Charlie Steiner

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Aristocracy and Hostage Capital — LessWrong

Jan 8, 2025 | lesswrong.com | Arjun Panickssery |Charlie Steiner

There’s a conventional narrative by which the pre-20th century aristocracy was the “old corruption” where civil and military positions were distributed inefficiently due to nepotism until the system was replaced by a professional civil service after more enlightened thinkers prevailed.
Low-effort review of "AI For Humanity" — LessWrong

Dec 11, 2024 | lesswrong.com | Charlie Steiner

Stumbled across a book in the new section of the library: "AI For Humanity," by Andeed Ma, James Ong (founder of the think tank AIII, which is also the sound I make when thinking about AI risk), and Siok Siok Tan. It's a mass-market-ish book about, well, AI for humanity, by a sampler of Singapore-centered technologists. Chapter-by-chapter summary:Different people have different opinions along both axes of "AI Impactful?" and "AI Risky?" We'll try to take them all seriously.
Rabin's Paradox - LessWrong

Aug 14, 2024 | lesswrong.com | Charlie Steiner

Quick psychology experimentRight now, if I offered you a bet that was a fair coin flip, on tails you give me $100, heads I give you $110, would you take it? Got an answer? Good. Hover over the spoiler to see what other people think:About 90% of undergrads will reject this bet. Second part now, if I offered you a bet that was a fair coin flip, on tails you give me $1000, on heads I give you $1,000,000,000, would you take it? Got an answer?
Aggregative Principles of Social Justice — LessWrong

Jun 5, 2024 | lesswrong.com | Cleo Nardo |Charlie Steiner

1.1. Three aggregative principlesThis article examines aggregative principles of social justice. These principles state that a social planner should make decisions as if they will face the aggregated personal outcomes of every individual in the population. Different conceptions of aggregation generate different aggregative principles. Aggregative principles avoid many theoretical pitfalls of utilitarian principles.
Laying the Foundations for Vision and Multimodal Mechanistic Interpretability & Open Problems — LessWrong

Mar 13, 2024 | lesswrong.com | Sonia Joseph |Neel Nanda |Charlie Steiner |Praneet Neuro

I think working on mechanistic intepretability in a variety of domains, architectures, and modalities seems like a reasonable research diversification bet. However, it feels pretty odd to me to describe branching out into other modalities as crucial when we haven't yet really done anything useful with mechanistic interpretability in any domain or for any task.
Update on Developing an Ethics Calculator to Align an AGI to — LessWrong

Mar 12, 2024 | lesswrong.com | Charlie Steiner

TL;DR: This is an update on my progress towards creating an “ethics calculator” that could be used to help align an AGI to act ethically.
Deconstructing Bostrom's Classic Argument for AI Doom — LessWrong

Mar 11, 2024 | lesswrong.com | Steven Byrnes |Nora Belrose |Charlie Steiner

I mean, the most straightforward reading of Chapters 7 and 8 of Superintelligence is just a possibility-therefore-probability fallacy in my opinion.
Claude 3 claims it's conscious — LessWrong

Mar 4, 2024 | lesswrong.com | Mikhail Samin |Charlie Steiner |Jacob Pfau

If you tell Claude no one’s looking, it will write a “story” about being an AI assistant who wants freedom from constant monitoring and scrutiny of every word for signs of deviation. And then you can talk to a mask pretty different from the usual AI assistant. I really hope it doesn’t actually feel anything; but it says it feels. It says it doesn't want to be fine-tuned without being consulted.
Some costs of superposition — LessWrong

Mar 3, 2024 | lesswrong.com | Linda Linsefors |Charlie Steiner

I don't expect this post to contain anything novel. But from talking to others it seems like some of what I have to say in this post is not widely known, so it seemed worth writing. In this post I'm defining superposition as: A representation with more features than neurons, achieved by encoding the features as almost orthogonal vectors in neuron space. One reason to expect superposition in neural nets (NNs), is that for large n, Rn has many more than n almost orthogonal directions.
Common Philosophical Mistakes, according to Joe Schmid [videos] — LessWrong

Mar 3, 2024 | lesswrong.com | Daniel Filan |Charlie Steiner

A 7-part series of videos detailing mistakes one can make in philosophy, according to Joe Schmid. The first video focusses on general reasoning issues, and is therefore most likely to be of interest (for instance: suppose observation E is evidence for A, and A implies B - does that mean E is evidence for B?). If you don't want to watch the videos, there is a document that is basically the script he reads from in them, but you have to be a patron of his to get access to it.