edit: Changed title from "Postmortem on RatVac" for clarity. … | Continue reading
Related to: Infinite Certainty • Suppose the people at FiveThirtyEight have created a model to predict the results of an important election. After crunching poll data, area demographics, and all the… | Continue reading
I got access to Dall·E 2 yesterday. Here are some pretty pictures! … | Continue reading
Click lower right to download or find on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, etc. … | Continue reading
On March 29th, DeepMind published a paper, "Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models", that shows that essentially everyone -- OpenAI, DeepMind, Microsoft, etc. -- has been training large langu… | Continue reading
tl;dr: It's obvious at this point that humanity isn't going to solve the alignment problem, or even try very hard, or even go out with much of a fight. Since survival is unattainable, we should shift… | Continue reading
Disclaimer: Feeling so-and-so about posting this on LW, but given how many people here work in ML or adjacent fields I might as well. … | Continue reading
At least three people have died playing online games for days without rest. People have lost their spouses, jobs, and children to World of Warcraft. If people have the right to play video games - and… | Continue reading
Edit: There's now a follow up post here. LW Discussion. EA Forum and r/ssc. … | Continue reading
It's probably not presuming too much to guess that many around here have personal experience with the autism spectrum, if not in relation to themselves, then with close family. I say this because the… | Continue reading
At least three people have died playing online games for days without rest. People have lost their spouses, jobs, and children to World of Warcraft. If people have the right to play video games - and… | Continue reading
Shortly after I started blogging, because I was a college student and had nothing better to do, I set a goal to write every week. I started in September 2013 and wrote around 150 posts between then a… | Continue reading
Alexey Guzey’sTheses on Sleep gained a lot of popularity and acclaim on LessWrong and among people I follow on social media, despite largely consisting of what I think were weak arguments and mislead… | Continue reading
SETI stands for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. A few projects, such as Breakthrough Listen, have secured substantial funding to observe the sky and crawl through the data to look for e… | Continue reading
SUMMARY * InstructGPT3 (hereafter IGPT3), a better version of GPT3 has recently been released by OpenAI. This post explores its new capabilities. * IGPT3 has new impressive capabilities and many po… | Continue reading
[Cross-posting from the EA Forum] • People keep telling me how they've had trouble convincing others to care at all about AI risk, or to take the concerns about misaligned AI seriously. This has puzz… | Continue reading
This story was originally posted as a response to this thread. … | Continue reading
A suggested solution to AGI safety is to ensure intelligent systems only work on abstract mathematical problems that have, as far as we know, little to no connection with the "real world". I'll sides… | Continue reading
[Note: While I do intend to write more about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this post is intended to address this only indirectly rather than directly, by helping illustrate how to find other sources… | Continue reading
A collection of shorter posts by LessWrong user seacos | Continue reading
I have very detailed opinions on lots of topics. I sometimes get asked how I do this, which might just be people making fun of me, but I choose to interpret it as a real question, and I’m going to sk… | Continue reading
Consider the following model of conflict: … | Continue reading
Published originally (with all of the footnotes) on my site: https://guzey.com/theses-on-sleep/ • … | Continue reading
Steve Omohundro has suggested a folk theorem to the effect that, within the interior of any approximately rational, self-modifying agent, the marginal benefit of investing additional resources in any… | Continue reading
To explore better possibilities for nurturing new minds, and to care about the problem in the first place, it helps to remember what's wrong with what we do to new minds. John Taylor Gatto speaks abo… | Continue reading
Machine learning is touching increasingly many aspects of our society, and its effect will only continue to grow. Given this, I and many others care about risks from future ML systems and how to miti… | Continue reading
Continuing topics from an earlier 2015 blog post, The Brain as a Universal Learning Machine, this new series will begin with updated distillations of deep learning's best learnings, then interweave b… | Continue reading
The gaming industry has a huge and gradually expanding audience. According to Statista, 2.69 billion people enjoyed digital journeys in 2020. Their number jumped to 2.81 billion in 2021. This data co… | Continue reading
I loved Joe Carlsmith’s blog post on "the innocent gene". It’s a post about perspective shifts. One of them occurs when, as Dawkins suggested, we shift from thinking about organisms as agents, and st… | Continue reading
Socrates and Glaucon are walking down from the Acropolis, when they encounter a stranger from a distant land. • Caplan: Greetings, Socrates. … | Continue reading
[Previously called Rational Breaks. See comments for name discussion] … | Continue reading
What if the brain is highly efficient? To be more specific, there are several interconnected key measures of efficiency for physical learning machines: … | Continue reading
Immune: A journey into the mysterious system that keeps you alive, by Philipp Dettmer, is a cross between a high-school biology textbook and an epic two-part saga. At its core there are two stories,… | Continue reading
Since the early 21st century, some transhumanist proponents and futuristic researchers claim that Whole Brain Emulation (WBE) is not merely science fiction - although still hypothetical, it's said to… | Continue reading
And for all this, nature is never spent… • — Gerard Manley Hopkins • Summary: … | Continue reading
TL;DR: The wonderful tradition of playing chess drunk, Marr's levels of analysis, AlphaZero, and Iterated Amplification and Distillation. … | Continue reading
I hear friends reasoning, “I’ll get covid eventually and long covid probablyisn’t that bad; therefore it’s not worth much to avoid it now”. Here are somethings informing my sense that that’s an error:A. Really bad anecdotes aren’t hard to find.I asked for people’s long-covid expe … | Continue reading
The Clumsy Game-PlayerYou and a partner are playing an Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. Both of you havepublicly pre-committed to the tit-for-tat strategy. By iteration 5, you're goinghappily along, raking up the bonuses of cooperation, when your partnerunexpectedly presses the "defe … | Continue reading
I recently came across the short essay below by George Eliot, the male pen nameof Victorian author Mary Ann Evans. It's quite remarkable in its prescience ofcurrent AI debates, particularly how long the "servant-master" relationship canpersist between humans and their machines.Wh … | Continue reading
The first nuclear bomb had a immediate impact on world affairs. The first steamengine did not. It took decades for the steam engine to transform civilization.Why? Because of math.The engineers at the Manhattan Project built a working nuclear device on theirfirst try because they … | Continue reading
"Do you believe in the American Dream?" my brother asked.I looked out the airplane window. Y-Combinator (YC) had paid for our tickets.Our application had been good enough to qualify us for a ten-minute interview inSilicon Valley. If we passed the interview we'd receive $120k in f … | Continue reading
I love Less Wrong's Frontpage comment guidelines. I especially love the firstguideline "Aim to explain, not persuade". The guideline averts arguments,improves my persuasiveness and enhances my intellectual triage.INTELLECTUAL TRIAGEIt is easy to tell if a field is garbage when yo … | Continue reading
It’s the holidays, which means it’s also “teach technology to your elderlyrelatives” season. Most of my elderly relatives are pretty smart, and weretechnically advanced in their day. Some were engineers or coders back when thatwas rare. When I was a kid they were often early adop … | Continue reading
How’s it going?The CDC nowcast last week was 2.7% Omicron. That seemed like a reasonable guess.The CDC nowcast this week is 73% Omicron, and last week’s nowcast got revisedfrom 2.7% to 12.6%.That’s two retroactive extra doublings last week, and then four more in thefollowing seve … | Continue reading
This is a reference post for the Law of No Evidence.Scott Alexander did us all a public service this week with his post The Phrase“No Evidence” Is a Red Flag for Bad Science Communication. If you have not yetread it I recommend doing so, and it is an excellent link to have handy … | Continue reading
I would like to know whether I should delay having children to take advantage ofpolygenic screening technology. I imagine this could be valuable for otheraspiring parents to know as well, and would (probably) have positive externalityfor aspiring parents to know this. Might also … | Continue reading
Here are some better worlds we might have lived in, but don’t. 1. In a better world, I could focus on this full time and also maybe even hire a research assistant, and be better able to scour for information. 2. In a better world than that, there would be a department at a new … | Continue reading
Once I realized that my attention was even scarcer than my time, I became ananti-distraction fanatic. During my weekly reviews I methodically went throughmy past week, figured out what had been distracting me, and tried to eliminateit or replace it with something less distracting … | Continue reading