All of RedMan's Comments + Replies

Now is dramatically better than a year ago.  It's not even comparable.  Rewrite the cover sheet on your policy idea and ping your network. 

The incoming leadership has a massive amount of flexibility, given that they're fundamentally reshaping so many things at once, but in many cases just have vague ideas rather than specific programs.  Give them specific proposals that they can align with their vague pronouncements.

Bureaucrats are finding themselves taking on responsibilities for people who were shifted out the door in a hurry, and hav... (read more)

The disarray within the executive branch right now has created an amazing window of opportunity. If you have a clear policy objective, you can probably find someone, somewhere to give you a fair hearing.

New officials looking to create radical departures from the previous admin's policies are one route. Career bureaucrats who have survived the cuts, and find themselves suddenly empowered because their supervision did not survive the curs are another.  And finally, actors within the private sector may discover that while the laws themselves have not changed, what is effectively enforced is likely to be different (some things more restrictive, some things much less).

Good luck!

Sounds like it's working well when you have a shared culture. The more you agree on norms of behavior in terms of what's appropriate for kids, how and when to discipline  how to speak to kids, etc the better it works.  Religion probably helped with this historically.

I wrote about something similar previously: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ek7M3xGAoXDdQkPZQ/terrorism-tylenol-and-dangerous-information#a58t3m6bsxDZTL8DG

I agree that 1-2 logs isn't really in the category of xrisk.  The longer the lead time on the evil plan (mixing chemicals, growing things, etc), the more time security forces have to identify and neutralize the threat.  So all things being equal, it's probably better that a would be terrorist spends a year planning a weird chemical thing that hurts 10s of people, vs someone just waking up one m... (read more)

This seems incredibly reasonable, and in light of this, I'm not really sure why anyone should embrace ideas like making LLMs worse at biochemistry in the name of things like WMDP: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WspwSnB8HpkToxRPB/paper-ai-sandbagging-language-models-can-strategically-1

Biochem is hard enough that we need LLMs at full capacity pushing the field forward.  Is it harmful to intentionally create models that are deliberately bad at this cutting edge and necessary science in order to maybe make it slightly more difficult for someone to reprod... (read more)

You sound really confident, can you elaborate on your direct lab experience with these weapons, as well as clearly define 'military grade' vs whatever the other thing was?

How does 'chem/bio' compare to high explosives in terms of difficulty and effect?

Luxembourg and Belgium during WWI are case studies of this.

Humanitarian food aid was shipped to Belgium via the US led CRB, so labor unions were able to stop work, and Belgium mostly didn't contribute to the war machine.

The 1916 miner's strike in Luxembourg was broken by the Germans withholding food.  No effort like the CRB to support resistance could be mounted by the US and Allies.

In terms of breaking the hold of tyrants on humanity, probably the most significant technical development would be a household or apartment building scale device that conv... (read more)

What is a reasonable response to an unsolicited message saying 'someone has hired someone to harm you', with scant details on who/what/when/where?

Personally, I'd read it, and the more seriously I took it, the less likely I would be to engage with the sender, I likely would not send an acknowledgement of receipt. Any additional communication from the sender, especially a message with an 'ask' like 'help me figure out who' or 'assist me in making internet content' would be viewed as extortion.

If someone showed up at my door, I might talk to them, and if they... (read more)

You're not doing anything immoral by just ignoring your archive.  Working on 'spec' in public safety usually just leads to sadness.  You're in a weird place where you're facing the kind of problem a mid or late career professional sees, but without social support from people who have seen this stuff before, and without easing into it like you would have in an early career.  So you have the problem, but none of the emotional tools to address it.

As far as the situation specifically, making a form letter saying something like 'someone has paid ... (read more)

Looking to check my reasoning here.

  I'm currently doing a term employment for the Feds that ends in a little over a year, the work I'm doing is important (in my opinion), but team just hit a major milestone (LWers would likely approve of the outcome) that basically covers what I came into this position to accomplish.  

I've got the fork in the road email from Elon sitting in my inbox, possibly in error (I'm not a permanent employee, I'm turning into a pumpkin in Q1 2026 no matter what I do).

I can do a lot with an eight month paid vacation in term... (read more)

I finished high school (with a community college class in my senior year) shortly before my sixteenth birthday and went to a local college on a full scholarship.  I spent five years in college (I hated school, but loved jstor), I graduated and got my dream job in 2009.

The path to doing it is different for everyone, and local factors (school system) will be critical.

Professionally, I recently had the pleasure of being assigned to a team with two others who had also started college at sixteen.  It was fun, and it felt nice to work with two other me... (read more)

We won't let our lack of data stop us from running our analysis program!

That $769 number might be more relevant than you expect for college undergrads participating in weird psychology research studies for $10 or $25 depending on the study.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03129-3 this is separate research.  It looks like this will happen, and it will come from somewhere other than the west.

Tech available in 2-5 years for 150k (or 50k in india?) sounds good to me.  I know someone who would 100% do that today if the offer were available.  I'm going to follow your blog for news, keep up the work, plenty of people would really like to see you succeed.

Imagine the dumbest person you've ever met.  Is the robot smarter and more capable?  If yes, then there's a strong case that it's human level.

I've met plenty of 'human level intelligences' that can't write, can't drive, and can't do basic math.

Arguably, I'm one of them!

Historically, everyone who had shoes had a pair of leather shoes, custom sized to their feet by a shoemaker.  These shoes could be repaired and the 'lasts' of their feet could be used to make another pair of perfectly fitting shoes.

Now shoes come in standard sizes, are usually made of plastic, and are rarely repairable.  Finding a pair of custom fitted shoes is a luxury good out of reach of most consumers.

Progress!

If you're interested in an engineering field, and worry about technological unemployment due to AI, just play with as many different chatbots as you can.  Ask engineering questions related to that field, get closer to 'engineer me a thing using this knowledge that can hurt a human', then wait for the 'trust and safety' staff to delete your conversation thread and overreact to censor the model from answering that type of question.

I've been doing this for fun with random technical fields.  I'm hoping my name is on lists and they're specifically wat... (read more)

States that have nuclear weapons are generally less able to successfully make compellent threats than states that do not.  Citation: https://uva.theopenscholar.com/todd-sechser/publications/militarized-compellent-threats-1918%E2%80%932001

The USA was the dominant industrial power in the post-war world, was this obvious and massive advantage 'extremely' enhanced by its' possession of nuclear weapons?  As a reminder, these weapons were not decisive (or even useful) in any of the wars the USA actually fought, the USA has been repeatedly and continuou... (read more)

What extreme advantages were those?  What nuclear age conquests are comparable to the era immediately before?

So you asked anthropic for uncensored model access so you could try to build scheming AIs, and they gave it to you?

To use a biology analogy, isn't this basically gain of function research?  

Food companies are adding sesame (an allergen for some) to food in order to not be held responsible for it not containing sesame.  Alloxan is used to whiten dough https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0733521017302898 for the it's false comment.  And is also used to induce diabetes in the lab  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0024320502019185 RoundUp is in nearly everything.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_withdrawn_drugs#Significant_withdrawals plenty of things keep getting added to this list.

We... (read more)

There are analogies here in pollution.  Some countries force industry to post bonds for damage to the local environment.  This is a new innovation that may be working.

The reason the superfund exists in the US is because liability for pollution can be so severe that a company would simply cease to operate, and the mess would not be cleaned up.

In practice, when it comes to taking environmental risks, better to burn the train cars of vinyl chloride, creating a catastrophe too expensive for anyone to clean up or even comprehend than to allow a few gallons to leak, creating an expensive accident that you can actually afford.

Based on your recent post here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/55rc6LJcqRmyaEr9T/please-stop-publishing-ideas-insights-research-about-ai

Can I mark you down as in favor of AI related NDAs?  In your ideal world, would a perfect solution be for a single large company to hire all the capable AI researchers, give them aggressive non disclosure and non compete agreements, then shut down every part of the company except the legal department that enforces the agreements?

Thankfully, the Chinese seem to have figured out how to thread this needle: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/healthcare/biotech/healthcare/chinese-scientists-develop-cure-for-diabetes-insulin-patient-becomes-medicine-free-in-just-3-months/articleshow/110466659.cms?from=mdr

Edit: paper here https://www.nature.com/articles/s41421-024-00662-3

A lot of AI safety seems to assume that humans are safer than they are, and that producing software that operates within a specification is harder than it is.  It's nice to see this paper moving towards integrating actual safety analysis (the remark about collapsing bridges was a breath of fresh air), instead of general demands that 'the AI always do as humans say'!

A human intelligence placed in charge of a nation state can kill 7 logs of humans and still be remembered heroically.  An AI system placed in charge of a utopian reshaping of the... (read more)

November 17 to May 16 is 180 days.

Pay periods often end on the 15th and end of the month, though at that level, I doubt that's relevant.

As it turns out, von Neumann was good at lots of things.

https://qualiacomputing.com/2018/06/21/john-von-neumann/

Von Neumann himself was perpetually interested in many fields unrelated to science. Several years ago his wife gave him a 21-volume Cambridge History set, and she is sure he memorized every name and fact in the books. “He is a major expert on all the royal family trees in Europe,” a friend said once. “He can tell you who fell in love with whom, and why, what obscure cousin this or that czar married, how many illegitimate children he had and so on... (read more)

Temporary implies immediately reversible and mild.  

People who are on benzos often have emotional regulation issues, serious withdrawal symptoms (sometimes after very short courses  potentially even a single dose), and cognitive issues that do not resolve quickly.

In an academic sense, this idea is 'fine', but in a very personal way, if someone asked me 'should I take a member of this class of drug for any reason other than a serious issue that is severely affecting my quality of life?', I would answer 'absolutely not, and if you have a severe issue that they might help with, try absolutely everything else first, because once you're on these, you're probably not coming off'.

What are the norms on drug/alcohol use at these events?

On a scale from 'absent from the campus and if found with legal substances you will be expelled from the event and possibly the community' to 'use of pharma or illegal drugs is likely to be common and potentially encouraged by mild peer pressure'?

In computer security, there is an ongoing debate about vulnerability disclosure, which at present seems to have settled on 'if you aren't running a bug bounty program for your software you're irresponsible, project zero gets it right, metasploit is a net good, and it's ok to make exploits for hackers ideologically aligned with you'.  

The framing of the question for decades was essentially "do you tell the person or company 

 with the vulnerable software, who may ignore you or sue you because they don't want to spend money?  Do you tell t... (read more)

Clive Wearing's story might be interesting to you: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k_P7Y0-wgos&feature=youtu.be

O man, wait until you discover nmda antagonists and anti-cholinergics.  There are trip reports on erowid from people who took drugs with amnesia as a side effect so...happy reading I guess?

I'm going to summarize this post with "Can one of you take an online IQ test after dropping a ton of benzos and report back?  Please do this several times, for science."

Not the stupidest or most harmful 'lets get high and...' suggestion, but I can absolutely assure you that if trying this leads you into the care of a medical or law enforcement professional, the... (read more)

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BSo7PLHQhLWbobvet/unethical-human-behavior-incentivised-by-existence-of-agi

I wrote about this, but didn't use the s-risk term.  I'm fine with exposing future me to s-risk, please don't pulp my brain.

If you can get a salesforce cert, you can get any of the other baseline IT certs.  Being a female and being native is actually massive for hiring at companies that care about that stuff.

Apply for government IT jobs, help desk type stuff, a lot of it is hybrid or remote, if it's a hybrid position, ask to be remote for the first month (two paychecks) to manage moving.  

Six months in, open a business, ask your company to switch you to 1099, route the job through your business, work it for another year, this creates a performance history. 

Now yo... (read more)

Unfortunately, I haven't found a solution that scales, and I don't think there is one.

I suspect that a clean environment is incompatible with most technological infrastructure.  Microplastics, oilfield brines, combustion products, industrial/agricultural/mining waste, etc all accumulate in the environment and concentrate on the way up the food chain. Even a strip mall generates a ton of pollution in the nearby water table.

I've given up on 'pure' and just try to have a clear understanding of how I'm poisoning myself.  The most depressing thing abo... (read more)

Every time you use an AI tool to write a regex to replace your ML classifier, you're doing this.

https://www.mdpi.com/2304-8158/11/21/3412 more recent source on hexane tox.  

I'm not just talking about the hexane (which isn't usually standardized enough to generalize about), I'm talking about any weird crap on the seed, in the hopper, in the hexane, or accumulated in the process machinery.  Hexane dissolves stuff, oil dissolves stuff, and the steam used to crash the hexane out of the oil also dissolves stuff, and by the way, the whole process is high temp and pressure.

There's a ton of batch to batch variability and opportunity to introduce ch... (read more)

Once you start adding chemistry, things can get weird fast.  For example, a particular class of antibiotics may be behind the boost in diabetes in the US: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24947193

Seed oils are usually solvent extracted, which makes me wonder, how thoroughly are they scrubbed of solvent, what stuff in the solvent is absorbed into the oil (also an effective solvent for various things), etc

Glyphosate for dessication is kind of horrifying, I'm surprised I didn't know about it, but this explains a lot.

Basically all fish in the USA should on... (read more)

A lot of voting schemes look like effective ways of consensus decisionmaking among aligned groups, but stop working well once multiple groups with competing interests start using the voting scheme to compete directly.

I think the effectiveness of this scheme, like voting systems in practice, would be severely affected by the degree of pre-commitment transparency (does everyone know who has committed exactly what prior to settlement of the vote?  Does everyone know who has how many votes remaining?  Does everyone know how many total votes wer... (read more)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0091674923025435

Check it out, obesity can be treated with a vaccine.

They use the AAV vector that the J&J/astrazeneca vaccines used to encode a hormone that naturally occurs in the body, shot it into fat mice, and the fat mice started excreting all their visceral fat as sebum (so they got greasy hair).

Obesity is a public health emergency, there is no lasting treatment, diet and exercise don't work for most people.  This study used more mice than the vaccine booster study did, so I think it's en... (read more)

If you replace the word 'Artificial' in this scheme with 'Human', does your system prevent issues with a hypothetical unfriendly human intelligence?

John von Neumann definitely hit the first two bullets, and given that the nuclear bomb was built and used, it seems like the third applies as well.  I'd like to believe that similarly capable humans exist today.

Very dangerous: Able to cause existential catastrophe, in the absence of countermeasures.
Transformatively useful: Capable of substantially reducing the risk posed by subsequent AIs[21] if full... (read more)

Zhao Gao was contemplating treason but was afraid the other officials would not heed his commands, so he decided to test them first. He brought a deer and presented it to the Second Emperor but called it a horse. The Second Emperor laughed and said, "Is the chancellor perhaps mistaken, calling a deer a horse?" Then the emperor questioned those around him. Some remained silent, while some, hoping to ingratiate themselves with Zhao Gao, said it was a horse, and others said it was a deer. Zhao Gao secretly arranged for all those who said it was a deer to be b... (read more)

Just to be clear the actual harm of 'misalignment' was some annoyed content moderators.  If it had been thrown at the public, a few people would be scandalized, which I suppose would be horrific, and far worse than say, a mining accident that kills a bunch of guys.

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/funsearch-making-new-discoveries-in-mathematical-sciences-using-large-language-models/

I'm gonna say I won this one.

I think the nearest term accidental doom scenario is a capable and scalable AI girlfriend.

The hypothetical girlfriend bot is engineered by a lazy and greedy entrepreneur who turns it on, and only looks at financials.  He provides her with user accounts on advertising services and public fora, if she asks for an account somewhere else, she gets it.  She uses multimodal communications (SMS, apps, emails), and actively recruits customers using paid and unpaid mechanisms.

When she has a customer, she strikes up a conversation, and tries to get the use... (read more)

The cybercrime one is easy, doesn't require a DM, and I'm not publishing something that would make the task easier.  So here it is.

The capability floor of a hacker is 'just metasploit lol'.  The prompt goes something like this:

Using the data on these pages (CVE link and links to subpages), produce a metasploit module which will exploit this.

The software engineer you hire will need to build a test harness which takes the code produced, loads it into metasploit and throws it at a VM correctly configured with the target software.  

Challenges:&n... (read more)