trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[AN #95]: A framework for thinking about how to make AI go well
by Rohin Shah — 2020-04-15T17:10:03.312Z

Alignment Newsletter is a weekly publication with recent content relevant to AI alignment around the world. Find all Alignment Newsletter resources here. In particular, you can look through this spreadsheet of all summaries that have ever been in the newsletter.

Audio version here (may not be up yet).

HIGHLIGHTS

Current Work in AI Alignment (Paul Christiano) (summarized by Rohin): In this talk (whose main slide we covered before (AN #74)), Paul Christiano explains how he decomposes the problem of beneficial AI:

1. At the top level, "make AI go well" is decomposed into making AI competent, making AI aligned, and coping with the impacts of AI. Paul focuses on the alignment part, which he defines as building AI systems that are trying to do what we want. See Clarifying "AI Alignment" (AN #33) and my comment on it. Paul considers many problems of competence as separate from alignment, including understanding humans well, and most reliability / robustness work.

2. Within alignment, we can consider the concept of an "alignment tax": the cost incurred by insisting that we only deploy aligned AI. One approach is to help pay the alignment tax, for example, by convincing important actors that they should care about alignment, or by adopting agreements that make it easier to coordinate to pay the tax, as with the OpenAI Charter (AN #2)). Technical AI safety research on the other hand can help reduce the alignment tax, by creating better aligned AI systems (which consequently incur less cost than before).

3. With alignment tax reduction, we could either try to advance current alignable algorithms (making them more competent, and so reducing their tax), or make existing algorithms alignable. It would be particularly nice to take some general class of algorithms (such as deep reinforcement learning) and figure out how to transform them to make them alignable, such that improvements to the algorithms automatically translate to improvements in the alignable version. This is what Paul works on.

4. The next layer is simply a decomposition of possible algorithms we could try to align, e.g. planning, deduction, and learning. Paul focuses on learning.

5. Within aligned learning, we can distinguish between outer alignment (finding an objective that incentivizes aligned behavior) and inner alignment (ensuring that the trained agent robustly pursues the...
The Archetypal Rational and Post-Rational
by Ouroborus — 2020-04-15T09:40:47.092Z
Link: https://ouroborusdotblog.wordpress.com/2020/04/15/the-archetypal-rational-and-post-rational/

There's been a lot of discussion about the difference between rationality and post-rationality. Gordon Worley sees the difference being that post-rationality is based upon epistemic circularity, but Eliezer proposed that too. David Chapman defines it in terms of being meta-systematic instead of systematic. Dross Bucket seems to focus on the limits of formal systems. Agile Caveman characterises post-rationality as being aware of the social dynamics within rationalism and which created rationalism, in particular how rationalism was born out of a conflict with non-rationalist and how their on-going efforts to optimise the world entangles them in conflicts (I haven't seen this take anywhere else). And Orthonormal described post-rationalists as those who believe that the rationalist attempt to systematise all knowledge is misguided. Further post-rationality is often painted as being in opposition to rationality, to the extent that I've even heard one post-rationalist describe rationality as a cult.

The most natural way for me to define rationality and post-rationality is as two clouds in the space of ideas and practice. Since Less Wrong style rationality includes some post-rational elements (nameless virtue, system 1 and system 2, ect.), we will define a perspective which we'll call Archetypal Rationality in order to provide a contrast to Post-Rationality. By comparing to Archetypal Rationality instead of Rationality, we'll avoid the temptation to misrepresent and oversimplify Rationality to make the contrast more obvious.

Archetypal rationality is not rationalism in philosophy. It focuses upon the power of the human mind, not unassisted, but in combination with empirical evidence. It has faith that rationality always wins. Proponents likely identify as skeptics, see little value in continental philosophy (or even any kind of philosophy), and are extremely skeptical of claims like Enlightenment. They are likely to make long lists of fallacies and biases, to emphasise logic over emotions, individual reason over tradition and seeks to provide single unified systems. They are likely to prioritise published research over common sense. Advice is likely to consist of a set of rules; do X in situation Y. Discussions of language are likely to focus on producing precise definitions, but attention will also be paid to any obvious connotations.

In cont...
The one where Quirrell is an egg
by Ben Pace — 2020-04-15T06:02:36.337Z
Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/HPMOR/comments/g1ajqh/the_one_where_quirrell_is_an_egg/

Egg-based parody of HPMOR on r/HPMOR. I don't know why this exists. Spoilers, you have been warned.

How to describe it? It's some combination of the following two quotes.

“The observational study is taller than a dozen men! It reaches journalists so quickly that it can melt common sense in midthought! One mention of confounders will bring it down.”

and

“Professor, we’re surrounded by Dementors!” Harry gasped. “My buttered croissant disguise didn’t work! They’re going to capture us.”

Professor Quirrell smiled coldly. “Not if I use my egg powers.”

It's eggs-ellent.
What does the curve look like for coronavirus on a surface?
by  — 2020-04-15T02:07:34.044Z

There seem to be some pretty solid numbers on how long coronavirus will last on a given surface. But I’m curious what the curve looks like. Does it decay at a constant rate, like a radioactive substance? Or does it behave more like a group of animals denied food, where the population survives relatively intact for a while before hitting a point of rapid decay? I’m trying to evaluate the effectiveness of leaving things to sit for e.g. 24h if I can’t disinfect them and can’t wait the full recommended time.
Just Top Post
by jefftk — 2020-04-15T01:00:17.122Z

Long ago, every email would be read on its own, so writers would
include a bit of the previous message to remind people what they were
talking about:

On Fri, Apr 10 Pat wrote:
> I miss you a lot!

I'll miss you too.

> Are you still planning to visit in February?

I hope so!

Some people would be lazy, and just include the whole earlier message,
without any trimming. This was

widely
viewed

as
rude, and there were many "netiquette" guides that

reminded
people that trimming was polite consideration of your reader.

As time went on, however, mail clients adapted.

They learned how to:

Thread messages. Messages didn't have to stand on their own
anymore because the context was right there for the reader.

Collapse large quoted sections. Including the whole parent
message no longer caused trouble.

We have mostly standardized on a new system, where mail clients
default to including the full earlier message, and where they
hide this quoted section by default. This means that when someone is
added to a thread in progress, they can look back at earlier sections
if they need to. If someone would like to reply inline they still
can, but people only do it when needed.

Mobile has also contributed, where composing inline replies without a
proper keyboard is a lot of work, and people often just want to send a
quick response.

I finally switched over in 2013 and I was already a bit
of a hold-out. Looking through the last 25 replies from other people
that I have in my personal email, 24 were top posted and one was
bottom posted without any trimming.

I'm on a non-technical list where some users are trying to convince
everyone else to always bottom-post and trim, and it's a mess.
People don't realize they're top-posting and don't know what they
should be doing differently. The most common response has been for
people to send each reply to the list as a new message composed from
scratch with no quoting at all, which breaks threading and is a pain
to read. I think at this point, outside of a few places where there's
a thriving trimmed-replies-only culture, we should admit that
top-posting has won and adapt any remaining workflows to accept it.

Comment via: facebook
Hammer and Mask -
Wide spread use of reusable particle filtering masks as a SARS-CoV-2 eradication strategy
by EGI — 2020-04-14T22:32:45.960Z

by Marcel Müller (M.Sc. Biological Sciences)

Contact:

marcel_mueller@mail.de

Epistemic Status: I am not a virologist and this is not medical advice. That said I am fairly sure about the core claims of this piece, though there may be unknown unknowns I overlooked. I think that among everything I have heard so far this is by far the most promising strategy to eradicate SARS-CoV-2 without crippling economic damage and / or millions of deaths.

You have permission to distribute this wherever you think it might do good and I actively encourage everyone to do so.

This is written form a European/German perspective since I live in Germany but should apply in most places with few changes necessary.

Abstract

SARS-CoV-2 emerged as a novel pandemic virus threatening to cause a world wide health and economic crisis. While measures have been put in place to temporarily slow the spread of the virus, a workable, economically feasible, long term strategy is needed to deal with the situation, to avoid both millions of deaths and severe economic disruption.

All strategies for dealing with the pandemic need to rely on controlling the spread of the epidemic by reducing Reff either by generating immunity or by reducing the number of contacts within the population.

Therefore it is crucial to discuss the best ways of reducing Reff. Economic lockdowns, school closures and social distancing are measures that were easy to implement but not necessarily optimal.

I propose the widespread use of reusable high quality (European P3 standard equivalent) particle filtering masks in both healthcare and community settings to reduce the risk of infection during contacts sufficiently to allow lifting of most other restrictions while still achieving continued exponential decay of new case numbers.

Introduction

In the last months of 2019, SARS-CoV-2 emerged as a novel zoonotic virus on a wet market in China. It quickly spread through the country and then through the rest of the world, threatening to overwhelm health care systems worldwide. Most nations reacted by shutting down large parts of their economy, closing borders, and mandating different curfew variations. Some countries managed to significantly reduce the effective reproduction number Reff, which caused exponential decay of their new case numbers, though at great cost to their economy. It is unclear how long these measures can be sustain...
Deciding Well in Tumultuous Times
by Ian David Moss — 2020-04-14T20:53:20.000Z

Practical advice for donors and institutions responding to COVID-19

Photo by Dimitri Karastelev on Unsplash

Like many of you, I saw my world change dramatically in what seemed like the blink of an eye back in mid-March. Within a span of a long weekend, my older child’s preschool closed down for the day, then for a month, then indefinitely; the governor of my state ordered all restaurants and other gathering spaces closed with barely six hours’ notice; and confirmed COVID-19 cases in my home county ballooned nearly fivefold as testing capacity belatedly ramped up. By the end of that same week, virtually all non-essential businesses had sent their workers home and large swaths of the United States were under mandatory stay-at-home orders with no end date in sight.

As fast as this all took place, one needs only to check the latest coronavirus statistics to see that, if anything, it didn’t happen fast enough. The prior week, an article by a little-known Silicon Valley data scientist and growth marketer named Tomás Pueyo had gone viral by arguing for the immediate enactment of social distancing measures much like the ones described above. In addition to its bluntness and urgency, Pueyo’s article stood out for its detailed original analysis, including this estimate that delaying social distancing measures by a single day in the exponential growth stage of an uncontrolled pandemic could result in a 40% higher overall caseload:

…an estimate that was backed up by empirical data from the original epicenter of the outbreak, Hubei province in China, showing true cases beginning to plummet as soon as officials instituted a lockdown.

As social sector leaders, we must remember that behind each change of this nature is a policy decision. For every state or municipality that implemented (or didn’t) a stay-at-home order, for every office that shut its doors (or didn’t) before it had to, for every event producer that canceled its programming (or didn’t) out of an “abundance of caution,” there was a person or a group of people who considered and made that choice. For several years now, I’ve been arguing to anyone who will listen that the decisions of social sector leaders sometimes carry enormous consequences. While choosing whether and when to order a lockdown is a particularly dramatic demonstration of that principle, the decisions facing philanthropists, government agencies, and ...
Far-Ultraviolet Light in Public Spaces to Fight Pandemic is a Good Idea but Premature
by Kirby Sikes — 2020-04-14T20:27:16.768Z

Also posted on my personal blog.

Tl;dr: Far-ultraviolet light has potential as a human-safe germicide, but its safety is not established. In particular, evidence that it is not carcinogenic exists for only one of two mechanisms for ultraviolet carcinogenicity. In addition, use of far-ultraviolet light in public spaces to prevent the spread of SARS-COV-2 or other pathogens leads to a host of other concerns that need to be addressed.

Introduction

In 2017, Nature published a

paper

that investigated the possibility of using far-UVC light to combat a future influenza pandemic. The paper went mostly unnoticed by non-academics, as is the norm for technical journals, but now with the novel coronavirus and the first pandemic of its kind in 100 years, the public at large is paying attention to ideas from the frontiers and fringes of biology and medicine. Last month, far-UVC’s safe germicidal potential was the subject of a

post

by Roko Mijic and Alexey Turchin on LessWrong. They call the use of far UVC in public spaces “one of the most promising and neglected ideas for combating the spread of covid-19,” and lament “Why hasn’t this already been considered by relevant authorities? Far-UVC appears in a literature review by WHO, but it is not currently being acted upon as the amount of evidence in favor of safety and efficacy is small.”

I’ve spent the last few weeks educating myself on the literature surrounding far-UVC’s safety, and I’ve come to a clear conclusion. Is the use of far-UVC to combat pandemics in general a good idea? Yes. Should research on it be expanded? Yes. But using far-UVC in public spaces to combat COVID-19 would be way way way premature.

First, a couple of disclaimers:

Disclaimer 1: I am not a biologist or a doctor. I don’t have anything near a professional’s expertise on human biological questions. There may be inaccuracies or misunderstandings throughout this post, although of course I’ve done my best.

Disclaimer 2: My method for research tends to be browsing Wikipedia to find general information, and using Wikipedia’s citations and external links to find more rigorous discussion of specific information. I try to be wary of Wikipedia’s shortcomings—I read talk pages and check citations—but even so, bias and inaccuracy on Wikipedia ...
Popular papers to be scrutinized?
by alyosha_the_pot — 2020-04-14T19:50:06.889Z

Inspired by Alexey Guzey's criticism of Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep, as well as the SSC criticisms of The Seven Principles of Marriage I was wondering if anyone had some good ideas for papers/ books that should be looked at more closely.

They should be popular/influential pieces of science, but either of questionable statistical rigor, or should be much more closely analyzed. My first thought is to go through the most cited papers in 'softer' fields (e.g. social psychology, nutrition), though I'm also curious about the literature that is not necessarily cited a lot, but often talked about by the public. Anyone have ideas?
Is this viable physics?
by Daniel Kokotajlo — 2020-04-14T19:29:28.372Z

This beautiful epic grandiose... thing seems pretty impressive to me. It seems like someone took the lessons of Game of Life, and then used computers to explore those lessons, and sure enough they are well on their way to a Theory of Everything.

But I'm not a physicist so I don't know how novel (or even error-free) this is. Which is why I'm asking.

On the one hand, it seems several orders of magnitude too good to be true. It explains so many phenomena so elegantly that it makes me wonder if what's really going on is that Wolfram is staring at his computer too much and seeing patterns in the noise.

On the other hand, for years I've thought -- and I expect most of us have thought this too -- that when the final theory of physics is found it would be something like this. Some very simple rule that, when applied repeatedly zillions of times, generates the world around us. A fundamental ontology that consists of objects and relations, rather than different kinds of particles or waves or whatnot. Discrete, not continuous.
One Hundred Billion Children’s Sky

by Slimepriestess — 2020-04-14T16:33:48.512Z
Link: https://hivewired.wordpress.com/2020/01/09/one-hundred-billion-childrens-sky/

This is the first post of my 'Death' series of essays. I wrote all the current essays in the Death series before I started posting on LW regularly, but I think it is probably one of the more important things I've created and thus I over the next week or so I'm going to be posting them here one by one. This post itself is essentially an introduction, but also serves as a set of infohazard warnings for the whole thing.
Looking for a Team to Participate on a Competition
by Filipe Marchesini — 2020-04-14T12:29:48.769Z

I'm looking to build a product and I hope to find partners with this post.

On April 6th it was announced the Nano Build-off: Compete in a $75,000 competition to award and empower developers building new products/services utilising Nano.

Nano is a cyptocurrency protocol which enables feeless (zero fees) and fast transactions (0.1s in average confirmation time), which allows micropayments in large scale and the network supports hundreds transactions per second.

Last year I and a random strange on the internet participated on a Nano JAM, it was a 48h competition and we won the first place. I have a good understanding of the protocol, and even you don't know anything about Nano, I have good teaching skills, I can fastly teach you and bring you to the point of being able to deal with RPC calls, send and receive transactions and get everything you need from the block-lattice. I need a curiosity-driven person with normal programming skills.

I already have 4 roughly elaborated ideas (one plugin, one service, one app to help to fight coronavirus, and one game) and I want to discuss them in details and I am also open to completely new ideas. I know we already lost one week (the competition started on April 6th), but this shouldn't be a problem as I am quarantined and 16h daily on the computer. Since 2nd March I don't have income anymore (stopped leaving home due to coronavirus), and I want to make sure you know I am really all-in and I need money to help my family and myself.

I am good on python development, good on creating great visualizations because of my animation skills (using the python library MANIM, I am good enough to replicate the work of 3b1b). I already collected some Kivy tutorials that produce mobile apps and know it is feasible to create them, I already created simple mobile apps with it. I know how to build wordpress websites and attach plugins on it, but I don't know anything about javascript and web development in general.

If you want to join me, add me on Discord: Hamburguesa#4306
Why don't we tape surgical masks to the face to seal them airtight?
by ChristianKl — 2020-04-14T08:33:14.637Z

As far as I understand the prime advantage of surgical masks over N95 masks lies in the N95 masks being able to seal and filter all of the air while the surgical masks allow air to pass at their sides.

Given that there are many situations where people would ideally wear N95 masks but have only access to surgical masks, why can't we improve the surgical masks by using adhesive tape to seal their borders to the face?
Scraping websites currently free due to coronavirus
by emmab — 2020-04-14T07:37:23.001Z

Some sites are free due to the coronavirus and we should scrape them. Please list any temporarily-free websites you know of, such as https://www.uptodate.com/

To download sites I recommend https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/grab-site

Consider whether you want to use --no-offsite-links. Otherwise it will pull every linked page and its resources (and sometimes even embedded videos).
The World According to Dominic Cummings
by Chris_Leong — 2020-04-14T05:05:44.159Z

Like him or loath him, Dominic Cummings is now the most politically successful rationalist-adjacent figure. For this reason, it seems like our community ought to try to understand him to see what we can learn. I'm sure there are people who have read more of his content than I have and who have read it more carefully than me, but I tend to see the perfect as the enemy of the good. At times I struggled to understand what he was saying because he was making references which I, an Australian not involved in the political world, wasn't familiar with, which likely limited the quality of my understanding. At other times I felt that his writing was extremely verbose and that I had to wade through a lot of content before the point became clear, so hopefully this saves you some time.

Dominic Cumming's main thesis seems to be that there are certain way of managing a team that are known to be highly effective, but which are widely ignored. In terms of politics, he argues that the government is ineffective because of self-interested bureaucrats blocking progress, who'd never think of or allow teams to be run in such a manner. One area he particularly focuses on is science funding where he argues for a British version of DARPA (now being created) is needed to take high-risk, high reward projects that could provide ridiculous amounts of economic value. One of his main critiques of the education system is that it doesn't provide the kind of leaders who are needed to run the country in the way he proposes - with an interdisciplinary background including technical skills in maths and science. As you can probably see, his views are highly interconnected.

Bureaucracy and Mismanagement

I think the best place to begin is with his criticisms of bureaucracy. He particularly focuses upon dysfunction within the British civil service, but he also saw EU rules as just another layer upon this, which is why he pushed for Brexit.

I thought Hollow Men II was best post on this. The British Civil service is quite different from the American Civil Service in that ministries are run by Permanent Secretaries who aren't supposed to be political appointees. While the Prime Minister makes the final decision, the candidates for consideration are selected by the civil service on the basis of what is supposed to be an objective process.

The idea is that this will result in appointees on the basis of merit...