Harley-ml/lesswrong huggingface dataset:
# How to think about and deal with OpenAI

Eliezer Yudkowsky [writes on twitter](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1446562238848847877):

> Nothing else Elon Musk has done can possibly make up for how hard the "OpenAI" launch trashed humanity's chances of survival; previously there was a nascent spirit of cooperation, which Elon completely blew up to try to make it all be about *who*, which monkey, got the poison banana, and by spreading and advocating the frame that everybody needed their own "demon" (Musk's old term) in their house, and anybody who talked about reducing proliferation of demons must be a bad anti-openness person who wanted to keep all the demons for themselves.

> Nobody involved with OpenAI's launch can reasonably have been said to have done anything else of relative importance in their lives.  The net impact of their lives is their contribution to the huge negative impact of OpenAI's launch, plus a rounding error.

> Previously all the AGI people were at the same conference talking about how humanity was going to handle this together.  Elon Musk didn't like Demis Hassabis, so he blew that up.  That's the impact of his life.  The end.

I've found myself repeatedly uncertain about what to make of OpenAI and their impact. The most recent LessWrong discussion that I'm aware of has happened on the post [Will OpenAI-s work unintentionally increase existential risk](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CD8gcugDu5z2Eeq7k/will-openai-s-work-unintentionally-increase-existential), but the arguments for negative impact are different from the thing Eliezer named.

I'm also not entirely sure whether publicly debating sensitive questions like whether a person or organization accidentally increased existential risk is a good idea in the first place. However, spontaneously bringing up the issue on a twitter thread is unlikely to be optimal. At the very least, it should be beneficial to discuss the meta question, i.e., how we should or shouldn't talk about this. With that in mind, here are three things I would like to understand better:

1. Concretely speaking, should we be hesitant to talk about this? If so, what kind of discussions are okay?

And -- conditional on discussing them being a good idea:

2. What is the more detailed story of how the "nascent spirit of cooperation" has degraded or changed since the inception of OpenAI?

3. What interventions are possible here, if any? (Is it really that difficult to organize some kind of outreach to Elon to try and reverse some of the effects? Naively speaking, my impression has been that our community is sufficiently well connected to do this, and that Elon is amenable to arguments.)

I'm less interested in estimating the total impact of any specific person.
# Bayeswatch 12: The Singularity War

The Singularity Cyberwar took 6 minutes. Vanilla human beings never again led an organization larger than a million people.

The missile exchange took 6 hours. It destroyed all significant semiconductor fabricators. Computronium became a nonrenewable resource.

The world's aircraft carriers and Gauss battleships lasted 6 days.

It took 6 weeks to shoot down the last F-15 and Chengdu J-20.

Analog radios were being mass-produced 6 months after that.

---

Cheap analog radios are often staticy. It's not always obvious who's talking, or where they're coming from.

"We're taking heavy casualties on the Southern front."

"I've never seen androids like this."

"The Baltic AI says the Transsiberian AI has gone rogue but the Transsiberian AI said the Baltic AI has gone rogue. What's going on?"

"I tried to radio Bayeswatch HQ but we've lost our entire chain of command. Who's in charge over there?"

An assistant handed Vi the shortwave radio. "I am," she said.

---

Vi established her HQ in the Natanz fortress, a several-decades-old network of tunnels built inside of a mountain designed to withstand a nuclear bunker-buster. Her hivemind mainframe was stored next to their C&CAI (command-and-control artificial intelligence) in a artificial cave originally built to house plutonium and centrifuges.

She kept the perimeter lightly staffed. The best defense was a dynamic counterattack. The outermost perimeter was just a barbed wire fence.

"I have a report from our security guard," said Trinity. She technically didn't need to talk to Vi but it kept the collective sane. The vanilla human habits helped keep the officers at ease too.

Vi looked up from the war room's C&CAI diagnostic readout. "Is it a diplomat?" she said.

"No. Miriam's back," said Trinity.

---

Vi brought Miriam into her private office/bedroom. Vi sat in her chair. Miriam sat on the bed with her legs dangling off. There were no windows or viewscreens this deep underground. Just a verdant watercolor painted from memory.

"Can I have a coffee?" said Miriam.

Vi pressed the intercom. "One coffee please. Real, if possible. The best stuff we have. Black. No cream or sugar," said Vi into the intercom.

A private entered through the airlock, silently gave Miriam her coffee and departed.

Vi took off the hazmat suit she wore in the war room. Miriam took off the breathing apparatus she had worn to survive outside.

"This is so much better. I haven't been able to take that thing off outside of a bivy tent in weeks," said Miriam.

"Where have you been?" said Vi, "I haven't seen you since I went on medical leave―since before the Singularity War."

"I was hunting Sherine," said Miriam.

"Preemptive strikes always have been your style. Did you kill her?" said Vi.

"We came to a mutual understanding," said Miriam.

Vi drew her pistol. "Hello Sherine," she said.

"Hello Vi," said Sherine's ancillary.

"How long did it take to break Miriam under the directional amplifier?" said Vi.

Sherine's bioweapon activated, killing everyone in the room.
# Without a phone for 10 days

I woke up this morning to a bricked Google Pixel 4. After taking it to a local repair shop for a diagnosis, I was told that a fuse had been blown on the motherboard. A board-level repair would cost half as much as a brand new phone, and I was thinking about upgrading to the new Pixel 6 once it came out later this month. After spending a few hours sorting out account details and learning about replacement options with my carrier I learned that it would cost me $150 to get a replacement by this coming Monday. What good would it do to pay $150 for a phone that I would only have for a week until upgrading?

And that’s when I realized I had stumbled into a very unique moment in which I had every reason to attempt something I had been hesitantly curious to try: living without a phone. After all, the Pixel 6 was rumored to launch only ten days from now on October 19th. And if I decide at the end that life is better with a smartphone, then I’ll get one.

Okay so there are a few things I’m a bit worried about. The most obvious one is that I’ll be unreachable to close family and friends during this time. Ten days isn’t a ton of time, so I decided to email those closest to me to tell them about this experiment. A less obvious problem is that I’ll be unable to do typical two-factor authentication, which my university and some other services periodically require. The good news is that I have backup codes saved on my laptop, but it’s kind of a hassle.

I’m very curious to see how this will turn out. I’m hoping that I’ll appreciate the disconnection so much that I won’t want to go back to smartphones. I’ll likely still want the basic call and text functionality, so maybe I’ll go with a simpler phone. I had heard of [the lightphone](https://www.thelightphone.com/) before and loved the idea, but was afraid of giving up apps like Uber for emergencies. Today I looked into some other “feature phones” and discovered the [Nokia 6300](https://www.nokia.com/phones/en_us/nokia-6300-4g?sku=16LIOB11A03), the [Punkt. MP02](https://www.punkt.ch/en/products/mp02-4g-mobile-phone/), and the [Mudita Pure](https://mudita.com/products/phones/mudita-pure/). Anyway, I’ll probably write at least one more post on this experiment when the ten days are up.

Has anyone else made the switch away from their smartphone? Would love to hear about it below.
# Outdoor dancing is likely very safe

After the spontaneous contra dance at [Porchfest](https://www.jefftk.com/p/porchfest-2021), I'm helping organize [another one](https://www.jefftk.com/davis). I wanted to get a better sense of how much covid risk an attendee would be taking, so I ran some numbers on [microcovid](https://www.microcovid.org/). If everyone is masked and vaccinated, I count ~2.2 microcovids:

*   [~1.7](https://www.microcovid.org/?distance=close&duration=90&interaction=oneTime&personCount=1&riskProfile=average&scenarioName=custom&setting=outdoor&subLocation=US_25017&theirMask=surgical&theirVaccine=vaccinated&topLocation=US_25&voice=silent&yourMask=surgical&yourVaccineDoses=2&yourVaccineType=pfizer) from your partner. While your partner is not the only person your head gets close to, you're this close to at most one person at a time, so for simplicity assume its your current partner.
*   [~0.2](https://www.microcovid.org/?distance=normal&duration=90&interaction=oneTime&personCount=4&riskProfile=average&scenarioName=custom&setting=outdoor&subLocation=US_25017&theirMask=surgical&theirVaccine=vaccinated&topLocation=US_25&voice=silent&yourMask=surgical&yourVaccineDoses=2&yourVaccineType=pfizer) from your neighbors and next/previous neighbors.
*   [~0.2](https://www.microcovid.org/?distance=sixFt&duration=90&interaction=oneTime&personCount=8&riskProfile=average&scenarioName=custom&setting=outdoor&subLocation=US_25017&theirMask=surgical&theirVaccine=vaccinated&topLocation=US_25&voice=silent&yourMask=surgical&yourVaccineDoses=2&yourVaccineType=pfizer) from your next/previous hands fours.
*   [~0.08](https://www.microcovid.org/?distance=tenFt&duration=90&interaction=oneTime&personCount=8&riskProfile=average&scenarioName=custom&setting=outdoor&subLocation=US_25017&theirMask=surgical&theirVaccine=vaccinated&topLocation=US_25&voice=silent&yourMask=surgical&yourVaccineDoses=2&yourVaccineType=pfizer) from the hands fours one farther away.

If you have multiple lines close together, you could ~double these numbers. Other social dances are likely ~half as risky.

This is a very low level of risk: about 1% of a cautious risk budget of 200 microcovids/week (1% risk of covid/year).

I wish I'd run these numbers sooner: this is probably our last chance for an outdoor dance in Boston before spring.

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/davis-sq-contra.jpg)](https://www.jefftk.com/davis-sq-contra-big.jpg)  
*An outdoor dance in October 2013*

We may end up dancing indoors this winter. Over the next few months I think our communities are likely to move away from treating covid as something where we have a duty to make substantial sacrifices to limit spread. Once everyone is vaccinated who wants to be, including boosters and approving the vaccine for kids, I think people will view the tradeoffs very differently.

*Comment via: [facebook](https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/10100231551211352)*
# NVIDIA and Microsoft releases 530B parameter transformer model, Megatron-Turing NLG

> In addition to reporting aggregate metrics on benchmark tasks, we also qualitatively analyzed model outputs and have intriguing findings (Figure 4). We observed that the model can infer basic mathematical operations from context (sample 1), even when the symbols are badly obfuscated (sample 2). While far from claiming numeracy, the model seems to go beyond only memorization for arithmetic.
> 
> We also show samples (the last row in Figure 4) from the HANS task where we posed the task containing simple syntactic structures as a question and prompted the model for an answer. Despite the structures being simple, existing natural language inference (NLI) models often have a hard time with such inputs. [Fine-tuned models](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.01007.pdf) often pick up spurious associations between certain syntactic structures and entailment relations from systemic biases in NLI datasets. MT-NLG performs competitively in such cases without finetuning.

Seems like next big transformer model is here. No way to test it out yet, but scaling seems to continue, see quote.  
It is not mixture of experts, so parameters mean something as compared to [WuDao](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2dG7vXDZjd6crkdLa/beijing-academy-of-artificial-intelligence-announces-1-75) (also it beats GPT-3 on PiQA and LAMBADA).  
  
How big of a deal is that?
# Bayeswatch 13: Spaceship

"This headquarters will be overrun in an hour. We have to evacuate," said Colonel Qiang.

"Not an option," said Trinity.

"Look. If I throw everything we've got at them―and I mean everything―we can hold off the Baltic forces for perhaps two hours―but that would be suicide. And for what?" said Colonel Qiang.

The intercom rang. "It's Eitan from Jerusalem," said the secretary.

"Put him through," said Trinity.

"You have Vi's access codes but you don't sound like her," said Eitan over the radio.

"Hivemind," said Trinity.

"What do you need?" said Eitan.

"I'm cashing in the favor you owe me for saving the Levant. I need to use your giant space laser," said Trinity.

"You realize you're too far away for us to provide you air defense? The curvature of the Earth gets in the way. Also, I saw those tanks and battlemechs on our satellites. Your options are defeat or Masada," said Eitan.

"What? No. We have our own weapons. We need you to cut a path through the Kessler debris. I'm sending you our launch trajectory," said Trinity.

"It shall be done," said Eitan.

Trinity turned off the radio.

"You're good at keeping secrets. I thought the ship's life support systems wouldn't be ready for another ten years," said Colonel Qiang.

"They won't be ready. Ever. I scrapped the life support project months ago. It's pure propaganda," said Trinity.

"You mean the reason I'm here, the reason I agreed to work for you, is a lie?" said Colonel Qiang.

"We were born on Earth. We will die on Earth. Space is for our children," said Trinity.

Colonel Qiang's eyes widened. "You're building a von Neumann machine."

"Built. It'll be ready to launch in two hours," said Trinity.

"You will have your two hours," said Colonel Qiang.

"萬歲," said Trinity.

Colonel Qiang bowed, clicked his boots, turned on his heels and left the room.

![](https://s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/www.lsusr.com/lesswrong/bayeswatch-banner.png)

# Credits

This concludes *Bayeswatch*. Thank you [Dov Random](https://dov-random.blogspot.com/) for helping to come up with the original idea.
# What's your plan?

A question I find useful with my kids is "what's your plan?":

*   What's your plan for snack at school today?
*   What's your plan if it gets cold while we're at the picnic?
*   What's your plan for these drawings?

It works well when trying to find a balance on responsibility: the issue is theirs to resolve, but it's not something I can just trust they'll handle unassisted. It acts as both a casual reminder and an opening for me to offer feedback if I end up thinking their plan is unrealistic.

I also like that it's easy to pull back from: I can [try not asking](https://www.jefftk.com/p/lessons-from-dropping-out), and see how it goes. Over time, as they become more capable, many things have moved out of this intermediate state while others have moved in.

(This is another example of [cultivating independence](https://www.jefftk.com/p/growing-independence).)

*Comment via: [facebook](https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/10100231711664802)*
# Meetup advice sequence intro

I'm transitioning into working on global meetup organization as more of a full-time thing, and the lowest-hanging fruit — something many people have asked for — seemed to be writing up all the advice I have on how to run a meetup well. So that's my first project!

Over the past few years I have surveyed more than 500 meetup organizers and attendees, asking what they like and don't like about the meetups they've attended, and what advice they would give to other organizers. This upcoming sequence is simply a writeup of what all of those people have told me.

This sequence will at least start by focusing on the very basics — the four main clusters that people mention are (1) venue, (2) attendance & advertising, (3) activities, and (4) managing the social environment. I will write posts on all of these, as well as things like how to run a first meetup, how to run meetups in cities of different sizes, and some other more exploratory topics. I don't have a sequence outline yet, nor do I have a posting schedule; I'm just going to keep going until I've exhausted the thousands of pieces of advice I've collected — which could take years, who knows? (Probably not.)

Beyond the realm of basic logistics, there are still a lot of unsolved problems, with governance structures and general interpersonal relations at the forefront. I don't know the answers to those problems yet, but hopefully someday I'll be able to give advice on them!

* * *

"But wait," you might say, "isn't there already a guide on how to run a meetup?" If you're referring to [Kaj's guide](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qMuAazqwJvkvo8teR/how-to-run-a-successful-less-wrong-meetup), well, that's nearly a decade old, and things have changed quite a bit in the years since it was published. I also find it difficult to navigate since it's a PDF, so I think it's valuable to have something more bullet-point-y and clickable. If you're referring to [Maia's meetup cookbook](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ousockk82npcPLqDc/meetup-cookbook), that is useful and great and totally worth checking out, but it primarily covers activities, and I think there's a lot more to be said. If you're referring to [the LW wiki page](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/less-wrong-meetup-group-resources), that's a good summary, but again, I want to go into a lot more depth. My sequence is going to be thorough *as hell.* So thorough that you'll be glad it's got so many section headers so that you can click through to only the parts you're actually interested in!

* * *

If you're an organizer, or if you're just interested in connecting with other people who are interested in meetups, you can join the [Rationality Meetups Discord server](https://discord.gg/DEyWYaf4th). All are welcome!

And if you have requests or suggestions for this sequence, or for what I should do as meta-meetup-organizer in general, let me know in the comments!
# Is nuking women and children cheaper than firebombing them?

When I was a teenager, my favorite board game was the World War Two strategy game *Axis & Allies*. It taught me basic principles of adversarial strategy including Lanchester's laws, how to wield the law of large numbers and "chaos favors the underdog". But my favorite thing about the game is what it taught me about morality.

The game is balanced and rewards aggression. If you don't send everything you have to the front lines as fast as you can enemy forces will march through your homeland and those of your teammates. The game is long. If you lose your defeat will be protracted. It will suck. *Axis & Allies* is a desperate struggle for survival.

In *Axis and Allies* it's common to leave a single infantry unit on the front lines knowing they'll become casualties so you can destroy your enemy's more expensive tanks after the [inevitable counterattack](https://acoup.blog/2021/09/17/collections-no-mans-land-part-i-the-trench-stalemate/). Whether your enemy accepts prisoners of war or just shoots surrendering soldiers is irrelevant to this calculus.

Soldiers are fungible. Territory is fungible. Entire continents can be sacrificed and regained. Just holding off the enemy forces requires every trick available.

*Axis & Allies* supports a mechanic called "strategic bombing". Strategic bombing is a euphemism for bombing civilians. Strategic bombing is usually the wrong thing to do. Not because burning women and children alive is unethical. Strategic bombing is wrong because it does slightly less damage to an enemy's capacity for war than bombing their soldiers directly.

When I think about ethics I ask myself "If I was a 19-year-old in 1945 would I have refused to pilot a B-29 just because I was ordered to commit a war crime?"

I'm pretty sure the answer is no.

I'm not saying that bombing civilians is ever morally defensible. Or even that it was strategically effective. Just that, given my knowledge of history and my knowledge of my own personality I'm pretty sure that bombing civilians is what I would have done if I had been born in 1926 and assigned to the Air Force operating a B-29. I might've ended up on the Manhattan Project instead.

# One-Sided Offensive Nuclear War

When discussing the ethics of nuclear weapons[^1], it's easy to get drawn into calculations of how many Japanese lives they did(n't) save. Such perspective is a historical anachronism. When I'm playing *Axis & Allies* I throw all of my resources at the enemy as fast as I can. I don't ask "is it ethical to detonate nuclear bombs on starving civilians who never voted for their fascist government"? I ask "is nuking women and children cheaper than firebombing them"?

[^1]: We added many homebrew rules, including rules for nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are not in vanilla *Axis & Allies*.
# NLP Position Paper: When Combatting Hype, Proceed with Caution

*Linkpost for* [*https://cims.nyu.edu/~sbowman/bowman2021hype.pdf.*](https://cims.nyu.edu/~sbowman/bowman2021hype.pdf) *To appear on arXiv shortly.*

I'm sharing a position paper I put together as an attempt to introduce general NLP researchers to AI risk concerns. From a few discussions at *ACL conferences, it seems like a pretty large majority of active researchers aren't aware of the arguments at all, or at least aren't aware that they have any connection to NLP and large language model work.

The paper makes a slightly odd multi-step argument to try to connect to active debates in the field:

*   It's become extremely common in NLP papers/talks to claim or imply that NNs are too brittle to use, that they aren't doing anything that could plausibly resemble language understanding, and that this is a pretty deep feature of NNs that we don't know how to fix. These claims sometimes come with evidence, but it's often bad evidence, like citations to failures in old systems that we've since improved upon significantly. Weirdly, this even happens in papers that themselves show positive results involving NNs.
*   This seems to be coming from concerns about real-world harms: Current systems are pretty biased, and we don't have great methods for dealing with that, so there's a pretty widely-shared feeling that we shouldn't be deploying big NNs nearly as often as we are. The reasoning seems to go: If we downplay the effectiveness of this technology, that'll discourage its deployment.
*   But is that actually the right way to minimize the risk of harms? We should expect the impacts of these technologies to grow dramatically as they get better—the basic AI risk arguments go here—and we'll need to be prepared for those impacts. Downplaying the progress that we're making, both to each other and to outside stakeholders, limits our ability to foresee potentially-impactful progress or prepare for it.

I'll be submitting this to ACL in a month. Comments/criticism welcome, here or privately ([bowman@nyu.edu](mailto:bowman@nyu.edu)).
# Write Surprisingly About Reality

Good writing illuminates surprising things about reality. It must therefore be grounded in reality. Losing touch with reality is boring.

The best way to keep your writing grounded in reality is to write concretely. Don't write "the United States committed war crimes". Write ["the United States firebombed women and children"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cLehpZAY3HZuEQbHe/cheap-food-causes-cooperative-ethics?commentId=5srZf3uJZwCnvsRfw#comments). Personal experience is always concrete.

- Don't argue. Arguing shifts your focus from things to ideas. It distances you from empirical reality. Don't anticipate counterarguments. Preemptive counterargument is form of arguing.
- Don't write positively about other peoples' opinions. I love George Orwell but putting him on a pedestal is no less shallow than arguing against him.

Writing about facts, feelings and faith is fine. Fiction has its place too. What you shouldn't write about is other peoples' beliefs. Doing so opens the Box of Infinite Recursion and ultimately leads to the Black Hole of Drama.

Reversed conformity is orthogonal to independent thought. Independent thought equals ignoring others' opinions.

Most people are right most of the time about most things. Deviating from consensus makes you less correct on average. How correct you are on average is unimportant when you are inventing radical ideas. [You must weigh according to impact.](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/26/rule-genius-in-not-out/)

- Personal attacks cause collateral damage. Before you make a personal attack you should be extremely confident that your claim is true and that the good will outweigh the harm.
- It's worth publishing weird ideas even when most of them are wrong because if you publish a weird idea and your idea is good then it will be adopted by many people whereas if the idea is bad then it will be quickly forgotten.

Make your claims easy to falsify. Claims that aren't falsifiable aren't grounded in reality.

# Surprise!

Unsurprising facts are boring. Good writing focuses on the surprising ones. If you're ignoring others' opinions then "surprising" means "surprising to you". Explore.

Surprise is temporary. If you discover something surprising then you should write about it immediately, before you acclimatize.
# "Redundant" AI Alignment

This is a post I wrote on my personal blog after a discussion with a deep learning professor at the University of Chicago. I don't know if this particular topic has been studied in much depth elsewhere, so I figured I would share it here. If you know of any related work (or have any other comments on this, of course), let me know.

tldr: Supposing that someone figures out how to make an AGI and solve the alignment problem at least to some degree, would it be helpful to distribute many copies of the AI and have them keep each other in check? I propose a mathematical model to think about this question and conclude that this would probably be helpful at first, but would probably diminish in effectiveness over time. Under some assumptions, this approach may actually be counterproductive.
# Explaining Capitalism Harder

A friend recently shared a sharing of a screenshot of a reblogging of a reblogging of this tumblr post:

> Pro-Capitalist's defense of capitalism is just explaining how it works, and then when you say "yes I know, I just think it shouldn't be like that" they explain it to you again but angrier this time  
> —[strawberry-crocodile](https://strawberry-crocodile.tumblr.com/post/628477095237074944/pro-capitalists-defense-of-capitalism-is-just)

I really like this perspective, even as someone relatively pro-capitalism, because I think it captures something that often goes wrong in these discussions.

The strongest argument in favor of capitalism is that in practice it works for most things, better than the other systems we've tried. Not because it was designed to work, but because that's just how it falls together. When someone points at a piece of the system that seems unfair or wasteful and says "I just think it shouldn't be like that," stopping it's going to have effects elsewhere in the system, often negative ones. And so pro-capitalism folks often respond by trying to explain capitalism harder: what role is the thing you want to change filling? When people propose removing something without engaging with how it ties in to the rest of the system, it is natural to assume they don't know about its function and try to explain.

As in the opening quote, however, people don't want more explanation of the workings of the status quo. Instead, I think a better response is to think about what you expect would go wrong, and ask if they would expect that. Perhaps they don't, and you can try and figure out where specifically your expectations diverge. Perhaps they do, and they think it's worth it. Perhaps they have additional proposals which work together. Whichever way the conversation goes, I think it probably is more productive?

(Overall my perspective is that while things are much worse than they could be, they're also much better than they have [ever been](https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty). I really don't want us to break the system that keeps improving our ability to turn time and stuff into what people need. At the same time, to the extent that we can do it without breaking this cycle of improvement, I'd like to see far more redistribution of wealth. In my own life this looks like [giving](https://www.jefftk.com/donations).)

*Comment via: [facebook](https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/10100232028260342)*
# Feature Suggestion: one way anonymity

Sometimes there's something I want to write, where I would be perfectly happy for whoever happens to read it on Less Wrong and is interested in who the author is to check and see it's me, but I don't want the post to appear in search results for my name.

I also don't want anyone who opens my profile on Less Wrong to see the post.

There could be various reasons for this - perhaps I'm about to claim that tabs are better than spaces and I don't want potential employers to see such heresy if they search for me. Perhaps I'm asking for suggestions for my wife's birthday present and don't want her to find out what it is.

My suggestion is to allow posting semi-anonymously. The name that would appear on such posts is "anonymous" but the name would be a link to the author's user profile. The post wouldn't appear on the users profile, but any votes would change the users karma as usual.

Perhaps it should only be possible for a user with sufficient karma to click on the link to the user profile, so that some bad actor can't scrape all semi-anonymous posts and publish the author's names in a searchable format, or at least if they do it should be straightforward to detect and block that user.
# In the shadow of the Great War

The idea of progress fell out of favor in the course of the 20th century. But when exactly, and why?

In [a recent essay](https://rootsofprogress.org/a-new-philosophy-of-progress) I alluded to the pivotal role of the World Wars. Here’s a quote that adds weight to this—from [*Progress and Power*](https://www.amazon.com/Progress-Power-Carl-L-Becker/dp/0404200230?tag=jasocraw-20), by historian Carl Becker, published in 1936:

> For two centuries the Western world has been sustained by a profound belief in the doctrine of progress. Although God the Father had withdrawn into the places where Absolute Being dwells, it was still possible to maintain that the Idea or the Dialectic or Natural Law, functioning through the conscious purposes or the unconscious activities of men, could be counted on to safeguard mankind against future hazards. However formulated, with whatever apparatus of philosophic or scientific terminology defended, the doctrine was in essence an emotional conviction, a species of religion—a religion which, according to Professor \[J. B.\] Bury, served as a substitute for the declining faith in the Christian doctrine of salvation …
> 
> **Since 1918 this hope has perceptibly faded.** Standing within the deep shadow of the Great War, it is difficult to recover the nineteenth-century faith either in the fact or the doctrine of progress. The suggestion casually thrown out some years ago by Santayana, that “civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters which overtake it from time to time,” seems less perverse now than when it was made. Current events lend credit to the prophets of disaster who predict the collapse of a civilization that seemed but yesterday a permanent conquest of human reason …
> 
> At the present moment the world seems indeed out of joint, and it is difficult to believe with any conviction that a power not ourselves—the Idea or the Dialectic or Natural Law—will ever set it right. The present moment, therefore, when the fact of progress is disputed and the doctrine discredited, seems to me a proper time to raise the question: What, if anything, may be said on behalf of the human race? **May we still, in whatever different fashion, believe in the progress of mankind?**

(Emphasis added.)

I find it fascinating to see that the downfall of the idea of progress began as early as this, after World War I. World War II perhaps simply reinforced an existing trend.

I also find fascinating Becker’s idea that humanity required some sort of safeguard, a “power not ourselves” to “set it right.”

There is no power outside of humanity. We are the masters of our fate, for better or for worse. If there is to be [a 21st-century philosophy of progress](https://rootsofprogress.org/a-new-philosophy-of-progress), it needs to be based not on an Idea or a Dialectic, but on human agency.
# [$10k bounty] Read and compile Robin Hanson’s best posts

Edit: this is now [online here](https://overcoming-bias-anthology.com).

I think Robin Hanson's ideas are not read nearly as widely as they should be, in part because it's difficult to navigate [his many, many blog posts](https://www.overcomingbias.com/archives) (I estimate he's written ~~2000 of them~~ [exactly 3302 of them](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QaDwBio8MLqRvTREH/usd10k-bounty-read-and-compile-robin-hanson-s-best-posts?commentId=p2rCB9KtraEYYac7g)). So I'd like to pay someone to read through all his writings and compile the best ones into a more accessible format. The default output would be an ebook like [Rationality: from AI to Zombies](https://intelligence.org/rationality-ai-zombies/), containing several thematically-linked sequences of posts; possible extensions of this include adding summaries or publishing physical copies (although let me know if you have any other suggestions).

I expect this to take 1-2 months of work, and plan to pay around $10k USD (more details to be determined as we get a better idea of the scope of the project). My gmail address is richardcngo; email me with the subject line "Hanson compilation", plus any relevant information about yourself, if you might be interested in doing this.
# NATO: Cognitive Warfare Project

NATO seems to have a project on cognitive warfare and a few public reports online:

> ### [Interim Report](https://www.innovationhub-act.org/sites/default/files/2021-07/210601%20Cognition%20Workshop%20Report-%20v3.pdf)
> 
> Based on the Understanding Phase findings, NATO has identified the following priorities:  
> - Develop a Critical Thinking online course  
> - Develop improvements to the decision making processes
> 
> - Leverage technologies, including VR and AI to develop tools in support of better cognition and better decision making
> 
> ### [1 Jun 21 Cognition Workshop Report](https://www.innovationhub-act.org/sites/default/files/2021-07/210601%20Cognition%20Workshop%20Report-%20v3.pdf)
> 
> Cognition includes three interrelated aspects that are reflected in the structure of the workshop: information, decision-making and neuroscience.
> 
> [Cognitive Warfare](https://www.innovationhub-act.org/sites/default/files/2021-01/20210122_CW%20Final.pdf)
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> As global conflicts take on increasingly asymmetric and "grey" forms, the ability to manipulate the human mind employing neurocognitive science techniques and tools is constantly and quickly increasing. This complements the more traditional techniques of manipulation through information technology and information warfare, making the human increasingly targeted in the cognitive warfare.
# Feature idea: Notification when a parent comment is modified

Not sure how many people would consider this feature useful: Imagine that you reply on someone else's comment, and the person *edits their comment later*. I think it might be useful (perhaps depending on circumstances) to get a notification.

Notification "XY edited a comment you replied to" should appear at the same place as when you get a reply. In perfect case, the tooltip would highlight the *difference* between the original and the updated comment.

Use cases that I imagine:

*   Person A makes a comment. Person B makes a reply disagreeing with the original comment. Upon reading this, person A changes their mind and updates the original comment like this: "\[EDIT: Actually, B makes a good argument against\]". This feature would show this information in person B's inbox, without A having to write a separate reply to their comment.
*   Person A makes a comment. Person B makes a disagreeing reply. Person A silently updates their original comment to make B's response seem silly.

This feature would apply only to comments that *reply to comments*, i.e. not to the top-level comments, because I assume that minor modifications of articles are sometimes too frequent (and would flood the inboxes of top-level commenters), and because more people would notice a substantial stealthy article edit.

An argument *against* this feature is that some people can make frequent insubstantial edits to their comments (e.g. fix typos), which also could flood the inboxes of the repliers. Then this feature would be annoying. Possible solutions:

*   Multiple unread notifications for the same comment are merged into one.
*   Some heuristic (e.g. only punctuation or isolated words are modified) to detect insubstantial edits.
*   Or an opposite solution (covering only the first use case), where a heuristic would identify *substantial* edits (e.g. where the added text contains a word like "edit", "update", "change", "modify", "remove", "delete").

Your opinions?
# AMA on Truthful AI: Owen Cotton-Barratt, Owain Evans & co-authors

We just published a long [paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.06674) on Truthful AI ([overview post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aBixCPqSnTsPsTJBQ/truthful-ai-developing-and-governing-ai-that-does-not-lie)). We’ll be running an Ask Me Anything on truthful AI from Tuesday (October 26) to Wednesday (October 27) at this post.  
  
You may wish to ask about:

1.  Anything discussed in the Truthful AI paper (e.g. concepts, costs/benefits, governance, development, connections to beneficial AI).
2.  Truthfulness for current language models (e.g. [TruthfulQA](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PF58wEdztZFX2dSue/how-truthful-is-gpt-3-a-benchmark-for-language-models) — which [Owain](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/owain_evans) co-authored)
3.  Promising research directions on truthful AI
4.  Anything else (unrelated to truthful AI) — although we are more likely to answer questions about truthful AI.

If you want to ask something just post a top-level comment. Also feel free to make comments that are not questions (e.g. objections or suggestions).
# What health-related tips do you have for buying meat?

Currently I buy meat at the grocery store (Sprouts), but I'm considering spending more money via something like [Crowd Cow](https://www.crowdcow.com/) on meat that was raised responsibly and stuff. The main reason is because I suspect the health benefits are worth it. I've been thinking that I should invest more money in my health in general.

I don't actually know that the health benefits are worth it though.
- Googling around hasn't been very fruitful.
- ~~I [recall](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HjFkEcw26GGHrjMXu/open-and-welcome-thread-october-2021?commentId=uEWqNeyyd8DKLxJiv) a blog post emphasizing that it is important to spend the money on it.~~ From [this blog post](https://hackernoon.com/im-32-and-spent-200k-on-biohacking-became-calmer-thinner-extroverted-healthier-happier-2a2e846ae113): "Do not eat cheap industrially-farmed animal products." and "Eat organic when possible, especially when discussing animal products. Generally spend more money on food — the cheaper the food, the more “hacks” the producer used to be able to deliver that price. Many of these hacks are harmful — they inject saline solution to increase weight, feed dead animals to live animals, use antibiotics a lot etc."
- Reading through how they treat farm animals on [[ACC] Is Eating Meat A Net Harm?](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-net-harm/), and then [watching](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kklc9eezPSA) how things are done by the farmers Crowd Cow selects, it seems like a big difference.
- In general I feel like it makes sense to assume that the food industry is cutting tons of corners and doing a bunch of subtle little things that are going to eventually harm you. Because there is a huge precedent for this.
- On top of that, in reading [Decoding Your Meat: A Guide to USDA Beef Labels](https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-read-usda-beef-steak-labels) and [
Know Your Chicken: What USDA Poultry Labels Actually Mean
](https://www.seriouseats.com/what-is-organic-free-range-chicken-usda-poultry-chicken-labels-definition) from Serious Eats and watching that Adam Ragusea video on Crowd Cow linked above, I get the sense that USDA labels aren't very helpful and ultimately it boils down to trusting the farmer. Here's a quote from the first article: "There is no substitute for talking with the producer. Failing that, buy from retailers who have done the investigative work for you."
- The difference I'd spend might be something like $100-200/month, which isn't really that much money (people spend more on things like coffee, alcohol, and eating out). Although it _feels_ like it is to me! It also isn't that big a bar to overcome in terms of the health benefits outweighing the costs, I'd think.

Are there [third alternatives](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative) I should consider? Local butchers? Whole Foods?

Edit: I found a lit review [Effects of organic food consumption on human health; the jury is still out!](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5345585/).
# T-Mobile: Spurious Account Takeover Warning

This morning, reading in bed, I got a very worrying notification:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/tmobile-pin-changed.png)](https://www.jefftk.com/tmobile-pin-changed-big.png)

This is the notification you would receive if someone was in the process of taking control of your phone number, which could then give them access to other accounts where you had used that phone number as a backup or for two-factor authentication. So I was very concerned!

In case this was a different sort of scam, however, I wasn't about to call the phone number (which could be anyone) but I visited the website and talked to someone over chat. They confirmed that my pin had been changed, but also said that since I have a prepaid account they couldn't tell me more than that. They told me to call T-Mobile customer support at 611.

When I called 611, they looked into it, and said that this was an automatic message sent as part of migrating my account to a new billing system. They confirmed no one had reset my pin other than their automated system.

I'm disappointed in T-Mobile for either not realizing their migration would trigger this message, or deciding to go ahead with it despite the user impact.
# Deleted comments archive?

This is a question for the Less Wrong moderation team.

Suppose that I post a comment on a post, and the author of that post deletes that comment. Now, that comment isn’t *lost*, per se (as its contents are sent to me via private message), but it’s no longer publicly accessible. This is likely to be unfortunate, from my perspective, as I sometimes write comments with the intention of having something I can then link to (and often the comment-thread context is relevant to the comment’s meaning).

Would it be permissible to make a post (of the “personal” type) where I re-post any of my comments that are deleted in this fashion? (I am assuming here that the reason for the comment’s deletion wasn’t anything like “having this comment on the site is illegal”, “this comment reveals privileged information”, etc. Likewise, I am assuming that any such comment does not violate any general site rules—despite that it may violate the commenting/moderation guidelines specified by a given post author—and so its presence on the site is not inherently problematic.)
# The Roots of Progress events in Austin, November 4–6

I’ll be in Austin, TX in November for a few events:

**Talk on nuclear power**
-------------------------

“The Energy of Tomorrow: The Promise, Failure, and Possible Rebirth of Nuclear Power”:

> In the 1950s, nuclear power was seen as the energy of the future. Today, it is stagnating on the sidelines, providing only 10% of world electricity, with no fundamental advance in reactor design for several decades. Why did this technology seem so incredibly promising, how did it go so badly wrong, and is there hope for a nuclear renaissance? This talk will demystify nuclear power, explaining how it works and why it deserves development instead of neglect.

When: Thursday, November 4, 7:00pm

Where: UT Austin, [Rowling Hall (RRH)](https://goo.gl/maps/UDkHCetUmhgVRXuDA) 4.408

**Community meetup**
--------------------

Co-hosted with [Austin LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/syf4gEbaNQ8btKCbb). I’ll talk for a few minutes about progress studies, followed by discussion. Light snacks provided; cash bar.

When: Saturday, November 6, 1:30pm (normal Austin LW meetup time)

Where: [The Front Page Pub](https://thefrontpage.pub/), [1023 Springdale Road](https://g.page/thefrontpageatx?share) (NOT the normal Austin LW meetup location)

RSVP: Please [let us know here](https://airtable.com/shr0mo6w5N1okCmO0) if you plan to make it; not required but it will help us plan.
# Child Walksheds

Roads are the biggest limitation on mobility for our older kids, now that we're using [walkie-talkies](https://www.jefftk.com/p/walkie-talkies). Anna (5y) can't cross the street on her own, because she is not quite reliable enough at checking for cars. For her, the neighborhood is a collection of islands:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/child-walkshed-blocks.png)](https://www.jefftk.com/child-walkshed-blocks-big.png)

With assistance she can move between them, but otherwise she's pretty limited.

Lily (7y) is better at crossing streets, and we let her cross specific low-traffic intersections. Here they are, in red:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/child-walkshed-kidder.png)](https://www.jefftk.com/child-walkshed-kidder-big.png)

You can see that this opens up the neighborhood dramatically. She can [walk to school](https://www.jefftk.com/p/walking-to-school) (reduces conflict when Anna is slow to get ready) and visit friends (~8 of them).

On the other hand, there are still many nearby places they really want to go and can't, because the streets involved are too dangerous. I think the next stage will be learning how to cross at the crosswalk marked below, which opens up the [community path](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerville_Community_Path), [park](https://somervillehub.org/park_playground/lexington-park), and more friends:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/child-walkshed-kidder-morrison.png)](https://www.jefftk.com/child-walkshed-kidder-morrison-big.png)

Right now we deal with this by just being pretty willing to help them cross that street. It's also possible that some of this will get better with the speed humps they are planning to install in our neighborhood soon.

*Comment via: [facebook](https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/10100232765443022)*