trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
D&D.Sci Long War: Defender of Data-mocracy Evaluation & Ruleset
by aphyer — 2024-05-14T03:35:10.586Z

This is a follow-up to last week's D&D.Sci scenario: if you intend to play that, and haven't done so yet, you should do so now before spoiling yourself.

There is a web interactive here you can use to test your answer, and generation code available here if you're interested, or you can read on for the ruleset and scores.

RULESET

Each alien has a different amount of HP:

Alien	HP	Threat*
Swarming Scarab	1	1
Chitinous Crawler	3	2
Voracious Venompede	5	3
Arachnoid Abomination	9	4
Towering Tyrant	15	5

*Threat has no effect on combat directly - it's a measure of how threatening Earth considers each alien to be, which scales how many soldiers they send. (The war has been getting worse - early on, Earth sent on average ~1 soldier/4 Threat of aliens, but today it's more like 1 soldier/6 Threat. The wave you're facing has 41 Threat, Earth would send on average ~7 soldiers to it. Earth doesn't exercise much selection with weapons, but sends soldiers in pairs such that each pair has two different weapons - this is a slight bias towards diversity.)

Each weapon has a damage it deals per shot, and a rate of fire that determines how many shots it can get off before the wielder is perforated by venomous spines/dissolved into a puddle of goo/voraciously devoured by a ravenous toothed maw:

Weapon	Damage	Min Shots	Max Shots
Macross Minigun	1	5	8
Fusion Flamethrower	1	3	12
Pulse Phaser	2	4	6
Rail Rifle	3	3	5
Laser Lance	5	2	5
Gluon Grenades	7	2	3
Thermo-Torpedos	13	1	3
Antimatter Artillery	20	1	2

Each soldier will be able to fire a number of shots chosen randomly between Min Shots and Max Shots - for example, a soldier with a Laser Lance will have time to fire 1d4+1 shots, each doing 5 damage.

During a battle, humans roll for how many shots each weapon gets, and then attempt to allocate damage from their shots to bring down all aliens. If they succeed, the humans win - if not, the humans lose. While doing this optimally is theoretically very difficult, your soldiers are well-trained and the battles are not all that large, so your soldiers will reliably find a solution if one exists.

For example, if you are fighting two Towering Tyrants and two Swarming Scarabs using two soldiers:

If you bring one soldier with Antimatter Artillery and one with a Macross Minigun, the Minigun soldier will reliably kill the Scarabs and have 3-6 shots left over (not enough to kill a Tyrant). The Artillery soldier will get e

...
Environmentalism in the United States Is Unusually Partisan
by Jeffrey Heninger — 2024-05-13T21:23:10.755Z
Link: https://blog.aiimpacts.org/p/environmentalism-in-the-united-states

This is the first in a sequence of four posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?

Introduction

In the United States, environmentalism is extremely partisan.

It might feel like this was inevitable. Caring about the environment, and supporting government action to protect the environment, might seem like they are inherently left-leaning. Partisanship has increased for many issues, so it might not be surprising that environmentalism became partisan too.

Looking at the public opinion polls more closely makes it more surprising. Environmentalism in the United States is unusually partisan, compared to other issues, compared to other countries, and compared to the United States itself at other times.

The partisanship of environmentalism was not inevitable.

Compared to Other Issues

Environmentalism is one of the, if not the, most partisan issues in the US.

The most recent data demonstrating this comes from a Gallup poll from 2023.[1] Of the 24 issues surveyed, “Protecting the Environment Has Priority Over Energy Development” was tied for the largest partisan gap with “Government Should Ensure That Everyone Has Healthcare.” Of the top 5 most partisan issues, 3 were related to environmentalism. The amount this gap has widened since 2003 is also above average for these environmental issues.

Figure 1: The percentages of Republicans and Democrats who agree with each statement shown, 2003-2023. Reprinted from Gallup (2023).

Pew also has some recent relevant data.[2] They ask whether 21 particular policies “should be a top priority for the president and Congress to address this year.” The largest partisan gap is for “protecting the environment” (47 p.p.), followed by “dealing with global climate change” (46 p.p.). These are ten percentage points higher than the next most partisan priority. These issues are less specific than the ones Gallup asked about, and so might not reveal as much of the underlying partisanship. For example, most Democrats and most Republicans agree that strengthening the economy is important, but they might disagree about how this should be done.

Figure 2: The percentages of Republicans and Democrats who believe that each issue should be a top priority. Reprinted from Pew (2023).

Guber’s analysis of Gallup polls from 1990, 2000, & 2010 also shows that environmentalism is unusually partisan.[3] Conc...
OpenAI releases GPT-4o, natively interfacing with text, voice and vision
by Martín Soto — 2024-05-13T18:50:52.337Z
Link: https://openai.com/index/gpt-4o-and-more-tools-to-chatgpt-free/

Until now ChatGPT dealt with audio through a pipeline of 3 models: audio transcription, then GPT-4, then text-to-speech. GPT-4o is apparently trained on text, voice and vision so that everything is done natively. You can now interrupt it mid-sentence.
It has GPT-4 level intelligence according to benchmarks. 16-shot GPT-4o is somewhat better at transcription than Whisper (that's a weird comparison to make), and 1-shot GPT-4o is considerably better at vision than previous models.
It's also somehow been made significantly faster at inference time. Might be mainly driven by an improved tokenizer. Edit: Nope, English tokenizer is only 1.1x.
It's confirmed it was the "gpt2" model found at LMSys arena these past weeks, a marketing move. It has the highest ELO as of now.
They'll be gradually releasing it for everyone, even free users.
Safety-wise, they claim to have run it through their Preparedness framework and the red-team of external experts, but have published no reports on this. "For now", audio output is limited to a selection of preset voices (addressing audio impersonations).
The demos during the livestream still seemed a bit clanky in my opinion. Still far from naturally integrating in normal human conversation, which is what they're moving towards.
No competitor of Google search, as had been rumored.
GPT-4o is out
by WitheringWeights — 2024-05-13T18:33:53.890Z

OpenAI just announced an improved LLM called GPT-4o.
From their website

Today, GPT-4o is much better than any existing model at understanding and discussing the images you share. For example, you can now take a picture of a menu in a different language and talk to GPT-4o to translate it, learn about the food's history and significance, and get recommendations. In the future, improvements will allow for more natural, real-time voice conversation and the ability to converse with ChatGPT via real-time video. For example, you could show ChatGPT a live sports game and ask it to explain the rules to you. We plan to launch a new Voice Mode with these new capabilities in an alpha in the coming weeks, with early access for Plus users as we roll out more broadly.
Somerville Porchfest Thoughts
by jefftk — 2024-05-13T17:20:05.308Z

This Saturday was Porchfest in Somerville, an annual festival where
musicians around the city play on their porches and people wander
around listening. As in the past few years Cecilia and I (

Kingfisher) played for
contra dancing:

Harris Lapiroff called:

If anyone has pictures of videos from the set, I'd love to see them as
well.

Overall, we had a great time! It was fun seeing so many friends, and
the kids did some very good business with their bake sale.

This was the second year we'd gotten permission to close the street to
traffic, which we really needed. I applied on Monday 2024-03-18 and
it was approved on Wednesday 2024-05-08 for an event on Saturday
2024-05-11. This was cutting it a bit close; among other things the
permit says you need to give all abutters at least one week written
notice, which wasn't possible. My guess is the city wanted to decide
all together which streets would be closed, and wanted to do that
close to the time so they'd have as much information as possible?

There were several times that cars came through the closed street,
mostly in groups. They moved appropriately slowly, but they're just
very bulky which was tricky with the dancing. There were barriers up,
but maybe with how many streets were closed the drivers felt like they
had no other possible routes?

Even though Morrison tends to have a lot of bands and people, this
year it was far from the most crowded place. That would have been
Aberdeen, where Guster played. Over
on Reddit /u/mais318 took
a drone up (possibly unsafely/illegally?):

I did hear a lot of mixed things afterwards about crowd and traffic
management. Some ideas for future iterations:

Close more streets. If bands that tend to draw a large crowd
on a street, put in a block party request.

Pick some main streets to keep open [1] and ask people not to
perform on those streets. Strongly discourage driving on non-main
streets, even the ones that aren't closed.

Decide farther in advance which streets will be closed, and
make a map available.

Encourage people with houses backing up onto the bike path to
play/host bands on the path.

Bands likley to draw very large crowds (ex: with >20k
monthly Spotify streamers) should only play as a surprise.

Other ideas?

[1] Spitballing: Broadway, Holland, Elm, Powder House, Boston Ave,
Highland Ave, Summer,...
Branding AI Safety Groups: A Field Guide
by agucova — 2024-05-13T17:17:01.799Z

This article is the first in a series I plan to publish on different aspects of AI Safety group strategy. The aim is that, eventually, these articles will form the basis for a new resource center for AI Safety Groups. Note that these articles aren’t being published in any particular order.

TL;DR: AI safety groups should carefully consider their branding strategy to attract target audiences and avoid silently losing talented individuals by giving the wrong impressions. Key things to do are identifying audience profiles, tailoring the value proposition and differentiating your group from others. Common branding strategies (technical, institutional, impact, or broad appeal) each have tradeoffs to weigh based on your goals and your context. Regularly seek feedback to refine branding rather than relying solely on intuition.

Introduction

In some ways, it’s still the early days of AI Safety groups. Groups, whether they’re at universities, entire cities, or online, are still trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t. In many ways, AI Safety groups are much more heterogeneous than, say, EA groups, and this is to be expected: there isn’t broad agreement about things like group strategy, programming, or even a defined set of common goals.

One aspect of this heterogeneity is branding. This is partly a good thing: AI Safety is a field, not a cohesive community, and it often needs to appeal to very different audiences. At the same time, we could benefit from sharing lessons learned from aspects like branding, especially as groups continue to experiment and collect feedback from the real world.

This post is a provisional field guide for group organizers to think through their branding and incorporate some of the early lessons learned from other groups.

Why branding matters

First impressions matter. It’s easy for organizers to underestimate how many talented people they lose to self-exclusion. The “vibes” you project can be a dealbreaker for many people, and these are often silent failures: it’s difficult to realize this is happening unless you make an explicit effort to find out about it.

Many group organizers have seen steep and surprising benefits after branding changes[1], and based on my interaction with many organizers, I suspect many groups’ early struggles with outreach stem from the problems I describe below. Branding is not a silver bullet, but ...
Against Student Debt Cancellation From All Sides of the Political Compass
by Maxwell Tabarrok — 2024-05-13T14:55:57.525Z
Link: https://www.maximum-progress.com/p/against-student-debt-cancellation

A stance against student debt cancellation doesn’t rely on the assumptions of any single ideology. Strong cases against student debt cancellation can be made based on the fundamental values of any section of the political compass. In no particular order, here are some arguments against student debt cancellation from the perspectives of many disparate ideologies.

Equity and Fairness

Student debt cancellation is a massive subsidy to an already prosperous and privileged population. American college graduates have

nearly double

the income of high school graduates. African Americans are

far underrepresented

among degree holders compared to their overall population share.

Within the group of college graduates debt cancellation increases equity, but you can’t get around the fact that

72% of African Americans

have no student debt because they never went to college. The tax base for debt cancellation will mostly come from rich white college graduates, but most of the money will go to … rich white college graduates.

Taxing the rich to give to the slightly-less-rich doesn’t have the same Robin Hood ring but might still slightly improve equity and fairness relative to the status quo, except for the fact that it will trade off with far more important programs. Student debt cancellation will cost several hundred billion dollars at least, perhaps up to a trillion dollars or around

4% of GDP

. That’s more than defense spending, R&D spending, more than Medicaid and Medicare, and almost as much as social security spending.

A trillion-dollar transfer from the top 10% to the top 20% doesn’t move the needle much on equity but it does move the needle a lot on budgetary and political constraints. We should be spending these resources on those truly in need, not the people who already have the immense privilege on an American college degree.

Effective Altruism

The effective altruist critique of student debt cancellations is similar to the one based on equity and fairness, but with much more focus on global interventions as an alternative way to spend the money.

Grading student debt cancellation on impact, tractability, and neglectedness, it scores very poorly. Mostly because of tiny impact compared to the most effective charitable interventions. Giving tens of thousands of dollars to people who already have high incomes, live in the most prosperous country on earth, and face little risk...
Monthly Roundup #18: May 2024
by Zvi — 2024-05-13T12:30:04.863Z

As I note in the third section, I will be attending LessOnline at month’s end at Lighthaven in Berkeley. If that is your kind of event, then consider going, and buy your ticket today before prices go up.

This month’s edition was an opportunity to finish off some things that got left out of previous editions or where events have left many of the issues behind, including the question of TikTok.

Oh No

All of this has happened before. And all of this shall happen again.

Alex Tabarrok: I regret to inform you that the CDC is at it again.

Marc Johnson: We developed an assay for testing for H5N1 from wastewater over a year ago. (I wasn’t expecting it in milk, but I figured it was going to poke up somewhere.)

However, I was just on a call with the CDC and they are advising us NOT to use it.

I need a drink.

They say it will only add to the confusion because we won’t know where it is coming from. I’m part of a team. I don’t get to make those decisions myself.

Ben Hardisty: The usual institute, or did they have a good reason?

Marc Johnson: They say it would only add to the confusion since we don’t know precisely where it is coming from. But then they said 2 minutes later that they aren’t sure this isn’t just regular influenza appearing late. We can answer that, so why don’t we??? I don’t get it.

Alex: Are your team members considering bucking the CDC advice or has the decision been made to acquiesce? I understand them not wanting panic but man if that’s not self serving advice I don’t know what is.

Marc Johnson: The CDC will come around.

ZzippyCorgi11: Marc, can private entities ask you to test wastewater around their locations? Is the CDC effectively shutting down any and all testing of wastewater for H5N1?

Marc Johnson: No, if people want to send me wastewater I can test them with other funding. I just can’t test the samples I get from state surveillance.

JH: This is ridiculous. Do it anyway!

Marc Johnson: It’s not my call. I got burned once for finding Polio somewhere I wasn’t supposed to find it. It fizzled, fortunately.

Ross Rheingans-Yoo: It’s a societal mistake that we’re not always monitoring for outbreaks of the dozen greatest threats, given how cheap wastewater testing can get.

Active intervention by the CDC to stop new testing for a new strain of influenza circulating in mammals on farms is unconscionable.

I strongly agree with Ross here. Of all the lesso...
What you really mean when you claim to support “UBI for job automation”
by Deric Cheng — 2024-05-13T08:52:08.683Z

Author’s Note: Though I’m currently a governance researcher at Convergence Analysis, this post is unaffiliated with Convergence. The opinions expressed are solely my own.

You’ve seen it a dozen times at this point. You’re probably broadly aligned philosophically, but haven’t thought terribly deeply about the details. You generally support Andrew Yang’s $12k / year “Freedom Dividend” as “moving in the right direction”, even if it’s economically flawed.

The argument goes roughly like this: “All of our jobs are about to be automated away with AI technology and robotics! We’ll end up soon in a post-work society with massive unemployment unless we can find a way to distribute the benefits of AI automation fairly. We need a universal basic income to protect humans.”

To recap - universal basic income is a proposal to give every individual in a society a sum of money on a monthly or annual basis, to provide a “universal safety-net” for those who are unemployed or enable greater financial flexibility. A very common proposal for the US is on the order of $1k a month, or $12k a year[1].

Personally, I’m fairly aligned with the direction of this argument. But it strikes me as painfully simplistic. Our social welfare systems have been incrementally built over decades, targeting measurable improvements for vulnerable demographics. Effective taxation and redistribution is dependent on thousands of economic factors, with winners and losers for every decision.

So - I decided to explore. What would an actual implementation of “UBI in the face of increasing job automation” look like? As a casual proponent, what specific policies do you actually support to achieve your socioeconomic ideals?

A couple big takeaways from this research:

Part 1: If your goal is a universal safety net, you probably don’t actually want UBI. You want some form of a targeted negative income tax (NIT) that also provides direct payments. In practice, you might only want minor (US) policy tweaks to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).
Part 2: If your goal is to transfer the wealth generated by automation, you probably actually want global tax reform to better enforce corporate income taxes. You might also support some form of a progressive income tax on the largest multinational corporations.

Let me share a hot take. After doing this research, I think that if you support UBI (as popularly structured as a $X,000 mont...
The two-tiered society
by Roman Leventov — 2024-05-13T07:53:25.438Z

On AI and Jobs: How to Make AI Work With Us, Not Against Us With Daron Acemoglu

Here is Claude.ai's summary of Daron Acemoglu's main ideas from the podcast:

Historically, major productivity improvements from new technologies haven't always translated into benefits for workers. It depends on how the technologies are used and who controls them.
There are concerns that AI could further exacerbate inequality and create a "two-tiered society" if the benefits accrue mainly to a small group of capital owners and highly skilled workers. Widespread prosperity is not automatic.
We should aim for "machine usefulness" - AI that augments and complements human capabilities - rather than just "machine intelligence" focused on automating human tasks. But the latter is easier to monetize.
Achieving an AI future that benefits workers broadly will require changing incentives - through the tax system, giving workers more voice, government funding for human-complementary AI research, reforming business models, and effective regulation.
Some amount of "steering" of AI development through policy is needed to avoid suboptimal social outcomes, but this needs to be balanced against maintaining innovation and progress. Regulation should be a "soft touch."
An "AI disruption reduction act," akin to climate legislation, may be needed to massively shift incentives in a more pro-worker, pro-social direction before AI further entrenches a problematic trajectory. But some temporary slowdown in AI progress as a result may be an acceptable tradeoff.

The prospect of two-tiered socioeconomic order looks very realistic to me, and it is scary.

On the one hand, this order won't be as static as feudal or caste systems: sure thing, politicians and technologists will create (at least formal) systems for vertical mobility from the lower tier, i.e., people who just live off UBI, and the higher level, politicians, business leaders, chief scientists, capital and land owners.

On the other hand, in feudal and caste systems people in all tiers have their role in the societal division of labour from which they can derive their sense of usefulness, purpose, and self-respect. It will be more challenging for those "have-nots" in the future AI world. Not only their labour will not be valued by the economy, their family roles will also be eroded: teacher for their own kids (why kids would respect them if AI will be vastly m...