LessWrong 2.0 Reader

What do you think antidepressants would be useful for?

In my experience I've gone months through a depressive episode while remaining externally functional and convincing myself (and the people around me) that I'm not going through a depressive episode. Another thing I've noticed is that with medication (whether anxiolytics, antidepressants or ADHD medication), I regularly underestimate the level at which I was 'blocked' by some mental issue that, after taking the medication, would not exist, and I would only realize it previously existed due to the (positive) changes in my behavior and cognition.

Essentially, I'm positing that you may be in a similar situation.

Yeboooiiiii.

Also this was gonna be the second essay i posted, so great minds think alike!

I was thinking of having evals that controlled deployment of LLMs could be something that needs multiple stakeholders to agree upon.

Butt really it is a general use pattern.

Thanks, Elizabeth! Really has helped us out :)

Hey Eshvy!

Retention is a really tough one to answer questions on, sadly - it very much depends on where the user came from (ie, a TikTok ad vs an organic intentional search). Happy to answer any other questions though!

I don't actually think proponents of anti-x-risk AI regulation have thought very much about the ways in which regulatory capture might in fact be harmful to reducing AI x-risk. At least, I haven't seen much writing about this, nor has it come up in many of the discussions I've had (except insofar as I brought it up).

In general I am against arguments of the form "X is terrible but we have to try it because worlds that don't do it are even more doomed". I'll steal Scott Garrabrant's quote from here [? · GW]:

"If you think everything is doomed, you should try not to mess anything up. If your worldview is right, we probably lose, so our best out is the one where your your worldview is somehow wrong. In that world, we don't want mistaken people to take big unilateral risk-seeking actions.

Until recently, people with P(doom) of, say, 10%, have been natural allies of people with P(doom) of >80%. But the regulation that the latter group thinks is sufficient to avoid xrisk with high confidence has, on my worldview, a significant chance of either causing x-risk from totalitarianism, or else causing x-risk via governments being worse at alignment than companies would have been. How high? Not sure, but plausibly enough to make these two groups no longer natural allies.

What about estimating LLM capabilities from the length of a sequence of numbers that it can reverse?

I used prompts like:
"please reverse 4 5 8 1 1 8 1 4 4 9 3 9 3 3 3 5 5 2 7 8"
"please reverse 1 9 4 8 6 1 3 2 2 5"
etc...

Some results:
- Llama2 starts making mistakes after 5 numbers
- Llama3 can do 10, but fails at 20
- GPT-4 can do 20 but fails at 40

The followup questions are:
- what should be the name of this metric?
- are the other top-scoring models like Claude similar? (I don't have access)
- any bets on how many numbers will GPT-5 be able to reverse?
- how many numbers should AGI be able to reverse? ASI? can this be a Turing test of sorts?

Yeah, I did some Googling and packaged supermarket bread has all kinds of stuff added to it. (There's a reason the bagels from the bagel store nearby get moldy and the "Thomas's Bagels" from the supermarket last forever...)

I think I'm gonna start posting top blogpost to the main feed (mainly from dead writers or people I predict won't care) 

So once that research is finished, assuming it is successful, you'd agree that many worlds would end up using fewer bits in that case? That seems like a reasonable position to me, then! (I find the partial-trace kinds of arguments that people make pretty convincing already, but it's reasonable not to.)