trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Matrix completion prize results
by paulfchristiano — 2023-12-20T15:40:04.281Z

Earlier this year ARC posted a prize for two matrix completion problems. We received a number of submissions we considered useful, but not any complete solutions. We are closing the contest and awarding the following partial prizes:

$500 to Elad Hazan for solving a related problem and pointing us to

this paper

$500 to Som Bagchi and Jacob Stavrianos for their analysis in

this comment

.
$500 to Shalev Ben-David for a reduction to computing the

gamma 2 norm

.

Our main update from running this prize is that these problems are hard and there’s probably not a simple solution we are overlooking. My current guess is that it’s possible to achieve a polynomial dependence on the precision ε, but not the logarithmic dependence we desired; even this weaker result seems like it will be challenging.

Thanks to everyone who took time to think about this problem.

What this means for ARC

In this section I’ll try to briefly describe the relationship between these problems and heuristic estimators. I’ll use the context and notation from

this talk

. I don’t expect this discussion to be detailed enough to be meaningful to anyone who doesn’t already have a lot of context on ARC’s work, and I think most readers should wait to engage until we publish a more extensive research update next year.

One of ARC’s main activities this year has been refining our goals for heuristic estimators by finding algorithms, finding evidence for hardness, and clarifying what properties are actually needed for our desired alignment applications. This contest was part of that process.

In early 2023 ARC hoped to find an estimator G such that for any matrix A and any argument π, the heuristic estimate G(vTAATv∣π) would be a non-negative quadratic function of v. The two problems we proposed are very closely related to achieving this goal in the special case where π computes a sparse set of m entries of AAT. We now expect that it will be algorithmically difficult to ensure that G(vTAATv∣π) is a non-negative quadratic; as a result, we don't expect this property to be satisfied by the kind of natural heuristic estimator we're looking for.

We made a related update based on another result: Eric Neyman proved that unless P=PP, there is no fast estimator G that satisfies our other desiderata together with the property G(f(x)∣π)≥0 whenever π proves that f(x)≥0 for all x. Instead, the best we can hope for is that G(f(x)...
What's the minimal additive constant for Kolmogorov Complexity that a programming language can achieve?
by Noosphere89 — 2023-12-20T15:36:50.968Z

This is a question that I got from these posts, which essentially talked about how the constant issue impacts discussions of simplicity, and thus I wanted to ask a question about Kolmogorov Complexity:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uWdAKyHZMfoxDHcCC/simplicity-arguments-for-scheming-section-4-3-of-scheming#What_is__simplicity__

https://joecarlsmith.com/2021/10/29/on-the-universal-distribution#iii-is-everything-equivalent-up-to-a-finite-fudge-factor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity#Invariance_theorem

What's the lowest additive constant that can be achieved by a programming language while still being Turing-Complete?

Or equivalently, what's the least overhead that you must have in order to describe an object like a computer program or string?

Bonus points for not only establishing a lower bound, but either finding a programming language that achieves the lower bound and showing the source, or actually creating a programming language that achieves the lower bound.

As a side question, I'd also like estimations of how much overhead/the additive constant is added to popular languages like Python, Java, C, C++, and Rust.
Legalize butanol?
by bhauth — 2023-12-20T14:24:33.849Z
Link: https://www.bhauth.com/blog/food/butanol.html

ethanol

Alcoholic drinks are popular in most of the world. Excessive consumption of them is also a major public health problem. Bans have been attempted, sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully, but some people argue that alcohol plays a necessary role in social interactions.

Alcoholic drinks contain ethanol, which is metabolized to acetaldehyde, which is metabolized to acetate. In cells, ethanol is mostly unreactive but can bind to receptors. Acetaldehyde reacts with lots of stuff, mostly reversibly but sometimes irreversibly. Small amounts of acetate are essentially irrelevant, mostly providing calories.

Acetaldehyde can inactivate enzymes by causing crosslinking. Large amounts of it are generally bad. We can separate out the effects of ethanol itself and acetaldehyde by looking at people who metabolize acetaldehyde slowly.

About 50% of people of Northeast Asian descent have a dominant mutation in their acetaldehyde dehydrogenase gene, making this enzyme less effective, which causes the alcohol flush reaction, also known as Asian flush syndrome. A similar mutation is found in about 5–10% of blond-haired blue-eyed people of Northern European descent. In these people, acetaldehyde accumulates after drinking alcohol, leading to symptoms of acetaldehyde poisoning, including the characteristic flushing of the skin and increased heart and respiration rates. Other symptoms can include severe abdominal and urinary tract cramping, hot and cold flashes, profuse sweating, and profound malaise. Individuals with deficient acetaldehyde dehydrogenase activity are far less likely to become alcoholics, but seem to be at a greater risk of liver damage, alcohol-induced asthma, and contracting cancers of the oro-pharynx and esophagus due to acetaldehyde overexposure.

— Wikipedia

alternatives to ethanol

Ethanol is what's in drinks because it's produced naturally by a common type of fermentation, it prevents growth of most harmful microbes, and the yeast produced has some nutritional value. But our modern industrial civilization is no longer bound by such prosaic concerns. Can we do better?

ether

Studies, including that of an ether addict in 2003, have shown that ether causes dependence; however, the only symptom observed was a will to consume more ether. No withdrawal symptoms were prevalent.

— Wikipedia

Diethyl ether has the same direct effect as ethanol, but mostly...
A short dialogue on comparability of values
by cousin_it — 2023-12-20T14:08:29.650Z

Q: Are all of a person's values comparable with each other? For example, is a candlelit dinner comparable to a sunset walk on a beach?

A: Of course. You can ask the person to choose between these two things. Their answer will give you information about what they value more.

Q: What if the person can't choose?

A: Then they probably value these two things about equally.

Q: Okay, I have another question. Are all abstract concepts comparable to each other by weight?

A: Come again?

Q: I mean, we can ask a person: "Is one mile heavier than one hour or vice versa?" That will give you information about that person's weight function, do they assign more weight to one mile or one hour.

A: The person can't choose, because the question is nonsense.

Q: But by your own argument above, doesn't that mean they weigh these things about equally?

A: It's different, because the question about value feels more meaningful to the person, even if they can't give an answer.

Q: But a question can feel meaningful without being about anything real. For example, questions about gods and demons feel meaningful to many people. What if questions about which thing is more valued are also like that?

A: The difference is that value doesn't only manifest in answers to questions, it also manifests in what actions people choose.

Q: Do you mean, for a specific binary choice you can imagine a person in a room faced with two buttons and so on?

A: Exactly.

Q: Very well. Imagine a person in a room faced with two buttons, saying "one mile is heavier than one hour" and "vice versa".

A: Screw you!

Tedious explanation of the joke: I've long been puzzled by the argument that we can ask people to choose between things, therefore people have preferences. Today I realized how to kick that argument down: by pointing out that you can ask people anything at all. So the mere act of asking can't be evidence that the question is meaningful. Very quickly this dialogue was born, I hope you like it.
Inside View, Outside View... And Opposing View
by chaosmage — 2023-12-20T12:35:48.509Z

Summary: I argue that the very useful concepts of inside view and outside view are even more useful when completed with a third, equally fundamental, opposing view.

Epistemic status: I am very sure this is a good way to model my own thinking. I suspect it will be useful for more of us. But I don't know how many, because it’s about a fairly meta organization of cognition, where we should expect a lot of interindividual variance.

What is an Opposing View?

It is a type of cognition that does not neatly fit into the categories of inside and outside view.

It’s different from the outside view

…in content: it goes into some detail, rather than be satisfied with a reference class
…and in the underlying emotion: it’s motivated, focused and directional.

It’s different from the inside view

…in content: the details aren’t systematically connected to each other, so there’s little effort/attention to changes in them
…and in the underlying emotion: negative, suspicious and not by default entangled with one's self.

While the inside view is assertive and the outside view is detached, the opposing view is critical.

Why might you oppose this concept?

The duality of inside view and outside view is one of the best tools we have. Just on priors it should be expected that any alternative to it is likely inferior.
Part of their usefulness is that they're simple. Adding complexity is always a cost - at the very least it muddles the waters.
In this case maybe adding another view could create a kind of three body problem where interactions become too complicated to be predicted deterministically?
Obviously we can be against things. It does not automatically follow that opposition should be as important as inside and outside view.
Maybe it’s sufficient to understand one’s own opposition as a flavor of inside view, a stance “in favor of the opposite of that” where the opposite just happens to be less well-defined than what is opposed? Or as an outside view that just happens to add details on the negative aspects of a thing?

So why do I use this concept?

I basically do it because it works for me. I seem to map my own mind better than I mapped it before. This resolves some puzzles and makes my cognition appear better-ordered to myself.

I had aggressive thoughts, and trouble classifying them either as inside or as outside views. They didn’t fit with my other inside views, because:

They were much less detailed

...
Heuristics for preventing major life mistakes
by SK2 — 2023-12-20T08:01:09.340Z

Edit: If you are interested in this subject, I'd like to interview you to learn about your own experience with making difficult life mistakes. Hearing people's stories will help validate my framework and give me material for future essays. And I might be able to offer some interesting insights to you also. Please add me on Discord (username: chrisw5823). I would really appreciate it!

Making mistakes is fine; making major life-altering mistakes is something I recommend trying to avoid. In this post I will introduce a framework that can help with this.

The study of mistakes is fascinating from the perspective of rationality and biases. And from a practical perspective, it's very high impact. In my case, there are several mistakes I've made in the past that I'd be willing to pay at least a year of my salary to undo.

Below is a short intro to a few of my main principles. I also compiled various heuristics/principles in a diagram here. It's a graph where related heuristics are connected to each other by an edge. (I made this for my own purposes and am uploading as-is for now, sorry if some terms/lingo don't make sense to others.)

A few of my most important principles

Asking "what's far?"

A major human bias is "near vs. far": we focus on the "here and now" and discount everything else:

We discount pain that will come to us in the future (hyperbolic discounting)

We forget the pain of mistakes that happened far in the past, so we keep repeating them.

We neglect things that are far from our senses/awareness/focus ("out of sight, out of mind").

To correct for this, make a frequent habit of asking yourself "what's far right now?". This is like your "radar" that will alert you to things you should be paying more attention to.

Pre-mortems

How many of you have had the following experience:

You have a decision to make. You carefully evaluate your choices and decide. Then, it is revealed that your decision had a bad outcome. Immediately you have an "oh no" moment and realize why it was a terrible decision. You see the obvious things you failed to consider, ask yourself "what was I thinking?", etc., but it's too late.

It's remarkable that within seconds of seeing the bad outcome of your decision, you can produce insights that you failed to produce during days of contemplating beforehand. Wouldn't it be nice if you could somehow force those insights to occur before the decision ...
What should be reified?
by herschel — 2023-12-20T04:52:53.826Z
Link: https://brothernin.substack.com/p/what-should-be-reified

I've said elsewhere, I think the sticking point of a lot of important questions is just this question: what should be reified? Another way to say this is: what are our ontological and axiological commitments? This is basically a cold take in many of my circles, but certainly not elsewhere, and I'd like to make this distinction as glaringly obvious as it is to me. Hopefully this post will be become trite and annoying to more people :).

Mathematics has the fortunate property of using axioms which are essentially solipsistic. In some sense they simply don't permit varying interpretations; alternative models belong to a different genus or theory or whatever. The further we get from math, and the larger and more complex the objects we want to study, the more destructive or lossy our abstractions are.

Models and frameworks exist for various purposes, they provide gripping points for interacting with the world. The abstractions we choose are where our existing intuitions, goals, etc leak into the model. This also isn't about explicit models necessarily, this question is underneath lots of intuitions, "embodied knowings", the whole lot.

Reifications make things easier to think about because they reduce dimensionality, or at least salient dimensionality. Maybe a goofy way to express the title of this post would be: "what subspace can we project into which preserves the structures we're concerned with?" Perhaps, better: "does this reification reduce complexity appropriately? And then, surely, we should also ask: "what structures exactly are we concerned with?"--which brings us back to the title of the post.

Part of the question then is also to ask, what should be dereified? This is part and parcel of the question. A lot of frameworks rely on dereifying large aspects of the domain, sometimes explicitly, and sometimes simply leaving them out of the discussion.

Ok dude, thanks for your philosophy 101 post.

No seriously, though. I think these distinctions are largely absent from our discourse, and in my experience, people are insensitive enough to them (or else just blended enough with their reifications) that they can't step out of them to investigate the abstractions they're using. Perhaps, part of the trouble here is that this process is relatively phenomenologically subtle. If someone is insensitive to the process by which they apprehend the world, then they take the output...
(In)appropriate (De)reification
by herschel — 2023-12-20T04:51:56.269Z
Link: https://brothernin.substack.com/p/inappropriate-dereification

So obviously there’s a 2x2 here: appropriate/inappropriate vs dereification/reification. I think the basic concepts here are unfortunately not that familiar to everyone, so I'll lay them out at least a bit.

Reification I've already discussed, and is perhaps worth reading if the word is not familiar to you from meditation discourse.

Inappropriate reification

'Inappropriate reification' is a concept which I get almost entirely from Mark, and which hasn't yet diffused much further than people directly following his stuff. A fine way to put this is something like, "pernicious over-updates". Mark uses this concept almost reflexively, to point at a pervasive pattern in transformative practice where people notice a pattern, causal structure, etc (spuriously or not), and then make updates in a way which is perhaps "inadequately epistemically parsimonious".

This is probably not a problem that's unique to practice, but it seems stickier or more problematic in that domain. My vague impression is that in the history of science, lots of people over-updated and then held on to whatever ideas they had for too long; this problem doesn't really appear that bad in our telling of history (I think?), because the broader community is able to make the right updates, at least eventually. Anyway, in some sense this is a very general pattern in human cognition and is not really particular to practice.

I think this framing as a sort epistemic misstep or maladjustment is probably decent. I should also say that the problem is not necessarily analyzed as epistemic, but I usually think about occurring at a phenomenological level, which is obviously upstream. I'm going to wave my hands here and say bayesian brain and leave it there.

Let's talk about the other three quadrants.

Appropriate reification

It probably goes without saying that basic functioning relies on various kinds of reification, let's say object permanence. Probably there's developmentally earlier stuff I've never heard of. A friend of mine criticized my reification post, saying that I seemed to be demonizing reification in principle (even though I said otherwise in the post). This is the obvious counterpoint: fabricating (read: phenomenally constructing) stability and distinction is something like the basis of perception whatsoever, and is useful! This is appropriate reification!

Everything else though is obviously going to be conte...
Escaping Skeuomorphism
by Stuart Johnson — 2023-12-20T03:51:00.489Z

In discussions about AI capabilities, there's a human aspect of how people access those capabilities which I think is important regardless of whether or not you're an AI doomer. Interface design can seem banal, but I think it's fundamental to how people interact with the singularity.

I.

When Apple invented the mouse, consumers didn't automatically know how to use it. Apple's hunch was that the quality ceiling of mouse-based interactions would be much higher than terminal or keyboard-based navigation because of the intuitiveness. They were right. They won again with the touchscreen; both interfaces are now ubiquitous.

But this was the first Apple mouse.

In both cases, although a new kind of input had been created, it took much longer for optimal ergonomics to develop. 40 years on, I think it's unlikely a mouse will ever release that is a substantial advance on ergonomics invented in the early 2010s - the Logitech G502 comes to mind. I think if you held an early mouse from any manufacturer, you'd feel that this is not the final form immediately.

Importantly, the barrier to making better mice wasn't the technology - mice are conceptually pretty simple, the interfaces needed already existed, and there's nothing special about the hardware. What took time was the development of software patterns that could take advantage of this new method of input. It took 12 years from the release of the first mouse for the standard two-buttons-and-a-wheel design to catch on.

Back in 1993, as I was watching many Excel users do their work, I noticed the difficulty they had moving around large spreadsheets. Finding and jumping to different sections was often difficult. I had the idea that perhaps a richer input device would help.
My original idea was the zoom lever. This was simply a lever, presumably for your non-mouse hand (i.e. on the left side of your keyboard if you're right-handed). When you push it away from you the spreadsheet zooms out. When you pull it towards you, it zooms back in.
I prototyped this by hooking a joystick up to my computer and using DDE to connect it to Excel for zooming. Using a joystick button along with the stick, I also had it do "data zooming", which was drilling in and out through Excel outlines.
This all seemed useful, so I showed it to the Hardware division at Microsoft. They were initially cool to the idea, which I presented as a zoom lever, and it didn'

...
Ronny and Nate discuss what sorts of minds humanity is likely to find by Machine Learning
by So8res — 2023-12-19T23:39:59.689Z

Context: somebody at some point floated the idea that Ronny might (a) understand the argument coming out of the Quintin/Nora camp, and (b) be able to translate them to Nate. Nate invited Ronny to chat. The chat logs follow, lightly edited.

The basic (counting) argument

Ronny Fernandez

Are you mostly interested in Quintin's newest post?

I haven’t read it but I don’t suspect it’s his best

So8res

I'm more interested in something like "what are the actual arguments here".

I'm less interested in "ronny translates for others" and more interested in "what ronny believes after having spoken to others", albeit with a focus on the arguments that others are making that various locals allegedly buy.

Ronny Fernandez

Sweet that’s way better

So8res

Options: (a) i start asking questions; (b) you poke me when you wanna chat; (c) you monologue a bit about places where you think you know something i don't

and obviously (d) other, choose your own adventure

Ronny Fernandez

Let's start real simple. Here is the basic argument from my point of view:

If there's a superintelligence with goals very different from mine, things are gonna suck real bad.
There will be a superintelligence.
Its goals will be very different from mine.

Therefore: Things will suck real bad.

I totally buy 1 and 2, and find 3 extremely plausible, but less so than I used to for reasons I will explain later. Just curious if you are down with calling that the basic argument for now.

So8res

works for me!

and, that sounds correct to me

Ronny Fernandez

Some points:

One of the main things that has me believing 3 is a sort of counting argument.
Goals really can just be anything, and we're only selecting on behavior.
Corrigibility is in principle possible, but seems really unnatural.
It makes sense to behave pretty much like a mind with my goals if you're smart enough to figure out what's going on, until you get a good coup opportunity, and you coup.
So like P(good behavior | my values) ~ P(good behavior | not my values) so the real question is P(my values),which seems real small

So8res

I agree with 1-4 and am shaky on 5

4 is slightly non-sequiturish, though true

Ronny Fernandez

4 is to establish 5

good behaviour in training, to be clear

So8res

my objection to 5 is "so the real question is"; i don't super buy the frame; there are things to look at like the precise behavior trajectory and the mind internals, an

...