trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Experiments and Consent
by jefftk — 2019-11-10T14:50:01.956Z

One of the responses to my

Uber
self-driving car post was objecting to Uber experimenting on
public roads:

Self-driving research as practiced across the industry is in violation
of basic research ethics. They should not be allowed to toss informed
consent out the window, no matter how cool or revolutionary they think
their research is.

I've seen this general sentiment before: if you want to run an
experiment involving people you need to get their consent, and get
approval from an

IRB,
right?

While academia and medicine do run on a model of informed consent,
it's not required or even customary in most fields. Experimentation
is widespread, as organizations want to learn what effect their
actions have. Online companies run
tons
of a/b
tests. UPS ran experiments on routing and found it was more
efficient if they planned routes to avoid left turns. Companies
introduce new products in test markets.
This is all very standard and has been happening for decades, though
automation has made it easier and cheaper, so there's more now.

When you look at historical
cases of experimentation gone wrong, the problem is generally that
the intervention was unethical on its own. Leaving
syphilis untreated, infecting people with
diseases, telling people to shock
others, and dropping mosquitoes
from planes are all things you normally shouldn't do. The problem
in these cases wasn't that they were experimenting on people, but that
they were harming people.

Similarly, the problem with Uber's car was that if you have an
automatic driving system that can't recognize pedestrians, can't
anticipate the movements of jaywalkers, freezes in response to
dangerous situations, and won't brake to mitigate collisions, it is
absolutely nowhere near ready to guide a car on public roads.

We have a weird situation where the rules for experimentation in
academia and medicine are much more restrictive than everywhere else.
So restrictive that even a very simple study where you do everything
you normally do but also record whether two diagnostics agreed with
each other can be bureaucratically
impractical to run. We should remove most of these restrictions:
you should still have to get approval and informed consent if you want
to hurt people or violate a duty you have to them, but "if it's ok to
do A or B then it's fine to run an experiment on
A vs B" should apply every...
Indescribable
by lsusr — 2019-11-10T13:31:45.298Z

Some things can be described only via experience.

Direct sensory experience (such as the color red)

Foreign untranslatable words and phrases

Rasas

Certain meditative states (such as kenshō and satori)

Other things cannot be precisely described at all.

Any particular noncomputable number

Indescribable things cannot be described in a finite number of words. That's because each one contains an infinite quantity of information. I don't mean they convey this information all at once (except for noncomputable numbers). Rather, they open up a new channel of information.

Opening up a new channel of information is mathematically equivalent to adding an input node to a neural network. This is a totally different process from training a machine learning system. When you train a neural network you adjust the weights of the connections between neurons to solve a problem. Adding hidden nodes amounts to basically the same thing. Adding an input node to a neural network unfolds a new dimension of the problem space thereby adding information for the network to work with. In other words, adding a new input node doesn't improve your solution to a problem at all. It makes the problem easier instead.

For example, the traditional Chinese method of teaching strategy involves memorizing ancient Taoist texts. This pedagogical technique is off the radar of modern MBA programs for reasons independent of its effectiveness. The "memorized passages of concise time-tested wisdom" input node is just missing.

You can't tell someone an indescribable thing but you can tell her where to look. You can tell someone to identify the color of blood, listen to a piece of music or stare silently at a blank wall until you see the essence of reality.

The arts of war…cannot be ignored.

―first line of Sunzi's The Art of War

Where else should I look?
Ethical experimentation
by KatjaGrace — 2019-11-10T08:00:01.534Z

I suggested experimenting with different settings on personal characteristics that aren’t obviously good or bad. For instance, trying out being more or less perfectionistic for a day.

A particular variety of this that interests me is experimentation with different ethical principles, where opinion differs on which is correct. Both at levels of action (being a vegan for a week) and of abstract belief (being a virtue ethicist for a week).

I think this is a particularly non-obvious thing to do, because:

You already have views on what is correct, and trading your good ethical principles for bad ethical principles seems unethical.

Ethics seems like an area where experimentation is particularly unhelpful, being mostly about things outside of you that you don’t have direct access to, and also arguably inhabiting a separate realm that doesn’t interact with empirical facts.

I think it is a good idea anyway. On 1, this is basically the same as the case for placebo controlled medical trials, assuming that the thing can actually help you be more ethical in the long run.

On 2, the main thing you have to go by on ethics is intuitions and arguments that are salient and moving to you. But people are notoriously bad at coming up with an unbiased selection of considerations to make salient on topics where they feel something, and it is easy to hear an argument and not really feel it. Actually trying to inhabit the different positions seems helpful for these.

I haven’t done this, but I have become a vegetarian for no great reason and in spite of my argument that it is not an effective use of effort, and then gone back to eating fish, and I found both things had pretty interesting effects on my intuitions about things and the arguments I thought about (possibly changing ethical positions for no good reason is especially good, because then your brain tries to make up its best reasons).

I was thinking of trying nihilism week soon, but then I got busy and maybe became a nihilist anyway, so we’ll see.
Self-Keeping Secrets
by lsusr — 2019-11-10T07:59:15.119Z

A magician never reveals his secrets.

The secret behind nearly every magic trick ever performed is available at your local library. Magicial secrets stay secret because they're inconsequential. Unless you are a magician or aspire to become one, you have better things to learn than magic tricks. If magic tricks did anything that mattered then they wouldn't be magic tricks. They'd be technology.

Magicians don't need a conspiracy to keep our tricks secret. It takes work to learn how to do magic. Friction and inertia are sufficient to keep out the riffraff.

This is true of more important subjects too, like computer security. Though zero-day exploits themselves are precious secrets, "how to find" zero-days is public knowledge. And since zero-day exploits have a limited shelf-life it's "how to find" zero-days that matters.

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

―Benjamin Franklin

Organizations leak like a sponge. Organizations can keep passwords secret most of the time only because a good authentication system is easy to reset. If you're even the slightest bit concerned that your passwords have been stolen then you can re-randomize them. Similarly, an intelligence agency maintains its stockpile of zero-day exploits by constantly replenishing them. To an organization, "preserving secrecy" really means "restoring secrecy". Techniques can't be kept secret because they change too infrequently to restore secrecy after they get stolen.

In practice, organizations face the opposite problem: not enough knowledge is widely-known. Training people is so hard that the limiting factor of an organization's size is how many skilled employees it can hire. The bigger your organization gets the more it'll suffer a regression to the mean. Scaling a company is an exercise in dumbing down your employees' jobs to counteract the regression to the mean.

Large organizations can neither keep knowledge secret nor spread it around. In other words, a dependence on smart people of any kind inhibits the growth of an organization. An organization can scale to the extent it makes its employees'—and especially its customers'—intelligence unnecessary.

SCP-055 is a "self-keeping secret" or "anti-meme".

―internal document, SCP Foundation

The largest organizations are precisely those that make knowledge the most obsolete. The public school system is, by headcount, among the largest organiza

...
Goal-thinking vs desire-thinking
by Sniffnoy — 2019-11-10T00:31:40.661Z

[Adapted from an old post on my personal blog]

There's a lot of long-running arguments on the internet that basically consist of people arguing past each other due to differing basic assumptions that they don't know how to make explicit, preventing them from noticing the fundamental disagreement. I've noticed a few of these and tried to see if I can make both sides more explicit. In this post I'd like to try to explicate one.

Let's start with a concrete example; there are a number of people who would say that wireheading is a good thing, which is obviously not the general thinking on LW. What's the source of this disagreement? One possible explanation would be to say that the former are saying "happiness is our only terminal value, all other values are subsidiary to it", while the latter say hell no it's not, but I think there's more to it than that.

Without yet saying what I think the fundamental distinction is, let me give another example that I think stems from the same disagreement. Consider this essay -- and this isn't the only thing I've seen along these lines -- which takes the point of view that obviously a rational person would kill themselves, while to me this just seems... dumb.

So what's going on here? What's the actual distinction that leads to such arguments? Again, I can't know, but here's my hypothesis. I think there are two sorts of thinking going on here; I'm going to call them "goal-thinking" and "desire-thinking" (these are my own terms, feel free to devise better ones).

So -- goal thinking is thinking in terms of what I'm calling "goals". Goals are to be accomplished. If you're thinking in terms of goals, what you're afraid of is being thwarted, or having your capacity to act, to effect your goals, reduced -- being somehow disabled or restrained; if your capabilities are reduced, you have less ability to make an effect on the future and steer it towards what you want. (This is important; goal-thinking thinks in terms of preferences about the future.) The ultimate example of this is death -- if you're dead, you can't affect anything anymore. While it's possible in some unusual cases that dying could help accomplish your goals, it's pretty unlikely; most of the time, you're better off remaining alive so that you can continue to affect things. So suicide is almost always unhelpful. Goals, remember, about the world, external to oneself.

W...
Neural nets as a model for how humans make and understand visual art
by Owain_Evans — 2019-11-09T16:53:49.350Z
Link: https://owainevans.github.io/visual_aesthetics/sensory-optimization.html

This is a new paper relating experimental results in deep learning to human psychology and cognitive science. I'm excited to get feedback and comments. I've included some excerpts below.

Abstract

This paper is about the cognitive science of visual art. Artists create physical artifacts (such as sculptures or paintings) which depict people, objects, and events. These depictions are usually stylized rather than photo-realistic. How is it that humans are able to understand and create stylized representations? Does this ability depend on general cognitive capacities or an evolutionary adaptation for art? What role is played by learning and culture?

Machine Learning can shed light on these questions. It’s possible to train convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to recognize objects without training them on any visual art. If such CNNs can generalize to visual art (by creating and understanding stylized representations), then CNNs provide a model for how humans could understand art without innate adaptations or cultural learning. I argue that Deep Dream and Style Transfer show that CNNs can create a basic form of visual art, and that humans could create art by similar processes. This suggests that artists make art by optimizing for effects on the human object-recognition system. Physical artifacts are optimized to evoke real-world objects for this system (e.g. to evoke people or landscapes) and to serve as superstimuli for this system.

From "Introduction"

In a psychology study in the 1960s, two professors kept their son from seeing any pictures or photos until the age of 19 months. On viewing line-drawings for the first time, the child immediately recognized what was depicted. Yet aside from this study, we have limited data on humans with zero exposure to visual representations.

...

For the first time in history, there are algorithms [convolutional neural nets] for object recognition that approach human performance across a wide range of datasets. This enables novel computational experiments akin to depriving a child of visual art. It’s possible to train a network to recognize objects (e.g. people, horses, chairs) without giving it any exposure to visual art and then test whether it can understand and create artistic representations.

From "Part 1: Creating art with networks for object recognition"

Figure 2. Outputs from testing whether a conv-net model can generalize to pain...
Notes on Running Objective
by jefftk — 2019-11-09T15:40:02.123Z

I've been playing

Killer
Queen lately at work. It's a ten-person arcade game,
five-vs-five. The general idea is that you're a "bumblebear" drone that
runs and jumps around trying to win by (a) collecting berries or (b)
riding the snail. Some bumblebears will bring berries to "wing gates"
and become warriors, who can fly around and kill others. Each side
also has one queen, who is like a warrior but also has the ability to
dive.

You fly by tapping a button, sometimes very fast (7-15hz
depending), and it turns out this hurts my wrists. I have bad wrists, and generally need to be pretty
careful. Not being able to play any flying roles, I've been getting
a lot of practice playing drone, and wanted to write up some notes.

The two main things drones do are collect berries and ride the snail.
Since those are the direct paths to victory, the objectives, we call
this "running objective." Typically a team will have one member who
always runs objective, and another member who plays "flex", either
playing warrior or running objective depending on the needs of the
situation.

Presenting everything at an introductory level would take way too
long, though, so the rest of this post will be terse and jargony. If
you'd like me to explain something ask in the comments, or you can ask
your teammates.

General

The longer you hold the button the higher you jump. Making a
minimum-sized jump requires only a very slight tap.

Your forward speed is the same whether you're walking, jumping,
or falling.

If you're not making progress because of offensive guards, call
for a hive/snail clear.

Even though you can't kill anyone, booping others is still very
valuable in the right situation. You can boop drones out of gates,
boop enemy warriors into your own warriors, and boop warriors out of
the hive. Play around with booping to learn which parts are safe and
which will kill you.

Coordinate with teammates before the round starts to pick a
strategy (typically 2-2 berries or 3-1 snail) and figure out if there
are any gates you should plan to deny off the bat.

Watch the whole board so you have as much warning as possible
about what's coming next. Give other players a heads up about
important things: number of berries remaining, progress of the snail,
warrior counts, gate possession, queen lives. What's worth tracking
and calling takes time and depends on

...
Reference Classes for Randomness
by Rafael Harth — 2019-11-09T14:41:04.157Z

(Follow-up to Randomness vs. Ignorance)

I've claimed that, if you roll a die, your uncertainty about the result of the roll is random, because, in 1/6th of all situations where one has just rolled a die, it will come up a three. Conversely, if you wonder about the existence of a timeless God, whatever uncertainty you have is ignorance. In this post, I make the case that this distinction isn't just an analog to probability inside vs. outside a model, but is actually fundamental (if some more ideas are added).

The randomness in the above example doesn't come from some inherent "true randomness" of the die. In fact, this notion of randomness is compatible with determinism. (You could then argue it is not real randomness but just ignorance in disguise, but please just accept the term randomness, whenever I bold it, as a working definition.) This randomness is simply the result of taking all situations which are identical to the current one from your perspective, and observing that, among those, one in six will have the die come up a three. This is a general principle that can be applied to any situation: a fair die, a biased die, delay in traffic, whatever.

The "identical" in the last paragraph needs unpacking. If you roll a die and we consider only the situations that are exactly identical from your perspective, then the die will come up a three either in a lot more or a lot less than 1/6th of them. Regardless of whether the universe is fully deterministic or not, the current state of the die is sure to at least correlate with the chance for a three to end up on top.

However, you are not actually able to distinguish between the situation where you just rolled a die in such a way that it will come up a three, and the situation where you just rolled a die in such a way that it will come up a five, and thus you need to group both situations together. More precisely, you need to group all situations that, to you, look indistinguishable with respect to the result of the die, into one class. Then, if among all situations that belong to this class, the die comes up a three in 1/6th of them, your uncertainty with respect to the die roll is random with probability 16 for a three. This grouping is based both on computational limitations (you see the die but can't compute how it'll land) and on missing information (you don't see the die). If you were replaced by a superintell...
Pricing externalities is not necessarily economically efficient
by Orborde — 2019-11-09T12:07:46.509Z
Link: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Coase_World.html

[A]s long as externalities exist and are not internalized via Pigouvian taxes, the result is inefficient. The inefficiency is eliminated by charging the polluter an emission fee equal to the damage done by his pollution. In some real world cases it may be difficult to measure the amount of the damage, but, provided that that problem can be solved, using Pigouvian taxes to internalize externalities produces the efficient outcome.
That analysis was accepted by virtually the entire economics profession prior to Coase's work in the field. It is wrong—not in one way but in three. The existence of externalities does not necessarily lead to an inefficient result. Pigouvian taxes, even if they can be correctly calculated, do not in general lead to the efficient result. Third, and most important, the problem is not really externalities at all—it is transaction costs.
For the metaphors
by KatjaGrace — 2019-11-08T23:30:01.693Z

I make use of a lot of analogies, for instance ‘like dancing’ and ‘the ice skating thing’ are particular phenomena I often think about, and I get value from thinking about meta-ethics as if it were romance, or saving the world as if it were a party. I wonder if providing a variety of concrete experiences that other things might be analogized to is a big source of value from doing new things.

For instance, recently I took up knitting and I think there are things about it that my other experiences don’t have. For instance, I got some knitting patterns, and they have this very brief and utilitarian jargon, and a bunch of concepts, and I got a sense of this rich world of actionable and actioned knowledge about how to do a concrete thing, with much doing of it, which is pretty unlike other things I engage in, I am sorry to say.

I was also struck by the experience of being able to take a relatively simple substance (wool) and turn it into a useful object of the kind one buys in a store (a hat, or it seems like it will be a hat).

These things are of course what I expect in the abstract, but it is something else to experience things.

I’m not sure how these new experiences compare to the value I have had so far from the activity of knitting, but it seems like much more than the value of a generic hat, and I only have maybe a quarter of one of those.

My current guess is that filling out my repertoire of concrete intuitions about specific kinds of occurrences or relationships between things is pretty helpful.
A First Sketch of the Nature of Heat (Novum Organum Book 2: 15-25)
by Francis Bacon — 2019-11-08T03:42:20.842Z

This is the eleventh post in the Novum Organum sequence. For context, see the sequence introduction. For the reading guide, see earlier posts in the sequence.

We have used Francis Bacon's Novum Organum in the version presented atwww.earlymoderntexts.com. Translated by and copyright to Jonathan Bennett. Prepared for LessWrong by Ruby.

[[In the previous section, Bacon introduced his "three tables": his careful collection of data and observations that are core to building up his scientific method.

These tables are:

1) A table of presence which lists many examples where phenomena of interest in presence, e.g. many examples of things where we have heat.

2) A table of nearby essence. His example is heat and to discriminate its true heat, Bacon looks for examples of things that resemble those in the table of presence yet are lacking the heat. For the example, the light of the moon (cold) is contrasted with the light of the sun (hot) which is interesting given they are both heavenly bodies.

3) A table of degrees or comparison where are examples are brought where the amount of perceived heat differs in degree between things. This is also useful in discriminating the true underlying cause and and nature of heat.]]

Aphorism Concerning the Interpretation of Nature: Book 2: 15-25

15. The job of these three tables is—in the terminology I have chosen—to present instances to the intellect. After the presentation has been made, induction itself must get to work. After looking at each and every instance we have to find a nature which

is always present when the given nature (in our present case: heat) is present,
is always absent when the given nature is absent,
always increases or decreases with the given nature, and
is a special case of a more general nature

(I mentioned this last requirement in 4). If the mind tries to do this •affirmatively from the outset (which it always does when left to itself), the result will be fancies and guesses and ill-defined notions and axioms that have to be adjusted daily. (Unless like the schoolmen* we choose to fight in defence of error; and in that case how well an axiom fares will depend ·not on how much truth it contains but· on the ability and strength of its defender.) It is for God (who designed and gave the forms), and perhaps also for angels and higher intelligences, to have an immediate •affi...