trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Does the Higgs-boson exist?
by Shmi — 2019-05-23T01:53:21.580Z
Link: https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/05/does-higgs-boson-exist.html

What do scientists mean when they say that something exists? Every time I give a public lecture, someone will come and inform me that black holes don’t exist, or quarks don’t exist, or time doesn’t exist. Last time someone asked me “Do you really believe that gravitational waves exist?”

Sabine is a theoretical physicists who had gained prominence (and notoriety) through her book Lost in Math, about groupthink in high-energy physics.

In this post she sums up beautifully what I and many physicists believe, and is vehemently opposed by the prevailing realist crowd here on LW. A few excerpts:

Look, I am a scientist. Scientists don’t deal with beliefs. They deal with data and hypotheses. Science is about knowledge and facts, not about beliefs.

...

We use this mathematics to make predictions. The predictions agree with measurements. That is what we mean when we say “quarks exist”: We mean that the predictions obtained with the hypothesis agrees with observations.

...

Now, you may complain that this is not what you mean by “existence”. You may insist that you want to know whether it is “real” or “true”. I do not know what it means for something to be “real” or “true.” You will have to consult a philosopher on that. They will offer you a variety of options, that you may or may not find plausible.
A lot of scientists, for example, subscribe knowingly or unknowingly to a philosophy called “realism” which means that they believe a successful theory is not merely a tool to obtain predictions, but that its elements have an additional property that you can call “true” or “real”. I am loosely speaking here, because there several variants of realism. But they have in common that the elements of the theory are more than just tools.
And this is all well and fine, but realism is a philosophy. It’s a belief system, and science does not tell you whether it is correct.

...

Here is a homework assignment: Do you think that I exist? And what do you even mean by that?
Free will as an appearance to others
by Yuxi_Liu — 2019-05-22T23:57:42.395Z

Free will

Consider creatures. This is really hard to define in general, but for now let's just consider biological creatures. They are physical systems.

An effectively deterministic system, or an apparent machine, is a system whose behavior can be predicted by the creature making the judgment easily (using only a little time/energy) from its initial state and immediate surroundings.

An effectively teleological system, or an apparent agent, is a system whose behavior cannot be predicted as above, but whose future state can be predicted in some sense.

In what sense though, needs work: if I can predict that you would eat food, but not how, that should count. If I can predict you would eat chocolate at 7:00, though I don't know how you would do that, that might count as less free. Perhaps something like information-theoretic "surprise", or "maximizing entropy"? More investigation needed.

Basically, an apparent machine is somebody that you can predict very well, and an apparent agent is somebody that you can predict only to a limited, big-picture way.

A successful agent needs to figure out what other agents are going to do. But it's too hard to model them as apparent machines, just because how complicated creatures are. It's easier to model them as apparent agents.

Apparent agents are apparently free: they aren't apparently deterministic.

Apparent agents are willful: they do actions.

Thus, apparent agents apparently have free will. To say someone "has free will" means that someone is a creature that does things in a way you can't predict in detail but can somewhat in outcome. Machines can be willful or not, but they are not free.

In this theory, free will becomes a property that is not possessed by creatures themselves, but by creatures interacting with other creatures.

Eventually, some creatures evolved to put this line of thought to their self, probably those animals that are very social and need to think about their selves constantly, like humans.

And that's how humans think they themselves have free will.

Perhaps all complicated systems that can think are always too complicated to predict themselves, as such, they would all consider themselves to have free will.

From free to unfree

With more prediction power, a creature could modeling other creatures as apparent machines, instead of apparent agents. This is how humans have been treating other animals, actually. Descartes

...
And the AI would have got away with it too, if...
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2019-05-22T21:35:35.543Z

Paul Christiano presented some low-key AI catastrophe scenarios; in response, Robin Hanson argued that Paul's scenarios were not consistent with the "large (mostly economic) literature on agency failures".

He concluded with:

For concreteness, imagine a twelve year old rich kid, perhaps a king or queen, seeking agents to help manage their wealth or kingdom. It is far from obvious that this child is on average worse off when they choose a smarter more capable agent, or when the overall pool of agents from which they can choose becomes smarter and more capable. And its even less obvious that the kid becomes maximally worse off as their agents get maximally smart and capable. In fact, I suspect the opposite.

Thinking on that example, my mind went to Edward the Vth of England (one of the "Princes in the Tower"), deposed then likely killed by his "protector" Richard III. Or of the Guangxu Emperor of China, put under house arrest by the Regent Empress Dowager Cixi. Or maybe the ten year-old Athitayawong, king of Ayutthaya, deposed by his main administrator after only 36 days of reign. More examples can be dug out from some of Wikipedia's list of rulers deposed as children.

We have no reason to restrict to child-monarchs - so many Emperors, Kings, and Tsars have been deposed by their advisers or "agents". So yes, there are many cases where agency fails catastrophically for the principal and where having a smarter or more rational agent was a disastrous move.

By restricting attention to agency problems in economics, rather than in politics, Robin restricts attention to situations where institutions are strong and behaviour is punished if it gets too egregious. Though even today, there is plenty of betrayal by "agents" in politics, even if the results are less lethal than in times gone by. In economics, too, we have fraudulent investors, some of which escape punishment. Agents betray their principals to the utmost - when they can get away with it.

So Robin's argument is entirely dependent on the assumption that institutions or rivals will prevent AIs from being able to abuse their agency power. Absent that assumption, most of the "large (mostly economic) literature on agency failures" becomes irrelevant.

So, would institutions be able to detect and punish abuses by future powerful AI agents? I'd argue we can't count on it, but it's a question that needs its own explorati

...
Cognition and Intractability by Rooij, Blokpoel, Kwisthout, Wareham
by bhishma — 2019-05-22T18:55:30.822Z
Link: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cognition-and-intractability/2FC21B94CCCFBBD1E11A2D30D4503A23

Intractability is a growing concern across the cognitive sciences: while many models of cognition can describe and predict human behavior in the lab, it remains unclear how these models can scale to situations of real-world complexity. Cognition and Intractability is the first book to provide an accessible introduction to computational complexity analysis and its application to questions of intractability in cognitive science. Covering both classical and parameterized complexity analysis, it introduces the mathematical concepts and proof techniques that can be used to test one’s intuition of (in)tractability. It also describes how these tools can be applied to cognitive modeling to deal with intractability – and its ramifications – in a systematic way. Aimed at students and researchers in philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, psychology,artificial intelligence, and linguistics who want to build a firm understanding of intractability and its implications in their modeling work, it is an ideal resource for teaching or self-study

From the preface of the book .

Since cognitive science is an active topic of discussion in LessWrong, I guess many people would like this book. Even though the book is not free, you can check out the intro chapter. Iris Van Rooij also has some other interesting papers such as "The tractable cognition thesis"
What is your personal experience with "having a meaningful life"?
by Hazard — 2019-05-22T14:03:39.509Z

I hear a lot of different stories about how meaning should fit into one's life

"What's all this meaning bullshit? Just focus on doing your job well and providing for your family."

^my grandparents

"Wanting meaning is wanting a simple narrative to your life, no simple narrative can possibly be true which means you should forgo the impulse for meaning in favor of the truth."

^some rationalists I know now

"Sure you can have meaning, but base it off of something real like 'pushing the bounds of human knowledge' instead of some ancient conception of a deity."

^some other rationalists I know now

"Without meaning you might still be able to have an okay life, but you're missing out on one of the most important/enjoyable/most-human parts of being a human."

^my parents

"Without meaning, you and your society will slowly degrade and fall apart and it is imperative that you find a narrative that works, otherwise game over."

^Jordan Peterson maybe(?)

Question: Do you personally feel a need/desire/impulse to have something like meaning in your life? How do you feel when you have it? How do your feel when you don't? If you do experience a need for meaning, how do you feel about having that need?

If you feel a need for meaning, what sorts of things feel meaningful? If you don't feel a need for meaning, what is that like? If you feel a need for meaning but don't endorse it, why is that the case?

Alternative Question (If your answer is something along the lines of "I don't really care about meaning much, I mostly just try to spend time on things I care about"): Are you readily able to discern what you care about? Do you think and decide what to care about? Have you ever had the experience of caring about ABC for a long time, then some event cause you to no longer care about ABC? What does life feel like when you're doing stuff you care about? What does it feel like when you aren't?

This is an open ended and fuzzy topic, and I'm am looking for any and all personal experience data points you can provide.

Edit/Clarification: My main motive for asking is that I was planning to write some posts about meaning, and wanted to check if the views I was responding to were ones other people held, or just straw men. Again, I'm interested in either personal details of how yo...
Schelling Fences versus Marginal Thinking
by Davidmanheim — 2019-05-22T10:22:32.213Z

Follow-up / Related to: Scott Alexander's Schelling Fences on Slippery Slopes, Sunk Cost Fallacy, Gwern's Are Sunk Costs Fallacies?, and Unenumerated's Proxy Measures, Sunk Costs, and Chesterton's Fence

I was recently reading an essay by Clayton Christensen, in the (fairly worthwhile) HBR's "Must Reads" boxed set, where he recommends that people "Avoid the Marginal Cost Mistake". In short, he suggests that Schelling Fences are sometimes ignored, or not constructed, because of a somewhat fallacious application of marginal-cost thinking. For example, my Schelling fence for work is that I stop when it is time to get my kids. The other side is that occasionally I'm in the middle of something - coding, or writing this lesswrong post - where being interrupted is fairly high cost. I can usually ask someone else to pick them up instead, and given how much I see them, the marginal value of time with my kids is low.

Christensen suggests that this analysis is incorrect, largely because of myopia. I am ignoring the longer term benefits of family dinners because the connection between coming home today and building the norm of being home for dinner every night is a longer-term investment. The future is full of extenuating circumstances, and only a fairly strong Schelling fence will let me insist that my kids stay home for dinner once they are teenagers.

I'd apply it more broadly, but his point was that this is especially critical in matters of morality. Cheating once changes everything. The simple fact that you cheated weakens your resolve not to in the future. The spiral created by a single action leads easily down a path towards using infinite money and invulnerability cheat codes, with no further challenge or enjoyment from playing the video game - or in the context he's discussing, it led to jail time for two of the people from his graduating class back in college.

Conclusions?

The critical question is: where do we want to use marginal cost analysis, and where do we want to stick to our sunk-costs and Schelling fences?

Based on Christensen's analysis, I would suggest that Schelling fences rather than sunk costs are particularly valuable for reinforcing values that are hard to measure, are too long term to get routine feedback on, or that involve specific commitments to other people. On the other hand, based...
Where are people thinking and talking about global coordination for AI safety?
by Wei Dai — 2019-05-22T06:24:02.425Z

Many AI safety researchers these days are not aiming for a full solution to AI safety (e.g., the classic Friendly AI), but just trying to find good enough partial solutions that would buy time for or otherwise help improve global coordination on AI research (which in turn would buy more time for AI safety work), or trying to obtain partial solutions that would only make a difference if the world had a higher level of global coordination than it does today.

My question is, who is thinking directly about how to achieve such coordination (aside from FHI's Center for the Governance of AI, which I'm aware of) and where are they talking about it? I personally have a bunch of questions related to this topic (see below) and I'm not sure what's a good place to ask them. If there's not an existing online forum, it seems a good idea to start thinking about building one (which could perhaps be modeled after the AI Alignment Forum, or follow some other model).

What are the implications of the current US-China trade war?

Human coordination ability seems within an order of magnitude of what's needed for AI safety. Why the coincidence? (Why isn’t it much higher or lower?)

When humans made advances in coordination ability in the past, how was that accomplished? What are the best places to apply leverage today?

Information technology has massively increased certain kinds of coordination (e.g., email, eBay, Facebook, Uber), but at the international relations level, IT seems to have made very little impact. Why?

Certain kinds of AI safety work could seemingly make global coordination harder, by reducing perceived risks or increasing perceived gains from non-cooperation. Is this a realistic concern?

What are the best intellectual tools for thinking about this stuff? Just study massive amounts of history and let one's brain's learning algorithms build what models it can?
Discourse Norms: Justify or Retract Accusations
by Davis_Kingsley — 2019-05-22T01:49:12.271Z

One discourse norm that I think is really important is that of having to either support or retract accusations if challenged. If you say something negative about another person, their work, etc. and they ask you to explain yourself, I believe you are compelled to either justify or retract your statement. This creates a strong barrier against unjustified attacks and gossip, while still allowing justified criticism.

Here are some examples of what this norm might look like in action:

1. Alice posts about her thoughts on an issue; Bob, who dislikes Alice, responds with snarky insults about Alice's motivations. Alice asks Bob to explain his accusations, and he doesn't do so or replies with more insults. Moderation intervenes against Bob.

2. Carol posts a brief comment saying a project is incompetent. Darryl replies asking her to provide more detail or retract. Carol links to a post that explains her critique in more detail.

3. Efren posts a statement criticizing an event that will soon be held. Faye asks Efren to back up his criticisms. Efren decides that his claim was actually more emotional and less grounded than he first thought, so he decides to retract his original statement.

Now, someone might ask "why try to make it more difficult to be critical of something?" The answer is that making fun of things is easy [1], and in general norms online often trend too much in the direction of low-content mockery rather than reasoned debate. Holding norms that require people to back up or retract controversial statements can be a good step away from that failure mode.

[1] Full disclosure: I wrote the linked post under my old username.
Constraints & Slackness Reasoning Exercises
by johnswentworth — 2019-05-21T22:53:11.048Z

Epistemic status: no idea if this will work at all for learning the relevant thought-skills. Please post feedback if you try any exercises, especially if you hadn’t internalized these skills already.

The goal of this post is to briefly explain and practice a very general thought-tool. If you've ever tried to hold off on proposing solutions, then sat there without any idea where to start, then this is the sort of tool which you may find useful. We'll start with a short example and explanation, then dive right into the exercises.

Here’s a reaction you may have used in high school or undergrad chem lab to synthesize aspirin:

(

source

)

Each mole of aspirin requires one mole each of salicyclic acid and acetic anhydride to produce.

Warm-up question: we start with one mole of salicyclic acid and two moles of acetic anhydride. Assuming the reaction runs to completion (i.e. as much of the reactants as possible are converted to aspirin), which will result in more total aspirin production: one extra mole of salicyclic acid, or one extra mole of acetic anhydride?

In the language of optimization/economics, we have two constraints:

the amount of aspirin produced is less than or equal to the amount of salicyclic acid available (in moles)
the amount of aspirin produced is less than or equal to the amount of acetic anhydride available (in moles)

In the case of our warm-up question, we would say that constraint 1 is “taut” and constraint 2 is “slack”. Once 1 mole of aspirin is produced, we cannot produce any more, because there is no “room left” in constraint 1 - just like a taut rope cannot be pulled further, a taut constraint can go no further. Conversely, just like a slack rope can be pulled further, constraint 2 has extra room - extra acetic anhydride left, which could produce more aspirin if only we had more salicyclic acid.

Key point: the slack constraint is completely and totally irrelevant to the amount of aspirin produced, so long as it remains slack: adding one additional mole of acetic anhydride will produce exactly zero extra moles of aspirin. If we want to maximize the amount of aspirin produced, then we should ignore the slack constraint (acetic anhydride) and focus on the taut constraint (salicyclic acid).

This idea generalizes: whenever we want to optimize something, we can ignore slack constraints. Only the taut constraints matter.

In more realistic situations, “constrain...
A Quick Taxonomy of Arguments for Theoretical Engineering Capabilities
by Ruby — 2019-05-21T22:38:58.739Z

Epistemic Status: I didn't think about this for that long, could be improved, but I still think it's a good first pass.

This post is was written as an answer to the "and how do we know that?" part of the question Space colonization: what can we definitely do and how do we know that?

Working on questions related to space colonization, I've formed a loose taxonomy of the kinds of arguments I've encountered - primarily those in Eternity in Six Hours, but also other sources and arguments I make myself.

A Taxonomy of Argument Types

1. Our understanding of the laws of physics says it should be possible. (Argument from Physics/Basic Science)

At the most basic, we have reason to believe doing something is possible when applying highly-confident models of physics say that it should be. For example, we have a lot of confidence in the laws of motion, general relativity, and chemistry. Related to these, we have (I believe) a lot of confidence in our models of astronomy and how far away different stars. These models state that with enough energy one can accelerate objects to fast enough speeds to reach remote celestial destinations.

At this level, we're dealing a lot with energy, distances, accelerations and things that resemble back of the envelope calculations.

Usually application of physical theory also requires use of empirically obtained data, such as calculations of interstellar dust densities. However, this data can often be generated from robust models and sensors that work off basic physical quantities. Plus one can explore the sensitivity of the models showing that even changing empirical parameters by an order of magnitude doesn't undermine the overall argument.

Note that the arguments in these models are both contingent and used to rule out of a lot of goals and scenarios. We could imagine worlds where everything is much further away and achievable speeds are much slower such that we could never reach anything. We also don't spend thought on things which seem ruled out, e.g. faster than light travel, or even levels of speed that would require exceedingly enormous quantities of energy.

2. Things nature has done, so reasonably we as intelligent beings in nature should eventually be able to too. (Argument from Nature)

Without elaboration, the authors of Eternity in Six Hours rely on this argument when making the assumption th...
Go Do Something
by Davis_Kingsley — 2019-05-21T15:42:48.096Z

There's this notion going around in the community sometimes that holds that the best way to progress on one's rationality skills is to make lots and lots of theoretical study by yourself or to go off and "level up" a bunch on your own prior to getting involved in object-level projects or efforts.

I think that's false and in fact that it's not only false but it's almost the opposite of what needs to be done. In point of fact, much of the time I've seen people go off to meditate in the darkness for a year and "level up" a bunch, this has not only not helped much but in some cases has seemed to actually harm, as people have a tendency to go in strange and unsound directions when doing this sort of thing on their own without feedback.

Instead, I think that if you want to make progress on your rationality skills, the best way to do that is to get involved with object-level projects and use those as testing grounds for your practice. Not only will this help you test skills in a more realistic and practical setting, but it will also provide demonstrations that you can later refer to to show how things worked (or didn't), and it will quite possibly help you build a secret identity as well.

So, yeah. If you want to be an advanced rationalist, don't just theorize - go out there and do stuff.