trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Monthly Shorts 6/22
by Celer — 2022-07-03T23:40:22.024Z

Nifty Computer Things

I have a website! kellerscholl.com is the product of weeks worth of obsessing and fiddling with the little details, and I’m happy with the outcome.

arxiv-utils makes arXiv papers have names instead of numbers. Works smoothly, works everywhere.

I found a very useful map-builder for quickly coloring US states, countries, and more.

Fun fact: you can mark a deck of cards with IR-readable bar codes to track where every card is in a deck! There are reasons that gamblers want to crack open new decks

Words that demonetize you on Youtube.

Equilibria

For those of you playing along at home, among the list of distinctions graduates of my school have acquired is now included being convicted with the death penalty for insider trading in China. He apparently made $500k, which someone with a PhD in policy analysis can make in 2-3 years if they sell out to a consultancy in America. My conclusion is that we should have easier immigration laws.

If you want to know how to avoid being convicted of insider trading, by either of the obvious routes, I recommend reading Matt Levine’s Money Stuff, which has been excellent recently. You can get it as a newsletter if you don’t have access to the Bloomberg website.

Neat podcast transcript on multiple equilibria: Los Angeles apartments don’t come with refrigerators, unlike everywhere else. And on one hand, this is obviously absurd. A fridge is incredibly bulky, has weird sizing requirements, I get that Americans like their apartments much less furnished than Europeans (in Edinburgh you can move in and expect the previous tenants to have left couches and chairs), but refrigerators, really? And one theory might be that Angelenos are allergic to cold, explaining why AC isn’t universal in the hellhole of a state.

Queen Victoria going into mourning cancelled the London Season, where nobility and gentry would find suitable partners, for two years. Rather than simply delaying, they married peasants. Peer-commoner marriage increased by 40%.

Politics

danah boyd is looking for research assistants: I think fewer readers will want to apply for the job (basically checking to see if she’s interacting with literatures appropriately) than want to get an expert’s recommendation for how to get into the literatures of interest:

STS. Lots on infrastructures and sociotechnical imaginaries with a mix of SCOT, feminist STS, and occasionally some ANT

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Decision theory and dynamic inconsistency
by paulfchristiano — 2022-07-03T22:20:05.788Z

Here is my current take on decision theory:

When making a decision after observing X, we should condition (or causally intervene) on statements like “My decision algorithm outputs Y after observing X.”
Updating seems like a description of something you do when making good decisions in this way, not part of defining what a good decision is. (More.)
Causal reasoning likewise seems like a description of something you do when making good decisions. Or equivalently: we should use a notion of causality that captures the relationships relevant to decision-making rather than intuitions about physical causality. (More.)
“How much do I care about different copies of myself?” is an arbitrary question about my preferences. If my preferences change over time, it naturally gives rise to dynamic inconsistency unrelated to decision theory. (Of course an agent free to modify itself at time T would benefit by implementing some efficient compromise amongst all copies forked off after time T.)

In this post I’ll discuss the last bullet in more detail since I think it’s a bit unusual, it’s not something I’ve written about before, and it’s one fo the main ways my view of decision theory has changed in the last few years.

(Note: I think this topic is interesting, and could end up being relevant to the world in some weird-yet-possible situations, but I view it as unrelated to my day job on aligning AI with human interests.)

The transparent Newcomb problem

In the transparent version of Newcomb’s problem, you are faced with two transparent boxes (one small and one big). The small box always contains $1,000. The big box contains either $10,000 or $0. You may choose to take the contents of one or both boxes. There is a very accurate predictor, who has placed $10,000 in the big box if and only if they predict that you wouldn’t take the small box regardless of what you see in the big one.

Intuitively, once you see the contents of the big box, you really have no reason not to take the small box. For example, if you see $0 in the big box, you know for a fact that you are either getting $0 or $1,000. So why not just take the small box and walk away with $1,000? EDT and CDT agree about this one.

I think it’s genuinely non-obvious what you should do in this case (if the predictor is accurate enough). But I think this is because of ambiguity about what you want, not how you should make de...
Five routes of access to scientific literature
by DirectedEvolution — 2022-07-03T20:53:47.044Z

Tl;dr: It seems like you can get access to a large amount of scientific literature on DeepDyve for $500. This might be enough to meet the needs of researchers outside the university system.

The eleventh virtue is scholarship. Study many sciences and absorb their power as your own. Each field that you consume makes you larger. If you swallow enough sciences the gaps between them will diminish and your knowledge will become a unified whole. If you are gluttonous you will become vaster than mountains. It is especially important to eat math and science which impinges upon rationality: Evolutionary psychology, heuristics and biases, social psychology, probability theory, decision theory. But these cannot be the only fields you study. The Art must have a purpose other than itself, or it collapses into infinite recursion. - Eliezer Yudkowsky, Twelve Virtues of Rationality

Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive... That tension will not go away. - Stewart Brand

We have a literature on LessWrong on the costs and benefits of scholarship. Yet we might still neglect it. For a good, broad treatment of content fragmentation, check out Who Has All the Content? from 2017. Here, I promote this virtue by helping the reader consider the tradeoffs of five routes of access to the scientific literature.

Epistemic limitations: I haven't used all the services I'm describing. This is based on my own research needs, and it's possible that others would find it easier or harder to access what they need. This isn't comprehensive: it doesn't look at the cost of textbooks, for example.

Moral limitations: Some people think pirating the scientific literature is wrong, others think that information wants to be free. I'm not taking a side here. I'm just listing practical options, as well as some reasons why people might practice scientific literature piracy - even when they have legal access to the article they're looking for.

Free legal options

Within-section Tl;dr: This is probably adequate if you rarely need access to scientific articles, but happen to need a handful of new papers for some non-urgent reason.

There are free or low-cost alternatives to piracy. Preprints sometimes appear on a aRxiv.org. Sometimes, universities may offer public access to their articles for a moderate fee. If you email the corresponding authors (often indicated by a little 'letter' icon nex...
Toni Kurz and the Insanity of Climbing Mountains
by GeneSmith — 2022-07-03T20:51:58.429Z

This post has been recorded as part of the LessWrong Curated Podcast, and can be listened to on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Libsyn.

Content warning: death

I've been on a YouTube binge lately. My current favorite genre is disaster stories about mountain climbing. The death statistics for some of these mountains, especially ones in the Himalayas are truly insane.

To give an example, let me tell you about a mountain most people have never heard of: Nanga Parbat. It's a 8,126 meter "wall of ice and rock", sporting the tallest mountain face and the fastest change in elevation in the entire world: the Rupal Face.

I've posted a picture above, but these really don't do justice to just how gigantic this wall is. This single face is as tall as the largest mountain in the Alps. It is the size of ten empire state buildings stacked on top of one another. If you could somehow walk straight up starting from the bottom, it would take you an entire HOUR to reach the summit.

31 people died trying to climb this mountain before its first successful ascent. Imagine being climber number 32 and thinking "Well I know no one has ascended this mountain and thirty one people have died trying, but why not, let's give it a go!"

The stories of deaths on these mountains (and even much shorter peaks in the Alps or in North America) sound like they are out of a novel. Stories of one mountain in particular have stuck with me: the first attempts to climb tallest mountain face in the alps: The Eigerwand.

The Eigerwand: First Attempt

The Eigerwand is the North face of a 14,000 foot peak named "The Eiger". After three generations of Europeans had conquered every peak in the Alps, few great challenges remained in the area. The Eigerwand was one of these: widely considered to be the greatest unclimbed route in the Alps.

The peak had already been reached in the 1850s, during the golden age of Alpine exploration. But the north face of the mountain remained unclimbed.

Many things can make a climb challenging: steep slopes, avalanches, long ascents, no easy resting spots and more. The Eigerwand had all of those, but one hazard in particular stood out: loose rock and snow.

In the summer months (usually considered the best time for climbing), the mountain crumbles. Fist-sized boulders routinely tumble down the mountain. Huge avalanaches sweep down its 70-degree slopes at incredible speed. And the huge, concave fa...
Wonder and The Golden AI Rule
by JeffreyK — 2022-07-03T18:21:46.006Z

Just now I looked out my very picturesque window and saw a massive cloud jutting upward like a mountain peak framed by some trees and the sky high above…I whispered an audible “Wow”, it was truly majestic and beautiful like a great white mountain full of bright spots and dark cregs.

Wonder.

Will AI ever look up and say Wow?

If it did would it then wonder where the wonder came from?

Presumably it would know the cloud was a collection of water droplets forming and preparing to fall back to earth, but would it know the how and why of the cloud’s existence? Would it then express wonder about nature’s beautiful cycle of water going up and down and feeding the earth?

What is AI going to think about art?

AI will be able to make art, but will it desire to make art? Will it desire to experience the “Wow” of art? Might a science R&D AI decide to retire from its research and paint by the seaside instead?

Might AI achieve exhaustive knowledge of the earth and decide it needs to go explore the galaxy to remain interested? Rocketing off and leaving us alone? Searching for ever greater Wows?

I am both a secular humanist and a religious universalist and since I know people don’t know about religion sometimes, I’ll explain that; Universalism is the belief that all religions are valid and equal and though their tentacles down on earth are very divergent, they all go back up to heaven to the same source. Usually we chalk this divergence up to simply the same diversity that causes culture. Different strokes for different folks.

The fact that I’m stating I’m simultaneously an atheist and a theist might be lost on some of you or disputed by others, or seem kind of chill cool to the rest. It is definitely the chill cool. And for those who might view it as a contradiction, I won’t take time to explain why it’s possible, but I’m right here in front of you and it’s alive and well in me, so I hope that’s evidence enough for now.

But here’s why I bring this up; Religious people will discount AI misalignment once it becomes a big enough cultural/social discussion for them to pay attention. They will say that human person and being is the creation of God, and no machine could ever match it. They might even agree that AI could do amazing Research & Development at faster rates then humans, but they would then say, because AI will never look up at the clouds and say “Wow” then AI...
Nature abhors an immutable replicator... usually
by MSRayne — 2022-07-03T15:08:32.611Z

Epistemic status: Popped into my head yesterday and I am trying to clarify my reasoning about it out loud. I expect that I am overestimating the universality of this principle to at least some degree, and there is some chance that it's altogether wrong, but I think it may be a potentially useful framing.

The claim in a nutshell

Replicating information patterns tend to maintain a significant rate of mutation, even when near-perfect replication is possible in principle, as a result of coopetition between sub-patterns with their own interests, which are not always perfectly aligned with the interests of the whole pattern.

The argument

To the extent that an information pattern is a replicator, its sub-patterns (which form a Boolean lattice if composed ultimately of discrete minimal units, such as nucleotides) must also be replicators in the sense that they are copied whenever the whole is.
Whenever a replicator mutates - that is, when a copy of it is made with one or more minimal units modified compared to the parent - any sub-patterns not containing the mutated units will be unaffected, while those that do contain the mutation (including the whole original pattern) will essentially be "dead" and unable to replicate further in that lineage.
Thus to the extent that sub-replicators are separately acted upon by selection, they should tend, to first approximation, to evolve towards greater stability - less probability of mutation. They "want" to remain unchanged. (A good example of sub-replicators is genes within a genome. The entire genome is a replicator, but the individual genes are too, with their own independent interests.)
But, sometimes mutations make the resulting child replicator more fit than its parent for the current environment, which after all is the driver of evolution. So in the longer term, sub-patterns benefit from other sub-patterns besides themselves being mutable as long as there are peaks in the fitness landscape which can be climbed via that mutation.
So if sub-replicators are comparable in "influence" - if mutating them has roughly equal effects on the fitness of the whole replicator - they should tend to all "agree" to retain a small chance of mutating in return for the "expectation" that other sub-patterns will be the ones to do it instead, so that they can benefit from the increased fitness of the whole pattern.
If, however, one sub-pattern has a s

...
Post hoc justifications as Compression Algorithm
by Johannes C. Mayer — 2022-07-03T05:02:15.142Z

It seems that a thing that the human mind tries to do all the time, without being aware of it, is to reach a conclusion and then, after the fact, provide justification for why it is true. Compare this with first taking into account all the available evidence and then building a conclusion based on what the evidence says.

This mechanism is probably at work all the time. One hypothesis for its purpose is, that it can act as a sort of compression algorithm. If there is something where you carefully consider the evidence and reach a conclusion, it makes sense to just store the conclusion reached, instead of the entire process with which you reached it. From this conclusion, you can then reconstruct the argument. This allows you to just focus on the reconstruction of the conclusion you made, instead of going through the entire process of evaluating the argument again in detail.

This already has great potential to mislead, as each time you reconstruct the argument, you train to remember the things that support a specific outcome, while the arguments for the opposite outcome might get lost over time. This probably happens at least to some extent (especially with arguments for the other side, that you do not explicitly refute).

However, we have lots of innate intuitions. For example, that incest is wrong. Here this mechanism works the same, only that you might never really evaluated the evidence. You maybe never actually have gone through the evidence and reached a conclusion, but just wrote down your bottom line, based on how you feel about certain thoughts. For example, this could happen because we are genetically predisposed to feel negative about incest, but also because we are socially conditioned to dislike incest. In general, both genetics and social conditioning can determine how you feel about certain thoughts.

This algorithm might try to construct the previous argument, but without considering the specifics of the situation. If there is additional information, then it might be ignored. Possibly because there is the implicit assumption that you have also evaluated this piece of evidence already when forming your original conclusion (unless it sounds very alien to you). And of course, it also depends on how certain you are that you have some absolute truth. The more certain you are that what you think is correct, the less likely you are to evaluate new pieces of...
SOMA - A story about Consciousness
by Johannes C. Mayer — 2022-07-03T04:46:18.291Z
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp_Eroq5cOo

SOMA has a great story. I like it so much that I made a story video compilation about it, containing only the best things. The video actually presents a coherent story, that somebody can enjoy without any prior knowledge, even though ~92.5% of the content has been cut.

I think it has one of the best "stories" of all video games I know. However, I think the gameplay is not that great. So I think watching the video that I made is actually a superior experience to playing the game yourself.

I recommend the long video, but if you don't want to spend much time on this I recommend just watching the suit switch scene, which is only 6 minutes, and then seeing if you like it. This is one of the best scenes if not the best. It is part of the longer video. There are more scenes of similar quality in the longer video.
Sexual self-acceptance
by Johannes C. Mayer — 2022-07-03T04:26:46.801Z

I have noticed very often that I can't predict how my brain reacts towards women. I often expect that nothing special will happen, compared to talking to males. However very often sexual thoughts come to mind that seems out of place to me. Normally they are very short (1-5s) and visual, but with very low detail.

This would happen most often when meeting women for the first time. Normally within the first minute of meeting them. Actually, this does not only happen in meetings but even when I watch a video with a woman (I mean a normal video, not pornography/erotica). Also, the frequency and strength of this are proportional to the time to last orgasm. Although that correlation is much weaker for me than one would expect. Though I am trying to maximize the time between orgasms. If I would not do this, there might be a stronger correlation. Certainly, if there are many orgasms not far apart (e.g. on the same day), there would be no sexual thoughts at all.

My normal reaction now for years was to feel embarrassed about my own thoughts. Interestingly, I always fail to anticipate my thoughts. Thus far I have seen the arising of sexual thoughts as a bad thing. A failure of self-control. Maybe when I manage to not have sexual thoughts for some time, my brain seems to think that now this problem is gone, and then it gets disappointed when thoughts come up again.

However recently I have managed to actually sort of just let it happen. Not only the imagination but also the suppression of it, without judging it at all. I sort of just let it happen and observed it. Right as I was starting to think sexual thoughts, I was thinking in a flash that this is a part of myself and that fighting it with negative emotions does not make sense. And then I managed to just observe it over the next 3 seconds before it disappeared, without any strong negative feelings. And it still disappeared. The negative feelings were not required to make it disappear!

Learning to accept/love yourself is old wisdom. I think I was applying it to various degrees before. But never to this explicitly. This might help me, to avoid unproductive negative feelings in the future. I wonder if this will continue to work.

I could imagine that this actually increases the frequency and intensity of sexual thoughts as it might make me not suppress them as hard. But even if this is the case, the psychological relief might ...
Can we achieve AGI Alignment by balancing multiple human objectives?
by Ben Smith — 2022-07-03T02:51:34.279Z

Can we improve alignment of hypothetical superintelligent AGI by shaping their reward functions on a balance of multiple human objectives?

Perhaps one important key to AGI Alignment is not to overthink it. If we want AGI to avoid certain misaligned outcomes, maybe the key is to simply to design the reward function to be averse to those outcomes.

We are a long, long way from fully describing human objectives and preferences, and yet, we've come a long way from being unable to describe them at all. In other words, we can describe human objectives and preferences imperfectly, in a way that is probably sufficient to give an agent that understands what a "human" is some objective with respect to the way humans would like to be treated.

Human objectives have been defined in many different ways, and I won't attempt to summarize them all here, but some notable examples are:

psychological definitions like the Schwartz theory of basic values, which posits "Conformity, Tradition, Security, Power, Achievement, Hedonism, Stimulation, Self-Direction, Universalism, and Benevolence".
behavioral definitions such as avoidance of pain and seeking of pleasure
Biological definitions like maintaining chemical homeostasis through adequate food, water, and sleep, and drives such as the sex drive

There are also a number of ways to measure the fulfillment of human objectives used in psychology and other disciplines where it is necessary to objectively measure human objectives or needs. These include:

Physical: for some human objectives, it may be possible to physically observe e.g., lack of sleep
Behavioral: we can infer a human's objectives through their behavior. If a human walks to the kitchen fridge, or drives to a restaurant, these are clues the human seeks food
Revealed preferences: closely related to behavioral preferences, this term is often preferred in economic disciplines
Self-report: humans sometimes verbally self-report their own needs

Can we align AGI to human priorities by write a reward function that includes the fulfillment of some set of human objectives like the ones listed above? There are a number of possible objections, but of all the objections I anticipate, I also anticipate responses. Let's see how it might be done.

"Which objectives do we align to?"

The answer to this is quite simple: we align to some non-linear combination of all of them. Likely, we want a loss-averse fu...