trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Scientific Wrestling: Beyond Passive Hypothesis-Testing
by adamShimi — 2022-03-07T12:01:23.943Z

Epistemic status:

exploratory

In 1907, Ross Harrison grew a frog nerve in vitro, inventing modern

tissue culture

. He extracted cells from the relevant part of a frog embryo, put them in a contraption from bacteriology called a hanging drop, and observed as the cells grew and differentiated into nerves.

Drawings from Harrison's paper, showing the hanging drop and the growth of nerves.

Based on his paper and later comments, Harrison only wanted to settle a controversy about the cellular nature of nerves. Where others had to cut frogs at different stages of development and interpret their dead bodies, Harrison could just watch the nerve grow. But he did more than that — he shattered many assumptions about the conditions and necessities of life, by making cells live and grow outside the body.

When I read about it, that’s what I found exciting: Harrison had intervened in the world, in doing so uncovering deep principles of cell biology. This was no passive measure to confirm a hypothesis, but a wrestling with nature to make her reveal her secrets.

I started to see this everywhere: chemical properties revealed through synthesis, natural selection probed by Darwin’s experiments, complexity classes characterized by artificial problems… I realized that many of the experiments and ideas that excited me included wrestling with nature to discover its secrets. And understanding the possibilities and limits of this “scientific wrestling” will definitely prove a powerful tool in any epistemic toolkit, even more so in a field like Alignment where passive observation is hopeless.

So in this post, I discuss five ways I've noticed in which such wrestling can create knowledge, with examples from chemistry, cell biology, complexity theory, evolutionary biology, network architecture, and more.

Thanks to Flora for a great discussion on synthesis and for helping me clarify the point of this post.

Studying hard-to-observe processes through instantiation

Many fundamental processes we want to understand are just hard to observe: what’s happening inside the body (because of opacity), genes (because of scale), natural selection (because of temporal and spatial scale), chemical bonds (because of microscopic scale)... Yet we can reveal these processes by instantiating them in settings where they can be observed.

The already mentioned invention of tissue culture by Ross Harrison ...
You can tell a drawing from a painting
by alkexr — 2022-03-07T11:45:33.034Z

Epistemic status: I've had this concept for a while, and applied it in practice many times. It's fairly easy to convey in an argument, and can clear up some confusion. But there are many loose ends, and I'm not sure it's well formulated. Also, I'm stuck, so I'll just throw it out there, hoping that it grows into something.

Drawings and paintings

You are presented with a .bmp file containing a digitalized version of two art pieces. You are told that one is a drawing and the other is a painting. Can you tell which one is which?

On one hand, of course you can't. The .bmp file format doesn't contain information about the history of some clumps of matter on some rock in space. All you have is the color of each pixel (plus some technical stuff). Clearly, the one that looks like a painting could be the result of the artist very carefully drawing every tiny square milimeter of the image so that the digitalized version is equivalent, pixel by pixel, to the .bmp file you are looking at right now...

On the other hand, that's not what happened. The only way doubt can even arise is if the images were adversarially designed for this very purpose. Even then, it'd take a skillful artist and some serious effort to succesfully confuse people, especially other artists.

Plotting

Some writers prefer to start working on their novel by planning the whole plot before actually putting words on paper, while others just start writing a story and see where it goes. If you haven't encountered this distinction before, you may want to pause for a few seconds to figure out how it will affect the sort of book that results.

Stories that are written without a pre-planned plot tend to be more locally consistent. The characters' decisions are not constrained by where the plot needs to go, so they will be better aligned with their personalities, motivations, and pasts. Consequences follow more clearly from causes, because the causes aren't backwards-engineered to fit the pre-determined consequences. But you'll get a meandering story that doesn't seem to move towards a conclusion. A good example is A Song of Ice and Fire. Stories that are written with a clear outline planned in advance feel more coherent as a whole, have a conclusion, and plot twists make sense. However, characters may at times act in ways that make little sense just to keep the plot going. An example is the Harry Potter series.

But you ...
Personal imitation software
by Flaglandbase — 2022-03-07T07:55:36.044Z

The question is very simple: could you train a powerful computer program to act like an accurate copy of yourself?
Some LW members may have already tried this, but it would require super powerful software. Even if it's only text based, GPT-3 wouldn't be enough. Maybe GPT-13.

If such a program could generate a perfect copy of someone's written responses to any query, a Super Turing Test, the original person would arguably no longer need to exist. That would be the whole point: such a program would be like a "mind backup", a solution to the problem of death.
This would take something like "Deeper Learning" software, requiring huge amounts of data. For starters, it could record its subject's digital activities. Then it might try to predict sleeping and working habits. To get more data it should take the form of an operating system, or virtual assistant, or digital mind extension.

In my case, it could analyze all my old drawings, sorted by date and themes, with description and genre tags added. It could look up style data from the comic books my art is inspired by. Then it would start making making similar art of its own. It could do the same thing even easier with my fan fictions and other written texts. Obviously there would be no demand for any of this, but it would be possible.

Even more advanced, a human subject might start wearing a "sensor hat" or other clothing to allow the software to perceive everything they do. Then it would start to predict what they WILL do and experience.
An important function would be knowing what data to ignore. It should not try to predict everything in the subject's environment, like whatever appears on screens or the actions of other people. It could predict common themes like colors and shapes in programs and web layouts etc. These same patterns already exist in your brain.

Such imitator software might only render a low bandwidth or text-based description of the simulated person's behavior. That wouldn't matter at all, as long as it's all-encompassing.
One application of such research would be software designed to understand what people are doing at any time. One problem of such research would be temporary glitches, like if your coffee mug suddenly dissolves into a slinkie you'd know you were actually the software simulation. That sort of thing is obviously many decades away.

The real question is: what is the most predicti...
Grabby Aliens could be Good, could be Bad
by mako yass — 2022-03-07T01:24:43.769Z

Robin Hanson's Grabby Aliens is a succinct model of how and when technological life will spread. It argues that we've simply arrived too early in the universe's lifespan for other civilizations to have grown to the point of being visible to us yet, but they are there, and eventually, most of us will give rise to large enough civilizations that we'll start to run into each other.

The paper gave me the impression that this was kind of going to be a bad thing, for us, because it means there will be these rapacious colonizers penning us in on every side and forbidding us from rapaciously colonizing as much of the accessible universe as we otherwise would have liked to. I will argue that having neighbors might actually be really good, and then I will argue that it may also be extremely bad, in a way that I don't think the article touched on.

This could be Very Good

It may be easier to travel at light speed if someone has already built a radio receiver at the other side of the accessible universe, you can travel as a signal, instead of having to physically boost a signal receiver (and programmable nanomanufacturer) around and somehow decelerate it once it arrives so that it lands in tact on a material source. Moving as signals might be much easier than moving physical objects.

Unless there is some other way of traveling through a dead universe at light speed that doesn't require moving physical objects?

Is it possible to shoot a laser just right so that if it hits a certain common kind of mineral it can cause the matter to melt and oscillate into a form that can then receive a more subtle sort of signal that will cause it to melt and oscillate into a form that can eventually produce a form that receives high bandwidth signal that can manufacture an entire person?
And, what are the most complex chemicals that would survive a light speed collision with a suitable substrate? Could we supply the reaction with our own reagents? Could we hail down a searing heavenfall of primordial soup?

There was a great-soul, a Jesuit priest, and a Deist (by my reckoning), Teilhard de Chardin, who wrote of the Omega Point, essentially he was describing technological singularity. "He imagined that once the Omega Point had been reached, life might finally move off the planet in an explosive beam of light, heading out to colonize the universe." I learned of this after musing of this searing hea

...
Sabotage challenge
by ViktoriaMalyasova — 2022-03-06T22:51:37.823Z

You are an ordinary citizen in a hypothetical, imaginary Evil Empire that wages an aggressive war against its neighbor. Telling the truth about the war can get you imprisoned, protesting can get you fined or imprisoned. What can you do to impede your country's war effort?

Unlike the usuall bubble challenge, feel free to post any number of ideas you have, criticize and improve on other's ideas. It says "sabotage" in the title, but useful ideas which don't fall under that category are also welcome.
Why work at AI Impacts?
by Katja — 2022-03-06T22:10:07.009Z

AI Impacts is beginning a serious hiring round (see here for job postings), so I’d like to explain a bit why it has been my own best guess at the highest impact place for me to work for me. (As in, this is a personal blog post by Katja on the AI Impacts blog, not some kind of officialesque missive from the organization.)

But first—

What is AI Impacts?

AI Impacts is a few things:

An online library of best-guess answers to questions about the future of AI. Including big questions, like ‘how likely is a sudden jump in AI progress at around human-level performance?’, and sub-questions informing those answers (‘are discontinuities common in technological trends?’), and sub-sub questions (‘did penicillin cause any discontinuous changes in syphilis trends?’), and so on. Each page ideally has a high-level conclusion at the top, and reasoning supporting it below, which will often call on the conclusions of other pages. These form something like a set of trees, with important, hard, decision-relevant questions at the root and low-level, tractable, harder-to-use-on-their-own questions at the leaves. This isn’t super obvious at the moment, because a lot of the trees are very incomplete, but that’s the basic idea.

A research group focused on finding such answers, through a mixture of original research and gathering up that which has been researched by others.

A blog on these topics, for more opinionated takes, conversational guides to the research, updates, and other things that don’t fit in the main library (like this!).

A locus of events for people interested in this kind of research, e.g. dinners and workshops, a Slack with other researchers, online coffees.

Why think working on AI Impacts is among the best things to do?

1. AI risk looks like a top-notch cause area

It seems plausible to me that advanced AI poses a substantial risk to humanity’s survival. I don’t think this is clear, but I do think there’s enough evidence that it warrants a lot of attention. I hope to write more about this, see here for recent discussion. Furthermore, I don’t know of other similarly serious risks (see Ord’s The Precipice for a review), or of other intervention areas that look clearly more valuable than reducing existential risk to humanity.

I actually also think AI risk is a potentially high-impact area to work (for a little while at least) if AI isn’t a huge existential risk to humani...
Ukraine update 06/03/2022
by ViktoriaMalyasova — 2022-03-06T21:49:37.181Z

Power plant shelling

On March 4th Putin's troops shelled Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Enerhodar city. Zaporizhzhia NPP in the largest nuclear plant in Europe, providing 25% of Ukraine's electricity. A training building close to one of the plant’s reactor units caught fire from the shelling. According to Andriy Tuz, the plant's spokesman, firefighters could not initially access the building, because they were shot at. The plant was captured, the fire put out, no radiation was released.
How close did we come to a disaster? Zaporizhzhia power plant has 6 water-water energetic reactors (VVER). This design is used in all Ukraine's active power plants and is a Russian analogue of Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR). Unlike Chernobyl's RBMK reactor, VVER has a concrete containment structure around the reactor to stop any radioactive release. This structure can sustain an aircraft crash. But, according to Najmedin Meskati, a bunker-buster missile would breach it. I'll update once I figure out which kind of missiles Russian troops fired at the plant.

The spent fuel pool is not inside the containment structure, though. If a shell hit it, it could release radiation.

Another source of risk is power shortage. If the power supply to the plant is cut, it can use any of 3 emergency diesel generators to power the cooling systems. The Russian troops may be short of fuel for them, though - more on that below. The plant also has 4 passive emergency cooling systems called "hydroaccumulators": vessels filled with water and pressurized gas. They rely on gas pressure to inject the water and do not need electricity. If all cooling systems fail, the reactor will melt down, like it happened in Fukushima. Spent fuel pools also need constant circulation of water to keep them cool. If they overheat, zirkonium will react with water to produce hydrogen. A hydrogen exlosion caused by this damaged a containment structure in Fukushima.

Human factor adds risk too. Chernobyl was also recently occupied by Russians, and, according to Ukraine, the Chernobyl personnel, "who have been detained by the Russian military without rotation for seven days, are under psychological pressure and morally exhausted and as a result have limited opportunities to communicate, move and carry out full-fledged routine and repair work, which leads to radiation regime disruptions and endangers their lives and healt...
Balancing Audio in Software
by jefftk — 2022-03-06T19:40:02.721Z

A few months ago I

ported my whistle
controlled synthesizer to the Raspberry Pi. I configured it with mono
output, and ran it through a

DI box to get a
balanced XLR output I could send to a sound board. I realized a few
weeks ago, however, that I don't actually need a DI box, and I can
balance the audio in software. Now that I've

made
the change I wanted to write about how it works.

To send an audio signal, you need two conductors: the signal and a
reference (ground):

This works fine, unless you get radio frequency interference. There's
energy in the air, from intentional broadcasts or noisy devices, and
the weaker your signal or longer your cable the more it will shift
the signal:

There are a few different technical solutions, but the most common one
in audio is to use a balanced signal. In addition to our signal, we
add and "anti-signal" which is the same signal but reversed:

Instead of interpreting the signal relative to ground, we now
interpret it relative to the anti-signal. Absolute magnitude is
unimportant, what matters is the delta. Now when we get interference,
it still shifts our signal, but it makes an almost identical change to
our anti-signal, and the difference between the two signals is almost
unchanged:

Normally you create the anti-signal with a transformer, in a DI box,
but my software already has access to stereo output. If I want to
send X, I can write X to the left channel and -X to the right. With a
3.5mm to 1/4" TRS cable I can be as far as I need to be from the board
without worrying about interference.

(Do be careful not to use a 3.5mm to XLR cable: you need to connect to
the mixer's "line" and not "mic" input. The latter often will provide
"phantom power", which is designed to feed microphones power
backwards, through their output. The soundboard provides +48V to both
the signal and anti-signal pins, relative to ground. This could break
your sound card, since that's a lot of voltage to some thing that was
probably not designed to receive it. You might think you could turn
off phantom power on inputs that don't need it, but on the (cheaper)
mixers you would typically see at a contra dance or bar there is
typically one switch for the entire board.)

Comment via: facebook
Preserving and continuing alignment research through a severe global catastrophe
by A_donor — 2022-03-06T18:43:10.746Z

[Epistemic status: Shallow dive into research questions, backed by some years of on-and-off thinking about this kind of plan.]

Introduction

There is some chance that civilization will cease to function before we hit an intelligence explosion. If it does, it would be good to preserve existing alignment research for future generations who might rebuild advanced technology, and ideally have safe havens ready for current and future researchers to spend their lives adding to that pool of knowledge.

This might delay capabilities research by many decades, centuries, or longer while allowing basic theoretical alignment research to continue, and so be a potential Yudkowskian positive model violation for which we should prepare.

Setting this infrastructure up is a massively scalable intervention, and one that should likely be tackled by people who are not already on the researcher career path. It would have been good to get started some years ago given recent events, but now is the second best time to plant a tree.[1]

Preserving alignment knowledge through a global catastrophe

What data do we want to store?

Thankfully, the EleutherAI people are working on a dataset of all alignment research[2]. It's still a WIP[3] and contributions to the scripts to collect it are welcome, so if you're a programmer looking for a shovel ready way to help with this then consider submitting a PR[4].

How do we want to store it?

My shallow dive into this uncovered these options:

We could print it out on paper

Lifetime: 500+ years in good conditions (might depend significantly on paper and ink quality, more research needed). Vacuum sealing it with low humidity seems like it would help significantly.
Pros: Totally human readable.

Microsoft's Project Silica is the longest lasting option I could find

Lifetime: 10000+ years
Cons: Would require high levels of technology to read it back. I'm not seeing an option to buy the machines required to write new archives and expect them to be very advanced/expensive, so this would be limited to storing pre-collapse research.

CDs could be a minimalist option

Lifetime: Maybe 50 years if stored in good conditions
Pros: Good ability for researchers to explore the information on computers while those last)
Cons: It's very plausible that a severe GCR[5] would set us back far enough that we'd not regain CD reading technology before they decayed so they aren't a ful

...
Patricia Hall & The Warlock Curse
by Jsevillamol — 2022-03-06T16:32:59.611Z

Patricia Hall had studied all her life to become an archmage diviner of the Ivory Tower. When she was expelled, her heart broke and her world shattered. Even worse, she learned short after that the world might be literally about to end.

Join the eponymous character on a life-transforming journey that will take her out of academia to become an unlikely hero of magekind.

Read it now in our exclusive reading platform

Testimonials

Oh no, what have I done.

Jaime Sevilla, prolific writer

I read the book! Really enjoyed it. Definitely very clear rationalist/EA influence.

Anonymous kind friend

No Jaime, I haven't gotten around to reading your novella yet.

Anonymous patient friend

Thanks to Faatima Osman, Anne Wissemann and Jonas Sandbrink for support and feedback.

More from the author
Via productiva - my writing and productivity framework
by Jan — 2022-03-06T16:06:19.816Z
Link: https://universalprior.substack.com/p/via-productiva?s=w

TL;DR: Introspection on how I do things and which rules and heuristics help me to be productive. Framed as Taleb's via negativa advice. Weaves in a bit of Greek mythology.

Do you wonder how I manage to write one essay every week despite finishing my Ph.D.? Yeah, I wonder the same. That's why I wrote an essay where I try to articulate the rules and heuristics I use to be productive. YMMV. Hope you enjoy!

Against advice

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth. -

Everybody's Free To Wear Sunscreen

…

Yeah, I’m not a huge fan of advice.

I think there are many good side effects of giving and receiving advice. The act of giving advice is essentially an

expression of trust

, "asking for help" is a

social superpower

, and the downsides of being exposed to information are usually rather low[1]. But those are just side effects; the actual core purpose of advice (exchanging relevant and helpful information) is surprisingly hard to get right:

Causality is

complicated

.

Figuring out why you succeeded

is hard, and the story you tell yourself about it is probably wrong.
For almost any piece of advice out there, you can find

reverse advice

, i.e.
“You need to stop being so hard on yourself, remember you are your own worst critic” versus “Stop making excuses for yourself, you will never be able to change until you admit you’ve hit bottom.”

SSC

and because of your

social bubble

, you might be exposed to advice with exactly the wrong polarity[2].
The people with the most relevant insight are probably busy doing stuff, leaving the people with a lot of free time on their hands to dominate the advice-giving market. So most people who want to give (or sell) advice do not have the relevant insight to give good advice. This effect corroborates the

importance of having mentors

; even busy people want to give advice but are more selective about whom they give it to.

source

Consequently, a lot of advice floating around online and offline tends to be

pretty

much

useless

. Even in the rationality community (which gets a lot of other things right), I’m rather put off by “

group debugging

”, “

Hamming circles

“, and the “

Hammertime

”. I see that people get value from doing these things, but most (if ...