trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[Crosspost] Introducing the Hypermanifest: Redefining AI's Role in Human Connection and Interaction
by simulacra.exe — 2024-04-07T17:21:42.786Z

Crossposted from my Substack. This is a rough introduction to a series of thoughts I had regarding our interface with AI -I'm hoping to broaden it more in the future.

As Artificial Intelligence becomes ever more pervasive in our everyday lives, there becomes an overwhelming need to address how humans and AI connect and interact with each other. This also includes nebulous structures that we deem of “intelligence” and “consciousness” in general, as we attempt to identify them in non-human entities without a strict definition of it within ourselves. One particular example is the application of the term Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) as an important benchmark of progress - commonly defined as the point at which an AI is as capable as a human. I argue that there is no clear definitive way to prove this, and the timelines and predictions will continue to shift until we can ascertain what human intelligence is and if AI can match or surpass it. Throughout its life cycle, AI has always been effective at creating new ways to question the status quo of what it means to be human - an extremely practical application of Science Fiction to humanity in general. We strive to create intelligence either in our own image or merge with it to create a connection that creates stable and harmonious relationships without being fully aware of our own capabilities or functions. Therefore, I wish to approach this categorization from a different angle - creating a separate vocabulary for the ways in which AI engages with humans; the main framework of this is what I call the hypermanifest. This introductory piece aims to explore and define this - a new conceptual framework for understanding AI’s evolving role in human connection and interaction.

Breaking it Down

I aim to break down this term into two parts - the concepts of Wilfrid Sellars’ Manifest image and Jean Baudrillardian’s Hyperreal. Sellars introduces the manifest image as humanity’s initial conceptual framework, an understanding through direct, experiential human perception. This is in contrast with the scientific image, extending beyond immediate human experience and seeks to explain the world in terms of scientific, often unseen explanations. Sellars explains that:

The 'manifest' image of man-in-the-world can be characterized in two ways, which are supplementary rather than alternative. It is, first, the framework

...
Applications Open: Elevate Your Mental Wellbeing with Rethink Wellbeing's CBT Program
by Inga G. — 2024-04-07T14:03:37.297Z

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People who are well do good better. In a rapidly evolving world where adaptability and innovation are paramount, compromised cognitive function due to mental health issues can severely limit one’s own and one's team's performance and potential [e.g., 1, 2, 3].

We [at Rethink Wellbeing] are now accepting participants for this year’s Mental Resilience Program, and we can offer 3 times the amount of spots this time! Reminder: last year, >350 ambitious altruists applied, and we served 55, among those employees of 80,000 Hours, Effective Ventures, Rethink Priorities, and the Center for AI Safety, had nearly no dropout (3 people), a 90%+ recommendation rate, and significant pre-post effects on mental health, wellbeing, and productivity.

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The Poker Theory of Poker Night
by omark — 2024-04-07T09:47:01.658Z
Link: https://www.codeandbugs.com/post/poker-theory-poker-night/

Link to my own article. I removed the explanation of EV since I assume on LW that's not necessary.

A group of friends and I occasionally like to get together to play Poker. Yet
something keeps happening that I have observed time and again with these kinds
of group gatherings: It is hard to find a suitable date and then on top people
cancel last minute. This is demotivating for other participants, who in turn
also become less committed and this often leads to such groups failing.

Here is one theory of why this happens and how to solve it, explained with
Poker. This article will assume Texas Hold'em Poker, probably the most popular
variant.

tl;dr People's incentives are not aligned. The solution is to create a social
rule that makes folding (canceling attendance) have a bit of negative EV.

Aside: Poker Basics

You can skip this section if you are familiar with Texas Hold'em Poker.

Poker is played with a standard deck of 52 cards and with 2 to 9 players.

The game is played over many game rounds that are called hands. Unfortunately
hand also refers to the specific cards that a player is holding, which can be a
little confusing.

At the beginning of the hand each player gets two cards that only the player
themself gets to see. These are the pocket cards. For example A♣️ and A♦️.

Then over the course of several rounds up to a total of 5 cards are added to the
middle of the table, face-up i.e. everyone gets to see them. These are the
community cards. For example 9♦️, T♠️, A♠️, Q♣️ and A♥️. (Note: T stands for
10 so that all ranks can be written using a single character: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,
8, 9, T, J, Q, K, A).

Above you see a player holding their pocket cards and in the back the
five community cards on the table.

At the end of the hand during the showdown each player gets to choose 5 total
cards out of the 7 available cards (their two pockets cards plus the five
community cards). All players share the community cards so they can be used
multiple times. For example the player in the example above would choose A♣️,
A♦️, A♠️, A♥️ and Q♣️ for a final hand combination of four of a kind aces and
queen kicker (which is a very strong hand). The fact that this player used two
aces and the queen from the community cards does NOT prevent other players from
using them too.

The strongest hand wins and takes the money in the center of the table (the
pot).

The hands are ranked from the stronge...
Centrists are (probably) less biased
by Kevin Dorst — 2024-04-07T06:40:29.682Z
Link: https://kevindorst.substack.com/p/centrists-are-probably-less-biased

TLDR: Which side is more responsive to political evidence? Some empirical studies suggest the left; others suggest the center. The debate is ongoing, but some very general dynamics imply that it’s probably the center.

I am not a centrist. I am also biased. (Rationally so, I think.)

Is that a coincidence? Which side of the political spectrum tends to be less biased? That’s a fraught conceptual and normative question. But it’s also, in part, an empirical one. Here’s what we know.

The debate centers around cognitive rigidity—the opposite of cognitive flexibility, understood as the ability to properly adapt to changing environments and questions by switching perspectives and modes of thinking. Rigidity is one aspect of bias: rigid people are less sensitive to relevant evidence.

There are two (not mutually exclusive) hypotheses with empirical support:

Rigidity-of-the-Right: conservatives are, on average, more cognitively rigid than liberals.
Rigidity-of-the-Extremes: people on the ideological extremes are, on average, more cognitively rigid than those near the center.

What’s the evidence?

The empirical debate

The evidence for rigidity-of-the-right is based on self-reports.

Of course, no one says “I suck at being flexible” on a survey. Rather: psychologists generate survey questions, find clusters whose answers are correlated (indicating that they measure something), and then label them with what they seem to be measuring.

For example, the “need for cognitive closure” scale has people rate themselves on statements like:

“I don’t like situations that are uncertain.”
“I dislike questions which could be answered in many ways.”
“In most social conflicts, I can easily see which side is right and which is wrong.”

Correlations between political beliefs and answers to such questions provide the main evidence for rigidity-of-the-right. Political conservatism is positively correlated with measures of need for closure (r = 0.26) and dogmatism (r = 0.34), and is negatively correlated with measures of openness to experience (r = -0.32) and tolerance for uncertainty (r = -0.27).

The problem? Self-reports are socially confounded.

That is: people’s self-conception of what they “should” answer—which answer lives up to their (community’s) values—affects what they say. If you’ve ever gone on a first date, you’ll know that the line between description and aspiration can be a fuzzy one. (“I also love ...
on the dollar-yen exchange rate
by bhauth — 2024-04-07T04:49:53.920Z
Link: https://www.bhauth.com/blog/economics/yen.html

Recently, the yen-dollar exchange rate hit a 34-year low. Why is that?

6-month US Treasuries are paying around 5.3% interest. Japanese government bonds are paying about 0%. That being the case, you can borrow yen, trade it for dollars, buy US bonds, and get more interest. That's called a "yen carry trade". The risk you take in exchange for that money is that the exchange rate will shift so that a dollar is worth less yen.

But of course, it's also possible that the exchange rate will shift in the other direction, and that's what's happened recently. From 2020 to now, $1 went from 105 to 150 yen.

That being the case, I'd normally expect inflation to be higher in Japan than the US - their currency became less valuable, which makes imports more expensive. Yet, that's not what happened; inflation has been higher in the US. In Japan, you can get a good bowl of ramen for $6. In an American city, today, including tax and tip you'd probably pay more like $20 for something likely worse.

The PPP / nominal GDP of Japan is now ~1.5x that of the US, and I'd argue that's actually an underestimate: PPP estimates don't account for quality of services, and a lot of Japanese services are higher-quality than their US equivalents. But that's not to say I envy how the economic situation of people in Japan has changed. While inflation was lower in Japan than America, wages barely increased, and real incomes of most Japanese fell.

In some countries, you can argue that crime or lack of property rights or inadequate infrastructure keep labor values down, but that's not the case for Japan. So, we're left with some questions.

Question 1: Why would an hour of labor from an American be worth 2x as much as an hour from a Japanese employee?

I remember talking to an economist about this once, and he said, "that means Japanese labor is just not as good as American labor" - but he was just wrong. (He didn't even consider the possibility that Japanese management culture was the problem, because obviously inefficient companies would just get outcompeted.) There's something about a lot of economists where, when they have some model and reality disagrees with them, they seem to think reality is wrong, and aren't even inclined to investigate.

I'll have to get back to this later.

Question 2: Why do Japanese automakers operate some factories in America instead of importing everything from Japan?

I can a...
Conflict in Posthuman Literature
by Martín Soto — 2024-04-06T22:26:04.051Z
Link: https://twitter.com/MotionTsar/status/1776726715311767913

Grant Snider created this comic (which became a meme):

Richard Ngo extended it into posthuman=transhumanist literature:

That's cool, but I'd have gone for different categories myself.[1]
Here they are together with their explanations.

Top: Man vs Agency
(Other names: Superintelligence, Singularity, Self-improving technology, Embodied consequentialism.)
Because Nature creates Society creates Technology creates Agency.
At each step Man becomes less in control, due to his increased computational boundedness relative to the other.

Middle: Man vs Realities
(Other names: Simulation, Partial existence, Solomonoff prior, Math.)
Because

Man vs Self is the result of dissolving holistic individualism (no subagents in conflict) from Man vs Man.
Man vs Reality is the result of dissolving the Self boundary altogether from Man vs Self.
Man vs Realities is the result of dissolving the binary boundary between existence and non-existence from Man vs Reality. Or equivalently, the boundary between different physical instantiations of you (noticing you are your mathematical algorithm).

At each step a personal identity boundary previously perceived as sharp is dissolved.[2]

Bottom: Man vs No Author
(Other names: Dust theory, Groundlessness, Meaninglessness, Relativism, Extreme functionalism, Philosophical ill-definedness, Complete breakdown of abstractions and idealizations, .)
Because

Man vs God thinks "the existence of idealization (=Platonic realm=ultimate meaning=unstoppable force)" is True. This corresponds to philosophical idealism.
Man vs No God notices "the existence of idealization" is False. And scorns Man vs God's wishful beliefs. This corresponds to philosophical materialism.
Man vs Author notices "the existence of idealization" is not a well-defined question (doesn't have a truth value). And voices this realization, scorning the still-idealistic undertone of Man vs No God, by presenting itself as mock-idealization (Author) inside the shaky boundaries (breaking the fourth wall) of a non-idealized medium (literature, language). This corresponds to the Vienna circle, Quine's Web of Belief, Carnap's attempt at metaphysical collapse and absolute language, an absolute and pragmatic grounding for sensorial reality.
Man vs No Author notices that the realization of Man vs Author cannot really be expressed in any language, cannot be voiced, and we must remain silent. It notices there never w

...
"Fractal Strategy" workshop report
by Raemon — 2024-04-06T21:26:53.263Z

I just ran a workshop teaching the rationality concepts I've developed this year.

If you're interested in paying money for a similar workshop, please fill out this form.

Six months ago, I started thinking about improving rationality.

Originally my frame was "deliberate practice for confusing problems". For the past two months, I've been iterating on which skills seemed useful to me personally, and which I might convey to others in a short period of time.

I settled into the frame "what skills are necessary for finding and pivoting to 10x better plans?". It's the area I most needed rationality for, myself, and it seemed generalizable to a lot of people I know.

I ended up with 5-10 skills I used on a regular basis, and I put together a workshop aiming to teach those skills in an immersive bootcamp environment. The skills wove together into a framework I'm tentatively called "Fractal Strategy", although I'm not thrilled with that name.

Basically, whenever I spend a bunch of resources on something, I...

Explicitly ask "what are my goals?"
Generate 2-5 plans at 3 different strategic levels
Identify my cruxes for choosing between plans
Fluently operationalize fatebook predictions about those cruxes
Check if I can cheaply reduce uncertainty on my cruxes

The framework applies to multiple timescales. I invest more in this meta-process when making expensive, longterm plans. But I often find it useful to do a quick version of it even on the ~30-60 minute timescale.

I put together a workshop, aiming to:

help people improve their current, object level plan
help people improve their overall planmaking/OODA-loop process

tl;dr on results

I didn't obviously succeed at #1 (I think people made some reasonable plan updates, but not enough to immediately say an equivalent of "Hot Damn, look at that graph". See the Feedback section for more detail).

I think many people made conceptual and practical updates to their planning process, but it's too early to tell if it'll stick, or help.

Nonetheless, everyone at the workshop said it seemed like at least a good use of their time as what they'd normally have been doing. I asked "how much would you have paid for this?" and the average answer was $800 (range from $300 to $1,500).

When I was applying these techniques to myself, it took me more like ~3 weeks to update my plans in a significant way. My guess is that the...
The 2nd Demographic Transition
by Maxwell Tabarrok — 2024-04-06T14:10:13.095Z
Link: https://www.maximum-progress.com/p/the-2nd-demographic-transition

Birth rates in the developed world are below replacement levels and

global fertility

is not far behind. Sub-replacement fertility leads to exponentially decreasing population. Our

best models of economic growth

suggest that a shrinking population causes economic growth and technological progress to stop and humanity to

stagnate into extinction

.

One theory of fertility decline says it’s all about opportunity costs, especially for women. Rising labor productivity and expanded career opportunities for potential parents make each hour of their time and each forgone career path much more valuable. Higher income potential also makes it cheaper for parents to gain utility by using financial resources to improve their children’s quality of life compared to investing time in having more kids. Simultaneously, economic growth raises the returns to these financial investments in quality (e.g education).

In addition to higher incomes, people today have more diverse and exciting options for leisure.

DINKs

can go to Trader Joes and workout classes on the weekend, play video games, watch Netflix, and go on international vacations.

These rising opportunity costs accumulate into the large and pervasive declines in fertility that we see in the data.

If this explanation is correct, it puts a double bind on the case for economic growth. Unless AI upends the

million-year old relationship

between population and technological progress just in time, progress seems self defeating. The increases in labor productivity and leisure opportunities that make economic growth so important also siphon resources away from the future contributors to that growth. Empirically, the opportunity cost of having kids has grown large enough to bring fertility well below replacement levels all around the world. The opportunity cost explanation suggests we have to pick between high incomes and sustainable fertility.

Luckily, this explanation is not correct. At least not entirely. There are several observations that the opportunity cost theory cannot explain without clarification. Across and within countries today, the relationship between income and fertility is positive or U-shaped. Further economic growth can raise everyone’s incomes to the upward sloping part of the relationship and begin a 2nd demographic transition.

Micro Data

Above a $200k a year, fertility is increasing in household income.

** Update **

I r...
My intellectual journey to (dis)solve the hard problem of consciousness
by Charbel-Raphaël — 2024-04-06T09:32:41.612Z

Epistemological status: At least a fun journey. I wanted to post this on April Fool’s Day but failed to deliver on time. Although April Fool’s Day would have been lovely just for the meme, this is my best guess after thinking about this problem for seven years.

I invite you to dive deep into the consciousness iceberg with me. The story will be presented chapter by chapter, presenting you with the circulating ideas I've absorbed, building ideas in your brain to deconstruct them better until I present you with my current position. Theoretically, this should be easy to follow; this post has already been beta-tested.

We'll go through a pre-awakening phase, during which I was unfamiliar with the theory of mind literature, then an awakening to the problem of consciousness, followed by a presentation of some essential elements of the scientific literature on consciousness, and finally, a phase of profound confusion before resolving the problem. The chronology has been slightly adapted for pedagogical purposes.

Why do I think this is important? Because I think more and more people will be confused by this notion as AI progresses, I believe it is necessary to be deconfused by it to have a good model for the future. I think one of the main differences in worldview between LeCun and me is that he is deeply confused about notions like what is true "understanding," what is "situational awareness," and what is "reasoning," and this might be a catastrophic error. I think the tools I give in this blog post are the same ones that make me less confused about these other important notions.

Theoretically, at the end of the post, you will no longer ask "Is GPT-4 conscious or not?" by frowning your eyebrows.

Oh, and also, there is a solution to meta-ethics in the addendum.

If you're already an Eliminativist, you can skip right to Chapter 7, otherwise, well, you'll have to bear with me for a while.

Chapter 1: Pre-awakening, before stumbling upon the hard problem

Philosophy class: Freud's consciousness iceberg, I’m going to nail this dissertation.

In high school, I was a good student; in philosophy class, I was just reciting my knowledge to get good grades. We discovered Freud's framework on the conscious/preconscious/unconscious. At the time, I heard people say that consciousness was mysterious, and I repeated that consciousness was mysterious myself. Still, I hadn't really internali...