LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

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"Dear Self; we need to talk about ambition" by Elizabeth Aug 30, 2023

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I keep seeing advice on ambition, aimed at people in college or early in their career, that would have been really bad for me at similar ages. Rather than contribute (more) to the list of people giving poorly universalized advice on ambition, I have written a letter to the one person I know my advice is right for: myself in the past.
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uGDtroD26aLvHSoK2/dear-self-we-need-to-talk-about-ambition-1
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"Assume Bad Faith" by Zack_M_Davis Aug 27, 2023

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I've been trying to avoid the terms "good faith" and "bad faith". I'm suspicious that most people who have picked up the phrase "bad faith" from hearing it used, don't actually know what it means—and maybe, that the thing it does mean doesn't carve reality at the joints.

People get very touchy about bad faith accusations: they think that you should assume good faith, but that if you've determined someone is in bad faith, you shouldn't even be talking to them, that you need to exile them.

What does "bad faith" mean, though? It doesn't mean "with ill intent."
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pZrvkZzL2JnbRgEBC/feedbackloop-first-rationality
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"Book Launch: "The Carving of Reality," Best of LessWrong vol. III" by Raemon Aug 27, 2023

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The Carving of Reality, third volume of the Best of LessWrong books is now available on Amazon (US).

The Carving of Reality includes 43 essays from 29 authors. We've collected the essays into four books, each exploring two related topics. The "two intertwining themes" concept was first inspired when as I looked over the cluster of "coordination" themed posts, and noting a recurring motif of not only "solving coordination problems" but also "dealing with the binding constraints that were causing those coordination problems."
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Rck5CvmYkzWYxsF4D/book-launch-the-carving-of-reality-best-of-lesswrong-vol-iii
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"Large Language Models will be Great for Censorship" by Ethan Edwards Aug 23, 2023

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LLMs can do many incredible things. They can generate unique creative content, carry on long conversations in any number of subjects, complete complex cognitive tasks, and write nearly any argument. More mundanely, they are now the state of the art for boring classification tasks and therefore have the capability to radically upgrade the censorship capacities of authoritarian regimes throughout the world.
Produced as part of the SERI ML Alignment Theory Scholars Program - Summer 2023 Cohort. Thanks to ev_ and Kei for suggestions on this post.
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oqvsR2LmHWamyKDcj/large-language-models-will-be-great-for-censorship
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"6 non-obvious mental health issues specific to AI safety" by Igor Ivanov Aug 22, 2023

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Intro: I am a psychotherapist, and I help people working on AI safety. I noticed patterns of mental health issues highly specific to this group. It's not just doomerism, there are way more of them that are less obvious.

If you struggle with a mental health issue related to AI safety, feel free to leave a comment about it and about things that help you with it. You might also support others in the comments. Sometimes such support makes a lot of difference and people feel like they are not alone.
All the examples in this post are changed in a way that it's impossible to recognize a specific person behind them.
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tpLzjWqG2iyEgMGfJ/6-non-obvious-mental-health-issues-specific-to-ai-safety
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"Ten Thousand Years of Solitude" by agp Aug 22, 2023

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This is a linkpost for the article "Ten Thousand Years of Solitude", written by Jared Diamond for Discover Magazine in 1993, four years before he published Guns, Germs and Steel. That book focused on Diamond's theory that the geography of Eurasia, particularly its large size and common climate, allowed civilizations there to dominate the rest of the world because it was easy to share plants, animals, technologies and ideas. This article, however, examines the opposite extreme.

Diamond looks at the intense isolation of the tribes on Tasmania - an island the size of Ireland. After waters rose, Tasmania was cut off from mainland Australia. As the people there did not have boats, they were completely isolated, and did not have any contact - or awareness - of the outside world for ten thousand years.

How might a civilization develop, all on its own, for such an incredible period of time?
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YwMaAuLJDkhazA9Cs/ten-thousand-years-of-solitude
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"Against Almost Every Theory of Impact of Interpretability" by Charbel-Raphaël Aug 20, 2023

Show notes

I gave a talk about the different risk models, followed by an interpretability presentation, then I got a problematic question, "I don't understand, what's the point of doing this?" Hum.

Feature viz? (left image) Um, it's pretty but is this useful?[1] Is this reliable?
GradCam (a pixel attribution technique, like on the above right figure), it's pretty. But I’ve never seen anybody use it in industry.[2] Pixel attribution seems useful, but accuracy remains the king.[3]
Induction heads? Ok, we are maybe on track to retro engineer the mechanism of regex in LLMs. Cool.

The considerations in the last bullet points are based on feeling and are not real arguments. Furthermore, most mechanistic interpretability isn't even aimed at being useful right now. But in the rest of the post, we'll find out if, in principle, interpretability could be useful. So let's investigate if the Interpretability Emperor has invisible clothes or no clothes at all!
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LNA8mubrByG7SFacm/against-almost-every-theory-of-impact-of-interpretability-1
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"Feedbackloop-first Rationality" by Raemon Aug 15, 2023

Show notes

I've been workshopping a new rationality training paradigm. (By "rationality training paradigm", I mean an approach to learning/teaching the skill of "noticing what cognitive strategies are useful, and getting better at them.")

I think the paradigm has promise. I've beta-tested it for a couple weeks. It’s too early to tell if it actually works, but one of my primary goals is to figure out if it works relatively quickly, and give up if it isn’t not delivering.

The goal of this post is to:

Convey the framework
See if people find it compelling in its current form
Solicit ideas for improvements, before I decide whether to invest heavily into a larger experiment around it.

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pZrvkZzL2JnbRgEBC/feedbackloop-first-rationality
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"Inflection.ai is a major AGI lab" by Nikola Aug 15, 2023

Show notes

Inflection.ai (co-founded by DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman) should be perceived as a frontier LLM lab of similar magnitude as Meta, OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic based on their compute, valuation, current model capabilities, and plans to train frontier models. Compared to the other labs, Inflection seems to put less effort into AI safety.

Thanks to Laker Newhouse for discussion and feedback.
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Wc5BYFfzuLzepQjCq/inflection-ai-is-a-major-agi-lab
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"Model Organisms of Misalignment: The Case for a New Pillar of Alignment Research" by evhub, Nicholas Schiefer, Carson Denison, Ethan Perez Aug 09, 2023

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TL;DR: This document lays out the case for research on “model organisms of misalignment” – in vitro demonstrations of the kinds of failures that might pose existential threats – as a new and important pillar of alignment research.

If you’re interested in working on this agenda with us at Anthropic, we’re hiring! Please apply to the research scientist or research engineer position on the Anthropic website and mention that you’re interested in working on model organisms of misalignment.
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ChDH335ckdvpxXaXX/model-organisms-of-misalignment-the-case-for-a-new-pillar-of-1
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