trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Endogenous Epinephrine for Anaphylaxis?
by jefftk — 2019-10-20T12:10:01.538Z

Content warning: discussion of allergy attacks.

Epistemic warning: I know very little and this is total
speculation. Don't do anything in this post unless this becomes the
recommended way of dealing with allergy attacks.

Imagine you're walking in a remote area with someone who has a severe
allergy to bee stings, and they get stung. They don't have their
Epi-Pen (epinephrine
autoinjector), there's no one else around, and you're far from
everything. There's clearly not time for an ambulance, and they start
going into anaphylactic shock. I think it's possible that the best
response is to try to kill them.

Wait, what?

Well, not actually try to kill them, but make them think you're trying
to kill them. Specifically, triggering the "fight-or-flight"
or "acute stress" response to make their body release epinephrine
(adrenalin), the standard emergency treatment for anaphylaxis.

One question is whether their body would release enough epinephrine
that this would actually work. Being stung by a bee when you know you
have a life-threatening allergy seems terrifying already, which
probably induces some amount of acute stress response, and that's
clearly not enough to stop anaphylaxis. Perhaps the problem is that
the amount of epinephrine released in acute stress is just much lower
than what you get from an Epi-Pen?

I tried to look up numbers, and found Adrenomedullary response to maximal stress in
humans (Wortsman 1984). They looked at blood samples from fifteen
patients undergoing cardiac arrest, which is about as stressful as you
can get. All were either not given external epinephrine, or their
blood was sampled before they were. They measured a mean peak value
of 10.3 ± 2.9 ng/ml of epinephrine in the samples. They also
wrote:

Resuscitation after cardiac arrest is associated with
the highest endogenous epinephrine concentration ever
recorded: 35.6 ng/ml. This finding supports our a priori
assumption that the stress of cardiac arrest produces
maximal adrenomedullary stimulation.

To compare to an auto-injector, I found Epinephrine
0.3 mg Bioavailability Following a Single
Injection with a Novel Epinephrine Auto-injector, e-cue, in Healthy
Adults, with Reference to a Single Injection using EpiPen 0.3 mg
(Edwards 2012) which compared the Epi-Pen to the Auvi-Q (then called
e-cue). They found a mean peak blood epinephrine conce...
The problem/solution matrix: Calculating the probability of AI safety "on the back of an envelope"
by John_Maxwell — 2019-10-20T08:03:23.934Z

If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing With Made-Up Statistics

-- Scott Alexander

My earlier post Three Stories for How AGI Comes Before FAI, was an "AI research strategy" post. "AI research strategy" is not the same as "AI strategy research". "AI research strategy" relates to the Hamming question for technical AI alignment researchers: What are the most important questions in technical AI alignment and why aren't you trying to answer them?

Here's a different way of looking at these questions (which hopefully has a different set of flaws).

Suppose we had a matrix where each column corresponds to an AI safety problem and each row corresponds to a proposed safety measure. Each cell contains an estimate of the probability of that safety measure successfully addressing that problem. If we assume measure successes are independent, we could estimate the probability that any given problem gets solved if we build an AGI which applies all known safety measures. If we assume problem successes are independent, we could estimate the probability that all known problems will be solved.

What about unknown problems? Suppose that God has a list of all AI safety problems. Suppose every time an AI alignment researcher goes out to lunch, there's some probability that they'll think of an AI safety problem chosen uniformly at random from God's list. In that case, if we know the number of AI alignment researchers who go out to lunch on any given day, and we also know the date on which any given AI safety problem was first discovered, then this is essentially a card collection process which lets us estimate the length of God's list as an unknown parameter (say, using maximum likelihood on the intervals between discovery times, or you could construct a prior based on the number of distinct safety problems in other engineering fields). In lay terms, if no one has proposed any new AI safety problems recently, it's plausible there aren't that many problems left.

How to estimate the probability that unknown problems will be successfully dealt with? Suppose known problems are representative of the entire distribution of problems. Then we can estimate the probability that an unknown problem will be successfully dealt with as follows: For each known problem, cover up rows corresponding to the safety measures inspired by that problem, then compute its new probability of success. Tha

...
Mediums Overpower Messages
by lsusr — 2019-10-20T05:46:19.339Z

I've observed that consuming certain kinds of media make me smarter and other kinds of media makes me dumber.

Makes me dumber:

Videogames

YouTube

News

Makes me smarter:

Books

Audiobooks

Direct messaging apps

By "smarter" I mean it holistically causes me to behave in a way that increases my overall rate of learning and quality of life. By "dumber" I mean the opposite.

For a long time I rejected this conclusion. Surely playing Kerbal Space Program must be more educational than reading Yu-gi-oh! manga. Nope. Yu-gi-oh! beats it by a long shot. I ran a long series of subjective personal experiments on a variety of timescales over many years. They all confirmed this theory[1]. The medium overpowers the message.

What I am watching on TV is irrelevant compared against the fact that I am watching TV.

I can even plot different mediums on a scale from "makes me dumber" to "makes me smarter" and it use to infer why different mediums have the effect they do.

Makes Me Dumber

[BAD & DANGEROUS] Videogames

[BAD & DANGEROUS] Media feeds

[BAD & DANGEROUS] YouTube

[BAD & ADDICTIVE] News

[BAD] Stack Exchange

[BAD] Web surfing

Blogs

Movies

Webcomics

Comic books (fiction)

[OKAY] Books (fiction)

[OKAY] Podcasts

[OKAY] Direct messaging (native language)

[GOOD] Audiobooks (nonfiction)

[GOOD] Books (nonfiction)

[GOOD] Direct messaging (foreign language)

[GOOD] Blogging

[GOOD] Books (textbooks)

[GOOD] Writing software

[VERY GOOD] Making videos

[VERY GOOD] Drawing comics

[VERY GOOD] Spaced Repetition Software

Makes Me Smarter

There is a symmetry to this sorting. Playing videogames is near the top but writing software is near the bottom. Watching YouTube is near the top but making YouTube videos is near the bottom. The smarter creating a certain kind of media makes me the dumber consuming it does.

In fact, this whole list is just sorted by difficulty. The harder a medium is to consume (or create, as applicable) the smarter it makes me. The difficulty of consuming a medium is dominated by the medium itself, not its content.

That feels wrong. Intuitively, it makes sense that certain mediums should facilitate better content and that's why they're educational. Nope. For me, it's the medium itself.

There are handful of exceptions. In particular, downloading certain kinds of videos from YouTube and watching them locally can make me smarter. But even this illustrates the pow

...
Invisible Choices, Made by Default
by lsusr — 2019-10-20T02:09:02.992Z

There are two popular language learning software platforms: Anki and Duolingo. Anki is hard, free and effective. Duolingo is easy, commercial and ineffective.

The number of Duolingo users far outstrips the number of Anki users. Duolingo has 8 million downloads on the Play Store. Anki has 40 thousand. So there are 200 Duolingo users for every Anki user[1]. If you ask a random language learner what software to use they'll probably suggest Duolingo. If you ask a random successful language learner what software to use they'll probably suggest Anki. Most language learners are unsuccessful.

It should be no surprise that most language learners use an ineffective product. Learning a language is hard. Duolingo is designed to attract as many customers as it can. Therefore Duolingo must be easy to use. Anki is designed to work. Therefore Anki must be hard to use[2]. Effectiveness and mass-adoption are mutually exclusive.

On average, you'll have to ask 200 language learners what software they use before one of them tells you about Anki. In practice, you are unlikely to stumble across Anki at all. You can only find out about Anki if you go looking for it and you'll only go looking for it if you already know it exists.

No one ever told me about most of the software I use. Usually I'll infer that it must exist and then go looking for it. This is how I discovered qutebrowser, Spacemacs, tmux, i3 and—of course—Anki.

This principle isn't limited to open source software. Everything I've ever taken seriously exhibits a similar pattern. There's a common way most people do it and there's a cheaper, better, skill-intensive way a tiny minority do it.

Minority opinions are inherently controversial. Here are a few (relatively) uncontroversal examples to illustrate the trend:

Vim keybindings vs. conventional hotkeys

Lisps vs. programming languages without syntactic macros

Good history books vs. the news

Powerlifting vs. popular exercise de jour

Tiling window managers vs. the desktop metaphor

If you disagree with one of the examples above that's okay but I won't reply to you in the comments.

I don't mind choosing to be part of the majority. I watch mainstream movies. I eat at popular restaurants. I perform the oldest magic tricks in the book. I'm okay with these choices I know about.

I make most of my choices unknowingly, by default, from the options presented to me. Most of the time I pick

...
Anti-counterfeiting Ink - an alternative way of combating oil theft?
by  — 2019-10-19T23:04:59.069Z

In recent years, oil theft from pipelines has escalated in Mexico - $7.4 billion in fuel have been stolen since 2016. Pipeline tapping has increased from 211 occurrences in 2006 to over 7000 times in 2016. The cartels seem to have gotten involved as a means to diversify away from narcotics sale. The government has responded with heavy-handed crackdown, deploying federal security forces to patrol frequently tapped pipeline sections, arresting corrupt Pemex employees and even going as far as shutting down entire pipelines and resorting to tanker trucks and trains instead.

The last measure in particular has resulted in gas shortages and panic buying in the states the pipelines traversed, ironically increasing the incentive for oil thieves - a situation not too dissimilar to the war on drugs. This ultimately culminated in an explosive incident that killed over 130 people, most of which locals trying to gather free gas from a pipeline puncture. (It also doesn't bode well for tanker truck drivers as they're the next target)

I've been thinking of an alternative solution: Suppose you have two chemical compounds A and B, the exact formula of which you keep secret. You add a certain concentration (1mg/L, let's say) of compound A at the source, and add compound B at the sink upon arrival (also 1mg/L for simplicity). The police can then easily identify oil stolen from the pipeline which only contains compound A (the reason for using 2 compounds instead of 1 is that we still want to allow the sale of oil from other legal sources that don't include either compound, e.g. imports).

This solution is similar to anti-counterfeit ink used in banknotes (or digital signatures, if you like). The compounds must be easy to detect (verify) but very hard to produce (duplicate). If the criminals get a hold of compound B, they can counterfeit stolen oil; if they get a hold of compound A, they can sabotage the system by spiking legal oil with it.

But guarding a small amount of secret compounds should be far easier than guarding the bulk material being transported over thousand of kilometers. After all, banknote printing facilities do it all the time with their anti-counterfeiting ink and pharmaceutical companies do it with otherwise illicit opioids. The security risk has been funneled through a narrow corridor.

Of course, these compounds must also be hard to separate ...
Defining Myopia
by abramdemski — 2019-10-19T21:32:48.810Z

IID vs Myopia

In a comment to Partial Agency, Rohin summarized his understanding of the post. He used the iid assumption as a critical part of his story. Initially, I thought that this was a good description of what was going on; but I soon realized that iid isn't myopia at all (and commented as such). This post expands on the thought.

My original post conflated episodic (which is basically 'iid') with myopic.

In an episodic setting, it makes sense to be myopic about anything beyond the current episode. There's no benefit to cross-episode strategies, so, no need to learn them.

This is true at several levels (which I mention in the hopes of avoiding later confusion):

In designing an ML algorithm, if we are assuming an episodic structure, it makes sense to use a learning algorithm which is designed to be myopic.
A learning algorithm in an episodic setting has no incentive to find non-myopic solutions (even if it can).

However, it is also possible to consider myopia in the absence of episodic structure, and not just as a mistake. We might want an ML algorithm to learn myopic strategies, as is the case with predictive systems. (We don't want them to learn to manipulate the data; and even though that failure mode is far-fetched for most modern systems, there's no point setting up learning procedures which would incentivise it. Indeed, learning procedures seem to mostly encourage myopia, though the full situation is still unclear to me.)

These myopic strategies aren't just "strategies which behave as if there were an episodic assumption", either. For example, sequential prediction is myopic (the goal is to predict each next item accurately, not to get the most accuracy overall -- if this is unclear, hopefully it will become clearer in the next section).

So, there's a distinction between not remembering the past vs not looking ahead to the future. In episodic settings, the relevant parts of past and future are both limited to the duration of the episode. However, the two come apart in general. We can have/want myopic agents with memory; or, we can have/want memoryless agents which are not myopic. (The second seems somewhat more exotic.)

Game-Theoretic Myopia Definition

So far, I've used 'myopia' in more or less two ways: an inclusive notion which encompasses a big cluster of things, and also the specific thing of only optimizing each output to maximize the very next reward. L...
Algorithms of Deception!
by Zack_M_Davis — 2019-10-19T18:04:17.975Z

I want you to imagine a world consisting of a sequence of independent and identically distributed random variables Xi, and two computer programs.

The first program is called Reporter. As input, it accepts a bunch of the random variables Xi. As output, it returns a list of sets whose elements belong to the domain of the Xi.

The second program is called Audience. As input, it accepts the output of Reporter. As output, it returns a probability distribution.

Suppose the Xi are drawn from the following distribution:

P(X=x)=⎧⎪
⎪
⎪⎨⎪
⎪
⎪⎩1/2x=11/4x=23/16x=31/16x=4

We can model drawing a sample from this distribution using this function in the Python programming language:

import random

def x():
r = random.random()
if 0 <= r < 1/2:
return 1
elif 1/2 <= r < 3/4:
return 2
elif 3/4 <= r < 15/16:
return 3
else:
return 4

For compatibility, we can imagine that Reporter and Audience are also written in Python. This is just for demonstration in the blog post that I'm writing—the real Reporter and Audience (out there in the world I'm asking you to imagine) might be much more complicated programs written for some kind of alien computer the likes of which we have not yet dreamt! But I like Python, and for the moment, we can pretend.

So pretend that Audience looks like this (where the dictionary, or hashmap, that gets returned represents a probability distribution, with the keys being random-variable outcomes and the values being probabilities):

from collections import Counter

def audience(report):
a = Counter()
for sight in report:
for possibility in sight:
a[possibility] += 1/len(sight)
d = sum(a_j - len(a) for a_j in a.values())
return {x: (a_i - 1)/d for x, a_i in a.items()}

Let's consider multiple possibilities for the form that Reporter could take. A particularly simple implementation of Reporter (call it reporter_0) might look like this:

def reporter_0(xs):
output = []
for x in xs:
output.append({x})
return output

The pairing of audience and reporter_0 has a Very Interesting Property! When we call our Audience on the output of this Reporter, the probability distribution that Audience returns is very similar to the distribution that our random variables are from![1]

>>> audience(reporter_0([x() for _ in range(100000)]))
{1: 0.500

...
Billion-scale semi-supervised learning for state-of-the-art image and video classification
by  — 2019-10-19T15:10:17.267Z
Link: https://ai.facebook.com/blog/billion-scale-semi-supervised-learning

Facebook AI releases a new SOTA "weakly semi-supervised" learning system for video and image classification. I'm posting this here because even though it's about capabilities, the architecture includes a sort-of-similar-to amplification component where a higher capacity teacher decides how to train a lower capacity student model.
Why Ranked Choice Voting Isn't Great
by jefftk — 2019-10-19T11:10:01.566Z

Several friends are collecting signatures to put

Instant-runoff
Voting, branded as Ranked Choice Voting, on the ballot in
Massachusetts (

Ballotpedia,

full
text). I'm glad that an attempt to try a different voting method
is getting traction, but I'm frustrated that they've chosen
IRV. While every voting method has downsides, IRV is substantially
worse than some other decent options.

Imagine that somehow the 2016 presidential election had been between
Trump, Clinton, and Kasich, and preferences had looked like:

35% of people: Trump, Kasich, Clinton

14% of people: Kasich, Trump, Clinton

17% of people: Kasich, Clinton, Trump

34% of people: Clinton, Kasich, Trump

(This is very hypothetical; Kasich wasn't this popular.)

In a traditional election we'd have 35% for Trump, 34% for Clinton,
31% for Kasich, and declare Trump the winner. Under IRV we would
eliminate the last-place candidate, Kasich, and divide their votes
based on who was put down in second place:

49% of people: Trump, Clinton

51% of people: Clinton, Trump

Since Clinton has passed 50% we declare her the winner.

But let's take a look at how people would have voted in one-on-one
elections:

Trump vs Kasich: Kasich wins 65% to 35%

Clinton vs Kasich: Kasich wins 66% to 34%

Trump vs Clinton: Clinton wins 51% to 49%

About 2/3 of people prefer Kasich to any other candidate on offer, but
he doesn't win with a traditional election, and he also doesn't win
with IRV. This election has a "

Condorcet
winner", someone who would win a one-on-one election against
every other candidate, and IRV isn't designed in a way that it will
always choose that person. [1]

Additionally, some proponents of IRV will say that voting your true
preferences will never hurt you: that under IRV you never need to hold
your nose and put someone first when really you prefer someone else.
But there are cases where you can get an outcome you like more by
putting a higher ranking on a candidate you like less. Consider an
election like:

32% of people: Clinton, Sanders, Trump

33% of people: Sanders, Trump, Clinton

35% of people: Trump, Clinton, Sanders

Now, this is a terrible election and there's no clear winner because
people's preferences
point around in a circle. Under traditional voting Trump wins,
while under IRV Clinton is eliminated and Sanders wins. But if a few
people prefer...
Does the body have an almost infinite number of potential positions?
by leggi — 2019-10-19T05:39:26.883Z

Edited to add: It was the wording not the concept that was niggling. Thank you for all the replies.

The body is capable of innumerable positions.

Better, but still subject to further consideration and I've realised I was getting side-tracked.

I'm rewriting my post where I said:

'The body has an almost infinite number of potential positions'

And I am OK with it, but not completely. Something's niggling at me and I don't know what.

Am I missing something? Or is the statement valid?

(No link to the post containing my reasoning because I don't want to contaminate anyone else's thoughts...)
[AN #69] Stuart Russell's new book on why we need to replace the standard model of AI
by Rohin Shah — 2019-10-19T00:30:01.642Z

Find all Alignment Newsletter resources

here

. In particular, you can

sign up

, or look through this

spreadsheet

of all summaries that have ever been in the newsletter. I'm always happy to hear feedback; you can send it to me by replying to this email.

This is a bonus newsletter summarizing Stuart Russell's new book, along with summaries of a few of the most relevant papers. It's entirely written by Rohin, so the usual "summarized by" tags have been removed.

We're also changing the publishing schedule: so far, we've aimed to send a newsletter every Monday; we're now aiming to send a newsletter every Wednesday.

Audio version

here

(may not be up yet).

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control

(Stuart Russell): Since I am aiming this summary for people who are already familiar with AI safety, my summary is substantially reorganized from the book, and skips large portions of the book that I expect will be less useful for this audience. If you are not familiar with AI safety, note that I am skipping many arguments and counterarguments in the book that are aimed for you. I'll refer to the book as "HC" in this newsletter.

Before we get into details of impacts and solutions to the problem of AI safety, it's important to have a model of how AI development will happen. Many estimates have been made by figuring out the amount of compute needed to run a human brain, and figuring out how long it will be until we get there. HC doesn't agree with these; it suggests the bottleneck for AI is in the algorithms rather than the hardware. We will need several conceptual breakthroughs, for example in language or common sense understanding, cumulative learning (the analog of cultural accumulation for humans), discovering hierarchy, and managing mental activity (that is, the metacognition needed to prioritize what to think about next). It's not clear how long these will take, and whether there will need to be more breakthroughs after these occur, but these seem like necessary ones.

What could happen if we do get beneficial superintelligent AI? While there is a lot of sci-fi speculation that we could do here, as a weak lower bound, it should at least be able to automate away almost all existing human labor. Assuming that superintelligent AI is very cheap, most services and many goods would bec...