LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Inspired by a house party inspired by Scott Alexander.

By the time you arrive in Berkeley, the party is already in full swing. You’ve come late because your reading of the polycule graph indicated that the first half would be inauspicious. But now you’ve finally made it to the social event of the season: the Every Bay Area House Party-themed house party.

The first order of the evening is to get a color-coded flirting wristband, so that you don’t incur any accidental micromarriages. You scan the menu of options near the door. There's the wristband for people who aren’t interested in flirting; the wristband for those want to be flirted with, but will never flirt back; the wristband for those who only want to flirt with people who have different-colored wristbands; and of course the one for people who want to glomarize disclosure of their flirting preferences. Finally you [...]

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First published:
February 16th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/g5q4JiG5dzafkdyEN/every-every-bay-area-house-party-bay-area-house-party

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

The Data

0. Population

There were 558 responses over 32 days. The spacing and timing of the responses had hills and valleys because of an experiment I was performing where I'd get the survey advertised in a different place, then watch how many new responses happened in the day or two after that.

Previous surveys have been run over the last decade or so.

2009: 166
2011: 1090
2012: 1195
2013: 1636
2014: 1503
2016: 3083
2017: "About 300"
2020: 61
2022: 186
2023: 558

Last year when I got a hundred and eighty six responses, I said that the cheerfully optimistic interpretation was "cool! I got about as many as Scott did on his first try!" This time I got around half of what Scott did on his second try. A thousand responses feels pretty firmly achievable.

This is also the tenth such [...]



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First published:
February 16th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WRaq4SzxhunLoFKCs/2023-survey-results

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Cross-posted with light edits from Otherwise.



I think of us in some kind of twilight world as transformative AI looks more likely: things are about to change, and I don’t know if it's about to get a lot darker or a lot brighter.

Increasingly this makes me wonder how I should be raising my kids differently.

What might the world look like

Most of my imaginings about my children's lives have them in pretty normal futures, where they go to college and have jobs and do normal human stuff, but with better phones.

It's hard for me to imagine the other versions:

• A lot of us are killed or incapacitated by AI
• More war, pandemics, and general chaos
• Post-scarcity utopia, possibly with people living as uploads 
• Some other weird outcome I haven’t imagined

Even in the world where change is slower, more like the speed [...]



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First published:
February 15th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cyqrvE3dk5apg54Sk/raising-children-on-the-eve-of-ai

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a linkpost for https://seekingtobejolly.substack.com/p/no-one-in-my-org-puts-money-in-theirEpistemic status: the stories here are all as true as possible from memory, but my memory is so so.

An AI made this This is going to be big

It's late Summer 2017. I am on a walk in the Mendip Hills. It's warm and sunny and the air feels fresh. With me are around 20 other people from the Effective Altruism London community. We’ve travelled west for a retreat to discuss how to help others more effectively with our donations and careers. As we cross cow field after cow field, I get talking to one of the people from the group I don’t know yet. He seems smart, and cheerful. He tells me that he is an AI researcher at Google DeepMind. He explains how he is thinking about how to make sure that any powerful AI system actually does what we want it [...]

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First published:
February 16th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLXdCjxbJMGtDBWTH/no-one-in-my-org-puts-money-in-their-pension

Linkpost URL:
https://seekingtobejolly.substack.com/p/no-one-in-my-org-puts-money-in-their

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a linkpost for https://www.narrativeark.xyz/p/masterpieceA sequel to qntm's Lena. Reading Lena first is helpful but not necessary.

We’re excited to announce the fourth annual MMindscaping competition! Over the last few years, interest in the art of mindscaping has continued to grow rapidly. We expect this year's competition to be our biggest yet, and we’ve expanded the prize pool to match. The theme for the competition is “Weird and Wonderful”—we want your wackiest ideas and most off-the-wall creations!

Competition rules

As in previous competitions, the starting point is a base MMAcevedo mind upload. All entries must consist of a single modified version of MMAcevedo, along with a written or recorded description of the sequence of transformations or edits which produced it. For more guidance on which mind-editing techniques can be used, see the Technique section below.

Your entry must have been created in the last 12 months, and cannot [...]

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First published:
February 13th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Fruv7Mmk3X5EekbgB/masterpiece

Linkpost URL:
https://www.narrativeark.xyz/p/masterpiece

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I'm trying to build my own art of rationality training, and I've started talking to various CFAR instructors about their experiences – things that might be important for me to know but which hadn't been written up nicely before.

This is a quick write up of a conversation with Andrew Critch about his takeaways. (I took rough notes, and then roughly cleaned them up for this. I don't know

"What surprised you most during your time at CFAR?

Surprise 1: People are profoundly non-numerate.

And, people who are not profoundly non-numerate still fail to connect numbers to life.

I'm still trying to find a way to teach people to apply numbers for their life. For example: "This thing is annoying you. How many minutes is it annoying you today? how many days will it annoy you?". I compulsively do this. There aren't things lying around in [...]

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First published:
February 14th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jash4Gbi2wpThzZ4k/cfar-takeaways-andrew-critch

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a hasty speculative fiction vignette of one way I expect we might get AGI by January 2025 (within about one year of writing this). Like similar works by others, I expect most of the guesses herein to turn out incorrect. However, this was still useful for expanding my imagination about what could happen to enable very short timelines, and I hope it's also useful to you.

The assistant opened the door, and I walked into Director Yarden's austere office. For the Director of a major new federal institute, her working space was surprisingly devoid of possessions. But I suppose the DHS's Superintelligence Defense Institute was only created last week.

“You’re Doctor Browning?” Yarden asked from her desk.

“Yes, Director,” I replied.

“Take a seat,” she said, gesturing. I complied as the lights flickered ominously. “Happy New Year, thanks for coming,” she said. “I called you in today [...]

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First published:
December 17th, 2023

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xLDwCemt5qvchzgHd/scale-was-all-we-needed-at-first

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a linkpost for https://garrisonlovely.substack.com/p/sam-altmans-chip-ambitions-undercut If you enjoy this, please consider subscribing to my Substack.

Sam Altman has said he thinks that developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) could lead to human extinction, but OpenAI is trying to build it ASAP. Why?

The common story for how AI could overpower humanity involves an “intelligence explosion,” where an AI system becomes smart enough to further improve its capabilities, bootstrapping its way to superintelligence. Even without any kind of recursive self-improvement, some AI safety advocates argue that a large enough number of copies of a genuinely human-level AI system could pose serious problems for humanity. (I discuss this idea in more detail in my recent Jacobin cover story.)

Some people think the transition from human-level AI to superintelligence could happen in a matter of months, weeks, days, or even hours. The faster the takeoff, the more dangerous, the thinking goes.

Sam [...]

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First published:
February 10th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pEAHbJRiwnXCjb4A7/sam-altman-s-chip-ambitions-undercut-openai-s-safety

Linkpost URL:
https://garrisonlovely.substack.com/p/sam-altmans-chip-ambitions-undercut

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.