trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Welcome to New Delhi SSC [Edit With Your Details]
by mingyuan — 2019-09-25T02:38:17.069Z

(The following are our suggestions for what kind of information is best to include in the welcome post of your group, feel free to replace them with whatever you think is best)

What kind of events does your group usually run? What does it usually do?

How frequently does your group organize events or meet?

Who would be a good fit for you group?

Should they have any particular skills or have done some specific background reading?
Welcome to SSC Hamburg [Edit With Your Details]
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2019-09-24T21:35:10.473Z

(The following are our suggestions for what kind of information is best to include in the welcome post of your group, feel free to replace them with whatever you think is best)

What kind of events does your group usually run? What does it usually do?

How frequently does your group organize events or meet?

Who would be a good fit for you group?

Should they have any particular skills or have done some specific background reading?
How can I reframe my study motivation?
by DivineMango — 2019-09-24T21:30:15.872Z

Hello LessWrong! First time posting here. I am a second-year college student, and I am interested in doing independent learning outside my coursework. Books I've been eyeing / trying to read include The Sequences, The Selfish Gene, and Superintelligence.

However, I've noticed that it feels much more like an obligation, which makes the process much less enjoyable and rewarding. I feel like I want to have read, instead want to read. Particularly, I noticed that as I was reading The Sequences, I constantly checked how far away from the end of the current essay I was. When I got to the last page, it felt very good; but the reading itself did not feel as rewarding. At its core, I feel as though I want to have read so that I can feel like I've made progress. But it's dutiful and it's draining.

In short: how can I make the reading itself more rewarding and remove the 'ought' feeling, shifting myself into a more curious and motivated mindset?
Idols of the Mind Pt. 1 (Novum Organum Book 1: 38–52)
by Francis Bacon — 2019-09-24T19:53:18.770Z

This is the fourth post in the Novum Organum sequence. For context, see the sequence introduction.

We have used Francis Bacon's Novum Organum in the version presented at www.earlymoderntexts.com. Translated by and copyright to Jonathan Bennett. Prepared for LessWrong by Ruby.

Ruby's Reading Guide

Novum Organum is organized as two books each containing numbered "aphorisms." These vary in length from three lines to sixteen pages. Titles of posts in this sequence, e.g. Idols of the Mind Pt. 1, are my own and do not appear in the original.

While the translator, Bennett, encloses his editorial remarks in a single pair of [brackets], I have enclosed mine in a [[double pair of brackets]].

Bennett's Reading Guide

[Brackets] enclose editorial explanations. Small ·dots· enclose material that has been added, but can be read as though it were part of the original text. Occasional •bullets, and also indenting of passages that are not quotations, are meant as aids to grasping the structure of a sentence or a thought. Every four-point ellipsis . . . . indicates the omission of a brief passage that seems to present more difficulty than it is worth. Longer omissions are reported between brackets in normal-sized type.

Aphorism Concerning the Interpretation of Nature: Book 1: 38–52

by Francis Bacon

38. The idols and false notions that now possess the human intellect and have taken deep root in it don’t just •occupy men’s minds so that truth can hardly get in, but also when a truth is allowed in they will •push back against it, stopping it from contributing to a fresh start in the sciences. This can be avoided only if men are forewarned of the danger and do what they can to fortify themselves against the assaults of these idols and false notions.

39. There are four classes of idols that beset men’s minds, and to help me in my exposition I have given them names. I call the first class idols of the tribe, the second idols of the cave, the third idols of the market place, and the fourth idols of the theatre.

40. The proper way to keep idols at bay and to drive them off is, no doubt, to form ideas and axioms by true induction. But it is very useful just to point the idols out; for •the truth about the idols serves •the interpretation of nature in the way that •the truth about argumentative...
The MA Estate Tax is Broken
by jefftk — 2019-09-24T10:40:01.796Z

There's a common misconception that crossing the boundary into a higher tax bracket hurts you. In a sensibly designed tax system how much money you have after taxes, as a function of how much money you have before taxes, should only go up. The Massachusetts estate tax, however, is not sensibly designed.

Nominally, it's a graduated system. Let's say when you die your only possession a big pile of cash. If it's $100k then you pay 0% on your first $40k, 0.8% on your next $50k, and then 1.6% on the rest, for a total of $200 (0.6%). It ramps up to eventually reach a marginal rate of 16% at $10M.

Except if your big pile of cash is under $1M, you're not required to file at all, and you actually pay $0. What you pay looks like:

You can see that someone dying with $1,000,001 is paying $37k, while someone dying with $999,999 is paying $0.

Here's the marginal tax rate, what you pay per dollar you die with:

That peak isn't 100%, though, it's 3,700,000%. Your millionth dollar sure costs you!

Here's another way of looking at it: $1M gives $963k after tax, which is the same amount you'd get if you'd just started with $963k.

While $37k is a lot of money, it's still only 3.7% of $1M, so it's a barely noticeable blip if you look at it with some perspective:

Still, this does lead people to do weird things around the $1M mark, so a better system would just be to give each person a $1M exemption and then charge higher rates on estates over $1M to keep it revenue neutral. If you die with less than $1M you don't have to file, but also wouldn't owe any tax if you did.

(This doesn't get into the various ways that richer people and people with better planning can set up their finances so they avoid estate taxes, countering a lot of the intentional progressive setup. And it also doesn't get into additional complications around situations where you have to file despite having a net value of under $1M.)

Comment via: facebook
On Becoming Clueless
by Martin Sustrik — 2019-09-24T04:20:00.672Z

It is said that every year the IQ needed to destroy the world drops by one point.

Well, yes, but let me add a different spin on the problem:

Every year, the IQ needed to make sense of the world raises by one point.

If your IQ is 100 and you want to see yourself in 2039 just ask somebody with IQ 80 and listen carefully.

I know that some people are troubled about prospects of those less intellectually gifted in the modern knowledge-based economy. And yes, it's troubling that we are heading towards some kind of intellectual elitism. But, on the other hand, it may be just a temporary thing. At the end we will all, village idiots and von Neumanns alike, end up having no clue.

What are we going to do then?
Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of the Green Rationalists
by Zack_M_Davis — 2019-09-24T04:12:07.560Z

Followup to: What Evidence Filtered Evidence?

In "What Evidence Filtered Evidence?", we are asked to consider a scenario involving a coin that is either biased to land Heads 2/3rds of the time, or Tails 2/3rds of the time. Observing Heads is 1 bit of evidence for the coin being Heads-biased (because the Heads-biased coin lands Heads with probability 2/3, the Tails-biased coin does so with probability 1/3, the likelihood ratio of these is 2/31/3=2, and log22=1), and analogously and respectively for Tails.

If such a coin is flipped ten times by someone who doesn't make literally false statements, who then reports that the 4th, 6th, and 9th flips came up Heads, then the update to our beliefs about the coin depends on what algorithm the not-lying[1] reporter used to decide to report those flips in particular. If they always report the 4th, 6th, and 9th flips independently of the flip outcomes—if there's no evidential entanglement between the flip outcomes and the choice of which flips get reported—then reported flip-outcomes can be treated the same as flips you observed yourself: three Headses is 3 * 1 = 3 bits of evidence in favor of the hypothesis that the coin is Heads-biased. (So if we were initially 50:50 on the question of which way the coin is biased, our posterior odds after collecting 3 bits of evidence for a Heads-biased coin would be 23:1 = 8:1, or a probability of 8/(1 + 8) ≈ 0.89 that the coin is Heads-biased.)

On the other hand, if the reporter mentions only and exactly the flips that came out Heads, then we can infer that the other 7 flips came out Tails (if they didn't, the reporter would have mentioned them), giving us posterior odds of 23:27 = 1:16, or a probability of around 0.06 that the coin is Heads-biased.

So far, so standard. (You did read the Sequences, right??) What I'd like to emphasize about this scenario today, however, is that while a Bayesian reasoner who knows the non-lying reporter's algorithm of what flips to report will never be misled by the selective reporting of flips, a Bayesian with mistaken beliefs about the reporter's decision algorithm can be misled quite badly: compare the 0.89 and 0.06 probabilities we just derived given the same reported outcomes, but different assumptions about the reporting algorithm.

If the coin gets flipped a sufficiently large number of times, a reporter whom you trust to be impartial (but isn't), ca...
Towards an empirical investigation of inner alignment
by evhub — 2019-09-23T20:43:59.070Z

I recently wrote a post detailing some concrete experiments that could be done now to start learning interesting things about inner alignment. The goal of that post was to provide an overview of a bunch of different possible proposals rather than go into any single proposal in detail.

The goal of this post, on the other hand, is to actually sketch out a more complete proposal for the single experiment I would most want to be done now, which is to provide a definitive empirical demonstration of an inner alignment failure.[1] Furthermore, I have tried to make this post as accessible as possible for someone with only a machine learning background so as to facilitate people being able to work on this without having read the entirety of “Risks from Learned Optimization.” Additionally, if you’re interested in working on this, definitely reach out to me either in the comments here or at evanjhub@gmail.com, as I’d love to help out however I can.

Background

First, we have to understand what exactly we’re looking for when we say inner alignment failure. At least when I say inner alignment failure, I mean the following:

Inner alignment fails when your capabilities generalize but your objective does not.

That seems a bit cryptic, though—what do I actually mean by that? Well, consider a maze-solving agent trained to get to the end of mazes of the following form:

Then, I want to know how it will generalize on the following larger maze with an interesting twist where the green arrow that marked the end has now been moved to a different position:

In this situation, there are a couple of different ways in which your model could generalize:

Complete generalization failure: The model only knows how to solve small mazes and can’t properly navigate the larger maze.

Intended generalization: The model learned how to navigate mazes in general and uses that knowledge to get to the end of the larger maze.

Capability generalization without objective generalization: The model learned how to navigate mazes in general, but it learned to do so for the purpose of getting to the green arrow rather than actually getting to the end. Thus, the model successfully navigates the larger maze, but it successfully navigates to the green arrow rather than successfully navigating to the end.

The reason I think this last situation is particularly concerning—and in a very different way than the first f...
Therapy vs emotional support
by squidious — 2019-09-23T19:00:01.103Z

There's a misconception that therapy is like paying someone to be your friend. While most therapists would disagree with that statement, there is a kernel of truth; therapy can often focus on emotional support, and getting those needs met. I sometimes joke that when friends need help, we suggest they see a therapist, yet in therapy, clients are asked to vent to their friends. This may sound like the person is being tossed back and forth, but there are two things at play here. The first is that many people rely on a few friends for more support than they can handle (hence being referred to a therapist), while others see a therapist partly from the worry of overburdening their friends (hence being challenged to open up to friends). The second, more complicated piece is that therapy and emotional support are actually two different things, fulfilling different needs, and there are many cases where one would work far better than the other.

The first and most obvious difference is that therapy is one-sided. The extent of this differs on an individual basis; some therapists may reveal that they too have had a parent pass away, so the client feels understood, while others may never mention their kids or partner under any circumstances. Emotional support, on the other hand, can go both ways. When a friend vents to you about their family, you can share similar experiences in greater detail, whether to tell them you can relate, give them advice, or even just to vent yourself. We are social creatures, so this can help us forge a deeper type of connection.

Ideally, therapists are unbiased, and non judgmental. Of course, this is difficult in practice, which is why many therapists see their own therapists. Being in therapy can help therapists separate our own past experiences from the client's present, and compartmentalize anything that comes up without just shoving it into a messy closet to be dealt with in the far future. In contrast, your friends are likely to have biases, whether they're aware of them or not. Even a friend who wants the best for you may have a particular idea of what that looks like, whether that's in judging a potential partner or convincing you not to apply to college far away so you don't move. Friends also have little to no incentive to work on this, since this comes from having a deeper connection and wanting to stay in each other's lives. At best,

...
[AN #65]: Learning useful skills by watching humans “play”
by Rohin Shah — 2019-09-23T17:30:01.539Z

Find all Alignment Newsletter resources

here

. In particular, you can

sign up

, or look through this

spreadsheet

of all summaries that have ever been in the newsletter. I'm always happy to hear feedback; you can send it to me by replying to this email.

Audio version

here

(may not be up yet).

Highlights

Learning Latent Plans from Play

(Corey Lynch et al) (summarized by Cody): This paper collects unsupervised data of humans playing with robotic control systems, and uses that data to thread a needle between two problems in learning. One problem is that per-task demonstration data is costly, especially as number of tasks grows; the other is that randomly sampled control actions will rarely stumble across complex motor tasks in ways that allow robots to learn. The authors argue that human play data is a good compromise because humans at play tend to explore different ways of manipulating objects in ways that give robots nuggets of useful information like "how do I move this block inside a drawer", which can be composed into more complicated and intentional tasks.

The model works by learning to produce vectors that represent plans (or sequences of actions), and jointly learning to decode those vectors into action sequences. This architecture learns to generate plan vectors by using an autoencoder-like structure that uses KL divergence to align (1) a distribution of plan vectors predicted from the start and end state of a window of play data, and (2) a distribution of plan vectors predicted by looking back at all the actions taken in that window. Because we're jointly learning to unroll the (2) lookback-summarized vector such that it matches the actions actually taken, we'll ideally end up with a system that can take in a given plan vector and produce a sequence of actions to execute that plan. And, because we're learning to predict a vector that aligns with actions successfully taken to get to an end state from a starting one, the model at test time should be able to produce a play vector corresponding to feasible actions that will get it from its current state to a goal state we'd like it to reach. The authors found that their Play-trained model was able to outperform single-task models on a range of manipulation tasks, even though those single-task models were trained with explicit demonstrations of the task.

Cody's opinion: I r...
Don't clean your glasses
by jefftk — 2019-09-23T15:20:01.943Z

I rarely clean my glasses:

They do get dusty, but I find that as long as I don't clean them I
don't notice it. Just like I no longer notice having glasses at all,
despite the opaque frames and the sharp boundary between clear and
fuzzy vision, the dust just fades from my perception.

Same goes for computer screens:

This is great: instead of spending time cleaning my glases, and being
frustrated when they're not perfect, I just wear them as they are and
am happy.

Smudges, however, do need cleaning. While vision can easily work
around the dust, blurry patches lose enough information that you can't
subconsciously adjust anymore. I end up cleaning my glasses about
twice a month when they get fingerprints or other oils on them.
The Inadequacy of Current Science (Novum Organum Book 1: 1-37)
by Francis Bacon — 2019-09-23T02:53:35.433Z

This is the third post in the Novum Organum sequence. For context, see the sequence introduction.

We have used Francis Bacon's Novum Organum in the version presented at www.earlymoderntexts.com. Translated by and copyright to Jonathan Bennett. Prepared for LessWrong by Ruby.

Ruby's Reading Guide

Novum Organum is organized as two books each containing numbered "aphorisms." These vary in length from three lines to sixteen pages. Titles of posts in this sequence, e.g. Idols of the Mind Pt. 1, are my own and do not appear in the original.

While the translator, Bennett, encloses his editorial remarks in a single pair of [brackets], I have enclosed mine in a [[double pair of brackets]].

Bennett's Reading Guide

[Brackets] enclose editorial explanations. Small ·dots· enclose material that has been added, but can be read as though it were part of the original text. Occasional •bullets, and also indenting of passages that are not quotations, are meant as aids to grasping the structure of a sentence or a thought. Every four-point ellipsis . . . . indicates the omission of a brief passage that seems to present more difficulty than it is worth. Longer omissions are reported between brackets in normal-sized type.

Aphorism Concerning the Interpretation of Nature: Book 1: 1–37

by Francis Bacon

1. Man, being nature’s servant and interpreter, is limited in what he can do and understand by what he has observed of the course of nature—directly observing it or inferring things ·from what he has observed·. Beyond that he doesn’t know anything and can’t do anything.

2. Not much can be achieved by the naked hand or by the unaided intellect. Tasks are carried through by tools and helps, and the intellect needs them as much as the hand does. And just as the hand’s tools either •give motion or •guide it, so ·in a comparable way· the mind’s tools either •point the intellect in the direction it should go or • offer warnings.

3. Human knowledge and human power meet at a point; for where the cause isn’t known the effect can’t be produced. The only way to command nature is to obey it; and something that functions as the •cause in thinking about a process functions as the •rule in the process itself.

4. All that man can do to bring someth...
Value Impact
by TurnTrout — 2019-09-23T00:47:12.991Z

Being on Earth when this happens is a big deal, no matter your objectives – you can't hoard pebbles if you're dead! People would feel the loss from anywhere in the cosmos. However, Pebblehoarders wouldn't mind if they weren't in harm's way.

Appendix: Contrived Objectives

A natural definitional objection is that a few agents aren't affected by objectively impactful events. If you think every outcome is equally good, then who cares if the meteor hits?

Obviously, our values aren't like this, and any agent we encounter or build is unlikely to be like this (since these agents wouldn't do much). Furthermore, these agents seem contrived in a technical sense (low measure under reasonable distributions in a reasonable formalization), as we'll see later. That is, "most" agents aren't like this.

From now on, assume we aren't talking about this kind of agent.

Notes

Eliezer introduced Pebblesorters in the the Sequences; I made them robots here to better highlight how pointless the pebble transformation is to humans.
In informal parts of the sequence, I'll often use "values", "goals", and "objectives" interchangeably, depending on what flows.
We're going to lean quite a bit on thought experiments and otherwise speculate on mental processes. While I've taken the obvious step of beta-testing the sequence and randomly peppering my friends with strange questions to check their intuitions, maybe some of the conclusions only hold for people like me. I mean, some people don't have mental imagery – who would've guessed? Even if so, I think we'll be fine; the goal is for an impact measure – deducing human universals would just be a bonus.
Objective impact is objective with respect to the agent's values – it is not the case that an objective impact affects you anywhere and anywhen in the universe! If someone finds $100, that matters for agents at that point in space and time (no matter their goals), but it doesn't mean that everyone in the universe is objectively impacted by one person finding some cash!
If you think about it, the phenomenon of objective impact is surprising. See, in AI alignment, we're used to no-free-lunch this, no-universal-argument that; the possibility of something objectively important t

...