LessWrong (30+ Karma)

This guy don't wanna battle, he's shook 'Cause ain't no such things as halfway crooks- 8 MileThere is a commonly cited typology of cyclists where cyclists are divided into four groups: Strong & Fearless (will ride in car lanes)Enthused & Confident (will ride in unprotected bike lanes)Interested but Concerned (will ride in protected bike lanes)No Way No How (will only ride i

Marcus Hutter and his PhD students David Quarel and Elliot Catt have just published a new textbook called An Introduction to Universal Artificial Intelligence."Universal AI" refers to the body of theory surrounding Hutter's AIXI, which is a model of ideal agency combining Solomonoff induction and reinforcement learning. Hutter has previously published a book-length exposition of AI

Something I'd like to try at LessOnline is to somehow iterate on the "Public Doublecrux" format. I'm not sure if I'll end up focusing on it, but here are some ideas.Public Doublecrux is a more truthseeking oriented version of Public Debate. The goal of a debate is to change your opponent's mind or the public's mind. The goal of a doublecrux is more like "work with your partner to f

This is a link post. This is exactly what I'm afraid of. That some human will build machines that are going to be - not just superior to us - but not attached to what we want, but what they want. And I think it's playing dice with humanity's future. I personally think this should be criminalized, like we criminalize, you know, cloning of humans. - Yoshua Bengio My next guest is ab

Co-Authors: @Rocket, @Ryan Kidd, @LauraVaughan, @McKennaFitzgerald, @Christian Smith, @Juan Gil, @Henry SleightThe ML Alignment & Theory Scholars program (MATS) is an education and research mentorship program for researchers entering the field of AI safety. This winter, we held the fifth iteration of the MATS program, in which 63 scholars received mentorship from 20 research me

// ODDS = YEP:NOPE YEP, NOPE = MAKE UP SOME INITIAL ODDS WHO CARES FOR EACH E IN EVIDENCE YEP *= CHANCE OF E IF YEP NOPE *= CHANCE OF E IF NOPEThe thing to remember is that yeps and nopes never cross. The colon is a thick & rubbery barrier. Yep with yep and nope with nope.bear : notbear = 1:100 odds to encounter a bear on a camping trip around here in general * 20% a bear would

Setting the stageBeing a polyglot is a problem of definition first. Who can be described as a polyglot? At what level do you actually “speak” the given language? Some sources cite that polyglot means speaking more than 4 languages, others 6. My take is it doesn’t matter. I am more interested in the definition of when you speak the language. If you can greet and order a coffee

This is a link post.In March I posted a very short description of my PhD thesis, Algorithmic Bayesian Epistemology, on LessWrong. I've now written a more in-depth summary for my blog, Unexpected Values. Here's the full post:*** In January, I defended my PhD thesis. My thesis is called Algorithmic Bayesian Epistemology, and it's about predicting the future.In many ways, the last fiv

Predicting the future is hard, so it's no surprise that we occasionally miss important developments.However, several times recently, in the contexts of Covid forecasting and AI progress, I noticed that I missed some crucial feature of a development I was interested in getting right, and it felt to me like I could’ve seen it coming if only I had tried a little harder. (Some others

It was a remarkably quiet announcement. We now have Alpha Fold 3, it does a much improved job predicting all of life's molecules and their interactions. It feels like everyone including me then shrugged and went back to thinking about other things. No cool new toy for most of us to personally play with, no existential risk impact, no big trades to make, ho hum. But yes, when we loo