trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
But Where do the Variables of my Causal Model come from?
by Dalcy — 2024-08-09T22:07:57.395Z

Tl;dr, A choice of variable in causal modeling is good if its causal effect is consistent across all the different ways of implementing it in terms of the low-level model. This notion can be made precise into a relation among causal models, giving us conditions as to when we can ground the causal meaning of high-level variables in terms of their low-level representations. A distillation of (Rubenstein, 2017).

Motivation

1) Causal Inference

Say you're doing causal inference in the Pearlian paradigm. Usually, your choice of variables is over high-level concepts of the world rather than at the level of raw physics.

Given my variables, I can (well, in principle) perform experiments and figure out the causal structure over them. I intervene on my neighbor's sprinkler while holding everything still and notice that it results in a variation of the wetness of the grass! I perform cloud seeding to make it rain and voila, my grass is wet!

But soon I notice a problem. Say I want to find out if cholesterol levels—measured by adding up the level of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) and high-density lipoprotein (HDL) in the body—cause heart disease. So I survey the literature and find various papers that do so by intervening on the diet (which is known to causal cholesterol levels to change).

Then I find inconsistent results: some paper says high cholesterol increases HD, others give the opposite result. What is going on?[1]

Turns out, if we use LDL and HDL as variables rather than Cholesterol, we get a consistent result, because LDL and HDL respectively has negative and positive effects on HD. The problem was in the choice of variables, i.e. how we factorize the world.

More concretely:

Cholesterol is a high-level variable that combines LDL and HDL.
Implementing an intervention over a high-level variable must translate into interventions over low-level variables that we can actually control, which is LDL and HDL in this case.
The intervention "set Cholesterol as C" can thus be implemented in many different ways of the form "set LDL as x, HDL as C−x."
The reason why it's bad to consider Cholesterol as the primitive variable of your causal model is because different (low-level) implementations of the same (high-level) intervention over Cholesterol levels result in different outcomes.

So it seems like, in the context of analyzing the causal effects on Heart Disease, "intervening on...
[LDSL#2] Latent variable models, network models, and linear diffusion of sparse lognormals
by tailcalled — 2024-08-09T19:57:56.122Z

This post is also available on my Substack.

Where we last left off, I proposed that life cannot be understood through statistics, but rather requires more careful study of individual cases. Yet I don’t think this is actually convincing to the statistical/academic mindset unless we have a statistical description of the phenomenon. To understand it, I’ve developed a new explicit model for the relationship between statistics and reality: linear diffusion of sparse lognormals.

But in order to explain this, I first want to bring up the two classical models of the relationship, as usually presented in psychometrics.[1]

Latent variable models and network models

We don’t have direct access to raw reality; instead to infer things about reality, we have some sensory inputs (e.g. for humans, eyes; for psychometricians, surveys; for computers, network and storage IO) which we can use to infer things that exist. This is called a latent variable model:

Generally, a single variable does not give us enough evidence to robustly infer anything. For instance a single light ray entering your eyes does not teach you what object it reflected off of. Instead, you need many observations to infer things about reality, which requires the latent variable to influence many different variables.

If you’ve got a large dataset, and you are willing to assume that there’s much fewer factors that matter in reality than there are observations, you can use fairly straightforward methods to fit a latent variable model to this dataset, which tends to give fairly “reasonable” results, in the sense that similar observations end up attributed to similar factors.

Sometimes people find latent factor models unbelievable and unworkable. For instance, different mental health problems correlate with each other, so standard latent factor models might suggest thinking up broad mental health factors that influence many symptoms from poor sleep to anxiety. When treating people’s mental health, clinicians might often try to directly stabilize individual variables like sleep, which is somewhat strange if we think the root cause is something much broader.

Yet at the same time, obviously a lot of the time there are latent dynamics that need to be intervened on. Imagine trying to stop global warming by freezing lots of ice and transporting it to places, rather than developing nuclear and renewable energy; it would never w...
"Which Future Mind is Me?" Is a Question of Values
by dadadarren — 2024-08-09T18:17:09.884Z

This is written right after reading Rob Bensinger's relevant post and andeslodes' comments. That discussion touched on a topic I have long held a strong belief about. I purposed first-person perspective is not physically reducible and ought to be regarded as primitive. Following that, questions such like "which future mind is me?" or "which mind ought to be regarded as myself in the future?" does not have an unequivocal logical answer.

To demonstrate this position imagine this: You are Elon Musk instead of whoever you actually are. Here it is not suggesting that your physical body and Elon's switch places. The world is still objectively the same. But instead of experiencing it from the perspective of your current body (e.g. in my case that of Dadadarren's), now you do it from that of Elon's. The subjective experience felt and consciousness accessible is now from the Billionaire's physical point of view instead of your current case, viz. you are Elon.

Everyone but Elon himself would say the above is a different scenario from reality. Each of us knows which body our first-person perspective resides in. And that is clearly not the physical human being referred as Elon Musk. But the actual and imaginary scenarios are not differentiated by any physical difference of the world, as the universe is objectively identical.

So to quote Arnold Zuboff (not verbatim), it is a question of "Why is that you are you and I am me?" (hopefully with the above context this doesn't sound like a tautological question begging). It is something without a physical explanation. I have long held this "which person is me?" is primitively known. (The more appropriately worded question should be "which thing is me" as self identification happens prior to even the conception of personhood) It is a fiat fact so fundamentally clear to each one that doesn't have or need any explanation: the only accessible experience comes from this body, and that's me. Nothing more to it.

In problems involving brain-copying machines, "which brain is me?" ought to be answered the same way: once the copying process is over and finding myself waking up as one of the brains, "which brain is me?" would be apparent. But short of that, without subjectively experiencing from the perspective of one of the brains, there is no way to analyze which of the two I would wake up to be (ot...
Simulation-aware causal decision theory: A case for one-boxing in CDT
by kongus_bongus — 2024-08-09T18:09:20.013Z

Disclaimer: I am a math student new to LW and the rationalist community. I could not find this idea anywhere else after a modest amount of research; I apologize if this has been brought up before.

Summary: CDT agents may behave differently than expected in situations involving reliable predictors due to the possibility that they are themselves simulations being run by the predictor. This may lead to decisions such as one-boxing in Newcomb's problem and acquiescing in counterfactual mugging.

The traditionally held conclusion of CDT in Newcomb's problem is that the decision of which boxes to take cannot causally influence the predictor's prediction, so in the absence of any evidence as to what the prediction is, a CDT agent should take both boxes as it would be better off with that choice than with the choice to take only the opaque box regardless of what the prediction is. The potential challenge I pose to this is that in such a situation, a rational agent ought to have significant credence in the possibility that it is a simulation being run by the predictor, and that in the case that the agent is a simulation, its choice actually does have a causal influence on the "real" prediction.

Fundamental to this argument is the claim that a reliable predictor is almost certainly a reliable simulator. To see why this is plausible, consider that if a predictor was not able to predict any particular internal process of the agent, that process could be abused to generate decisions that thwart the predictor. For a rough example, think of a human-like agent deciding "at random" whether to one-box or two-box. Human pseudorandom bit generation is far from a coin flip, but it depends on enough internal state that a predictor unable to simulate most, if not all, of the brain would likely not perform well enough to warrant being called reliable.

We must also make the assumption that an agent in this situation would, if it knew it was a simulation, strive to maximize expected utility for its real-world counterpart instead of its simulated self. I'm not entirely sure if this is a reasonable assumption, and I admit this may be a failure point of the theory, but I'll continue anyway. At the very least, it seems like the kind of behavior you would want to build into a utility-maximizing agent if you were to design one.

Now, for a concrete example of a decision problem where this observa...
The gatekeepers of the AI algorithms will shape our society
by ProfessorFalken — 2024-08-09T17:59:33.594Z

So algorithms and weighted neuralnets are going to be the enlightened super beings that oversee our society.

Elon has said - and I'm paraphrasing cos I can't find the link - that social media with it's free exchange of ideas will allow for a consensus to bubble up and reveal a nuanced truth - and will use such data to train it's AI model.

But I believe the gatekeepers of AI models will manipulate the algorithms to edit out anything they disagree with whilst promoting their agenda

It's absurd to think that if a neuralnet starts churning out a reality they disagree with they won't go "oh this AI is hallucinating, let's tweak the weights till it conforms with our agenda."

How do you police AI? Who gets to say what is a hallucination and what is a harsh truth that contradicts the gatekeepers ideology?
Practical advice for secure virtual communication post easy AI voice-cloning?
by hmys — 2024-08-09T17:32:33.458Z

So, I saw this video https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1enq52b/a_clip_from_the_gpt4o_safety_card_where_the_voice/

And, I don't know the context, or if it is even real, but it seems believable on priors, and certainly something people could deliberately create with current technology. Still, the video game me the spooks.

A few weeks ago, my aunt messaged my mother, encouraging her to sign up for a crypto exchange with a referral. They also had a few messages back and fourth, with seemingly natural conversation. My mom (and this makes me somewhat proud, as my mom is not that technologically literate) asked me if this was an AI attempting to trick her. My dad was confident it was. I was (worryingly) not able to give her a straight answer. We called her on facetime, and she confirmed it was her, and that she had been told by her son (my cousin) to use it. Intellectually the video made me confident this wasn't an AI scheme, but even after that short video exchange, I had an uneasy feeling.

All this to say, I'm seriously considering setting up a secure physical system for making online communication with people I know deepfake-proof. Have anyone tried to do this?
The simplest solution I can think of is to take two pieces of paper. Write down the same 20 high-entropy sentences on each of them, numbered. Then give one of them to a partner. Then you can ask them for one of the sentences if you are suspicious, or they you. Afterwards you cross out the sentence you use.
This has the advantage of being watertight if you use a good source of randomness in generating the sentences, which is easy enough to get. It has the disadvantage of being limited in the number of sentences you can bother to write down. And also pieces of paper being easily lost/broken. I haven't tried to I don't know if this would really be an issue. If you'd use the pad 20x/day, or only 2x / year.
Another solution is to have two raspberry pis computing the same hash function. Then you can tell the person you're speaking with "type in 158327 and click enter, what is the response?", then you can type in the number on your raspberry pi, and check if it is the same.
This has the issue that I don't know how to set up a raspberry pi, although I could probably learn pretty quickly. If the system breaks I'd have to travel to fix it, which would be a big hassle.
The biggest issue with both ...
The Carnot Engine of Economics
by StrivingForLegibility — 2024-08-09T15:59:40.458Z

The history of coordination spans billions of years, and we've been finding new ways to help each other out for as long as there have been more than one of us. From multicellularity to the evolution of brains, from the development of social and moral instincts to their codification in laws and contracts, from the emergence of currency to the invention of stocks and bonds and options and every other modern financial instrument, we have accumulated countless ways to work together.

Every time a group gets a little better at coordinating, moving closer to the Pareto frontier, they get a little more economically efficient. The field of thermodynamics has a model for the most perfectly efficient engine theoretically possible, given the limitations of entropy. Does economics have an equivalent result for the most perfectly efficient coordination mechanism, given the limitations of voluntary participation by agents with different interests?

An idealized heat engine.

Thermal efficiency is limited by the fact that we can't control individual particles directly. At least not without increasing entropy more somewhere else than we were able to reduce it among those particles. If we could, we could use that ability to produce limitless free energy forever. Literally forever, the "inevitable heat death of the universe" would be a cute little thing our distant ancestors worried about.

Economic efficiency is limited by the fact that we can't control individual agents directly. And much more so by our intelligence; our ability to find good solutions among a large space of candidates. If we could identify the socially optimal joint policy, and if we could direct all agents to implement it, this would be an instant win condition, bringing about utopia for as long as there is organized matter in the universe. World peace is easy when you can just direct people to get along.

Economists call the ratio between "the highest social welfare a central planner could achieve" and "the actual social welfare that results from people following their incentives" the Price of Anarchy. The better an economic mechanism is, the lower the price of anarchy (inefficiency caused by the lack of a central planner), and the better job that mechanism is doing at reshaping individual incentives to coordinate on socially-better joint policies. If a mechanism can incentivize agents to voluntarily coordinate on ...
Outrage Bonding
by Jonathan Moregård — 2024-08-09T13:46:59.818Z
Link: https://honestliving.substack.com/p/outrage-bonding

I stopped following the news back when Trump (first?)[1] got elected. The amount of attention put on a foreign[2] election was staggering, with normal media

saccades

replaced by Monk-level single-mindedness. Trump was the permanent spotlight for months.

The media’s fixation on Trump had interesting downstream effects. My peer groups — normally a dynamic bunch — turned into a bunch of snide

gossipmongers

. Every day was Trump-day, with shared outrage being the primary source of connection. People scored points by retelling

outrageous news

, parroting hot takes and sharing edgy memes.

Focusing on judgment and outrage was unhealthy for me. I got addicted to the drama, allowing outrage to outcompete healthy forms of relating. I felt disconnected from my friends, got irritated more often, and had an increase in pessimistic thought patterns.

Around this time, I had a coworker who was always grumpy — always complaining about this or that. He was also quite old. I used to wonder if he had once been happier — but then practised grumpiness a lot. It takes some repetition to get to his level of mastery.

One day, the situation got too much for me. I decided that I didn’t want to become a bitter old man — and that I needed to disengage from the outrage-bonding going on in my social circles.

Having stopped following the news, the next step wasn’t hard — I made a hard commitment to not put energy into outrage-bonding. Whenever people started complaining together, I responded by:

Zoning out, ignoring the topic
Asking the group to shift the focus, explaining that I didn’t like the way outrage shaped my being
Walking away

At first, people didn’t like it. Bringing up the negative consequences of other people’s unhealthy habits is generally frowned upon — even if it’s done indirectly. If done in a judgemental way, it can be seen as a social manoeuvring move — a subtle claim that I’m better (more healthy) than others.

Luckily, I

care little

for social signalling games. I forged ahead — and managed to shift the group dynamics I interacted with. Sometimes, a strong-headed

minority

can have a

lot of impact

.

Now, shit is about to hit the fan. The US elections are scheduled for November, and the drama is already building. The news will turn increasingly single-minded, and you are likely to find yourself in outrage-oriented social contexts. You can choose to hand over your attention and ...
Non-Transactional Compliments
by Jonathan Moregård — 2024-08-09T13:42:16.471Z
Link: https://honestliving.substack.com/p/non-transactional-compliments

I used to dislike receiving compliments.
I used to dislike giving compliments.

One day, I sat down and reflected on the nature of compliments.

What other things do you “give” and “receive”?
Material goods, gifts, capital. Items of value.

I realized I’d been thinking of compliments as a kind of transaction, where the recipient gets a chunk of social esteem/status. They felt icky because of the implicit expectation of reciprocity — handing something back.

When I received a compliment, I felt a pressure to give something in return — maybe stammering out a faked return-compliment, of roughly equal value. When I gave compliments, I was afraid of putting someone on the spot — hay gurl u wun sum drink?

Mostly I avoided giving compliments — they felt impure. In the transactional frame, I always questioned myself for hidden motivations — it felt impossible to give out compliments without having an agenda.

A Relational Frame

Having realized that the transactional metaphor for compliments sucked, I set out to find another way of thinking about them. After some experimentation, I settled on a relational framing of compliments.

I stopped thinking of compliments as goods to be traded — and decided to see them as a way to highlight aspects of relationships. Concretely, when I felt a sense of appreciation for someone, I made a habit of mentioning the thing I was appreciating.

“I like being here with you.”
“I love hanging out with you, I love how silly we can be together.”
”I’m so happy I met you, we connect in a way that’s rare for me.”
”I love how your eyes are shining right now, you look so happy.”

The relational focus has helped me get unstuck when it comes to compliments, allowing me to express myself freely. Using this framing, I can speak out

appreciations

without thinking about potential hidden motivations.

Using compliments to highlight relational experiences takes away a lot of complexity — allowing me to focus on relating, rather than social games. Expressing momentary experiences reduces awkwardness — I don’t try to invoke certain feelings, I simply highlight things that are already there.

How are you relating to compliments? If you struggle, consider reframing them.
FarmKind's Illusory Offer
by jefftk — 2024-08-09T11:30:07.082Z

While the effective altruism movement has changed a lot over time, one
of the parts that makes me most disappointed is the

steady
creep of donation matching. It's not that donation matching is
objectively very important, but the early EA movement's

principled
rejection of a very effective fundraising strategy made it clear
that we were committed to helping people understand the real impact of
their donations. Over time, as people have specialized into different
areas of EA, with community-building and epistemics being different
people from fundraising, we've become less robust against the
real-world incentives of "donation matching works".

Personally, I would love to see a community-wide norm against EA
organizations setting up donation matches. Yes, they bring in money,
but at the cost of misleading donors about their impact and unwinding
a lot of what we, as a community, are trying to build. [1] To the
extent that we do have them, however, I think it's important that
donors understand how the matching works. And not just in the sense
of having the information available on a page somewhere: if most
people going through your regular flow are not going to understand
roughly what the effect of their choices are, you're misleading
people.

Here's an example of how I don't think it should be done:

I come to you with an offer. I have a pot with $30 in it, which will
go to my favorite charity unless we agree otherwise. If you're
willing to donate $75 to your favorite charity and $75 to mine, then
I'm willing to split my $30 pot between the two charities.

How should you think about this offer? As presented, your options
are:

Do nothing, and $30 goes from the pot to my favorite charity.

Take my offer, and:

$75 goes from your bank account to your favorite charity

$75 goes from your bank account to my favorite charity

$15 leaves the pot for your favorite charity

$15 leaves the pot for my favorite charity

While this looks nice and symmetrical, satisfying some heuristics for
fairness, I think it's clearer to (a) factor out the portion that
happens regardless and (b) look at the net flows of money. Then if
you take the offer:

$150 leaves your bank account

$90 goes to your favorite charity

$60 goes to my favorite charity

If I presented this offer and encouraged you to take it because of my
...