trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Jeff Clune advertising a postdoc on twitter...and asking where he should target his posts
by Joyee Chen — 2023-05-21T01:02:16.779Z

Jeff Clune, who I saw cited in some DL alignment posts here, just posted: https://twitter.com/jeffclune/status/1656314945443889163

in regards to advertising a postdoc. I was about to reply on twitter myself, saying "Lesswrong", but signing in with google on twitter always goes shit for me.

Any thoughts about this?
Running Sound for Yourself
by jefftk — 2023-05-20T22:10:00.902Z

The way sound amplification normally works at a contra dance these
days is that the dance series arranges to have sound equipment and
someone to set it up and adjust levels. Sometimes, though, you're
playing for an event where the band is bringing and running sound, and
there's no one to do levels. Setting up sound yourself when you're
also playing isn't that bad, it's just more hassle, but how do you
set levels when you're playing?

Ideally you don't. Often if you ask the organizer they can find
someone with a decent ear to help you get things balanced in the hall.
While this is a bit risky (maybe the person they pick has strange
judgement or wants to play with EQ settings) this has generally worked
out better for me than not having it.

If you're in a larger band, one option that can work is taking turns
having musicians go out into the hall and set levels. For example, in
the Free Raisins (fiddle,
mandolin, piano) when we ran our own sound we'd start the first set
with just fiddle+piano, with the mandolin player (me!) in the hall
checking fiddle-vs-piano and caller-vs-band, plus getting the caller
EQ dialed in. When that was sounding good I'd get back on stage and the
fiddle player (Audrey) would
go out and set the mandolin level with the piano as reference.

In a duo, though, what do you do? One option is for the fiddle player
to use a wireless electric violin, which lets them go out into the
hall and hear exactly how it all sounds together. This seems ideal,
but Ed
Howe is the only person I've seen do that.

What I do instead is set up the board where I can reach it from where
I'm sitting. Then I take the main speaker farthest from me and rotate
it on its speaker pole until it's pointed at me. With all the other
speakers (monitors and the other main) off I set levels, but I do this
very differently from usual. Normally my approach is:

Set a rough input gain for each instrument by eye, using the input
trims and the pre-fader-listen LEDs

Turn up instruments in the monitor as needed until everyone is
happy.

Turn up instruments in the mains until it sounds right

That doesn't work well when running sound while playing, so instead I:

Set each instrument's mains levels to 50%

Set each instrument's monitor levels to 50%, with the monitor
master all the way down

Set input gains for instruments by ear, based on how the

...
Job Opening: SWE to help build signature vetting system for AI-related petitions
by Ethan Ashkie — 2023-05-20T19:02:00.875Z

Update: this role has been filled. Thanks for your attention and applications!

Full-Stack Software Engineer Position - AI Policy Petition Platform Development

Survival and Flourishing .Com (SFC) seeks a competent Full-Stack Software Engineer to join us in creating a novel public opinion aggregation platform centered around AI policy issues.

Annual compensation: $200,000 - $300,000

Application here.

Your Role

Develop our "V-process" project, a system that ranks signatories of AI-policy petitions based on signature authenticity, credentials, and relevance to the subject matter. This role offers a unique opportunity to contribute to a platform that addresses the need for legible public expression, independent of existing social media platforms and power structures, regarding emerging technologies, particularly AI.

Our Ideal Candidate

Strong understanding of system demands and scalability considerations.
Proficient in full-stack TypeScript, with experience building and maintaining large-scale web applications.
Comfortable in a remote work environment, with occasional in-person meetings in the Bay Area.
Excellent communication skills, with the ability to effectively convey progress, implementation trade-offs, and the impact of design decisions.
Capable of efficiently updating UI based on design requests and contributing to feature decisions.

Job Responsibilities

Collaborate with SFC's Product Manager Ethan Ashkie and CEO Andrew Critch, as well as a diverse team of developers and contractors.
Design and prototype user-friendly UIs for capturing and displaying signatory data.
Implement business logic for signature validation and integrate with external APIs.
Occasionally assist with other philanthropic and grant-making projects, time permitting.

Benefits

Competitive annual salary of $200,000 - $300,000, plus health benefits.
Join as the first full-time hire in a flexible, predominantly remote team.
We are open to hiring remote contractors living outside the US and can collaborate with institutions who may be capable of providing work visas.

If you're ready to contribute to democratizing the conversation around AI safety and ethics, apply here. We look forward to working together to shape the future of AI policy.
My Kind of Pragmatism
by Nora Belrose — 2023-05-20T18:58:48.574Z

Recently I've been thinking about pragmatism, the school of philosophy which says that beliefs and concepts are justified based on their usefulness. In LessWrong jargon, it's the idea that "rationality is systematized winning" taken to its logical conclusion— we should only pursue "true beliefs" insofar as these truths help us "win" at the endeavors we've set for ourselves.

I'm inclined to identify as some sort of pragmatist, but there are a lot of different varieties of pragmatism, so I've been trying to piece together a "Belrosian pragmatism" that makes the most sense to me.

In particular, some pragmatisms are a lot more "postmodernist-sounding" (see e.g. Richard Rorty) than others (e.g. Susan Haack). Pragmatism leads you to say relativist-sounding things because usefulness seems to be relative to a particular person, so stuff like "truth is relative" often comes out as a logical entailment of pragmatist theories.

A lot of people think relativism about truth is just a reductio of any philosophical theory, but I don't think so. Respectable non-relativists, like Robert Nozick in Invariances, have pointed out that relativism can be a perfectly coherent position. Furthermore, I think much of the initial implausibility of relativism is due to confusing it with skepticism about the external world. But relativism doesn't imply there's no mind-independent reality: there can be one objective world, but many valid descriptions of that world, with each description useful for a different purpose. Once you make this distinction, relativism seems a lot more plausible. It's not totally clear to me that every pragmatist has made this distinction historically, but I'm going to make it.

There's one other hurdle that any pragmatist theory needs to overcome. Pragmatism says that we should believe things that are useful, but to determine if a belief is useful we need some background world model where we can imagine the counterfactual consequences of different beliefs. Is this world model a totally separate mental module that's justified on non-pragmatist grounds? Most pragmatists would say no, and adopt some form of coherentism: we assess the utility of a belief or concept with respect to background beliefs that we aren't questioning at the moment. Those background beliefs can come into the foreground and be questioned later. The hope is that this procedure will lead to an approxi...
Twiblings, four-parent babies and other reproductive technology
by GeneSmith — 2023-05-20T17:11:23.726Z

Two weeks ago I finally published my year-long research project into how to have polygenically screened children. In that post, I explained all the practicalities of embryo screening and how parents can use it right now to make their children smarter, happier, and less prone to disease.

This week I'm going to talk about some of the more off-the-wall methods that have been proposed for increasing genetic gain across a variety of traits, along with their implications for family structure, society, and the human experience.

What are Twiblings?

A twibling is somewhere between a sibling and a twin. If identical twins share 100% of their DNA and siblings share

about 50%

, twiblings share 75%.

To the best of my knowledge, twiblings don’t exist in nature. EDIT: This process is rare, but we have documented cases of it happening in humans. The proper scientific term is "Sesquizygotic Twins". See ScottNYX's comment for more. To get one, you’d need two different genetically identical eggs to be fertilized by different sperm. But why would we create twiblings?

Anyone who has gone through IVF knows that the main limiting factor in all cycles is the number of eggs the female partner can produce. In an average menstrual cycle, a woman will produce exactly one egg. In an average ejaculation, a man produces about 100 million sperm. Using a specialized set of medications, we can increase the number of eggs harvested per menstrual cycle to between 5 and 100 (there's a lot of variance depending on maternal age and other factors). But even 100 is a lot less than 100 million.

Older women in particular have a very hard time producing eggs. Women over the age of 42 often produce 5 or fewer per retrieval, and many of those have chromosomal issues that prevent them from turning into a baby. So the few eggs without such issues are very precious.

It sure would be nice if there was a way to duplicate the few viable eggs these women can produce…

As it turns out, this is possible! And

we’ve already done it

in the lab. You can make a haploid stem cell line by tricking an egg into thinking it’s an embryo; you let a sperm fertilize it, then you pull out the sperm’s pronucleus before it fuses with that of the egg.

Success! The egg now thinks it’s an embryo and will start dividing.

So now you have a bunch of haploid embryonic stem cells, each of which is fairly epigenetically s...
P-zombies, Compression and the Simulation Hypothesis
by RussellThor — 2023-05-20T11:36:23.180Z

Can we have approximate p-zombies?

Lets say we accept that p-zombies don't make sense because of the core arguments. However what about a creature who's behavior is very similar to the target but with a different neural software? That is a simulated person who's behavior is different only by a small, perhaps undetectable amount from the real person, but with internal software so different that we would not expect them to have the same consciousness, if any at all?

Approximate p-zombies would be very useful for Simulations

Say you want to run an ancestor simulation. Your goal is to have the resulting world turn out as accurate as possible after a number of years. This Sim could start by having a software model of a person that is very similar to a brain and takes a considerable amount of processing power. It would also have to simulate the physical environment. The core simulation hypothesis argument from my understanding is that we are probably in one of say 10^15 ancestor Sims running in the future in a universe with our physical laws.

Compression is essential

In order to have a Sim, compression is essential. For example the simulated physical earth would have to be very highly compressed in terms of base reality hardware required to Sim earth space. This goal of the compression algorithm is to preserve as much as possible the accuracy of the predicted world while saving as much computation as possible. Preserving the consciousness of human like creatures in it is not a goal.

So the questions is, how would the simulation of a brain change when subjected to a Super-intelligent compression algorithm honed by running a significant amount of simulated time already? If it can be compressed to behave much the same way with less computation, then it will do. This is where GPT-X comes in. Say we want to produce an essay any way we can. If GPT-X can do one that looks like it was written by a person, then we know that there is a compression algorithm that can make the essay with far less computation than simulating a persons brain during that time if the goal is a text output. So we have the same output with presumably no human like consciousness needed. We don't believe that GPT-X had any "I think therefore I am" moments while writing such an essay.

How far can this go? Can we get a 99.9% accurate simulation of a person with an algorithm so compressed and different t...
The possible shared Craft of deliberate Lexicogenesis

by TsviBT — 2023-05-20T05:56:41.829Z

[Note: crossposted from https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-possible-shared-craft-of-deliberate.html.]

Words are good. Making more good words is good. Being better and faster at making more good words would be more good. Maybe we can get better and faster at making more good words by working together.

Prefatory notes

Disclaimers

Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen.

(Whoever doesn't know foreign languages, knows nothing of his own.)

——Johann Wolfgang von Goethe[1]

Since I only speak English, my perspective is English-centric and more generally Indo-European-centric, and this essay will fail to integrate huge regions of the possibilities of language. Since I'm not a linguist, there will be errors and incompletenesses in this essay. Since I work on AGI alignment, recent examples of language of creation will be drawn from people working on alignment.

This essay is speculative, and emphasizes a vision that's exciting to me.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Rafe Kennedy and to TJ for useful conversations about lexicogenesis. Thanks to Sam Eisenstat for spiritually related conversations. Thanks to Daniel Filan for comments on a draft.

Random access essay

Sections and some subsections of this essay can be read out of order without losing much. It's a long essay, so I'd encourage looking around for something interesting.

Synopsis

Lexicogenesis is the creation of new words. People do lexicogenesis when they have to talk about something new. When people have to think difficult new thoughts, they need new language. By working together, people could help each other make new language, and could develop a craft of lexicogenesis that people could use to come up with suitable new language. If you have ideas that might need new words to carry them, or if you want to help people come up with words, or if you want to make a shared craft of lexicogenesis, maybe say so in the comments or join this Zulip group.

Condensation

Extended table of contents:

Rhapsody of words: Humans carry the world——outer and inner, object and thought——with them, in their Words.

What is lexicogenesis?

Creating words: Lexicogenesis is the creation of words.

Language production in general: Lexicogenesis stands in for all forms of creating new language.

Language makers: In all new periods and realms, people have created new language.

What this essay is not about

A sense that

...
Buying Tall-Poppy-Cutting Offsets
by trevor — 2023-05-20T03:59:46.336Z
Link: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/why-is-everyone-so-boringhtml

From Overcomingbias:

Centuries ago, while people could rest safe and show themselves at home, when traveling between towns they tried to look either look poor or well-defended, as bandits lay in wait. Even within towns, people without allies who acted unusually rich, assertive, and confident would induce others to try to trip them somehow. It’s the tall poppy that gets cut down, after all.

We fill our worlds of fiction with interesting passionate charismatic people, and yet the real people around us seem boring by comparison. But this isn’t just because it is hard for reality to achieve the heights of imagination. Notice that within their small circles of family and friends, real people are more often lively, passionate, opinionated, and provocative, and they express more disagreements.

I propose that the main reason that most of us look more boring in public is that social predators lie in wait there. With friends, family, and close co-workers, we are around people that mostly want to like us, and know us rather well. Yes, they want us to conform too, but they apply this pressure in moderation.

Out in public, in contrast, we face bandits eager for chances to gain social credit by taking us down, often via accusing us of violating the sacred. And like townspeople traveling among the bandits, we are in public pretty vulnerable to the kinds of bandits that afflict us.

If we act interesting, passionate, and opinionated in public, we are likely to seem to claim high status for ourselves, and to touch on sacred subjects, either by word or deed. And this makes us quite vulnerable to accusations of arrogance and violating the sacred.

...

The degree of this danger is made clear, I think by the reaction of the “gods” among us. The public tone of huge powerful firms and other orgs is consistently “officious”, i.e., mild boring supplication. They don’t dare act lively or passionate or opinionated, for fear of suffering devastating attacks from those predatory social bandits. The new somewhat-god-like A.I.s that have recently joined our world are also designed to act boring.

I see roughly three typical public stances: boring, lively, or outraged. Either you act boring, so the bandits will ignore you, you act lively, and invite bandit attacks, or you act outraged, and play a bandit yourself. Most big orgs and experts choose boring, and most everyone else who doesn’t pick boring

...
What's the best way to streamline two-party sale negotiations between real humans?
by Isaac King — 2023-05-19T23:30:26.244Z

Some types of negotiations are strategyproof; designed such that the optimal strategy is for each player to be truthful. For example in a Vickrey auction, there's no incentive to lie or bid less than your maximum; doing so would only put you at a disadvantage.

Unfortunately, when it comes to negotiations between a single buyer and a single seller, it's been proven that there is no strategyproof solution. (See Lying in negotiations: a maximally bad problem.) The seller is always incentivized to overrepresent the value of the item, and the buyer to underrepresent it. This can lead to brinksmanship, where both parties try to set a firm "take it or leave it" price in order to force the other party to accept, at the risk of no deal occurring at all.

Ideally, the correct price at which to sell the item is the price that maximizes utility across both players. But when it comes to real humans in the real world, it's very easy for one to lie about their own utility curve, so there's no good way for both parties to enforce this.

The typical way humans go about these negotiations this is with emotional manipulation, extortion, artificial self-restrictions, social coercion, etc. (e.g. think of the stereotypical car salesman.) This seems generally bad for epistemics, and as someone who has to negotiate a lot, I also find it personally very annoying.

I'd like to design a system that allows these negotiations to take place in a more incentive-compatible way that's faster to execute, doesn't reward skill at manipulating other people, and is less likely to lead to bad feeling afterwards. Obviously it can't be perfect and there will be some method of gaming the system, but humans aren't superintelligences, and if the system can make it hard to calculate the optimal strategy and make it so that providing one's true valuation doesn't give the player that much of a disadvantage, I expect that most people will comfortably just fall back on being truthful.

How would you design such a system?

(I have an idea that I'll share later, but I don't want to prime people with a specific kind of approach from the beginning.)
Trust develops gradually via making bids and setting boundaries
by Richard_Ngo — 2023-05-19T22:16:38.483Z

In my previous post, I talked through the process of identifying the fears underlying internal conflicts. In some cases, just listening to and understanding those scared parts is enough to make them feel better—just as, when venting to friends or partners,

we often primarily want to be heard

rather than helped. In other cases, though, parts may have more persistent worries—in particular, about being coerced by other parts. The opposite of coercion is trust: letting another agent do as they wish, without trying to control their behavior, because you believe that they’ll take your interests into account. How can we build trust between different parts of ourselves?

I’ll start by talking about how to cultivate trust between different people, since we already have many intuitions about how that works; and then apply those ideas to the task of cultivating self-trust. Although it's tempting to think of trust in terms of grand gestures and big sacrifices, it typically requires many small interactions over time to build trust in a way that all the different parts of both people are comfortable with. I’ll focus on two types of interactions: making bids and setting boundaries.

By “making bids” I mean doing something which invites a response from the other person, where a positive response would bring you closer together. You can read about them in the work of John Gottman, who gives many examples:

Sometimes bids are explicit, like asking somebody out on a date. But far more often they’re implicit—perhaps greeting someone more warmly than usual, or dropping a hint that your birthday is coming up. One reason that people make their bids subtle and ambiguous is because they’re scared of the feeling of a bid being rejected, and subtle bids can be rejected gently by pretending to not notice them. Another is that many outcomes (e.g. being given a birthday present) feel more meaningful when you haven't asked for them directly. Some more examples of bids that are optimized for ambiguity:

Teenagers on a first date, with one subtly pressing their arm against the other person’s, trying to gauge if they press back.
Telling your parents about your latest achievements, in the hope that they’ll express pride.
Making snarky comments about your spouse being messy, in the hope that they’ll start being more proactive in taking care of your preferences.
Asking to “grab a coffee” with someone

...