trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Workday Air Quality Measurements
by jefftk — 2022-05-18T02:10:01.741Z

I continue to be very excited about my new

M2000
meter, and I brought it with me today to measure air quality
during my commute and workday. Here's what I found:

full-size image

Time
Activity
CO2 (ppm)
pm2.5 ug/m3

8:00
Left house
426
2.9

8:15
Davis station
468
69.9

8:24
Red line, new car
802
29.3

8:36
Kendall station, outside
477
11

8:40
Hallways, elevators, breakfast in cafe
563
2.8

9:18
Office, door open
475
1

10:00
Closed door
514
1

10:31
Open door
553
1

11:02
Team meeting, 14 people, ~15x30
1052
1

12:04
Hallways, elevator
686
1.6

12:10
Lunch in cafe
943
2.6

12:50
Hallways, elevator
763
2.1

12:57
Office, door open
537
1

2:02
Closed door
539
1

2:31
Two people
599
1

2:54
One person, open door
587
1

3:01
Closed door, two people
598
1

3:31
Open door, zero people
538
1

4:04
Closed door, two people
591
1

4:38
Kendall station
487
36.6

4:44
Red line, old car
953
21.6

4:56
Davis station
537
134.5

4:58
Outside
445
2.25

I spent most of my workday in my office, with the door open. I closed
the door for meetings, either virtual or in person. The "zero people"
at 3:31 is me going on a walking 1:1: with a report and leaving my
meter behind at my desk.

Currently I wear a mask on the subway (and stations) and at work when
I'm not in my office or a conference room with a small number of
people. Based on these readings, it would be safe from a
covid perspective to remove my mask in the subway station, but given
the high level of particulate pollution I might as well leave it on.

(At this point I'm not wearing a mask because I think it would be
directly harmful to myself or my family to get covid, but instead
because the steps we would need to take to reduce the risk of
infecting others once we knew we were infected would be very
inconvenient.)
Feature request: draft comments
by DirectedEvolution — 2022-05-17T21:21:36.306Z

When thinking about somebody’s post, I often benefit from writing out my thoughts. Usually, I do that in a comment box, because that’s convenient.

Often, I’ll realize that my first thought is wrong, hit on something I want to read before posting, not have time to finish my thought, or feel growing uncertainty about whether it’s worthwhile investing the time to finish my comment. I don’t want to keep track of a bunch of half-formed thoughts on, say, Google Drive. So I delete the comment instead.

It would be nice if I could easily make and save a bunch of hidden comments on the post itself. They’d be essentially “draft comments.”
Popular education in Sweden: much more than you wanted to know
by Henrik Karlsson — 2022-05-17T20:07:50.318Z
Link: https://escapingflatland.substack.com/p/popular-education-in-sweden-much?s=w

Growing up on the Swedish seaside, I had a five-minute walk to four open learning facilities – not counting the library and the youth center. It was very Christopher Alexander.

One of the premises was an abandoned church that my friends and I used as a recording studio; we'd renovated it ourselves with funding from a study association. There we played distorted pop. In another, I learned French from an émigré of Montpellier. We arranged public lectures – once, to our great surprise, we even managed to book then general secretary of the United Nations Ban-Ki Moon for a lecture in Uppsala. I analyzed Soviet cinema with a group of whom an unsettling number sang Sång för Stalin before the screenings.

Since leaving Sweden, I have realized that not everyone grows up like this. And I miss it. In fact, if the whole of Sweden was about to burn down and I could only save one thing, I might grab just folkbildningsrörelsen.

Folkbildningsrörelsen: that is the name we have for this movement of self-organized study groups, resource centers, maker spaces, public lectures, and free retreats for personal development.

These types of things exist in other countries too – but not at the same scale. Or even close.

To get a sense of how comprehensive folkbildningsrörelsen is, it helps to remember that Sweden has a population roughly comparable to New York City. If NYC had as many free resource centers per inhabitant as the municipality where I grew up, Manhattan would look like this:

I was going to do all of New York but my hand started hurting from making all these dots, so I only managed the tip of Manhattan.

At every other intersection, there would be a few rooms where you could go in and get some money to buy literature or access tools you needed. (In practice, the resource centers in cities tend to be lumped together in larger units, but the map still captures a lived reality for the 7.5 percent of Sweden's population who regularly take part in study associations.)

Experientially, the spaces I have been part of have felt more like niche internet forums than schools. There were plenty of trolls, witches, and freaks – but we were also able to sustain a depth of conversation which was out of scope at school. When I entered university, seminars often felt like play-acting in comparison. In our often quite dilapidated buildings (as in inter...
On saving one's world
by Rob Bensinger — 2022-05-17T19:53:58.192Z

If the world is likeliest to be saved by sober scholarship, then let us be sober scholars in the face of danger.

If the world is likeliest to be saved by playful intellectual exploration, then let us be playful in the face of danger.

Strategic, certainly; aware of our situation, of course; but let us not throw away the one mental mode that can actually save us, if that's in fact our situation.

If the world is likeliest to be saved by honest, trustworthy, and high-integrity groups, who by virtue of their trustworthiness can much more effectively collaborate and much more quickly share updates; then let us be trustworthy. What is the path to good outcomes otherwise?

CFAR has a notion of "flailing". Alone on a desert island, if you injure yourself, you're likelier to think fast about how to solve the problem. Whereas injuring yourself around friends, you're more likely to "flail": lean into things that demonstrate your pain/trouble to others.

To my eye, a lot of proposals that we set aside sober scholarship, or playful intellectual exploration, or ethical integrity, look like flailing. I don't see an argument that this setting-aside actually chains forward into good outcomes; it seems performative to me, like hoping that if our reaction "feels extreme" enough, some authority somewhere will take notice and come to the rescue.

Who is that authority?

If you have a coherent model of this, we can talk about it and figure out if that's really the best strategy for eliciting their aid.

But if no one comes to mind, consider the possibility that you're executing a social instinct that's adaptive to threats like tigers and broken legs, but maladaptive to threats like Unfriendly AI.

If you feel scared about something, I generally think it's good to be honest about that fact and discuss it soberly, rather than hiding it. I don't think this is incompatible with rigorous scholarship or intellectual play.

But I would clearly distinguish "being honest about your world-models and feelings, because honesty is legitimately a good idea" from "making it your main strategy to do whatever action sequence feels emotionally resonant with the problem".

An "extreme" key doesn't necessarily open an "extreme" lock. A dire-sounding key doesn't necessarily open a dire-feeling lock. A fearful or angry key doesn't necessarily open a lock that makes you want to express fear or anger.

Rather, the lock's exa...
Proposal: Twitter dislike button
by KatjaGrace — 2022-05-17T19:40:10.485Z

The popular story of Twitter’s role in the ruin of civilization is that it is a runaway trash fire of reciprocal anger and offense, where otherwise nice people are possessed by overwhelming outrages, and drawn into throwing their own energy behind creating the vilest and most vindictive responses to what they see, turning away from reason and hurting others in turn, and so the place continues.

I’m not sure how much of Twitter activity this accounts for (apparently Michael Nielsen enjoys an entirely different place, and my experience seems pretty nice too). But I think there’s a real pattern of this kind, which makes game theoretic sense, and goes something like this:

People say things

People read these things

If anything seems objectionable to any of these people, then they repost those things with commentary, and everyone else reads them extra.

In the next round, people (or the ones who who get attention) say objectionable things (that they expect will get attention), about objectionable things (that they have their attention on from the last round)

etc.

To lay out the effects of all this more clearly:

People disproportionately read things they don’t like, which is presumably bad for them

People get the visceral sense that others are disproportionately writing things they don’t like, which is misleading, and not in a helpful-for-public-friendship way

Things people don’t like get extra space in the public conversation

People who tend to write things that others don’t like get extra power and attention instead of less

Writing things other people don’t like is incentivized (if you want attention, writing things other people don’t like is probably somewhat better than writing things people do like, and way better than writing things they don’t feel strongly about).

Supposing something like this model is true, and bad, it seems to me that there is a really simple solution: add a dislike button.

That is, what if when a person sees a thing they don’t like, instead of broadcasting it to others, they register their disapproval by quietly clicking a different button next to the heart, and then Twitter shows it to other people less instead of more? You can still retweet it if you especially want other people to see it more, but adding attention wouldn’t be the default disapproval vote.

This is not an original idea, and the other major websites ...
BERI is seeking new collaborators (2022)
by sawyer — 2022-05-17T17:33:04.303Z

The Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative (BERI) is once again

accepting applications

from university-affiliated groups and individuals interested in receiving our support. Applications are due June 26th.

Winning applicants would be eligible for free services from BERI, like purchasing equipment, food, and software, maintaining an Uber account for easy travel, and hiring experts for research support; see

How does BERI help our collaborators?

for more info on that. If you’re a member of a research group, or an individual researcher, working on longtermist projects, I encourage you to apply. If you know anyone who might be interested, please share this with them!

BERI is a public charity whose mission is to improve human civilization’s long-term prospects for survival and flourishing. We’ve been working with university groups since 2017, and have provided over $4 million of administrative and operational support on longtermist projects with groups at UC Berkeley, Oxford, Stanford, MIT, and

elsewhere

.

To read what past BERI collaborators have said about us, please see our recent

collaborator survey results

.
For more information on what we do for our collaborators, see our

FAQ

.
For more information about what BERI’s been up to, check out

our website

and our recently-released

annual report on 2021

.

If you have any questions, please comment below or send an email to

contact@existence.org

.
Formula for Dying Babies
by Zvi — 2022-05-17T16:50:01.780Z

Note: This was posted originally on Thursday, May 12 as part of the weekly Covid post. It is being separated out into its own post for future reference, and in case some people are no longer reading Covid posts.

There’s a shortage of specialty infant formula. Half of all types are unavailable. Some parents are panicking, without a plan for how to feed a baby that can’t use regular formula.

An infant formula plant shutdown triggered by two infant deaths has created a new nightmare for some parents: There’s now a dangerous shortage of specialized formulas that are the only thing keeping many children and adults alive.

The Abbott Nutrition plant in Sturgis, Mich., was not just one of the biggest suppliers of infant formula nationally, but it was also the major supplier of several lesser-known specialty formulas that are a lifeline for thousands of people with rare medical conditions, including metabolic, allergic and gastrointestinal disorders, which can make eating regular foods impossible or even dangerous. The situation has not only rattled parents and medical professionals, but has raised questions about whether the federal government should do more to ensure critical, life-sustaining supply chains don’t break down.

“If this doesn’t get fixed soon, I don’t know how my son will survive,” said Phoebe Carter, whose 5-year old son John — a nature-lover and “paleontologist in training” — has a severe form of Eosinophilic Esophagitis, a rare digestive and immune system disease driven by a dysfunctional immune response to food antigens. “I just can’t stress that enough.”

One of my good friends looked into this a bit and isn’t buying that the shortage could be caused by shutting down this one plant. This article’s primary contribution is that the supply chains were already strained before the shutdown due to demand fluctuations on top of supply issues in the wake of the pandemic. It’s certainly a large contributor, and it’s possible without the shutdown we wouldn’t have a problem.

This one points out that before the recent recall, we were on the edge of disaster to start, through a combination of the usual supply chain disruptions and the usual tariffs. We went out of our way to ensure that the supply of baby formula couldn’t compete against American dairy farmers, and, well, whoops. This quote from that post (the quote is originally from here) is very on the...
Actionable-guidance and roadmap recommendations for the NIST AI Risk Management Framework
by Dan H — 2022-05-17T15:26:23.201Z

Updated 13 September 2022 with a link to our arXiv paper and corrections to out-of-date items

This is a linkpost to our working paper “Towards AI Standards Addressing AI Catastrophic Risks: Actionable-Guidance and Roadmap Recommendations for the NIST AI Risk Management Framework”, which we co-authored with our UC Berkeley colleagues Jessica Newman and Brandie Nonnecke. Here is a link:

pdf on arXiv (55 pp, last revised 7 September 2022)

We seek feedback from readers considering catastrophic risks as part of their work on AI safety and governance. Please email feedback to Tony Barrett at

anthony.barrett@berkeley.edu

.

If you are providing feedback on the draft guidance in this document, in addition to any comments via email, it would be particularly helpful if you answer the questions in Appendix 2 of this document or in the following Google Form:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1XHshf_mKBijbP5RZI2JAlclnE6LZJrujDYWUANDt090/

We may update the links or content in this post to reflect the latest version of the document.

Background on the NIST AI RMF

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is currently developing the

NIST Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework

, or AI RMF. NIST intends the AI RMF as voluntary guidance on AI risk assessment and other AI risk management processes for AI developers, users, deployers, and evaluators. NIST plans to release Version 1.0 of the AI RMF in early 2023.
As voluntary guidance, NIST would not impose “hard law” mandatory requirements for AI developers or deployers to use the AI RMF. However, AI RMF guidance would be part of “soft law” norms and best practices, which AI developers and deployers would have incentives to follow as appropriate. For example, insurers or courts may expect AI developers and deployers to show reasonable usage of relevant NIST AI RMF guidance as part of due care when developing or deploying AI systems in high-stakes contexts, in much the same way that NIST Cybersecurity Framework guidance can be used as part of demonstrating due care for cybersecurity. In addition, elements of soft-law guidance are sometimes adapted into hard-law regulations, e.g., by mandating that particular industry sectors comply with specific standards.

Summary of our Working Paper

In this document, we provide draft elements of actionable guidance focused primarily on identifying and...
[Intro to brain-like-AGI safety] 15. Conclusion: Open problems, how to help, AMA
by Steven Byrnes — 2022-05-17T15:11:12.397Z

(Last revised: July 2024. See changelog at the bottom.)

15.1 Post summary / Table of contents

This is the final post of the “Intro to brain-like-AGI safety” post series! Thanks for reading this far!

In Section 15.2, I’ll list seven open problems that came up in the previous posts. I’m putting them all here in one place for the convenience of potential researchers and funders.
In Section 15.3, I’ll offer some brief remarks on practical aspects of doing AGI safety (a.k.a. AI alignment) research, including funding sources, connecting to the relevant research community, and where to learn more.
In Section 15.4, I’ll wrap up with 8 takeaway messages that I hope readers will have gotten out of this series.

Since this is the “Conclusion” post, feel free to use the comment section for more general discussion (or to “ask me anything”), even if it’s not related to this particular post.

15.2 Open problems

This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a complete list of open problems whose progress would help with brain-like-AGI safety, let alone with the more general topic of Safe & Beneficial AGI (see

Post #1, Section 1.2

). Rather, these are just some of the topics that came up in this series, with ratings proportional to how enthusiastic I am about them.

I’ll split the various open problems into three categories: “Open problems that look like normal neuroscience”, “Open problems that look like normal computer science”, and “Open problems that require explicitly talking about AGIs”. This division is for readers’ convenience; you might, for example, have a boss, funding source, or tenure committee who thinks that AGI Safety is stupid, and in that case you might want to avoid the third category. (However, don’t give up so soon—see discussion in Section 15.3.1 below.)

15.2.1 Open problems that look like normal neuroscience

15.2.1.1 The “Is Steve full of crap when he talks about neuroscience?” research program — ⭐⭐⭐⭐

If you didn’t notice, Posts

#2

–

#7

are full of grand theorizing and bold claims about how the human brain works. It would be nice to know if those claims are actually true!!

If those neuroscience posts are a bunch of baloney, then I think we should throw out not only those posts, but the whole rest of this series too.

In the text of those posts, you’ll see various suggestions and pointers as to why I believe the various neuroscience claims that I made. ...
What are the possible trajectories of an AGI/ASI world?
by Jakobovski — 2022-05-17T13:28:00.659Z

I am curious to know what people think are the possible trajectories of an AGI/ASI world. If you are brave and want to share relative probabilities that would be interesting.

Some example trajectories:

1) Asimov "utopia". Robot's do all the labor, humans are free to leisure and enjoy life. Resources are basically free except for resources that are scarce like land. AI is controlled by a democratic, western authority.
2) AI turns the entire universe into paperclips.
3) AI is controlled by an authoritarian government. Govt kills everyone not deemed valuable or lets them live in some mediocre state of existence. Rebellion and change are impossible.
4) AI is controlled by a few large corporations that are mostly benevolent. They provide a "utopian" world for most people while the corporate owners live the life of the super-wealthy. Not clear to me what the differences between super-wealthy and those on UBI are?
5) Everyone turns into cyborgs, lays in bed all day and moves their mind into the metaverse.
How to invest in expectation of AGI?
by Jakobovski — 2022-05-17T11:03:43.676Z

I think there is a very high probability of AGI becoming a reality in less than 5 years. I am trying to figure out a good investment strategy given this prediction while keeping in mind that there is a good chance the prediction is wrong.

I am assuming AGI at first will require very expensive hardware (in the million dollar range) and thus be limited in its adoption due to high costs and processor supply shortages. The huge economic impacts will be delayed by two years or so until hardware production can be scaled up and costs lowered. During this time ASI will start developing but it will be slowed due to computational limits of the hardware and supply constraints.

1) Given the above assumptions what is a good investment strategy for the next 5 years?
2) Given AGI is developed in 5 years, in what ways are my secondary predictions wrong?
The "Adults in the Room"
by David Udell — 2022-05-17T04:03:20.740Z

Significant spoilers for mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus (planecrash Book 1).

Dath ilan has put significant effort into protecting what it has to protect. To that end, it's thought quite a bit about how to think effectively. Dath ilan knows how to train people to preempt reality, to concentrate their thoughts on modeling the tiny slivers of possibility space that reality is on track to wander into and to effectively respond.

However, they don't disseminate this art to all their citizens to the greatest possible extent. They teach it fully to just a select few, and teach everyone else a good chunk. Their reason for holding out on making most people into the best rationalists they can be … is that, as an unfortunate quirk of human psychology … becoming the best rationalist you can as quickly as you can is not the most fun path you can chart through your life.

A few dath ilani specialize in becoming Keepers -- full time, professional, regularly tested and proven masters of Bayescraft. Keepers in dath ilan are the "adults in the room." Their job is to make sure that everyone else can life a fun-theoretically optimized life without sacrificing their civilization's ability to seriously reason about its future. A purely Keeper civilization would be missing out on something worth protecting; a civilization without enough adults around would be helpless in the face of capricious reality.

There is a commonly held wisdom, in dath ilan, about the way a human mind is put together, that it is a thing made of little subtle tensions and balances and internal compromises. The human mind being the limited thing that it is, these balances form around your current level of ability to see into yourself and see the implications of what you already know - or not see them, as the case may be. The reason why not everybody runs off to learn all they can from Keepers, the reason why not everyone asks a Keeper to tell them all the answers about themselves, is that this would bring parts of themselves into conflict that were previously living in a more agreeable truce of ignorance. You might not survive as yourself, if you could see yourself.

Those who say "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be" may continue to walk the Path from there. But not uncommonly, even somebody who sets out along that Path, turns back at some point, and well short of

...