Legionnaire

Karma: 106

Legionnaire 1 May 2025 21:08 UTC
5 points
1
on: Legionnaire’s Shortform
Months ago I suggested that you could manipulate the popular LLMs by mass publishing ideological text online. Well this has now been done by Russia.

Legionnaire 11 Mar 2025 21:05 UTC
1 point
0
on: So how well is Claude playing Pokémon?
Me and my college educated wife recently got stuck playing Lego Star wars… Our solution was to go to Google it. Some of these games are poorly designed and very unintuitive as others have said. Especially a game this old. Seems like they should give Claude some limited Google searches at least.
The earliest Harry Potter games had help hotlines you could call, which we had to do once when I was 9.
It’s hilarious it thinks the game might be broken sometimes, like an angry teenager claiming lag when he loses a firefight in CoD.

Legionnaire 10 Mar 2025 18:42 UTC
7 points
4
on: A Bear Case: My Predictions Regarding AI Progress
It will not meaningfully generalize beyond domains with easy verification
Why can’t we make every domain have automated verification? (I wont claim easy, but easy enough to do with finite resources) Agency, for instance, is verifiable in competitive games of arbitrary difficulty and scale. Just check who won. DeepMind has already done this to some degree with language models and virtual agents a year ago. https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/sima-generalist-ai-agent-for-3d-virtual-environments/

Every other trait we care about is instrumental in agency to some degree, and the games can be customized to focus on various aspects as well, just like you focus a class in school.

Legionnaire 25 Feb 2025 6:10 UTC
7 points
2
on: Have LLMs Generated Novel Insights?
It’s hard to see what a novel insight is exactly. Any example can be argued against. Can you give an example of one? Or of one you’ve personally had?
Various LLMs can spot issues in code bases that are not public. Do all of these count?

Legionnaire 17 Jan 2025 19:47 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Milan W’s comment on: Legionnaire’s Shortform
Well that puts my concern to rest. Thanks!

Legionnaire 17 Jan 2025 19:41 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: eggsyntax’s comment on: Numberwang: LLMs Doing Autonomous Research, and a Call for Input
Would also love to take the tests. If possible you could grab human test subjects from certain areas: a less wrong group, a reddit group, etc.

Legionnaire 14 Jan 2025 17:50 UTC
1 point
1
on: Legionnaire’s Shortform
Who is aligning lesswrong? As lesswrong becomes more popularized due to AI growth, I’m concerned the quality of lesswrong discussion and posts has decreased since creating and posting have no filter. Obviously no filter has been a benefit while lesswrong was a hidden gem, only visible to those who can see its value. But as it becomes more popular, i think it should be obvious this site would drop in value if it trended towards reddit. Ideally existing users prevent that, but obviously that will tend to drift if new users can just show up. Are there methods in place for this issue?

Specific example: lots of posts seem like rehashes of things that have already been plainly discussed, and the quick takes section, and discussion on Discord, do a great job of cutting down on this particular issue. So maintaining high quality posts is not a pipe dream!

Legionnaire 17 Sep 2024 20:44 UTC
7 points
0
in reply to: Yoav Ravid’s comment on: Yoav Ravid’s Shortform
LLMs can be very good at coming up with names with some work:

A few I liked:
Sacrificial Contest
Mutual Ruin Game
Sacrificial Spiral
Universal Loss Competition
Collective Sacrifice Trap
Competition Deadlock
Competition Spiral
Competition Stalemate
Destructive Contest
Destructive Feedback Competition
Conflict Feedback Spiral
What links here?
- Yoav Ravid's comment on Yoav Ravid’s Shortform by Yoav Ravid (22 Sep 2024 18:05 UTC; 2 points)

Legionnaire 17 Sep 2024 20:29 UTC
−6 points
−2
on: Legionnaire’s Shortform
Potential political opportunity: LLMs are trained on online data and will continue to be. If I want to make sure they are against communism by default, I could: Auto generate a bunch of public github repositories, Fill them with text I generate using gpt4o mini which is $15 per 4 million letters which I have prompted to be explicitly pro free markets and against communism. Entwine them by posting links to each other and the rest of the internet: highlight, share, fork, and star them to increase likelihood they are included in the dataset.
What links here?
- Legionnaire's comment on Legionnaire’s Shortform by Legionnaire (1 May 2025 21:08 UTC; 5 points)

Legionnaire 16 Jun 2024 12:33 UTC
1 point
0
on: Legionnaire’s Shortform
Speculation: LLM Self Play into General Agent?
Suppose you got a copy of GPT4 post fine tuning + hardware to train it. How would the following play out?
1. Give it the rules and state of a competitive game, such as automatically generated tic-tac-toe variants.
2. Prompt it to use chain of thought to consider the best next move and select it.
3. Provide it with the valid set of output choices (like a json format determining action and position, similar to AutoGPT)
4. Run two of these against each other continuously, training on the results of the victor which can be objectively measured by the game’s rules.
5. Benchmark it against a tiny subset of those variants that you want to manually program a bot with known ELO / have a human evaluate it.
6. Increase the complexity of the game when it reaches some general ability (eg tic tac toe variants > chess variants > Civilization 5 The Videogame variants)

Note this is similar to what Gato did. https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/a-generalist-agent/

This would have an interesting side effect of making its output more legible in some ways than a normal NN agent, though I suppose there’s no guarantee the chain of thought would stay legible English unless additional mechanisms were put in place, but this is just a high level idea.

Legionnaire 5 Mar 2024 21:31 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: dreeves’s comment on: Making 2023 ACX Prediction Results Public
Good to know. In that case the above solution is actually even safer than that.

Legionnaire 5 Mar 2024 21:28 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: dreeves’s comment on: Making 2023 ACX Prediction Results Public
Plausible Deniability yes. Reason agnostic. It’s hard to know why someone might not want to be known to have their address here, but with my numbers above, they would have the statistical backing that 1/1000 addresses will appear in the set by chance, meaning a someone who wants to deny it could say “for every address actually in the set, 1000 will appear to be” so that’s only a 1/1000 chance I actually took the survey! (Naively of course; rest in peace rationalist@lesswrong.com)

Legionnaire 5 Mar 2024 18:48 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Brendan Long’s comment on: Making 2023 ACX Prediction Results Public
Thanks for your input. Though ideally we wouldn’t have to go through an email server, it may just be required at some level of security.

As for the patterns, the nice thing is that with a small output space in the millions, there are tons of overlapping reasonable addresses even if you pin it down to a domain. Every English first and last name combo even without any numbers in it is already a lot larger than 10 million, meaning even targeted domains should have plenty of collisions.

Legionnaire 8 Oct 2023 18:23 UTC
5 points
1
in reply to: Amal ’s comment on: Announcing Dialogues
I have done something similar using draw.io for arguments regarding a complex feature. Each point often had multiple counterpoints, which themselves sometimes split into other points. I think this is only necessary for certain discussions and should probably not be the default though.

Legionnaire 7 Oct 2023 10:05 UTC
4 points
0
on: Announcing Dialogues
I’m a software developer and father interested in:
- General Rationality: eg. WHY does Occam’s Razor work? Does it work in every universe?
- How rationality can be applied to thinking critically about CW/politics in a political-party agnostic way
- Concrete understanding of how weird arguments: Pascals Wager, The Simulation Hypothesis, Roko’s B, etc. do or don’t work
- AI SOTA, eg. what could/should/will OpenAI release next?
- AI Long Term arguments from “nothing burger” all the way to Yudkowsky
- Physics, specifically including Quantum Physics and Cosmology
- Lesswrong community expansion/outreach
Time zone is central US. I also regularly read Scott Alexander.

Legionnaire 15 Jun 2023 16:52 UTC
4 points
0
on: UFO Betting: Put Up or Shut Up
I am concerned for your monetary strategy (unless you’re rich). Let’s say you’re absolutely right that LW is overconfident, and that there is actually a 10% chance of aliens rather than 0.5. So this is a good deal! 20x!

But only on the margin.

Depending on your current wealth it may only be rational to take a few hundred dollars worth of these bets for this particular bet. If you go making lots of these types of bets (low probability, high payoff, great EXpected returns) for a small fraction of your wealth each, you should expect to make money, but if you make only 3 or 4 of these types of bets, you are more likely to lose money because your are loading all your gains into a small fraction of possibilities in exchange for huge payouts, and most outcomes end up with you losing money.

See for example the St. Petersburg paradox which has infinite expected return, but very finite actual value given limited assets for the banker and or the player.

Legionnaire 15 Jun 2023 16:25 UTC
4 points
1
in reply to: Mitchell_Porter’s comment on: UFO Betting: Put Up or Shut Up
Smaller sums are more likely to convey probabilities of each party accurately. For example, if Elon Musk offers me $5000 to split between two possible outcomes, I will allocate them close to my beliefs, but if he offers me 5mil, I’ll allocate about 2.5mil each because either one is a transformative amount of money.

People are more likely to be rational with their marginal dollar because of pricing in the value of staying solvent. The first 100k in my bank account IS worth more than the second, and so the saying, a non-marginal bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

Legionnaire 4 May 2023 18:38 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: RamblinDash’s comment on: The Moral Copernican Principle
Good to know! I’ll look more into it.

Legionnaire 2 May 2023 17:19 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: The Moral Copernican Principle
I agree that’s all it is, but you can make all the same general statements about any algorithm.

The problem is that some people hear you say “constructed” and “nothing special”, and then conclude they can reconstruct it any way they wish. It may be constructed and not special in a cosmic sense, but it’s not arbitrary. All heuristics are not made equal for any given goal.

Legionnaire 6 Apr 2023 4:43 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Bentham's Bulldog’s comment on: The Orthogonality Thesis is Not Obviously True
I’m not saying “the experts can be wrong” I’m saying these aren’t even experts.

Pick any major ideology/religion you think is false. One way or another (they can’t all be right!), the “experts” in these areas aren’t experts, they are basically insane: babbling on at length about things that aren’t at all real, which is what I think most philosophy experts are doing. Making sure you aren’t one of them is the work of epistemology which The Sequences are great at covering. In other words, the philosopher experts you are citing I view as largely [Phlogiston](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RgkqLqkg8vLhsYpfh/fake-causality) experts.