trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Hebbian Learning Is More Common Than You Think
by Aleksi Liimatainen — 2022-06-19T15:57:08.378Z

Epistemic status: locating the hypothesis. I have my private confidence but you shouldn't take my word for it.
I originally got the idea from this video interview of professor Richard A. Watson where he explains how learning networks could arise naturally and be an important factor in evolution. The meat starts around 15 minutes in.
First, an intuition pump: If you had a suspended network of non-ideal springs, loading the network would slightly change the resting lengths of the springs for the next iteration. In effect, even a spring network has (admittedly limited) learning potential.
Dr. Watson focuses on evolution and makes his strongest case in that domain. In short, ecological stressors impose evolutionary pressures on individuals that cause the ecological relationships between species to change over evolutionary time in a manner consistent with Hebb's rule. In other words, individual selection powers Hebbian learning on the ecosystem level.
In the interview, he mentions his associate setting up an ecological simulation isomorphic to the rules of sudoku and getting it to perform at what would be considered a very high skill level for a human. I believe this to be the relevant paper. I haven't read more than the abstract; here's the most relevant quote:

We demonstrate the capabilities of this process in the ecological model by showing how the action of individual natural selection can enable communities to i) form a distributed ecological memory of multiple past states; ii) improve their ability to resolve conflicting constraints among species leading to higher community biomass; and iii) learn to solve complex resource-allocation problems equivalent to difficult computational puzzles like Sudoku.

Based on the above, I think learning networks arise frequently and spontaneusly in contexts involving biological life. This includes multicellular organisms, ecosystems and human networks such as economies, societies and civilizations. As of now, I don't have an easy way to evaluate the power of these networks but the potential implications seem large.
The Malthusian Trap: An Extremely Short Introduction
by Davis Kedrosky — 2022-06-19T15:25:44.026Z
Link: https://daviskedrosky.substack.com/p/the-malthusian-traphttps://daviskedrosky.substack.com/p/the-malthusian-trap

If you’ve read much about the pre-industrial world, you’ve probably run into Malthus. The English parson whom Keynes dubbed “the first of the Cambridge economists” has had an outsized and wholly unintended impact on the study of income and demography thanks to his 1798 classic,

An Essay on the Principle of Population

, in which he argued that any increase in wages above a bare minimum would be curtailed by a corresponding rise in birth rates. This prediction, which had just become invalid at the time of writing,[1] was nevertheless a fairly accurate characterization of human history. to that point. Between 1250 and 1650, for example, England’s GDP per capita rose by just 27 percent. Malthusianism is so useful and illustrative in explaining the relative stagnation of pre-modern living standards that historians, economists, and anthropologists of all stripes invoke it casually. We’re all familiar with implicit or explicit versions of the “Malthusian Trap.” But familiarity has bred contempt—contempt as in disregard, as we appear to have forgotten what exactly it means.

As we’ll see, using the word “Malthusian” to describe an economy doesn't define its standard of living. Instead, the term refers to a hypothetical relationship between population and income, which can be characterized using a simple model. The focus of this essay is thus straightforward: explaining how economic historians use the basic Malthusian model.[2] Once we’re familiar with the assumptions, mechanisms, and predictions, we can then discuss how and when the framework should be applied to the pre-industrial world.

To start, however, let’s take our cue from the Cambridge curate himself. In Chapter II of the Essay, Malthus wrote that

[I]n all societies… there is a constant effort towards an increase of population… [This] increases the number of people before the means of subsistence are increased. The food therefore which before supported seven millions must now be divided among seven millions and a half or eight millions. The poor consequently must live much worse, and many of them be reduced to severe distress. The number of labourers also being above the proportion of the work in the market, the price of labour must tend toward a decrease, while the price of provisions would at the same time tend to rise. The labourer therefore must work harder to earn the same as he did before.

Once in...
Parliaments without the Parties
by Yair Halberstadt — 2022-06-19T14:06:23.167Z

Epistemic status: butterfly idea

Parliaments might be great, but they suffer from a number of problems. For example, in Israel the opposition is refusing to vote for bills they almost unanimously support, in the hope it will bring down the current government.[1] Meanwhile members of all parties in all governments are often forced to vote for proposals they disagree with in order to keep their party in power.

It seems to me that it would be ideal if parliaments just dropped the whole party thing. MPs voted for proposals they like, and don't vote for proposals they don't like. That way proposals will get accepted if and only if a majority of MPs like them - no matter which MPs they are. It seems to me that getting rid of parties would get rid of most political drama in one fell swoop. Partisanship would probably sharply decrease, and we'd pretty much only end up with policies that appeal to the majority of all voters.

However even if we abolished any official concept of a party, party-like entities will probably naturally form. MPs who want their pet proposal passed will likely form informal coalitions - "I'll vote for you if you vote for me" - which eventually ends up in full blown parties. Also entities will provide valuable backing to promising candidates, in return for their continued support once elected. Such candidates will then vote as a block, and sooner or later we end up back where we started.

So how could you stop this happening?

One option would be to make all votes secret. That way MPs can vote for whatever they want, and aren't answerable to anyone.

On the other hand, they now aren't answerable to the people who voted for them either, which defeats a lot of the point of democracy in the first place!

Perhaps we could release the voting record for each MP only a week before an election, by which time most of the support an MP could get from a party has already been committed, reducing their ability to decide MPs' fates in return for votes. It also means feedback is too slow for voting coalitions to form.

It might also have some other advantages: the entire voting record is visible all at once, so it's easy to quickly skim over it and see whether your MP is voting the way you want them too or not, rather than focusing on the one or two issues you remember.

This proposal makes particular sense for first pass the post or other electoral district based vo...
Lamda is not an LLM
by Kevin — 2022-06-19T11:13:01.221Z
Link: https://www.wired.com/story/blake-lemoine-google-lamda-ai-bigotry/

…so new interview with Blake Lemoine.

Lamda is not an LLM. It’s an LLM retrained in real-time by Deepmind’s StarCraft playing AlphaStar with full ability to query Google Search, Books, Maps. I note that much of the dismissal of Blake Lemoine’s claims strawman Lamda as GPT-3 but it’s so much easier to imagine a strange loop of consciousness happening in the actual architecture. Plug in some nematode brain copies and start improving that aspect and it’ll be much more believable for us that it feels the buzz of consciousness with visceral, consistent qualia. Or what if its only buzz of existence is the essence of what it takes to play StarCraft? Not what I would have chosen as a human friendly basis for intelligence.

I can see the path the AGI as being as simple as plugging in Gato or another model striving to be more general, which they seemingly know not to do and are keeping underpowered for now. Interesting times. I remain optimistic.
Getting stuck in local minima
by louis030195 — 2022-06-19T08:50:14.032Z
Link: https://brain.louis030195.com/Philosophy/Epistemology/Getting+stuck+in+local+minima

I don't have a lot of occasion of discussing and challenging my ideas, it's hard sometimes, I try to explain what I read for example, but sometimes

the conversation is not aligned

.

When you don't expose your ideas, you take the risk of getting stuck in local minima, that is when your

map does not reflect the territory

, but you are unaware of it.

Exposing your ideas allows you, sometimes, to get out of this local minima (if you have

Epistemic humility

), i.e., to revise your map and understand that you were wrong.

For example, I used to think that in

health

looking at

evolution

was a pretty good heuristic, that is the diet of our ancestors should be quite healthy for us. Someone hinted to me that we don't have that much data about our ancestors and that our nature might have adapted to our new environment.

A good

Epistemic hygiene

to avoid these local minima is to get rid of your

Ego

, in a way, the ego makes the climb steeper.

The descent is steep

Say you start believing that the earth is flat, then you will stop believing in

relativity

, in our physics, etc. at some point it's too hard to escape the local minima.

(

Karl Popper

)

You'll end up building a

map that does not reflect the territory

.
ETH is probably undervalued right now
by mukashi — 2022-06-19T02:20:15.752Z

ETH is trading right now under 1k USD, which gives it a market cap as large as the 100th largest company in the world. There is definitely a real possibility that a sizeable part of our financial system runs on the ETH network at some point during the next 10 years. If this prediction becomes true, ETH is probably very undervalued right now, due in part to the wave of panic affecting the markets right now.

Things move quickly in the cryptomarkets and the short term is impossible to predict. Next week it could go to 200 USD or it could go move up to never go down again. In any case, ETH is at the moment the most promising platform for DeFI, with many more investors, programmers and contributors than any other alternative.

On top of all that, we are very likely only a few months away from the long awaited Merge, when ETH abandons PoW for good, which is arguably the worst part of cryptos like Bitcoin. It is likely that there is a big rebound in ETH price, so I am putting my money where my mouth is.
Juneberry Cake
by jefftk — 2022-06-19T01:40:02.708Z

The

Juneberries
are ripe, and the kids got pretty excited about picking some at the
park:

This is not a berry I knew about growing up. In gardens there were
strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries, and there
were mulberries on street trees, but when I saw these berries I
assumed they were ornamental only. A neighbor showed them to me last
year, though, and they're pretty good! Some of the flavors remind me
of the kind of ripe peach you generally can't get around here.

The kids were so into picking them that we ended up with
about 3 cups. The next day we still had almost as many, so I decided
to make what my family calls "peach cake" (regardless of the
ingredients). It's lots of raw fresh fruit baked under an eggy cake
batter (recipe).

It came out ok, but not as good as when using conventional fruit; the
more subtle flavors of the berries had been baked off. There was an
almond flavor, which the internet tells me is from the seeds, but it
wasn't any more interesting than if I'd just put in a dash of almond
extract.

Next year I'll probably stick to eating them off the tree.

Comment via: facebook
Agent level parallelism
by Johannes C. Mayer — 2022-06-18T20:56:12.236Z

Let's suppose that an Em researcher runs 1000 times faster than the equivalent human brain. To the Em researcher who runs faster, it will seem like the experiments take significantly longer to run. So there is more waiting around. I expect that a collection of Ems would still be able to make progress much, much faster than the same number of human researchers. I don't expect that waiting for experiments to finish will not nearly be as much of a slowdown as one might naively expect. There are multiple reasons to believe this.

It is simply not true that you can't do anything useful while waiting for experimental results to come in (e.g. refine your theory, plan the next experiment).

Many interesting experiments probably don't take very long to run.

If the experiment is computational, you might be able to shut down the Em and assign the resources used for running the Em, to run the experiment.

You can switch between executing different agents, always trying to execute the one, that can "have the most useful thoughts".

The argument does not just apply to Em researchers, but to a wide range of agents.

Doing (4) might be faster than having only one agent that context switches, at least if the agents are as bad at context switching as humans. You can also see (4) as a way to context switch that could work well. Then you can think naturally think of the whole system as a single agent.

Each of the agents could research a specific thing, and context switching might be a good way to optimally use the computational resources available. For humans, it seems to work relatively well to have specialists that focus on a narrow task. Through it principle, there is no reason why any subagent would not have access to all of the knowledge from all of the other subagents.

I got inspired by this:

Francois Chollet: "Our brains themselves were never a significant bottleneck in the AI-design process."

Eliezer Yudkowsky: "A startling assertion. ..."
What are our outs to play to?
by Hastings — 2022-06-18T19:32:10.822Z

This is an unfiltered, unsorted collection of plausible (not likely) scenarios where there are humans alive in 200 years. I have left out "We solve alignment" since it is adequately discussed elsewhere on the website. These non-alignment scenarios form a larger and larger part of the human utility pie as MIRI adds nines to the odds of AGI takeoff being unaligned.

I've collected the conditions for these outcomes into two categories:

Epistemic conditions, where the scenario depends on some fact that is either true or false about the world but which we don't yet know, and
Future events, where the scenario depends on things that haven't happened yet.

We can influence future events. Notably, we can learn about epistemic conditions, but cannot influence them: they're either true or not. However, in a scenario where we 'play to our outs,' we need to estimate the odds of everything turning out OK in a way we had no influence over, in order to judge how much harm an organization 'playing to our outs' should be willing to do.

Nuclear war:

Epistemic conditions: AGI research requires a significant number of GPU Years- it cannot be achieved by an extremely clever and lucky programmer with a generator and a 3090.

Future events: A significant fraction of all nuclear warheads are launched, and all chip fabs and supercomputers are hit. Humanity loses the ability to build computers at a 2022 level of performance, and cannot regain it because fossil fuels are depleted.

This scenario is not palatable. After reading Eliezer Yudkowsky's "Death With Dignity", intellectually this seems like by far the most likely scenario where humanity recognizably survives. Emotionally I disagree with that conclusion, and I suspect that emotion is encoding some important heuristics.

Spontaneous morality:

Epistemic conditions: inner goals are sampled randomly when an AGI takes off, and there's a nonzero chance that "intrinsically wants to keep some number of humans around and happy" makes the cut.

Future events: Conceivably, creating a large number of AGIs at once increases the odds that one of them wants pets. In particular, we suspect that we got morality from living in tribes.

This scenario isn't necessarily likely. However, it's worth noting that in our N=1 example of intelligence takeoff, humans spontaneously developed the inner goal of keeping cats, even when this is not needed f...
What's the information value of government hearings?
by Kenny — 2022-06-18T17:13:48.820Z

Background:

Bounded Distrust - by Scott Alexander - Astral Codex Ten

I'm curious about both:

Generalities – for all/most/some governments (and different types of hearings if that's relevant)

Specifics – (relatively) concrete details about specific governments, or specific hearings

My own model (roughly):

Hearings are, by default, political theater.

Political/legal rhetoric has a very low information density.

Information from the hearings might be true; but definitely not all of it.

At least some of the people compelled to participate in hearings will lie.

Most hearings are run by partisans from multiple coalitions.

The leaders of hearings are NOT generally trustworthy or honest.

Even if we assume that we can determine [2] (what info is true), we should expect to be manipulated, if nothing else, the distribution of true info that is made public.

It is – somewhat – possible, still, given [1-7], for some people to extract some true info from government hearings.

It is hard to identify the people of [8], even if you're one of them.

There's a particular concrete example that inspired this. I was implored by someone to watch the 'January 6th' hearings. I replied that it didn't seem worth doing and that I would instead just rely on my own network of [8] that I have accumulated. I did get a nice update from someone outside my network, but I don't think I can 'operationalize' that kind of serendipity.

My current model of 'January 6th' (roughly):

Trump might have had a plan to disrupt the 'vote certification'[1].

If the vote certification had been disrupted, it very probably would have resulted in an extremely 'undefined' state of the presidency and the executive branch.

If the system had reached that undefined state, Trump (maybe) could have remained President.[2]

[Normative] [3] would have been terrible.

Most of the above is relatively new for me! I did not know those details a few weeks ago. I even considered those 'classes' of possibility before then, but believed they were too implausible. I did feel very confused. I was (and am) curious about better understandings and more details.

But I didn't think me directly watching the hearings about Jan-6 would be a particularly valuable use of my time. Was I wrong (in your own estimation)?

Am I wrong about the information value of government hearings in general?

Do you think I should watch more of them myself directl...
The best 'free solo' (rock climbing) video
by Kenny — 2022-06-18T15:29:37.915Z

I think this might be the 'best' 'free solo' free solo video (including "Free Solo" the movie, or any other climbing movie I've seen):

I tried free solo with Alex Honnold Insane experience - YouTube

I was pretty disappointed by "Free Solo" – not much climbing!

(Watch "The Dawn Wall" for a climbing movie with a lot of climbing; one of my favorite movies, period.)

(I would still like to eventually see "Free Solo: The Actual Climbing" too!)

There are some great climbing 'movies'/videos of Honnold free soloing. But they're – apparently, according to Honnold himself – bullshit in a way. He says somewhere (not sure which video exactly) that most of the time he will (a) free solo a new route by himself, with no cameras, first; (b) go back (via ropes) and free solo parts of the route with cameras. (That is kinda crazier than just free soloing a route!)

But this video – (I'm pretty sure) it's what it looks like: a real first-time free solo, by Magnus. Magnus IS a fantastic climber; maybe top 100 worldwide for the kinds of climbing he does? (There is a LOT of 'room' in terms of 'climbing difficulty' at the top!)

(There are lots of kinds of climbing and Magnus isn't a 'professional climber' like what that typically entails; more of a former professional climber that's now a professional YouTuber but whose YouTube videos are mostly about climbing.)

I can climb 5.9 – tho I've never climbed outdoors, never climbed a route (in a gym) with multiple pitches, don't know really anything 'mechanically' (e.g. have any muscle memory) for 'trad climbing' at all, which looks like how anyone else would climb the route they climb in this video.

But I could climb that route. (And I think I'd be mostly fine, psychologically, going with a guide and after testing that the ropes and other gear would catch me when I fell.)

I think maybe I might, someday, climb an (EASY) 'highball' boulder problem up to maybe 30-40 feet? (That's a somewhat survivable height to fall from!)

But I'm very sure I could climb the route!

But I'm also still thinking about whether I would ever, possibly, climb anything, even with ropes and gear (and a helmet) much harder this outside. I definitely am 'terrified' of mountaineering; the climbing itself doesn't seem to be the primary danger. The main dangers are snow (e.g. avalanches) and ice (e.g. breaking or falling) and falling rocks and human stupidity handling the ropes a...
What's the name of this fallacy/reasoning antipattern?
by David Gross — 2022-06-18T14:04:17.581Z

There's a particular reasoning antipattern I'm looking for the name of (if it's been named).

It happens when you imagine what sort of evidence would support the position you want to take, and then prematurely assume from this that the evidence exists, and then use this spurious evidence to justify the original conclusion. For example:

I don't feel like doing laundry today. The machines are probably being used anyway. So I might as well wait until some day when they're free.
I don't want to to do anything to help the homeless. It's probably their own fault anyway. There's no point in rewarding such behavior.

Is this just a variety of "motivated reasoning" or "confirmation bias" or is there a more precise name for this specific variety?