LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Virtual watercoolers

As I mentioned in some recent Shortform posts, I recently listened to the Bayesian Conspiracy podcast's episode on the LessOnline festival and it got me thinking.

One thing I think is cool is that Ben Pace was saying how the valuable thing about these festivals isn't the presentations, it's the time spent mingling in between the presentations, and so they decided with LessOnline to just ditch the presentations and make it all about mingling. Which got me thinking about mingling.

It seems plausible to me that such mingling can and should happen more online. And I wonder whether an important thing about mingling in the physical world is that, how do I say this, you're just in the same physical space, next to each other, with nothing else you're supposed to be doing, and in fact what you're supposed to be doing is talking to one another.

Well, I guess you're not supposed to be talking to one another. It's also cool if you just want to hang out and sip on a drink or something. It's similar to the office water cooler: it's cool if you're just hanging out drinking some water, but it's also normal to chit chat with your coworkers.

I wonder whether it'd be good to design a virtual watercooler. A digital place that mimicks aspects of the situations I've been describing (festivals, office watercoolers).

1. By being available in the virtual watercooler it's implied that you're pretty available to chit chat with, but it's also cool if you're just hanging out doing something low key like sipping a drink.
2. You shouldn't be doing something more substantial though.
3. The virtual watercooler should be organized around a certain theme. It should attract a certain group of people and filter out people who don't fit in. Just like how festivals and office water coolers.

In particular, this feels to me like something that might be worth exploring for LessWrong.

Note: I know that there are various Slack and Discord groups but they don't meet conditions (1) or (2).

I'd take an agnostic view on whether LLMs are doing search internally. Crucially, though, I think the relevant output to be searching over is distributions of tokens, rather than the actual token that gets chosen. Search is not required to generate a single distribution over next tokens. 

I agree that external search via scaffolding can also be done, and would be much easier to identify, but without understanding the internals it's hard to know how powerful the search process will be.

More dakka with festivals

In the rationality community people are currently excited about the LessOnline festival. Furthermore, my impression is that similar festivals are generally quite successful: people enjoy them, have stimulating discussions, form new relationships, are exposed to new and interesting ideas, express that they got a lot out of it, etc.

So then, this feels to me like a situation where More Dakka [? · GW] applies. Organize more festivals!

How? Who? I dunno, but these seem like questions worth discussing.

I think it's still valid to ask in the abstract whether RL is a particularly dangerous approach to training an AI system.

To test whether Drake’s circumvention of his short-term memory loss worked via the intended mechanism, I could ask my girlfriend in advance to prompt me once — and only once — to complete the long-term memory scene that I had been practicing. Then I could see if I have a memory of the scene after I fully regain my memory.

You should have her decide (and write down) what to encode in advance, so that you can check later not just if you remembered something, but if you successfully encoded it in such a way that you communicate what you intend to communicate to yourself.

(Since Drake managed to send a memory, but was only guessing about what it was intended to mean.)

I listened to part of “Processor clock speeds are not how fast AIs think”, but I was disappointed by the lack of a human narrator. I am not interested in machine readings; I would prefer to go read the article.

That's true; I misremembered that part when I wrote it. I'll just remove that.

The direction extracted using the same method will vary per layer, but this doesn’t mean that the correct feature direction varies that much, but rather that it cannot be extracted using a linear function of the activations at too early/late layers.

InDesign! Or anything on page layout / publishing / how to make a pretty and well formatted book

shut your phone off

Leave phones elsewhere, remove batteries, or faraday cage them if you're concerned about state-level actors:

https://slate.com/technology/2013/07/nsa-can-reportedly-track-cellphones-even-when-they-re-turned-off.html