trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Voicing Voice
by Willa — 2021-06-28T04:29:51.332Z

There is this idea of one’s voice, that a person has a voice which only they are capable of developing and uttering, but this is different than the mere act of saying words out loud or writing words down—though those are two common mediums for voicing one’s voice. Searching around online for this idea of voice turns up mostly songs or political websites for different causes (in addition to linguistic and/or psychology related results), though the Merriam-Webster dictionary tries define this sense of voice (see 4a & 4b), but fails to capture all that it is: one’s voice is not just an opinion held and uttered nor solely one’s right to expression nor just a rhetorical device / political tool.

I claim that a human being’s voice is that being’s uniqueness as an entity, incarnate. Someone writing this some years ago may have chosen to use the word “soul” or “essence” instead of the phrase “uniqueness as an entity”, but I tabooed those because (1) I don’t think they clearly convey what I’m communicating and (2) they are curiosity stoppers in ways that “uniqueness as an entity” doesn’t seem to be (you can ask about the idiosyncrasies of an entity and how those differ from those of another entity, and so on). One’s voice comprises their identities, their lived experiences, the material composition of theirself, and all the other things that make one particular human being a unique mind and entity despite sharing so much mind and material design with all other humans. Only one person has a particular voice, only that person can voice that voice, only that person can experience their own life experiences, and only that person can write their own story (for a lovely and inspirational song with this message, see Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten”). I take it as a given that it is beneficial for each human being to develop and enrich their own voice, and ask: dear reader, are you growing and nurturing your own voice? Don’t answer that question yet, hold it with you as you read, please, now to what this voicing voice stuff looks like and why I care about it so much via stories from my life.

At the age of 7, I explicitly believed that I had a secret to take to my grave. Back then in 2002 or so, I had no idea that trans people existed and didn’t learn so + the terminology until much later, but I knew culturally that “someone like me”, who I was and how I felt (born male but...
Optimism about Social Technology
by mike_hawke — 2021-06-27T23:35:31.174Z

In reaction to my morning dose of negativity from [blogger's name redacted], I am compelled to share some contrarian optimism:

I see a decent chance of significant improvements to the human condition in the near future due to breakthroughs in social technology. The historical precedent that comes to mind is the widespread adoption of insurance some hundreds of years ago. (Disclaimer: I skimmed the wikipedia article on insurance a while back and don’t really remember it all that well. Corrections welcome.) Prior to insurance contracts, your only option for hedging against catastrophes was to build up social capital with family & neighbors. Maybe people could expect more automatic community support back then, but this was at a time of drastically lower social and geographic mobility. I’m really glad that I live in a world with markets for explicit insurance policies (even if those policies and markets could be a lot better).

So I have to wonder if at least one of {dominant assurance contracts, quadratic funding, prediction markets, ring signatures, attention auctions, retroactive public goods funding, demand offsets, smart contracts in general, the Prósperan legal system} might catch on and be as much of a game changer as formalized insurance contracts have been.

Sometimes I read someone and think “Well no wonder you’re always so pessimistic & sarcastic...for you, the phrase 'new technology' only evokes smartphone addiction, so you keep hanging all your hopes for the future on the vagaries of national politics.”

I'm motivated to say all this because I recently read a blog post about the collapse of legacy journalism (a hot topic in my echo chamber). The writer said that journalism has devolved into a monoculture of low-paid cultural elites, who are bound by reality very much less than they are bound by their social cliques. He's not wrong, but...he said it all with a such heavy note of despair in his voice. Meanwhile, I personally can’t help but imagine what crazy, cool, more incentive-aligned media model might rise from the ashes of the current system.
Intentionally Making Close Friends
by Neel Nanda — 2021-06-27T23:06:49.269Z
Link: https://www.neelnanda.io/blog/43-making-friends

Introduction

One of the greatest sources of joy in my life are my close friends. People who bring excitement and novelty into my life. Who expose me to new experiences, and ways of seeing the world. Who help me learn, point out my blind spots, and correct me when I am wrong. Who I can lean on when I need support, and who lean on me in turn. Friends who help me grow more into the kind of person I want to be.

I am especially grateful for this, because up until about 4 years ago, I didn’t have any close friends in my life. I had friends, but struggled to form real emotional connections. Moreover, it didn’t even occur to me that I could try to do this. It wasn’t that I knew how to form close friends but was too anxious to try, rather, ‘try to form close friendships’ was a non-standard action, something that never even crossed my mind. And one of my most life-changing experiments was realising that this was something I wanted, and actually trying to intentionally form close friends.

It’s easy to slip into a passive mindset here, to think of emotional connections as ‘something that take time’ or ‘need to happen naturally’. That to be intentional about things is ‘inauthentic’. I think this mindset is absolutely crazy. My close friendships are one of the most important components of my life happiness. Leaving it up to chance feels like passing up an incredible opportunity. As with all important things in life,

this can be optimised

- further, if done right, this adds a massive amount to the lives of me and of my future close friends.

The first half of this post is the story of how I approached intentionally forming close friends, and the second half is an attempt to distill the lessons I learned from this. As such, this post is more autobiographical than most. Feel free to skip to the advice section if you don’t want that. Further, what you value in close friendships is highly personal - this post will focus on what I want in friendships and how I try to get it, but you should adapt this to your own situation, values, and what feels missing in your life!

Exercise: Think about your closest friends, and how these friendships happened. What needs are you fulfilling in each other’s lives? Are you happy with this state of affairs, or is something missing? What could be better?

My story

The Problem

Back when I was in school, I never had close friends. I had friends, people I lik...
Brute force searching for alignment
by Donald Hobson — 2021-06-27T21:54:26.696Z

This is a speculative idea I came up with when writing clankers, which was one of the short stories in the AI vignettes workshop.

The premise is that you already have enough alignment done that you can do non-malign optimization over computationally verifiable goals. In other words, it assumes that you can take any function foo:X→R that you know how to program (and that runs fairly efficiently), and get an AI to pick x∈X to maximize foo .

You begin by considering any problem that you believe may have a conceptually simple core, but you don't know that core yet.

Examples of such problems include

optimizing for a goal that you can't directly observe.
corrigible behaviour
non deceptiveness.

Once you have this list, you create large numbers of grid worlds, and similar. In each world, you specify the quantity to be maximized. For example, if you wanted to understand (1.), you would design a grid world where there are ways to create and destroy blue blocks. There are things that look like blue blocks but aren't. (say the world contains mirrors, so you can have one block and several reflections) The agent can only see its immediate surroundings. The goal is to maximize the number of blue blocks.

You are using an already designed, at least fairly powerful AI, searching for a piece of code. (Brute force would work, except it would take too much compute) The piece of code you are searching for is short. Maybe a few pages, maybe less. You might add some predefined functions, writing most of the agents code and just leaving a few gaps. You might have a piece of code specific to each gridworld, and some code shared between them.

The code you are searching for is an agent. A small toy agent that has the property you don't understand. This agent should be forced to learn about its environment. Its code should be sufficiently short, and the environments sufficiently complex and diverse, that it can't get by with hard coded knowledge. It has to learn.

You are searching for something short, a postcard full of mathematics, not millions of network weights. Your ideal is code you could have written, if you understood the topic at hand. You should be able to put 100 different deterministic 2 player games into this setup, and discover min max trees.

Once the program finishes, you look at the generated code. You are...
What precautions should fully-vaccinated people still be taking?
by Sameerishere — 2021-06-27T19:10:24.312Z

(UPDATE 9/6/21: now that more is known about the Delta variant, I'm being more conservative than I articulated below, and managing to a weekly risk budget of 400 microcovids. The main difference beyond what I articulated below is that I'm no longer interacting freely with fully vaccinated people, but rather considering how risky various interactions are and moderating those accordingly or masking/distancing. I may relax that again based on my determination of how big an issue long covid is, which I'm exploring here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jfHZR6Ykmc5DBSLCp/cliffs-notes-how-much-should-fully-vaccinated-people-care)

ORIGINAL POST, FOR REFERENCE:

As someone who is now several months past my second dose of Pfizer, and who lives in San Francisco, which opened up completely earlier this month, I've been debating what events / spaces are still too risky to spend time in. Here are the rules of thumb I've been following and the thinking that informed them; would be interested in input!

I imagine I could make further progress with further thinking (and/or maybe I should just pick a risk budget and use the microCOVID calculator to stick to it), but figured that since I've done this amount of research and thinking, it might be helpful to some and low-cost for others to help fill in some gaps.

Summary:

I am ok interacting freely (unmasked, indoors) with fully vaccinated people
In "mixed" environments (where I could be interacting with unvaccinated people), I will still take precautions:

Outdoors: wear a mask (KN95 or better) OR distance
Indoors: wear a mask (KN95 or better) AND distance

I will avoid events / spaces where those precautions are impossible
Open questions:

How risky is it to loosen precautions in environments where not everyone is fully-vaccinated?

I'm not quite sure how to use the microcovid calculator to gauge risk in "mixed" settings - does anyone know if they incorporate vaccination rates in your area when you select "I don't know" in response to "Their vaccine"?

It seems like they might, because for a given scenario, answering that question with "Yes" yielded 40 microCOVIDs, "No" yielded 400, and "I don't know" yielded 100, which is much closer to "Yes" than "No". But I haven't thought though the math.

How risky is it to do risky activities (say, kissing, sharing drinks) with people who are fully vaccinated but regularly doing those activities with unv

...
What are some claims or opinions about multi-multi delegation you've seen in the memeplex that you think deserve scrutiny?
by Quinn — 2021-06-27T17:44:52.389Z

I think multi-multi is really hard to think about. One of the first steps I'm taking to get less confused about it is to scrutinize claims or opinions that I've encountered in the wild.

Context

Critch & Krueger 2020 primarily discuss delegation, which is described as "when some humans want something done, those humans can delegate responsibility for the task to one or more AI systems." (p19). Delegation is in fact the composition of three subproblems; comprehension ("the human ability to understand how an AI system works and what it will do"), instruction ("the human ability to convey instructions to an AI system regarding what it should do"), and control ("the human ability to retain or regain control of a situation involving an AI system, especially in cases where the human is unable to successfully comprehend or instruct the AI system via the normal means intended by the system’s designers"). The four flavors of delegation are single-(human principal)/single-AI-(system), single-(human principal)/multi-AI-(systems), multi-(human principals)/single-AI-(system), and multi-(human principals)/multi-AI-(systems).

Naturally, the traditional "alignment problem" is roughly single-single delegation, especially single-single control. Aspects of single-multi can be made sense of in light of Dafoe et. al. 2020, and aspects of multi-single can be made sense of in light of Baum 2020, but it's difficult to find even minimal footholds in multi-multi.

Here's some notes from Critch about what makes multi-multi problematic:

I almost never refer to a multi-multi alignment, because I don’t know what it means and it’s not clear what the values of multiple different stakeholders even is. What are you referring to when you say the values are this function? ...
So, I don’t say multi-multi alignment a lot, but I do sometimes say single-single alignment to emphasize that I’m talking about the single stakeholder version. I think the multi-multi alignment concept almost doesn’t make sense. ...
And the idea that there’s this thing called human values, that we’re all in agreement about. And there’s this other thing called AI that just has to do with the human value says. And we have to align the AI with human values. It’s an extremely simplified story. It’s got two agents and it’s just like one big agent called the humans. And then there’s this one big agent called AIs. And we’re jus

...
Finite Factored Sets: LW transcript with running commentary
by Rob Bensinger — 2021-06-27T16:02:06.063Z

This is an edited transcript of Scott Garrabrant's May 23 LessWrong talk on finite factored sets. Video:

Slides: https://intelligence.org/files/Factored-Set-Slides.pdf

Since there are existing introductions to finite factored sets that are shorter (link) or more formal (link), I decided to do things a bit differently with this transcript:

I've incorporated Scott's slides into the transcript, and cut out some parts of the transcript that are just reading a slide verbatim.
There was a text chat and Google Doc attendees used to discuss the talk while it was happening; I've inserted excerpts from this conversation into the transcript, in grey boxes.
Scott also paused his talk at various times to answer questions; I've included these Q&A sections in white boxes.

Finite Factored Sets

Anonymous α: Scott: do you have any suspicions that the basis of the mathematics is poorly fit to reality (q.v. Banach-Tarski decomposition)?

Daniel Filan: I really liked it when causality came from pictures that I can look at. Does finite factored sets have pictures? One way this could be true is if it were some sort of category. Like, every other way I know of thinking about time (Newtonian mechanics, general relativity) is super geometric.

Ramana Kumar: In case others are interested, I’ve been formalising these results in

HOL

(as I did for Cartesian Frames, which recently was

posted publicly

)

Daniel Filan: (why) is HOL a good system in which to formalize these things?

Ramana Kumar: Mainly: just because it’s possible, and I know the system/logic well. HOL is pretty good for most of math though - see

this

for some advocacy.

Daniel Kilan: thx, will give that a look!

Quinn Dougherty: +1

Some Context

Scott: I'm going to start with some context. For people who are not already familiar with my work: My main motivation is to reduce existential risk. This leads me to want to figure out how to

align

advanced AI. This leads me to want to become

less confused

about intelligence and about

agents embedded in their environment

. I think there are a lot of hard open problems in trying to figure out how to do this.

This leads me to do a bunch of weird math and philosophy, and this talk is going to be an example of some of that weird math and philosophy.

Factoring the Talk

Scott: This talk can be split into 2×5=10 parts. For example, this slide is in part 1 (the combinatoric...
Nuclear Strategy in a Semi-Vulnerable World
by Jackson Wagner — 2021-06-27T08:17:07.735Z

(This article is cross-posted from my brand-new blog, jacksonw.xyz, but there's nothing else there yet unless you're into puzzle videogames Braid and The Witness.)

Bostrom's Vulnerable World Hypothesis

In his paper The Vulnerable World Hypothesis, Nick Bostrom invokes a thought experiment about "easy nukes" -- what if it were possible to create incredibly destructive weapons with extreme ease? Considering a "counterfactual history in which Leo Szilard invents nuclear fission and realizes that a nuclear bomb could be made with a piece of glass, a metal object, and a battery arranged in a particular configuration," the situation seems hopeless -- although the information could perhaps be kept secret by classifying and policing the relevant academic fields, eventually the knowledge would get out. In a world where anyone with the right instructions can create a nuclear weapon, the imminent collapse of civilization seems almost inevitable. Even the best-case scenarios
involve zealously purging the world of glass and electrical equipment, totalitarian surveillance, and a quickly-growing count of irradiated craters.

Bostrom uses this thought experiment to illustrate the general principle that, since the capabilities of future technologies are unknown, at any point we could be about to stumble upon a discovery that "makes the devastation of civilization extremely likely, unless civilization sufficiently exits the semi-anarchic default condition" of limited preventative policing, limited global governance, and diverse motivations.

In this post, I want to use a modification of Bostrom's thought experiment to explore the specific dynamics of nuclear proliferation. What if nuclear weapons were intermediate in difficulty between metal/glass/battery "easy nukes", and real nukes with their highly-enriched uranium encased in shaped charges of exotic, perfectly-timed high-explosives? What if all you needed for a nuclear bomb was to pack some ordinary, unenriched uranium-238 into a box of TNT?

Semi-Vulnerable: U-238 Is All You Need

Following the EA Forum question by eca that originally prompted my thoughts, we'll imagine that the secret of semi-easy nukes was revealed to the world in 1950. Disclaimer: I don't have any kind of special insight into nuclear strategy, policy, or technology -- I'm just a typical internet layperson trying to think things through based on what I...
The Unexpected Hanging Paradox
by Chris_Leong — 2021-06-27T06:17:08.128Z

The Unexpected Hanging Paradox has been described as follows:

A judge tells a condemned prisoner that he will be hanged at noon on one weekday in the following week but that the execution will be a surprise to the prisoner. He will not know the day of the hanging until the executioner knocks on his cell door at noon that day.

Having reflected on his sentence, the prisoner draws the conclusion that he will escape from the hanging. His reasoning is in several parts. He begins by concluding that the "surprise hanging" can't be on Friday, as if he hasn't been hanged by Thursday, there is only one day left - and so it won't be a surprise if he's hanged on Friday. Since the judge's sentence stipulated that the hanging would be a surprise to him, he concludes it cannot occur on Friday.

He then reasons that the surprise hanging cannot be on Thursday either, because Friday has already been eliminated and if he hasn't been hanged by Wednesday noon, the hanging must occur on Thursday, making a Thursday hanging not a surprise either. By similar reasoning, he concludes that the hanging can also not occur on Wednesday, Tuesday or Monday. Joyfully he retires to his cell confident that the hanging will not occur at all.

The next week, the executioner knocks on the prisoner's door at noon on Wednesday — which, despite all the above, was an utter surprise to him. Everything the judge said came true.

I first heard this paradox years ago, but only now do I think that I can provide a satisfactory account. I guess some people won't see this as a deeply challenging problem though, as it's quite clear that the word "unexpected" is under-defined. For example, it could mean unexpected based on the information that you have at the start or unexpected based on the information you have on a particular day or unexpected based on the day of the hanging.

We'll consider different definitions of unexpected, which involves considering different definitions of expectected. We'll define E* as expected based on the information that you have at the start, which we'll further clarify as meaning that you are able to logically deduce that it must be on a particular day. Clearly, no day is expected based on definition E*, which mean that a hanging any day would be unexpected based on this information. Call this definition of unexpected U*.

Next, we'll define E1 to mean expected based on the information you ...
Sam Altman and Ezra Klein on the AI Revolution
by Zack_M_Davis — 2021-06-27T04:53:17.219Z
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/11/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-sam-altman.html

On The New York Times's Ezra Klein Show podcast, Klein interviews OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on the future of AI (archived with transcript). (Note the nod to Slate Star Codex in the reading recommendations at the end.)

My favorite ("favorite") part of the transcript was this:

EZRA KLEIN: Do you believe in 30 years we're going to have self-intelligent systems going off and colonizing the universe?

SAM ALTMAN: Look, timelines are really hard. I believe that will happen someday. I think it doesn't really matter if it's 10 or 30 or 100 years. The fact that this is going to happen, that we're going to help engineer, or merge with or something, our own descendants that are going to be capable of things that we literally cannot imagine. That somehow seems way more important than the tax rate or most other things.

"Help engineer, or merge with, or something." Indeed! I just wish there were some way to get Altman to more seriously consider that ... the specific details of the "help engineer [...] or something" actually matter? Details that Altman himself may be unusually well-positioned to affect?