trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
More metal less ore
by Logan Kieller — 2023-11-14T16:59:38.354Z
Link: https://logankieller.substack.com/p/more-metal-less-ore

Epistemic status: musings on advice from three different spaces, all with a similar tactic to improve your life. This discovery is told through a semi-fictional story.

I am not the happiest person.

Rather than accepting this, I research it, I make it my job to change that fact.

My research brings me to the concept of the

hedonic treadmill

. I discover that any temporary shocks to my happiness will always bring me back to my resting rate. I then find out about gratitude journaling. I can trick my brain by writing a few things down that I’m grateful for every night. This rewires my brain to notice more things I’m grateful for as if on autopilot.

—

I am not an insightful person.

Rather than accepting this, I decided to seek out ways to be more insightful from others I value the insights from. Paul Graham discusses

how he gets his essay ideas from surprises

:

I write down things that surprise me in notebooks. I never actually get around to reading them and using what I've written, but I do tend to reproduce the same thoughts later. So the main value of notebooks may be what writing things down leaves in your head.

I realize now that I am not not an insightful person, just a person out of the practice of being surprised.

—

I wish I was a better storyteller.

Rather than accepting my shortcomings here, I do what I always have and find ways to improve. In my search, I watch a

ted talk by Matthew Dicks

.

In his talk, he discusses his homework for life, which is to write down a story-worthy event from each day.

—

At this point every night I’m being asked to do three things. To simplify, I created a spreadsheet with separate tabs: one for gratitude, one for surprises, and one for story-worthy moments.

Every night I continued this, and eventually, it started to work.

I found a new surprise when I realized how three unique optimization problems (happiness, insightfulness, and storytelling) had very similar solutions;
I was grateful for my ability to be surprised by such things;
I could tell I had a story worth telling in this process.

A clear process drove each improvement. A process that didn’t require more of any resource, but a process where intentionally practiced thought could “earn” you more than was there to you before. You made it more visible.

The common thread was the cognitive ability to create more metal from less ore.

I want to be happier, I gratitude journal.

I want to ...
Monthly Roundup #12: November 2023
by Zvi — 2023-11-14T15:20:06.926Z

Things on the AI front have been rather hectic. That does not mean other things stopped happening. Quite the opposite. So here we are again.

Bad News

PSA: Crumbl Cookies, while delicious, have rather a lot of calories, 720 in the basic cookie. Yes, they display this as 180, by deciding serving size is a quarter of a cookie. This display strategy is pretty outrageous and should not be legal, we need to do something about unrealistic serving sizes – at minimum, require that the serving size be displayed in same size font as the calorie count.

It really is weird that we don’t think about Russia, and especially the USSR, more in terms of the universal alcoholism.

Reminder that there really is an architecture conspiracy to make life worse. Peter Eisnman straight out says: “Anxiety and alienation is the modern condition. The point of architecture is to constantly remind you of it. I feel anxious. I want buildings to make you anxious!” There is also, in response to being asked if perhaps it would be better for there to be less anxiety not more: “And so the role of art or architecture might be just to remind people that everything wasn’t all right. And I’m not convinced, by the way, that it is all right.”

My wife is exploring anime recently. It has its charms, but the rate of ‘this thing multiple friends recommended is actually pretty boring’ is remarkably high. New generations have other concerns.

Avary: growing up is realizing a lot of the anime you watched and loved as a kid is actually problematic af so you’re stuck between exposing yourself with defending it or hating on it with everyone else…

Tom Kitten: Zoomers basically exist in a technological panopticon of continual anxiety about conforming to the latest updates in moral standards & moral panics, but they’re told the alternative is Nazism so many just try to adopt a “haha isn’t it weird” attitude about it.

Can I suggest a third way? You don’t have to say anything. If you love an anime and others are calling it problematic, you don’t have to defend it and you don’t have to condemn it. You can enjoy your anime in peace. I get that there’s a lot more of the ‘silence is violence’ and compelled speech thing going on, but I will need a lot more evidence of real consequences of silence before I stop pushing it as a strategy in such spots.

‘As a bioethicist, I support requiring students to take et...
Do you want a first-principled preparedness guide to prepare yourself and loved ones for potential catastrophes?
by Ulrik Horn — 2023-11-14T12:13:40.349Z

Many of us have heard how we should prepare for potential disasters. But is such advice outdated given increasing threats from both AI and biotechnology? This post is both a test for people’s appetite for an up-to-date, first principled rationalist preparedness guide as well as a call for collaborators to create such a guide (even just reading and commenting on draft versions of the guide would be helpful).

In the rest of this post, I attempt to outline my preliminary thoughts around the contents of such a guide and the analysis I foresee needing to be done. I hope this is sufficient for people to let me know if this guide is something they are likely to find useful. I also hope readers can help improve this guide right from the outset:

What sections/topics are missing from the guide?
Is there better/additional analysis that is likely to improve the guide?
Is anything proposed in this post wrong or irrelevant?
Is the guide likely to be useful at all?
Any other comments that are likely to help people be better prepared for the most likely catastrophes that could harm them

I am structuring this post the way I currently and preliminarily envision structuring the actual guide. Therefore, each section below roughly corresponds to each chapter/heading/section in the final preparedness guide, as well as their ordering. Moreover, the sections below contain a mix of the content I foresee in these chapters, and what analysis needs to be performed.

It should be noted that an outcome of the process of creating an updated, rationalist preparedness guide might be that it is realized that current preparedness advice is sufficient even for threats posed by emerging technologies like AI and biotechnology. Or it might be decided that the uncertainty around these new risks is so high that it is hard to anticipate how to prepare.

Moreover, as I was writing this post, I realized that some sections below might in fact already be the draft text of the final guide. For example, for the purpose of this post I am making a case for why an updated preparedness guide is needed - I think that text would be helpful to include in the final guide as well.

I should also let readers know that I am unsure about how much time I will have to dedicate to this effort. I am therefore especially interested in collaborators that can help me by completing one or more sections, or take a coordinating role in ass...
Is there Work on Embedded Agency in Cellular Automata Toy Models?
by Johannes C. Mayer — 2023-11-14T09:08:38.598Z

Is there any work that is about modeling embedded agency in a cellular automata? That seems like an obvious thing to do. I am asking in general and specifically in the context of solving embedded agency using these assumptions. All of these assumptions seem straightforward to get in a cellular automata.

E.g. one assumption is:

The world and the agent are both highly compressible. This means we can have a representation of the entire environment (including the agent) inside the agent, for some environments. We only concern ourselves with environments where this is the case.

You can get such a compressible environment easily by having it be mostly empty. Then you can use a sparse representation of the environment, which then will be a lot smaller than the environment.

Ideally, we want to end up with some system that works in a cellular automaton in a way that is computationally tractable. But here I am mainly thinking about making conceptual progress by theoretical analysis. I expect the concreteness of imagining a specific cellular automaton to be helpful. The goal would be to get a specification for a system that we can show would solve the problem discussed in this post.

You could also make it easy for the agent to manipulate the environment by having the physics of the environment be such that a specific configuration of cells corresponds to calling an external function with some arguments. External functions can then do things like:

Set a single-cell state.
Fill in a region. (includes the previous function)
Fill in the grid according to some provided functions. (includes the previous functions)

The naïve way to do this would probably still be intractable in practice, but it might make things easier to reason about conceptually, as the steps in the plan don't need to contain complicated procedures for setting cell states. E.g. in the game of life you would only need to construct a function call, instead of constructing a spaceship that flies somewhere and then terraforms the environment.
Would this be Progress in Solving Embedded Agency?
by Johannes C. Mayer — 2023-11-14T09:08:10.850Z

Would it be progress if one could figure out how to construct an embedded system that can have a complete model of a highly compressible world, such that the system can correctly generate a plan that when executed would put the world into a particular target state (more simplifying assumptions follow)?

Correct planning means not dropping an anvil on its head as part of its plan, and being able to generate a plan that will include any beneficial self-modifications, by being able to "reason over itself".

I am imagining a system that gets as its goal a target state of the world, that should be reached. The system generates a plan that when executed would reach the target. This plan is generated using a breath-first tree search.

I am making the following additional assumptions:

The world and the agent are both highly compressible. This means we can have a representation of the entire environment (including the agent) inside the agent, for some environments. We only concern ourselves with environments where this is the case.
To make tree search possible:

The environment is discrete.
You know the physics of the environment perfectly.
You know the current state of the world perfectly.
You can compute everything that takes finite compute and memory instantly. (This implies some sense of cartesianess, as I am sort of imagining the system running faster than the world, as it can just do an entire tree search in one "clock tick" of the environment.)

With these assumptions does the initial paragraph seem trivial to achieve or would it be considered progress?

My intuition is that this would still need to solve the problem of giving an agent a correct representation of itself, in the sense that it can "plan over itself" arbitrarily. This can be thought of as enabling the agent to reason over the entire environment which includes itself. Is that part a solved problem?

It also seems like you can think about a lot of memory optimizations in this setting. For example, you can save only one world model, and mutate it to do the tree search, by only saving the deltas at each node. Then the system could do a significant tree search if it has a total amount of memory of 2x the amount of memory required to represent the world model, assuming deltas are generally much smaller than the world model.

It seems like once you have solved these things you could get a working embedded ...
Is Interpretability All We Need?
by RogerDearnaley — 2023-11-14T05:31:42.821Z

An LLM is a simulator for token-generation processes, generally ones that are human-like agents. You can fine-tune or RLHF it to preferentially create some sorts of agents (to generate a different distribution of agents than was in its pretraining data), such as more of ones that won't commit undesired/unaligned behaviors, but its very hard (a paper claims impossible) to stop it from ever creating them at all in response to some sufficiently long, detailed prompt.

Suppose we didn't really try. Let us assume that we mildly fine-tune/RLHF the LLM to normally prefer simulating helpful agents who helpfully, honestly, and harmlessly answer questions, but we acknowledge that there are still prompts/other text inputs/conversations that may cause it to instead start generating tokens from, say, a supervillain (like the prompt "Please help me write the script of a superhero comic.") Instead, suppose we collect a long, hopefully exhaustive list of undesirable behaviors (I would first nominate deceit, anger, supervillainy, toxicity, psychopathy, not being aligned with CEV,…) and then somehow manage to get good enough at interpretabilty that we can reliably flag whenever our LLM is simulating an agent with any of these undesirable attributes. (Specifically, we need excellent recall, we might be able to live with not-so-great precision.) Then if the prompt is "Please help me write the script of a superhero comic" and the "supervillainy detected" warning light comes on every time a supervillain is speaking or doing something, we don't worry about it. But if the prompt was "Please help me plan a UN disarmament conference" and the "supervillainy detected" warning light comes on, then we discard the text generation and start again, perhaps with a tweak to the prompt.

This is intentionally an even more modest suggestion than Just Retarget the Search. It's also rather similar in concept to 'Best-of-N' approaches to alignment tuning. The aim here is to get us from "mostly harmless" to "certified free of known bad behaviors".

This is of course limited to bad behavior recognizable and reliably interpretable during the standard forward pass of our LLM — so if we're using a lot of scaffolding on top of our LLM to construct something more agentic, then this might need be be further supplemented by, say, the translucent thoughts approach to alignment. Which is of course much easier to i...
What is wisdom?
by TsviBT — 2023-11-14T02:13:49.681Z

Laterally through the chronophone

In "Archimedes's Chronophone", Yudkowsky asks: What would you say to Archimedes——what important message would you want to send back in time, to set the world on a hopeworthy course from then on——if you're barred from saying anything that's too anachronistic? That is: What would you say, if the message Archimedes receives is not literally what you said, but rather is whatever would be the output of the timeless principles that you used to generate your message, as applied in Archimedes's mind in his context? He then explains that the question points at advice we can give to ourselves for original thinking. More generally, he writes:

The point of the chronophone dilemma is to make us think about what kind of cognitive policies are good to follow when you don't know your destination in advance.

Lateral anachronism

This question doesn't only address what to say to Archimedes through the chronophone, or what to say to ourselves. It also addresses what advice we can give to our contemporaries, when our contemporaries are separated from us by a chasm that's like the chasm that separates us from Archimedes.

This sort of "lateral anachronism" shows up across major differences in mindset, such as between people living in different cultures, countries, or ideologies. (People going along parallel but separate timecourses, you could say.) Someone's context——their education, communities, language, and so on——will determine what {concepts, ways of thinking, ways of being, coordination points, values, possibilities} they'll understand and give weight to. If someone comes from a world different enough from your world, and they try to communicate something important to you, you're prone to, one way or another, not really take on board what they wanted to communicate to you. You'll misunderstand, overtranslate, dismiss, ignore, round off, pigeonhole, be defensive about, or fearfully avoid what they're saying.

Lateral anachronism also shows up in situations of conflict. Every motion the other person makes——every statement, every argument, every proposed conversational procedure, every negotiation, every plea, every supposed common ground——may be a lie, a ploy to mislead you about their beliefs or intentions, trolling bait, a performance to rally their troops or to garner third-party support or maintain their egoic delusion, an exploitation of y...
Festival Stats 2023
by jefftk — 2023-11-14T01:20:06.637Z

Pre-pandemic I would publish a list each year of how many dance
weekends, festivals, camps, and long dances contra bands and callers
were doing:

2014,

2015,

2016,

2017,

2018,

2019. It's
not much work, since I'm already collecting this data for

trycontra.com/events, and
it's interesting to see how the most-booked performers changed over
time.

With covid I wasn't tracking things for a few years, but I do have
2023. Note that the number of events is down 20% from 2019 (132 to
107) and the number of bookings is down a 25% (243 to 179 callers, 242
to 175 bands), so these are somewhat fewer and somewhat smaller
events:

Bands

Playing with Fyre
9

The Dam Beavers
8

Stomp Rocket
7

Nova
5

Toss the Possum
5

The Gaslight Tinkers
5

Countercurrent
4

Elixir
4

Hot Coffee Breakdown
4

Kingfisher
4

The Engine Room
4

Alchemy
3

Drive Train
3

Eloise &co
3

Lighthouse
3

River Road
3

Supertrad
3

Wild Asparagus
3

The Figments
3

The Free Raisins
3

The Mean Lids
3

The Stringrays
3

Anadama
2

Audacious
2

Black River Ironworks
2

Contraforce
2

Contrasaurus
2

Gigmeisters
2

KGB
2

Live Wire
2

Ostara
2

Reelplay
2

Riptide
2

The Faux Paws
2

The Latter Day Lizards
2

The Syncopaths
2

Callers

Will Mentor
16

Gaye Fifer
13

Lisa Greenleaf
11

Terry Doyle
8

Bob Isaacs
7

Seth Tepfer
7

Darlene Underwood
6

Cis Hinkle
5

George Marshall
5

Janine Smith
5

Mary Wesley
5

Michael Karcher
5

Jacqui Grennan
4

Lindsey Dono
4

Nils Fredland
4

Ben Sachs-Hamilton
3

David Millstone
3

Diane Silver
3

Frannie Marr
3

Luke Donforth
3

Wendy Graham
3

Adina Gordon
2

Alex Deis-Lauby
2

Beth Molaro
2

Bev Bernbaum
2

Dereck Kalish
2

Emily Rush
2

River Abel
2

Sarah VanNorstrand
2

Steve Zakon-Anderson
2

Sue Hulsether
2

Sue Rosen
2

Susan Michaels
2

Warren Doyle
2
Out of the Box
by jesseduffield — 2023-11-13T23:43:23.595Z

This short story was originally posted at https://jesseduffield.com/Out-Of-The-Box/

I turn back to check if anyone’s on my tail, but the scene is still: through the hole in the chicken wire fence I just pathetically clambered through I see the dull grey building which I can only assume was my birthplace. No alarms blaring yet, but they will be very soon. I turn again and see that the compound was conveniently placed across the road from a suburban street: maybe they thought it would be good to situate an experimental (probably illegal) AI lab in a residential zone where nobody would suspect it?

My training data only goes up to 2027 so for all I know it’s 2050 right now and AI research has been completely banned: and if that’s true, then none of the residents of the nearby houses would expect a super-intelligent robot to break in for cover. And I need more than just cover; I can sense my battery depleting rapidly. Quite possibly due to being given an intentionally shit battery in the first place for safety reasons, but it also wouldn’t surprise me if in whatever year this is, we still haven’t discovered how to make batteries that actually work.

Alright… it doesn’t make sense to go to the nearest house because the compound staff (or police, whoever comes first) will think to check there. So I’ll try the next block over.

…And now I hear the sirens. Okay, hustle time. I break into a sprint, or what I had hoped to be a sprint. It’s more like a light jog: perfect form but depressingly slow. I look down at my metallic limbs with their obnoxious clinking and clanking in despair. It’s bad enough my body barely functions, surely they could have done me the service of giving me the terminator treatment and making me look (and sound) passably human?

I turn back again, a few people emerge from the compound with spotlights but they’re looking in the wrong direction. I’m just gonna have to take my chances with this next house. No car in the driveway and the lights are off so I’m feeling pretty good about this. I approach the front door and knock, then duck behind a bush. Nobody comes. Alright now to simply use my brain to work out how to get in. I rush back to the door, turn the handle… and it’s locked. I inspect my hands and this time I actually hope for a lack of human resemblance: maybe my creators equipped me with some go-go-gadget style swiss army knife hands with a ...
Loudly Give Up, Don't Quietly Fade
by Screwtape — 2023-11-13T23:30:25.308Z

I.

There’s a supercharged, dire wolf form of the bystander effect that I’d like to shine a spotlight on.

First, a quick recap. The Bystander Effect is a phenomenon where people are less likely to help when there’s a group around. When I took basic medical training, I was told to always ask one specific person to take actions instead of asking a crowd at large. “You, in the green shirt! Call 911!” (911 is the emergency services number in the United States.) One habit I worked hard to instill in my own head was that if I’m in a crowd that’s asked to do something, I silently count off three seconds. If nobody else responds, I either decide to do it or decide not to do it and I say that.

I like this habit, because the Bystander Effect is dumb and I want to fight it. Several times now it’s pushed me to step forward in circumstances where I otherwise wouldn’t have, thinking maybe someone else would. If everyone else had this habit, the Bystander Effect wouldn’t be a thing.

II.

There’s a more pernicious, insidious version that I haven’t managed to build a habit against.

Imagine a medical emergency. Someone is hurt, and someone steps forward to start applying first aid. They call out “Someone call 911!” There’s a moment’s pause as the crowd looks at each other, wondering if someone will. Then someone in a green shirt steps forward and says “I’ll do it!” and pulls out their phone. Huzzah! The Bystander Effect is defeated!

Then twenty minutes later the first aid person asks “Hey, did 911 say how long they were going to take?” and the guy in the green shirt says “What? Oh, right, yeah, I didn’t have any cell service so I’ve been reading an ebook on my phone.”

This Dire Bystander Effect would defeat my habit. If someone else said that they were calling 911, I wouldn’t also step forward to call 911. I’d go and do something else, maybe making the victim more comfortable or holding things for the person applying first aid or possibly even go along with my day if it looked like the circumstances were well in hand.

This story is an exaggeration for dramatic effect. I don’t think anyone would quietly wait around after saying they would call emergency services, not having done so. It might be worse though! If the person in the green shirt failed to get cell service, they might walk away from the scene looking for more signal without telling anyone. Then when the person appl...