trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
be the person that makes the meeting productive
by Oldmanrahul — 2025-01-18T22:32:43.640Z

How many times have you been in a meeting where people seem to talk past each other? Everyone is smart and well-intentioned, but you don’t seem to be making any progress.

Here’s the likely problem, you don’t have a tangible thing to anchor your discussions around. You need something real (a doc, a sketch, a prototype) to create a focal point for the team’s attention, collaboration, and energy.

This thing doesn’t need to be polished, it just needs to exist. Actually, it’s better if it’s a little rough because humans are natural correction machines. We love smoothing out the wrinkles. A rough whiteboard sketch sparks discussion, a “perfect” blueprint in your head doesn’t.

When you work with hypotheticals, there’s a huge risk of spinning in circles. This is because everyone’s mental model is slightly different. Moreover, we don’t have access to each other’s internal states. We need to externalize it on a whiteboard, a piece of paper, or a clay model to kick off the alignment process.

A few years ago I read an excerpt from Ken Kocienda’s book “Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs,” that spoke to me. In it, he walks through the imaginary scenario of deciding which breed of puppy is cuter.

Consider the scenario. Two people have imagined two cute puppies. I assert mine is cuter. What do we do now? Do we have a cuteness argument? How can we? We have nothing to go on. Do I try to describe the puppy in my mind and attempt to sway you that my vision of a golden retriever puppy is superlatively cute—because everyone knows that golden retrievers are the cutest of all dog breeds—and therefore, my conjured mental picture is unbeatably cute. […] Let’s say you’re my manager. What do you do now . . . pull rank?

The scenario is ridiculous. There’s no way to resolve this conflict. Without a concrete and specific example of a cute puppy, there’s no way to make progress. Now, I can make this easier. Here are pictures of two cute puppies. Now we can talk about the merits of these options.

Without tangible examples, brainstorming is harder than it needs to be.

So, be the antidote to unstructured discussions. Be the person that makes everyone’s lives easier. Share your screen, grab the whiteboard marker, and give people something to react to. It's that simple.

If you found this post valuable, you can subscribe to see more of my writing by subs...
Beards and Masks?
by jefftk — 2025-01-18T16:00:04.049Z

In general, you're

not
supposed to wear a beard with a respirator mask (N95, P100, etc),
at least not in a way where you have facial hair

under
the seal:

But how much worse is the fit? A P100 with a beard is going to filter
less well than a P100 without a beard, but does it do as well as an
N95? Or is it hopelessly compromised? And is stubble as bad as a
full beard? Does length matter? In an emergency where I really need
my mask for protection should I shave?

Bottom line up front: with my rough DIY test setup I got 80%
filtration with a long beard, 92% with a short one, and 99.7% with
stubble. But see my note at the end about a weird effect I saw.

What was my test setup? The goal is to measure the difference between
filtered and unfiltered air. I have a Temtop
M2000 meter, which I'd bought to measure air quality for testing
my ceiling fan
air purifier idea, so I can use that as a sensor. Burning matches
is still a fine way of putting enough smoke in the air that I can see
differences. And then I can measure the effect of the mask by
measuring at my 3M HF-802SD
elastomeric respirator's exhale valve, with the meter in a bag, and
seeing how smoky it is (pm2.5). With the filter cartridges inserted I can
measure the effect of the mask, while with them removed I'm measuring
essentially no filtration. The ratio of particles with vs without the
filters is my filtration efficacy.

This isn't perfect:

My lungs or the the non-filter parts of the mask might be doing
some filtration.

My seal with the bag might not be 100%.

The bag needs to be unsealed to let air out, or it will
burst. But maybe this also lets a little smoky air in.

All of these are off in the same direction, however: my measurement is
likely to be a lower bound in filtration efficacy.

To actually build this I made a small hole in a gallon ziplock, and
attached it around the vent of my elastomeric respirator. The first
time I did this I used packing tape, which didn't work very well and
kept coming loose:

I did it again with duct tape:

I made sure to get a good seal all the way around:

Then I realized I wanted to test this with a pretty long beard to
start, so put this on hold for a month while growing out my beard. I
got to maybe 1 1/4":

Here's it combed to show the full length, though for all these tests I
had it flat a...
How likely is AGI to force us all to be happy forever? (much like in the Three Worlds Collide novel)
by uhbif19 — 2025-01-18T15:39:21.549Z

Hi, everyone. I'm not sure if my post is well-written, but I think LW might be the only right place to have this discussion. Feel free to suggest changes.

AGI may arrive soon and it is possible that it would kill us all. This does not bother me that much, as dying happens to people all the time.
But losing control of our mind and lifespan is a much less pleasant perspective.

As far as I am aware, people usually do not let others kill themselves. In some situations, this may lead to involuntary placement in a mental hospital. And as not living forever may be seen as a form of killing yourself, AGI may quite well not let you have a finite lifespan. That places you in the uncomfortable situation of being trapped with AGI forever.

Going further. We do not know what peak happiness looks like, and our regular state may be very different from it. And as EY outlined in Three Worlds Collide, letting us live our miserable lives may be unacceptable. This change may not align well with our understanding of life's purpose. And being trapped to live that way forever might not be that desirable.

So my question is: would you see that as a possible outcome? If so, do you see a way to somehow see that happening in advance?
Well-being in the mind, and its implications for utilitarianism
by Sjlver — 2025-01-18T15:32:29.160Z

When learning about classic utilitarianism (approximately, the quest to maximize everyone's expected well-being), I struggle because much of my well-being seems internal. If happiness or misery are significantly influenced by our internal processing of events, then how does this affect utilitarianism and its practical application?

I'll start with a few examples:

When I was a child, my family moved to a tropical country. I had some health problems due to the tropical climate. Fortunately, as an adult, I remember almost none of them, and instead have mostly positive memories about the time abroad. I occasionally remember them, which makes me feel happy.
I have been through some stressful times and depressive episodes in my life. This made me seek therapy and encouraged me to learn mindfulness techniques. Overall, these had positive effects on my life, and I now look back at the depressive episodes as challenges that made me grow stronger.
I have an app that I use to keep a mood diary. It has a "memories" feature that displays random entries from the past. I like this feature. Sometimes, it causes me to remember a past happy day, and I feel some new happiness as I think back.

In all these examples, the overall happiness derived from an event contains large contributions from internal processes: whether I remember the event in a positive or negative light, how often I think back to it, etc. This has a few implications for my behavior as an aspiring utilitarian:

It is difficult to base decisions on expected happiness. For example, was it a good decision for my parents to move abroad? If I were to have different memories from my time abroad, would this change the value of the decision? To estimate a decision's expected value, one would need to factor in unknowns such as the affected persons' happiness set-point, the parts they might remember (e.g., peak-end bias), or whether their diary app would randomly select the corresponding memory and show it again.

I recognize that these internal processes are second-order effects. To a first approximation, positive experiences will cause positive memories, and vice versa. However, my personal examples above show that this is not always the case. Are there situations where we should risk bad experiences, in the expectation that good may come from them?

Given that some of my well-being is internal, I wonder if I ought (in the ethica...
[Exercise] Four Examples of Noticing Confusion
by Logan Riggs — 2025-01-18T15:29:23.293Z

Confusion is a felt sense; a bodily sensation you can pay attention to and notice! So here's my question for you:

What's this Song about?

Think About Things by Daði Frey
Youtube Link, Spotify Link
(recommended to listen to the song first, before reading the lyrics)

Lyrics

Baby I can't wait to know
Believe me I'll always be there so

Though I know I love you
I find it hard to see how you feel about me
'Cause I don't understand you
Oh you are yet to learn how to speak

When we first met
I will never forget
'Cause even though I didn't know you yet
We were bound together then and forever
And I could never let you go

Baby I can't wait to know
What do you think about things
Believe me I will always be there so
You can tell me anything and I'll listen

When we are together
There isn't anywhere that I would rather be
Three birds of a feather
I just hope you enjoy our company

It's been some time
And though hard to define
As if the stars have started to align
We are bound together
Now and forever
And I will never let you go

Baby I can't wait to know
What do you think about things
Believe me I will always be there so
You can tell me anything and I'll listen

I might
Even know what to say
But either way
At least I'll be there

Baby I can't wait to know
What do you think about things
Believe me I will always be there so
You can tell me anything and I'll listen

This is intended as an excercise, so feel free to stop for a moment, enjoy the song, and notice that confusion!

hint 1:

"Oh you are yet to learn how to speak"

hint 2:

"Three birds of a feather
I just hope you enjoy our company"

hint 3:

It's not about romantic love at all (but is indeed love)

hint 4:

Try interpreting everything literally

The answer:

It's about their newborn child, a literal "Baby"

Discussion:

I originally thought this song was about a new romantic partner, which is a great guess based off priors of pop songs w/ the word "Baby" in it.

Then I came across the line:

Oh you are yet to learn how to speak

Is he negging? Why diss your new romantic partner?

Three birds of a feather
I just hope you enjoy our company

Are they a thruple? But there's been no mention of another person this whole time.

So here my expectation of "typical love song" clashed with the literal words of the song. The easy way out is to ignore those parts of the lyrics (since everything else fits so nicely!), but this "clash + wantin...
Scaling Wargaming for Global Catastrophic Risks with AI
by rai — 2025-01-18T15:10:39.696Z
Link: https://blog.sentinel-team.org/p/scaling-wargaming-for-global-catastrophic

We’re developing

an AI-enabled wargaming-tool,

grim, to significantly scale up the number of catastrophic scenarios that concerned organizations can explore and to improve emergency response capabilities of, at least, Sentinel.

Table of Contents

How AI Improves on the State of the Art
Implementation Details, Limitations, and Improvements
Learnings So Far
Get Involved!

How AI Improves on the State of the Art

In a wargame, a group dives deep into a specific scenario in the hopes of understanding the dynamics of a complex system and understanding weaknesses in responding to hazards in the system.

Reality has a surprising amount of detail

, so thinking abstractly about the general shapes of issues is insufficient. However, wargames are quite resource intensive to run precisely because they require detail and coordination.

Eli Lifland

shared with us some limitations about

the exercises his team has run, like at The Curve conference

:

It took about a month of total person-hours to iterate of iterating on the rules, printouts, etc.
They don’t have experts to play important roles like the Chinese government and occasionally don’t have experts to play technical roles or the US government.
Players forget about important possibilities or don’t know what actions would be reasonable.
There are a bunch of background variables which would be nice to keep track of more systematically, such as what the best publicly deployed AIs from each company are, how big private deployments are and for what purpose they are deployed, compute usage at each AGI project, etc. For simplicity, at the moment they only make a graph of best internal AI at each project (and rogue AIs if they exist).
It's effortful for them to vary things like the starting situation of the game, distribution of alignment outcomes, takeoff speeds, etc.

AI can significantly improve on all the limitations above, such that more people can go through more scenarios faster at the same quality. One can also prompt AIs for stranger scenarios much more easily than one can people. At the end of the day, AI will still be probing a space with priors, but people have more rigid priors and get tired during sampling.

In line with

Sentinel’s thesis

that we are collectively underappreciating unknown-unknowns and their interactions, running 5-100x more serious wargames in a wider range of scenarios means that many more chances to find buried

grain

...
Alignment ideas
by qbolec — 2025-01-18T12:43:49.384Z

epistemic status: I know next to nothing about evolution, development psychology, AI, alignment. Anyway, I think the topic is important, and I should do my, however small part, in trying to think seriously for 5 minutes about it. So here's what I think

How come, that I am aligned? Somehow neocortex plays along with older parts of the brain and evolution goals even though it's relatively smarter (can figure out more complicated plans, hit narrower targets, more quickly). What mechanisms achieve this trick, that a human brain stays on track instead of wireheading, drifting, or hacking the reward system (most of the time)?

My instinctive answer: because I fear retaliation from members of society if I misbehave. But, if I contemplate it a bit longer it's clearly false. It's not the fear of the police, or public shaming which prevents me from doing wrong - instead the norms are internalized somehow. My internal simulation of what would happen if I rob someone is not focusing on jail or being ostracized. Rather, I am frighten of what I would become - I don't want to change into a kind of person who does bad things. How does this value system get loaded in?

Instinctive answer: it probably starts in childhood with "I want my father to accept me". But, this is already a very high level goal, and I have no idea how it could be encoded in my DNA. Thus maybe even this is somehow learned. But, to learn something, there needs to be capability to learn it - an even simpler pattern which recognizes "I want to please my parents" as a refined version of itself. What could that proto-rule, the seed which can be encoded in DNA, look like?

A guess: maybe some fundamental uncertainty about future, existence and food paired with an ability to recognize if probability of safety increases. This sounds simple enough and useful, that evolution could have figured out how to equip organisms with something like that early on. And if a particular animal additionally has a neural network which can serve as an "accelerator" for this kind of analysis, then there's of course a pressure to use it. Even if such a network starts as quite random blank slate, it would quickly be incentivized to recognize the face of care-giver, and correlate it with food and safety. As modeling capabilities grow (with size of brain on evolutionary timescales, and with learning from experience within a given life), it ...
AI-enabled Cloud Gaming
by samuelshadrach — 2025-01-18T11:56:10.037Z
Link: http://samuelshadrach.com/?file=/raw/english/unimportant/ai_enabled_cloud_gaming.md

Update: This is a living document. Posted below is an older version. Link has the latest version.

2025-01-18

AI-enabled Cloud gaming

AI-enabled cloud gaming seems like one of the hardest applications to do on cloud rather than locally. However I expect it'll get done in 10 years.

If you're a game developer you might want to work on this.

Latency limits of human body

- Video output - Most people can't distinguish individual frames in video above 90 frames per second (~10 ms / frame)
- Audio ouput - Some audio engineers on reddit find 10 ms latency when playing music digitally to be noticeable but acceptable.
- Keyboard + mouse input - Human motor reaction times are generally estimated above 100 ms. Upper bound on nerve conduction velocity is around 120 m/s, covering 1 metre of neurons from hand to brain requires >10 ms. Anticipating inputs and reacting to them can lower response time (often happens in games).
- End to end - Many cloud gamers have reported on reddit that <10 ms latency is where FPS and other action-heavy games feel as fast as playing them offline.

Internet bandwidth limits

- streaming 24x7 video requires lot more bandwidth than text/image/audio
- 1 gbps fiber connection (with no upload/download cap) is becoming increasingly popular in US, which is more than sufficient to stream UHD 90 fps video.
- Streaming 3D content directly is not possible though. VR headsets-based use cases might (?) still prefer streaming 3D content over the rendered 2D output, I haven't studied VR well enough.

Latency limits of computers

- Input/output device latency - 1 ms latency (1000 Hz) has been achieved on keyboards and mice, and gamers generally feel increased latency won't be detectable.
- Game engine, 3D rendering latency - I don't know much about this, but seems doable for most games today in under 1 ms? It depends a lot on the exact application though, there's definitely lots of 3D apps that can't be built with 10 ms latency constraint.
- Network roundtrip latency - <10 ms has already been achieved on consumer fiber connections in many US cities, there's no fundamental reason paying customers can't get this in cities across the world. Light travelling from Netherlands to California (9000 km) one-way takes 33 ms, in practice roundtrip latency is reported around 100 ms (50 ms one-way...
Don’t ignore bad vibes you get from people
by Kaj_Sotala — 2025-01-18T09:20:17.397Z

I think a lot of people have heard so much about internalized prejudice and bias that they think they should ignore any bad vibes they get about a person that they can’t rationally explain.

But if a person gives you a bad feeling, don’t ignore that.

Both I and several others who I know have generally come to regret it if they’ve gotten a bad feeling about somebody and ignored it or rationalized it away.

I’m not saying to endorse prejudice. But my experience is that many types of prejudice feel more obvious. If someone has an accent that I associate with something negative, it’s usually pretty obvious to me that it’s their accent that I’m reacting to.

Of course, not everyone has the level of reflectivity to make that distinction. But if you have thoughts like “this person gives me a bad vibe but maybe that’s just my internalized prejudice and I should ignore it”, then you probably have enough metacognition to also notice if there’s any clear trait you’re prejudiced about, and whether you would feel the same way about other people with that trait.

Naturally, “don’t ignore the bad feeling” also doesn’t mean “actively shun and be a jerk toward them”. If they’re a coworker and you need to collaborate with them, then sure, do what’s expected of you. And sometimes people do get a bad first impression of someone that then gets better – if the bad feeling naturally melts away on its own, that’s fine.

But if you’re currently getting a bad feeling about someone and they make a bid for something on top of normal interaction… like if they ask you out or to join a new business venture or if you’re just considering sharing something private with them… you might want to avoid that.

I don’t have any rigorous principled argument for this, other than just the empirical personal observation that ignoring the feeling usually seems to be a mistake.

Consider reversing this advice in the case where you tend to easily get a bad vibe from everyone. Anni Kanniainen comments:

I struggle with trauma-related trust issues, so sometimes I might get bad vibes merely due to my own withdrawn nature in the situation or the fact that I expect the worst from a situation — i.e. meeting with a lady during a weekend out and finding later that she’s approached me with a voice message, so I assume she’s yelling at me about something I had done wrong.

That being said, I think there is a genuine bad vibe you ma

...
Renormalization Redux: QFT Techniques for AI Interpretability
by Lauren Greenspan — 2025-01-18T03:54:28.652Z

Introduction: Why QFT?

In a previous post, Lauren offered a take on why a physics way of thinking is so successful at understanding AI systems. In this post, we look in more detail at the potential of Quantum field theory (QFT) to be expanded into a more comprehensive framework for this purpose. Interest in this area has been steadily increasing[1], but efforts have yet to condense into a larger-scale, coordinated effort. In particular, a lot of the more theoretical, technically detailed work remains opaque to anyone not well-versed in physics, meaning that insights[2] are largely disconnected from the AI safety community. The most accessible of these is Principles of Deep Learning theory (which we abbreviate “PDLT”), a nearly 500 page book that lays the groundwork for these ideas[3]. While there has been some AI safety research that has incorporated QFT-inspired threads[4], we see untapped potential for cross-disciplinary collaborations to unify these disparate directions. With this post – one of several in a series linking physics and AI– we explain some of the high-level ideas we find important, with the goal of generating ideas to be developed later. In particular, we want to encourage more of a dialogue between the physics and AI safety communities to generate a tighter feedback loop between (theoretical) idea generation and AI safety’s epistemic goals and methods (namely: strong empirics).

AI interpretability researchers are increasingly realizing that NN’s are less like exact programs and more like big collections of shallow, stochastically interacting heuristics. QFT – a theoretical framework for describing systems with many interacting degrees of freedom – is well suited to study phenomena of this shape, as it captures the collective behavior of particle interactions at varying levels of abstraction set by the scale of the field theory. Briefly, there is a particular scaling limit of neural networks (corresponding roughly to infinite width[5]) in which the neurons become non-interacting, and can be modeled by a system of independent particles, known as a free QFT. The width can be thought of as the parameter governing the scale of interactions between neurons, as it governs how sparse (overparameterized) the network is. In the field theory description, we can do a perturbative expansion in this scale parameter to add more complex interaction...