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LessWrong (Curated & Popular) episodes
- Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went WrongThe New York Times
Picture a scene: the New York Times is releasing an article on Effective Altruism (EA) with an express goal to dig up every piece of negative information they can find. They contact Émile Torres, David Gerard, and Timnit Gebru, collect evidence about Sam Bankman-Fried, the OpenAI board blowup, and Pasek's Doom, start calling Astral Codex Ten (ACX) readers to ask them about rumors they'd heard about affinity between Effective Altruists, neoreactionaries, and something called TESCREAL. They spend hundreds of hours over six months on interviews and evidence collection, paying Émile and Timnit for their time and effort. The phrase "HBD" is muttered, but it's nobody's birthday.
A few days before publication, they present key claims to the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), who furiously tell them that many of the claims are provably false and ask for a brief delay to demonstrate the falsehood of [...]
The original text contained 16 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
---
First published:
December 19th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2vNHiaTb4rcA8PgXQ/effective-aspersions-how-the-nonlinear-investigation-went
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.55 min - Constellations are Younger than ContinentsAt the Bay Area Solstice, I heard the song Bold Orion for the first time. I like it a lot. It does, however, have one problem:
He has seen the rise and fall of kings and continents and all,
Rising silent, bold Orion on the rise.
Orion has not witnessed the rise and fall of continents. Constellations are younger than continents.
The time scale that continents change on is ten or hundreds of millions of years.
The time scale that stars the size of the sun live and die on is billions of years. So stars are older than continents.
But constellations are not stars or sets of stars. They are the patterns that stars make in our night sky.
The stars of some constellations are close together in space, and are gravitationally bound together, like the Pleiades. The Pleiades likely have been together, and will stay close [...]
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
---
First published:
December 19th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YMakfmwZsoLdXAZhb/constellations-are-younger-than-continents
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.5 min - The ‘Neglected Approaches’ Approach: AE Studio’s Alignment AgendaMany thanks to Samuel Hammond, Cate Hall, Beren Millidge, Steve Byrnes, Lucius Bushnaq, Joar Skalse, Kyle Gracey, Gunnar Zarncke, Ross Nordby, David Lambert, Simeon Campos, Bogdan Ionut-Cirstea, Ryan Kidd, Eric Ho, and Ashwin Acharya for critical comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this agenda, as well as Philip Gubbins, Diogo de Lucena, Rob Luke, and Mason Seale from AE Studio for their support and feedback throughout.
TL;DR- Our initial theory of change at AE Studio was a 'neglected approach' that involved rerouting profits from our consulting business towards the development of brain-computer interface (BCI) technology to dramatically enhance human agency, better enabling us to do things like solve alignment. Now, given shortening timelines, we're updating our theory of change to scale up our technical alignment efforts.
- With a solid technical foundation in BCI, neuroscience, and machine learning, we are optimistic that we’ll be able to contribute meaningfully [...]
---
First published:
December 18th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qAdDzcBuDBLexb4fC/the-neglected-approaches-approach-ae-studio-s-alignment
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.25 min - “Humanity vs. AGI” Will Never Look Like “Humanity vs. AGI” to HumanityWhen discussing AGI Risk, people often talk about it in terms of a war between humanity and an AGI. Comparisons between the amounts of resources at both sides' disposal are brought up and factored in, big impressive nuclear stockpiles are sometimes waved around, etc.
I'm pretty sure it's not how that'd look like, on several levels.
1. Threat Ambiguity
I think what people imagine, when they imagine a war, is Terminator-style movie scenarios where the obviously evil AGI becomes obviously evil in a way that's obvious to everyone, and then it's a neatly arranged white-and-black humanity vs. machines all-out fight. Everyone sees the problem, and knows everyone else sees it too, the problem is common knowledge, and we can all decisively act against it.[1]
But in real life, such unambiguity is rare. The monsters don't look obviously evil, the signs of fatal issues are rarely blatant. Is this whiff [...]
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
---
First published:
December 16th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xSJMj3Hw3D7DPy5fJ/humanity-vs-agi-will-never-look-like-humanity-vs-agi-to
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.10 min - Is being sexy for your homies?Epistemic status: Speculation. An unholy union of evo psych, introspection, random stuff I happen to observe & hear about, and thinking. Done on a highly charged topic. Caveat emptor!
Most of my life, whenever I'd felt sexually unwanted, I'd start planning to get fit.
Specifically to shape my body so it looks hot. Like the muscly guys I'd see in action films.
This choice is a little odd. In close to every context I've listened to, I hear women say that some muscle tone on a guy is nice and abs are a plus, but big muscles are gross — and all of that is utterly overwhelmed by other factors anyway.
It also didn't match up with whom I'd see women actually dating.
But all of that just… didn't affect my desire?
There's a related bit of dating advice for guys. "Bro, do you even lift?" Depending on the [...]
---
First published:
December 13th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nvmfqdytxyEpRJC3F/is-being-sexy-for-your-homies
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.24 min - [HUMAN VOICE] "Significantly Enhancing Adult Intelligence With Gene Editing May Be Possible" by Gene Smith and Kman
Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts:
www.patreon.com/LWCurated
TL;DR versionIn the course of my life, there have been a handful of times I discovered an idea that changed the way I thought about the world. The first occurred when I picked up Nick Bostrom’s book “superintelligence” and realized that AI would utterly transform the world. The second was when I learned about embryo selection and how it could change future generations. And the third happened a few months ago when I read a message from a friend of mine on Discord about editing the genome of a living person.
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JEhW3HDMKzekDShva/significantly-enhancing-adult-intelligence-with-gene-editing
Narrated for LessWrong by Perrin Walker.
Share feedback on this narration.
[125+ Karma Post] ✓
[Curated Post] ✓1 hr 2 min - [HUMAN VOICE] "Moral Reality Check (a short story)" by jessicata
Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts:
www.patreon.com/LWCurated
This is a linkpost for https://unstableontology.com/2023/11/26/moral-reality-check/Janet sat at her corporate ExxenAI computer, viewing some training performance statistics. ExxenAI was a major player in the generative AI space, with multimodal language, image, audio, and video AIs. They had scaled up operations over the past few years, mostly serving B2B, but with some B2C subscriptions. ExxenAI's newest AI system, SimplexAI-3, was based on GPT-5 and Gemini-2. ExxenAI had hired away some software engineers from Google and Microsoft, in addition to some machine learning PhDs, and replicated the work of other companies to provide more custom fine-tuning, especially for B2B cases. Part of what attracted these engineers and theorists was ExxenAI's AI alignment team.
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/umJMCaxosXWEDfS66/moral-reality-check-a-short-story
Narrated for LessWrong by Perrin Walker.
Share feedback on this narration.
[125+ Karma Post] ✓
[Curated Post] ✓40 min - AI Control: Improving Safety Despite Intentional SubversionCrossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.We’ve released a paper, AI Control: Improving Safety Despite Intentional Subversion. This paper explores techniques that prevent AI catastrophes even if AI instances are colluding to subvert the safety techniques. In this post:
- We summarize the paper;
- We compare our methodology to what the one used in other safety papers.
Here's the abstract of the paper:
As large language models (LLMs) become more powerful and are deployed more autonomously, it will be increasingly important to prevent them from causing harmful outcomes. Researchers have investigated a variety of safety techniques for this purpose, e.g. using models to review the outputs of other models [...]
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First published:
December 13th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d9FJHawgkiMSPjagR/ai-control-improving-safety-despite-intentional-subversion
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.17 min - 2023 Unofficial LessWrong Census/SurveyThe Less Wrong General Census is unofficially here! You can take it at this link.
It's that time again.
If you are reading this post and identify as a LessWronger, then you are the target audience. I'd appreciate it if you took the survey. If you post, if you comment, if you lurk, if you don't actually read the site that much but you do read a bunch of the other rationalist blogs or you're really into HPMOR, if you hung out on rationalist tumblr back in the day, or if none of those exactly fit you but I'm maybe getting close, I think you count and I'd appreciate it if you took the survey.
Don't feel like you have to answer all of the questions just because you started taking it. Last year I asked if people thought the survey was too long, collectively they thought it was [...]
---
First published:
December 2nd, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JHeTrWha5PxiPEwBt/2023-unofficial-lesswrong-census-survey
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.3 min - The likely first longevity drug is based on sketchy science. This is bad for science and bad for longevity.If you are interested in the longevity scene, like I am, you probably have seen press releases about the dog longevity company, Loyal for Dogs, getting a nod for efficacy from the FDA. These have come in the form of the New York Post calling the drug "groundbreaking", Science Alert calling the drug "radical", and the more sedate New York Times just asking, "Could Longevity Drugs for Dogs Extend Your Pet's Life?", presumably unaware of Betteridge's Law of Headlines. You may have also seen the coordinated Twitter offensive of people losing their shit about this, including their lead investor, Laura Deming, saying that she "broke down crying when she got the call".
And if you have been following Loyal for Dogs for a while, like I have, you are probably puzzled by this news. Loyal for Dogs has been around since 2021. Unlike any other drug company or longevity [...]
---
First published:
December 12th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vHSkxmYYqW59sySqA/the-likely-first-longevity-drug-is-based-on-sketchy-science
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.10 min
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