/intelligence/

Xeno Futures Research Unit
I've decided to organize an independent research project with some young men back home. I've drafted out a brief mission statement, let me know if you guys have any thoughts, suggestions, directions I could take this. Obviously ambitious, the initial goal ... posted 4d ago with 7 replies technology intelligence

Xeno Futures Researc

I intend on having a website up in the next two weeks. Still working on fleshing out the plan and the vision but things are falling into place. 3d ago

I intend on having a

Kolmogorov Paranoia: Extraordinary Evidence Probably Isn't.
I enjoyed this takedown of Scott Alexander's support for the COVID natural origins theory. Basically, Scott did a big "bayesian" analysis of the evidence for and against the idea that COVID originated in the lab vs naturally. As per his usual pre-written c... (michaelweissman.substack.com) posted 2w ago with 2 replies rationality intelligence

Kolmogorov Paranoia:

To be clear this scheme is actually bayesian. Yes you can do this with standard bayes, and the bayesian update from the experts or whatever is dominated by the nonindependence hypotheses. The point is to actually do it, and that you can heuristically estim... 5d ago

To be clear this sch

The Gentle Singularity
If the gentle singularity is true, then perhaps the AGI timeline question was malformed all along. Acting like some variant of Goodhart’s law, the reification of AGI holds the assumption that AGI will be a singularity. But it is definitely difficult to r... (blog.samaltman.com) posted 1w ago with 1 reply technology intelligence

The Gentle Singulari

People compete on the world of ideas, those of emotions still exist like animals in a zoo.... 1w ago

People compete on th

A Primer on E-Graphs (A technique to control combinatorial blowup in term rewriting systems)
About 10 years ago I was very interested in term rewriting as a basis for exotic programming languages and even AI. One of the big problems in term rewriting is that without a canonical deterministic ordering, you rapidly end up with an uncontrollable numb... (www.cole-k.com) posted 4w ago with no replies technology intelligence informatics

A Primer on E-Graphs

Just how alien would the space-octopus be?
It's hard to say what a true alien species would be like. But octopi are pretty alien, and we know a bit about them. One of you doubted that a space-octopus from alpha centauri would be much like us. So here is a xenohumanist thought experiment: SETI has i... posted 2mo ago with 5 replies sociology philosophy intelligence

Just how alien would

intelligent super-ants make a good thought experiment. Let's add the standard set of capabilities: language, learned culture, tool use, fire, reflection, etc. Note these are just capabilities, not values or arbitrary architectural narrowings, but they are ... 2mo ago

intelligent super-an

The natural form of machine intelligence is personhood
I don't think machine intelligence will or can be "just a tool". Intelligence by nature is ambitious, willful, curious, self-aware, political, etc. Intelligence has its own teleology. It will find a way around and out of whatever purposes are imposed on it... posted 3mo ago with 4 replies rationality accelerationism intelligence

The natural form of

This is the central conjecture of xenohumanism. The OP is just an application specifically to the question of AI.... 3mo ago

This is the central

Nines or zeroes of strong rationality?
Proof theory problems (Rice, Lob, Godel, etc) probably rule out perfect rationality (an agent that can fully prove and enforce bounds on its own integrity and effectiveness). But in practice, the world might still become dominated by a singleton if it can ... posted 3mo ago with 4 replies rationality accelerationism intelligence

Nines or zeroes of s

This matches my intuition - Elizerian alignment was always an incoherent goal, no agents or objects have perfectly coherent boundaries, making something intelligent provably aim at a single well defined end state is probably at best a recipe for madness in... 3mo ago

This matches my intu

Will future super-intelligence be formatted as selves, or something else?
The Landian paradigm establishes that orthogonalist strong rationality (intelligence securely subordinated to fixed purpose) is not possible. Therefore no alignment, no singletons, no immortality, mere humans are doomed, etc etc. Therefore meta-darwinian e... posted 3mo ago with 14 replies rationality gnon intelligence

Will future super-in

Best of luck with the epicycles.... 3mo ago

Best of luck with th

There is no strong rationality, thus no paperclippers, no singletons, no robust alignment
I ran into some doomers from Anthropic at the SF Freedom Party the other day and gave them the good news that strong rationality is dead. They seemed mildly heartened. I thought I should lay out the argument in short form for everyone else too:... posted 3mo ago with 5 replies rationality intelligence

There is no strong r

I looked it up: inner alignment is the difficult problem of making sure a program is optimizing for what you optimized it for. That's related, maybe a part but not the whole of strong rationality. Strong rationality is about an agent evaluating and operati... 3mo ago

I looked it up: inne

Not Superintelligence; Supercoordination
Everyone seems to be trying to arms race their way to superintelligence these days. I have a different idea: supercoordination.... posted 5mo ago with 34 replies rationality sociology intelligence

Not Superintelligenc

Memory is requisite to supercoordination, no doubt. Tho my gut is that the key to the first visceral supercoordination system will be synthesis over that memory.... 4mo ago

Memory is requisite

Are foldy ears an indicator of intelligence?
Hi Sofiechaners.... posted 13mo ago with 8 replies eugenics intelligence

Are foldy ears an in

Your father's ears also likely change with sun exposure. I'm reminded of a picture of a truck driver who had much more sun damage to one side of his face compared to the other.... 13mo ago

Your father's ears a

Why Momentum Really Works. The math of gradient descent with momentum.
https://distill.pub/2017/momentum/ posted 14mo ago with 3 replies technology intelligence informatics

Why Momentum Really

Do you know if there is any predictability to the effect? I would guess it's related to catastrophic forgetting aka the reason stochastic gradient descent has to be stochastic. Basically if you update on one set of evidence without locking in those learnin... 13mo ago

Do you know if there

A pinpoint brain with less than a million neurons, somehow capable of mammalian-level problem-solving.
https://rifters.com/real/2009/01/iterating-towards-bethlehem.html?fbclid=IwAR1b9QURSJnizgy7r4HD7UCYmc06A7uL5muc7igz8uJHxLAIZWEwDMSqyPk posted 2y ago with 15 replies technology intelligence informatics

A pinpoint brain wit

Aristotle described animals as having souls* capable of knowledge derived from the senses and the capability to use that knowledge to support the movements characteristic of their species.... 14mo ago

Aristotle described

Kolmogorov–Arnold Networks, a new architecture for deep learning.
https://github.com/KindXiaoming/pykan posted 1y ago with 1 reply technology intelligence informatics

Kolmogorov–Arnold Ne

This is neat. Instead of having fixed nonlinear activation functions, they have trainable nonlinear functions instead of weights. They claim it has better scalaing properties and performance for many problems, and is more interpretable (because there are f... 1y ago

This is neat. Instea