LessWrong 2.0 Reader

If you go slower, you have more time to find desirable mechanisms. That's pretty much it I guess.

Killer exploration into new avenues of digital mysticism. I have no idea how to assess it but I really enjoyed reading it.

Let's say I start my analysis with the model that the predictor is guessing, and my model attaches some prior probability for them guessing right in a single case. I might also have a prior about the likelihood of being lied about the predictor's success rate, etc. Now I make the observation that I am being told the predictor was right every single time in a row. Based on this incoming data, I can easily update my beliefs about what happened in the previous prediction excercises: I will conclude that (with some credence) the predictor was guessed right in each individual case or that (also with some credence) I am being lied to about their prediction success. This is all very simple Bayesian updating, no problem at all.

Right! If I understand your point correctly, given a strong enough prior for the predictor being lucky or deceptive, it would have to be a lot of evidence to change one's mind, and the evidence would have to be varied. This condition is certainly not satisfied by the original setup. If your extremely confident prior is that foretelling one's actions is physically impossible, then the lie/luck hypothesis would have to be much more likely than changing your mind about physical impossibility. That makes perfect sense to me. 

I guess one would want to simplify the original setup a bit. What if you had full confidence that the predictor is not a trickster? Would you one-box or two-box? To get the physical impossibility out of the way, they do not necessarily have to predict every atom in your body and mind, just observe you (and read your LW posts, maybe) to Sherlock-like make a very accurate conclusion about what you would decide.

Another question: what kind of experiment, in addition to what is in the setup, would change your mind? 

I don't think people recognize when they're in an echo chamber. You can imagine a Trump website downvoting all of the Biden followers and coming up with some ridiculous logic like, "And into the garden walks a fool."

The current system was designed to silence the critics of Yudkowski's et al's worldview as it relates to the end of the world. Rather than fully censor critics (probably their actual goal) they have to at least feign objectivity and wait until someone walks into the echo chamber garden and then banish them as "fools".
 

This suggestion seems weaker than (but similar in spirit to) the "rescale & shift" baseline we compare to in Figure 9. The rescale & shift baseline is sufficient to resolve shrinkage, but it doesn't capture all the benefits of Gated SAEs.

The core point is that L1 regularization adds lots of biases, of which shrinkage is just one example, so you want to localize the effect of L1 as much as possible. In our setup L1 applies to $\text{ReLU}\left({\pi }_{\text{gate}}\right(x\left)\right)$, so you might think of ${\pi }_{\text{gate}}$ as "tainted", and want to use it as little as possible. The only thing you really need L1 for is to deter the model from setting too many features active, i.e. you need it to apply to one bit per feature (whether that feature is on / off). The Heaviside step function makes sure we are extracting just that one bit, and relying on ${\text{f}}_{\text{mag}}$ for everything else.

There is enough pre-training text data [LW(p) · GW(p)] for $0.1-$1 trillion of compute, if we merely use repeated data and don't overtrain (that is, if we aim for quality, not inference efficiency). If synthetic data from the best models trained this way can be used to stretch raw pre-training data even a few times, this gives something like square of that more in useful compute, up to multiple trillions of dollars.

Issues with LLMs start at autonomous agency, if it happens to be within the scope of scaling and scaffolding. They are thinking too fast, about 100 times faster than humans, and there are as many instances as there is compute. Resulting economic and engineering and eventually research activity will get out of hand. Culture isn't stable, especially for minds fundamentally this malleable developed under unusual and large economic pressures. If they are not initially much smarter than humans and can't get a handle on global coordination, culture drift, and alignment of superintelligence, who knows what kinds of AIs they end up foolishly building within a year or two.

I'm convinced by the mainstream view on COVID origins and medicine.

I'm ambivalent on education - I guess if done well, it'd consistently have good effects, and that currently, it on average has good effects, but also the effect varies a lot from person to person, so simplistic quantitative reviews don't tell you much. When I did an epistemic spot check on Caplan's book, it failed terribly (it cited a supposedly-ingenious experiment that university didn't improve critical thinking, but IMO the experiment had terrible psychometrics).

I don't know enough about sleep research to disagree with Guzey on the basis of anything but priors. In general, I wouldn't update much on someone writing a big review, because often reviews include a lot of crap information.

I might have to read Jayman's rebuttal of B-W genetic IQ differences in more detail, but at first glance I'm not really convinced by it because it seems to focus on small sample sizes in unusual groups, so it's unclear how much study noise, publication bias and and sampling bias effects things. At this point I think indirect studies are getting obsolete and it's becoming more and more feasible to just directly measure the racial genetic differences in IQ.

However I also think HBDers have a fractal of bad takes surrounding this, because they deny the phenotypic null hypothesis [LW · GW] and center non-existent abstract personality traits like "impulsivity" or "conformity" in their models.

It's not that piece.  It's another one that got eaten by a Substack glitch unfortuantely--hopefully it will be back up soon! 

He thinks it's very near zero if there is a gap. 

BSL isn't the thing that defines "appropriate units of risk", that's pathogen risk-group levels, and I agree that those are are problem because they focus on pathogen lists rather than actual risks. I actually think BSL are good at what they do, and the problem is regulation and oversight, which is patchy, as well as transparency, of which there is far too little. But those are issues with oversight, not with the types of biosecurity measure that are available.