trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Actually, All Nuclear Famine Papers are Bunk
by Lao Mein — 2022-10-12T05:58:40.306Z

After doing a bit of digging, I'm pretty convinced that nuclear famine was never a thing to begin with. Maybe back during the Cold War, when the Soviets were seriously considering ground-bursting thousands of warheads across the American corn belt to knock out missile silos, but that's not the world we live in anymore. With modern C&C , they simply can't realistically expect to destroy those sites before launch. I've heard Peter Zaihan and alarmists say things like "the world only has 2 months' worth of food in reserve" and assumed they were right, but the numbers say otherwise. For this analysis, I'm using this USDA report.

This is dried grain stored across the United States. Soon, after the autumn harvest, the US will have more than 400 million tons of dried grains in storage. They range from 3000-4000 kcal per kg. Assuming an average daily consumption of 2000 kcal per person per day and a population of 330 million, that's around half a decade's worth of food from this stockpile alone. Most of it goes to animal feed/ethanol under normal circumstances. Even a worst-case scenario in September still gives a 90 million-ton stockpile, which is enough to feed America for more than a year. And at that point the grain is in the field, almost ready for harvest. This isn't an emergency stockpile, it's just what farmers have lying around to arbitrage against harvest-related price fluctuations. There are also plenty of other foodstuffs in the American food supply chain, stockpiles of other foods, the FEMA food stockpile, and so on, but it is pretty incredible most analyses of nuclear famine don't take even this into account. At this point, I'm convinced the entire field is based on active misrepresentations for anti-nuclear messaging and was never at any point interested in honest inquiry.

The nuclear famine paper I analyzed earlier lied about this, by the way, implying that existing food stockpiles would only increase food availability in the first year. I am awestruck that this isn't more well-known when people talk about casualty projections from nuclear war.

Addendum: Denkenberger posted two papers he wrote in regards to a 150Tg nuclear exchange scenario (worst case scenario, total targeting of cities). As far as I can tell, although the developed world doesn't come close to famine and there is theoretically enough food to feed everyone on Earth...
Contingency is not arbitrary
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2022-10-12T04:35:07.407Z

In my last post I made the point that truth is contingent on human motivations. I got a couple comments interpreting me as saying that truth is arbitrary. This is definitely not what I mean, and it's also not the first time I've encountered this confusion, so I want to write a brief post to tackle this point head on.

What does it mean to say that something is contingent? It means that it depends on something else. So, for example, when I said in my post that truth is contingent, I mean that it's a concept whose shape depends on other things, like the shape of other concepts and our motivations.

This is quite different from claiming that something is arbitrary. Something is arbitrary if it is chosen or formed without concern for suitability to some purpose or is otherwise not dependent on other things. For something to be arbitrary it has to be like a free variable in an equation, totally unconstrained by anything else, existing outside causality.

(There are shades of meaning in language I'm excluding here. Some people use "arbitrary" to mean "lots of degrees of freedom" rather than "infinite degrees of freedom". But my point will stand so long as you agree that "contingent" implies "no or very few degrees of freedom" and "arbitrary" means "lots of degrees of freedom".)

Laid out like that the difference between these terms is clear enough, but then why, when I write about something like truth being contingent, do people interpret me to mean that it's arbitrary? I'll try to tell a plausible story to explain why I think this happens.

When we're young we develop a fairly simple ontology of the world. Some things seem fixed and permanent and other things seem variable and changing. Fixed things stay the same and don't change, and variable things change a bunch. For example, to a six-year old, things like their relationship with their parents, what foods they like, and what games they like playing probably feel fixed because they have no memory of them having been any other way. Meanwhile things that change seem to do so for arbitrary and literally inexplicable reasons because at that young age we're still building up our model of the world and it doesn't have very many gears in it yet. So we start to organize the world into what seems like a natural dichotomy: those things that are fixed and those that are not.

As we get older we encounter new concepts, including abstr...
That one apocalyptic nuclear famine paper is bunk
by Lao Mein — 2022-10-12T03:33:32.488Z

I've seen a few commentors and bloggers cite this study from Nature Food to explain why they think nuclear war may lead to the collapse of civilization in event of a full nuclear exchange between the US and Russia. I read it and updated towards Nature Food being a publication with bad terrible editorial standards more than anything else.

The Apocalypse is Bad at Math

Wow, 5 Billion people dead. That's pretty bad. It actually projects 99% population reduction in China, the US, and Russia due to a 90% reduction in global farm yields. But let's break down those numbers. Firstly, how did they even get those crop yield numbers? Well, it turns out they assumed a 10 degrees C decrease in temperatures in the northern hemisphere, and then assumed no change in the crop selection and area under cultivation.

This isn't just bad statistics. It's intentionally misleading. Of course, if temperatures drop 10 degrees and people do literally nothing in response crop yields will decrease massively. But that's not how human beings work. They will increase land under cultivation in the tropics, clear-cut the Amazon, and do whatever it takes to get food production going again. Obviously, they will switch to more cold-resistant crops rather than lose 100% of their harvest to frost. These assumptions are terrible. Garbage in, garbage out.

This is a bad paper. Other scientists in the field know it's a bad paper, which is why almost no one has cited it. It's a scaremongering piece designed to push a denuclearization agenda and is used as clickbait by journalists. Its bad assumptions make it basically useless. Please don't take any apocalyptic nuclear starvation scenarios based on it seriously. I am utterly astounded that a journal like Nature let this one through. I will definitely try to publish in Nature Food in the future.
AstralCodexTen and Rationality Meetup Organisers’ Retreat Asia Pacific region
by Elo — 2022-10-12T03:20:43.461Z

TL;DR: Retreat for APAC meetup organisers, mid 2023, apply here
Application (5 min form) soft deadline: 31ˢᵗ Oct 2022

Why a retreat?

We think we all benefit from having an international community of rationality and ACX meetup organisers who can go to one another for advice and support. The goal of this retreat is to build on the success of the 2022 global retreat in San Francisco, focusing on local organisers in Australia, Asia and the Pacific region. This retreat will run in parallel with similar regional events in the US East Coast, US Central, and Europe regions.

We'll spend time together and help each other solve problems, and form connections that will allow us to reach out for help even after we've gone back home to our respective cities.

In addition to getting to know each other, we'll be taking part in activities and discussions with the goal of improving our meetup groups. We hope that you'll come out of the retreat with a clearer vision for your local community, and concrete plans for how to work towards that vision.

We expect that food, lodging, and travel are covered

We don't want money to be an obstacle preventing anyone from attending. We will be applying for funding so that your travel to and from the retreat will be fully reimbursed, and your food and lodging will be covered during the retreat itself.

General FAQ

Who is this retreat for?

You're invited to apply if you:

Currently organise ACX/LW/rationality meetups or other rationalist community events, anywhere in Australia, New Zealand, India, Japan, and across Asia
Would like to start an ACX/LW/rationality community in a location in APAC where none exists, or where the community has been small or dormant for a long time
Formerly organised ACX/LW/rationality meetups and are interested in sharing your knowledge and experience

If you're unsure whether you 'qualify', please err on the side of applying anyway — if we don't think it makes sense for you to come, we'll let you know!

Can more than one organiser from my city attend?

Yes! Anyone involved in organising is welcome to apply; there's no city-based quota.

Where will the retreat be held?

We will be using a retreat venue... exact location and country TBD depending on how many people end up attending. If we hold the retreat anywhere other than an easily-accessible city, we will arrange group transportation to the venue.

How many people will be there...
Abbots Bromley Horn Dance History
by jefftk — 2022-10-12T02:10:01.675Z

If you see the Abbots Bromley horn dance performed in the US (Revels,
Pinewoods, etc) it typically looks something like:

(youtube)

Note the serious and mildly "spooky" setting, and the use of
Robinson's tune.

Compare to how it's done in Abbots Bromley itself:

(youtube)

Note the happy bouncy tune and lack of theatrical mystery.

Sometimes this leads Brits to accuse Americans of taking their dance
and botching it. But the real story is a bit more complex!

The history of folk traditions is often murky, but in this case there
are written sources. In The
Sword Dances of Northern England Together With the Horn Dance of
Abbots Bromley (1911, p105-106) Cecil Sharp has:

There is no special or traditional tune for the dance. The musician
told me that any country dance air would serve, provided that it was
played in the proper time (in Common Time, 108 bpm). When I saw the
dance performed two tunes only were played, "Yankee Doodle" and the
following simple little melody: [snip]

In a letter written in 1893 by the vicar of the parish (see "Folklore
Journal," vol. iv, pg. 172), it is stated that a special tune used to
be played for the horn dance by a man with a fiddle and within the
memory of some men living, but that all efforts to recover it had
failed.

But then, in The
Sword Dances of Northern
England, Song and Dance Airs Book II (1912, preface) Sharp has an
update for us:

The Abbotts Bromley Horn Dance Air was sent to me by Mr. J. Buckley,
who noted it down in 1857 or 1858 from "the fiddling of William (or
Henry) Robinson, a wheelright of Abbotts Bromley, who is famous at the
time is the only man who could play the horn dance air."

This is the same Robinson's tune as used in the US today (more on the
tune). Musicians in the village apparently had moved on to other
tunes, as is common with folk dances.

At some point in the 20th century, the Thaxted Morris Men (Thaxted,
England) put together their own version, which they would dance at the
closing of the Thaxted Annual Ring Meeting.
This included both the revival of Robinson's tune and the introduction
of a more theatrical framing:

(youtube)

Here's a description from the November/December American Morris
Newsletter (pdf):

This continued until 10:15 p.m. when everyone fell into a dead hush
awaiting the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, performed annu

...
Power-Seeking AI and Existential Risk
by Antonio Franca — 2022-10-11T22:50:27.225Z

Summary

For my

MLSS

project, I created this distillation of “

Is power-seeking AI an existential risk?

” which was originally written in 2021 by Joe Carlsmith, an analyst at Open Philanthropy. After a while, Stephen McAleese contacted me and proposed to re-edit it and upload it as a post. Here is the result.

The report estimates the level of existential risk from AI by breaking the possibility of an existential catastrophe from AI down into several enabling steps, assigning probabilities to each one, and estimating the total probability by multiplying the probabilities. The report concludes that advanced AI is a potential source of existential risk to humanity and has a roughly 5% chance of causing an existential catastrophe by 2070. A year later Carlsmith increased his estimate to >10%.

Introduction

The report is about risks from advanced artificial intelligence by the year 2070. The year was chosen by the author because it’s near enough to be within the lifetimes of people alive today while being far enough to reason about the long-term future. Carlsmith reasons that highly intelligent reasoning and planning agents will have an instrumental incentive to acquire and maintain power by default because power increases the probability of agents achieving their goals for a wide range of goals. Power-seeking in AI systems would make them particularly dangerous. Unlike passive risks such as nuclear waste, since power-seeking AI systems would actively search for ways to acquire power or cause harm, they could be much more dangerous.

Therefore, the existential risk posed by advanced AI systems could be relatively high. Risk can be

decomposed

such that Risk ≈ (Vulnerability x Exposure x Severity) / Ability to Cope. Advanced AI seems like a risk that would have high severity and exposure and possibly high overall risk. The general background of the report includes two important points: (a) intelligent agency is an extremely powerful force for controlling and transforming the world, and (b) building agents much more intelligent than humans is “playing with fire”. In the following sections, I’ll describe the six events mentioned in the report that would need to happen for AI to cause an existential catastrophe and estimate the probability of each one to calculate an overall estimate of existential risk from AI by the year 2070. Note that whenever I am describing a...
From technocracy to the counterculture
by jasoncrawford — 2022-10-11T19:37:20.780Z
Link: https://rootsofprogress.org/american-genesis-part-2-technocracy-to-counterculture

Part 2 of my review of American Genesis

Quote quiz: who said this?

American efficiency is that indomitable force which neither knows nor recognizes obstacles; which continues on a task once started until it is finished, even if it is a minor task; and without which serious constructive work is inconceivable.

Teddy Roosevelt? Henry Ford? No—it was Joseph Stalin, writing on “The Foundations of Leninism” in Pravda, in April 1924.

That was one of many fascinating facts I learned from American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870–1970, by Thomas Hughes. The book is not only about the century of technological enthusiasm, but also about how that enthusiasm (in my opinion) went wrong, and how it came to an end.

I’m reviewing this book in three parts, although each part should stand alone. This is part 2. Part 1, covering roughly the first half of the book, was on the creation of large technological systems of production and distribution: Ford’s manufacturing operation, the Bell telephone network, the electric grid. This part, covering most of the second half of the book, is about the reaction to and interpretation of these systems. (All quotes in what follows are from the book unless otherwise attributed.)

“The system must be first”

With large technological systems came a challenge of order and control: load management in electrical power generation, circuit switching in telephone networks, inventory management in supply chains.

Factories, too, required order and control. I’ve written earlier about how Carnegie felt the lack of control over steel production, saying “I felt as if we were moles burrowing in the dark.” There was a similar problem in machine shops and engineering works. Shop foremen were responsible for most of the production process; they ordered materials and delegated jobs to machinists:

The foremen had overall supervision, but there was little scheduling and, therefore, little planned coordination of the various jobs. Components sometimes reached the assembly point, or erecting shop, haphazardly. Because of lack of planning, scheduling, and close monitoring of the progress of work, raw materials were often not on hand.

The man who was most obsessed with improving factory efficiency, whose name became almost synonymous with it, was Frederick W. Taylor:

Taylor found the disorder and lack of control unbearably inefficient and declare

...
Prettified AI Safety Game Cards
by abramdemski — 2022-10-11T19:35:18.991Z

Donald Hobson's AI Safety Card Game already has simple cards you can print out on cardstock and cut out, but I wanted a nicer print-on-demand version with illustrated card backs.[1] You can order it here. Major thanks to Mati Roy for helping make this happen, along with Jim Babcock, and Daniel Recinto.

^

Card-back illustrations are AI-generated. We did this around December-January, when the state of the art for AI-generated illustrations was much worse! I would be excited for someone to re-do it now. There's a lot of room for improvement; for example, illustrated card fronts rather than just card backs.
On the proper piloting of flesh shoots
by Mordecai Weynberg — 2022-10-11T18:52:34.347Z

In communities like ours, it is not uncommon to find people who identify purely with their consciousness and refer to their body as a meat cage or similar. Until recently, I was very sympathetic to this view, but on Monday the 3rd of October I started taking oestrogen (2 mg daily) and now feel Embodied, like a person made of a body and mind working together.

I am now entirely in favour of the idea that everyone should try HRT for two weeks once in their adult life. In that time frame, it should only affect your skin texture and state of mind. Permanent changes take around three months, so only taking it for two weeks is harmless.

As well as feeling more embodied, I would also say that until this week I didn't know I was trans. I was pretty sure but this has still managed to be a major update, and I'm fairly certain that if someone had given me a strip of tablets five years ago I could have skipped all the intermediate steps. Even if you don't turn out to be trans you will know for sure and can stop wondering.

So there you have it, a two-week low-effort low-risk experiment with the potential to greatly improve your quality of life and give you possibly the most important data point of your entire life.

As to how to get hormones, https://hrt.cafe/ is a curated list of sellers, but for oestrogen and for our purposes it should be easier to just ask a trans woman. If you are reading this you are probably at least passing me familiar with one and we tend to respond well to requests like this.
Why I think nuclear war triggered by Russian tactical nukes in Ukraine is unlikely
by Dave Orr — 2022-10-11T18:30:08.110Z

This is a response to Max's post Why I think there's a one-in-six chance of an imminent global nuclear war.

Max's thesis is that Putin is likely to use nuclear weapons if the war in Ukraine goes badly for Russia, that the west will retaliate, and both sides will continue to escalate until we have a full nuclear exchange. In particular, he estimates a 30% chance that Ukraine is nuked, an 80% chance of a significant conventional retaliation, and a 70% chance that things further escalate from there all the way to KABOOM.

I think the first and last terms in that equation are much too high. I think the center term is perhaps slightly too low (it's hard to believe that nuclear weapon use will be tolerated because it sets up terrible incentives for future nuclear weapon use), but I won't explore that here in depth.

Initial nuclear strike

An initial use of tactical nuclear weapons is unlikely because:

There is no military purpose served by nuclear weapon use
There are very large downsides to using nuclear weapons, including the scenario Max outlines
Because of points 1 and 2, such a use will not win Putin political points at home

The war against Ukraine can't really be won by bigger explosions. The Ukrainian military is broadly dispersed across a huge front, operating on both sides of the line. Similarly their equipment is not stored in a small number of supply depots.

Infrastructure and logistical networks can be disrupted with conventional explosives, and both Ukraine and Russia are attacking enemy logistics (Ukraine with rather more success than Russia). But the Russian ineffectiveness is due to missiles getting shot down and poor targeting, neither of which is helped by nukes.

And of course there are significant downsides to using nukes, which is that it risks a serious escalation with the west, one that could endanger Russia's future as a country and Putin's leadership and life, as well as losing support domestically, allowing Putin's political rivals to argue (perhaps correctly!) that he is a madman taking irrational and highly risky actions, and needs to be stopped.

There is exactly the case that he is a madman to worry about. I think this is unlikely; perhaps he has been corrupted by power, or is succumbing to dementia, but absent those Putin has showed himself to be a careful strategic actor in the past.

Overall I put the likelihood of an initial tactical nuclear...
Misalignment Harms Can Be Caused by Low Intelligence Systems
by DialecticEel — 2022-10-11T13:39:18.674Z

Most clinical trials are very simple statistical models. There are not trillions of parameters in a complex neural network architecture. Yet they are still the most effective tools we have at validating and optimising health and recovery in human beings. Very simple statistical tools can lead to large effects and, if misaligned, very large harms.

When private companies use A/B tests on human beings, they are usually explicitly optimising for objectives which are not aligned with human wellbeing - engagement, click-through rate, company profits. The harm that this can then cause depends on the nature of the interaction surface between the technology and the human, and the amount of exposure.

In configuration space we can consider the total effect of a company on a human as ΔH|C=∫∂H∂C|tdt where ∂H∂C|t is the 'interaction bandwidth' between human and company across the human's markov blanket at time t. As an approximation, we can say the magnitude of the overall interaction is going to be roughly proportional to the magnitude of the average interaction bandwidth multiplied by the cumulative interaction time:

|ΔH|C≈⟨∂H∂C⟩⋅T

In modern social media, T is obviously high relative to many other interventions, but what about ⟨∂H∂C⟩? What makes the interaction bandwidth high or low? Is this determined by the the complexity of the recommendation algorithm you use? Is this determined by the potency of the content available to recommend?

If there was a piece of content so convincing that anyone who read it instantly decided to sell all of their possessions, give the proceeds to MegaCorp and spend the rest of their life giving any available money to MegaCorp, then all the MegaCorp Recommendation Algorithm™ would have to do to maximise profits would be to show this content. It would not require a complex statistical model. Now this content may not exist, but participants in the platform are strongly incentivised to try and create it as conforming with the utility of the platform leads to broad reach again using a simple recommendation system.

Now, once you do have a highly intelligent recommendation system optimising on humans with knowledge of the human's present and past states, the interaction between recommendation system and human is no longer ergodic and there can be more powerful interactions constructed over time with a tight feedback lo...