trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
New cooperation mechanism - quadratic funding without a matching pool
by Filip Sondej — 2022-06-05T13:55:19.063Z

cross-posted to ethresear.ch and EA forum

Motivation

Quadratic funding[1] is a powerful mechanism for resolving some collective action problems. But it has a major limitation - it relies on some third party, that provides a matching pool of funds.

In the most dangerous collective action problems, we don't have such third party helping us from above. Those situations already involve the most powerful actors, so we can't expect someone more powerful to resolve the conflict, like a galactic mom.

Some examples:

global superpowers trying to coordinate to fight climate change

AI organisations coordinating to pay AI alignment tax (more info here)

for example by funding safety research

or creating some large dataset together, that's useful for alignment

or funding methods which are thought to be safer, like STEM AI or tool AI

in general, escaping inadequate equilibria (see this post for many great examples)

and most importantly, conflict between transformative AI systems or their owners[2]

Solution

One thing we can try in this situation, is to create a smart contract where each party says "I'll pay more if others pay more". This way, if you decide to increase your contribution by 1$, it causes the pot to grow by more than 1$, because your dollar caused other agents to contribute some more. This leverage, in some situations can be enough to make someone pay, because the value they get out of the bigger pot is higher than what they have to pay.

Some properties that it would be nice to have in such a system are:

continuity - every increase in your payment causes an increase in others' payments

known payment limit - you won't have to pay more than some limit you chose

everyone is incentivised to contribute something - just like in quadratic funding, small contributions get a high leverage (it can get arbitrarily high, as you'll see later) - so even if you're only willing to pay if you get >100x leverage, there is always some contribution size that gives you such a high leverage

A very simple system that has these properties is given by those equations:

h=∑i√paymenti(h)
paymenti(h)=limitiπ2arctan(h∗saturation_speedi)

paymenti(h) is the amount that i'th agent has to pay

limiti is the i'th agent payment limit

saturation_speedi tells how quickly i'th agent's limit will be approached as new agents make contributions (the choice of this parameter is underspecified for

...
The Fourth Arena 2: New beings in time
by Bill Benzon — 2022-06-05T13:30:15.831Z

Yesterday I suggested that we are at the edge of a new era in cosmic history, at least our local version of it, for we have little idea what’s been happening with life on other planets in other solar systems in other galaxies or even if such life exists or has existed. The arena of matter started 14 billion years ago, from which the arena of life emerged four billion years ago. Human culture, the third arena, started about 3 million years ago. We are now on the threshold of a fourth arena.

The second and third arenas each brought new kinds of beings into the world, and those beings brought with them new ways of being in time. Living beings, the second arena, use free energy – ultimately from the sun – to swim against the tide of entropy. Life has been getting ever more complex over the long run – something David Hays and I argued in A Note on Why Natural Selection Leads to Complexity.

The third arena has brought us, well, cultural beings – there is no one good word for them. Yes, we are talking about human culture and therefore about human beings. But in this scheme human beings are themselves creatures of the second arena, animals. But very special animals, but animals that that provide the arena in which cultural beings can live.

What do I mean by cultural beings? Things like songs, stories, works of visual art, buildings, machines, and so forth. All of these are cultural beings. Physically, they are constituted of matter in various ways, but they live in and through us.

And they have the potential to live as long as humans walk the earth. We know little of those protohumans who crafted those stone tools in Africa some two or three million years ago. They probably spoke some kind of proto-language, which is lost. Their clothing, lost, their songs and dances, lost, their food, what did they eat? But those stone tools persist, and specialists have spent hours upon hours trying to figure out how they made them.

What about the ancient Greeks? Some of their stories live on in the two poems by Home, Iliad and Odyssey. But many stories have been lost. We also have tools and implements, remnants of building, and so forth. We could ramble through all of human history like this, but you get the idea, no? Ancient texts, the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Confucian Analects, and many others are still read today and used as guides to life. Cultural beings can, in the right c...
Russian x-risks newsletter May 2022 + short history of "methodologists"
by avturchin — 2022-06-05T11:50:31.185Z

My impression is that the risk of nuclear escalation in Ukraine war has declined. Putin didn’t choose any escalatory paths in the last two months: no nuclear tests, no declaration of war and mobilization, no closed borders. The most intense fightings are in the same regions as they were in 2014-2015 in Donbass. However, it all may change if Ukraine use (or accused of) US-delivered long-range weapons to strike Russian cities like Belgorod or some other unexpected things happen.

Ukraine atomic energy head dismissed claims that occupied Zaporozhskaia nuclear power plant has 40 tons of enriched uranium and 30 tons of plutonium. The difference is what should be counted as enriched uranium - fuel? and plutonium – is it in the spent fuel? Surely, any nuclear plant has a lot of fresh and spent fuel, but uranium and plutonium there are not suitable for nuclear weapons without complex reprocessing.

Now I’ll go back in time to show some strange relation between Russian politics and rationality thought.

In 1960-70 in Moscow appeared a proto-Yudkowsky, Schedrovitsky. He developed his own variant of rationality called “methodology" with a group of devoted students. They had seminars every day.

The general idea was simple [infohazard]: to solve a task we use some method, like scientific method. But where we got this method? We need a method of generating a correct method. Then we repeat reflection and we need a method of creating of method of creating a method, and now the all hell broke loose and they generated many books of texts about methods of creating methods.

Another their idea was that all what they are doing could be implemented in role-playing games, that there is strong connection between thinking and acting (activity theory).

In 80-90s they convinced themselves that they have created a powerful and universal method of solving most problems - and they wanted to test it in practice, in business and politics.

I don’t know about any their success in business, but some methodoligists went into politics. Meanwhile Schedrovitsky died in 1994.

The most prominent methodologist is Sergey Kirienko, who became Russian prime minister in 1998, being only 35 years old, but was dismissed after half a year as it turned out that Russia has accumulated debt pyramid which resulted in default. After that he remains on second roles in the Russian government for 25 ye...
Some questions I've been pondering...
by Dalton Mabery — 2022-06-05T04:21:07.581Z

Was there an objective reality that existed whether or not we could ever observe it?
Were there laws that restored strict causality to phenomena that seemed inherently random?
Was everything in the universe predetermined?
When do political parties start being a bad idea?
Why don't we want the government controlling the internet but we're okay with them controlling our education system?
How is it that outcomes can be likely and not happen and outcomes can be unlikely and still happen?
Is a democracy possible in the information age? Or has social media and technology changed the way humans function in a "democracy" and policy hasn't caught up yet?
Where do jokes come from?
How many people do I admire that are actually miserable?
Which people know what the right answers are, but no one listens to because they either 1. Don't look the part 2. Don't act like the part 3. Don't talk like the part?
Is there really a difference between a more-disciplined person and a less-disciplined person, or do they just experience their temptations in different ways?
Why isn't anyone building something like the Statue of Liberty, The Eiffel Tower, or The Great Bridge anymore? The coolest thing in recent years may be modern looking skyscrapers.
How is it some things existed in the past but there's no record of them in the present (online)?
There are a certain set of questions/problems that every person is faced with: how to choose a spouse, how to pick a career (and when to leave the one you're in), how to deal with difficult family members, how to deal with losing someone you love, how to enjoy life outside of work, and many more. Why is there no Thesis on Life or an almanack that answers these questions? Tim Ferris's Tribe of Mentors is the closest thing I'm aware of and it's still a long way off. This would be a really, really fun project to work on.
Reinventing the wheel
by jasoncrawford — 2022-06-04T22:39:49.776Z
Link: https://rootsofprogress.org/reinventing-the-wheel

Someone posted this photo recently. I can’t find a definitive original source, but multiple social media posts (Reddit, Twitter, Instagram), with different photos of the same object, all identify it as a 4,000-year-old wagon found in Lchashen, Armenia:

Reddit

A few interesting things to note about the wheels:

First, contrary to popular belief, wooden wheels like this were generally not made from cross-sections of logs. Look at the grain: they were assembled from planks.

In The Wheel: Inventions and Reinventions, Richard Bulliet writes:

When three planks were used, they were fastened together by mortise and tenon—that is, tab A in slot B—and glue, and sometimes were reinforced by thin strips of wood going crosswise instead of radially.

(A Twitter commenter suggests that “Tree rounds unavoidably split radially when seasoning.”)

Second, look at how the hub is wider than the rest of the wheel. Why make it that way? Given the material (wood) and the level of precision attainable at the time in manufacturing, if the hub were narrower, the wheel would wobble too much on the axle:

If the round hole that the axle goes through in the center of the wheel is roomy enough for the wheel to turn without much friction, however, a narrow wheel will inevitably tilt to the side a bit and wobble when it rolls, eventually wearing through the axle.

Of course, you could just make the entire wheel that thickness, but then it would be too heavy. So: thin wheel with a thick hub.

Michael Romero Taylor

Here’s an even older wheel. Notice anything different?

Ljubljana Marshes Wheel. Wikimedia / Petar Milošević

Look closely at the hub and the axle.

The hub is square. That’s because this wheel does not rotate on its axle: the axle and both wheels attached to it all rotate together, as a unit. This design is known as a “wheelset.”

Wikimedia / Vikiçizer

A wheelset is easier to construct. The drawback is that it is harder to steer: On a turn, the outer wheel needs to rotate faster than the inner one. When they are both fixed to the same axle, this can’t happen, so at least one of the wheels drags on the ground. Wheelsets may have initially been used for mine carts that mostly followed short, straight tracks.

Independently rotating wheels are better for, say, an oxcart, which needs to turn in fields and on roads:

Eastern Wei pottery ox cart. Wikimedia / Gary Todd

A wagon, which has four wheels (vs. two for a car...
What do you do to deliberately practice?
by hath — 2022-06-04T22:20:50.609Z

Also related: Humans Are Not Automatically Strategic

At the beginning of Tyler Cowen and David Gross's recent book, Talent, they mention an interview question Tyler used for new hires:

Daniel recalls that he first learned from Tyler this question for prospective hires: "What is it you do to practice that is analogous to how a pianist practices scales?" You learn what this person is doing to achieve ongoing improvement, and perhaps you can judge its efficacy or even learn something from it. You also learn how the person thinks about continual self-improvement, above and beyond their particular habits. If a person doesn't practice much, they still might be a good hire, but then you are much more in the world of "what you see is what you get," which is valuable information on its own. If the person does engage in daily, intensive self-improvement, perhaps eschewing more typical and more social pursuits, there is a greater chance they are the kind of creative obsessive who can make a big difference.

When I read this, I opened a new Obsidian file and tried to write down what I do for deliberate practice. I couldn't think of anything; I don't do anything to deliberately practice skills I have.

As I thought of what I might start doing to deliberately practice, I realized that while I had some conception of my comparative advantage (high charisma and extroversion) relative to the skilled people I regularly interact with, I had no plan to practice that, even though I knew a good drill for practicing public speaking. I also realized that I had no idea how to deliberately practice certain skills—what does, say, Tyler Cowen do to deliberately practice his skill at searching for talent? (EDIT: a friend linked his post on it)

I'd like to see what it is that you do to deliberately practice. If, like me, you realized that you don't deliberately try to improve the skills you regularly use, hopefully the other responses can provide some ideas for possible new habits.

Examples:

If you wanted to improve your social skills or public speaking, you could try recording yourself giving a speech or having a conversation and then seeing what specific things you could have done better. [1]

Similarly, an extracurricular program at my old school had a speaking drill for interview practice:

The teacher provides a question: something like "What issue in the world do you wish more people were a

...
Quick Look: Asymptomatic Herpes Shedding
by Elizabeth — 2022-06-04T21:40:05.376Z

Tl;dr: Individuals shed and thus probably spread oral HSV1 while completely asymptomatic.

Introduction

“Herpes virus” can refer to several viruses in the herpes family, including chickenpox and Epstein-Barr (which causes mono). All herpesviridae infections are for life: once infected, the virus will curl up in its cell of choice, possibly to leap out and begin reproduction again later. If the virus produces visible symptoms, it is called symptomatic. If the virus is producing viable virions that can infect other people, it’s called shedding. How correlated symptoms and shedding are is the topic of this post.

When people say “herpes” without further specification, they typically mean herpes simplex 1 or 2. HSV1 and 2 are both permanent infections of nerve cells that can lay dormant forever, or intermittently cause painful blisters on mucous membranes (typically mouth or genitals, occasionally eyes, very occasionally elsewhere). There are also concerns about subtle long-term effects, which I do not go into here.

There are two conventional pieces of conventional wisdom on HSV: “you can shed infectious virus at any time, even without a sore. Most people who catch herpes catch it from an asymptomatic individual” and “99.9% of shedding occurs during or right before a blister and there are distinct signs you can recognize if you’re paying attention. If you can recognize an oncoming blister the chances of infecting another human are negligible.” At the request of a client I performed two hours of research to judge between these.

It is definitely true that doctors will only run tests looking for the virus directly (as opposed to antibodies) if you have an active sore. However when researchers proactively sampled asymptomatic individuals using either genetic material tests (PCR/NAAT, which look for viral DNA in a sample) or viral culture (which attempt to breed virus from your test sample in a petri dish), they reliably found some people are shedding virus.

HSV1 prefers the mouth but is well known to infect genitals as well. HSV2 is almost exclusively genital. Due to a dearth of studies I’ve included some HSV2 and genital HSV1 studies.

Studies

Tronstein et al: This paper stupidly lumped in “0% shedding” with “>0% shedding” and I hate them. Ignoring that, they found that 10% of all days recorded from individuals with asymptomatic genital HSV2 involved she...
How to pursue a career in technical AI alignment
by Charlie Rogers-Smith — 2022-06-04T21:11:46.501Z

(Crossposted at the EA forum.)

This guide is written for people who are considering direct work on technical AI alignment. I expect it to be most useful for people who are not yet working on alignment, and for people who are already familiar with the arguments for working on AI alignment. If you aren’t familiar with the arguments for the importance of AI alignment, you can get an overview of them by reading

Why AI alignment could be hard with modern deep learning

(Cotra, 2021) and one of

The Most Important Century Series

(Karnofsky, 2021) and

AGI Safety from First Principles

(Ngo, 2019).

It might not be best for you to work on technical AI alignment. You can have a large impact on reducing existential risk from AI by working on AI strategy, governance, policy, security, forecasting, support roles, field-building, grant-making, and governance of hardware. That’s not counting other areas, such as bio-risk. It is probably better to do great work in one of those areas than mediocre technical alignment work, because impact is heavy-tailed. One good exercise is to go through Holden Karnofsky’s aptitudes

podcast

/

post

, and think about which of the aptitudes you might be able to become great at. Then ask yourself or others how you could use those aptitudes to solve the problems you care about. I also recommend applying to

speak with 80,000 Hours

.

I’ll probably be wrong but I might be helpful. Feedback was broadly positive, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some people think that this guide is net-negative. For example, because it pushes people toward/away from theoretical research, or empirical research, or ML engineering, or getting a PhD. I have tried to communicate my all-things-considered view here, after integrating feedback. But I can only suggest that you try to form your own view on what’s best for you to do, and take this guide as one input to that process.

I had lots of help. Neel Nanda helped me start this project. I straight-up copied stuff from Rohin Shah, Adam Gleave, Neel Nanda, Dan Hendrycks, Catherine Olsson, Buck Shlegeris, and Oliver Zhang. I got great feedback from Adam Gleave, Arden Koehler, Rohin Shah, Dan Hendrycks, Neel Nanda, Noa Nabeshima, Alex Lawson, Jamie Bernardi, Richard Ngo, Mark Xu, Oliver Zhang, Andy Jones, and Emma Abele. I wrote most of this at Wytham Abbey, courtesy of Elizabeth Garrett.
...
Open & Welcome Thread - June 2022 
by MondSemmel — 2022-06-04T19:27:45.197Z

If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it.

If you are new to LessWrong, here's the place to introduce yourself. Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to get from the site and community are invited. This is also the place to discuss feature requests and other ideas you have for the site, if you don't want to write a full top-level post.

If you want to explore the community more, I recommend reading the Library, checking recent Curated posts, seeing if there are any meetups in your area, and checking out the Getting Started section of the LessWrong FAQ. If you want to orient to the content on the site, you can also check out the new Concepts section.

The Open Thread tag is here. The Open Thread sequence is here.
The Fourth Arena: What’s Up in the world these days? We’re moving to a new, a new what? 
by Bill Benzon — 2022-06-04T19:07:51.225Z

About ten years of so ago I discovered object-oriented ontology (OOO) and Bruno Latour. That plunged me into a philosophy period during which I ended up taking a really Big Look at things. I ended up sketching a cosmology/ontology, Living with Abundance in a Pluralist Cosmos: Some Metaphysical Sketches. I ended up arguing that, to date, the universe has seen the emergence of three arenas of abundance. I’ve taken the term “abundance” from Paul Feryerabend: the universe is abundant, it just keeps generating lots and lots of stuff.

I’ve identified these three realms on this nice chart which I round in Wikipedia’s entry on Universe. Roughly speaking, the universe began 14 billion years ago, giving rise to the arena of Matter. Four billion years ago Life emerged. While animals do have culture – the higher primates, certainly, do beaver dams count as culture? I don’t know – it’s human culture that ushered in a new arena, that of Culture. Wikipedia dates Oldowan tools to about 2.6 million years ago. That’s when we can locate the origins of human culture. Whether it’s a million years later or earlier hardly matters on this time scale.

Three Arenas: Matter, Life, Culture

Just as the other areas exhibit internal differentiation, so does Culture. Over the years David Hays and I had developed an account of cultural evolution based on fundamental cognitive architecture which we cultural ranks. We’ve identified four cultural ranks. Rank 1 is based on speech and emerged we don’t really know how long ago. Let’s put it between 100,000 and a million years ago; I doubt that it’s younger and it may well be older. Rank 2 is based on writing and is 5000 to 7000 years old or so. Rank 3 began to emerge after Asian methods of calculation reached Europe by way of the Arabs. It is thus based on calculation and showed its face, say, 700 or so years ago. It gave us the scientific and industrial revolutions, but also the novel, coherent geometric perspective in drawing and painting, and harmony in music. We traced Rank 4 back to statistical mechanics and Darwinian evolution in the 19th century and flourished in the wake of Alan Turing’s conceptualization of computing and then, at mid-20th century, with the development and deployment of digital computers. At this point a large percentage of the earth’s peoples individually own one or more digital computers, whether in their phone or a laptop...