trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The Risk of Orbital Debris and One (Cheap) Way to Mitigate It
by clans — 2022-12-19T03:16:00.092Z
Link: https://locationtbd.home.blog/2022/12/17/how-free-radar-data-can-save-billions-of-dollars/

I worked as a researcher on orbital debris during university and now work full time on this and adjacent problems. My full write-up on the approach for using cheap radar data to assess orbital debris is here on my blog.

Orbital Debris

There has been a considerable increase in the number of things humans have lofted into space, specifically low-Earth orbit (LEO) in the past ~6 years. In 2016, there were about 6,000 satellites that had ever been launched into space, according to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs. Of that, there were about 4,000 satellites orbiting the planet, many of them launched before the turn of the century by the USA and USSR between 1957 and 1999. At the time of writing this post (EOY 2022), there are about 8,500 satellites in orbit, and more than 12,000 satellites total have been thrown into space by humans.

Earth is a shared resource

, and LEO is no different. The exponential nature of the growth in LEO use via satellites is not a harmless thing and could result in some nasty outcomes, namely Kessler Syndrome. When objects in orbit break up, the debris that is created often does not immediately deorbit and depending on the altitude, it can remain floating in the sky for eons. Except it doesn’t float – it careens around the planet at thousands of miles per hour with ludicrous amounts of kinetic energy. The danger is obvious, but what isn’t is the positive feedback loop of destruction and debris that feeds on the now numerous satellites in orbit: Kessler Syndrome. Even without the syndrome, space debris is still a dangerous and rather expensive threat – assets worth billions of dollars in space have to be monitored increasingly carefully to guard against collisions and

it doesn’t always work

.

Space Environmentalism

Dr. Moriba Jah, who was recently named a MacArthur Fellow for his work on the subject, is an astrodynamicist and prominent researcher on the subject of orbital debris. He and his colleagues have developed a platform for aggregating various data sources into a complete catalogue of space objects,

ASTRIAGraph

, as well as visualization tools like

Wayfinder

, available for free use in the public domain. In particular, the novel statistical methods employed in these tools highlight the discrepancies prominent between multiple data sources: data on space objects is often anything but tidy.

Researchers like Jah, including him...
Why I think that teaching philosophy is high impact
by Eleni Angelou — 2022-12-19T03:11:38.363Z

Crossposted from the EA Forum: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9cCyPE2EDpjpJvqnF/why-i-think-that-teaching-philosophy-is-high-impact

I wrote this post quickly because it's better to share an imperfect post than to never write anything at all.

In a recent post, I mentioned some thoughts about teaching and communication mostly considering some classes I taught on AI risk during my Intro to Philosophy course this fall.

I think it's easy to agree that teaching is in principle a way to have high impact by directly influencing people's intellectual lives and careers. But here I want to argue that there is something special about teaching philosophy: a philosophy classroom is one of the few places in the world where all sorts of arguments can be heard and discussed and where everyone is invited to question their experiences and very own thoughts.

What I did this fall

For that reason, I thought that having a whole section on Science, Technology, and Society with a focus on AI was worth the while. In particular, we discussed some bits of Chalmer's Singularity, we watched a good chunk of this video by Rob Miles, and read excerpts from Ord's Precipice and Bostrom's Superintelligence.

Most of the students had very thoughtful contributions to understanding how a technological singularity could happen and what it would mean for humanity. I asked them to reflect on it as a thought experiment as we weren't trying to produce actual forecasting results or AI timelines.

Overall, I felt that a philosophy classroom is the best place to discuss difficult and controversial topics and have everyone engaged in the conversation. Those that were easy to agree that AI risk is a plausible scenario had something to argue about and so did those that considered it unlikely or couldn't see if it makes sense or not.

I keep saying that a philosophy classroom is great for such conversations because it really encourages arguing and people have to explain why they think what they think and find the right words to articulate their thoughts and make communication possible and effective.

Their final essay was to construct their ideal future and discuss the role of science, technology, and philosophy in that future. Many of them seemed to be concerned about the role of future technologies and wanted people to philosophize in the ideal fut...
A template for doing annual reviews
by peterslattery — 2022-12-19T03:09:28.265Z

Quick post because I am starting to think about it and want to promote the practice.

Looking for a way to review your year and plan for the next?
This is an annual review/planner template that I made in google sheets.
It incorporates questions from Alex Vermeer, a few of my own, and some additional sheets to add goals and plans for the future.
It's also prioritised so that you can choose how many questions you want it to be.
Please feel free to copy, share and modify it.
http://bit.ly/2MhHc0W

Other resources

https://alexvermeer.com/8760hours/ - the original material that I developed my spreadsheet from

Example of someone else's process Annual Reviews Aren't Just for Organizations - Kyel Fish

Lots of New Year Review Resources - Lynette Bye
Event [Berkeley]: Alignment Collaborator Speed-Meeting
by AlexMennen — 2022-12-19T02:24:20.666Z

If you’re working in alignment research, or would like to be, and you would like help finding researchers with whom to collaborate, this event is for you.

Inspired by the structure of a speed-dating event, participants will spend the first two hours in short one-on-one conversations with each other, changing partners at regular intervals, all for the goal of assessing fit as collaborators. The event will end with one hour of free-for-all socializing.

Please RSVP through Eventbrite or Facebook:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/688222332896562/
Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/alignment-collaborator-speed-meeting-tickets-490832281567

The event will take place at Constellation, on Jan 14, 2023.

Instructions for access:
Upon arrival at the building (at the Shattuck Ave. entrance) text phone number (510) 213-8521, and one of the event hosts will come down to let you up. Feel free to arrive as soon as 2:45 PM.
An easier(?) end to the electoral college
by ejacob — 2022-12-19T02:09:46.162Z

There's currently a campaign to do an end-run around the United States' electoral college system, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. (There's a lot of reasons why you might or might not want to abandon the electoral college system, which I will not discuss here.) If you've never heard of NaPoVoInterCo I recommend this fun and animated CGP Grey explanation. Basically, signatory states agree to send electors for whoever wins the national popular vote for president, but only when enough states have signed on that they have a controlling majority of the electoral college. In theory, this would mean the electors meeting to choose the president just vote for the winner of the national popular vote, not whoever won their state. (As Grey mentions, this would almost certainly end up with a supreme court fight if the winner of the electoral college and the national popular vote were not the same person.)

It occurred to me the other day that a major party presidential candidate stands a good chance to pull off a similar end-run, given the right conditions. I don't think this plan is likely to be attempted by anyone currently in politics who would be in a position to do so, and I can think of a lot of reasons why it might not work. But the idea interested me enough that I thought I'd write it out.

Here is the plan: Candidate X supports replacing the electoral college with a national popular vote. All they have to do is go on TV and say "I believe in democracy! In fact, I believe in it so much that I don't want to be president without winning a popular vote. So if it turns out that I win the electoral college but not the national popular vote, I would like my electors to vote for Candidate Y." (A professional speech writer should fit in more applause lights; public support and pressure would be critical for this scheme to work.)

This might make X's party election strategists explode with frustration, since the candidate keeping their word means they now have fewer ways to win. However, if they wait a little while, they may see that the announcement results in pressure for the opponent to make the same pledge (and ultimately, this is the goal). Provided both candidates believe in a national popular vote over the electoral college, or at least want to look like they "love democracy" (which, I'll grant, is not a sure thing), it's plausible that Candidate Y wou...
How Death Feels
by sisyphus — 2022-12-18T23:47:47.117Z

[Epistemic Status: rambly and exploratory, hoping for some serious discussion]

It's 2030, the AGI takeoff ended badly and humanity is wiped out by a misaligned AGI. You die. The end.

The end? The above is a cliché many of us have in mind when discussing scenarios where death is involved. Death is often talked about as the final chapter. You're just... gone.

But what does death actually feel like from a subjective point of view?

In an infinite multiverse where every possible outcome is realized (e.g. a Tegmark level III/IV world), there are guaranteed to be instances where "you" are "resurrected", in the sense that there exist computations that possess your exact memory and personality before you died and that will continue to be run after "experiencing death". An example would be a resurrection simulation of you being carried out by an FAI in branches where humanity has succeeded in tackling the alignment problem. The probability of being resurrected does not matter, as long as it is non-zero you should expect to feel resurrected in an infinite multiverse since it is guaranteed to happen.

Therefore, we should expect "death" to feel like falling asleep, since we are guaranteed to continue experiencing observer moments after our death in our subjective point of view. If you allow identity to be extended over time (like almost all of us do) as a chain of similar observer-moments, then the logical conclusion is that you will never "die" in the sense of experiencing nothing. "Experiencing death" is a tautologically meaningless statement. Oblivion doesn't "feel" like anything because you can't "feel" at all if you are gone.

This argument is quite similar to the argument usually made for quantum immortality, where you can never experience death, since death is the cessation of all experiences. The difference here is that the quantum immortality argument is generalized to include other possible worlds (e.g. simulations of us in universes with different physical laws), not just Everett branches, and emphasis is given to resurrection simulations instead of "surviving branches".

Therefore, we can never truly "die".
Why Are Women Hot?
by Jacob Falkovich — 2022-12-18T23:20:38.638Z

Cross-posted, as always, from Putanumonit.

Why are women hot?

They just are is not an unreasonable answer, but it’s not like women are hot entirely by coincidence. Women put a lot of effort into their appearance. They care a great deal about their looks, as does everyone around them.

Why do women want to be hot?

The default answer: it’s sex appeal. Women are hot so that men will want to have sex with them. Men wanting to have sex with a woman results in her getting things she wants like companionship, resources, and even sex.

And it’s undeniable that men like having sex with hot women. Or at least, that they like imagining having sex with hot women. Although actually, the sort of women that men imagine having sex with the most is not the sort that most men describe as beautiful, which also isn’t who they marry, which itself isn’t the look that most women are trying to achieve. Taking a careful look at men looking at women, whether they be ancient sculptors or club VIPs or Tinder matches, reveals that something is missing with the default answer.

There is more to female beauty than meets the eye of the male beholder.

A Fat Bitch. What Could This Mean?

A good place to start our investigation of female beauty is

Dispelling Beauty Lies: The Truth About Feminine Beauty

by an evil vizier in charge of the sultan’s harem. What lies does it dispel?

Vizier notes that models advertising fashion are often not very beautiful. Heroin chic mannequins picked by gay male designers for the catwalk or “body positivity” models cast to align the brand with a political message, neither of those are maximally attractive to the majority of men. Simply asking men what they find beautiful is also fallible, with several reasons listed for both men and women to lie in public about whom they find beautiful. Only revealed preference is to be trusted.

Men’s preferences reveal a lot. Noticing a striking convergence between ancient statues of love goddesses from Minos to the Indus, “odalisque” paintings commissioned by Romantic era aristocrats, Japanese anime waifus, bestselling sex dolls, and the modern American’s porn browsing history Vizier arrives at the following timeless and universal list:

hourglass figure with a tiny waist-to-hip ratio
round “bubble” butts
big boobs. way bigger than you’d think. still bigger. we’re talking really huge
not too thin, but thinner than the average woman today
youthful

...
Can we, in principle, know the measure of counterfactual quantum branches?
by sisyphus — 2022-12-18T22:07:56.736Z

In the Many-Worlds Interpretation, the amplitude of the wave function is seen as describing the "measure of existence". We can tell the existence measure of potential future Everett branches, but can we, even in principle, know the measure of existence for counterfactual branches? E.g. the measure of existence of an Everett branch where WW2 never happened?
Boston Solstice 2022 Retrospective
by jefftk — 2022-12-18T19:00:03.562Z

Last night was our first full in-person Boston Secular Solstice since

2019, and I was
back in the "music director and host" role while Taymon did most of
the organizing. Overall I feel like it went pretty well! People had
a good time, minimal technical issues, lots of good feedback afterwards.

We had about 35 people, which was about right for the space during the
event. If we had had a few more we still would have been able to seat
them with folding chairs in a place where they couldn't see very
well. This was a bit too many people, though, for moving around easily
during intermission. We had about 28 chairs plus room for about 12 on
couches, and they weren't all full. Here's the layout I used:

Pretty similar layout to last time, but with
only one floor futon and slightly tighter spacing in the back rows.

We had the windows partway open and an air purifier running at each
end of the room, but in retrospect I wish I had asked some of the
attendees if they could bring along additional purifiers. We didn't
require masks, but I put up a sign saying: something like:

Visiting
elderly relatives this season? Have events you'd be really sad to
miss? Consider a mask ↓

The sign was above a box of n95s, and I think I saw several people in
the kind of mask I put out.

I set up a PA speaker on a stand just to the left of the projection,
and amplified everything: keyboard, electronic drums, overlays, a mic
on a stand for me at the keyboard, and a mic for the reader or lead
singer. I was worried that the big speaker on the stand would feel to
obtrusive, but with it up by the ceiling I think it was fine. Getting
it high and angled
down mostly avoided the problem where it's too loud for people at
the front and too quiet for people at the back. In past years we
haven't used amplification, but with the sound of air purifiers and
most speakers masked we really needed it.

Alex led half the songs and I led the other half. Alex was great, and
I'm very happy he stepped up, but in future years I'd love to get a
wider range of song leaders. I'd also prefer not to lead any myself,
so I can focus on playing. If you're interested in helping lead songs,
let me know!

We didn't have separate person adjusting levels and running sound
during the event, but Miranda helpfully accepted being volunteered for
the role. I had the mixer where I cou...
Take 11: "Aligning language models" should be weirder.
by Charlie Steiner — 2022-12-18T14:14:53.767Z

As a writing exercise, I'm writing an AI Alignment Hot Take Advent Calendar - one new hot take, written every day some days for 25 days. I have now procrastinated enough that I probably have enough hot takes.

People often talk about aligning language models, either to promote it, or to pooh-pooh it. I'm here to do both.

Sometimes, aligning language models just means trying to get a present-day model not to say bad outputs that would embarrass your organization. There is a cottage industry of papers on arxiv doing slightly different variants of RLHF against bad behavior, measuring slightly different endpoints. These people deserve their light mockery for diluting the keyword "alignment."

The good meaning of aligning language models is to use "get language models to not say bad things" as a toy problem to teach us new, interesting skills that we can apply to future powerful AI. For example, you could see the recent paper "Discovering Latent Knowledge in Language Models Without Supervision" as using "get language models to not lie" as a toy problem to teach us something new and interesting about interpretability. Aligning language models with an eye towards the future doesn't have to just be interpretability research, either, it can be anything that builds skills that the authors expect will be useful for aligning future AI, like self-reflection as explored in Constitutional AI.

If you're brainstorming ideas for research aligning language models, I encourage you to think about connections between current language models and future AI that navigates the real world. In particular, connections between potential alignment strategies for future AIs and situations that language models can be studied in.

Here's an example: Constitutional AI uses a model to give feedback on itself, which is incorporated into RL fine-tuning. But we expect future AI that navigates the real world to not merely be prompted to self-reflect as part of the training process, but to self-reflect during deployment - an AI that is acting in the real world will have to consider actions that affect its own hardware and software. We could study this phenomenon using a language model (or language-model-based-agent) by giving it access to outputs that affect itself in a more direct way than adding to an RL signal, and trying to make progress on getting a language model to behave well under those conditions...
Bad at Arithmetic, Promising at Math
by cohenmacaulay — 2022-12-18T05:40:37.088Z

n-Cohesive Rings

Definition: Let n be a positive integer. We define an n-cohesive ring to be a commutative ring S such that, for every prime p dividing the characteristic of S, pn divides the order of the multiplicative group S×. We define an n-cohesive ideal of a ring R to be an ideal I of R such that the quotient ring R/I is an n-cohesive ring.

Example: Z/25 is a 4-cohesive ring. The multiplicative group R× is the set {1,3,5,7,9,11,13,15,17,19,21,23,25,27,29,31}, which consists of the 16 elements of R that are relatively prime to 25. The order of the multiplicative group R× is 16, which is divisible by 24, so R is an n-cohesive ring for n=4.

Example: Consider the ideal (8) of the ring Z. The multiplicative group of Z/I is {1,3,5,7}, whose order is 4. The highest power of 2 that divides the order of this group is 22, which means that I is a 2-cohesive ideal.

The notion of an n-cohesive ring, and the dual notion of n-cohesive ideals, do not, to the best of my knowledge, appear in the mathematical literature. I know of no definitions off the top of my head that are equivalent to n-cohesiveness.[1] The definition is rigorous, logically sound, and there exist nontrivial examples of n-cohesive ideals. A problem like "classify all 5-cohesive ideals of Z" strikes me as not completely trivial. A problem like "classify all 5-cohesive ideals of [insert number ring here]" strikes me as potentially very difficult (though I am not a number theorist). If someone came along and proved a strong classification result about n-cohesive ideals in number rings, they could probably publish that result in a mid-tier algebra or number theory journal. I could easily imagine handing it off as a research project to an undergraduate learning about unit groups, or maybe even a grad student who was particularly bored.

The most interesting thing about the concept of n-cohesive ideals, however, is that it was not invented by a human.

The examples of n-cohesiveness given above did involve some human handholding and cherrypicking (we will talk more about this shortly), but, I ...
Overconfidence bubbles
by kaputmi — 2022-12-18T02:07:32.122Z

Overconfidence is easy to maintain if, and only if, it goes untested. This is the great trap found in many “soft sciences.” If feedback loops are short enough, with high enough fidelity, authority is of no great independent significance because it is derived from accuracy and its validity is updated regularly. But when feedback loops are long and noisy, authority bubbles can grow to enormous size.

You will be hard-pressed to find such authority bubbles in the world of chess. If a charismatic leader becomes a proponent of 1. a4 as a new paradigm of opening theory, he will be hard-pressed to find followers because the local IM will blow him off the board.

Much easier in macroeconomics, for example, where theories must largely go untested — because there's no way to test them. Easiest of all in politics, where truth is adjudicated by popular vote.

There are a couple of interesting thoughts to chase down by comparing macroeconomics to chess. I think of it this way: what if, instead of playing through the game, we were forced to evaluate the position at move 15 and declare a winner?

First, it would be difficult to know who the best chess player in the world actually is, because there would be lots of disagreement about who won a given game. This disagreement would be grounded in reasonable argument on both sides, but because it couldn’t be tested it also couldn’t be settled properly.

We might also collectively arrive at incorrect conclusions. Suppose some opening sequence gives white a decisive material advantage but would lead to forced checkmate through a sequence of accurate moves by black. This could be nearly impossible to detect without actually playing out the moves, and players might reasonably conclude the position is a win for white.

With that piece of incorrect knowledge lodged into the collective consciousness, chess theory would develop under the assumption that black must avoid this line, and white should favor it. When, one day in the far future, move-15 restriction is lifted, the chess world would be shocked to learn that all of the opening theory resting on this assumption was wrong.

Thus, the move-15 restriction would have two large, negative effects on chess theory. First it makes pairwise comparisons of skill much more difficult. But in the long run, it hurts everyone’s skill level by perpetuating incorrect assumpt...