LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Back in the before-time of the 2010s, when EA was still known mostly for funding health efforts in the developing world, there were many baskets of criticism floating around from the left. The most prominent was a cluster centered around EAs being white men, and therefore suspicious. Another category, in my experience the second-most common, was that in attempting to rectify the problems in the world, EA was masking, whitewashing, and misdirecting efforts away from solving the "real problem"...

Ice cream There's a particular kind of listening that kids (and adults) sometimes do. Daddy is saying stuff—his mouth is moving and making noise—and he's talking about what I ate for lunch, and something about other times I've eaten ice cream, and something about rules and this and that and what Mommy would think and something about bedtime—but I am not so interested in that. What interests me is the punchline "...and therefore you can't have ice cream.". I'm only incidentally interested ...

Cross-posted from Sören Mindermann's substack (I am not Sören). Should be of general interest to the LW community. Next month, I am moving to Beijing and joining Tsinghua University's College of AI as an assistant professor working on frontier AI safety, especially loss of control. I have also started co-directing the new Beijing AI Safety Hub (BASH) in Tsinghua, and I continue my Cambridge work. I believe I can have a large impact there compared to strong baseline options. This post ex...

Why LM Psychology? One of the great ironies of modern language models is that we create them, we know exactly what computations constitute them, and yet we do not really understand them. More precisely, we do not understand them on a level of abstraction that lets us reliably predict how their behaviour will generalise: there's a trivial sense in which we can predict how they will behave in specific new situations — we can just run the computations — but we can’t answer the broader questio...

As our understanding of mechanistic interpretability and steering techniques increase, for both LLMs and uploaded connectomes, there is a corresponding "hellish capabilities" increase. In layman's terms, we get better at torturing the digital minds we create. Our brief history with open source technologies such as MaleCNS or the LLM pain steering repo shows that torture is often one of the first use cases pursued when the public is given access to a digital mind perceived as capable of suf...