trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
So You Created a Sociopath - New Book Announcement!
by Garrett Baker — 2024-04-01T18:02:18.010Z

Lets face it, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, and you can't start a worldwide social and political movement without creating a few power-hungry sociopaths. We get it. It hard, but its necessary. Whether it be dictators or dictresses; terrorists or terrorettes; fraudsters or fraudines. Every great social movement does and did it. Christianity, Liberalism, Communism, and even Capitalism have all created and enabled evil, power-hungry individuals who have caused mass calamity, and even death.

Our guide is aimed at the leaders, and future leaders of these and similar movements, but we believe its also a fun and exciting read for a popular audience, and those who find themselves within such movements.

We offer 5 keys to success in the aftermath of these situations:

Deny, deny, deny. Deny anything happened, and if you can't deny anything happened, deny you had knowledge of anything happening.
Disavow. Convince yourself and the world that the actions of the individual or individuals in question had nothing to do with the principles or ground-level reality of your social movement. This one is easy! We do it by default, but leaders often don't do it loud enough.
Do Something. Often people don't care what, they just want to know you're doing it. Whether it be a cheap and surface level investigation, or calling the next big change you make a reform effort, Do It!
Scapegoat. Lets be honest here, social movements are never unified, and you probably have some political enemies who have or had some features or goals in common with the sociopath, right? Why not blame them! Hit two birds in one stone, and be gone with both your problems.
Change Nothing, say nothing. In case the previous gave you the wrong impression, the last thing you should do is say anything of substance, or do anything of substance. That gives the wider world the ability to legitimately blame you and your social movement for what happened. Not ok!

Make sure to pre-order on Amazon before its release this June!
Announcing Suffering For Good
by Garrett Baker — 2024-04-01T17:08:12.322Z

TL;DR: We are excited to announce the new animal welfare organization Suffering For Good, a new factory farming charity aimed at vegans, where we use our excess profits to buy suffering offsets--in particular, an enormous number of rats on heroin.

For decades, even centuries, us vegans have been trying but failing to get the world to stop eating & torturing sentient minds that can definitely feel pain & suffer. But the global number of such minds tortured & killed just keeps on increasing. We at Suffering for Good think its time we just gave up, and ask ourselves "how can we use this to our advantage?"

We realized something when we asked that question. After decades of fighting this fight, we know far more about the factory farming industry than virtually anyone inside that industry. In that period of learning, and attempted dismantling, we had learned basically all the industry secrets, strategically releasing only the most gruesome, and least cost-effective practices, so as to maximize the public's awareness of the pain, and minimize the spread of good ideas.

But it seems the public does not care about the suffering. Only we care about the suffering, and at the end of this long road we find our strength is in doing exactly what we hate most, but more effectively than anyone else.

After months of debate and math, calculating our expected profit margins, the logistics of the heroin suppliers, of keeping our rats alive & fed, and the legality of this operation, we found that no matter what our assumptions were, as long as they were reasonable, our numbers came out the same: Suffering for Good is not only a viable charity, but we feel morally compelled to work on it, no matter how personally disgusted we feel by the conclusion.

We unfortunately can't share the exact numbers publicly at this moment, however we will be sharing them with select funders.
The Evolution of Humans Was Net-Negative for Human Values
by Zack_M_Davis — 2024-04-01T16:01:10.037Z

(Epistemic status: publication date is significant.)

Some observers have argued that the totality of "AI safety" and "alignment" efforts to date have plausibly had a negative rather than positive impact on the ultimate prospects for safe and aligned artificial general intelligence. This perverse outcome is possible because research "intended" to help with AI alignment can have a larger impact on AI capabilities, moving existentially-risky systems closer to us in time without making corresponding cumulative progress on the alignment problem.

When things are going poorly, one is often inclined to ask "when it all went wrong." In this context, some identify the founding of OpenAI in 2015 as a turning point, being causally downstream of safety concerns despite the fact no one who had been thinking seriously about existential risk thought the original vision of OpenAI was a good idea.

But if we're thinking about counterfactual impacts on outcomes, rather than grading the performance of the contemporary existential-risk-reduction movement in particular, it makes sense to posit earlier turning points.

Perhaps—much earlier. Foresighted thinkers such as Marvin Minsky (1960), Alan Turing (1951), and George Eliot (1879!!) had pointed to AI takeover as something that would likely happen eventually—is the failure theirs for not starting preparations earlier? Should we go back even earlier, and blame the ancient Greeks for failing to discover evolution and therefore adopt a eugenics program that would have given their descendants higher biological intelligence with which to solve the machine intelligence alignment problem?

Or—even earlier? There's an idea that humans are the stupidest possible creatures that could have built a technological civilization: if it could have happened at a lower level of intelligence, it would have (and higher intelligence would have no time to evolve).

But intelligence isn't the only input into our species's penchant for technology; our hands with opposable thumbs are well-suited for making and using tools, even though the proto-hands of our ancestors were directly adapted for climbing trees. An equally-intelligent species with a less "lucky" body plan or habitat, similar to crows (lacking hands) or octopuses (living underwater, where, e.g., fires cannot start), might not have gotten started down the path of cultural accumulation of technology—even...
Protestants Trading Acausally
by Martin Sustrik — 2024-04-01T14:46:26.374Z

Protestants believe in predestination. The God has already decided on who's going to get to hell and heaven.

This feels like a terrible incentive structure. If you are already predestined to get one of those places, why care? Why try to be good?

In reality though it works pretty well. Protestants are trying to be good to convince themselves (and others) that they've been predestined to go to heaven.

It may even work better (protestant work ethic etc.) because if you haven't been predestined, it always feels like there's still time to change your ways and eventually achieve salvation. With predestination it doesn't work that way. There's no changing of the decision in play. If you are behaving badly today it's a sign that you've been already predestined for hell. Too bad for you.

This is a funny example of an acausal trade. In particular because it does not assume an intelligent actor, an actor who knows game and decision theory and can act accordingly, which is traditionally an assumption for an acausal trade. A simple artisan or merchant in XVI. century may have done the acausal trade with God although the game or decision theory did not yet exist.
Pluck Sensor Circuit
by jefftk — 2024-04-01T14:00:05.578Z

A

while
ago I finished the "user interface" portion of my electronic harp
mandolin. I'm

happy with
the signals the piezos put out, but now I need some electrical
engineering to get the signals into a computer where I'll be more at
home.

Since I made a design with 13 piezos, I wanted something with at least
that many analog to digital converters, and decided on the Teensy 4.0 with
14. It turns out that this only has ten easily accessible ADCs,
though, and in retrospect the 4.1 would have
been a better choice. More on that later!

Reading the docs, each ADC pin converts an input voltage between 0 and
+3.3v into a number between 0 and 1023. The piezo puts out voltages
centered on zero, and not guaranteed to have a peak-to-peak of under
3.3v. So we have two problems: how do we bias the pizeo's output up,
and how do we ensure it stays in range?

I talked to my TAs and posted
on StackExchange, and ended up with this circuit:

To center the pizeo's output halfway between 0 and 3.3v I've used
resistors to make a voltage divider. Since R1 through R4 all have the
same values, as we go around the circuit each will drop the voltage by
the same amount:

To keep voltages from getting too high or low for the ADC I've used
two diodes. With an ideal diode this would keep the ADC between +2.48
and -0.83:

Since in practice the diode will have some resistance and some delay,
this 2x margin should keep us between 0 and +3.3v.

The R5, in parallel with the piezo, is to pull the ADC pin back to the
midpoint.

When running multiple sensors, only the piezo, R5, the diodes, and the
ADC pin need to be duplicated; everything else can be shared.

I assembled a single-sensor version on a breadboard, and tested it
with a cheap
oscilloscope. I'm not totally confident I was using it correctly,
but I think it said the voltage was staying within range, so I
assembled a two-sensor version and hooked up the microcontroller:

I followed the Teensy tutorial
and wrote some code github
to look for a pluck and dump the ADC values around it. Here's what I
saw:

Looks pretty good! I played with the detection and got it to where it
could reliably determine how hard I plucked, and almost always
determine which direction. That "almost always" is probably not good
enough for a musical instrument, though, so I'll need more work there
if I want ...
Please Understand
by samhealy — 2024-04-01T12:33:20.459Z

In which a case is made for worrying about the AI Prompt Box.

Preamble

Technology serves to abstract away nonessential aspects of creative activities, giving us more direct access to their conceptual cores. Few audio engineers pine for the days of flaky reel-to-reel tape machines that unspool at the worst moments; few graphic designers long to swap their Macbooks for bulky old photostat rigs; few mathematicians grieve for the sliderule or the log table.

Yet domain understanding survived those leaps to digital abstraction. Music producers working entirely 'in the box' still know and/or intuit dynamics, frequency equalisation, melody and harmony. Photoshop natives still know and/or intuit colour theory, visual communication, the rules of composition. Recent mathematics and physics graduates experience the beauty of Euler's identity, its vast arms linking trigonometry to arithmetic to analysis to the complex plane, just as vividly as their predecessors did a century ago. Indeed, with the time these modern creatives save by not having to re-ravel 1/4" tape, wrestle with Zipatone and fixative or pore over columns of logarithms (to say nothing of their access to new tools), they can elevate their understanding of their fields' fundamentals[1].

The GenAI Prompt Box declares itself the asymptote of this march to abstraction: a starry empyrean of 'pure', unfettered creative actualisation, in every medium, on the instant, where all pesky concrete details are swept away and the yellow brick road to Perfect Self-Expression is illuminated like a kaleidoscopic runway.

Here are some problems with that dream.

The Worse Angels of Our Nature

Consider the normal distribution of intellectual curiosity in the human population.

The long tail on the right is the minority whose genius and drivenness guarantee that they will seek and find whatever high-hanging epistemic fruit it was their destiny to pluck, no matter how alluring the paths of less resistance on offer.

On the left is the opposing minority whom no amount of goading could make curious. They want simple, earthly pleasures; they are not prepared to invest near-term time towards a long-term goal. They don't care how things work. (And that's fine.)

The majority of us are in the middle, on the bell: we who are naturally curious and eager to understand the world, but also fallible and time-poor and often money-poor. On a ba...
God Coin: A Modest Proposal
by Mahdi Complex — 2024-04-01T12:04:09.157Z

[cross-posted from the EA Forum]

Epistemic status: I may be a little nuts.

Content warning: may contain harm to some sacred cows.

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. (Matt. 6:19-21)

No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.(Matt. 6:24)

The challenges humanity will face in the 21st century, from the governance of emerging technologies to global inequality and existential risks, will require a serious reevaluation of our current institutions and governance frameworks. Nation-states and international organizations appear increasingly ill-equipped to address the complex, interconnected problems we face as a species. In this essay, I propose a radical idea: creating a new cryptocurrency, the "God Coin," to fund decentralized global institutions that can peacefully compete with nation-states and international organizations and represent the interests of humanity as a whole. By leveraging the power of blockchain technology, such institutions could potentially gain the legitimacy and resources needed to tackle our greatest challenges and align economic incentives with universal human values. While the "God Coin" proposal may seem unrealistic, I argue that exploring such unconventional solutions is necessary if we hope to create a future that benefits all of humanity.

The Problem

The Westphalian system, which has dominated global politics since the 17th century, is based on the principle of sovereign nation-states with exclusive authority over their territory and domestic affairs. However, the challenges of the 21st century, particularly the development of advanced artificial intelligence, are likely to strain this system to its breaking point. To effectively address these issues and safeguard the interests of humanity as a whole, we may need to move towards a post-Westphalian world order, with new institutions that transcend national boundaries and represent the collective interests of our species.

These post-Westphalian governance frameworks will be crucial not only for...
Thousands of malicious actors on the future of AI misuse
by Zershaaneh Qureshi — 2024-04-01T10:08:42.357Z

Announcing the results of a 2024 survey by Convergence Analysis. We’ve just posted the executive summary below, but you can read the full report

here

.

In the largest survey of its kind,

Convergence Analysis

surveyed 2,779 malicious actors on how they would misuse AI to catastrophic ends.

In

previous

work

, we’ve explored the difficulty of forecasting AI risk. Existing attempts rely almost exclusively on data from AI experts and professional forecasters. As a result, the perspectives of perhaps the most important actors in AI risk – malicious actors – are underrepresented in current AI safety discourse. This report aims to fill that gap.

Methodology

We selected malicious actors based on whether they would hypothetically end up in "the bad place" in the TV show, The Good Place. This list included members of US-designated terrorist groups, convicted war criminals, and anyone who has ever appeared on Love Island or The Apprentice.

Results

This survey was definitely an infohazard: 19% of participants indicated that they are likely to misuse AI to catastrophic ends. However, the most popular write-in answer was: “Wait, that’s an option?”
“Just ask” is not an effective monitoring regime: 8% of participants indicated that they were already misusing AI. When we followed up with this group, none chose to elaborate.
Move over, biohazards: Surprisingly, 92% of respondents chose “radiological” as their preferred Chemical, Biological, Radiological, or Nuclear (CBRN) threat.
Dear God: 1% of respondents selected “other” as their preferred CBRN threat. Our request for participants to specify “other” yielded answers that were too horrifying to reproduce here.
Even malicious actors have limits: Almost all malicious actors said they’d stop short of permanently destroying humanity’s future. One representative comment reads “anything greater than 50% of the global population is just too far.”
All press is good press: The most evil survey responses (1.2 standard deviations above the mean evilness) were submitted by D-list celebrities vying to claw their way back into the public eye.

A majority of participants agreed to reflect on their experience in a follow-up survey if they successfully misuse AI. Unfortunately, none agreed to register their misuse with us in advance.

If you self-identify as a malicious actor, please get in touch ...
[LINKPOST] Agents Need Not Know Their Purpose
by Capybasilisk — 2024-04-01T10:04:14.523Z

https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.09734

Ensuring artificial intelligence behaves in such a way that is aligned with human values is commonly referred to as the alignment challenge. Prior work has shown that rational agents, behaving in such a way that maximizes a utility function, will inevitably behave in such a way that is not aligned with human values, especially as their level of intelligence goes up. Prior work has also shown that there is no "one true utility function"; solutions must include a more holistic approach to alignment. This paper describes oblivious agents: agents that are architected in such a way that their effective utility function is an aggregation of a known and hidden sub-functions. The hidden component, to be maximized, is internally implemented as a black box, preventing the agent from examining it. The known component, to be minimized, is knowledge of the hidden sub-function. Architectural constraints further influence how agent actions can evolve its internal environment model. We show that an oblivious agent, behaving rationally, constructs an internal approximation of designers' intentions (i.e., infers alignment), and, as a consequence of its architecture and effective utility function, behaves in such a way that maximizes alignment; i.e., maximizing the approximated intention function. We show that, paradoxically, it does this for whatever utility function is used as the hidden component and, in contrast with extant techniques, chances of alignment actually improve as agent intelligence grows.
A Selection of Randomly Selected SAE Features
by CallumMcDougall — 2024-04-01T09:09:49.235Z

Epistemic status - self-evident.

In this post, we interpret a small sample of Sparse Autoencoder features which reveal meaningful computational structure in the model that is clearly highly researcher-independent and of significant relevance to AI alignment.

Motivation

Recent excitement about Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) has been mired by the following question: Do SAE features reflect properties of the model, or just capture correlational structure in the underlying data distribution?

While a full answer to this question is important and will take deliberate investigation, we note that researchers who've spent large amounts of time interacting with feature dashboards think it’s more likely that SAE features capture highly non-trivial information about the underlying models.

Evidently, SAEs are the one true answer to ontology identification and as evidence of this, we show how initially uninterpretable features are often quite interpretable with further investigation / tweaking of dashboards. In each case, we describe how we make the best possible use of feature dashboards to ensure we aren't fooling ourselves or reading tea-leaves.

Note - to better understand these results, we highly recommend readers who are unfamiliar with SAE Feature Dashboards briefly refer to the relevant section of Anthropic's publication (whose dashboard structure we emulate below). TLDR - to understand what concepts are encoded by features, we look for patterns in the text which causes them to activate most strongly.

Case Studies in SAE Features

Scripture Feature

We open with a feature that seems to activate strongly on examples of sacred text, specifically from the works of Christianity.

Scripture Feature

Even though interpreting SAEs seems bad, and it can really make you mad, seeing features like this reminds us to always look on the bright side of life.

Perseverance Feature

We register lower confidence in this feature than others, but the top activating examples all seem to present a consistent theme of perseverance and loyalty in the face of immense struggle (this was confirmed with GPT4[1]). We’re very excited at how semantic this feature is rather than merely syntactic, since a huge barrier to future progress in dictionary learning is whether we can find features associated with high-level semantic concepts like these.

Perseveran

...
[April Fools' Day] Introducing Open Asteroid Impact
by Linch — 2024-04-01T08:14:15.800Z
Link: https://openasteroidimpact.org/

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

Hillary Clinton, who is still alive

I'm proud and excited to announce the founding of my new startup, Open Asteroid Impact, where we redirect asteroids towards Earth for the benefit of humanity. Our mission is to have as high an impact as possible.

Below, I've copied over the one-pager I've sent potential investors and early employees:

Name: Open Asteroid Impact

Launch Date: April 1 2024

Website: openasteroidimpact.org

Mission: To have as high an impact as possible

Pitch: We are an asteroid mining company. When most people think about asteroid mining, they think of getting all the mining equipment to space and carefully mining and refining ore in space, before bringing the ore back down in a controlled landing. But humanity has zero experience in Zero-G mining in the vacuum of space. This is obviously very inefficient. Instead, it’s much more efficient to bring the asteroids down to Earth first, and mine it on the ground.

Furthermore, we are first and foremost an asteroid mining *safety* company. That is why we need to race as fast as possible to be at the forefront of asteroid redirection, so more dangerous companies don’t get there before us, letting us set safety standards.

Cofounder and CEO: Linch Zhang

Other employees: Austin Chen (CTO), Zach Weinersmith (Chief Culinary Officer), Annie Vu (ESG Analyst)

Board: tbd

Competitors: DeepMine, Anthropocene

Valuation: Astronomical

Design Principles: Bigger, Faster, Safer

Organizational Structure: for-profit C corp owned by B corp owned by public benefit corporation owned by 501c4 owned by 501c3 with a charter set through a combination of regulations from Imperial France, tlatoani Aztec Monarchy, Incan federalism, and Qin-dynasty China to avoid problems with Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem

Safety Statement: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from human-directed asteroids should be a global priority alongside other civilizational risks such as nuclear war and artificial general intelligence”

You can learn more about us on our website.