trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Fictional parasites very different from our own
by Abhishaike Mahajan — 2024-09-08T14:59:39.080Z
Link: https://www.owlposting.com/p/fictional-parasites-very-different

Note: this is a fictional story. Heavily inspired by SSC’s similar posts on

fictional legal systems

and

fictional banned drugs

.

Neuroplana temporalis

Neuroplana temporalis is a flatworm that resides in the cerebrospinal fluid of mammals with a diurnal rhythm. It has a particular affinity for the regions surrounding the

suprachiasmatic nucleus

— the brain's central pacemaker. From this location, N. temporalis secretes a cocktail of peptides that interact with the host's circadian rhythm regulation.

These peptides modulate the expression of clock genes —

Per1

,

Per2

, and

Per3

— effectively altering the host's internal perception of time.

Specifically, the primary symptom of N. temporalis infection is a gradual shift in circadian rhythm, overriding typical

zeitgebers

that modulate the host’s internal clock. Infected individuals typically experience extending their perceived day to 27-30 hours, creating a constant misalignment with the Earth's 24-hour cycle. This leads to chronic jet-lag-like symptoms, including sleep disturbances, metabolic irregularities, and cognitive impairments.

Through this disruption of its host’s circadian rhythm, the parasite creates a chronic state of immune fatigue. Infected individuals become increasingly susceptible to opportunistic infections, especially those caused by normally benign microorganisms present in the environment. Common ailments such as upper respiratory infections, skin conditions, and gastrointestinal disturbances become more frequent and severe.

N. temporalis feeds on

cerebrospinal fluid microbes

, which thrive due to host immune suppression. Its lifecycle alternates between active feeding periods, where it disrupts the host's circadian rhythm, and dormant phases when the host normalizes. As its food depletes, the parasite reactivates, again releasing peptides to alter the host's rhythm and boost microbial growth, renewing its food source.

This cycle of feeding, dormancy, and reactivation continues indefinitely, creating a long-term pattern of alternating disrupted and normal circadian rhythms in the host. Due to its difficulty of diagnosis and impact on mental health, human hosts often display anxiety, anhedonia, and suicidal ideation.

Given the appearance of the parasite in infants as young as two months, N. temporalis is believed to originate as a parasite within the mother, which ends up infecting a developing embryo. H...
My Number 1 Epistemology Book Recommendation: Inventing Temperature
by adamShimi — 2024-09-08T14:30:40.456Z
Link: https://epistemologicalfascinations.substack.com/p/my-number-1-epistemology-book-recommendation

In

my last post

, I wrote that no resource out there exactly captured my model of epistemology, which is why I wanted to share a half-baked version of it.

But I do have one book which I always recommend to people who want to learn more about epistemology:

Inventing Temperature

by Hasok Chang.

To be very clear, my recommendation is not just to get the good ideas from this book (of which there are many) from a book review or summary — it’s to actually read the book, the old-school way, one word at a time.

Why? Because this book teaches you the right feel, the right vibe for thinking about epistemology. It punctures the bubble of sterile non-sense that so easily pass for “how science works” in most people’s education, such as the “scientific method”. And it does so by demonstrating how one actually makes progress in epistemology: by thinking, yes, but also by paying close attention to what actually happened.

It works first because the book is steeped in history, here the history of thermometry (the measurement of temperature). By default, beware anything that is only philosophy of science, without any basis in history — this is definitively ungrounded bullshit.

Not only is Chang leveraging history, he also has an advantage over most of the literature in History and Philosophy of Science: early thermometry is truly not that complex technically or mathematically. Except for the last historical chapter, where details of

the Carnot cycle

get in the way, most of the book describes straightforward questions that anyone can understand, and both experiments and mathematics are at a modern high-school level.

As such, I know that any educated person can read this book, and follow the history part.

Last but not least, thermometry provides a great opportunity to show what happens at the beginning, before all the frames and techniques and epistemic infrastructure is set up.

Another source of oversimplification in people’s models of epistemology (including my own before I started digging into the history) is that we moderns mostly learn well-framed and cleaned up science: when we learn Classical Mechanics, we don’t just learn it as Newton created it, but we benefit from progress in notations, mathematics, and even the whole structure of physics (with the emphasis on energy over forces).

This, I surmise, has the unfortunate consequence of making even practicing scientists feel like sci...
I want a good multi-LLM API-powered chatbot
by rotatingpaguro — 2024-09-08T09:40:52.736Z

Chatbots are pretty useful to me, but the pro plans are expensive. I don't want to spend 20$/month here and there. However, I couldn't find a free chatbot app with at least OpenAI and Anthropic API support with a similar level of functionality as the online gpt or claude chatbots. In particular I want to attach images and pdfs.

The best thing I found so far is chatbox, but attaching documents is supported only with... a 20$/plan, and it seems the docs are sent to their server.

Am I spoiled to expect a free open-source software for anything? Though that's often the case for much more complicated applications I regularly use.

Does anyone know of something better?
That Alien Message - The Animation
by Writer — 2024-09-07T14:53:30.604Z
Link: https://youtu.be/fVN_5xsMDdg

Our new video is an adaptation of That Alien Message, by @Eliezer Yudkowsky. This time, the text has been significantly adapted, so I include it below. The author of the adaptation is Arthur Frost. Eliezer has reviewed the adaptation.

Part 1

Picture a world just like ours, except the people are a fair bit smarter: in this world, Einstein isn’t one in a million, he’s one in a thousand. In fact, here he is now. He’s made all the same discoveries, but they’re not quite as unusual: there have been lots of other discoveries. Anyway, he’s out one night with a friend looking up at the stars when something odd happens. [visual: stars get brighter and dimmer, one per second. The two people on the hill look at each other, confused]

The stars are flickering. And it’s just not a hallucination. Everyone’s seeing it.

And so everyone immediately freaks out and panics! Ah, just kidding, the people of this world are smarter than ours; What they do is try to work together and figure out what’s going on.

It turns out that exactly one star seems to shift in brightness every 1.005 seconds. Except, the stars are light years away, so actually the shifts must have happened a long time ago, and somehow they’ve all been perfectly timed to reach Earth specifically every 1.005 seconds. If you look at the stars from a high-orbit satellite (which of course this planet has) then the flickering looks a little out of sync. So whatever this is, it’s directed at Earth.

Nobody can find a pattern in the position of the stars, but it’s one at a time getting either much dimmer or much brighter by the same amount and, well, that looks a bit like binary. So loads of people think ‘huh, maybe it’s a code!’. But a lot of other people wonder, ‘Who would be trying to send a message to Earth by shifting the brightness of stars across the galaxy? There must be an easier way to talk to us?’

But it seems like there must be some intelligence behind it, so the data gets gathered and put on the internet. Some people wonder if maybe it’s somehow dangerous, but, well, whoever is making the stars change brightness probably has easier ways to destroy humanity.

And so the great analysis begins. Half the planet’s physicists, mathematicians, cryptographers, precocious kids, crossword enthusiasts, whoever, they’re all trying to work out what this means, they’re trying to crack the code. And as they do, the st...
Jonothan Gorard:The territory is isomorphic to an equivalence class of its maps
by Daniel C — 2024-09-07T10:04:47.840Z
Link: https://x.com/getjonwithit/status/1814443968492351628

Jonothan Gorard is a mathematician for Wolfram Research and one of the cofounders of the wolfram physics project. I recently came across this twitter thread from him and found it particularly insightful:

Jonothan Gorard: The territory is isomorphic to an equivalence class of its maps.

As this is pretty much the only statement of my personal philosophical outlook on metaphysics/ontology that I've ever made on here, I should probably provide a little further clarification. It starts from a central idea from philosophy of science: theory-ladenness.

As argued by Hanson, Kuhn, etc., raw sense data is filtered through many layers of perception and analysis before it may be said to constitute "an observation". So making a truly "bare metal" observation of "reality" (uninfluenced by theoretical models) is impossible.

Hence, if we see nothing as it "truly is", then it only ever makes sense to discuss reality *relative* to a particular theoretical model (or set of models). Each such model captures certain essential features of reality, and abstracts away certain others.

There are typically many possible models consistent with a given collection of sense data. E.g. we may choose to decompose an image into objects vs. colors; to idealize a physical system in terms of particles vs. fields; to describe a given quale in English vs. Spanish.

Each model captures and abstracts a different set of features, so that no single one may be said to encompass a complete description of raw sense data. But now consider the set of all possible such models, capturing and abstracting all possible combinations of features.

If we accept the premise that observations are theory-laden, then my contention is that there cannot exist any more information present within "objective reality" than the information encoded in that collection of consistent models, plus the relationships between them.

This is analogous to the Yoneda lemma in category theory: any abstract category can be "modeled" by representing its objects as sets and its arrows as set-valued functions. Each such "model" is lossy, in that it may not capture the full richness of the category on its own.

Yet the collection of all such models, plus the relationships between them (i.e. the functor category) *does* encode all of the relevant information. I suspect that something quite similar is true in the case of onto

...
Pay Risk Evaluators in Cash, Not Equity
by Adam Scholl — 2024-09-07T02:37:59.659Z

Personally, I suspect the alignment problem is hard. But even if it turns out to be easy, survival may still require getting at least the absolute basics right; currently, I think we're mostly failing even at that.

Early discussion of AI risk often focused on debating the viability of various elaborate safety schemes humanity might someday devise—designing AI systems to be more like “tools” than “agents,” for example, or as purely question-answering oracles locked within some kryptonite-style box. These debates feel a bit quaint now, as AI companies race to release agentic models they barely understand directly onto the internet.

But a far more basic failure, from my perspective, is that at present nearly all AI company staff—including those tasked with deciding whether new models are safe to build and release—are paid substantially in equity, the value of which seems likely to decline if their employers stop building and releasing new models.

As a result, it is currently the case that roughly everyone within these companies charged with sounding the alarm risks personally losing huge sums of money if they do. This extreme conflict of interest could be avoided simply by compensating risk evaluators in cash instead.
Excerpts from "A Reader's Manifesto"
by Arjun Panickssery — 2024-09-06T22:37:40.254Z
Link: https://arjunpanickssery.substack.com/p/excerpts-from-a-readers-manifesto

“A Reader’s Manifesto”

is a July 2001 Atlantic piece by B.R. Myers that I've returned to many times. He complains about the inaccessible pretension of the highbrow literary fiction of his day. The article is mostly a long list of critiques of various quotes/passages from well-reviewed books by famous authors. It’s hard to accuse him of cherry-picking since he only targets passages that reviewers singled out as unusually good.

Some of his complaints are dumb but the general idea is useful: authors try to be “literary” by (1) avoiding a tightly-paced plot that could evoke “genre fiction” and (2) trying to shoot for individual standout sentences that reviewers can praise, using a shotgun approach where many of the sentences are banal or just don’t make sense.

Here are some excerpts of his complaints. Bolding is always mine.

The “Writerly” Style

He complains that critics now dismiss too much good literature as “genre” fiction.

More than half a century ago popular storytellers like Christopher Isherwood and Somerset Maugham were ranked among the finest novelists of their time, and were considered no less literary, in their own way, than Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Today any accessible, fast-moving story written in unaffected prose is deemed to be "genre fiction"—at best an excellent "read" or a "page turner," but never literature with a capital L. An author with a track record of blockbusters may find the publication of a new work treated like a pop-culture event, but most "genre" novels are lucky to get an inch in the back pages of The New York Times Book Review.

The dualism of literary versus genre has all but routed the old trinity of highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow, which was always invoked tongue-in-cheek anyway. Writers who would once have been called middlebrow are now assigned, depending solely on their degree of verbal affectation, to either the literary or the genre camp. David Guterson is thus granted Serious Writer status for having buried a murder mystery under sonorous tautologies (Snow Falling on Cedars, 1994), while Stephen King, whose Bag of Bones (1998) is a more intellectual but less pretentious novel, is still considered to be just a very talented genre storyteller.

Further, he complains that fiction is regarded as “literary” the more slow-paced, self-conscious, obscure, and “writerly” its style.

The "literary" writer need not be an intell

...
Fun With CellxGene
by sarahconstantin — 2024-09-06T22:00:03.461Z

Midjourney image

For this week’s post, I thought I’d mess around a bit with the CellXGene tool provided by the Chan Zuckerberg Institute.

It’s based on a big dataset of individual cells, classified by tissue, cell type, and disease state, and their gene expression profiles (single-cell RNA counts).

You can automatically compare how gene expression looks different between sick and healthy individuals, for a variety of diseases, and drill down into which cells/tissues are different and how.

It’s a fascinating toy and a great way to generate hypotheses.

Here, I’ll do it for Alzheimer’s, comparing 138,438 Alzheimer’s brain cells to 9,203,998 normal/healthy brain cells to see what the most “differentially expressed” genes are, and what that might tell us about how the disease works.

Top Hits

LINC01609

1.6x overexpressed in Alzheimer’s, d =4.203

This is a non-protein coding RNA. Typically most expressed in the testis. In CellxGene’s healthy brain cells, it’s expressed only in activated microglia and astrocytes; but in the Alzheimer’s brain, it’s expressed in roughly half of all types of cells.

Like many long non-coding RNAs, its function is unknown.

SLC26A3

10.6x overexpressed in Alzheimer’s, d = 3.310

This is a chloride anion exchanger, a membrane protein that transports chloride ions across the cell membrane. It’s most heavily expressed in the colon, where it controls the resorption of fluid from the intestines. Defects in this gene are associated with congenital diarrhea, as the body is unable to maintain the right osmotic concentration and loses water in the stool. But we’re interested in SLC26A3 in the brain, not in the intestine.

In the healthy brain, once again, it’s only expressed in activated astrocytes and microglia; in the Alzheimer’s brain it’s expressed in large numbers of all cell types.

CellxGene classifies it as one of the top “markers” for mature astrocytes and mature microglial cells, with a specificity of 1.00.

Other researchers have observed the upregulation of SLC26A3 in Alzheimer’s, e.g. as part of a pattern of “gliovascular” alteration around the clusters of astrocytes and endothelial cells that control the blood-brain barrier.1

A gliovascular unit is the place a blood vessel meets the brain. The vessel is surrounded by astrocytes and microglia, which control what goes in and out of the bloodstream, clearing excess glutamate and misfolded proteins...
Is this voting system strategy proof?
by Donald Hobson — 2024-09-06T20:44:46.691Z

My voting system works like this. Each voter expresses their preferences for all candidates on a real numbered utility scale.

Then a Maximal lottery takes place over all lotteries over candidates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximal_lotteries

Lets describe this in more detail. Suppose there are 3 candidates. A,B,C.

The set of candidates is S={A,B,C}

A probability distribution over candidates looks like (A:30%,B:20%,C:50%)

This probability distribution is in ΔS the set of all probability distributions over S.

A probability distribution over probability distributions looks like ((A:30%,B:20%,C:50%):60%,(A:70%,B:30%,C:0%):40%)

Though note that there are infinitely many distributions, so most distributions-of-distributions will be assigning probability densities.

Also note that we can sample a candidate from this distribution over distributions by first sampling a distribution, and then sampling a candidate from that distribution. This is equivalent to integrating a distribution-of-distributions into a distribution over candidates and then sampling that.

A distribution is equivalent to a point in a triangle. A distribution over distributions is a probability density over a triangle, ie a non-negative function over the triangle (may include dirac deltas)

So the voters all mark their preferences on a numerical scale.

Then these votes get sent to Fred and George, 2 perfectly rational players in a 0 sum game.

Fred and George both propose probability distributions over the candidates.

Fred's utility is the number of candidates that strictly prefer Fred's proposed probability distribution over Georges, minus the number of voters that strictly prefer Georges distribution over Freds.

This game has a unique Nash equilibrium. This equilibrium is a distribution over distributions. Sample a candidate from this equilibrium to get the election winner.

I know that this has a few nice properties. If candidate A is the first choice of the majority, then A definitely wins. If everyone prefers A to B, then B has no chance of winning. If C has no chance of winning, the candidates existence doesn't influence the election.

Is this system strategy proof, or can it be gamed? Will voters ever be incentivized to lie about their preferences?
Adam Optimizer Causes Privileged Basis in Transformer LM Residual Stream
by Diego Caples — 2024-09-06T17:55:34.265Z

Diego Caples (diego@activated-ai.com)

Rob Neuhaus (rob@activated-ai.com)

Introduction

In principle, neuron activations in a transformer-based language model residual stream should be about the same scale. In practice, the dimensions unexpectedly widely vary in scale. Mathematical theories of the transformer architecture do not predict this. They expect no dimension to be more important than any other. Is there something wrong with our reasonably informed intuitions of how transformers work? What explains these outlier channels?

Previously, Anthropic researched the existence of these privileged basis dimensions (dimensions more important / larger than expected) and ruled out several causes. By elimination, they reached the hypothesis that per-channel normalization in the Adam optimizer was the cause of privileged basis. However, they did not prove this was the case.

We conclusively show that Adam causes outlier channels / privileged basis within the transformer residual stream. When replacing the Adam optimizer with SGD, models trained do not have a privileged residual stream.

As a whole, this work improves mechanistic understanding of transformer LM training dynamics and confirms that our mathematical models of transformers are not flawed. Rather, they simply do not take into account the training process.

Our code is open source at the LLM outlier channel exploration GitHub.

Key Results

Training an LM with SGD does not result in a privileged basis, indicating that Adam is the cause of privileged basis in transformer LMs.
Training a 12M parameter model on TinyStories allows us to replicate outlier channel behavior on a small LM, training in less than 15 minutes on an H100.

Background

Recommended Reading

Privileged Bases in the Transformer Residual Stream
Toy Models of Superposition (Privileged Basis Section)

More About Anthropic’s Work

We consider Anthropic’s research on privileged basis the primary motivator for this work. In Anthropic’s Privileged Bases in the Transformer Residual Stream, they demonstrate privileged basis in a 200M parameter LLM, performed some experiments to rule out possible causes, but did not find a definitive cause. They hypothesize that outlier channels are caused by Adam’s lack of rotational equivariance, and suggest that training using SGD could isolate Adam as the cause.

Adam vs SGD, and Rotational Equivariance

Consider an experiment where we rotate...