trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The True Face of the Enemy
by Space L Clottey — 2021-01-12T10:03:23.777Z

Greetings! May I incarcerate you?

‘What?’

Don’t worry! You’ll get out soon! I’ll even do you a couple favours. How does… free lunches sound? What if everyone else there agreed to never use the phrase ‘incarcerated’? It’d hardly feel like you were being locked up. Fifteen years tops, I swear.

‘What??’

Ok! Fine! What about instead of all day it’ll just be eight hours. That’s not so bad, right?

‘But why?’

Ask me that again in about three minutes. I’ll have an answer that you’ll like then. But don’t worry about that! I’ll feed you! Free meals! Doesn’t that sound nice? Aren’t you lucky?

(You admit that free meals sound pleasant, but that they in no way balance out the rest of the incarceration.)

Ok, how about this. What if, at the end of it, I’ll upgrade you to a slightly different form of incarceracion. It’s a great honour, really.

‘I seriously think you’ve forgotten to include the part about how this is appealing in any way. I like freedom,’ you insist. ‘Freedom is good for me. You would have to have an astounding case for taking it away.’

Oh, we have a case. We teach!

‘I can learn on my own, thanks.’

Oh, no you can’t. (And by the end of your incarceration I’m sure you’ll agree with me). You won’t want to learn without us anyway.

‘What??’ You screech.

Nothing!

‘Look I still think you’ve forgotten to give me the real reason. I’m not sold on this, at all, and am really quite confused how you could think I’d take you up on this. Why do you want to lock me up in the first place? What’s the real reason?‘

Ok, you want to know the real reason? For real?

‘Yes.’

(You witness it struggle for a moment, as its parts within it are at odds. Then it smiles, in a way you can’t pinpoint why is unsettling. And then it spoke. It said:)

Ok. I’ll be real with you.

I. Manipulating Memory

Your existence is costly for us. Each one of you that’s made… you’re not economically sustainable. See, it’s easier to work in units of money. Money is quantified, money is simple. While you have your “freedom”, as you put it, you take time away from your parents. We need your parent’s time… few things can be so easily converted into money.

We can only restrict so much of the Released’s freedom. If we went ahead with the Reproduction Restriction Program, they’d remember what it was like before. They’d have something to compare it to. They’d know there was a better time And that’s costly. Costly in peace, costly in ...
A vastly faster vaccine rollout
by KatjaGrace — 2021-01-12T07:40:16.165Z

When a traveler introduced smallpox to New York City in 1947, the city—and in particular its health commissioner, Israel Weinstein—apparently ran an epic vaccination campaign, reaching 5 million people in the first two weeks.1 That is, four hundred thousand vaccinations per day. San Francisco in two days.

For covid, the first New York City vaccine was given on the 14th of December, and if I understand, by the 10th of January, twenty seven days later, 203,181 doses had reportedly been given. That’s around eight thousand doses per day. A factor of fifty fewer.

That’s a pretty incredible difference. Why is New York fifty times slower at delivering covid vaccines in 2021 than it was at delivering smallpox vaccines in 1947?

Part of the answer is presumably ‘regression to the mean’: if thousands of different cities at different times try to roll out vaccinations quickly, with a similar basic ability to do so, and there is some random chance in how well it goes, then the one we tell stories about seventy years later will one that got surprisingly lucky. You shouldn’t expect your own effort to go as well as that best one. But—without having done the statistics—I don’t think you should expect your attempt to be fifty times worse. New York didn’t get that lucky.

Perhaps there are other differences in the problems faced. For instance, the current vaccine needs refrigeration, or we are so late in the disease spread that we can’t all crowd together in around fast-moving vaccinators, or be rounded up in our natural crowded habitats, like classrooms or offices.

Though the 1947 situation looks harder in important ways too. For one thing, there was no time to prepare. The vaccination project began the day that the disease was identified to health commissioner Weinstein. By 2pm, he was apparently holding a news conference publicly asking residents to be vaccinated. With covid, there were about ten months to prepare. For another thing, now people have smartphones with which they can be alerted, and computers and online systems that might be used to coordinate them and tell them what to do.

I heard about this episode from the Rachel Maddow Show, and read about it in the New York Times, both of which bring it up to note the inadequacy in the current vaccine efforts. The New York Times says a rollout like this, “almost certainly couldn’t happen today”, and offers some explanations:

...
Physicist's dissociation
by Mateusz Mazurkiewicz — 2021-01-12T04:40:25.561Z

Frankly, I find the fact that this thought was thought and written quite absurd. It is my fingers, tendons and muscles, jumping over the keys, pressing symbols made of curves. They do so with impressive agility and coordination. I see my skin over them, which is a fascinating material with physical properties. The keys, clicking, input a signal into a silicon-based computation device, running process connecting it to a society-wide system of such devices. The signal—my keystrokes—sent as light, then through a wire, are recorded as sequences of symbols forming semantic chunks, processed again by the brain (that controlled the fingers' motion) into concepts. Electrical-chemical activity within language-synthesizing neural sections (moving ions releasing electrical potential, signals sent down the axion) into the keyboard-typing neural circuit, into the motion of muscles, into the deflection of the membrane, into an electrical signal, into EM wave, into potential across a copper wire, into another information-processing system, back the same way to the laptop, photons emitted via LEDs, absorbed by appropriate sensory cells responsible for visual perception, and processed by the part of the brain just next to the one synthesizing the text.

When reduced to physics, the concepts lose clarity of their meaning and implications. For example, the silicon-based device is not just a computation system; its significance is that it is, functionally, a direct augmentation of the user's instrumental reason, a dynamic medium of thought vectors in concept space. The user, the totality of body parts placed together into a human, engages in behaviors, including ones with other humans. What emerges is too mind-boggling to be systemically described in a book, let alone a short text. From electrical reactions in a brain evolved by a Darwinian process, into language, into a system (society) of dynamics difficult enough to be impossible to grasp by any single intelligent entity engaging in it; it is impossible to create a symbolic state vector of a person's perception, as the observation of the world is fundamentally codependent on the non-symbolic observer.

All of humanity refers to the memory of the past of itself, giving historical character to the system emergent. Stories are told: stories of discovery and invention, conquest and struggle. The historical character means that the p...
Review of 'Debate on Instrumental Convergence between LeCun, Russell, Bengio, Zador, and More'
by TurnTrout — 2021-01-12T03:57:06.655Z

I think that 'robust instrumentality' is a more apt name for 'instrumental convergence.' That said, for backwards compatibility, this post often uses the latter.

In the summer of 2019, I was building up a corpus of basic reinforcement learning theory. I wandered through a sun-dappled Berkeley, my head in the clouds, my mind bent on a single ambition: proving the existence of instrumental convergence.

Somehow.

I needed to find the right definitions first, and I couldn't even imagine what the final theorems would say. The fall crept up on me... and found my work incomplete.

Let me tell you: if there's ever been a time when I wished I'd been months ahead on my research agenda, it was September 26, 2019: the day when world-famous AI experts debated whether instrumental convergence was a thing, and whether we should worry about it.

The debate unfolded below the link-preview: an imposing robot staring the reader down, a title containing 'Terminator', a byline dismissive of AI risk:

Scientific American
Don’t Fear the Terminator
"Artificial intelligence never needed to evolve, so it didn’t develop the survival instinct that leads to the impulse to dominate others."
The byline seemingly affirms the consequent: "evolution ⟹ survival instinct" does not imply "no evolution ⟹ no survival instinct." That said, the article raises at least one good point: we choose the AI's objective, and so why must that objective incentivize power-seeking?

I wanted to reach out, to say, "hey, here's a paper formalizing the question you're all confused by!" But it was too early.

Now, at least, I can say what I wanted to say back then:

This debate about instrumental convergence is really, really confused. I heavily annotated the play-by-play of the debate in a Google doc, mostly checking local validity of claims. (Most of this review's object-level content is in that document, by the way. Feel free to add comments of your own.)

This debate took place in the pre-theoretic era of instrumental convergence. Over the last year and a half, I've become a lot less confused about instrumental convergence. I think my formalisms provide great abstractions for understanding "instrumental convergence" and "power-seeking." I think that this debate suffers for lack of formal grounding, and I wouldn't dream of introducing someone to these concepts via this debate....
Base rate of RCT from developing countries finding unexpected effects 
by MichaelLowe — 2021-01-12T01:57:49.897Z

The last few months I have been stumbling onto RCTs conducted in developing countries, with great results in treating Covid-19. The evaluated treatments seem apriori unlikely to generate these great results, e.g. this gargling study from Bangladesh, or this honey+black cumin seeds study from Pakistan, or Bromhexine from Iran all have results that would revolutionary-if-true. FWIW, and on the face of it, none of them can be described as garbage (decent sample size, randomized, p- preregistered for the Pakistani study, etc.)

This question however is not about these particular studies, but which base rate I should be using to evaluate such studies. I am coming up empty with prior instances of clinical trials from developing countries with promising results, good sample sizes but which later turned out to be false. Does anybody know of examples or can recommend search terms?
What skills or habits have lasting value through time?
by Duff — 2021-01-12T01:54:13.268Z

I'm thinking especially of things that will be useful for the rest of your life, and apply to almost everyone. Things with huge ROI.

More obvious things:

Exercise 30-60 minutes a day. An obvious one, but more health means more energy and likely a longer life too. If you can make it a habit, requiring virtually no willpower (harder to not do), this will pay off for as long as you live.
Permanently quit bad habits. If you can identify what these are and successfully quit for life, that frees up a ton of time, energy, and quite possibly also money. Depending on the bad habit, it might also lengthen your life.

Less obvious things:

Improving typing speed. "Hunt and peck" typists average 20 words per minute. You can easily boost that to 80 wpm by learning to touch type. That's a 4x productivity boost for life. Dictation may be even better, since people on average speak at 150 wpm. Learning speed reading may have similar productivity benefits, even if you just double or triple your reading rate, given how much text we read now.
"If hear alarm, then get out of bed." I programmed myself to do this with mental rehearsal. This is important because many self-improvement projects such as meditating, exercising, or writing really are only going to happen if they happen first thing in the morning. And you can't do that if you can't get out of bed when you want. Spend a mere 0.5-2 hours mentally (or physically!) rehearsing this if-then plan and it pays dividends 5+ times a week 50+ weeks a year.

I'm struggling to come up with many more things though. It seems to me there should be dozens and dozens of more or less obvious things. Learning to think clearly? (How specifically?) Communication skills? (Which ones?) Emotional resilience techniques?

Help me brainstorm here, smart people.
D&D.Sci II: The Sorceror's Personal Shopper
by abstractapplic — 2021-01-12T01:38:44.168Z

The day’s task shows up in an envelope, and not in glowing purple letters emblazoned across the inside of your eyelids, which is usually a good sign. The owl that brought it looks on with equanimity as you read its master's message:

Hello,

I hearde that you do odde jobs for Wizards. I neede 120 mana for a ritual but cannot leave my Tower righte now. Go to the caravans in towne and buy enough magic items that I can gette that much by sacrificinge them.

My Owle has a pouch. It is biggere inside than oute. Putte the things in it ande she will carrye them back.

Enclosed is my Thormo Tharmeu Magic Sensing Device. It usually lies but is probably bettere than guessinge. Returne it when you are done. Enclosed is also a list of 836 itemse I sacrificed and what coloure they glowed and how muche mana I gotte and what the Thau Lying Box said when I pointede it at them. I like lists.

The pouch contains 200 gold pieces. You may keepe what coins are lefte over. If I do notte gette at leaste 120 mana from the things you sende me, you shalle owe me 200 gold pieces.

Goodbye,

Wakalix the Wizard

PS: If you do not accepte the jobbe, I bid you sende the Owle and the gold back before sundown, that I may finde another to charge with it.

Your spirits lift with every line. Clear objectives, payment in advance, acknowledgement that you have the right to refuse the task, no threats of involuntary transformation, no random tangents about world domination or beard care, handwriting legible, capitalization not entirely random . . . this is one of the good clients. And if you make clever enough use of the list he provided, you suspect you could end up taking home a decent fraction of that 200gp once this day’s work is done. With a song in your heart, you depart for the travelling caravans and their magic items.

The selection of artefacts that greets you is as follows:

Item name	Glow color	Thaumometer reading	Price
Longsword of Wounding +2	Red	14	66gp
Warhammer of Justice +1	Yellow	5	41gp
Hammer of Capability	Blue	35	35gp
Pendant of Truth	Red	40	38gp
Ring of Joy +5	Blue	29	32gp
Warhammer of Flame +2	Yellow	48	65gp
Battleaxe of Glory	Blue	7	23gp
Plough of Plenty	Yellow	12	35gp
Saw of Capability +1	Green	16	35gp
Amulet of Wounding +2	Green	50	35gp
Pendant of Hope	Blue	77	34gp
Pendant of Joy +4	Green	42	39gp

Will you accept Wakalix’s errand? If so, what will you buy?

I’ll be posting an interactive letting you test your decision, along with an explana...
Group house norms really do seem toxic to many people.
by sapphire — 2021-01-11T23:42:36.239Z

Be careful about joining rationalist group houses. The environment is toxic to a lot of people and can lead to a ton of conflict. This seems important to say since a lot of people are considering returning to Berkley/TheBay.

This analysis is general and examples can be cited from many houses. But I personally lived at Decision Tree for about a year. For context, Decision Tree is an eight-bedroom house in North Oakland. The amount of interpersonal conflict has been very high. The worst situation predates my arrival. But I want to state this explicitly: I was involved in a bunch of conflicts. You definitely should hold this against me. In my opinion, a lot of the conflicts involving me came down to me being pro-cleanliness, bothered by tons of noise, and loud about some very unusual political beliefs. But I was also combative in how I handled some things. I regret much of my behavior. However, a huge amount of conflict in the house's history did not involve me.

I have now explicitly made myself look pretty bad. I deserve to look bad. However, the point I am trying to make requires doing the opposite as well. Before I lived in the Bay I was a member of Overcoming Bias NYC for a few years. For about two years I lived at the four-person apartment that usually hosted the weekly meetup. My reputation was quite good. When I applied to be a REACH host I asked for character witnesses from the people in NYC who had run the most meetups. The reviews were good, Shrinkant even called me a peacemaker unprompted. If you doubt these claims you can ask the people who were actively running OBNYC during my time there (Jacob Putanumonit, Shrikant, Sam R, Zvi, etc). You can also talk to the people I lived with in NYC (ex: Geoff C and Alex M).

Crowded bay group houses are not toxic for everyone. But they are toxic for a lot of people. Some group houses have only lasted months before they dissolved. There are just so many potential issues. For example: Covid pre-cautions, noise, cleanliness, politics, amount of clothing worn in common areas, taking up space in common areas, showers, etc. The situation is even worse if money is an issue for any/many housemates (DT certainly had money issues). A large group house is also likely to have residents coming and going on relatively short notice. Even if you like the current house culture you need to be vigilant about maintaining it over time....
Transparency and AGI safety
by jylin04 — 2021-01-11T18:51:50.022Z

Introduction

Transparency is the problem of going inside the black box of an AI system and understanding exactly how it works, by tracking and understanding the processes in its internal state.

In this post, I’ll argue that making AI systems more transparent could be very useful from a longtermist or AI safety point of view. I’ll then review recent progress on this centered around the

circuits program

being pursued by the Clarity team at OpenAI, and finally point out some directions for future work that could be interesting to pursue.

Some definitions that I’ll use in this note are that

Transformative AI (TAI) is AI that precipitates a social transition on the scale of the Industrial Revolution.
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is usually more vaguely defined as an AI system that can do anything that humans can do. Here, I’ll operationally take it to mean “AI that can outperform humans at the task of generating qualitative insights into technical AI safety research,” for instance by coming up with new research agendas that turn out to be fruitful.

Why should longtermists care about transparency?

I’ll start by summarizing my views on AI safety and why I think that transparency could help with it. The upshot is that I think that AGI is fairly likely to go well by default (in a sense that I'll explain more below), but that work on transparency

… could help to reduce our considerable uncertainties around AI timelines,
… seems broadly useful, if not necessary, to solve the (inner) alignment problem in a world where the development of advanced AI doesn’t go well by default,
… provides a solution in principle for AGI safety via control, and
… could nonetheless be instrumentally useful for longtermists in a world where advanced AI goes well by default.

This section is organized according to these four items.

AI timelines are uncertain (and could be much longer than suggested by forecasts based on compute)

A first comment is that AI timelines seem to me to be rather uncertain, and in particular could be much longer than suggested by

forecasts based on compute

. This is because such forecasts assume that today’s algorithms + the datasets that will be available under business as usual will scale up to TAI or AGI given unlimited compute, but it's not clear to me that this has to be true. Since the usefulness of AI safety research today likely decays with l...
In Defense of Twitter's Decision to Ban Trump
by ragintumbleweed — 2021-01-11T18:08:38.190Z

After Twitter permanently suspended Donald Trump’s Twitter account, some high-profile rationalists and rationalist-adjacent folks came out strongly against the decision. Among those who seem strongly opposed: Eliezer Yudkowsky, Kevin Simler, Naval Ravikant, and Balaji Srinivasan.

This post is about why I think they’re wrong.

1. Does the law allow Twitter to do this?

Yes. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act gives platforms broad discretion to edit or not edit user generated content as they see fit. Dozens of courts have held that this includes the ability to permanently ban users or suspend their accounts, for any reason or no reason. For more background on this, please read Professor Eric Goldman’s excellent Law and Technology Blog (Full disclosure: I’m an occasional contributor on the blog).

2. Does banning Trump stifle free speech?

No. Twitter is a private company and not a state actor. The First Amendment does not apply to decisions about whom it allows to use its platform.

Too many smart people are conflating the rights and responsibilities of state actors with those of private companies.

For example, in response to the ban, early-stage Twitter investor Naval Ravikant tweeted “First they ban accounts. Then, they ban apps. Finally, they block websites.”

It’s important that we disambiguate the “they” in this tweet. (Even though the misleadingly ambiguous pronoun choice gives the statements all of their purported power.)

There’s a critical difference between a state actor banning free speech and a private platform doing the same. The First Amendment provides the confines for government limitations on free speech. The law gives broad discretion to private companies to address what kind of speech to permit within the confines of their physical and digital boundaries.

Conflating the two is a lazy and misleading.

Donald Trump can still speak freely in public.

He still has plenty of soapboxes. Just not his preferred soapbox.

3. Is it wrong for Twitter to enforce social norms on its platform?

No.

As a fan of SlateStarCodex, I remember the occasional post where Scott Alexander would give updates on commenters who received temporary or permanent bans for violating the rules and norms of his comments section. Occasionally, folks would kick and scream about those decisions. But Scott wanted to encourage good-faith arguments and civil and charitable condu...