trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
I Will Organize Meetups in Norfolk, Virginia [Hampton Roads Metro Area]
by Willa — 2021-06-25T02:41:32.162Z

Hi!

I recently moved to Norfolk, Virginia. I used to organize the in-person meetups prior to COVID when I lived in Houston, Texas and still organize meetups there virtually.

Now that I'm living in a new place, and am vaccinated, I want to attend in-person meetups again, but have searched and don't see any in the Norfolk, Virginia area so I'm starting a meetup group here!

Norfolk is part of the broader Hampton Roads community of cities. I don't know the area too well yet, but it seems like Norfolk is a relatively central location within the metro area (correct me if I'm wrong, please) and is one of the larger cities so it seems like a good spot to run meetups. I'm happy to travel to other cities in the area to host meetups if most potential attendees are concentrated outside of Norfolk (let me know!).

The meetups I organize are open to all, and unless mentioned otherwise are focused on building a social group and community in the area. If there are enough group members and meetup attendees, and enough interest in specific ideas then I'm happy to organize smaller more focused on something specific / productive kinds of meetups and events. Each social meetup will include 1 or 2 suggested readings so that we can have a common shared topic to start from, but meandering as far as our interests take us is welcome! Note that even if you are only interested in smaller, specific / focused meetups, it is strategically beneficial to build up a social rationalist community in your area, because that's where such groups and events typically draw from. Thus, if you don't want to attend social meetups here, please still reach out to me so I can connect you with anyone else who may share your same interest in the area, if they are available and willing.

Please comment on this post and/or message me here on LessWrong if you live in the area (or visit from time to time or often) and want to attend meetups. Let's build a community, have fun, and improve our art of rationality!

Cheers,

Willa
A Somewhat Rationalist Baptism
by ZorbaTHut — 2021-06-25T00:39:38.171Z

Preamble:

I am not religious, and neither is my wife, and neither are our families. Nevertheless, for reasons that I think are much funnier if left unstated, I ended up needing to baptize my daughters on two days' notice.

This is not "get my daughters baptized", note, this is "me, specifically, performing the baptism".

I obviously needed to write a baptismal speech, and after a few hours of tinkering, the following is what I came up with. I'm posting it here because I think some people might enjoy it. You are welcome to use it, though note that parts were cribbed from multiple sources that I don't have copyright over, so, y'know, maybe don't sell it for money.

(Names somewhat anonymized, obviously.)

====

Welcome, everyone. My name is Zorba, and I don't know what I'm doing. But we'll get back to that.

We are here to participate in the ceremony of A and C's baptism. This is a strange thing for a nonreligious family, and doubly so with a nonreligious minister, and yet, we're doing it anyway. I think many of us find this confusing. But we'll get back to that.

When I was asked to run this ceremony, I had to decide if I was able to run it. Baptisms are primarily a Christian ceremony, and I am not Christian; they are a ceremony that people find spiritually important, and I don't like butting into other people's spirituality. If you search for "what is baptism" you will find a lot of information about accepting Christ, but very little about what that actually means. This seems appropriate, though; baptisms are applied to children, often so young that they don't understand language let alone speak it. They don't know what it means; they don't know why they're involved. We'll get back to that too.

As I did research, I realized that some people don't just think of it in terms of joining with Christ. They think of it as joining with the world. An introduction and commitment, between the child, their parents, their extended family, society at large, the universe itself, and the Creator, whoever or whatever that might be.

Most of us have times in our lives when we don't know who we were, or what we're doing, or why we're here. I believe everyone in this room is experiencing a bit of that right now. I think it's just part of being human - a part that is terrifying and dangerous, but that is to be cherished, and understood, and then solved, with tools granted to us by our family, fri...
AXRP Episode 9 - Finite Factored Sets with Scott Garrabrant
by DanielFilan — 2021-06-24T22:10:12.645Z

YouTube link

This podcast is called AXRP, pronounced axe-urp and short for the AI X-risk Research Podcast. Here, I (Daniel Filan) have conversations with researchers about their papers. We discuss the paper and hopefully get a sense of why it’s been written and how it might reduce the risk of artificial intelligence causing an existential catastrophe: that is, permanently and drastically curtailing humanity’s future potential.

Being an agent can get loopy quickly. For instance, imagine that we’re playing chess and I’m trying to decide what move to make. Your next move influences the outcome of the game, and my guess of that influences my move, which influences your next move, which influences the outcome of the game. How can we model these dependencies in a general way, without baking in primitive notions of ‘belief’ or ‘agency’? Today, I talk with Scott Garrabrant about his recent work on finite factored sets that aims to answer this question.

Topics we discuss:

Finite factored sets’ relation to Pearlian causality and abstraction

Partitions and factors in finite factored sets

Orthogonality and time in finite factored sets

Using finite factored sets

Why not infinite factored sets?

Limits of, and follow-up work on, finite factored sets

Relevance to embedded agency and x-risk

How Scott researches

Relation to Cartesian frames

How to follow Scott’s work

Daniel Filan:
Before we begin, a note about this episode. More than other episodes, it assumes knowledge of the subject matter during the conversation. So, although we’ll repeat some basic definitions, before listening there’s a good chance that you’ll want to watch or read something explaining the mathematics of finite factored sets. The description of this episode will contain links to resources that I think do this well. Now, on to the interview.

Daniel Filan:
Hello everybody. Today, I’ll be speaking with Scott Garrabrant. Scott is a researcher at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute or MIRI for short. And prior to that, he earned his PhD in Mathematics at UCLA studying combinatorics. Today, we’ll be talking about his work on finite factored sets. For links to items that we’ll be discussing, you can check the description of this episode, and you can read a transcript at axrp.net.

Relation to Pearlian causality and abstraction

Daniel Filan:
Scott, welcome to AXRP. I guess we’re goin...
How do the side effects of Novavax compare to other COVID-19 vaccines?
by ChristianKl — 2021-06-24T16:36:19.488Z

I'm curious whether Novavax has the same side-effects of the mRNA vaccines where normal side-effects often involve the person being feeling too sick to do anything and having fever the next day. Unfortunately, most sources I find while googling aren't very detailed when they talk about side effects. If Novavax would have side-effects that are more similar to a normal flu vaccine then to mRNA vaccines that would be good to know.
War on Cancer II
by ChristianKl — 2021-06-24T14:59:33.464Z

Epistemic status: This isn’t medical advice. To the extent that it’s advice it’s health policy advice. I’m no domain expert. If you are faced with the prospect of cancer, consult with multiple experts.

Introduction

Richard Nixon declared the war against cancer in 1971. Beau Biden, the son of Joe Biden, died in 2015 due to brain cancer. Having their child die before them is one of the worst experiences a parent can have. Joe Biden, then the vice-president, decided to start the Vice President's Cancer Moonshot. On the campaign trail on his run for presidency he

declared

in 2019: “I promise you if I'm elected president, you're going to see the single most important thing that changes America: We're gonna cure cancer.” Joe Biden essentially declared the second war against cancer.

With both Nixon and Biden wanting to fight wars on cancer the issue is essentially bipartisan. Biden has personal reasons for fighting the war that distinguish him from other recent presidents but they are not party-political. I applaud the ideal of fighting wars against cancer instead of burning resources to fight expensive wars against human people.

While I applaud the principle, the first war against cancer failed. In this article I want to lay out the problems with the policies that came with the last war on cancer and make a case of how we can approach health policy in a better way.

The difference between the cancer survival rate and the cancer death rate

One mainstream view of the war on cancer is that it was partly a success. Vincent DeVita writes in

The 'War on Cancer' and its impact

:

Relative survival rates for all cancers have increased 70%, since the passage of the Act [National Cancer Act of 1971]

To a layperson that claim might seem impressive but as Sarah Constantin writes in

Is cancer progress stagnating

:

But the War on Cancer seems to have disappointing results. Cancer deaths have

only fallen by 5%

since 1950, at a rate of 200 deaths a year per 100,000 individuals. (By contrast, heart disease deaths are a third of what they were in 1950, thanks to innovations like statins, stents, and bypass surgery.)

There are three possible explanations of why those two numbers diverge.

The longer lifespans thesis

While it's true that we increased lifespan and a higher lifespan increases the likelihood of getting cancer you would expect the same with heart disease. Given that we ...
Covid 6/24: The Spanish Prisoner
by Zvi — 2021-06-24T14:40:00.755Z

The last scare is underway. Delta is an increasing share of Covid cases around the world, causing cases in many places to rise. Are enough people vaccinated? How bad are things going to get before we turn the corner one final time?

The incremental news was not good. Calculations that looked comfortable last week look less comfortable now. I still expect things to mostly be fine, especially in areas with high mRNA vaccination rates.

Also: John McAfee found dead in a Spanish prison. If you think he killed himself I have some computer security software and I’d like to sell you a subscription. Works great.

Let’s run the numbers.

The Numbers

Predictions

Prediction from last week: Positivity rate of 1.8% (down 0.1%), deaths fall by 9%.

Result: Positivity rate of 1.8% (down 0.1%), and deaths fall by 9%.

Prediction for next week: Positivity rate of 1.8% (unchanged) and deaths fall by 8%.

Got this week on the nose. With the rise of Delta and the shift in tests from safe to unsafe regions, I no longer expect the positivity rate to continue to decline, and if anything an uptick is more likely than a downtick. For deaths, there’s no reason to think things won’t improve for a few more weeks.

Deaths

Date	WEST	MIDWEST	SOUTH	NORTHEAST	TOTAL
May 13-May 19	592	1194	1277	811	3874
May 20-May 26	615	948	1279	631	3473
May 27-June 2	527	838	1170	456	2991
June 3-June 9	720	817	915	431	2883
Jun 10-Jun 16	368	611	961	314	2254
Jun 17-Jun 23	529	443	831	263	2066

As discussed last week, I’ve shrunk the graph so we can see what’s happening recently, which was otherwise impossible to read. We saw progress this week, but the West’s number last week was indeed ahead of itself, so we saw only modest overall progress and hit the 9% decline target exactly. Things now seem like they’re back on the expected track and the orange New York line is down to 51 deaths last week.

We should expect to see things continue to improve, but the increasing share of Delta infections does mean the fatality rate should now be rising, given the slow pace of additional vaccinations.

Cases

Date	WEST	MIDWEST	SOUTH	NORTHEAST	TOTAL
May 6-May 12	46,045	59,945	70,740	46,782	223,512
May 13-May 19	39,601	45,030	63,529	34,309	182,469
May 20-May 26	33,890	34,694	48,973	24,849	142,406
May 27-June 2	31,172	20,044	33,293	14,660	99,169
Jun 3-Jun 9	25,987	18,267	32,545	11,540	88,339
Jun 10-Jun 16	23,700	14,472	25,752	8,177	72,101
Jun 17-Jun 23	23,854	12,

...
ELI12: how do libertarians want wages to work?

by TekhneMakre — 2021-06-24T07:00:02.206Z

[ETA: apparently my actual question got completely lost in translation. Thanks to the people who tried to answer. I think it has something to do with having said "libertarians" when my question isn't really about libertarianism.]
[Disclaimer: this post was written hastily and barely edited.]
I don't get how anyone things employer-employee relations are supposed to work. Libertariants have some opinions.
I think the idea is, we have no minimum wages, no mandatory unions, etc.; and then employers and workers bargain over wages by making offers to hire or be hired at a given wage. If workers employed by a firm F are unhappy with their wages, then some other firm F' could poach them by offering higher wages. Since F is afraid of that, F will have already offered higher wages.
But like, how does bargaining work? It seems like there's all sorts of parameters that might make a really big difference to the outcome of a negotiation like this, and I don't have clarity on what those are and how they affect the outcome. Do other people have opinions about employer-worker based on beliefs about those questions, or what?
[Some more disorganized thoughts follow, but the above is the basic question.]
Humans need a steady stream of food and shelter, or they become less productive (often permanently). That means that if the boss Bob has enough wealth to outlast his worker's stores of nutrients, he can basically pay them just the absolute minimum so that they can still work.
An argument goes like: the minimum wage law only harms people. If you remove the law, then more trades would happen, which are always good (or good in expectation, or in aggregate across a given class of people, or something) for both parties. But this just seems false? Without the minimum wage law, lots of people would probably be paid significantly less. Or maybe that's untrue? If it is true, it seems like there's an attractor where managers have all the wealth, and everyone else is paid just enough to keep them able to work. That's supposed to be not an attractor, because a slightly more generous manager could easily poach employees. But how does that break the equilibrium? Seems like the generous manager is just losing a bit of money. They could have their pick of employees; is that supposed to be a crux of the argument? That seems to just imply an exploitative equilibrium, but with more desirable workers g...
Two non-obvious lessons from microcovid.org
by catherio — 2021-06-24T02:35:14.357Z

At the 2021 Summer Solstice, Elizabeth Van Nostrand made a brief speech thanking the organizers of microcovid.org, which I found very heartwarming and meaningful.

I wish I had thought in advance about taking the opportunity to make a few public remarks about microcovid.org: things I wish the community knew, that weren't obvious.

Here's what I would've said, in terms of my lessons from this project:

Build your own oxygen mask. Next, share it with others.

Connect and collaborate with non-rationalists.

1) Build your own oxygen mask. Next, share it with others.

We didn't start out trying to create a resource for our whole community, let alone a website with many thousands of users. All we wanted was to save our own asses. We looked at the precipitous "autonomy crunch" we were facing, and said "oh shit, our house is going to explode if we don't fix this."

So, we built a spreadsheet — for ourselves first. Other group houses asked about it, and the momentum snowballed inexorably from there. Each broadening of project scope was compelled by a commensurate rise in demand, and corresponding deeply felt motivation.

I think many people who have altruistic or worldsaving ambitions could stand to have more focus on first making their own lives not suck. Fixing huge problems in your own life — and then later making an extra effort to share and export them — is one important path to altruistic impact.

2) Connect and collaborate with non-rationalists

To my knowledge, I'm the only project member out of the top dozen or so top contributors who self-identifies as a rationalist.

The "core idea" is an extremely, extremely rationalist idea. But the implementation took writers, copyeditors, web developers, backend developers, UX designers, a medical doctor whose patients were among our first users, and many more. These folks had to understand the core idea and know how to use it, but did not have to be skilled enough at quantitative risk thinking to have designed it in the first place.

The final product had a vastly more scalable reach because many people, who had very little identity-level commitment to epistemics, looked at it and said things like "I need to access this on my phone, I won't ever use a spreadsheet" or "This has too much jargon, move all these details to the appendix."

Thank you again everyone for the gratitude and recognition; and for using the system to make your own ...
Discussion: Objective Robustness and Inner Alignment Terminology
by jbkjr — 2021-06-23T23:25:36.687Z

In the alignment community, there seem to be two main ways to frame and define objective robustness and inner alignment. They are quite similar, mainly differing in the manner in which they focus on the same basic underlying problem. We’ll call these the objective-focused approach and the generalization-focused approach. We don’t delve into these issues of framing the problem in Empirical Observations of Objective Robustness Failures, where we present empirical observations of objective robustness failures. Instead, we think it is worth having a separate discussion of the matter. These issues have been mentioned only infrequently in a few comments on the Alignment Forum, so it seemed worthwhile to write a post describing the framings and their differences in an effort to promote further discussion in the community.

TL;DR

This post compares two different paradigmatic approaches to objective robustness/inner alignment:

Objective-focused approach

Emphasis: “How do we ensure our models/agents have the right (mesa-)objectives?”

Outer alignment: “an objective function r is outer aligned if all models that perform optimally on r in the limit of perfect training and infinite data are intent aligned.”

Outer alignment is a property of the training objective.

Generalization-focused approach

Emphasis: “How will this model/agent generalize out-of-distribution?”

Considering a model’s “objectives” or “goals,” whether behavioral or internal, is instrumentally useful for predicting OOD behavior, but what you ultimately care about is whether it generalizes “acceptably.”

Outer alignment: a model is outer aligned if it performs desirably on the training distribution.

Outer alignment is a property of the tuple (training objective, training data, training setup, model).

Special thanks to Rohin Shah, Evan Hubinger, Edouard Harris, Adam Shimi, and Adam Gleave for their helpful feedback on drafts of this post.

Objective-focused approach

This is the approach taken by “Risks from Learned Optimization" (RFLO) and elaborated upon by Evan Hubinger’s follow-up post “Clarifying inner alignment terminology":

Outer alignment: an objective function r is outer aligned if all models that perform optimally on r in the limit of perfect training and infinite data are intent aligned.

Objective robustness: an agent is objective robust if its behavioral objective is aligned with the base

...
Empirical Observations of Objective Robustness Failures
by jbkjr — 2021-06-23T23:23:28.077Z

Inner alignment and objective robustness have been frequently discussed in the alignment community since the publication of “Risks from Learned Optimization” (RFLO). These concepts identify a problem beyond outer alignment/reward specification: even if the reward or objective function is perfectly specified, there is a risk of a model pursuing a different objective than the one it was trained on when deployed out-of-distribution (OOD). They also point to a different type of robustness problem than the kind usually discussed in the OOD robustness literature; typically, when a model is deployed OOD, it either performs well or simply fails to take useful actions (a capability robustness failure). However, there exists an alternative OOD failure mode in which the agent pursues an objective other than the training objective while retaining most or all of the capabilities it had on the training distribution; this is a failure of objective robustness.

To date, there has not been an empirical demonstration of objective robustness failures. A group of us in this year’s AI Safety Camp sought to produce such examples. Here, we provide four demonstrations of objective robustness failures in current reinforcement learning (RL) agents trained and tested on versions of the Procgen benchmark. For example, in CoinRun, an agent is trained to navigate platforms, obstacles, and enemies in order to reach a coin at the far right side of the level (the reward). However, when deployed in a modified version of the environment where the coin is instead randomly placed in the level, the agent ignores the coin and competently navigates to the end of the level whenever it does not happen to run or jump into it along the way. This reveals it has learned a behavioral objective—the objective the agent appears to be optimizing, which can be understood as equivalent to the notion of a “goal” under the intentional stance—that is something like “get to the end of the level,” instead of “get to the coin.”

(video examples)

Our hope in providing these examples is that they will help convince researchers in the broader ML community (especially those who study OOD robustness) of the existence of these problems, which may already seem obvious to many in this community. In this way, these results might highlight the problem of objective robustness/inner alignment similarly to the way the CoastRunners e...
How do you deal with people cargo culting COVID-19 defense?
by ChristianKl — 2021-06-23T19:59:35.454Z

In Berlin there are rules for public transportation where all passengers have to wear FFP-2 masks. Nobody, seems to care whether people wear the masks in a way that seals. The security personal in public transportation only wears surgical masks. Whenever, I see security personal in public transportation they do nothing besides standing around. Security personal that stands around doing nothing might make people feel safer, but the idea of having security personal with less masking makes them unable to credible enforce mask wearing and endangers passengers. People on public transportation talk the same amount they did pre-COVID-19, seemingly not knowing that talking widely increases spread.

In the podcast between Spencer Greenberg and Jacob Falkovich, Jacob makes the point that it seems like people don't understand that COVID-19 is caused by a virus and that they way to prevent getting it is to show one's virtue by engaging in socially approved rituals against COVID-19.

It becomes increasingly hard for me to take people seriously and the security people with less masking then the passenger were a huge strike. How do you deal emotionally with it? Do you become cynic?