trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The Sequences on YouTube
by Neil  — 2024-01-07T01:44:39.663Z

tl;dr: Do you have any thoughts/advice/warnings/ideas for someone who wants to turn the Sequences into a series of YouTube videos?

Naturally, this post also exists as a video.

I will be:

Turning all 50 Sequence Highlights posts into 6-15 minute videos
Hopefully 1-2 a week
Just a guy talking into a camera, no fancy effects yet

I'm looking for:

Someone who can edit videos. I can do it myself, it will only be slightly more complicated. (I’m running on a Chromebook.) I'll be searching for interim solutions and I'm not sure what I'll end up settling on, but the more options, the better.
Ideas. This community is supposed to be good at arriving at good idea through First Principles regardless of whether they end up looking weird or not. If you want to help, think about this for 5 minutes, by the clock.

I have:

Slack

Zero experience in video.
(But I do theater?)
(And I'm motivated.)
A Blue Yeti mic

I'm doing this because:

YouTube has a much larger audience potential than this website currently has. More people learning about the Sequences is good.
People who come here and haven't read the Sequences may do more damage than good. Only, not everyone is interested in sitting down and reading 8 hours of blog posts before being a-okayed to speak.
This project has been

tried before using Minecraft railcarts and a robot voice

, but it didn't curate many views. This is not the same project. There are plenty of longform high-views videos on YouTube (eg. video essays or

RealEngineering videos

) and this wouldn't even be longform. Short attention spans are not the perceived problem here.

Ideas that might work:

The Sequences are more than a decade old, and Eliezer and others have noted how they are flawed and outdated in certain specific ways. So:

I might change the writing a little if better for video. The writing in itself isn't sacred to me, I'm just here to facilitate the transmission of ideas.
Of course, I am pretty foolish and should be running any changes by the LW audience before doing anything drastic. (And Eliezer, if he deems this project worthy of some attention.)
Having LW users write short afterwords to videos might be a good idea to address some problems and concrete applications of lessons without editing the original text. I could also plug CFAR.

It'd be nice to be able to ship new viewers into a space

...
AI Risk and the US Presidential Candidates
by Zane — 2024-01-06T20:18:04.945Z

It's the new year, and the 2024 primaries are approaching, starting with the Iowa Republican causus on January 15. For a lot of people here on LessWrong, the issue of AI risk will likely be an important factor in making a decision. AI hasn't been mentioned much during any of the candidates' campaigns, but I'm attempting to analyze the information that there is, and determine which candidate is most likely to bring about a good outcome.

A few background facts about my own position - such that if these statements do not apply to you, you won't necessarily want to take my recommendation:

I believe that, barring some sort of action to prevent this, the default result of creating artificial superintelligence is human extinction.
I believe that our planet is very far behind in alignment research compared to capabilities, and that this means we will likely need extensive international legislation to slow/pause/stop the advance of AI systems in order to survive.
I believe that preventing ASI from killing humanity is so much more important than any[1] other issue in American politics that I intend to vote solely on the basis of AI risk, even if this requires voting for candidates I would otherwise not have wanted to vote for.[2]
I believe that no mainstream politicians are currently suggesting any plans that would be sufficient for survival, nor do they even realize the problem exists. Most mainstream discourse on AI safety is focused on comparatively harmless risks, like misinformation and bias. The question I am asking is "which of these candidates seems most likely to end up promoting a somewhat helpful AI policy" rather than "which of these candidates has already noticed the problem and proposed the ideal solution," since the answer to the second question is none of them.

(Justification for these beliefs is not the subject of this particular post.)

And a few other background facts about the election, just in case you haven't been following American politics:

As the incumbent president, Joe Biden is essentially guaranteed to be the Democratic nominee, unless he dies or is otherwise incapacitated.
Donald Trump is leading in the polls for Republican nominee by very wide margins, followed by Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Chris Christie. Manifold[3] currently gives him an 88% chance of winning the nomination.
However, Trump is facing criminal charges

...
Lack of Spider-Man is evidence against the simulation hypothesis
by RamblinDash — 2024-01-06T18:17:20.641Z

This is a very short post, but I haven't seen this argument elsewhere so I wanted to write it up.

The basic argument in favor of the simulation hypothesis runs like this:

Far future people will likely be able to and want to create simulated realities
If they do, they will likely create many such simulations
The people in the simulations will not know they are in a simulation
We are probably some of those simulated people

I guess this is sort of an attack on #1 - looking around at the world today, people do create many (low-fidelity) simulations of the world, which we call video games. Some are more realistic than others, and actually most are very unrealistic and full of wild and crazy stuff!

Obviously this is an undercount on both sides, but I think it's instructive to compare The Sims to Spider-Man. According to Wikipedia, there have been 14 The Sims games, selling a total of about 200 million copies. That's a lot of simulations! But even looking at just one character, there are approximately 40 video games just with Spider-Man in the title, plus many more games that contain Spider-Man. I didn't easily find total sales numbers but just eyeballing the list, I know that some of those games were pretty damn popular. I think it's easily the case that these 40 Spider-Man games collectively outsold The Sims by a ton.

If our theory that future people will likely want to create simulations is based on looking at the kinds of things that present people want to do, and extrapolating (and how could it be based on anything else?), then we should conclude that simulations are far more likely to be fantastical than to be mundane. The fact that we live in a mundane world is some evidence against simulation.
A Land Tax For Britain
by A.H. — 2024-01-06T15:52:14.942Z

This essay was written as an entry to the TxP Progress Prize. The prize is run in partnership with Civic Future and New Statesman Spotlight to encourage blog posts responding to the question 'Britain is stuck. How can we get it moving again?'.

The result is a bit more 'argumentative' than my usual style, so do skip if that's not your thing.

The British economy is stagnating. Tax levels are the highest they have been in 70 years, with 24% of tax revenue coming from income taxes. Many people are struggling to pay rents and the proportion of income spent on rent by private renters has increased from less than 10% in 1968 to over 25% in 2020. Pubs and music venues across the UK are closing due to high rents. Housebuilding, which would relieve these problems, has consistently fallen below the required levels. At the same time, vast brownfield sites which could be developed are left unused and many of the properties that are built are simply left empty, and held as a speculative investment [1]. It may be surprising to learn that there is a single policy which addresses all of these problems. It was first proposed over 100 years ago by Henry George and has been endorsed by figures as diverse as Albert Einstein, Milton Friedman, Leo Tolstoy and Joseph Stiglitz .

The solution is to tax the unimproved rental value of land, at a rate close to 100%. Then, to use the revenues from this to reduce taxes on economically productive activities by reducing income taxes. Under this proposal, each year, landowners would pay in tax the amount it would cost to rent the land (minus any improvements, such as buildings) for that year.

Landlords make their money by owning property, and charging people to live or work there. Some of their income comes from work they do maintaining the property or capital investment they put in to creating the property, which are both economically productive activities. But a large proportion of their income comes from something else. This can be seen by that fact that many landlords choose to hand their properties over to letting agents who perform all maintenance and investment in the property, while only taking a fraction of the rental income, leaving the rest to the landlord. If the letting agents are performing all of the capital investment and labour, where is the rest of the landlord's income coming from? The answer is land. A landlo...
Book review: Trick or treatment (2008)
by Fleece Minutia — 2024-01-06T15:40:49.953Z

TL;DR: Read if you enjoy witnessing applied rationality.

In their book from 2008, Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst went through the evidence for and against a large range of alternative, a.k.a. complementary, health interventions. And wowza, was that an interesting journey!

Outline

The first chapter, titled "How do you determine the truth?" effectively fulfills its purpose. I wish my whole family had read and understood this chapter ;-)

Chapters 2-5 each take a close look at a well-known alternative treatment, describing its history and (postulated) way of working, then turning to the evidence and drawing conclusions from that. That is, the authors apply the standards from Chapter 1 to a selection of treatments.

Chapter 6, the last chapter of the book, is prescriptive. Fingers are pointed at different entities that cause the spread of useless or dangerous treatments, and suggestions made for what they should do differently. In my opinion it is optional; I understand why the authors include this, but I'm not convinced the information is useful for small fish like myself.

Reasons to read it

The book is a tour de force in applied rationality: Put aside prejudice, consider the evidence regarding the thing being studied, then draw appropriately strong or weak conclusions. Reading it improved my procedural knowledge.

I especially like that they explain what concrete facts make them rate a piece of evidence as higher or lower quality.

The authors take the reader by the hand. They provide illuminating anecdotes where appropriate, explain things in accessible but not imprecise ways, and remind us that strange ideas might work, even if their postulated way of working is inconsistent with our understanding of the world works.
I learned a lot, including

More about placebo, including what it can and cannot do, and how to control for it in various contexts
That smart people can end up advocating absolute bogus. This, to me, is the Rationality equivalent of memento mori: You can have a great track record of being right and still be completely off the tracks.
The beautiful concept of Cochrane reviews: high-level summaries on what we (humanity) currently know about how well intervention A works on problem P, including and quality-weighting all the evidence to date. This seems to me like the top-tier golden ultimate standard in how sure we can be about anything, given the av

...
Are we inside a black hole?
by Jay — 2024-01-06T13:30:51.451Z

Epistemic status: Wildly speculative. I am not a physicist. It may quickly become apparent that I have no idea what I'm talking about. Nevertheless, I found the thought experiment interesting.

The set of models known as superstring theory posits the existence of multiple compactified dimensions in addition to the usual three spatial and one temporal dimension, which I'll call 3+1 space. Here I will suggest that an observer approaching a black hole might perceive 3+1 space collapsing into a 2+1 space. By extension, our 3+1 space may have resulted from gravitational collapse in a higher dimensional space (possibly more than once).

Consider an observer approaching a black hole. If the observer is well clear of the event horizon, the observer has three degrees of spatial freedom. We can describe its position in space using the common spherical coordinates of r, phi, and theta. R is the distance between the observer and the center of the black hole. Phi and theta are two angles equivalent to latitude and longitude on Earth.

As the observer approaches the black hole, the gravitational force Fg increases. The forces acting on the observer in the radial dimension can be summarized as Fg+X, where X is all other forces acting on the observer in the radial dimension. As the observer approaches the singularity, Fg grows without bound and X becomes increasingly irrelevant.

At this point, the observer's position in the radial dimension r is, for all practical purposes, a function of time. The observer has lost all capability to affect its motion in the r dimension. Any length the observer may have had along the r dimension will be stripped away in the process of spaghettification. The observer would no longer be able to perceive r and time as separate dimensions. The point r=0 would be, to the observer, both the center of the universe and the infinite future.

Two spatial dimensions would remain, phi and theta, and the observer would be able to freely move across the surface of the sphere (subject to the constraint that the accessible sphere is changing with time). The observer would live in a 2+1 universe (if whatever remained of the observer was capable of surviving).

Note that particles of very low mass are not completely localized in space. Even under the influence of the b...
Survey of 2,778 AI authors: six parts in pictures
by KatjaGrace — 2024-01-06T04:43:34.590Z

Crossposted from AI Impacts blog

The 2023 Expert Survey on Progress in AI is out, this time with 2778 participants from six top AI venues (up from about 700 and two in the 2022 ESPAI), making it probably the biggest ever survey of AI researchers.

People answered in October, an eventful fourteen months after the 2022 survey, which had mostly identical questions for comparison.

Here is the preprint. And here are six interesting bits in pictures (with figure numbers matching paper, for ease of learning more):

1. Expected time to human-level performance dropped 1-5 decades since the 2022 survey. As always, our questions about ‘high level machine intelligence’ (HLMI) and ‘full automation of labor’ (FAOL) got very different answers, and individuals disagreed a lot (shown as thin lines below), but the aggregate forecasts for both sets of questions dropped sharply. For context, between 2016 and 2022 surveys, the forecast for HLMI had only shifted about a year.

(Fig 3)

(Fig 4)

2. Time to most narrow milestones decreased, some by a lot. AI researchers are expected to be professionally fully automatable a quarter of a century earlier than in 2022, and NYT bestselling fiction dropped by more than half to ~2030. Within five years, AI systems are forecast to be feasible that can fully make a payment processing site from scratch, or entirely generate a new song that sounds like it’s by e.g. Taylor Swift, or autonomously download and fine-tune a large language model.

(Fig 2)

3. Median respondents put 5% or more on advanced AI leading to human extinction or similar, and a third to a half of participants gave 10% or more. This was across four questions, one about overall value of the future and three more directly about extinction.

(Fig 10)

4. Many participants found many scenarios worthy of substantial concern over the next 30 years. For every one of eleven scenarios and ‘other’ that we asked about, at least a third of participants considered it deserving of substantial or extreme concern.

(Fig 10)

5. There are few confident optimists or pessimists about advanced AI: high hopes and dire concerns are usually found together. 68% of participants who thought HLMI was more likely to lead to good outcomes than bad, but nearly half of these people put at least 5% on extremely bad outcomes such as human extinction, and 59% of net pessimists gave 5% or more to extremely go...
Project ideas: Epistemics
by Lukas Finnveden — 2024-01-05T23:41:23.721Z
Link: https://www.forethought.org/research/project-ideas-epistemics

This is part of a series of lists of projects. The unifying theme is that the projects are not targeted at solving alignment or engineered pandemics but still targeted at worlds where transformative AI is coming in the next 10 years or so. See here for the introductory post.

If AI capabilities keep improving, AI could soon play a huge role in our epistemic landscape. I think we have an opportunity to affect how it’s used: increasing the probability that we get great epistemic assistance and decreasing the extent to which AI is used to persuade people of false beliefs.

Before I start listing projects, I’ll discuss:

Why AI could matter a lot for epistemics. (Both positively and negatively.)
Why working on this could be urgent. (And not something we should just defer to the future.) Here, I’ll separately discuss:

That it’s important for epistemics to be great in the near term (and not just in the long run) to help us deal with all the tricky issues that will arise as AI changes the world.
That there may be path-dependencies that affect humanity’s long-run epistemics.

Why AI matters for epistemics

On the positive side, here are three ways AI could substantially increase our ability to learn and agree on what’s true.

Truth-seeking motivations. We could be far more confident that AI systems are motivated to learn and honestly report what’s true than is typical for humans. (Though in some cases, this will require significant progress on alignment.) Such confidence would make it much easier and more reliable for people to outsource investigations of difficult questions.
Cheaper and more competent investigations. Advanced AI would make high-quality cognitive labor much cheaper, thereby enabling much more thorough and detailed investigations of important topics. Today, society has some ability to converge on questions with overwhelming evidence. AI could generate such overwhelming evidence for much more difficult topics.
Iteration and validation. It will be much easier to control what sort of information AI has and hasn’t seen. (Compared to the difficulty of controlling what information humans have and haven’t seen.) This will allow us to run systematic experiments on whether AIs are good at inferring the right answers to questions that they’ve never seen the answer to.

For one, this will give supporting evidence to the above two bullet points. If AI systems systematica

...
Almost everyone I’ve met would be well-served thinking more about what to focus on
by Henrik Karlsson — 2024-01-05T21:01:27.861Z
Link: https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/multi-armed-bandit

Almost everyone I’ve ever met would be well-served by spending more time thinking about what to focus on. —Sam Altman

In May 2020, we parked two moving trucks in the harbor and carried everything we owned from one to the other. Johanna, Maud, and I were leaving Sweden, and Covid restrictions meant we were forbidden from returning once we boarded the ferry. Hence the second truck, which we had gotten a stranger to ferry from the island to us: the Swedish truck had to stay in Sweden.

The motivation to leave was that we wanted to homeschool Maud, who was 3. In Sweden, this is illegal, so most Swedish homeschoolers end up on one of two islands in the Baltic Sea. On our island, we knew no one. We had no jobs awaiting. We were leaving something, more than going somewhere. The life we had grown piecemeal over 30 years disappeared overnight. We had to figure out what to replace it with. Should I start another software consultancy to support us? Could I write? How would we find a meaningful social context?

Life is a multi-armed bandit

The moldy apartment we rented as we looked for a house has a view of the sea. Every day, deep into winter, I’d walk down to the water and dive from the cliffs. Swimming in the channels between the rocks, I realized I could model our situation using a concept from probability theory.

It was a

multi-armed bandit problem

. This problem, which, under a different name, had

first been studied

by the biologist

William R. Thompson

in 1933, centers on a rather surreal thought experiment. A gambler faces a slot machine (“a one-armed bandit”), except this machine doesn’t have one arm—following some twisted dream logic, it has k arms, arms sticking out in every direction. Some of these arms have a high probability of paying out the jackpot, others are worse. But the gambler does not know which is which.

The problem is pulling the arms in an order that maximizes the expected total gains. ("Gains" could be anything. Early on, the problem was used to design drug trials. There, the jackpot was defined as finding a successful treatment. If you are looking for a partner, talking to people is how you pull the multi-armed bandit and the resonance (or lack thereof) is the payoff.)

The gambler needs to learn new knowledge about the machines and simultaneously use what they have already learned to optimize their decisions. In t...
The Next ChatGPT Moment: AI Avatars
by kolmplex — 2024-01-05T20:14:10.074Z

Epistemic Status: Speculative. Dependent on intuitions about near-term AI tech and human psychology.

Claim: Within the next 1-3 years, many people will have an interaction with an AI avatar that feels authentically human. This will significantly amplify the public perception of current AI capabilities and risks.

An AI avatar is a realistic AI-generated render of a human (speech and video) that can have a real-time conversation with a human, for example over a video call.

The individual components needed to implement AI avatars already exist. AI is capable of holding a conversation over text, transcribing speech to text, and synthesizing natural-sounding speech.[1] Generating photorealistic video of a talking human is currently limited, but

still impressive

and making rapid progress.

Taken together, these capabilities mean it will soon be possible to create a realistic AI avatar. The first generation avatars will be a bit rough, especially the rendered video, but overall there don't seem to be large conceptual hurdles to creating convincing AI avatars.[2]

Personal conversation with a high-quality AI avatar will have a significant emotional and mental impact on most people.[3] The impact will be especially acute for people distant from the world of AI, but will also affect those familiar with AI.

For humans, communication medium matters just as much as content. The same words can hit much harder when spoken in an emotive voice by an expressive face, than when silently read off a screen. Having a realistic personal conversation with an AI avatar will change people's gut-level intuitions about AI.

For better or worse, once decent AI avatars become generally accessible, public sentiment around AI will experience another shift comparable to the one spurred by ChatGPT.[4] AI will be perceived as more human-like and capable. It will seem like an independent agent that possesses "true intelligence".

After talking with a realistic AI avatar, the common refrains of "It's not actually intelligent, it just predicts the next token" and "Why would it want anything?" won’t resonate with the public. For many people, consciousness is a prerequisite for real AI, and human-like AI avatars will appear to be a direct instantiation of that.

ChatGPT’s release was a cultural moment.[5] It captured the public’s imagination and triggered a reclassificati...