LessWrong 2.0 Reader

aaaaw thank you for saying that! ^_ I appreciate it!

Thanks! :)

Yeah, I don't know if it's worth it to make it more accessible. I may have just failed a Google + "keyword in quotation marks" search, or failed to notice a link when searching via LessWrong's search feature.

Actually, an easy fix would just be for Google to improve their search tools, so that I can locate any link regardless of how specific for any public webpage just by ranting at my phone.

Anyway, thanks as well to Ben for tagging those mod-staff people.

Could consider “frontier AI watch”, “frontier AI company watch”, or “AGI watch.”

Most people in the world (including policymakers) have a much broader conception of AI. AI means machine learning, AI is the thing that 1000s of companies are using and 1000s of academics are developing, etc etc.

I'm neither of these but for temporarily secret reasons I care a lot about having the Geometric Rationality and Maximal Lottery-Lottery sequences be slightly higher-quality. Warning: these are AI-generated, if that's a problem. It's that, an abstract pattern, or programmer art from me.

Two options for Maximal Lottery-Lotteries:

Two options for Geometric Rationality:

Very interesting. I suspect the effect would be much greater for Mediterranean languages because Esperanto itself is latin based.

This is very well written and compelling. Thanks for posting it!

"Can we build a better Public Doublecrux?"

Something I'd like to try at LessOnline is to somehow iterate on the "Public Doublecrux" format.

Public Doublecrux is a more truthseeking oriented version of Public Debate. (The goal of a debate is to change your opponent's mind or the public's mind. The goal of a doublecrux is more like "work with your partner to figure out if you should change your mind, and vice vera")

Reasons to want to do _public_ doublecrux include:

• it helps showcase subtle mental moves that are hard to write down explicitly (i.e. tacit knowledge transfer)
• there's still something good and exciting about seeing high profile smart people talk about ideas. Having some variant of that format seems good for LessOnline. And having at least 1-2 "doublecruxes" rather than "debates" or "panels" or "interviews" seems good for culture setting.

Historically I think public doublecruxes have had some problems:

• two people actually changing *their* minds tend to get into idiosyncratic frames that are hard for observers to understand. You're chasing *your* cruxes, rather than presenting "generally compelling arguments." This tends to get into weeds and go down rabbit holes
• – having the audience there makes it a bit more awkward and performative.

...

...

With that in mind, here are some ideas:

• Maybe have the double cruxers in a private room, with videocameras. The talk is broadcast live to other conference-goers, but the actual chat is in a nice cozy room.
• Have _two_ (or three?) dedicated facilitators. One is in the room with the doublecruxers, focused on helping them steer towards useful questions. (this has been tried before seems to go well if the facilitator prepares). The SECOND (and maybe third) facilitator hangs out with the audience outside, and is focused on tracking "what is the audience confused about?". The audience participates in a live google doc where they're organizing the conversational threads and asking questions.
  
  (the first facilitator is periodically surreptitiously checking the google doc or chat and sometimes asking the Doublecruxers questions about it)
• it's possibly worth investing in developing a doublcrux process that's explicitly optimized for public consumption. This might be as simple as having the facilitator periodically asking participants to recap the open threads, what the goal of the current rabbit hole is, etc. But, like, brainstorming and doing "user tests" of it might be worthwhile.

...

Anyway those are some thoughts for now. Curious if anyone's got takes.

It's helpful to include a summary with linkposts.

So here's a super quick one. I didn't listen to it closely, so I could've missed something.

It's about the article No "Zero-Shot" Without Exponential Data

Here's the key line from the abstract:

We consistently find that, far from exhibiting "zero-shot" generalization, multimodal models require exponentially more data to achieve linear improvements in downstream "zero-shot" performance, following a sample inefficient log-linear scaling trend

So, we might not continue to get better performance if we need exponentially larger datasets to get small linear improvements. This seems quite plausible, if nobody comes up with some sort of clever bootstrapping in which automatic labeling of images and videos, with a little human feedback, creates useful unlimited size datasets.

I think this isn't going to much of a slowdown on AGI progress, because we don't need much more progress on foundation models to build scaffolded agentic cognitive architectures that use system 2 type cognition to gauage their accuracy and the importance of the judgment, and use multiple tries on multiple models for important cognitive acts. That's how humans are as effective as we are; we monitor and double-check our own cognition when appropriate.

I think one missing dynamic is "tools that an AI builds won't only be used by the AI that built them" and so looking at what an AI from 5 years in the future would do with tools from 5 years in the future if it was dropped into the world of today might not give a very accurate picture of what the world will look like in 5 years.

Hello, i am looking for a introductory book for psychology right now. I see that your post is 4 years old, would you still recommend this book as an introductory psychology book or is there something better you can suggest today?