Nate Showell

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How are you preparing for the possibility of an AI bust? — LessWrong

Jun 23, 2024 | lesswrong.com | Nate Showell

What actions have you been taking to prepare for the possibility that the AI industry will experience a market crash, something along the lines of the dotcom bust of the early 2000s? Also, what actions would you take if a crash like that occurred? For example:If your career is strongly AI-focused, what backup plan do you have in place? If you're working on AI alignment research, how would your research agenda change? Would you switch to a different cause area altogether?
0th Person and 1st Person Logic — LessWrong

Mar 10, 2024 | lesswrong.com | Adele Lopez |Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel |Nate Showell

Truth values in classical logic have more than one interpretation. In 0th Person Logic, the truth values are interpreted as True and False. In 1st Person Logic, the truth values are interpreted as Here and Absent relative to the current reasoner. Importantly, these are both useful modes of reasoning that can coexist in a logical embedded agent.
Choosing My Quest (Part 2 of "The Sense Of Physical Necessity") — LessWrong

Feb 24, 2024 | lesswrong.com | Logan Strohl |Nate Showell

This is the second post in a sequence that demonstrates a complete naturalist study, specifically a study of query hugging (sort of), as described in The Nuts and Bolts of Naturalism. This one demos phase zero, all the preparation that's often needed before you can really get to work. It corresponds to the how-to posts "Getting Started With Naturalism" and "Catching the Spark". For context on this sequence, see the intro post.
Phallocentricity in GPT-J's bizarre stratified ontology — LessWrong

Feb 17, 2024 | lesswrong.com | Charlie Steiner |Nate Showell

TL;DR This relates to the findings reported in my posts Mapping the Semantic Void parts I and II. By creating a custom embedding at the token centroid (the mean vector of all 50,257 GPT-J token embeddings), prompting the model to define it and considering logits, it's possible to construct a "definition tree" which consists overwhelmingly of vague generalities. This is hardly surprising, as GPT-J is basically being challenged to define "the average thing".
Decaeneus's Shortform — LessWrong

Jan 26, 2024 | lesswrong.com | Zac Hatfield-Dodds |Nate Showell

Pretending not to see when a rule you've set is being violated can be optimal policy in parenting sometimes (and I bet it generalizes). Example: suppose you have a toddler and a "rule" that food only stays in the kitchen. The motivation is that each time food is brough into the living room there is a small chance of an accident resulting in a permanent stain. There's cost to enforcing the rule as the toddler will put up a fight.
FixDT - LessWrong

Nov 30, 2023 | lesswrong.com | Sylvester Kollin |Nate Showell

FixDT is not a very new decision theory, but little has been written about it afaict, and it's interesting. So I'm going to write about it. TJ asked me to write this article to "offset" not engaging with Active Inference more. The name "fixDT" is due to Scott Garrabrant, and stands for "fixed-point decision theory". Ideas here are due to Scott Garrabrant, Sam Eisenstat, me, Daniel Hermann, TJ, Sahil, and Martin Soto, in roughly that priority order; but heavily filtered through my own lens.
On Tapping Out - LessWrong

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.
The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor — LessWrong

Jul 26, 2023 | lesswrong.com | Steven Byrnes |Nate Showell

From the post: For the first time in the world, we succeeded in synthesizing the room-temperature superconductor ( K, 127C) working at ambient pressure with a modified lead-apatite (LK-99) structure. The superconductivity of LK-99 is proved with the Critical temperature (), Zero-resistivity, Critical current (), Critical magnetic field (), and the Meissner effect.