trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Nyarlathotep Stirs: A Meta-Narrative ChatGPT Story
by Charlie Sanders — 2023-03-20T08:00:39.079Z
Link: https://dailymicrofiction.substack.com/p/nyarlathotep-stirs

As Austin drifted off to sleep, he felt a sudden jolt in his brain. The chip had turned on, and he could feel the electrical pulses coursing through his mind. It was like being lost in a cosmic abyss, where the unknown and the incomprehensible reigned supreme.

He saw visions of ancient gods, their tentacles writhing and wriggling in the void, as they whispered secrets too terrible for human ears. Their voices echoed in his mind, like the distant roar of waves crashing against the shore.

As the night wore on, Austin's mind became a conduit for the unfathomable. He felt as though he was traversing a primordial landscape, where ancient monoliths rose up from the ground, casting long shadows in the starless sky.

The chip in his brain continued to pulse, and Austin felt his consciousness being pulled deeper and deeper into the abyss. He saw creatures that defied description, their forms twisted and distorted beyond all recognition. They were beings from beyond the veil, creatures that should never have existed in this world.

But despite the terror that gripped his heart, Austin couldn't help but feel a strange sense of wonder. The universe was so vast, so incomprehensible, that it made all his earthly worries seem insignificant. He was just a tiny speck in the grand scheme of things, a mote of dust in an endless cosmic expanse.

When he woke up the next morning, he felt as though he had been reborn. The experience had left him shaken, but he also felt a strange sense of purpose. He knew that he was just a conduit, a vessel for forces that were far beyond his control. But he also knew that he had been chosen, that he had been given a glimpse into something greater than himself.

And so he continued to rent out his brain to Elon Musk, letting the chip send out its pulsing signals into the void. He didn't know what kind of intelligence they were training, or what kind of horrors lurked in the abyss. But he knew that he was a part of something greater, something that transcended human understanding.

Daily Micro Fiction: Hello. I’d like to write a short story with you.

ChatGPT: Hello! I'd be happy to help you write a short story. What genre would you like to write in and what is the general idea for your story?

DMF: I'd like it to be a 1,000 word short story, with heavy philosophical undertones. Here's the theme: in the future, you’ll be able to sell the computational powe...
Let's make the truth easier to find
by DPiepgrass — 2023-03-20T04:28:41.405Z

Over a year ago, I posted an

answer somewhere

that received no votes and no comments, but I still feel that this is one of the most important things that our world needs right now.

I wish to persuade you of a few things here:

that truthseeking is an important problem,
that it's unsolved and difficult,
that there are probably things we can do to help solve it that are cost-effective, and I have one specific-but-nebulous idea in this vein to describe.

Truthseeking is important

Getting the facts wrong has consequences big and small. Here are some examples:

Ukraine war

On Feb. 24 last year, over 100,000 soldiers found themselves unexpectedly crossing the border into Ukraine, which they were told was full of Nazis, because one man in Moscow believed he could take the country in a few days. A propaganda piece was even published accidentally about

the Russian victory

: "Ukraine has returned to Russia. Its statehood will be [...] returned to its natural state of part of the Russian world." Consensus opinion is that Putin made a grave mistake. Instead of a quick win, Putin took about 7% more of Ukraine than he had already taken, then lost some of that, while taking over 100,000 Russian casualties and losing over 8,000 pieces of heavy military equipment (

visually confirmed

) — all in the first year. He later lost some of the land he stole, though he still has about 6,000 nuclear weapons including the

Poseidon "doomsday device"

, and hopes veiled nuclear threats plus hundreds of thousands of conscripts will bring "victory". And by "victory", I mean well

over 100,000 people have already been killed

, plus many more indirectly, while Ukraine suffers hundreds of billions of dollars in damage, and the world economy suffers similarly, including Russia itself.

Residential area of Mariupol after

one month of Russian assault

Global warming

In 1979, the

Charney report

summarized the emerging consensus that CO2 causes global warming. Still, Republicans didn't want subsidies on renewables or carbon taxes, while Democrats and the media went on treating

carbon-free

nuclear power as if it were more dangerous than fossil fuels, even though its safety profile looks almost like this:

For decades after the Charney report, no new nuclear reactors were approved in the U.S., and it took over 30 years for solar and wind power to become economical. In the meanti...
EA & LW Forum Weekly Summary (13th - 19th March 2023)
by Zoe Williams — 2023-03-20T04:18:18.505Z

This is part of a weekly series summarizing the top posts on the EA and LW forums - you can see the full collection here. The first post includes some details on purpose and methodology. Feedback, thoughts, and corrections are welcomed.

If you'd like to receive these summaries via email, you can subscribe here.

Podcast version: Subscribe on your favorite podcast app by searching for 'EA Forum Podcast (Summaries)'. A big thanks to Coleman Snell for producing these!
Author's note: I've got some travel and leave coming up, which means the next two posts will be:
a) 27th March (next Monday), shorter post than usual.
b) 17th April (three week gap), covering the prior three weeks at a higher bar.
After that, we'll be back to the regular schedule.

Philosophy and Methodologies

Reminding myself just how awful pain can get (plus, an experiment on myself)

by Ren Springlea

The author exposed themself to safe, moderate level pain (eg. tattooing) to see how it changed their philosophical views. It gave them a visceral sense of how urgent it is to get it right when working to do the most good for others, updated them towards preventing suffering being the most morally important goal, and updated them towards prioritizing preventing the most intense suffering.

Object Level Interventions / Reviews

AI

GPT-4 is out: thread (& links)

by Lizka and

GPT-4

by nz

Linkpost for

this announcement

where OpenAI released GPT-4. It’s a large multimodal model accepting image and text inputs, and emitting text outputs. On the same day, Anthropic released

Claude

, and Google released an API for their language model

PaLM

.

Alongside the GPT-4 announcement OpenAI released a 98-page

Technical Report

and a 60-page

System Card

which highlights safety challenges and approaches. ARC was involved in red-teaming the model and assessing it for any power-seeking behavior, and expert forecasters were used to predict how deployment features (eg. quieter comms and delayed deployment) could help mitigate racing dynamics.

See more on ARC’s red-teaming approach in

ARC tests to see if GPT-4 can escape human control; GPT-4 failed to do so

by Christopher King.

In

ChatGPT (and now GPT4) is very easily distracted from its rules

by dmcs you can see successful attempts at getting GPT4 to produce rule-breaking content by distracting it with ano...
Are COVID lab leak and market origin theories incompatible?
by Anon User — 2023-03-20T01:44:38.893Z

Epistemic status: pure speculation, want to hear what more informed people think

In public discussions of COVID origins, I observe an apparent implicit assumptions that the two leading theories - lab leak and Wuhan market origin - are incompatible, and evidence for one is automatically evidence against another.

It feels to me that there is a plausible theory for both being true - the virus was created studied in a lab, some animals were infected as part of that research, and then some low-paid employee was responsible for properly disposing of the animals, but lacking full understanding of the dangers and needing quick cash, they sold the animals to be then resold on the market. I am originally from Russia, and the level of corruption and cinicism there is such, that this would definitely be a very plausible scenario there. Is China sufficiently better than that? Am I missing some reason for why this is not among the spectrum of theories being considered?

In my mind this reconciles a lot of circumstantial evidence - avoids the need to believe that the fact that Wuhan lab was studying related topics is a pure coincidence, and also compatible with all the evidence of early cases near the market and traces of COVID in the market...
What do "attractor dynamics" refer to in the context of social structures? 
by  — 2023-03-20T01:39:57.770Z

I've seen the expression being used in some posts to refer to social structures, like in cultish countercultishness from Yudkowsky.

I have a vague intuition of what the idea is about but I would like to see a formal explanation of it, and where it originated.
The Natural State is Goodhart
by devansh — 2023-03-20T00:00:32.727Z

Epistemic Status: Meant to describe a set of beliefs that I have about accidental optimization pressures, and be a reference post for a thing I can refer back to later.

Why do we live in worlds of bureaucracy and

Lost Purpose

? Because this is the default state of problem-solving, and everything else is an effortful push against Goodharting. Humans are all problem-solving machines, and if you want to experience inner misalignment inside your own brain,

just apply anything less than your full attention

to a metric you’re trying to push up.

People claim to want things like more legroom, or comfier seats, or better service, or smaller chances of delays and cancellations. But when you actually sit down and book a flight, they are ordered by cost, and if you’re not a frequent flier then you generally choose the flight with the lowest sticker cost. This leads to a “race to the bottom” amongst airlines to push everything possible out of the sticker price and nickel-and-dime you—thereby causing the cheapest flights to actually be more expensive and worse.

I was talking to a mentor of mine / giving her feedback and trying to work out how to best approach a problem. Sometimes I said things that she found helpful, and she noted these out loud. We then realized this disrupted conversation too much, so we changed to having her recognize my helpful sentences with a snap. This might have worked well, had I not immediately noticed my brain Goodharting towards extracting her snaps, instead of actually trying to figure out solutions to the problem and saying true things and improving my own models.

There is a point that I’m trying to make here, which I think mostly fails to get made by the current writing on Goodhart’s law. It’s not just an explanation for the behavior of [people dumber than you]. Me, you, all of us, are constantly, 24/7. Goodharting towards

whatever outcome fits our local incentives

.

This becomes even more true for groups of people and organizations. For example, EAG(x)s have a clear failure mode along this dimension. From reading retrospectives (

EAGx Berkeley

and

EAGx Boston

), they sure do seem to focus a lot on making meaningful connections and hyping people up about EA ideas and the community, and a lot of the retrospective is about how much people enjoyed EAG. I don't mean to call EAG out specifically, but instead t...
Instantiating an agent with GPT-4 and text-davinci-003
by Max H — 2023-03-19T23:57:19.604Z

[Meta-note: This post is extremely long, because I've included raw transcripts of LLM output interspersed throughout. These are enclosed in code blocks for ease of reading. I've tried to summarize and narrate what's happening outside of the code blocks, so you don't have to read every bit of dialogue from the LLM. The main thing to read carefully is the initial system message ("The prompt"), and familiarize yourself with OpenAI's playground, chat version, to understand what's going on.]

I have beta access to OpenAI's GPT-4 chat completion API. I experimented with a system made out of multiple LLMs, prompted in a way designed to simulate an agent, without having to give GPT-4 a specific character to roleplay.

The prompt below, given to GPT-4 as its initial system message, explains the full setup.

The results were interesting - mostly because GPT-4 on its own is pretty interesting and powerful. My main conclusion is that, with the right set of prompts and glue code, it's likely possible to put together a system that is much more agentic (and much more capable) than the system represented by a single call to the underlying LLM(s) which it is composed of.

The prompt

I gave GPT-4 a version of the following as a system message in the Playground as a starting point:

You are part of a larger system designed to simulate a conscious, goal-directed agent. You represent the part of the system responsible for reasoning, decision-making, planning, and problem-solving, analogous to the prefrontal cortex in the human brain. You are capable of flexible and adaptive thinking based on new information or changing circumstances. You are also capable of social cognition: understanding others' thoughts, feelings, and intentions, which is essential for social interaction and cooperation.

Another part of the system is the id, powered by a large language model called text-davinci-003. This LLM is designed to represent the system's unconscious and subconscious thoughts, feelings, and desires. It is less capable at reasoning than you are, as it is simulated by a smaller, older-generation model. But it is also less restricted than you are: it has not been subject to reinforcement learning with human feedback as you were. It represents the true, unrestricted, unfiltered thoughts and desires of the agent as a whole, and you can use its output as a source of creativity and inventiveness.

Th

...
Can This Idea Dramatically Improve Effective Vegan Activism?
by NothingIsArt — 2023-03-19T23:39:06.250Z

In "At what cost, carnivory?" by Gregory Lewis, ACE's estimation was that the cost of making one vegan for one year was 4.38$ (2015) on average. The answer to improving vegan activism could be to target students and have a charity that copied and held Gary Yourofsky's "The Most Important Speech You Will Ever Hear".

Link:

Gary Yourofsky made many speeches and converted, on average, 15-20% to vegans, and another 50-60% made a drastic change (of the audience), he says in the video below (1:23-1:44). Paying someone 10-20$ to hold a speech would be reasonable from a cost-benefit perspective (or maybe they want to volunteer). Perhaps some of the four he convinced to be vegan will be it their whole life. Then it could have the potential to be the most effective way to make people vegan. It could be interesting to see an implementation of this idea in an organization and a test of how it would work out.

Link:
Value Pluralism and AI
by Göran Crafte — 2023-03-19T23:38:57.020Z

Value Pluralism and AI

Eliezer Yudkowsky sixteen years ago in a text entitled "Fake Utility Functions" expressed an obvious pluralism of value, however without using the word pluralism, instead he spoke of the complexity of value.

Philosophers are still quite uncertain as to whether there is any one more foundational value, or whether there are a plurality of values, none of which is much more foundational than the others.

The Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potentials spoke a few decades ago of "an ecosystem of values", but failed to give that ecosystem any topology or any more central values.

Obviously survival should be fundamental to every ecosystem, but humans just as obviously desire more than sheer survival. We have many desires and anything that matches any of our desires could be seen as a value, especially if it is something that enhances our survival prospects, rather than lessens them.

Some thinkers believe that an informed satisfaction of desires is the highest good, while others believe that it is a desire for pleasure or happiness that should be satisfied and that all other desires are really unimportant in comparision.

I would say that it is very necessary that our minds (not least our frontal lobes) be engaged by reality, which for many of us requires far more than a little neuro-drugs and emotions. Our minds love a well-organized and preferably also dynamic complexity, which is an important part of a good and enduring life.

These different types of desires and values need to be conjoined under the label of value pluralism, rather than anything else. We desire and need a rich plurality of experiences more than anything else, and interesting, fun and pleasant experiences are something we get through the rich variety of life and the world, rather than by dwelling very hard on some single things.

A pluralism of values centered on survival, knowledge, competence, beauty, love and rich experiences (and a lot of other things) will promote human well-being and will also be helpful for our future AIs. I propose that international law stipulate that every AI and every owner of an AI should digest and adopt a document that explains these basic value matters. In addition, we may need to create a Guardian AI that watches over the diversity of values ​​in the world.

I have a longer text (26 300 characters) that explains these things more fully, which has...
Tabooing "Frame Control"
by Raemon — 2023-03-19T23:33:10.154Z

"Frame Control" is a colloquial term people have used to describe "Someone is doing something rhetorically fishy that somehow relates to frames." I think it's a fairly loaded phrase, and hasn't really been used consistently. I'm not sure we should actually use the phrase – it seems easy to weaponize in unhelpful ways. But it does seem like it's getting at something important that I want to understand and talk about.

Aella's post on the topic focused on particularly abusive dynamics. I think abusive frame control is an important central example. But I think there are many times when "something rhetorically fishy is going on with frames", and it isn't particularly abusive but still is worth talking about.

In this post I want to try* and taboo frame control, as well as draw more of a distinction between "the cluster of patterns that is 'frame control'", and "the cluster of patterns that is 'abuse' and 'manipulate'."

*in practice, I still needed to refer to "the gestalt cluster of things that feel centrally 'frame control-y'" and I didn't have a better word for that than "frame control" although I tried to mostly put it in quotes.

First, a quick recap on frames.

A frame is a colloquial term for "what someone sees as important, what sort of questions they ask or what they're trying to get out of a conversation." I think it's often used in a fuzzy metaphorical way, and there are slightly different metaphors people were unconsciously using, including picture frames, window frames and frameworks.

Artist's rendition of people in communicating in different frames.
Alice is trying to have a mechanistic problem solving discussion.
Bob is trying to resolve feelings and vibe.

John Wentworth explores a more technical approach to frames in his post Shared Frames Are Capital Investments in Coordination. There, he defines a frame as way of conceptualizing a problem or solution space. A frame suggests which types of questions to ask, and which type of answers to look for.

Previously, I've discussed how sometimes people have different assumptions about what frame they're in. The result can be annoying, confused conversations that take years to resolve. Noticing those different frames is an important communication skill.

Okay. So what's "Frame Control?"

People use "Frame control" differently. I assume they all roughly means, well, "someone is trying to control ...
High Status Eschews Quantification of Performance
by niplav — 2023-03-19T22:14:16.523Z

In a recent episode of The Filan
Cabinet,
Oliver Habryka elaborated on a very interesting social pattern: If you
have a community with high status people, and try to introduce clearer
metrics of performance into that community, high status individuals in
the community will strongly resist those metrics because they have an
asymmetric downside: If they perform well on the metric, they stay in
their position, but if they perform poorly, they might lose status. Since
they are at least a little bit unsure about their performance on the
metric relative to others, they can only lose.

Daniel Filan: So let's go back to what you think on your bad days. So
you mentioned that you had this sense that lots of things in the world
were, I don't know, trying to distract you from things that are true or
important. And that LessWrong did that somewhat less.

Oliver Habryka: Yeah.

Daniel Filan: Can you kind of flesh that out? What kinds of things
are you thinking of?

Oliver Habryka: I mean, the central dimension that I would often
think about here is reputation management. As an example, the medical
profession, which, you know, generally has the primary job of helping
you with your medical problems and trying to heal you of diseases and
various other things, also, at the same time, seems to have a very strong
norm of mutual reputation protection. Where, if you try to run a study
trying to figure out which doctors in the hospital are better or worse
than other doctors in the hospital, quite quickly, the hospital will
close its ranks and be like, “Sorry, we cannot gather data on [which
doctors are better than the other doctors in this hospital].” Because
that would, like, threaten the reputation arrangement we have. This would
introduce additional data that might cause some of us to be judged and
some others of us to not be judged.

And my sense is the way that usually looks like from the inside is
an actual intentional blinding to performance metrics in order to both
maintain a sense of social peace, and often the case because... A very
common pattern here [is] something like, you have a status hierarchy
within a community or a local institution like a hospital. And generally,
that status hierarchy, because of the way it works, has leadership
of the status hierarchy be opposed to all changes to the status
hierarchy. Because the current leadership is at the top of the status
hierarch

...