Legionnaire

• LegionnaireMar 11, 2025, 9:05 PM

  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.

• LegionnaireMar 10, 2025, 6:42 PM

  5 points

  2

  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.

• LegionnaireFeb 25, 2025, 6:10 AM

  3 points

  0

  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?

• LegionnaireJan 17, 2025, 7:47 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Milan W’s comment on: Le­gion­naire’s Shortform

  Well that puts my concern to rest. Thanks!

• LegionnaireJan 17, 2025, 7:41 PM

  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.

• LegionnaireJan 14, 2025, 5:50 PM

  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!

• LegionnaireSep 17, 2024, 8:44 PM

  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 (Sep 22, 2024, 6:05 PM; 2 points)

• LegionnaireSep 17, 2024, 8:29 PM

  −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.

• LegionnaireJun 16, 2024, 12:33 PM

  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’s Shortform

• LegionnaireMar 5, 2024, 9:31 PM

  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.

• LegionnaireMar 5, 2024, 9:28 PM

  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)

• LegionnaireMar 5, 2024, 6:48 PM

  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.

[Question] Mak­ing 2023 ACX Pre­dic­tion Re­sults Public

• LegionnaireOct 8, 2023, 6:23 PM

  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.

• LegionnaireOct 7, 2023, 10:05 AM

  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.

• LegionnaireJun 15, 2023, 4:52 PM

  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.

• LegionnaireJun 15, 2023, 4:25 PM

  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.

• LegionnaireMay 4, 2023, 6:38 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: RamblinDash’s comment on: The Mo­ral Coper­ni­can Principle

  Good to know! I’ll look more into it.

• LegionnaireMay 2, 2023, 5:19 PM

  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.