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Published on January 24, 2025 5:18 AM GMTPhysiology seemed like a grab-bag of random processes which no one really understands. If you understand a physiological process—congratulations, that idea probably doesn’t transfer much to other domains. You just know how humans—and maybe closely related animals—do the thing. At least, that’s how I felt. (These sentiments tend to feel sillier when spelled out.)I haven't totally changed...

Published on January 24, 2025 4:57 AM GMTA lot of my recent research work focusses on:1. building the case for why perfect surveillance is becoming increasingly hard to avoid in the future2. thinking through the implications of this, if it happenedWhen I say perfect surveillance, imagine everything your eyes see and your ears hear is being broadcast 24x7x365 to youtube (and its equivalents in...

Published on January 24, 2025 4:30 AM GMTI recently read Darren McKee's book "Uncontrollable: The Threat of Artificial Superintelligence and the Race to Save the World". I recommend this book as the best current introduction to AI risk for people with limited AI background. It prompted me to update my thinking about Asimov's Laws and related risks in light of recent evidence about AI...

Published on January 23, 2025 11:30 PM GMT I think of a standard contra dance as running 8pm-11pm: three hours is a nice amount of time for dancing, and 8pm is late enough that dinner isn't rushed. Looking over the 136 regular Free Raisins dances from 2010 to 2019 matches my impression: 85% were 3hr, 62% started at 8pm, and 51% did both. I...

Published on January 23, 2025 10:16 PM GMTCross posted from SubstackContinuing the Stanford CS120 Introduction to AI Safety course readings (Week 2, Lecture 1)This is likely too elementary for those who follow AI Safety research - my writing this is an aid to thinking through these ideas and building up higher-level concepts rather than just passively doing the readings. Recommendation: skim if familiar with...

Published on January 22, 2025 6:36 PM GMT(and as a completely speculative hypothesis for the minimum requirements for sentience in both organic and synthetic systems)Factual and Highly PlausibleModel latent space self-organizes during training. We know this. You could even say it's what makes models work at all.Models learn any patterns there are to be learned. They do not discriminate between intentionally engineered patterns or...

Published on January 22, 2025 5:36 PM GMTThis post is about ‘ut’, a gender-neutral pronoun I am proposing and plan to use experimentally in the future on my blog and here on lesswrong.(The u of ‘ut’ sounds like the u of uber, not the u of utter.)The pronoun is used to refer to a single individual (singular) whose gender is unspecified. It follows the...

Published on January 22, 2025 4:54 PM GMTCross-posted from Telescopic TurnipAs we all know, humans are terrible at building butterflies. We can make a lot of objectively cool things like nuclear reactors and microchips, but we still can't create a proper artificial insect that flies, feeds, and lays eggs that turn into more butterflies. That seems like evidence that butterflies are incredibly complex machines...

Published on January 22, 2025 3:41 PM GMTNote: This report was conducted in June 2024 and is based on research originally commissioned by the Future of Life Foundation (FLF). The views and opinions expressed in this document are those of the authors and do not represent the positions of FLF.This report investigates Training Data Attribution (TDA) and its potential importance to and tractability for...

Published on January 22, 2025 3:40 PM GMTNote: This report was conducted in June 2024 and is based on research originally commissioned by the Future of Life Foundation (FLF). The views and opinions expressed in this document are those of the authors and do not represent the positions of FLF.This report investigates Training Data Attribution (TDA) and its potential importance to and tractability for...

Published on January 22, 2025 11:48 AM GMTtl;dr: If a copy is not identical to the original, MWI predicts that I will always observe myself surviving failed Mars teleportations rather than becoming the copy on Mars. BackgroundThe classic teleportation thought-experiment asks whether a perfect copy is "you". This normally presents as a pure decision problem – do you step into the teleporter? But I suggest...

Published on January 22, 2025 10:45 AM GMTThis is a linkpost for an article I've written for my blog. Readers of LessWrong may want to skip the intro about Bayesian Reasoning, but might find the application to the Peter Miller vs Rootclaim debate quite interesting.I’ve been a fan of Bayesian Reasoning since the time I’ve read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. In...

Published on January 22, 2025 9:46 AM GMTOn blanket criticism and refutationIn his long post on the subject, Charbel-Raphaël argues against theories of impacts of interpretability. I think it's a largely a good, well-argued post, and if the only thing you get out of it is reading that post, I'll be contributing to improving the discourse. There is other material with similar claims that...