It is January 2020. 

Is it OK for LW admins to look at DM metadata for spam prevention reasons? 

Sometimes new users show up and spam a bunch of other users in DMs (in particular high-profile users). We can't limit DM usage to only users with activity on the site, because many valuable DMs get sent by people who don't want to post publicly. We have some basic rate limits for DMs, but of course those can't capture many forms of harassment or spam. 

Right now, admins can only see how many DMs users have sent, and not who users have messaged, without making a whole manual... (read more)

Could mech interp ever be as good as chain of thought?

Suppose there is 10 years of monumental progress in mechanistic interpretability. We can roughly - not exactly - explain any output that comes out of a neural network. We can do experiments where we put our AIs in interesting situations and make a very good guess at their hidden reasons for doing the things they do.

Doesn't this sound a bit like where we currently are with models that operate with a hidden chain of thought? If you don't think that an AGI built with the current fingers-crossed-its-faithful paradigm would be safe, what percentage an outcome would mech interp have to hit to beat that?

Seems like 99+ to me.

You should say "timelines" instead of "your timelines".

One thing I notice in AI safety career and strategy discussions is that there is a lot of epistemic helplessness in regard to AGI timelines. People often talk about "your timelines" instead of "timelines" when giving advice, even if they disagree strongly with the timelines. I think this habit causes people to ignore disagreements in unhelpful ways.

Here's one such conversation:

Bob: Should I do X if my timelines are 10 years?

Alice (who has 4 year timelines): I think X makes sense if your timelines are l... (read more)

Physical object.

I might (20%) make a run of buttons that say how long since you pressed them. eg so I can push the button in the morning when I have put in my anti-baldness hair stuff and then not have to wonder whether I did.

Would you be interested in buying such a thing?

Perhaps they have a dry wipe section so you can write what the button is for.

If you would, can you upvote the attached comment.

I decided to conduct an experiment at neurips this year: I randomly surveyed people walking around in the conference hall to ask whether they had heard of AGI

I found that out of 38 respondents, only 24 could tell me what AGI stands for (63%)

we live in a bubble

(https://x.com/nabla_theta/status/1869144832595431553)

Should LessWrong have an anonymous mode? When reading a post or comments, is it useful to have the username or does that introduce bias?

I had this thought after reading this review of LessWrong: https://nathanpmyoung.substack.com/p/lesswrong-expectations-vs-reality

Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking is claimed to 'transparently show its thought process' (in contrast to o1, which only shows a summary): https://x.com/denny_zhou/status/1869815229078745152. This might be at least a bit helpful in terms of studying how faithful (e.g. vs. steganographic, etc.) the Chains of Thought are.   

[this is a draft. I strongly welcome comments]

The Latent Military Realities of the Coming Taiwan Crisis

A blockade of Taiwan seems significantly more likely than a full-scale invasion. The US's non-intervention in Ukraine suggests similar restraint might occur with Taiwan. 

Nevertheless, Metaculus predicts a 65% chance of US military response to a Chinese invasion and separately gives 20-50% for some kind of Chinese military intervention by 2035. Let us imagine that the worst comes to pass and China and the United States are engaged in a hot war?

China's... (read more)

I *despise* the category of "social construction." "Race is a social construct." "Gender is a social construct."

It confusingly conflates these four:

- Socially Constituted: Something that only exists because we say it does conceptually.

- Socially Caused: A thing in the world that only exists because we chose to make it exist.

- Socially Chunked: Something that exists as a spectrum in the real world that we—with some arbitrariness—chunk into discrete categories.

- Socially Charged: Something that exists in the real world that we decide to assign social importa... (read more)

I recently stopped using a sleep mask and blackout curtains and went from needing 9 hours of sleep to needing 7.5 hours of sleep without a noticeable drop in productivity. Consider experimenting with stuff like this.

Ok, I really don't get why my post announcing my book got downvoted (ignored is one thing, downvoted quite another)...

Update: when I made this post the original post was on 5 Karma and out of the frontpage. Now it's 15 Karma, which is about what I expected it to get, given that it's not a core topic of LW and doesn't have a lot of information (though I now added some more information at the end), so I'm happy. Just a bit of a bummer that I had to make this post to get the original post out of the pit of obscurity it was pushed into by noise.

How to Poison the Water?

I think we've all heard the saying about the fish and the water (the joke goes, and old fish asks young fish about the water, and the the young fish ask "what's water?).

I'm curious the key failure modes or methods that tend to "poison the water", or destroy/alter an organization/scene's culture or norms negatively. Are there major patterns that communities tend to fall into as they self destruct? 

Would love for anyone to share resources or general reflections on this- I'm currently part of a (unrelated) community where I see th... (read more)

I just saw a post from AI Digest on a Self-Awareness benchmark and I just thought, "holy fuck, I'm so happy someone is on top of this".

I noticed a deep gratitude for the alignment community for taking this problem so seriously. I personally see many good futures but that’s to some extent built on the trust I have in this community. I'm generally incredibly impressed by the rigorous standards of thinking, and the amount of work that's been produced.

When I was a teenager I wanted to join a community of people who worked their ass off in order to make sure hu... (read more)

Parable of the Purple Creatures

Some Medieval townsfolk thought witches were poisoning their wells. Witches, of course, are people—often ugly—who are in league with Satan, can do magic, and have an affinity for broomsticks. These villagers wanted to catch the witches so they could punish them. Everyone in the town felt that witches should be punished. So they set up a commission to investigate the matter.

Well, it turned out little purple alien creatures were poisoning their wells. 

They *weren’t* human. 

They *couldn’t* do magic. 

They *weren’t*... (read more)