trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The Online Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed
by Zvi — 2024-11-11T14:30:04.371Z

Related: Book Review: On the Edge: The Gamblers I have previously been heavily involved in sports betting. That world was very good to me. The times were good, as were the profits. It was a skill game, and a form of positive-sum entertainment, and I was happy to participate and help ensure the sophisticated customer got a high quality product. I knew it wasn’t the most socially valuable enterprise, but I certainly thought it was net positive. When sports gambling was legalized in America, I was hopeful it too could prove a net positive force, far superior to the previous obnoxious wave of daily fantasy sports.

It brings me no pleasure to conclude that this was not the case. The results are in. Legalized mobile gambling on sports, let alone casino games, has proven to be a huge mistake. The societal impacts are far worse than I expected.

The Short Answer

Joe Weisenthal: Why is it that sports gambling, specifically, has elicited a lot of criticism from people that would otherwise have more laissez faire sympathies?

This full post is the long answer. The short answer is that it is clear from studies and from what we see with our eyes that ubiquitous sports gambling on mobile phones, and media aggressively pushing wagering, is mostly predation on people who suffer from addictive behaviors. That predation, due to the costs of customer acquisition and retention and the regulations involved, involves pushing upon them terrible products offered at terrible prices, pushed throughout the sports ecosystem and via smartphones onto highly vulnerable people. This is not a minor issue. This is so bad that you can pick up the impacts in overall economic distress data. The price, on so many levels, is too damn high.

Paper One: Bankruptcies

We start with discussion of one of several new working papers studying the financial consequences of legalized sports betting. The impacts include a 28% overall increase in bankruptcies (!).

Brett Hollenbeck: *Working Paper Alert*: “The Financial Consequences of Legalized Sports Gambling” by Poet Larsen, @dade_us and myself. We study how the widespread legalization of sports gambling over the past five years has impacted consumer financial health. In 2018, SCOTUS ruled that states cannot be prohibited from allowing sports betting, and 38 states have since legalized sports gambling. This has led to a large new industry and a large increase in gamb

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How I Learned That You Should Push Children Into Ponds
by Bentham's Bulldog — 2024-11-11T14:20:23.080Z

Crosspost of this, on my blog.

Effective altruism, the capitalist ultracapitalist movement in favor of capitalism and capitalism, is a white cishet settler colonialist movement. It talks a big game about doing good effectively but then some people in the movement said bad things in 1996—so how good can it really be? It talks about helping people, but many people in the movement are white—sounds like white saviorism to me! The movement is partially about longtermism, making the future go well by reducing existential risks, but that sounds pretty weird and involves big numbers.

[Insert several paragraphs of sneering].

Effective altruism tries to do good effectively, but Sam Bankman Fried was involved with the movement, and he was a bad hombre. Also, doing good by preventing kids from getting malaria involves saving—sounds like WHITE SAVIORISM, the horrifying consequence of white people trying to do good things.

After reading

Alice Crary’s

very serious complaints about the fact that EA “positions rich people as ‘saviors’ of the poor,” I knew I had to act differently. That is why, when this morning I saw a poor black child drowning in a river, I ignored him entirely. While his parents called on me to save him—for they were too far away—I knew better than to engage in white saviorism. Hadn’t these people ever heard of colonialism? Who am I to position myself as a savior of the poor?

I no longer work a job or go to school. After all, Sam Bankman Fried worked a job and went to school. I now decide upon my stock portfolio by throwing a dart at a dart board. As I learned from the wise sage Alice Crary, the world is more complicated than objective, numerical metrics. For this reason, rather than relying on racist numerical metrics, I now put all my money in Doge Coin. Using objective metrics is problematic in charitable giving, one should trust their gut; my gut is that Doge Coin is going to the moon!

I learned from Freddie deBoer that

EA is trivial

—everyone supports doing good effectively. Similarly, putting one’s money in stocks that are likely to pay off is trivial—everyone supports it. When I put my money in doge coin and when you put your money in general funds, we are the same. We are both involved in effective investment—you just have the hubris to think you’re the only one doing it.

From

Leif Wenar

I learned that effective altruism has a perverse hero complex a...
The new ruling philosophy regarding AI
by Mitchell_Porter — 2024-11-11T13:28:24.476Z

I suggest that (for now) it's a mix of Marc Andreessen, Leopold Aschenbrenner, and Guillaume Verdon.

But let's back up first. What was the Biden-Harris administration's philosophy regarding AI? For the first half of Biden's term, I would say they didn't have one. As with most of the world, it was the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 that made AI a top-level issue.

And though it's not as if Biden's cabinet contained any avowed effective altruists, I do think that by default, the "safetyist" attitude towards AI that is associated with effective altruism and Less Wrong rationalism, was philosophically influential; not least because influential advocates of effective altruism were part of the elite Democratic base. FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried came from that background. Open Philanthropy's Dustin Moskovitz is another.

(I've listed three people as alleged thought leaders for the Trump 2.0 era; if I was going to pick three for the second half of the Biden era, maybe it would be Paul Christiano, Helen Toner, and Joseph Matheny.)

As most of us would know, irritation with AI safetyism did a lot to inspire the creation by a few Silicon Valley memelords of an alternative ideology, "effective accelerationism"; and after the unsuccessful OpenAI coup against Sam Altman at the end of 2023, e/acc was widely considered to have won the culture war against effective altruism in the tech world.

Now, looking back from the end of 2024, we can see that many of the tech figures who affiliated with e/acc at the start of the year, defected from elite consensus to ally with the victorious Trump Republicans by the end of the year. This is why I regard e/acc as a major component of the emerging zeitgeist regarding AI and AI policy.

What follows is far more a product of intuitive speculation than scholarship. Also, I don't live in North America, I'm poor, I have zero experience of contemporary Silicon Valley (or Washington DC, for that matter). I am a distant observer of all this. I am prepared to be corrected by people who are actually in the thick of things.

But for now, I don't see anyone making a clear claim about which ideas will inform the thinking of the incoming American government and its allies. So this is my "model" of what's ahead, make of it what you will.

First, Marc Andreessen. A pivotal figure in the 1990s Internet, CEO of the browser company N...
What Ketamine Therapy Is Like
by Sable — 2024-11-11T11:09:08.602Z
Link: https://affablyevil.substack.com/p/what-ketamine-therapy-is-like

Sniff-click. Sniff-click.

One shot in each nostril, and here…we…go.

A while ago, I started Ketamine therapy for depression. I didn’t finish - I changed jobs, which switched insurances, which messed everything up - but I was doing it for two and half weeks (five doses) before then, and had good results with it.

(For those of you who read about my experiences with TMS, I tried Ketamine first, and did the TMS after I couldn't get back on the Ketamine with my new insurance.)

Background

The TL;DR is that a while back, someone figured out that giving humans a low-dose horse tranquilizer cured depression (temporarily).

I don’t know (and I don’t want to know) how they figured that out, because the story in my head is funnier than anything real life could come up with.

Now we’ve got an FDA-approved treatment for depression using a nasal spray (called Spravato) with a ketamine-adjacent molecule called esketamine, and boy howdy does it get the job done.

If you want details about the science or plausibility, look here or do your own research. This post isn’t about that. It’s about the experience I’ve have doing the ketamine therapy, including some of the boring details along with the fun part of what the trip is like.

The Boring Bits

Signing Up For The Treatment

If you’ve got treatment-resistant depression and want a nuclear option, this is it. The good news is that, so far as I know, ketamine works on almost everybody. Unlike every antidepressant I’ve ever taken, it also works within a day or two.

The bad news is that The Bureaucracy Must Be Appeased.

After bringing up Ketamine to my psychiatrist and getting the go-ahead, I looked up local clinics that did the treatment and got in touch with one of them.

They though I’d be a great candidate, and they were happy to help! There were just a few bazillion forms I had to fill out, an app I had to install, an account I had to create, and so on.

I’ll forever enjoy the irony of someone going, “Yes, we can help you with your depression, absolutely! But first you’re going to have to jump through dozens of small pointless hoops made of paperwork and boredom, because accomplishing numerous small tasks isn’t something people with depression struggle with at all, no-sirree.”

Granted, no one actually said that, but I think it captures the zeitgeist of the experience pretty well.

Some of the things I had to do:

install an app for communication with the

...
Spherical cow
by dkl9 — 2024-11-11T03:10:27.788Z
Link: https://dkl9.net/essays/spherical_cow.html

"Are you about to assume the lotus position?" asked Pat.

"I'm about to assume a spherical cow," retorted the Zen master.

"That's a physicist's term," Pat noted.

"I studied physics when I was younger," continued the master. "Physics will teach you how to send a rocket to the moon. It can't teach you how to properly experience the process of building the rocket. Nor how to cope if a cosmic ray fries the electronics and ruins the mission."

"Are you about to assume the lotus position?" asked Pat.

"I'm about to assume a spherical cow," retorted the Zen master. "Really, I'll simplify further than the physicists. A physicist might sit thinking. I will just sit."

The master sat.

"Are you about to assume the lotus position?" asked Pat.

"I'm about to assume a spherical cow," retorted the Zen master.

"What's the spherical cow doing?"

"The cow is doing zazen," explained the master. "It may be rolling down a hill."

"Are you about to assume the lotus position?" asked Pat.

"I'm about to assume a spherical cow," retorted the Zen master.

The phrase was new to Pat. "Surely you jest. Cows are far from spherical."

"How should I know that?" the master mused. "There are no cows around monasteries."

"Are you about to assume the lotus position?" asked Pat.

"I'm about to assume a spherical cow," retorted the Zen master.

"Has the spherical cow Buddha-nature, or not?"

"Mu!"
how to truly feel my beliefs?
by KvmanThinking — 2024-11-11T00:04:30.994Z

I have some beliefs that I believe, but I don't feel them. Like, I consciously believe them, but subconsciously I don't. Consciously, I am fully aware that we could all go extinct by the hand of one of the many existential risks we are currently facing as a species. But I don't feel it, deep inside of me. Just like I know that all people are equal regardless of race or gender, but implicit biases still remain. It seems consciously forming and submitting a thought is not enough to cement it deep into me such that the false previous thought it replaces no longer affects my decision-making process. How can I rectify this?
Bay Winter Solstice 2024: song leading auditions
by tcheasdfjkl — 2024-11-10T23:59:08.199Z

Hello! I am looking for community members to lead songs at the Bay Winter Solstice this year. (I am the music director; Ozy is the overall creative lead.)

If you're interested, please send me your audition recordings by the end of November 24 via this form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSegrNKXJCTS69ioGUxSaMDXqz60X5zyb6kBDCuTVcTF6Mu3Ig/viewform

The form contains audition instructions, as well as a list of songs we're currently auditioning for.

As a reminder, the event itself will be the evening of Friday, December 20 in Berkeley. There will also be a dress rehearsal on the evening of Tuesday, December 17 in Berkeley, which you should plan on attending if you're leading a song.

If you have any questions, feel free to email me at anya.tche@gmail.com.

P.S. If you're interested in reading a speech, see Ozy's post with audition instructions for those! Note that speech auditions are due by November 17.
A Coordination Cookbook?
by azergante — 2024-11-10T23:20:34.843Z

Coordination can improve default outcomes, i.e. what happens when individuals act according to their own interest assuming others will do the same.

For example in a flat share the default outcome may be that the common areas stay dirty because each flatmate is willing to spend time cleaning only if they are confident that all other flatmates will also spend time cleaning ; in the absence of coordination there is no such confidence so the common areas stay dirty.

Such coordination challenges come up often in daily life. Another example that comes to mind is choosing a leader, whether for a sport team on a small scale, or a country on a larger scale. This coordination issue first requires to get everyone to agree that a leader is needed, and then to agree on a method to choose that leader.

We can view each situation as being in one of several possible equilibria (dirty versus clean common areas, not having a leader versus having one), and coordination protocols as the way to take us from one equilibrium to another.

This raises the question: what protocol can we use to get to a better equilibrium for the situations we care about?

To answer this question, I suggest we should aggregate a "coordination cookbook": just like having a list of recipes is useful when cooking, so too having a list of issues paired to coordination protocols would be useful when navigating coordination issues of any scale.

Humanity has accumulated a lot of tacit knowledge about coordination. Societies with their organizations, laws and infrastructures ; cultures, traditions, religions and rituals already impart us with know-how and protocols for many issues. Making these protocols explicit, comparing them and improving them could be a good starting point.

I hope you find this idea of coordination cookbook stimulating.

Please feel free to share:

your own experience and protocols for solving coordination issues

existing resources

any other relevant insights

Thank you for engaging.

Relevant material:

https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/coordination-cooperation

https://equilibriabook.com/
Towards a Clever Hans Test: Unmasking Sentience Biases in Chatbot Interactions


by glykokalyx — 2024-11-10T22:34:58.956Z

The famous story of Clever Hans has become a cautionary tale in animal cognition. Hans was a horse in Germany in the early 1900s who could seemingly perform all kinds of smart tasks, such as simple arithmetic and spelling words. It is not explicitly documented, but it is probably safe to assume that Hans would have even been able to count the number of Rs in the word "strawberry", a feat that we, of course, know today to be fiendishly hard. To cut a long story short, it turned out that Hans could not actually do any of these things but was merely reading subtle cues from his handlers.

Based on this story, the Clever Hans effect describes the phenomenon where humans inadvertently influence animals they interact with in ways that lead the humans to ascribe more cognitive abilities to the animals than they actually have. It has recently been argued that this can also happen with AI algorithms, particularly with conversational agents. I suspect that this effect creates an implicit bias in the standard setup of the Turing test, where the human tester interacts with two other agents (a human and an AI) and a-priori might assume both of them to be sentient. This could then create a Clever Hans effect that might make the human more likely to perceive the AI as actually being sentient, by unconsciously prompting the AI in a way that would manifest such apparent behavior.

To mitigate this issue, I therefore propose a Clever Hans Test to account for (or at least measure) this prompting-dependent effect. The test could work roughly like this: Take two LLMs, one interlocutor (A) and one LLM to be tested (B). Let the LLMs talk to each other, similar to the setup in the Chatbot Arena. The crux is now that you repeat this experiment at least twice. Once, A is told that it will have a conversation with a sentient being, while the other time, A is told that it will interact with a mindless machine. Finally, we take the conversation logs from these two experiments and show them to a judge (either a human or another LLM) and ask how sentient B seems in these two conversations.

I would hypothesize that for most current LLMs, we should be able to see a clear difference in the way that B behaves in these two settings. I hope that this would help provide a more objective foundation for the current discussion about potential LLM sentience.
Personal AI Planning
by jefftk — 2024-11-10T14:00:06.837Z

LLMs are getting much more capable, and progress is rapid. I

use them in my daily work,
and there are many tasks where they're usefully some combination of
faster and more capable than I am. I don't see signs of these
capability increases stopping or slowing down, and if they do continue
I expect the impact on society to start accelerating as they exceed
what an increasing fraction of humans can do. I think we could see
serious changes in the next

2-5
years.

In my professional life, working on pathogen detection I take this
pretty seriously. Advances in AI make it easier for adversaries to
design and create pathogens, and so it's important to get a
comprehensive detection system in place quickly. Similarly, more
powerful AIs are likely to speed up our work in some areas
(computational detection) more than others (partnerships) and increase
the value of historical data, and I think about this in my planning at
work.

In other parts of my life, though, I've basically been ignoring that I
think this is likely coming. In deciding to get more solar panels
and not get a heat
pump I looked at historical returns and utility prices. I book
dance gigs a year or more out. I save for retirement. I'm raising my
kids in what is essentially preparation for the world of the recent
past.

From one direction this doesn't make any sense: why wouldn't I plan
for the future I see coming? But from another it's more reasonable:
most scenarios where AI becomes extremely capable look either very
good or very bad. Outside of my work, I think my choices don't
have much impact here: if we all become rich, or dead, my having
saved, spent, invested, or parented more presciently won't do
much. Instead, in my personal life my decisions have the largest
effects in worlds where AI ends up being not that big a deal, perhaps
only as transformative as the internet has been.

Still, there are probably areas in our personal lives where it's worth
doing something differently? For example:

Think hard about career choice: if our kids were a bit older
I'd want to be able to give good advice here. How is AI likely to
impact the fields they're most interested in? How quickly might this
go? What regulatory barriers are there? How might the portions they
especially enjoy change as a fraction of the overall work?

Maybe either hold off on having kids or have them ea

...
AI alignment via civilizational cognitive updates
by AtillaYasar — 2024-11-10T09:33:35.023Z

(This started as a reply to @Tamsin Leake 's reply in my post about why cyborgism maybe should be open. This post does not require you to read our interaction, though it lead to this, and I'm very grateful for Tamsin's reply.)

In general, this is a counterargument against:

we should only share cyborg tools (software that lets AI help us think) among AI safety people, so that the big labs don't get ahold of them, so we can save the world before they end it

The gist

My idea is that IF humanity doesn't want to die, we can discover this by maximizing information sharing and "converging" our culture and discourse towards what is *actually* going on with AI and what systems are capable of and that society isn't equipped to handle it, which will then cause humanity to resolve its dislike of the state of the world, by creating safe AI and/or institutions for creating safe AI.

(or whatever the path may be, which we don't know yet!!)

Tools that (in part via AI) help us think, help us share ideas and parse information and find information, will speed up memetic evolution.

Can't solve a problem you can't see.

Explore vs exploit ("don't buttclench")

Something feels wrong about AI safety people not wanting to discuss insights "because big bad tech will use it to build stronger AI".
(It doesn't jive with my personality at all because it feels very buttclenchy, so I'm aware that I'm biased against this way of viewing things, but I'll keep writing anyway)

I wanna propose this framing:

how much you share moves you along a spectrum of, fast learning on one side vs "the enemy" getting bad information, on the other side.

I believe we still need a LOT of information, and therefor should err on "share more and learn more".

If AI safety is a massive civilizational coordination problem, we need all the memetic-evolutionary pressure we can get. Technology that helps us think and communicate is the way to perform such updates.

List of thoughts related to memetic evolution and AI alignment

Civilizational change as memetic evolution

Basically updates happens along 2 axes: raising update speed and widening information bottleneck.
Population density increased both of those: (hunter/gatherer -> villages -> cities, (tho specialization is also a factor here, but you can see specialization as a result of widening search space + widening information bottleneck by societ...