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I cannot explain the thoughts of others who have read this and chose not to comment.

I would've not commented had I not gone through a specific series of 'not heavily determined' mental motions.

First, I spent some time in the AI recent news rabbit hole, including an interview with Gwern wherein he spoke very beautifully about the importance of writing.

This prompted me to check back in on LessWrong, to see what people have been writing about recently. I then noticed your post, which I presumably only saw due to a low-karma-content-filter setting I'd disabled... (read more)

1Spiritus Dei4mo

There hasn't been much debate on LessWrong. Most of my conversations have been on Reddit and Twitter (now X). Eliezer and Connor don't really want to debate on those platforms. They appear to be using those platforms to magnify their paranoia. And it is paranoia with a veneer of rationalism. If someone has the intellectual high ground (or at least thinks they do) they don't block everyone and hide in their LessWrong bunker. However, if there something you want to discuss in particular I'm happy to do so.

Open Thread Spring 2024

Nevin Wetherill1y10

Thanks anyway :)

Also, yeah, makes sense. Hopefully this isn't a horribly misplaced thread taking up people's daily scrolling bandwidth with no commensurate payoff.

Maybe I'll just say something here to cash out my impression of the "first post" intro-message in question: its language has seemed valuable to my mentality in writing a post so far.

Although, I think I got a mildly misleading first-impression about how serious the filter was. The first draft for a post I half-finished was a fictional explanatory dialogue involving a lot of extended metaphors... A... (read more)

Open Thread Spring 2024

Nevin Wetherill1y10

Thanks! :)

Yeah, I don't know if it's worth it to make it more accessible. I may have just failed a Google + "keyword in quotation marks" search, or failed to notice a link when searching via LessWrong's search feature.

Actually, an easy fix would just be for Google to improve their search tools, so that I can locate any link regardless of how specific for any public webpage just by ranting at my phone.

Anyway, thanks as well to Ben for tagging those mod-staff people.

Open Thread Spring 2024

Nevin Wetherill1y50

Hey, I'm new to LessWrong and working on a post - however at some point the guidelines which pop up at the top of a fresh account's "new post" screen went away, and I cannot find the same language in the New Users Guide or elsewhere on the site.

Does anyone have a link to this? I recall a list of suggestions like "make the post object-level," "treat it as a submission for a university," "do not write a poetic/literary post until you've already gotten a couple object-level posts on your record."

It seems like a minor oversight if it's impossible to find certa... (read more)

3RobertM1y

EDIT: looks like habryka got there earlier and I didn't see it. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zXJfH7oZ62Xojnrqs/#sLay9Tv65zeXaQzR4 Intercom is indeed hidden on mobile (since it'd be pretty intrusive at that screen size).

3habryka1y

It's not the most obvious place, but the content lives here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zXJfH7oZ62Xojnrqs/lesswrong-moderation-messaging-container?commentId=sLay9Tv65zeXaQzR4

3Ben Pace1y

@Ruby @RobertM

How do top AI labs vet architecture/algorithm changes?

Nevin Wetherill1y10

Thanks! It's no problem :)

Agreed that the interview is worth watching in full for those interested in the topic. I don't think it answers your question in full detail, unless I've forgotten something they said - but it is evidence.

(Edit: Dwarkesh also posts full transcripts of his interviews to his website. They aren't obviously machine-transcribed or anything, more like what you'd expect from a transcribed interview in a news publication. You'll lose some body language/tone details from the video interview, but may be worth it for some people, since most ... (read more)

How do top AI labs vet architecture/algorithm changes?

Nevin Wetherill1y50

I am not an AI researcher, nor do I have direct access to any AI research processes. So, instead of submitting an answer, I am writing this in the comment section.

I have one definite easily sharable observation. I drew from this a lot of inferences, which I will separate out so that the reader can condition their world-model on their own interpretations of whatever pieces of evidence - if any - are unshared.

This interview in this particular segment, with the most seemingly relevant part to me occuring around roughly the timestamp 40:15.

So, in this segment... (read more)

2Jemal Young1y

Dwarkesh's interview with Sholto sounds well worth watching in full, but the segments you've highlighted and your analyses are very helpful on their own. Thanks for the time and thought you put into this comment!

Introducing AI-Powered Audiobooks of Rational Fiction Classics

Nevin Wetherill1y*41

(edit: formatting on this appears to have gone all to hell and idk how to fix it! Uh oh!)

(edit2: maybe fixed? I broke out my commentary into a second section instead of doing a spoiler section between each item on the list.)

(edit3: appears fixed for me)

Yep, I can do that legwork!

I'll add some commentary, but I'll "spoiler" it in case people don't wanna see my takes ahead of forming their own, or just general "don't spoil (your take on some of) the intended payoffs" stuff.

... (read more)

2Mir9mo

This is awesome, thank you so much! Green leaf indicates that you're new (or new alias) here? Happy for LW! : ) ---------------------------------------- I first learned this lesson in my youth when, after climbing to the top of a leaderboard in a puzzle game I'd invested >2k hours into, I was surpassed so hard by my nemesis that I had to reflect on what I was doing. Thing is, they didn't just surpass me and everybody else, but instead continued to break their own records several times over. Slightly embarrassed by having congratulated myself for my merely-best performance, I had to ask "how does one become like that?" My problem was that I'd always just been trying to get better than the people around me, whereas their target was the inanimate structure of the problem itself. When I had broken a record, I said "finally!" and considered myself complete. But when they did the same, they said "cool!", and then kept going. The only way to defeat them, would be by not trying to defeat them, and instead focus on fighting the perceived limits of the game itself. To some extent, I am what I am today, because I at one point aspired to be better than Aisi. ---------------------------------------- Two years ago, I didn't realize that 95% of my effort was aimed at answering what ultimately was other people's questions. What happens when I learn to aim all my effort on questions purely arising from bottlenecks I notice in my own cognition? I hate how much time my brain (still) wastes on daydreaming and coming up with sentences optimized for impressing people online. What happens if I instead can learn to align all my social-motivation-based behaviours to what someone would praise if they had all the mental & situational context I have, and who's harder to fool than myself? Can my behaviour then be maximally aligned with [what I think is good], and [what I think is good] be maximally aligned with my best effort at figuring out what's good? I hope so, and that's

Why I'm not doing PauseAI

Nevin Wetherill1y10

I'm pretty sure GPT-N won't be able to do it, assuming they follow the same paradigm.

I am curious if you would like to expand on this intuition? I do not share it, and it seems like one potential crux.

I do not share this intuition. I would hope that if I say a handful of words about synthetic data, that will be sufficient to move your imagination into a less certain condition regarding this assertion. I am tempted to try something else first.

Is this actually important to your argument? I do not see how it would end up factoring into this problem, except... (read more)

Introducing AI-Powered Audiobooks of Rational Fiction Classics

Nevin Wetherill1y90

I am not sure if this has been well enough discussed elsewhere regarding Project Lawful, but it is worth reading despite some fairly high value-of-an-hour multiplied by the huge time commitment and the specifics of how it is written adds many more elements to "pros" side of the general "pros and cons" considerations of reading fiction.

It is also probably worth reading even if you've got a low tolerance for sexual themes - as long as that isn't so low that you'd feel injured by having to read that sorta thing.

If you've ever wondered why Eliezer describes hi... (read more)

5Mir1y

I gave it a try two years ago, and I rly liked the logic lectures early on (basicly a narrativization of HAE101 (for beginners)), but gave up soon after. here are some other parts I lurned valuable stuff fm: * when Keltham said "I do not aspire to be weak." * and from an excerpt he tweeted (idk context): "if at any point you're calculating how to pessimize a utility function, you're doing it wrong." * Keltham briefly talks about the danger of (what I call) "proportional rewards". I seem to not hv noted down where in the book I read it, but it inspired this note: * If you're evaluated for whether you're doing your best, you have an incentive to (subconsciously or otherwise) be weaker so you can fake doing your best with less effort. Never encourage people "you did your best!". An objective output metric may be fairer all things considered. * and furthermore caused me to try harder to eliminate internal excusification-loops in my head. "never make excuses for myself" is my ~3rd Law—and Keltham help me be hyperaware of it. * (unrelatedly, my 1st Law is "never make decisions, only ever execute strategies" (origin).) * I already had extensive notes on this theme, originally inspired by "Stuck In The Middle With Bruce" (JF Rizzo), but Keltham made me revisit it and update my behaviour further. * re "handicap incentives", "moralization of effort", "excuses to lose", "incentive to hedge your bets" * I also hv this quoted in my notes, though only to use as diversity/spice for explaining stuff I already had in there (I've placed it under the idionym "tilling the epistemic soil"): * Keltham > "I'm - actually running into a small stumbling block about trying to explain mentally why it's better to give wrong answers than no answers? It feels too obvious to explain? I mean, I vaguely remember being told about experiments where, if you don't do that, people sort of revise history inside their own heads, and aren't aware of the processes

2Askwho1y

Thanks so much! Glad you are enjoying the audio format. I really agree this story is worth "reading" in some form, it's why I'm working on this project.

If you are assuming Software works well you are dead

Nevin Wetherill1y*10

I have been contemplating Connor Leahy's Cyborgism and what it would mean for us to improve human workflows enough that aligning AGI looks less like:

Sisyphus attempting to roll a 20 tonne version of The One Ring To Rule Them All into the caldera of Mordor while blindfolded and occasionally having to bypass vertical slopes made out of impossibility proofs that have been discussed by only 3 total mathematicians ever in the history of our species - all before Sauron destroys the world after waking up from a restless nap of an unknown length.

I think this is wh... (read more)

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