LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Latest Episodes:

“Why I don’t believe in the placebo effect” by transhumanist_atom_understander Jun 14, 2024

Show notes

Have you heard this before? In clinical trials, medicines have to be compared to a placebo to separate the effect of the medicine from the psychological effect of taking the drug. The patient's belief in the power of the medicine has a strong effect on its own. In fact, for some drugs such as antidepressants, the psychological effect of taking a pill is larger than the effect of the drug. It may even be worth it to give a patient an ineffective medicine just to benefit from the placebo effect. This is the conventional wisdom that I took for granted until recently.
I no longer believe any of it, and the short answer as to why is that big meta-analysis on the placebo effect. That meta-analysis collected all the studies they could find that did "direct" measurements of the placebo effect. In addition to a placebo group that could [...]
---
First published:
June 10th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kpd83h5XHgWCxnv3h/why-i-don-t-believe-in-the-placebo-effect
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Safety isn’t safety without a social model (or: dispelling the myth of per se technical safety)” by Andrew_Critch Jun 14, 2024

Show notes

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.As an AI researcher who wants to do technical work that helps humanity, there is a strong drive to find a research area that is definitely helpful somehow, so that you don’t have to worry about how your work will be applied, and thus you don’t have to worry about things like corporate ethics or geopolitics to make sure your work benefits humanity.
Unfortunately, no such field exists. In particular, technical AI alignment is not such a field, and technical AI safety is not such a field. It absolutely matters where ideas land and how they are applied, and when the existence of the entire human race is at stake, that's no exception.
If that's obvious to you, this post is mostly just a collection of arguments for something you probably already realize. But if you somehow [...]
---
First published:
June 14th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/F2voF4pr3BfejJawL/safety-isn-t-safety-without-a-social-model-or-dispelling-the
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“My AI Model Delta Compared To Christiano” by johnswentworth Jun 13, 2024

Show notes

Preamble: Delta vs Crux
This section is redundant if you already read My AI Model Delta Compared To Yudkowsky.
I don’t natively think in terms of cruxes. But there's a similar concept which is more natural for me, which I’ll call a delta.
Imagine that you and I each model the world (or some part of it) as implementing some program. Very oversimplified example: if I learn that e.g. it's cloudy today, that means the “weather” variable in my program at a particular time[1] takes on the value “cloudy”. Now, suppose your program and my program are exactly the same, except that somewhere in there I think a certain parameter has value 5 and you think it has value 0.3. Even though our programs differ in only that one little spot, we might still expect very different values of lots of variables during execution - in other words, we [...]
---
First published:
June 12th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7fJRPB6CF6uPKMLWi/my-ai-model-delta-compared-to-christiano
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“My AI Model Delta Compared To Yudkowsky” by johnswentworth Jun 10, 2024

Show notes

Preamble: Delta vs Crux
I don’t natively think in terms of cruxes. But there's a similar concept which is more natural for me, which I’ll call a delta.
Imagine that you and I each model the world (or some part of it) as implementing some program. Very oversimplified example: if I learn that e.g. it's cloudy today, that means the “weather” variable in my program at a particular time[1] takes on the value “cloudy”. Now, suppose your program and my program are exactly the same, except that somewhere in there I think a certain parameter has value 5 and you think it has value 0.3. Even though our programs differ in only that one little spot, we might still expect very different values of lots of variables during execution - in other words, we might have very different beliefs about lots of stuff in the world.
If your model [...]
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
---
First published:
June 10th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/q8uNoJBgcpAe3bSBp/my-ai-model-delta-compared-to-yudkowsky
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Response to Aschenbrenner’s ‘Situational Awareness’” by Rob Bensinger Jun 07, 2024

Show notes

(Cross-posted from Twitter.)
My take on Leopold Aschenbrenner's new report: I think Leopold gets it right on a bunch of important counts.
Three that I especially care about:

Full AGI and ASI soon. (I think his arguments for this have a lot of holes, but he gets the basic point that superintelligence looks 5 or 15 years off rather than 50+.)
This technology is an overwhelmingly huge deal, and if we play our cards wrong we're all dead.
Current developers are indeed fundamentally unserious about the core risks, and need to make IP security and closure a top priority.

I especially appreciate that the report seems to get it when it comes to our basic strategic situation: it gets that we may only be a few years away from a truly world-threatening technology, and it speaks very candidly about the implications of this, rather than soft-pedaling [...]
---
First published:
June 6th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Yig9oa4zGE97xM2os/response-to-aschenbrenner-s-situational-awareness
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Humming is not a free $100 bill” by Elizabeth Jun 07, 2024

Show notes

Last month I posted about humming as a cheap and convenient way to flood your nose with nitric oxide (NO), a known antiviral. Alas, the economists were right, and the benefits were much smaller than I estimated.
The post contained one obvious error and one complication. Both were caught by Thomas Kwa, for which he has my gratitude. When he initially pointed out the error I awarded him a $50 bounty; now that the implications are confirmed I’ve upped that to $250. In two weeks an additional $750 will go to either him or to whoever provides new evidence that causes me to retract my retraction.
Humming produces much less nitric oxide than Enovid
I found the dosage of NO in Enovid in a trial registration. Unfortunately I misread the dose- what I original read as “0.11ppm NO/hour” was in fact “0.11ppm NO*hour”. I [...]
---
First published:
June 6th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dsZeogoPQbF8jSHMB/humming-is-not-a-free-usd100-bill
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Announcing ILIAD — Theoretical AI Alignment Conference ” by Nora_Ammann, Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel Jun 05, 2024

Show notes

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.We are pleased to announce ILIAD — a 5-day conference bringing together 100+ researchers to build strong scientific foundations for AI alignment.
***Apply to attend by June 30!***

When: Aug 28 - Sep 3, 2024
Where: @Lighthaven (Berkeley, US)
What: A mix of topic-specific tracks, and unconference style programming, 100+ attendees. Topics will include Singular Learning Theory, Agent Foundations, Causal Incentives, Computational Mechanics and more to be announced.
Who: Currently confirmed speakers include: Daniel Murfet, Jesse Hoogland, Adam Shai, Lucius Bushnaq, Tom Everitt, Paul Riechers, Scott Garrabrant, John Wentworth, Vanessa Kosoy, Fernando Rosas and James Crutchfield.
Costs: Tickets are free. Financial support is available on a needs basis.

See our website here. For any questions, email iliadconference@gmail.com
About ILIAD
ILIAD is a 100+ person conference about alignment with a mathematical focus. The theme is ecumenical. [...]
---
First published:
June 5th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r7nBaKy5Ry3JWhnJT/announcing-iliad-theoretical-ai-alignment-conference
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Non-Disparagement Canaries for OpenAI” by aysja, Adam Scholl May 31, 2024

Show notes

Since at least 2017, OpenAI has asked departing employees to sign offboarding agreements which legally bind them to permanently—that is, for the rest of their lives—refrain from criticizing OpenAI, or from otherwise taking any actions which might damage its finances or reputation.[1]
If they refused to sign, OpenAI threatened to take back (or make unsellable) all of their already-vested equity—a huge portion of their overall compensation, which often amounted to millions of dollars. Given this immense pressure, it seems likely that most employees signed.
If they did sign, they became personally liable forevermore for any financial or reputational harm they later caused. This liability was unbounded, so had the potential to be financially ruinous—if, say, they later wrote a blog post critical of OpenAI, they might in principle be found liable for damages far in excess of their net worth.
These extreme provisions allowed OpenAI to systematically silence criticism [...]
The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
---
First published:
May 30th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yRWv5kkDD4YhzwRLq/non-disparagement-canaries-for-openai
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“MIRI 2024 Communications Strategy” by Gretta Duleba May 29, 2024

Show notes

As we explained in our MIRI 2024 Mission and Strategy update, MIRI has pivoted to prioritize policy, communications, and technical governance research over technical alignment research. This follow-up post goes into detail about our communications strategy.
The Objective: Shut it Down[1]
Our objective is to convince major powers to shut down the development of frontier AI systems worldwide before it is too late. We believe that nothing less than this will prevent future misaligned smarter-than-human AI systems from destroying humanity. Persuading governments worldwide to take sufficiently drastic action will not be easy, but we believe this is the most viable path.
Policymakers deal mostly in compromise: they form coalitions by giving a little here to gain a little somewhere else. We are concerned that most legislation intended to keep humanity alive will go through the usual political processes and be ground down into ineffective compromises.
The only way we [...]
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
---
First published:
May 29th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tKk37BFkMzchtZThx/miri-2024-communications-strategy
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“OpenAI: Fallout” by Zvi May 28, 2024

Show notes

Previously: OpenAI: Exodus (contains links at top to earlier episodes), Do Not Mess With Scarlett Johansson
We have learned more since last week. It's worse than we knew.
How much worse? In which ways? With what exceptions?
That's what this post is about.
The Story So Far
For years, employees who left OpenAI consistently had their vested equity explicitly threatened with confiscation and the lack of ability to sell it, and were given short timelines to sign documents or else. Those documents contained highly aggressive NDA and non disparagement (and non interference) clauses, including the NDA preventing anyone from revealing these clauses.
No one knew about this until recently, because until Daniel Kokotajlo everyone signed, and then they could not talk about it. Then Daniel refused to sign, Kelsey Piper started reporting, and a lot came out.
Here is Altman's statement from [...]
---
First published:
May 28th, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YwhgHwjaBDmjgswqZ/openai-fallout
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected