trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
To Match the Greats, Don’t Follow In Their Footsteps
by HoldenKarnofsky — 2022-02-11T19:20:19.002Z

People who dream of being like the great innovators in history often try working in the same fields - physics for people who dream of being like Einstein, biology for people who dream of being like Darwin, etc.

But this seems backwards to me. To be as revolutionary as these folks were, it wasn’t enough to be smart and creative. As I’ve argued previously, it helped an awful lot to be in a field that wasn’t too crowded or well-established. So if you’re in a prestigious field with a well-known career track and tons of competition, you’re lacking one of the essential ingredients right off the bat.

Here are a few riffs on that theme.

The next Einstein probably won’t study physics, and maybe won’t study any academic science. Einstein's theory of relativity was prompted by a puzzle raised 18 years earlier. By contrast, a lot of today’s physics is trying to solve puzzles that are many decades old (e.g.) and have been subjected to a massive, well-funded attack from legions of scientists armed with billions of dollars’ worth of experimental equipment. I don’t think any patent clerk would have a prayer at competing with professional physicists today - I’m thinking today’s problems are just harder. And the new theory that eventually resolves today’s challenges probably won’t be as cool or important as what Einstein came up with, either.

Maybe today’s Einstein is revolutionizing our ability to understand the world we’re in, but in some new way that doesn’t belong to a well-established field. Maybe they’re studying a weird, low-prestige question about the nature of our reality, like anthropic reasoning. Or maybe they’re Philip Tetlock, more-or-less inventing a field that turbocharges our ability to predict the future.

The next Babe Ruth probably won’t play baseball. Mike Trout is probably better than Babe Ruth in every way,2 and you probably haven't heard of him.

Maybe today’s Babe Ruth is someone who plays an initially less popular sport, and - like Babe Ruth - plays it like it’s never been played before, transforms it, and transcends it by personally appealing to more people than the entire sport does minus them. Like Tiger Woods, or what Ronda Rousey looked at one point like she was on track to be.

The next Beethoven or Shakespeare probably won’t write orchestral music or plays. Firstly because those formats may well be significantly “tapped out,” and secondly...
Our philosophical thought experiments aren’t good enough and we can do better
by Dead Hour Canoe — 2022-02-11T16:48:31.420Z

There hasn’t been nearly enough work put into creating good philosophical thought experiments, and as a result the ones that we have are either flawed or flat-out terrible. It’s easiest to explain the issues by looking at one of the terrible ones. So, in the footbridge or fat man question a trolley is out of control, and will kill its five passengers. You’re standing on a bridge over the tracks, and if you push someone standing next to you off the bridge, your action will kill that person, but stop the trolley, saving the lives of its passengers. Would you do so?

The 2020 PhilPapers Survey recently sent out 100 questions to all anglophone academic philosophers. The footbridge question was on the list, and only 22% of responders gave an answer other than yes or no. It doesn’t seem unfair to describe it as one of the best known philosophical thought experiments, or to claim that it is treated seriously by professional philosophers. It’s also witlessly awful.

All of the specifics of the problem are in conflict with the definite consequences of your actions which the problem insists that you assume. Pushing someone off a bridge is exceptionally unlikely to stop a runaway trolley safely. Nor will it definitely kill the person you push. Nor will a runaway trolley definitely kill its passengers. If you are imagining an action which will stop a runaway trolley safely, save all its passengers, and kill someone else, you are not imagining pushing someone off a bridge. If, while standing on a bridge and observing with horror an unfolding tragedy below, another onlooker sidled up to you and suggested that a solution could be found by giving a hearty shove to a fellow gawper of larger than average girth, you would not react by seriously considering the merits of the proposal. In short, answers to this question can’t answer anything other than which parts of the question the person answering it has decided they should ignore.

The trolley problem isn’t as bad, but it still isn’t good enough. Firstly, nothing anyone could do to the controls of this railway would definitely make something happen. It’s a Roadrunner cartoon, Wild West type railway (or it wouldn’t have people tied to it). It’s just not reliable. In this problem, that’s crucial; you have to be made to put yourself in a situation where taking the decision to kill someone will absolutely, without any doubt, sa...
Online Privacy: Should you Care?
by brook — 2022-02-11T13:20:37.098Z

Epistemic status: Initially, this was a practical advice post, because I thought privacy was obviously important. After some discussion, I realised that I cared about privacy as a terminal goal, and that this view wasn't universal. It's therefore hard for me to judge the instrumental use of privacy for other goals fairly.

As more and more of our lives plays out online, the importance of deciding who gets access to what information about us is only going up. Privacy is not a new topic on LW, but I think there's still fertile ground here, particularly around privacy online.

I'm planning a follow-up post with pointers for practical advice if you decide you do care.

What is "Privacy" anyway? Do I have it?

When we talk about "privacy" we mean a lot of different things. Words are complicated. I'll define privacy as the [social, technical, legal, practical] ability to control who has access to what information about you. Societies and people with greater [social, technical, legal, practical] ability to control access to their information have more privacy, even when they choose not to use this ability. A necessary prerequisite for this kind of privacy is knowledge about how your information is being used.

There are three important classes of privacy within this definition:

Governmental Privacy: unless you have taken serious steps to guard your data, you have negligible privacy from the government.
Corporate privacy: the main block to having corporate privacy is that corporations go out of their way to avoid giving knowledge about how they use your data. As a best guess, you have some privacy from corporate actors, but less than you think.
Individual privacy: depends a lot on how you use the internet.

In all three cases, especially #1 and #3, your main defense is the practical fact that nobody cares about your data specifically. As we'll see, I think this still comes with significant downsides.

Related but distinct concepts:

Security: The technical ability to stop others accessing your data. A subskill of privacy as defined above.

Anonymity: If you're anonymous, your actions cannot be associated with your true identity or with any of your other actions.

Pseudonymity: If you're pseudonymous, your actions cannot be associated with other pseudonyms or your 'true' name, but can be associated with other actions under the same pseudonym.

Reasons to Care

You

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Theses on Sleep
by guzey — 2022-02-11T12:58:15.300Z

Published originally (with all of the footnotes) on my site: https://guzey.com/theses-on-sleep/

Summary: In this essay, I question some of the consensus beliefs about sleep, such as the need for at least 7 hours of sleep for adults, harmfulness of acute sleep deprivation, and harmfulness of long-term sleep deprivation and our inability to adapt to it.

It appears that the evidence for all of these beliefs is much weaker than sleep scientists and public health experts want us to believe. In particular, I conclude that it’s plausible that at least acute sleep deprivation is not only not harmful but beneficial in some contexts and that it’s that we are able to adapt to long-term sleep deprivation.

I also discuss the bidirectional relationship of sleep and mania/depression and the costs of unnecessary sleep, noting that sleeping 1.5 hours per day less results in gaining more than a month of wakefulness per year, every year.

Note: I sleep the normal 7-9 hours if I don’t restrict my sleep. However, stimulants like coffee, modafinil, and adderall seem to have much smaller effect on my cognition than on cognition of most people I know. My brain in general, as you might guess from reading

my site

, is not very normal. So, be cautious before trying anything with your sleep on the basis of the arguments I lay out below. Specifically do not make any drastic changes to your sleep schedule on the basis of reading this essay and, if you want to experiment with sleep, do it gradually (i.e. varying the average amount of sleep by no more than 30 minutes at a time) and carefully.

Comfortable modern sleep is an unnatural superstimulus. Sleepiness, just like hunger, is normal.

The default argument for sleeping 7-9 hours a night is that this is the amount of sleep most of us get “naturally” when we sleep without using alarms. In this section, I argue against this line of reasoning, using the following analogy:

Experiencing hunger is normal and does not necessarily imply that you are not eating enough. Never being hungry means you are probably eating too much.
Experiencing sleepiness is normal and does not necessarily imply that you are undersleeping. Never being sleepy means you are probably sleeping too much.

Most of us (myself included) eat a lot of junk food and candy if we don’t restrict ourselves. Does this mean that lots of junk food and candy is the “natural” or the “optimal” amount ...
No, human life was not a misery until the 1950s
by David Hugh-Jones — 2022-02-11T10:39:14.399Z
Link: https://wyclif.substack.com/p/no-human-life-was-not-a-misery-until

There is an extant meme about early human history, that the invention of agriculture was a huge mistake. Noah Yuval Hariri popularized the idea in Sapiens. He pointed out that ancient foragers were “taller and healthier than their peasant descendants”. Foragers also suffered less from famine and plague and had a “relatively short working week”. As a result, Hariri calls the agricultural revolution “history’s biggest fraud”. Matt Yglesias has taken up the idea: “agriculture made living standards lower rather than higher.” And he pastes in this chart, with its appealingly honest y-axis:

As the source says, “we have some good reasons to think that this transition made life worse for the average person.”

You can’t discuss anthropology without pointing out that Jean-Jacques Rousseau said it all first, here in the Discourse on Inequality:

… equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became indispensable, and vast forests became smiling fields, which man had to water with the sweat of his brow, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow up with the crops…. The poets tell us it was gold and silver, but, for the philosophers, it was iron and corn, which first civilised men, and ruined humanity.

It’s not my goal to criticize the empirics here. I think that plausibly, the average person’s welfare went down after the introduction of agriculture, although it’s a controversial result in a fast-moving field. But this ignores an equally important change: there were a lot more of those people!

Average welfare is an appealing way of evaluating societies. It has a natural interpretation: if you were to be a randomly chosen person in a society, how well off would you be? This is the basis of John Rawls’ veil of ignorance in A Theory of Justice, although he rejects average utilitarianism, and before Rawls, John Harsanyi had made the same point.

But the average welfare metric is indifferent to the number of people alive. A hundred people with average welfare of X counts the same as a thousand people with average welfare of X, or a million. That’s not plausible! We should care whether people are alive or dead.

Not doing so is just intuitively weird, and it leads to paradoxes. Suppose you evaluate society using average welfare, and people in society have average lifetime welfare of 100 utils or whatever. You’re indifferent, then, to a hundred new people bei...
Escaping Locality
by L3moncak3 — 2022-02-11T04:08:35.489Z

The local is what is near to you; what is easily seen and interacted with. In everyday life this is the language you speak, the cultural traditions you practice, the way problems are approached, and the field you work in among other things. The connotations associated with local are usually that of geolocation but in this sense the "local" is much larger comprising all that is close in all dimensions of existence.

This is contrasted with the global. Not just as in the far, but as in everything that exists. Things that are encompassing, too large to fit squarely in the local.

In this way being a "global" person is not possible because there are human limits to what we can think and do, because we are finite we must be local, leading to bias towards the near. Despite this bias people have found ways around it, human scientific progress in some way has been the slow escaping and expanding of collective human locality, looking into places that are more unfamiliar to us over time. Human thought has taken us to new places and new ways of thinking about things.

As time has gone on and I have grown as a person escaping what is close to me has allowed me to understand the world better. The problem I face is that I have yet to find a reliable way to discern these blindspots other than to cycle through novel experiences, but whatever the future does bring I want to escape locality.

Examples:

In the 1950s United States it was easy to view homosexuality as a mental disorder, and as something to be criminalized, but upon inspection of other cultures from other time periods it is found that such things are natural.

Where I live the only way to get around is to take a car but when I went to Los Angeles I was astounded by the high quality public transport and the walkablilty of much of the city and how big of a difference that makes on how enjoyable a city is.

Capitalism is the current economic system for most of the world but this was not always the case and most likely will not always be the case. I find that people constrain thought too much by the current capitalist system, what things are and are not impossible as stated by the current system (what would the world be like without money?)

*Inspired by this

**This is my first lesswrong post I've been a lurker for the longest time here, so I thought I would try to post some of my low resolution t...
Simplify EA Pitches to "Holy Shit, X-Risk"
by Neel Nanda — 2022-02-11T01:59:18.086Z
Link: https://www.neelnanda.io/45-x-risk

TL;DR If you believe the key claims of "there is a >=1% chance of AI causing x-risk and >=0.1% chance of bio causing x-risk in my lifetime" this is enough to justify the core action relevant points of EA. This clearly matters under most reasonable moral views and the common discussion of longtermism, future generations and other details of moral philosophy in intro materials is an unnecessary distraction.

Thanks to Jemima Jones for accountability and encouragement. Partially inspired by Holden Karnofsky’s excellent

Most Important Century

series.

Disclaimer: I recently started working for Anthropic, but this post entirely represents my opinions and not those of my employer

Introduction

I work full-time on AI Safety, with the main goal of reducing x-risk from AI. I think my work is really important, and expect this to represent the vast majority of my lifetime impact. I am also highly skeptical of total utilitarianism, vaguely sympathetic to person-affecting views, prioritise currently alive people somewhat above near future people and significantly above distant future people, and do not really identify as a longtermist. Despite these major disagreements with some common moral views in EA, which are often invoked to justify key longtermist conclusions, I think there are basically no important implications for my actions.

Many people in EA really enjoy philosophical discussions and debates. This makes a lot of sense! What else would you expect from a movement founded by moral philosophy academics? I’ve enjoyed some of these discussions myself. But I often see important and controversial beliefs in moral philosophy thrown around in introductory EA material (introductory pitches and intro fellowships especially), like strong longtermism, the astronomical waste argument, valuing future people equally to currently existing people, etc. And I think this is unnecessary and should be done less often, and makes these introductions significantly less effective.

I think two sufficient claims for most key EA conclusions are “AI has a >=1% chance of causing human extinction within my lifetime” and “biorisk has a >=0.1% chance of causing human extinction within my lifetime”. I believe both of these claims, and think that you need to justify at least one of them for most EA pitches to go through, and to try convincing someone to spend their career working on AI or bio...
[Linkpost] TrojanNet: Embedding Hidden Trojan Horse Models in Neural Networks
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2022-02-11T01:17:42.119Z

TrojanNet: Embedding Hidden Trojan Horse Models in Neural Networks

TL;DR:

TrojanNet embeds a neural network within another neural network, and it's NP-hard to detect - which limits transparency.

Abstract:

The complexity of large-scale neural networks can lead to poor understanding of their internal details. We show that this opaqueness provides an opportunity for adversaries to embed unintended functionalities into the network in the form of Trojan horses. Our novel framework hides the existence of a Trojan network with arbitrary desired functionality within a benign transport network. We prove theoretically that the Trojan network’s detection is computationally infeasible and demonstrate empirically that the transport network does not compromise its disguise. Our paper exposes an important, previously unknown loophole that could potentially undermine the security and trustworthiness of machine learning.

(found on FB and apparently suggested by old-timer XiXiDu)
Why do people avoid vaccination?
by KatjaGrace — 2022-02-10T21:10:18.311Z

I’ve been fairly confused by the popularity in the US of remaining unvaccinated, in the face of seemingly a non-negligible, relatively immediate personal chance of death or intense illness. And due to the bubbliness of society, I don’t actually seem to know unvaccinated people to ask about it. So in the recent covid survey I ran, I asked people who hadn’t had covid (and thus for whom I didn’t have more pressing questions) whether they were vaccinated, and if not why not. (Note though that these people are 20-40 years old, so not at huge risk of death.)

Their responses:

I don’t think I need it, I don’t think covid is a big deal, I don’t think the vaccine works and the more the government/media pushes it the more I don’t want to ever get it. It should be a private decision between someone and their doctor, not Joe Biden and CNN saying comply or be kicked out of society.

I still dont trust the information and safety claims made by the crooked FDA and CDC. Needs more research and study.

I had a scary vaccine reaction previously.

I am only 32 years old and in decent health so I think I would be fine if I caught COVID. It has almost been two years since the pandemic started and I haven’t gotten sick besides some minor colds. I would rather rely on natural immunity instead of the vaccine.

dont want one

Other health issues where my Doctor wants me to wait to get vaccinated.

I think it is poison at worst and ineffective at best. Also the way the pushed it came off like a homeless man trying to lure me into an ally. The vaccine issue has made me lose 100% trust and faith in media and government i do not believe or trust anything from them anymore

I have anxiety problems and other health issues.

I‚Äôm actually scheduled to get a vaccination, I‚Äôm simply waiting for my appointment date.

The places where the vaccination is available are always crowded and I am somewhat afraid of being outdoors or indoors in large crowds for too long these days.

I am extremely skeptical of this “vaccine”, which has been proven ineffective (vaccinated people keep getting it, and what’s with all of the boosters?!) and has caused too many deaths and/or serious health issues/emergencies. I’ll take my chances on Covid any day over a “vaccine” that magically appeared from 8+ pharmaceutical companies in such an astonishingly s

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If you say "don't lose focus," what does that actually tell you to focus on?
by Nicole Dieker — 2022-02-10T21:04:18.307Z

Crossposted. (At this point the discussion on LW is nearly always better than the discussion on my own blog, and gives me more to think about afterwards. Thank you for that.)

If there’s any reason for you to watch these piano practice videos, it’s less about watching my skills improve than it about watching me realize, in real time, what I am learning.

With that in mind, here’s some transcript from my most recent video:

Hey! Let’s see how the program is going today. So we’re going to do a bit of Bach, a bit of Mozart, a bit of Chopin, and a bit of Stravinsky.

You’ve heard all these bits before, but I hope that this time they’ll be more… controlled, actually.

Closer to the experience I want us all to have.

[Plays the first half of Bach Ricercar a 6]

So you can see here, if you actually listened to it very carefully — or even not so carefully, if you just had it in the ol’ background — I would think you can tell that the parts that I can shape into an experience for both of us to have are the parts that I know.

The parts where it gets all clunky and junky, you know — and it’s not even inaccurate, it’s just you can hear and sense the hesitations, because I’m still like butts butts butts, what’s the next note, butts butts butts butts butts, because I don’t really know it yet and I’m a little bit insecure and that comes through in the playing of it.

But the moments that I actually know what I’m doing are really getting kind of beautiful. That’s because I know how to make them beautiful. It’s… yeah.

Let’s do some Mozart.

I should say that the challenge for the Mozart — oh my goodness — is maintaining focus throughout and not thinking about what I’ve done before or thinking about what you might think of what I’ve done. Mostly what I think of what I’ve done.

And then the third one, still too fast, third movement still too fast, don’t let’s start the third movement too fast please! Thank you!

[Plays the Mozart Piano Sonata #12 in F Major, First Movement, very well, until the second half of the double exposition where it falls apart. Stops.]

So you can see at this point now I’ve lost a bit of focus. Um… which is interesting, because it was going really well. Um… and I think it was the fact that I was noticing that, I was thinking not precisely about the notes themselves but how suddenly they were — there was that really brief kind of moment where they were coming out the way I real

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