trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
What's your standard for good work performance?
by Chi Nguyen — 2023-09-27T16:58:16.114Z

A lot of people in the community, including me, are working independently (or have a lot of autonomy, even if they are employed). A lot of people, including me, often feel like they are underperforming or at least wonder if they are. But how do I actually know when I'm not underperforming? I'd like to make some criteria for under which circumstances I'll consider my work satisfactory. I'd be curious to hear what other people would consider "decent" output.

This is obviously hard to define but some types of data that seem helpful:

How much do you get done in a typical month/half year?
How much do consider aspirational but realistic to get done in a typical month/half year?
How much do you consider on the low end but okay to get done in a typical month/half year?
What kind of output would you want to see out of a researcher/community organiser/other independent worker within a month/half a year to be impressed/not be disappointed? (Assuming this is amount is representative of them)
What's the minimum output would you want to see out of a researcher/community organiser/other independent worker to be in favour of them getting funding to continue their work? (Assuming this is amount is representative of them)
What's the minimum output would you want to see out of your friend to feel good about them continuing their current work? (Assuming this is amount is representative of them)

I literally mean silly things like "X number of substantive research documents of roughly this and that quality" - totally okay if very domain-specific. I know this probably hugely varies from person to person and is hard to answer in general - There's lots to take into account that seems hard to specify like quality of work and often we really care about outcomes instead of outputs. Feel free to rephrase the question in whichever way seems useful to you.

(I know that there is no objective "enough" or that the real measuring stick are my values and reality. (I would have liked to include a link to a post that I'm sure exists but couldn't find it.) And there's a bunch of things that are individual to me and my line of work of course, so I don't expect people to say things that are directly useful and applicable to my situation. But I still think that sometimes a bit of data would be really useful to me and hopefully many others!)
The Role of Groups in the Progression of Human Understanding
by Chris_Leong — 2023-09-27T15:09:45.445Z

This post isn't intended to be anything stunningly original, but simply to collect a few basic, but under-utilized observations together in one place.

The question of how we can progress human knowledge and understanding is one that is of particular interest to people on this website. The most obvious reason why groups are important for these purposes is that often a lot of work is required to move a field forward and when more people are working on a problem, you might expect that more work would get done[1]. There are other reasons too, but this the main one.

This immediately leads us to the question of what factors are important for allowing a group to produce knowledge:

Focus area: A group's focus area can be broad or it can be narrow. As already noted, a broad focus area can dilute the group's common knowledge. If a group's focus is too narrow, then there will be too few people interested in joining or participating in the group. If the group's focus is too broad, then it'll be less likely to attract people with expertise in a particular area or to develop such talent. If you want to start a new group, picking the right focus area is crucial.
Common knowledge: This is knowledge that basically everyone in a group knows, apart from beginners. This is important as being able to take certain things for granted allows discussions to cover more advanced concepts or for people to explore further down the conversational tree. Unfortunately, only so much knowledge can be common knowledge and this is especially limited when groups have no way to insist that membership is conditional on completing a certain course or program. The broader a group's focus, the more shallow the group's common knowledge will be, but this can be less of a disadvantage if there are synergies among areas. Common knowledge can also backfire if it results in members becoming overly ideological or unknowingly making assumptions.
Norms: It's often valuable for groups to develop their own norms. I expect rationalists to have a tendency to search for a set of perfectly rational group norms, but I suspect that the ideal norms vary heavily depending on the specific group. For example, if you want to know the truth, it's often better for people to be blunter, but this can also be quite off-putting for beginners. The solution to competing access needs is often to have multiple groups with different nor

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The Great Disembedding
by rogersbacon — 2023-09-27T14:53:25.116Z
Link: https://www.secretorum.life/p/the-great-disembedding

“Confucius and Lao-Tse were living in China, all the schools of Chinese philosophy came into being, including those of Mo Ti, Chuang Tse, Lieh Tzu and a host of others; India produced the Upanishads and Buddha and, like China, ran the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities down to materialism, scepticism and nihilism; in Iran, Zarathustra taught a challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine the prophets made their appearance from Elijah by way of Isaiah and Jeremiah to Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the appearance of Homer, of the philosophers—Parmenides, Heraclitus and Plato,—of the tragedians, of Thucydides and Archimedes. Everything implied by these names developed during these few centuries almost simultaneously in China, India and the West.” (

Karl Jaspers

)

Epistemic status: Absolute certitude. Rock-hard evidence, air-tight arguments, white-hot memes.

I.

The Axial Age refers to broad changes in religious and philosophical thought that occurred in a variety of locations from about the 8th to the 3rd century BC. According to Jaspers, during this period, universalizing modes of thought appeared in Persia, India, China, the Levant, and the Greco-Roman world, in a striking parallel development, without any obvious admixture between these disparate cultures…

Individual thinkers each laid spiritual foundations within a framework of a changing social environment. Jaspers argues that the characteristics appeared under similar political circumstances: China, India, the Middle East and the Occident each comprised multiple small states engaged in internal and external struggles. The three regions all gave birth to, and then institutionalized, a tradition of travelling scholars, who roamed from city to city to exchange ideas. (Wikipedia)

Nathan Gardels’ essay “

Religious Imagination as the Future Unfolds

” has an interesting passage describing the philosopher Charles Taylor’s understanding of what happened in the Axial Age.

For Charles Taylor, the first Axial Age resulted from the “great disembedding” of the person from isolated communities and their natural environment, where circumscribed awareness had been limited to the sustenance and survival of the tribe guided by oral narrative myth. The lifting out from a closed-off world, according to Taylor, was enabled by the arrival of written language — the stored memories of the first c

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how do short-timeliners reason about the differences between brain and AI?
by  — 2023-09-27T08:13:58.659Z

If the general capabilities necessary for effective self-improvement or to directly get an AGI can be bridged without the apparent complexity of the brain structures that enable general intelligence in humans (just with memory, more data, compute and some algorithmic breakthroughs or even none), I wonder why those structures are not needed.
Sure, it's not necessary that a sufficiently advanced AI has to work like the brain, but there has to be an intuition about why those neural structures are not needed to at least create an autonomous utility maximizer if you are going to defend short timelines.
Is there a widely accepted metric for 'genuineness' in interpersonal communication?  
by M. Y. Zuo — 2023-09-27T05:30:46.716Z

... And if you don't believe there is one on LW or elsewhere, what what you consider to be the ideal?

'genuineness' here refers to all the positive qualities we associate with the word 'genuine' such as truthfulness, completeness (to their best knowledge at the time of record), fidelity, consistency (with past claims, statements, etc.), logical validity (to the best extent attainable), etc...

My own personal ideal would be something along the following, if no prior track record is available:

irreversibility - the more difficult to 'take back', the more likely the communication is genuine.

e.g. a direct email vs. a random verbal comment from the same person

detail - the more explicit, enumerated, spelled out, etc., the more likely the communication is genuine

e.g. an email with every claim spelled out, highlighted, and justified with some explanation vs. a quick email

costly - the higher the cost it took to produce the communication, the more likely it is genuine

e.g. a company selling widgets sending out free physical samples of their products in a premium packaged box vs. sending out typical email newsletters

'gotcha' free - the less strings attached the more likely it is genuine

e.g. a car salesman letting you take home the car for a 24 hour test drive vs. a salesman offering only a supervised quick test drive
Bariatric surgery seems like a no-brainer for most morbidly obese people
by lc — 2023-09-27T01:05:32.976Z

Procedures like gastric bypass have been around a long time; long enough that their effects are measured by virtue of their impact on overall health. If your goal with weight loss is to lose weight, and not perform a ritual of self-actualization or make scientific discoveries, you should probably seriously consider it.

From wikipedia (emphasis added):

Long-term studies from 2009 show the procedures result in significant long-term loss of weight, recovery from diabetes, improvement in cardiovascular risk factors, and a mortality reduction from 40% to 23%.[12] A meta-analysis in 2021 found that bariatric surgery was associated with 59% and 30% reduction in all-cause mortality among obese adults with or without type 2 diabetes, respectively.[13] This meta-analysis also found that median life-expectancy was 9.3 years longer for obese adults with diabetes who received bariatric surgery as compared to routine (non-surgical) care, whereas the life expectancy gain was 5.1 years longer for obese adults without diabetes.[13] A 2013 National Institute of Health symposium summarizing available evidence found a 29% mortality reduction, a 10-year remission rate of type 2 diabetes of 36%, fewer cardiovascular events, and a lower rate of diabetes-related complications in a long-term, non-randomized, matched intervention 15–20 year follow-up study, the Swedish Obese Subjects Study.[14] The symposium also found similar results from a Utah study using more modern gastric bypass techniques, though the follow-up periods of the Utah studies are only up to seven years. While randomized controlled trials of bariatric surgery exist, they are limited by short follow-up periods. The risk of death in the period following surgery is less than 1 in 1,000.[15]

Yes, the above are observational studies, and they probably overestimate the benefits to some degree. Nevertheless, the proposed mechanism of action here seems so obvious, and the effect sizes are so large, that I think it's an overdetermined choice above a BMI of 35. The up-front payment and recovery periods are not a serious blocker for most people when compared against the reduced healthcare costs and QALYs, setting aside any social or romantic benefits of being thinner.

I'm confused that surgery is not a more heavily discussed option for weight loss, given that it's the only thing that's been shown to reliably work. Most morbi...
Jacob on the Precipice
by Richard_Ngo — 2023-09-26T21:16:39.590Z
Link: https://narrativeark.substack.com/p/jacob-on-the-precipice

And he dreamed, and behold, there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven. And behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it! And behold, the LORD stood above it and said, “I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring. Your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and in you and your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land. For I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it.”

- Genesis 28:12

That night Jacob arose and took his two wives, his two female servants, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He sent them across the stream along with everything else that he had. And Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched his hip socket, and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then the man said, "Let me go, for the day has broken." But Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” And he said, “What is your name?” And he said, "Jacob." Then he said, "Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed."

- Genesis 32:22

The ineffable is dead; science has killed it. Oh, there are still open questions, there are still things we don’t know, but almost none of it is truly unimaginable any more. The origins of life: tide pools, maybe, or hydrothermal vents—we’ll know once we can run more powerful simulations. Consciousness: looks like it’s a pattern of recursive attention in a neural network, we’ll be able to recreate it once we get better architecture searches working. Even the laws of physics themselves we can chalk up to the multiverse: if all possible universes exist, we can think of our own as just a random draw from the set of universes in which it’s possible for life to flourish.

There’s only one real mystery left. One thing that feels impossible to understand, even in principle: ...
Text Posts from the Kids Group: 2022
by jefftk — 2023-09-26T20:40:06.656Z

Another round (previously:

2023) of
liberating kid posts from

Facebook:

(Some of these were from me; some were from Julia. Ones saying "me"
could mean either of us.)

2022-01-01

Me: Anna, if you don't come soon, I'm going to start brushing your
teeth without you

Anna: how can you brush my teeth without me there?

Me: [turns on toothbrush]

Anna: [frantic] I'm coming! I'm coming!

2022-01-04

Anna: [sitting calmly, concerned] I think... I might have just broken
my rib.

Jeff: oh?

Anna: do I have ribs in my hands?

2022-01-09

Nickname update: The kids have moved from Nora to Norfla to Norfluffy
to Fluffy to Fluffy Muffin and occasionally my favorite, Fluffy
Puffin.

2022-01-13

Me: why are you packing your snack in that thermos?

Lily: well, the other two thermoses don't hold water in

Me: but you're packing potato chips!

2022-01-13

I don't know what's happening outside, I can just hear Lily yelling
"Never do this, Erika. Watch!"

2022-01-16

Anna was telling me about a book where children clean up trash at the
beach. "I wouldn't be one of those people who throws my trash into the
sea... but it would be very fun and convenient if you went to the
beach every day."

I wasn't sure at first if she meant that the sea
would be a fun and convenient place to throw your trash, but yes,
that's what she meant.

2022-01-24

Anna: ... Maybe it was a squirrel.

Lily: Every time you say it was a squirrel, it was really you.

2022-01-25

Somebody asked me how representative these posts are of real life. Not
representative! This is a bubble of things we think are funny or
interesting or cute, and there's a lot of life that is none of those
things. And we don't include stuff that we think the kids will find
embarrassing later.

Among the many things not pictured:

whining

jabbing one's sister in the face with a marker

bad decisions about things to put in the toilet

2022-01-30

Anna: Papa, why don't you ever let me use a chainsaw?

2022-02-22

Lily: My friends and I started a book club!

Anna: Book...club. That's the horriblest thing I ever heard of.

(Later Anna indicated this is because she can't read.)

2022-02-02

Lily: Have you seen the toy that I made for Nora?

Me: Can you remind me what it looks like?

Lily: It's a clownfish that doesn't look anything like a clownfish.

2022-02-03

...
GPT-4 for personal productivity: online distraction blocker
by Sergii — 2023-09-26T17:41:31.031Z
Link: https://grgv.xyz/blog/awf/

There are many apps for blocking distracting websites: freedom.to, leechblock, selfcontrol, coldturkey, just to name a few. They are useful for maintaining focus, avoiding procrastination, and curbing addictive web surfing.

They work well for blocking a list of a few distracting websites. For me, this is not enough, because I’m spending a large portion of my time on a large number of websites, which I check out for a minute or two and then never visit again. It’s just impossible to maintain a blocklist for this long tail. Also, the web has grown so much that there are just too many easily found alternatives for any blocked distraction.

Well, GPT-4 to the rescue! With an LLM it’s possible to block websites based on the content, checking each page — if it’s distracting or useful/productive.

To test the idea I have implemented a prototype of a distraction filtering browser extension. This way, GPT-4 is turning into a personal productivity assistant!

The extension sends the content of each loaded page to OpenAI API, and asks GPT if the page should be blocked. The prompt can be edited in the config window; the following prompt is used by default:

You are a smart web filter, a distraction blocker with goal of improving user's productivity.
Following types of pages are distracting and should be blocked:
entertainment, shopping, online stores, social networking, news, magazines, lists of links, blogs without technical/educational content.
Following types of pages are useful for work and should not be blocked:
software development, technical information, general reference, manuals, answers to technical questions
Should a web page with following content be blocked? Answer only YES or NO, followed with a newline and a brief explanation.
===
{text}

Sensitive content, whitelist & blacklist.

While the extension is active, it sends a sample of each visited page’s content to OpenAI API. This might be a problem for pages with sensitive content.

You can add any domains which you do not want to expose to OpenAI to the whitelist or the blacklist. Pages that are matched are allowed or blocked without sending content to OpenAI.

OpenAI is claiming to handle user data securely, and to not use data submitted via API for model training. Still, if you have any concerns about the privacy and security of the pages that you visit, and if you do not want to risk leaking your browsing history, ...
ARENA 2.0 - Impact Report
by CallumMcDougall — 2023-09-26T17:13:19.952Z

Authors - Kathryn O'Rourke, Callum McDougall. Thanks to Joseph Bloom and Denizhan Akar for feedback, and major thank you to all of our wonderful TAs and the MATS London team– your positive contributions to the program have been innumerable.

TL;DR

We ran a bootcamp aimed at teaching people ML engineering for alignment. The goal was to prepare people for the current alignment landscape, both technically and career-wise. Our three primary goals were:

Technical Upskilling
Alignment Career Acceleration
Improving Inside Views

We think these goals were successfully achieved overall - we noticed significant improvements in our participants ability as well as their career opportunities, and we received positive feedback on the course (with some variance between different sections). We aim to run the program again, though with some changes.

If you just want to skim this post, some of the most important sections (in our view) are:

What we would do differently (x3), where we discuss the ways we plan to adjust the program in the future to better achieve each of the three goals above.
Considerations for running ARENA again, where we summarize a few arguments for / against further iterations of ARENA.
Capstone Projects, where we give a brief description of the capstone projects some of our participants worked on at the end of the program (which generally far exceeded our expectations).
APPENDIX: Summary of planned structural changes to ARENA, where we discuss the changes to the curriculum we're planning for future iterations.

Introduction

ARENA

(Alignment Research Engineer Accelerator) had its second iteration from the 22nd of May to the 30th of June (duration 6 weeks). The program covered the fundamentals of neural networks, transformers and mechanistic interpretability, reinforcement learning, training at scale, and a capstone project for students to advance their work independently.

The project was oriented around three goals:

To help participants learn relevant machine learning skills for alignment research.
To help produce people who wanted to work in alignment and help them make the relevant career steps.
To help participants inform their own views about different alignment agendas.

This report is an analysis of how we attempted to achieve each goal, how we measure our success, and what we might do differently in the future.

Goal One: Technical Upskilling

H

...
Mechanistic Interpretability Reading group
by 1stuserhere — 2023-09-26T16:26:44.757Z

Greetings.

This is an open invitation for folks interested in technical AI alignment literature to join our reading group, which has been running for 22 weeks now. Our meetings take place online via the Mechanistic Interpretability Group Discord server, accessible through this invite link.

Each week 4-5 papers are shortlisted and polled, occasionally with some central theme, and people vote on which papers they'd like to read and discuss. The most popular option is selected for the next week's reading. You can find a list of the papers we've already read as well as some of the upcoming papers at https://mechinterp.com/reading-group.

In addition to paper discussions, we occasionally host authors for Q&A sessions. This week, we will be reading Studying Large Language Model Generalization with Influence Functions (arxiv). One of the authors, Juhan Bae, will be joining us for a Q&A session on September 27th at 5pm GMT.

The usual meeting time is Wednesdays at 5pm GMT (10am PT) and the sessions usually run for an hour. If you're unavailable at that time, we've recently started recording some of our sessions, transcribing them with Whisper. The recordings and transcripts are available here.

We welcome anyone interested to join us in our discussions. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or need further information. The best way to reach us is through the Discord server.