Donald Hobson

A post that is going to be part of my sequence on rethinking programming languages. The baisc idea A compiler is a piece of machine code C, that takes as input a text string describing a program p and returns the compiled machine code C(p) Let Opt be a function...

So there is this meme going around, that of the shoggoth. But one of the downsides of this model is that it's very vague about what is behind the mask. A Jukebox was an old machine that would pick up vinyl records and place them on a turntable to play...

Imagine aliens on a distant world. They have values very different to humans. However, they also have complicated values, and don't exactly know their own values. Imagine these aliens are doing well at AI alignment. They are just about to boot up a friendly (to them) superintelligence. Now imagine we...

Logical counterfactuals are when you say something like "Suppose π=3 , what would that imply?" They play an important role in logical decision theory. Suppose you take a false proposition P and then take a logical counterfactual in which P is true. I am imagining this counterfactual as a function...

A response to this paper. https://asi-safety-lab.com/DL/Kill-Switch-For_ASI_EW_21_12_14.pdf A substantial fraction of my argument comes down to. It is plausible that a hypothetical hypercompetent civilization could coordinate to build such infrastructure. However we don't live in a hypothetical hypercompetent civilization. We are not remotely close, and any attempt to get us there...

Current LLM based AI systems are getting pretty good at maths by writing formal proofs in Lean or similar. https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/ai-solves-imo-problems-at-silver-medal-level/ So, how can we use these models to help align AI? The Simple Alignment Solution Assumption states that many problems in alignment, for example corrigibility or value learning, have simple...

My voting system works like this. Each voter expresses their preferences for all candidates on a real numbered utility scale. Then a Maximal lottery takes place over all lotteries over candidates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximal_lotteries Lets describe this in more detail. Suppose there are 3 candidates. A,B,C. The set of candidates is S={A,B,C}...