Steven Byrnes

Karma: 17,303

I’m an AGI safety / AI alignment researcher in Boston with a particular focus on brain algorithms. Research Fellow at Astera. See https://sjbyrnes.com/agi.html for a summary of my research and sorted list of writing. Physicist by training. Email: steven.byrnes@gmail.com. Leave me anonymous feedback here. I’m also at: RSS feed , Twitter , Mastodon , Threads , Bluesky , GitHub , Wikipedia , Physics-StackExchange , LinkedIn

Spatial attention as a “tell” for empathetic simulation?

Steven Byrnes26 Apr 2024 15:10 UTC

49 points

11 comments8 min readLW link

A couple productivity tips for overthinkers

Steven Byrnes20 Apr 2024 16:05 UTC

76 points

13 comments4 min readLW link

“Artificial General Intelligence”: an extremely brief FAQ

Steven Byrnes11 Mar 2024 17:49 UTC

65 points

6 comments2 min readLW link

Some (problematic) aesthetics of what constitutes good work in academia

Steven Byrnes11 Mar 2024 17:47 UTC

146 points

12 comments12 min readLW link

Woods’ new preprint on object permanence

Steven Byrnes7 Mar 2024 21:29 UTC

58 points

1 comment6 min readLW link

Social status part 2/2: everything else

Steven Byrnes5 Mar 2024 16:29 UTC

61 points

2 comments23 min readLW link

Social status part 1/2: negotiations over object-level preferences

Steven Byrnes5 Mar 2024 16:29 UTC

110 points

15 comments21 min readLW link

Four visions of Transformative AI success

Steven Byrnes17 Jan 2024 20:45 UTC

112 points

22 comments15 min readLW link

Deceptive AI ≠ Deceptively-aligned AI

Steven Byrnes7 Jan 2024 16:55 UTC

97 points

19 comments6 min readLW link

[Valence series] Appendix A: Hedonic tone / (dis)pleasure / (dis)liking

Steven Byrnes20 Dec 2023 15:54 UTC

15 points

0 comments12 min readLW link

[Valence series] 5. “Valence Disorders” in Mental Health & Personality

Steven Byrnes18 Dec 2023 15:26 UTC

35 points

7 comments13 min readLW link

[Valence series] 4. Valence & Social Status

Steven Byrnes15 Dec 2023 14:24 UTC

35 points

19 comments10 min readLW link

[Valence series] 3. Valence & Beliefs

Steven Byrnes11 Dec 2023 20:21 UTC

63 points

6 comments21 min readLW link

[Valence series] 2. Valence & Normativity

Steven Byrnes7 Dec 2023 16:43 UTC

70 points

4 comments28 min readLW link

[Valence series] 1. Introduction

Steven Byrnes4 Dec 2023 15:40 UTC

87 points

14 comments15 min readLW link

Thoughts on “AI is easy to control” by Pope & Belrose

Steven Byrnes1 Dec 2023 17:30 UTC

189 points

55 comments13 min readLW link

I’m confused about innate smell neuroanatomy

Steven Byrnes28 Nov 2023 20:49 UTC

34 points

0 comments8 min readLW link

8 examples informing my pessimism on uploading without reverse engineering

Steven Byrnes3 Nov 2023 20:03 UTC

111 points

12 comments12 min readLW link

Late-talking kid part 3: gestalt language learning

Steven Byrnes17 Oct 2023 2:00 UTC

31 points

5 comments2 min readLW link

“X distracts from Y” as a thinly-disguised fight over group status / politics

Steven Byrnes25 Sep 2023 15:18 UTC

97 points

14 comments8 min readLW link