trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
RandomWalkNFT: A Game Theory Exercise
by Annapurna — 2021-11-12T19:05:47.916Z

Analyzing RandomWalkNFT's interesting withdrawal mechanism for minted ETH

Random Walk #0

Note: This is a discussion regarding RandomWalkNFT’s specific withdrawal mechanism of the accumulated ETH used to mint the images. This is not a discussion about its NFTs or NFTs in general. This is not an introductory post on NFTs.

Random Walk NFTs

RandomWalkNFT

is a website where you can mint Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) that are attached to a one of a kind image (technically two images as well as two videos detailing its creation) created through a

Random Walk

. The NFTs are minted on the

Arbitrum

blockchain, a layer 2 scaling solution on the Ethereum protocol. RandomWalkNFT is the first NFT project to launch on the Arbitrum blockchain.

I was linked to RandomWalkNFT through my prediction markets community, and what really caught my attention in particular was how it was designed to handle the ETH used to mint the NFTs.

Withdrawal Mechanism

In order to create an NFT, A certain amount of ETH needs to be used to mint it. In the case of RandomWalkNFT, every new NFT requires more ETH for minting than the previous one. As of November 12, 2021 at 1:00 pm EST, you need 0.0096 ETH + gas fee to mint a RandomWalkNFT.

The 0.0096 ETH used to mint the NFT would be going into

this contract

, which is accumulating all the ETH used to mint all the RandomWalkNFTs. Currently, there are 7.448 ETH accumulated (~$34,400 USD).

Where it gets interesting is how it is designed to distribute this accumulated ETH.

Snapshot of the Withdrawal Mechanism

Every time a new NFT is minted that clock will reset to 30 days. If 30 days pass without a new NFT minted, the last minter address will then have the ability to withdraw 50% of the minted ETH accumulated, currently about 3.77 ETH.

So for a total mint cost of 0.015539 ETH, you could potentially get a return of 3.77 ETH, a 242x return on your investment!

Once the last minter address withdraws, the clock will freeze until a new mint happens. After that new mint happens, the 30 day countdown will restart.

Game Theory

There is a clear opportunity to generate a significant return on your investment with this design, if you are able to execute the correct strategy. This mechanism was designed as an incentive to mint until it gets uneconomically expensive to do so, which in theory should increase the value of every minted NFT so far.

At what point...
Preprint is out! 100,000 lumens to treat seasonal affective disorder
by Fabienne — 2021-11-12T17:59:20.077Z

Let’s give people with winter depression (seasonal affective disorder, SAD) LOTS OF LIGHT and see what happens!

Our preprint is out now for our paper “100,000 lumens to treat seasonal affective disorder: A proof of concept RCT of bright, whole-room, all-day (BROAD) light therapy”! We have sent it to a number of professors working in that area and have received very encouraging and helpful feedback, which has made me even more excited about continuing this research.

→ Paper:

https://medrxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2021.10.29.21265530v1

, short summary Twitter thread:

https://twitter.com/FabienneSand/status/1457745472773296128

Jan Brauner and I are very thankful to the LessWrong/EA communities, which have inspired this first study (there will be more) and through which we have found funding. In particular, thank you Eliezer Yudkowsky for helping us find funding and for inspiring the study with Inadequate Equilibria, David Chapman for inspiring us with

these

two

posts in the Meaningness blog, Raemon for inspiring us with

this

LessWrong post and everyone who discussed with us setups they have tried. <3
ALERT⚠️ Not enough gud vibes 😎
by Pee Doom — 2021-11-12T11:25:16.280Z

🚓🚓WEEOOWEEOOWEEOO🚓🚓

It has come to the attention of the Center for Applied Postrationality there aren't enough ｇｏｏｄ　ｖｉｂｅｓ right now. We wish to rectify this error.

Here are some ｇｏｏｄ　ｖｉｂｅｓ. May you pass the vibe check, when the time comes. (Hint: It's the Dankularity, forecasted to occur on February 1st, 2024.)

Inspirobot

Where has the rum gone?

:)

bnuuy

Your turn.
Avoiding Negative Externalities - a theory with specific examples - Part 1
by M. Y. Zuo — 2021-11-12T04:09:32.462Z

Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow; attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia negative externalities.

- Samuel Johnson, with modifications

This will be my first post on LW, hopefully some will find it enlightening.

1.1 Preface

It is customary to adorn the beginning of any undertaking with words of encouragement, high hopes, premonitions of great triumphs, and the possibility of accolades from far and wide. Those readers who have already pondered over these precepts, as they are common enough to have been repeated throughout history, have likely grown to a stage of development beyond the need for further enticements with the fruits of higher realms of learning. Although what I write may yield treasures disproportionate to effort invested in exceptional circumstances, it is far more likely to merely supplement the existing modes of thought in operation among many of the readership.

1.2 Introduction – Why care?

For as long as multi-cellular organisms have existed there has been a need to cooperate to survive the changing tides of fortune. Among the many forms and schemes of cooperation effected so far on this Earth to survive these forces, none are considered more advantageous, in the reckoning of human society, than those that which rewards the architects of such designs disproportionately beyond their invested effort. The prospect of any increase along an exponential curve is thus minutely analyzed in the hopes that the multiplication of what mankind desires can continue forevermore.

Historically, the greater the realized return, the more advantageous it is considered to be among the broad ranks of society. There thence arises a form of cooperation, in the course of human activity, that seeks to maximize potential returns while minimizing resources spent, due to the fact that all expenditures of resources carry an opportunity cost. A notion that has engendered innumerable triumphs and innumerable villainies throughout the course of history, the exemplars of which are too many to enumerate. Sometimes as an intentional consequence, but all too often the most significant consequences are the unexpected, and indeed surprising effects whi...
It's Ok to Dance Again
by jefftk — 2021-11-12T02:50:02.506Z

In March 2020 contra dances, along with most everything else,

shut down. For most of the
time since I would have considered it

irresponsible to hold a dance
regardless of whether it was currently legal, but at this point I
think holding dances with masks and vaccination required

is reasonable. The risk
to vaccinated attendees is very low, dancing is now fully allowed
again, and since many much riskier activities are common opening
up activities like this doesn't appreciably change the shape of the
pandemic.

I've gone through all the contra dances on Try Contra, and categorized them
by whether they appear to have resumed. It looks like ~26 out of 331
dances (8%) have restarted. Here's the list; let me know if I've
missed any: trycontra.com/list.

(The closest one to Boston is the Worcester dance, which I'm
playing
on Saturday. I've brought up re-opening with the BIDA board, but we do not have
consensus to restart dances at this time.)
Measuring and Forecasting Risks from AI
by jsteinhardt — 2021-11-12T02:30:20.959Z

As part of my work for Open Philanthropy, I recently wrote a call for grant proposals on measuring and forecasting risks from future AI systems. I personally think this is a promising area that could absorb $10 million or more in high-quality research projects, and I want to use this post to explain why I'm excited about it.

I've written before about why I think measurement is a highly underrated endeavor that we need much more of in the field of machine learning. But beyond this general need, measurement is especially useful for mitigating risks. This is because few people want to build AI that causes harm, but right now it's unclear how large the risks from AI are or what shape they will take. Operationalizing and measuring risks makes it much easier to mobilize resources to reduce them. And to the extent that some actors do want to cause harm (or are indifferent to it), measuring those harms creates political pressure to change course.

Measurement is also particularly helpful for thinking about future risks. Currently many future risks seem fairly speculative to the typical ML researcher---including things like deception, treacherous turns, or extreme forms of reward hacking. While I think people are wrong to confidently write these off, I doubt that more compelling conceptual arguments will make much headway in this debate. It will be far more convincing to systematically generate concrete examples of these behaviors, and show empirically that they grow with model capacity. This will also be the first step towards mitigating them.

In the remainder of this post, I want to clear up two common confusions that I run into when talking to people about measurement.

Measurement Isn't Just Benchmarks

Data sets have recently gotten a lot of attention in machine learning. For instance, Chris Ré and Karan Goel have a nice blog post on data-centric AI, and many conferences are starting to implement a datasets track. A lot of this was initially kicked off by the massive success of the ImageNet benchmark, and by many later dataset contributions that showed that ImageNet wasn't a singular phenomenon and that datasets systematically helped spur important progress.

Given this background, there's two common but understandable misconceptions: that datasets are all about benchmarks, and that measurement is all about datasets.

Datasets are more than benchmarks. Historically, ML ha...
AGI is at least as far away as Nuclear Fusion.
by Logan Zoellner — 2021-11-11T21:33:58.381Z

Consider two future technologies.

For technology A:

The underling physical laws governing it are fully understood.
A blueprint for the technology is available and the universal consensus of scientists is that this blueprint will work.
A worldwide consortium of scientists has undertaken to build the technology and are funded tune of $10B's

For technology B, none of this is true:

There is no agreement on the underlying rules describing how and whether the system will work
The general consensus is that existing blueprints will not work no matter how much they are scaled up
The largest projects are in the $10M's of dollars and are frequently deemed "too expensive"

Which of these technologies would you expect to be developed first?

I would argue, based on this evidence, that AGI is no closer (and probably in fact much further) away than Commercial Nuclear Fusion. I furthermore suspect there is less than a 50/50 chance that nuclear fusion will achieve "positive energy" by ITER's 2035 target.
A Brief Introduction to Container Logistics
by Vitor — 2021-11-11T15:58:11.510Z

Container logistics is an interesting but complicated topic, with a lot of implicit knowledge kept by industry insiders. In this post, I'll give a brief overview, based on my experiences having worked in the industry for three different shipping companies (all located in Chile) over a period of five years. Hopefully, this will allow people to get more accurate models of the heavy port congestion in Long Beach that has been theorized about extensively here on LW. I can't comment on circumstances specific to that port or the US more generally; but there's a set of underlying intuitions that should give people a solid, universal foundation to think about the issue. Based on those intuitions, I think people are way too optimistic about simple and easy solutions that claim to make major progress on the problem overnight.

Lifecycle of a Container Shipment

I'll start with the basics. Let's say you want to send some cargo from port A to B. Thanks to the invention of standardized shipping containers, this is a relatively easy process, vastly easier than 100 years ago. All the equipment used along the trip (ships, cranes, truck trailers, etc) are specialized for the task of moving containers. This reduces costs dramatically, and makes your cargo arrive faster and safer.

The main trunk lines of international transport are between Asia and the US west coast, and between Asia and Europe (through the Suez canal). There's a significant amount of traffic across the Atlantic too. All of this is done with massive container ships carrying 8'000 or more TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units. 20' container = 1 TEU, 40' container = 2 TEUs). Then there are many, many feeder services with much smaller vessels, going along the coasts of every continent, delivering cargo to/from smaller ports. I was in charge of container logistics for one such feeder line along the South American West Coast, visiting Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Chile.

From a user perspective the process of shipping from A to B looks like this: you make a booking with a shipping company. This booking allows you to pick up a standardized container at a depot, which is usually near A, but might be hundreds of kilometers inland as well. You fill the container with your goods, and apply a tamper proof seal. You then arrange to get that container to port A, which will give you a bill of lading (a physical or virtual document s...
Covid 11/11: Winter and Effective Treatments Are Coming
by Zvi — 2021-11-11T14:50:02.374Z

I was considering splitting off my analysis of the effectiveness of Pfizer’s Paxlovid, a new Covid-19 treatment pill, but it’s so straightforward there’s no reason to do that. It works, with our best guess being it is 89% effective at preventing hospitalization and death, and that’s that. Trial was halted because medical ‘ethics’ is crazy and decided we couldn’t study the pill because it was too effective. Paxlovid still needs to be approved and production needs to be scaled up, but both of these seem like near certainties.

In the meantime, it looks like cases are heading back upwards again. There was high uncertainty (I said I’d be more surprised by no change than by some change, but it wasn’t obvious which direction was more likely) so this was definitely in the possibility space, but it’s near the top end and rather disheartening.

There’s the usual kinds of developments on other fronts, but none of it should come as a meaningful surprise.

Executive Summary

Pfizer’s new Covid-19 treatment pill Paxlovid is ~89% effective at preventing hospitalization and death, but it will take several months to ramp up production and gain official approvals before it is widely available. Effective treatment is coming.
Cases are starting to increase again outside of the South. Winter is coming.
Everything else about as you’d expect.

Let’s run the numbers.

The Numbers

Predictions

Prediction from last week: 442k cases (no change) and 7500 deaths (-11%)

Results: 470k cases (+7%) and 8092 deaths (-4%).

Prediction for next week:

The miss on deaths is due to a large increase in the West. On reflection I likely should have baked some of that in, -11% was a lousy prediction and -7% or so would have been a better prediction. I do think that this is still a disappointing number despite that. For cases the miss is the same size, but this seems more like uncertainty rather than mostly being a mistake in prediction. Cases rising this much this quickly was definitely surprising, and a large update on what’s likely to happen this winter.

Deaths

The jump in the West is not centered on one particular state, with several reporting the highest levels in a while. I’d like to say it is a systematic reporting pattern somehow, and I presume that some deaths from last week out West got shifted into this week. I don’t have any gears for that explanation and given it’s not focused in one state I don’t ...
Using blinders to help you see things for what they are 
by Adam Zerner — 2021-11-11T07:07:41.961Z

In basketball, people are often, well, biased in favor of one player over another. For example:

There's no way that Khris Middleton is better than Kyrie Irving.

Kyrie is widely perceived as an ultra-talented superstar, while Middleton is perceived as a nice sidekick, maybe even a very good sidekick, but not a true hero.

"And then the really smart people," Draco said, his face now serious, "went off and had a little discussion by themselves..."

— HPMoR, Chapter 19

In basketball, something the smart people do in these little discussions is pose questions like the following:

Player A scores 22 points per 75 possessions on +9% efficiency relative to league average.

Player B scores 26 pp75 on +3% efficiency.

Who's better?

It's a pretty good debiasing technique. It'll often lead to uncomfortable conclusions, like "Middleton is better than Kyrie", or "Ginobili is better than McGrady".

I'd like to see this technique used more widely.

It's not quite the same thing, but consider the following.

The consensus opinion of experts is that there is this event that will happen. They don't know when it is going to happen, but they are in agreement that it is going to happen, and that it is going to lead humanity to either utopia or extinction.

What is the chance of utopia vs extinction? Maybe 60-40. It's hard to say.

When do they think it will happen? Maybe between 2030 and 2080. Also hard to say.

Do they think we can do anything to stop it from happening? Nope. It's pretty much inevitable.

Do they think we can do anything to, y'know, push us closer to utopia and further from extinction? Yeah, for sure!

Are we currently doing any of that stuff? Nah, not really. There are a couple of organizations with budgets of a few million dollars, but that's it.

If such a thing were true, how would you expect civilization to react?

I dunno. Maybe some politicians would make a move on it. Not all, but some. Maybe concerned citizens would start Facebook groups. Maybe there'd be documentaries, like we have for climate change. Maybe Vice would write some articles about it. Maybe universities and research groups would be attacking it with some force. Maybe people would spend more mental energy worrying about it than their 401k.

Well, such a thing is true. It's called the singularity. And to my knowledge, civilization is not reacting like I would have expected.

Perhaps using that debiasing technique...
Hardcode the AGI to need our approval indefinitely?
by MichaelStJules — 2021-11-11T07:04:09.567Z

I wouldn't be surprised if others have thought about this before and decided it doesn't work, but I haven't seen it discussed. Is there a version of this proposal that's promising? If so, what would it look like? If not, why not?

What I'm imagining is that there will be a panel of people, and every n days, the AGI will receive a punishment signal (-1) by default by design, unless that panel votes (with e.g. >90% consensus) to replace that signal with 0 and instead give the AGI a reward signal (+1, default 0), which they should commit to doing if and only if the AGI hasn't done anything horrible. I think this could be implemented with (something like) cooperative inverse reinforcement learning.

The AGI should be told that these punishments are being prevented manually and the rewards, given manually, so that it knows that killing everyone or taking control is likely to cost it a lot, unless it can hack the signals first. Furthermore, if it finds a way to disable the punishment signal without being able to hack the reward itself, too, it will just not get either signal with a nonzero value, indefinitely.

Here are some important details that I expect need to be fleshed out:

We make sure that these signals have greater weight than everything else the AGI might care about, but not so much that it leads to paralysis or fanaticism. I had one idea here.
We make sure the signal is secure and too hard for the AGI to hack or otherwise manipulate without alerting us, after which the AGI would be punished and/or stop receiving the panel's rewards.
Successors for the panel must be decided on, so that this arrangement can be maintained indefinitely. We'd like to do this in a way that makes it unlikely that the AGI can get on the panel itself or put someone there to represent itself. Maybe the panelists decide successors.
Discussion with Eliezer Yudkowsky on AGI interventions
by Rob Bensinger — 2021-11-11T03:01:11.208Z

The following is a partially redacted and lightly edited transcript of a chat conversation about AGI between Eliezer Yudkowsky and a set of invitees in early September 2021. By default, all other participants are anonymized as "Anonymous".

I think this Nate Soares quote (excerpted from Nate's response to a report by Joe Carlsmith) is a useful context-setting preface regarding timelines, which weren't discussed as much in the transcript:

[...] My odds [of AGI by the year 2070] are around 85%[...]

I can list a handful of things that drive my probability of AGI-in-the-next-49-years above 80%:

1. 50 years ago was 1970. The gap between AI systems then and AI systems now seems pretty plausibly greater than the remaining gap, even before accounting the recent dramatic increase in the rate of progress, and potential future increases in rate-of-progress as it starts to feel within-grasp.

2. I observe that, 15 years ago, everyone was saying AGI is far off because of what it couldn't do -- basic image recognition, go, starcraft, winograd schemas, programmer assistance. But basically all that has fallen. The gap between us and AGI is made mostly of intangibles. (Computer Programming That Is Actually Good? Theorem proving? Sure, but on my model, "good" versions of those are a hair's breadth away from full AGI already. And the fact that I need to clarify that "bad" versions don't count, speaks to my point that the only barriers people can name right now are intangibles.) That's a very uncomfortable place to be!

3. When I look at the history of invention, and the various anecdotes about the Wright brothers and Enrico Fermi, I get an impression that, when a technology is pretty close, the world looks a lot like how our world looks.

Of course, the trick is that when a technology is a little far, the world might also look pretty similar!
Though when a technology is very far, the world does look different -- it looks like experts pointing to specific technical hurdles. We exited that regime a few years ago.

4. Summarizing the above two points, I suspect that I'm in more-or-less the "penultimate epistemic state" on AGI timelines: I don't know of a project that seems like they're right on the brink; that would put me in the "final epistemic state" of thinking AGI is imminent. But I'm in the second-to-last epistemic state, where I wouldn't feel all that shocked to learn that some group ha

...