This is a link post.

Understanding Coordination Problems

The following is a post introducing coordination problems, using the examples of poaching, civilisational development, drug addiction and affirmative action. It draws on my experience as a documentary filmmaker. The post is available for free in its original format at nonzerosum.games.

When I was eleven, I disassembled the lock to our back door, and as I opened the housing… it exploded, scattering six tiny brass pellets on to the floor.

I discovered (too late) that a lock of this type contained spring-loaded cylinders of different heights corresponding to the teeth of the key.

I struggled for hours trying to get the little buggers back in, but it was futile—eventually, my long suffering parents called a locksmith.

The reason fixing the lock was so difficult was not only because it was spring-loaded but because I had to find the [...]

The original text contained 12 images which were described by AI.

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First published:

July 27th, 2024

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/honDH7PRbsSgc6xWF/unlocking-solutions

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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This is a link post.

If you're familiar with SB 1047, I recommend reading the letter in full; it's only 7 pages.

I'll go through their list of suggested changes and briefly analyze them, and then make a couple high-level points. (I am not a lawyer and nothing written here is legal advice.)

Major Changes

Greatly narrow the scope of pre-harm enforcement to focus solely on (a) failure to develop, publish, or implement an SSP[1] (the content of which is up to the company); (b) companies making materially false statements about an SSP; (c) imminent, catastrophic risks to public safety.

Motivated by the following concern laid out earlier in the letter:

The current bill requires AI companies to design and implement SSPs that meet certain standards – for example they must include testing sufficient to provide a “reasonable assurance” that the AI system will not cause a catastrophe, and must [...]

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:

July 27th, 2024

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oa4AQ7K9vKHroc5Co/re-anthropic-s-suggested-sb-1047-amendments

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Many people who are concerned about AI x-risk work at AI labs, in the hope of doing directly useful work, boosting a relatively responsible lab, or causing their lab to be safer on the margin.

Labs do lots of stuff that affects AI safety one way or another. It would be hard enough to follow all this at best; in practice, labs are incentivized to be misleading in both their public and internal comms, making it even harder to follow what's happening. And so people end up misinformed about what's happening, often leading them to make suboptimal choices.

In my AI Lab Watch work, I pay attention to what AI labs do and what they should do. So I'm in a good position to inform interested but busy people.

So I'm announcing an experimental service where I provide the following:

• Calls for current and prospective employees of frontier [...]

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First published:

July 27th, 2024

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bnx4FEwxTkNm7TWCR/safety-consultations-for-ai-lab-employees

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

silentbob's post "Failures in Kindness" is excellent. I love the idea that sometimes, when we exaimine a situation in depth, the most "kind" course of action can be highly conterintuitive. A few other examples I'd like to offer:

Appreciative Kindness

Imagine you meet a friend-of-a-friend for the first time while attending a gathering at their home. "Hey, welcome! It's great to meet you - can I get you anything?" they ask. There's nothing you really want right now, and you don't want to take from them or cause inconvienience, so you say "I'm fine, thanks."

Some people might assume declining their offer is kind. After all, wouldn't it be inconsiderate to make them go to the effort to proivde you with something you don't even really want?

But declining in this way will likely be percieved as a minor rejection. From the other person's perspective, they [...]

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First published:

July 27th, 2024

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SAzrAyJw6LeQ4SAb6/inspired-by-failures-in-kindness

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post.

On 75 percent or more of the residential land in most major American cities it is illegal to build anything other than a detached single-family home. 95.8 percent of total residential land area in California is zoned as single-family-only, which is 30 percent of all land in the state. Restrictive zoning regulations such as these probably lower GDP per capita in the US by 8-36%. That's potentially tens of thousands of dollars per person.

Map of land use in San Jose, California. Pink is single family only (94%)

The legal authority behind all of these zoning rules derives from a 1926 Supreme Court decision in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. Ambler realty held 68 acres of land in the town of Euclid, Ohio. The town, wanting to avoid influence, immigration, and industry from nearby Cleveland, passed a restrictive zoning ordinance which prevented Ambler [...]

The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.

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First published:

July 26th, 2024

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZF5ukoCvRYRjchxcW/end-single-family-zoning-by-overturning-euclid-v-ambler

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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I asked the Constellation Slack channel how the technical AIS landscape has changed since I last spent substantial time in the Bay Area (September 2023), and I figured it would be useful to post this (with the permission of the contributors to either post with or without attribution). Curious if commenters agree or would propose additional changes!

This conversation has been lightly edited to preserve anonymity.

Me: One reason I wanted to spend a few weeks in Constellation was to sort of absorb-through-osmosis how the technical AI safety landscape has evolved since I last spent substantial time here in September 2023, but it seems more productive to just ask here "how has the technical AIS landscape evolved since September 2023?" and then have conversations armed with that knowledge. The flavor of this question is like, what are the technical directions and strategies people are most excited about, do we [...]

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First published:

July 26th, 2024

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vxwdfK7FEuM8Butr6/how-the-ai-safety-technical-landscape-has-changed-in-the

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

The Bay Area rationalist community has an entry problem! Lots of listed groups are dead, the last centralized index disappeared, communication moved to private discord and slacks. This is bad, so we're making a new index, hopefully up to date and as complete as we can!

Communication

Discord: Bay Area Rationalists: https://discord.gg/EpG4xUVKtf

Email Group: BayAreaLessWrong: https://groups.google.com/g/bayarealesswrong

Local Meetup Groups

Taco Tuesday: by Austin Chen, founder emeritus of Manifold. Check his Manifold questions page for the next date!

North Oakland LessWrong Meetup: every Wednesday, hosted by @Czynski.

Thursday Dinners in Berkeley: Advertised on the Discord server and Google group, alternating between a few restaurants on the northwest side of UC campus.

Bay Area ACX Meetups: For the ACX everywhere meetups twice per year, and some other sporadic events.

Housing

To find spots in group houses, temporary or long term, you can use the Bay Area EA/Rationality Housing Board. The [...]

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First published:

July 26th, 2024

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hDefuqC2Rbnr8THYW/index-of-rationalist-groups-in-the-bay-july-2024

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.This is a link post.

Work done at FAR AI.

There has been a lot of conceptual work on mesa-optimizers: neural networks that develop internal goals that may differ from their training objectives (the inner alignment problem). There is an abundance of good ideas for empirical work (find search in a NN, interpret it), but very little actual execution, partly because we did not have a clear-cut example of a mesa-optimizer to study. Until now.[1]

We have replicated the mesa-optimizer that Guez et al. (2019) found, and released it open-source as a model organism for inner alignment research. In brief, Guez et al. trained a recurrent neural network (RNN) with model-free RL to play Sokoban. They noticed that if you give the RNN more time to think by repeating the initial observation at inference time, its performance increases. [...]

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

The original text contained 4 images which were described by AI.

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First published:

July 25th, 2024

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CLijBSGKi6bbSHw46/pacing-outside-the-box-rnns-learn-to-plan-in-sokoban

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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(Crossposted from Twitter)

I'm skeptical that Universal Basic Income can get rid of grinding poverty, since somehow humanity's 100-fold productivity increase (since the days of agriculture) didn't eliminate poverty.

Some of my friends reply, "What do you mean, poverty is still around? 'Poor' people today, in Western countries, have a lot to legitimately be miserable about, don't get me wrong; but they also have amounts of clothing and fabric that only rich merchants could afford a thousand years ago; they often own more than one pair of shoes; why, they even have cellphones, as not even an emperor of the olden days could have had at any price. They're relatively poor, sure, and they have a lot of things to be legitimately sad about. But in what sense is almost-anyone in a high-tech country 'poor' by the standards of a thousand years earlier? Maybe UBI works the same way [...]

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First published:

July 26th, 2024

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fPvssZk3AoDzXwfwJ/universal-basic-income-and-poverty

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This article contains more than fifty uses of logical or mathematical notation, so an audio narration would be too hard to follow. You'll find a link to the original text in the episode description.

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First published:

July 26th, 2024

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QA7bQHpKymPBFBuHb/a-solomonoff-inductor-walks-into-a-bar-schelling-points-for

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.