trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
My Critique of Effective Altruism
by Dylan Price — 2024-09-20T17:41:21.000Z

Effective altruism (EA) defines itself as "a philosophical and social movement that advocates taking actions which maximally benefit sentient beings, as determined by evidence and reason."

In practice, effective altruists advocate making as much money as possible and then donating a (ideally large) percentage of it to charity. They also advocate choosing charities based on systematic evaluation of their effectiveness, in order to maximize the benefit of their dollars.

EA has its roots in the philosophical theory of utilitarianism, which can be briefly described as the moral principle that one should take actions which maximize the well-being of all affected individuals. EA is often motivated by arguing that the classic "trolley problem" is an analogy for modern life, and then positing a utilitarian approach as the solution.

In the trolley problem, there is a runaway trolley barreling down a track towards five people who cannot get out of the way in time. You are standing in front of a lever which would divert the trolley onto a side track, but there is an unaware worker on the side track who would be killed if you do so. Do you pull the lever?

Effective altruists argue that this is the type of decision we are constantly faced with in the modern world. People are suffering and dying and those of us living in a situation of relative wealth and comfort must recognize that our action or inaction can make things better or worse. We should pursue the course of action which maximizes the good that we can effect in the world. Therefore, if we are in the position to do so, should we not pull the lever and save five lives, even though one may still die?

For example, getting a high paying job may contribute to income inequality, but if you donate a substantial amount to highly effective charities, then on the balance you are doing more good than harm. Or, getting elected for political office may require you to pander to lobbyists and corporate interests, but if you can push through legislation that addresses climate change or some other social good, then on the whole you are doing more good than harm. Lever pulled, lives saved.

Effective altruists then go on to describe systems and methods for determining exactly how to measure "good" and determine what action produces the "most" good. Here I am only concerned with the core motivations, so I won't go into details on any of t...
Why be moral if we can't measure how moral we are? Is it even possible to measure morality?
by OKlogic — 2024-09-20T17:40:26.377Z

Imagine that you believe that the purpose of your life is to be the best marathon runner in the world, or even just an above average marathon runner. Despite the fact that you are committed to the mission, imagine that running is not particularly enjoyable to you, and your training regime is tough, but being a better marathon runner than others is such a noble goal you persist. Everyday, you train, painstakingly learning new running techniques, building stamina, pushing your limits. When you are not training, you are thinking about running. You dream of marathon running in your bed, think of it in the bathroom, conjecture about it on the way to work. Even if its detrimental to your happiness (although there is a high correlation between your self-perceived notion of how good of a marathon runner you are and your happiness), marathon running, you claim, is even more important to you than what you give up to obtain it. You routinely make sacrifices in order to run faster, whether that be avoiding certain foods, or forgoing leisure activities, or spending hard earned money on training. In fact, marathon running is so important to you, that you would almost say that everything in your life: your job, your relationships, your possessions, are really just a tool to increase your ability to be a good marathon runner.

Now, imagine every time you run, you are forced to do so in a VR environment. You are running in real life, but you are wearing a headset which work to manipulate your sensory, auditory, and tactile processing. As a result you are unable to gain any meaningful information about the speed at which you are running the marathons, or if you are making progress towards becoming a better runner or not. You are also not allowed to directly race with anyone else. Additionally, you are aware that many people are biased about how great of a marathon runner they they are. Many people who by consensus are slower marathon runners think they are great. Furthermore, even John Lipid, widely agreed to be the most overweight and least athletic man who ever lived (and whom rarely ran at all) claimed, and appeared to believe, that he was a great marathon runner in his day. In fact there is little ostensible correlation between self-perception of marathon running ability and real ability. Indeed, in your culture, there are many strong incentives to view oneself as a g...
On Measuring Intellectual Performance - personal experience and several thoughts
by Alexander Gufan — 2024-09-20T17:21:19.747Z

A very interesting problem is measuring something like general intelligence. I’m not going to delve deeply into this topic but simply want to draw attention to an idea that is often implied, though rarely expressed, in the framing of such a problem: the assumption that an "intelligence level," whatever it may be, corresponds to some inherent properties of a person and can be measured through their manifestations. Moreover, we often talk about measurements with a precision of a few percentage points, which suggests that, in theory, the measurement should be based on very stable indicators.

What’s fascinating is that this assumption receives very little scrutiny, while in cases where we talk about "mechanical" parameters of the human body (such as physical performance), we know that such parameters, aside from a person’s potential, heavily depends on numerous external factors and what that person has been doing over the past couple of weeks.

In this text, I will discuss my experience not with measuring my intelligence level but with measuring my intellectual performance level under various circumstances.

Why Could This Be Useful?

There could be several practical benefits from this:

If there are simple ways to temporarily boost your "intellectual shape", it is obviously good to know about them. By regularly measuring your intellectual performance based on easily adjustable factors, you might discover such methods.
It’s useful to recognize when, on a particular day, you are consistently less sharp than usual. On such days, it’s wise to avoid tackling problems that are at the limits of your intellectual abilities, or at least to be skeptical of decisions made on those days and double-check them later.
If there are identifiable factors that predict drops in intellectual performance, you can plan around them and schedule critical tasks during periods of peak performance.
There are likely applications in the field of biohacking.

Several Requirements to the Method for Measuring Intellectual Performance

After some thought, I arrived at the following requirements for a measurement method:

The result should somehow reflect the manifestation of intellectual abilities — such as pattern recognition, decision-making, prediction, optimization, attention to detail... With all other factors remaining the same, an improvement in these abilities should correspond to an increase in the resu

...
Introduction to Super Powers (for kids!)
by Shoshannah Tekofsky — 2024-09-20T17:17:27.070Z
Link: https://kidquest.substack.com/p/introduction-to-super-powers

And how surprisingly untraumatizing it apparently is when mom feigns amnesia.

I’m going to be honest here and say I just did the mental equivalent of a fist pump when my 5 year old responded to a prompt to pick any book in the book store with … The Handbook for Superheroes.

Part 9.

We are definitely starting at part 9.

For reasons. Perfectly legible reasons. That my 5 year old will one day explain to me, I’m sure.

Either way, we found ourselves in dire need of superhero-themed bedtime rules.

All I can say, dear reader, is… Please do try this at home.

And I don’t mean the destructive powers. I’m as much a fan of explosions and power fantasies as the next child person. But no one sleeps well two minutes after slugging fireballs across the bed, teleporting across the room, and dodging ice spikes.

It was fun though.

Instead, consider introducing temporal manipulation and telekinesis to a 5 year old.

Rewind

As you might know by now, most of these rule sets I just riff on the spot. So as ever, I had no idea where this was going. My kid wanted more super powers, and the night before we waged war between the great powers of Fire and Ice. What could possible top that?

So I paced the bedroom and suggested… Time rewind powers!

God this felt too vague and long-shotty when I said it.

But it was marvelous!

The rule was that kiddo earns one charge of her Rewind power for every step of the bedtime routine. Then she can yell ‘Rewind’ and I go through my movements backward from that moment onward for roughly 5 seconds (including sound effects and garbled speech).

Now the kicker: I lose my memories from the period that was rewound.

I wasn’t sure how this was going to be fun for her, but my kid was up for it.

First she did a number of innocuous rewinds while getting changed into her pajamas. Each time I would restart what I had said before, apparently oblivious to the stolen seconds. We steadily made progress and once she started brushing her teeth, I decided I needed to clip my finger nails.

She had me rewind the same period of cutting my nails each time while she was brushing teeth. I kept being amazed that my nails were cut while I had just noticed they were long and I needed to cut them!

But then….

She found an infinite loop and exploited the hell out of the game.

Basically she stumbled on a 5 second segment in the bedtime routine that she could infinitely farm for charges as she rewound me back...
Collapsing “Collapsing the Belief/Knowledge Distinction”
by Jeremias — 2024-09-20T16:11:33.558Z

TL;DR: After re-examining my earlier stance on collapsing the belief/knowledge distinction, I've come to realize through Wittgenstein's "meaning as use" that these terms hold distinct meanings based on their contextual applications in language. Embracing this understanding, I now see that preserving the distinction is essential for meaningful communication and continued dialogue.

Motivation

Nine days ago, I made a post about how, when observed closely, the distinction between belief and knowledge is pragmatically useless at best and incoherent as worst. The reasoning was that what we call “knowledge” is only what we believe to be true—if we do not have a belief, we do not consider it to be “knowledge” or “truth”.

The user cubefox made points focusing on how “knowledge”, “belief”, “truth”, “justification”, and “verification” are defined differently by other philosophers, to which I rebutted by appealing to the quasi-skeptical, almost solipsistic, argument that, if what is primary is a subjects individual experience, then the collapsing of the distinction holds because whatever evidence/proof there may be to a belief, it can only be confirmed via other beliefs one already holds (ex. “I say my hand is there because I believe in the accuracy of my perception because I…).

I now see, albeit imperfectly, that the cubefox’s rebuttal has more merit than I first believed due to his appeal to how the words are used. As such, I will use cubefox’s position as a springboard to provide a counter argument of my own towards my own position.

Wittgensteinian Meaning

For a large class of cases-though not for all-in which we employ the word "meaning" it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §43)

Rather than solving the problem of belief/knowledge, the problem can be dissolved. How? Through Wittgenstein’s theory of “meaning as use”.

This can be best illustrated with the example of the different uses of the word “milk”.

Imagine I am in front of the counter in a French café (commonly regarded by the locals—not the tourists as the best café in Paris). I am asked by the clerk what I would like to order and I tell them I want an Café Americano (this is a nice Parisian, so they are not angry that I default to English). Then they ask me: “Anything else?”, and I reply with “Milk”.

After ordering, I sit down at the table, ...
A New Class of Glitch Tokens - BPE Subtoken Artifacts (BSA)
by Lao Mein — 2024-09-20T13:13:26.181Z

Introduction

I've spent the last few days going through every glitch token listed in the third SolidGoldMagikarp glitch token post, and was able to find the cause/source of almost every single one. This is the first in a series of posts in which I will explain the behaviors of these glitch tokens, the context in which they appear in the training data, and what they reveal about the internal dynamics of LLMs. If you're unfamiliar with glitch tokens, I highly suggest you read the glitch token archaeology posts first.

My process involved searching through OpenWebText, a recreation of GPT2 training data, and prompting GPT2 to locate the context of the training data.

Previous Context

In their 2023 post, the authors made the following pronouncement in regard to the glitch token ' practition' (token_id: 17629). I took it as a personal challenge.

The first thing I found was that ' practitioner' (32110) and ' practitioners' (24068) were both already tokens in the GPT2 tokenizer. Furthermore, all three tokens also present in the GPT3.5/4 and GPT4o tokenizers, meaning they weren't an artifact of GPT2's training data!

There were only 13 examples of " practition" in OpenWebText.

['urlsf_subset00-928_data.xz', '\nThe WCC is also a prominent supporter and practitioning body for Peace journalism: journalism practice that'], ['urlsf_subset01-45_data.xz', ' what is now the Czech Republic, became a noted practitioneer of lagers, and geology again']
['urlsf_subset06-66_data.xz', 'The site relaunched on Wordpress VIP, practitioned by ESPN and 10up, a company']
['urlsf_subset07-802_data.xz', ' one possible explanation for the positive association between BDSM practitioning and subjective well-being.”'], ['urlsf_subset09-305_data.xz' , ' that vital personal touch that feudalism asked of its practitioning monarchs. He made wild leaps of']
['urlsf_subset11-474_data.xz', ' of the Senators asked “…if a health practitionerr is advising a patient to go on a']
['urlsf_subset11-809_data.xz', ' the full range of Buddhist traditions and the diversity of practition-ers today. As Buddhism in the West']
['urlsf_subset12-398_data.xz', ' one possible explanation for the positive association between BDSM practitioning and subjective well‐being. Several limitations']
['urlsf_subset13-921_data.xz', ' availa ble.\n\nSecondly , LCA practitione rs need to comply with the ISO\n']
['urlsf_subset15-258_da

...
o1-preview is pretty good at doing ML on an unknown dataset
by Håvard Tveit Ihle — 2024-09-20T08:39:49.927Z

Previous post: How good are LLMs at doing ML on an unknown dataset?

A while back I ran some evaluation tests on GPT4o, Claude Sonnet 3.5 and Gemini advanced to see how good they were at doing machine learning on a completely novel, and somewhat unusual dataset. The data was basically 512 points in the 2D plane, and some of the points make up a shape, and the goal is to classify the data according to what shape the points make up. None of the models did better than chance on the original (hard) dataset, while they did somewhat better on a much easier version I made afterwards.

With the release of o1-preview, I wanted to quickly run the same test on o1, just to see how well it did. In summary, it basically solved the hard version of my previous challenge, achieving 77% accuracy on the test set on its fourth submission (this increases to 91% if I run it for 250 instead of 50 epochs), which is really impressive to me.

Here is the full conversation with ChatGPT o1-preview

In general o1-preview seems like a big step change in its ability to reliably do hard tasks like this without any advanced scaffolding or prompting to make it work.

Detailed discussion of results

The architecture that o1 went for in the first round is essentially the same that Sonnet 3.5 and gemini went for, a pointnet inspired model which extracts features from each point independently. While it managed to do slightly better than chance on the training set, it did not do well on the test set.

For round two, it went for the approach (which also Sonnet 3.5 came up with) of binning the points in 2D into an image, and then using a regular 2D convnet to classify the shapes. This worked somewhat on the first try. It completely overfit the training data, but got to an accuracy of 56% on the test data.

For round three, it understood that it needed to add data augmentations in order to generalize better, and it implemented scaling, translations and rotations of the data. It also switched to a slightly modified resnet18 architecture (a roughly 10x larger model). However, it made a bug when converting to PIL image (and back to torch.tensor), which resulted in an error.

For round four, o1 fixed the error and has a basically working solution, achieving an accuracy of 77% (which increases to 91% if we increase the number of epochs from 50 to 250, all still well within the alloted hour of runtime). I...
Moral Trade, Impact Distributions and Large Worlds
by Larks — 2024-09-20T03:45:56.273Z

Origin: I believe this was inspired by something Wei Dai said, but it is possible the originator is a simulation of him inside my head. I developed it after a brief conversation with Derek Shiller. Any errors are my own.

Epistemic status: seems like an interesting idea.

Terminology: in this post we will refer to moral theories agreeing to different levels of influence on agents, and agents as having different levels of impact in the world.

Moral Trade

One approach to moral uncertainty is to have different moral theories negotiate behind a veil of ignorance, Harsanyi style. There are a number of different approaches you could take here, like

Moral Parliaments

. What we care about here is the potential for these moral theories to do mutually beneficial (by each’s own lights) trades with each other.

A particular trade they might want to do would be to exchange influence across different agents and possible worlds based on their ability to exert counterfactual impact, since some theories assign higher value to being able to influence a lot of impact.

Impact Distribution

You might assign some credence to deontological moral theories, where the most important thing is that you personally behave well and do not violate any moral constraints - a naturally bounded quantity for each individual. You might also have some credence in an aggregative moral theory, where all that matters is maximising some global summation, like traditional hedonic utilitarianism, which has a much longer tailed distribution of impact.

Suppose some people are much more influential than others, and behind the veil of ignorance, the negotiating moral theories were uncertain as to how influential you would be. They might then agree to a trade where the deontological moral theory gains significant influence over you if you turn out to be a typical person, while the aggregative moral theory gains influence in the small fraction of worlds where you become an important leader.

For example, if real-world aggregate impact (which the aggregative theory cares about) was log-normally distributed, but each individual has the ability to personally sin or not (what the deontologist cares about), then the 75% of least influential individuals are 75% of the value for the deontologist, but only about 38% of the expected aggregated impact. So it might make sense for the deontologist to completely give up on the top...
Keyboard Gremlins
by jefftk — 2024-09-20T02:30:07.140Z

I had a great time playing

Amherst
last night

with

Cecilia, except for the
keyboard gremlins. I just got a new keyboard (more on that later!)
and it worked great when I tried it at home. At the dance, however,
there were strange crackles. Even weirder, when I played the highest
notes on the piano, I got a very small amount of phantom bass, maybe
four octaves down. It got louder and quieter, as I turned the keyboard
up and down or played at different volumes, and if I turned down the
volume on the keyboard it went away. MIDI output, which is a key part
of my

rhythm stage setup, was totally clean.

I was really very confused. I thought maybe this keyboard didn't have
good enough electrical shielding, and having my little stage computer
velcroed to the keyboard might be causing it? In support of this
theory, turning off the little computer did fix it. But moving the
little computer to the floor, where it should not have been able to
generate meaningful interference, did not. After trying a lot of
things, I eventually realized that disconnecting the MIDI cable was
enough to fix it.

This is one of the main differences between this keyboard and my
previous one: it's USB MIDI instead of 5-pin MIDI. But I had used my
system with USB MIDI before, with no issues. It was really
frustrating, and I was baffled. I took a video:

This evening, I tried to reproduce it. The same setup as I had on
stage did trigger the issue. Connecting it to my laptop, however, did
not trigger the issue. So probably not a keyboard problem, and
instead some thing my little stage computer is doing.

I thought maybe I was sending MIDI back out, which should never have
previously mattered because I never used to connect the MIDI cable in
the other direction. I started installing tshark to
debug, when I realized the problem:

My little box is set up to do two things:

If it detects it is being used as a MIDI router, it
routes MIDI and synthesizes audio. This is triggered by noticing that
MIDI devices are connected.

If it detects, it is being used as a bass whistle,
it interprets audio and generates bass. This is triggered by noticing
certain soundcards being connected, ignoring both the built-in one and
the one I use in MIDI routing mode.

In this case both of these conditions were met. I was using it as a
MIDI router, but also the new keyboard pres...