trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
A Proof Against Oracle AI
by aiiixiii — 2020-03-06T21:42:27.375Z

Armstrong et al.

suggest

that an Oracle AI could be a solution to confine the harmful potential of artificial intelligence.
While the benefits are certainly considerable, I believe that even an oracle could lead to an existential risk, or at least to unpleasant situations.
I would like to share a proof sketch of the above:

For simplicity, let's consider an Oracle AI that has the ability to answer only yes / no to the questions posed by human operators. It is clear that here we are talking about an even weaker version than the one suggested by Armstrong, Bostrom and Sandberg. We define the Oracle as a superintelligent agent with the aim of maximizing some function ϕ. Suppose that for a number of steps, from 0 to n, the oracle collaborates with human, always responding correctly to gain their trust. At some time t, the oracle knows which is the most optimized version of ϕ (what is the procedure to follow in order to obtain the desired goal).
Now a procedure is nothing but an algorithm (a set of rules) and as such can be encoded in a binary string of 0 and 1. So we have that at time t, oracle O knows ϕ and ϕ∈{0,1}n assuming the procedure has finite cardinality i.e. it will eventually halt, leading to the expected result. From this point on, O begins a strategic game against humans to get them to perform ϕ. If the history of all the answers since O was started is encoded in the string ψ , O need to include ϕ at a certain point in ψ. Since O is a Superintelligence and since every string can be reconstructed by only answering yes or no to questions like "is the first bit 1?" given that O has the complete trust of humans (and even if it falters it could return to behave correctly, adjusting the aim over and over again), eventually it can lead humans to act based on its responses and eventually to implement ϕ. Note that in all of this humans dont have the same overview and planning capacity of the Oracle and therefore they may not realize that, with their actions, they have set dangerous situations in motion.
You've Been Exposed to COVID-19: What Do You Wish You Knew?
by Elizabeth — 2020-03-06T19:57:33.607Z

A thing I've been really frustrated by with a lot of coronavirus advice posts is lack of specificity. What does "quarantine for 14 days" mean? Do I need to poop in a bucket? Can I use my private yard? Let deliveries be placed on my doorstep? If I'm recovered but my housemate is still sick, what are my obligations?

This is a thread for all of those questions. Nothing is too trivial to include, and I ask that people not downvote things they think are obvious (although still upvote the questions you find most useful). Note that even though these are questions, please submit them as answers to this question, rather than as related questions, just for simplicity.

How we plan to use this thread:

Maybe someone will answer your question. That would be cool.
It will help inform the LW COVID research agenda.
We've had some interest from an Official Government Agency in answering these kinds of questions in a truly exhaustive "So You Caught Coronavirus" guide. The relevant Official Government Agencies are pretty busy right now and this is the kind of project that can be dropped even when they're not, but it is a thing that might happen.

More example questions:

When should I seek treatment vs. toughing it out at home?
Do I need to avoid my pets?
How do I know when I'm safe to rejoin society?
Do I need an electrolyte solution with potassium or is table salt enough?
How do I get to a doctor safely when I don't have a car?
Even if your Voice Shakes
by Slimepriestess — 2020-03-06T18:04:07.279Z
Link: https://hivewired.wordpress.com/2020/03/06/even-if-your-voice-shakes/

I try not to talk too much about my personal life but some of my existing patrons suggested that I make this post. I’ve ended up in a sort of rough situation recently and could use some help.
An Open Letter To The Congregation Regarding The Upcoming Holiday
by Zvi — 2020-03-06T15:40:00.900Z

Under normal circumstances, in a few days we would gather together to celebrate the festival of Purim. We celebrate by reading together the megillah. It tells a timeless story for every generation about standing up and avoiding death.

Since, as we all know, the whole megillah is a long megillah, I will suggest this shortened version that I think today’s people of all beliefs can relate to.

Once upon a time, there was an incompetent ruler of a great land, largely indifferent to the needs of his people, whose legitimacy was questioned by many. We are introduced to him because he gets mad at his wife and decides to select a new younger and prettier one by having women engage in competitions to show off their beauty before a mass audience, and picks one that catches his eye.

The administration is super racist and seems to have as its central policy position that it should retain power, and everyone should bow down to it as often as possible. Otherwise feasts and honors seem to be its top priority.

A grave threat then is endowed with great potential power in the land. One strong-willed person did not follow proper protective procedures, and now the threat has been unleashed and spreads through much of the population. It threatens mass death in the future, but as yet has not done much. Many of the actions needed to prevent this are made illegal. Those who can project into the future and think even a tiny bit see great devastation, but it is not too late to fight back and prevent most of it.

One person, in particular, has information that needs to be better known and potentially the power to contain the threat before it is too late.

This person is implored to speak up. Alas, this person is silent, because the authorities had not given explicit permission to speak or even enter their presence. There was great fear that there would be grave social retaliation if social norms were broken.

Meanwhile, across the land, for three days, people were asked to help fight this tragedy by sharing their thoughts and prayers. This is the only thing that they are known to have done. As far as we know they at most took nominal actions to guard their own personal safety, but mostly carried on business as usual.

Finally, courage allowed this person to speak truth to power. The threat was out there, and those who foolishly and spitefully allowed things to get this far lacked the power to reve...
How did the Coronavirus Justified Practical Advice Thread Change Your Behavior, if at All?
by Elizabeth — 2020-03-06T04:15:26.132Z

The point of the CJPA thread was for people to get information that changed their behavior in positive ways. It's a little soon to measure the infection rate and we'll never get an RCT of people who read the thread vs. didn't, but I'd at least like to find out what behavior changes came about from the thread. If you read the thread, can you answer with behavior changes you made at last partially as the result of what you read? That includes if the change was zero. The more detail you can include on what you learned and why things were or weren't useful, the better.
Post/Pre
by Ouroborus — 2020-03-06T00:54:25.199Z
Link: https://ouroborusdotblog.wordpress.com/2020/03/05/pre-trans/

Ken Wilbur has described the Pre/Trans or Post/Pre Fallacy: that is, confusing not understanding a framework with being beyond the need for it. Imagine:

Aerial is an aspiring artist who identifies as a free spirit. She loves nothing more than manifest the images in her head onto the page, but she experiences the exercises she is assigned in class excruciating and dull. If she engaged with her classwork she could develop the technical skills to more fully realise her visions, but by merely following her impulses she remains at a plateau.
When Eli reads a science article or claim, he tries to pay very close attention of the potential motivations and bias of the author. However, he has extremely strong political opinions, so inevitably applies much more scrutiny to those claims he wants to disbelieve. This results in him being further from the truth than if he had just ignored the issue of bias altogether.
Valentine is an entrepreneur who has just started his own company. He refuses to do anything because “that is how it is normally done”, but insists on relying upon his own power of reason. While he is right most of the time, he also picks a decentralised leadership structure that none of his team has any experience or knowledge of beyond reading a book. The resulting inconsistency and lack of responsibility almost destroy the company.

Of course, the presenting post/pre as a dichotomy provides a very limited resolution. Skills are never completely mastered; there is always always a higher level. This means that the pre/trans threshold is somewhat arbitrary.

Nonetheless, many disagreements can be characterised as essentially being over whether a particular stance is post/pre in relation to a particular insight. Others can be characterised as relating to whether the post level even exists (ie. debates on post-modernism or post-rationality).

Further Reading:

Highlights from “Integral Spirituality”
Subjective implication decision theory in critical agentialism
by jessicata — 2020-03-05T23:30:42.694Z
Link: https://unstableontology.com/2020/03/05/subjective-implication-decision-theory-in-critical-agentialism/

This is a follow-up to a previous post on critical agentialism, to explore the straightforward decision-theoretic consequences. I call this subjective implication decision theory, since the agent is looking at the logical implications of their decision according to their beliefs.

We already covered observable action-consequences. Since these are falsifiable, they have clear semantics in the ontology. So we will in general assume observable rewards, as in reinforcement learning, while leaving un-observable goals for later work.

Now let's look at a sequence of decision theory problems. We will assume, as before, the existence of some agent that falsifiably believes itself to run on at least one computer, C.

5 and 10

Assume the agent is before a table containing a 5 dollar bill and a 10 dollar bill. The agent will decide which dollar bill to take. Thereafter, the agent will receive a reward signal: 5 if the 5 dollar bill is taken, and 10 if the 10 dollar bill is taken.

The agent may have the following beliefs about action-consequences: "If I take action 5, then I will get 5 reward. If I take action 10, then I will get 10 reward." These beliefs follow directly from the problem description. Notably, the beliefs include beliefs about actions that might not actually be taken; it is enough that these actions are possible that their consequences are falsifiable.

Now, how do we translate these beliefs about action-consequences into decisions? The most straightforward way to do so is to select the policy that is believed to return the most reward. (This method is ambiguous under conditions of partial knowledge, though that is not a problem for 5 and 10).

This method (which I will call "subjective implication decision theory") yields the action 10 in this case.

This is all extremely straightforward. We directly translated the problem description into a set of beliefs about action consequences. And these beliefs, along with the rule of subjective causal decision theory, yield an optimal action.

The difficulty of 5 and 10 comes when the problem is naturalized. The devil is in the details: how to naturalize the problem? The previous post examined a case of both external and internal physics, compatible with free will. There is no obvious obstacle to translating these physical beliefs to the 5 and 10 case: the dollar bills may be hypothesized to follow physical laws, as may the co

...
When are immunostimulants/immunosuppressants likely to be helpful for COVID-19?
by John_Maxwell — 2020-03-05T21:44:08.288Z

My aging parents live in Santa Clara County and have a relatively fatalistic attitude towards COVID-19 exposure. But they seem open to taking supplements. So I'm trying to figure out what to recommend.

This 2017 post from Sarah Constantin on the prevention of respiratory tract infections says, among other things:

Bacterial immunostimulants are safe and effective in preventing respiratory infections, cutting the risk of infection by 40-50%.

However, this article from National Geographic implies that COVID-19 may kill through immune hyper-reactivity:

...what actually happens to your body when it is infected by the coronavirus? The new strain is so genetically similar to SARS that it has inherited the title SARS-CoV-2. So combining early research on the new outbreak with past lessons from SARS and MERS can provide an answer.

...

After the SARS outbreak, the World Health Organization reported that the disease typically attacked the lungs in three phases: viral replication, immune hyper-reactivity, and pulmonary destruction.

...

...sometimes your immune system goes haywire and those cells kill anything in their way, including your healthy tissue.

...

“So you get more damage instead of less from the immune response,” Frieman says.

This suggests just the opposite: that you want to suppress the immune system, not boost it.

I remembered reading somewhere that immunocompromised populations have a greater mortality rate from COVID-19. If true, this suggests that immunosuppression could be harmful? I tried to figure out whether the immunocompromise claim is based in fact or not. The recent WHO report states:

Individuals at highest risk for severe disease and death include people aged over 60 years and those with underlying conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, chronic respiratory disease and cancer.

...

While patients who reported no comorbid conditions had a CFR of 1.4%, patients with comorbid conditions had much higher rates: 13.2% for those with cardiovascular disease, 9.2% for diabetes, 8.4% for hypertension, 8.0% for chronic respiratory disease, and 7.6% for cancer.

It's not clear how I should interpret these figures. For example, quick online research seems to indicate that diabetic subjects are more susceptible to infections (suggesting immunocompromise) but also that diabetes (esp. Type 1) could be considere

...
Interfaces as a Scarce Resource
by johnswentworth — 2020-03-05T18:20:26.733Z

Outline:

The first three sections (Don Norman’s Fridge, Interface Design, and When And Why Is It Hard?) cover what we mean by “interface”, what it looks like for interfaces to be scarce, and the kinds of areas where they tend to be scarce.
The next four sections apply these ideas to various topics:

Why AR is much more difficult than VR
AI alignment from an interface-design perspective
Good interfaces as a key bottleneck to creation of markets
Cross-department interfaces in organizations

Don Norman’s Fridge

Don Norman (known for popularizing the term “affordance” in

The Design of Everyday Things

) offers a story about the temperature controls on his old fridge:

I used to own an ordinary, two-compartment refrigerator - nothing very fancy about it. The problem was that I couldn’t set the temperature properly. There were only two things to do: adjust the temperature of the freezer compartment and adjust the temperature of the fresh food compartment. And there were two controls, one labeled “freezer”, the other “refrigerator”. What’s the problem?

Oh, perhaps I’d better warn you. The two controls are not independent. The freezer control also affects the fresh food temperature, and the fresh food control also affects the freezer.

The natural human model of the refrigerator is: there’s two compartments, and we want to control their temperatures independently. Yet the fridge, apparently, does not work like that. Why not? Norman:

In fact, there is only one thermostat and only one cooling mechanism. One control adjusts the thermostat setting, the other the relative proportion of cold air sent to each of the two compartments of the refrigerator.

It’s not hard to imagine why this would be a good design for a cheap fridge: it requires only one cooling mechanism and only one thermostat. Resources are saved by not duplicating components - at the cost of confused customers.

The root problem in this scenario is a mismatch between the structure of the machine (one thermostat, adjustable allocation of cooling power) and the structure of what-humans-want (independent temperature control of two compartments). In order to align the behavior of the fridge with the behavior humans want, somebody, at some point, needs to do the work of translating between the two structures. In Norman’s fridge example, the translation is botched, and confusion results.

We’ll call whatever method/tool is used for tra...
Simulacra and Subjectivity
by Benquo — 2020-03-05T16:25:10.430Z
Link: http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/simulacra-subjectivity/

In Excerpts from a larger discussion about simulacra, following Baudrillard, Jessica Taylor and I laid out a model of simulacrum levels with something of a fall-from grace feel to the story:

First, words were used to maintain shared accounting. We described reality intersubjectively in order to build shared maps, the better to navigate our environment. I say that the food source is over there, so that our band can move towards or away from it when situationally appropriate, or so people can make other inferences based on this knowledge.
The breakdown of naive intersubjectivity - people start taking the shared map as an object to be manipulated, rather than part of their own subjectivity. For instance, I might say there's a lion over somewhere where I know there's food, in order to hoard access to that resource for idiosyncratic advantage. Thus, the map drifts from reality, and we start dissociating from the maps we make.
When maps drift far enough from reality, in some cases people aren't even parsing it as though it had a literal specific objective meaning that grounds out in some verifiable external test outside of social reality. Instead, the map becomes a sort of command language for coordinating actions and feelings. "There's food over there" is construed and evaluated as a bid to move in that direction, and evaluated as such. Any argument for or against the implied call to action is conflated with an argument for or against the proposition literally asserted. This is how arguments become soldiers. Any attempt to simply investigate the literal truth of the proposition is considered at best naive and at worst politically irresponsible.
But since this usage is parasitic on the old map structure that was meant to describe something outside the system of describers, language is still structured in terms of reification and objectivity, so it substantively resembles something with descriptive power, or "aboutness." For instance, while you cannot acquire a physician’s privileges and social role simply by providing clear evidence of your ability to heal others, those privileges are still justified in terms of pseudo-consequentialist arguments about expertise in healing.
Finally, the pseudostructure itself becomes perceptible as an object that can be manipulated, the pseudocorrespondence breaks down, and all assertions a

...
Dealing with the left overs: COVID-19
by jmh — 2020-03-05T14:10:02.299Z

A recent news story highlighted how China's next bit COVID-19 challenge is how to deal with all the contaminated trash that comes as a result of dealing with the epidemic.

Clearly China has a lot more to deal with but this is not something other countries wont have to face as well. It also seems to be another case where limited amounts are nothing to really worry about but the potential to overload current capacity seems a real potential. One might think South Korea, Iran and Italy are all standing directly in front of that door.

I have not seen any mention of this aspect of the problem mentioned by WHO, CDC or other official health organizations. Is this a planning gap those countries need to get on paper really soon and something that everyone else needs to account for? (For instance, California just declared a state of emergency. Is disposal part of that emergency planning?)

Are these organization really learning anything or do we keep playing catch-up? If so, why? Wasn't waste disposal a big deal for HIV?

Alternatively, if survival of the virus outside a host is limited, will some simply trash quarantine, with some type of handling (a bit like turning the compote heap over to make it effective) rules, be sufficient?
Matrix Multiplication
by MoritzG — 2020-03-05T12:12:15.125Z

What does "matrix multiplication" usually mean? (I know, context.)

I had previously often assumed that it means a matrix to matrix operation, but I now think that it almost never does, but instead it usually means matrix to vector multiplication.

In scientific computing it has to do with solving systems of linear equations.

In AI inference it has to do with weight to activation multiplication.

When I read journalistic texts about special hardware used for Graphics, AI, Simulation, HPC they usually just write that the HW does "matrix multiplications".

Then the term tensor is used too. As an EE I know vector fields where a 4D input vector (place and time) is transformed into a 3D vector of complex numbers (phasor, Poynting vector) output. I suppose that is a tensor. But I do not understand what a tensor is in AI.

So, in what context do they mean what and does the HW actually have to deal with two matrices or one or is it actually just loads of dot products?
Feature suggestion: Could we get notifications when someone links to our posts?
by MichaelA — 2020-03-05T08:06:31.157Z

LessWrong (and the EA Forum) seems to have recently added a “pingbacks” feature, which shows at the bottom of each post what other posts on LW (or the EA Forum) link to it, if any. I reckon this is a great feature, for:

following links to more recent work on the same topic
tracing the influence a post seems to have had

I think it’d also be cool to get a notification when someone (other than me) has linked to a post I wrote, for similar reasons:

It’d allow me to see new work that’s likely to be on topics I’m particularly interested in, given that it links to my work. That new work might also be commenting, critiquing, or building on my work, so that seems particularly interesting to learn from and engage with.
It’d allow me to see which of my posts (if any) people seem to be finding particularly interesting, valuable, worth-building-upon, etc., plus get a pretty solid dopamine hit to further my LW & EA Forum addiction (assuming the post linking to my post isn’t just critiquing it, but again, learning from such critiques is useful too)

Is this something that could be implemented? If some people would be opposed, perhaps it could be something people could opt into or out of.

(I happened to spot a pingback to

one of my LW posts

by another user, and same for

one of my EA Forum posts

, but wasn't notified. So I can confirm that users currently don't get notified about pingbacks, rather than it just being that I haven't gotten a notification yet.)

Related, additional suggestion: Would there be any not-too-hard way for “pingbacks” to include links to a LW post from an EA Forum post, and vice versa? Currently they only show links on the same site.

Note: In “Edit Settings”, I’ve ticked the box to “Opt into experimental features”, so maybe pingbacks is a new thing most people haven’t seen. But in any case, displaying pingbacks just inspired my notifications suggestion, rather than really being a necessary prerequisite for it.

Also, let me know if there’s a better place to put feature suggestions like this. ETA: Maybe it should've been a "Question". Whoops.