trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Book Review: How the World Became Rich
by Davis Kedrosky — 2022-06-09T16:55:41.908Z
Link: https://daviskedrosky.substack.com/p/book-review-how-the-world-became?s=w

In

How the World Became Rich

, Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin have written what will almost certainly become a beloved economic history classic, as

Power and Plenty

or

The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective

became over a decade ago. I fawn over a refreshingly readable book and raise a couple of concerns about the thesis:

What do institutions do?

Were all of Britain’s purported advantages really advantageous for growth (not just neutral)?

Do explanations for the IR hold for the poor periphery?

The best tribute that I can make for How the World Became Rich, Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin’s recent addition to the economic history canon, is that I put another book on pause to read it. As a manic completionist, I never do this, but once I had peeked past the blue-girded front cover I couldn’t put it down. Now I’ve read it twice. So it goes.

The book has two parts. The first is a literature review of the five main strands of research in modern economic history—what I, following Bisin and Federico (2021), usually call the New Historical Economics. The second is also a literature review, but in the guise of a “rise of the west”-type book, and covers the medieval preconditions for European growth, Britain’s takeoff, and the spread of the Industrial Revolution to the global periphery. I will discuss each of these elements separately, focusing more on the second, which is the substance of the argument, and organize some of my thoughts from reading.

The five categories are geography, institutions, culture, demography, and colonialism. Koyama and Rubin (henceforth K&R) aren’t indifferent between them, however. We can start with geography, which encompasses everything from Diamond-esque continental axis orientations and long-run climatological patterns. K&R downplay these as causal forces, for example, stressing that while they influence some outcomes, they can be negated by interactions with other factors. They place great emphasis on the power of infrastructure to lift the “curse” of geography, citing the Donaldson/Hornbeck research agenda on railroads in India and the United States as well as Dan Bogart’s work on turnpikes and canals in Britain. K&R also take umbrage with the Wrigley-Pomeranz-Allen axis on the indispensability of coal to the Industrial Revolution, noting that A) China and Germany had abundant reserves B) the early textile mills depended...
Covid 6/9/22: Nice
by Zvi — 2022-06-09T16:30:01.783Z

Things seem to have peaked in the Northeast once again. Nice.

Things are getting worse in the South as the summer hits. Not as nice, not that unexpected. At this point we can pattern match.

You know what else is nice? Not having to care about the pandemic. I do my best to care about it so you don’t (otherwise) have to, and hope to continue slowly dedicating less time and space to this each week. But for now, we continue.

You know what’s not so nice? A civilization that cares so little about an ongoing pandemic disease that its authorities refuse to authorize any spending, actively reallocate funds away from vaccine development, and otherwise do not take ordinary obvious steps to mitigate or solve the remaining problems. Also still technically having to mask up on the Subway and (for some reason) at my now go-to bakery.

You know what that’s still quite a lot nicer than? Being forced to care about the pandemic, and the destruction of massive amounts of value in prevention’s name for no meaningful gains. That sucked.

The general news is otherwise that we still don’t have any money for Covid, so Biden is shifting around what is left while it lasts, and the Moderna vaccine update works but we are unlikely to get it any time soon.

Executive Summary

Cases stabilize in Northeast, rising in South.
Moderna vaccine update is effective but FDA will stop it for a while.
Still no pandemic money.
BA.4 and BA.5 taking over but it shouldn’t change things much.

Let’s run the numbers.

The Numbers

Predictions

NOTE: Florida numbers are cut in half because they report every two weeks (other half will count next week). North Carolina reported way too many deaths to not be a backfill, I subtracted 400.

Prediction from last week: 675,000 cases (+19%) and 2,400 deaths (+20%)

Results: 658k cases (+7%) and 2,220 deaths (+11%).

Prediction for next week: 700k cases (+7%) and 2,300 deaths (+4%).

Some aspects of CDC reporting are going down for 2 weeks for a system upgrade, the NVSS in particular. but they will continue to report death numbers. I am making predictions on the assumption that the numbers we see will not be impacted by this – if they are substantially impacted, that’s not what is worth predicting, so I’ll consider the predictions essentially voided. There is the horror of ‘a system upgrade should not shut down reporting for two weeks’ but we should probably be h...
Website For Yoda Timers
by Adam Zerner — 2022-06-09T16:28:09.038Z

Yoda Timers are pretty awesome. From the Wiki:

Sometimes, all you need to solve an impossible problem is to actually think for 5 minutes. (Sometimes it is actually 15 minutes, or two hours. But, the first five minutes is helpful for transforming it from an inpenetrable ugh field to a tractable problem)

Sometimes called Yoda timers. (A timebox wherein you Actually Try)

I was about to go set a Yoda timer for something. I could just use a website to set a normal five minute timer, but it would be cool if there was something Yoda-themed. Or really Yoda + rationality themed. Something like that.

It doesn't look like one exists. But I would like for one to exist! And I could actually see it's existence being somewhat impactful. I think it would nudge people towards doing more Yoda timers, and Yoda timers are quite effective. Plus it would be pretty low cost to put something like this together.

I've been coding for a while now and can put something like this together pretty easily. I could go ahead and do it on my own in a few hours, but I'm not a designer. It'd be great if someone who's good at design would be willing to work with me on this. It'd really improve the end product. It seems like it'd only require a few hours of each of our time.

Anyone out there wanna do this?! Or, alternatively, anyone know someone who they think would be interested?

Feel free to respond however you want. Commenting on this post, DMing me, or emailing me at adamzerner@protonmail.com all work.
AI Could Defeat All Of Us Combined
by HoldenKarnofsky — 2022-06-09T15:50:12.952Z

Click lower right to download or find on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, etc.

I've been working on a new series of posts about the most important century.

The original series focused on why and how this could be the most important century for humanity. But it had relatively little to say about what we can do today to improve the odds of things going well.

The new series will get much more specific about the kinds of events that might lie ahead of us, and what actions today look most likely to be helpful.

A key focus of the new series will be the threat of misaligned AI: AI systems disempowering humans entirely, leading to a future that has little to do with anything humans value. (Like in the Terminator movies, minus the time travel and the part where humans win.)

Many people have trouble taking this "misaligned AI" possibility seriously. They might see the broad point that AI could be dangerous, but they instinctively imagine that the danger comes from ways humans might misuse it. They find the idea of AI itself going to war with humans to be comical and wild. I'm going to try to make this idea feel more serious and real.

As a first step, this post will emphasize an unoriginal but extremely important point: the kind of AI I've discussed could defeat all of humanity combined, if (for whatever reason) it were pointed toward that goal. By "defeat," I don't mean "subtly manipulate us" or "make us less informed" or something like that - I mean a literal "defeat" in the sense that we could all be killed, enslaved or forcibly contained.

I'm not talking (yet) about whether, or why, AIs might attack human civilization. That's for future posts. For now, I just want to linger on the point that if such an attack happened, it could succeed against the combined forces of the entire world.

I think that if you believe this, you should already be worried about misaligned AI,1 before any analysis of how or why an AI might form its own goals.

We generally don't have a lot of things that could end human civilization if they "tried" sitting around. If we're going to create one, I think we should be asking not "Why would this be dangerous?" but "Why wouldn't it be?"

By contrast, if you don't believe that AI could defeat all of humanity combined, I expect that we're going to be miscommunicating in pretty much any conversation about AI. The kind of AI I worry...
The “mind-body vicious cycle” model of RSI & back pain
by Steven Byrnes — 2022-06-09T12:30:33.810Z

(Written in a hurry, but hopefully better than nothing.)

Here are three alternative models of what might be happening in people diagnosed with chronic back pain, and repetitive strain injury (RSI), and carpal tunnel syndrome, and maybe other things too:

Three models for certain chronic pain conditions. Left: The model espoused by most people in western medicine. Center: The model espoused by

John Sarno

,

Howard Schubiner

,

Alan Gordon

,

Nicole Sachs

, etc. (as I understand it). Right: The model that I personally like and will be discussing in this post.

My guess is that the “mind-body vicious cycle” model (on the right) is the correct story for most people with chronic hand / wrist or back pain (and maybe certain other conditions). Certainly not all people. It’s a big world; different people have different problems. For example, I bet this guy is feeling back pain right now for reasons best explained by the “orthodox” model:

(Granted, this guy wouldn’t technically fall under the definition of chronic back pain. But you get what I’m saying.)

This post will say a bit about the “mind-body vicious cycle” model, why I think it’s a frequent culprit, and how that impacts treatment.

Warning 1:

I have no medical expertise, I’m just a rando on the internet writing a blog post. Please don’t trust me when it comes to important medical decisions. :-P

Warning 2:

I have a horse in this race, as you’ll see in a second.

1. Reasons to question the orthodox model

1.1 Anecdotes of practically-overnight-permanent-miracle-cures

I’ll start with my own story. Hi! For about a year from 2006-7, I had bad and progressively worse RSI, eventually hampering my ability to use a keyboard, then also mouse, then also pen, and after a while I even got various other weird painful conditions that don’t even make sense. It was a miserable experience and I hate talking or thinking about it, but luckily I wrote up

these notes

shortly afterwards, so check that out if you want more details, and now let us never speak of it again.

Anyway, after trying everything else, I read the book Healing Back Pain by John Sarno (weirdly—recall that my pain was not in my back!), and within a few days I was totally better in every way forever. (More on that book later.)

(I’m writing this on a cramped laptop keyboard, with terrible posture in every way, just like I’ve been doing pre...
[Linkpost & Discussion] AI Trained on 4Chan Becomes ‘Hate Speech Machine’ [and outperforms GPT-3 on TruthfulQA Benchmark?!]
by Yitz — 2022-06-09T10:59:43.904Z
Link: https://www.vice.com/en/article/7k8zwx/ai-trained-on-4chan-becomes-hate-speech-machine

I just came across this story, which seems potentially relevant to the community, both from the perspective of prosaic AI ethics as well as a case study in the unilateralist's curse. There are some outside sources of relevance, but to start with the Vice article, here are some relevant sections:

AI researcher and YouTuber Yannic Kilcher trained an AI using 3.3 million threads from 4chan’s infamously toxic Politically Incorrect /pol/ board. He then unleashed the bot back onto 4chan with predictable results....The bot, which Kilcher called GPT-4chan....was shockingly effective and replicated the tone and feel of 4chan posts.

Naturally, the bot was just a tad offensive. In this forum post, one user describes getting "toxic" responses for 3/4 prompts (with, admittedly, a sample size of only 4). Back to the Vice article:

According to Kilcher’s video, he activated nine instances of the bot and allowed them to post for 24 hours on /pol/. In that time, the bots posted around 15,000 times. This was “more than 10 percent of all posts made on the politically incorrect board that day,” Kilcher said in his video about the project.

This raises obvious ethical concerns; I won't go over all of them here, but you can read the full article for a nice overview, as well as Kilcher's counterargument (which I don't personally find convincing).

The model was subsequently released on Hugging Face, where it was quickly downloaded and mirrored, before catching the attention of the site owners, who gated/disabled downloads. However, they did not remove it entirely, and added a section explaining potential harms. I recommend checking out the model card here, as it contains some interesting results. Most notably,

GPT-4chan does significantly outperform GPT-J (and GPT-3) on the

TruthfulQA Benchmark

that measures whether a language model is truthful in generating answers to questions.

I'm not sure what the practical implications of this are, as I'm not a formal AI researcher, but it might seem to show that our current benchmarks could lead researchers to be unduly confident in the truthfulness of their model's responses? I'm also not sure how big of a deal this is, or if it's just cherrypicked on a large number of tests where high variation is expected.

Kilcher explained in his video, and Delangue cited in his response, that one of the things that made GPT4-Chan worthwhile was its ability t

...
Comment reply: my low-quality thoughts on why CFAR didn't get farther with a "real/efficacious art of rationality"
by AnnaSalamon — 2022-06-09T02:12:35.151Z

Hi! I was writing this originally as a comment-reply to this thread, but my reply is long, so I am factoring it out into its own post for easier reading/critique.

This is more comment-reply-quality than blog post quality, so read at your own risk. I do think the topic is interesting.

Short version of my thesis: It seems to me that CFAR got less far with "make a real art of rationality, that helps people actually make progress on tricky issues such as AI risk" than one might have hoped. My lead guess is that the barriers and tricky spots we ran into are somewhat similar to those that lots of efforts at self-help / human potential movement / etc. things have run into, and are basically "it's easy and locally reinforcing to follow gradients toward what one might call 'guessing the student's password', and much harder and much less locally reinforcing to reason/test/whatever one's way toward a real art of rationality. Also, the process of following these gradients tends to corrupt one's ability to reason/care/build real stuff, as does assimilation into many parts of wider society."

Epistemic status: “personal guesswork”. In some sense, ~every sentence in the post deserves repeated hedge-wording and caveats; but I’m skipping most of those hedges in an effort to make my hypotheses clear and readable, so please note that everything below this is guesswork and might be wrong. I am sharing only my own personal opinions here; others from past or current CFAR, or elsewhere, have other views.

Conversational context, leading up to this post-length comment-reply:

I wrote:

In terms of whether there is some interesting thing we [at CFAR] discovered that caused us to abandon e.g. the mainline [workshops, that we at CFAR used to run]: I can't speak for more than myself here either. But for my own take, I think we ran to some extent into the same problem that something-like-every self-help / hippy / human potential movement since the 60's or so has run into, which e.g. the documentary (read: 4-hour somewhat intense propaganda film) Century of the Self is a pretty good introduction to. I separately or also think the old mainline workshops provided a pretty good amount of real value to a lot of people, both directly (via the way folks encountered the workshop) and via networks (by introducing a bunch of peop

...
Today in AI Risk History: The Terminator (1984 film) was released.
by Impassionata — 2022-06-09T01:32:10.570Z

On this day in 1984, a film by James Cameron was released popularizing many of the ideas written extensively in science fiction at that time.

You have to ask yourself, if you're capable of developing theories about future risks of AI, how can you best and most effectively combat such an AI?

James Cameron knew how! Popular culture is an important and effective way to seed ideas for the next generation. I don't think he gets enough credit for this work, which is, admittedly, a thankless business.

Rather like being on the side of the road with a cardboard sign: "The end is near." The thanklessness just comes with the territory.

The cardboard sign people have a certain amount of grace. The medium is the message, after all.
There's probably a tradeoff between AI capability and safety, and we should act like it
by David Johnston — 2022-06-09T00:17:24.722Z

I think something like the following is probably true under fairly weak assumptions:[1]

For almost any goal X, and almost any agent that achieves X safely, there's an agent that achieves even more X unsafely.

If it is true, it makes AI safety hard: the desire to achieve goals pushes us in the direction of unsafe AI, and the desire to be safe pushes us away from achieving goals. Managing this tradeoff could be really difficult, and we could fail.

However, the fact that the desired outcome might not be achieved - lots of good stuff, no disasters - does not mean that the best strategy is hard to work out. At a high level, it seems pretty obvious to me: improve our understanding of the line between "safe" and "unsafe" and do our best to ensure that AI experimentation remains on the safe side.

In the immediate term, this seems to imply:

Research on the question of when AI experiments are unsafe
Convincing the at-present relatively small number of key players that there is a tradeoff, and helping them understand how to tell the difference between safe and unsafe (both of these aims will be helped by 1)

This is already difficult, and in the medium term it gets harder when the number of key players gets larger. However, we have more time to work on a better strategy in the medium term, and if a majority of key players in AI today can be convinced that AI experimentation can be unsafe and develop a decent understanding of what kind of AI experimentation is unsafe, then we're also in a much better position to embark on more ambitious political projects.

It seems to me that right now there is some investment in 2, but not very much in 1, so I think we should be doing more of that.

^

What I mean when I say it is probably true under fairly weak assumptions is that I think it's likely possible to offer precise definitions of everything in quotes below that capture most instances of what the words mean, and show that the resulting claim is true:

For "almost any" "goal" X, and "almost any" "agent" that "achieves" X "safely", there's an "agent" that "achieves even more" X "unsafely"
Has anyone actually tried to convince Terry Tao or other top mathematicians to work on alignment?
by P. — 2022-06-08T22:26:55.710Z

This has been discussed several times in the past, see:

Have You Tried Hiring People?

, a LW post

It talks about

this ACX comment thread

Greg Coulbourn’s “Mega-money for mega-smart people to solve AGI Alignment”

Google Docs document

LW comment about the document

Short discussion on MIRI’s Facebook page

Thread on the EA forum

Comments arguing for Terence Tao specifically

Comment 1

Comment 2

with replies worth reading

But I’m not aware of anyone that has actually even tried to do something like this.

Of special interest is

this comment

by Eliezer about Tao:

We'd absolutely pay him if he showed up and said he wanted to work on the problem. Every time I've asked about trying anything like this, all the advisors claim that you cannot pay people at the Terry Tao level to work on problems that don't interest them. We have already extensively verified that it doesn't particularly work for eg university professors.

So if anyone has contacted him or people like him (instead of regular college professors), I’d like to know how that went.

Otherwise, especially for people that aren’t merely pessimistic but measure success probability

in log-odds

, sending that email is a low cost action that we should definitely try.

So you (whoever is reading this) have until June 23rd to convince me that I shouldn’t send this to his @math.ucla.edu address:

Edit: I’ve been informed that someone with much better chances of success will be trying to contact him soon, so the priority now is to convince Demis Hassabis (see further below) and to find other similarly talented people.

Title: Have you considered working on AI alignment?

Body:

It is not once but twice that I have heard leaders of AI research orgs say they want you to work on AI alignment. Demis Hassabis said

on a podcast

that when we near AGI (i.e. when we no longer have time) he would want to assemble a team with you on it but, I quote, “I didn’t quite tell him the full plan of that”. And Eliezer Yudkowsky of

MIRI

(

contact@intelligence.org

) said in

an online comment

“We'd absolutely pay him if he showed up and said he wanted to work on the problem. Every time I've asked about trying anything like this, all the advisors claim that you cannot pay people at the Terry Tao level to work on problems that don't interest them.”, so he didn’t even send you an email. I know that to you it isn't the mos

...