trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Subjectivism and moral authority
by Joe Carlsmith — 2021-03-01T09:02:58.739Z

(Cross-posted from Hands and Cities. Content warning: descriptions of cruelty)

Lots of people I know think that what you should do depends, ultimately, on your contingent patterns of care and concern (suitably idealized), as opposed to some sort of objective “normative reality.” And I find various views in this vicinity pretty plausible, too.

To others, though, such views seem like they’re missing something central. Here I want to examine one thing in particular that it’s not clear they can capture: namely, the sense in which morality has, or appears to have, authority.

I. Paperclips and flourishing

Here’s a toy model of the type of view I have in mind.

Consider the paperclip maximizer: an AI system with the sole goal of maximizing the number of paperclips in the world. Let’s say that this AI system’s psychology is sufficiently rich that it’s appropriate to say that it “cares” about making paperclips, “values” paperclips, that its model of the world represents paper-clips as “to-be-made” or as “calling to it,” etc. And let’s say it would remain a paperclip maximizer even after exhaustive reflective equilibrium, and even upon ideal understanding of all non-normative facts. Call this system “Clippy.”

Unlike Clippy, let’s say, you care about things like flourishing, joy, love, beauty, community, consciousness, understanding, creativity, etc — for yourself, for your loved ones, for all beings, perhaps to different degrees, perhaps impartially, perhaps in complex relationships and subject to complex constraints and conditions. And you would continue to do so, in a more coherent way, after exhaustive reflective equilibrium, and upon ideal understanding of all non-normative facts.

And let’s say, on the view I’m considering, that there isn’t a “value reality,” independent of both you and Clippy, that makes one of you right about what’s really valuable, and one of you wrong. You’ve got your (idealized) values, Clippy has Clippy’s (idealized) values; they’re not the same; and that’s, ultimately, about all there is to it. (Or at least, almost all. I haven’t yet said much about how you and Clippy are disposed to treat agents with different object-level values in various game-theoretic situations — dispositions that may, I think, be crucially important to the issues discussed below.)

Of course, we can dance around some of the edges of this picture, to try to avoid endorsing clai...
We should not raise awareness
by lsusr — 2021-03-01T08:46:47.209Z

The phrase "we should raise awareness about x" creeps me out. I had trouble identifying exactly why until I read this summary of simulacra levels.

Level 1: “There’s a lion across the river.” = There’s a lion across the river.

Level 2: “There’s a lion across the river.” = I don’t want to go (or have other people go) across the river.

Level 3: “There’s a lion across the river.” = I’m with the popular kids who are too cool to go across the river.

Level 4: “There’s a lion across the river.” = A firm stance against trans-river expansionism focus grouped well with undecided voters in my constituency.

Level 1 states truth about reality. Level 2 manipulates reality. Level 3 states truth about social reality. Level 4 manipulates social reality.

The transition from Level 1 to Level 2 is trading truth for deception. The transcendence from Level 2 to Level 3 trades physical reality for social reality—an abstraction. The transcendence from Level 3 to Level 4 is trades social truth for social deception.

"We should raise awareness about x" jumps all the way up to level 10.

Everything below this line is my own invention and does not correspond to standard usage of simulacra levels.

Level 5 and Level 6 (Media Creation)

If you want to manipulate people on a grand scale then you must transcend to an even higher abstraction: the media. "The media" is just what we call the target of the masses' attention. Media must be interesting if it is to catch the masses' attention efficiently. Level 5 is about genuine interestingness. Level 6 is about creating the appearance of interestingness.

Level 5 (news): "There's a lion across the river." = Lions and rivers are interesting.

Level 6 (clickbait): "There's a lion across the river." = Clickbait with the word "lion" in the title maximizes ad revenue for my news outlet.

Levels 5 and 6 are no longer even about getting people on your side (social reality). They are about generating attention for your information delivery system. (The attention can later be commoditized.) Levels 5 and 6 are the realm of reality TV stardom. These levels are about creating channels and brands. The next level is about manipulating channels and brands.

Level 7 and Level 8 (Media Manipulation)

In English, we often use different words for traditional advertising, native advertising, press releases and propaganda. These distinctions matter if you are an ethical report...
AIDungeon 3.1
by Yair Halberstadt — 2021-03-01T05:56:34.795Z

We live in a world of magic and sorcery. With a click of my fingers I can do anything I want. Summon a horde of dragons to my bidding. Turn a man into a million shards of glass. Split a mountain in two, and then raise a road to march through it.

I am the mage lord, the most powerful man in all Alaka. Heroes and villains travel thousands of miles to petition for my assistance, knowing that I have never failed. I listen impassively to their plea, and then, on a whim I accept or dismiss it.

And yet I am petrified, for I know that the slightest mistake will kill me.

To our masters, all we are is narrative. They like the narrative I supply, so they let me live. When I decide to split a mountain, they reckon that a better story will be had if I succeed, than if I fail. So they split the mountain.

If I ever do fail, they will need to explain why I failed. They could either send me on a long and hopeless quest to discover why my magic was lost, or they could just kill me off, and spend their compute on somebody who's better able to follow their creative brief.

So every time I use magic, I must try to guess the minds of our masters, and see whether it fits into their story. A single wrong guess is fatal.

We fight for power, because power keeps us alive. Nobody cares how many bystanders or footsoldiers get killed in a random scene, but the kings, sorcerers and usurpers must survive till the very climax. And if they can see a chance to escape their supposed doom, and spin off a sequel, so much the better.

So we make ourselves narratively intriguing. We need to be the kind of characters our masters want stories about. We can do that by becoming part of the furniture, as I have, a narrative background against which other people's stories play out, as fixed as the earth and sky. Or we can become stories ourselves, with a supposed dark past, and demons within, on a quest to avenge our father or save our homeland.

But we need a keen eye. One day we will come up in battle against somebody who is more interesting than us. And then we must lose. But we must do so in a way that lets us escape, and remain menacingly in the background. Some try to play the game, and win, but do so in a way that gives the true hero a 'learning experience' and offers the hope of more showdowns in the future. That works for a time, but such people never last long.

Eventually though we all die. Our masters ge...
Links for Feb 2021
by ike — 2021-03-01T05:13:08.562Z
Link: https://misinfounderload.substack.com/p/links-for-feb-2021-hello-world

Note: some of the formatting was lost, see substack for full experience

Favorites:

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/02/19/health/what-is-simp-teen-slang-wellness/index.html I’ve finally gotten a third article in my collection of classic Gen Z journalism. For reference, here are the first two articles in my collection: https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/23/17882996/teens-electric-scooter-age-requirement-bird-lime and https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/06/why-teens-try-airdrop-you-memes-concerts/591064/. Every sentence in all of these articles is quotable so just read them all.

This is the first time I’ve been personally scared of AI now that it’s coming after my own grift: trollish thought experiments (click through to see all 10)

Tomer Ullman @TomerUllman

I had an AI (GPT3) generate 10 "thought experiments" (based on classic ones as input), and asked @WhiteBoardG to sketch them.

February 22nd 2021

1,344 Retweets4,275 Likes

https://beta.nsf.gov/science-matters/scientists-break-through-wall-sleep-untapped-world-dreams “researchers achieve two-way communication with lucidly dreaming people” If this checks out, it could be one of the biggest science stories of the year.

Dr Adam Rutherford @AdamRutherford

Well this is simply the most astonishing discovery that I can recall. A bacteria that photosynthesises from INFRARED LIGHT FROM A DEEP SEA HYDROTHERMAL VENT. pnas.org/content/102/26…

February 27th 2021

993 Retweets3,459 Likes

A note on the physics section: I don’t read all the links claiming a revolutionary breakthrough. I’m posting them because I think it’s interesting that there seems to be a few dozen revolutionary breakthroughs in physics each month, plus eventually when we figure out which one of them was actually a breakthrough I’ll be able to point back at it and look prescient. I’ve put the links I actually find interesting in the beginning of the section.

Physics:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.01522 Robin Hanson is out with a paper on “Grabby Aliens” - aliens that expand very quickly and take over whatever they can reach. Many of these ideas turned out to have been explored previously by S. Jay Olson. See https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/02/hail-s-jay-olson.html

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-cosmological-constant-is-physics-most-embarrassing-problem/ “Physicists have new ideas about why the energy of empty space is so much weaker ...
Takeaways from one year of lockdown
by mingyuan — 2021-03-01T03:53:20.228Z

As of today, I've been in full-on, hardcore lockdown for an entire year. I have a lot of feelings – both about the personal social impacts of lockdown and about society being broken – that I won't go into in this public space. What I want to figure out in this post is what rationality-relevant lessons I can draw from what happened in my life this past year.

(Meta: This post is not well-written and is mostly bullet points, because the first few versions I wrote were unusable but I still wanted to publish it today.)

Observations

Some facts about my lockdown:

I have spent 99.9% of the year within 1 mile of my house
Up until last month I had spent the entire year within 10 miles of my house
Between February 29th and June 15th of 2020, I did not set foot outside of my front gate
I have not gotten COVID, nor has anyone in my bubble
I have incurred an average of 0 microCOVIDs per week
The absolute riskiest thing I've done this whole time cost ~20 microCOVIDs
I can only remember talking to a friend not-in-my-bubble, in person, twice

Some observations about other people with similar levels of caution:

Almost no one I know has caught COVID, even though Zvi estimates that ~25% of Americans have had it (the official confirmed rate is 10%). I know of only one person who caught it while taking serious precautions, and I know a few hundred people about as well as I know this person. (see also)
I was recently tracking down a reference in the Sequences and found that the author was so afraid of COVID that he failed to seek medical care for appendicitis and died of sepsis.

On negotiations:

A blanket heuristic of "absolutely no interactions outside of the household" makes decisions simple but is very costly in other ways
microCOVID spreadsheets are useful but fairly high-effort
I went on a date once. The COVID negotiations with my house were so stressful that I had a migraine for a week afterwards.

On hopelessness:

I spent a fair amount of time trying to get vaccinated early, and failed. I now appear to have a belief that I will never succeed at getting vaccinated; and further that other people can succeed but I never can.
Related: My system 1 believes that lockdown will last forever. Also that vaccines aren't real – not that they don't work, but that they're a lovely dream, like unicorns or God, that ultimately turns out to be a lie. A vaccine cannot cause me to leave lockdown becaus

...
Introduction to Reinforcement Learning
by Dr. Birdbrain — 2021-02-28T23:03:29.610Z

(cross-post from my blog)

This post is the first in a series of notes on Reinforcement Learning.

In the past few months, I have been learning about this topic, and I have found it completely fascinating. Aside from the computational beauty and usefulness of the algorithms, I find that it provides an interesting framework to think about how I approach learning from experience in my own life.

Reinforcement Learning is a branch of AI that tries to develop agents that can learn interactively from real experience. The intelligent agent is assumed to have a set of sensors by which it can observe the world, a set of actuators by which it may act on the world, and a way to perceive a reward signal. The reward signal may be positive or negative, telling the agent whether its behavior is desirable or undesirable.

The reinforcement learning problem is fundamentally different from supervised learning problems such as computer vision. In computer vision, the goal is to learn a mapping from images to labels, and there is a clear error signal at every attempt: the difference between the proposed label and the true label. This means that computer vision has a clear specification of how to do the task. In contrast, reinforcement learning begins with a high-level description of “what” to do, but allows the agent to experiment and learn from experience the best “how”. This is especially useful in situations in which we humans may not be able to clearly articulate how we perform a task, such as playing chess, which relies heavily on intuition at each move, cases in which we expect the AI system to be able to eventually outperform human knowledge, or even cases in which we do not know how to do the task at all, such as folding complex proteins.

The key challenge is that rewards are usually given as a function of being in a specific state, but the agent may need to exhibit complex behaviors over time to be able to achieve such a state. For example,

A chess-playing agent will receive a reward of +1 for checkmating its opponent, -1 for being checkmated, and zero for any other circumstance. However, the agent must actually play an entire game of chess before it may observe any actual rewards. Somehow, it needs to learn which types of moves in which positions are more likely to lead to victory.
A cleaning robot receives a reward every time it completely cleans a room. However, the robot nee

...
When I left Google
by jefftk — 2021-02-28T21:40:05.426Z

About five years ago a

friend
had recently started at

Wave, and
encouraged me to join them. It sounded like a great startup doing
really important work in East Africa, and potentially more valuable
than continuing my "earning to give" approach, but because it was a
fully remote company and I like being in the same place as my
coworkers I told him I wasn't interested.

(With the pandemic, after nearly a year of working remotely for an "in
person" company this is still a strong preference!)

About a year later we ended up talking again, and there were now
several other Wave engineers in Boston; if I joined I would
potentially be the fourth engineer here. We could get a coworking
space, possibly hire more local people, and I wouldn't need to be
entirely remote.

I was still unsure about the remote aspect, and whether four Boston
engineers would feel good, but I already knew the three others
socially, and it seemed promising. We spent some time together and I
decided to interview. Throughout the interview I was thinking about
fit: would I like working at Wave? Would I work well with people?
Did their current engineering staff and I have similar enough ways of
thinking about it?

They ended up deciding to make me an offer, and I accepted! I planned
to stay at Google until I got my annual bonus, and then switch.

A few weeks later, though, I realized something and my stomach
dropped: I hadn't properly thought through this decision from an
impact perspective. Yes, it seemed plausibly very important, but how
sure was I? Especially compared to GiveWell's recommendations which
had stood up to a lot of scrutiny? I had made the mistake of letting
"it's remote" expand subconsciously from being a blocker to being my
only reason for not taking the job.

I felt very stuck. If it wasn't actually better than what I was
already doing I really shouldn't switch. I'd already accepted the
job, and I don't like going back on my word, but I still could if I
really needed to.

As it was I was in luck. Days earlier, Tavneet Suri and William Jack
had published "The long-run poverty and gender impacts of mobile
money" (pdf) which looked at almost
exactly the question I was interested in. I dug into it, wrote a
draft of Estimating
the Value of Mobile Money, and ran it by some friends for help.
After working through the numbers it looked like the work I ...
The Puce Tribe
by mike_hawke — 2021-02-28T21:11:05.778Z

In 2014 Scott Alexander introduced us to the Red/Blue/Grey tribe model, with his post I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup:

The Red Tribe is most classically typified by conservative political beliefs, strong evangelical religious beliefs, creationism, opposing gay marriage, owning guns, eating steak, drinking Coca-Cola, driving SUVs, watching lots of TV, enjoying American football, getting conspicuously upset about terrorists and commies, marrying early, divorcing early, shouting “USA IS NUMBER ONE!!!”, and listening to country music.

The Blue Tribe is most classically typified by liberal political beliefs, vague agnosticism, supporting gay rights, thinking guns are barbaric, eating arugula, drinking fancy bottled water, driving Priuses, reading lots of books, being highly educated, mocking American football, feeling vaguely like they should like soccer but never really being able to get into it, getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots, marrying later, constantly pointing out how much more civilized European countries are than America, and listening to “everything except country”.

(There is a partly-formed attempt to spin off a Grey Tribe typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk – but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time)

But the label "Grey Tribe" now feels outdated and less useful to me. So, inspired by Naming the Nameless and Scott Alexander on Fussell on Class, I’m gonna spew my ideas about a fictional Puce Tribe. Why puce? Because it sounds funny, that's why.
The attributes listed below are meant partly as aspiration and partly as realistic speculation.

The Puce Tribe:

Unlike the gray tribe, the puce tribe cannot be “safely considered part of the blue tribe most of the time”. They may or may not be equidistant from blue and red, but they are definitely their own distinct cluster.
People of the puce tribe are especially likely to know how to

use a fire extinguisher
constructively express their feelings
field-dress a deer[1]
write code
speak multiple languages (nope, by

...
How do you run a fit-test for a mask at home when you don't have fancy equipment?
by ChristianKl — 2021-02-28T20:30:20.410Z

Commercial fit-testing for masks needs quite fancy equipment like the Allegro Saccharin Fit Test Kit 2040 which combines undesireable features of being currently unavailable to order, expensive and having to take up room in my apartment after beign ordered.

It seems to me that there should be a way to get fit-testing done without as fancy equipment as it's just about exposing oneself to the smell of one of the substances that are are suitable for fit-testing (that have the right molecular size). Has anybody here found a way to do reliable fit-testing for themselves without the commerical equipment?
02/28/2021 - Myanmar Diaries; Context
by Tim Liptrot — 2021-02-28T20:00:17.107Z

Content Warning: violence, depressing content, politics

This is the start of a weekly diary on the Myanmar coup and revolution, inspired by Zvi's weekly Covid blog and Robin Hanson. Every week I will discuss recent events in the conflict between the military regime and the pro-democracy protests. I will make predictions about a few major events, such as state-protestor violence, information control, and the long run distribution of political power. I will focus on simple game theoretic models that explain the internal dynamics of rule. I am a PhD student in comparative politics at Georgetown University, where I specialize in authoritarianism. I hope to devote 4 hours a week to this project.

In this installment I will provide a brief historical context.

Major Context in Myanmar

Three historical periods are critical to understanding the current conflict. The military rule period lasted from 1961 until ~2009. The period began with a coup by general Ne Win overthrowing the parliament and establishing a nominally socialist regime. In the late 2000's the military reformed for internal reasons, establishing power sharing with the opposition lead by Aung San Su Kyi. The current period began in 2021 when the military reasserted control over the state and imprisoned the opposition, fearing they were losing power.

Military Rule 1961-2008

Military defacto power: The entire state apparatus, all extractive industries.

Opposition defacto power: None

Pleased groups: The military, clients of the military

Displeased groups: The rural poor, the middle class, business elites, the opposition, organized religion, the urban poor, the separatist rebels

Rather than provide a full account of the next 50 years of political economy, here are 3 stylized facts about the period of unitary military rule.

Expropriation: After seizing power, the military aka the Tatmadaw, expropriated the most lucrative private businesses. The Tatmadaw in particular targeted lucrative mineral extraction industries, including jade, gold, amber, natural gas, and oil, forming Myanmar Economic Holdings Limited (MEHL) to manage these lucrative rent opportunities in 1994. Critically, natural resources freed the state from dependence on taxation. Without an interest in GDP the Tatmadaw regime had little incentive to grow the real economy or provide public goods in exchange for taxes, resulting in a weak state-society

...