trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Come and daydream with me about science reform
by TeaTieAndHat — 2024-01-15T11:09:44.299Z

These last few weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time reading stuff about how to fix science, and there’s a lot of conflicting things, or different priorities we could have, etc. There are those who want more freedom and creativity, those who want more innovation and ideas that solve the world’s big problems, those who think we should focus on trashing peer-review, those who think getting more funding is even more important, etc., etc.

I think I’m reaching the point where I have a good enough sense of the sort of things people are suggesting, but, not being a scientist myself, and not being actively involved in science policy either, I don’t have clear opinions on which of these things are the most important, and I’m not sure how confident to be in the opinions I do have.

If I really was a policy analyst, I’d probably try some sort of cost-benefit analysis to see what to prioritise, but since I’m not involved in it at all in practice, and am currently literally just daydreaming while waiting for the bus home, the question’s not important enough for me to do that now, although I might give it a try someday. Meanwhile, however, I want to ask you what you think!

So, to make it a little more fun and specific, let’s say: you’re not actually in charge of scientific policy in any country, but you have, say, $100 million at your disposal (if you used it as an endowment, that’d mean maybe $4 million to spent per year, forever, but you can also spent it right away), and you want to use that money to do your part in fixing science. What do you do?
AI doing philosophy = AI generating hands?
by Wei Dai — 2024-01-15T09:04:39.659Z

I've been playing around with Stable Diffusion recently, and an analogy occurred to me between today's AI's notoriously bad generation of hands and future AI's potentially bad reasoning about philosophy.

In case you aren't already familiar, currently available image generation AIs are very prone to outputting bad hands, e.g., ones with four or six fingers, or two thumbs, or unnatural poses, or interacting with other objects in very strange ways. Perhaps what's especially striking is how bad AIs are at hands relative to other image generation capabilities, thus serving as a cautionary tale about differentially decelerating philosophy relative to other forms of intellectual progress, e.g., scientific and technological progress.

Is anyone looking into differential artistic progress as a possible x-risk? /jk

Some explanations I've seen for why AI is bad at hands:

it's hard for AIs to learn hand generation because of how many poses a hand can make, how many different ways it can interact with other objects, and how many different viewing angles AIs need to learn to reproduce

each 2D image provides only partial information about a hand (much of it is often obscured behind other objects or parts of itself)

most hands in the training data are very low resolution (a tiny part of the overall image) and thus not helpful for training AI

the proportion of hands in the training set is too low for the AI to devote much model capacity to hand generation ("misalignment" between the loss function and what humans care about probably also contributes to this)

AI developers just haven't collected and trained AI on enough high quality hand images yet

There are news articles about this problem going back to at least 2022, and I can see a lot of people trying to solve it (on Reddit, GitHub, arXiv) but progress has been limited. Straightforward techniques like prompt engineering and finetuning do not seem to help much. Here are 2 SOTA techniques, to give you a glimpse of what the technological frontier currently looks like (at least in open source):

Post-process images with a separate ML-based pipeline to fix hands after initial generation. This creates well-formed hands but doesn't seem to take interactions with other objects into (sufficient or any) consideration.

If you're not trying to specifically generate hands, but just don't want to see incidentally bad hands in images with

...
Even if we lose, we win
by Morphism — 2024-01-15T02:15:43.447Z

Epistemic status: Updating on

this comment

and taking into account uncertainty about my own values, my credence in this post is around 50%.

TLDR: Even in worlds where we create an unaligned AGI, it will cooperate acausally with counterfactual FAIs—and spend some percentage of its resources pursuing human values—as long as its utility function is concave in resources spent. The amount of resources UAI spends on humans will be roughly proportional to the measure of worlds with aligned AGI, so this does not change the fact that we should be working on alignment.

Assumptions

Our utility function is concave in resources spent; e.g. we would prefer a 100% chance of 50% of the universe turning into utopia to a 50% chance of 100% of the universe turning into utopia, assuming that the rest of the universe is going to be filled with something we don't really care about, like paperclips.
There is a greater total measure of worlds containing aligned AGI with concave utility than worlds containing anti-aligned AGI with concave utility, anti-aligned meaning it wants things that directly oppose our values, like suffering of sentient beings or destruction of knowledge.
AGIs will be able to predict counterfactual other AGIs well enough for acausal cooperation.
(Added in response to these comments) AGIs will use a decision theory that allows for acausal cooperation between Everett Branches (like LDT).

Acausal cooperation between AGIs

Let's say two agents, Alice and Bob, have utilities that are concave in money. Let's say for concreteness that each agent's utility is the logarithm of their bank account balance, and they each start with $10. They are playing a game where a fair coin is flipped. If it lands heads, Alice gets $10, and if it lands tails, Bob gets $10. Each agent's expected utility here is

12log(10)+12log(20)=12log(200).

If, instead, Alice and Bob both just receive $5, their expected utility is

log(15)=12log(225)>12log(200).

Therefore, in the coin flip game, it is in both agents' best interests to agree beforehand to have the winner pay the loser $5. If Alice and Bob know each other's source code, they can cooperate acausally on this after the coin is flipped, using Löbian Cooperation or similar. This is of course not the only Pareto-optimal way to cooperate, but it is clearly at the Galactic Schelling Point of fairness, and both agents wil...
Detachment vs attachment [AI risk and mental health]
by Neil  — 2024-01-15T00:41:04.935Z

"What? Why would I choose cosmic energy over Katara?"

Avatar the Last Airbender

"You idiot" said the monk from atop his mountain, "there's all this fresh air up here and the view is breathtaking and you're down there dredging mud ." The mud-dredger only grit his teeth. After finishing the foundations, he cut down some lumber and built a cabin. That winter, the mountaintop monk died of starvation and was eaten by bears.

There is a common trope: that to achieve "inner peace", you must to some degree disentangle your desires with the atoms around you. E.g. caring about wealth or social status implies entangling your goals with the material world, which is Bad because it means externalizing your locus of control.

I call this "being the mountaintop monk". A mountaintop monk disentangles their desires with atomic reality to such an extreme degree that they end up retiring to a monastery in Tibet and spending the rest of their life meditating in the lotus position and being mysterious at people.

A lot of credit is given to the Way of the mountaintop monk. Cached thoughts like "one must make peace with death" or "but is human extinction really a bad thing?" are in accordance with his general philosophy. I can imagine most of my friends listening to this description and nod along thinking "this is wise".

There are, however, significant disadvantages that come with being a mountaintop monk. For instance, if you believe in AI x-risk, you understand that there is nowhere you can hide from an intelligent threat. You cannot hide at the top of a mountain and meditate your way into Nirvana to escape death. If your desires are in any way still entangled with reality (you might have loved ones to protect) then retiring to a mountain is not a good plan.

The best example in fiction I can think of is a scene in Avatar the Last Airbender in which Aang, in order to reach the avatar state on demand,[1] must relinquish his "attachment to this world", namely the person he's in love with. "What?" Aang exclaims, "why would I choose cosmic energy over Katara?"[2]

I know a guy who believes that humanity and all his loved ones don't have long to live. But he holds this belief while not taking the necessary offensive steps to prevent them from dying. I suspect part of the explanation is that taking a lot of 5-meo DMT makes you lose an intuition ...
Making up statistics to establish priority on Land Value Tax vs Earned Income Tax Credit vs Social Media Dynamic Regulation
by Canucklug — 2024-01-14T23:57:42.744Z

I feel the desire to make the largest pro-social contribution I can make and I feel that I have identified some core projects that have a lot of upside. I see this post as an early submission for peer review focused on getting the basics directionally right rather than trying to leap to a refined estimate

Contender #1: Land Value Tax
I think there are two dimensions to rating the projects, being total potential value vs my likely influence. I notice that influence doesn't need to be specifically correct as long as it's relatively well adjusted to the chance of my having influence on the other projects. These two initial estimates for the land value tax should be longer as they establish my estimation process

Value

According to Wikipedia's Excess Burden of Taxation page the excess burden of taxation is between 2.5 and 30%, so I assume 15%. US governmental revenue for '22 is $5 trillion, giving me a loss of $750 billion. In the ACX land value tax series Doucet says Krugman and Friedman agree that it has no deadweight loss, making the avoided loss the theoretical value of the project. I'm ignoring net benefits but it's probably quite optimistic to assume the LVT will be fully substituted for other taxes. Since the LVT also shifts tax from productivity to wealth it must have a marginal benefit multiplier in terms of greater relative benefit for low income people. I guess a trillion sounds good?

Chance of Impact

This is a fairly well known policy which suggests to me that additional marginal advocation for it will experience a liminal multiplier where a small effect may help get the whole thing rolling downhill. Although, it does have a lot of headwind as people tend to recoil from the massive change and the negativity biased sense that they could get boned by this. If I look at a bell curve where the LVT rests half a standard deviation from the peak of neutral acceptance it looks to me like one unit of advocacy at that point will have 50% of the effect of a maximal unit at the peak experiencing the least climb or difficulty so I will give my unit a .5 multiplier. It seems to me that my visual guess of the liminal effect has significant error bars

Since there are 30,000 registered LessWrong users I assume there are 90,000 people with a significant interest in the LVT and 1% doing significant advocacy, for 900 people. I assume I am potentially at the 25th percentile of a...
Is the universe all there is? 
'Evidence' for objects outside the universe...
by JonathanHall — 2024-01-14T23:56:28.580Z

Introduction

One of the topics that seems to come up from time to time on Lesswrong is the supernatural vs a naturalistic explanation for the universe.

I felt that I could make a contribution to this discussion as a theoretical physicist (now moved into a different area), which actually came about from a discussion I had with a particular esteemed professor from the University of Melbourne, in 2012. Prior to this moment, I had slowly (perhaps nascently) been developing a metaphysical philosophy that was a little closer to Functionalism than Physicalism (these two metaphysics are compatible with one another), but since Functionalism was shown by Prof. Searle to be 'incomplete' in a certain sense that I won't go into right now, I continued my search as a side project, and I found that after much training both during Ph.D and in post-doctoral research in theoretical physics and pure mathematics, I found a 'bug' (or a 'feature') worth expounding that continued on from my initial thoughts on metaphysics many years prior. What I arrived at was a kind of reverse-Epiphenomalism, which I will explore below.

The 'bug' (or 'feature') is that while I found many scientists will typically attest to a kind of physicalism or completely naturalistic philosophy by lip-service, when in conversation and in daily work in their profession within science (or mathematics) I found that there was a tacit working-ethos of something more akin to Mathematical Realism. I want to defend this philosophy a little bit, as I would currently consider myself to fall into that category (would love to hear others' view on this). What I mean is, when queried, many physicists and mathematicians would frame mathematical truths as actually true, 'real', that is, existing entities, and that there is a kind of Platonic 'math world', and in physics apply the process of Ansatz, where we apply a proposed mathematical object or principle and propose a theory, before beginning to query it and conduct experiments to see if we can falsify it. I found that a) this belief reminded me strongly of a talk by Richard Feynman where he explains the scientific enterprise as not really being so much a following of the scientific method per se (many great scientists have intuited great ideas prior to the experiment being conducted), but that it begins often with a kind of 'special guess' (Feynman's terminology)...
What is the minimum amount of time travel and resources needed to secure the future?
by Perhaps — 2024-01-14T22:01:03.862Z

The MINIMUM amount of backwards time travel(only one step backwards, and then the remainder of the person's life is lived) and the MINIMUM amount of resources(let's say USD in XXXX year) a person would need to be sure that any problems associated with existential risks will be handled adequately(i.e. human flourishing). Any specific person can be sent back, we can assume they're completely motivated to the task and have the necessary domain knowledge. Convincing everyone you're from the future does not count.
Alternately, if this seems insufficient, what specific extra knowledge would need to be brought back that we may not know right now.

The rationale for this post is to get a better idea of what a successful AI governance or alignment plan would have looked like.
D&D.Sci Hypersphere Analysis Part 2: Nonlinear Effects & Interactions
by aphyer — 2024-01-14T19:59:37.911Z

Following on from Part 1, again don't read this if you're trying to avoid spoilers!

Nonlinear Effects

The correlation analysis we did in Part 1 can find simple effects. If the Evil Squelchers break our machines, we will be able to see a negative correlation between Evil Squelching and Performance.

It can't find complicated effects. If a low Feng Shui is bad, a high Feng Shui is also bad, and a moderate Feng Shui is good, the correlation analysis won't tell us that.

While summary statistics are nice, there's a lot that they miss, and one of the best things to do is just get the data somewhere you can look at it.

Probably the best place for us to start is how stats vary with Latitude/Longitude/etc.

Longitude

In our correlation analysis in Part 1, we saw a slight positive correlation between performance and Longitude. Here we can see that does seem to appear in the data, in an interesting not-entirely-linear way:

I can't seem to find any other column that drives this. Every other column's chart with Longitude looks something like this:

with no apparent trend.

If this planet is aligned similarly to Earth, a Longitude pattern like this would be 'things receiving sunlight do slightly better'. However, if this were the case, it would also change as the planet rotates, and the sun might be elsewhere when our superiors check our performance.

I've asked the GM whether we have information about this, and been told that we can assume a lack of time effects in the data. In a real-world situation I think I'd be nervous about making assumptions on this until I actually had firm data on how the planet rotated: happily, Word Of GM can override that.

Latitude

In our last analysis, we saw a surprising frequency pattern for Latitude/Shortitude/Deltitude, where the polar values around +-90 were low (as expected from choosing a random location on the planet), but the equatorial values around 0 were also strangely low:

I still don't know why this is the case.

We have to be careful when looking at those buckets near the middle/ end, because they're very small. If we plot the value of Pi against Latitude:

Those unusually-high outliers are not particularly meaningful. The top left one is derived from a total of 4 datapoints. Overall, I won't believe I've found an actual effect unless it shows an effect across the whole dataset...

...which it...
Gender Exploration
by sapphire — 2024-01-14T18:57:32.893Z
Link: https://open.substack.com/pub/sapphirestar/p/gender-exploration

The rationalist community has been discussing whether ‘AGP males’ should try hormones or not. Eneaz Brodsky says Transitioning Is Harmful To Most AGP Males. Ozy has a thoughtful, but paywalled, reply. Regardless of the benefits of transitioning you would think the main downside would be the costs incurred if you decide to detransition1. Given that I have actually detransitioned, and didn’t find it very difficult or costly, I feel like I should share my experiences. Trying hormones, even for years, wasn’t very scary for me. Given the subject matter I am not going to try to avoid TMI and in fact will be very candid even if the subject is more than a bit embarrassing.

I spent about three years on estrogen, during most of that period I identified as female and used she/her pronouns. I stopped estrogen for a few reason. Unlike hormones bottom surgery does feel quite risky to me. Even if they are fully committed to living as a woman, transgirls definitely commonly have problems with orgasms and maintaining vagina depth post surgery. Since I didn’t want bottom surgery it was a serious problem that my dick eventually stopped functioning very well. Even masturbation stopped being as fun. I tried using topical testosterone but it didn’t help enough in doses consistent with transfemme HRT goals.

Estrogen also sadly made my Borderline Personality Disorder and anxiety worse. Estrogen had a lot of advantages. I was much more in tune with emotions and more interested in other people. It was very nice to have an easier time connecting. I was able to cry. But I am hoping I can keep some of the gains despite stopping estrogen. For example I have been off estrogen for awhile but am still able to cry.

Of course I could still identify as a girl and use she/her despite being off estrogen. But when I think of my personal gender I think about what I want to express and which gender mythos appeal to me. There is definitely a heroic beauty to being a boy or a man; bravery and strength in service of those who need help. It feels inspiring to cultivate those virtues. So I am trying out being a boy again.

People seem quite worried about long term costs to their body so lets see how I look these days:

Here is a link to some uhhh sluttier pics of me if you want to see my body in more detail. In one of these I am fully naked.

Here is a picture of me right before starting estrogen:

Here is an olde...
List of projects that seem impactful for AI Governance
by JaimeRV — 2024-01-14T16:53:07.854Z

(Cross-posted from EA Forum.)

Goals of this post

The main goal of this post is to clarify what projects can be done at the frontier of AI Governance. Indirect goals are:

Inspiring people to work on new and fruitful projects.
Providing possible projects for newcomers.
Staking out new projects for

ENAIS

.
Promoting discussion on projects’ merit through making this list public.

How we collected the list

We filtered for posts from the last 14 months (with

one exception

) with at least 15 karma (usually >100). This post is mostly a collection of ideas from other posts/articles, but any errors are our own. We do recommend reading the original posts for additional context. We did not filter the projects in these posts; we neither in- or excluded projects based on our views, nor did we remove potentially controversial projects. Through just stating the projects, we hope to invoke Cunningham’s law to improve the projects and provide context on their expected value.

Moreover, our collection methods meant that the projects have widely varying scopes and difficulty levels. Additionally, many of these projects could have many subprojects.

We (Jaime and Teun from ENAIS) spent less than 30 hours in total on this post. We might decide to do a deeper research based on how the post is received.

Before you start on a project

If you are interested in any of the projects, we recommend you to check what has been done before. We did not look into this, the status of these projects may have changed between the posts being published, and you starting working on it. If you find out that a project already has been addressed to some extent, you could add value building on top of it, reviewing what has been done and flagging errors, collecting different views in one report, etc.

List of projects

Writing

Here we suggest any kind of project where the outcome is something written: post, paper, report, … Variants of each of these suggestions with different scopes are obviously also possible.

The general intuition behind this section is to further AI Governance by clarifying relevant concepts, as explained

here

: “Figure out areas where people are confused, come up with takes that would make them less confused or find people with good takes in those areas, and write them up into clear blog posts.”

Compute Governance

Conduct a detailed study on the impa

...