LessWrong 2.0 Reader

But if the universal failure of nature and man to find non-connectionist forms of general intelligence does not move you

Firstly, AIXI exists, and we agree that it would be very smart if we had the compute to run it. 

Secondly I think there is some sort of slight of had here. 

ChatGPT isn't yet fully general. Neither is a 3-sat solver.  3-sat looks somewhat like what you might expect a non-connectionist approach to intelligence to look like. There are a huge range of maths problems that are all theoretically equivalent to 3 sat.

In the infinite limit, both types of intelligence can simulate the other at huge overhead, In practice, they can't. 

Also, non-connectionist forms of intelligence are hard to evolve, because evolution works in small changes. 

This paper creates a new 1-bit strategy for circumventing Ryan and Buck's safety strategy. The collusion team achieves 90%+ success rate.

I would really appreciate any input, especially from Ryan or his co-authors. This seems like a very important issue to address.

I have found it fruitful to argue this case back and forth with you, thank you for defending and explaining your perspective.

I will restate my overall position, I invite you to do the same, and then I propose that we consider this 40+ comment thread concluded for now.

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The comment of yours that (to me) started this thread was the following.

If the default path is AI's taking over control from humans, then what is the current plan in leading AI labs? Surely all the work they put in AI safety is done to prevent exactly such scenarios. I would find it quite hard to believe that a large group of people would vigorously do something if they believed that their efforts will go to vain.

I primarily wish to argue that, given the general lack of accountability for developing machine learning systems in worlds where indeed the default outcome is doom, it should not be surprising to find out that there is a large corporation (or multiple) doing so. One should not assume that the incentives are aligned – anyone who is risking omnicide-level outcomes via investing in novel tech development currently faces no criminal penalties, fines, or international sanctions.

Given the current intellectual elite scene where a substantial number of prestigious people care about extinction level outcomes, it is also not surprising that power-seeking companies have large departments focused on 'ethics' and 'safety' in order to look respectable to such people. Separately from any intrinsic interest, it has been a useful political chip for enticing a great deal of talent from scientific communities and communities interested in ethics to work for them (not dissimilar to how Sam Bankman-Fried managed to cause a lot of card-carrying members of the Effective Altruist philosophy and scene to work very hard to help build his criminal empire by talking a good game about utilitarianism, veganism, and the rest).

Looking at a given company's plan for preventing doom, and noticing it does not check out, should not be followed by an assumption of adequacy [? · GW] and good incentives such that surely this company would not exist nor do work on AI safety if it did not have a strong plan, I must be mistaken. I believe that there is no good plan and that these companies would exist regardless of whether a good plan existed or not. Given the lack of accountability, and my belief that alignment is clearly unsolved and we fundamentally do not knowing what we're doing [LW(p) · GW(p)], I believe the people involved are getting rich risking all of our lives and there is (currently) no justice here.

We have agreed on many points, and from the outset I believe you felt my position had some truth to it ("I do get that point that you are making, but I think this is a little bit unfair to these organizations."). I will leave you to outline whichever overall thoughts and remaining points of agreement or disagreement that you wish.

Another bit I forgot to highlight in the original post: the fonts available on my site.

Not bad at all! Needs some work on the details and some bug fixes, but—really not bad! The dropcaps, in particular, are well done; and the overall theme is elegant.

Curated. This was one of the more inspiring things I read this year (in a year that had a moderate number of inspiring things!)

I really like how Sarah lays out the problem and desiderata for neutrality in our public/civic institutional spaces.

LessWrong's strength is being a fairly opinionated university about how to do epistemics, which the rest of the world isn't necessarily bought into. Trying to make LW a civic institution would fail. But, this post has me more excited to revisit "what would be necessary to build good, civic infrastructure" (where "good" requires both "be 'good' in some kind of deep sense," but also "be memetically fit enough to compete with Twitter et all." One solution might be convincing Musk of specific policies rather than building a competitor)

Hmm. I think the core thing is transparency. So if it cultivates human network intelligence, but that intelligence is opaque to the user, algorithm. Algorithms can have both machine and egregoric components.

Hey! Exciting! How about you go ahead and write your first stab at it, and then post it online? You could then make a comment here or on What 2026 Looks Like linking to it.

I'm afraid not, as far as I know it still hasn't been implemented and tested. Though maybe OpenAI is doing something halfway there. If you want to implement and test the idea, great! I'd love to advise on that project.

Anthropic shadow isn't a real thing, check this post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LGHuaLiq3F5NHQXXF/anthropically-blind-the-anthropic-shadow-is-reflectively [LW · GW]

Also, you should care about worlds proportional to the square of their amplitude.