trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Links for Dec 2020
by ike — 2021-01-05T19:53:04.672Z
Link: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1366256067049466&id=100009952574823

Nov post: Facebook, LW post

Based on feedback, I’ll put a few favorites in the front, and the rest gets categorized as usual. For several, I just copied the title if that seemed like enough of a description.

Favorites:

https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/06/nicholas-kristof-wants-to-save-the-world-with-his-new-york-times-columns-why-are-so-many-of-them-wrong.amp

Old article but good. Money quote: Kristof feels lousy when he has to “cut somebody off and say, ‘It’s terrible that you were shot in the leg,’ ” he said. “Meanwhile, I will go off and find someone who was shot in both legs.”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/no-one-can-explain-why-planes-stay-in-the-air/

This one wins just based on the title: No One Can Explain Why Planes Stay in the Air. I kind of thought we’d have figured that out by now, you know?

https://twitter.com/xkcd/status/1333529967079120896

Turns out Google is really bad at answering questions. Favorite one is “how far from a nuclear bomb is safe? Six feet.”

https://commoncog.com/blog/cash-flow-games/

Come for the cash flow analysis, stay for the epistemology. The podcast mentioned there is also great and worth listening to.

https://twitter.com/avi_eisen/status/1337070949921853441

“Yo dog, I heard you like dogs, so I researched how dogs know other dogs are dogs so you can know a dog while it dogs”

https://milan.cvitkovic.net/writing/things_youre_allowed_to_do

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-promoting-beautiful-federal-civic-architecture/

“Sec. 2. Policy. (a) Applicable Federal public buildings should uplift and beautify public spaces, inspire the human spirit, ennoble the United States, and command respect from the general public.”

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine/

This was an excellent article explaining how the source code of the pfizer vaccine works. Well written. Follow-up part 2:

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/part-2-reverse-engineering-source-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine/

. While I’m at it, this 2019 post is also really interesting:

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/what-is-life/

Space/Aliens:

https://www.thedebrief.org/fast-movers-and-transmedium-vehicles-the-pentagons-uap-task-force/

“Along with classified briefings, multiple senior U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the matter say two classified int...
The Pointers Problem: Clarifications/Variations
by abramdemski — 2021-01-05T17:29:45.698Z

I've recently had several conversations about John Wentworth's post The Pointers Problem. I think there is some confusion about this post, because there are several related issues, which different people may take as primary. All of these issues are important to "the pointers problem", but John's post articulates a specific problem in a way that's not quite articulated anywhere else.

I'm aiming, here, to articulate the cluster of related problems, and say a few new-ish things about them (along with a lot of old things, hopefully put together in a new and useful way). I'll indicate which of these problems John was and wasn't highlighting.

This whole framing assumes we are interested in something like value learning / value loading. Not all approaches rely on this. I am not trying to claim that one should rely on this. Approaches which don't rely on human modeling are neglected, and need to be explored more.

That said, some form of value loading may turn out to be very important. So let's get into it.

Here's the list of different problems I came up with when trying to tease out all the different things going on. These problems are all closely interrelated, and feed into each other to such a large extent that they can seem like one big problem.

(0. Goodhart. This is a background assumption. It's what makes getting pointers right important.)

Amplified values. Humans can't evaluate options well enough that we'd just want to optimize the human evaluation of options. This is part of what John is describing.
Compressed pointer problem. We can't realistically just give human values to a system. How can we give a system a small amount of information which "points at" human values, so that it will then do its best to learn human values in an appropriate way?
Identifiability problems for value learning. This includes Stuart's "no free lunch" argument that we can't extract human values (or beliefs) just with standard ML approaches.
Ontology mismatch problem. Even if you could extract human values (and beliefs) precisely, whatever that means, an AI doesn't automatically know how to optimize them, because they're written in a different ontology than the AI uses. This is what John is primarily describing.
Wireheading and human manipulation. Even if we solve both the learning problem and the ontology mismatch problem, we may still place the AI under some perverse incentives by telling

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On Meaning and Machines
by meanderingmoose — 2021-01-05T15:51:59.568Z

Cross-posted from mybrainsthoughts.com

Merriam Webster:
meaning \ˈmē-niŋ \ noun 1 a the thing one intends to convey especially by language b the thing that is conveyed especially by language 2 something meant or intended 3 significant quality 4 a the logical connotation of a word or phrase b the logical denotation or extension of a word or phrase

Meaning is an interesting concept. In everyday conversation, when the “meaner” is a person, the idea of meaning fits effortlessly into our worldview; other people’s words and actions mean things, and we’re able to understand that meaning and generate our own in return. However, when looking from a deeper level of granularity, the idea of meaning becomes less clear. Your brain is made up of ~100 billion neurons and ~100 to 1,000 trillion synapses, which all combine to make “you” – where does meaning reside within those connections? Humans have been wondering about our inner workings since ancient times, and while the progress of neuroscience has shed some light on this question, it’s still far from solved. Over the last ~100 years, we’ve had the chance to see this problem from a different light with the invention of computers. With their extreme complexity, it feels as though these systems may also be able to have meaning. Though there have been significant efforts in this area, progress has been limited, and computers still seem to be far away from understanding the world as we do. This post will take a deeper look at meaning and how it relates to machines, first laying some foundations for the concept of meaning, and then looking more explicitly at how we might get this meaning “into” machines.

As in previous posts, it will be helpful to build up a foundational concept of meaning from first principles, due to the ambiguity of the general concept. Zooming way in, we can picture the world as a vast number of particles moving around, bumping into each other and exchanging energy according to certain laws. From this point of view, there is no meaning, only things happening and particles bumping into other particles. However, zooming out a bit, we can see that certain patterns emerge in the interactions of these particles. The lowest level particles (that we’re aware of) settle into stable (or semi-stable) configurations, forming atoms, which settle into patterns of molecules, which settle into patterns of “objects” (solids...
The National Defense Authorization Act Contains AI Provisions
by ryan_b — 2021-01-05T15:51:28.329Z

A bunch of laws about AI were recently passed by Congress in the US.

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is the law which funds and organizes the Department of Defense of the United States. A new version of the law is passed periodically. For reasons beyond the scope of this post, it is one of a few bills which are considered "must pass" and therefore contain a lot of supplemental legislation, lately including action on COVID-19.

Hidden in the bill are AI provisions, both within the Department of Defense and for civilian agencies. There is a summary of the relevant sections provided by the Institute for Human-centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) at Stanford. There is an even shorter summary, bullet-point style, at Import AI which is where I got the information.

It is primarily a matter of bureaucratic assignments: different offices and/or agencies are directed to produce reports describing their impacts; new committees are formed; the mandate for existing agencies/committees are expanded to include new facets of AI. The best news is that it includes one provision for ethics, including safety, but I remind everyone that these are in the generic sense of the term which includes uses and capability of machine learning rather than a focus on AGI. So think robots working alongside humans and error margins on deep learning target assessments rather than value alignment.

I will break each item from HAI's summary into a separate comment below, so we can discuss them individually. The ones beginning with CIV are civilian, and with DOD are Department of Defense.
Why is loss of muscle cells not considered one of the hallmarks of aging?
by ChristianKl — 2021-01-05T14:19:42.407Z

When muscles go in adults it's due to individual muscle cells getting bigger and not due to increase in muscle cells. It's generally believed that no new muscle cells get produced in human adults. Sometimes muscle cells die. I would expect that as humans age therefore the count of muscle cells will go down. There are frequently claims that there's a limited number of hallmarks of aging that if repaired would stop aging. Neither SENS list nor the 2013 paper seem to include muscle cell count as one mark of aging. Is there a good reason for this?
Intended enjoyment
by KatjaGrace — 2021-01-05T10:20:21.608Z

I am sometimes unsure what is meant to be enjoyed in things, for instance the short story The Gioconda Smile, or In the mood for love which people often enjoy a lot. Which seems like it shouldn’t be a problem, as long as I find something to enjoy in them. But it also seems like I would be seriously missing something if I was buying bags of coffee all these years just to appreciate the thick, substantive quality of the paper bag between my teeth as I chewed it. How many of my enjoyments are like this?
Ways to be more agenty?
by Nicholas / Heather Kross — 2021-01-05T08:06:13.496Z

Akrasia is not really good. Being more of an agent is pretty good.

Are there actual ways to become more of an agent? Especially lesser-known ways.

Dumb, expensive, and dangerous ideas only please. Assume I'm looking for answers besides "sleep more" or "drink water" or "you don't really want to be agenty".
Predictions for 2021 (+ a template for yours)
by epiphi — 2021-01-05T03:35:31.878Z

How do you make new year's predictions?

Assemble a list of predictions about what you think will happen in the next year.

Assign probabilities to each item. I follow the approach of picking a limited number of probabilities (51%, 60%, 70%, 80%, and 90%) and assigning one to each item that I have an opinion on. You could also use the full 0 – 100% range and bin the probabilities when you assess them.

At the end of the year, score your predictions. You then get to assemble a sense of your calibration!

The first item on that list is where I usually get stuck, so here's a template predictions list for you (you'll be prompted to make a copy of the Google Sheet).

The items on the template list were assembled by me and jayterwahl after looking at current Good Judgment Open Challenges, some LW forecasting threads (2020s, existential risk), the post on throwing a prediction party, and previous predictions from SlateStarCodex (2020, 2019) and Zachary Jacobi (2019, 2018).

My predictions

To avoid being anchored, you may want to use the template and make your own predictions before reading on. My previous attempts at predictions have also been much less accurate than SlateStarCodex or Zachary Jacobi's, so don't update too much regardless.

All predictions are for the end of 2021 unless otherwise specified.

COVID

On March 1 2021, >15 US states have an overall COVID positivity rate of >10% — 70%

Fewer than 1 million US COVID deaths — 80%

US has the highest official COVID death toll of any country — 80%

Before March 31, 2021, 4 or more COVID vaccines approved by the US FDA — 70%

Before March 31, 2021, 6 or more COVID vaccines approved by the US FDA — 70%

SF Bay Area will be shut down in some major form (eg restaurants closed for indoor dining) beyond June 15 — 70%

…until the end of the year — 51%

New COVID strain leads to dramatically worse situation (50K+ US deaths, much more extreme lockdowns) — 80%

On April 1 2021, between 2.5 million and 5 million cases of COVID-19 declared by Africa CDC — 80%

On April 30 2021, more than 6 countries have 100,000 or more deaths attributed to COVID-19 — 90%

More than 10 countries will have 100,000 or more deaths attributed to COVID-19 — 70%

More than 3 million global COVID deaths — 70%

Fewer than 10 million global COVID deaths — 70%

Before June 1 2021, Canada permits discretionary travel for foreign nationals arriving fro

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What I Learned From Running a Pol.is Conversation
by hamnox — 2021-01-05T00:14:33.356Z

Try Things

A couple weeks ago, I asked around facebook and discord for people willing to test out Polis, an interactive survey tool.
Polis appealed to my aesthetic. It hosts a conversation where participants submit twitter-size comments on a topic which other participants vote on by clicking "agree", "disagree", or "pass". It uses these votes to cluster participants into like-minded groups and identifies "consensus" points about which all the clusters agree.
I saw a lot of promise in their model. Social media tends to addict and polarize, and I am constantly seeking for healthier alternative technologies. I had hope this could enable positive communication and group problem-solving.
So I made a "conversation" in polis, just to try it out.
The resulting survey report is here: https://pol.is/report/r7dr5tzke7pbpbajynkv8. I'm proud of myself for taking a step forward on my ideas. I tested my concept, now I have concrete data to iterate on. I learned its potential much more quickly than if I'd gone on theorizing about it.

Afterthoughts

Polis is, first and foremost, a tool for doing good data science. It's a simple user interface, cleverly optimized to collect a sparse matrix of evolving survey data, tied with a few automatically generated visualizations of the data. This became clearer as I engaged with the platform and its quirks.

I will not go deeply into the results of the survey I ran. The highlights:

Disagreed (>60%)

Everybody else has the exact same name as me.

(negative calibration comment)

we're doing fine on coordination already

Agreed: (>60%)

Spending too much time on discord take[s] away from being productive
In-community dating is normal and acceptable

Passed (>30%)

Rats are slans
Lesswrong codebase is very impressive
Prompt I want to hear from people on: What specific social media incentives are pulling apart the community, and in what ways
Lesswrong codebase is overly complicated

(Depending on how many readers know how to code, I may want to write a basic tutorial for using the Lesswrong API. I'm big on empowering end users to tinker.)

The meetup zooms are a net positive

I spent some time analyzing both the automated report and the raw data, and mostly came to the realization that the survey needed better 'question' design and more stable responses to make useful inferences. Earlier participants never returned to vote on comments submitted by others later....
What do we *really* expect from a well-aligned AI?
by Jan Betley — 2021-01-04T20:57:52.389Z

I'm quite new to the AI alignment problem - have read something like 20-30 articles about it on LW and around, aiming for the most upvoted - and have a feeling that there is a fundamental problem that is mostly ignored. I wouldn't be surprised if this feeling was wrong (because it is either not fundamental, or not ignored).

Imagine a future world, where a singularity occurred, and we have a nearly-omnipotent AI. AI understands human values, tries to do what we want, makes no mistakes - so we could say that humanity did pretty well on the AI alignment task. Or maybe not. How do we find out?

Let's consider a few scenarios:

AI creates a heaven on Earth for everyone. Fertility rates keep falling - e.g. because people in heaven are not interested in procreation, or maybe we globally accept VHEM as the best ethical position, or for some other reason. Unfortunately, immortality turns out to be impossible. Humans go extinct.

AI creates a virtual heaven for everyone. We live forever lives as full of fun as possible - never knowing nothing of this is real. Note: there are no other sentient beings in those virtual heavens, so this has nothing to do with the simulation hypothesis.

It turns out that smarter, more knowledgable humans, who are "more the people they wished they were" just want to be able to get more happiness from simple everyday activities. AI strictly follows the Coherent Extrapolated Volition principles and skilfully teaches us Buddhism-or-whatever. Earth becomes the prettiest garden in the Universe, tended by a few billions of extremely happy gardeners.

Now, what mark would you give humanity on the "AI alignment" task in each of the scenarios? Is there any agreement among AI alignment researchers about this? I would be surprised neither by AAA nor FFF - despite the fact that I didn't even touch the really hard problems, like spawning zillions of ems.

I have a feeling that such issues don't get the attention they really deserve - we all happily agree about being turned into paperclips, creation of smiley-faces or mindcrime, and hope the answer to the rest of the problems is "utilitarianism".

So, the question(s).

Is there any widely-accepted way of solving such problems (i.e. rating humanity in the scenarios above)?

Is this considered an important problem? Let's say, the one that has to be solved before singularity? If not - why?

(Speculative bonus questio

...
Utopianism
by Mateusz Mazurkiewicz — 2021-01-04T18:40:46.702Z

Freedom is the ability to act on a goal, a desire, to not be constrained by the world one lives in. One could formulate freedoms to life, to property, to information, to expression. Universal Declaration of Human Rights highlights 30 articles detailing rights that should at no circumstances be infringed upon.

The multitude and variety of human desires and aspirations create a flood of possible freedoms, some contradictory to each other. The rule often employed to resolve those contradictions is "one person's freedom ends where another's freedom begins." However, for that to produce a unique solution to the problem, all freedoms would have to be given their utility or order of importance. A case illustrating that might be the freedom to oppress others against freedom to not be oppressed. It is as obvious as it gets that society should assert the freedom to not be oppressed over the other, but this does not immediately result from the rule outlined above. Without first granting the right to not be oppressed, the right to the oppression of others does not infringe on others' rights. Since this particular example has an answer that appears self-evident and would be argued only either as a theoretical example (as here) or in bad faith, let us proceed to something more likely to create a conflict.

Some people have an abundance of food, whereas others hunger. There is a case for the freedom of ownership of that abundance. The owners have worked hard to obtain it, living frugally and often skipping meals to amass a supply for worse times. The others feasted and entertained their minds with games rather than thoughts about the future. There, of course, is also a case for the hungry. Some lived even more frugally and thought more about the future than the former but were struck by a disaster independent of their actions. There is even a case that those hungry that are in distress because of no reasons other than their actions should be given sustenance as well. There is plenty of food. If we shared, none would suffer. Should the freedom to food, or, by extension, freedom to life if the scarcity of food is dire, be conditioned on a person being able to prove they tried their best, or that they will contribute to society if given a chance? One can certainly imagine many pathologies, edge cases that slip through the smallest cracks in the system, causing innocent children ...
Embarrassment and Instinct
by damiensnyder — 2021-01-04T18:16:19.801Z
Link: https://www.damiensnyder.com/blog/embarrassment-and-instinct

Imagine you're staying in a hotel alone, and you take a shower before breakfast. Out of habit you sing in the shower, and, well, you're not much of a singer. Going to breakfast, you run into the couple in the room next door. The walls are thin, and you can tell by their looks that they're not impressed.

This sucks! Being judged sucks. But there's a fact about the situation that's easy to forget: there are no further consequences.[1] But even knowing that there are no consequences, I think few people would sing in the shower knowing they would be judged. There are, as far as I can tell, three reasons not to:

There might be consequences

Sometimes you do something embarrassing and it does turn out to be a bad thing. Like maybe people make fun of you, or decide you're uncool and stop hanging out with you. That would suck, and you might avoid embarrassing yourself because you're afraid of that.

But even if there are no lasting consequences, I would feel uncomfortable embarrassing myself. I think most people feel the same way. Consequences alone don't explain why people avoid embarrassment.

It's not very nice

Sure, you would get on just fine after being caught singing in the shower, but what about the people who heard you? Maybe they were sleeping and you woke them up, or they just find the noise irritating. In that case, it would make sense not to sing, out of common courtesy. But people feel embarrassed even when they've been completely courteous. Some people feel embarrassed for buying toilet paper, or mispronouncing a word, or having bodily functions in general. It doesn't harm anyone to buy toilet paper, so what else can explain why it would distress someone?

Being judged feels bad

This doesn't supplant the other reasons not to do embarrassing things, but a big factor is that embarrassment deals psychic damage. Embarrassment is bad the same way stubbing your toe is bad. It's a mental version of the pain response.

The similarity to our physical pain response brings up an interesting question: are we better off, feeling this pain?

Mixed feelings on feelings

Physically, there does seem to be value in experiencing pain. Children learn not to hurt themselves, and adults can detect problems they might not have otherwise noticed. One can infer from the presense of our pain response that it has helped us to survive and reproduce as we evolved into our modern species.

Emb...