John Wentworth explains natural latents – a key mathematical concept in his approach to natural abstraction. Natural latents capture the "shared information" between different parts of a system in a provably optimal way. This post lays out the formal definitions and key theorems.
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...It's blogging but shorter. I'll give it a better name if I think of one.
What’s the model here?
Eliezer's AI doom arguments have had me convinced since the ancient days of 2007, back when AGI felt like it was many decades away, and we didn't have an intelligence scaling law (except to the Kurzweilians who considered Moore's Law to be that, and were, in retrospect, arguably correct).
Back then, if you'd have asked me to play out a scenario where AI passes a reasonable interpretation of the Turing test, I'd have said there'd probably be less than a year to recursive-self-improvement FOOM and then game over for human values and human future-steering control. But I'd have been wrong.
Now that reality has let us survive a few years into the "useful highly-general Turing-Test-passing AI" era, I want to be clear and explicit about how I've updated my...
There should be a community oriented towards the genomic emancipation of humanity. There isn't such a community, but there should be. It's a future worth investing our hope in—a future where parents are able to choose to give their future children the gift of genomic foundations for long, healthy, sane, capable lives.
We're inaugurating this community with the Reproductive Frontiers Summit 2025 in Berkeley, CA, June 10—12. Come join us if you want to learn, connect, think, and coordinate about the future of germline engineering technology. Apply to attend by filling out this (brief) form: https://forms.gle/xjJCaiNqLk7YE4nt8
Who will be there?
Our lineup of speakers includes:
- representatives from several reproductive technology companies,
- a panel of current and future parents of polygenically screened children,
- GeneSmith, on his embryo CRISPR editing company,
- some scientists working on reproductive
Some people (the “Boubas”) don’t like “chemicals” in their food. But other people (the “Kikis”) are like, “uh, everything is chemicals, what do you even mean?”
The Boubas are using the word “chemical” differently than the Kikis, and the way they’re using it is simultaneously more specific and less precise than the way the Kikis use it. I think most Kikis implicitly know this, but their identities are typically tied up in being the kind of person who “knows what ‘chemical’ means”, and… you’ve gotta use that kind of thing whenever you can, I guess?
There is no single privileged universally-correct answer to the question “what does ‘chemical’ mean?”, because the Boubas exist and are using the word differently than Kikis, and in an internally-consistent (though vague) way.
The Kikis...
Crossposted from AI Impacts.
Epistemic status: I am not a historian, nor have I investigated these case studies in detail. I admit I am still uncertain about how the conquistadors were able to colonize so much of the world so quickly. I think my ignorance is excusable because this is just a blog post; I welcome corrections from people who know more. If it generates sufficient interest I might do a deeper investigation. Even if I’m right, this is just one set of historical case-studies; it doesn’t prove anything about AI, even if it is suggestive. Finally, in describing these conquistadors as “successful,” I simply mean that they achieved their goals, not that what they achieved was good.
Summary
In the span of a few years, some minor European...
Update: Just came across this excellent blog post on the same subject, focusing primarily on Pizarro/Peru instead of Cortes/Mexico. https://mattlakeman.org/2025/03/24/conquest-of-the-incas/
Let’s create a list of which journalists LessWrongers trust, so as to gave a guide if people get contacted.
Agree votes are for more good.
Upvotes aren’t helpful because i think heavily downvoted comments get hidden (and i expect many journalists to be underwater). If you want to use upvotes, I suggest they are for if someone is a journalist or not.
Please add each journalist as a separate entry. I will delete any entries that include multiple people. If you’d prefer not to add someone yourself, feel free to DM me.
The title question is a proxy for the thing I mean:
- Are they trustworthy?
- Do they publish articles that reflect the quotes you give
- Do they avoid cutting up quotes?
- Are they truth seeking?
Demonstrable mendacity is considerably worse than “they did not write about a thing”.
One of the main drivers, perhaps the main driver[1], of algorithmic progress is compute for experiments. It seems unlikely that the effect you note could compensate for the reduced pace of capabilities progress.
Both labor and compute have been scaled up over the last several years at big AI companies. My understanding is the scaling in compute was more important for algorithmic progress as it is hard to parallelize labor, the marginal employee is somewhat worse, the number of employees has been growing slower than compute, and the returns to compute vs
There's an irritating circumstance I call The Black Hat Bobcat, or Bobcatting for short. This essay is me attempting to give you a new term, so you have a word for it. Bobcatting is when there's a terrible behavior that comes up often enough to matter, but rarely enough that it vanishes in the noise of other generally positive feedback.
The alt-text for this comic is illuminating.
"You can do this one in thirty times and still have 97% positive feedback."
I would like you to contemplate this comic and alt-text as though it were deep wisdom handed down from a sage who lived atop a mountaintop.
I.
Black Hat Bobcatting is when someone (let's call them Bob) does something obviously lousy, but very infrequently.
If you're standing right there when the Bobcatting...
This post feels to me weirdly bloodless. As if there were no way to make decisions other than Verifiable Documented Evidence. And only accepting Verifiable Documented Evidence is a great way to allow predators to keep getting away with it.
I understand this is written from the perspective of a meetup czar who does not & cannot attend most meetups, but in an ideal world the solution would be:
Czar becomes aware of a potential problem
Czar visits the area, talks to people
Czar makes a decision
You only need Verifiable Documented Evidence if no one actually has the power to make a decision based on intuitive knowledge.
I couldn't click into it from the front page if I tried to click on the zone where the text content would normally go, but I was able to click into this from the front page if I clicked on the reply-count icon in the top-right corner. (But that wouldn't have worked when there were zero replies.)
