trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Non-coercive motivation for alignment research?
by Jonathan Moregård — 2022-03-08T20:50:22.706Z

Alignment researchers, what non-coercive motivations do you have for pursuing alignment research?

What makes it fun, exciting, rewarding or similar?

What motivates you to get up in the morning and go at it?

I'm asking because I've seen a lot of EA-related "system 1" arguments,
but I lack insight into what makes it rewarding in a day-to-day felt sense.

By hearing how it excites you, I might be able to cobble together a mindset that allows me to start working without having to sacrifice parts of myself for the greater good.
PSA for academics in Ukraine (or anywhere else) who want to come to the United Kingdom
by gabrielrecc — 2022-03-08T20:00:01.775Z

If you are an academic with a PhD, or someone who has achieved some level of recognition in the arts or digital technology, and you would like to come to the United Kingdom, the UK's "Global Talent" visa is worth taking a look at.

Although the website makes it sound as if it is intended for the Stephen Hawkings of the world, I know multiple academics who did not think of themselves as "international leaders in their field" but managed to qualify nevertheless. If you are an academic-- assuming you do not already have an eligible UK job offer, individual fellowship, UKRI research grant, or eligible award--you will have to go through a peer review process, which I assume is the typical route by which academics get in. For the digital technologies route, this blog claims that the success rate is around 50% (though of course, that's out of the people who submit applications, and the criteria are stringent enough that there's a certain amount of self-selection going on).
Preparing for Power Outages in Disasters
by tragedyofthecomments — 2022-03-08T17:02:38.292Z

Author: Finan Adamson

Last Updated: 03/2022

Overview

This doc goes into details on how to maintain electricity if it’s important to your survival and flourishing even when the power goes out. It may not be necessary to do anything here if you don’t depend on electricity to live. If the electricity is out for many weeks or months, you’ll likely go elsewhere so you don’t need to prepare on that scale. You may also want to do some minimal amount of preparation so you can charge your cell phone.

Tradeoffs

If you need to have electricity when the grid is down your options seem to be generators and/or batteries. What setup you want will vary depending on your needs.

Generators:

Need to be run outside.
Noisy
Can consistently get power as long as you have fuel.
Must be able to acquire or store fuel.

Batteries:

Can be run inside.
Quiet
When you run out you’re done unless you have a way of charging.

You may want both so you can charge your batteries off the generator, but this can get expensive so you may want to skip this unless you really need it for medical reasons.

Providing Power during an Outage

I just want to charge my phone for a day or two

If all you want is a way to charge your phone. Getting a little external charger would fit your needs. It would cost $20-$50. You could charge it and store it with your other emergency gear.Then you just hook up your phone via USB charger.
If you want to go a little harder on this so you can keep recharging things every day. You could get a portable solar panel. Wirecutter has

solar panel recommendations

. These would mostly be for charging things like phones, not laptops.

I want to charge a few things, but not my whole house

You’re going to want a power station. Basically a big battery that you can recharge when you have electricity.

Wirecutter’s recommendations

that cost between $500 and $1,400

In determining how much battery you want. You can figure out the watt hours(Wh) of the things you want to charge.

A watt hour (Wh) is the watts per hour a battery can produce. So a battery with a capacity of 300 Wh could charge a 60 Watt (the amount a typical laptop charger would pull) for 5 hours.

For most purposes a large battery probably meets your needs, but maybe it’s essential for you to have power, so you want to store gasoline and be able to charge your batteries from the g

...
Bugout Bags for Disasters
by tragedyofthecomments — 2022-03-08T17:02:26.412Z

Author: Finan Adamson

Last Updated: 09/2020

Overview

A bugout bag is a selection of supplies you put together to take with you when you have to leave your home in a hurry. This could be for a wide variety of disasters. You’ll want to have the basics you need to survive for sure, and then you can consider how much more to add based on how much room you have and how you’re traveling.

Premade Options

If you don’t want to think about packing, you could buy a bugout bag. You will make the tradeoff of not tailoring a bugout bag to your specific needs, but you won’t have to spend much time thinking about what to get.

Customizing Your Bugout Bag

Choosing a pack

If you’re traveling in a car it doesn’t matter much what kind of bag you’re packed in, but if you have to walk you’ll want a backpack that fits. You should use a pack that fits even if you are driving so that you can hike if your car breaks down or roads are impassable.

You can buy a backpack at any outdoor store. Here are a couple pack fitting guides. When going long distances, pack fit will make a huge difference to your comfort. You can also just ask the people at the outdoor store and they can help you.

REI Pack Fitting Guide

Gregory Pack Fitting Guide

Packing Water

If you’re driving, packing some jugs of water is great!

You could take the

containers

of water you’ve already stored for other reasons.

Have enough water to last the length of your journey.

Water is heavy. It sucks to carry water. So if you’re walking with your stuff you’ll want alternate methods to carrying all your water.

You should still have a water bottle or two. You need something to keep water in and drink from.
Along with your water bottle you’ll need a way of making water clean.

Water Purification Tablets

There are a lot on the market. Just follow the instructions for whichever you choose to buy.

Pump or Gravity Filters

There are a lot of water filters made for camping. You could buy one to be able to purify water from lakes and streams. Check the specific products to see how well they filter.

For more options and information about what the different water purification and filtration options do, read Water Preparedness for Disasters.

Packing Food

If you’re driving, just grab the food you had stored for emergencies and whatever else you have that won’t spoil quickly.
If you’re walking, you’ll want

...
Food Preparedness for Disasters
by tragedyofthecomments — 2022-03-08T17:02:13.021Z

Author: Finan Adamson

Last Updated: 03//2022

Overview

This guide goes into detail on food storage, how much food people need, how to know if your food has gone bad, and how to keep your cold food cold. This is meant to give you a tool to reason about how to prepare for and act in emergencies that disrupt your food supply. Ultimately the decision of how much food to store comes down to your own estimation of risk and how prepared you want to be.

Food Storage

How much food should I store?

Ready.gov

recommends you store at least a 3 day supply of non-perishable food. Finan thinks you should have more like two weeks. If it’s easy, it’s totally ok to have more, but for most disasters you won’t be without access to some way of buying food for extended periods of time. We’ve seen in the Covid pandemic that grocery ordering has continued and people can still go into grocery stores relatively safely with sealed N95s or P100s. If things like earthquake or fire disrupted supply chains that could make food much more expensive/scarce, but you’d probably be able to get food or get to food within a month. Something like a nuclear attack could disrupt food supplies for much longer, but you probably have bigger immediate problems at that point and are likely evacuating elsewhere. Food is also not as limiting as water. You can survive much longer without food than without water.

Many online sources agree you need about 2,000-2,500 cal per day. Closer to 2,000 if female and closer to 2,500 if male. Need will also vary with exercise.

What kinds of food should I store?

Store things that you like to eat.

If you don’t like the food you store, having to eat it will really suck. Morale is important in a disaster. Get good food.
Remember to get food in line with your dietary restrictions.

If gluten makes you feel ill. Stock foods without gluten.

Store things that last a long time.

You don’t want to constantly be restocking your supply or get into a disaster and realize all your food has gone bad.
Premade emergency food supplies are an option; Or you could get a bunch of canned foods you like and can eat. A bag of rice and lots of canned beans can go a long way.

Get some spices. Salt is important for your health and spices will make your food taste better. You don’t want to be stuck eating the same bland rice and beans.

Where should I store m

...
Water Preparedness for Disasters
by tragedyofthecomments — 2022-03-08T17:02:02.295Z

Overview

This guide goes into details on storing and purifying water. This is meant to give you a tool to reason about how to prepare for and act in emergencies that disrupt your water supply.

Storing Water

How much to store?

Ready.gov

recommends storing 3 gallons of water per person to last for 3 days. A normally active person needs about ¾ gallons per day to drink and you can use the rest for cleaning. Needs vary with outside temp, humidity, exercise, and illness. Finan thinks you should store a two-week supply of water. Most scenarios won’t call for it, but water is probably the most essential thing you need.

Wirecutter agrees

the 3 day recommendation is unreasonably low (especially for people in earthquake country). Ultimately the decision of how much water to store comes down to your own estimation of risk, how prepared you want to be, and how much effort you want to invest in storing and maintaining your water supplies.

What do I store water in?

One of

these containers

can hold enough water for one person (drinking and cleaning) for a week. Fill at least two for each person in your house and replace the water every 6 months (set yourself a calendar reminder)

Generally it’s good to store water out of the sun so the plastic doesn’t degrade.
If there were no contaminants, the water would be safe to drink indefinitely, it would have no shelf life. The 6 month recommendation is in case contamination happened while bottling and to avoid making the water taste like plastic.
To minimize contamination, thoroughly wash your hands before filling storage containers, and while filling take care to avoid touching any part of the “inside” of the container or lid.

It’s also reasonable to just buy and store bottled water if that feels easier.

Bottled water has no official shelf life, but you want to store it out of the sun and after a while it will taste like plastic. Finan would replace stored bottled water after 2 years.

How else do I stay hydrated?

Don’t exert yourself unnecessarily. Sweating will reduce your water and salt content.
Don’t just drink water. You need electrolytes (salt, sugar) too.
Eat food with some salt.
It would be good to have some pedialyte or other electrolytes to help you re-hydrate.
Avoid drinking a lot of alcohol or coffee (or other things with caffeine). Both can dehydrate you.

Purifyi

...
Nuclear Preparedness Guide
by tragedyofthecomments — 2022-03-08T17:01:39.206Z

Author: Finan Adamson

Last Updated 03/2022

Overview

This doc is to help you prepare for the tail risk of nuclear war. Estimates vary, but an

EA Forum survey

put the annual probability of US-Russia nuclear war at 0.24%. This doc will go into some detail on threat models of nuclear war and then go over preparations you could make to survive being near a nuclear event.

Threat Models

Nuclear Bombs

To get a sense of how a nuclear bomb damages an area, the distance of radioactive fallout, etc. you can check out

NukeMap

. The damage caused by a nuclear bomb or missile being detonated is going to depend on many factors including bomb size, detonated on ground or in air, weather, etc.

This chart

includes some distances and effects for different yields and detonation heights. Yield can vary a lot and is difficult to estimate because yields are often secret and can be changed in similar sizes of missiles because the nuclear material is not a heavy part of the missile. Historically, ICBMs in the

Russian Arsenal

include a range from ~40 kilotons to ~6 megatons. The largest bomb ever tested was Tsar Bomba, which had a yield of about 50 megatons.

States generally keep modern yields secret, but common yields of ICBMs in the US and Russian arsenal would almost certainly include warheads with yields in the 100-500 kiloton range and might include weapons of 1 to 6 megatons. I’m basing this guess off of

Wikipedia’s list of nuclear weapons

.

Nuclear War

Estimates vary, but an

EA Forum survey

put the annual probability of US-Russia nuclear war at 0.24%. Living in the US, Russia, Canada, and Northern Europe this is the most concerning nuclear threat.

9 countries

possess nuclear weapons.

Nuclear Winter

Nuclear winter is a controversial risk. During the cold war the security community and the scientific community disagreed about how bad a nuclear winter would be or even if it was possible. The cooling effect depends on a lot of things. How much smoke is created, how much of it is black carbon, how high is that lofted in the atmosphere, what is the weather, were there firestorms, what materials were burned, etc. Looking through the scientific literature, there’s a lot of uncertainty, but in an all out nuclear war between Russia and the US, a nuclear winter lasting months to years seems plausible. If there were a nuclear war between,...
Is there a good solution for documents that need to be signed with a ballpoint pen under suicide watch?
by ChristianKl — 2022-03-08T15:58:17.502Z

In Scott Alexander's article about his IRB nightmare, he writes that one of the problems he faced is that the rules both said that documents have to be signed by ballpoint pen and that the involved patients are only allowed to use pencils.

Politically, there seems to be a similar issue in the case of Joshua Schulte who's imprisoned under poor conditions by the US and who's complained were rejected because they were not filled out with a ballpoint pen when he was also not being able to use ballpoint pens due to being under suicide watch rules.

Is there any way to construct a pencil to fulfill the legal criteria that would allow its use in those cases?
[MLSN #3]: NeurIPS Safety Paper Roundup
by Dan H — 2022-03-08T15:17:25.643Z

As part of a larger community building effort, I am writing a safety newsletter which is designed to cover empirical safety research and be palatable to the broader machine learning research community. You can subscribe here or follow the newsletter on twitter here.

Welcome to the 3rd issue of the ML Safety Newsletter. In this edition, we cover:

NeurIPS ML safety papers
experiments showing that Transformers have no edge for adversarial robustness and anomaly detection
a new method leveraging fractals to improve various reliability metrics
a preference learning benchmark
... and much more.

Robustness

Are Transformers More Robust Than CNNs?

This paper evaluates the distribution shift robustness and adversarial robustness of ConvNets and Vision Transformers (ViTs). Compared with previous papers, its evaluations are more fair and careful.

After controlling for data augmentation, they find that Transformers exhibit greater distribution shift robustness. For adversarial robustness, findings are more nuanced. First, ViTs are far more difficult to adversarially train. When successfully adversarially trained, ViTs are more robust than off-the-shelf ConvNets. However, ViTs’ higher adversarial robustness is explained by their smooth activation function, the GELU. If ConvNets use GELUs, they obtain similar adversarial robustness. Consequently, Vision Transformers are more robust than ConvNets to distribution shift, but they are not intrinsically more adversarially robust.

Paper

Video

Fractals Improve Robustness (+ Other Reliability Metrics)

PixMix improves both robustness (corruptions, adversaries, prediction consistency) and uncertainty estimation (calibration, anomaly detection).

PixMix is a data augmentation strategy that mixes training examples with fractals or feature visualizations; models then learn to classify these augmented examples. Whereas previous methods sacrifice performance on some reliability axes for improvements on others, this is the first to have no major reliability tradeoffs and is near Pareto-optimal.

Paper

Other Recent Robustness Papers

A new adversarial robustness state-of-the-art by finding a better way to leverage data augmentations.

A highly effective gradient-based adversarial attack for text-based models.

A new benchmark for detecting adversarial text attacks.

Adversarially attacking language models with bidirectional and large-scale unidirec...
It's not WWIII if 5/6 of humanity remains neutral
by lsusr — 2022-03-08T09:20:09.965Z

I am guilty of using "World War III" as shorthand for "War Between the Great Western Powers". I plan to be more precise with my language in the future.

The worst likely outcome of the Ukraine-Russia war is a total nuclear exchange between Russia and NATO. Assuming Russia's nukes function as intended, the only countries likely to be nuked are NATO, Russia and a few allies.

Europe (including western Russia) has a population of 751 million people. The USA plus Canada has a population of 372 million. That's a total of only 1.1 billion people. If we add Ukraine and Belarus the total rounds up to 1.2 billion people.[1]

The world population is 7.9 billion people. 15% of the world population isn't a "world war". If it was, a war between India (1.4 billion) and Pakistan (0.2 billion) would be a world war because they have 20% of the world population—and that's not even counting Bangladesh.

It's not a world war if China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Mexico, Japan, Ethiopia, the Phillipines, Egypt and Vietnam aren't fighting. I predict that none of the above countries will engage in direct hostilities that spiral out of the present Ukraine-Russia war.

World War II was a real "world war".

Nuclear war between Russia and NATO would unleash suffering at an unprecedented scale. But it wouldn't (by itself) constitute a world war. Most of Asia, Latin America, Africa—none of them are likely to be directly involved.

Would China take the opportunity to invade Taiwan? Maybe. If the USA (after getting nuked by Russia) defended Taiwan then, yes, I think we could call it a world war because it would include the world's three major powers (NATO, China and Russia). But a European war, even it includes the USA, is not a world war. It wouldn't even include all five permanent members of the UN Security Council.

This isn't to say non-white people would come out unscathed. Homo sapiens would be facing nuclear winter. The global economy would be in ruins. But most human cities would not be the target of nuclear strikes.

My numbers fail to count Asian Russia but they also include (when they shouldn't) non-NATO European states. Even if we counted every Russian twice, the total would still come out to less than the population of India plus Pakistan. ↩︎
Effective Ideas is announcing a $100,000 blog prize
by fin — 2022-03-07T21:45:18.888Z
Link: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xapRLBTpMYokrpd9q/we-re-announcing-a-usd100-000-blog-prize

From the EA Forum:

We want to encourage a broader, public conversation around effective altruism and longtermism. To that end, we’re offering up to 5 awards of $100,000 each for the best new and recent blogs. We’re also making grants to promising young writers in the community.

You can learn more about the project and get on our radar

here

.

Why does this matter?

Top-of-funnel community growth in EA

is slower

than it could and should be. At the same time, EA is relatively underrepresented in intellectual discourse compared to newer and smaller movements like

Progress Studies

. EA is producing a ton of thoughtful writing, but the majority takes place in internal discussions and private documents. For some discussions, this would be the only sensible way to have them. But having other discussions in public should help to raise the salience of EA in the broader discourse and bring more people in. It could also help spark new ideas.

Further, we think EA needs more strong writers who can share key ideas in prestigious and popular venues — to persuade people to work on the most pressing issues of our time and to advance our thinking about them. We want to incentivize EAs to develop those skills.

What’s the plan?

We want to jumpstart these ambitions with the Blog Prize. Over the course of 2022, we want to find the very best new blogs exploring themes related to effective altruism and longtermism. Up to 5 winning bloggers will receive a prize of $100,000 each. (We were inspired by Tyler Cowen’s “

Liberalism 2.0” blog prize

). You can read more about our rules and guidelines on our

website

.

The judging panel for the blog prize is me (

Nick Whitaker

),

Leopold Aschenbrenner

,

Avital Balwit

, and

Fin Moorhouse

. Most blogs will be considered via our

self-nomination form

, but please feel free to send us

recommendations

.

What next?

We hope this can be a first step towards a more ambitious effort to support an ecosystem of public-facing writing for EA and longtermism. We believe that EA blogs could soon make up a major part of the general blogosphere, finding audiences (and potential EAs) we wouldn’t have found otherwise. Hopefully, we will also inspire the writing of foundational blog posts and posts that evolve into great

projects

.

To help potential bloggers, we’ve

compiled a “How to start a blog” guide

. We’re also offering mentorship on writing and edit...
Dependencies and conditional probabilities in weather forecasts
by AnthonyC — 2022-03-07T21:23:12.696Z

For a variety of reasons I've been looking at weather forecasts lately, a lot more than I ever used to, and I'm more and more aware of both how useful and how incomplete the ranges of temperatures and probabilities of precipitation are. Like, if there's a chance of rain rising from 0% at 3pm towards 100% at 7pm, that's pretty clearly "it's going to rain, we're just not sure when it'll start." But if there's a 30% chance of rain on each of 5 consecutive days starting 4 days from now, is that "It'll probably rain, but we don't know when or for how long" or "a storm may or may not form at all, and if it does it may or may not head your way"? And what are the error bars on high and low and expected temperatures, in the event that I care a lot about whether we cross a particular temperature threshold (for example, above or below freezing)? Similar questions on error bars for wind speed and direction forecasts, both sustained and gusts.

I don't really see any good way to convey this in typical forecasts in a way most people would understand or care about, but is there anywhere someone who isn't at the level of a meteorologist can go for this kind of info or something like it?