trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
How's it going with the Universal Cultural Takeover? Part I
by David Hugh-Jones — 2021-09-23T19:07:17.492Z
Link: https://wyclif.substack.com/p/hows-it-going-with-the-universal

Warning: this is a long post, split over two parts. Part II is here.

David Reinstein points me at a 2016 exchange between Bryan Caplan and Scott Alexander over a fine point of nomenclature: is the culture that is taking over the world “Western” or “universal”? Here’s Scott Alexander’s key point:

I worry that Caplan is eliding the important summoner/demon distinction. This is an easy distinction to miss, since demons often kill their summoners and wear their skin. But in this case, he’s become hopelessly confused without it.

I am pretty sure there was, at one point, such a thing as Western civilization. I think it included things like dancing around maypoles and copying Latin manuscripts. At some point Thor might have been involved. That civilization is dead. It summoned an alien entity from beyond the void which devoured its summoner and is proceeding to eat the rest of the world.

I love Scott Alexander’s writing. His post is thought-provoking, sharp and completely wrong-headed. In fact, I’ll put both articles forward as 21st-century versions of The End of History or Norman Angell’s Great Illusion: confident predictions which turned out wildly mistaken.

Lakshargah

On the Today Programme, the general defending Lakshargah is calm. “The Taliban are unable to take this city given the number of casualties that they have sustained…. Last week, the Taliban casualty rate in Helmand was 70, our casualty rate was 1”. He calls the presenter “Martha” in clipped Transatlantic. I get an uncomfortable feeling: there are two ways to look at that statistic. Are the Taliban losing? Or are they just more willing to take casualties?

Next up is a former interpreter for the Brits with a different perspective. Thick Afghan accent. “The city is almost 95% fallen into the Taliban hands… There is dead bodies in every street…. I’ve changed places three times…. My own house which I left yesterday, it has been captured by Taliban, and they are living there, and they were asking for me.”

“Is Coke Western culture?”

Or is it universal culture, as Alexander says? But we can skip this question, because Coke isn’t culture. As a concept, “culture” is notoriously slippery and expansive. Biologists have the best definition: behaviours that are not built-in, but learned from conspecifics. That’s big and broad, but it still has cutting power. So, Coke isn’t culture: it’s a brown fizzy drink in cans. “Likin...
What is Compute? - Transformative AI and Compute [1/4]
by lennart — 2021-09-23T16:25:30.102Z

Cross-posted here on the EA Forum.

Transformative AI and Compute - A holistic approach - Part 1 out of 4

This is part one of the series Transformative AI and Compute - A holistic approach. You can find the sequence here and the summary here.

This work was conducted as part of Stanford’s Existential Risks Initiative (SERI) at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University. Mentored by Ashwin Acharya (Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET)) and Michael Andregg (Fathom Radiant).

This post attempts to:

Introduce a simplified model of computing which serves as a foundational concept (Section 1).

Discuss the role of compute for AI systems (Section 2).

In Section 2.3 you can find the updated compute plot you have been coming for.

Explore the connection of compute trends and more capable AI systems over time (Section 3).

Epistemic Status

This article is Exploratory to My Best Guess. I've spent roughly 300 hours researching this piece and writing it up. I am not claiming completeness for any enumerations. Most lists are the result of things I learned on the way and then tried to categorize.

I have a background in Electrical Engineering with an emphasis on Computer Engineering and have done research in the field of ML optimizations for resource-constrained devices — working on the intersection of ML deployments and hardware optimization. I am more confident in my view on hardware engineering than in the macro interpretation of those trends for AI progress and timelines.

This piece was a research trial to test my prioritization, interest and fit for this topic. Instead of focusing on a single narrow question, this paper and research trial turned out to be more broad — therefore a holistic approach. In the future, I’m planning to work more focused on a narrow relevant research questions within this domain. Please reach out.

Views and mistakes are solely my own.

1. Compute

Highlights

Computation is the manipulation of information.

There are various types of computation. This piece is concerned with today’s predominant type: digital computers.

With compute, we usually refer to a quantity of operations used — computed by our computer/processor. It is also used to refer to computational power, a rate of compute operations per time period.

Computation can be divided into memory, interconnect, and logic. Each of these components is rele

...
Covid 9/23: There Is a War
by Zvi — 2021-09-23T13:30:01.557Z

The FDA, having observed and accepted conclusive evidence that booster shots are highly effective, has rejected allowing people to get those booster shots unless they are over the age of 65, are immunocompromised or high risk, or are willing to lie on a form. The CDC will probably concur.

I think we all know what this means. It means war!

Don’t get me wrong. The FDA has been hard at work for decades ensuring people die or twist their lives into knots from a lack of access to medicine. Refusing to acknowledge that there is a war doesn’t change the fact that there is a war.

What changed this week was that the FDA gave us an unusually clear proof that there is a war, which side of that war they are on, and how far they are willing to go.

The good news is that, because of the exceptions, anyone who wants a booster can still get a booster, so on reflection this is a win-win. We know exactly what is going on, and it didn’t cost us all that much.

The CDC is now meeting to consider who should have the ability to get booster shots, not withstanding the FDA already having made that same decision. And they are being explicit that the point of vaccination, according to the CDC, they are now claiming, is to prevent hospitalization and death and NOT to prevent infection.

Let me say that again. The CDC explicitly claims that it does not think it is an important goal of a medical intervention to prevent Covid-19 infections that don’t result in hospitalization. Or, by implication, to prevent you from spreading the disease to others.

Tell that to all the people who see a mild infection somewhere vaguely around them, and quarantine for two weeks or shut down their office, and freak out. Tell that to all the people at the CDC mandating such behaviors. Tell that to all the people saying vaccinations are a social responsibility, or requiring it to engage in ordinary life activities. Tell that to everyone, at the CDC and elsewhere, warning us about ‘Long Covid,’ or suffers from it. Tell that to everyone who simply gets Covid-19 and has a really bad time for a week. Tell that to everyone around you deciding whether they can live their lives.

There. Is. A. War.

(As a weird aside, did you know their name is short for “Center For Disease Control”?)

Executive Summary

There is a war to preserve or destroy our way of life.
The FDA and CDC are on one side.
They have made it even m

...
"Rational Agents Win"
by Isaac King — 2021-09-23T07:59:09.072Z

Rachel and Irene are walking home while discussing Newcomb's problem. Irene explains her position:

"Rational agents win. If I take both boxes, I end up with $1000. If I take one box, I end up with $1,000,000. It shouldn't matter why I'm making the decision; there's an obvious right answer here. If you walk away with less money yet claim you made the 'rational' decision, you don't seem to have a very good understanding of what it means to be rational".

Before Rachel can respond, Omega appears from around the corner. It sets two boxes on the ground. One is opaque, and the other is transparent. The transparent one clearly has $1000 inside. Omega says "I've been listening to your conversation and decided to put you to the test. These boxes each have fingerprint scanners that will only open for Irene. In 5 minutes, both boxes will incinerate their contents. The opaque box has $1,000,000 in it iff I predicted that Irene would not open the transparent box. Also, this is my last test of this sort, and I was programmed to self-destruct after I'm done." Omega proceeds to explode into tiny shards of metal.

Being in the sort of world where this kind of thing happens from time to time, Irene and Rachel don't think much of it. Omega has always been right in the past. (Although this is the first time it's self-destructed afterwards.) Irene promptly walks up to the opaque box and opens it, revealing $1,000,000, which she puts into her bag. She begins to walk away, when Rachel says:

"Hold on just a minute now. There's $1000 in that other box, which you can open. Omega can't take the $1,000,000 away from you now that you have it. You're just going to leave that $1000 there to burn?"

"Yup. I pre-committed to one-box on Newcomb's problem, since it results in me getting $1,000,000. The only alternative would have resulted in that box being empty, and me walking away with only $1000. I made the rational decision."

"You're perfectly capable of opening that second box. There's nothing physically preventing you from doing so. If I held a gun to your head and threatened to shoot you if you didn't open it, I think you might do it. If that's not enough, I could threaten to torture all of humanity for ten thousand years. I'm pretty sure at that point, you'd open it. So you aren't 'pre-committed' to anything. You're simply choosing not to open the box, and claiming that walking away $1000 poor...
Neural net / decision tree hybrids: a potential path toward bridging the interpretability gap
by Nathan Helm-Burger — 2021-09-23T00:38:40.912Z

Neural net / decision tree hybrids: a potential path toward bridging the interpretability gap

[Meta: I feel pretty confident that these are valuable ideas to explore, but low confidence that the best implementation details would be exactly what's in these linked papers.]

[Background on me: I'm a machine learning engineer with a background in neuroscience. I'm much better at building my ideas than I am at explaining my ideas. I've been a fan of Less Wrong and Eliezer's work for a long time and more recently also of Paul Christiano's. I enjoy reading Rohin Shah and Cody Wild's paper summaries, which is how I came across many of these concepts.]

Introduction

Eliezer Yudkowsky: ...I'd be hopeful about this line of work primarily because I think it points to a bigger problem with the inscrutable matrices of floating-point numbers, namely, we have no idea what the hell GPT-3 is thinking and cannot tell it to think anything else...

Evan Hubinger: +1 I continue to think that language model transparency research is the single most valuable current research direction within the class of standard ML research, for similar reasons to what Eliezer said above.
source

As an ML engineer, I have interest and ability to work on currently-testable hypotheses for AI safety. It is my hope to find an angle to approach this from which can be tackled on current models but which makes progress towards the goal of reducing existential risk from AGI.

To give you some idea of the motivation behind the ideas in this proposal, let’s explore a rough thought experiment about progress in AI over the next few years. I expect that, given that the lottery ticket hypothesis ( https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/dpzLqQQSs7XRacEfK/understanding-the-lottery-ticket-hypothesis ) is correct, it could be valuable to train models starting with something like 1e16 or more parameters, if there is sufficient economic backing. Using some yet-to-be-developed analysis technique, then very early in training detect the best found architecture within that possibility space and delete the unnecessary neurons. This would bring us down to perhaps something roughly in range of the estimated 3e14 parameters from Ajeya's report ( https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KrJfoZzpSDpnrv9va/draft-report-on-ai-timelines ). This idea is basically about doing a broad search of an enormous possibility space of possible architect...
[Book Review] Altered Traits
by lsusr — 2021-09-23T00:33:23.391Z

Proponents of meditation claim it causes long-term beneficial changes to a person's mind. Does it? Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body by science journalist Daniel Goleman and neuroscientist Richard (Richie) Davidson attempts to answer this question using the newest research.

The book has three main themes.

It starts by establishing what constitutes rigorous research.

The bulk of the book is dedicated to asking "Does meditation make you a better person?" where "better" can mean "healthier", "more capable" or "more altruistic". This section is focused on ordinary practitioners.

The book ends with a yogi in a brain scanner.

Obstacles to Research

The United States government suppresses research into mind-altering drugs under penalty of imprisonment. Research into mind-altering contemplative practices got caught in the crossfire. For this and other reasons[1], there has been little research into meditation in the Western world until very recently. Much of what we do have is shoddy.

Meditation is hard to study scientifically for all the reasons it's hard to study sleep plus all the reasons it's hard to study weightlifting.

Sleep is hard to study because it happens invisibly inside a person's head and if you ask them what's going on they wake up and the altered state of consciousness disappears.

Weightlifting is hard to study because weightlifting involves hard work applied over a long time with proper technique. Optimal training for a beginner is different from optimal training for an athlete. Optimal training for an athlete depends on the sport an athlete is training for. Even if you could handwave away liability concerns, it's hard to pay volunteers to participate in a 20-year-long weightlifting program. Weightlifting is impossible to double-blind. (I'm going to ignore how many weightlifters take drugs while pretending not to.)

Due to the dearth of research, it is plausible Western science has left low-hanging fruit unpicked. If LSD can cure PTSD and MDMA can help autistic people socialize then it's conceivable meditation might cultivate altered traits too.

The Frontiers of Science

The first several chapters of Altered Traits explain the challenges associated with studying meditation scientifically and how scientists can deal with them. They discuss discriminant validity and active control groups ad nauseum. These...
How dangerous is Long COVID for kids?
by Viliam — 2021-09-22T22:29:16.831Z

All adults in my family are already vaccinated. But I also have two kids, age 6 and 3, who are not. The older one needs to wait a few months until the child vaccine is approved. The younger one will probably have to wait more than a year, because as far as I know the child COVID vaccines are only planned for kids 5 years or older.

How much should I be afraid until my kids get vaccinated? How much precaution is reasonable?

Most online debates about "kids and COVID" focus on the fact that the kids have a very small chance to die from COVID. There are numbers and pictures showing that an unvaccinated X years old child actually has a smaller chance of dying than a vaccinated Y years old adult. Okay, I got the memo.

But the number of people who end up in hospital and don't die is much larger than the number of people who die, right? My friends had their child for one month in a hospital, for COVID-related reasons, and although the child seems perfectly healthy now, I'd prefer to avoid this kind of experience, too. How high is the probability of "kid ends up in hospital (but survives)"? I don't have good data here: some people keep sending me articles about crowded child hospitals, other people insist that those were children with preexisting medical problems so this doesn't apply to my kids who seem average health-wise.

Plus there is the question of Long COVID. Kids on average have more years of life ahead of them, so even if the chance of a problem is smaller, if it is a permanent damage, you need to multiply it by a greater number to get the total harm. Here the data is even noisier, I guess. First, given that we only know COVID for two years (and it keeps mutating), it is hard to estimate whether the damage is actually permanent, or how long it takes. Second, the symptoms of Long COVID are various, and they happen with other diseases too, so I guess in all studies you also have people with symptoms of "Long COVID" who actually never had COVID. So, what is the actual risk distribution here, for kids?

I assume that when kids sit all day long in a classroom, it doesn't make much difference whether they wear masks on not; ultimately they are breathing the same air for hours in a badly ventilated room. Plus they remove the masks in the canteen, or when eating snack. What are the expected consequences of exposing my children to this situation, as opposed to keeping them ...
[Summary] "Introduction to Electrodynamics" by David Griffiths - Part 1
by lsusr — 2021-09-22T22:22:48.893Z

Epistemic Status: The mathematical formulation of electromagnetism is the most solidly established theory in all of science. If this book is wrong then science is broken to the core, space is flat, Colombus' landing in the New World was faked, birds aren't real and the Illuminati controls the lizard people.

There are three fundamental forces. The color force holds atomic nuclei together. (The strong nuclear force is a special case of the color force.) Gravity holds planets and larger structures together. The electroweak force does everything in-between.

The electroweak force unifies the weak nuclear force with the electromagnetic force. The weak nuclear force doesn't matter.

When I ask physics majors "What is your favorite textbook?" the answer is usually Introduction to Electrodynamics by David Griffiths. Electrodynamics (in the framework of quantum mechanics[1]) explains basically everything on Earth except meteors and nuclear decay. Electrodynamics is important, satisfying and elegant. It is the basis of almost everything of consequence to human beings.

Griffiths' book is equivalent to at least two months of full-time intermediate-level undergraduate physics at a university.

Vector Calculus

Like every great physics book, Introduction to Electrodynamics frontloads its math. The math is all vector calculus. If you know vectors and you know calculus then the math should be within your grasp. If you can read and understand the following definition of →∇ then you're probably fine.

→∇≡^x∂∂x+^y∂∂y+^z∂∂z

The most domain-specific math is the use of divergence and curl.

Divergence

Imagine a vector field as a bunch of arrows. Define a finite region. Divergence is the number of arrows going out of the region minus the arrows going into it.

divergence=→∇⋅→v

Curl

Curl is the counterpart of divergence. Imagine again a vector field as a bunch of arrows. Nonzero curl means the arrows go in a circle.

curl=→∇×→v

Electostatics

Coulomb's Law

Electrostatics is governed by Coulomb's Law. The force between two charges q,Q is proportional to the inverse square distance r between them. Opposite charges attract. Identical charges repel.

→F=14πϵ0qQr2^r

The constant ϵ0 is called (ludicrously) the permittivity of free space.

If you think "permittivity of free space" is a silly name then you can call it "vacuum permittivity" or the "electric constant" instead.

ϵ0=8.85×10−12C2N⋅m2

Electric Fi

...
Robin Hanson's Grabby Aliens model explained - part 1
by Writer — 2021-09-22T18:51:29.594Z
Link: https://youtu.be/l3whaviTqqg

This article is the script of the video linked above. It differs slightly from the video due to some phrasing changes in the narration [now it's exactly the narration]. Here, I aim to explain the rationale for Robin Hanson's Grabby Aliens model. In short, humanity's appearance date looks implausibly early. This puzzle is explained by positing that civilizations that Hanson calls "grabby" will set a deadline for other civilizations to appear, embodying a selection effect. This topic might be important for EAs and rationalists because it's a plausible theory of how an essential aspect of the far future will unfold. The next video/article will have more specific numbers to work with.
EA Forum cross-post.

Introduction

Welcome. Today’s topic is... aliens. In particular, we’ll talk about a recent model of how intelligent life expands and distributes in the universe. Its variables can be estimated from observation, and it makes many predictions. For example, it predicts when we should expect to meet another civilization, has things to say about our chances of hearing alien messages, and of becoming an interplanetary civilization ourselves. It also answers why we don’t see aliens yet, considering the universe’s large number of stars and galaxies.

The model we’ll discuss is one of the most interesting of its kind, but it's very recent and still not widely known. Its main author is Robin Hanson. You may know him as the person who first introduced the idea of the Great Filter in 1996. He published a paper with three coauthors detailing his new model in March 2021. [Here's the paper, here's the website, with lots of links].

The model’s basic assumption is that some civilizations in the universe at some point become “grabby”. This means that 1. They expand from their origin planet at a fraction of the speed of light, 2. They make significant and visible changes wherever they go. And 3. They last a long time.

The hard-steps model, planets habitability, and human earliness

But why do we have reason to think that such civilizations should exist? The starting point of the model, the thing that makes it necessary in the first place, is a question: “Why are humans so early?”

To understand where this question comes from, we need to step back and ask another question.

What is the probability that simple dead matter becomes a civilization like ours? Robin Hanson uses a simple ...
Weird models of country development?
by Connor_Flexman — 2021-09-22T17:39:57.596Z

A Scott Alexander post argued that plausibly "land reform" was a vital first step to developing most countries in Asia. I hadn't heard any clear theory like this before—all the development goals I hear about sound like "get them more education and democracy" or sometimes "invest in them so they can develop their economies". Does anyone have other novel models of how to develop countries, like the idea of land reform as prerequisite, that are far outside the mainstream?

(Given that >$40b are now committed to EA, it seems plausible to me that most of the current best charities and even cause areas will soon be fully funded. If so, the bottleneck becomes opening new cause areas. Pushing hard for novel and better developmental economic policies seems like one of the possibilities with highest impact/neglect/tractability combination, with plausible comparative advantage in tractability through non-ideological thinking and pulling the policy rope sideways.)