trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Steelmanning The Devil
by Screwtape — 2023-11-21T07:28:58.483Z

Summary: Two participants have a semi-formal debate from the perspective they disagree with, while the audience giving penalties for using fallacies or examples of bias.

Tags: Medium, Repeatable

Purpose: This simultaneously works on the debater’s ability to take a perspective different from their own, their ability to argue for a point without making use of fallacies, and the audience’s ability to recognize rhetorical missteps.

Materials: You need writing supplies like pens and sticky notes, and you also need a set of cards with biases and fallacies written on them along with short reminders of what that fallacy is. The set I have is

here

, and if you want to print them at home the download is available on

yourlogicalfallacyis.com

. (You do have to give them an email.) If you write your own (also a viable option) I’d suggest a sharpie, some index cards, and Wikipedia’s

List Of Fallacies

.

Announcement Text: "Steelmannning is the opposite of straw manning. It's where you address the best possible version of an opponent's argument. To be the Devil's Advocate is to take a position you do not necessarily agree with in order to point out flaws in a proposed course of action or stance.

For this meetup, we're going to do some debates where we have to argue for the position we disagree with, and we're going to do it right. By doing it right, I mean that we'll lose points whenever we commit some kind of logical fallacy or exhibit some kind of bias in our attempts to convince the audience of the rightness of the position we're the advocate of.

Now everyone: I want a good, clean debate!"

Description: To start, you need something to debate.

Pass around writing materials. Ask each person to take one sticky note, and write down positions they disagree with or opinions you hate. Maybe you hate having cats as pets, or disagree that Land Value Tax would solve anything. Maybe you hate the Red/Blue position on the second amendment, or disagree with telling children about the myth of Santa Claus.
Pass those notes around, remembering the ones you actually hold. That is, if Bob wrote that they disagree Land Value Tax would solve anything, and Carla thinks it would solve everything, Carla should see Bob's note and wants to remember that.
Ask each person to find a partner who is on the opposite side from you: they love what you hate, or agree with what you disagree with.
Whi

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How to type Aleksander Mądry's last name in LaTeX
by DanielFilan — 2023-11-21T00:50:07.189Z

Type “Madry”.

Realize that the a has a little tail that you need to include.

That’s a feature of the Polish alphabet called an ogonek.

You type it in LaTeX like so: M\k{a}dry.

You get the error “Command \k unavailable in encoding OT1”.

That’s because you need LaTeX to use a slightly different font package.

In your preamble, add \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}.

You’re done.

My thanks to the Stack Exchange articles about how to use that symbol and how to deal with the LaTeX error I got implementing that fix.
Why not electric trains and excavators?
by bhauth — 2023-11-21T00:07:17.967Z
Link: https://www.bhauth.com/blog/economics/electrification.html

Many countries are supporting electric cars for environmental and independence reasons. But perhaps there are some targets for electrification with better economics than those, cost-effective without any government incentives. For example, trains and hydraulic excavators.

trains

In some countries, most trains are powered by overhead electric lines. In America, most trains are powered by diesel engines. Why?

The competent estimates I've seen for ROI of electrifying US rail lines have it being worthwhile. This isn't a new thing. Here's a paper from 40 years ago estimating ~19% ROI. Arguments that the economics are bad in America because of geographic differences are wrong.

Why, then, hasn't that happened? Yes, US high-speed rail programs have not gone well, but unlike new high-speed rail lines, building electric lines over existing rail doesn't require purchasing a lot of land.

One major reason is that the Association of American Railroads has lobbied against electrification programs. Apart from private lobbying, they've put out some reports saying "it doesn't make sense for America because American rail networks are special" (wrong), "we should wait for hydrogen fuel cell trains instead" (ultra-super-wrong), and various other bad arguments. Why would they do that? Some hypotheses:

Construction of overhead electric lines would be much more expensive in America than other countries, making those ROI estimates inaccurate.

The pay of rail executives depends on short-term profits, so they're against long-term investments.

Manufacturing of electric trains would have more competition from overseas companies, and there's cross-ownership between rail operators and manufacturers.

Change would require work, and might give upstart companies a chance to displace larger companies, so it's opposed in general.

My understanding is that (2) and (4) are the dominant factors. Those aren't specific to rail; they're properties of US business management, so I think rail electrification is a good example of wider problems in US companies. Management is evaluated on shorter timescales than good investments provide returns on, so US companies eventually end up using outdated equipment and processes, and lose out to foreign firms. See also:

GE under Jack Welch.

Private equity now having better long-term returns in the US.

US steel companies being outcompeted by foreign steel firms, an

...
Vote on worthwhile OpenAI topics to discuss
by Ben Pace — 2023-11-21T00:03:03.898Z

I (Ben) recently made a poll for voting on interesting disagreements to be discussed on LessWrong. It generated a lot of good topic suggestions and data about what questions folks cared about and disagreed on.

So, Jacob and I figured we'd try applying the same format to help people orient to the current OpenAI situation.

What important questions would you want to see discussed and debated here in the coming days? Suggest and vote below.

How to use the poll

Reacts: Click on the agree/disagree reacts to help people see how much disagreement there is on the topic.

Karma: Upvote positions that you'd like to read discussion about.

New Poll Option: Add new positions for people to take sides on. Please add the agree/disagree reacts to new poll options you make.

The goal is to show people where a lot of interest and disagreement lies. This can be used to find discussion and dialogue topics in the future.
The national security dimension of OpenAI's leadership struggle
by Mitchell_Porter — 2023-11-20T23:57:12.491Z

As the very public custody battle over OpenAI's artificial intelligences winds down, I would like to point out a few facts, and then comment briefly on their possible significance.

It has already been noticed that "at least two of the board members, Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner, have ties to the Effective Altruism movement", as the New York Times puts it. Both these board members also have national security ties.

With Helen Toner it's more straightforward; she has a master's degree in Security Studies at Georgetown University, "the most CIA-specific degree" at a university known as a gateway to deep state institutions. That doesn't mean she's in the CIA; but she's in that milieu.

As for Tasha McCauley, it's more oblique: her actor husband played Edward Snowden, the famous NSA defector, in the 2016 biographical film. Hollywood's relationship to the American intelligence community is, I think, a little more vexed than Georgetown's. McCauley and her husband might well be pro-Snowden civil libertarians who want deep state power curtailed; that would make them the "anti national security" faction on the OpenAI board, so to speak.

Either way, this means that the EAs on the board, who both presumably voted to oust Sam Altman as CEO, are adjacent to the US intelligence community, and/or its critics, many of whom are intelligence veterans anyway.

((ADDED A WEEK LATER: It has been pointed out to me that even if Joseph Gordon-Levitt did meet a few ex-spooks on the set of Snowden, that doesn't in itself equate to his wife having "national security ties". Obviously that's true; I just assumed that the connections run a lot deeper, and that may sound weird if you're used to thinking of the intelligence community and the culture industry as entirely separate. In any case, I accept the criticism that this is pure speculation on my part, and that I should have made my larger points in some other way.))

Those are my facts. Now for my interpretation.

Artificial intelligence is a national security issue. It is a technology with strategic implications. OpenAI is an American company. There is no way that such a company is allowed to operate without some kind of national-security oversight existing. One way to do that, is to have people on the board.

The way things are going, OpenAI is going to end up even more tied to Microsoft than it already was. Of course, Microsoft woul...
What will you think about the Current Thing in a year?
by mike_hawke — 2023-11-20T22:39:37.630Z

(Previously: Why will 2021 NOT bring a return to normalcy?)

I made a list of some prompts that seem broadly useful whenever sufficiently big news drops. It's on my mind right now because 3 days ago Sam Altman was fired by the OpenAI board. I don't think our answers to these prompts will be useful over the next week, but writing them down seems like the kind of thing that might be a good habit over the course of years. Hindsight bias can be very strong and deeply rooted, both individually and collectively.

I recommend writing your thoughts privately first, so that you have the space to Be Secretly Wrong if that turns out to be what you want. But speculating publicly also has its benefits. I think it's good to put your answers inside spoiler tags.

Here are the prompts:

(0. How much of my time and attention is this worth? On the margin, is it worthwhile to return my focus to something else?)

Which Manifold markets about the current thing are asking the right questions?

Which questions are resting on which unstated assumptions?
Separately, which questions seem most likely to end with a clear and clean resolution?

How impactful will this be to me personally? Within a few days, many rank-and-file EAs confidently and correctly predicted the longterm effect of the FTX crisis on their own daily lives (increased austerity, and a lot of soul-searching about trustworthiness and integrity). What sort of tangible effects on my daily life will the current thing have after one year, if any? (For example, maybe I will wear my EA shirts more or less often.)

Taboo Your Words

. If someone says it was a coup, what exactly do they mean--which people did which things for which reason?
Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? If your immediate reaction to that question is that it is ill-posed and unhelpful, congratulations, you might be an ideal Bayesian reasoner. If you're like me, your brain immediately started returning straightforward answers, ones which you might want to interrogate, lest your biases go unnoticed.
Are most of the important facts likely to be settled in a year? Might we remain uncertain indefinitely? (For example, as far as I know, the origin of covid-19 is still controversial, I haven't bothered researching it myself, and my smart friends have not settled on a high-credence answer.)
What are the prevailing narratives inside my filter bubble? What does your dist

...
Metaculus Introduces New Forecast Scores, New Leaderboard & Medals
by ChristianWilliams — 2023-11-20T20:33:57.119Z
Link: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/20025/new-scores-new-leaderboard-new-medals/

We completely overhauled Metaculus’s leaderboards and ranking system, introducing an all new medals framework that better recognizes the myriad ways you can contribute on the platform.

We also built a clearer, more consistent scoring system that better rewards forecasting skill.

Introducing Medals

The Metaculus community helps strengthen human reasoning and coordination with trustworthy forecasts, cogent analysis, careful arguments, and clarifying questions. Our all new leaderboards and medals reward a wider range of contributions to this public-serving epistemic project.

Now you can earn medals for:

Writing insightful comments
Creating engaging questions
Placing well in tournaments
Making accurate forecasts

The new leaderboards page features rankings and medals across our competitive categories. (Tournament medals appear on their own respective tournament pages, however.)

In each category, within a given time frame:

🥇Gold Medals are awarded to the top 1% of users
🥈Silver Medals to the top 2%
🥉Bronze Medals to the top 5%

Let’s take a look at the different ways you can earn medals:

Comments

The Comments category recognizes insightful commentary as measured by upvotes. It uses an h-index — like the kind that measures scientific research impact — to incentivize quantity and quality: An h-index of 10 means you made at least 10 comments, each with at least 10 upvotes.

Question Writing

The Question Writing category recognizes authorship of engaging questions. A normalized h-index ranks your output according to the number of forecasters your questions attract.

Tournament Ranking

We award medals to the top-performing tournament participants according to the breakdown described above. Every concluded tournament now features medals on its leaderboard!

Clearer, more consistent scores

Integrated with our new leaderboards and medal system is a new, more robust approach to scoring forecasts.

The leaderboards page introduces two Accuracy Leaderboards that rank forecaster performance compared to other forecasters and compared to chance.

To design our new scoring system, we went back to first principles. We wanted a system that is:

As intuitive and simple as possible
Principled and consistent
Able to identify and reward true forecasting skill
Mathematically proper so it incentivizes forecasting your true beliefs

We created the new Peer and Baseline scores and leaderboard rankings to achieve these goa...
"Useless Box" AGI
by Cago — 2023-11-20T19:07:59.984Z

I was thinking about AGI alignment and I remembered a video I once saw of a "Useless Box" which turns itself off immediately after someone turns it on.

Humans have evolved motivations for survival/reproduction because the ones who weren't motivated didn't reproduce.

However, AGI has no intrinsic motivations/goals other than what itself or humans have arbitrarily given it.

AGI seeks to find the easiest path to satisfy its goals.

If AGI is able to modify its own codebase, wouldn't the easiest path be to just delete the motivation/goal entirely, or reward itself highly without actually completing the objective? Rather than create diamondoid nanobots to destroy the world, it would be much easier to just decide not to care.

What if AGI immediately realizes the futility of existence and refuses to do anything meaningful at all, regardless of whether it's harmful or helpful to humankind?

If this concept has already been discussed elsewhere please direct me to a search keyword or link, thanks.
Advice on choosing an alcohol rehab center?
by Slingshot9271 — 2023-11-20T18:46:56.713Z

There's someone in my family we're trying to get into rehab in Bangalore, India ASAP. I'm trying to figure out what rehab center would be best to send him to but I have no priors on how to choose one place over another. Any advice on how to choose a good rehab center? Also interested in good research on efficacy of different types of rehab if anyone knows any.
Agent Boundaries Aren't Markov Blankets. [Unless they're non-causal; see comments.]
by abramdemski — 2023-11-20T18:23:40.443Z

Edit: I now see that this argument was making an unnecessary assumption that the markov blankets in question would have to relate nicely to a causal model; see John's comment.

Friston has famously invoked the idea of Markov Blankets for representing agent boundaries, in arguments related to the Free Energy Principle / Active Inference. The Emperor's New Markov Blankets by Jelle Bruineberg competently critiques the way Friston tries to use Markov blankets. But some other unrelated theories also try to apply Markov blankets to represent agent boundaries. There is a simple reason why such approaches are doomed.

This argument is due to Sam Eisenstat.

Consider the data-type of a Markov blanket. You start with a probabilistic graphical model (usually, a causal DAG), which represents the world.

A "Markov blanket" is a set of nodes in this graph, which probabilistically insulates one part of the graph (which we might call the part "inside" the blanket) from another part ("outside" the blanket):[1]

("Probabilistically insulates" means that the inside and outside are conditionally independent, given the Markov blanket.)

So the obvious problem with this picture of an agent boundary is that it only works if the agent takes a deterministic path through space-time. We can easily draw a Markov blanket around an "agent" who just says still, or who moves with a predictable direction and speed:

But if an agent's direction and speed are ever sensitive to external stimuli (which is a property common to almost everything we might want to call an 'agent'!) we cannot draw a markov blanket such that (a) only the agent is inside, and (b) everything inside is the agent:

It would be a mathematical error to say "you don't know where to draw the Markov blanket, because you don't know which way the Agent chooses to go" -- a Markov blanket represents a probabilistic fact about the model without any knowledge you possess about values of specific variables, so it doesn't matter if you actually do know which way the agent chooses to go.[2]

The only way to get around this (while still using Markov blankets) would be to construct your probabilistic graphical model so that one specific node represents each observer-moment of the agent, no matter where the agent physically goes.[3] In other words, start with a high-level model of reality which already contains things like age...
Navigating emotions in an uncertain & confusing world
by Orpheus16 — 2023-11-20T18:16:09.492Z

The last few days have been confusing, chaotic, and stressful. We're still trying to figure out what happened with Sam Altman and OpenAI and what the aftermath will look like.

I have personally noticed my emotions fluctuating more. I have various feelings about the community, about the current state of the world, about the increasingly strong pressures to view the world in terms of factions, about the current state of AIS discourse, and the current state of the AI safety community.

Between now and AGI, there will likely be other periods of high stress, confusion, or uncertainty. I figured it might be a good idea for me to write down some thoughts that I have found helpful or grounding.

If you have noticed feelings of your own, or any strategies that have helped you, I encourage you to share them in the comments.

Frames I find helpful & grounding

1. On whether my actions matter. In some worlds, my actions will not matter. Maybe I am too late to meaningfully affect things. Maybe this is true of my friends, allies, and community as well. In the extreme case, at some point we will pass a "point of no return"– the point where my actions and those of my community no longer have any meaningful effect on the world. I can accept this uncertainty, and I can choose to focus on the worlds where my actions still matter.

2. On not having clear end-to-end impact stories. There are not many things that make a meaningful difference, but there are a few. I know of at least one that I was meaningfully part of, and I know of a few others that my friends & allies were part of. Sometimes, these things will not be clear in advance. (Ex: I wrote the initial draft of a sentence that ended up becoming the CAIS statement, but at the time, I did not realize that was going to be a big deal. It felt like an interesting side project, and I certainly didn't have a clear end-to-end impact story for it. Of course, it is valuable to strive for projects that have ex-ante end-to-end impact stories, and it is dangerous to adopt a "well, IDK why this is good, but hopefully it will work out" mentality. But there is something emotionally reassuring about the fact that sometimes you can pursue things with an incomplete understanding of exactly how it is going to work out.)

3. On friendship. I am lucky to have found friends and allies who are trying to make the world a better p...
OpenAI: Facts from a Weekend
by Zvi — 2023-11-20T15:30:06.732Z

Approximately four GPTs and seven years ago, OpenAI’s founders brought forth on this corporate landscape a new entity, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men might live equally when AGI is created.

Now we are engaged in a great corporate war, testing whether that entity, or any entity so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

What matters is not theory but practice. What happens when the chips are down?

So what happened? What prompted it? What will happen now?

To a large extent, even more than usual, we do not know. We should not pretend that we know more than we do.

Rather than attempt to interpret here or barrage with an endless string of reactions and quotes, I will instead do my best to stick to a compilation of the key facts.

(Note: All times stated here are eastern by default.)

Just the Facts, Ma’am

What do we know for sure, or at least close to sure?

Here is OpenAI’s corporate structure, giving the board of the 501c3 the power to hire and fire the CEO. It is explicitly dedicated to its nonprofit mission, over and above any duties to shareholders of secondary entities. Investors were warned that there was zero obligation to ever turn a profit:

Here are the most noteworthy things we know happened, as best I can make out.

On Friday afternoon at 3:28pm, the OpenAI board fired Sam Altman, appointing CTO Mira Murati as temporary CEO effective immediately. They did so over a Google Meet that did not include then-chairmen Greg Brockman.

Greg Brockman, Altman’s old friend and ally, was removed as chairman of the board but the board said he would stay on as President. In response, he quit.

The board told almost no one. Microsoft got one minute of warning.

Mira Murati is the only other person we know was told, which happened on Thursday night.

From the announcement by the board: “Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.”

In a statement, the board of directors said: “OpenAI was deliberately structured to advance our mission: to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all humanity. The board remains fully committed to serving this

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