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LessWrong (Curated & Popular) episodes
- [HUMAN VOICE] "What are the results of more parental supervision and less outdoor play?" by Julia Wise
Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts:
www.patreon.com/LWCurated
Crossposted from Otherwise
Parents supervise their children way more than they used toChildren spend less of their time in unstructured play than they did in past generations.
Parental supervision is way up. The wild thing is that this is true even while the number of children per family has decreased and the amount of time mothers work outside the home has increased.
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/piJLpEeh6ivy5RA7v/what-are-the-results-of-more-parental-supervision-and-less
Narrated for LessWrong by Perrin Walker.
Share feedback on this narration.
[125+ Karma Post] ✓
[Curated Post] ✓13 min - Significantly Enhancing Adult Intelligence With Gene Editing May Be PossibleIn 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.
We’ve had gene therapy to treat cancer and single gene disorders for decades. But the process involved in making such changes to the cells of a living person is excruciating and extremely expensive. CAR T-cell therapy, a treatment for certain types of cancer, requires the removal of white blood cells via IV, genetic modification of those cells outside the [...]
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First published:
December 12th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JEhW3HDMKzekDShva/significantly-enhancing-adult-intelligence-with-gene-editing
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.1 hr 8 min - re: Yudkowsky on biological materialsI was asked to respond to this comment by Eliezer Yudkowsky. This post is partly redundant with my previous post.
Why is flesh weaker than diamond?
When trying to resolve disagreements, I find that precision is important. Tensile strength, compressive strength, and impact strength are different. Material microstructure matters. Poorly-sintered diamond crystals could crumble like sand, and a large diamond crystal has lower impact strength than some materials made of proteins.
Even when the load-bearing forces holding large molecular systems together are locally covalent bonds, as in lignin (what makes wood strong), if you've got larger molecules only held together by covalent bonds at interspersed points along their edges, that's like having 10cm-diameter steel beams held together by 1cm welds.
lignin (what makes wood strong)
That's an odd way of putting things. The mechanical strength of wood is generally considered to come from it [...]
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First published:
December 11th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XhDh97vm7hXBfjwqQ/re-yudkowsky-on-biological-materials
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.12 min - Speaking to Congressional staffers about AI riskIn May and June of 2023, I (Akash) had about 50-70 meetings about AI risks with congressional staffers. I had been meaning to write a post reflecting on the experience and some of my takeaways, and I figured it could be a good topic for a LessWrong dialogue. I saw that hath had offered to do LW dialogues with folks, and I reached out.
In this dialogue, we discuss how I decided to chat with staffers, my initial observations in DC, some context about how Congressional offices work, what my meetings looked like, lessons I learned, and some miscellaneous takes about my experience.
Context
hathHey! In your message, you mentioned a few topics that relate to your time in DC.
I figured we should start with your experience talking to congressional offices about AI risk. I'm quite interested in learning more; there don't seem to be many [...]
---
First published:
December 4th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2sLwt2cSAag74nsdN/speaking-to-congressional-staffers-about-ai-risk
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.31 min - [HUMAN VOICE] "Shallow review of live agendas in alignment & safety" by technicalities & Stag
Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts:
www.patreon.com/LWCurated
You can’t optimise an allocation of resources if you don’t know what the current one is. Existing maps of alignment research are mostly too old to guide you and the field has nearly no ratchet, no common knowledge of what everyone is doing and why, what is abandoned and why, what is renamed, what relates to what, what is going on.This post is mostly just a big index: a link-dump for as many currently active AI safety agendas as we could find. But even a linkdump is plenty subjective. It maps work to conceptual clusters 1-1, aiming to answer questions like “I wonder what happened to the exciting idea I heard about at that one conference” and “I just read a post on a surprising new insight and want to see who else has been working on this”, “I wonder roughly how many people are working on that thing”.
This doc is unreadably long, so that it can be Ctrl-F-ed. Also this way you can fork the list and make a smaller one.
Most of you should only read the editorial and skim the section you work in.
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zaaGsFBeDTpCsYHef/shallow-review-of-live-agendas-in-alignment-and-safety#More_meta
Narrated for LessWrong by Perrin Walker.
Share feedback on this narration.
[125+ Karma Post] ✓
[Curated Post] ✓1 hr 3 min - Thoughts on “AI is easy to control” by Pope & BelroseCrossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.Quintin Pope & Nora Belrose have a new “AI Optimists” website, along with a new essay “AI is easy to control”, arguing that the risk of human extinction due to future AI (“AI x-risk”) is a mere 1% (“a tail risk worth considering, but not the dominant source of risk in the world”). (I’m much more pessimistic.) It makes lots of interesting arguments, and I’m happy that the authors are engaging in substantive and productive discourse, unlike the ad hominem vibes-based drivel which is growing increasingly common on both sides of the AI x-risk issue in recent months.
This is not a comprehensive rebuttal or anything, but rather picking up on a few threads that seem important for where we disagree, or where I have something I want to say.
Summary / table-of-contents:
Note: I think Sections 1 [...]
---
First published:
December 1st, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YyosBAutg4bzScaLu/thoughts-on-ai-is-easy-to-control-by-pope-and-belrose
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.24 min - The 101 Space You Will Always Have With YouAny community which ever adds new people will need to either routinely teach the new and (to established members) blindingly obvious information to those who genuinely haven’t heard it before, or accept that over time community members will only know the simplest basics by accident of osmosis or selection bias. There isn’t another way out of that. You don’t get to stop doing it. If you have a vibrant and popular group full of people really interested in the subject of the group, and you run it for ten years straight, you will still sometimes run across people who have only fuzzy and incorrect ideas about the subject dauntless you are making an active effort to make Something Which Is Not That happen.
Or in other words; I have run into people at Effective Altruism meetups who were aghast at the idea of putting a dollar price on a [...]
---
First published:
November 29th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ydmctK2qLyrR9Xztd/the-101-space-you-will-always-have-with-you
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.10 min - [HUMAN VOICE] "Social Dark Matter" by Duncan Sabien
The author's Substack:
https://substack.com/@homosabiens
Support ongoing human narrations of LessWrong's curated posts:
www.patreon.com/LWCurated
You know it must be out there, but you mostly never see it.Author's Note 1: In something like 75% of possible futures, this will be the last essay that I publish on LessWrong. Future content will be available on my substack, where I'm hoping people will be willing to chip in a little commensurate with the value of the writing, and (after a delay) on my personal site (not yet live). I decided to post this final essay here rather than silently switching over because many LessWrong readers would otherwise never find out that they could still get new Duncanthoughts elsewhere.
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KpMNqA5BiCRozCwM3/social-dark-matter
Narrated for LessWrong by Perrin Walker.
Share feedback on this narration.
[125+ Karma Post] ✓
[Curated Post] ✓1 hr 6 min - Shallow review of live agendas in alignment & safetyCrossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.Summary.
You can’t optimise an allocation of resources if you don’t know what the current one is. Existing maps of alignment research are mostly too old to guide you and the field has nearly no ratchet, no common knowledge of what everyone is doing and why, what is abandoned and why, what is renamed, what relates to what, what is going on.
This post is mostly just a big index: a link-dump for as many currently active AI safety agendas as we could find. But even a linkdump is plenty subjective. It maps work to conceptual clusters 1-1, aiming to answer questions like “I wonder what happened to the exciting idea I heard about at that one conference” and “I just read a post on a surprising new insight and want to see who else has been [...]
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
---
First published:
November 27th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zaaGsFBeDTpCsYHef/shallow-review-of-live-agendas-in-alignment-and-safety
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.1 hr 18 min - Ability to solve long-horizon tasks correlates with wanting things in the behaviorist sense
Status: Vague, sorry. The point seems almost tautological to me, and yet also seems like the correct answer to the people going around saying “LLMs turned out to be not very want-y, when are the people who expected 'agents' going to update?”, so, here we are.
Okay, so you know how AI today isn't great at certain... let's say "long-horizon" tasks? Like novel large-scale engineering projects, or writing a long book series with lots of foreshadowing?
(Modulo the fact that it can play chess pretty well, which is longer-horizon than some things; this distinction is quantitative rather than qualitative and it's being eroded, etc.)
And you know how the AI doesn't seem to have all that much "want"- or "desire"-like behavior?
(Modulo, e.g., the fact that it can play chess pretty well, which indicates a [...]
---
First published:
November 24th, 2023
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AWoZBzxdm4DoGgiSj/ability-to-solve-long-horizon-tasks-correlates-with-wanting
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.9 min
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