trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[AN #117]: How neural nets would fare under the TEVV framework
by Rohin Shah — 2020-09-16T17:20:14.062Z

Alignment Newsletter is a weekly publication with recent content relevant to AI alignment around the world. Find all Alignment Newsletter resources here. In particular, you can look through this spreadsheet of all summaries that have ever been in the newsletter.

Audio version here (may not be up yet).

HIGHLIGHTS

Estimating the Brittleness of AI: Safety Integrity Levels and the Need for Testing Out-Of-Distribution Performance (Andrew L. John) (summarized by Flo): Test, Evaluation, Verification, and Validation (TEVV) is an important barrier for AI applications in safety-critical areas. Current TEVV standards have very different rules for certifying software and certifying human operators. It is not clear which of these processes should be applied for AI systems.

If we treat AI systems as similar to human operators, we would certify them ensuring that they pass tests of ability. This does not give much of a guarantee of robustness (since only a few situations can be tested), and is only acceptable for humans because humans tend to be more robust to new situations than software. This could be a reasonable assumption for AI systems as well: while systems are certainly vulnerable to adversarial examples, the authors find that AI performance degrades surprisingly smoothly out of distribution in the absence of adversaries, in a plausibly human-like way.

While AI might have some characteristics of operators, there are good reasons to treat it as software. The ability to deploy multiple copies of the same system increases the threat of correlated failures, which is less true of humans. In addition, parallelization can allow for more extensive testing that is typical for software TEVV. For critical applications, a common standard is that of Safety Integrity Levels (SILs), which correspond to approximate failure rates per hour. Current AI systems fail way more often than current SILs for safety-critical applications demand. For example an image recognition system would require an accuracy of 0.99999997 at 10 processed frames per second just to reach the weakest SIL used in aviation.

However, SILs are often used on multiple levels and it is possible to build a system with a strong SIL from weaker components by using redundant components that fail independently or by detecting failures sufficiently early, such that AI modules could still be used safely as parts of a syst...
Spoiler-Free Review: Orwell
by Zvi — 2020-09-16T13:30:02.648Z

Orwell is another game in the discrete-choices-over-time genre. In this case, you are an investigator, and choose which ‘datachunks’ to upload into the system. From there, others will take action.

Like other games in the genre, if you are going to play, play it blind.

I’d rank the game as lower Tier 3 – it’s good at its job, but not essential. It mostly does what it sets out to do, creating an experience and an atmosphere. It has some big frustrations along the way.

Orwell has three problems that prevent it from doing better. It’s also short.

You should play Orwell if and only if the concept of Orwell seems like something you want to experience.

Problem one, which is not in any way a spoiler, is that a lot of the game effectively involves finding the datachunks, or links on pages that lead to new pages that in turn contain datachunks. Several times I got frustratingly stuck trying to figure out where the game wanted me to click. Similarly, there is a star by things that are new, which leads to furious “make the star go away” actions to allow for better searching.

Problem two, which is a minor spoiler, is that the game often gives you less choices than it looks like it can, or than it easily could. Events mostly seem to proceed in order, so you don’t really have the option to withhold most datachunks. Several times I wanted to not upload something, but the game would simply not proceed if I didn’t do it. This leads to the problem of, if I don’t upload this, I could spend a long time not knowing if that’s the only way to advance the game while looking for some other way to advance it that might or might not exist. I would have appreciated a lot more flexibility. Mostly all the system gives you are some binary choices where two chunks conflict and you have to decide which one to go with.

Problem three requires spoiling the experience to talk about, so that would be a distinct post.
Applying the Counterfactual Prisoner's Dilemma to Logical Uncertainty
by Chris_Leong — 2020-09-16T10:34:44.876Z

The Counterfactual Prisoner's Dilemma is a symmetric version of Counterfactual Mugging where regardless of whether the coin comes up heads or tails you are asked to pay $100 and you are then paid $10,000 if Omega predicts that you would have paid if the coin had come up the other way. If you decide updatelesly you will always received $9900, while if you decide updatefully, then you will receive $0. So unlike Counterfactual Mugging, pre-committing to pay ensures a better outcome regardless of how the coin flip turns out, suggesting that focusing only on your particular probability branch is mistaken.

The Logical Counterfactual Mugging doesn't use a coin flip, but instead looks at the parity of sometime beyond your ability to calculate, like the 10,000th digit of pi. You are told it is even and then asked to pay $100 on the basis that if Omega predict you would have paid, then he would have given you $10,000 if had turned out to be odd.

You might naturally assume that you couldn't construct a logical version of the Counterfactual Prisoner's Dilemma. I certainly did at first. After all, you might say, the coin could have come up tails, but the 10,000th digit of pi couldn't have turned out to be odd. After all, that would be a logical impossibility.

But could the coin actually have come up tails? If the universe is deterministic, then the way it came up was the only way it could ever have come up. So is there is less difference between these two scenarios than it looks at first glance?

Let's see. For the standard counterfactual mugging, you can't find the contradiction because you lack information about the world, while for the logical version, you can't find the contradiction because of processing power. In the former, we could actually construct two consistent worlds - one where it is heads and one where it is tails - that are consistent with the information you have about the scenario. In the later, we can't.

Notice however that for Logical Counterfactual Mugging to be well defined, you need to define what Omega is doing when it is making its prediction. In Counterfactuals for Perfect Predictors, I explained that when dealing with perfect predictors, often the counterfactual would be undefined. For example, in Parfit's Hitchhicker a perfect predictor would never give a lift to someone who never pays in town, so it isn't immediately clear that predicting what such...
Effective Altruism and Rationalist Philosophy Discussion Group
by Chris_Leong — 2020-09-16T02:45:32.109Z

I've created a group on Facebook for rationalists and effective altruists to discuss philosophy (currently has about 120 members). To be clear, this isn't a group where the philosophy has to be related to effective altruism or rationality, but instead a group for Rationalists and Effective Altruists to discuss philosophy.

I know it's already possible to post about philosophy here, but people tend to be reluctant to post unless they've invested a huge amount of effort in writing it up, so it's useful to have somewhere else where there's a lower barrier.
Memorizing a Deck of Cards
by Tofly — 2020-09-16T01:31:05.201Z

I just memorized a deck of cards, because I was told doing so would improve my focus.

The process took 2 hours and 13 minutes, including breaks. I used 20-5 pomodoro at first, and switched to 25-5 in the middle.

I initially wrote a script to simulate a randomly shuffled deck. After memorizing the first 18 cards, I switched to a physical deck (starting with the same cards).

I chose not to use any strategy from an outside source (e.g. memory palace), because I wanted to see what I would come up with on my own, and I thought that using such a strategy might make the challenge too easy.

I began by memorizing cards in groups of four. After memorizing a group, I would go back to the previous group and see if I still remembered all of the cards in both groups. Then I would go back an arbitrarily far amount (wherever I cut the deck), and begin from there. Occasionally, I would go back to the beginning and go through the deck up to the point I had memorized to. If I messed up in an earlier group, I would repeat the process for that group.

However, after three such groups (12 cards), it became clear that four was too many to memorize at once, so I switched to groups of three. I then ran into another problem-I could memorize individual groups fairly easily, but I would have trouble remembering the order in which the groups themselves came. I was able to solve this problem by “linking” the groups together - memorizing the last card of the previous group along with the next group.

A few attributes of groups made them easier to memorize:

two or more cards in the group share a face or suit

fortunately, this is true for most groups

the group is monotonically increasing or decreasing

two consecutive cards in the group numbers which are related to one another

one is a factor of the other (e.g. 3 and 9),

they are consecutive (e.g. 10 and jack)

The easiest group was 4 of spades, 7 of spades, 8 of spades - increasing and all of the same suit.

Some of my most common mistakes were:

mixing up suits of the same color

getting the order of the groups wrong

mixing up aces and queens

Sometime into the task, I grew anxious that I was wasting my time, or that it wouldn’t help, or that I should be working on something else. There were times when I felt an urge to stop and do anything else. I often get such urges when doing other activities, but this time I was able to resist t...
The Axiological Treadmill
by  — 2020-09-15T18:36:31.954Z

The obvious reason that Moloch is the enemy is that it destroys everything we value in the name of competition and survival. But this is missing the bigger picture. We value what we value because, in our ancestral environment, those tended to be the things that helped us with competition and survival. If the things that help us compete and survive end up changing, then evolution will ensure that the things we value change as well.

To borrow a metaphor: Elua cheats. The hedonic treadmill has nothing on the axiological treadmill.

Consider a thought experiment. In Meditations on Moloch, Scott Alexander dreams up a dictatorless dystopia:

Imagine a country with two rules: first, every person must spend eight hours a day giving themselves strong electric shocks. Second, if anyone fails to follow a rule (including this one), or speaks out against it, or fails to enforce it, all citizens must unite to kill that person. Suppose these rules were well-enough established by tradition that everyone expected them to be enforced.

So you shock yourself for eight hours a day, because you know if you don’t everyone else will kill you, because if they don’t, everyone else will kill them, and so on. Every single citizen hates the system, but for lack of a good coordination mechanism it endures. From a god’s-eye-view, we can optimize the system to “everyone agrees to stop doing this at once”, but no one within the system is able to effect the transition without great risk to themselves.

Even if this system came into being ex nihilo it probably wouldn’t be stable in reality; a population that spends eight hours a day receiving strong shocks isn’t going to be able to feed itself, or reproduce. But assume for a moment that this system starts out economically and biologically stable (that is, people can still eat, and reproduce at the rate of replacement, despite the electric shocks, and that there are no outside countries ready to invade). What do we expect to happen over the long run?

Well, obviously there’s a strong evolutionary pressure to be tolerant to electric shocks. People who can tolerate those shocks better will do better on average than those who can’t. However, there’s another more subtle pressure at play: the pressure to ensure you shock yourself. After all, if you forget to shock yourself, or choose ...
Low hanging fruits (LWCW 2020)
by Arthur Milchior — 2020-09-15T18:15:54.745Z

During Less Wrong Community Week-end (Europe), in one event people share low-hanging fruit they used. I chaired it this year and defined low-hanging fruit as something that can be easily bought or done that improved the life. Here is the list of fruits shared in 2020. All typos are mine. "I" usually reflect the one who gave the message and not the author of this blog post.

Water watering bulbs

If you don't know how much to water your plants, if you did too much or not enough, let bulbs do it for you. Examples of bulbs are

Before work time

Reserve some time in the morning, before you head out to work, and invest this into something that is important to you. You do this without any experience from the day (bad/good) and with you full physical ability.

Ad block on smartphone

Blokada https://blokada.org/index.html Add blocking for android. Reduce noises, distraction, bandwidth (?), easy to install. added bonus: Firefox + Ublock origin

Kalimba

Playing music is to listening to live music as live music is to recorded music. If you don't want to spend time to learn an instrument, the Kalimba is cheap and directly lead to beautiful musics.

Better sleeping

No device at night

Set all devices to lock at sleeping time.

Light

Get a smart lightbulb, and setting to slowly dim/become red for the half hour before bed - makes going to bed at the right time the default action and makes me feel tired, and signficantly decreases the willpower it takes.

End the day with a paper book to avoid looking at screen.

Two to ten minutes of sun in the morning, or by default strong light

Melatonine

Takes melatonine.

Morning

Schedule things in morning so that you have incentive to sleep.

Having phone 3 meters from bed, to force to go outside of bed to turn it of

Day / night separation

Ensuring you don't see your bed from your workplace (and reciprocally) , to feel the separation between work space and personal space

Neater writing

Switching to using a fountain pen can force you to write slower and therefore neater. Pilot makes very cheap and good-writing fountain pens (the Pilot Varsity) that are disposable just like regular ballpoints, they're around $20 US for a pack of 12

Note taking

One note

Use the software One Note to keep tracks of notes about everything.

Recalling fact about friends

You can use space repetition system to recall fact about friends (who is friend with who, where they mov...
God in the Loop: How a Causal Loop Could Shape Existence
by ChrisM — 2020-09-15T14:40:45.449Z

Crossposted from Vessel Project.

My last article, “Life Through Quantum Annealing” was an exploration of how a broad range of physical phenomena — and possibly the whole universe — can be mapped to a quantum computing process. But the article simply accepts that quantum annealing behaves as it does; it does not attempt to explain why. That answer lies somewhere within a “true” description of quantum mechanics, which is still an outstanding problem.

Despite the massive predictive success of quantum mechanics, physicists still can’t agree on how its math corresponds to reality. Any such proposal, called an “interpretation” of quantum mechanics, tends to straddle the line between physics and philosophy. There is no shortage of interpretations, and in the words of physicist David Mermin, “New interpretations appear every year. None ever disappear.” Am I going to throw one more on that pile? You bet.

I’m not going to start from scratch though; I simply propose an ever-so-slight modification to an existing forerunner: the many-worlds interpretation, where other “worlds” or timelines exist in parallel to our own. My modification is this: the only worlds that can exist are those that exist within a causal loop. Stated another way: our universe, or any possible universe, must be a causal loop.

I will introduce the relevant concepts and provide an argument for my proposal, but my goal is not to once-and-for-all prove this interpretation as true. Rather, my goal is to explore what happens if we accept the interpretation as true. If we start with the assumption that only causal loop universes can exist, then several interesting things follow — we find parallels to our own universe, and we might even find God.

Causality & Quantum Interpretations

Before talking about causal loops, let’s take a step back and talk about causality — perhaps the single most fundamental concept in all the sciences. It plays a starring role in the two most important theories in physics: general relativity and quantum mechanics.

General relativity, developed by Einstein, combines space, time, and gravity in a geometric description of spacetime. In spacetime, two observers might not agree on the space between two events or time between two events — but they always agre...
Gems from the Wiki: Paranoid Debating
by habryka — 2020-09-15T03:51:10.453Z
Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/paranoid-debating

During the LessWrong 1.0 Wiki Import we (the LessWrong team) discovered a number of great articles that most of the LessWrong team hadn't read before. Since we expect many others to also not have have read these, we are creating a series of the best posts from the Wiki to help give those hidden gems some more time to shine.

Most of the work for this post was done by freyley and JenniferRM who I've added as coauthors to this post. Wiki edits were also made by all of the following: BJR, PeerInfinity, Admin, PotatoDumplings, Vladimir Nesov, Zack M. Davis, Freyley and Grognor. Thank you all for your contributions!

Paranoid Debating is a variant of The Aumann Game where one player purposefully subverts the group estimate. Similar to The Aumann Game, the activity consists of a group jointly producing a confidence interval for an unknown, but verifiable quantity, which is then scored for accuracy and calibration. One individual is designated the spokesperson, who is responsible for choosing the final estimate. However, before the activity begins, one individual is secretly assigned the role of misleading the other members. The deceiver is scored higher the worse the final estimate is.The activity is intended to teach accurate estimate, proper agreement techniques, and recognition of deception.

A typical subject for the game might be "How much maize is produced in Mexico annually?".

Rules

Select player roles. In person, each player receives or selects a card from a pack of role cards. For 4 players, create a pack of role cards by combining 3 black cards with 1 red card. For 4-6 players there should be 1 red card and the rest black with the rest being enough for one card per person. For 7-9 players, 2 red cards. Some variants include a role named the Advocate, which you can designate one of the black cards to represent.

Simplest variant

Each player receives a role. No advocate.
A question is asked.
Players discuss for 20 minutes, then write down their individual response on a card.
The answer is researched.
Scores are assigned.

Advocate variant, #1

Each player receives a role. One advocate in the deck. The player who receives the Advocate displays it to the group.
A question is asked.
Players discuss for 20 minutes, attempting to convince the advocate. The advocate writes down their response on a card. This is the group's answer.
The answer is researched, scores are assigned.

Advocat...
Book Review: Working With Contracts
by johnswentworth — 2020-09-14T23:22:11.215Z

Contracts is one of those areas that I always figured I ought to study, at least enough to pick up the basics, but never seemed either interesting or important enough to reach the front of my queue. On top of that, there’s a lot of different angles from which to approach the subject: the law-school-style Contracts 101 class covers the legal principles governing contracts, the economists’ version abstracts away the practical specifics and talks about contracts in game-theoretic terms, more business-oriented books often focus on negotiation, etc.

“

Working With Contracts: What Law School Doesn’t Teach You

” is about the practical skills needed for working with contracts on an everyday basis - specifically the sort of skills usually picked up on the job by young lawyers. It talks about things like what to look for when reviewing a contract, how to organize contracts, why lawyers use weird words like “heretofore”, various gotchas to watch out for, etc. It assumes minimal background knowledge, but also includes lots of technical nuts and bolts. In short, it’s the perfect book for someone who wants a technical understanding of real-world contract practice.

This post will review interesting things I learned from the book.

Background Knowledge

First, some very brief background info, which the book itself mostly assumes.

Legally, in order to count as a “contract”, we need four main pieces:

Offer: someone offers a deal
Acceptance: someone else accepts it
Consideration: both parties gain something from the deal; it’s not a gift
Mutual understanding: both parties agree on what the deal is and the fact that they’ve agreed to it

A Contracts 101 class has all sorts of details and gotchas related to these. Notice that “signature on a piece of paper” is not on that list; e.g. oral contracts are entirely enforceable, it’s just harder to prove their existence in court. Even implicit contracts are enforceable - e.g. when you order food from a restaurant, you implicitly agree to pay for it, and that’s a legally-enforceable contract. That said, we’ll focus here on explicit written contracts.

Once formed, a contract acts as custom, private law between the parties. Enforcement of this law goes through civil courts - i.e. if someone breaches the contract, then the counterparty can sue them for damages. Note the “for damages” in that sentence; if a counterparty breaches a contract in a way that d...