trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Historical Contra Swing Holds
by jefftk — 2024-03-29T02:30:06.697Z

One of the most common and moves in contra dance is the 'swing', where
two people face each other, hold on in some fashion, and quickly spin
clockwise. In modern urban contra every dance has a partner swing
(doing the figure with the person you chose to dance with, every 30s
or so), and maybe a bit more than half have a neighbor swing (doing
the figure with a series of other people you meet in line).

The amount of force needed to hold two people together who are
swinging quickly is pretty high. [1] I've written
about some holds I think do a better job distributing the weight than
the standard one, but after some discussion
on the contracallers@ mailing list I was curious: what did people
do historically?

I looked back at several older contra dance videos to see what holds
people were using. What I'd call the "ballroom" swing was the most
common, with outer hands (gent's left, lady's right) joined, gent's
right hand behind lady's back, lady's left hand behind gent's
shoulder. Another very common hold is what I'm calling a "forearm"
hold, where the outer arms overlap more. In some videos nearly
everyone is using one hold, while in others there's more variation.

1964, somewhere in New England:

A slightly shorter version of this video is also online by the
videographer labeled 1967, and
unfortunately I took the timestamps from that video. I see ballroom
at 0:35, 0:37, 3:15, 3:16, 5:08, 5:10. At 1:05 (and then again in the
background at 5:11, and then again at 5:23 and 5:33) I see a forearm
hold with arms that are straighter than I'm used to. At 2:08 I see a
hold where the gents hands are both around the lady's waist and the
lady's hands are both over the tops of the gent's shoulders.

1976 in Bloomington IN:

Almost all the couples are swinging with a ballroom variation where
the lady's left hand is on the back of the gent's right arm. One
couple's doing a symmetrical swing with left hands joined low between
their bodies.

1981 in Belmont MA:

This one is very long, and I only watched the contra portion from 9:17
to 13:00. Almost all the swings use a forearm hold, though I saw one
couple doing that symmetrical swing at 10:52 and another doing a
ballroom swing at 11:33.

1986 in Cambridge MA:

Outdoor demo performance. Almost all ballroom holds, but at 4:04 the
couple all the way on the right has outer hands i...
Politics are not serious by default
by Neil  — 2024-03-28T23:36:32.279Z

[This is part of a series I’m writing on how to convince a person that AI risk is worth paying attention to.]

tl;dr: People’s default reaction to politics is not taking them seriously. They could center their entire personality on their political beliefs, and still not take them seriously. To get them to take you seriously, the quickest way is to make your words as unpolitical-seeming as possible.

I’m a high school student in France. Politics in France are interesting because they’re in a confusing superposition. One second, you'll have bourgeois intellectuals sipping red wine from their Paris apartment writing essays with dubious sexual innuendos on the deep-running dynamics of power. The next, 400 farmers will vaguely agree with the sentiment and dump 20 tons of horse manure in downtown Bordeaux. (This happened last Monday.)

The ground is horse manure. I bike through this spot every morning to go to school.

Take one of my classmates: he has an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure French philosophers, a high g factor, and a fantastic written ability. He also wears only black, calls himself a trotskyist, and doesn’t know the barest basics of Economy 101.

He and his teenage friends want to topple the French government (a common ambition in France). When I asked him what he wanted to do after they succeeded, he told me he “didn’t have the arrogance to know how he would lead". I am blown away by his wisdom. What humility! Surely, a modest leader like himself couldn't screw things up. [1] This man has read over 1 million words' worth of Hegel, and has led a protest which consisted of waking up at 6AM to build an improvised barricade out of garbage cans at the school entrance. (They cooked barbecues and played cards for the rest of the day.) It's all a game to him: he aims to become a high school teacher, which isn't instrumentally useful to his revolutionary ends at all.

The rest of my classmates aren't much better. Politics are a category labeled "serious adult things" for them: but since they're not adults, what they're really doing is theater. It's fascinating to observe them in the wild. They'll be going about their day as usual, and then someone will pronounce all 6 syllables of the name of He Who Pushed Retirement Age Forward by Two Years.[2] They'll proceed to stop, drop, and pick the right shade o...
From the outside, American schooling is weird
by Jacob G-W — 2024-03-28T22:45:30.485Z

g-w1

Hey, so I wanted to start this dialogue because we were talking on Discord about the secondary school systems and college admission processes in the US vs NZ, and some of the differences were very surprising to me.

I think that it may be illuminating to fellow Americans to see the variation in pedagogy. Let's start off with grades. In America, the way school works is that you sit in class and then have projects and tests that go into a gradebook. Roughly speaking, each assignment has a max points you can earn. Your final grade for a subject is ∑iearnedimax possiblei. Every school has a different way of doing the grading though. Some use A-F, while some use a number out of 4, 5, or 100. Colleges then use these grades as one of the main criteria in admissions. How does this work in NZ?

Malumit

In New Zealand, we have the NZQA (New Zealand Qualifications Authority) which regulate the NCEA (National Certificate of Educational Attainment).
NZQA manages three levels of exams and scholarship. The levels are numbered Level 1, 2, and 3. Level 1 is taken mainly in Year 11 (11th year of a 13 year education), Level 2 in Year 12, and Level 3 in Year 13.
You take several assessments throughout the year for each subject. These are divided by whether they are taken internally or externally. Internal exams, while standardised across New Zealand, are graded by your teacher within school. External asessments are sat by all New Zealanders at the same time and are proctored by officials outside the school.
Each assessment offers a different amount of credits and these credits can either be Achieved, Merit, or Excellence. By recieving 14 credits in a subject, you can be endorsed and this endorsement will depend on whether those credits are Achieved, Merit, or Excellence. There is also a requirement that at least some of these credits are from external exams. These certificate endorsements aren't very useful for anything.
Aside from subject-specific endorsements, you can also recieve a certificate by level and this requires a certain amount of absolute credits. For example, you can recieve a Level 1 certificate with Excellence by gaining 50 Excellence credits but either completely fail Maths or never take it. Most students take assessments totalling more than 50 credits. For me, I took assessments worth ~85 credits each year.
Finally, to gain entrance in university re

...
A Dilemma in AI Suffering/Happiness
by iva — 2024-03-28T20:53:18.501Z

The following is an example of how if one assumes that an AI (in this case autoregressive LLM) has "feelings", "qualia", "emotions", whatever, it can be unclear whether it is experiencing something more like pain or something more like pleasure in some settings, even quite simple settings which already happen a lot with existing LLMs. This dilemma is part of the reason why I think AI suffering/happiness philosophy is very hard and we most probably won't be able to solve it.

Consider the two following scenarios:

Scenario A: An LLM is asked a complicated question and answers it eagerly.

Scenario B: A user insults an LLM and it responds.

For the sake of simplicity, let's say that the LLM is an autoregressive transformer with no RLHF (I personally think that the dilemma still applies when the LLM has RLHF, but then the arguments are more complicated and shaky).

If the LLM has "feelings", "qualia", whatever, are they positive or negative in scenarios A and B? One could argue in two ways:

They are positive in scenario A and negative in scenario B since LLMs emulate humans, and that's what the answer would be for a human.
They are significantly more negative in scenario A than in scenario B because:

If scenario A was part of the training corpus, the loss would be significantly higher than if scenario B was part of the training corpus.
It can be argued that things correlated with high loss cause negative feelings and things correlated with low loss cause positive feelings, the same way as in humans, things correlated with low reproductive fitness cause negative feelings and things correlated with high reproductive fitness cause positive feelings.

Some people might argue that either of the two answers is the right one, but my point is that I don't think it's plausible we would reach an agreement about the answer.
Templates I made to run feedback rounds for Ethan Perez’s research fellows.
by Henry Sleight — 2024-03-28T19:41:15.506Z

TL;DR: I'm releasing my templates to make running feedback rounds easy for research teams that might otherwise neglect to set it up.

The main questions on my feedback form template

Why I wrote this post:

Feedback is my job:

My role on research projects mentored by Ethan is somewhere between a people manager and a research assistant for the team.
Feedback, and more generally, facilitating direct and honest communication between team members (and Ethan), is one of the main ways I add value.

My feedback process is pretty good:

I’ve run feedback rounds for two cohorts of Ethan Perez’s mentees so far.
When Ethan first asked me to run feedback for his mentees, I adapted what I was able to glean about how Anthropic runs peer-led performance reviews.
I don't think I've perfected the process, but my first version was good enough that one of Ethan’s collaborators (Akbir Khan) now uses my templates for his projects, and describes them as useful.
Ethan's mentees, both on MATS and Astra have commented that the feedback was helpful for them - and I've noticed a substantial increase in directness and honesty on projects once I've run at least one round of semi-formal feedback.
So, now that I've iterated on this feedback process,

I'm interested if

other research teams would find it useful, so I’m releasing the templates here.

In the rest of the post, I'll explain how my feedback rounds work, plus my best guesses of when and how to run feedback in a research project.

If you're somewhere between curious and unconvinced, you can keep reading to hear my takes on why teams don't do structured rounds of feedback (or sometimes any) by default, and why I think running feedback is worth it.

To summarise the rest of this post: I think rounds of feedback encourage collaborators to communicate more openly about their needs and concerns for their projects. I think many teams wouldn't communicate very well without doing something at least a bit like this feedback process at least once per project.

Thanks to Rajashree Agrawal, Sam Svenningsen for letting me talk this post through while I was planning it, and to Mikita Balesni and Miranda Zhang for comments on my drafts.

How my feedback rounds work:

My templates can be found here.

My workflow for feedback starts with sending out a short doc framing this feedback round to the team, and linking a form for them t...
Narratives of business models
by Itay Dreyfus — 2024-03-28T19:05:58.595Z

There’s a common theme when discussing business models over the internet, which usually revolves around its optimal form.

What’s the most effective model? Monthly vs. yearly subscriptions, the relevance of ads, and the appeal of lifetime plans are debates I often come across on my Twitter feed. Builders of all kinds shake their heads to crack the formula.

Needless to say, a business model is at the core of any for-profit entity. It might make a business or break it.

When I was writing about Telegram a couple of months ago, I was intrigued by its nearly two-year-old freemium model. I knew Telegram had been financed for a good decade by its CEO, Pavel Durov, so unveiling a real sustainable business model seemed interesting. However, I was a bit skeptical when I was trying to do the math:

In a rough calculation, it needs to take more than 1.5 million customers to pay for the premium version to pay back only the “investment” Durov made. Although Telegram surpassed 800 million users, I’m curious to know what’s the conversion rate.

Despite Telegram already had more than 1 billion active users, I doubted how many people have actually taken their credit cards out of their pockets (or tapped) to pay.

In the territory of messaging apps, monetization has never been easy. Looking at the history of this space shows no great evidence:

WhatsApp used to charge an annual $0.99 subscription, then became free (by Facebook acquisition)
Facebook Messenger is free
Signal is free, supported by community donations only

In a weird coincidence, a day after I

published the post

, I received my answer when Durov announced on his channel that Telegram had reached 4 million premium subscribers. I’m not sure what number I was expecting but it kinda hit me. Then, a month later Durov, again, announced an addition of a whole new million subscribers.

So now Telegram has presumably more than 5 million premium subscribers. That’s 3x more than what I estimated it would take to pay back Durov's investment.

I very much doubt this number as Telegram users often become paid subscribers by discounts. But by all means, this is astonishing news.

Considering Telegram isn’t a company with big enterprise contracts, it solely relies on the grace of individuals. Inspecting total revenues in 2022 of other tech companies makes Telegram's estimated revenue promising:

1

Figma was at $400m

Duolingo was at $369.5m

Asana was at $37

...
How to safely use an optimizer
by Simon Fischer — 2024-03-28T16:11:01.277Z

Summary: The post describes a method that allows us to use an untrustworthy optimizer to find satisficing outputs.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Benjamin Kolb (@benjaminko), Jobst Heitzig (@Jobst Heitzig) and Thomas Kehrenberg (@Thomas Kehrenberg) for many helpful comments.

Introduction

Imagine you have black-box access to a powerful but untrustworthy optimizing system, the Oracle. What do I mean by "powerful but untrustworthy"? I mean that, when you give an objective function f as input to the Oracle, it will output an element x that has an impressively low[1] value of f(x). But sadly, you don't have any guarantee that it will output the optimal element and e.g. not one that's also chosen for a different purpose (which might be dangerous for many reasons, e.g. instrumental convergence).

What questions can you safely ask the Oracle? Can you use it to create utopia by asking for designs of machines, proteins, computer programs, etc.? Or are you risking the destruction of everything that we value if you dare to use such designs?

As an example, the Oracle could be a learned system; in that case, the topic of this post would be finding a way to get useful work out of the Oracle despite its inner misalignment.

In this post I'll describe a technique that allows us to safely use the Oracle under fairly weak assumptions. This approach can also be considered to be a way of controlling arbitrarily powerful AI systems.

Edit: I've written a bit more on the motivation for this setting in a comment.

One neat trick

This isn't fair, isn't fair, isn't fair! There's a limit to how many constraints you can add to a problem before it really is impossible!

(Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Chapter 56)

Let O be a finite set of possible outputs of the Oracle (e.g. strings of length at most l) and f:O→R be our objective function. Let's assume we are happy with an output that satisfices; i.e. we want to find an output x such that the value of f(x) is lower than some threshold c. Let S={x∈O∣f(x)<c} be the set of satisficing outputs.[2]

We are worried about using the Oracle because it might be misaligned, i.e. it might be optimizing for a different objective function f'. Therefore, we fear there is a non-empty subset D⊂S of outputs that are dangerous to use because they were high...
[Linkpost] Practically-A-Book Review: Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate
by trevor — 2024-03-28T16:03:36.452Z
Link: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim

Saar Wilf is an ex-Israeli entrepreneur. Since 2016, he’s been developing a new form of reasoning, meant to transcend normal human bias.

His method - called Rootclaim - uses Bayesian reasoning, a branch of math that explains the right way to weigh evidence. This isn’t exactly new. Everyone supports Bayesian reasoning. The statisticians support it, I support it, Nate Silver wrote a whole book supporting it.

But the joke goes that you do Bayesian reasoning by doing normal reasoning while muttering “Bayes, Bayes, Bayes” under your breath. Nobody - not the statisticians, not Nate Silver, certainly not me - tries to do full Bayesian reasoning on fuzzy real-world problems. They’d be too hard to model. You’d make some philosophical mistake converting the situation into numbers, then end up much worse off than if you’d tried normal human intuition.

Rootclaim spent years working on this problem, until he was satisfied his method could avoid these kinds of pitfalls. Then they started posting analyses of different open problems to their site, rootclaim.com. Here are three:

For example, does Putin have cancer? We start with the prior for Russian men ages 60-69 having cancer (14.32%, according to health data). We adjust for Putin’s healthy lifestyle (-30% cancer risk) and lack of family history (-5%). Putin hasn’t vanished from the world stage for long periods of time, which seems about 4x more likely to be true if he didn’t have cancer than if he did. About half of cancer patients lose their hair, and Putin hasn’t, so we’ll divide by two. On the other hand, Putin’s face has gotten more swollen recently, which happens about six times more often to cancer patients than to others, so we’ll multiply by six. And so on and so forth, until we end up with the final calculation: 86% chance Putin doesn’t have cancer, too bad.

This is an unusual way to do things, but Saar claimed some early victories. For example, in a celebrity Israeli murder case, Saar used Rootclaim to determine that the main suspect was likely innocent, and a local mental patient had committed the crime; later, new DNA evidence seemed to back him up.

One other important fact about Saar: he is very rich. In 2008, he sold his fraud detection startup to PayPal for $169 million. Since then he’s founded more companies, made more good investments, and won hundreds of thousands of dollars in professional poker.

So, in the g

...
Idea black holes
by Logan Kieller — 2024-03-28T15:17:16.801Z
Link: https://logankieller.substack.com/p/idea-black-holes

You are a rational thinker.

Ever since you were born, you’ve been racing through a universe of ideas: creating, evaluating, disputing, engaging with, and being bombarded by…

Ideas.

Like a particle from the Big Bang, you have bounced around the universe until you found yourself here.

Reading, pondering, considering.

Thinking is the foundation by which we establish our reality.

Over time you should master this skill, and yet people seem to get stuck on ideas. People stumble into ideologies and then keep falling deeper into them. These can be ideologies of philosophy, identity, interests, career, or beyond.

Just as a particle whizzing around in the universe can fall into a black hole, people too can get stuck on an idea, cross an event horizon, and never come back.

You see this phenomenon often, and it frequently manifests as a part of someone's identity.

For me, this raises some questions. You and I think of ourselves as rational thinkers, so:

Why do people fall into these idea black holes and get stuck?
How do we know when this is happening to us?
Is there a way to climb out of a black hole?
Is there a way to never get stuck in the first place?
Should we aspire to get stuck on an idea if it’s the best?

Before we start, it’s important to understand how our trajectories in the universe start in the first place.

In his book “How We Learn”, neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene explores the innate ways babies behave like statisticians and scientists. Each child has genetically instantiated priori, and they then learn with experiments to prove, disprove, and augment their mental models.

In an unadulterated environment, with eight billion people on the planet, we would have eight billion unique idea trajectories. Yet, we somehow settle on similar paths, and not just because someone uses good rhetoric against us.

Some ideas are just simply good (an objective property), and these rightly attract our attention, but just as many are bad ideas, and we yet still subscribe to them. We fall into black holes.

Question 1: Why do people fall into these idea black holes and get stuck?

Evaluation gravity.

Rational thinkers will, or should, have some criteria or rubric to evaluate things in their lives. This could be a principle, ranking, or algorithm. A notable phenomenon occurs when someone is falling into an idea black hole: they don’t seem to mind. Their evaluation criter...
Inexistence of Rational Disagreement when Information can be Freely Exchanged
by Cheops — 2024-03-28T12:40:01.029Z

Suppose rationality is a set of principles that people agreed on to process information then arrive at conclusions. Then, on the basis of cost-free information exchange, should rational disagreements still exist? In that case, both parties would have the same information which will then be processed the same way. Just by these factors, there shouldn't be.

However, disagreements do still exist, and we'd like to believe we're rational, so the problem must be in the exchange of information. Previous posts have mentioned how sometimes there are too much background information to be exchanged fully. Here I'd like to point to a more general culprit: language.

Not all knowledge can be expressed through language, and not all languages express knowledge. Yet language, including obscure symbols that take in mathematics, n order logic, and other communicable disciplines, still so far cannot convey a significant portion of our knowledge, such as intuition and creativity. Substantial amount of studies have shown that intuition is more accurate than thinking in certain areas, and much worse in other areas. Yet we have not came up with a way to systematically use intuition and rational judgement selectively.

And I'd say this is the obstacle in most rationalist disagreements: it's not that when they can freely discuss for as long as possible then they will definitively agree; it's that there is knowledge unique to themselves that is incommunicable, but that considerably swayed their judgements of things. As we progress as a species we expand our languages to communicate more complexity, so this issue should gradually fade away, that is unless the scale of complexity of knowledge is infinite.