trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Funding is All You Need: Getting into Grad School by Hacking the NSF GRFP Fellowship
by hapanin — 2022-09-22T21:39:15.399Z

Fellowship is All You Need: Getting into Grad School by Hacking the NSF GRFP

Last year I started having delusions of grad school. By delusions I mean that on paper, in the numeric and text fields that actually make it into the application, I looked utterly unqualified to do machine learning research, let alone at a top school. I had no computer science publications, no masters degree, and a 3.3 GPA, in materials engineering. I was a self-taught washed up startup founder six years out of school with no advisor and three months work experience in my proposed field of NLP. Only two people had ever seen me write code; one was my current boss and the other was my ex-cofounder, who also happened to be my brother, so I couldn’t even scrape together a single letter of recommendation attesting to my programming talents. I did take a programming class once, CSE142: Intro to Computer Programming I, where I got a C. But next month I’ll be starting my PhD studies at Columbia advised by Zhou Yu and Luis Gravano. They’re really really good at what they do and there’s no school I’d rather be at. This is the story of how I leveraged the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP) to get my unqualified ass into grad school. The technical guide follows.

Table of Contents

The Hack

Technical Guide

Abstract

Background

Normal Route

Funding is All You Need

What Does the NSF Want?

Methods

How to Win a GRFP

Take Risks

The Hero's Journey

Editing

Timeline

What to Do Once You've Won

Results & Conclusion

Footnotes

Appendix 1: Useful Links

The Hack

In June of 2021 I forgot to register my +1 at a wedding and got placed next to a cool dude named Logan who told me just to shoot my shot on PhD applications even though I didn’t feel qualified. After all, they’re kind of a crap shoot anyway. Lacking any proper mentorship I took this advice at face value and spent the rest of the summer reading papers and the autumn drinking cappuccinos and banging out applications at Amy’s Merkato and Fort St. George after work. At the end of the year I fired off my freshly minted applications and swapped caffeine for alcohol while the responses rolled in.

I was rejected from every school. Don’t get me wrong, I knew my application was weak, but that doesn’t make it suck less. All seven schools turned me down without even waitlisting me. There’s not much more to s...
What Do AI Safety Pitches Not Get About Your Field?
by Aris — 2022-09-22T21:27:08.097Z

When I was first introduced to AI Safety, coming from a background studying psychology, I kept getting frustrated about the way people defined the and used the word "intelligence". They weren't able to address my questions about cultural intelligence, social evolution, and general intelligence in a way I found rigorous enough to be convincing. I felt like professionals couldn't answer what I considered to be basic and relevant questions about general intelligence, which meant that I took a lot longer to take AI Safety seriously than I otherwise would have. It feels possible to me that other people have run into AI Safety pitches and been turned off because of something similar -- a communication issue because both parties approached the conversation with very different background information. I'd love to try to minimize these occurrences, so if you've had anything similar happen, could you please share:
What is something that you feel AI Safety pitches usually don't seem to understand about your field/background? What's a common place where you feel you've become stuck in a conversation with AI Safety pitches? What question/information makes/made the conversation stop progressing and start circling?
(Cross-posted from the EA forum)
"Free Will" in a Computational Universe
by DragonGod — 2022-09-22T21:25:26.087Z

Previous post: Initial Thoughts on Dissolving "Couldness"

Epistemic Status

Been sitting in my drafts unattended to for a month. I'm publishing now so that I publish at all. I do not currently endorse this post or its predecessor.

Disclaimer

This is an expansion of my previous post generated in a stream of consciousness like manner. I found it sufficiently weird/sketchy that I decided to separate it to its own post.

This is an area for which I have many holes in my knowledge. Take it with a grain of salt (I don't fully trust it myself).

Acknowledgements

Discussions with others helped me refine/sharpen these ideas. I'm grateful for them.

Introduction

In the previous post, I showed that it is impossible to determine the output (choice) of an arbitrary (decision) algorithm on arbitrary input (sensory data).

This seems to give rise to a computational notion of libertarian "free will". Arbitrary decision algorithms can really choose any choice (or simply not halt).

To phrase this "computational free will" in the most succinct manner:

You cannot know the output of an arbitrary function on an arbitrary input without computing the function.

(This definition seamlessly integrates computing extensionally equivalent algorithms. For algorithms that don't halt, "not halting" can simply be considered another output of the function.)

I'll investigate this notion of "computational free will" over the remainder of the post.

Computational Free Will as Libertarian Free Will

I think computational free will provides a seamless implementation of libertarian free will that is no less free than e.g. dualistic implementations. That is, I wish to argue that at least one of the below is true:

Algorithms are endowed with the exact same "free will" that dual minds ("souls", "spirits", etc.) are imagined to have in dualistic implementations of libertarian free will.
Libertarian "free will" — even in dualistic ontologies — is an incoherent or confused concept.

That is insomuch as "libertarian free will" is a coherent and sensible concept, then it manifests for algorithms. There is no free will that a dual mind endowed with libertarian free will (henceforth DELF) can have that is absent from an algorithm.

Argument

The thesis of computational free will is that the output of arbitrary decision functions (on arbitrary inputs) cannot be known apriori (here, "apriori" means someth...
Initial Thoughts on Dissolving "Couldness"
by DragonGod — 2022-09-22T21:23:31.510Z

Epistemic Status

Been sitting in my drafts unattended to for a month. I'm publishing now so that I publish at all. I do not currently endorse this post or its follow up.

Acknowledgements

Discussions with others helped me refine/sharpen these ideas. I'm grateful for them.

Introduction

(You may skip to "Closing Remarks" to get a high-level summary of the post.)

Counterfactual/counterlogical reasoning seems intuitively sensible as a decision procedure.
We can build deterministic algorithms that consider what "would" happen if they took one action or another. I will refer to such algorithms as "decision algorithms".

Loosely speaking, a decision algorithm is one that takes in sensory data (observation history) as input and (if it halts) returns ("chooses") an action as its output.

Given a set of actions A={a1,a2,...,an}.
What does it mean for a decision algorithm to consider an action a3 if it will deterministically choose an action a5 and can't actually "choose" a3.
In what sense "could" it have chosen a3?
Why is this possible?

What "Couldness" Feels Like From the Inside

I'm guessing that "couldness" flows from a paradox of self-reference?
A decision algorithm cannot (in general) determine ahead of time what its output (choice) is, until it actually returns its output (makes that choice). This can be proven by contradiction.
Suppose that there's a subroutine D that gave the algorithm its deterministic choice.
D(st)=ad(ad∈A)

Where:

st is the algorithm's percept sequence (sensory data/observation history) at the time of invocation.

Then after running D, the algorithm can pick aj∈A:aj≠ad (or simply not halt).

("Can" here means that the algorithm may be constructed so that after invoking D it acts in a manner inconsistent with the output of D.)

This leads to a contradiction.
Thus, no such D can exist.
Thus, the algorithm cannot "know" its choice ahead of time.

(This is a limitation of decision algorithms in general. Some specific algorithms call a subroutine that determines their choice and then just return that choice.)

This inability of decision algorithms to know their (deterministic) choice ahead of time, is what "couldness" feels like from the inside.

From the perspective of the algorithm, it really can "choose" any ax∈A.

What "Couldness" Feels Like From the Outside

What about from ou...
Let's Compare Notes
by Shoshannah Tekofsky — 2022-09-22T20:47:38.553Z

What's the best way to share your progress skilling up in AI alignment? Maybe it's highly polished posts on your well-considered and nuanced insights in to alignment. Or maybe it's massively overconfident takes you should really just keep in your private drafts. Let's find out with the power of science. Here is the experiment:

I dump a raw extract here of my research notes from reading through the core material of Richard Ngo's Safety Fundementals course. This only covers "new" ideas I had (quotation marks, as I have yet to generate an idea I can't find back in the literature). These are not redacted, contain some weird grammar, jumps in reasoning, and many stupid questions. Then we see if anyone gets anything out of it. If so, we all learn something. If not, I mentally award myself another badge for awkward self-disclosure.

A little more context before we dive in: This is just from my "ideas" page on the Obsidian Vault I started with all my AIS readings. I can highly recommend this tool, and shout out to jhoogland for making me aware of it. Additionally, I started thinking about AIS about 3-4 months ago in my spare time, so my questions, models, and hypotheses are still quite naive.

With all those disclaimers out of the way, here we go:

Raw Notes

Can we build a population of divergent or varied mini AI's that work together, such that any one bad actor/unaligned AI is suppressed by the rest? This is what happens in evolution both on the cellular and organismic level. It would mirror an AI immune system, in a way. But it would require AI to be built up modularly. It would avoid failure modes related to homogeneity. - Idea source: Intelligence Explosion Extract. Maybe look in to Society of Mind by Minsky?

The Alignment Tax on this seems insanely high cause you basically get very inefficient systems? Source
Coordination cost increases superlinearly with scale, so you don't want a huge number of modular AI's coordinating cause then the Alignment Tax is through the roof. However, is there an optimal number of AGI that you can have coordinating such that the Alignment Tax is manageable while you achieve Robustness/Immune System to misalignment? So like ... what are the arguments for purposefully moving to a multi-agent equilibrium for AGI?
How have evo algos been combined with NN/DL? Can we set up a population of AGI's to evolve toward optimality which i

...
Methodological Therapy: An Agenda For Tackling Research Bottlenecks
by adamShimi — 2022-09-22T18:41:03.346Z

This post is part of the work done at Conjecture.

Epistemic Status: Palimpsest

Better epistemology should make you stronger.

Which is why at Conjecture's' epistemology team we are so adamant on improving our models of knowledge-production: this feels like the key to improving alignment research across the board, given the epistemological difficulties of the field.

Yet we have failed until now to make our theory of impact legible, both to ourselves and to well-meaning external reviewers. The most sorely missing piece is the link between better models of knowledge-production and quick improvements of alignment research, in the shorter timelines that we expect at Conjecture .

Following interviews that we conducted with a handful of alignment researchers (John Wentworth, Vanessa Kosoy, Evan Hubinger, Abram Demski, Steve Byrnes, Conjecture researchers, and Refine participants), we want to present our current best guess for framing how our epistemology research can make alignment research stronger: revealing, analyzing, and expanding or replacing what we call "Cached Methodologies" — patterns that encode how research is supposed to proceed in a given context, for example the idea that we need to prove a statement to learn if it's true or not. Given that this involves bringing to light and questioning cached thoughts about methodology, we dub this approach methodological therapy.

Note that we definitely also want to leverage better models of knowledge-production to help field-builders and newcomers; our current focus on explicit applications for established researchers comes from two key factors: we're currently only three people in the epistemology team, which means we have to prioritize; and we expect that models and tools useful to established researchers will prove instrumental in building ones for field-builders and newcomers.

On credit: this idea emerged from discussions within the epistemology team (composed of Adam Shimi, Lucas Teixeira, and Daniel Clothiaux); Adam contributed the overall perspective, the unification and the therapy metaphor (from Bachelard); Lucas contributed the focus on actual cached patterns in researchers' minds and interviews; Daniel contributed the expansion of the idea to encompass more alternatives (for examples more ways of doing experiments) as well as many insights from the literature. This post is written by Adam; "we" means that the ...
Berkeley group house, spots open
by Jack R — 2022-09-22T17:13:59.842Z

If you are interested in living in a group house of EAs in Berkeley starting as soon as you’d like, please fill out

this 1-minute form

- we have a few spots available that we’re hoping to fill. Rent durations are up to 8 months (longer if a new lease is signed). The form will close when all spots have been filled. More info about the house can be found

here

. We're looking forward to having you join us :)
Fake qualities of mind
by Kaj_Sotala — 2022-09-22T16:40:05.085Z

There’s a thing where you’d like to have one “quality of mind”, but it’s not available, but you substitute it with a kind of a fake or alternative version of the same. Which is fine as long as you realize you’re doing it, but becomes an issue if you forget that what’s happening.

For example, you have a job that you’re sometimes naturally motivated to do and sometimes you totally don’t feel like it. On the days when you don’t feel motivated, you substitute the motivation with an act of just making yourself do it.

Which of course makes sense: it’s hard to be motivated all the time, and if you need to work anyway, then you need to find some substitute.

But what happens if you forget that you’re doing this, and forget what it actually feels like to be naturally motivated?

Then you might find yourself doing the mental motion of “pushing yourself” all the time and wonder why it is that you keep struggling with motivation and why work feels so unenjoyable. You might think that the answer is to push yourself more, or to find more effective ways of pushing yourself.

And then you might wonder why it is that even when you do manage to more successfully push yourself, you keep feeling depressed. After all, the pushing was a substitute for situations when you’re not enjoying yourself, but need to work anyway!

But it might be that you constantly pushing yourself is a part of the problem. It’s hard to be naturally motivated if you don’t give yourself the time (or if your external circumstances don’t give you the time) to actually let that motivation emerge on its own.

That’s not to say that just easing off on the pushing would necessarily be sufficient. Often there’s a reason for why the pushing became the default response; the original motivation was somehow blocked, and you need to somehow identify what’s keeping it blocked.

It’s easiest to talk about this in the context of motivation. Most people probably have some sense of the difference between feeling naturally motivated and pushing yourself to do something. But in my experience, the same dynamic can emerge in a variety of contexts, such as:

Trying to ‘do’ creative inspiration, vs. actually having inspiration

Trying to ‘do’ empathy, vs. actually having empathy

Trying to ‘do’ sexual arousal, vs. actually getting aroused

Trying to quiet your feelings, vs. actually having self-compassion

As well as more subtle mental motions ...
Dath Ilan's Views on Stopgap Corrigibility
by David Udell — 2022-09-22T16:16:07.467Z
Link: https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1824440#reply-1824440

The second half of this linkpost contains significant planecrash spoilers, up through Book 7, null action.

Somewhere in the true dath ilan, carefully blurred out of satellite images by better image-editing software than is supposed to exist anywhere, is the true Conspiracy out of dath ilan, or as they call it, the Basement of the World.

They're trying to build a god, and they're trying to do it right. The initial craft doesn't have to be literally perfect to work perfectly in the end, it just has to be good enough that its reflection and self-correction ends up in exactly the right final place, but there's multiple fixpoints consistent under reflection and anything lost here is lost forever and across a million galaxies.

It's a terrifying problem, if you're doing right. Not the kind of terror you nod about and courageously continue on past; the kind of terror that shapes the careers of fully 20% of the brightest people in all of dath ilan. They'd use more if they thought productivity would scale faster than risk.

A lot of dath ilan's present macrostrategy could be summed up as "We're still successfully heredity-optimizing people to be smarter, and the emotions and ethics and humaneness of the smartest people haven't started to come apart; let's create another generation of researchers before we actually try anything for real." Life in dath ilan, even before the Future, is not that bad; people who'd rather not be alive today have easy access to cryopreservation; another generation of non-transhumanist existence is not so much a crime that it's worth risking the glorious transhuman future. Even the negative utilitarians would agree; they don't like present life but they are far more terrified of a future mistake amortized over millions of galaxies, given that they weren't going to win a war against having any future at all.

They're delaying their ascension, in dath ilan, because they want to get it right. Without any Asmodeans needing to torture them at all, they apply a desperate unleashed creativity, not to the problem of preventing complete disaster, but to the problem of not missing out on 1% of the achievable utility in a way you can't get back. There's something horrifying and sad about the prospect of losing 1% of the Future and not being able to get it back.

A dath ilani has an instinctive terror, faced with a p

...
Ukraine Post #12
by Zvi — 2022-09-22T14:40:03.753Z

After doing frequent Ukraine posts early on, I decided that the war was no long a good match for this blog and my skill set. The basic situation was clear and was moving slowly. In the last few weeks things have started moving more rapidly on multiple fronts. Ukraine has made substantial progress.

In response, Russia has begun substantial mobilization.

Thus, it seems like it is worth writing another of these posts. I am not sure if events will justify any additional ones.

Putin’s Speech

In situations like this, one must watch the speech. I was later pointed to a transcript.

Here are my notes as I watched. I cannot verify the translation but have no reason to doubt it that I can see.

Putin initially frames this, even now, as about Donetsk and Lugansk only.

However he then quickly names other ‘liberated’ regions and talks about the ‘security and territorial integrity’ of the regime – the ‘desire and will of our compatriots to choose their future independently’ (1:10)

He claims West wants to split up the Russian Federation. Yes, well. (1:51)

LNR/DNR units now considered on par with Russian units. (4:57)

Clear intent to keep all territory Russia physically controls. (8:27)

They will do this via ‘referendums’ in all these regions.

Mobilization only of the reserves, promise of training. (10:00)

Mobilization begins today, right now. (10:43)

Defense industry tasked with ensuring there is equipment, promised support as needed. (11:17)

Delivery of Western weapons that could ‘strike Crimea and Russia.’

Claims that West is pushing Ukraine to invade Russia. (12:27)

Accused West of ‘nuclear blackmail’ including weapons threats. (13:06)

“In the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of the country, and to defend Russia and our people, we will certainly make use of all weapons systems available to us. This is not a bluff.”

Emphasis on “By all the systems available to us.”

Speech accused Ukraine and the West of various atrocities and other things as justification for all this.

Speech does not mention how many troops are being called up. Many sources say 300,000. The speech neither limits that in any way, nor commits to doing anything that substantial.

The references to industrial production being the responsibility of industry, aside from promises of financial support, seems like throwing industry under the bus. It ...
Covid 9/22/22: The Joe Biden Sings
by Zvi — 2022-09-22T14:40:00.621Z

Joe Biden firmly declared on 60 Minutes that the Covid pandemic is over.

As you would expect, those in Public Health did not all quietly agree with this.

When Bob Wachter says it is a judgment call whether the pandemic is over, you know the pandemic is over.

When Caitlin Rivers says ‘yes and no,’ and the details she lists are far more yes than no, you know the pandemic is over.

When Celine Gounder responds by saying that calling the pandemic over is Just Awful and means we are awful people violating sacred values and must Do More, you still know the pandemic is over. She points to some other similar quotes here. It similarly does not seem over to Tatiana Prowell.

More generally, with various Public Health voices chiming in.

Experts agreed it was not yet time to call the pandemic over, but some suggested acknowledging we have entered a new phase of the pandemic.

Experts, huh.

“I worry that premature declarations like this, especially from the U.S. president, can also influence other HIC (high-income country) leaders to follow suit and pump the brakes on response efforts. COVID-19 has affected the most vulnerable communities first, including women and girls, people of color, and low-income communities — statements like this give false hope to policymakers and leaders that COVID-19 is no longer a threat, and it’s these marginalized communities that once again will feel the brunt of rising cases again,” Lal said.

And while the progress against COVID-19 should be celebrated, Lal said, “We should all be clear eyed about the reality we face — COVID-19 remains a threat to our communities and we need more, not less, political will to bring it under control.”

We must Do More. Beyond that, we must Do More Than Ever. We must Bring It Under Control, for values of under control that are physically impossible and absolutely never going to happen even if such people get their way.

So, yeah. Pandemic over.

That does not mean there is not a Public Emergency. There is very much still a Public Emergency because there must always be a Public Emergency. How else would we transfer hundreds of billions of dollars to favored groups without the approval of Congress?

Still, pandemic over. When the Public Emergency expires, the search will be on for the new emergency.

On that note, and given several people asked about it, let us welcome the latest variant, BA.2.75.2, with...