• LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

  • By: LessWrong
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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

By: LessWrong
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  • Summary

  • Audio narrations of LessWrong posts. Includes all curated posts and all posts with 125+ karma.

    If you'd like more, subscribe to the “Lesswrong (30+ karma)” feed.
    © 2024 LessWrong (Curated & Popular)
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Episodes
  • “The hostile telepaths problem” by Valentine

    “The hostile telepaths problem” by Valentine
    Oct 28 2024
    Epistemic status: model-building based on observation, with a few successful unusual predictions. Anecdotal evidence has so far been consistent with the model. This puts it at risk of seeming more compelling than the evidence justifies just yet. Caveat emptor.

    Imagine you're a very young child. Around, say, three years old.

    You've just done something that really upsets your mother. Maybe you were playing and knocked her glasses off the table and they broke.

    Of course you find her reaction uncomfortable. Maybe scary. You're too young to have detailed metacognitive thoughts, but if you could reflect on why you're scared, you wouldn't be confused: you're scared of how she'll react.

    She tells you to say you're sorry.

    You utter the magic words, hoping that will placate her.

    And she narrows her eyes in suspicion.

    "You sure don't look sorry. Say it and mean it."

    Now you have a serious problem. [...]

    ---

    Outline:

    (02:16) Newcomblike self-deception

    (06:10) Sketch of a real-world version

    (08:43) Possible examples in real life

    (12:17) Other solutions to the problem

    (12:38) Having power

    (14:45) Occlumency

    (16:48) Solution space is maybe vast

    (17:40) Ending the need for self-deception

    (18:21) Welcome self-deception

    (19:52) Look away when directed to

    (22:59) Hypothesize without checking

    (25:50) Does this solve self-deception?

    (27:21) Summary

    The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

    ---

    First published:
    October 27th, 2024

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5FAnfAStc7birapMx/the-hostile-telepaths-problem

    ---

    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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    29 mins
  • “A bird’s eye view of ARC’s research” by Jacob_Hilton

    “A bird’s eye view of ARC’s research” by Jacob_Hilton
    Oct 27 2024
    This post includes a "flattened version" of an interactive diagram that cannot be displayed on this site. I recommend reading the original version of the post with the interactive diagram, which can be found here.

    Over the last few months, ARC has released a number of pieces of research. While some of these can be independently motivated, there is also a more unified research vision behind them. The purpose of this post is to try to convey some of that vision and how our individual pieces of research fit into it.

    Thanks to Ryan Greenblatt, Victor Lecomte, Eric Neyman, Jeff Wu and Mark Xu for helpful comments.

    A bird's eye view

    To begin, we will take a "bird's eye" view of ARC's research.[1] As we "zoom in", more nodes will become visible and we will explain the new nodes.

    An interactive version of the [...]

    ---

    Outline:

    (00:43) A birds eye view

    (01:00) Zoom level 1

    (02:18) Zoom level 2

    (03:44) Zoom level 3

    (04:56) Zoom level 4

    (07:14) How ARCs research fits into this picture

    (07:43) Further subproblems

    (10:23) Conclusion

    The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

    The original text contained 3 images which were described by AI.

    ---

    First published:
    October 23rd, 2024

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ztokaf9harKTmRcn4/a-bird-s-eye-view-of-arc-s-research

    ---

    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

    ---

    Images from the article:
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    11 mins
  • “A Rocket–Interpretability Analogy” by plex

    “A Rocket–Interpretability Analogy” by plex
    Oct 25 2024
    1.

    4.4% of the US federal budget went into the space race at its peak.

    This was surprising to me, until a friend pointed out that landing rockets on specific parts of the moon requires very similar technology to landing rockets in soviet cities.[1]

    I wonder how much more enthusiastic the scientists working on Apollo were, with the convenient motivating story of “I’m working towards a great scientific endeavor” vs “I’m working to make sure we can kill millions if we want to”.

    2.

    The field of alignment seems to be increasingly dominated by interpretability. (and obedience[2])

    This was surprising to me[3], until a friend pointed out that partially opening the black box of NNs is the kind of technology that would scaling labs find new unhobblings by noticing ways in which the internals of their models are being inefficient and having better tools to evaluate capabilities advances.[4]

    I [...]

    ---

    Outline:

    (00:03) 1.

    (00:35) 2.

    (01:20) 3.

    The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

    ---

    First published:
    October 21st, 2024

    Source:
    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/h4wXMXneTPDEjJ7nv/a-rocket-interpretability-analogy

    ---

    Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
    Show More Show Less
    3 mins

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