trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The Kids are Not Okay
by Zvi — 2023-03-08T13:30:01.032Z

It has been a subject of much recent internet discourse that the kids are not okay. By all reports, the kids very much seem to be not all right.

Suicide attempts are up. Depressive episodes are way up. The general vibes and zeitgeist one gets (or at least that I get) from young people are super negative. From what I can tell, they see a world continuously getting worse along numerous fronts, without an ability to imagine a positive future for the world, and without much hope for a positive future for themselves.

Should we blame the climate? Should we blame the phones? Or a mind virus turning them to drones? Heck, no! Or at least, not so fast.

Let’s first lay out the evidence and the suspects.1

Then, actually, yes. Spoiler alert, I’m going to blame the phones and social media.

After that, I’ll briefly discuss what might be done about it.

Suicide Rates

The suicide numbers alone would seem at first to make it very very clear how not all right the kids are.

Washington Post reports, in an exercise in bounded distrust:

Nearly 1 in 3 high school girls reported in 2021 that they seriously considered suicide — up nearly 60 percent from a decade ago — according to new findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Almost 15 percent of teen girls said they were forced to have sex, an increase of 27 percent over two years and the first increase since the CDC began tracking it.

…

Thirteen percent [of girls] had attempted suicide during the past year, compared to 7 percent of boys.

One child in ten attempted suicide this past year, and it is steadily increasing? Yikes.

There is a big gender gap here, but as many of you already suspect because the pattern is not new, it is not what you would think from the above.

In the U.S, male adolescents die by suicide at a rate five times greater than that of female adolescents, although suicide attempts by females are three times as frequent as those by males. A possible reason for this is the method of attempted suicide for males is typically that of firearm use, with a 78–90% chance of fatality. Females are more likely to try a different method, such as ingesting poison.[8] Females have more parasuicides. This includes using different methods, such as drug overdose, which are usually less effective.

I am going to go ahead and say that if males die five times as often from suicide, that seems more imp...
Alignment Targets and The Natural Abstraction Hypothesis
by Stephen Fowler — 2023-03-08T11:45:28.579Z

In this post, we explore the Natural Abstraction Hypothesis (NAH), a theory concerning the internal representations used by cognitive systems. We'll delve into how this hypothesis could significantly reduce the amount of data required to align AGI, provided we have powerful interpretability tools. We review the idea of Re-targetting The Search and discuss how aligning AI targets requires less effort as their internal representations move closer to human abstractions. By the end of this post, you'll understand one way the NAH could impact future alignment efforts.

My research is supported by a grant from the LTFF. This post was inspired by Johannes C. Mayers recent comment about "Bite Sized Tasks" and originally formed part of a much longer work. The present post was edited with assistance from a language model.

Review: The Natural Abstraction Hypothesis

Wentworth's Natural Abstraction Hypothesis states "a wide variety of cognitive architectures will learn to use approximately the same high-level abstract objects/concepts to reason about the world."

In his Summary of the Natural Abstraction Hypothesis, TheMcDouglas views this as 3 separate subclaims. I paraphrase his definitions of each claim here.

Abstractability: The amount of information you need to know about a system that is far away is much lower than a total description of that system. The "universe abstracts well". This is almost tautological.
Convergence: A wide variety of cognitive architectures will form the same abstractions.
Human-Compatability: Humans are in included in that class of cognitive architectures, the abstractions used in our day to day lives are natural.

For our purposes, the NAH is a claim that when we "cut open" the internal of an AGI we can expect to find preexisting internal references to objects that we care about. The task of actually aligning the model becomes easier or harder depending on the degree to which the NAH is true.

Re-Targetting The Search

Re-Targetting The Search is an proposal that explains how you could use fantastic interpretability tools to align an AGI. By "fantastic interpretability" tool, I believe the intended requirement is that they allow you to accurately decompose and translate the internal logic of the AGI, accurately identify pointers to the outside world (i.e. you know what the important variables mean) an...
Computer Input Sucks - A Brain Dump
by Johannes C. Mayer — 2023-03-08T11:06:37.780Z

Epistemic Status: Just dumping my current thinking, and information I have on the topic, together with some possible solutions. I have not optimized super hard to be very accurate. I expect most of the value of this post comes from becoming aware of the issue.

It seems like we are in inadequate equilibria with regard to computer input.

I find it pretty weird that QWERTY is the default input method we use. It is very slow (much slower than you can think) and gives you RSI. It is possible to do much better than this, even without a BCI. I use the Dvorak keyboard layout. As far as I know, it does not make you type faster, but it does make your fingers move a lot less. This is good for preventing RSI. In Dvorak, the keys that are used the most frequently are in the home row of the keyboard.

However, the input speed problem remains. I write ~80 WPM on Dvorak. I think this slows me down. I can think much faster in language than this. This is especially noticeable in stream-of-thought writing, where you are optimizing a lot less for quality.

Alternative Input Machines

There are two alternative input schemes that I know about, that seem promising. These are Stenography and the CharaChordor One.

The goal of both of these systems is to write much faster. 225wpm is definitely possible with a lot of training in stenography. I am unsure about the top speed of the CharaChorder, but I would guess that it is at least 150, with the default setup. As far as I know, both of these systems do not induce RSI. Stenography was invented for court reporting. People still use it for that, and nowadays also for live captioning. Using it you can write for hours every day, without RSI becoming a problem.

Both of these systems speed you up, by enabling you to press multiple characters at the same time, which then creates a word or a syllable of a word.

I have heard that it takes 1 to 4 weeks to get up to 40WPM with the CharaChorder. Stenography takes much longer I think. I expect 100-400 hours of training time. CharaChorder has the advantage that you have all of the normal keyboard keys, whereas with Stenography it might be hard to use keyboard shortcuts to control your desktop environment, but it is definitely possible using plover.

The CharaChorder software is closed source, while plover is open source. The CharaChorder costs 300$, while you can get a steno keyboard for as little as 75-$140.

Al...
Under-Appreciated Ways to Use Flashcards - Part II
by Florence Hinder — 2023-03-08T09:54:51.529Z
Link: https://blog.thoughtsaver.com/under-appreciated-ways-to-use-flashcards-part-ii/

By Tereza Ruzickova

TL;DR

In

my first article

, I outlined how significant flashcard learning has been for me and how I utilize it in many different - often unexpected - areas of my life. In this article, I will share some practical strategies for making the flashcard habit stick. Most of these I've learned the hard way over the past ten years (while accumulating more than 40 000 cards!). Here are my key takeaways from the article.

I make notes whenever something interesting crops up using a convenient note-taking app like

Things

or

Thought Saver

.
I regularly distill these notes into atomic, concise flashcards
I have my decks loosely organized into Everything, ASAP, Therapy Skills, Spanish and German
I built a daily habit using the Tiny Habits approach - just five cards a day.
The easiest times for me to revise are when I am not groggy/distracted by work

How I create and organize my flashcards

For the past few years, I have found that the most variable that determines whether I regularly create new cards is convenience. When I set up a super convenient information-gathering method for any facts that have flashcard potential, I am much more likely to make and revise flashcards alongside everything else that I do.

I have found the software Things to work really well for me, especially their keyboard shortcut that creates new notes very quickly and effortlessly both on the phone and desktop. This way, I easily note down anything that I want to remember throughout the day - whether it's fun facts I hear on podcasts, gratitude moments I experience, or even life lessons that randomly occur to me. You can also effortlessly create cards directly into the Thought Saver mobile app.

About once a week, I then go through all of these notes, filter out any that no longer seem interesting, and start creating new cards. I always aim to keep each card as simple as possible, which often means having to break things down into several cards and stripping the content to the most essential bits of information.

For example, this might be one note I write down after reading a book:

Francisco Franco was a Spanish general who led the Nationalist forces in overthrowing the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War and then ruled over Spain from 1930s to 1970s as a dictator.

And this is how I might break it into several cards:

...
Squeezing foundations research assistance out of formal logic narrow AI.
by Donald Hobson — 2023-03-08T09:38:16.651Z

Suppose you have a ML model trained to output formal proofs. Maybe you start with ZFC and then add extra tokens for a range of common concepts. (along with definitions. ). So a human mathematician needs to type in the definition of a gradient in terms of limits, and the definition of limits in terms of epsilon and delta, and the definition of the real numbers in terms of dedekind cuts. All the way back to ZFC. The human needn't type any proofs, just the definitions.

The model could be trained by generating random syntactically correct strings of tokens, and trying to prove or disprove them. (Remember, we have added the notion of a gradient to the token pool, plenty of the random questions will involve gradients) Hopefully it forms intermediate theorems and heuristics useful towards proving a wide class of theorems.

Computer programs can be described as mathematical objects. So the human adds some tokens for lisp programs, and a few definitions about how they behave to the token pool.

"Will program X do Y?" is now a perfectly reasonable question to ask this model.

This is where the magic happens. You give your system a simple toy problem, and ask for short programs that solve the toy problem, and about which many short theorems can be proved. Maybe you do gradient descent on some abstract latent space of mathematical objects. Maybe an inefficient evolutionary algorithm selecting both over the space of programs and the theorems about them. Maybe "replace the last few layers, and fine tune the model to do a new task", like RLHF in ChatGPT.

Now I don't expect this to just work first time. You will want to add conditions like "ignore theorems that are true of trivial programs (eg the identity program)" and perhaps "ignore theorems that only take a few lines to prove" or "ignore theorems so obvious that a copy of you with only 10% the parameters can prove it". For the last one, I am thinking of the programmers actually training a mini version with 10% the parameters, and running some gradients through it. I am not thinking of the AI reasoning about code that is a copy of itself.

The AI model should have a latent space. This can let the programmers say "select programs that are similar to this one" or "choose a program about which theorems close to this theorem in latent space can be proved".

The idea of this is that

Asking questions sho

...
Monthly Shorts 1&2/23
by Celer — 2023-03-08T07:10:07.632Z

Apologies for missing last month’s, and the delay on this one. I attended EAG, and enjoyed it. Wrote a few small pieces for the EA Forum, and am in the process of writing a few more. In the meantime…

Politics and Possibilities

The FTC is proposing a ban on all non-compete clauses.

For the obvious reasons incentives, power, and corruption have been on my mind lately. This is a well-reported story on Elise Stefanik, detailing how an ambitious moderate at Harvard became a die-hard Trumpist.

But the story I was reminded of was something I once heard from Desmond King. Des was a professor of mine, and he’s one of the globe’s top scholars on American racialized politics. I think Des over-simplifies his analysis of US politics, but I have some sympathy for his perspective. And, as such scholars do, he’s had many students, many of them bright and distinguished. One of them, a bright young Rhodes Scholar, would go on to attack “shareeah law” in America while running in a presidential primary. While relating this, Des seemed sad. Not angry, just disappointed. He knew that his former student knew better, and didn’t care. And that’s a hard thing to know. Said student would fail out of US politics, and now works as an “operating advisor” at an investment management firm.

Texas is getting into more explicit social engineering: 40% off property taxes for your primary residence if you have or have ever had four kids, if you’re a married couple, neither of whom has ever been divorced. I think that I’m against this, partially because of the abuse of the tax code it entails, partially because it discriminates against renters. Law hasn’t passed yet.

Estonian news of the month: Fitch continues to give them an AA- rating. I hadn’t been aware that bond ratings are this public, and it is interesting to see how everything is assessed. Oh, and also they had an election in which the majority of votes were cast online. At some point I really want to see one of the computer security experts who explain why it can’t be done safely explain to me why Estonia has a relatively anti-Russian government after a mostly-online election. I suspect that the answer is that the costs are too high to bother attacking Estonia, a country about the size of New Hampshire by population and double it by land area. Though if you think that America would smoothly go on one consistent system…

By far the strangest thi...
Is religion locally correct for consequentialists in some instances?
by Robert Feinstein — 2023-03-08T04:02:58.721Z

Sorry if I'm about 10 years late to this conversation, if this exact idea has already been propagated and responded to in detail, feel free to point me towards any existing resources.

Personal Beliefs: I am a staunch athiest/agnostic who does not believe in God, especially any specific God, as a matter of looking at the data and making a decision based on the evidence, with a high degree of certainty based on how overwhelming the bayesian evidence is.

Situation that brought this question to my mind: I was talking to a friend about their belief in the Christian God (denomination unknown), and they told me about how they found God later in life, and that they were actively suicidal (cutting, etc), and that volunteering for a Christian camp helping underprivileged children helped show them how powerful belief in God was and how the hope provided is a positive force in many, especially those with the least to be hopeful about otherwise, after which this friend started believing in God and stopped being suicidal. (I believe this friend is being entirely sincere, in case my tone did not convey that)

It seems to me that while I still believe that religion as a whole has a negative average expected value to the average person, this situation seems to paint to me a picture that for many individuals, the value of religion is one that is strongly positive, and that those who are likely to recieve the most benefits are also those with the least intersection with rationality, basically the opposite of WEIRD populations. I've never strongly tried to change the beliefs about relgion of others, but this revelation definitely makes it harder to try to quickly defend my athiesm to others or explain any disdain for religion that accidentally slips out, and also suggests that for many individuals, trying to convince them athiesm is correct would not only be socially rude, but also not even correct if one's goal is a consequentialist "wellbeing".

How does one deal with the situation when one believes trying to add information to a situation will consistently make people less happy/satisfied, it feels like a sort of cognitive dissonance, would this be considered an infohazard? (All of this assuming you can successfully identify those for whom religion adds net value, and you grant my proposition that it does for them)

Also, is this a consensus stance about how others here think about ...
AI Safety in a World of Vulnerable Machine Learning Systems
by AdamGleave — 2023-03-08T02:40:43.139Z
Link: https://far.ai/post/2023-03-safety-vulnerable-world/

Even the most advanced contemporary machine learning systems are vulnerable to adversarial attack. The safety community has often assumed adversarial robustness to be a problem that will be solved naturally as machine learning (ML) systems grow more capable and general. However, recent work has shown that superhuman systems in a narrow domain such as AlphaZero are highly vulnerable to adversarial attack, as are general but less capable systems like large language models. This raises the possibility that adversarial (worst-case) robustness will continue to lag behind average-case capabilities. In other words, transformative AI systems are likely to be exploitable.

Exploitability will cause a wide variety of current alignment proposals to fail. Most extant agendas seek to align the main ML system with the assistance of helper ML systems. The main ML system is the primary system that takes actions in the world (e.g. interacting with users), with the helper ML systems acting as scaffolding to train and/or verify the main ML system. These alignment schemes will fail if the helpers are exploited by the main system – and we expect helpers to be vulnerable to exploitation (see Contemporary ML systems are exploitable by default).

In Table 1 we present a subjective risk matrix for a range of popular alignment agendas, evaluating the degree to which main ML systems have the ability and incentive to exploit the helper. We find many alignment agendas have a high risk of exploitation, with all having at least some risk.

Alignment Agenda	Main System’s Ability to Exploit Helper	Main System’s Incentive to
Exploit Helper	Risk of Exploit
RL on learned reward model (e.g. RLHF, IRL)	Medium	High	High
Scalable oversight (e.g. recursive reward modeling,
AI safety via debate)	Medium	High	High
Imitation learning (e.g. behavioral cloning, supervised fine-tuning)	Medium	Low	Low-Medium
Imitative Iterated Distillation and Amplification	High	Low	Medium
Auditing Tool (e.g. Adversarial Testing, Transparency)	Low	Medium	Low-Medium

Table 1: Subjective risk matrix for popular alignment agendas (see next section), using a helper ML system to assist with aligning the main ML system that will eventually be deployed.

We are most concerned by vulnerabilities in the helpers as this can impact the alignment of the main system. By contrast, an aligned but adversarially exploitable main system would not necess...
Educating people about rationality: where are we?
by plurple — 2023-03-08T01:59:57.436Z

Motivation. There are a number of ideas in rationality that seem to me so important and useful that it's worthwhile systematically exposing the general population to them. Off the top of my head, these might include general ideas about better decision making, cognitive biases and information hygiene, and somewhat more technical topics like probability/Bayes, utility, information theory and game theory. And yet, I wouldn't know about many of these without either picking up a book about decision making, or taking an undergraduate course with statistics content or going to a rationality camp!

Question. What resources are there out there to educate people about ideas in rationality? What attempts/barriers are there to introducing more ideas about rationality to school curricula?

I would be interested in taking a look at particular resources that provide good content about rationality aimed at the general population; but more importantly I'm interested in understanding the question Where are we? Is there a campaign advocating for this already, and are there outreach initiatives aimed at people from outside the rationality community?

Or, are my premises flawed and is there not a strong case to invest in the provision of rationality education more widely?

My background. I'm new to this forum and come from outside the rationality community, but I would really like to understand more about rationality education. I wasn't sure where to look, so I'm hoping that kind people here will be able to at least point me in the right direction so I know where to find out more or who to ask! I would be so grateful for any help :)
A Brief Defense of Athleticism 
by Wofsen — 2023-03-07T20:48:27.960Z

Non-athletic thinkers are myopic. I see at least three very important reasons any rationalist must value exercise.

As someone who has trained extremely hard in distance running, sports in general and athletic conditioning in particular create an intuitive understanding of the fallaciousness of Cartesian Dualism and the accuracy of materialism in the sense that the mind is merely a part of the body.

Physical challenges also force one to understand the limitations of Kahneman's "system two." For example, one may know what it means to not start a race too quickly and then "die" (running jargon for running out of steam prematurely), but repeated failures in actual races teach one to realize the limitations of one's rationality, especially under stress (even if distance running is classified as eustress rather than distress; remember, cortisol levels & arousal are the same in either case).

Conditioning has been shown to increase cognitive performance. Results of a quick google finds: This study notes better reaction time in fit adolescents (no causal link, n = 30). This review shows decreased "system 2" aging in physically fit elderly individuals (causality likely, preponderance of evidence). Acute exercise (<1 hour) has also been shown to cause immediate improvements in decision making. I recommend a deep dive into the mechanistic research into the causes of this for structuralists. But any Bayesian looking to be more rational ought to make an update and start working out.

(Edit: Grammar)