trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
A case study in simulacra levels and the Four Children of the Seder
by DirectedEvolution — 2020-09-14T22:31:39.484Z

This was originally going to be a comment on Zvi's excellent post, The Four Children of the Seder as the Simulacra Levels, but it got too long and I thought it warranted its own post.

My cousin's kid is having a tough time lately. He's stealing trinkets, destroying things around the house, and according to his parents he "lies all the time." His mom will grill him over whether he's lying or not - asking him again and again whether he's brushed his teeth, until he breaks down and admits that he didn't.

It's not clear that she has evidence in cases like this that he was lying. I suspect that the experience of being grilled is so uncomfortable that the kid finds it easier to make a false confession and brush his teeth a second time than to stand up for himself. I also guess that some of his stealing and destroying habits come from acting out on frustration with authority figures. It's a way of practicing deception, provoking reactions, and testing adults. Because he doesn't see a way to gain the trust and respect of adults, he's trying to figure out how to trick them most effectively.

Why are his parents behaving this way? It is because they have become far less concerned with object-level reality - whether or not he's brushed his teeth - than with the question of whether their child is a liar. The kid understands that everything they ask him to do is a test of his honesty. It's a symbol. Brushing his teeth isn't to prevent cavities. It's a trial of his character.

So his parents are speaking to him on the level of simplicity. He may have started wise, but is becoming wicked as his parents draw him deeper and deeper into a world of symbolism.

This highlights one of the paradoxes of the levels. Whether or not the kid lied about brushing his teeth is an object-level truth. And if you asked his parents why they care, they'd tell you "because we don't want him to get cavities."

A relationship that's on a higher simulacrum level is often still connected to level one. The higher levels accumulate, rather than replacing the lower levels. Brushing his teeth is about cavities, but it's also about whether you can trick your parents, and it's also about whether or not your child is a liar.

Our family is concerned about this, and we're operating on level four. We understand that bringing this up with the parents is a delicate issue, because we don't want to imply that they're bad ...
Most Prisoner's Dilemmas are Stag Hunts; Most Stag Hunts are Schelling Problems
by abramdemski — 2020-09-14T22:13:01.236Z

I previously claimed that most apparent Prisoner's Dilemmas are actually Stag Hunts. I now claim that they're Schelling Pub in practice. I conclude with some lessons for fighting Moloch.

This post turned out especially dense with inferential leaps and unexplained terminology. If you're confused, try to ask in the comments and I'll try to clarify.

Some ideas here are due to Tsvi Benson-Tilsen.

The title of this post used to be Most Prisoner's Dilemmas are Stag Hunts; Most Stag Hunts are Battle of the Sexes. I'm changing it based on this comment. "Battle of the Sexes" is a game where a male and female (let's say Bob and Alice) want to hang out, but each of them would prefer to engage in gender-stereotyped behavior. For example, Bob wants to go to a football game, and Alice wants to go to a museum. The gender issues are distracting, and although it's the standard, the game isn't that well-known anyway, so sticking to the standard didn't buy me much (in terms of reader understanding).

I therefore present to you,

the Schelling Pub Game:

Two friends would like to meet at the pub. In order to do so, they must make the same selection of pub (making this a Schelling-point game). However, they have different preferences about which pub to meet at. For example:

Alice and Bob would both like to go to a pub this evening.
There are two pubs: the Xavier, and the Yggdrasil.
Alice likes the Xavier twice as much as the Yggdrasil.
Bob likes the Yggdrasil twice as much as the Xavier.
However, Alice and Bob also prefer to be with each other. Let's say they like being together ten times as much as they like being apart.

Schelling Pub Game payoff matrix
payoffs written alice;bob	B's choice
X	Y
A's choice	X	20;10	2;2
Y	1;1	10;20

The important features of this game are:

The Nash equilibria are all Pareto-optimal. There is no "individually rational agents work against each other" problem, like in prisoner's dilemma or even stag hunt.
There are multiple equilibria, and different agents prefer different equilibria.

Thus, realistically, agents may not end up in equilibrium at all -- because (in the single-shot game) they don't know which to choose, and because (in an iterated version of the game) they may make locally sub-optimal choices in order to influence the long-run behavior of other players.

(Edited to add, based on comments:)

Here's a summary of the central argument which, despite the lack of pictures...
Comparing Utilities
by abramdemski — 2020-09-14T20:56:15.088Z

(This is a basic point about utility theory which many will already be familiar with. I draw some non-obvious conclusions which may be of interest to you even if you think you know this from the title -- but the main point is to communicate the basics. I'm posting it to the alignment forum because I've heard misunderstandings of this from some in the AI alignment research community.)

I will first give the basic argument that the utility quantities of different agents aren't directly comparable, and a few important consequences of this. I'll then spend the rest of the post discussing what to do when you need to compare utility functions.

Utilities aren't comparable.

Utility isn't an ordinary quantity. A utility function is a device for expressing the preferences of an agent.

Suppose we have a notion of outcome.* We could try to represent the agent's preferences between outcomes as an ordering relation: if we have outcomes A, B, and C, then one possible preference would be A<B<C.

However, a mere ordering does not tell us how the agent would decide between gambles, ie, situations giving A, B, and C with some probability.

With just three outcomes, there is only one thing we need to know: is B closer to A or C, and by how much?

We want to construct a utility function U() which represents the preferences. Let's say we set U(A)=0 and U(C)=1. Then we can represent B=G as U(B)=1/2. If not, we would look for a different gamble which does equal B, and then set B's utility to the expected value of that gamble. By assigning real-numbered values to each outcome, we can fully represent an agent's preferences over gambles. (Assuming the VNM axioms hold, that is.)

But the initial choices U(A)=0 and U(C)=1 were arbitrary! We could have chosen any numbers so long as U(A)<U(C), reflecting the preference A<C. In general, a valid representation of our preferences U() can be modified into an equally valid U'() by adding/subtracting arbitrary numbers, or multiplying/dividing by positive numbers.

So it's just as valid to say someone's expected utility in a given situation is 5 or -40, provided you shift everything else around appropriately.

Writing ≈ to mean that two utility functions represent the same preferences, what we have in general is: U1(x)≈U2(x) if and only if U1(x)=aU2+b. (I'll call a the multiplicative constant and b the add...
If Starship works, how much would it cost to create a system of rotable space mirrors that reduces temperatures on earth by 1° C?
by ChristianKl — 2020-09-14T18:46:19.490Z

There are many proposed geoengineering solutions that could reduce temperatures on earth. Unfortunately, a lot of them have a mix of side effects and lock-in effects where the changes in temperature come years after deployment which creates risk of unintended consequences.

If we would have a constellation of space mirrors that can be rotated as we desire to let in less or more sunlight, how much would it cost to bring up enough to reduce temperatures on earth by an average of 1° C? Let's say that Elon's promise of being able to lunch a Starship that brings up 100,000kg for 1,000,000$ works out, what would it cost to produce and deploy those mirrors?
Outcome Terminology?
by Dach — 2020-09-14T18:04:05.048Z

I'm writing a post about S-risks, and I need access to some clean, established terminology/background material for discussing AI-based long-term outcomes for humanity.

My current (very limited) vocabulary can be summarized with the following categories:

Outcomes which are roughly maximally bad: Hyperexistential risk/S-risk/Unfriendly AI/Existential risk
Outcomes which are nontrivially worse than paperclipping-equivalents but better than approximate minimization of human utility: Hyperexistential risk/S-risk/Unfriendly AI/Existential risk
Outcomes which are produced by agents essentially orthogonal to human values: Paperclipping/Unfriendly AI/Existential risk
Outcomes which are nontrivially better than paperclipping but worse than Friendly AI: ???
Outcomes which are roughly maximally good: Friendly AI

The problems are manifold:

I haven't read any discussion which specifically addresses parts 1 or 2. I have read general discussion of parts 1 and 2 combined under the names of "Outcomes worse than death", "Hyperexistential risk", "S-risk", etc.
My current terminology overlaps too strongly to use to uniquely identify outcomes 1 and 2.
I have no terminology or background information for outcome 4.

I've done a small amount of investigation and determined less brainpower would be wasted by just asking for links.
On Niceness: Looking for Positive Externalities
by Neel Nanda — 2020-09-14T18:03:12.196Z
Link: https://www.neelnanda.io/blog/mini-blog-post-10-seek-positive-externalities

One of the most useful concepts I’ve learned from economics is the idea of an externality: the consequences of your actions on other people. This is important because, intuitively, humans are self-centred, and it’s easy to not notice the effects your actions have on others. And it almost never feels as visceral as the costs and benefits to yourself. The canonical examples are coordination problems, like climate change. Taking a plane flight has strong benefits to me, but costs everyone on Earth a little bit, a negative externality. And a lot of the problems in the world today boil down to coordination problems where our actions have negative externalities.

But, for this post, I don’t care about any of that. The important part is that externalities introduce a bias. And once you’ve noticed a bias, something that is preventing you from taking the best actions, you can correct for it! And a much more interesting bias is a bias away from positive externalities.

With my Effective Altruism hat on, the obvious positive externalities are the good your actions can do for the countless unknown strangers in need. And this is an extremely important way to correct for this bias. But for this post I want to put my ineffective altruism hat on, and talk about something more fun! The local positive externalities - being nice to the people around you. Where by niceness, I don’t mean nonsense like virtue signalling, I mean taking actions that make the people around you happier, and making their lives better.

I think we have systematic biases against being nice to our friends and those close to us, because being nice is, fundamentally, a positive externality. Being nice to people is obviously great. I think it’s intrinsically good to help the people I care about. And there’s a lot of selfish benefits to me! People are more likely to do you favours, people like you more, it’s fun to help people, you have a better reputation, etc.

Yet, in practice, most people approach niceness in a very intuitive way. Doing nice things when the idea occurs to them, in a very local, unplanned way. But, as with all things that matter in life, niceness can be optimised for. A really significant life upgrade for me was realising this, and trying to introduce a deliberate bias in favour of niceness. If I ever have anything I care about, I try to f...
[Link] Five Years and One Week of Less Wrong
by abramdemski — 2020-09-14T16:49:35.082Z
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/13/five-years-and-one-week-of-less-wrong/

This is a link post for Five Years and One Week of Less Wrong. I was surprised to see that it was never cross-posted to LW in the first place. I wanted it to be here so that I could put it under the new Intellectual Progress via LessWrong tag.

Some excerpts:

I wrote a post a while ago called Read History Of Philosophy Backwards. I theorized that as old ways of thinking got replaced by newer ways, eventually people forgot the old ways even existed or were even coherent positions people could hold. So instead of reading Hobbes to tell you that people can form governments for their common advantage – which you already know – read him to tell you that there was a time when no one believed this was true and governments were natural structures ordained by God.

It makes sense that over five hundred years, with births and deaths and so on, people would forget they ever held strange and incomprehensible positions. It’s more surprising that it would happen within the course of a single person’s philosophical development. But this is what I keep hearing from people in the Less Wrong community.

“I re-read the Sequences”, they tell me, “and everything in them seems so obvious. But I have this intense memory of considering them revelatory at the time.”

This is my memory as well.

So I thought it would be an interesting project, suitable for the lofty milestone of five years plus one week, to go back and try to figure out how far we have progressed without noticing that we were progressing.

It was around the switch to Less Wrong that someone first brought up the word “akrasia” (I think it was me, but I’m not sure). I remember there being a time when I was very confused and scandalized by the idea that people might engage in actions other than those rationally entailed by their beliefs. This seems really silly now, but at the time I remember the response was mostly positive and people upvoted me a lot and said things like “Huh, yeah, I guess people might engage in actions other than those rationally entailed by their beliefs! Weird! We should worry about this more!” For a while, we were really confused about this, and a really popular solution (WHICH I ALWAYS HATED) was to try to imagine the mind as being made up of multiple agents trying to strike a bargain. Like, your conscious mind was an agent, your unconscious mind was an agent, your sex drive was an agent, and so

...
Free Money at PredictIt: 2020 General Election
by Zvi — 2020-09-14T14:40:01.941Z

Previously: Free Money at PredictIt?

It’s time for another look at PredictIt. Is there free money? What are our best options for free money?

The short answer is that there is free money if and only if you have available capital at PredictIt.

There is no free money if your plan is to deposit to make the wager and then withdraw. That hits you with a 5% withdrawal fee, wiping out your profits.

Let’s look at the major markets first, then scour for minor ones.

As with the last such post, despite the fact that we can’t discuss these prices without discussing the potential for a stolen election, let’s be clear: No advocacy for or against any candidate or party in the comments. Any such comments will be deleted reign-of-terror style. That’s not what this is about.

General Election

Prices are where you would sell if you traded right away by hitting the bid.

Joe Biden 58

Donald Trump 44

Kamala Harris 3

Hillary Clinton 2

Mike Pence 1

That adds up to 108. You pay 10% on winnings. If you take the relative prices here at face value, you’d pay roughly 5.9 cents in fees, leaving a profit of 2.1 cents without need to tie up capital.

You also get a freeroll to win all bets if none of those five win. That’s probably under a 1% shot but every little bit helps. It’s good to win the weird outcomes, and win them big. Note that many people are betting on candidates, including at other sites, and paying >100% combined for Biden and Trump. Not only does the house always win if they choose to balance their books, the house can sweep.

The labor and cognitive costs of doing this arb if you’re not already set up aren’t worth it as such on their own, but it’s good to note this is there. If you derive satisfaction from taking free money, I approve.

I’m not taking this because I already took it during the primary, and thus can’t take it again.

What do I think of the baseline claim here, that considered as a two-way race Biden is 57% to win, or BetFair’s 54% for that same question? Note that the secondary candidates favor the Democrats in both cases, so the two-way races are more like 59% and 55% respectively for the Democratic side.

That depends on what exactly you mean by ‘win the election.’ The rules say ‘the winner of the presidential election’ but that really doesn’t clear it up this year. Whereas the BetFair rules say ‘next president.’ Which if we interpret literally makes Mike Pence at...
My computational framework for the brain
by Steven Byrnes — 2020-09-14T14:19:21.974Z

(See comment here for some updates and corrections and retractions. —Steve, 2022)

By now I've written a bunch of blog posts on brain architecture and algorithms, not in any particular order and generally interspersed with long digressions into Artificial General Intelligence. Here I want to summarize my key ideas in one place, to create a slightly better entry point, and something I can refer back to in certain future posts that I'm planning. If you've read every single one of my previous posts (hi mom!), there's not much new here.

In this post, I'm trying to paint a picture. I'm not really trying to justify it, let alone prove it. The justification ultimately has to be: All the pieces are biologically, computationally, and evolutionarily plausible, and the pieces work together to explain absolutely everything known about human psychology and neuroscience. (I believe it! Try me!) Needless to say, I could be wrong in both the big picture and the details (or missing big things). If so, writing this out will hopefully make my wrongness easier to discover!

Pretty much everything I say here and its opposite can be found in the cognitive neuroscience literature. (It's a controversial field!) I make no pretense to originality (with one exception noted below), but can't be bothered to put in actual references. My previous posts have a bit more background, or just ask me if you're interested. :-P

So let's start in on the 7 guiding principles for how I think about the brain:

1. Two subsystems: "Neocortex" and "Subcortex"

(Update: I have a revised discussion of this topic at my later post Two Subsystems: Learning and Steering.)

This is the starting point. I think it's absolutely critical. The brain consists of two subsystems. The neocortex is the home of "human intelligence" as we would recognize it—our beliefs, goals, ability to plan and learn and understand, every aspect of our conscious awareness, etc. etc. (All mammals have a neocortex; birds and lizards have an homologous and functionally-equivalent structure called the "pallium".) Some other parts of the brain (hippocampus, parts of the thalamus & basal ganglia & cerebellum—see further discussion here) help the neocortex do its calculations, and I lump them into the "neocortex subsystem". I'll use the term subcortex for the rest of the brain (brainstem, hypothalamus, etc.).

Aside: Is this the triune brain theory?

...
Against boots theory
by philh — 2020-09-14T13:20:04.056Z

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

– Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

This is a compelling narrative. And I do believe there's some truth to it. I could believe that if you always buy the cheapest boots you can find, you'll spend more money than if you bought something more expensive and reliable. Similar for laptops, smartphones, cars. Especially (as Siderea notes, among other things) if you know how to buy expensive things that are more reliable.

But it's presented as "the reason that the rich [are] so rich". Is that true? I mean, no, obviously not. If your pre-tax income is less than the amount I put into my savings account, then no amount of "spending less money on things" is going to bring you to my level.

Is it even a contributing factor? Is part of the reason why the rich are so rich, that they manage to spend less money? Do the rich in fact spend less money than the poor?

That's less obvious, but I predict not. I predict that the rich spend more than the poor in total, but also on boots, laptops, smartphones, cars, and most other things. There might be exceptions where rich people consume less of the thing than poor people - bus tickets, for example - but I think if you group spending in fairly natural ways, the rich will spend more than the poor in almost every group.

Maybe they spend less money on their daily wear boots, but own more pairs of shoes for different occasions. Or maybe they decide that they care about

...
SlateStarCodex online meetup: Integrating evolutionary psychology and behaviorism
by Joshua_Fox — 2020-09-14T10:33:17.018Z

Dr. Diana Fleischman will talk on integrating evolutionary psychology and behaviorism.

Sunday, September 27 at 20:30 IDT, 17:30 UTC, 10:30 PDT

Sign up here and we'll send you a link to the online meetup

https://forms.gle/EJ9YxDvEPUT1YkEQ9

Summary: All of us want to change other people's behavior to align more closely with our goals. Over the last century, behaviorists have discovered how reward and punishment change the behavior of organisms. The central idea of this talk is that we are intuitive behaviorists and that our relationships, emotions, and mental health can be better understood if you consider how we evolved to change the behavior of others.

Diana Fleischman is an evolutionary psychologist currently writing a book called "How to Train Your Boyfriend" integrating evolutionary psychology and behaviorism. Diana has published extensively on disgust, human sexuality and evolutionary psychology more broadly. Currently she lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.