trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
An Unexpected Victory: Container Stacking at the Port of Long Beach
by Zvi — 2021-10-28T14:40:00.497Z

A miracle occurred this week. Everyone I have talked to about it, myself included, is shocked that it happened. It’s important to

Understand what happened.
Make sure everyone knows it happened.
Understand how and why it happened.
Understand how we might cause it to happen again.
Update our models and actions.
Ideally make this a turning point to save civilization.

That last one is a bit of a stretch goal, but I am being fully serious. If you’re not terrified that the United States is a dead player, you haven’t been paying attention – the whole reason this is a miracle, and that it shocked so many people, is that we didn’t think the system was capable of noticing a stupid, massively destructive rule with no non-trivial benefits and no defenders and scrapping it, certainly not within a day. If your model did expect it, I’m very curious to know how that is possible, and how you explain the years 2020 and 2021.

Here’s my understanding of what happened. First, the setup.

The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach together are responsible for a huge percentage of shipping into the Western United States.
There was a rule in the Port saying you could only stack shipping containers two containers high.
This is despite the whole point of shipping containers being to stack them on top of each other so you can have a container ship.
This rule was created, and I am not making this up, because it was decided that higher stacks were not sufficiently aesthetically pleasing.
If you violated this rule, you lost your right to operate at the port.
In normal times, this was annoying but not a huge deal.
Thanks to Covid-19, there was increased demand to ship containers, creating more empty containers, and less throughput to remove those containers.
Normally one would settle this by changing prices, but for various reasons we won’t get into price mechanisms aren’t working properly to fix supply shortages.
Trucking companies started accumulating empty containers.
The companies ran out of room to store the containers, because in many places they could only stack them in stacks of two, and there was no practical way to move the containers off-site.
Trucks were forced to sit there with empty containers rather than hauling freight.
This made all the problems worse, in a downward spiral, resulting in a standstill throughout the port.
This was big enough to threaten the entire supply chain, and with it th

...
Save the kid, ruin the suit; Acceptable utility exchange rates; Distributed utility calculations; Civic duties matter
by spkoc — 2021-10-28T11:51:52.057Z

This is a follow up to my rambly incoherent comment on https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cujpciCqNbawBihhQ/self-integrity-and-the-drowning-child

Let's put some rough math on the drowning example

Statistical value of human life is $5,000,000.

Death of a child is a massive utility loss for parents and close relatives(several of them might even be willing to die in an attempt to save the child!)...

Death of a child is a utility hit of ... $15,000,000 for various people. Rough number, but I don't think grossly inflated, if anything probably too low.

A good suit is like $5000(?).

If you think there's a 1% chance that taking 10 seconds to take off the suit, will kill the kid, you're expected values are -$150,000 vs -$5,000.

Now. It's -$150,000 of OTHER people's utility vs $5000 of your own.

But if you take the suit saving option, this implies that your exchange rate of OTHER PEOPLE utility to PERSONAL utility is like 30 to 1. That's pretty much an awful person, in my opinion. A literal car thief converts less than 2 OTHER for 1 PERSONAL.

Society should have some standards for what individual utility functions are acceptable

Claim 1.

We should expect people to care about other people, as in there should be SOME exchange rate between OTHER utility and PERSONAL utility.

Corollary

Individual preferences are off the table. Ah but what is individual?

We firewall people's truly ... individual preferences. You like oranges or pineapples, who cares. We only require that you care SOME AMOUNT about the people around you as well. Anything purely personal is no one else's business.

But what is purely personal? Maybe the existence of a meat eater or a broccoli eater produces negative utility for me... whatever we come up with some rule based definition of personal, if your society ends up being too intrusive you'll find out in the violent rebellion later on.

Claim 2.

The exchange rate should probably be (less than 2 OTHER) to 1 PERSONAL.

And even that's high. Maybe like 1.1 OTHER to 1 PERSONAL.

Also there's some tolerance to ignoring small utility inefficiencies. Like you should give money to the homeless on the pure local utility calculation, but it's not that big a deal. Injure someone by speeding to not miss the first 10 minutes of a movie.... yeah throw them in the hole, officer.

Also 1 - 1 is probably ... not computationally efficient. Like individuals know themselves best...

Actuall...
Voting for people harms people
by CraigMichael — 2021-10-28T08:29:13.075Z

So, look, The Culture War totally sucks, right? I mean, really, it more than sucks. I've put it this way before:

The Culture War is The Nothing. (If you're an American and you're not sure what The Nothing is, I'm probably envious of your youth. You should know the 80s were cool and The NeverEnding Story was part of what made it that way.)

The Nothing was a force that ate imagination. The Culture War eats up our opportunities to talk about things other than The Culture War. Some of those conversation topics may be important, or fun, or interesting or other bomb-ass adjectives. I really feel like I'm missing out on the kinds of conversations I had all the way back in 2010. The quality of my life has been significantly diminished by this. Am I alone here?

What if people pledged to stop voting for people? You could still vote for initiatives, referendums, amendments and all that, those are basically ideas. What you can't vote for are people because, right now, those people are proxies for waring tribes.

In this way, if someone tries to engage you in a candidate- or party-related culture war topic, the conversation might go like this:

You: "Uhh... sorry if this is awkward, but, look, I took this pledge to not to vote for people. So you can talk with me about this if you want to, but I'm not going to vote for [insert person or party here] or against [insert person or party here] because I don't vote for people anymore."

Voter: "Why?"

You: "The Culture War is causing humans harm and I don't want to be part of something that causes humans harm if I can avoid it. The Culture War is centered around candidates so I'm not voting for candidates. There may be some harm-reduction a vote could hypothetically contribute to, but it's unlikely my vote will make a difference one way or another, so I'm more concerned about the harm caused from culture war externalities. If The Culture War goes away, or becomes substantially less harmful, maybe I'll go back to voting again."

(It would be nice to cinch this with a smart contract or Beeminderish thing. I can't really think of how that would work, but if you have ideas let me know. In lieu of that maybe go old-school and write an affidavit and get it notarized. Both would require some good enough quantification of culture war levels to be meaningful.)

So this would (1) Draw attention to the harm caused by The Culture War (2...
Selfishness, preference falsification, and AI alignment
by jessicata — 2021-10-28T00:16:47.051Z
Link: https://unstableontology.com/2021/10/28/selfishness-preference-falsification-and-ai-alignment/

If aliens were to try to infer human values, there are a few information sources they could start looking at. One would be individual humans, who would want things on an individual basis. Another would be expressions of collective values, such as Internet protocols, legal codes of states, and religious laws. A third would be values that are implied by the presence of functioning minds in the universe at all, such as a value for logical consistency.

It is my intuition that much less complexity of value would be lost by looking at the individuals than looking at protocols or general values of minds.

Let's first consider collective values. Inferring what humanity collectively wants from internet protocol documents would be quite difficult; the fact a SYN packet must be followed by a SYN-ACK packet is a decision made in order to allow communication to be possible rather than an expression of a deep value. Collective values, in general, involve protocols that allow different individuals to cooperate with each other despite their differences; they need not contain the complexity of individual values, as individuals within the collective will pursue these anyway.

Distinctions between different animal brains form more natural categories than distinctions between institutional ideologies (e.g. in terms of density of communication, such as in neurons), so that determining values by looking at individuals leads to value-representations that are more reflective of the actual complexity of the present world in comparison to determining values by looking at institutional ideologies.

There are more degenerate attractors in the space of collective values than in individual values, e.g. with each person trying to optimize "the common good" in a way that means that they say they want "the common good", which means "the common good" (as a rough average of individuals' stated preferences) thinks their utility function is mostly identical with "the common good", such that "the common good" becomes a mostly self-referential phrase, referring to something with little resemblance to what anyone wanted in the first place. (This has a lot in common with Ayn Rand's writing in favor of "selfishness".)

There is reason to expect that spite strategies, which involve someone paying to harm others, are collective, rather than individu...
Ruling Out Everything Else
by Duncan Sabien (Inactive) — 2021-10-27T21:50:39.545Z

Clear communication is difficult. Most people, including many of those with thoughts genuinely worth sharing, are not especially good at it.

I am only sometimes good at it, but a major piece of what makes me sometimes good at it is described below in concrete and straightforward terms.

The short version of the thing is "rule out everything you didn't mean."

That phrase by itself could imply a lot of different things, though, many of which I do not intend. The rest of this essay, therefore, is me ruling out everything I didn't mean by the phrase "rule out everything you didn't mean."

Meta

I've struggled much more with this essay than most. It's not at all clear to me how deep to dive, nor how much to belabor any specific point.

From one perspective, the content of this essay is easy and obvious, and surely a few short sentences are all it takes to get it across?

From another perspective, if this were obvious, more people would have discovered it, and if it were easy, more people would do it, and if more people knew and acted in accordance with the below, the world would look very different.

So that's evidence that my "easy and obvious" intuition is typical minding or similar, and in response I've decided to err on the side of going slowly and being more thorough than many readers will need me to be. If you find yourself impatient, and eager to skip to the end, I do not have a strong intuition that you're making a mistake, the way I have in certain other essays.

I note that most of my advice on how to communicate clearly emerges fairly straightforwardly from a specific model of what communication is—from my assumptions and beliefs about what actually happens when one person says words and other people hear those words. So the majority of this essay will be spent transmitting that model, as a prerequisite for making the advice make sense.

The slightly less short version

Notice a concept you wish to communicate.
Form phrases and sentences which accurately match the concept as it lives in your mind. (For some thoughts on how to gain skill at this, look here.)
Notice the specific ways in which those phrases and sentences will mislead your audience/reliably trigger predictable confusions. (I say "notice" to equivocate between "actively check for" and "effortlessly perceive"—in my experience, it's the latter, but that comes from a

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They don't make 'em like they used to
by jasoncrawford — 2021-10-27T19:44:47.098Z
Link: https://rootsofprogress.org/old-vs-modern-stoves

Recently someone on Twitter posted a picture like this, commenting that this kind of stove still works after a hundred years, but “thanks to ‘progress’ and ‘improvement’ you have to replace your new one after 5 years.”

Columbian Stove Works No. 28 “Modern Mistress,” Ulster American Folk Park. Geograph / Kenneth Allen

Of course, durability is not the only attribute that matters.

A stove like this burns wood or coal. That fuel needs to be hauled into the house (and up the steps of a tenement), and the ashes carried out. Solid fuel, unlike natural gas, also generates smoke. If all is in proper order, the chimney carries the smoke away so that it merely pollutes your neighborhood. If not, the smoke could leak into the home, causing a major health hazard to both the lungs and the eyes.

Note also a few missing features:

An on-off control. This kind of stove, which is only one step advanced beyond an open-hearth fireplace, requires that you build the fire yourself. (One young woman’s 1868 diary entry reads, “Had an awful time to get breakfast, the fire would not burn.”)
A temperature dial. You build the fire and you get what you get. A skilled cook can vary the temperature by, e.g., moving the pots various distances from the firebox. But basically, good luck following a recipe.
“Self-cleaning” mode. Or, for that matter, any enamel or other protective coating. Cast iron stoves need to be cleaned ~daily and waxed regularly, or they will rust and wear out.

So, for most people, the convenience, cleanliness, and safety of a modern stove far outweigh its shorter lifespan (which, incidentally, is not 5 years, but 13–15, according to Consumer Reports). In other words: yes, modern stoves do represent progress and improvement, no scare quotes required.

The advantages of gas/electricity, in particular, also outweigh the downside of risking an interruption in these services—an example of Matt Ridley’s observation of how we move “from precarious self-sufficiency to safer mutual interdependence.”

But why can’t a modern stove last a hundred years? I don’t know the technical answer. The electric connections needed for the temperature control are sensitive, presumably. Probably the walls and door are thinner—using less material for cost and efficiency, vs. thick, heavy cast iron.

But I think I know the economic answer, which is: a modern stove designed and built to last a hundred years w...
Hegel vs. GPT-3
by Bezzi — 2021-10-27T05:55:18.296Z

The good is the idea, or unity of the conception of the will with the particular will. Abstract right, well-being, the subjectivity of consciousness, and the contingency of external reality, are in their independent and separate existences superseded in this unity, although in their real essence they are contained in it and preserved. This unity is realized freedom, the absolute final cause of the world. Every stage is properly the idea, but the earlier steps contain the idea only in more abstract form. The I, as person, is already the idea, although in its most abstract guise. The good is the idea more completely determined; it is the unity of the conception of will with the particular will. It is not something abstractly right, but has a real content, whose substance constitutes both right and well-being.

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

I bet this quote will sound vaguely familiar to most readers. I'll help you: it was used by Scott Alexander in his Nonfiction Writing Advice as an example of entirely unreadable abstract paragraph.

Like Scott, I won't advice any human to end up sounding like Hegel. But GPT-3 isn't human, so I prompted it with the above excerpt (using the Eleuther UI). I will remark that that there was no cherrypicking. I genuinely ran the prompt just twice with default parameters on the same input, and reported here the generated gibberish.

Two of the following paragraphs are GPT-3 output. The other one is the actual following paragraph from the Philosophy of Right. Now you can play this little game:

Easy mode: Carefully re-read the initial paragraph, check it against each one of the following, and guess which one is from actual Hegel.

Hard mode: You can't re-read the initial paragraph (if you didn't read it at all, read it now, then go for a 5-minutes walk and return). Trust your short-term memory, examine each of the following and guess which one is from Hegel.

I

It is a will, whose unity is the idea, which has become actual, but not as a power of some abstract thing in itself, but as the idea in itself. To be the good means to be the idea, that is, freedom. It means to be at home in one's right, and, in this sense, it is to be at home everywhere. And in this sense, it is a power.

II

In this idea well-being has value, not independently as the realization of the separate particular will, but only as universal well-being, as universal, that is,

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Everything Studies on Cynical Theories
by DanielFilan — 2021-10-27T01:31:20.608Z
Link: https://everythingstudies.com/2021/10/26/the-woke-up-call-a-review-of-cynical-theories/

A review of Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay's book "Cynical Theories", which casts it as a missive to moderate liberals to get them to reject illiberal strands of popular wokism.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Psychomagic | Chapter 2: The Global Neuronal Workspace
by Henry Prowbell — 2021-10-26T18:54:49.386Z

This is a Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality fan-fiction which contains spoilers. If you haven't, you should read or listen to Eliezer Yudkowsky's original work before reading this.

<< Chapter 1

White marble the floors, ochre the sculptured walls and grey the vaulted ceilings. Harry and Hermione walked together through the maze of ancient corridors that was Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

“I must say Harry, I wasn’t expecting this. I thought you were all about logic and rational thinking – not emotions,” said Hermione. “I really don’t know how to feel about this. It’s either a really positive development or the start of something truly disastrous.”

They rounded another corner passing a painting that showed a group of dogs sitting around a table playing exploding snap. Harry was sure they had walked past this one before but Hogwarts had a way of arranging its corridors so that you tended to reach your destination if you just walked with sufficient confidence towards the place where you felt a room should be.

“The start of something truly disastrous?” asked Harry.

“Well, aren’t you afraid this might, you know, turn out really really bad? Using magic to mess with your mind – don’t you see how that could go wrong?”

“That is something that I’ve thought about. But I don’t see how magical research into psychology should be any more dangerous than research into physics which is what we’ve been doing so far – in fact there are good arguments that researching physics should be much more dangerous”

Hermione was growing visibly more worried so he quickly changed tack. “But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. All I’m suggesting we do is work through this book.”

Of all the magic they could learn it had been obvious that boosting their ability to think more effectively should be the first they focused on, if it indeed existed. But it wasn’t immediately obvious that it did. A cursory survey of the library hadn’t thrown up any spells like that.

And Harry’s Hufflepuff part did think Hermione had a point. Brute forcing a massive change to your neural architecture did sound like something that could go very wrong. Would disrupting the balance between the billions of interacting neurons in his brain immediately trigger some kind of mental breakdown?

Assuming it was possible to do safely, would he even want to do something that co...
X-Risk, Anthropics, & Peter Thiel's Investment Thesis
by Jackson Wagner — 2021-10-26T18:50:03.300Z

This story is cross-posted from my blog, jacksonw.xyz, and from the EA Forum.

Summary: I analyze an essay by Peter Thiel, in which he explains:

How markets are incentivized to ignore the risk of civilizational collapse.
How this introduces distortions in both market prices and our thinking.
How to attempt to correct for these distortions using "The Optimistic Thought Experiment"
A big-picture view of financial history as a single "Great Boom" built on the uncertain hope that capitalist civilization will ultimately be proven viable and achieve existential security.

I then add my own musings about how these ideas might usefully connect with the goals of longtermist Effective Altruism.

EA/Rationalist Portfolio Design: An Unsolved Problem Way Over My Head

Rationalists and EAs have discussed how our values and beliefs should affect how we invest:

For altruistic donations, the utility of money is roughly linear with increasing wealth, rather than having diminishing returns like with increasing personal wealth. This probably means that we should be willing to use more leverage and invest in a higher-risk, higher-expected-return portfolio?
Popular types of "socially-responsible investing" are sadly not very effective by EA lights, but this could be changed. Conversely, divestment is often considered to be an ineffective strategy, but done in the right way perhaps it could work well.
Or perhaps we should do the opposite, using the logic of "mission hedging" to investing in bad things so we have more money to deploy in worlds where bad things grow larger. (More details on mission hedging here.)
Perhaps we could pursue a variant of mission hedging that is less related to divestment and "sin funds" and more based on prediction-market hedging of specific events, like how a presidential election might change the tractability of a certain cause.
There is a rich discussion around the idea of "patient philanthropy" or "investing to give". Investing money now and waiting to spend it later might be a good idea simply because of the growth rate of the economy, or because it allows us to wait and identify better opportunities for impact later, or to ensure the long-term health and viability of the EA movement, or perhaps even because having a store of capital around means that we can employ some of the other do-gooder financial schemes on this list! (See a detailed report on patient philanth

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