AlexMennen

People sometimes wonder whether certain AIs or animals are conscious/sentient/sapient/have qualia/etc. I don't think that such questions are coherent. Consciousness is a concept that humans developed for reasoning about humans. It's a useful concept, not because it is ontologically fundamental, but because different humans have lots of close similarities in...

Cryonics Institute and Suspended Animation now have an arrangement where Suspended Animation will conduct a field cryopreservation before shipping the body to Cryonics Institute, thus decreasing tissue damage occuring in transit. They are raising their prices accordingly, but offering a discount from the new price for people who sign up...

A forecaster is well-calibrated if, for every p∈[0,1], of the propositions that they assign probability approximately p to, the fraction of them that are true is approximately p. However, there is no natural probability distribution over propositions, so this notion is not well-defined. Often, people aren't even using an implicit...

Produced as part of the SERI ML Alignment Theory Scholars Program - Winter 2022 Cohort Introduction I think that Discovering Latent Knowledge in Language Models Without Supervision (DLK; Burns, Ye, Klein, & Steinhardt, 2022) is a very cool paper – it proposes a way to do unsupervised mind reading[1] –...

If you’re working in alignment research, or would like to be, and you would like help finding researchers with whom to collaborate, this event is for you. Inspired by the structure of a speed-dating event, participants will spend the first two hours in short one-on-one conversations with each other, changing...

Suppose you know what outcomes are better than what other outcomes, but not by how much. Given two possible actions you could take, A and B, if you know what probability distributions over outcomes each of them results in, this doesn't necessarily help you pick which is better. Being able...

Let's say you want to assign a probability to some proposition X. Maybe you think about what odds you'd accept bets at, and decide you'd bet on X at 1:99 odds against X, and you'd bet against X at 1:9 odds against X. This implies you think the probability of...