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undefined — **“How I Learned To Stop Trusting Prediction Markets and Love the Arbitrage” by orthonormal** Aug 08, 2024
Show notes

This is a story about a flawed Manifold market, about how easy it is to buy significant objective-sounding publicity for your preferred politics, and about why I've downgraded my respect for all but the largest prediction markets.
I've had a Manifold account for a while, but I didn't use it much until I saw and became irked by this market on the conditional probabilities of a Harris victory, split by VP pick.
Jeb Bush? Really? That's not even a fun kind of wishful thinking for anyone. Please clap.The market quickly got cited by rat-adjacent folks on Twitter like Matt Yglesias, because the question it purports to answer is enormously important. But as you can infer from the above, it has a major issue that makes it nigh-useless: for a candidate whom you know won't be chosen, there is literally no way to come out ahead on mana (Manifold keeps [...]
The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.
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First published:
August 6th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/awKbxtfFAfu7xDXdQ/how-i-learned-to-stop-trusting-prediction-markets-and-love
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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**Images from the article:**
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“This is already your second chance” by Malmesbury Aug 07, 2024

Show notes

Cross-posted from Substack.
1.
And the sky opened, and from the celestial firmament descended a cube of ivory the size of a skyscraper, lifted by ten thousand cherubim and seraphim. And the cube slowly landed among the children of men, crushing the frail metal beams of the Golden Gate Bridge under its supernatural weight. On its surface were inscribed the secret instructions that would allow humanity to escape the imminent AI apocalypse. And these instructions were…

On July 30th, 2024: print a portrait of Eliezer Yudkowsky and stick it on a wall near 14 F St NW, Washington DC, USA;
On July 31th, 2024: tie paperclips together in a chain and wrap it around a pole in the Hobby Club Gnome Village on Broekveg 105, Veldhoven, NL;
On August 1st, 2024: walk East to West along Waverley St, Palo Alto, CA, USA while wearing an AI-safety related T-shirt;
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First published:
July 28th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BgTsxMq5bgzKTLsLA/this-is-already-your-second-chance
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“0. CAST: Corrigibility as Singular Target” by Max Harms Aug 07, 2024

Show notes

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.What the heck is up with “corrigibility”? For most of my career, I had a sense that it was a grab-bag of properties that seemed nice in theory but hard to get in practice, perhaps due to being incompatible with agency.
Then, last year, I spent some time revisiting my perspective, and I concluded that I had been deeply confused by what corrigibility even was. I now think that corrigibility is a single, intuitive property, which people can learn to emulate without too much work and which is deeply compatible with agency. Furthermore, I expect that even with prosaic training methods, there's some chance of winding up with an AI agent that's inclined to become more corrigible over time, rather than less (as long as the people who built it understand corrigibility and want that agent [...]
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Outline:
(07:30) Overview
(07:33) 1. The CAST Strategy
(08:15) 2. Corrigibility Intuition (Coming Saturday)
(08:49) 3a. Towards Formal Corrigibility (Coming Sunday)
(09:27) 3. Formal (Faux) Corrigibility ← the mathy one (Also Sunday)
(10:12) 4. Existing Writing on Corrigibility (Coming Monday)
(10:33) 5. Open Corrigibility Questions (Also Monday)
(10:58) Bibliography and Miscellany
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First published:
June 7th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NQK8KHSrZRF5erTba/0-cast-corrigibility-as-singular-target-1
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“You don’t know how bad most things are nor precisely how they’re bad.” by Solenoid_Entity Aug 07, 2024

Show notes

TL;DR: Your discernment in a subject often improves as you dedicate time and attention to that subject. The space of possible subjects is huge, so on average your discernment is terrible, relative to what it could be. This is a serious problem if you create a machine that does everyone's job for them.
See also: Reality has a surprising amount of detail. (You lack awareness of how bad your staircase is and precisely how your staircase is bad.) You don't know what you don't know. You forget your own blind spots, shortly after you notice them.
An afternoon with a piano tuner
I recently played in an orchestra, as a violinist accompanying a piano soloist who was playing a concerto. My 'stand partner' (the person I was sitting next to) has a day job as a piano tuner.
I loved the rehearsal, and heard nothing at all wrong with [...]
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Outline:
(00:42) An afternoon with a piano tuner
(02:56) Hear how it rolls over?
(03:43) Are any of these notes brighter than others?
(04:31) Yeah the beats get slower, but they dont get slower at an even rate...
(05:19) This string probably has some rust on it somewhere.
(06:55) Please at least listen to this guy when you create a robotic piano tuner and put him out of business.
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First published:
August 4th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PJu2HhKsyTEJMxS9a/you-don-t-know-how-bad-most-things-are-nor-precisely-how
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“‘AI achieves silver-medal standard solving International Mathematical Olympiad problems’” by gjm Jul 30, 2024

Show notes

This is a link post.Google DeepMind reports on a system for solving mathematical problems that allegedly is able to give complete solutions to four of the six problems on the 2024 IMO, putting it near the top of the silver-medal category.
Well, actually, two systems for solving mathematical problems: AlphaProof, which is more general-purpose, and AlphaGeometry, which is specifically for geometry problems. (This is AlphaGeometry 2; they reported earlier this year on a previous version of AlphaGeometry.)
AlphaProof works in the "obvious" way: an LLM generates candidate next steps which are checked using a formal proof-checking system, in this case Lean. One not-so-obvious thing, though: "The training loop was also applied during the contest, reinforcing proofs of self-generated variations of the contest problems until a full solution could be found."[EDITED to add:] Or maybe it doesn't work in the "obvious" way. As cubefox points out in the comments [...]
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First published:
July 25th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TyCdgpCfX7sfiobsH/ai-achieves-silver-medal-standard-solving-international
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Universal Basic Income and Poverty” by Eliezer Yudkowsky Jul 27, 2024

Show notes

(Crossposted from Twitter)
I'm skeptical that Universal Basic Income can get rid of grinding poverty, since somehow humanity's 100-fold productivity increase (since the days of agriculture) didn't eliminate poverty.
Some of my friends reply, "What do you mean, poverty is still around? 'Poor' people today, in Western countries, have a lot to legitimately be miserable about, don't get me wrong; but they also have amounts of clothing and fabric that only rich merchants could afford a thousand years ago; they often own more than one pair of shoes; why, they even have cellphones, as not even an emperor of the olden days could have had at any price. They're relatively poor, sure, and they have a lot of things to be legitimately sad about. But in what sense is almost-anyone in a high-tech country 'poor' by the standards of a thousand years earlier? Maybe UBI works the same way [...]
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First published:
July 26th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fPvssZk3AoDzXwfwJ/universal-basic-income-and-poverty
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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