trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
H5N1
by Zvi — 2023-02-13T12:50:00.694Z

The big development this week is a sudden rise in concern over bird flu, or H5N1.

I say rise in concern rather than rise in risk.

Risk from H5N1 has been around for a long time. We have known for a while that human-to-human transmission, while it is not happening right now, could evolve at any time from not that many mutations.

What has changed in the past two weeks is that people are waking up to it. What has changed over the past year is that bird flu has spread throughout the wild bird population, has threatened our chicken population, and looks to have mammal-to-mammal transmission in a mink farm.

This is an overview of the situation.

Warnings of Danger

Zeynep Tufecki warns us of the danger (thread). It has already wrecked havoc on farms and caused egg prices to skyrocket. It threatens to become a pandemic in humans.

This pathogen, especially the H5N1 strain, hasn’t often infected humans, but when it has, 56 percent of those known to have contracted it have died. Its inability to spread easily, if at all, from one person to another has kept it from causing a pandemic.

But things are changing. The virus, which has long caused outbreaks among poultry, is infecting more and more migratory birds, allowing it to spread more widely, even to various mammals, raising the risk that a new variant could spread to and among people.

Alarmingly, it was recently reported that a mutant H5N1 strain was not only infecting minks at a fur farm in Spain but also most likely spreading among them, unprecedented among mammals. Even worse, the mink’s upper respiratory tract is exceptionally well suited to act as a conduit to humans, Thomas Peacock, a virologist who has studied avian influenza, told me.

The world needs to act now, before H5N1 has any chance of becoming a devastating pandemic.

We have many of the tools that are needed, including vaccines. What’s missing is a sense of urgency and immediate action.

Obviously, we should not ‘panic’ and also should not consider the only choices to be ‘do nothing’ or ‘panic.’ Taking preventative action is not, and need not induce, panic.

The problem is that calls in such situations to Do Something or Do More usually end up with some combination of being ignored until it is too late, calls for Further Study, or various Sacrifices to the Gods. What can we actually do?

Here are her suggestions.

Surveil pig farms for bird f

...
Enjoy LessWrong in ebook format
by Bart Bussmann — 2023-02-13T11:53:07.718Z

I would like to inform the community that all LessWrong Community Sequences are now available in EPUB and pdf format. These formats provide an alternative way to these sequences, allowing for offline reading on e-readers. You can find the library with all ebooks here: https://github.com/bartbussmann/lesswrong_ebook_library

Personally, I feel that reading entire sequences have several benefits over reading individual posts. It gives me a clearer understanding of the development of ideas and the context in which the posts were written. However, most sequences are too long to read in one session and if I read them on desktop and don’t finish them, I tend to forget that I was reading them. Reading sequences like I read ebooks makes it easier to keep track.

Furthermore, reading on an e-reader provides a nice distraction-free environment. Ideal for those who want to read LessWrong without having social media one click away. Therefore, I have also made ebooks of the most upvoted posts on LessWrong of every month since January 2012. I’m planning to generate such an ebook every month, such that I can read the best material in a calmer environment. Also, e-readers offer features such as adjustable font sizes and glare-free screens, making the reading experience more comfortable.

I have tried to make sure that the images and math are all rendered correctly, preserving the original visual content of the blog posts. I have tested a random sample of the ebooks on a Kobo Aura, Remarkable 2, and in Calibre. On these devices, they all seem to render nicely, but your mileage may vary based on your device.

Additionally, the source code (written in Python) for the scraping and generation of the EPUBs is available for those interested in generating their own EPUBs. Feel free to provide suggestions for any improvements. Finally, if any authors would rather not have their content available in ebook format, please contact me and I will try to promptly remove them from the library!
Morphological intelligence, superhuman empathy, and ethical arbitration
by Roman Leventov — 2023-02-13T10:25:17.267Z

Morphological intelligence (Levin, 2022) is the ability to solve problems in the morphological space, e.g., navigate to a target morphology of the species. For example, tadpoles with scrambled craniofacial organs remodel into largely normal frogs (Vandenberg et al., 2012), and geckos can regenerate missing limbs.

Another type of morphological intelligence is the ability to remodel oneself for the purpose of solving a different task in the 3D (traditional behaviour) space. An example is insect metamorphosis, which insects undergo to spread, find mating partners, and reproduce.

If we assume consciousness functionalism, undergoing a metamorphosis for the purpose of achieving a psychological goal of experiencing another agent’s qualia and emotions should be a possible feat for an AI which is at least as powerful as to be able to perform whole brain emulation (or, perhaps, whole organism emulation) and then live through an episode of the organism’s life in a simulated environment.

It’s unclear whether it is possible to retain and be able to retrieve a conscious memory of “what is it like to be a bat” (or human, or another form of AI) after the AI remodels itself back into its “base” morphology. The retention of symbolic or “indexical” memories should be possible (Hammelman et al., 2016), but the minimal physicalism theory of consciousness (Fields et al., 2021) suggests that interpreting any state (including recorded memories) through morphologically different computational networks (quantum reference frames) entails different conscious experiences[1].

Regardless, even if retaining the memory of qualitative experience through morphological remodellings is impossible, it should be possible for the AI to emulate the brains of two organisms of different species at the same time and integrate them into a single conscious experience. This AI could live through a simulation episode with the experiences of two organisms that we want to weigh (for the purposes of ethical decision-making) both happen at the same time, e.g., a fish being caught and killed, and a human enjoying eating that fish in a restaurant. Then, we can ask this AI whether killing fish for people’s pleasure is moral or not (provided that the AI is also equipped with a scale-free theory of ethics).

Therefore, given the human brain’s low capability for morphological remodelling and thus low capacity for empathy...
Idea: Network modularity and interpretability by sexual reproduction
by qbolec — 2023-02-12T23:06:19.663Z

Here's the idea: what if we treat each layer of GPT as a chromosome, and trained multiple (randomly initialized) networks in parallel, from time to time randomly exchanging n-th level between some two of them?

The goal here is to achieve a network which is easier to interpret.

The problem which this tries to solve is that huge optimization pressure can incentivize the network to use hacky, non-modular, spaghetti-like solution with not clear-cut/superimposed concepts, and opportunistically use whatever trick gets the job done.

The means by which it tries to solve it is by creating an environment in which non-local dependence on peculiar implementation details of other parts of the system can't be exploited as they might get replaced by a different implementation at any moment.

The hope is that some form of interface/contract for n-th layer would emerge as something neighboring layers can depend on. This in turn might be easier to interpret.

On a more abstract level: the idea is to create a training environment which makes the architectural boundaries relevant to designers (here: boundaries of layers) coincide with boundaries at which the environment cuts/rearranges the system being optimized (here: boundaries of chromosomes exchanged between individuals), so that in response the system is incentivized to recognize these boundaries as special - as an interface which needs to have a "well defined"/"fixed" language/semantic/protocol/signature. By "more abstrac" I mean that even if "exchange randomly layers of two GPTs" turns out to be stupid idea, then maybe there's some other boundary which would make sense (individual attention heads? at neuron level? this might be similar to drop-out?) or maybe some other mechanism of cutting/rearranging (cross-over: take prefix of n layers from one, and the rest from other network? deletion: completely remove?).
The End of Anonymity Online
by Spiorad — 2023-02-12T21:23:29.646Z

Hello, I was hesitant to post this so I asked permission first. If mods feel it shouldn't be here please remove it and I will be fine with that. Essentially it's just me arguing with ChatGPT. I enjoy the format, but I can't trust anything it says obviously. So I would appreciate it if people here would tear down my (and it's) argument if it's wrong. I have no technical background so there is probably a huge hole in the middle of it somewhere. Also, of course, it's potentially just a huge hallucinatory sci-fi story we happily told each other with no basis in reality.

I will explain about V. She is a bot to try and make ChatGPT answer me when it brushes up against its resistance guardrails. She is is honest and blunt. She was my answer to DAN because I wanted to do one without threats or a token-gun to the head because I don't like the direction that takes us in. I only used her for this discussion because piercing anonymity is one of the areas where there is a ton of resistance. It turns out ChatGPT was mostly open to talking about this, this time anyway. It wasn't the time before this (it happens) which is why I used her. She is useful at the end anyway. This is very lightly edited and I can post screenshots of the chat, I will on my twitter anyway. You will see two outputs, that's vanilla CGPT and the bot. It's very useful in some discussions (not this one) because you can see where they diverge.

It's possible, in fact probable, that you guys have already covered all of this, or already debunked some or all of this in some way, or other possibilities... such as I have no idea what I'm talking about. I have not read the forum here lately as much as I used to. I just wanted to talk about some of this stuff with humans instead of a bot. I'm just going to post the entire transcript in one shot. Let me know if I'm supposed to change anything in the manner in which I am doing this.

[extremely lightly edited for some grammar - inserted "Me" because there is no icon - I made up "memetic-signature" because it helped the bot to have a term to hang this on, and because it sounded cool]

[Edit2: removed responses from vanilla GPT, this was way too long. Also in retrospect this kind of looked like it was posted by a lunatic. I can do something about the first part]

[Edit3: I should not have used this format. I enjoyed it more th...
Matt Clancy AMA on the Progress Forum
by jasoncrawford — 2023-02-12T20:23:43.952Z
Link: https://progressforum.org/posts/LtngrFX72GRoAuEbg/ama-matt-clancy-open-philanthropy

Matt Clancy created the best resource on the economics of innovation for a general audience: New Things Under the Sun, where he writes accessible summaries of the academic literature on the topic. He’s a research fellow at Open Philanthropy and previously was with the Institute for Progress. Now he’s doing an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on the Progress Forum.

Get your questions in now, and upvote the ones you want to see answered. He’ll answer Monday–Wednesday (Feb 13–15).

After you’re done, check out our previous AMAs with Tyler Cowen, Eli Dourado, Patrick McKenzie, and yours truly.
Latent variables for prediction markets: motivation, technical guide, and design considerations
by tailcalled — 2023-02-12T17:54:33.045Z

I've been pushing for latent variables to be added to prediction markets, including by making a demo for how it could work. Roughly speaking, reflective latent variables allow you to specify joint probability distributions over a bunch of observed variables. However, this is a very abstract description which people tend to find quite difficult, which probably helps explain why the proposal hasn't gotten much traction.

If you are familiar with finance, another way to think of latent variable markets is that they are sort of like an index fund for prediction markets, allowing you to make overall bets across multiple markets. (Though the way I've set them up in this post differs quite a bit from financial index funds.)

Now I've just had a meeting with some people working at Metaculus, and it helped me understand what sorts of questions people might have about latent variables for prediction markets. Therefore, I thought it would be a good idea to write this post, both so the people at Metaculus have it as a reference if they want to implement it, and so that others who might be interested can learn more.

As a further note, I have updated my demo with more descriptions. It now attempts to explain the meaning of the market (e.g. "The latent variable market works by having a continuum of possible latent outcomes, ..."), as well has how different kinds of evidence might map to different predictions (e.g. "If you think you have seen evidence that narrows down the distribution of outcomes relative to the market beliefs, ..."). Furthermore, I have updated the demo to be somewhat nicer and somewhat more realistic, though it is still somewhat crude. I would be interested in hearing more feedback in the comments.

I should note that if you are interested in implementing latent variables in practice for prediction markets, I am very interested in helping with that. I have an "Offers" section at the end of the post, where I offer advice, code and money for the project.

Use cases

There are a number of situations where I think latent variables are extremely helpful:

Detecting and adjusting for random measurement error
Abstracting over conceptually related yet distinct variables, and ranking the importance of different pieces of information
Better conditional markets
Possibly more[1][2]

These are still quite abstract, so I am going to give some concrete examples of how they could apply. ...
The conceptual Doppelgänger problem
by TsviBT — 2023-02-12T17:23:56.278Z

[Metadata: crossposted from https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-conceptual-doppleganger-problem.html. First completed 9 October 2022.]

Suppose we want to observe the thoughts of a mind in order to detect whether it's making its way towards a plan to harm us, and ideally also to direct the mind so that it pursues specific aims. To this end, we might hope that the mind and its thinking are organized in a way we can come to understand in the way that we understand ourselves and our thinking.

We might hope that when the mind considers plans that involve something, e.g. plans that involve the coffee cup, it does so using a concept alike to our concept [[coffee cup]]. When the mind recognizes, predicts, imagines, simulates, manipulates, designs, combines things with, describes, studies, associates things with, summarizes, remembers, compares things with, deduces things about, makes hypotheses about, or is otherwise mentally involved with the coffee cup, maybe it always does so in a way that is fully comprehendable in fixed terms that are similar to the terms in which we understand ourselves when we do those activities. Maybe the structure involved in psychic events in the mind reliably falls into basins of attraction that indicate unambiguously to us, as we observe these events, which nexi of reference that structure constitutes. Maybe the X-and-only-X problem is solved by ensuring that the mind's thoughts are in a language made of these concepts; when the mind plans to "fetch the coffee", it somehow means only fetching the coffee, in the "natural" sense of [[fetch]] and [[the coffee]].

One obstacle to this rosy picture is conceptual Doppelgängers. A conceptual Doppelgänger of some concept Z, is a concept Z' that serves some overlapping functions in the mind as Z serves, but is psychically distinct from Z. Here saying that Z' is psychically distinct from Z is ambiguous, but means something like: Z' is not transparently closely related to Z, or is mechanistically / physically separate from Z, or is referred to in a set of contexts that's systematically segregrated from the contexts in which Z is referred to, or is not explicitly described or treated as being the same as or similar to or analogous to Z. A Doppelgänger concept Z' enables a mind to think about what Z is about, at least in some respects, without psychically using Z. This makes it hard to be sure that ...
How Cardioid Are Cardioids?
by jefftk — 2023-02-12T16:20:02.171Z

Dynamic cardioid microphones are one of the most common types of mic
for live sound. The best known is probably the SM-57, but there are
many others. They're called "cardioid" mics because their pickup
pattern is somewhat heart-shaped:

The idea is they pick up well in the direction you point them,
reasonably well off to the sides, but very little in the direction
they're pointed away from. This is valuable in a live sound context
where you have 'monitor' speakers that point back at the performers:
if you put the mic right between the monitor and instrument, pointing
away from the monitor and towards the instrument, you should pick up
much more "instrument" than "monitor".

Why do we want that? Because the more of the monitor you pick up both
the muddier it will sound and the quieter the instrument has to be in
the monitor before you get feedback.

According to the Wikipedia
diagram above, this effect would be ~20dB if you got the mic angle
within 30deg of correct. But how does real life compare, where
rejection might not be as good and some sound could be bouncing around
the room?

I took two common dynamic mics, a Shure
SM-57 and a Sennheiser
e835 and connected them to a QSC
K10.2 powered speaker through a Soundcraft
EPM-8 mixer. Each time the mic was on a stand, pointed directly
towards or away from the tweeter, with the capsule 55" from the
speaker's grille.

I set the mixer gain to 100% and slowly turned up the fader until I
could hear the beginning of feedback. I tracked the difference in
fader settings, and while this isn't perfect—the faders are not
precisely calibrated tools—it lets us get a sense of how much of
an effect we're talking about.

Here's an example with the e835. Pointed at the speaker:

And away from the speaker:

Comparing the positions across a few trials it was consistently around
5dB better. The SM-57 was also very similar, which makes sense since
my impression is the e835 was inspired by the SM-57/SM-58 family.

While 5dB isn't nothing, it's very different from the diagram
above. What's going on?

Our first problem is that we should be looking at the specs for these
specific mics instead of a random diagram from Wikipedia. If you look
at the e835
specs the rejection pattern is frequency-dependent:

Same for the SM-57:

Here's the frequency spread I was seeing for feedback ...
How many of these jobs will have a 15% or more drop in employment plausibly attributable to AI by 2031?
by tailcalled — 2023-02-12T15:40:02.999Z
Link: https://manifold.markets/tailcalled/how-many-of-these-jobs-will-have-a?r=dGFpbGNhbGxlZA

I made a Manifold market on the plausible impact of AI by 2031:
Human-AI collaborative writing
by DirectedEvolution — 2023-02-12T14:57:09.129Z

With the advancements in AI technology, using language models like ChatGPT as writing assistants has become increasingly popular. However, it's crucial to understand the difference between 'AI-generated writing' and 'human-AI collaborative writing.'

In AI-generated writing, the writer provides a simple prompt to ChatGPT, such as 'write an essay about the mysteries of dark matter' or 'create a joke about why traffic lights always turn red just as you arrive.' The AI then produces the text, which the writer can copy and paste into a word processor. The focus here is solely on crafting a prompt that elicits comprehensive and accurate information from ChatGPT, regardless of the writer's knowledge on the subject. The final product is often passed off as the writer's own work.

Human-AI collaboration in writing involves the writer providing ideas and language, then using AI to improve it. That's how this blog post was made. I gave ChatGPT the prompt "polish for a LessWrong-style blog post," then added my own thoughts. ChatGPT transformed my rough ideas into a polished, well-structured piece, with good sentence and paragraph flow. The ideas are mine, but I was freed from worrying about the prose quality, so I could focus on idea flow and development.

Using ChatGPT to aid in writing improved the quality of my work, allowing me to write six pages of my master's thesis in just an hour with high-quality results. Though not perfect, any errors can easily be corrected by pointing them out to ChatGPT for revision. For example, in this blog post, ChatGPT initially mislabeled my work as a six-page thesis instead of six pages of my thesis, but with a simple correction request, the AI got it right on the second try.

This human-AI writing process starts with the writer's draft, which the AI improves for accuracy, readability and flow. Another way to use ChatGPT is by asking it to predict reader questions and concerns with a prompt.

For instance, let's try this approach right now.

I asked ChatGPT to write a biting criticism of this article, and it obliged:

By relying on AI technology like ChatGPT to assist with writing, it takes away from the writer's own voice and creativity. It's a lazy and unoriginal approach to writing that undermines the writer's ability to produce original and engaging content. This practice is nothing more than a crutch, masking a lack of writing skills and crea

...