trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Are the bad epistemic conditions global?
by jmh — 2020-01-25T23:31:21.283Z

You've set this in the context of USA politics and society. Clearly it is not just limited to the USA. I seem to recall similar types of things occurring in Europe over the past 20 - 30 years.

I also suspect one might find this type of problem more prevalent within the environmental discussions and various camps.

Last, the the behavior of a lot of mainland Chinese students in other countries seems to be applying these types of tactics in the context of discussions and positive views about the Hong Kong protests and pro-democracy movements.

It does seem that some pendulum has been swinging in this direction for some time everywhere. So perhaps it is actually a normal social/political cycle type event we're seeing play out. But that does still beg the question about underlying forces and perhaps more importantly the countervailing forces that might return us to more reasoned and tolerant dialogue when differences exist.
Material Goods as an Abundant Resource
by johnswentworth — 2020-01-25T23:23:14.489Z

If you want to understand the modern economy, as opposed to the economies of yore, one source I strongly recommend is a short story from the July 1958 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, titled “

Business As Usual During Alterations

”. It’s roughly a 15 minute read. I’m about to throw out major spoilers, so stop reading here if you want to enjoy the story first.

One morning, two devices mysteriously appear in front of city hall, along with directions on how to use them. Each has two pans and a button. Any object can be placed in one pan and, with a press of the button, a perfect duplicate will appear in the other pan. By placing one duplicator device in the pan of the other, the device itself may be duplicated as well.

Within a span of hours, material scarcity is removed as an economic constraint. What happens in such a world?

People tend to imagine the dawn of a new era, in which human beings can finally escape the economic rat-race of capitalism and consumerism. In the world of the duplicator, a pantry can provide all the food one needs to live. A single tank of gas can drive anywhere one wishes to go. Any good can be copied and shared with friends, for free. All material needs can be satisfied with the push of a button. Utopia, in a nutshell.

The main takeaway of the story is that this isn’t really what happens.

Towards the end, a grocer explains the new status quo eloquently:

... not very many people will buy beans and chuck roast, when they can eat wild rice and smoked pheasant breast. So, you know what I've been thinking? I think what we'll have to have, instead of a supermarket, is a sort of super-delicatessen. Just one item each of every fancy food from all over the world, thousands and thousands, all different

Sound familiar?

Of course, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. When it comes to digital goods, like music or videos, the world of the duplicator is exactly the world in which we now live. That’s the obvious parallel, but let’s not stop there.

Over time, the value of raw materials and manufacturing have steadily fallen as a fraction of economic output. Even when looking at material goods, efficiency has shifted the bulk of costs from materials and manufacturing to design and engineering. We are converging to the world of the duplicator, where marginal production costs hit zero, and in many areas we’re already most of the way there.

In terms of constraints...
Constraints & Slackness as a Worldview Generator
by johnswentworth — 2020-01-25T23:18:54.562Z

Last post speculated that capital was much more scarce (relative to labor) in medieval/renaissance China than Europe. We introduced the hypothesis that this was a major cause (though not a

root cause

) of the failure of China to automate and, by extension, the failure of China to kick-start the industrial revolution. More importantly, we introduced some simple first-pass ways to test this hypothesis: go look at market prices of labor and capital in medieval/renaissance China and Europe.

We did not go into depth actually testing that hypothesis, nor will we. Instead, we're going to go up a meta-level, and generalize this whole technique. We have a very general hypothesis about the large-scale historical evolution of China compared to Europe. It’s part of a whole worldview, in which the central gear - the central mediating factor - is the scarcity of capital relative to labor. What’s the process which generates this sort of hypothesis? Can we generalize it, to generate other broad worldviews?

Here's the idea, in 4.5 steps.

Step 1: Pick a General Resource/Constraint

Pick some very general resource, which serves as an input to production in a wide variety of areas. Our China/Europe example mainly considers capital as the resource (though we also use labor as a baseline for comparison in this case). Other important examples in economic history include transportation, energy, and fertile land. More modern and abstract examples might include research/innovation, communication/coordination, signals of status/virtue/intelligence, or material goods as a whole.

Step 2: Qualitative Analysis

Reason qualitatively about what would happen as the constraint becomes more taut/slack. What technologies (machines, contracts, organizational structures, etc) would be adopted? What would happen to market prices? What other constraints would become more/less slack as a result?

For instance, as capital constraints become more taut, we expect to see more people performing tasks which could be performed by machines (i.e. not adopting capital-intensive technology), and we expect returns on capital investments to be higher (i.e. higher market price of capital). When capital constraints become more slack, we expect the opposite.

Step 3: Compare to the Real World

Compare real-world observations (market prices, technology actually used) to our predictions to figure out (qualitatively) how taut/slack ...
Technology Changes Constraints
by johnswentworth — 2020-01-25T23:13:17.428Z

A thousand years ago, books were generally written by hand, on parchment made from sheep skin. I don't have a good source on how long it took a person to transcribe a typical book, so for the purpose of this post let's just call it 30 days. I do know that a typical book required the skins of about 12 sheep (source:

Braudel

).

We can represent this via two production constraints:

Nbooks≤130NtranscriptionDays

Nbooks≤112Nsheep

... and of course we could add more constraints to reflect all the other inputs to a book. We write it like this, rather than just saying "1 book = 12 sheep + 30 transcriptionDays", to highlight that each input is an independent limit on the number of books produced. If we only have 15 sheep on hand, then we can make at most 1 book, no matter how many bored transcriptionists are sitting around.

Another reason why writing out the constraints is useful: it offers a natural way to introduce technology changes.

Let's consider two possible technology changes:

switching from parchment to paper
switching from transcriptionists to a printing press

How do these modify the constraints? Well, paper eliminates the sheep constraint and replaces it with a paper constraint (of the form Nbooks≤CNpaper for some C) - yet the transcription constraint remains exactly the same. Conversely, a press eliminates the transcription constraint - yet the sheep constraint remains exactly the same. The constraint representation is modular with respect to technology changes: introduction of new technology removes/modifies some constraints, while leaving most of them unaltered.

With a little creativity, this representation can be extended to other kinds of technology changes as well:

Before the invention of television, we had the constraint NTV≤0. The invention of television replaced this constraint with a bunch of television production constraints, like NTV≤NvacuumTubes
Fixed-cost capital goods, e.g. a printing press, add a constraint that we need at least one of the capital good, independent of the number of things produced: 1≤Npress
A more efficient sheep-skin processing technique might replace Nbooks≤112Nsheep with Nbooks≤110Nsheep

... etc.

Conjugacy

One of the main lessons of optimization theory - be it linear programming, convex analysis, what have you - is that every constraint has a conjugate ...
Ten Causes of Mazedom
by Zvi — 2020-01-25T13:40:00.434Z

We continue answering the questions we asked earlier. It was claimed last time that maze levels and the danger of mazes was lower in the past than it is now, and that overall maze levels have been rising, as measured both by maze levels within organizations across the board, and maze levels within the overall society.

The world is better for people than it was back then. There are many things that have improved. This is not one of them.

I am confident this is the case and have pointed to ways to see it. I recognize that I have in no way proven this is the case. I don’t have a way to do that. Rather I am relying on your own observations and analysis. If you disagree, I hope the discussion that follows will still prove useful as a comparison to what you see as an alternate possible scenario where these dynamics are less toxic.

Now we ask what may have been different in the past, and whether we can duplicate those causes.

Why was it different? Can we duplicate those causes?

The sketched model suggests several causes.

One can model this as a two-level problem. Something happens (e.g. technological change) resulting in a change in circumstances (e.g. more real need for large organizations, cause one), which then causes higher overall maze levels.

Since this question asks for potential action on a large scale, political proposals will need to be among the proposals discussed. Let us do our best to debate models and how the gears in them work, and stay away from actual politics. To that end, I am not claiming any of these policies are good ideas and should be implemented, or bad and should not be implemented. I am only claiming that they would have particular physical results in the world. If they are obviously good or bad ideas, I shouldn’t need to say so.

Cause 1: More Real Need For Large Organizations

Modern life has larger organizations with more levels of hierarchy. Corporations are bigger. Governments are bigger. Political organizations are bigger. Universities are bigger. They wrap that bigness in more levels of hierarchy than ever before, with increasing amounts of bureaucracy and administration.

Jobs are done that previously did not get done. Where the same job persists, that same job takes more people.

There is little doubt that some of the problem is caused by the increased complexity of real needs. What is difficult is figuring out how much is necessary vers...
On the ontological development of consciousness
by jessicata — 2020-01-25T05:56:43.244Z
Link: https://unstableontology.com/2020/01/25/on-the-ontological-development-of-consciousness/

This post is about what consciousness is, ontologically, and how ontologies that include consciousness develop.

The topic of consciousness is quite popular, and confusing, in philosophy. While I do not seek to fully resolve the philosophy of consciousness, I hope to offer an angle on the question I have not seen before. This angle is that of developmental ontology: how are "later" ontologies developed from "earlier" ontologies? I wrote on developmental ontology in a previous post, and this post can be thought of as an elaboration, which can be read on its own, and specifically tackles the problem of consciousness.

Much of the discussion of stabilization is heavily inspired by On the Origin of Objects, an excellent book on reference and ontology, to which I owe much of my ontological development. To the extent that I have made any philosophical innovation, it is in combining this book's concepts with the minimum-description-length principle, and analytic philosophy of mind.

World-perception ontology

I'm going to write a sequence of statements, which each make sense in terms of an intuitive world-perception ontology.

There's a real world outside of my head.

I exist and am intimately connected with, if not identical with, some body in this world.

I only see some of the world. What I can see is like what a camera placed at the point my eyes are can see.

The world contains objects. These objects have properties like shape, color, etc.

When I walk, it is me who moves, not everything around me. Most objects are not moving most of the time, even if they look like they're moving in my visual field.

Objects, including my body, change and develop over time. Changes proceed, for the most part, in a continuous way, so e.g. object shapes and sizes rarely change, and teleportation doesn't happen.

These all seem common-sensical; it would be strange to doubt them. However, achieving the ontology by which such statements are common-sensical is nontrivial. There are many moving parts here, which must be working in their places before the world seems as sensible as it is.

Let's look at the "it is me who moves, not everything around me" point, because it's critical. If you try shaking your head right now, you will notice that your visual field changes rapidly. An object (such as a computer screen) in your vision is going to move side-to-side (or top-to-bottom), from one

...
Have epistemic conditions always been this bad?
by Wei Dai — 2020-01-25T04:42:52.190Z

In the last few months, I've gotten increasingly alarmed by leftist politics in the US, and the epistemic conditions that it operates under and is imposing wherever it gains power. (Quite possibly the conditions are just as dire on the right, but they are not as visible or salient to me, because most of the places I can easily see, either directly or through news stories, i.e., local politics in my area, academia, journalism, large corporations, seem to have been taken over by the left.)

I'm worried that my alarmism is itself based on confirmation bias, tribalism, catastrophizing, or any number of other biases. (It confuses me that I seem to be the first person to talk much about this on either LW or EA Forum, given that there must be people who have been exposed to the current political environment earlier or to a greater extent than me. On the other hand, all my posts/comments on the subject have generally been upvoted on both forums, and nobody has specifically said that I'm being too alarmist. One possible explanation for nobody else raising an alarm about this is that they're afraid of the current political climate and they're not as "cancel-proof" as I am, or don't feel that they have as much leeway to talk about politics-adjacent issues here as I do.)

So I want to ask, have things always been like this, or have they actually gotten significantly worse in recent (say the last 5 or 10) years? If they've always been like this, then perhaps there is less cause for alarm, because (1) if things have always been this bad, and we muddled through them in the past, we can probably continue to muddle through in the future (modulo new x-risks like AGI), and (2) if there is no recent trend towards worsening conditions then we don't need to worry so much about conditions getting worse in the near future. (Obviously if we go back far enough, say to the Middle Ages, then things were almost certainly as bad or worse, but I'm worried about more recent trends.)

If there are other reasons to not be very alarmed aside from the past being just as bad, please feel free to talk about those as well. But in case one of those reasons is "why be alarmed when there's little that can be done about it", my answer is that being alarmed motivates one to try to understand what is going on, which can help with (1) deciding personal behavior now in expectation of future changes (for exampl

...
Cambridge Prediction Game
by NoSignalNoNoise — 2020-01-25T03:57:59.721Z

In order to improve our prediction and calibration skills, the Cambridge, MA rationalist community has been community has been running a prediction game (and keeping score) at a succession of rationalist group houses since 2013.

Below are the rules:

General

The game consists of a series of prediction markets. Each market consists of a question that will (within a reasonable timeframe) have a well-defined binary or multiple-choice answer, an initial probability estimate (called the "house bet"), and a sequence of players' probability estimates. Each prediction is scored on how much more or less accurate it is than the preceding prediction (we do it this way because the previous player's prediction is evidence, and one of the skills this game is meant to develop is updating properly based on what other people think).

Creating Markets

Any player can create a market. To create a market, a player writes the question to be predicted on a whiteboard or on a giant sticky note on the wall with a house bet. The house bet should be something generally reasonable, but does not need to be super well-informed (this is abusable in theory but has not been abused in practice).

Making Predictions

To make a prediction, a player writes their name and their probability estimate under the most recent prediction (or the house bet if there are no predictions so far). The restrictions on predictions are:

The player who set the house bet cannot make the first prediction (otherwise they could essentially award themself points by setting a bad house bet).

No predicted probability can be < 0.01.

A player without a positive score cannot lower any predicted probability by more than a factor of 2 (in order to avoid creating too many easy points from going immediately after an inexperienced player).

Scoring

When a market is settled (i.e. the correct answer becomes known), each prediction is given points equal to:

100 * log2(
probability given to the correct answer /
previous probability given to the correct answer)

In a binary market where the correct answer is no, each prediction's implied probability of "no" is used (e.g. if a player predicted 0.25, that is treated as p(no)=0.75).

This is a strictly proper scoring rule, meaning that the optimal strategy (strategy with the highest expected points) is to bet one's true beliefs about the question.

The points from each market are tr

...
Litany Against Anger
by namespace — 2020-01-25T00:56:53.958Z

The map is not the territory,

the word is not the thing.

My anger is not the trigger,

triggers do not become more or less important

as I feel anger wax and wane.

Emotions are motivation,

they're supposed to get me to do the right thing.

Defuse from my frustration,

breathe and wait for clarity calm will bring.
Welcome to Effective Altruism Munich
by pranomostro — 2020-01-24T21:31:35.662Z

Our Munich group started back in October 2015 and since then we have kept busy. In our meetups we discuss modern aspects of philosophy, economy and psychology, and discuss how we can apply them to help others as much as possible. We organize fundraisers to support the most outstanding charitable organizations in the world, and we work to bring the ideas of Effective Altruism to the public eye.

Whether you already self-identify as an effective altruist or you want to learn more about the movement's ideas and actions, we'd love for you to join us.

We organize monthly meetups with talks and socializing, more information can be found here.
AI alignment concepts: philosophical breakers, stoppers, and distorters
by JustinShovelain — 2020-01-24T19:23:10.902Z

Meta: This is one of my abstract existential risk strategy concept posts that are designed to be about different perspectives or foundations upon which to build further.

Introduction

When thinking about philosophy one may encounter philosophical breakers, philosophical stoppers, and philosophical distorters; thoughts or ideas that cause an agent (such as an AI) to break, get stuck, or take a random action. They are philosophical crises for that agent (and can in theory sometimes be information hazards). For some less severe human examples, see this recent post on

reality masking puzzles

. In AI, example breakers, stoppers, and distorters are logical contradictions (in some symbolic AIs), inability to generalize from examples, and mesa optimizers, respectively.

Philosophical breakers, stoppers, and distorters all both pose possible problems and opportunities for building safe and aligned AGI and preventing unaligned AGI from becoming dangerous. The may be encountered or solved by either explicit philosophy, implicitly as part of developing another field (like mathematics or AI), by accident, or by trial and error. An awareness of the idea of philosophical breakers, stoppers, and distorters provides another complementary perspective for solving

AGI safety

and may prompt the generation of new safety strategies and AGI designs (see also, this complementary strategy post on

safety regulators

).

Concept definitions

Philosophical breakers:

Philosophical thoughts and questions that cause an agent to break or otherwise take a lot of damage that are hard to anticipate beforehand for that agent.

Philosophical stoppers:

Philosophical thoughts and questions that cause an agent to get stuck in an important way that are hard to anticipate beforehand for that agent.

Philosophical distorters:

Philosophical thoughts and questions that cause an agent to choose a random or changed philosophical answer than the one it was using (possibly implicitly) earlier. An example in the field of AGI alignment would be something that causes an aligned AGI to in some sense randomly choose it’s utility function to be paperclip maximizing because of an

ontological crisis

.

Concepts providing context, generalization, and contrast

Thought breakers, stoppers, and distorters:

Generalizations of their philosophical versions that covers thoughts and questions in general, like a thought that would cause an

...