"More persuasive" here means a higher win rate in debate, which I think is the same thing it would mean in any debate context? I agree the limitation to inference time rather than training is definitely important to keep in mind. I think that best-of-N using the judge as a preference model is a reasonable approximation of moderate amounts of RL training, but doing actual training would allow us to apply a lot more optimization pressure and get a wider spread of Elos. There has been some good debate RL work done in a similar setting here, and I'd love to see more research done with debate-trained models.
Thanks for the feedback Ryan!
I like this paper, but I think the abstract is somewhat overstated.
This is good to know. We were trying to present an accurate summary in the abstract while keeping it concise, which is a tricky balance. Seems like we didn’t do a good enough job here, so we’ll update the abstract to caveat the results a bit more.
Hidden passage debate on QuALITY is actually pretty narrow as far as domains go and might have pretty different properties from future cases.
Yep, agreed! QuALITY is a great testbed for debate, but we definite...
Seems weird for this to be the same time and date as the Toronto meetup. Lots of people who might have been interested in going will probably be at the one in Toronto instead.
The bottleneck in this scenario becomes brain health, as receiving a brain transplant is not very useful. I’m not sure how much of an obstacle this will be in practice.
For a high level look at quantum physics I’d recommend Something Deeply Hidden by Sean Carroll. I feel like I understand many worlds much better after reading it. If you like audiobooks this one is great too.
My employer isn’t gonna allow me to take a couple months off to go do this thing I personally am very interested in
Have you considered asking them about it? I've worked at several software jobs where this would have been no problem. I've also seen a few people take sabbaticals and there was no issue with it, their teammates generally thought it was really cool. One guy I know took a 1-year sabbatical to live in a van and drive around Europe.
This is all anecdotal and your situation may be different of course. I just wanted to add this data point as it seemed like you may be prematurely dismissing sabbaticals as some crazy thing that never happens in real life.
The worst part is, for most of these, time lost is gone forever. It's just a slowdown. Like the Thai floods simply permanently set back hard drive progress and made them expensive for a long time, there was never any 'catchup growth' or 'overhang' from it.
Isn’t this great news for AI safety due to giving us longer timelines?
I found your earlier comment in this thread insightful and I think it would be really valuable to know what evidence convinced you of these timelines. If you don't have time to summarize in a post, is there anything you could link to?
How long do you expect the event to last for? I'd love to join but this week I'll have to leave after the first hour.
Update: Black Sheep is fully booked tomorrow, so the location has changed to Kimchi Hophouse!
Declarative and procedural knowledge are two different memory systems. Spaced repetition is good for declarative knowledge, but for procedural (like playing music) you need lots of practice. Other examples include math and programming - you can learn lots of declarative knowledge about the concepts involved, but you still need to practice solving problems or writing code.
Edit: as for why practice every day - the procedural system requires a lot more practice than the declarative system does.