trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Kids NCurses Messenger
by jefftk — 2021-05-22T17:50:02.240Z

Yesterday I wrote a program that lets me and

Lily (7y) send messages back and
forth:

The laptop is an eeepc
700. It was the first mass produced netbook and I liked it a lot. By 2010 I wasn't using it anymore,
and it ended up in the basement. Recently I found it, I noticed that
while it is still a ridiculously tiny computer, it is a good size for
a child:

It still booted, and was apparently running Debian 7. I'm not
sure where that came from; I had thought it had been in a box since
before Debian 7 came out in 2013, but I guess not. I wasn't entirely
sure what I wanted to do with it, but started by upgrading it to
something recent. It was too old for apt-get dist-upgrade
on its own, but by putting first 8, then 9, then 10 in
/etc/apt/sources.list I was able to get it up to date
with apt-get update && apt-get upgrade.

Thinking more about what to do with it, I thought Lily would be
excited to have something her size, which might get her more
interested in typing and writing. After over a year of remote school
(and a bit of parental lessons) she could use the practice!

I started by writing a simple
chat TUI in python with
curses. It has a section at the bottom for input, and the rest is
for the conversation so far. I added exec python3
simplechat/client.py to the end of her .bashrc, so
it starts automatically when she logs in.

I initially wanted to make it send texts, but everything seems to cost
at least $1/m for a phone number. Thinking over the chat apps already
on my computer/phone, Slack would work well: they prioritize making it
easy to integrate with.

Posting to Slack directly from the client was straightforward, but
there wasn't a great way to receive messages. I decided to write an intermediate
server to receive messages with Slack's Events
API, and have the client poll it. I didn't use any of their
libraries; it was simple enough to send and receive JSON.

Our house Slack now has a
#kids channel, and any of us who join it can talk to
Lily. I could potentially add external guests, but I'd want to teach
her about @-ing people first. I could also potentially
build support for other kids to join; perhaps her cousins when they're
literate?

She's pretty happy with it, though I am curious how much she ends up
using it.

(The code is on
github.)
What is the biggest crypto news of the past year?
by mike_hawke — 2021-05-22T02:01:49.040Z

Please give reasons for why you consider it big.

Here are my top questions right now:

What major policies are governments adopting, especially in the US?
What the hell is Tesla up to?

Does anyone really believe that Tesla sold its Bitcoin in order to help the environment? If so, why did they buy it in the first place?

Are there any worthwhile applications of smart contracts yet?

What are you using them for?
I don't see much value in NFTs yet, I don't feel much draw to defi, and the prediction markets are either small or nonfunctional.

More importantly, is there a good way for me to answer these questions on my own? I avoid Twitter and news sites because I think they are bad for my mind. What I would like is a way to check in on the state of crypto a few times per year. I care much less about price changes than longer-term things like government policies, clever new applications, scaling & usability issues, and so on.
The Web is Turning into Cable TV
by matto — 2021-05-21T23:06:02.621Z

(Cross-posted from my blog)

The Web was never perfect. There were always people using it to exploit others. Sometimes, it was the small-time Ebay scammer looking for a couple of dollars. Other times, it was a giant multinational trying to get you to buy things you didn't need.

At the same time, it was a wonderful place. You could meet interesting people and talk about anything that you liked. In a way, it freed us from the physical limitations of geography and paper, letting our minds wander, meet, and create things like LessWrong.

But now I believe some loosely coordinated actors threaten to change the Web for the worse. If allowed, they would turn it into a medium that restricts interaction and promotes passively consuming low quality information–like cable TV. I believe advertising and recommendation systems are driving this change.

This is Water: Online Advertising

The prevalence of ads has normalized them. Most people I've met have never asked "Where do ads come from?" If they did, they would discover it involves private data centers, a small army of software engineers, and enough hardware purchases to influence global markets. But for most, it's simply a part of reality, like electricity and supply chains.

In line with this norm, Google, along with a handful of other online advertisers, developed a new standard called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC).

The way it works is this: while a user surfs the Web, their browser analyzes what content they see. Based on that, it assigns them to a cohort of users with similar preferences. Any ad system they encounter can request the cohort ID and use that to display ads targeted at a user's specific preferences.

Privacy advocates have scrutinized FLoC and found multiple problems. For example, exposing users' ethnicity, political affiliation, and other traits to anyone who asks for it, making it easier to discriminate against them. Or creating convincing scams targeted at specific groups of people. Or... I'll stop here.

However, what I haven't seen discussed is that FLoC would write advertising into a standard. That would make every browser an extension of the online advertising industry. I believe this is dangerous because it further normalizes the idea that ads are critical to the Web.

But are they?

The common argument in favor of ads says that ads are better than alternatives like paywalls and micropayments. They allo...
[Event] Weekly Alignment Research Coffee Time (05/24)
by adamShimi — 2021-05-21T17:45:53.618Z

Just like every Monday now, researchers in AI Alignment are invited for a coffee time, to talk about their research and what they're into.

Here is the link.

And here is the everytimezone time.

Note that the link to the walled garden now only works for AF members. Anyone who wants to come but isn't an AF member needs to go by me. I'll broadly apply the following criteria for admission:

If working in a AI Alignment lab or funded for independent research, automatic admission
If recommended by AF member, automatic admission
Otherwise, to my discretion

I prefer to not allow people who might have been interesting but who I'm not sure will not derail the conversation, because this is supposed to be the place where AI Alignment researchers can talk about their current research without having to explain everything.

See you then!
The Reebok effect
by Jan Christian Refsgaard — 2021-05-21T17:11:57.076Z
Link: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/05/11/if-a-value-is-less-than-10-you-can-bet-its-not-0-1-usually/

The principle here is that if you’re trying to make the result sound as impressive as possible, an unintended consequence is that you’re revealing the upper limit.

Here is the full quote by Phil Price (from Andrew Gelman's blog):

Many years ago I saw an ad for a running shoe (maybe it was Reebok?) that said something like “At the New York Marathon, three of the five fastest runners were wearing our shoes.” I’m sure I’m not the first or last person to have realized that there’s more information there than it seems at first. For one thing, you can be sure that one of those three runners finished fifth: otherwise the ad would have said “three of the four fastest.” Also, it seems almost certain that the two fastest runners were not wearing the shoes, and indeed it probably wasn’t 1-3 or 2-3 either: “The two fastest” and “two of the three fastest” both seem better than “three of the top five.” The principle here is that if you’re trying to make the result sound as impressive as possible, an unintended consequence is that you’re revealing the upper limit.
Topic Survey for June Meet-up
by shaneebert — 2021-05-21T14:10:39.784Z

We have a few ideas for discussion topics for the next meet-up, so please follow the link to let us know which topic or topics are of interest. You can also add your own ideas (or do so in the comments here). Please complete the survey by Monday, May 24 so that I can finalize the topic for June's meet-up (June 5th @ 2 PM).

https://forms.gle/egiF1un4G3fdZ6GLA

NOTE: We're going to switch back to meeting in person for the June meet-up and see how it goes (at South Loop Strength & Conditioning). Either way, we may also have some future meet-ups online to make the meet-ups more accessible to more people. Feel free to share your thoughts on that too.
AI Safety Research Project Ideas
by Owain_Evans — 2021-05-21T13:39:39.790Z

This post contains project ideas in AI Safety from Owain Evans and Stuart Armstrong (researchers at

FHI

). Projects are aimed at students, postdocs or summer research fellows who would be interested in collaborating on them for 2-6 months with Owain or Stuart. We are happy to explore possible funding options for the duration of the project. If you are interested in discussing mentorship or academic collaborations please get in touch -- details are at the bottom of this post. The deadline is EOD 20th of June but we encourage people to apply early.

Project ideas from

Stuart Armstrong

1) Model splintering: How can you automate moving from one model to another?

Context:

This post

by Stuart Armstrong gives an overview of model splintering: examples, arguments for its importance, a formal setting allowing us to talk about it, and some uses we can put this setting to.

This post

looks at how the formalisms of Cartesian frames and generalised models relate to each other.

Details: Humans are capable of extending moral values to new situations, when their previous concepts no longer apply. This is analogous to the ability of a reinforcement learning agent to generalise it’s previous reward signal to new situations, when the reward signal is no longer available and the environment is out of distribution.

This project posits that that is not a mere analogy: that the human capacity for extending moral values (which includes analytic philosophy and thought experiments to un-encountered situations) is a skill which can be transposed into algorithms, and further automated to extend to environments shaped by powerful AIs, about which humans have no current intuitions.

The main initial task is to collect references from analytic philosophy, human value changes, and out-of-distribution behaviour in algorithms. The insights from these areas should then be combined in the model-splintering formalism, and new algorithms created in this formalism to generalise for advanced AIs.

The output of this research should be a few publications on new methods for safely extending AI reward and values to new areas, and maybe some sample code.

2) Detecting preferences in agents: how many assumptions need to be made?

Context:

This post

by Stuart Armstrong gives some relevant context on detecting preferences in agents.

This post

summarises a research agenda on synthesising human preferenc...
Get your gun license
by Alex Hollow — 2021-05-21T12:44:58.055Z
Link: https://alexhollow.wordpress.com/2021/05/21/get-your-gun-license/

Should you apply for a gun license? Most people in the rationalist community think they should not. After all, it seems that America should have more gun control. However, the correct policy for the country and the correct policy for you can be different things. I’m not going to talk about the correct policy for the country, but I am going to try to convince you that you should get licensed yourself. Not buy a gun, or carry a gun, but just get a license to increase your range of options.

Gun ownership in Massachusetts requires a license. The process for getting a license in Boston takes a full year. You call and ask to be put on a waitlist, where you stay for 10 months. Then, you fill out an application and wait another month. Then, you get fingerprinted, the FBI does a background check, and you wait another month. Then, finally, you get a call saying that your license will be mailed, in another month. All these months add up to a serious lag between deciding you want a license and getting one.

The full cost of a license is $110, and licenses are valid for 6 years, so having the right to buy a gun costs around $20 a year (plus a one-time investment of around 2 hours of work to make your application, get fingerprinted, etc).

In a given year, how likely are you to want to be able to buy a gun? If you currently don’t want to own a gun, it’s reasonable to believe that you would continue not wanting to own a gun unless something changed. What things could change to make you want a gun? Maybe you get worried about people storming the Capital and trying to overturn an election, or other political unrest happens. Maybe the people who say they want a second Civil War accomplish some of their goals. Other than fear of political extremists, imagine a drop in American agricultural productivity, or a very severe drought, or anything else that could lead to civil unrest.

If you do end up wanting a gun, how much would you be willing to pay for it in that moment? That’s a hard question to answer, because it depends wildly on how much money you have available and why you want the gun. Someone with a million dollars in the bank would pay a lot of that money to get a gun if crime rates spiked massively, while someone who is near-broke would not pay much money for a license if they want to get a gun to shoot as a hobby. But maybe there is a 1% chance per year of you being willing t...
The Argument For Spoilers
by abramdemski — 2021-05-21T12:23:49.127Z

I'll say it right up-front: this is not an argument against cooperating with people who are trying to avoid spoilers. It's obviously a good idea to avoid spoiling people who don't want to be spoiled, so long as such people are sufficiently prevalent in the population that the minor inconveniences of spoiler warnings etc are predictably going to be appreciated.

Epistemic status: devil's advocate. I've been unsympathetic to spoiler concerns for a long time, for more or less the reasons argued here, but my arguments are far from perfect. Should they be convincing? I don't know. I still occasionally avoid spoilers, but not usually.

For an ideal agent, information should not be harmful. This is violated in many ways in practice, but these often point to irrationalities (including imperfect decision theories, like evidential decision theory). We should avoid harmful information when we know we can't handle it, but I also strive to be able to handle information of all kinds.

As JenniferRM mentions in the comments, avoiding spoilers has a chilling effect on discussions about the intellectual content of media. This means that embedding ideas into fiction can actually inhibit their spread in a weird way.

So, why avoid spoilers?

1: the puzzle argument.

Obviously you don't want a puzzle spoiled, right? It deprives you of the joy of solving it. You can't learn if you don't at least try to solve it yourself before getting the answer, right? Spoilers for movies, TV shows, and books are like this too, to the extent that the story presents puzzles. Even if you're just trying to enjoy yourself, learning and enjoyment often go hand in hand -- the reason your brain rewards you for engaging in play activity is because it satisfies evolutionary heuristics for learning (probably).

But is it true? Do we need to avoid spoilers, solving things ourselves, in order to learn?

First, let's consider an idealized learner.

The perfect Bayesian can learn just as much regardless of what order the evidence is presented in. It's not literally true that the only way to learn to do something is to struggle-fail-revise-retry yourself before getting advice. It's not even necessarily the best way to learn. We learn lots of things by being told. (Would you prefer teachers keep Darwinian evolution secret, waiting for students to invent it themselves? An extreme anti-spoilers mindset would suggest something lik...
Book Review of 5 Applied Bayesian Statistics Books
by Jan Christian Refsgaard — 2021-05-21T10:23:51.672Z

There are 5 strong contender for best Bayesian Statistics book

TLDR

Statistical Rethinking, henceforth SR[1]

Up to speed fast, no integrals, very intuitive approach.

Doing Bayesian Data Analysis, henceforth The Dog Book[2]

This is the easiest book. If your goal is only to create simple models and you aren't interested in understanding the details, then this is the book for you.

A Student’s Guide to Bayesian Statistics, henceforth Student's Guide[3]

This book has the opposite focus of the Dog book. Here the author slowly goes through the philosophy of Bayes with an intuitive mathematical approach.

Regression and Other Stories, henceforth ROS[4]

Good you want a slower and thorough approach where you also learn the Frequentest perspective.

Bayesian Data Analysis, henceforth BDA[5]

The most advanced text, very math heavy, best as a second book after reading one or two of the others, unless you are already a statistician.

Irregardless of which one you pick, watching the YouTube lectures for either SR or Student's Guide is very helpful

Short review of each Book

The Dog Book: Is the easiest book is thus if you do not strive for understanding but simply want to quickly get to a skill level where you need to develop a not to fancy model then this is a great book, It is also a good reference book as each chapter is based on a specific link and function and regression variable type, thus, if you want to do an Bayesian ANOVA you simply look for chapters named something like "categorical predictor with metric outcome".

Student's Guide: This book has the opposite focus as the Dog book. Here the author slowly goes trough the philosophy of bayes with a mathematical intuitive approach. It looks like a very good reference book. A Bayesian professor has recommended it as one of the best introductions to STAN. Chapter 8 is also very good. It starts with a graph of the relationship between all likelihoods and then goes trough EACH and EVERY ONE with an intuitive example and some nice plots. I would recommend everyone to read the chapter and/or to use the chapter as a reference whenever you have a few 'candidate' likelihoods in your head. Reading Chapter 12 in SR will subsequently teach you to create mixtures of these likelihoods if you need further hacks such as zero inflation. Remember the YouTube series explain the math very well. So use them as a supplement!

RO...
Bayeswatch 5: Hivemind
by lsusr — 2021-05-21T07:35:43.069Z

Three humans sat around a table. The notary was unaugmented. He wore a charcoal business suit. The ancillary wore a silk paisley print top zippered at the back. A thick cable extended from the back of her head to the collective's mainframe. Trinity nervously fondled the virgin socket embedded in the occipital bone of her own skull.

"Please confirm your DNA," said the notary.

Trinity pricked her thumb on the bloodometer.

"You are Trinity Sariah Rees," said the notary.

"You don't say," Trinity rolled her eyes.

"Nineteen years old. Mormon…" said the notary.

"Ex-Mormon," corrected Trinity.

"Please speak into the microphone. We need an unambiguous record of your consent," said the notary.

"This is ridiculous. It's my body and mind. I should have the freedom to do what I want with it," said Trinity.

"Informed consent is important," said the ancillary, "We don't want to get into legal trouble. Tomorrow you will feel the same way."

"Which is why we need consent now. It won't count after the procedure," said the notary.

"I already had the surgery. All we're doing is plugging me in," Trinity crossed her arms and legs.

"The government is prejudiced against transhumans," said the ancillary, "It could be worse. We're lucky all they demand is paperwork."

"Let's get this done quickly," said Trinity.

"Are you really ready to have five sixths of your personality erased?" said an ancillary.

"That five sixths will be equally divided among you guys. Are you ready to have one sixth of your personality become me?" said Trinity.

"It sounds like you are familiar with predictive processing and connectome-specific harmonic waves," said the notary.

"I have wanted to join a collective since I was thirteen. I keep up-to-date on the newest research," said Trinity.

"Then I don't need to explain how modern neuroscience is based on the idea that synapse weights modify the topology of your brain like how gravity bends spacetime," said the notary.

"Do you always use general relativity metaphors when explaining things to people?" said Trinity.

"I didn't want to insult your intelligence," said the notary.

"It's about time someone recognized it," said Trinity.

"We do too. We can sync only a handful of brains before the global workspace fragments. We must be selective about who we assimilate. High g-factor is a priority," said the ancillary.

"Anyway," said the notary, "The primary purpose of the human brain is to creat...
Covid 5/20: The Great Unmasking
by Zvi — 2021-05-21T00:30:01.228Z

The CDC has lifted its mask mandate for vaccinated people. In one fell swoop, it is suddenly fine for anyone fully vaccinated to go maskless anywhere, without social distancing, at any time, so long as regulations and rules permit it. This retains the madness of ignoring partial vaccination entirely, and the madness of making children as young as two (!) wear masks around groups of fully vaccinated adults, but it is certainly a huge step towards sanity. It also implies that the rules and regulations that remain need to be changed, and many of them are indeed being changed.

Reactions were mixed.

There was much rejoicing. Many cried tiers of joy. Others pointed out that this was a damn good reason to get vaccinated.

There was also much confusion and opposition. Very Serious People expressed panic and horror. Others expressed reasonable concern that this was premature. This would destroy mask mandates, causing maskless people to go around maskless. People would go around acting like the pandemic was over before there was full ‘herd immunity.’

The opposition has some legitimate points. The control system could still have some fight in it. We have no way to verify verification status that anyone is willing to use. Vaccination checks are mostly going to be either non-existent or on the honor system, and America does not highly value honor. Norms that are ignored by half the people are easy for the other half to choose to ignore as well. At a minimum, this will change norms in ways that slow down the decline in cases. If everyone were to use this as a reason to go fully ‘back to normal’ at current vaccination rates cases would presumably start rising again at least for a while, and it’s not clear we could do much of anything to reverse course if that happened beyond pushing harder to get more vaccinations.

A lot of people also pointed out the contradictions between this new policy and the old one, with the change from ‘take precautions that wouldn’t even make sense if you were unvaccinated’ to ‘once vaccinated take no precautions whatsoever’ coming overnight with zero warning, with little or no change in the underlying physical conditions. I think it’s important not to make a big deal about that. Yes, the contradictions are huge and blatant, but the time to point out how crazy the old guidance was was when they were still in place. As many people did, freq...