trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The Broken Screwdriver and other parables
by bhauth — 2024-03-04T03:34:38.807Z

previously: The Parable Of The Fallen Pendulum

The Broken Screwdriver

Alice: Hey Bob, I need something to put this screw in the wall.

Bob: OK, here's a screwdriver.

Alice starts trying to hammer a screw in using the butt of the screwdriver.

Alice: I think this screwdriver is broken.

Bob: You're not using it correctly, you have to fit the other end inside the screw and twist the screw in.

Alice tries doing that.

Alice: It's still not working.

Bob: You're using the hex bit, you need to swap it for the Philips head.

Alice: Bob, this screwdriver has already failed to work twice, and each time, I did a Bayesian update against it being a working screwdriver. It seems pretty likely that it's actually broken.

Bob: Tools are only expected to work within a narrow range of conditions. Some tools are so difficult to use that they require years of study to operate. You should only be updating towards the screwdriver being broken to the extent that you're confident you're using it correctly, and from what I've seen, you should have low confidence in that.

Alice: I can only judge the chance that I'm doing things wrong from my results with other tools. I've been very successful at using hammers with nails, and nails seem similar to screws to me.

The Finicky Car

Bob is buying a used car from Carol.

Bob: I want to see the car running, to make sure it works.

Carol: Sure, I'll take you for a short drive.

The car leaks oil. Unbeknownst to Bob, Carol adds oil to the car immediately before the drive. Carol then takes Bob for a short drive, avoiding using the broken 3rd gear.

Bob buys the car, takes it home, and it soon stops working.

Bob: Carol, you sold me a broken car.

Carol: Tools are only expected to work within a narrow range of conditions. It's not my fault you weren't using this one correctly.

Bob: We live in a society that has social expectations about the ranges of conditions in which things are normally expected to work.

Carol: Yeah, well, in my culture, people don't expect stuff to work beyond the extent to which it's demonstrated.

The Suspicious Math Professor

Bob signs up for an advanced math class from Professor Dave at a university. He arrives at the first class, and finds that he's the only student there.

Bob: Hello professor. So, what will we be covering today?

Dave: Hello! The ultimate goal here is teaching you all about inter-universal Teichmüller theory, but to

...
Grief is a fire sale
by Nathan Young — 2024-03-04T01:11:06.882Z

Written in Nov 2023.

For me, grief is often about the future. It isn't about the loss of past times, since those were already gone. It is the loss of hope. It's missing the last train to a friends wedding or never being able to hear another of my grandfathers sarcastic quips.

In the moment of grief, it is the feeling of disorientation between a previous expected future and what the future looks like now. I can still feel anticipation for that set of worlds, but it is almost worthless. And it is agony, a phantom limb.

One of my closest friends and I no longer talk. I don’t want to get into why, but we were friends for about 10 years and now we don’t talk. This is one of the echoing sadnesses of my life, that the decades ahead of us are gone. The jokes, the hangouts, the closeness, they won't happen. It's a bit like a death.

Loss comes in waves. Many times I grieved that the world I expected wasn’t going to take place. The neurons that fire to tell me to pass on an in-joke are useless, vestigial. I’ll never see their siblings again. We won’t talk about work. There was no single moment but at some point signals build and I notice how drastically the situation has shifted, that the things I've invested in are gone.

Grief is like a fire sale. It is the realisation that sacred goods have taken a severe price cut. And perhaps selling isn't the right analogy here but it's close. I was expecting to retire on that joy. But now it's gone. The subprime mortgage crisis of the soul.

Eventually I have to offload my grief. To acknowledge reality. Sometimes I don’t want to hear that

Last year, I had a large fake money position that Sam Bankman Fried would plead guilty in his trial. I thought this because the vast majority of fraud cases end in a guilty plea. And several people I normally defer to had pointed this out. On base rates it seemed the market was too low (around 30%-50%) rather than where it ought to be (perhaps at 60% - 70%) taking into account SBF's idiosyncratic nature, . The goods were too cheap, so I amassed a large holding of "SBF PLEAD".

But later on I got to thinking, was I really looking at representative data. The data I had looked at was about all fraud cases. Was it true of the largest fraud cases? I began to research. This was a much muddier picture. To my recollection about half those cases didn't plead and those that did pleaded well before the trial. Sudden...
Good HPMoR scenes / passages?
by PhilGoetz — 2024-03-03T22:42:12.673Z

I'm doing a reading of good fan-fiction at a con this weekend, to counter the many "bad fanfic reading" panels. I want to read an interesting passage from HPMoR, but I can't remember any particular passage myself, and I don't want to re-read the whole thing this week. Can anyone remember any scene or passage that stuck in their mind as impressive?

It should:

be less than 1000 words
be understandable to someone who's read Harry Potter, but not HPMoR, with at most one or two sentences of background info (please write those sentences in your reply)
be good at the things that make HPMoR special, e.g.,

a clever "exploit" of Muggle society using magic
gobsmacking you with a new way of looking at something you thought you knew well
convincing you that something that seems evil is the right thing to do
Quirrell or Harry creeping you out, scaring you, or making you question your ethics by being ruthlessly rational
Attending Sold-Out Beantown Stomp
by jefftk — 2024-03-03T21:30:05.052Z

Beantown Stomp, the Boston
contra dance weekend I helped start in 2018, is two weeks out. It sold out

a
month ago, which is good and bad: it's great that lots of people
are coming, but not that there are many more who won't be able to.
Someone in the latter category wrote to me, which got me thinking
about two options for people who still want to attend:

The Saturday morning, 9:15-10:30, there will be a family dance
with an open band, open to all ($3 for kids, $5-$20 for adults) even
if you're not registered for the weekend. If you do come for the
family dance, you're welcome to stay for the 10:45-noon contra set
with Will Mentor calling to the Figments. (more)

BIDA's regular Sunday evening dance is the Sunday of Beantown
Stomp, with Will Mentor calling to the Mean Lids. Unlike the dance
weekend itself, this event is mask-required (which I expect is a plus
for some people and a minus for others). (more)

I'll be at both of these, leading the music for the former and hall
managing for the latter. Hope to see you there!

Comment via: facebook, mastodon
AI things that are perhaps as important as human-controlled AI
by Chi Nguyen — 2024-03-03T18:07:24.291Z

Topic of the post: I list potential things to work on other than keeping AI under human control. Executive Summary by Summary Bot

Motivation

The EA community has long been worried about AI safety. Most of the efforts going into AI safety are focused on making sure humans are able to control AI. Regardless of whether we succeed at this, I think there’s a lot of additional value on the line.

First of all, if we succeed at keeping AI under human control, there are still a lot of things that can go wrong. My perception is that this has recently gotten more attention, for example

here

,

here

,

here

, and at least indirectly

here

(I haven’t read all these posts. and have chosen them to illustrate that others have made this point purely based on how easily I could find them). Why controlling AI doesn’t solve everything is not the main topic of this post, but I want to at least sketch my reasons to believe this.

Which humans get to control AI is an obvious and incredibly important question and it doesn’t seem to me like it will go well by default. It doesn’t seem like current processes put humanity’s wisest and most moral at the top. Humanity’s track record at not causing large-scale unnecessary harm doesn’t seem great (see factory farming). There is reasonable disagreement on how path-dependent epistemic and moral progress is but I think there is a decent chance that it is very path-dependent.

While superhuman AI might enable great moral progress and new mechanisms for making sure humanity stays on “moral track”, superhuman AI also comes with lots of potential challenges that could make it harder to ensure a good future. Will MacAskill talks about “grand challenges” we might face shortly after the advent of superhuman AI

here

. In the longer-term, we might face additional challenges. Enforcement of norms, and communication in general, might be extremely hard across galactic-scale distances. Encounters with

aliens

(or even merely humanity thinking they might encounter aliens!) threaten conflict and could change humanity’s priorities greatly. And if you’re like me, you might believe there’s a whole lot of weird

acausal

stuff

to get right. Humanity might make decisions that influence these long-term issues already shortly after the development of advanced AI.

It doesn't seem obvious to me at all that a future where some humans are in control o...
A tedious and effective way to learn 汉字 (Chinese characters)
by dkl9 — 2024-03-03T16:41:26.780Z
Link: https://dkl9.net/essays/tedious_hanzi.html

Sometimes I look up Chinese words on my phone, usually on Wiktionary. Any foreign-enough characters (including all 汉字, i.e. Chinese characters) show up in my phone's web browser as mutually-identical blank boxes (tofu). If I want to see the actual form of the 汉字 — I usually do — I must find images, rather than text.

Wiktionary only gives images for a select few common complex 汉字, plus most radicals (simple 汉字, of which all others are combinations). Thus I can infer the form of the original 汉字 I seek by looking up each of its component radicals and combining them myself, sans any glances at their combined form from outside sources. This seems avoidably tedious, even inane, but I usually know the 汉字 I learn this way very well afterward, much better than more obvious methods. It works equally well for Japanese's 漢字 (kanji).

For example, let's learn the character for "hē" ("to drink"). Wiktionary links to its component radicals ("composition"), the first of which is "kǒu" ("mouth"), for which there's an image, showing that radical to be 口. The second is "hé" ("what?"), which in turn consists of "yuē" ("to say"), a radical — 曰 — and a variant of "gài" ("beggar"). That form of "gài" consists of a radical, 勹, and another variant form made of 𠃊 and 人. The full character "hē" is some arrangement of 口 + (曰 + (勹 + (𠃊 + 人))). To arrange these radicals correctly takes a bit of guessing. Wiktionary orders the composition in pairs, either left-right or top-bottom. In this case, 口 is on the left, 曰 at the top-right, and 勹 surrounds 𠃊 + 人 at the bottom-right.

This helps so much with memorising characters sith it forces attention to proper details into the learning process. More obvious ways to learn 汉字, by showing the complete characters, let you mentally model them in whatever way tempts you. Seeing only the radicals forces your understanding of 汉字 to correspond to their true structure.

Depending on how you apply the method, it may also force active recall, which aids memory encoding even further. My phone shows one page at a time, slowly and linearly. If I write out the radicals as I look them up, the method works a bit less well. If I accumulate the radicals in my working memory, and combine them at the end, all in my head, the method works even better.

If you find a 汉字 (or 漢字) you want to memorise:

Use a browser with a limited character set, so as to show all 汉字 as identica

...
Some costs of superposition
by Linda Linsefors — 2024-03-03T16:08:20.674Z

I don't expect this post to contain anything novel. But from talking to others it seems like some of what I have to say in this post is not widely known, so it seemed worth writing.

In this post I'm defining superposition as: A representation with more features than neurons, achieved by encoding the features as almost orthogonal vectors in neuron space.

One reason to expect superposition in neural nets (NNs), is that for large n, Rn has many more than n almost orthogonal directions. On the surface, this seems obviously useful for the NN to exploit. However, superposition is not magic. You don't actually get to put in more information, the gain you get from having more feature directions has to be paid for some other way.

All the math in this post is very hand-wavey. I expect it to be approximately correct, to one order of magnitude, but not precisely correct.

Sparsity

One cost of superposition is feature activation sparsity. I.e, even though you get to have many possible features, you only get to have a few of those features simultaneously active.

(I think the restriction of sparsity is widely known, I mainly include this section because I'll need the sparsity math for the next section.)

In this section we'll assume that each feature of interest is a boolean, i.e. it's either turned on or off. We'll investigate how much we can weaken this assumption in the next section.

If you have m features represented by n neurons, with m>n, then you can't have all the features represented by orthogonal vectors. This means that an activation of one feature will cause some some noise in the activation of other features.

The typical noise on feature f1 caused by 1 unit of activation from feature f2, for any pair of features f1, f2, is (derived from Johnson–Lindenstrauss lemma)

ϵ=√8ln(m)n [1]

If l features are active then the typical noise level on any other feature will be approximately ϵ√l units. This is because the individual noise terms add up like a random walk. Or see here for an alternative explanation of where the root square comes from.

For the signal to be stronger than the noise we need ϵ√l<1, and preferably ϵ√l≪1.

This means that we can have at most l<n/(8ln(m)) simultaneously active features, and m&...
Self-Resolving Prediction Markets
by PeterMcCluskey — 2024-03-03T02:39:42.212Z
Link: https://bayesianinvestor.com/blog/index.php/2024/03/02/self-resolving-prediction-markets/

Back in 2008, I criticized the book
Predictocracy
for proposing prediction markets whose contracts would be resolved
without reference to ground truth.

Recently, Srinivasan, Karger, and Chen (SKC) published more scholarly
paper titled Self-Resolving
Prediction Markets for Unverifiable Outcomes.

Manipulation

In the naive version of self-resolving markets that I think
Predictocracy intended, the market price at some point is used to pay
off participants. That means a manipulator can enter the market as a
trader, and trade so as to drive the market price in whatever direction
they want. Unlike markets that are resolved by a ground truth, there's
no reliable reward for other traders to offset this distortion. It seems
likely that manipulators will sometimes be able to set the price
wherever they want, because there are no incentives that offset the
manipulation.

SKC replace the standard prediction market approach with a sequential
peer prediction mechanism, where the system elicits predictions rather
than prices, and a separate step aggregates the individual predictions
(as in Metaculus).

SKC propose that instead of ground truth or market prices, the market
can be closed at a random time, and the prediction of whichever trader
traded last is used to determine the rewards to most of the other
traders. (Much of the paper involves fancy math to quantify the rewards.
I don't want to dive into that.)

That suggests that in a market with N traders, M of whom are
manipulating the price in a particular direction, the chance of the
final rewards being distorted by manipulation is M/N. That's grounds
for some concern, but it's an important improvement over the naive
self-resolving market. The cost of manipulation can be made fairly high
if the market can attract many truthful traders.

The paper assumes the availability of truthful traders. This seems
appropriate for markets where there's some (possibly very small) chance
of the market being resolved by ground truth. It's a more shaky
assumption if there's a certainty that the market will be resolved
based on the final prediction.

When is this useful?

Self-resolving markets are intended to be of some value for eliciting
prices for contracts that have a low probability of achieving the kind
of evidence that will enable them to be conclusively resolved.

At one extreme, traders will have no expectation of future traders being
better...
Increase the tax value of donations with high-variance investments?
by Brendan Long — 2024-03-03T01:39:45.473Z

The United States has a strange (legal) tax loophole where you can double-count capital gains when donating securies (with some restrictions): If you buy a stock, the values goes up, and you've held it for at least a year, you can donate it and claim a tax deduction on the current market value instead of the value of what you paid for it (the cost basis), and you don't pay taxes on the gains.

To see why this is a loophole, take a year where you make $100,000 in income and bought a stock for $15,000 last year and donated it this year (after holding it for at least a year).

If the stock's price didn't change, the market value of the stock is $15,000 and you reduce your taxable income to $85,000

If the stock doubles in price, the market value is now $30,000 and you reduce your taxable income to $70,000[1]

Notice that you're donating exactly the same thing: You paid $15,000 on Jan 1st and everything that happened after that is irrelevant to you (except for the warm-fuzzies I guess).

If you could find two perfectly anti-correlated securities, you could exploit this more:

Buy $7,500 of security A and $7,500 of security B

Wait a year

Sell whichever security went down and donate the proceeds, along with the security that went up

Deduct the charitable donations (at least $15,000)

Deduct the loss on the security that went down

As an extreme case, if you found one security that doubles and one that goes to $0, you would have $15,000 in charity donations plus $7,500 in losses.[2]

Anyway, I'm wondering why people don't exploit this? Tax avoidance is as legal as shooting an apple pie as long as you follow the letter of the law[3] so I feel like I must be missing something.

I imagine "find two perfectly anti-correlated security with huge variance" is hard, but they don't have to be perfect for this strategy to be worth it. It seems like if you can find a charity that will accept options (like this one), you could do a long straddle and donate the in-the-money side, although this would be complicated and I think only 60% of the gains could be double-counted[4]. Needing to hold whatever securities for a year is also annoying, but that's not a particularly long amount of time in the grand scheme of things.

Is there something I'm missing about this?

Note: Please don't blindly take this question as an argument that you should do this. If you actually plan to do this, you should r...
Common Philosophical Mistakes, according to Joe Schmid [videos]
by DanielFilan — 2024-03-03T00:15:47.899Z
Link: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxRhaLyXxXkY8lCiJY7XZFkfBChK1VdMK

A 7-part series of videos detailing mistakes one can make in philosophy, according to Joe Schmid. The first video focusses on general reasoning issues, and is therefore most likely to be of interest (for instance: suppose observation E is evidence for A, and A implies B - does that mean E is evidence for B?).

If you don't want to watch the videos, there is a document that is basically the script he reads from in them, but you have to be a patron of his to get access to it. Otherwise, you'll have to settle for brief lists of the mistakes covered in each video and resources that he draws from:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Joe Schmid is a philosopher focussed on philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and philosophy of time. He is also a YouTuber and a graduate student at Princeton University.
Agreeing With Stalin in Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles
by Zack_M_Davis — 2024-03-02T22:05:49.553Z
Link: http://unremediatedgender.space/2024/Mar/agreeing-with-stalin-in-ways-that-exhibit-generally-rationalist-principles/

It was not the sight of Mitchum that made him sit still in horror. It was the realization that there was no one he could call to expose this thing and stop it—no superior anywhere on the line, from Colorado to Omaha to New York. They were in on it, all of them, they were doing the same, they had given Mitchum the lead and the method. It was Dave Mitchum who now belonged on this railroad and he, Bill Brent, who did not.

—Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

Quickly recapping my Whole Dumb Story so far: ever since puberty, I've had this obsessive sexual fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman, which got contextualized by these life-changing Sequences of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky that taught me (amongst many other things) how fundamentally disconnected from reality my fantasy was. So it came as a huge surprise when, around 2016, the "rationalist" community that had formed around the Sequences seemingly unanimously decided that guys like me might actually be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense. A couple years later, having strenuously argued against the popular misconception that the matter could be resolved by simply redefining the word woman (on the grounds that you can define the word any way you like), I flipped out when Yudkowsky prevaricated about how his own philosophy of language says that you can't define a word any way you like, prompting me to join with allies to persuade him to clarify. When that failed, my attempts to cope with the "rationalists" being fake led to a series of small misadventures culminating in Yudkowsky eventually clarifying the philosophy-of-language issue after I ran out of patience and yelled at him over email.

Really, that should have been the end of the story—with a relatively happy ending, too: that it's possible to correct straightforward philosophical errors, at the cost of almost two years of desperate effort by someone with Something to Protect.

That wasn't the end of the story, which does not have such a relatively happy ending.

The New York Times's Other Shoe Drops (February 2021)

On 13 February 2021, "Silicon Valley's Safe Space", the anticipated New York Times piece on Slate Star Codex, came out. It was ... pretty lame? (Just lame, not a masterfully vicious hit piece.) Cade Metz did a mediocre job of explaining what our robot cult is about, while pushing hard on the subtext to make us look racist and...