trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Do agents with (mutually known) identical utility functions but irreconcilable knowledge sometimes fight?
by mako yass — 2023-08-23T08:13:05.631Z

Been pondering; will conflict always exist? A major subquestion: Suppose we all merge utility functions and form an interstellar community devoted to optimizing the merger. It'll probably make sense for us to specialize in different parts of the work, which means accumulating specialist domain knowledge and becoming mutually illegible.

When people have very different domain knowledge, they also fall out of agreement about what the borders of their domains are. (EG: A decision theorist is insisting that they know things about the trajectory of AI that ML researchers don't. ML researchers don't believe them and don't heed their advice.) In these situations, even when all parties are acting in good faith, they know that they wont be able to reconcile about certain disagreements, and it may seem to make sense, from some perspectives, to try to just impose their own way, in those disputed regions.

Would there be any difference between the dispute resolution methods that would be used here, and the dispute resolution methods that would be used between agents with different core values? (war, peace deals, and most saliently,)

Would the parties in the conflict use war proxies that take physical advantages in different domains into account? (EG: Would the decision theorist block ML research in disputed domains where their knowledge of decision theory would give them a force advantage?)
Separate the truth from your wishes
by Jacob G-W — 2023-08-23T00:52:59.107Z
Link: https://jacobgw.com/blog/observation/2023/08/21/truth.html

The sentence “All people are equal.” (and ones like it) seems simple at first glance but actually contains a lot of depth. Depending on how you interpret it, it can be false or subjective, but I don’t think it’s true.

The most naive interpretation is obviously false. All people are literally not equal in the physical sense. Our atoms are in different configurations. Neither are we equal in the psychological sense. We react to the same stimuli in different ways.

So what in the world do people mean when they say all people are equal?

Do they mean everyone has equal rights? That makes a little more sense, but it is not true. I do not have the same rights as someone living in Switzerland or China.

Hmm, maybe they mean that everyone has equal opportunities? A quick thought falsifies this interpretation. So what do they mean???

What someone really means when they say “All people are equal.” is “I wish for all people to be equal!” which is neither true nor false. It is a wish about the future. I do wish for all people to be equal (but not in the Harrison Bergeron sense, more along the lines of equal rights).

The reason we knee-jerk react to “All people are equal.” is because our culture has conditioned us, from the humanism of the Enlightenment to the Declaration of Independence and onwards, to believe it is true. We don’t realize that we are really stating a wish when we think we are making a true statement, and this is dangerous.

Conversely, there are some statements that look like opinions (or maybe even falsehoods) at first glance, but are actually true. (Statements about intelligence fit this category very nicely, but I’m going to leave them out.) These statements usually go against what culture has conditioned us to believe. For example: “All people are not equal.” This statement is true but is usually interpreted as “I wish for all people to have unequal rights.” (a wish), but it should just be interpreted as a fact. Again, this is dangerous, since it masks what is really true.

In order to push society forward – to actually make everyone equal and become better – we need to separate our beliefs and wishes. If we believe that something that is not true (but that we want to be true) is actually true, we won’t notice it as much and will not spend as much time and effort on fixing it. If, however, we could accurately believe the (sometimes inconvenient) truth, we could ...
Implications of evidential cooperation in large worlds
by Lukas Finnveden — 2023-08-23T00:43:45.232Z
Link: https://lukasfinnveden.substack.com/p/implications-of-ecl

I've written several posts about the plausible implications of "evidential cooperation in large worlds" (ECL), on my newly-revived blog. This is a cross-post of the first. If you want to see the rest of the posts, you can either go to the blog or click through the links in this one.

All of the content on my blog, including this post, only represent my own views — not those of my employer. (Currently Open Philanthropy.)

“ECL” is short for “evidential cooperation in large worlds”. It’s an idea that was originally introduced in Oesterheld (2017) (under the name of “multiverse-wide superrationality”). This post will explore implications of ECL, but it won’t explain the idea itself. If you haven’t encountered it before, you can read the paper linked above or this summary written by Lukas Gloor.[1]

This post lists all candidates for decision-relevant implications of ECL that I know about and think are plausibly important.[2] In this post, I will not describe in much depth why they might be implications of ECL. Instead, I will lean on the principle that ECL recommends that we (and other ECL-sympathetic actors) act to benefit the values of people whose decisions might correlate with our decisions.

As described in this appendix, this relies on you and others having particular kinds of values. For one, I assume that you care about what happens outside our light cone. But more strongly, I’m looking at values with the following property: If you could have a sufficiently large impact outside our lightcone, then the value of taking different actions would be dominated by the impact that those actions had outside our lightcone. I’ll refer to this as “universe-wide values”. Even if all your values aren’t universe-wide, I suspect that the implications will still be relevant to you if you have some universe-wide values.

This is speculative stuff, and I’m not particularly confident that I will have gotten any particular claim right.

Summary (with links to sub-sections)

For at least two reasons, future actors will be in a better position to act on ECL than we are. Firstly, they will know a lot more about what other value-systems are out there. Secondly, they will be facing immediate decisions about what to do with the universe, which should be informed by what other civilizations would prefer.[3] This suggests that it could be important for us to Affect whether (and ho...
Walk while you talk: don't balk at "no chalk"
by dkl9 — 2023-08-22T21:27:47.257Z
Link: https://dkl9.net/essays/walk_talk.html

Some days ago, after a long conversation with a friend, I took retrospective notes, recalling what we discussed. (I wrote over 50 items. This is not a small sample.) For parts of the time, we walked; for other parts, we stayed in roughly the same place. Writing the notes, I could tell I was missing up to half of what we said (and forgot the order) for those stationary parts. I had no such issues recalling the walking-concurrent parts.

I've noticed this kind of discrepancy a bit before, but this was when it became obvious. Walking as you talk can help a lot towards remembering what's said.

This may be a quirk of how my mind works and wouldn't apply to everyone. I doubt I'm totally unique, so it probably at least applies to some other people, even if not everyone.

Why would this work?

This part is justified speculation, not explicitly confirmed, and not important if you're just using the method.

What seems to be going on here is that my episodic memory encodes the surroundings I see together with the conversation I hear. Later, when I recall the event, I think of what I saw around me to help bring the event to mind, and what I heard (or interpreted at the time from what I heard) comes with it.

I see two ways that the walking helps:

Walking means I'll be in different places at different stages of the conversation, so each visual memory (exact place and its surroundings) associates to fewer auditory/semantic memories (things spoken), and thus associates more strongly.
Moving in space enforces a continuous path (unless I can teleport, so maybe refrain from teleporting during conversations), which is easy to interpolate and "walk thru" from just a few points — much easier than the unpredictable transitions of conversation.

I don't know which is more important.

Corollaries and extensions

The mechanism here depends on you moving, not those with whom you speak. If you only care about your own memory (or the circumstances otherwise demand it), you could call them while walking alone and get the same effect. (I have tried this. It works.)

The method should also apply equally well to one-sided speeches to which you listen, tho those tend to be more predictable anyway.

The mechanism here depends on movement and changing surroundings, not specifically walking. I expect you'd get the same effect if you're cycling/driving/riding a vehicle, so long as you're observing what you pass by as...
State of Generally Available Self-Driving
by jefftk — 2023-08-22T18:50:01.166Z

After a lot of discussions online where people try to argue about
where self-driving tech is going but seem pretty confused about where
the tech currently is, I wanted to give a bit of an overview of the
current state.

There are two main approaches: taxis and personal vehicles. There are
many companies that have gotten as far as testing with a safety driver
and/or with "trusted tester" riders, but as far as I can tell only two [EDIT: three? four?]
companies run commercial ride services open to the public without
anyone in the driver's seat:

Waymo
(Google-affiliated) has been operating fully driverless vehicles in
Phoenix AZ as a commercial ride
service since 2020. They
used to have a waitlist, but at this point anyone can download the app
and try it. They've just expanded to SF,
and have a waitlist for LA
and Austin. As
of 2023-08
they claim to be serving 10k weekly riders.

Cruise (GM-affiliated) has been
operating fully driverless vehicles in SF as a commercial ride service
since 2022.
They also now seem to cover Austin and Phoenix, and as of
2023-08-02
also claim 10k weekly riders.

[Added 2023-08-23] It's hard to tell because the best sources
are in Chinese, but it looks like Apollo (Baidu) meets this as
well. As of the end
of 2022: "In addition to Wuhan, Baidu now provides commercialized
autonomous ride-hailing service with no driver or safety operator in
Chongqing as well. Beijing will soon be added to the list."

[Added 2023-08-23] There's even less English-internet
information on this one, but another Chinese company, pony.ai may also be running a fully
driverless commercial ride hailing service. "Pony.ai said it has
launched fully driverless autonomous ride-hailing services in Beijing
and Guangzhou." (2023-03-17)

For personal vehicles, the most automation you can currently get is Level
3. These are systems where, when engaged, the person in the
driver's seat can safely and legally read a book or otherwise not pay
attention. If the system runs into a situation it can't handle, it
alerts the driver, and if the driver doesn't take control it
automatically stops the car. One option here, and maybe the only
commercially available one, is Mercedes' Drive Pilot, which they
launched in Germany in
2022. It only operates on highways under 40mph (essentially,
stop-and-go traffic) but Mercedes takes on the legal liability when
...
Seth Explains Consciousness
by Jacob Falkovich — 2023-08-22T18:06:42.653Z
Link: https://putanumonit.com/2023/08/19/seth-explains-consciousness/

The Real Problem

For as long as there have been philosophers, they loved philosophizing about what life really is. Plato focused on nutrition and reproduction as the core features of living organisms. Aristotle claimed that it was ultimately about resisting perturbations. In the East the focus was less on function and more on essence: the Chinese posited ethereal fractions of qi as the animating force, similar to the Sanskrit prana or the Hebrew neshama. This lively debate kept rolling for 2,500 years —

élan vital

is a 20th century coinage — accompanied by the sense of an enduring mystery, a fundamental inscrutability about life that will not yield.

And then, suddenly, this debate dissipated. This wasn’t caused by a philosophical breakthrough, by some clever argument or incisive definition that satisfied all sides and deflected all counters. It was the slow accumulation of biological science that broke “Life” down into digestible components, from the biochemistry of living bodies to the thermodynamics of metabolism to genetics. People may still quibble about how to classify a virus that possesses some but not all of life’s properties, but these semantic arguments aren’t the main concern of biologists. Even among the general public who can’t tell a phospholipid from a possum there’s no longer a sense that there’s some impenetrable mystery regarding how life can arise from mere matter.

In Being You, Anil Seth is doing the same to the mystery of consciousness. Philosophers of consciousness have committed the same sins as “philosophers of life” before them: they have mistaken their own confusion for a fundamental mystery, and, as with élan vital, they smuggled in foreign substances to cover the gaps. This is René Descartes’

res cogitans

, a mental substance that is separate from the material.

This Cartesian dualism in various disguises is at the heart of most “paradoxes” of consciousness.

P-zombies

are beings materially identical to humans but lacking this special res cogitans sauce, and their conceivability requires accepting substance dualism. The famous “

hard problem of consciousness

” asks how a “rich inner life” (i.e., res cogitans) can arise from mere “physical processing” and claims that no study of the physical could ever give a satisfying answer.

Being You

by Anil Seth answers these philosophical paradoxes by refusing to engage in all but the minimum required ...
ChatGPT challenges the case for human irrationality
by Kevin Dorst — 2023-08-22T12:46:22.085Z
Link: https://kevindorst.substack.com/p/chatgpt-undermines-the-case-for-human

TLDR: Humans make systematic errors: apparent overconfidence, the conjunction fallacy, the gambler’s fallacy, and belief inertia. For decades, this has been taken to show that we reason in an irrational, non-probabilistic way. But GPT4—a probabilistic inference machine—exhibits every one of these “errors”. This gives some (defeasible!) evidence for rational explanations of human biases.

Charlie is a helpful chap. An experimenter’s dream subject, really. He knows a lot. Ask him any question you like, and he’ll try his best to answer it.

But sometimes he’s wrong. Indeed—as with most people—when he has to make judgments under uncertainty, his errors tend to be systematic.

He seems to display overconfidence: his average confidence in his guesses often exceeds the proportion of those guesses that are correct—on a typical test, his average confidence was 73% but his proportion-correct was only 53%.

He commits the conjunction fallacy: often saying that conjunctions (A&B) are more probable than their conjuncts (A)—contrary to the laws of probability.

He commits the gambler’s fallacy: if a coin lands tails a few times in a row, he tends to act as if a heads is “due”.

He displays both conservativeness and belief inertia when updating on data from random processes: he does not update as much as a Bayesian would, and once he becomes confident of a claim, he’s too slow to respond to evidence that undermines it.

Given all that, what do you conclude about how Charlie deals with uncertainty?

Perhaps—following some heroic psychologists and philosophers—you’d argue that these “errors” are in fact “resource-rational” responses given his limited information and cognitive resources.

Maybe his “overconfidence” is largely due to selection effects. Maybe the conjunction fallacy results from a sensible tradeoff between accuracy and informativity. Maybe the gambler’s fallacy arises from reasonable uncertainty about the causal system. And maybe conservativeness is due to ambiguity in the experimental setup.

Maybe.

But that’s a bit forced, isn’t it? You’re probably more inclined to follow behavioral economists, concluding that these errors provide strong evidence that Charlie is irrational. Rather than maintaining complex probability distributions over possibilities, he must use other (worse) ways of handling uncertainty—such a simple heuristics that lead to these systematic biases.

You’...
The Joan of Arc Challenge For Objective List Theory 
by Bentham's Bulldog — 2023-08-22T08:01:53.802Z

Introduction

The Joan of Arc challenge to objective list theory, as I shall argue, shows that only happiness is of intrinsic value. Pluralists—people who say that there are many things of intrinsic value—otherwise known as objective list theorists (maybe there’s some technical distinction between the two, but if so, I haven’t been able to find it) think that there are several things that are of intrinsic value. Objective list theorists hold roughly the following: that which is of intrinsic value is only happiness, knowledge, relationships, and achievements. To paraphrase Hitchens’ famous quote about those who proclaim “there is no god but Allah,” such people end their sentence a few words too late.

The basic idea behind the Joan of Arc challenge is that all of the things other than happiness that are on the objective list potentially hinge on whether various people take innocuous actions that no one will ever find out about. As a consequence, objective list theory has deeply counterintuitive implications about what you should do in private—holding that people being harmed is desirable. This objection will become clearer in the later sections.

All in all, I think this is potentially the second or third best argument for hedonism, after the

lopsided lives challenge

and maybe also the argument advanced

here

.

Knowledge

Lots of people think that they know something about Joan of Arc. She was burned to death,

had a rap battle against Miley Cyrus

, stood up for . . . (I’m actually realizing I know embarrassingly little about Joan of Arc, though I think it was something religious—maybe to do with the beginning of Protestantism?). But what if . . . everything you know about Joan of Arc is a lie? What if it was all the product of a grand conspiracy—Joan of Arc wasn’t really burned at the stakes? What if she actually lived out her life in peace and happiness and harmony?

No, I obviously don’t think that’s actually the case. But if it were, that would be good, right? If Joan of Arc didn’t actually get burned at the stake, but instead lived out her life in happiness, unburned and at places that are nicer than the stake, wouldn’t that be a good thing? Intuitively it seems like it would be. But unfortunately, most versions of objective list theory must deny this very obvious moral datum.

Why is this? And what the hell is objective list theory? Objective list theory says that...
The Lopsided Lives Argument For Hedonism About Well-being
by Bentham's Bulldog — 2023-08-22T07:59:46.186Z

1 Introduction

(Crosspost of this).

A warning: This is going to get very complicated. The various different models of well-being end up producing weird and counterintuitive conclusions. This is probably the topic that I have spent the most time thinking about of any topic in my life. Very few people have spent much time thinking about lopsided lives, so the terrain is largely unexplored. There are maybe two people on the planet who have spent lots of time thinking about this argument, and I’m one of them. So hopefully this is interesting, but it will only be interesting if you’re a giant nerd.

It’s a shame that very often the best arguments for things are totally ignored by almost all people. The number of people who have read various papers which provide quite decisive cases against deontology is quite small—no one has heard of the

suitcase

cases

or

Chappell’s paradox of deontology

or the

paralysis argument

. The best arguments are often churned out in the dusty halls of academia, relegated to some obscure journal, footnoted occasionally—never seriously explored. There are, as far as I can tell,

upwards of 8 arguments against deontology

that have been made at various points, that no one has ever published a response to. These arguments appeal to deeply intuitive, widely shared premises, showing that if you accept, for example, the principle that you should want others to act rightly, you should give up your deontological beliefs.

But my target here is not deontology. Instead, I am arguing for hedonism about well-being, roughly the idea that the only thing that makes a person’s life go well is happiness and the only thing that makes a person’s life go poorly is suffering. In other words, the only things that determine how well your life goes are your mental states—the ones that feel good are good for you, ones that feel bad are bad for you. How much you know, how many friends you have, and so on matter instrumentally, as friendship and knowledge tend to make a life happier than it would be otherwise. Still though, if two lives are equal in pleasure and pain, it is utterly irrelevant how much of the other things they each contain. Friendship, knowledge, and achievements are valuable as means towards an end—as ways to get pleasure for yourself and others—but are not ends in and of themselves.

This

argument comes from

one of my favorite philosophers—Theron Pum...
Causality and a Cost Semantics for Neural Networks
by scottviteri — 2023-08-21T21:02:00.542Z

Epistemic status: I time-boxed this idea to three days of effort. So any calculations are pretty sloppy, and I haven't looked into any related works. I probably could have done much better if I knew anything about circuit complexity. There are some TODOs and an unfinished last section -- if you are interested in this content and want to pick up where I have left off I'll gladly add you as a collaborator to this post.

Here is a "tech tree" for neural networks. I conjecture (based on admittedly few experiments) that the simplest implementation of any node in this tree includes an implementation of its parents, given that we are writing programs starting from the primitives +, *, and relu. An especially surprising relationship (to me) is that "if statements" are best implemented downstream of division.

Introduction

While discussing with my friend Anthony Corso, an intriguing idea arose. Maybe we can define whether program p1 "causes" p2 in the following way: Given a neural network that mimics p1, how easy is it to learn a neural network which mimics the behavior of p2? This proposition is intriguing because it frames causality as a question about two arbitrary programs, and reduces it to a problem of program complexity.

Suppose that p1 and p2 are written in a programming language P, and let P(ops) represent P extended with ops as primitive operations. We define a complexity function C:P(ops)→R, which takes a program in the extended language and returns a real number representative of the program's complexity for some fixed notion of complexity. Let's define the degree to which p1 "causes" p2 as the minimum complexity achievable by a program p from P(p1) such that p is extensionally equal (equal for all inputs) to p2. If P2 is the set of all p in P(obs+p1) that are extensionally equal to p2, then causes(p1,p2)=minp∈P2C(p). We can also use this definition in the approximate case, considering the minimum complexity achievable by programs p such that E(p(x)−p2(x))2<ε with respect to some L1−integrable probability measure.

We can define a particular complexity function C that represents the cost of executing a program. We can estimate this quantity by looking at the program's Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) in rela...