTTHERE ARE LAKES at the bottom of the ocean. I saw it in a nature documentary. You get a weird mineral deposit on the seafloor and it makes these brine pools, water so salty it doesn't mix with the sea water around it. Because it has no oxygen, any unlucky fish or crabs that fall in there...

Published on January 19, 2025 3:53 AM GMTLast week some results were released from a 6-week study using AI tutors in Nigeria. Below I summarize the results of that and four other recent studies about AI tutoring (the dates reflect when the study was conducted rather than when papers were published):Summer 2024 — 15–16-year olds in NigeriaThey had 800 students total. The treatment group...

Published on January 18, 2025 10:32 PM GMTHow many times have you been in a meeting where people seem to talk past each other? Everyone is smart and well-intentioned, but you don’t seem to be making any progress.Here’s the likely problem, you don’t have a tangible thing to anchor your discussions around. You need something real (a doc, a sketch, a prototype) to create...

Published on January 18, 2025 3:32 PM GMTWhen learning about classic utilitarianism (approximately, the quest to maximize everyone's expected well-being), I struggle because much of my well-being seems internal. If happiness or misery are significantly influenced by our internal processing of events, then how does this affect utilitarianism and its practical application?I'll start with a few examples:When I was a child, my family moved...

Published on January 18, 2025 3:39 PM GMTHi, everyone. I'm not sure if my post is well-written, but I think LW might be the only right place to have this discussion. Feel free to suggest changes.AGI may arrive soon and it is possible that it would kill us all. This does not bother me that much, as dying happens to people all the time.But...

Published on January 18, 2025 4:00 PM GMT In general, you're not supposed to wear a beard with a respirator mask (N95, P100, etc), at least not in a way where you have facial hair under the seal: But how much worse is the fit? A P100 with a beard is going to filter less well than a P100 without a beard, but does...

Published on January 18, 2025 3:29 PM GMTConfusion is a felt sense; a bodily sensation you can pay attention to and notice! So here's my question for you:What's this Song about?Think About Things by Daði FreyYoutube Link, Spotify LinkFull Lyrics:Baby I can't wait to knowBelieve me I'll always be there soThough I know I love youI find it hard to see how you feel...

Published on January 18, 2025 3:10 PM GMTWe’re developing an AI-enabled wargaming-tool, grim, to significantly scale up the number of catastrophic scenarios that concerned organizations can explore and to improve emergency response capabilities of, at least, Sentinel.Table of ContentsHow AI Improves on the State of the ArtImplementation Details, Limitations, and ImprovementsLearnings So FarGet Involved!How AI Improves on the State of the ArtIn a wargame,...

Published on January 18, 2025 12:43 PM GMTepistemic status: I know next to nothing about evolution, development psychology, AI, alignment. Anyway, I think the topic is important, and I should do my, however small part, in trying to think seriously for 5 minutes about it. So here's what I thinkHow come, that I am aligned? Somehow neocortex plays along with older parts of the...

Published on January 18, 2025 9:20 AM GMTI think a lot of people have heard so much about internalized prejudice and bias that they think they should ignore any bad vibes they get about a person that they can’t rationally explain. But if a person gives you a bad feeling, don’t ignore that. Both I and several others who I know have generally come...

Published on January 18, 2025 3:54 AM GMTIntroduction: Why QFT?In a previous post, Lauren offered a take on why a physics way of thinking is so successful at understanding AI systems. In this post, we look in more detail at the potential of Quantum field theory (QFT) to be expanded into a more comprehensive framework for this purpose. Interest in this area has been...

Published on January 17, 2025 9:24 PM GMTCross-posted from SubstackFeeling intellectually understimulated, I've begun working my way through Max Lamparth's CS120 - Introduction to AI Safety. I'm going to use this Substack as a kind of open journaling practice to record my observations on the ideas presented, both in the lectures and in the readings.The reading for the first week is Dobbe, Gilbert, and...

Published on January 17, 2025 9:45 PM GMTInner Alignment is the problem of ensuring mesa-optimizers (i.e. when a trained ML system is itself an optimizer) are aligned with the objective function of the training process.Inner alignment asks the question: How can we robustly aim our AI optimizers at any objective function at all?As an example, evolution is an optimization force that itself 'designed' optimizers...

Published on January 16, 2025 6:03 PM GMTThis is a linkpost for How should we analyse survey forecasts of AI timelines? by Tom Adamczewski, which was published on 16 December 2024[1]. Below are some quotes from Tom's post, and a bet I would be happy to make with people whose AI timelines are much shorter than those of the median AI expert.How should we...

Published on January 16, 2025 5:20 PM GMTSummaryCan LLMs science? The answer to this question can tell us important things about timelines to AGI. In this small pilot experiment, we test frontier LLMs on their ability to perform a minimal version of scientific research, where they must discover a hidden rule about lists of integers by iteratively generating and testing hypotheses. Results are ambiguous:...

Published on January 16, 2025 5:19 PM GMTI would like to thank Professor Vincent Conitzer, Caspar Oesterheld, Bernardo Subercaseaux, Matan Shtepel, and Robert Trosten for many excellent conversations and insights. All mistakes are my own.I think that there's a fundamental connection between AI Safety via Debate and Guaranteed Safe AI via topology. After thinking about AI Safety via Debate for nearly two years, this...

Published on January 16, 2025 2:20 PM GMTThe fun, as it were, is presumably about to begin. And the break was fun while it lasted. Biden went out with an AI bang. His farewell address warns of a ‘Tech-Industrial Complex’ and calls AI the most important technology of all time. And there was not one but two AI-related everything bagel concrete actions proposed –...

Published on January 16, 2025 1:55 PM GMTNB this dialogue occurred at the very end of 2023, and for various reasons is only being published ~a year later! Keep this in mind while reading.Key topics coveredconsistent NN-internal deceptive planning (search: goblin, fae, homunc, inner)making AI/agents from foundation models (search: scaffold, condition)planning (search: planning, simulator, consequential)standards of evidence (search: fanfic, theory, Shrek, analog, logic)elicitation gaps...

Published on January 16, 2025 11:38 AM GMTWeirdML websiteRelated posts:How good are LLMs at doing ML on an unknown dataset?o1-preview is pretty good at doing ML on an unknown datasetIntroductionHow good are Large Language Models (LLMs) at doing machine learning on novel datasets? The WeirdML benchmark presents LLMs with weird and unusual machine learning tasks, designed to require careful thinking and actual understanding to...