LessWrong 2.0 Reader

you seem to be the only user, although not the only account, who experienced this problem.

Definitely not. I second the complaint.

This really depends on the definition of "smarter". There is a valid sense in which Stockfish is "smarter" than any human. Likewise, there are many valid senses in which GPT-4 is "smarter" than some humans, and some valid senses in which GPT-4 is "smarter" than all humans (e. g., at token prediction). There will be senses in which GPT-5 will be "smarter" than a bigger fraction of humans compared to GPT-4, perhaps being smarter than Sam Altman under a bigger set of possible definitions of "smarter".

Will that actually mean anything? Who knows.

By playing with definitions like this, Sam Altman can simultaneously inspire hype by implication ("GPT-5 will be a superintelligent AGI!!!") and then, if GPT-5 underdelivers, avoid significant reputational losses by assigning a different meaning to his past words ("here's a very specific sense in which GPT-5 is smarter than me, that's what I meant, hype is out of control again, smh"). This is a classic tactic; basically a motte-and-bailey variant.

This seems directly important and actionable in a way that most Less Wrong posts, while well considered and informative, are not.  I have not acquitted myself well in the rationalist community so I would like to offer engagement with this article and its concepts as a surrogate for any engagement with me.

Model Organisms as an agenda is a behaviourist turn to alignment research

If there's no constraints on when they have to name a system "GPT-5", they can make the statement true by only naming a system "GPT-5" if it is smart enough. (cf. Not Technically a Lie [? · GW])

Edit: though "and those two [...] I'd like to hear back from you in a little bit of time" implies a system named GPT-5 will be released 'in a little bit of time'

I've started a wiki to help organize information about recent events, and could use help building it out: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZpnPxn433EMWw2t6m/wiki-on-suspects-in-lind-zajko-and-maland-killings

On the contrary, convex agents are wildly abundant -- we call them r-selected organisms.

Since AI interpretability is a big issue for AI safety, let's completely interpret the results of evolutionary computation. 

Disclaimer: This interpretation of the results of AI does not generalize to interpreting deep neural networks. This is a result for interpreting a solution to a very specific problem that is far less complicated than deep learning, and by interpreting, I mean that we iterate a mathematical operation hundreds of times to get an object that is simpler than our original object, so don't get your hopes up too much.

A basis matroid is a pair $(X,M)$ where $X$ is a finite set, and $M\subseteq P\left(X\right)$ where $M$ denotes the power set of $X$ that satisfies the following two properties:

1. If $A,B\in M$, then $|A|=|B|$.
2. if $A,B\in M,A\ne B,a\in A\setminus B$, then there is some $b\in B\setminus A$ with $(A\setminus \{a\left\}\right)\cup \left\{b\right\}\in M$ (the basis exchange property).

I ran a computer experiment where I obtained a matroid $(X,M)$ where $|X|=9$   $|M|=68$ and where each element in $M$ has size $4$ through evolutionary computation, but the population size was kept so low that this evolutionary computation mimicked hill climbing algorithms. Now we need to interpret the matroid $(X,M)$.

The notion of a matroid has many dualities. Our strategy is to apply one of these dualities to the matroid $(X,M)$ so that the dual object is much smaller than the original object $(X,M)$. One may formulate the notion of a matroid in terms of closure systems (flats),hyperplanes, closure operators, lattices, a rank function, independent sets, bases, and circuits. If these seems to complicated, many of these dualities are special cases of other dualities common with ordered sets. For example, the duality between closure systems, closure operators, and ordered sets applies to contexts unrelated to matroids such as in general and point-free topology. And the duality between the basis, circuit, and the hyperplanes may be characterized in terms of rowmotion.

If $(Z,\le )$ is a partially ordered set, then a subset $A\subseteq Z$ is said to be an antichain if whenever $a,b\in A,a\le b$, then $a=b$. In other words, an antichain is a subset $A$ of $Z$ where the restriction of $\le$ to $A$ is equality. We say that a aubset $L$ of $Z$ is downwards closed if whenever $x\le y$ and $y\in L$, then $x\in L$ as well. If $A\subseteq Z$, then let $L\left(A\right)$ denote the smallest downwards closed subset of $Z$ containing $A$. Suppose that $Z$ is a finite poset. If $A$ is an antichain in $Z$, then let $A^{\prime }$ denote the set of all minimal elements in $Z\setminus L\left(A\right)$. Then $A^{\prime }$ is an antichain as well, and the mapping $A\mapsto A^{\prime }$ is a bijection from the set of all antichains in $Z$ to itself. This means that if $A$ is an antichain, then we may define $A^{\left(n\right)}$ for all integers $n$ by setting $A^{\left(0\right)}=A,A^{(n+1)}=(A^{\left(n\right)}{)}^{\prime }$.

If $(X,M)$ is a basis matroid, then $M$ is an antichain in $P\left(X\right)$, so we may apply rowmotion, so we say that $(X,M^{\left(n\right)})$ is an $n$-matroid. In this case, the $1$

-matroids are the circuit matroids while the $-1$-matroids are the hyperplane matroids. Unfortunately, the $n$-matroids have not been characterized for $|n|>1$. We say that the rowmotion order of $(X,M)$ is the least positive integer $n$ where $M^{\left(n\right)}=M$. If $(X,M)$ is a matroid of order $n$, then my computer experiments indicate that $gcd(|X|+2,n)>1$ whichs lends support to the idea that the rowmotion of a matroid is a sensible mathematical notion that may be satisfied mathematically. The notion of rowmotion of a matroid also appears to be a sensible mathematical notion for other reasons; if we apply iteratively apply a bijective operation $g$ (such as a reversible cellular automaton) to a finite object $x$, then that bijective operation will often increase the entropy in the sense that if $x$ has low entropy, then $g^{\left(n\right)}\left(x\right)$ will typically have a high amount of entropy and look like noise. But this is not the case with matroids as $n$-matroids do not appear substantially more complicated than basis matroids. Until and if there is a mundane explanation for this behavior of the rowmotion of matroids, I must consider the notion of rowmotion of matroids to be a mathematically interesting notion even though it is currently not understood by anyone.

With the matroid $(X,M)$ obtained from evolutionary computation, I found that $(X,M)$ has order $1958$ which factorizes as $1958=2\cdot 79\cdot 11$. Set $X=\{1,\dots ,9\}$. By applying rowmotion to this matroid, I found that $(X,M^{\left(342\right)})$.

={{1, 8, 9},{2, 3, 6, 8},{2, 3, 7, 9},{4, 5},{4, 6, 9},{4, 7, 8},{5, 6, 9},{5, 7, 8}}. If $(X,M^{\left(m\right)})$ is a basis matroid, then $M^{\left(m\right)}=M$, so the set $M^{\left(342\right)}$ is associated with a unique basis matroid. This is the smallest way to represent $(X,M)$ in terms of rowmotion since if $|M^{\left(n\right)}|\le 8$, then $M^{\left(n\right)}=M^{\left(342\right)}$.

I consider this a somewhat satisfactory interpretation of the matroid $(X,M)$ that I have obtained through evolutionary computation, but there is still work to do because nobody has researched the rowmotion operation on matroids and because it would be better to simplify a matroid without needing to go through hundreds of layers of rowmotion. And even if we were to understand matroid rowmotion better, this would not help us too much with AI safety since here this interpretability of the result of evolutionary computation does not generalize to other AI's and it certainly does not apply to deep neural networks.

I made a video here where one may see the rowmotion of this matroid and that video is only slightly interpretable.

 Deep matroid duality visualization: Rowmotion of a matroid 

I partially agree, but I think this must only be a small part of the issue.

- I think there's a whole lot of key insights people could raise that aren't info-hazards. 
- If secrecy were the main factor, I'd hope that there would be some access-controlled message boards or similar. I'd want the discussion to be intentionally happening somewhere. Right now I don't really think that's happening. I think a lot of tiny groups have their own personal ideas, but there's surprisingly little systematic and private thinking between the power players. 
- I think that secrecy is often an excuse not to open ideas to feedback, and thus not be open to critique. Often, what what I see, this goes hand-in-hand with "our work just really isn't that great, but we don't want to admit it"

In the last 8 years or so, I've kept on hoping there would be some secret and brilliant "master plan" around EA, explaining the lack of public strategy. I have yet to find one. The closest I know of is some over-time discussion and slack threads with people at Constellation and similar - I think these are interesting in terms of understanding the perspectives of these (powerful) people, but I don't get the impression that there's all too much comprehensiveness of genius that's being hidden. 

That said,
- I think that policy orgs need to be very secretive, so agree with you regarding why those orgs don't write more big-picture things.

you seem to be the only user, although not the only account, who experienced this problem.

Are you accusing me of sockpuppetting?

I like Nick Land (see e.g. my comment [LW(p) · GW(p)] on jessicata's post). I've read plenty of Xenosystems. I was still confused reading your post (there are lots of headings and quotations and so on in it).

I told you my experience and opinion, mostly because you asked for feedback. Up to you how/whether you update based on it.