trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
D&D.Sci Evaluation and Ruleset
by abstractapplic — 2020-12-12T15:00:20.984Z

This is a followup to the D&D.Sci post I made a week ago; if you haven’t already read it, you should do so now before spoiling yourself.

Here is the web interactive I built to let you test your solution; below is a complete explanation of the rules used to generate the dataset. You’ll probably want to test your answer before reading any further.

(Unless you’d prefer to enter your answer, then read through the rules with a slowly growing sense of vindication and/or concern before clicking “Begin Quest!”; or unless you’d like to completely ignore the spirit of the exercise and use the rules to improve your solution. I’m not the boss of you.)

Ruleset

Generation and Selection

An applicant for Adventurer College gets their stats by rolling two ten-sided dice for each stat and then adding them.

Not everyone who applies gets in. Only those with >60 total points are allowed entry; you, with your 62 points, barely made the cut. Of course, you only get the records for those who were accepted; this produces small but non-negligible selection effects.

Advantage and Disadvantage

On graduation, an Adventurer will inevitably find themselves in a party of 3-6 loyal friends who help each other with their Great Quests. Your chances of success are determined by how well you can contribute to a team like that (your Advantage), and how much you get in their way (your Disadvantage). These quantities are calculated as follows:

Everyone starts with 1 Advantage and 1 Disadvantage.
You can ignore the Dexterity score; in this world, it’s useless for everything Adventurers do except qualifying for Adventurer College.
Having unusually high stats allows you to help take skill checks for your team. For every non-Dexterity skill you have above 12 points, add 2 Advantage for every point it exceeds 12 by. (For example, if you had 15 Charisma, that would give you (15-12)*2=6 extra Advantage.)
Having unusually low stats means you cause trouble for your team. For every non-Dexterity skill you have below 8 points, add 3 Disadvantage for every point under 8. (For example, if you had 5 Charisma, that would give you (8-5)*3=9 extra Disadvantage.)
If your Strength is greater than your Constitution, you’ll end up committed to physical tasks you don’t have the stamina to see through: that’s +2 Disadvantage.
For similar reasons, if your Intelligence is greater than your Wisdom, that’s also +2 Disadvantage.
Bei

...
The institution of email
by KatjaGrace — 2020-12-12T10:50:08.468Z

There seems to be a common phenomenon where people get messages, then fail to respond to them, then feel bad. And the rarer strategy of actually dealing with all of one’s emails promptly doesn’t even seem obviously better. Was that how things were with letters or telegrams? Is it just that there are so many messages now, because they are easy to send?

Could email, say, have gone a different way?

I act as though I’m assuming email involves implied norms, though I didn’t agree to them. For instance, if someone writes me a personal message, I think I should not delete it without reading it, unless they deserve my disregard for some reason. If someone sends me a message asking me to do something, I act like I think I should do it in a timely fashion, if it is a reasonable request. If I write to someone, I feel like I should make it less terse than ‘ok.’. At least, many people seem to constantly feel bad for failing to uphold some standards that are I guess implicitly bought into by having an email address. (And not having an email address would be pretty wild.)

Was this bad luck, and we could instead have developed happier norms? For instance, that there is no expectation that one read emails, or that responding in about a month is proper, or that tersity is expected, like text messages? Or the norm that you are meant to respond within a few seconds, or consider it dead, like verbal speech? Or the norm where if you want to put something in someone else’s to-do list, you find a slot in their Calendly and send them money for it? My guess is no - the norms are mostly implied by the length and cost and permanence of the form. Could we have a form that better implies happier norms in that case?
The Flynn Effect Clarified
by PeterMcCluskey — 2020-12-12T05:18:53.327Z
Link: http://www.bayesianinvestor.com/blog/index.php/2020/12/11/the-flynn-effect-clarified/

I said in my review of WEIRDest
People
that the Flynn effect seems like a natural consequence of thinking
styles that became more analytical, abstract, reductionist, and
numerical.

I'll expand here on some questions which I swept under the rug, so that
I could keep that review focused on the book's most important aspects.

Cultural Bias

After reading WEIRDest People, I find that the goal of a culture-neutral
IQ test looks strange (and, of course, WEIRD). At least as strange as
trying to fix basketball to stop favoring tall people.

I found after writing that review that Muthukrishna and Henrich discuss
IQ in Innovation in the collective
brain
(hereinafter referred to as MH2016), saying roughly what I inferred from
WEIRDest People.

MH2016 says: "IQ measures the abilities that are useful at school and
work in these societies."

There's a good case to be made for removing accidental cultural bias.
Doing so will increase the test's ability to detect cognitive patterns
that are oriented toward science and technology.

Similar cultural biases pervade psychology. E.g. there are real cultural
differences about the wisdom of conformism, which lead me to doubt
there's a culture-neutral rule for what the correct answer is in the
Asch conformity test.

Strong cultural biases are built into the central ideas behind what we
call science. E.g. it's somewhat WEIRD to believe that we should seek
universal laws of nature, rather than expecting valuable knowledge to be
context-dependent knowledge.

Could a genuinely culture-neutral IQ test be developed? I presume it's
possible to shift the emphasis so that it measures holistic reasoning
more, and analytical reasoning less. But what would be a neutral mix of
those two? You could average over all humans currently alive, but that
would produce a rather different result than if you'd taken that
average 1000 years ago.

Changes of this nature seem likely to reduce the value of IQ tests at
satisfying the original goals behind testing, without satisfying
critics.

If I really wanted to develop a culture-neutral IQ test, I'd start with
the research that has been done on measuring cognitive abilities of
nonhuman animals and
software.
I suspect that that research has so far remained an obscure niche due to
confusion about whether it ought to measure something more universal
than the skills needed in current high-status jobs.

Timing

The rise of WEIRD cul...
On the stagnation of energy technology and the Cabal of Scientists
by df fd — 2020-12-12T04:24:24.869Z

[Epistemic status: conspiracy theory/raving of the mads]
We all know that GPD/standard of living all track with energy use, yet arguably the most convenient and widespread energy sources current are fossil fuels, which saw mass adoption with the start of the industrial revolution. Which happened, it can be said without hyperbole, eons ago [citation needed].

For some time, nuclear fission seems poised to replace fossil fuel, yet a series of unfortunate events permanently sour the public perception of this technology [Chernobyl, Fukushima]. Even in countries that push for nuclear fission as an energy source [France, South Korea, China], nuclear reactors are plagued with construction delays and cost overrun. The whole field is generally regarded as a dead-end and widely distrusted [citation needed].

Let us digress at this juncture and talk about the virtue of silence. The one rightful Caliph Eliezer once lamented that the secret of nuclear power was unwisely disclosed/leaked. That due to such disclosure, we are now living under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. He proposed that it may have been wiser for scientists, especially those that could coordinate, to form a cabal to keep dangerous power from unwise/unworthy hands. Yet reading between the lines, we can see that any form of empowerment is dangerous. We are now living with a higher quality of life than kings in the middle ages. It can also be argued that we have more power than them as well. For examples: a state militia with guns vs 10x the number of pikemen, truck transport vs horse transport, phone communication vs runner communication, etc. It is not hard to imagine with ever more power granted to our hands we would become ever more dangerous, so much so that future us would be to us now as we are now to medieval kings in the past. This is inherently destabilizing. Remember that medieval kings are immensely powerful beings, capable of changing the course of history. Imagine a billion of such individuals. Such a scenario is precisely what a Cabal of Scientists, if they exist, is meant to prevent.

Viewed from this lens, it is easy to see why in the civilized world, where cooperation and coordination are easier than their counterpart, every potent source of energy that could be turned to war is discredited and under heavy pressure to be phased out. Fission and fusion power are considered laughing s...
Avoiding Side Effects in Complex Environments
by TurnTrout — 2020-12-12T00:34:54.126Z
Link: https://avoiding-side-effects.github.io/

Previously: Attainable Utility Preservation: Empirical Results; summarized in AN #105

Our most recent AUP paper was accepted to NeurIPS 2020 as a spotlight presentation:

Reward function specification can be difficult, even in simple environments. Rewarding the agent for making a widget may be easy, but penalizing the multitude of possible negative side effects is hard. In toy environments, Attainable Utility Preservation (AUP) avoided side effects by penalizing shifts in the ability to achieve randomly generated goals. We scale this approach to large, randomly generated environments based on Conway’s Game of Life. By preserving optimal value for a single randomly generated reward function, AUP incurs modest overhead while leading the agent to complete the specified task and avoid side effects.

Here are some slides from our spotlight talk (publicly available; it starts at 2:38:09):

Agents only care about the parts of the environment relevant to their specified reward function.

We somehow want an agent which is "conservative" and "doesn't make much of a mess."

Before now, side effect avoidance was only demonstrated in tiny tabular domains.

Conway's Game of Life has simple, local dynamics which add up to complex long-term consequences.

SafeLife turns the Game of Life into an actual game, adding an agent and many unique cell types.

Crucially, there are fragile green cell patterns which most policies plow through and irreversibly shatter. We want the low-impact agent to avoid them whenever possible, without telling it what in particular it shouldn't do. This is where the AUP magic comes in.

We learn the AUP policy in 3 steps. Step one: the agent learns to encode its observations (the game screen) with just one real number. This lets us learn an auxiliary environmental goal unsupervised.

Step two: we train the agent to optimize this encoder-reward function "goal"; in particular, the network learns to predict the values of different actions.

Step three: we're done! We have the AUP reward function. Now we just learn to optimize it.

The full paper is here. Our Github.io page summarizes our results, with a side-by-side comparison of AUP to the baseline for randomly selected levels from the training distribution. The videos show you exactly what's happening, which is why I'm not explaining it here.

Open Questions

In Box AI safety gridworld, AUP required >5 randoml

...
Notes on Chastity
by David Gross — 2020-12-11T22:01:53.879Z

This post examines the virtue of chastity. It is meant mostly as an exploration of what other people have learned about this virtue, rather than as me expressing my own opinions about it, though I’ve been selective about what I found interesting or credible, according to my own inclinations. I wrote this not as an expert on the topic, but as someone who wants to learn more about it. I hope it will be helpful to people who want to know more about this virtue and how to nurture it.

What is chastity?

Chastity is usually defined as abstention from sex, or restriction of sex to certain moderate bounds, combined with a temperate regulation of the sexual appetite.

G.E.M. Anscombe asserted in 1972 that “chastity is simply the virtue whose topic is sex, just as courage is the virtue whose topic is danger and difficulty.”[1] But by 1972, and certainly by now, people seem much more concerned with other sexual virtues: is your sexuality authentic to your desires? is it generous to your partners? is it respectful of other people? is it skillful? is it sufficiently cautious? Chastity almost never makes the list anymore.

Chastity is related to temperance, continence, modesty (“the outpost and safeguard of chastity,”[2] according to The Catholic Encyclopedia), purity, decency, and dignity. It is sometimes confused with “celibacy,” which is usually defined as complete abstinence from sex and marriage, for instance as part of the qualifications for joining a monastic or priestly order.

What happened to chastity?

From the looks of things, chastity has long been a virtue more honored in the breach than in the breeches. But for a long time people at least paid lip service to it and thought that it was a virtue. Nowadays (except in the case of schoolchildren, who are sometimes asked in abstinence-only sex education classes to pretend as though adults value chastity), it’s rare to see chastity mentioned as an important character trait. So what happened? The whirlwind version of the just-so story I’ve heard about Euro-American culture goes something like this:

Even when chastity was held in esteem, there has always been a libertine subculture who did not buy it, believing that those who urged chastity were essentially killjoys who had an irrational disgust for sex and thought everyone else should too. This subculture waxed and waned in its influence.

The collapse of the hegemonic...
[Expired] 20,000 Free $50 Charity Gift Cards
by WilliamKiely — 2020-12-11T20:02:13.674Z

Update: The "20,000 free $50 Charity Gift Cards" opportunity expired on 12/11 around 10 PM EST, about 9 hours after it opened, according to an update on the website that reads "We’re happy to share that together, we’ve given away 30,000 Charity Gift Cards to support the causes you care about, for a total of $2 million donated."

20,000 Free $50 Charity Gift Cards made available on 12/11 at 1 PM EST

Link: https://redefinegifting.tisbest.org/

(This is a cross-post of my EA Forum post.)

Take 30 seconds to Sign up now to receive a $50 Charity Gift Card to give to the nonprofit of your choice:

Steps:

Go to: https://redefinegifting.tisbest.org/

Sign up with your name and email address:

Your $50 Charity Gift Card was sent to your email. Take another ~2-5 minutes to follow the instructions in the email you received to donate the money to a nonprofit of your choice.

I received my $50 gift card and donated it to MIRI.

I will update this post promptly upon learning that the 20,000 gift cards have run out.

Sign up here: https://redefinegifting.tisbest.org/

If you're interested in another opportunity like this, see Make a $10 donation into $35 (available until December 25th).
Death Positive Movement
by lejuletre — 2020-12-11T18:29:13.879Z

The Death Positive Movement was started by Caitlin Doughty to build a culture of positivity around the prospect of human mortality. The 8 Tenets of the Death Positive Movement are outlined as follows:

I believe that by hiding death and dying behind closed doors we do more harm than good to our society.
I believe that the culture of silence around death should be broken through discussion, gatherings, art, innovation, and scholarship.
I believe that talking about and engaging with my inevitable death is not morbid, but displays a natural curiosity about the human condition.
I believe that the dead body is not dangerous, and that everyone should be empowered (should they wish to be) to be involved in care for their own dead.
I believe that the laws that govern death, dying and end-of-life care should ensure that a person’s wishes are honored, regardless of sexual, gender, racial or religious identity.
I believe that my death should be handled in a way that does not do great harm to the environment.
I believe that my family and friends should know my end-of-life wishes, and that I should have the necessary paperwork to back-up those wishes.
I believe that my open, honest advocacy around death can make a difference, and can change culture.

I was familiar with the DPM through several friends long before I was aware of rationality. Getting involved with rationality and LessWrong has put me in contact with many people who hope to live forever (or a very very long time), who believe that death is unequivocally bad, and who have devoted their lives in one way or another to combating death and reducing it wherever possible.

On the face of it, these seem very contradictory. The Death Positive Movement is all about coming to terms with the inevitability of death, not trying to fight it. And yet there isn't anything in the 8 Tenets that seem to stick out as being at odds with a desire for a long/never-ending/indefinite lifespan. (Unless you disagree about death being inevitable, in which case I'm especially interesting in hearing your thoughts.)

I have always had some degree of thanatophobia (death anxiety) throughout my life, ranging from dull dread to daily panic attacks. The DPM has always appealed to me as a way of combating this death anxiety: If I could conceptualize death as less of a boogeyman, maybe it wouldn't seem so scary. If I could talk about death openly, maybe...
The Good Life Quantified
by Jacob Falkovich — 2020-12-11T17:52:21.219Z

Cross-posted, as always, from Putanumonit.

Rob Wiblin writes at

80,000 Hours

, a site for systematically thinking about how to have a positive impact for the world through your career. The site tends to an analytical approach, with explicit models for

comparing global priorities on three axes of impact

or

planning your career with an explore/exploit structure

. It’s a lot like Putanumonit for people who care about improving the world instead of just about, uhh,

getting laid

and

buying soap

.

This summer Rob

recorded a podcast with Russ Roberts of EconTalk

, and even though Russ is sympathetic to the Effective Altruism project, he is less sympathetic to 80,000 Hours’ approach of putting numbers on improving the world. He starts by discussing some failures of applying the systematic/quantitative approach to philanthropy, such as deworming charity recommendations that were based on an RCT that has since been called into question. He then expresses a broader skepticism of the applicability of the quantitative approach to life in general:

Russ: In principle, that all sounds great. But, I don’t really actually think it’s the right way to think about how to live your life, or how to live your career. So, let me try to suggest some things I find troubling about it.

So, you mentioned a whole bunch of factors. They’re all reasonable. Any one of them is extremely reasonable. You should tackle an important problem. You should tackle a problem that people have not successfully solved, that you might have a chance of improving, that you might have an impact. It’s a variation really of expected value theory to me. […]

So, when I think about that enormous range of trade-offs within economics, and then I think about, ‘Oh, but I didn’t have to be an economist. I could have been, say, an English professor,’ would you conclude that I did the right thing? I happen to like economics now, but at the time I also liked fiction. If I had devoted my life to helping 25 students a class and maybe a hundred students a year to become deeply devoted to the fiction of William Faulkner, or to the poetry of Alexander Pope, would that have been an inferior life or a better life to the life I’ve chosen? I don’t know how to answer that question. I don’t think anybody could answer that question. Do you? […]

I think that kind of [broad utilitarian] calculus is just not obviously correct.

I’m somewhat sy...
Flights of wonder
by KatjaGrace — 2020-12-11T10:50:11.063Z

Today I put up the last page in AI Impacts’ (primarily Ronny Fernandez’s) investigation into how human-made flying machines compare to evolved ones. (Relevant to how we expect human efforts to build minds to compare to evolved minds.) Evolution mostly won.

Some other interesting things I learned in the process of editing this:

Monarch butterflies can probably fly at least 100km on the energy in about a quarter of a raspberry (not counting the energy they get from the wind, which seems to be central to their flying methods. And not to suggest that they eat raspberries, I am just more familiar with those than flower nectar).

People who estimate monarch butterfly ‘performance parameters’ sometimes do so by attaching plasticine to dead butterflies to get them to the right weight and balance, and then hand-throwing them across the room and noting measurements for those “in which no obvious pitching up or stalling occurred after release” (or at least they did in 1979).

Paramotors are a thing. They are like a giant fan you wear on your back to turn your paraglider into a powered vehicle.

A model airplane crossed the Atlantic on a gallon of fuel (this was the furthest per Joule of the machines in our collection).

This pedal-powered flying machine crossed the English Channel.

This might be a slightly different one: