trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Costs and benefits of metaphysics
by George3d6 — 2020-11-09T14:31:13.718Z

Prelude for LW

Section 2 contains a bunch of self-references to personal articles, all of which are the kind I also posted on less wrong before but considering the amount of self-referncing this article might come out as a bit douchy. If you hate that kind of thing stop reading here.
Using a rather broad definition of metaphysics here and I probably don't spend enough time expanding upon and grounding that definition.
Overall this is the kind of "bad" conceptual analysis that sounds nice but makes rather braod-reaching claims.

But I find the general concepts I stumbled upon while writing this interesting and it seems like the kind of thing that might click with some people here so I'm posting it. You never know.

***

One of the things that keeps me awake at night is the omnipresence of metaphysics in everything. By metaphysics, I specifically mean all-encompassing systems upon which we ground our observation-based theories of reality.

I - Examples

1. Killing humans

Killing humans is something we usually don't do. This has edge cases (e.g. abortion, voluntary euthanasia, wars... etc). But by enlarge, most people go their whole lives without killing a single fellow homo sapien, despite every day providing them tremendous opportunity to do so.

We can observe that people, generally speaking, teach their children not to kill or harm and that most report feeling bad about killing or physically harming others, or even at the thought of doing so.

If a policy encouraging a lot of murder was proposed, most of us would have a gut reaction to oppose it.

The reason we don't kill humans, however, is not at all obvious, but many people venture to provide an explanation.

You can have a religious argument for it, that killing people is pre-ordained as inherently "bad" by some sort of invisible sky-daddy or some sort of prime-mover that dictated the rules of the universe (or anything in between depending on the level of philosophical sophistication you need to not feel silly believing in religion).

You can have a pragmatic-economic argument for it, that the societies where fewer murders are committed are desirable to live in (loads of immigration) than those with a lot of crime. That a low chance of dying stops people from engaging in harmful zero-sum games since it gives them future optionality under almost any circumstances and so on.

You can have an evolutionary biology ...
Why You Should Care About Goal-Directedness
by adamShimi — 2020-11-09T12:48:34.601Z

Introduction

Deconfusing

goal-directedness would boost your favorite research approach for solving AI Alignment.

Why? Because every approach I know of stands to gain from the clarification of goal-directedness, from Prosaic AGI Alignment to Agents Foundations. In turn, this ubiquitous usefulness of goal-directedness motivates the writing of this sequence, which will include a literature review of the idea in the AI Safety literature and beyond, as well as advanced explorations of goal-directedness by me and collaborators Michele Campolo and Joe Collman.

But before that, I need to back up my provocative thesis. This is why this post exists: it compiles reasons to care about goal-directedness, from the perspective of every research approach and direction I could think of. Although not all reasons given are equally straightforward, none feels outrageously far-fetched to me.

I thus hope that by the end of this post, you will agree that improving our understanding of goal-directedness is relevant for you too.

Thanks to Michele Campolo and Joe Collman for many research discussions, and feedback on this post. Thanks to Alexis Carlier, Evan Hubinger, and Jérémy Perret for feedback on this post.

Meaning of Deconfusion

Before giving you the reasons for caring about goal-directedness, I need to synchronize our interpretations of “deconfusion”. The term comes from

MIRI

, and specifically this

blog post

; it captures the process of making a concept clear and explicit enough to have meaningful discussions about it. So it’s not about solving all problems related to the concept, or even formalizing it perfectly (although that would be nice) -- just about allowing coherent thinking. To quote Nate Soares (MIRI’s Executive Director, and the author of the linked blog post):

By deconfusion, I mean something like “making it so that you can think about a given topic without continuously accidentally spouting nonsense.”

What would that look like for goal-directedness? At first approximation, the idea simply means the property of trying to accomplish a goal. Which feels rather simple. But after digging deeper, issues and subtleties emerge: the difference between having a goal and being competent at accomplishing it (discussed

here

), what should count as a goal (discussed

here

), which meaningful classes of goals exist (discussed

here

), and many others.

Thus the concept is in dire need of deconfu...
Competitive Universal Basic Services?
by Gentzel — 2020-11-09T03:20:02.239Z

Providing basic services should often be more efficient than basic income. The state can use its centralized negotiating power to get lower prices on standardized packages, and accordingly a floor for welfare could be provided at a lower cost than just redistributing income, which, though it gives people more agency, can more easily just inflate prices generally and leave people more liable to impulse spending. To keep such a system efficient, there must be fitness pressure on the programs, plausibly via competing services (e.g. think of charter schools) and you probably want to peg the system to some percentage of GDP or natural resource rents to prevent uncontrolled growth and debt. Without a peg, responsible voters may keep the system sustainable, but there will always be the risk of the newly expanded policy window incentivizing politicians to bribe voters with other’s money. While redistribution can generate more utility right away since a dollar is worth more to a poor person than a rich person, it is more efficient yet if the government actually adds value by helping consumers solve their coordination problems.
In some areas, that probably means lowering standards on dimensions that people don’t care about too much, but that have previously been highly regulated by those trying to “outlaw” poverty in order to keep crime away from themselves (e.g. room size minimums, zoning, etc.) There could be competition between services, and also packages of services. At one extreme, there could be a highly paternalistic welfare system, where the state is providing a somewhat optimized diet, healthcare, housing, etc. while at the other extreme the state would just grant basic income at the same cost level it could have provided the other services. The competition aspect helps mitigate the problems of government placing bad bets, though if the government does a really bad job the basic income plan would always win. Essentially, people would be choosing between getting exactly what they want on a small budget, vs. getting more stuff with less choice. There are massive economies of scale to standardized production that we never see the benefits of because consumers can’t organize to coordinate their preferences: by reducing variety in the provision of basic necessities their cost can be driven down massively, but the economy can still have many outlets for status compe...
Notes on Temperance
by David Gross — 2020-11-09T02:33:09.692Z

This post examines the virtue of temperance, drawing mostly from others' insights rather than from my personal views, though I’ve selected material based on what I find credible and interesting. I write as a student of the virtue rather than an expert. I hope to help readers understand temperance and how to develop it.

What is temperance?

“The business of the head is to form a good heart, and not merely to rule an evil one, as is generally imagined.” ―Sir Arthur Helps[1]

Temperance is not a word that you hear a lot these days, and when you do, it’s often in the context of historical discussions of the “temperance movement” that culminated in the experiment with alcohol prohibition. But temperance used to be central to discussions of ethics and personal excellence. It was one of the four “cardinal virtues” of ancient Greek philosophy, for example.

To be temperate is to have a well-regulated set of desires, meaning that the desires themselves are good ones, that they are well-proportioned (none are exaggerated to unhealthy levels), and that the way we respond to them is appropriate. This of course raises the questions of which desires are the healthy ones, how to know how much of a desire is too much, and what is the proper way to respond to a desire. Another difficult question is to what extent our desires are tractable, or whether perhaps they are just givens that we have to work with or around.

Aristotle suggested a comparison between temperance and courage:[2] Courage enables us to keep our wits about us and behave honorably in the presence of frightening things (rather than behaving shamefully from cowardice); temperance enables us to do this in the presence of desirable things (rather than behaving shamefully from self-indulgence or covetousness).

He also drew a distinction between temperance and self-control. While a person with self-control is able to resist the temptation to do something they are sorely tempted to do, a temperate person is not so very tempted in the first place: they have better-regulated desires and do not typically need exceptional self control to overcome them.

Counterfeit temperance

In addition to the ordinary failure of intemperance, you may also respond to desire with an unhealthy asceticism or anorexia as a sort of counterfeit temperance. To do so suggests either that you are so intemperate that you cannot trust yourself to respon...
Model Depth as Panacea and Obfuscator
by abstractapplic — 2020-11-09T00:02:03.297Z

Introduction

Some models are inherently interpretable. An example of this is a linear model, like the one below:

Price = $3000 + $2000 * electric - $1000 * diesel + $50 * red + $100 * economy - $450 * years

Or, in ordinary language:

“When estimating the price of a car, start with $3000, add $2000 if it’s electric, subtract $1000 if it’s diesel, add $50 if it has a red paint job, add $100 for every point in its fuel economy rating, and subtract $450 for every year it’s been on the market.”

You can see what each term is doing to the overall prediction, and roughly how important each of them is. A proper discussion of the benefits of interpretability deserves its own post, but for now I’ll treat it as axiomatic that – all else equal – it is usually better to be able to see what you’re doing.

However, most models aren’t that straightforward. A typical tree-based model, as produced by the popular model-building algorithm XGBoost with its default treedepth of 3, looks like this:

. . . and so on for 98 more trees.

This is not inherently interpretable. No human could hold it in their head and make sense of it. People who use models like this cannot understand their behaviour, and are forced to analyze their output to get a (limited) sense of how they work.

The main cause of uninterpretability here is interaction. If all the decision trees that comprise this model had only one question (max_depth=1, also known as ‘decision stumps’), then no matter how many of them there were, you could sum up the effect of each variable with graphs like this:

This wouldn’t be quite as interpretable as a linear model, but it would still be pretty good; while you couldn’t take in the entire model at a glance, you would still be able to see exactly how each individual feature affects the outcome.

However, in a complex system, effects of variables are modified by other variables. While we should regard an algorithm that says “I’ve found a three-way interaction in this dataset, please use it to help inform your decisions” with some fraction of the skepticism we’d show a sociologist saying the same thing, frequently datasets are large enough and signals strong enough that we actually can meaningfully model interactions. So in these cases, models without the capacity to model interactions will underperform those which can.

Does this doom inherently interpretable models to inferiority? Probably. But the...
Where Do We Go From Here?
by  — 2020-11-08T19:53:51.955Z

[Mostly unjustified rambling and unpruned babble. Some politics, but mostly as framing. Still, I wouldn't share it here if I didn't think it had a nugget or two. Cross-posted from Grand, Unified, Empty.]

I.

Well.

Joe Biden will in all likelihood be the next American President come January. You can practically feel left-leaning elites the world over unclench their weary paranoia. Much remains to be dealt with as the last few votes are counted and legal challenges get addressed by the courts, but the climax is past. The denouement, of course, will last decades. It always does.

Well.

The pandemic rages on. More than a million people are dead, and thousands more are dying every day. Imagine a medium-sized city, slowly crumbling as every last inhabitant dies over the course of a single year. Only the bones remain. And yet we adapt: deaths per thousand cases continues to fall. The world’s most populous country, more than a billion people, has reported only a single COVID-19 death since April. The rest of the world is slowly learning, through trial and terrible error, which parts of the economy can be reopened or adapted, and which cannot.

Well.

Technology rushes on, heedless of the rest of the world. Competitive satellite internet. Virtual reality. Self-driving cars. Newer, faster, stronger, better. The pope is praying for friendly AI.

I just finished re-reading A Canticle for Liebowitz. [spoilers follow] A monastic order tries to preserve human knowledge for hundreds of years after a nuclear apocalypse. They succeed, civilization is reborn, and their reward is a second nuclear apocalypse, far worse. Humanity is not to be trusted with great power, nor great responsibility.

Well.

II.

America is increasingly divided. Biden may have won, but those hoping for a repudiation of Trump must be bitterly disappointed. The long future is violently uncertain. Healing? Secession? Civil war?

Beliefs are not isolated things. The human brain is remarkably adept at ignoring inconsistencies, but doesn’t necessarily resolve them correctly, even when forced to. Whichever side you take in this battle, your enemies believe in gravity. They believe in food, and air, and airplanes which fly. Their epistemology is intact.

Where people on both sides go wrong is that their priors create a self-reinforcing web of false beliefs that are too far removed from immediate empirical evidence to be emotionally f...
When Hindsight Isn't 20/20: Incentive Design With Imperfect Credit Allocation
by johnswentworth — 2020-11-08T19:16:03.232Z

A crew of pirates all keep their gold in one very secure chest, with labelled sections for each pirate. Unfortunately, one day a storm hits the ship, tossing everything about. After the storm clears, the gold in the chest is all mixed up. The pirates each know how much gold they had - indeed, they’re rather obsessive about it - but they don’t trust each other to give honest numbers. How can they figure out how much gold each pirate had in the chest?

Here’s the trick: the captain has each crew member write down how much gold they had, in secret. Then, the captain adds it all up. If the final amount matches the amount of gold in the chest, then we’re done. But if the final amount does not match the amount of gold in the chest, then the captain throws the whole chest overboard, and nobody gets any of the gold.

I want to emphasize two key features of this problem. First, depending on what happens, we may never know how much gold each pirate had in the chest or who lied, even in hindsight. Hindsight isn’t 20/20. Second, the solution to the problem requires outright destruction of wealth.

The point of this post is that these two features go hand-in-hand. There’s a wide range of real-life problems where we can’t tell what happened, even in hindsight; we’ll talk about three classes of examples. In these situations, it’s hard to design good incentives/mechanisms, because we don’t know where to allocate credit and blame. Outright wealth destruction provides a fairly general-purpose tool for such problems. It allows us to align incentives in otherwise-intractable problems, though often at considerable cost.

The Lemon Problem

Alice wants to sell her old car, and Bob is in the market for a decent quality used vehicle. One problem: while Alice knows that her car is in good condition (i.e. “not a lemon”), she has no cheap way to convince Bob of this fact. A full inspection by a neutral third party would be expensive, Bob doesn’t have the skills to inspect the car himself, and any words Alice speaks on the matter could just as easily be spoken by someone selling a lemon.

In order to convince Bob that the car is not a lemon, Alice needs to say or do something which a lemon-seller would not. What can she do?

One easy answer: offer to pay for any mechanical problems which come up after the sale. If Alice knew about expensive mechanical problems hiding under the car’s hood, then...
Two reasons to expect a peaceful change of power in the US
by Tim Liptrot — 2020-11-08T17:13:05.883Z

Motivation

Several commenters have argued that a Trump might attempt, or even succeed, at remaining in power despite his electoral defeat this year. Here are soem example articles

The Nation
Chicago Tribune
Japan Times

Most people dismiss these claims. We have never heard of a coup in a rich old democracy, so we dismiss it as "too weird to be possible". As rationalists, we know this argument proves too much. By the same argument a man in 1919 could have argued a fascist germany is impossible, or a man in 1780 that flight would be impossible.

Then what exactly is the reason that a coup is unlikely in the US? To answer that question, I will sketch two game theoretic arguments about why coups occur and why democracies reemerge from them.

Why do parties give up power? Weingast and Przeworski

To start with, a successful elite pact must be self-enforcing. Elites that choose to break the pact must face costs which keep them cooperating. There are real costs to a party that chooses to forsake democracy, and these costs are often higher than the cost of losing power.

For a party leaving power, the following inequality must hold

L1+pW2+(1−p)L2>S1+S2

Where is L is the utility of losing, W is the utility of winning the next election, S is the utility of subverting an election, and p is the probability of winning the next election. Because W>L, the expected utility of leaving power depends on the probability that the party will win the next election.

Does Mitch Mcconnell think he can win the 2024 election? Yeah, he probably does. Recessions are quite common, he just gained in the house, and he holds the senate. Because he holds the senate he can prevent any bills from passing, increase policy drift, get people pissed off at the government, and increase his chance to win 2024.

Furthermore, if the Republicans wanted to launch a coup, 2008 would have been a more favorable year. Bush Junior had strong relations with the party legislators and the lose was large such that p was low. So Republicans are very unlikely to participate in a subversion attempt.

Why do people protect constitutions.

The Weingast model is a bit more complicated, see here for full diagrams. Imagine a sovereign S and two citizen groups A and B. S would like to transgress against the citizens, taking half their utility and destroying half. A and B want to protect their utility. If A and B both r...
Cartesian Frames Definitions
by Rob Bensinger — 2020-11-08T12:44:34.509Z

This is a list of the main definitions from Scott Garrabrant's Cartesian Frames sequence. (I'll update it as more posts come out.)

1. Small Cartesian Frames

Let W={w0,w1} for the matrix visualizations below. Let C be an arbitrary Cartesian frame.

visualization	definition	notes
0	e ( )	0=({},{e},⋅), where Agent(0) is empty, Env(0)={e} is any singleton set, and Eval(0) is trivial.	⊥{}. Initial. Identity of sum (⊕).
⊤	a( )	⊤=({a},{},⋅), where Agent(⊤) is any singleton set, Env(⊤) is empty, and Eval(⊤) is trivial.	1{}. Terminal. ⊤◃C. Identity of product (&).
1	w0 w1a(w0 w1)	1S=({a},S,⋆), where S⊆W and a⋆s=s for all s∈S. 1 is the frame 1W.	Identity of tensor (⊗).
⊥	ew0w1(w0w1)	⊥S=(S,{e},⋆), where S⊆W and s⋆e=s for all s∈S. ⊥ is the frame ⊥W.	C◃⊥. Identity of par (⅋ ).
null	( )	null=({},{},⋅), with empty agent, environment, and evaluation function.

2. Binary Operations

Sum. For Cartesian frames C=(A,E,⋅) and D=(B,F,⋆) over W, C⊕D is the Cartesian frame (A⊔B,E×F,⋄), where a⋄(e,f)=a⋅e if a∈A, and a⋄(e,f)=a⋆f if a∈B.

Product. For Cartesian frames C=(A,E,⋅) and D=(B,F,⋆) over W, C&D is the Cartesian frame (A×B,E⊔F,⋄), where (a,b)⋄e=a⋅e if e∈E, and (a,b)⋄e=b⋆e if e∈F.

Tensor. Let C=(A,E,⋅) and D=(B,F,⋆) be Cartesian frames over W. The tensor product of C and D, written C⊗D, is given by C⊗D=(A×B,hom(C,D∗),⋄), where hom(C,D∗) is the set of morphisms (g,h):C→D∗ (i.e., the set of all pairs (g:A→F,h:B→E) such that b⋆g(a)=a⋅h(b) for all a∈A, b∈B), and ⋄ is given by (a,b)⋄(g,h)=b⋆g(a)=a⋅h(b).

Par. Let C=(A,E,⋅) and D=(B,F,⋆) be Cartesian frames over W. C⅋ D=(hom(C∗,D),E×F,⋄), where (g,h)⋄(e,f)=g(e)⋆f=h(f)⋅e.

Lollipop. Given two Cartesian frames over W, C=(A,E,⋅) and D=(B,F,⋆), we let C⊸D denote the Cartesian frame C⊸D=(hom(C,D),A×F,⋄), where ⋄ is given by (g,h)⋄(a,f)=g(a)⋆f=a⋅h(f)....
Is corruption a valuable antidote to overregulation?
by ChristianKl — 2020-11-08T12:15:35.819Z

When reading Robert Caro's book about Robert Moses there's a part of my that things that I'm glad that the city in which I'm living is less corrupt then New York was when Robert Moses was active.

On the other hand Robert Moses got things done and build a lot of infrastructure. After the Great Stagnation we aren't succeeding at building new infrastructure like Moses did.

In the discussion about why we don't have flying cars there's discussion about how nuclear plants in the US grew in cost while South Korea managed to continue to build cheaper nuclear plants. I read a few more recent articles and South Korea and it seems that after scandals that uncovered that a lot of corruption was involved in the nuclear industry when it managed to provide cheap nuclear power, and uncovering that corruption blew up their nuclear industry.

Corruption prevents bureaucracy from strangling progress as it gives people in power a way to get things done despite of the bureaucracy.

While I have strong instincts that corruption is evil, it seems we lack a good discussion of it in relation to the evil of bureaucracy that strangles progress.

What are your thoughts on the issue?