-
Apr 4, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Gerald M. Monroe |Victor Ashioya |M. Y. Zuo |Nora Belrose
Summary: the moderators appear to be soft banning users with 'rate-limits' without feedback. A careful review of each banned user reveals it's common to be banned despite earnestly attempting to contribute to the site. Some of the most intelligent banned users have mainstream instead of EA views on AI. Note how the punishment lengths are all the same, I think it was a mass ban-wave of 3 week bans:Gears to ascension was here but is no longer, guess she convinced them it was a mistake.
-
Jan 28, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Nathan Helm-Burger |Carl Feynman |M. Y. Zuo
Inspired by Milan Cvitkovic’s article, Things You’re Allowed to Do.Going to the dentist can be uncomfortable. Some amount of this is unavoidable. Yet most dentists and staff care a lot about patient comfort. Tell them what you need, and you may very well get it!The hardest part is figuring out what’s on the menu. Below are some items that I’ve discovered.
-
Jan 2, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Joe Carlsmith |Charlie Steiner |M. Y. Zuo |Nathan Young
(Cross-posted from my website. Audio version here, or search "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app. This is the first essay in a series that I’m calling “Otherness and control in the age of AGI.” See here for more about the series as a whole.)When species meetThe most succinct argument for AI risk, in my opinion, is the “second species” argument. Basically, it goes like this. Premise 1: AGIs would be like a second advanced species on earth, more powerful than humans. Conclusion: That’s scary.
-
Dec 30, 2023 | 
lesswrong.com | Ben Pace |Light Star |M. Y. Zuo
Or “How I got my hyperanalytical friends to chill out and vibe on ideas for 5 minutes before testing them to destruction”Sometimes talking with my friends is like intellectual combat, which is great. I am glad I have such strong cognitive warriors on my side. But not all ideas are ready for intellectual combat. If I don’t get my friend on board with this, some of them will crush an idea before it gets a chance to develop, which feels awful and can kill off promising avenues of investigation.
-
Nov 27, 2023 | 
lesswrong.com | Steven Byrnes |Zach Stein-Perlman |M. Y. Zuo |Thane Ruthenis
SummaryYou can’t optimise an allocation of resources if you don’t know what the current one is. Existing maps of alignment research are mostly too old to guide you and the field has nearly no ratchet, no common knowledge of what everyone is doing and why, what is abandoned and why, what is renamed, what relates to what, what is going on. This post is mostly just a big index: a link-dump for as many currently active AI safety agendas as we could find. But even a linkdump is plenty subjective.
-
Nov 17, 2023 | 
lesswrong.com | M. Y. Zuo |Nate Showell
I. It has been said that rationality is akin to a martial art. Very well. If we're going to borrow from martial arts, let us borrow properly. There is a technique known in some parts of the rationalist community called "Tapping Out." Tapping out in this context means you would like to exit an argument or debate. I believe this technique was first imported to LessWrong in this comment by Rain, and it is defined in this tag.
-
Nov 8, 2023 | 
lesswrong.com | M. Y. Zuo
I. I'm sure Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality taught me some of the obvious, overt things it set out to teach. Looking back on it a decade after I first read it however, what strikes me most strongly are often the brief, tossed off bits in the middle of the flow of a story. Fred and George exchanged worried glances. "I can't think of anything," said George. "Neither can I," said Fred. "Sorry."Harry stared at them. And then Harry began to explain how you went about thinking of things.
-
Sep 25, 2023 | 
lesswrong.com | Steven Byrnes |M. Y. Zuo |Seth Herd |Garrett Baker
There’s a popular argument that says: It’s bad to talk about whether future AI algorithms might cause human extinction, because that would be a distraction from the fact that current AI algorithms are right now causing or exacerbating societal problems (misinformation, deepfakes, political polarization, algorithmic bias, maybe job losses, etc.) For example, Melanie Mitchell makes this argument (link & my reply here), as does Blake Richards (link & my reply here), as does Daron Acemoglu (link...
-
Sep 4, 2023 | 
lesswrong.com | M. Y. Zuo |Sinclair Chen
Confessions of an ex-ACABUntil about five years ago, I unironically parroted the slogan All Cops Are Bastards (ACAB) and earnestly advocated to abolish the police and prison system. I had faint inklings I might be wrong about this a long time ago, but it took a while to come to terms with its disavowal. What follows is intended to be not just a detailed account of what I used to believe but most pertinently, why.
-
Sep 2, 2023 | 
lesswrong.com | M. Y. Zuo
tl;dr: The more knowledge you have, the smaller the button you need to press to achieve desired results. This is what makes moth traps formidable killing machines, and it's a good analogy for other formidable killing machines I could mention. TrapsI was shopping for moth traps earlier today, and it struck me how ruthlessly efficient humans could be in designing their killing apparatus.
