trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Excerpts from Veyne's "Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?"
by Rob Bensinger — 2021-11-08T20:23:25.271Z

"Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?" is a long 1983 essay by Paul Veyne, a French archaeologist/historian. The following post (written by me in 2011) consists of excerpts of the essay that I found particularly interesting when I read it.

Topics Veyne discusses include:

Can a politician really believe all the things she says?
Can contradictory views, e.g., of alternative medicine, coexist in the same mind? If so, how?
Do people 'believe' in their religion in the same way that they believe in the existence of laundry detergent?
Can someone fabricate completely new scriptures in good faith?

1. When historical truth was tradition and vulgate

Let us return to Estienne Pasquier, whose Reserches de la France appeared in 1560. Before publishing it, G. Huppert tells us, Pasquier circulated his manuscript among his friends. Their most frequent reproach concerned Pasquier's habit of giving too many references to the sources he cited. This procedure, they told him, cast a "scholastic pall" ("umbre des escholes") on the book and was unbecoming in a work of history. Was it truly necessary each time to confirm his "words by some ancient author"? If it was a matter of lending his account authority and credibility, time alone would see to that. After all, the works of the Ancients were not encumbered by citations, and their authority had been affirmed with time. Pasquier should let time alone sanction his book!

These startling lines show us the gulf that divides our conception of history from the one that was held by ancient historians and was still current among Pasquier's contemporaries. For them, as for the ancient Greeks, historical truth was a vulgate authenticated by consensus over the ages. This consensus sanctioned the truth as it sanctioned the reputation of those writers held to be classical or even, I imagine, the tradition of the Church. Far from having to establish the truth by means of references, Pasquier should have waited to be recognized as an authentic text himself. By putting his notes at the bottom of the page, by furnishing proofs as the jurists do, he indiscreetly sought to force the consensus of posterity concerning his work. [...]

[W]e believe that the ancient historians' respect for the tradition transmitted by their predecessors can be explained by the fact that for them history is born, not out of controversy—as it is with us—but from ...
Worth checking your stock trading skills
by at_the_zoo — 2021-11-08T19:19:41.083Z

I started trading equities (and equity derivatives) full time last year, without any prior training or experience, beyond some basic economics and finance courses that I took in college many years ago. I figured things out as I went by making a lot of mistakes, and listening to many podcasts.

My portfolio has gone up ~600%, counting from Jan 2020. (The US stock market went up ~50% during this time.) This was done using a variety of strategies across a large number of individual names, so it probably wasn't just the result of luck. My AUM (assets under management) is currently about that of a small hedge fund. (I'd prefer to not talk about the dollar amount for privacy, but it is relevant because increasing AUM tends to make achieving high returns more difficult, so it gives some idea of what you can potentially do before diminishing returns set in. In other words, if it's only possible to achieve this kind of return starting from a very low asset base, then maybe it's not worth one's time. As a compromise, I'm talking about it in a vague way and writing under a pseudonym.)

It took me about six months to a year to "get the hang of it" (develop a number of successful trading strategies and avoid making a lot of beginner mistakes), perhaps aided by the fact that the market was particularly inefficient last year due to a big influx of retail investors, which made the learning curve easier to climb. My trades are usually short to medium term (hours up to a year from entry to exit).

Some Tips

Become an expert in some corner (industry or asset class) of the market (for example, REITs, mining, shipping, oil & gas, SPACs, distressed assets) so that you can reliably determine, without doing an unreasonable amount of work, whether any given asset in that sector is overvalued or undervalued (relative to where the market is likely to go, not necessarily relative to just "fundamental" or "intrinsic" value, see Addendum below).

Follow other sector experts (free or paid, SeekingAlpha seems to be a good resource). One problem with this is that while you can often rely on such experts for relative value within the sector that they cover, they have an incentive to overstate how undervalued their own sector is as a whole.

Follow some generalists who are good at calling out which sectors are currently undervalued, so you can rotate into them in a timely manner.

Try different

...
What are red flags for Neural Network suffering?
by Marius Hobbhahn — 2021-11-08T12:51:28.294Z

Epistemic status: High uncertainty; This is exploratory work; Our goal is to provide possible research directions rather than offering solutions.

This is shared work. Most of the part on neural correlates is by Jan. Most of the parts on behavior and high-level considerations are by Marius.

Background

I (Marius) was listening to the 80k podcast with Chris Olah on his work on interpretability. When he talked about neural circuits, he said they found many circuits similar to structures in the human brain (some are also quite different). The question that I can’t unthink since then is “What evidence would we need to see in Neural Networks that would convince us of suffering in a morally relevant way?”. So I teamed up with Jan to explore the question.

To clarify, we don’t care about whether they suffer in a similar way that humans do or to the same extent. The question that interests us is “Do neural networks suffer?” and, more importantly, “How would we tell?”.

Broadly, we think there are three different approaches to this problem: a) Neural correlates, b) Behavioural data, and c) high-level considerations.

In this post, we want to find out if there are any avenues that give us reasonable answers or if you just run into a wall, like with most other questions about suffering, patienthood, etc.

It’s not super clear what we are looking for exactly. In general, we are looking for all kinds of evidence that can potentially update our probability of NN suffering.

Summary of the results:

Neural Correlates: Neuroscience helps to de-confuse some terminology, but has not (yet) unambiguously identified a unique neural correlate for suffering. Pain is much better characterized as a “homeostatic behavioral drive” with associated cognitive routines. Since pain usually leads to suffering, finding the homeostatic behavioral drive might also be indicative of suffering in NNs. Finally, the PANAS measure from psychology might provide comparability to humans.
Behavior: Looking at the response of NNs to different stimuli might yield some evidence about their ability to suffer. In language models, it is unclear how to test for the existence of suffering. But testing if GPT-3, for example, has a consistent concept of suffering or observing its answers to the PANAS questions might be a start. For RL agents we can create tests comparable to animal studies. For example, one could look at the react

...
Transcript for Geoff Anders and Anna Salamon's Oct. 23 conversation
by Rob Bensinger — 2021-11-08T02:19:04.189Z

Geoff Anders of Leverage and Anna Salamon of CFAR had a conversation on Geoff's Twitch channel on October 23, triggered by Zoe Curzi's post about having horrible experiences at Leverage.

Technical issues meant that the Twitch video was mostly lost, and the audio only resurfaced a few days ago, thanks to Lulie.

I thought the conversation was pretty important, so I'm (a) using this post the signal-boost the audio, for people who missed it; and (b) posting a transcript here, along with the (previously unavailable, and important for making sense of the audio) last two hours of chat log.

You can find the full audio here, and video of the first few minutes here. The full audio discusses a bunch of stuff about Leverage's history; the only part of the stream transcribed below is the Anna/Geoff conversation, which starts about two hours in.

The chat messages I have aren't timestamped, and sometimes consist of side-conversations that don't directly connect with what Geoff and Anna are discussing. So I've inserted blocks of chat log at what seemed like roughly the right parts of the conversation; but let me know if any are in the wrong place for comprehension, and I'll move them elsewhere.

1. (1:57:57) Early EA history and EA/Leverage interactions

[...]
Anna Salamon:
All right, let's talk.
Geoff Anders:
All right, all right. Yeah, let's get to it.
Anna Salamon:
I hear that the rationality and Leverage communities have some sort of history!
Geoff Anders:
That's right. Okay, so basically, Anna, as I mentioned to you when we chatted about this, I wanted to talk about in general Leverage history, and then there's a long history with the rationality community, and right now, it seems like there's... I'd like to understand what happened with the relations, basically.

Like, earlier on, things were substantially more congenial. More communication. There were various types of joint events. Ben, who suggested he would be called by first name, organized the first solstice for the rationality community. He did that while working at Leverage. That was totally fine. I volunteered at the CFAR workshops. Ben also did that. Then, EA Summit 2013, I thought was sort of a big deal. We had you guys sort of do a half-workshop during that. I thought that was great. Ben reminded me that we actually held a book launch for MIRI somehow. I remember the event very vaguely. Yeah, but it was at Luke Nosek's house...
How much of the supply-chain issues are due to monetary policy?
by ChristianKl — 2021-11-07T21:21:54.295Z

The most common explanation I hear for supply chain issues in the economy in the US and Europe is that COVID-19 lockdown measures messed with the supply chains.

On the other hand there seems to be a story of demand for some products having risen. How much of this is downstream of the FED and EZB printing a lot of new money to stimulate demand?
There Meat Come A Scandal...
by Nicholas / Heather Kross — 2021-11-07T20:52:12.025Z
Link: https://www.thinkingmuchbetter.com/main/there-meat-come-a-scandal/

Archived version here.

There are multiple companies working on the problem of lab-grown meat (aka "cultured meat"). Supermeat is trying to grow synthetic chicken meat in an Israeli restaurant. The makers of Just Egg have sold cultured chicken meat to a restaurant in Singapore. Wild Type is even making lab-grown salmon, which I'm personally excited about[1].

The goal is good: end the need for factory farming, while still giving humans something meat-styled to eat [2].

And yet, a scandal may be brewing right under our noses.

Someday soon, as the cultured-meat industry ramps up and new firms enter the market, we could witness this scenario: A restaurant or company finds it cheaper to secretly produce real meat, and more lucrative to label it as lab-grown.

If this happened, the headlines would be irresistible. Real meat being sold to bougie vegans like a counterfeit Gucci bag... it's hilarious! It's also unethical, unsafe, and will likely lead to the end of that company (unless they're already a huge diversified producer).

My Prediction

A private cultured-meat-focused company (anywhere in the world) will become embroiled in a scandal, wherein they'll be correctly accused of having intentionally sold non-cultured meat[3] as cultured meat, for longer than 1 contiguous month, in secret.

What counts:

A Theranos-style years-long con.

A 1-month-long "desperate measure" directed by high-level executives. The CEO doesn't need a paper trail showing it, but at least like the VP Of Food or something.

"It was a temporary solution, we just 'accidentally' used it for a long time".

It still counts even if the company calls it a "beta", as long as they're selling it for money to end-users and/or restaurants.

What doesn't count:

Some guy at a MacBonald's accidentally (or "accidentally") giving someone a normal burger when they ordered a MacCulteredBurger.

Chefs serving non-cultured meat, at a restaurant that serves lab-grown meat, as part of an internal sabotage or slowdown.

This April Fools' Day joke (which was my first result for googling "fake meat real meat scandal lab grown").

The company tries to do this, but they blow their cover in one month or quicker.

The company does this for a total of one month, but on a split/on-and-off basis. (However, it does count if any "on" chunk of time this happens in, is longer than 1 month.w)

This happens with some guy's food truck. It has

...
D&D.Sci Dungeoncrawling: The Crown of Command
by aphyer — 2021-11-07T18:39:22.475Z

STORY (skippable)

Across the world adventurers dive into tombs, mausoleums, and sunken cities in search of treasure. They clear out orcish keeps, goblin camps and dragon lairs to keep the people safe. And they meet with lords who wish to hire them to retrieve a certain item from its lost location.

You are one such lord, the rightful heir of the Kingdom of Calantha. Ever since your family was cruelly cast down from the throne, you have been forced to eke out a miserable existence, with but a few thousand acres of land to call your own, and a couple shabby mansions to live in. But no more! Today your work has born fruit, and you have found out at last where the shards of the Crown of Command were buried when your lineage was deposed.

(It was so unreasonable to object to your family's rulership! Your great-grandfather was the most popular king Calantha has ever had, with 100% approval rating among the populace! Yes, okay, this might have something to do with the Crown's kingdom-wide mind-affecting properties, but it still seems unreasonable for a band of plucky heroes to storm his palace, kill him, break his crown into three pieces, and cast his family into exile).

But now you know where the three pieces were hidden, and you will see your Crown reforged! Then you will reclaim your throne and rule as a wise and just king! (Starting, of course, by wisely hunting down and justly executing every descendent of anyone who was involved with the coup against your great-grandfather).

The three pieces were hidden in dungeons across the land: one in the Lost Temple of Lemarchand, one in the Infernal Den of Cheliax, and one in the Goblin Warrens of Khaz-Gorond. You've been able to find out something about what's defending each of these dungeons, via a mixture of divinations and sending in the last of your dutiful family retainers to scout them out. (Their loyalty and sacrifice will be remembered. Not by you personally, though. You have people for that.) Now all that remains is to hire three teams of foolish adventurers, tell each one you have lost a 'prized family heirloom' in a nearby dungeon, and offer to pay them to retrieve it! Simplicity itself!

Unfortunately, money is...a bit tight. And those greedy adventurers refuse to do anything unless you pay for a 'full party' of 4 of them...
You Don't Need Anthropics To Do Science
by dadadarren — 2021-11-07T15:07:03.266Z
Link: https://www.sleepingbeautyproblem.com/you-dont-need-anthropics-to-do-science/

The anthropic principle is often suggested as essential in linking observations to theories, such that without the proper anthropic assumption, we cannot do science. (For an example of such discussions see Nick Bostrom's ‘Anthropic Bias’ Chapter 3&5)

Say you are conducting an experiment, e.g. measuring the spin of an electron, to evaluate two competing theories. According to theory #1, the probability should be 99% spin up, 1% spin down. For theory #2, 1% spin up and 99% spin down. Let’s say you got the result of spin up. This is strong evidence favoring theory #1. If you were indifferent towards the two theories before, after the experiment you should be 99% sure that theory #1 is the correct one. All this is pretty straightforward.

However many anthropic thinkers would say this reasoning is simple-minded and technically incorrect. Without proper anthropic reasoning, the result only means there is a spin-up electron in the universe. Given the vast size of the universe, a spin-up electron is (practically) guaranteed to exist somewhere according to both theories. You could be a “freak observer” who sees a spin-up in a theory#2 universe. If the universe is infinite, even when the experiment is interpreted using all information available, like defining you as an observer with all specifiable attributes who find the electron spin-up, the outcome would still occur with probability 1 regardless of which theory is correct. So there is no way to evaluate any hypothesis at all.

Their solution is this: you have to regard yourself as a random sample from all observers. What all observers include is another matter of debate, i.e. maybe it should include potentially existing observers or maybe only include actually existing observers, but that part is not relevant for this topic. With this assumption, even though all experiment result happens with a probability of 1 in the universe, they have different probabilities happening to you. So in the end you can still use observations to evaluate theories.

To say the very least, this anthropic consideration seems unnecessary. Good scientific theories should be able to predict our observations, using experiments to evaluate them directly reflects that. The anthropic view above cuts off this tie by “zooming out” and taking a god’s eye view of the entire universe first. By doing so, how to locate “your observation” in the un...
Highlighting New Comments
by jefftk — 2021-11-07T12:50:02.375Z

Keeping track of which comments you have already read in an online
discussion is a pain. It's not too bad in a flat discussion, because
you can scroll up to the last comment you remember reading, but in a
threaded discussion it's really easy to miss things. Sites can solve
this by highlighting new comments:

Why isn't this more common?

The general idea is quite old: mail readers have always marked new
messages, so a threaded view with highlighted messages goes back at
least to the beginning of threading mail readers. I was using this in
the early 2000s, but it's surely older: the In-Reply-To
header goes back to RFC 680 (1975)
via RFC 733
(1977) and RFC
822 (1982).

On web forums, Reddit added new comment highlighting August
2010, but limited it to subscribers (then "Gold", now "Premium").
It used to be a headline feature of Gold (#2 in 2012,
falling to #4 in 2013)
but was dropped from advertising in the 2018
rebrand to Premium.

Since I never bought a Reddit subscription, I first saw new comment
highlighting on LessWrong, where it was added on May
2011. Some time before
2015 (I think it was early 2014) it was added to SlateStarCodex,
and I added it to my commenting system in August 2014. It survived the
LessWrong rewrite, and it's supported by the other deployments of that
platform.

From a technical perspective, it is a pretty small change: you can
implement it client-side in a dozen lines. Many people have written
userscripts to add this functionality to sites that don't have it.

The idea has been around for over ten years, it's very simple to
implement, it dramatically improves the experience of returning to a
complex discussion, but most comment systems that would benefit from
it don't support it. Since at this point the explanation is not going
to be that the people who would need to add it to FB/HN/etc haven't
heard of it, I think the explanation likely goes back to some form of
me (and the LW/EA communities) having unusual preferences? Maybe most
people don't return to discussions? Or find it distracting? What's
going on?

Comment via: facebook
Using Brain-Computer Interfaces to get more data for AI alignment
by Robbo — 2021-11-07T00:00:28.072Z

The purpose of this post is to sketch some ways that Brain Computer Interface (BCI) technology might help with various AI alignment techniques.
Roughly, we can divide the strategic relevance of BCI technology into three broad categories.[1]

Enhancement. BCI technology could enhance human intelligence - for example by providing new sensory modalities, or augmenting cognition. [2]

Merge. BCI technology could enable a “merge” between AIs and humans. This is advocated by among others, Sam Altman and Elon Musk, and is the stated raison d'etre of Neuralink:

“I think if we can effectively merge with AI by improving the neural link between your cortex and your digital extension of yourself, which already...exists, just has a bandwidth issue. And then effectively you become an AI-human symbiote. And if that then is widespread, with anyone who wants it can have it, then we solve the control problem as well, we don't have to worry about some evil dictator AI because we are the AI collectively. That seems like the best outcome I can think of.” -Elon Musk, interview with Y Combinator (2016) [3]

On these proposals, humans are not merely enhanced - in some radical sense, humans merge with AI. It’s not entirely clear what these “merge” proposals mean, what merging would look like (Niplav: “It seems worrying that a complete company has been built on a vision that has no clearly articulated path to success.”), and "merge" as a alignment strategy seems to be quite unpopular in the AI safety community. In future work, I’d like to clarify merge proposals more.

Alignment aid. BCI allows us to get data from the brain that could improve the effectiveness of various AI alignment techniques. Whereas enhancement would indirectly help alignment by making alignment researchers smarter, alignment aid proposals are about directly improving the techniques themselves.

This post is about category 3. In conversation, several AI safety researchers have mentioned that BCI could help with AI alignment by giving us more data or better data. The purpose of this post is to sketch a few ways that this could go, and prompt further scrutiny of these ideas.

1. Types of Brain Computer Interfaces

Various technologies fall under the term “brain computer interface”. The commonality is that they record neural activity and transmit information to a computer for further use -- e.g., controlling an e...