trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Reprograming the Mind: Meditation as a Tool for Cognitive Optimization
by Jonas Hallgren — 2024-01-11T12:03:41.763Z

This is a distillation of 4 years of my mechanistic investigation into meditation, specifically on how I perceive its more practical applications to how we can make the mind work optimally. For a more detailed explanation, I personally enjoyed and recommend Kaj Sotala’s sequence

Multi-Agent Models of Mind

, as it was a big inspiration for me to double down into meditation about 2 years ago.

Meditation has some very interesting consequences for creativity and focus that might not be obvious unless you fully understand it. I hope to give you a practical way of implementing these models in your life.

Introduction

Harmonisation of the mind and body isn’t some mambo jumbo hippie stuff from Buddhism; it is an actual phenomenon that I hope to explain some of the underlying cognition of today.

I’ve heard a lot of people talk about creating a great exobrain and using external tools for cognition. Whilst that is important, I believe many people

lose the root for the tree

here. Your own brain can be improved immensely, not only by using external tools but also by cultivating the different modes that your brain has in a great way. This can be done by both meditation and having conscious intention when invoking different modes of your mind. We will focus on the ways that you can use these attention techniques in order to change the way you think.

(Also some tech bro bait that I will throw in here:

Sam Altman on Meditation

(Podcast))

Amphitheatre model of mind

To start our journey, we should look at the amphitheatre model of mind. This is a theory of scientific consciousness (not necessarily the same as phenomenological consciousness) that says that our cognition acts in such a way that different modules compete for attention in an optimisation process developed during the course of evolution.

Figure 1: An amphitheatre (DALL-E 2 throwback)

The amphitheatre analogy comes from

Global Workspace Theory

, and a book on this subject I enjoyed reading was

Consciousness and The Brain

by Stanislas Dehaene. (If you want more details on GWT I recommend going through that book). There is some debate between

higher and lower-order theories of consciousness

and the way we should model consciousness. Yet the amphitheatre model seems compatible and, to some extent, convergent in most models of consciousness.

A way that we can visualise the c...
AI-Generated Music for Learning
by nomagicpill — 2024-01-11T04:11:58.545Z
Link: https://210ethan.github.io/thoughts/aimusic.html

AI-Generated Music for Learning

Catchy tunes are easy to remember.

Contents

Motivation
Implementation
Combination with Current Learning Methods
Appendix I: Lyric Examples
See Also

Motivation

Mnemonic devices are considered effective learning tools from countless studies:

Radović & Manzey, 2019
Wolgemuth, Cobb, & Alwell, 2008
Scruggs and Mastropieri, 2000
Yalch, 1991
Murakami, 2017

Music is a prominent device; remembering song lyrics, even longer information like phone numbers (see (or hear in your head) the song 867-5309/Jenny), is significantly easier than remembering similar series of words without the singer's voice and instruments in the background. Coupling this with the fact that music is fun to listen to and AI-generated musical abilities are improving rapidly and the following idea comes naturally.

Implementation

Lyrics

Lyrics can be generated using a large-language model (LLM) using fill-in-the-blank prompt like:

Create a(n) [number]-verse [style of music, e.g., country, rap, metal] that teaches the listener [information]

Extra conditions or qualifiers can be added, such as:

Have a [music style] feature in the middle

Ex: rap in the middle of a country song

In the style of [artist]

Ex: Drake, Lil Yachty, Tim McGraw

Use keywords such as [keyword1], [keyword2]

Ex: if talking about transistors, keywords can be Fermi level and conduction band

Use a level of detail a [grade level] grader could understand

Ex: third grader, if the song is targeted at a third-grade audience

Have a [type of mood] mood

Ex: upbeat, gloomy, melancholy

It's important that the song is catchier and more entertaining than it is informative, else the listener will be turned off and not listen, defeating the entire purpose. Disguising the information within the lyrics is the best option, but requires superb LLM prompting skills.

Generation

There are plenty of AI music generators available on the internet. I used Suno AI for the examples below.

Combination with Current Learning Methods

Music cannot replace the tried-and-true practice of good ol' studying and practice problems, but it can supplement it. Listening to the music regularly and attempting to sing along will help commit it to memory.

Appendix I: Examples

My prompt engineering skills are not strong and I don't have GPT-4 access, but with better prompts and a better model I'm sure the songs would be more informative and catchier.

Choruses are removed for br...
Introduce a Speed Maximum
by jefftk — 2024-01-11T02:50:04.284Z

Speeding is one of the most common ways for Americans to break the
law. Drive the speed limit on the highway around here and you'll
typically be the slowest car on the road. How much over the speed
limit is customary varies regionally, but drivers often expect cops to
ignore them at 5-15 mph over.

Overall, I think this is a pretty bad situation. It gets people used
to ignoring laws, people who scrupulously follow the law are often at
higher risk (and cause higher risk to those around them) than if they
went along with traffic, driverless cars go awkwardly slow, some risk
of selective enforcement, confusing for travelers, etc. How can we
get out of this?

If we just started strictly enforcing the current limits we'd have a
mess: it's too big a behavior change to push all at once so you'd see
even more dangerous variance in speeds than today, and it's unclear we
actually want people driving the posted speeds. It also wouldn't work
well to raise the limit to the speed people are mostly going, since
many people would assume they can then go an extra 5-15mph on top of
that.

Instead we could take inspiration from Brazil
and introduce a parallel system of maximum speeds:

Initially this has no legal effect, and just makes the existing amount
of leeway more legible. On a 55mph road where people normally drive
60-65 and the police don't start ticketing until you're more than
10mph over, the signs would say both "speed limit 55" and "max 65".
These would be rolled out gradually, in consultation with traffic
engineers and the people responsible for enforcement.

As they roll out, you adjust enforcement to match. Put up speed
cameras set to the maximum in many places, and in other places have
police enforce the max strictly after each sign is put up. Traveling
above the limit but below the maximum becomes effectively allowed,
since there's no enforcement.

Once the rollout is complete you overhaul the laws around speeding to
make the maximum the legal limit, and adjust rules that are set
relative to the old limit to still make sense. For example, if you
previously gave only low fines for going 58 in a 55 zone, and in
practice never issued them, while you gave high fines for going 68,
you would still want the higher fine for going 68 in a "max 65" zone.
The goal is to bring the law in line with behavior, but otherwise keep
the status quo.

...
Trying to align humans with inclusive genetic fitness
by peterbarnett — 2024-01-11T00:13:29.487Z

Epistemic status: I think this post points to some important ideas, I think the specific proposals might have flaws and there are likely better ideas. If you’re interested, I would be interested in other proposals, or converting standard alignment proposals into this frame.
Also, I don’t think any of the proposals in the post are moral or good things to do, obviously. IGF does not seem to be the one true moral imperative.

Reasoning about future AIs is hard, we want to be able to talk about systems which “optimize” for “goals”, but we don’t really know what either of these terms mean. It might not be clear if we should talk about an AI “wanting” something, and discussion often gets bogged down in terminology and confusion. But there is at least one example of an optimized system “wanting” something: humans!

Humans are often used as an example of an inner alignment failure, where evolution via natural selection optimizes for inclusive genetic fitness (IGF), and yet humans ended up pursuing goals other than maximizing IGF. I want to demonstrate some key alignment difficulties by pretending we are a god who is attempting to align humans to care about IGF. The aim here is to have humans which are just as intelligent as current humans, but do primarily terminally care about maximizing IGF.

I discuss IGF in this post, but I mostly expect difficulties here to carry over to any similarly abstract and specific concept. I don’t think it is valid to say “humans care about abstract and specific human values, and so it should be easy to make them care about abstract and specific”, because this is basically drawing the target around the arrow.

Ground rules

I am assuming we, as the god, are omnipotent but only as smart as current day humans. We can:

Smite humans
Clone humans
Make humans infertile
Rewind time
Provide external stimuli to humans

I am not assuming that the god can just rewire the humans’ brain to make them aligned, because current day humans don’t know how to do this (even assuming improved medical technology). The god can attempt to rewire the human brains, or rewrite the genome, but we don’t currently know which modifications to make in order to align humans to IGF.

The aim is to influence the evolution and development of humans such that they primarily terminally care about IGF. Evolution has partially succeeded at this where humans do care about their children and...
Universal Love Integration Test: Hitler
by Raemon — 2024-01-10T23:55:35.526Z

I'm still not satisfied with this post, but thought I'd ship it since I refer to the concept a fair amount. I write this more as "someone who feels some kernel of univeral-love-shaped thing", but, like, i dunno man i'm not a love expert.

tl;dr

I think "love" means "To care about someone such that they are an extension of yourself (at least to some degree)." This includes caring about the things they care about on their own terms (but can still include enforcing boundaries, preventing them from harming others, etc).

I think "love" matters most when it's backed up by actual actions. If you merely "feel like you care in your heart", but don't take any actions about that, you're kind of kidding yourself. (I think there is still some kind of interesting relational stance you can have that doesn't route through action, but it's relatively weaksauce as love goes)

What, then, would "Universal Love" mean? I can't possibly love everyone in a way that grounds out in action. I nonetheless have an intuition that universal love is important to me. Is it real? Does it make any sense?

I think part of what makes it real is having an intention that if I had more resources, I would try to take concrete actions to both help, and connect with, everyone.

In this post I explore this in more detail, and check "okay how actually do I relate to, say, Hitler? Do I love him?".

My worldview was shaped by hippies and nerds. This is basically a historical accident – I could have easily been raised by a different combination of cultures. But here I am.

One facet of this worldview is "everyone deserves compassion/empathy". And, I think, my ideal self loves everyone.

(I don't think everyone else's ideal self necessarily loves everyone. This is just one particular relational stance you can have to the world. But, it's mine)

What exactly does this mean though? Does it makes sense?

I can't create a whole new worldview from scratch, but I can look for inconsistencies in my existing worldview, and notice when it either conflicts with itself, or conflicts with reality, and figure out new pieces of worldview that seem good according to my current values. Over the past 10 years or so, my worldview has gotten a healthy dose of game theory, and practical experience with various community organizing, worldsaving efforts, etc.

I aspire towards a robust morality, which includes having compass...
The Perceptron Controversy
by Yuxi_Liu — 2024-01-10T23:07:23.341Z
Link: https://yuxi-liu-wired.github.io/essays/posts/perceptron-controversy/

Connectionism died in the 60s from technical limits to scaling, then resurrected in the 80s after backprop allowed scaling. The Minsky–Papert anti-scaling hypothesis explained, psychoanalyzed, and buried.

I wrote it as if it's a companion post to Gwern's The Scaling Hypothesis.
The Aspiring Rationalist Congregation
by maia — 2024-01-10T22:52:54.298Z

Meta Note: This post has been languishing in a Google doc for many months as I've procrastinated on cleaning it up to be more coherent and polished. So... I'm posting it as is, with very little cleanup, in the hopes that it's valuable in the current state. I'm sure there are big missing pieces that I haven't addressed, justifications I haven't added, etc., so at this point this is mainly starting a conversation.
Epistemic Status: The seed of an idea, but a seed of an unknown fruit that may grow to be sweet or bitter. I believe it to be a good seed, but who can know until it is planted?

What this, and why

Meetups are nice. Sometimes they even create something like real community in a place. Honestly, the amount of community I've gotten through LW meetups for the past decade or so is... more community than most people my age ever experience, from what I can tell talking to non-rat friends. (Mormons excepted.)

Yet I still have the sense more is possible. Exactly because of those Mormons I know. Community can be much more powerful than what we have now.

[TODO (left in intentionally because I don't have time to fill in these details): Put more motivation / justification here: Bowling Alone stats, stats about religion making people happier, some reference about religion making people believe untrue things. Friendships formed by repeated random bumping into people, thus regular events important]

Physical co-location can be very powerful for this. The group of folks living in Berkeley in walking distance from each other are doing quite well at it, in that sense. When I lived there, I was shocked by how often, in a city of 100,000 people, I randomly ran into someone I knew on the street. (It wasn't that often! But it happened.)

But that's not always possible, for myriad reasons. I now live in a spread-out metro area that has a decent number of rationalists, but very few living in the same town. I want something that works fairly well even when you can't live in a big group house or neighborhood with all of your friends. Something more like a religious congregation.

"So," one might ask, "what's the difference? Churches meet once a week, (some) meetups meet once a week, what's different about them?"

What makes a church community different (better)

Here are my desiderata:

1) Family. You want a place where the whole community gets together, including the people close...
An Actually Intuitive Explanation of the Oberth Effect
by Isaac King — 2024-01-10T20:23:17.216Z

This is a linkpost for An Actually Intuitive Explanation of the Oberth Effect.

Like anyone with a passing interest in Kerbal Space Program physics and spaceflight, I eventually came across the Oberth Effect. It's a very important effect, crucial to designing efficient trajectories for any rocket ship. And yet, I couldn't understand it.

Wikipedia's explanation focuses on how kinetic energy is proportional to the square of the speed, and therefore more energy is gained from a change in speed at a higher speed. I'm sure this is true, but it's not particularly helpful; simply memorizing formulae is not what leads to understanding of a phenomenon. You have to know what the numbers mean, how they correspond to the actual atoms moving around in the real universe.

This explanation was particularly galling as it seemed to violate relativity; how could a rocket's behavior change depending on its speed? What does that even mean; its speed relative to what? Whether a rocket is traveling at 1 m/s or 10000000 m/s relative to the Earth, the people on board the rocket should observe the exact same behavior when they fire their engine, right?

So I turned to the internet; Stack Overflow, Quora, Reddit, random physicists' blogs. But they all had the same problem. Every single resource I could find would "explain" the effect with a bunch of math, either focusing on the quadratic nature of kinetic energy, or some even more confusing derivation in terms of work.

A few at least tried to link the math up to the real world. Accelerating the rocket stores kinetic energy in the propellant, and this energy is then "reclaimed" when it's burned, leading to more energy coming out of the propellant at higher speeds. But this seemed unphysical; kinetic energy is not a property of the propellant itself, it depends on the reference frame of the observer! So this explanation still didn't provide me with an intuition for why it worked this way, and still seemed to violate relativity.

It took me years to find someone who could explain it to me in better terms.

Asymmetric gravitational effects

Say your spacecraft starts 1 AU away from a planet, on an inertial trajectory that will bring it close to the planet but not hit it. It takes a year to reach periapsis going faster and faster the whole way. Then it takes another year to reach 1 AU again, slowing down the whole time.

Two things to note here: The coor...
Beware the suboptimal routine
by jwfiredragon — 2024-01-10T19:02:52.563Z

AKA: If it's stupid but it works, it's still stupid.

TL;DR: It's easy to slip into a routine which accomplishes some task but is inconvenient or annoying. Sometimes, there's a trivial change that makes the task significantly easier. The trick is noticing that you're stuck in such a routine.

1: The motivating example

I play this mobile game called Arknights, which is a tower defense where your towers are anime characters. There's a seasonal event called Contingency Contract, where you're given infinite attempts at a stage that you can make more difficult by modifying with "risks", and you're rewarded based on the highest-risk run you complete. The "intended" risk level, at which you can collect all of the rewards, is easy enough that some players challenge themselves by playing with self-imposed rules such as beating the stage at maximum possible risk, only using characters with cat ears, etc.

I am one such player. I was attempting to clear Contingency Contract with a strategy that was in theory fine, but in practice bottlenecked on three fiddly timing bits so difficult that they may as well have been coin flips. So I had a 1/8 chance of doing all three parts correctly, and then a nonzero chance of messing up somewhere else, but I thought it was good enough to be worth trying.

I spent a few hours grinding away without success, discussed the strategy for a bit with a friend, and then went to bed, intending to grind more the next day. I woke up to the friend messaging me with a success of his own, building off of my strategy. In particular, he made one trivial change - moved one unit two grid tiles over - which completely eliminated one of the coin-flip-bottlenecks.

For some reason, this particular incident was the one that catalyzed the thought of "what kind of failure mode led to this mistake, and how can I avoid it in general?"

2: The failure mode

I think this is a problem similar to cached thoughts, so I'll call it "cached actions". A cached thought is something that your brain autocompletes when you start thinking about something, and analogously a cached action is one your body defaults to when you start doing something. It's useful to develop automatic routines for things you do often, because consciously thinking about brushing your teeth is a waste of brainpower when it's the same thing twice a day forever.

However, precisely because you don't think about cache...
The true cost of fences
by pleiotroth — 2024-01-10T19:01:40.384Z

Most people have fences in their conversation tree. They have topics which they will not talk about or which they will only talk about under certain conditions. In some cases those policies are public, in others people have to learn the hard way, i.e. they find out by running into the fence. Having fences is normal and often necessary, but the price you pay for them is greater than what most people realise.

The intuitive price you pay for a fence is that you will not hear certain ideas and will not be able to relay certain ideas to others in exchange for ensuring safety, comfort or something else entirely. You might additionally consider the cost of others being angry or disappointed to reach a wall. What most people do not take into account however is that because things lie behind the fence which others might value, they will take actions to get around it. The concern isn’t the mere fact of them getting around it (that’s not avoided by not having a fence after all), it’s the how. What’s the next best path now that this one is blocked? Someone, in a sincere attempt to comply with your policy may look for a “legal” way through, by taking actions you would not condone. You have created an incentive to do so, and you cannot be surprised that people will now use side paths they would not have used if there was no fence. You have to make sure those side paths are safe. If they are not, it is irresponsible of you to redirect people there.

Here’s a particularly dire example concerning information policy:
Let us say that there is an AI safety researcher Aaron who is unwilling to hear of infohazards, because the tracking and secrecy involved acts as a drain of spoons for him. This is understandable, and not in itself a problem. Note that this hypothetical researcher does consider the secrecy of infohazards important. They will not take them on because they would keep them safe. Diligently and stressfully.

Let us now imagine that Aaron is approached by another AI safety researcher called Beth. Beth has reason to believe that Aaron is the best person to consult with regards to a specific idea of hers, but explaining the idea would involve a significant amount of hazardous information. Here’s where things get interesting.

The field in question is AI safety after all, so Beth believes her research –and by extension this conversation– to be existentially important. Aaron is...
"Dark Constitution" for constraining some superintelligences
by Valentine — 2024-01-10T16:02:36.706Z
Link: https://www.anarchonomicon.com/p/teach-a-man-to-revolt?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

I thought the linked article ("…Teach a Man to Revolt: Dreams of a Dark Bill of Rights" by Kulak) was a fun and clarifying read. It explained some things about both Islamic political dynamics and the American Constitution that I hadn't fully appreciated before.

It occurred to me that some folk here might like reading it too. The main reason being, governments & social movements are to-me clear examples of current superintelligences. The attempts to align & constrain them are very related to questions of AI alignment, in my opinion. It's the closest we have to an empirical study of aligning superintelligences.

In that light, this article gives several examples of things that empirically work very well, and why; and also some ways that attempted constraints fail, and why. The author's reference to a "Dark Bill of Rights" is a kind of spitballing attempt to recombine the best of American liberty norms with Islamic cultural endurance.

Even if Kulak turns out to be exactly spot-on, I haven't put much thought into how to translate this method into a literal AI. It might be interesting to discuss how one might do so.