trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The time I got really into poker
by KatjaGrace — 2021-01-11T13:00:17.856Z

One time I decided it would be good to learn to play poker. I had probably learned to play some form of poker a couple of other times before, and forgotten. One way to play a game a lot is to play it with a computer rather than other people. An iPad turns Agricola from one of the slowest games that casual board gamers might still be bothered to play to something you can play a few quick rounds of over lunch. I downloaded some kind of poker app, and began. It was maybe 9pm, and I was maybe sitting on my bed, in maybe Berkeley. My memories are pretty unclear. The app was green I think, like some kind of casino table.

In the app there were a series of tables with increasing stakes. The first one was ‘your grandmother’s table’ or something, at which you needed almost no money to play, and were given a lot of advice about what to do. If you won several games there, you could afford a single game at the next table up, and so on. If you lost enough that you could no longer buy in at your higher table, you would drop down, and if you could no longer afford grandmother’s, then you could transfer American dollars to the app-maker in exchange for more fake poker money, and keep going.

I got the hang of the rules and began to play fast. And I got the hang of not losing and bought my way into higher tables. I played faster. I didn’t pause. The ends of games got the same reflexive flash of choice as any other part of the game. Time passed, and lots and lots of games. My mind started to wander, even while I played. It wandered to a memory of long ago, more vivid and detailed than memories that come when I call for them. How strange. I played very fast. And more memories appeared, intense against the smooth background of mindless poker. I don’t usually remember things for pleasure—recollection is a neutral activity, if not about something particularly upsetting or nice. But these were somehow pleasing. Not because they were about anything that would usually inspire happiness—they were mundane scenes, like a road that I crossed once to get to a gas station, and the look of the gas station, and the feeling of the sky and the car and the other passenger waiting and the afternoon (not a real example necessarily; I forget all of the particulars now)—but in their mere pungent existence, they felt somehow satisfying. I drifted between them and frantic yet peaceful poker. Hours passe...
Shouldn't it matter to the victim?
by Joe Carlsmith — 2021-01-11T07:16:28.453Z

(Cross-posted from Hands and Cities)

This post describes what I see as a basic but powerful objection to treating certain deontological distinctions as justified via some intrinsically important moral difference they reflect or respond to. In brief, the objection is that the distinctions in question are not, in the right way, important to the potential victims of harm. I focus on the doing vs. allowing distinction to illustrate the point, then briefly discuss how I think the objection does and does not generalize to other features of non-consequentialist ethics.

I think of this objection as “basic” in the sense that it seems to me quite natural and immediate, and a number of people have indicated to me that something closely related is core to their own skepticism towards deontological justifications of the relevant type. My own thinking on the topic stems mostly from many hours of conversation with Ketan Ramakrishnan, whose work (for example, the last section of his 2016 paper “Treating People as Tools,” as well as some unpublished work) treats closely related worries in depth. I expect that the type of objection I describe is discussed elsewhere in the philosophical literature as well, perhaps extensively, though other examples of in-depth treatment aren’t, at the moment, coming to mind (this isn’t a literature I’ve gone particularly deep on).

I. Doing and allowing

Many philosophers aspire to validate some sort of moral distinction between doing and allowing harm. Here’s an example.

Case 1: Maria is driving to the hospital on a country road with no other traffic, and she needs to get there soon, or she will die. On the side of the road, she sees Wilfred, who is hurt, and who will die if he doesn’t get help. If Maria stops to help Wilfred, though, she won’t make it to the hospital on time, and will die herself.
Case 2: Again, Maria is driving to the hospital, and needs to get there soon on pain of death. And again, she encounters Wilfred. This time, though, Wilfred is healthy, but immovably stuck in the middle of a narrow bridge, such that the only way for Maria to get to the hospital on time is to run over Wilfred’s body, killing him.

In both cases, Maria must choose: her life, or Wilfred’s. But the cases seem different along some important dimension. In particular, Maria’s running over Wilfred in Case 2 seems intuitively impermissible; whereas in Case 1, i...
Avoid Unnecessarily Political Examples
by Raemon — 2021-01-11T05:41:56.439Z

One of the motivations for You have about five words was the post Politics is the Mindkiller. That post essentially makes four claims:

Politics is the mindkiller. Therefore:
If you're not making a point about politics, avoid needlessly political examples.
If you are trying to make a point about general politics, try to use an older example that people don't have strong feelings about.
If you're making a current political point, try not to make it unnecessarily political by throwing in digs that tar the entire outgroup, if that's not actually a key point.

But, not everyone read the post. And not everyone who read the post stored all the nuance for easy reference in their brain. The thing they remembered, and told their friends about, was "Politics is the mindkiller." Some people heard this as "politics == boo". LessWrong ended up having a vague norm about avoiding politics at all.

This norm might have been good, or bad. Politics is the mindkiller, and if you don't want to get your minds killed, it may be good not to have your rationality website deal directly with it too much. But, also, politics is legitimately important sometimes. How to balance that? Not sure. It's tough. Here's some previous discussion on how to think about it. I endorse the current LW system where you can talk about politics but it's not frontpaged.

But, I'm not actually here today to talk about that. I'm here to basically copy-paste the post but give it a different title, so that one of the actual main points has an clearer referent.

I'm not claiming this is more or less important than the "politics is the mindkiller" concept, just that it was an important concept for people to remember separately.

So:

Avoid unnecessarily political examples.

The original post is pretty short. Here's the whole thing. Emphasis mine:

People go funny in the head when talking about politics. The evolutionary reasons for this are so obvious as to be worth belaboring: In the ancestral environment, politics was a matter of life and death. And sex, and wealth, and allies, and reputation . . . When, today, you get into an argument about whether “we” ought to raise the minimum wage, you’re executing adaptations for an ancestral environment where being on the wrong side of the argument could get you killed. Being on the right side of the argument could let you kill your hated rival!

If you want to make a point about

...
Mini thoughts on mintheism
by CraigMichael — 2021-01-11T05:14:59.524Z

[Epistemic status: Hunch in the form of a neologism. I've heard this idea—that I'm dubbing mintheism here—implied in several corners of the Internet. I want to give it a name and take a stab at why it's plausible. This post presupposes a connection between the decline in religious affiliation and the rise of conspiracy theories.]

The gist of it

Put like an SAT analogy, mintheism is to atheism as minarchy is to anarchy.

Fully defined, mintheism is a cost-benefit approach to religious belief and practice within a society that attempts to find the optimal amounts and kinds of religious belief and practice that achieve prosocial outcomes while minimizing antisocial side-effects.

Under this definition, there's many different ways one could solve the optimization problem. I'll explain my take which I'll call the nonsense management approach.

A little nonsense now and then is... necessary for signaling loyalty to your tribe

Social isolation is really undesirable and has measurable negative outcomes (that sentence has 10 words and 8 hyperlinks, sorry). So let's assume people want to be part of a tribe and that conservation of tribalism is basically accurate (analogous to conservation of mass—the level tribalism within a society is never created or destroyed, it just changes forms).

Building on an insight from Mencius Moldbug, the pen name of Curtis Yarvin of Neo-reactionary fame in An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives. (Please don't mistake this as staning for Yarvin. While the quoted insight is a good one, I would encourage those who haven't yet to read Scott Alexander's Anti-Reactionary FAQ).

"...in many ways nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army."

I'll go a little further than Moldbug and say nonsense is a necessary to create and maintain tribes successfully as tribes wouldn't be tribes without sufficiently loyal adherents.

Consider one of the many practices necessary to keep kosher in Judaism, keeping milk and meat separate—specifically not eating meat and diary as part of the same meal. It's difficult to imagine that someone who eats the same amount of cheese and meat but eats them at different times of the day achieves a nut...
Efficiency Wages: A Double-Edged Sword
by Aaron Bergman — 2021-01-11T04:43:09.201Z
Link: https://aaronbergman.substack.com/p/efficiency-wages-a-double-edged-sword

Why paying less (sometimes) buys you more

I.

Suppose you’re an employer trying to hire for an important position. Maybe your organization is (or seems) socially beneficial, so some people genuinely care about your mission, or maybe the role is quite enjoyable for some. Either way, the position provides potential employees something they care significantly about beyond the pay.

Still, no one is going to do it for free, and you have to decide how much compensation to offer. The naive, Econ 101-strawman thing to do is to choose the salary that will just barely attract one qualified person to fill the role.

But, obviously, “qualified” is doing a lot of work here. There’s a reason that real firms interview dozens of candidates for a single slot, even though they could save money and make hiring easier by offering less. Namely, higher wages attract more qualified and experienced candidates, increase employee satisfaction (and thus productivity), and decrease turnover. In general, above-market-clearing wages offered for these reasons are known as “

efficiency wages

.”

II

At first glance, it seems that higher wages attract better candidates, who in turn make for better employees. In general, I think this is correct. However, employers face the timeless challenge of selecting from a pool of candidates with only a few pieces of information about each, none of which are exceptionally indicative of future job performance. Attracting more candidates isn’t always a good (or even neutral) thing - you might accidentally hire someone who performs worse than his resume and interview indicated.

Basically everyone cares about money, but not everyone cares to the same degree. So, offering a nicer salary will attract better candidates, but it will also attract candidates who generally care more about money relative to the intrinsic value of the job itself - whether contributing to a mission they care about or having fun at work.

When placing high relative value on the position itself is a strong, positive indicator of future job performance, offering more money can make for worse hiring decisions. Likewise, even when the net effect of offering more money is positive, it might be less beneficial than you’d first expect.

A few examples:

Public defenders

Public defenders make an average of about

$61,000 annually

. Not nothing, but far less than the ~$120,000 among lawyers at large cited even by t...
Prediction: The Defense Department Will Blame Trump for the Slow Response on Jan. 7, 2021
by Tim Liptrot — 2021-01-11T01:02:47.888Z

Context

Recently a rioting group of protestors attacked congress after attending a presidential speech. The members from both parties and the senate narrowly escaped. One capitol policeman and one protestor were killed. After being evacuated to a bunker, the leadership of both parties phoned, at least, the following bodies: the Department of Defense (DoD), the governor of Maryland, the governor of Virginia, and the Department of Justice (a few other minor dept.'s as well).

The DoD's response was far slower than the other actors. The actual DoD guard deployment time was four hours, hard to judge the quality of that. Seems slow but gathering, arming and deploying is tough. More damning, the Virginia and Maryland guard offered to enter at 3:29 and received authorization at 5:45. The Maryland National guard waited at the border for 1.5 hours to receive authorization. That means the state of Maryland had time to decide, convene their leadership, gather their troops and drive them to the DC border, then watch two Game of Thrones episodes before getting a phone call from the DoD. This looks very embarrassing for the DoD.

Meanwhile there are rumors that President Trump intentionally delayed the DoD response. There's also a rumor that VP Pence authorized the deployment and Donald was not consulted the entire day. In their Wednesday briefing Sec of Def Miller did not mention Trump, saying he "spoke separately with the Vice President [Mike Pence] and with Speaker Pelosi, Leader McConnell, Senator Schumer and Representative Hoyer about the situation at the U.S. Capitol."

Prediction

So far the DoD has deflected blame onto the Capital Police (CP) and DC Mayor Bowser. This might explain the lack of preparation, but it can't explain the slow response. The national guard story in particular has no explanation. AFAICT, their options are to tell congress "we were incompetent" or "Trump did it".

I expect the DoD will place the blame for this episode squarely on President Trump. I predict that at least one named official will state either Trump declined to call in the guard immediately or that they knew not to ask. Prediction is true if an official resigns (post Jan. 7) then makes the statement, but not if the statement is anonymous. Must occur before March 1st or the first congressional hearings post-Trump, whichever comes first.

Probability = 80%

Reason

Congress sets the DoD's bud...
Does GenZ have a shorter attention span?
by Srijan Singh — 2021-01-10T21:38:49.253Z

intuitive answer: yes!

reasoning: harder to focus on one thing at a time.

TLDR; frequent context switching to ensure the constant or increasing flow of dopamine.
it doesn't matter if I am consuming low or high-quality dopamine (low: watching reaction videos, high: working on a side project; subjective to your life philosophy).
if I find a higher dopamine source I'll do the context switch (consciously ignoring any procrastination cue).
case study: me working on a side project

focus time: setup git repo; open and skim through required documentation, reference project, vi editor; initial boilerplate code; push an initial commit. (~30mins, feel: I started something, deserve a break now)
interval time: twitter; skim through some articles; check IG, whatsapp (continually trying to maintain or increase the dopamine levels)

maybe let’s go back to work? YES! but let’s get some coffee first.
makes coffee; more twitter; some IG; etc (~25mins, feel: productivity degradation, should work now)

hence this cycle keeps on going until the focus time ceases to exist.
causes behind this degradation of focus time:

relatively easy dopamine source available elsewhere (thanks to digital age corporations optimizing for maximum engagements because of their advertisement business model)
emotional brain triumph over the logical brain (instant gratification)

other examples:

reading youtube comments while watching the video.
using multiple apps on multiple devices at once.
continually switching between apps to ensure a constant flow of dopamine rush.
the exponential growth of interval time leading to degradation of focus time.
conscious ignorance of procrastination cues.

a common counter-argument that I've noticed recently:

"People don't have shorter attention span". they finish 3 hour Joe Rogan episodes, they binge 14 hours shows.

essentially alluding to the point that a provider must guarantee and convince its consumer in the starting few minutes of consumption that they'll receive ever-increasing levels of dopamine.

IMO, although this point does make sense but is limited to easy or passive material.
one could consume a high-quality engaging material on microservice architecture but unless they have built such a system themselves it will never transfer as a skill (even psychologically).
and the only way to actively do something is by embracing delayed gratification and triumphing over the procrastination cues.

...
Prediction can be Outer Aligned at Optimum
by Lukas Finnveden — 2021-01-10T18:48:21.153Z

This post argues that many prediction tasks are outer aligned at optimum. In particular, I think that the malignity of the universal prior should be treated as an inner alignment problem rather than an outer alignment problem. The main argument is entirely in the first section; treat the rest as appendices.

Short argument

In Evan Hubinger’s Outer Alignment and Imitative Amplification, outer alignment at optimum is defined as follows:

a loss function is outer aligned at optimum if all the possible models that perform optimally according to that loss function are aligned with our goals

In the (highly recommended) Overview of 11 proposals for building safe advanced AI, this is used to argue that:

Imitative amplification is probably outer aligned (because it emulates HCH, as explained in the first linked post, and in section 2 of the overview)

Microscope AI (section 5) and STEM AI (section 6) are probably outer misaligned, because they rely on prediction, and optimal prediction is characterised by Bayesian inference on the universal prior. This is a problem, since the universal prior is probably malign (see Mark Xu’s explanation and Paul Christiano’s original arguments).

I disagree with this, because I think that both imitative amplification and STEM AI would be outer aligned at optimum, and that some implementations of microscope AI would be outer aligned at optimum (see the next section for cases where it might not be). This is because optimal prediction isn’t necessarily outer misaligned.

The quickest way to see this is to note that everything is prediction. Imitative amplification relies on imitation learning, and imitating a human via imitation learning is equivalent to predicting what they’ll do (and then doing it). Thus, if microscope AI or STEM AI is outer misaligned due to relying on prediction, imitation learning is just as misaligned.

However, I don’t think that relying on prediction makes a method outer misaligned at optimum. So what’s wrong with the argument about the universal prior? Well, note that you don’t get perfect prediction on a task by doing ideal Bayesian inference on any universal prior. Different universal priors yield different predictions, so some of them are going to be better than others. Now, define optimal performance as requiring “the model to always have optimal loss on all data points that it ever encounters”, as Evan does in...
Review of Soft Takeoff Can Still Lead to DSA
by Daniel Kokotajlo — 2021-01-10T18:10:25.064Z

A few months after writing

this post

I realized that one of the key arguments was importantly flawed. I therefore recommend against inclusion in the 2019 review. This post presents an improved version of the original argument, explains the flaw, and then updates my all-things-considered view accordingly.

Improved version of my original argument

Definitions:

“Soft takeoff” is roughly “AI will be like the Industrial Revolution but 10x-100x faster”
“Decisive Strategic Advantage” (DSA) is “a level of technological and other advantages sufficient to enable it to achieve complete world domination.” In other words, DSA is roughly when one faction or entity has the capability to “take over the world.” (What taking over the world means is an

interesting question

which we won’t explore here. Nowadays I’d reframe things in terms of

potential PONRs.

)
We ask how likely it is that DSA arises, conditional on soft takeoff. Note that DSA does not mean the world is actually taken over, only that one faction at some point has the ability to do so. They might be too cautious or too ethical to try. Or they might try and fail due to bad luck.

In a soft takeoff scenario, a 0.3 - 3 year technological lead over your competitors probably gives you a DSA.

It seems plausible that for much of human history, a 30-year technological lead over your competitors was not enough to give you a DSA.
It also seems plausible that during and after the industrial revolution, a 30-year technological lead was enough. (For more arguments on this key point, see my original post.)
This supports a plausible conjecture that when the pace of technological progress speeds up, the length (in clock time) of technological lead needed for DSA shrinks proportionally.

So a soft takeoff could lead to a DSA insofar as there is a 0.3 - 3 year lead at the beginning which is maintained for a few years.
0.3 - 3 year technological leads

are reasonably common today

, and in particular it’s plausible that there could be one in the field of AI research.
There’s a reasonable chance of such a lead being maintained for a few years.

This is a messy question, but judging by the table below, it seems that if anything the lead of the front-runner in this scenario is more likely to lengthen than shorten!
If this is so, why did no one achieve DSA during the Industrial Revolution? My answer is that spies/hacking/leaks/etc. are much more powerful du

...