Each December, the LessWrong community reflects on the best blogposts of yesteryear, to decide which posts stood the tests of time. 

In this post, I aim to:

• Explain some subtleties of what I'm hoping we get out of the Annual Review
• Make some explicit asks (even of busy people), which I think have reasonable cost/benefit ratios.
• Describe the new UI features. 

The most important changes are:

• Reviews are much more prominent than they used to be
• You can nominate posts from elsewhere on the internet using the Linkpost Importer. (Use this to nominate posts that contribute to the overall LessWrong or Alignment Forum conversation). It can import PDFs from arXiV, and blogposts from most urls.

For the Nomination Voting Phase, the main ask I'm making is: "spend ~30 minutes casting nomination votes, and write 2...

ETA: I'm not saying that MIRI thought AIs wouldn't understand human values. If there's only one thing you take away from this post, please don't take away that. Here is Linch's attempted summary of this post, which I largely agree with.

Recently, many people have talked about whether some of the main MIRI people (Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nate Soares, and Rob Bensinger^[1]) should update on whether value alignment is easier than they thought given that GPT-4 seems to follow human directions and act within moral constraints pretty well (here are two specific examples of people talking about this: 1, 2). Because these conversations are often hard to follow without much context, I'll just provide a brief caricature of how I think this argument has gone in the places I've...

Midjourney, “the dream machine”

I recently started working at Renaissance Philanthropy. It’s a new organization, and most people I’ve met haven’t heard of it.^[1] So I thought I’d explain, in my own words and speaking for myself rather than my employers, what we (and I) are trying to do here.

Modern Medicis

The “Renaissance” in Renaissance Philanthropy is a reference to the Italian Renaissance, when wealthy patrons like the Medicis commissioned great artworks and inventions.

The idea is that “modern Medicis” — philanthropists — should be funding the great scientists and innovators of our day to tackle ambitious challenges.

RenPhil’s role is to facilitate that process: when a philanthropist wants to pursue a goal, we help them turn that into a more concrete plan, incubate and/or administer new organizations to implement that plan,...

This is the third in a sequence of posts scrutinizing computational functionalism (CF). In a previous post, I defined a concrete claim that computational functionalists tend to make:

Theoretical CF: A simulation of a human brain on a computer, with physics perfectly simulated down to the atomic level, would cause the conscious experience of that brain.

I contrasted this with “practical CF”, the claim that a suitably low-fidelity simulation of a brain, like one that only captures functional properties, would be conscious. In the last post, I discussed practical CF. In this post, I’ll scrutinize theoretical CF.

To evaluate theoretical CF, I’m going to meet functionalists where they (usually) stand and adopt a materialist position about consciousness. That is to say that I’ll assume all details of a human’s conscious...