trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
You Can Do Futarchy Yourself
by Tetraspace — 2020-06-14T00:16:20.823Z

Long ago, in the year 2000, Robin Hanson raised the question of whether we should vote on values and bet on beliefs. He proposes a form of government called futarchy, in which people vote on values and bet on beliefs.

Under futarchy, values experts propose measures of global welfare, policy-writing experts write up policies, and policy-evaluation experts bet on the outcome of those policies (in principle, anyone could do any of these things - but politics is valuable enough that I imagine experts will occupy these three roles). People vote on the measure of global welfare used, and the policies that have the best expected outcome by inputting the results of the betting markets into the currently-elected global welfare measure become law.

Sounds great! But as with all good things, one might suspect that the reason we don't already have futarchy is because of some sticky Nash equilibrium.

Imagine trying to go full futarchy, straight away. There are tons of different stakeholders in politics; some of them gain power when you implement futarchy, some of them lose power. The ones who lose power attempt to veto this. Given that tearing everything down and implementing futarchy requires a similar set of moves to tearing everything down and implementing dictatorship, the historical record suggests that they can usually veto this; you are not living under a dictatorship of the first person to ever try becoming a dictator. Depending on how powerful you are when you try, this looks like everyone ignoring the futarchy of you and your less-enthusiastic high school friends, a SWAT team raiding your futarchy compound, or your nation's constitution not having an amendment that lets you do futarchy.

So, forget systemic change for now. Imagine trying to become a personal futarch, as an elected politician. You hire a software engineer to write a prediction market app (like mine), or make a little thing on the Augur blockchain or something, and then from then on you vote on legislation according to the results of the markets rather than your own guesses. Just kidding! No you don't! You're an elected politician - the part of you that would be weird enough to do something as terribly unconventional as futarchy was ground away in your climb to the top, or you preserved it and got selected out of politics and you're not actually an elected politician. And that...
Preparing for "The Talk" with AI projects
by Daniel Kokotajlo — 2020-06-13T23:01:24.332Z

Epistemic status: Written for Blog Post Day III. I don't get to talk to people "in the know" much, so maybe this post is obsolete in some way.

I think that at some point at least one AI project will face an important choice between deploying and/or enlarging a powerful AI system, or holding back and doing more AI safety research.

(Currently, AI projects face choices like this all the time, except they aren't important in the sense I mean it, because the AI isn't potentially capable of escaping and taking over large parts of the world, or doing something similarly bad.)

Moreover, I think that when this choice is made, most people in the relevant conversation will be insufficiently concerned/knowledgeable about AI risk. Perhaps they will think: "This new AI design is different from the classic models, so the classic worries don't arise." Or: "Fear not, I did [insert amateur safety strategy]."

I think it would be very valuable for these conversations to end with "OK, we'll throttle back our deployment strategy for a bit so we can study the risks more carefully," rather than with "Nah, we're probably fine, let's push ahead." This buys us time. Say it buys us a month. A month of extra time right after scary-powerful AI is created is worth a lot, because we'll have more serious smart people paying attention, and we'll have more evidence about what AI is like. I'd guess that a month of extra time in a situation like this would increase the total amount of quality-weighted AI safety and AI policy work by 10%. That's huge.

One way to prepare for these conversations is to raise awareness about AI risk and technical AI safety problems, so that it's more likely that more people in these conversations are more informed about the risks. I think this is great.

However, there's another way to prepare, which I think is tractable and currently neglected:

1. Identify some people who might be part of these conversations, and who already are sufficiently concerned/knowledgeable about AI risk.

2. Help them prepare for these conversations by giving them resources, training, and practice, as needed:

2a. Resources:

Perhaps it would be good to have an Official List of all the AI safety strategies, so that whatever rationale people give for why this AI is safe can be compared to t...
Coronavirus as a test-run for X-risks
by Sammy Martin — 2020-06-13T21:00:13.859Z

On the 27th February, I, like many of us, became fully aware of the danger humanity was facing (let’s thank

‘Seeing the Smoke’

) and put my cards on the table with

this

:

This is partly a test run of how we'd all feel and react during a genuine existential risk. Metaculus currently has it as a 19%

chance of spreading to billions of people

, a disaster that would certainly result in many millions of deaths, probably tens of millions. Not even a catastrophic risk, of course, but this is what it feels like to be facing down a 1/5 chance of a major global disaster in the next year. It is an opportunity to understand on a gut level that, this is possible, yes, real things exist which can do this to the world. And it does happen.

It's worth thinking that specific thought now because this particular epistemic situation, a 1/5 chance of a major catastrophe in the next year, will probably arise again over the coming decades. I can easily imagine staring down a similar probability of dangerously fast AGI takeoff, or a nuclear war, a few months in advance.

Well, now a few months have gone by and much has changed. The natural question to ask is- what general lessons have we learned, compared to that ‘particular epistemic situation’, now that we’re in a substantially different one? What does humanity’s response to the coronavirus pandemic so far imply about how we might fare against genuine X-risks?

At a first pass, the answer to that question seems obvious - not very well. The response of most usually well-functioning governments (I’m thinking mainly of Western Europe here) has been slow, held back by an unwillingness to commit all resources to a strategy and accept its trade-offs, and sluggish to respond to changing evidence. Advance preparation was even worse.

This post gives

a good summary of some of those more obvious lessons for X-risks, focussing specifically on slow AI takeoff.

As to what we ultimately blame for this slowness - Scott Alexander and Toby Ord gave as good an account as anyone (before the pandemic) in blaming a

failure to understand expected value and the availability heuristic.

However, many of us predicted in advance the dynamics that would lead countries to put forward a slow and incoherent response to the coronavirus. What I want to explore now is - what has changed epistemically since I wr...
Testing Hanson's hypothesis about the uselessness of health care.
by JoshuaFox — 2020-06-13T18:34:04.436Z

Robin Hanson has hypothesized that much health care is useless, and that if we radically cut health care (just the part that looks most useless, or even at random), there would be no effect on health outcomes.

People have been staying away from clinics and hospitals in droves. So, are general outcomes generally worse, excluding Covid-19 itself?

Like all such natural experiments, there are confounders, like reduction in other infections diseases improving outcomes; and it is hard to isolate the effects of Covid-19. But overall, this seems like an excellent opportunity to test his hypothesis.
A Practical Guide to Conflict Resolution: Comprehension
by  — 2020-06-13T15:08:18.546Z

[As described in the introduction, this post is about the value of fully grasping the whole picture, including the many sides to each debate, even when most of them are wrong.]

Seek First to Understand

A good attitude and a good venue will carry you a surprisingly long way, but of course they’re not always sufficient on their own. The next thing I try when mediating conflict is to temporarily ignore whatever I believe and work to understand both sides of the argument equally. I called this post “comprehension”, but it could equally just be called “listening”, or maybe more precisely “active listening”. Honestly, Stephen Covey has already said most of this far better than I can in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Habit number five is “seek first to understand”, which captures the spirit of things.

The value of truly understanding both sides of a conflict cannot be overstated. Even when I’ve nominally resolved a conflict, I get antsy if I still don’t really grok one side or the other. More than once, trying to scratch that itch “after the fact” has turned up a hidden requirement or pain point which would have just caused more grief down the road. Remember, success is rarely as simple as just making the conflict go away; you can’t know if you’ve truly found success (not just victory) unless you properly understand both sides.

But understanding both sides isn’t just an after-the-fact thing. It also has concrete value in guiding the resolution of a conflict when you’re caught in the middle of it, because it allows you to properly apply the principle of charity. The principle of charity says that you should try and find the best possible interpretation for people’s arguments, even when they aren’t always clear or coherent. It goes back to assuming good faith; maybe an argument sounds crazy, but it makes sense to the person saying it. The only way to apply the principle of charity in many cases is to start by understanding the argument, and the person making it.

Understanding both sides is also a key part of something called “steelmanning“, which is the process of actively finding better versions of another person’s arguments. This may seem like an odd thing to do in a conflict, but only if you’...
How do you find good content on Youtube?
by Rudi C — 2020-06-13T12:29:00.859Z

Youtube is a treasure trove of visual content, including a lot of technical talks. Its search/discovery capabilities are weak though (possibly because there are so many normal users using it that their preferences have overtaken the system). It seems to me that knowing some good channels can help one find a lot of interesting content.

My own recommendations (mostly programming/CS):

StrangeLoop
BlackHat
goto
awesome lists on Github are a good place to find community-curated talks.
https://dev.tube/ (a search engine that filters on whitelisted channels)
PapersWeLove
[GoogleTechTalks](https://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleTechTalks/videos)
[Two Minute Papers](https://www.youtube.com/user/keeroyz/videos)
[Codegram](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwoOpKfkyCQHW562hXXQAGg/videos)
[infoq](https://www.youtube.com/user/MarakanaTechTV/videos)
[HackersOnBoard](https://www.youtube.com/user/HackersOnBoard)
Intuitive Lagrangian Mechanics
by lsusr — 2020-06-13T09:19:52.242Z
Link: https://www.lsusr.com/blog/intuitive-lagrangian-mechanics.html

Lagrangian mechanics is an alternative formulation of Newtonian mechanics. Newtonian mechanics solves movements using successive approximations. Lagrangian mechanics figures out the whole path all at once. Lagrangian mechanics is useful for solving problems subject to certain constraints. It is also a prerequisite to understanding quantum field theory and the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics.

In the classical formulation of Lagrangian mechanics, the Lagrangian L is the difference between a particle's kinetic energy T and potential energy V.

L=T−V

The action S of a particle is the path integral of its Lagrangian.

S=∫tftiLdt

The path of a particle extremizes S.

δS=0

We therefore derive the Euler–Lagrange equations.

ddt(∂L∂˙qj)=∂L∂qj

Does this make sense to you? Because subtracting potential energy from kinetic energy does not make conceptual sense to me. Besides, what, conceptually, is "action" and why should it be extremized? Lagrangian mechanics make better sense in special relativity.

Special Relativity

To make things more intuitive, let's look at Lagrangian mechanics in the context of special relativity, from which classical Lagrangian mechanics is an approximation. I will set c=1 because space and time ought to have the same units. I will set m0=1 for convenience because the rest mass of our particle does not change.

The most important number in special relativity is the Lorentz factor γ, the instantaneous ratio of coordinate time t to proper time τ.

γ=dtdτ=1√1−v2

We can[1] take the action S to be the length of the particle's world line between proper times τ1 and τ2. (Note that γ is a function of t.)

S=∫τ2τ1dτ=∫t2t11γdt

Locally maximizing S equals locally maximizing the proper time experienced by a particle. The Lagrangian L is the expression inside of the coordinate time integral.

L=γ−1=√1−v2=α

If you think of all matter particles as moving through spacetime at a speed of 1 along the hypotenuse of a right triangle with one spatial leg and one temporal leg then the particle's spatial velocity is v=˙q and its temporal velocity is α.

α2+v2=1

S=∫t2t1αdt

The Laplacian L is simply α, the particle's temporal velocity. The action S is the integral of the temporal velocity. Therefore, extremizing (maximizing[2]) the action S equals maximizing proper time.

Hamilton's principle, that the evolution of a system is a stationary point of the action functional S, naturally f...
Thomas Kwa's Bounty List
by Thomas Kwa — 2020-06-13T00:03:41.301Z

Recently I noticed three things:

About once a week, I have questions no one I know personally can answer; maybe Stack Exchange or LW could, but I don't have time to write them up properly. Other times they're too difficult to be answered on SE/LW without some incentive.

There are theoretically life improvements that I can make, but reading about lifehacks all day to find them would be net-negative.

Often I want something to exist, but don't have the time or desire to create it myself.

So, inspired by this, and this, I've decided to create a list of bounties on things I want. To be eligible for a bounty, reply to an answer.
Short essays on various things I've watched
by philh — 2020-06-12T22:50:01.957Z

Sometimes I write things in places that aren't here. Sometimes I think those things are worth preserving. Some of those things follow, with minor editing, mostly on the subject of various movies that I've watched. Also two stage musicals, one TV show, one short story, and one music video. They were written over the past four years, so I can't necessarily talk intelligently about these things any more. When I name a thing, spoilers generally follow.

I don't really get The Hurt Locker

It seemed like it was going to be a film about a cowboy with a death wish, who should be removed from duty but isn't because of institutional dysfunction in the US army. Or something along those lines.

Instead it turned out to be… a film about a cowboy with a death wish?

Like there's that bit where he's just been a fucking idiot who could have gotten everybody killed

(not very specific so far)

And someone who I got the impression outranks him comes up to him like «oh you seem like hot shit. Just how hot shit are you? Yeah that's pretty hot shit» in a tone that I swear is subtextually «I'm about to rip you a new one»

and then the scene just ends. No one gets ripped a new anything.

What?

His team mates realise how dangerous he is to be around. But they don't do anything about it, just get pissed at him. And also he's supposedly defused almost a thousand bombs. There's tension there, a question of how he hasn't died yet (did he used to be good at his job and recently something happened to make him so reckless?) but the film doesn't acknowledge it, it doesn't seem to think "being a fucking dangerous idiot cowboy" and "successfully defusing almost a thousand bombs" are at all incompatible?

This was a really well regarded movie. It won six Oscars, including best picture, best screenplay and best director. Part of me would be inclined to chalk that up to politics, but the movie isn't even especially political from what I could tell; I'm pretty sure it could have been made both more political and a better movie. So I don't think that's a complete explanation.

I suspect all the praise came for reasons that I missed either because I was distracted by this stuff or because I'm just not into the kind of movie it was trying to be or something. But that's really not very specific.

The Jungle Book (2016) is surprisingly pro-human?

I don't think it was intended, and I might be putting too much of mys...
[Link] "Will He Go?" book review (Scott Aaronson)
by ioannes — 2020-06-12T22:16:57.314Z

https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4845

From the beginning:

Will He Go?, by legal scholar Lawrence Douglas, is, at 120 pages, a slim volume focused on a single question: what happens if the 2020 US election delivers a narrow or disputed result favoring Biden, and Trump refuses to concede? This question will, of course, either be answered or rendered irrelevant in half a year. And yet, in my estimation, there’s at least a 15% probability that Will He Go? will enter the ranks of the most important and prescient books ever written. You should read it right now (or at least read this Vox interview), if you want to think through the contours of a civilizational Singularity that seems at least as plausible to me as the AI Singularity, but whose fixed date of November 3, 2020 we’re now hurtling toward.

In one of the defining memes of the past few years, a sign in a bookstore reads “Dear customers: post-apocalyptic fiction has been moved to the Current Affairs section.” I was reminded of that as Douglas dryly lays out his horror scenario: imagine, hypothetically, that a President of the United States gets elected on a platform of racism and lies, with welcomed assistance from a foreign adversary. Suppose that his every outrage only endears him further to his millions of followers. Suppose that, as this president’s deepest (and perhaps only) principle, he never backs down, never apologizes, never acknowledges any inconvenient fact, and never accepts the legitimacy of any contest that he loses—and this is perfectly rational for him, as he’s been richly rewarded for this strategy his entire life. Suppose that, during the final presidential debate, he pointedly refuses to promise to respect the election outcome if he loses—a first in American history. And suppose that, after eking out a narrow win in the Electoral College, he then turns around and disputes the election anyway (!)—claiming, ludicrously, that he would’ve won the popular vote too, if not for millions of fraudulent voters. Suppose that, for their own sordid reasons, Republican majorities in the Senate and Supreme Court enable this president’s chaotic rule, block his impeachment, and acquiesce to his daily cruelties and lies.

Then what happens in the next election?
Why do all out attacks actually work?
by lc — 2020-06-12T20:33:53.138Z

A surprising amount of rationalists agree that people can often do what seems impossible otherwise if they try really, really hard. It's something on the outset I wouldn't have expected a community of rationalists to believe - on the surface it seems like pure magical thinking - but I think it's nevertheless true anyways, because I see a lot of evidence for it. Lots of startup advice is repetitions of this point; if you want to succeed you can't give up, you have to look for solutions where you don't think on the outset there are any, optimists do better than pessimists, etc. etc. And anecdotally I've found that I have a lot of trouble accurately assessing the limit of my own abilities. I'm usually wrong, not only wrong in the sense that I'm generally inaccurate, but wrong in a specific direction, i.e. I consistently underestimate what I will accomplish when I invoke my inner anime character.

To say this is true of most people is something that should be pretty jarring. It's not obvious why humans should have a bias toward underestimating themselves in this way. On the other hand, you could also say that this entire phenomenon is all just confirmation and sampling bias. After all, I only ever really find confirmation of the reverse - when I think I can't do something and I find out I can. Most startups do fail, and the ones that succeed are subject to survivorship bias. Intuitively, however, it feels like this is a more common experience for me than it should be, or at least that my errors in this vein are fairly conspicuous examples of faulty reasoning. It's not that I can't think of things I can't do, persay. It would be difficult for me to take a sudden tumble into the sun and survive with no prep time. It's that when I am wrong, the errors seem particularly egregious. I don't know that everyone has this experience, but if my experience is the same for most people, I think have an explanation for it.

One insight I have is that when doing the impossible there aren't really just two modes, all-out-attack and normal attempts. What I've found is that there's actually a continuum of impossibility goggles. When I was in middle school and my parents wanted me to get to baseball practice, I would, in full honesty, propose the most trivial obstacles as evidence for why that was not going to happen. It was raining, for instance. Our coach cancelled and th

...
For moderately well-resourced people in the US, how quickly will things go from "uncomfortable" to "too late to exit"?
by Dagon — 2020-06-12T16:59:56.845Z

Expanding from a comment thread: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3jYwvwrNXyD3koHTM/open-and-welcome-thread-june-2020?commentId=FcZwHEWEt6EAP54qq

Growing up, I had a neighbor who'd escaped the Cultural Revolution as a child, going from very wealthy in China (she had bound feet, and had literally never seen food being cooked) to working- and then middle-class in the US. I have a number of friends with relatives who escaped or survived (or didn't) the Nazi Holocaust. In both of these cases, there were many months where someone could get out pretty easily (but at significant cost), but it wasn't clearly necessary. And then many weeks where the rich could get out (at a very high cost), and then it was too late. The US Civil War took 4 months from first declaration of secession to the shooting war starting at Fort Sumter. Travel was much harder back then, so I'm not sure how possible escape was was for most.

As things get ... weirder in the US, politically and economically, there is a (very low IMO) chance that things will collapse badly enough that it's worth significant disruption (leaving friends and family, possibly abandoning hard-to-move assets, certainly incurring expenses) to move out.

I expect that my perception of the chance over time, conditional on it actually happening, to be roughly logistic in shape, and with some intersection on a graph (whose shape I'm unsure of) of "cost/difficulty to get out". And complicated by contagion - it's not clear the US can fully collapse without taking with it most places I would want to go.

So: what are YOUR triggers and preparations for escaping if Very Bad things happen in the US?