trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[Thought Experiment] Given a button to terminate all humanity, would you press it?
by lorepieri — 2024-08-01T15:10:07.210Z

The rules:

Pressing the button will instantly terminate every single human being (including you).
Pressing the button is completely anonymous. Nobody will know you did it, now or in the far future.
The button cannot malfunction.
The button does not have any secondary effects.
The button is available for everyone to be pressed (not exactly the same physical button).
Meta rule: There are no clever exploits available. This is not a riddle, the button does only what is written above.

Please do not to take the result too seriously. Inspired by AI X-Risk conversations.

I'm not aware of a poll functionality here, so I created the poll externally: https://strawpoll.com/3RnYXleKBye Results are public and can be seen at the link without voting. Voting does not require any signup.
Are unpaid UN internships a good idea?
by Cipolla — 2024-08-01T15:06:04.034Z

Disclaimer: I am outside of the world of international organisations. I am a scientific researcher at university. I am writing this post to open a discussion.

Introduction

UN is an international organisation with the following main goals:

maintain international peace and security
develop friendly relations among nations
stand up for human rights
promote better living standards and social progress

Here a more concrete list of examples of what UN wants to achieve. For example, I am all in reducing social inequalities within and across countries.

Working at such an international organisation such as UN can therefore facilitate achieving these goals. To achieve these goals we probably need competent people. As the world is complex you also want a sample of people from diverse socio-economic backgrounds. To be safe, UN tries to attract the best talent offering jobs with good salaries, compared to average civil service jobs, perks, and prestige. As any job, there are problems. Nevertheless UN jobs can be a really good opportunity.

UN Internships

UN internships are an important way to facilitate people entering UN affiliated careers, higher the chance of getting a UN or international organisation job after. They train you. They boost your CV. They are an amazing opportunity to network, and perhaps enjoy your time.

Given the above points, there are a lot of incentives in becoming a UN intern.

On the other hand, if UN has the incentive to attract the best competent people for the future, and be really a good representation of the world population then it has to lure in the greatest number of people.

One very successful way to attract people is financially supporting internships.

This UN page says UN interns are not paid, and "living expenses must be borne by either the interns or their sponsoring institutions".

According to this 2018 report 83% of UN interns are unpaid. It is six years old. The situation might be different today.[1]

Let's assume that currently the different UN agencies flip a fair coin to fund you. Does this guarantee a fairer representation of the world population? Not. But it might higher the chance of encouraging more people to apply.

Problem

Here is speculative. Usually the people I have met that seek, train, and get these jobs include people with three European surnames (but also humans will tend to seek paths taken by family me...
AI #75: Math is Easier
by Zvi — 2024-08-01T13:40:05.539Z

Google DeepMind got a silver metal at the IMO, only one point short of the gold. That’s really exciting.

We continuously have people saying ‘AI progress is stalling, it’s all a bubble’ and things like that, and I always find remarkable how little curiosity or patience such people are willing to exhibit. Meanwhile GPT-4o-Mini seems excellent, OpenAI is launching proper search integration, by far the best open weights model got released, we got an improved MidJourney 6.1, and that’s all in the last two weeks. Whether or not GPT-5-level models get here in 2024, and whether or not it arrives on a given schedule, make no mistake. It’s happening.

This week also had a lot of discourse and events around SB 1047 that I failed to avoid, resulting in not one but four sections devoted to it.

Dan Hendrycks was baselessly attacked – by billionaires with massive conflicts of interest that they admit are driving their actions – as having a conflict of interest because he had advisor shares in an evals startup rather than having earned the millions he could have easily earned building AI capabilities. so Dan gave up those advisor shares, for no compensation, to remove all doubt. Timothy Lee gave us what is clearly the best skeptical take on SB 1047 so far. And Anthropic sent a ‘support if amended’ letter on the bill, with some curious details. This was all while we are on the cusp of the final opportunity for the bill to be revised – so my guess is I will soon have a post going over whatever the final version turns out to be and presenting closing arguments.

Meanwhile Sam Altman tried to reframe broken promises while writing a jingoistic op-ed in the Washington Post, but says he is going to do some good things too. And much more.

Oh, and also AB 3211 unanimously passed the California assembly, and would effectively among other things ban all existing LLMs. I presume we’re not crazy enough to let it pass, but I made a detailed analysis to help make sure of it.

Table of Contents

Introduction.

Table of Contents.

Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. They’re just not that into you.

Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. Baba is you and deeply confused.

Math is Easier. Google DeepMind claims an IMO silver metal, mostly.

Llama Llama Any Good. The rankings are in as are a few use cases.

Search for the GPT. Alpha tests begin of SearchGPT, which is

...
Temporary Cognitive Hyperparameter Alteration
by Jonathan Moregård — 2024-08-01T10:27:11.917Z
Link: https://honestliving.substack.com/p/shamanic-practice-of-soviet-era-cosmonaut

Social anxiety is one hell of a thing. I used to struggle with it a lot — escaping pressure by fleeing to the toilet. I’ve reduced my levels of social anxiety by bashing it over the head with exposure therapy, repeatedly dealing with anxiety-provoking situations until they became manageable.

Nowadays, my levels of social anxiety are low enough to be barely noticeable. I mainly notice my social anxiety when I have a “control” — an unusually uninhibited person that can serve as contrast. Besides serving as ad hoc control groups, these people tend to be fun at parties.

Looking at how unusually uninhibited people act, compared to me, has helped me find situations where my actions are constrained by social anxiety. Unfortunately, these people are different to me in ways unrelated to social anxiety. Differences in action can stem from different preferences — my

lover doesn’t like restaurants

, for instance.

Luckily, I can temporarily turn off my social anxiety. All it takes is some

Soviet-era Cosmonaut-enhancement drug

. The drug is a mild mood enhancer, energy booster, and anxiety-reducer. When I’m on it, I feel like I have an unusually good day, and my social anxiety is greatly reduced.

Note/Disclaimer:

Though sold as a legal supplement in Sweden, phenibut is highly addictive if used more than 2-3 times a week. The effects are mild, making it easy to underestimate/overuse. Do not use it if you tend to fall into addictions.
It takes 3 hours to start working, tempting people to re-dose — and accidentally overdosing. It has the same anti-anxiety effects as alcohol — mixing the two can lead to overdose with nasty side-effects.

Taking phenibut allows me to run great experiments. I can throw myself into normally challenging social situations, act unusually uninhibited, and check what happens. Everything I do when I’m kamratski-enhanced, I can do sober. Testing things out in real life — instead of ruminating on anxiety-distorted scenarios — gives me a more accurate view of my social potential.

Managed Anxiety Is Still Anxiety

Many people — including me — have great anxiety-reducing strategies.

When I get stressed, I take breaths with long exhales to calm down. I check in with people, asking things like: “How did that feel to you?”. I break patterns of hesitancy by taking breaks and returning with “more momentum”.

I reframe situations, focusing on connection and joy instead of...
Technology and Progress
by Zero Contradictions — 2024-08-01T04:49:41.575Z
Link: https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2015/01/technology-and-progress.html

The audio version can be listened to here:

In this essay, I will give my views on technology and progress, focusing specifically on space travel, computers and transhumanism.

Futurism is not just predictive. It is also normative. We are concerned with what we should do, not just with what will happen. So, I’m going to talk about what I think will happen, what probably won’t happen, and what I think we should try to do.

(see the rest of the post in the link)
Do Prediction Markets Work?
by Benjamin_Sturisky — 2024-08-01T02:31:21.682Z

TLDR: Prediction markets rely on efficiency, but efficiency is not guaranteed.

Prediction market structures can work. However, they rely on so many different components being in place that they do not consistently create accurate probability.

The systems rely on complete market efficiency, which is not realistic.

In my first piece on prediction markets, I broadly covered how prediction markets can act as a source of truth in a dark cloud. I also listed three fallacies that prevent specific markets from reaching true probability. This second article attempts to go in-depth on those three fallacies: skew from bias, hedging, and time.

Market efficiency

Market efficiency is integral to the accuracy of prediction markets because, without efficiency, probability skews exist.

This is an example of market efficiency in the purest form:

A market is set up on a coin flip, with the market maker selling flips at 55c. The market-maker effectively receives a 10% edge for each flip because he is selling .5 odds at .55. In this example, the buyer expects to lose 5c per coin flip.
Another market maker sees the market and wants to participate. He undercuts the other seller and sets the odds at 52.5c. His edge on each flip is 5%, and the buyer is expecting to lose 2.5c per coin flip.
A third market maker comes in and undercuts by setting odds at 51c. His edge on each flip is 2%, and the buyer is expecting to lose 1c per coin flip.

The point is that in an efficient market, profitable opportunities will be reduced until the risk premium is reached. For a coin flip, that risk premium is very low because of a highly predictable outcome, and thus, the market will be very efficient (+/- ~1 basis point). However, risk premiums are more significant for something like insurance because of higher outcome uncertainty (e.g., a forest fire destroying a neighborhood). This requires a more significant gap between the expected cost and the insurance price to ensure insurance providers remain profitable.

Skew from Bias

Without pure market efficiency, prediction markets' predictions' can be skewed (typically upwards).

When individuals look at a market, they are biased towards outcomes they benefit from. This leads to them indirectly pricing the probability of that event occurring higher than the real probability (e.g., a Chelsea fan is more likely to bid shares of Chelsea winning the Champions League than a...
2/3 Aussie & NZ AI Safety folk often or sometimes feel lonely or disconnected (and 16 other barriers to impact)
by yanni kyriacos — 2024-08-01T01:15:02.620Z

I did what I think is the largest piece of research on current and aspiring AI safety folk in Australia & New Zealand. I wanted to understand their career barriers so that I could then optimize

my organization's

tactics to remove them.

Caveats

I am not a trained social scientist nor a statistician. There will be errors.
I’ve budgeted a few hours to write this up. So this is mostly about me posting the results for others to use. I hope they’re useful.

The process

I conducted 35 long form interviews with local Technical and Governance folk (about an hour each).
From this qualitative data I identified a long list of barriers to impact.
I then clustered the long list of barriers into 15 high level ones.
I also found two reasonably common symptoms of mental-ill health. Not nice TBH.
I used this list of 17 barriers / symptoms of mental-ill health in a survey. My goal was to measure how intense or common each barrier to impact was using Likert scales.

The survey scales

Likert scale for Barriers

Not at all (0)
Slightly (1)
Somewhat (2)
Moderately (3)
Very (4)
Extremely (5)

Likert scale for mental health related questions

Never (0)
Rarely (1)
Sometimes (2)
Often (3)
Always (4)

Demo breakdown of survey responders

By career stage

I am not currently working in an AI Safety role, but I aspire to in the future	20
I am currently working in an AI Safety role	17

Their ideal or current career stream

Ideal or current career path	Count
Technical work (e.g. research)	21
Governance and Policy	13
Movement Building	3

Results

Barriers

Overall barriers to impact (high to low)

Barrier	Intensity
How limited have you been by a lack of *local*, well-paying AI Safety jobs?

3.11

How much has a lack of mentorship hindered your progress in AI Safety?

3.03

How confused are you about the amount of upskilling you'd need to be successful in your most desired AI Safety job?

2.72

How difficult have you found creating and following a career plan (including upskilling) for AI Safety?

2.56

How limited have you been by a lack of high-quality *local* training programs for AI Safety careers?

2.49

How challenging have you found navigating the funding ecosystem in AI Safety (this could include grants, PhD programs, etc.)?

2.47

How unclear are you about where your skills could be best applied in AI Safety?

2.36

How limited have you been by a lack of strong *local* (i.e. in-person) networks for AI Safety careers?

2.33

How

...
Can UBI overcome inflation and rent seeking?
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2024-08-01T00:13:51.693Z

For both AI and non-AI related reasons, many people are interested in Universal Basic Income (UBI). My suspicion is that UBI that is actually universal across an economy won't work due to a combination of inflation and rent seeking.

This feels like basic economics: you increase the supply of money to buy things with UBI, and this eats up the available supply of demanded goods. So for a few months UBI might help people out who otherwise have no income, but then everything would rise in price to where UBI is the cost of being broke. Compare the way you could make an $X a month income but still be homeless because it's less than the minimum needed to afford even the cheapest housing available.

Most defenses I see of UBI address nearly every objection to UBI but this one, and this seems like a glaring hole. As best I can tell this inflation argument makes UBI a nonstarter.

Am I right, or are there good arguments for why UBI would not fail to meet its goals due to inflation and rent seeking?
Recommendation: reports on the search for missing hiker Bill Ewasko
by eukaryote — 2024-07-31T22:15:03.174Z
Link: https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2024/07/31/missinghiker/

Content warning: About an IRL death.

Today’s post isn’t so much an essay as a recommendation for two bodies of work on the same topic: Tom Mahood’s blog posts and Adam “KarmaFrog1” Marsland’s videos on the 2010 disappearance of Bill Ewasko, who went for a day hike in Joshua Tree National Park and dropped out of contact.

2010 – Bill Ewasko goes missing

Tom Mahood’s writeups on the search [Blog post, website goes down sometimes so if the site doesn’t work, check the internet archive]

2022 – Ewasko’s body found

ADAM WALKS AROUND Ep. 47 "Ewasko's Last Trail (Part One)" [Youtube video]
ADAM WALKS AROUND Ep. 48 "Ewasko's Last Trail (Part Two)" [Youtube video]

And then if you’re really interested, there’s a little more info that Adam discusses from the coroner’s report:

Bill Ewasko update (1 of 2): The Coroner's Report
Bill Ewasko update (2 of 2) - Refinements & Alternates

(I won’t be fully recounting every aspect of the story. But I’ll give you the pitch and go into some aspects I found interesting. Literally everything interesting here is just recounting their work, go check em out.)

Most ways people die in the wilderness are tragic, accidental, and kind of similar. A person in a remote area gets injured or lost, becomes the other one too, and dies of exposure, a clumsy accident, etc. Most people who die in the wilderness have done something stupid to wind up there. Fewer people die who have NOT done anything glaringly stupid, but it still happens, the same way. Ewasko’s case appears to have been one of these. He was a fit 66-year-old who went for a day hike and never made it back. His story is not particularly unprecedented.

This is also not a triumphant story. Bill Ewasko is dead. Most of these searches were made and reports written months and years after his disappearance. We now know he was alive when Search and Rescue started, but by months out, nobody involved expected to find him alive.

Ewasko was not found alive. In 2022, other hikers finally stumbled onto his remains in a remote area in Joshua Tree National Park; this was, largely, expected to happen eventually.

I recommend these particular stories, when we already know the ending, because they’re stunningly in-depth and well-written fact-driven investigations from two smart technical experts trying to get to the bottom of a very difficult problem. Because of the way things shook out, we get to see this investigat...
Economics101 predicted the failure of special card payments for refugees, 3 months later whole of Germany wants to adopt it
by Yanling Guo — 2024-07-31T21:09:33.673Z

Three months ago, a county in Brandenburg, Germany introduced a special card payment for refugees to replace cash payment so that the refugees no longer need to fetch cash at the foreigner’s office every month. Besides, it’s thought that this special card, which can only be used locally, can prevent the refugees from paying Euros to human traffickers and give them more incentive to find a job to earn money.

This practice actually violates the teachings from Economics101 which says that it’s most efficient to directly pay the beneficiaries in money so that they can optimize their spending on their own.

However, like any other model in economics, this model is based on a bunch of assumptions, one of which is there are no mention-worthy externalities, namely the purchasing decisions of the beneficiary receivers are in line with what the society wants for their best. But this assumption doesn’t hold in this case: there were reports that refugees gave in large-scale money received from foreign offices to human traffickers who helped them come to Europe.

In one of the cited news articles below, the two interviewed refugees denied that they would forward received benefits to human traffickers. Of course, two cases are too few to serve as statistically significant evidence, and for lack of data I won’t speculate on how large the scale of paying human traffickers out of refugee benefits is, the point is, you can’t apply a theory or a model on real-life case without first checking the assumptions.

The above-cited model, while only having limited application in this case, does point out that printing a special card would cost more than simply handing out cash. I don’t know how much that additional cost is, but seemingly less than the benefit, because three months later, the whole of Germany wants to introduce this card. The introduction has to be delayed by some legal issues, and then a few counties want to introduce it independently. So popular is this special card!

Sure, the popularity among the refugees is lower, both interviewed refugees complained that they can’t use this card everywhere, but only in a few popular supermarkets. They also said that this reduced comfort won’t change their decision to stay as they face death threats in their home countries, and one of them found a job anyway and so no longer needs this special card, while the other had to go to school. So...
Ambiguity in Prediction Market Resolution is Still Harmful
by aphyer — 2024-07-31T20:32:40.217Z

A brief followup to this post in light of recent events.

Free and Fair Elections

Polymarket has an open market 'Venezuela Presidential Election Winner'. Its description is as follows:

The 2024 Venezuela presidential election is scheduled to take place on July 28, 2024.
This market will resolve to "Yes" if Nicolás Maduro wins. Otherwise, this market will resolve to "No."
This market includes any potential second round. If the result of this election isn't known by December 31, 2024, 11:59 PM ET, the market will resolve to "No."
In the case of a two-round election, if this candidate is eliminated before the second round this market may immediately resolve to "No".
The primary resolution source for this market will be official information from Venezuela, however a consensus of credible reporting will also suffice.

Can you see any ambiguity in this specification? Any way in which, in a nation whose 2018 elections "[did] not in any way fulfill minimal conditions for free and credible elections" according to the UN, there could end up being ambiguity in how this market should resolve?

If so, I have bad news and worse news.

The bad news is that Polymarket could not, and so this market is currently in a disputed-outcome state after Maduro's government announced a more-official-but-almost-certainly-faked election win, while the opposition announced somewhat-more-credible figures in which they won.

The worse news is that $3,546,397 has been bet on that market as of this writing.

How should that market resolve? I am not certain! Commenters on the market have...ah...strong views in both directions. And the description of the market does not make it entirely clear. If I were in charge of resolving this market I would probably resolve it to Maduro, just off the phrase about the 'primary resolution source'. However, I don't think that's unambiguous, and I would feel much happier if the market had begun with a wording that made it clear how a scenario like this would be treated.

(Update 8/2: market is still unresolved, Maduro trading at 75%).

(Update 8/5: market still unresolved, Maduro trading at 57%).

(Update 8/6: the market, with $6.15M bet, has resolved to opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzales)

How did other markets do?

I've given Manifold a hard time on similar issues in the past, but they actually did a lot better here. There is a 'Who w...