trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Is ethics a memetic trap ?
by George3d6 — 2020-04-23T10:49:29.874Z
Link: https://blog.cerebralab.com/Is_ethics_a_memetic_trap

Note: I've decided to also have an audio version for every article I write, for those that prefer that to reading. I'm not sure if linking it at the top is encouraged/allowed by LW policy, if it isn't, please let me know.

I've read up (possibly superficially?) on many ethical systems or at least viewpoints on ethics. But it seems that, once you reach the sphere of actions I can actually undertake in my daily life, almost none of the prescriptive claims given or derived from these systems differ.

For the sake of argument, let's take a system like the existentialist ethics prescribed by de Beauvoir, an up to date version of Aristotelian teleology based ethics, Kant's deontological ethics, Singer's branch of value-of-life consequentialist ethics and some New England style Christian ethics.

If you take an extreme thought experiments, the kind where you ask something like:

What if I was a monarch with absolute power over the world ?
What if I had a god-like action potential over a life-and-death choice between two groups of agents ?

Then you can argue ad-infinitum as to how the actions prescribed by the systems of ethics differ and I do believe they might differ. But we don’t live in thought experiments.

Applying these systems to the kind of choices that I make in everyday life I can see all of them basically saying something like:

• Well, I should take better care of my body... exercise more, don't drink coffee late at night, don't vape/smoke, eat healthy and in moderation, don't be awake at 4AM browsing reddit (etc)

• Be kinder to friends and family... spend more time thinking about who might be lonely during the quarantine and give them a call, visit more often.

• Donate more to projects and organizations that help the world (e.g. Wikipedia) and volunteer more of my time to said entities.

• I should try to be better at my work, research more, don't give up on hard problems so soon, be nicer to my coworkers, spend less time signaling about "the work I do" and more time "doing it". Even more, I should seek the kind of work that inspires me and that has a high potential for bringing new discoveries in fields I care about.

• I should avoid spurious hookups and seek a genuine and authentic human connection in my relationships and be less afrai...
Covid 19 as a Fermi Paradox Zoo Hypothesis Subset (Laboratory Hypothesis) Nudge Point
by JohnCDraper — 2020-04-23T09:39:53.612Z

One quite well known solution to the Fermi Paradox is John Ball's 1973 Zoo Hypothesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_hypothesis), i.e., the hypothesis that alien life intentionally avoids communication with Earth, with one of its main interpretations being that it does so to allow for natural evolution and sociocultural development, avoiding interplanetary communication, similarly to people observing animals at a zoo. In the Zoo Hypothesis, humans solve human problems, and Contact occurs when we develop warp or perhaps an ASI. Ball also hypothesized a lesser known version of the Zoo Hypothesis, the Laboratory Hypothesis.

One possible rationale for the Zoo Hypothesis is that there exists a low number of interstellar civilizations in this galaxy and no intergalactic travel, combined with no panspermia, resulting in the possibility that an alien civilization might view us as part of the 42 answer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Answer_to_the_Ultimate_Question_of_Life,_the_Universe,_and_Everything_(42)). In the Laboratory Hypothesis, there may be slightly more interstellar civilizations, although not enough powerful factions for one to ignore the galactic consensus and break into the zoo, but there may be more 'tinkering' in the zoo.

In the Zoo Hypothesis, the aliens have pretty strong stomachs for human suffering, including, recently, industrial genocide in the Second World War. However, zoos are are always curated, i.e., there are potential intervention points by the zoo keepers, and interventions are more likely in the Laboratory Hypothesis. Thus, in the Zoo but more so in the Laboratory Hypothesis, an interstellar civilization or an alien ASI may have been tempted (Zoo Hypothesis) or conducted (Laboratory Hypothesis) very fine 'nudge-like' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory) interventions, to direct human development towards their own dominant philosophies.

Following the Second World War, a potential 'nudge' was the 1946 Baruch Plan, the result of UN General Assembly Session 1, Article 1, which set up the UN Atomic Energy Commission (UN AEC). If the UNAEC had succeeded, this would have resulted in the US decommissioning its four atomic bombs and in the placing of all fission energy development under the UN in a kind of global 'Atoms for Peace' plan. ...
How four guys helped redirect Japan's coronavirus policy
by Taran — 2020-04-23T09:22:46.320Z
Link: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2020/04/21/japan-coronavirus/

In late March, popular consensus was that Japan was managing its coronavirus epidemic well, and was unlikely to be seriously affected. Patrick McKenzie, a software entrepreneur in Japan, thought that that was wrong, and on March 23rd through 25th he and three other locals produced a white paper describing their reasoning, which they shared with Japanese news organizations.

They were right; Japan is presently in a state of emergency. According to Patrick, their work helped accelerate the Japanese response.

(You may recall reading on Marginal Revolution that "The coronavirus situation in Japan is probably much worse than you think"; this is the group Tyler Cowen was talking to).

This essay describes how he reached his conclusion and how he acted on it. It's rather long and elliptically written, taking great care not to attribute blame to any of the institutions involved. Read it anyway: it's an account of concrete, successful action against Covid-19, and seems to contain a few LW easter eggs for alert readers.
Online Meetup: Forecasting workshop
by JoshuaFox — 2020-04-23T08:07:28.515Z

LessWrong Israel presents Edo Arad with a Forecasting workshop on Tuesday May 5, 2020

Forecasting is the art of assigning probabilities to future events. It turns out that there are many types of future predictions which we can make some sort of educated predictions on, and there are techniques for improving our methodology for doing so.

We will talk about the basics of forecasting and have some hands-on experience. So come prepared with a computer and be ready for a challenging and fast paced experience!

Please sign up here, and we will send you the URL: https://forms.gle/eJXGdAJfqhBiaZoR9

View in Your Timezone

Schedule:
- 18.45 IDT (15:45 UTC) Check that you can hear and see
- 19:00 IDT (16:00 UTC) Gathering and mingling
- 19:15 IDT (16:30 UTC) Start the main event See Less
Tag Relevance Systems (Feedback Requested)
by Raemon — 2020-04-23T01:29:56.165Z

We recently launched our Tagging Beta (See here for the full anouncement). We've spent the past few months thinking a lot about our longterm vision for tags on the site, but still have some uncertainty about exactly what shape tagging should take.

One major question that the team hadn't yet come to agreement on is how exactly to vote on Tag Relevance.

When you go to a tag page (such as the Rationality Tag), somehow we have to decide which posts to list first. An obvious answer is "just sort by karma", but this isn't quite right: High karma posts aren't necessarily the most relevant posts.

For example, if "Meditations on Moloch" had originally been a LessWrong post, one might have tagged it "economics". (It does touch on economic concepts). And it might have gotten lots of upvotes because it was an evocative, powerfully written piece. But this wouldn't make it appropriate to be listed first on the Economics Tag Page.

So, we want some other system to determine how relevant a post is. And we want that system to be scalable, where lots of users could potentially go tagging posts and determining their relevance. But this leaves us needing a dispute mechanism – what happens if two people disagree?

We shipped the Tagging Beta with one such system, but are considering an alternative. I'd love your feedback.

System 1: Karma-style Relevance

We shipped with a system that simply re-used our existing Karma System. For each Tag-Post relationship, you can vote on how relevant the post is to the tag, using your normal array of upvotes/downvotes/weakvotes/strongvotes.

Here, relevance is a simple number. Higher relevance posts are sorted higher on the tag page. Posts are considered "tagged" if they have a positive amount of relevance. If you think a post was tagged incorrectly, you can downvote it to zero.

This system has some advantages and disadvantages. I'm going to describe my thoughts on those in the comments, so that you have a chance to form your own opinion if you want.

System 2: Multiple Choice Voting

There were some aspects of the Karma-Relevance system that I personally found dissatisfying. So I created an alternate system and pitched it to the team, and we collectively decided to present them both and give you guys the chance to give some feedback.

This system uses multiple-choice voting, where you sort the tag into one of five buckets. Within those buckets, posts

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Problem relaxation as a tactic
by TurnTrout — 2020-04-22T23:44:42.398Z

It's easier to make your way to the supermarket than it is to compute the fastest route, which is yet easier than computing the fastest route for someone running backwards and doing two and a half jumping jacks every five seconds and who only follows the route p percent of the time. Sometimes, constraints are necessary. Constraints come with costs. Sometimes, the costs are worth it.

Aspiring researchers trying to think about AI alignment might[1] have a failure mode which goes something like… this:

Oh man, so we need to solve both outer and inner alignment to build a superintelligent agent which is competitive with unaligned approaches and also doesn't take much longer to train, and also we have to know this ahead of time. Maybe we could use some kind of prediction of what people want... but wait, there's also problems with using human models! How can it help people if it can't model people? Ugh, and what about self-modification?! How is this agent even reasoning about the universe from inside the universe?

The aspiring researcher slumps in frustration, mutters a curse under their breath, and hangs up their hat – "guess this whole alignment thing isn't for me...". And isn't that so? All their brain could do was pattern-match onto already-proposed solutions and cached thinking.

There's more than one thing going wrong here, but I'm just going to focus on one. Given that person's understanding of AI alignment, this problem is wildly overconstrained. Whether or not alignment research is right for them, there's just no way that anyone's brain is going to fulfill this insane solution request!

Sometimes, constraints are necessary. I think that the alignment community is pretty good at finding plausibly necessary constraints. Maybe some of the above aren't necessary – maybe there's One Clever Trick you come up with which obviates one of these concerns.

Constraints come with costs. Sometimes, the costs are worth it. In this context, I think the costs are very much worth it. Under this implicit framing of the problem, you're pretty hosed if you don't get even outer alignment right.

However, even if the real problem has crazy constraints, that doesn't mean you should immediately tackle the fully constrained problem. I think you should often relax the problem first: eliminate or weaken constraints until you reach a problem which is still a little confusing, but which you c

...
Validity>Soundness in Creative Writing
by OpportunisticBot — 2020-04-22T22:57:31.955Z

Apologies for the clickbaity title. A question that I've often come across is how much freedom should science fiction writers have in world building. Is it permissible to take liberty with the laws of physics? Is it OK to depict anthropomorphic AIs?

I hold the opinion that fantasy and SF writers should feel free to create unrealistic pictures of the future, so long as they do it consistently. They should feel free to conjure up worlds that are not probable, like creating an analytic complex valued function, which is partly obfuscated. However, the world is an enjoyable experience only if the culture and plot are entailed by the axioms of the world. To continue the forced analogy further, the analytic function defined on part of the complex plane is really interesting when the occluded parts of the function are exactly what one would obtain by analytic continuation. In less pretentious terms, validity is more important to me than soundness. You may decide the axioms of the world, but the culture and plot must follow as an inevitable outcome of the axioms.
Holiday Pitch: Reflecting on Covid and Connection
by Raemon — 2020-04-22T19:50:20.326Z
Link: http://secularsolstice.com/holiday-pitch-reflecting-on-covid-and-connection/

Somewhere on the edge of a Pareto frontier somewhere, I decided to make one of my shticks “founding holidays that fill important gaps in the 21st century." Founding a holiday is not normally the best solution to a problem, but it sometimes is, and I’ve spent ~10 years thinking about why/when/how to do it.

Recently, I awoke in the middle of the night with a thought:

There should be a holiday designed, from the ground up, to be telepresent. Once a year, you should gather – not with the family who are geographically close, but those who are emotionally central to you, no matter the distance.

What should you gather to celebrate about? One possible answer is “your connection and closeness is reason enough. You don’t need an excuse.” But I think holidays work best when they do provide an excuse – some event to commemorate, around which the whole thing coalesces.

Two seconds later, I thought: geez, the coronavirus is just… actually a mythic level event, which is affecting all of humanity. We are forced to endure hardship, to rework our lives, to coordinate in challenging times… and to find new ways to remain connected despite physical isolation. The story of COVID-19 is actually comparable to the events that most holidays are founded to commemorate. It’s also a very weird event, which gives a holiday lots of little narrative hooks for unique things that help it stand out.
I think a holiday focused on that would have a lot of narrative power, and it would fill an actual important need. I think there are concrete reasons people may benefit from a telepresent holiday right now, but I also predict that coronavirus will have long-lasting impacts that will make it reasonable to commemorate in future years (Although the narrative may need to change over time to account for new facts coming to light. We’re living through history right now)

It’s the 21st century, and we should be expecting holidays and traditions to adapt to changing technology. There should be at least one holiday where “skyping in to see your family” is not awkwardly bolted on afterwards, but deeply interwoven into the central traditions.

Seder in Quarantine

Last week I participated in an online Seder – a Jewish holiday where traditionally, family gather for a ceremonial dinner and read from an ancient text, telling the story of how their ancestors were liberated from Egypt. Some Jewish friends of mine

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[AN #96]: Buck and I discuss/argue about AI Alignment
by Rohin Shah — 2020-04-22T17:20:02.821Z

Alignment Newsletter is a weekly publication with recent content relevant to AI alignment around the world. Find all Alignment Newsletter resources here. In particular, you can look through this spreadsheet of all summaries that have ever been in the newsletter.

HIGHLIGHTS

AI Alignment Podcast: An Overview of Technical AI Alignment in 2018 and 2019 (Lucas Perry, Buck Shlegeris and Rohin Shah) (summarized by Rohin): This podcast with Buck and me is loosely structured around the review I wrote (AN #84), but with a lot more debate and delving into specific points of pessimism and optimism. I suspect that every reader will have some section they're interested in. Since much of the discussion was itself meant to be a summary, I'm not going to try and summarize even further. Here's the list of topics covered:

Our optimism and pessimism about different approaches to aligned AI
Traditional arguments for AI as an x-risk
Modeling agents as expected utility maximizers
Ambitious value learning and specification learning/narrow value learning
Agency and optimization
Robustness
Scaling to superhuman abilities
Universality
Impact regularization
Causal models, oracles, and decision theory
Discontinuous and continuous takeoff scenarios
Probability of AI-induced existential risk
Timelines for AGI
Information hazards

TECHNICAL AI ALIGNMENT

TECHNICAL AGENDAS AND PRIORITIZATION

AI Services as a Research Paradigm (Vojta Kovarik) (summarized by Rohin): The CAIS report (AN #40) suggests that future technological development will be driven by systems of AI services, rather than a single monolithic AGI agent. However, there has not been much followup research since the publication of the report. This document posits that this is because the concepts of tasks and services introduced in the report are not amenable to formalization, and so it is hard to do research with them. So, it provides a classification of the types of research that could be done (e.g. do we consider the presence of one human, or many humans?), a list of several research problems that could be tackled now, and a simple abstract model of a system of services that could be built on in future work.

Rohin's opinion: I was expecting a research paradigm that was more specific to AI, but in reality it is very broad and feels to me like an agenda around "how do you design a good society in the face of technological...
Description vs simulated prediction
by Richard Korzekwa  — 2020-04-22T16:40:02.999Z

During our investigation into discontinuous progress1, we had some discussions about what exactly it is that we’re trying to do when we analyze discontinuities in technological progress. There was some disagreement and (at least on my part) some confusion about what we were trying to learn from all of this. I think this comes from two separate, more general questions that can come up when forecasting future progress. These questions are closely related and both can be answered in part by analyzing discontinuities. First I will describe these questions generically, then I will explain how they can become confused in the context of analyzing discontinuous progress.

Question 1: How did tech progress happen in the past?

Knowing something about how historical progress happened is crucial to making good forecasts now, both from the standpoint of understanding the underlying mechanisms and establishing base rates. Merely being able to describe what happened and why can help us make sense of what’s happening now and should enable us to make better predictions. Such descriptions vary in scope and detail. For example:

The number of transistors per chip doubled roughly every two years from 1970 to 2020
Wartime funding during WWII led to the rapid development and scaling of penicillin production, which contributed to a 90% decrease in US syphilis mortality from 1945 to 1967
Large jumps in metrics for technological progress were not always accompanied by fundamental scientific breakthroughs

This sort of analysis may be used for other work, in addition to forecasting rates of progress. In the context of our work on discontinuities, answering this question mostly consists of describing quantitatively how metrics for progress evolve over time.

Question 2: How would we have fared making predictions in the past?

This is actually a family of questions aimed at developing and calibrating prediction methods based on historical data. These are questions like:

If, in the past, we’d predicted that the current trend would hold, how often and by how much would we have been wrong?
Are there domains in which we’d have fared better than others?
Are there heuristics we can use to make better predictions?
Which methods for characterizing trends in progress would have performed the best?
How often would we have seen hints that a discontinuity or change in rate of progress

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Training Regime Day 18: Negative Visualization

by Mark Xu — 2020-04-22T16:06:46.138Z

Introduction

There is an old riddle: "The inscription makes you sad when you're happy and happy when you're sad. What does it say?"

this too shall pass

Someone once told me that stoicism can be summarized as "don't worry about the stuff you can't change." Negative Visualization is a path to becoming more stoic, in the form of 2 TAPs.

As a meta-comment, there are many rationality techniques that basically come down to being specialized TAPs. My view is that specialized epistemic/mental TAPs correspond to nearly everything applied rationality has to offer, with things like murphyjitsu filling in the rest of the gaps. Getting good at establishing TAPs is fundamental.

Note: this is similar to Deflinching and Lines of Retreat, but about your conception of the world as opposed to your conception of yourself.

Negative Visualization

First TAP:

Trigger: thinking about uncertain events
Action: imagine events going badly

Second TAP:

Trigger: imagine events going badly
Action: consider what's next

The first TAP gets you to imagine the uncertainty resolves negatively, the second TAP reminds you that this will pass.

It's very important that if you install the first TAP, you also install the second one. Having only the first TAP means you're always visualizing negative outcomes, which will make you sad, which is bad. Don't do this.

There are 2.5 benefits to this technique:

Firstly, it helps you prepare for bad outcomes. In some very real sense, pain that you foresee hurts less. If you have already imagined a bad outcome and that bad outcome actually happens, you will likely be less hurt. If you miss your flight, you want to have already thought of a plan, because speed matters. If you already imagined that this was a possibility, then you are able to respond quicker/more adaptively. (Unfortunately, there is some sense in which you will need to think the fastest when it is the hardest to do so; your skills will leave you when you need them most if you don't prepare ahead of time.)

Secondly, if lets you appreciate good situations. If the uncertainty resolves positively, knowing how much better that was than a bad resolution makes you appreciate it more. If I don't miss my flight, knowing that I could could have makes me happier that I didn't miss it. (There's some sense in which this is benefit is a bit of psycho...
Could city design impact spread of infections?
by jmh — 2020-04-22T14:57:54.511Z

I was looking at the difference in reported performance between Los Angeles and NY City. NYC looks a lot worse on all counts I think.

What is producing the different results I wondered. I suspect things like population density will matter. Certainly population behavior and government competence should matter. But would that really explain it all?

What other factors might be in play here? The paper by Lydia Bourouida started me thinking about air flow dynamics. I also wondered about city age. Older cities do seem to have tighter streets and just seem more closed in that more recently designed cities.

The general social distancing, and even the shelter in place, policies are largely a once size fits all. Everyone is saying 2 meters is the safe distance (not so but...). Does shelter in place mean take the same actions everywhere?

I'm thinking that is not true and if local architectual factors and historical development can impact viral spread trying to gather some information on that during this pandemic might be valuable for future outbreaks with a similar transmission mechanism.