trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Lessons from 'Famine, Affluence, and Morality' and its reflection on today.
by Mayank Modi — 2022-10-27T17:20:30.531Z

"What's the point of reading all those books, if we don't learn from them?"

Introduction

The above dialogue is inspired by one of the arguments Peter Singer wrote while concluding his original essay 'Famine, Affluence, and Morality', which went on to become a pillar for the international effective altruistic moment. Known for his works on animal ethics and global eradication of poverty, Singer wrote this essay in 1972 upon realising a large-scale famine in the Bengal region of India and pitiful consideration from affluent nations towards providing aid to the people suffering. His essay was read worldwide and aged well. Later his recognition, Singer went on publish several other works in the same field and become one of the most valid and influential philosophers of the twenty-first century.[1]

Lessons To Learn

Right from the very start, Singer asked to change the entire moral conceptual scheme of the society that is allowing us to take the value of life for granted. As shaped by the modern era, for some people, death by starvation is not considered such a big deal among other contemporary measures of demise like- cancer or death by natural causes, or being caught in a war, or fighting your inner demons. Singer carefully guided those people to read no further his essay. As for others, he argued a general policy should be adopted- if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.

The above-mentioned quote may seem like wishful thinking, or a moral goal to reach, or an obvious rule of thumb, or a ripoff from the Spiderman, depending on the category you belong to. But in reality, today, very few people can actually adhere to such an orthodox principle, because most consider it a little too orthodox to follow; and/or they are already doing the best they can. The latter is the bread and butter of the populous regions and hence Singer clarifies what he meant by anything of comparable moral importance in detail, followed by the example of a child in a pond which is well-known and widely used as an analogy in various forms today.[2]

One of the factors which allow people to abstain from following the above-mentioned principle is Proximity or simply put, the location of where they are and where help is required. This also includes those who are willing t...
Is the Orthogonality Thesis true for humans?
by Noosphere89 — 2022-10-27T14:41:28.778Z

Basically, the Orthogonality Thesis is arguing that intelligence and goals do not correlate, at least in the limit of infinite compute and data. That is, minds and goals are very separate.

Now the question is, is the Orthogonality Thesis at least approximately true in humans?

Specifically, are behaviors and goals systematically correlated with intelligence, or is there very little correlation between goals/behavior and intelligence?

Also, what implications does the Orthogonality Thesis being true or false in humans imply about X-risk and technology?
Historicism in the math-adjacent sciences
by mrcbarbier — 2022-10-27T14:38:25.860Z

I use the word “historicism” to designate one of at least three distinct epistemologies or scientific methods, together with reductionism and functionalism. These epistemologies have clearly not been developped to the same extent, and most sciences favor only one of them, or have them verbally entangled. Linguistics is a very interesting field to build intuitions, as it has distinct subfields that are neatly dominated by only one such epistemology, with examples of all three.

I will call historical object an object whose current state is best explained, not by dissecting the object, nor by looking at other objects around it, but by looking at its previous states or predecessors.

A very useful archetype is etymology.

Why do we use the word “cat” to mean a cat?

The classic explanation is, to quote etymonline.com, that it comes from:

Old English catt (c. 700) "domestic cat," from West Germanic (c. 400-450), from Proto-Germanic *kattuz (source also of Old Frisian katte, Old Norse köttr, Dutch kat, Old High German kazza, German Katze), from Late Latin cattus.

The near-universal European word now, it appeared in Europe as Latin catta (Martial, c. 75 C.E.), Byzantine Greek katta (c. 350) and was in general use on the continent by c. 700, replacing Latin feles. Probably ultimately Afro-Asiatic (compare Nubian kadis, Berber kadiska, both meaning "cat").

This is a useful explanation, in that it provides a clear reason why the English word is “cat” rather than “glorphle”. It tells you that you could go to any European country and have a reasonable prior expectation for what the word should sound like.

In contrast, we don’t learn much by trying to split “cat” into c, a & t – at least not like we would learn something about water by splitting it into 2 H + O. There is no useful sense in which the meaning of “cat” is a combination of the meanings of each letter.

It’s not much more useful to compare and contrast it with other words in the same language, such as “cattle” and “cadmium”.

There are some weak ‘repulsive’ forces trying to prevent words from sounding too alike, but homophones are still all over the place (consider that in southern French, /le/ can mean ugly, milk, plural the, song, legacy…). There are also much weaker ‘attractive’ forces that sometimes lead words with related meanings to become alike, but whether they apply or not is largely due to chance – to hi...
How Risky Is Trick-or-Treating?
by jefftk — 2022-10-27T14:10:03.440Z

content warning: discussion of child fatalities

I've seen this chart going around:

Sperling and Smith created
it from NHTSA
FARS data, and there have been lots
of
news
stories
about it or the underlying data. Some people have a "lets make
costumes brighter" angle, some see this as ammunition in the fight
against car-centric culture (which I support), some people want to
move Halloween earlier in the day. But I think everyone is missing
the point: Halloween is actually one of the safest days to be
out walking as a kid.

Let's look at the data. I started by replicating the chart to verify
I was doing it correctly (code):

The dip on February 29th is mostly just that this day only occurs once every
four years, so it has about a quarter the deaths you'd expect. But what about
the spike on 4/30? On April 30th 1992 someone drove
their car into a large group of 3rd graders on a field trip, and
one of them died. It turns out the FARS records can include cases
where someone else died in the same accident. Filtering to
just the records representing deaths I get:

The data available actually goes back to 1982 and now runs to 2020, so
we can expand it a bit:

We can also break down by age, since "child" can mean a range of
things and most people are likely thinking mostly about younger
children:

All this is to confirm the original chart: more children do die on Halloween
than on a typical day. But I still don't think that's a reason to
keep your kids home on Halloween, even when you set aside the
consideration that Halloween is an especially fun time to be a child
pedestrian.

The issue is, there are a lot more kids out on Halloween than the
typical day. If you learned that more people died in car crashes in
the US (42k/y) than in Paraguay (1.6k/y) you wouldn't conclude that
Paraguay's roads are safer: the US has 50x more people than Paraguay!
We would ideally scale the initial chart by the number of children out
walking on any given day, but I don't think anyone has numbers on
this. Very roughly, though, maybe it's something like 5x as many
people (kids, parents, grandparents) out on foot on Halloween than the
typical day?

Every pedestrian is rolling some dice. The dice are pretty favorable:
of the ~70M people under age 18 in the US only 320 died in 2020 by
being hit by a car. But you still might want to a...
Covid 10/27/22: Another Origin Story
by Zvi — 2022-10-27T13:40:00.616Z

The big story this week was a new preprint claiming to show that Covid-19 had an unnatural origin. For several days, this was a big story with lots of arguing about it, lots of long threads, lots of people accusing others of bad faith or being idiots or not understanding undergraduate microbiology, and for some reason someone impersonating a virologist to spy on Kelsey Piper.

Then a few days later all discussion of it seemed to vanish. It wasn’t that everyone suddenly came to an agreement to move on. All sides simply decided that this was no longer the Current Thing. See the section for further discussion. In the end I did not update much, so I am mostly fine with this null result.

There’s also more Gain of Function research looking to create a new pandemic. There was a lot of consensus among the comments and those I know that this work must stop, yet little in the way of good ways to stop it. Several people gave versions of ‘have you considered violence or otherwise going outside the law?’ and my answer is no. While the dangers here are real, they are not at anything like the levels that would potentially justify such actions.

Note on Deleted Post from This Week

Finally, I need to address the post that got taken down in a bit more detail. I want to thank Saloni in particular for quickly and efficiently making some of my mistakes clear to me both quickly and clearly, with links, so I could within about an hour realize I’d made a huge mistake and the whole post structure and conclusions no longer made sense, so I took the post down. Please disregard it. Everyone has been great about understanding that mistakes happen, and I want you to know I appreciate it, and hope it helps myself and others similarly address errors in the future.

How did the mistakes happen? Ultimately, it is 100% my fault, on multiple counts, no excuses. What are some of the things I did wrong, so I can hopefully minimize chances they happen again?

My logic was flawed. I wasn’t thinking about the power of the study properly. I let the truly awful takes and absence of good takes defending colonoscopies make me too confident in the lack of available good takes doing so, and let that bias my thinking. I got feedback before posting, but I did not get enough or get it from the right sources. I heard everyone talking about ‘first RCT’ in various forms and failed to notice it was only t...
Why are probabilities represented as real numbers instead of rational numbers?
by Yaakov T — 2022-10-27T11:23:39.300Z

I have started going through Jaynes’ book on probability. In Chapter 1 (pg 17) he lists the basic desiderata for the theory. The first desiderata is that “Degrees of plausibility are represented by the real numbers”. I understand why we want to use numbers, and why we want continuity, but why do we specifically want to use real numbers instead of rational numbers?
Five Areas I Wish EAs Gave More Focus
by Prometheus — 2022-10-27T06:13:41.970Z

The Effective Altruism Community has been an unexpected and pleasant surprise. I remember wishing there was a group out there that shared at least one of my ideals. Instead, I found one that shares three: global reduction of suffering, rationality, and longtermism. However, with each conference I attend, posts I read on the forum, and organizations being created, I notice most of them fall into a few distinct categories. Global development/health, animal welfare, biosecurity, climate change, nuclear risk/global conflict, and AI Safety. Don’t get me wrong, these are some of the most important areas to possibly be working on (I’m currently focusing 90% of my energy on AI Safety, myself). But I think there are at least five other areas that could benefit substantially from a small growth in interest.

Interplanetary Species Expansion

This might come as the biggest surprise to be on the list. After all, space exploration is expensive and difficult. But there are very few out there who are actually working on how to change humanity from being a Single Point of Failure System. If we are serious about longtermism and truly decreasing x-risk, this might be one of the most crucial achievements needed. Any x-risk is most likely greatly reduced by this, even perhaps AGI*. The sooner this process begins, the greater the reduction in risk, since this will be a very slow process. One comparatively low-cost research area is studying biospheres and how a separate ecosystem and climate could be created in complete isolation. And this can be studied on Earth. It’s been decades since someone has attempted creating a

closed ecological system

, and advancement in this could even improve our chances of surviving on Earth if the climate proves inhospitable.

Life Extension

~100,000 people die from

age-related diseases

every day. ~100 billion people have died in our history. (Read that again.) Aging causes an immense amount of suffering, both to those who suffer from it for years, and to those who must grieve. It also causes irrecoverable loss, and is perhaps the greatest tragedy that is treated as normal. If every person who dies of preventable diseases like malaria is a tragedy, I do not see the difference in those dying of other causes also being a tragedy. Even if you do believe extending the human lifespan is not important, consider the alternative ca...
Apply to the Redwood Research Mechanistic Interpretability Experiment (REMIX), a research program in Berkeley
by maxnadeau — 2022-10-27T01:32:44.750Z

This winter, Redwood Research is running a coordinated research effort on mechanistic interpretability of transformer models. We’re excited about recent advances in mechanistic interpretability and now want to try to scale our interpretability methodology to a larger group doing research in parallel.

REMIX participants will work to provide mechanistic explanations of model behaviors, using our causal scrubbing methodology to formalize and evaluate interpretability hypotheses. We hope to produce many more explanations of model behaviors akin to our recent work investigating behaviors of

GPT-2-small

, toy language models, and models trained on algorithmic tasks. We think this work is a particularly promising research direction for mitigating existential risks from advanced AI systems (more in

Goals

and

FAQ

).

Since mechanistic interpretability is currently a small sub-field of machine learning, we think it’s plausible that REMIX participants could make important discoveries that significantly further the field. We also think participants will learn skills valuable for many styles of interpretability research, and also for ML research more broadly.

Apply

here

by Sunday, November 13th [DEADLINE EXTENDED] to be a researcher in the program. Apply sooner if you’d like to start early (details below) or receive an earlier response.

Some key details:

We expect to accept 30-50 participants.
The research program will take place in Berkeley, CA.
We plan to have the majority of researchers participate during the months of December and/or January (depending on availability) although we may invite some to begin earlier and are open to some starting as soon as possible.
We expect researchers to participate for a month minimum, and (all else equal) will prefer applicants who are able to come for longer. We’ll pay for housing and travel, and also pay researchers for their time. We’ll clarify the payment structure prior to asking people to commit to the program.
We’re interested in some participants acting as team leaders who would help on-board and provide research advice to other participants. This would involve arriving early to get experience with our tools and research directions and participating for a longer period (~2 months). You can indicate interest in this role in the application.
We’re excited about applicants with a range of backgrou

...
Quantum Suicide and Aumann's Agreement Theorem
by Isaac King — 2022-10-27T01:32:43.282Z

Alice and Bob want to know which interpretation of quantum mechanics is true. They devise an experiment: Bob will enter a box, where a quantum random number generator kills him with 99.99% probability.

Conditional on Many-Worlds being true, Bob expects to survive with 100% probability. Conditional on Copenhagen being true, Bob expects to survive with only 0.01% probability. So if Bob exits the box alive, this is strong evidence for him in favor of Many-Worlds.

Alice on the other hand, calculates a 0.01% probability of seeing Bob exit the box alive, no matter which interpretation is true. Moreover, she knows that in the world where she sees Bob come out alive, Bob will be convinced that Many-Worlds is true, and this is again independent of which theory is really true.

As such, if Bob exits the box alive, Bob should update strongly in favor of Many-Worlds being true, and Alice should leave her prior probability unchanged, as she has gained no evidence in either direction.

But if Alice and Bob are fully rational Bayesian agents with the same priors, Aumann's Agreement Theorem says that they should land on the same posterior probability for the truth of Many-Worlds after Bob exits the box. Any evidence that's valid for Bob should be equally valid for Alice, and they shouldn't be able to "agree to disagree" on what probability to assign to the Many-Worlds interpretation.

What resolves this seeming contradiction?
Reslab Request for Information: EA hardware projects
by Joel Becker — 2022-10-26T21:13:10.695Z

TL;DR

We want to hear ideas for physical engineering projects - that is, hardware prototypes moving around atoms (not just bits) - from the EA and/or longtermist community. Submit here!

Introducing Reslab

There has been a lot of talk about EA needing to take more large-scale action recently (e.g. Longtermist EA needs more Phase 2 work). And there likely exist cases where it would be helpful for action plans to start with small-scale hardware prototypes/MVPs. We came across such a case recently: as participants on SHELTER Weekend, we realised that the smallest scale MVPs for civilizational shelters often required technical implementation and tests.

We are starting Resilience Lab (or ‘Reslab’) to build capacity for prototyping hardware ideas with relevance to areas identified as important to the long-term future.

At this stage, we would love to hear from people with more project ideas, or an interest in working on someone else’s submitted idea. We will award $200, $150, and $50 prizes to the first-, second-, and third-best ideas respectively!

Long-term goal

Our intent is to develop a long-term resource to support EA and/or longtermist hardware projects. If successful, this pilot project would lead to a dedicated space with more full time staff and projects spinning out.

Which projects are suitable?

Any projects that:

Are primarily focused on EA and/or longtermist cause areas, and
Could make substantial progress with materials funding of up to $100k and project ownership by a junior mechanical engineer and intern for six months.

To give you a better sense of what we’re interested in, here are some ideas we have for possible projects:

Scaling of mushroom manufacturing techniques.
Positive pressure air filtration system kits.
Disinfection treatment testing.
PPE development and testing.
ALLFED technical development projects (e.g. open source hardware designs for greenhouse construction, seaweed farming, or food processing).

Submit your hardware project ideas here!

The deadline to be considered for prizes is January 31st, 2023.
A list of Petrov buttons
by philh — 2022-10-26T20:50:04.025Z

A thing people sometimes do in relation to Petrov day, is to have a button. And if anyone presses the button, something negative happens.

I'd like to know how often the button gets pressed, so I compiled a list of all the times people have done this, that I'm aware of, and the outcome. Also, for the events I was at in person, I'm not sure there's an existing write-up of what happened, so I'm adding details.

Here's the list. As I learn about other events, past or future, I'll try to keep it updated. (LW readers: I'm not going to keep it updated here. Read on my blog for the most recent version.)

2018, Oxford/Seattle: Failure

Parties happened simultaneously in these two places. I was at the Oxford one, which was actually camping in a field outside Oxford. We both had laptops connected to a web app.

What we were told: anyone at either party could press a button to launch a nuke at the other party. It would spend 45 minutes in transit, and then the other party would have to destroy a cake. But they'd be warned of launch, and be able to launch one of their own in the intervening period. I don't remember the time limit, probably like two or three hours.

What we weren't told: there was some chance of false alarms.

What happened: the Oxford party got notified of an incoming launch. We opened a Facebook chat with Seattle like "wtf guys". They convinced us that no one at their party had pressed the button. I don't remember if we'd considered the possibility of false alarms before messaging them, but given the context, they're not exactly something to dismiss out-of-hand.

We made it through right up to the time limit with no one pressing either button. My understanding of what happened next is that the time on the Seattle laptop ticked down to zero. Someone there pressed the button, which they now believed to be disabled, in celebration. The time on the laptop and the time on the server were slightly out of sync. The button was not disabled. A nuke got launched.

At any rate, Seattle convinced us that something along those lines had happened. We did not launch a retaliatory nuke. (This was still an option because we had one inbound.) We sent them a video putting our cake in the fire.

2019, LessWrong (+ Raemon's house): Success

125 people were sent codes that could be used to take down the front page of LessWrong for 24 hours.

Additionally, Raemon held a party at his house, ...