trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Covid 11/17/22: Slow Recovery
by Zvi — 2022-11-17T14:50:01.146Z

While the news has been fast and furious on many fronts, Covid is not one of them.

Except that, this week, I got it.

On Monday evening, I started having chills. They seem better during the day, worse at night, slowly improving.

That night, I was almost entirely unable to sleep. I would lie down to sleep, and my body would be having none of it, I’d simply be lying down in bed for the whole night for multiple nights straight. The third night was somewhat better. The third night did finally include a lot of coughing, which for now seems to have gone away.

I thank everyone on Twitter and elsewhere for the well wishes.

Needless to say, I am somewhat tired and not at full capacity. That is the main thing I am feeling right now – very, very tired and low energy. Other aspects are manageable.

You do not want to get this. It sucks. It is a bad time.

It also is something that ultimately has not been so bad. It will pass. Life goes on.

My main writing focus this week until I got sick was assembling my post on everything that happened with FTX. I hope people find it helpful.

Executive Summary

I have Covid. It is no fun, but I should be fine.

Remarkably little broader Covid news.

Beijing seeing a spike in cases.

Let’s run the numbers.

The Numbers

Predictions

Predictions from Last Week: 250k cases (+4%) and 2,400 deaths (+20%).

Results: 244k cases (+0%) and 2,139 deaths (+7%).

Predictions for Next Week (not a holiday yet): 250k cases (+2%) and 2,250 deaths (+5%)

There was some bounce back in deaths, but it still looks like the break in southern cases was for real. A combination of weather and variants seems like it should push case counts up slightly. For now, all seems quiet.

Deaths

Cases

Physical World Modeling

Oh look, we are intentionally creating strains of Covid-19 resistant to Paxlovid. Great.

Oh look, another study that says that people who get Covid-19 will later be in poorer health than people who did not get Covid-19, without controls, so thanks for that.

Paxlovid rebounds in 19% of study, versus 7% rebounds for controls (study).

In Other Covid News

White House seeks more Covid funding in lame-duck session. I don’t know why it would be forthcoming.

White House extending ‘Covid emergency’ until at least April. Still finding it useful, likely because Congress tied policy to the state of emergency. Seems like s...
Sadly, FTX
by Zvi — 2022-11-17T14:30:03.068Z

It has been quite a past two weeks, with different spheres in deeply divided narratives. In addition to the liberation of Kherson City, the midterm elections that of course took forever to resolve and the ongoing hijinks of Elon Musk taking over Twitter, there was the complete implosion of Sam Bankman-Fried (hereafter ‘SBF’), his crypto exchange FTX and his crypto trading firm Alameda Research.

The situation somehow kept getting worse several times a day, even relative to my updated expectations, as new events happened and new revelations came out.

In the wake of those events, there are not only many questions but many categories of questions. Here are some of them.

What just happened?

What happened in the lead-up to this happening?

Why did all of this happen?

What is going to happen to those involved going forward?

What is going to happen to crypto in general?

Why didn’t we see this coming, or those who did see it speak louder?

What does this mean for FTX’s charitable efforts and those getting funding?

What does this mean for Effective Altruism? Who knew what when?

What if anything does this say about utilitarianism?

How are we casting and framing the movie Michael Lewis is selling, in which he was previously (it seems) planning on portraying Sam Bankman-Fried as the Luke Skywalker to CZ’s Darth Vader? Presumably that will change a bit.

This post is my attempt to take my best stab at as much of this as possible, give my model of what happened and is likely to happen from here, what implications we can and should draw, and to compile as many sources as possible that I have found useful.

This is a fast-moving complicated situation that involves a lot of lying and fraud. Anyone attempting to sort it all out, especially quickly, is going to make mistakes. I decided that this was the time when the value of synthesis exceeded the cost of such errors. Still, doubtless there will be mistakes here. I will correct them as they are discovered, either by myself or others. I apologize for them in advance.

Thus I highly encourage you to read this post on the web rather than via an email or RSS version, in case there have been substantial revisions. I will attempt to update others but the Substack version is canonical. There have as of yet not been any substantive revisions since publication, which was on the morning of 11/17...
Deontology and virtue ethics as "effective theories" of consequentialist ethics 
by Jan_Kulveit — 2022-11-17T14:11:49.087Z

This is a rough attempt to present deontology and virtue ethics as approximate, effective theories [1] of consequentialist morality, for agents severely bounded in their ability to determine the consequences of their actions, and delegating actions to future selves. I think this view could help effective altruists to avoid some problems caused by what we may call bounded consequentialism or local consequentialism. None of this is very original: you can get some of the same intuitions from the works of Derek Parfit and Toby Ord among others, but it seemed worth writing down a short less formal synthesis of my current views.

The main claims I want to make are:

Because of boundedness, deontology and virtue ethics act as effective theories of consequentialism
Where attempts at consequentialist calculations diverge from virtue ethical and deontic intuitions, it's often because the consequentialist calculation is mistaken
If you're strongly consequentialist, because of boundedness and delegation, you should take deontic and virtue ethical intuitions pretty seriously - as that will lead to better consequences

In the post, I:

Set out how deontology and virtue ethics can be seen as effective approximations of idealised, unbounded consequentialism, given we are just humans
Offer some metaphors from physics for understanding the relationship between different ethical theories
Give some real-life examples of what I see as bounded consequentialism in effective altruism, relating to fire alarms, demandingness, outreach to young people, and optimization of social interactions

Consequentialism

Consequentialism

is the view that the right thing to do is always the action that will produce the best consequences.

Act consequentialism - where an actor directly chooses actions based on an assessment of the consequences - works straightforwardly in situations where it is possible to compute the consequences of actions, and we are able to estimate the value of the consequences. A textbook example would be selecting between a small number of lotteries, which have different probabilities of leading to different amounts of money. Another example would be a case of triage, where a paramedic has to choose between several casualties with different survival probabilities.

The direct act-based decision procedure becomes less tractable with large ac...
The Ground Truth Problem (Or, Why Evaluating Interpretability Methods Is Hard)
by Jessica Rumbelow — 2022-11-17T11:06:28.079Z

Work done @ SERI-MATS.

Evaluating interpretability methods (and so, developing good ones) is really hard because we have no ground truth. Or at least, no ground truth that we can compare our interpretations directly against.

The ground truth of a model's behaviour is provided by that model's architecture and its learned parameters. But, puny humans are unable to interpret this: it's precise, in that it accurately explains the model's behaviour, but it's not interpretable. On the other end of the spectrum we have something like "This model classifies cats" – a statement that is really easy to interpret, but lacks something in the way of precision.

Precise <---------------------------------> Interpretable

^ Useful?

Imagine two interpretations, each generated by a different method with respect to the same model (say, a cat classifier). Method A indicates that the model has learned to use ears and whiskers to identify cats. Method B indicates that it uses eyes and tails. Assuming both are easy to interpret, can we tell which method is most precise? Which most faithfully represents what the model is truly doing?

If we had a method that reconciled precision and interpretability, how would we know?

Well, we can perform sanity checks on the interpretability methods, and throw away any that fail them. This seems good – it's at least objective – but it only really allows us to throw away obviously bad approaches. It doesn't say anything about what to do when sane interpretability methods disagree.

We could also look at the interpretations and see if they appear sensible to us. This is a widely used approach (Zeiler et al., Petsuik et al., Fong et al., many many more), and I think it's a terrible idea.

Example:

We've made some new interpretability method that is supposed to help us understand which words are used by a language model to identify hate speech in tweets. To see if it works properly, we compare the words highlighted by this interpretability method to the actual hateful words in the tweet. It gets them right! Our new interpretability method works!
NO! We have fallen prey to a terrible assumption: that if a model performs well, it has learned to use the same features that a human would

...
[Personal Question] Can anyone help me navigate this potentially painful interpersonal dynamic rationally? 
by SlainLadyMondegreen — 2022-11-17T08:53:01.775Z

Hello, LessWrong community. I have a question, my dears, for you. I hope it will not annoy anyone as it is admittedly a self-indulgent question which perhaps does not fit very well within the landscape of LessWrong content; however, I have inwardly justified posting it anyway because a) I genuinely need advice, and b) I trust LW more than I trust the entire rest of the internet to give me clear, honest, good advice. I know LW is not a relationship advice column, but I am quite new to rationality concepts and need some help applying them to a relationship dilemma in my real life that I can't tell anyone about in my personal life for reasons that I will clarify below. I would appreciate any thoughts this community is willing to offer about my situation, as I greatly value your honest insight.

Where to start.

I have this friend. Let's call him Hector. He's 23 years older than me (I'm 29F); in fact, he's an old friend of my dad's from way back.

Hector works out of state during the summer months, so he's only here half the year, and during the off-season he spends a lot of time at my dad's. Before, we would see each other whenever I came to visit my dad (daily - my dad and I are close) and we were always friendly, but over the past two years he and I have started to develop a much closer friendship. He was here for us when my dad had a stroke last winter, for example, and I started to feel myself gravitating toward him and missing him when he wasn't around. It wasn't really an intentional thing -- we just sort of bonded. It was very easy and natural.

I was recently forced by circumstance to move back in with my dad temporarily, which has only increased the amount of time I spend with Hector. He has interesting life stories and is funny, and he listens to me when I need someone to talk to about my current situation (I'm going through a divorce on stilted but mostly friendly terms with my somewhat cold and closed-off soon-to-be-ex husband). Sometimes Hector and I sit up and talk late into the night, losing track of time until we see the sun starting to come up. He makes me laugh a great deal. I feel good when I'm with him.

Mostly, my feelings toward him are healthy and reasonable. But I also feel somewhat romantically attracted to him. I fear this will eventually wreck everything.

I don't know if my romantic interest in Hector is reciprocated or not. He sometimes seems t...
Massive Scaling Should be Frowned Upon
by harsimony — 2022-11-17T08:43:22.712Z

Summary: It seems at least possible that scaling AI systems (broadly construed) could create dangerously powerful agents. I consider methods to discourage groups from massively scaling AI systems with little regard for safety. Examining cultural, regulatory, and technological interventions, cultural approaches seem best suited to this goal in the near term.

Scale

For the purposes of this post, I am going to lump several things together when I talk about "scale".
Some of the highly-scalable inputs to an AI system include:

Number of parameters

Training time

Total memory

Total compute

Dataset size

Total cost

Number of researchers

Total research effort

I'm not particularly concerned with the specific way that these resources can be deployed to increase AI capability, rather, it's important that there are inputs that can be increased arbitrarily in exchange for higher performance.

In other words, once the fundamentally-limited inputs to an AI system have been maxed out, further gains will be determined by the infinitely-scalable inputs. Things like "better prompting" or "clever architectures" can certainly increase capability, but at some point, the low-hanging fruit will be picked. In order to get higher performance, researchers will have to turn to scaling [1]. What happens when we turn these dials up to 11?

The Scaling Hypothesis

The scaling hypothesis is becoming an increasingly important view in the AI safety community; some posit that "scale is all you need" to create AGI.

Personally, I'm uncertain whether scaling will allow us to create AGI; though the fact that transformer models demonstrate emergent capabilities when scaled is certainly suggestive.

Because it's at least possible that scaling existing transformer models can lead to AGI, we should do something to prepare for the worst case scenario where the hypothesis is true.

Slowing down scaling

Assuming that the Scaling Hypothesis is true, what does it mean for AI safety? Since we don't have good solutions to the alignment problem yet, it's important to slow down scaling [2] to provide more time for alignment research, outreach, and coordination.

Let's look at a couple of broad interventions that might slow down scaling.

Culture

The idea here is to "frown upon" groups that massively scale AI systems with little regard for safety. Cultural norms may seem like a weak method to enforce rules, but a tight-kn...
Why are profitable companies laying off staff?
by Yair Halberstadt — 2022-11-17T06:19:12.601Z

Consider all the reasons you might have to reduce headcount in an economic downturn:

You rely on venture capital to survive which is no longer as easy to get, so you simply can't afford to pay your staff.

You've started making a loss, so you need to fire people to get back to profitability.

You have low cash reserves, so need to reduce operating costs to give you more of a runway if things go wrong.

There's reduced demand for your services so no need for as much staff.

Business propositions which were marginally worthwhile in the past are no longer positive expected value.

So consider Meta:

It's a super profitable company (made 4 billion dollars last quarter).

It's got 40 billion dollars in cash reserves - enough to keep the lights on for 6 months even if income dropped to zero.

It's usage hasn't significantly changed, and demand for advertising certainly hasn't dropped enough to lay off more than 10% of it's workforce.

The employees who were layed off don't seem to be exclusively layed off from sectors which only make sense to invest in in an upturn. E.g. Eric Lippert was laid off, and his team worked on internal tooling to improve software development at Meta. Whether that's a good idea or not seems independent of the economic headwinds.

Also laying off staff has enourmous costs. Meta is paying extremely generous packages to laid off employees (16 weeks of pay, plus 2 for every year working at meta, and 6 months health insurance). It also strongly demotivates people who weren't fired and makes it harder to recruit in the future. Finally, since fired employees aren't usually given a chance to handover, it leaves their colleagues scrambling to take over their roles.

My best guess is that actually the layoffs have nothing directly to do with the economic downturn. Among any big company's investors there's those who want it to stay lean, and those who want it to expand. When Meta posts poor financial results (even if they have more to do with the state of the economy than whether Meta's business decisions were any good), that shifts more firepower towards those who want to slim things down, and so Meta is forced to make cuts.
[retracted] Discussion: Was SBF a naive utilitarian, or a sociopath?
by Nicholas / Heather Kross — 2022-11-17T02:52:09.756Z

EDIT 17 Nov 2022: Retracted due to someone reminding me that both is not merely an option, but one with at least some precedent. Oops.

The following is just here for historical purposes now:

Context: In a recent interview with Kelsey Piper, Sam Bankman-Fried was asked if his "ethics stuff" was a front for something else:

[Kelsey:] you were really good at talking about ethics, for someone who kind of saw it all as a game with winners and losers

[SBF:] ya ... I had to be
it's what reputations are made of, to some extent
I feel bad for those who get fucked by it
by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shiboleths and so everyone likes us

One comment by Eli Barrish asked the question I'm now re-asking, to open a discussion:

The "ethics is a front" stuff: is SBF saying naive utilitarianism is true and his past messaging amounted to a noble lie? Or is he saying ethics in general (including his involvement in EA) was a front to "win" and make money? Sorry if this is super obvious, I just see people commenting with both interpretations. To me it seems like he's saying Option A (noble lie).

Let me be clear: this is an unusually important question that we should very much try to get an accurate, precise answer to.

EA as a movement is soul-searching right now, and we're trying to figure out how to prevent this, or something similar-but-worse, from happening again. We need to make changes, but which changes are still unknown.

To determine which changes to make, we need to figure out if this situation was:
A. "naive utilitarian went too far", or
B. "sociopath using EA to reputation-launder".

Both are extremely bad. But they require different corrections, lest we correct the wrong things (and/or neglect to correct the right things).

Note: I'm not using "sociopath" in the clinical sense, at least not checking for that usage, but more as the colloquial term for "someone who is chronically incapable of empathy / caring about others at the level of 'feeling sad when they feel sad'".
Kelsey Piper's recent interview of SBF
by agucova — 2022-11-16T20:30:35.901Z
Link: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy

Edit: See the bottom for some important updates.

Kelsey Piper from Vox's Future Perfect very recently released an interview (made through Twitter DMs) with Sam Bankman-Fried. The interview goes in depth into the events surrounding FTX and Alameda Research.

As we messaged, I was trying to make sense of what, behind the PR and the charitable donations and the lobbying, Bankman-Fried actually believes about what’s right and what’s wrong — and especially the ethics of what he did and the industry he worked in. Looming over our whole conversation was the fact that people who trusted him have lost their savings, and that he’s done incalculable damage to everything he proclaimed only a few weeks ago to care about. The grief and pain he has caused is immense, and I came away from our conversation appalled by much of what he said. But if these mistakes haunted him, he largely didn’t show it.

The interview gives a much-awaited outlet into SBF's thinking, specifically in relation to prior questions in the community regarding whether SBF was practicing some form of naive consequentialism or whether the events surround the crisis largely emerged from incompetence.

During the interview, Kelsey asked explicitly about previous statements by SBF agreeing with the existence of strong moral boundaries to maximizing good. His answers seem to suggest he had intentionally misrepresented his views on the issue (see below for an important notice regarding this question):

See the bottom for relevant discussion regarding how to interpret these specific messages.

This seems to give some credit to the theory that SBF could have been acting like a naive utilitarian, choosing to engage in morally objectionable behavior to maximize his positive impact, while explicitly misrepresenting his views to others.

However, Kelsey also asked directly regarding the lending out of customer deposits alongside Alameda Research:

All of his claims are at least consistent with the view of SBF acting like an incompetent investor. FTX and Alameda Research seems to have had serious governance and accounting problems, and SBF seems to have taken several decisions which to him sounded individually reasonable, all based on bad information. He repeatedly doubled down, instead of cutting his losses.

I'm still not sure what to take out of this interview, especially because Sam seems, at best, somewhat incoherent regarding ...
The Echo Principle
by Jonathan Moregård — 2022-11-16T20:09:13.764Z
Link: https://honestliving.substack.com/p/the-echo-principle

This is an old post cross-posted from my personal blog. I thought it might be helpful to some people here, enjoy!

Yesterday, I had a very interesting conversation with a person that was concerned about being evil. I helped out the best I could by giving some philosophical feedback/grounding, noting when things went too propositional/judgy etc. It was great fun.

This got me into sharing-mental-tools mode. This text is about one of my favourites.
I haven’t named it yet, but now that I’m to talk about it in public I’ll have to come up with a name...

Let’s talk about “The Echo Principle”

Disclaimer: This is not based on rigorous studies, so take this with a pinch of salt. Feel free to try it out and get back to me with any results. (even null results please)

Initial discovery

I discovered the echo principle a few years ago. I was doing inner work, exploring the following questions:

Why do I hold myself to high standards, being harsh on myself?

Why do I judge other people for not living up to the criteria I set?

Why am I afraid of opening up to other people?

Then I realized that all of these questions point to ideas and ways of being that are symmetrical “echoes” of each other! Translated more simply:

I am critical of myself.

I am critical of others.

I am afraid that others are critical of me.

Criticism, real & imagined, echoing around

Note: Paraphrasing ahead! Can’t remember 1.5-year-old dialogue verbatim.

Applying the framework

I filed away the echo-symmetry concept where I put all of my other insights/ideas. Nothing really stood out, so I basically put it on hold.

A few months later, I was cooking & eating dinner with a friend. My friend asked me if she could +1 invite one more guest (an acquaintance of mine). I happily agreed. The acquaintance arrived late, with tears in their eyes. Worried, we asked them what had happened. Here’s what they shared:

“When I got the invitation, I was happy at first. But then doubt and unease crept in. I thought to myself ‘What if they invite me out of courtesy, but don’t really feel like hanging out?´
I don’t want to impose!“

We did some emergency emotional support, cheering them up and assuring them that it was ok. Then, after asking for consent, I went psycho-analysing!

“Aha!” I thought to myself, picturing this:

Then I added one simple symmetry, getting this

Me: “Do you have a tendency to invite people out...