trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Why I Prefer the Copenhagen Interpretation(s)
by dadadarren — 2020-10-31T21:06:02.500Z
Link: https://www.sleepingbeautyproblem.com/9-perspective-based-reasoning-and-quantum-interpretation/

I have (relatively) recently finished Sean Caroll's Something Deeply Hidden. I'm also under the impression that the Many-Worlds Interpretations (MWI) is favored by many in the lesswrong community. However, the more I think about it, the Copenhagen Interpretation (and other recent variants like RQM and QBism) becomes more appealing. I am not a physicist by any means. Just sharing my amateur thoughts for discussion.

Perspectives as Fundamentals

Thomas Nagel suggests we come to the notion of objectivity through the following steps[1]:

Realize (or postulate) that my perceptions are due to the actions of things upon me, though their effect on me.

Realize (or postulate) the same property that caused actions upon me can also lead to actions on other things.

Realize (or postulate) the property can exist without causing any action at all, which leads to our conception of a “true nature”, independent of any perspective.

Thomas Nagel calls this “the view from nowhere”, Bernard Williams the “absolute conception”. It represents our ordinary understanding of reality which science should strive to describe.

I think maybe Step 3 is one step too far. Step 1 can be regarded as the realization that I am experiencing the world from a given perspective. Step 2 can be seen as the realization that my perspective is just one of many, that it is not particularly special. Both steps put perspectives in a fundamental position. Then Step 3 suggesting objectivity being perspective-independent seems to be quite a jump.

By rejecting that last postulate, properties are no longer fundamentals but derived from actions upon a perspective center. The reality, instead of an absolute conception, needs to be described from some given perspective. Objectivity property is not perspective-independent but rather perspective-invariant. It refers to qualities, methods, and rationales that remains true with perspective changes. I call this idea the Perspective-Based Reasoning (PBR).

PBR and the Copenhagen Interpretation

PBR explains troubling concepts in the CI including the “observer”, “measurements”, and quantum nonlocality. It can be summarized as the following:

It starts with a given perspective and its center.

From here, any information or knowledge about the world is based on actions upon the perspective center.

These actions are the fundamental subject matter. The natures and properties of the

...
"Inner Alignment Failures" Which Are Actually Outer Alignment Failures
by johnswentworth — 2020-10-31T20:18:35.536Z

If you don’t know what “inner” and “outer” optimization are, or why birth control or masturbation might be examples, then

check out one of the posts here

before reading this one. Thanks to Evan, Scott, and Richard for discussions around these ideas - though I doubt all their objections are settled yet.

Claim: from an evolutionary fitness perspective, masturbation is an inner alignment failure, but birth control is an outer alignment failure.

More generally:

Assuming the outer optimizer successfully optimizes, failure to generalize from training environment to deployment environment is always an outer alignment failure (regardless of whether an inner optimizer appears).
Assuming outer alignment, inner alignment problems can occur only as the result of imperfect optimization.

All of these claims stem from one main argument, which can be applied to any supposed inner alignment problem.

This post will outline the argument, give a few examples, and talk about some implications.

Motivating Example: Birth Control vs Masturbation

Consider some simple biological system - like a virus or a mycobacterium - which doesn’t perform any significant optimization. The system has been optimized by evolution to perform well in certain environments, but it doesn’t perform any optimization “at runtime”.

From an evolutionary fitness perspective, the system can still end up misaligned. The main way this happens is an environment shift: the system evolved to reproduce in a certain environment, and doesn’t generalize well to other environments. A virus which spreads quickly in the rodents of one particular pacific island may not spread well on the mainland; a mycobacterium evolved for the guts of ancestral-environment humans may not flourish in the guts of humans with a modern diet.

Obviously this scenario does not involve any inner optimization, because there is no inner optimizer. It’s purely an outer alignment failure: the objective “reproductive fitness in ancestral environment” is not aligned with the objective “reproductive fitness in current environment”.

Now imagine a more complex biological system which is performing some optimization - e.g. humans. Evolutionary “training” optimized humans for reproductive fitness in the ancestral environment. Yet the modern environment contains many possibilities which weren’t around in the ancestral environment - e.g. birth control pills. “Want...
Aim to explain, not persuade
by lsusr — 2020-10-31T16:35:17.273Z

I love Less Wrong's Frontpage comment guidelines. I especially love the first guideline "Aim to explain, not persuade". The guideline averts arguments, improves my persuasiveness and enhances my intellectual triage.

Intellectual Triage

It is easy to tell if a field is garbage when you are an expert in the field. But it is a waste of time to become an expert in a garbage field. You should figure out if a field is garbage before you decide whether to become an expert in it.

Till one knows better, it's hard to distinguish something that's hard to understand because the writer was unclear in his own mind from something like a mathematical proof that's hard to understand because the ideas it represents are hard to understand.

―How to Do Philosophy by Paul Graham

It is often impossible for a non-expert to determine whether an expert is telling the truth. But it is easy for a non-expert to determine whether an expert is attempting to tell a coherent truth. Coherent truth is specific, falsifiable, unambiguous and precise.

The opposite of coherence is bullshit. Bullshit is vague, unfalsifiable, ambiguous and generic. You can cut through bullshit by communicating via positive statements. Don't waste your time cutting holes in an argument that was never intended to hold water. Instead, ask "How do you know?" and "What do you mean by x?". If you cannot quickly climb down to self-evident reality then your interlocutor is not worth your attention.

In other words, "aim to explain, not persuade".

Truth and falsehood are parity inversions of the same meme. If someone convinces you of a falsehood then you can repair the damage with a checksum and a single bit flip. Bullshit is worse than falsehoods because if you eat bullshit then it will gunk up your epistemic failsafes.
Containing the AI... Inside a Simulated Reality
by HumaneAutomation — 2020-10-31T16:16:48.404Z

So I just finished the paper by Yampolskiy called "Uncontrollability of AI" and it makes for a compelling read. In particular, I was happy to finally see something that explicitly mentions the ludicrous folly of believing it possible to make an AI conform to "human values" - as many posts on this blog make abundantly clear, to be human is to be irrational... asking an AI to conform with our ways of "reasoning" is... well - incoherent, to put it mildly.
But - that is not what this post is about :) I wish to propose a containment method that for some reason has not been especially elaborated on. Some might say it's another version of AI-in-a-Box, but I disagree. Allow me to explain...
What if the AGI we create is "brought online" inside a simulated reality... A place that, as far as it knows, is the entirety of the world? Let us call this place AISpace.
Now some of you probably are already pre-heating your keyboards to respond with the often repeated (and valid) arguments that "prove" how this won't work, but let me add a little twist first... as some of you may agree, we have no definitive proof that our world itself is not a simulated reality. Thus, if you feel it inevitable that an AGI must be able to get out of AISpace, releasing an AGI into this world would have to at least leave open the possibility that an AGI on Real Earth (aka Reality as we think we know it) could also "conclude" this actual world is a sim, or decide to find out if it is (and, yes, convert the entire universe into a computer to come up with an answer ;)
If we are unable to definitively settle whether Real Earth is or is not a simulation, why should an AI be able to do so?
Now - of course the above requires a few conditions, some of which may indeed be hard to meet, such as human operators not exposing the fact that AISpace is not in fact all of Reality... and (malevolent or indifferent) actors could always choose to release their AI into the Real World anyhow. What I'd like us to do here on this post is to not repeat the known arguments against AI in a Box, which make sense and are for the most part uncontroversial. Instead, let's deal with the specific case of a situation where the AGI is sincerely of the "opinion" that its reality (AISpace) is the entire world, and how it then might find out it is not, absent human error.
AISpace would of course need to be created first and the task...
Taking Ideas Seriously is Hard
by neilkakkar — 2020-10-31T13:47:30.375Z
Link: https://neilkakkar.com/taking-ideas-seriously.html

Most people don’t practice taking ideas seriously. I think it’s because most people don’t know how to. I didn’t either, until I stumbled upon an implication.

For example, what would it mean to take compounding seriously?

Ugh. I can feel your aversion. You’ve already heard so much about compounding, how it works, how it’s the eight wonder of the world, etc. etc.

But, familiarity is not the same as taking it seriously.

Say you start with $100, and every year, make 10% more. This compounds, since the extra money is a function of how much you already have. The more you have, the more you get. It’s a positive loop that keeps on increasing.

That’s the familiar interpretation. The earlier you start, the more money you’ll make.

To take this interpretation seriously would mean investing your earnings for a similar return. Reality has a surprising amount of detail, and sometimes assumptions break. You don’t make 10% - which means you need to balance your investments somehow. That makes things complicated. However, this complication is not related to compounding.

Taking compounding seriously means taking it a step further. Your net worth is just one implication. What else compounds?

Your life experiences and knowledge. What would it mean to leverage compounding here?

If you’re taking compounding seriously, you’d learn the skills with the greatest return first. That means learning the broadest applicable skills you’d apply throughout your life first. That means learning how to think well - before learning the new fancy tech you want to learn.

Of course, sometimes you need a medium to learn the skill better. That makes sense: learn to think well via this new tech you wanted to learn. Purposes are fragile though, and it’s easy to get lost in the tool, instead of the overall goal.

What makes this example so good is that you’re probably very familiar with compounding. What else are you familiar with, but haven’t realised you’re not taking seriously?

A good way to practice this is to ask this question: What are the implications of (idea) in (field of interest)?

For example, asking myself What are the implications of compounding for my self-directed knowledge base led to the above insight of learning broader skills first.
How do you read the news critically?
by ChristianKl — 2020-10-31T11:48:27.749Z

Epistemic status: My own theories that developed over years based on reading and giving mainstream media interviews about Quantified Self.

When the phrase 'fake news' became popular in 2016, many people called for critical news consumption. The American left used the term to talk about new venues that were very successful in producing stories that went viral on Facebook. Later Donald Trump co-opted the phrase to talk about the mainstream media.

The quality of the information of both kinds of sources is radically different. At the same time the mainstream media isn't a paragon of truth either. Given that there's little good writing about how to interpret news articles, I will try to describe a few key features of how reading the news media can mislead.

There's a common idea in the American discourse that you find informative articles by seeking for articles that are unbiased, have a neutral point of view and are objective. While the ideal has positive intent, following it leads to being less informed.

Why would you want to read an article from someone who doesn't have a neutral point of view? The average journalist has huge time pressure when he writes an article. An article that's based on the understanding of a topic that can be derived by researching the topic for a day isn't very deep because the author doesn't understand the topic very deeply. Traditionally, outlets such a Foreign Policy and The Economist, that take a point of view and are more informative than news media that pretends to be neutral. These articles are more thought through. The author has an informed opinion on a matter – a bias that has intelligent reasoning behind it.

While some forms of bias can be easily seen by reading an article, many can not. It's easier to correct for bias when the author is open about his stance on the issue.

When Robert Moses took over the building of the Triborough Bridge there was a flaw in the previous plan. The sensible location for the Bridge would have been 100th Street as 85% of its predicted traffic was going to move through it. The plan for the Triborough Bridge called for it to be built at 125th Street which added 2,5 miles of additional travel for most users of the bridge. Robert Caro writes in The Power Broker in 1974, that William Randolph Hearst, who owned at the time two newspapers, wanted the bridge to be built on 125th Street, because he would ...
Trick-or-treating in Covid Times
by jefftk — 2020-10-31T00:30:05.643Z

Somerville has asked its residents not to trick-or-treat:

Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone and the Somerville Board of
Health announced Halloween guidance and related updates today. They
strongly urge all community members to forgo trick-or-treating in
favor of lower-risk activities as defined by the Centers for Disease
Control such as at-home activities and holiday crafts.

—somervillema.gov

They link to

MA and

CDC
guidelines.

I have generally supported Somerville's cautious approach, closing
more quickly and opening more slowly than surrounding towns, keeping
schools remote until we can make sure we have sufficient ventilation,
organizing outdoor enrichment activities for students, etc. But I
don't understand how any town that allows
indoor dining can categorize trick-or-treating as impermissibly
high risk?

At this stage in the pandemic, we know that transmission primarily
happens through shared air, and outdoor activities are far safer than
indoor ones. Especially indoor ones where people are, as in
restaurants, generally unmasked and talking. Traditional
trick-or-treating, where everyone rings the same doorbells, frequents
centralized trick-or-treating corridors, gets quite close to each
other, and reaches into the same bowls of candy, I agree is risky. The
core experience of trick-or-treating, however, is walking around
outside in costumes, going to neighbors' houses, and collecting
candy. This can be done with very low risk:

Houses that want to participate should plan socially distanced
distribution. Participation is even more optional than usual.

Trick-or-treat within walking distance of your house.

Don't go anywhere where you won't be able to social distance.

Set expectations with your kids about this being more of a search
than usual, and clarify there will be less candy.

Only acquire candy if you're able to do it while keeping
distance.

Wear a face mask, not just a Halloween mask.

Wait to eat until you're home.

Our fall and winter holidays and traditions are full of gathering
indoors with food and song. Trick-or-treating is a rare exception,
and we should make the most of it.

I'm planning to take the kids out tomorrow night, and I think if we're
thoughtful about what we need to do differently it won't be any more
risky than our usual evening walks around the neighborhood.
A Parable of Four Riders
by matejsuchy — 2020-10-30T23:24:12.571Z

Four cavalrymen assemble on the banks of the Rhone.

Two are fools. I have beneath me behemoth, a mountain of flesh and

Tusk. I ought not simply break it like a horse. I will bring it to the tide of

Battle and the beast will find fury and both I and my adversary will be helpless to

Stay it, they say.

The fools charge into battle. The first’s mount balks at the Gaulish pikes and casts him

To the dirt, and it is his end. The second’s mount glimpses a wolf’s pelt on a pike man

Before him and mistakes it for a lion and falls

Into a blood rush. This fool survives two dozen adversaries, and is greatly rewarded

By his superiors. Here is a man who truly knows how to ride, they say.

Two are wise. The first wise man had broken his mount from its earliest days, and it

Obeys his very command. It is good for him to know that I am his master, for his every

Muscle to ripple only at my command, for I think clearly, and he does not, and my

Foresight will bring us the victory that base passion never could, he says.

His charge bears him dutifully to the tide of battle, and gives no hesitation as its rider

Drives it into the roil of pikes and lances.

And so is the first wise man’s end.

The second wise man had also broken his elephant. It is good for him to act under my

Direction, for I can see the ranks and formations and make sense of it. But he mustn’t

Act under it alone, for what use is an elephant which is as meek as a mouse? And as dull.

For the genius of the beast is not contained in its tusks alone, but in its cunning. It is he

Who will splinter the spears, who will cast the adversary underfoot. This he knows

Better than I ever could. His cunning will be our victory, and with it I will not interfere.

He says.

The second wise man drives his charge to the site of his adversary’s disadvantage, and

The Beast splinters the enemy, man and pike alike. Soon the Gauls disappear

Into the woods, and the fighting is done.

Here is another man who truly knows how to ride, his superiors say.
Why does History assume equal national intelligence?
by HumaneAutomation — 2020-10-30T23:11:30.686Z

So... what I have often wondered when reading about historical events is that it is very rare to read a story where it is asserted that historical actor A was victorious over actor B due to actor B being a bit of a dumbass, or actor A being smarter.
In fact, one could be forgiven for thinking that this is some sort of taboo; the outcomes of wars might be down to various sins such as pride, ill-advised beliefs about ones superiority or ascribed to the decisive tactics used, but almost no action is ever being attributed directly to cleverness, or any loss to thoughtlessness or just being dumb. Now one might argue that, say, the tactics of an army are the outcomes of intelligent thought, and of course this is true to some extent. But I am just curious why it is that history books in general basically appear to work on the implicit assumption that each nation being discussed has the same level of intelligence and the whole concept has no mentionable role to play in the run of history and the events as they transpire.
And this is very odd indeed, because it would seem to me that the vast majority of outcomes of a given interaction between nations, rulers and populations depend to a critical degree on the intelligence of the parties involved. Yet, this aspect appears to be hardly ever discussed. You'd sooner read about the ill health of a ruler, or the kind of extravagant palaces he built... intellectual capacity might also be mentioned, though if so, often as a general (inferred) trait, without elaborating on its impact in actions taken.
So why is that? Perhaps it is too hard to measure or ascertain...? Easier to count the number of cannons than the "IQ" of the generals...? I'm curious what you will say :)
Functors and Coarse Worlds
by Scott Garrabrant — 2020-10-30T15:19:22.976Z

This is the fifth post in the Cartesian frames sequence. Read the first post here.

Up until this point, we have only been working with Cartesian frames over a fixed world W. Now, we are going to start talking about Cartesian frames over different worlds.

1. Functors from Functions Between Worlds

In the Cartesian frames framework, a world is a set of possible worlds w that can all potentially occur in the same frame.

I find it useful to think about "different worlds" W and V in the case where W and V are different world models that carve up a situation in two different ways. W might be a refined world model, one that describes a situation in more detail; while V is a coarser model of the same situation that elides some distinctions in W.

Returning to an example from "Biextensional Equivalence," W={w0,w1,w2,w3,w4,w5,w6,w7} could be a world model that includes details about what the agent is thinking (G for a thought about the color green, R for red), as shown in

C0=SBGHGWRHRW⎛⎜
⎜
⎜⎝w0w1w2w3w4w5w6w7⎞⎟
⎟
⎟⎠,

while V={w8,w9,w10,w11} could be a world model that leaves out this information, representing the same real-world situation with the frame

C1=SBGHGWRHRW⎛⎜
⎜
⎜⎝w8w9w10w11w8w9w10w11⎞⎟
⎟
⎟⎠.

To move between frames like C0 and C1 and compare their properties, we will need a way to send agents and environments of frames defined over one world, to agents and environments of frames over an entirely different world. Functors will allow us to do this.

Definition: Given two sets W and and V, and a function p:W→V, let p∘:Chu(W)→Chu(V) denote the functor that sends the object (A,E,⋅)∈Chu(W) to the object (A,E,⋆)∈Chu(V), where a⋆e=p(a⋅e), and sends the morphism (g,h) to the morphism with the same underlying functions, (g,h).

To visualize this functor, you can imagine Chu(W) as a graph, with matrices as nodes (in the finite case) and arrows representing morphisms. Chu(V) is another graph made of matrices and arrows. To move each frame C from Chu(W) to Chu(V), we use p to entrywise replace the possible worlds in C's matrix with elements of V, without changing the functional properties of the rows and columns; and...
Responses to Christiano on takeoff speeds?
by Richard_Ngo — 2020-10-30T15:16:02.898Z

It's been over two and a half years since Paul put this blog post on takeoff speeds online. In particular, it argues that the "fast takeoff" undergone by humans is not very strong evidence that AIs will also undergo a fast takeoff, because evolution wasn't "optimising for" humans taking over the world.

I think this argument has been fairly influential - possibly disproportionately influential, given its brevity. I find it moderately persuasive, but not entirely so, and I'm currently working on a post explaining why. What I'm wondering is: have there been other critiques or responses to this argument? Because it currently seems to me like there's been very little public engagement with it.