LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Are you genuinely unfamiliar with what is happening to the uyghurs, or is this a rhetorical question?

Gott started this type of confusion than he claimed that Berlin wall will stay 14 more years and it actually did exactly that. A better claim would be "first tens of hours with some given credence"

This sounds like both an alignment and a capabilities problem.

AI 2027-style takeoffs do not look plausible when you can't extract reliable work from models. 

are you saying something like: you can't actually do more of everything except one thing, because you'll never do everything. so there's a lot of variance that comes from exploration that multiplies with your $O\left(k^2\right)$ variance from having a suboptimal zero point. so in practice your $k$ needs to be very close to optimal. so my thing is true but not useful in practice.

i feel people do empirically shift $k$ quite a lot throughout life and it does seem to change how effectively they learn. if you're mildly depressed your $k$ is slightly too low and you learn a little bit slower. if you're mildly manic your $k$ is too high and you also learn a little bit slower. therapy, medications, and meditations shift $k$ mildly.

“In a few rigged demos, it even lies in more serious ways, like hiding evidence that it failed on a task, in order to get better ratings.”

Yeah tbh these misalignments are more blatant/visible and worse than I expected for 2025. I think they'll be hastily-patched one way or another by this time next year probably.

InverseGaussian[7.97413, 1.315]

Can you elaborate on where these numbers coming from? Eli's screenshot for the inversegaussian had parameters of 5.3743 and 18.9427.

Regarding the Russians and East Slavs more broadly, Anatoly Karlin has some napkin math that at the very least shows the huge toll that the world wars had on their populations, which barely grow or s:

(8a) Russia just within its current borders, assuming otherwise analogous fertility and migration trends, would have had 261.8 million people by 2017 without the triple demographic disasters of Bolshevism, WW2, and the 1990s – that’s double its actual population of 146 million.

Source: Демографические итоги послереволюционного столетия & Демографические катастрофы ХХ века by Anatoly Vishnevsky

(8b) According to my very rough calculations, based on various sources, the population change for each of the following in their current borders between 1913/14 and 1945/46 was about as follows:

• Russia – 91M/97M
• Ukraine – 35M/34M
• Belarus – 7.5M/7.7M

Assuming a threefold expansion in all of these populations, we could have been looking to a Russian Empire or Republic with a further ~120M fully Russified Belorussians and largely Russified Ukrainians, for a total Slavic population of almost 400M.

That’s twice bigger than the number of White Americans today, the most populous single European ethnicity, and almost as much as all of today’s Western Europe.

(8c) Total population of a hypothetical Russian Empire that also retained Central Asia and the Caucasus, and that hadn’t been bled white by commies, Nazis, and Westernizers during the course of the 20th century, would likely have been not that far off from Dmitry Mendeleev’s 1906 projection of 594 million for 2000.

Can somebody get me in touch with somebody from the Center for AI Safety (safe.ai)? Their page for applying for compute resources seems broken. I have used their contact form to report the issue on April 7th, but received no reply.

This is how the application page looks like at least since then (linked from their Compute Cluster page):

As you can see, there is no form field to enter and only a lone "Absenden" button, which is German and means "submit" (which is strange because my system and browser are set to English). If I click that button, I get this message:

Looks like this form is empty. Try filling it out before submitting.

My guess is that there is a problem with their Airtable integration. 

If you wonder what I'm trying to apply for: 

• The project Reducing LLM deception at scale with self-other overlap fine-tuning [LW · GW] (SOO) I am working with at AE Studio is in urgent need for more compute to run SOO experiments with Mistral Large 2 (or even larger).
• The aintelope project [LW · GW] (sorry, not many updates recently) needs compute for running more evaluations of our benchmark From homeostasis to resource sharing: Biologically and economically aligned multi-objective multi-agent AI safety benchmarks and we wanted to apply at CAIS too (having run out of funding, more on that later).

Consider instead that Trump was elected with over 50% of the popular vote. Perhaps there are more fundamental cultural factors at play than the method used to count ballots.

Winning the popular vote in the current system doesn't tell you what would happen in a different system. This is the same mistake people make when they talk about who would have won if we didn't have an electoral college: If we had a different system, candidates would campaign differently and voters would vote differently.

Good timing.

Jesus: "I just got done trying to fix this!"

Less jokingly, scapegoating, accountability sinks, liability laundering, declining trust, kakonomics, form an interesting constellation that I feel is under explored for understanding human behavior when part of large systems.