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  • Tips and Code for Empirical Research Workflows
    Our research is centered on empirical research with LLMs. If you are conducting similar research, these tips and tools may help streamline your workflow and increase experiment velocity. We are also releasing two repositories to promote sharing more tooling within the AI safety community. John Hughes is an independent alignment researcher working with Ethan Perez and was a MATS mentee in the...
  • The mini-singularity
    Err, happy MLK Day! This week represents the convergence of so many plotlines that, if it were the season finale of some streaming show, I’d feel like the writers had too many balls in the air. For the benefit of the tiny part of the world that cares what I think, I offer the following […]...
  • I Worried
    Monday, January 20
  • Try The 2025 ACX/Metaculus Forecasting Contest
  • If the farmer grows, who will buy?
    If the farmer grows, who will buy? acrabbe Mon, 01/20/2025 - 22:09 . Lawrence Haddad: Good afternoon and good evening, everybody - welcome to the session, If the farmer grows, who will buy? Building demand under the Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils. My name is Lawrence Haddad.
  • Levels of Moral Explanation
    Where does the buck stop, and why?
  • Gender Norms Are Complex, Opaque
    Wondering how to make clear our cultural drift problem, it occurred to me that historical fiction, especially using time travel, could make vivid how key norms and values have actually changed greatly over time, and not always in obviously good ways.
  • Research Scholar | GovAI Blog
  • GPT-2 constructs a bag-of-tokens to represent context
    Overview: A common approach to Mechanistic Interpretability is to start from a task we know a particular model can perform, and attempt to work backwards to find the circuitry that enables this model to perform the task. Focusing on a narrow distribution makes the model’s behaviour easier to study because we can observe it fully within this limited scope.
  • Ways the world is getting better - discussion thread
    Comments from the banner on the frontpage will also be posted below, but you should also feel free to post here any time. You'll only see your comment on the banner if you add it by clicking on the banner- comments added directly to this post will only appear here. The banner will be up all week. This thread is for discussing ways the world is getting better.
  • The Urge To Destroy
    Explicating a vice and why fighting on the internet is addictive
  • The Asking People Out Manifesto
    Ask! People! Out
  • Animal Markets And Zoonotic Disease Risk
    This report investigates how animal markets worldwide contribute to zoonotic disease outbreaks, exploring global human-animal interactions and the urgent need for regulatory action. The post Animal Markets And Zoonotic Disease Risk appeared first on Faunalytics.
  • Project Officer, Food Systems and Environment
    Project Officer, Food Systems and Environment admin_inox Mon, 01/20/2025 - 16:30 vacancy_id SYS-1250 location Dhaka, Bangladesh Contract type Fixed Term Duration 24 Months Frontend apply URL https://jobs.gainhealth.org/vacancies/1250/apply/ Closing date Wed, 02/05/2025 - 12:00 Department Programmes about_the_role <p>The Global...
  • UFOs as Cosmic Parasites: An Evolutionary Game Theory Analysis of Relativistic Craft
    or How the “Grey Paradox” Might Actually Make Sense [Epistemic Status: I’m having fun. But also, I’m attempting to make sense of seemingly bizarre phenomena through the lens of physics, evolution, and game theory. Heavy, perhaps even daring, speculation based on limited but increasingly credible evidence – take with a giant grain of salt and […]...
  • The EU AI Act Newsletter #69: Big Tech and AI Standards
    Corporate Europe Observatory has published an overview arguing that European AI standard-setting bodies are heavily dominated by tech industry representatives. Analysis Feedback on the second Code of Practice draft: Leverhulme Centre for Future Intelligence academics reviewed the second draft of the Code of Practice for General-Purpose AI and acknowledged significant improvements from the...
  • A Buddhist Perspective on AI: Cultivating freedom of attention and true diversity in an AI future
    The AI-facilitated intelligence revolution is claimed by some to be setting humanity on a glidepath into utopian futures of nearly effortless satisfaction and frictionless choice. We should beware.
  • Project Coordinator, RAINS
    Project Coordinator, RAINS admin_inox Mon, 01/20/2025 - 15:30 vacancy_id SYS-1249 location Dhaka, Bangladesh Contract type Fixed Term Duration Other Frontend apply URL https://jobs.gainhealth.org/vacancies/1249/apply/ Closing date Mon, 02/03/2025 - 12:00 Department Programmes about_the_role <p>The Global Alliance for Improved...
  • Things I have been using LLMs for
    There are quite a few different things you can use LLMs for, and I think we’re still only discovering most of them. Here are a few of the ones I’ve come up with. My favorite chatbot is Claude Sonnet. It does have a tendency for sycophancy – for example, it will go “what a fascinating/insightful/excellent/etc. question!” […]...
  • The EU AI Act Newsletter #69: Big Tech and AI Standards
    Corporate Europe Observatory has published an overview arguing that European AI standard-setting bodies are heavily dominated by tech industry representatives.
  • HR and Operations Associate (on 60% work time basis)
    HR and Operations Associate (on 60% work time basis) admin_inox Mon, 01/20/2025 - 15:00 vacancy_id SYS-1248 location Washington D.C., USA Contract type Fixed Term Duration 36 Months Frontend apply URL https://jobs.gainhealth.org/vacancies/1248/apply/ Closing date Mon, 02/03/2025 - 12:00 Department Human resources Finance...
  • Does Elon still care about AI safety?
    He’s doing a terrible job of showing it.
  • Import AI 396: $80bn on AI infrastructure; can Intel's Gaudi chip train neural nets?; and getting better code through asking for it
    …I expect another punctured equilibrium in 2025 from dramatic AI progress…...
  • Open Thread 365
  • ChinAI #296: DeepSeek goes left, ModelBest goes right
    Greetings from a world where…...
  • The broligarchs have a vision for the new Trump term. It’s darker than you think.
    There’s a dominant narrative in the media about why tech billionaires are sucking up to Donald Trump: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, all of whom have descended on the nation’s capital for the presidential inauguration, either happily support or have largely acquiesced to Trump because they think he’ll offer lower taxes and friendlier […]...
  • Join the board at Wild Animal Initiative
    At Wild Animal Initiative, we're advancing scientific research to understand and improve the welfare of wild animals. We are currently seeking three new board members. Here are the basics: Board positions are a 2-year term with an estimated time commitment of 5–10 hours per month. This includes quarterly 2-hour meetings and other contributions to advancing our mission.
  • Bird Flu: Human Pandemic Unlikely, but Will Poultry and Cattle Industries Take Action?
    Illustration by James Daw. Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... The forecasters were asked to predict whether the H5N1 bird flu virus, currently circulating in birds and in some non-human mammal species, will lead to a major human health concern or to economic damage to the livestock industry. Key takeaways.
  • AXRP Episode 38.5 - Adrià Garriga-Alonso on Detecting AI Scheming
    YouTube link. Suppose we’re worried about AIs engaging in long-term plans that they don’t tell us about. If we were to peek inside their brains, what should we look for to check whether this was happening? In this episode Adrià Garriga-Alonso talks about his work trying to answer this question. Topics we discuss: The Alignment Workshop. How to detect scheming AIs.
  • Scaling up: how increasing inputs has made artificial intelligence more capable
    The path to recent advanced AI systems has been more about building larger systems than making scientific breakthroughs.
  • Being Mortal Pt. 2
    Sunday, January 19
  • TikTok returns 📱, OpenAI life extension 🧬, building your own datacenter 👨‍💻
  • Scaling Wargaming for Global Catastrophic Risks with AI
    We’re developing an AI-enabled wargaming-tool, grim, to significantly scale up the number of catastrophic scenarios that concerned organizations can explore and to improve emergency response capabilities of, at least, Sentinel. Table of Contents. How AI Improves on the State of the Art. Implementation Details, Limitations, and Improvements. Learnings So Far. Get Involved!.
  • The Gentle Romance
    I have a new story out with Asimov Press. It’s called The Gentle Romance, and it’s about living through the transition to utopia.
  • God May Be Maximally Simple
    Why the prior probability of God is high
  • this week in security — january 19 edition
    this week in security — january 19 edition PowerSchool breach may hit millions, Salt Typhoon sanctioned, Fortinet firewalls under attack, and more. ~this week in security~. a cybersecurity newsletter by @zackwhittaker volume 8, issue 3 View this email in your browser | RSS ~ ~ THIS WEEK, TL;DR. PowerSchool breach may affect millions of students; no MFA on...
  • I Called Into Matt Dillahunty's Show. DISASTER!
    Amos's blog https://wollenblog.substack.com/ My blog https://benthams.substack.com/ https://streamyard.com/7g26ew4k2v
  • Modal Rationalism - Intro
    From the Archives: on our grasp of possibility
  • GiveWell raised less than its 10th percentile forecast in 2023
    In 2023 GiveWell raised $355 million - $100 million from Open Philanthropy, and $255 million from other donors. In their post on 10th April 2023, GiveWell forecast the amount they expected to raise in 2023, albeit with wide confidence intervals, and stated that their 10th percentile estimate for total funds raised was $416 million, and 10th percentile estimate for funds raised outside of Open...
  • I care a lot about climate change. Does that mean I can never ever fly?
    Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a new framework for thinking through your ethical dilemmas and philosophical questions. This unconventional column is based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Here is a Vox […]...
  • The Open Way to Universal Peace and Prosperity
    In A Short Story of the Antichrist, p. 16-17 of my copy: ... he was writing, locked up in his study, his famous work entitled The Open Way to Universal Peace and Prosperity. The superman's previous books and public activity had always met with severe criticism, though these came chiefly from people of exceptionally deep religious convictions, who for that very reason possessed no authority...
  • Long-distance development policy
    It seems to me that we have ended up in a strange equilibrium. With one hand, the Western developed nations are taking actions that have obvious deleterious effects on developing countries... With the other hand, we are trying (or at least purport to be trying) to help developing countries through foreign aid...
  • Thoughts on the conservative assumptions in AI control
    Work that I’ve done on techniques for mitigating risk from misaligned AI often makes a number of conservative assumptions about the capabilities of the AIs we’re trying to control. (E.g. the original AI control paper, Adaptive Deployment of Untrusted LLMs Reduces Distributed Threats, How to prevent collusion when using untrusted models to monitor each other.). For example:
  • Call for suggestions: Climate change charity ideas with strong co-benefits for humans or animals
    Ambitious Impact (AIM, formerly Charity Entrepreneurship) is collecting ideas for promising interventions and new charities in animal welfare, global health, and development that have climate change co-benefits (mitigation or adaptation), or vice versa. Specifically, we're looking for ideas that:
  • Being Mortal
    Saturday, January 18
  • The Archon Abandonment Theodicy
    My (current) favorite theodicy from Cutter and Swenson
  • Beware Shared Basic Value Changes
    Most of our activities can be seen as nested plans, to achieve nested goals.
  • Rich and Poor: How Things Work
    Here, I explain how leftists misunderstand the economy.
  • The best thing that Joe Biden did
    Joe Biden has had a rough go of things. He leaves the presidency with the worst end-of-first-term approval rating of any president since Jimmy Carter; 55.8 percent of Americans disapprove of his job performance and only 37.1 percent approve, as of Friday. Biden’s legacy will take years to sort out, and I certainly think he […]...
  • Don’t ignore bad vibes you get from people
    I think a lot of people have heard so much about internalized prejudice and bias that they think they should ignore any bad vibes they get about a person that they can’t rationally explain. But if a person gives you a bad feeling, don’t ignore that. Both I and several others who I know have […]...
  • Mettre en scène le Transhumanisme avec Dominique Leclerc
    ⚠️ Découvrez du contenu EXCLUSIF (pas sur la chaîne) ⚠️ ⇒ https://the-flares.com/y/bonus/ ⬇️⬇️⬇️ Infos complémentaires : sources, références, liens... ⬇️⬇️⬇️ Le contenu vous intéresse ? Abonnez-vous et cliquez sur la 🔔 Vous avez aimé cette vidéo ? Pensez à mettre un 👍 et à la partager.
  • TikTok ban looms & Georgia suspends all poultry activities
    Weekly Manifold updates. TikTok, Israel-Hamas Ceasefire, LA Fires, Bird flu outbreak
  • acoemetae
    “Fuck; fuck!” the sister said, three days late to the tithe. Blink, blink, twitch canonical digits to commit. Blink, blink, digits. Blink—. (It’s now actually easier to read the logprobs right off the spike train; the blinks are just to prevent soreness, or seizure. But there’s no avoiding soreness if you’re as behind as she.). She bleared on.
  • Talent Recruitment Roulette: Replacing the H-1B Lottery
    We could almost double the economic value of the H-1B program without changing the number of visas
  • Boltzmann Brains
    Friday, January 17
  • The Humane League is hiring a Director of Philanthropy and OWA Grant Lead Position!
    The annual compensation range for this role is $68,473- $83,689 USD, or £38,203 - £46,692 GBP.Please let me know if you have any questions!. Discuss...
  • Part-Time Film Festival Executive Director
    Part-Time Film Festival Executive Director Organization: International Vegan Film Festival (IVFF) Location: Canada (Remote) preferred Type: Part-Time Application Deadline: February 10, 2025. About Us The International Vegan Film Festival (IVFF) is a global platform dedicated to celebrating the intersection of veganism, film, and creative storytelling.
  • AI’s big infrastructure week
    Transformer Weekly — Jan 17...
  • Paid Subscription Drive
    A highlight of some epic posts that you're missing out on!
  • New Report - EggTrack 2024: U.S. & Canada
    On January 15th, Compassion in World Farming USA released its new EggTrack 2024: U.S. & Canada report. Similar to previous global EggTrack reports, this iteration is a regional spotlight on the United States and Canada, along with global cage-free egg progress, if applicable. By focusing on these two regions, our report broadened its scope to even more companies than previously recorded.
  • Where I Donated In 2024
    All Grants Fund, Rethink, EA Funds Animal Welfare Fund
  • Contained Cats, Protected Wildlife: A Conservation Solution
    Free-roaming cats can devastate wildlife populations, but research reveals strategies to transform cat guardianship from an ecological threat to a conservation asset. The post Contained Cats, Protected Wildlife: A Conservation Solution appeared first on Faunalytics.
  • Should we try harder to appeal to conservatives?
    Hello! It seems to me that the EA community leans towards progressive or liberal political ideologies. This feels especially pertinent within animal advocacy, where moral and cultural disagreements often create barriers to broader acceptance. However, I think it’s an analogous problem within EA and so feel free to weigh in even if animals aren’t your primary concern.
  • How EA DC can help you get the most out of visiting Washington DC
    If you’re visiting Washington DC to learn more about what’s happening in effective altruist policy spaces, we at EA DC want to make sure you get the most out of it! EA DC is one of the largest EA networks and we have a lot of amazing people to draw from for help.
  • How big of a problem is abortion?
    As I was driving the other day, I saw a group of protestors in front of the local Methodist church. "God Hates Abortion! Pray to End the Murder!". Various signs to this effect were being held up triumphantly by the rather old people who had decided that this was their best use of a Tuesday morning. This got me curious; how big of an issue is abortion?
  • It's raining doggos
    Catch one at this link!! https://www.makeship.com/products/rational-animations-doggo-plushie (link also clickable in our channel bio)
  • There are no grown-ups in California
    Wildfires are on the mind here in California. It’s still not clear exactly to what degree the devastating Los Angeles fires were the product of gross mismanagement by the city and state governments, with lots of new details still emerging about the steps they could have taken and didn’t. It’s abundantly clear that the city […]...
  • Build the Presidio Freedom City
    Urban mismanagement and burdensome regulation are twin killers for American innovation. New cities built on federal land can spark an economic renaissance. The post Build the Presidio Freedom City appeared first on Palladium.
  • Developing the Modalities of the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI & the Global Dialogue on AI Governance - A Workshop Series
    In September 2024, the UN General Assembly adopted the Global Digital Compact (GDC), mandating the establishment of two new institutional…
  • Americans are ditching traditional health care for something cheaper — and riskier
    Fed up by unaffordable costs and insurance denials, more and more Americans are fleeing the conventional health care system. Many are seeking to cut out the government and insurers entirely by pooling their money together to cover their own bills, turning to what are called health cost-sharing ministries. Originally a faith-based alternative for those with […]...
  • Board Alumni
    Board Alumni gloireri Fri, 01/17/2025 - 12:21 . Board Alumni. Ndidi Okonkwo Nwuneli. . Felia Salim. Chair of the GAIN Board of Directors Alumni. Mauricio Adade. President Latin America and Global Malnutrition Partnerships, DSM. Catherine Bertini. Chair of the GAIN Board of Directors. Dominic O'Neill.
  • Zach Weinersmith | A City on Mars
    Zach Weinersmith is the cartoonist behind the popular geek webcomic, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. He writes popular science books with his wife Kelly, including the recent Hugo award-winning A City on Mars. His work has been featured by The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, Forbes, Science Friday, Foreign Policy, PBS, Boingboing, the Freakonomics Blog, the RadioLab blog,...
  • The 7 Best High-Protein Breakfast Cereals
    (I write listicles now). (there are only 7 eligible high-protein breakfast cereals, so the ones at the bottom are still technically among the 7 best even though they’re not good). If you search the internet, you can find rankings of the best “high-protein” breakfast cereals. But most of the entries on those lists don’t even have that much protein. I don’t like that, so I made my own list.
  • Make a short video for your favorite EA charity! (Project for Awesome 2025)
    Project for Awesome (P4A) is a charity video contest running from February 11th to February 19th this year (2025). Participants create short videos supporting a specific charity. Afterwards, the public can vote, and the charities with the most votes receive donations.
  • Links For January 2025
  • Nintendo Switch 2 🎮, Blue Origin reaches orbit 🚀, Google's internal AI coding 👨‍💻
  • 2024 Impact Report
  • Can Techno-Saints help us cooperate with Cathars?
    I hit a communication wall with a crypto-Cathar. The encounter exposed how an ancient heresy's worldview still blocks trust and cooperation. Here's lemonade. While Calvinism proposed a mechanism by which agency could be recovered from corruption through the intervention of divine grace (Calvinism as a Theory of Recovered High-Trust Agency), Catharism took the more radical […]...
  • What Would Socrates Do?
    Christians often ask themselves, as a guide to living, “What would Jesus do?” In her new book Open Socrates, my podcast-cohost Agnes Callard suggests we instead ask “What would Socrates do?”...
  • Turkey Repeatedly Clubbed and Left to Die at Canadian Poultry Farm
    New whistleblower footage captured in Quebec, Canada, reveals a turkey being repeatedly clubbed and left to slowly die. The disturbing video, released by the Canadian animal protection group Bien-être et sécurité animale, was taken at two commercial turkey farms in the Montérégie and Lanaudière regions. Crammed into filthy sheds, many turkeys suffered from open, infected […].
  • Good News! Washington State Just Banned Commercial Net-Pen Fish Farming
    Good news! After nearly four decades and untold environmental devastation, commercial net-pen fish farming has been officially banned in Washington State. As wild fish populations collapse from overfishing, the use of unsanitary and cruel fish farms is rapidly growing. In fact, nearly half of all the fish people eat come from fish farms, like the […]. The post Good News!
  • Sarah Paine Episode 1: The War For India (Lecture & Interview)
    First of three new lectures from Professor Paine, followed by my questions. This time: Mao v Khrushchev v Nehru v LBJ
  • Numberwang: LLMs Doing Autonomous Research, and a Call for Input
    Summary: Can LLMs science? The answer to this question can tell us important things about timelines to AGI. In this small pilot experiment, we test frontier LLMs on their ability to perform a minimal version of scientific research, where they must discover a hidden rule about lists of integers by iteratively generating and testing hypotheses.
  • Want to help fire victims? The best way to support Los Angeles in the short and long term.
    We’re making this story accessible to all readers as a public service. At Vox, our mission is to help everyone access essential information that empowers them. Support our journalism by becoming a member today. The Los Angeles wildfires, in the course of a week, killed at least 25 people, burned more than 30,000 acres, and displaced […]...
  • Implications of the inference scaling paradigm for AI safety
    Discuss...
  • The Homework: January 16, 2025
    Welcome to the January 16, 2025 Main edition of The Homework, the official newsletter of California YIMBY — legislative updates, news clips, housing research and analysis, and the latest writings from the California YIMBY team. News from Sacramento The State…. The post The Homework: January <span class="dewidow">16, 2025</span> appeared first on California YIMBY.
  • A Promised Land
    Thursday, January 16
  • What To Do If You Love Meat But Hate Factory Farms?
    How to have a positive impact on animals if you eat meat
  • Asian Farmed Animal Advocacy Organizations Are Critical Yet Under-Resourced
    The majority of the world’s people and farmed animals live in Asia, yet advocacy groups in the region receive comparatively little funding. This report takes a closer look at their capacity challenges. The post Asian Farmed Animal Advocacy Organizations Are Critical Yet Under-Resourced appeared first on Faunalytics.
  • Why-chain
    By Anders Sandberg I manifested on a hillside lit by the everlasting sunset, overlooking the dry western plains. A little girl was poking around a tangle of flowers in the terra cotta light. Her clothes were made of felt lizards, quietly and slowly moving around her body. She was manipulating the plants like a well-learned […]...
  • Beyond Phishing: Exploring the Rise of AI-enabled Cybercrime
    By Derek Manky and Gil Baram Over the last year, discussions about AI-enabled cybercrime have shifted from abstract speculation to concrete reality. During a recent tabletop exercise (TTX)…. The post Beyond Phishing: Exploring the Rise of AI-enabled Cybercrime appeared first on CLTC.
  • Announcing Applications for the AIM Research Program April 2025
    Are you ready to make a real difference in the world through research? The AIM Research Program (ARP) empowers you to help address some of the world’s most pressing challenges with rigorous, evidence-based research. This fully funded, 12-week program provides the skills, mentorship, and tools you need to produce impactful, decision-relevant work.
  • Does Stagnant Male Income Explain Falling Fertility and Marriage?
    Mostly Agreeing With Lyman Stone's hypothesis
  • OpenAI’s o3 wows (but it’s not AGI yet), China’s DeepSeek gets world-class LLM performance despite chip controls, and Trump names key AI and tech advisors
    Plus: Biden announces “AI Diffusion” rules and a plan to accelerate AI infrastructure, and Trump backers clash over H-1B program. The post OpenAI’s o3 wows (but it’s not AGI yet), China’s DeepSeek gets world-class LLM performance despite chip controls, and Trump names key AI and tech advisors appeared first on Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
  • Fish Victory: NG Hotels Commits to Comprehensive Commitment Including using Electrical Stunning on 100% of the Fishes they source
    We are pleased to announce that NG Hotels has made a comprehensive commitment to improving the welfare of the fish served in their operations. This commitment includes not only sourcing sea bass and sea bream that are harvested using electrical stunning systems, but also implementing other key welfare measures to ensure higher standards of animal care throughout the supply chain.
  • Call to ask the RCVS to investigate routine tail docking
    Dear colleagues,. Last week The Animal Law Foundation launched a new programme dedicated to putting an end to the illegal routine tail docking on pigs across the UK. This initiative holds the promise of potentially raising animal welfare standards for millions of pigs.
  • Fish Victory: ILKNAK Aquaculture Commits to Comprehensive Commitment Including using Electrical Stunning on 100% of Its Fishes
    We are pleased to announce that Ilknak Aquaculture, one of the fully integrated producers of the global and Mediterranean farmed fish industry, has committed to our fish welfare commitment which includes electrical stunning. Ilknak had already been meeting the standards outlined in our commitment, including the use of electrical stunning, and agreed to publish a formal written commitment.
  • Fish Victory: Divan Group Commits to Comprehensive Commitment Including using Electrical Stunning on 100% of Its Fishes
    We are pleased to announce that Divan Group has made a comprehensive commitment to improving the welfare of the fish served in their operations. This commitment includes not only sourcing sea bass and sea bream that are harvested using electrical stunning systems, but also implementing other key welfare measures to ensure higher standards of animal care throughout the supply chain.
  • Gaming TruthfulQA: Simple Heuristics Exposed Dataset Weaknesses
    (Explanation. Also I have no reason to think they hate me. )Do not use the original TruthfulQA multiple-choice or the HaluEval benchmark. We show that a simple decision tree can theoretically game multiple-choice TruthfulQA to 79.6% accuracy—even while hiding the question being asked!
  • Highlights From The Comments On Lynn And IQ

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