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Jul 9, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Garrett Baker
I happen to be in that happy stage in the research cycle where I ask for money so I can continue to work on things I think are important. Part of that means justifying what I want to work on to the satisfaction of the people who provide that money.
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Jun 7, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | David Lorell |Garrett Baker
Coming from another direction: a 50-bit update can turn Q into P, or vice-versa. So one thing this example shows is that natural latents, as they’re currently formulated, are not necessarily robust to even relatively small updates, since 50 bits can quite dramatically change a distribution. Are you sure this is undesired behavior?
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May 23, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Garrett Baker
TLDR: AI systems are failing in obvious and manageable ways for now. Fixing them will push the failure modes beyond our ability to understand and anticipate, let alone fix. The AI safety community is also doing a huge economic service to developers. Our belief that our minds can "fix" a super-intelligence - especially bit by bit - needs to be re-thought. I wanted to write this post forever, but now seems like a good time. The case is simple, I hope it takes you 1min to read.
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May 13, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Maxwell Tabarrok |Garrett Baker |Ramblin Dash |Rob Lucas
A stance against student debt cancellation doesn’t rely on the assumptions of any single ideology. Strong cases against student debt cancellation can be made based on the fundamental values of any section of the political compass. In no particular order, here are some arguments against student debt cancellation from the perspectives of many disparate ideologies. Student debt cancellation is a massive subsidy to an already prosperous and privileged population.
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Apr 4, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Garrett Baker
Ok, I can see why some of these would have stuff in common with others. Physics brings in a bunch of math you can use. Economics and sociology both tackle similar questions with very different techniques. It would be interesting to look at what they can tell each other (though it seems strange to spin off a brand new field out of this). Biology, evolution, and ecology? Sure.
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Apr 1, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Garrett Baker
Lets face it, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, and you can't start a worldwide social and political movement without creating a few power-hungry sociopaths. We get it. It hard, but its necessary. Whether it be dictators or dictresses; terrorists or terrorettes; fraudsters or fraudines. Every great social movement does and did it.
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Apr 1, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Garrett Baker
TL;DR: We are excited to announce the new animal welfare organization Suffering For Good, a new factory farming charity aimed at vegans, where we use our excess profits to buy suffering offsets--in particular, an enormous number of rats on heroin. For decades, even centuries, us vegans have been trying but failing to get the world to stop eating & torturing sentient minds that can definitely feel pain & suffer. But the global number of such minds tortured & killed just keeps on increasing.
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Mar 18, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Garrett Baker
I've been in many conversations where I've mentioned the idea of using neuroscience for outer alignment, and the people who I'm talking to usually seem pretty confused about why I would want to do that. Well, I'm confused about why one wouldn't want to do that, and in this post I explain why. As far as I see it, there are three main strategies people have for trying to deal with AI alignment in worlds where AI alignment is hard.
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Mar 8, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Igor Ivanov |Garrett Baker |Nathan Helm-Burger
TLDRI applied for funding from the EA Infrastructure Fund. They promised to give me their decision in a month, but they only kind of approved my application in 3 months. A month later they explained that they didn't actually approve my application, and I still have to wait for their final decision. It's almost 5 months since I applied, and I'm still waiting.
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Jan 22, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Michael Roe |Garrett Baker |Thomas Kwa |Tao Lin
Crossposted from substack. As we all know, sugar is sweet and so are the $30B in yearly revenue from the artificial sweetener industry. Four billion years of evolution endowed our brains with a simple, straightforward mechanism to make sure we occasionally get an energy refuel so we can continue the foraging a little longer, and of course we are completely ignoring the instructions and spend billions on fake fuel that doesn’t actually grant any energy. A classic case of the Human Alignment Problem.
