I think Instruction-following AGI is easier and more likely than value aligned AGI, and that this accounts for one major crux of disagreement on alignment difficulty. I got several responses to that piece that didn't dispute that intent alignment is easier, but argued we shouldn't give up on value alignment. I think that's right. Here's another way to frame the value of personal intent alignment: we can use a superintelligent instruction-following AGI to solve full value alignment.

This is different than automated alignment research; it's not hoping tool AI can help with our homework, it's making an AGI smarter than us in every way do our homework for us. It's a longer term plan. Having a superintelligent, largely autonomous entity that just really likes taking instructions from puny humans is counterintuitive, but it seems both logically consistent. And it seems technically achievable on the current trajectory - if we [...]

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First published:

November 5th, 2024

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/587AsXewhzcFBDesH/intent-alignment-as-a-stepping-stone-to-value-alignment

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Me: I think it's possible that we might not need to figure out biotechnological advances for how we can create superbabies through embryo selection or so, but that actually they might already be around 1000 or more superbabies born on earth per year, only they happen to be born into an environment where they don't get educated and don't learn the necessary skills to advance science. By superbabies I mean genetic potential for intelligence of >=+7std on the human distribution.

Imaginary person (IP): What, how could that be true? There being some hunter tribe of genetical supergeniuses which are almost not communicating with the rest of humanity?

Me: Sorta yeah.

IP: And where would those superbabies be?

Me: Here:

.

.

.

.

.

IP: Are you joking?

Me: No. See this excellent reddit post (or my wrapper post around it) for why it's IMO a pretty [...]

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Outline:

(02:29) Can someone please look into this?

(03:15) Cautionary notes

(04:08) Sidenote on how orcas (and pilot whales) could be useful datapoints for AI alignment

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

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

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First published:

November 5th, 2024

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vKM4CTjz5fPB7vznb/an-alternative-approach-to-superbabies

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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(Btw everything I write here about orcas also applies to a slightly lesser extent to pilot whales (especially long finned ones)[1].)

(I'm very very far from an orca expert - basically everything I know about them I learned today.)

I always thought that bigger animals might have bigger brains than humans but not actually more neurons in their neocortex (like elephants) and that number of neurons in the neocortex or prefrontal cortex might be a good inter-species indicator of intelligence for mammalian brains.[2] Yesterday I discovered that orcas actually have 2.05 times as many neurons in their neocortex[3] than humans from this wikipedia list. Interestingly though, given my pretty bad model of how intelligent some species are, the "number of neurons in neocortex" still seems like a proxy that doesn't perform too badly on the wikipedia list.

Orca brains are not just larger but also more strongly folded.

Orcas [...]

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

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

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First published:

November 4th, 2024

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gRShuaWgKjizM4xPM/could-orcas-be-trained-to-be-smarter-than-humans

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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There's a concept I think about when teaching, which I call Graceful Degradation. The basic idea is, how well does this lesson work if someone doesn’t remember it very well or if I teach it badly?

I.

Consider throwing a punch.

Make a fist with your thumb on the outside of your fingers, because you don’t want to pop your thumb. Place your feet shoulder width apart and then take a comfortable step forward with one foot and plant yourself solidly. Bring your fist close to your chest or face, then move it in a straight line from there to your opponent so you waste as little motion as possible. You want to make contact with the first knuckles of your pointer and middle fingers. Don’t hit someone in the face unless you’re wearing boxing gloves, particularly the jaw or mouth since that's one big crumple zone.

Different martial [...]

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Outline:

(00:16) I.

(01:39) 2.

(03:50) 3.

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First published:

November 5th, 2024

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N65uQ5RP6dYEC6CHW/graceful-degradation

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

(Epistemic status: I spoke simply / without "appears to" hedges, but I'm not sure of this at all.)

I’m confused why we keep getting scissors statements as our Presidential candidates, but we do. (That is: the candidates seem themselves to break many minds/conversations.)

A toy model:[1]

Take two capacities, A and B. Ideally anti-correlated.

Craft two candidates:

• Candidate X, who seems acceptable if you’re A-blind (if you have a major gap in your situation awareness near A).
• Candidate Y, who seems acceptable if you’re B-blind (if you have a major gap in your situation awareness near B).

Now let voters talk.

“How can you possibly vote for X, given how it’ll make a disaster on axis A?”, asks Susan. (She is B-blind, which is part of why she is so confused/irate/loud here.) Susan inquires in detail. She (accurately) determines the staunchest X-voters don't understand A, and (understandably, but [...]

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

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First published:

November 6th, 2024

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FkYAYQQig4FDTN6r5/scissors-statements-for-president

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Hello! I'm looking for community members to read speeches at the Bay Winter Solstice event this year. If you're interested, please email me by the end of November 17 with the speeches you're potentially interested in. I'll ask you to record yourself reading it (no need to be particularly polished).

I am currently auditioning for:

• Thanksgiving Prayer
• I Have Seen The Tops Of Clouds*
• Self-Compassion*
• What Resembles The Grave But Isn't
• 500 Million But Not A Single One More
• RMS Carpathia
• The Gift We Give To Tomorrow*
• An original piece about the malaria vaccine
• An original piece about the abolition of slavery

(The list is tentative and does not include all speeches at Solstice.)

For starred items, I am only including an excerpt of the speech, so please email me to get the excerpt I'm using before you record!

As a reminder, the event itself will [...]

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First published:

November 4th, 2024

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoT6G6raWWuSqpdR7/bay-winter-solstice-2024-speech-auditions

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

In our jobs as AI safety researchers, we think a lot about what it means to have reasonable beliefs and to make good decisions. This matters because we want to understand how powerful AI systems might behave. It also matters because we ourselves need to know how to make good decisions in light of tremendous uncertainty about how to shape the long-term future.

It seems to us that there is a pervasive feeling in this community that the way to decide which norms of rationality to follow is to pick the ones that win. When it comes to the choice between CDT vs. EDT vs. LDT…, we hear we can simply choose the one that gets the most utility. When we say that perhaps we ought to be imprecise Bayesians, and therefore be clueless about our effects on the long-term future, we hear that imprecise Bayesianism is “outperformed” by [...]

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Outline:

(01:31) “Winning” gives little guidance

(01:50) Avoiding dominated strategies

(04:36) Heuristics

(11:27) Non-pragmatic principles

(15:25) Conclusion

(16:48) Acknowledgments

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

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First published:

November 5th, 2024

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QxoGM89f8zr3JmNrz/winning-isn-t-enough

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

[Cross posting from my personal blog: https://spiralprogress.com/2024/10/28/the-shallow-bench/]

Project Hail Mary follows Ryland Grace, a disgraced academic turned high school biology teacher who gets selected as part of a crew of three tasked with saving all of humanity from an impending alien threat.

Not even in sci-fi does a premise this absurd get presented without explanation. What does PHM offer?

“They found a collection of genes that give a human ‘coma resistance.”

“The main problem is this: On average, only one in every seven thousand humans has that genetic sequence.”

“We wouldn’t be able to send the most qualified people. We’d be sending the seven-thousandth most qualified people.”

In real life, I work in a complex and niche field that my skill set only very tangentially qualifies me for.

Periodically, I’ll meet people who ask how I ended up there. They’re not trying to be mean, it's more like [...]

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First published:

November 5th, 2024

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9XtMrLzuf6Pmymckv/the-shallow-bench

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Thank you to Justis Millis for providing feedback and proofreading on this post. This post is also available on my Substack.

TL/DR: Contrary to the theory that neurological sex differences and autism both involve the same tradeoff of systemic versus empathic thinking, I found complex differences. It turned out that men were more interested in technology and more disagreeable, whereas autistic people had a narrower focus on details, were more introverted, more socially challenged, and had stronger sensory sensitivity.

I asked people on Prolific a bunch of questions that are supposed to be related to autism, systemizing and empathy. As a preview before I get into the details, the overall results can be seen here:

If there was only a single underlying tradeoff that all of these scales were measuring, then we would expect all of the group differences to be highly correlated, with the items just varying [...]

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Outline:

(01:21) Background

(03:01) Data

(04:03) Principal component analysis

(06:43) Measurement invariance

(10:22) Improving interpretability

(15:58) Appendix: Item list

(23:19) Appendix: Score distributions

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

The original text contained 29 images which were described by AI.

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First published:

November 4th, 2024

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eTHvMqxaLsrxtRLq3/empathy-systemizing-quotient-is-a-poor-biased-model-for-the

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Midjourney, “metastatic cancer”

Metastatic Cancer Is Usually Deadly

When my mom was diagnosed with cancer, it was already metastatic; her lymph nodes, said the nurse, “lit up like a Christmas tree.”

Most people with any kind of metastatic cancer — that is, instead of a single tumor, a cancer that has spread to multiple locations in the body — die within the year.

You’ve probably heard of people “surviving” cancer, saved by chemotherapy or surgery or radiation or a new high-tech drug.

If you know more about cancer, you’re aware that “survival” is relative; when there are no observable signs of cancer, you’re considered to be “in remission”, but you’ll always be at elevated risk of the cancer coming back. Still, years-long or even lifelong remissions are possible, and for some cancer types are even now the norm after treatment.

Mostly that's for cancers caught early, though. Once the [...]

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Outline:

(00:13) Metastatic Cancer Is Usually Deadly

(01:12) …So Eradicating Metastatic Cancer is Especially Impressive

(02:07) Methodology

(04:08) Single-Patient Case Studies

(04:14) Stats

(04:50) Takeaways

(06:27) Larger Studies and Case Series

(06:34) Stats

(07:07) Takeaways

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First published:

November 4th, 2024

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5mgAd5kY6Jag7d5o9/metastatic-cancer-treatment-since-2010-the-success-stories

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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