trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
18 Heterodox lenses to look the world through
by Shaurya Gupta — 2023-10-10T18:33:16.524Z

1) "cynics get to be right, optimist get to be rich"

• its better to have a worldview that is delusionary but beneficial, than accurate but stale.

• if you are going to be wrong majority of the times, why not be wrong in a way which benefits you.

• you are better off aiming for the moon and falling short among the stars, than of not launching at all.

2) operationalising emotions

• Operationalise emotion means setting an action cue after a sense emotion is felt to quickly mitigate the feeling.

• Frustration – cut out unessential tasks

• sadness - generate more options by mitigating ignorance

• anger - wait it out till water gets calm

• anxiety - prioritise available decisions

3) There is no utility in underestimating your opponents

• in which manner does it serve to perceive your opponent as weaker than you, what is the most that you get? Ego, at what cost? Complacency.

• you risk looking foolish if the opponent overdelivers and you underdeliver, and even if you win, you would have won with greater margin given you believed your opponent is stronger.

• be conservative when adjusting advantages and reasonable when disadvantages.

4) Learning isn’t a spectator sport

• intelligence - rate of learning

• learning - same condition, new behaviour

• if increased the rate at which you change your behaviour you can effectively be more intelligent.

• if I show you red card, and then slap you, and then show the red card again, and if you duck, that means you have learned, same condition, new behaviour.

• if I show you red card again and you don’t duck, or it takes more trials to duck, that effectively means you are stupid.

• life shows us red card daily in our life, and if you don’t change, then you are not as smart as you thought you were.

5) this is what hard feels like

• there is no alternative to the act of shoving the fucking coal, no productivity tactics are going to make you feel less shit for any less amount of time than what is demanded by the work. Work needs to be done.

• stop complaining about the results that you didn’t get for the work that you didn’t put in.

• people underestimate how much you can impact just by the sheer act of coming back at it, and chipping away every day.

• work works on you more than you work on it, no amount of work is wasted because one thing that is constant is you, and you change whilst outcomes might not.

6) You don’t have to ...
Documenting Journey Into AI Safety
by jacobhaimes — 2023-10-10T18:30:03.075Z

Summary

Recently, I have noticed that many individuals have become discouraged due to a seeming lack of progress in their attempts to break into a career in AI safety. It seems to me that a key bottleneck in the beginning a career in AI safety pipeline is access to mentors.

One method that may help address this need for mentorship would be for an individual going through this process to document their path, with a focus on peer and mentor feedback.[1]Although this content would not be tailored to each specific listener, my intuition is that a lot of the feedback provided to one individual will still be valuable to others who have not yet been able to find mentors themselves. A series like this could then be a resource for newcomers, and could significantly increase the number of people who can get involved in the field.

If you have the time, I would greatly appreciate any feedback that you have regarding my thought process and this endeavor. Check out the Feedback Request section for some more information.

Feedback Request

I have prioritized getting this out quickly over this being my final plan, as I believe we can reach a much better result more efficiently than I could on my own. So, if something seems incredibly obvious and I didn't mention it or take it into account, please let me know! Here are some questions to think about as you read through this post for a few different demographics:

If you are new to AI safety, would a series like this be helpful? Is there anything you would like to make sure is covered early on (if possible)?
Field builders, am I making a field-building-faux-pas, or does something like this make sense to you? Is there any way I can improve it?
AI safety veterans, am I missing an obvious opportunity or angle? Is there anything that you think would be highly valuable to talk about in a series like this?

Brief Intro

My name is Jacob Haimes, and I live just outside of Boulder, Colorado, USA. I have an MS in computational modeling. In my free time I love playing all kinds of games, especially TTRPGs.

Examining the Situation

When I began thinking about making a career change into AI safety, I saw two options: up-skill and apply for positions, or apply for a PhD (with the intent to focus on AI safety, and enter the field once finished with the program). After discussing with a number of individuals, I decided on the former for the fol...
Looking for AI Art Collaborators! 
by beatrice@foresight.org — 2023-10-10T18:24:16.179Z

Tldr.

Existential Hope is looking for generative AI-assisted art collaborators for our monthly content drop (which includes a podcast, our website, and a newsletter). These would be created via a monthly prompt in relation to the content of that month.

You can see prior art pieces on our website:

https://www.existentialhope.com/podcast

Existential Hope

The aim of

our platform

is to explore ideas, technologies, and projects which make you feel hopeful and ready to take action for the long-term flourishing of life.

The Existential Hope project is a sub-project of the

Foresight Institute

.

Content

Each month we curate a content drop, which includes an interview of a person of interest for our audience, an art piece deriving from the content of that interview, and a curated list of resources to explore. Recent content titles include:

Joe Carlsmith on infinity ethics, utopia, and AI
Sara Walker on Life’s beginnings with the cosmic perspective
Anders Sandberg on Grand Futures and the post-human coral reef

From the monthly interview, we create a prompt, which we then ask for art pieces from. Please see all of our work and the art

here

. We are looking for art pieces that use generative AI and are generally hopeful in nature. Beyond that, however, you are free to create anything in response to the monthly prompt.

Logistics

This is an unpaid collaboration.
We will share your name and bio with your art everywhere that is is present
You are welcome to create one art piece or many
There is no guarantee that we will use your art – although we do try to ask as few people as necessary to avoid the creation of pieces which are then not used

If you are interested or have questions, please contact

existentialhope@foresight.org

.
Childhood Roundup #3
by Zvi — 2023-10-10T14:30:04.287Z

It’s time once again for a roundup of all the childhood-related stories I’ve noticed since the last such post that don’t fit in elsewhere.

In addition to the standard post, I have a personal note, which is that unfortunately our current nanny’s health does not allow her to continue, and thus we in the process of searching and doing interviews for a new full-time nanny for our three children here in Manhattan. I hope to have someone in place by the end of the week. If you are or know someone we should consider, please do quickly contact me right away with the relevant information. You can DM me on Twitter, PM me on LesssWrong or email me through substack (or email directly if you know it). Thanks in advance.

We All Need a Friend

Sorry you are being bullied, here’s some gold? In this case, $40k raised for some reason for a kid who went around asking to make friends. But no friends.

Evan Zhao: Phenomenal super villain origin story

I feel his pain. Finding friends for my kids has been difficult as well – if anyone has kids about 10 or younger reasonably close to lower Manhattan and wants to try setting up playdates to bring the kids over, please reach out.

Time Spent on Children is Historically Anomalous

Reminder that working mothers today spend more time on childcare than did housewives of the 1960s. Quality time is great, quantity time has gotten out of hand.

Bryan Caplan points out in his version of my old post More Dakka the alternative hypothesis that also explains all the ‘parents don’t matter’ measurements.

Take parenting. Most readers summarize my Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids as “Parenting doesn’t matter.” But that is only one possible interpretation of the twin and adoption data. The data is also consistent, however, with the theory that most parents are barely trying to get results – at least on many relevant margins. I pondered this in depth before I started homeschooling my kids. I’m always stunned by all the economists who fail to teach their kids about supply-and-demand. All my kids know about these holy diagrams. What’s the difference between their kids and mine? I did ten times as much.

Yep. I interpret the ‘parents don’t matter’ statistics in a similar fashion. If you fail in one or more of many ways one can fail, that does a lot of damage.

You can then do vastly better than baseline, but that requires you to pu...
My simple model for Alignment vs Capability
by ryan_b — 2023-10-10T12:07:42.710Z

I have a simple model of the alignment vs. capabilities question. I am writing it down because after chewing on Michael Nielson's post about existential risk from AI, I thought it was great but was unsatisfied with with the idea an alignment dilemma. I wasn't the only person to feel that way, but neither was I able to find any satisfactory source describing the (tension? dichotomy? tradeoff?). The real rub of Nielsen's dilemma for me is that it was expressed in terms of accelerationism, which is a form of one-dialism, and one-dialism is wrong.

I note there is nothing actually new here; I am quite sure these considerations were all covered, and more besides, back when MIRI getting started. Yet we weren't speaking in terms of alignment vs capability then, and capabilities were a less urgent concern, and regardless of what we have said before here, people aren't talking about models in public now. So a simple model it is.

Background

The way I understand the alignment vs capabilities question is that capabilities research eventually cashes out as AGI, and alignment research cashes out as aligned AGI, so in this context alignment research is effectively a subset of capabilities research. I expect this to apply more or less continuously, where increasingly-capable-but-not-AGIs will still need to be aligned.

What I want to accomplish with the model is to have something we can use to make heuristic judgments about research: in particular things like whether to support, fund, or pursue it, and how to make comparisons between different research agendas. This is not for doing things like predicting timelines directly, or the course of AI research overall, or the future of a given research org.

Reject Acceleration

My chief objection to thinking and speaking in terms of acceleration is that it is causally useless. I make analogy to GDP as an economic metric: if a particular industry is growing very fast, and we want that industry to succeed but also to avoid catastrophic industrial accidents, one scalar number that refers to a big pile of all the activity adds nothing. We cannot build safer industrial facilities by saying "but GDP should go up less." Likewise for talking to investors, and also to regulators. Acceleration is purely a rhetorical device, which is why we should be unsurprised to see it appear in the public conversation, and also why it should be treated with cauti...
Next year in Jerusalem: The brilliant ideas and radiant legacy of Miriam Lipschutz Yevick [in relation to current AI debates]
by Bill Benzon — 2023-10-10T09:06:32.271Z
Link: https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2023/10/next-year-in-jerusalem-the-brilliant-ideas-and-radiant-legacy-of-miriam-lipschutz-yevick-in-relation-to-current-ai-debates.html

This is a link post for an article I just published in 3 Quarks Daily. No one has conceptualized the phenomenon of human thought in technical terms more deeply than Yevick did in her 1975 article, Holographic or Fourier Logic. Her conception was certainly incomplete – she knew that. It may also be wrong, but that's something that has yet to be determined. That requires analysis and discussion.

I've quoted Yevick at some length in an earlier post at LessWrong: Miriam Yevick on why both symbols and networks are necessary for artificial minds.

Here is the introduction to the article:

Oh, Ariela, daughter of the People of the Book, the work of the mind is our game!
– Miriam Yevick

I first became aware of Miriam Lipschutz Yevick through my interest in human perception and thought. I believed that her 1975 paper, Holographic or Fourier Logic, was quite important. David Hays and I gave it a prominent place in our 1988 paper, Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence, and in a related paper on metaphor.

Since Yevick’s work shares a mathematics with some work in machine vision and image recognition, I wondered whether or not that paper had been cited. Moreover, that work is relevant to current debates about the need for symbolic processing in artificial intelligence (AI). As recently as 2007 Yevick was arguing, albeit informally, that human thought requires both poetic, Gestalt, or holographic processing, on the one hand, and analytic, propositional, or logical on the other.

As far as I can tell, her work has been forgotten.

That is one thing. But there is more. I become curious about her, this woman, Miriam Lipschutz Yevick.

What about her? And so I began reading her 2012 memoire, A Testament for Ariela, which takes the form of letters she had written to her grand-daughter in a three-year period in the mid-1980s. The memoire says nothing about her mathematical ideas, though it does mention that in 1947 she became the fifth woman to get a mathematics Ph.D. from MIT. She also talks of her friendship and correspondence with David Bohm, who became a noted quantum theorist. It quickly became clear that she had not had an academic career worthy of her intellectual gifts. Yet she did not seem bitter about that. She had a rich and fulfilling life.

This essay is about both her life and her holographic logic. The work on holographic logic le...
I'm a Former Israeli Officer. AMA
by Yovel Rom — 2023-10-10T08:33:51.557Z

Hey everyone! Long time lurker, first time poster.

My name is Yovel Rom. I'm an Israeli data scientist. I served in the IDF in an elite program called Talpiot, which consists of a physics udergrad and broad military education (basically West Point for technology people, but more elitist), then as a data scientist, and finished my service as a captain. I'm currently at home, since I finished my service two years ago and they don't need many data scientists right now.

Ask me anything. I'm as updated on the situation as a person with no formal position can be (which might be less than you expect).

EDIT: I will try to cite sources as much as possible, but I might do that in Hebrew since there's so much more of it. I will only cite Wikipedia, major newspapers and state- funded think tanks, which are reliable.
Become a PIBBSS Research Affiliate
by Nora_Ammann — 2023-10-10T07:41:02.037Z

TL;DR: PIBBSS is hiring research affiliates!

PIBBSS is a research initiative facilitating work that draws on the parallels between intelligent behavior in natural and artificial systems, and leveraging these insights towards making AI systems safe, beneficial and aligned.

We want to support excellent researchers pursuing “PIBBSS-style” AI alignment research by providing them with tailored longer-term support: a full-time salary, a lively research community, operational support and more. The initial commitment is 6 months, with potential extensions to 12 or more.

To apply, click

here

. To be considered as part of the next iteration of affiliates, apply by November 5th.

At

PIBBSS

(“Principles of Intelligent Behavior in Biological and Social Systems”), our mission is to facilitate AI alignment research that draws on the parallels between intelligent behavior in natural and artificial systems. (For more details, see the section "About PIBBSS and our research priorities" below.)

Since PIBBSS’ inception in 2022, we have run two iterations of our

3-months research fellowships

, as well as

a reading group

,

an ongoing speaker series

, and a number of research retreats exploring topics in line with PIBBSS’ research interests. Our alumni have gone on to pursue AI alignment research at places like OpenAI, Anthropic, the Alignment of Complex Systems research group, and academia, as well as through independent funding.

While we continue to be excited about the value of those activities, we also believe that there is more value to be had! In particular, we see potential in a program geared towards supporting longer-term, more sustained research efforts in line with PIBBSS’ research bet.

As such, we are delighted to launch our new PIBBSS Affiliate Program.

Goals and key features of the Affiliate Program

At its core, our goal in running this program is to counterfactually help produce substantial, high-quality and legible research progress on problems in AI risk, alignment and governance. The affiliate program aims to do this by supporting promising individual researchers in a highly tailored fashion to scope, develop, and progress on their personal research agendas.

Concrete success scenarios might look like (but are not limited to) affiliates publishing insightful research results; joining t...
My 1st month at a "neurodivergent gifted school" called Minerva University
by exanova — 2023-10-10T03:34:12.879Z
Link: https://inawe.substack.com/p/1st-month-at-minerva-university-academics

An personal blog (8 min read) consisting of:

Academics

Habits of Mind and Foundational Concepts (HCs)
Class content
Class structure
Mild pacing
Somewhat rigourous
Tolerable technical bugs

Students

examples of eclectic students
cultural diversity
wholesome personality and humanities-lovers

Physical vibes

Chaotic dorm and not aspie-friendly
Messy and budget-constrained events
Epistemic Motif of Abstract-Concrete Cycles & Domain Expansion
by Dalcy — 2023-10-10T03:28:43.356Z

(crossposted from here)

I've noticed there are certain epistemic motifs (i.e. legible & consistent patterns of knowledge production) that come up in fairly wide circumstances across mathematics and philosophy. Here's one that I think is fairly powerful:

Abstract-Concrete Cycles and Domain Expansion

Given a particular object [structure/definition] that models some concept, we can modify it by either [abstracting out some of its features] or [instantiating a more concrete version of it] as we [modify the domain of discourse] that the object operates on, accompanied with [intuition juice from the real-world that guides our search]. Repeat this over various abstraction-levels, and you end up with a richer set of objects.

Examples of how this plays out

a) Space

Here's an example from mathematics (inspired from here). You have some concrete notion of a thing you want to capture, say, space. So you operationalize it using some immediately obvious definition like Rn which, being extremely concrete, comes equipped with a bunch of implicit structures (metric, angle, explicit coordinates, etc) - many of which you probably didn't explicitly intend or even superfluous to your aims.

Then you abstract away the structures one-by-one, e.g.,

Metric spaces abstract out the notion of "distance" using metrics.
Inner product spaces abstract out the notion of "similarity," which caches out to abstracting the notion of "magnitude" and "angle."
Topological spaces abstract out the notion of "locality" using open sets.

And with this more abstract notion of space in hand, you can project it down to more concrete structures in domains different from that of original consideration, effectively using it as a generator. e.g.,

Function spaces: "Now that I have this much less restrictive notion of space, what happens if I extend its domain of discourse to, say, infinite-dimensional objects like functions?"

From here, the loop continues. With a concrete structure in hand that captures what you want, but now with a flavor of operating in a different domain, this may yield insight into how certain structures that were not originally under your consideration might further be abstracted away.

Of course, this process is guided by our [intuition about real-world stuff/aesthetic/practical utility/simplicity] rather than being a blind search in conceptspace.

After you continue this process of abstract...
Simple Terminal Colors
by jefftk — 2023-10-10T00:40:08.092Z

I work in the terminal a lot and I often want to write programs that
color their output a bit. For example, perhaps I'm looking at a

sequencing read and I want to know what
part of it was the reason it was flagged. I could use

colorama,

termcolor, or another
library, but

including a
dependency for something this simple is not really worth
it. Instead, printing colored text is as simple as:

COLOR_RED_BOLD = '\x1b[1;31m'
COLOR_BLUE_BOLD = '\x1b[1;34m'
COLOR_END = '\x1b[0m'
print(
"One fish, two fish, " +
COLOR_RED_BOLD + "red" +
COLOR_END + " fish, " +
COLOR_BLUE_BOLD + "blue" +
COLOR_END + " fish.")

I usually just want one or two highlight colors, typically in bold,
and rarely find the six standard colors limiting. It's especially
helpful if you want to draw your eye to something specific, while
maintaining the context around it when you need to look further.

How compatible is this? Will someone with a non-ANSI terminal someday
run my code and complain? One data point is that I wrote icdiff with this approach in 2009, and it's been reasonably
popular. While I've gotten hundreds
of bug reports this has never been one people have complained about.

Comment via: facebook, mastodon
The Handbook of Rationality (2021, MIT press) is now open access
by romeostevensit — 2023-10-10T00:30:05.589Z

Of particular interest here is section 4.1 on subjective accounts of probability and section 8.4 which explicitly addresses Knightian uncertainty and its challenges for Bayesian accounts.

https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-edited-volume/5525/The-Handbook-of-Rationality