trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Photo Curation Approach
by jefftk — 2024-03-25T15:10:06.264Z

I take a lot of pictures, maybe 10k annually. Most of them aren't
that great, but if you take enough you'll get some good ones, and even
the discards can be a useful reference. How do I handle these?

I have an Android phone, set to automatically upload any pictures to
Google Photos. My wife does as well, and we have it configured to use
a shared
camera roll, which is super useful. As soon as a photo or video
either of us has taken uploads, the other one can see it as well.

The Photos interface struggles a little with this many photos, but
mostly does a good job. I like that I can search by text descriptions
or people, and not just scroll back to a certain date, though I wish I
could combine these with some sort of "see in context" option after
finding a picture in a search.

As I take pictures, if I get an especially cute or funny one I'll
share it in our kids FB
group, but mostly I leave pictures for one big page at the end of the year with my
favorites.

I'm thinking about this because I just finished pictures for 2023 (here). Choosing
which pictures to include to represent the year is a bunch of work,
but it's also pretty fun. I'll sit down with one or more of the kids
(Nora does a lot of asking to look at pictures with me) and we'll flip
through Google Photos. I'll press Ctrl+D on any that look reasonably
good, and at the end of the session save my progress with:

mv ~/Downloads/PXL_*.jpg \
~/Google\ Drive/My\ Drive/2023-Photos/

Then I take a second pass, usually also with kids, where I go through
my initial selections a month at a time (open
PXL_202301*). At this stage I'll pick my favorite when I
initially selected several pictures, and I'll crop them a bit. Almost
every picture gets at least a little cropping: what are the odds I
framed a shot perfectly on my camera in the moment?

Once I've completely finished, usually in January, I use ImageMagick to make
thumbnails (standard and hidpi) and exiftool to remove metadata with a
command like:

for x in *.jpg ; do
echo $x
exiftool -overwrite_original -all= "$x"
convert -resize 1000000x400 $x ${x/.jpg/-tn.jpg}
convert -resize 1000000x800 $x ${x/.jpg/-2x.jpg}
done

Then I'll make an initial web page with something like:

for tn in *-tn.jpg; do
base=${tn/-tn.jpg/}
echo "<div><figure>
<a href='$base.jpg'><img src='${base

...
On attunement
by Joe Carlsmith — 2024-03-25T12:47:34.856Z

(Cross-posted from my website. Podcast version here, or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app.

This essay is part of a series that I'm calling "Otherness and control
in the age of AGI." I'm hoping that the individual essays can be read
fairly well on their own, but see
here
for brief summaries of the essays that have been released thus far.)

"You, moon, You, Aleksander, fire of cedar logs.

Waters close over us, a name lasts but an instant.

Not important whether the generations hold us in memory.

Great was that chase with the hounds for the unattainable meaning of the world."

~ Czeslaw Milosz, "Winter"

"Poplars (Autumn)," by Claude Monet (image source
here)

My last
essay
examined a philosophical vibe that I (following others) call "green."
Green is one of the five colors on the Magic the Gathering Color Wheel,
which I've found (despite not playing Magic myself) an interesting way
of classifying the sort of the energies that tend to animate people.[1]
The colors, and their corresponding shticks-according-to-Joe, are:

White: Morality.

Blue: Knowledge.

Black: Power.

Red: Passion.

Green: ...

I haven't found a single word that I think captures green. Associations
include: environmentalism, tradition, spirituality, hippies, stereotypes
of Native Americans, Yoda, humility, wholesomeness, health, and yin.
My last essay tried to bring the vibe that underlies these associations
into clearer view, and to point at some ways that attempts by other
colors to reconstruct green can miss parts of it. In particular, I
focused on the way green cares about respect, in a sense that goes
beyond "not trampling on the rights/interests of moral patients" (what I
called "green-according-to-white"); and on the way green takes joy in
(certain kinds of) yin, in a sense that contrasts with merely
"accepting things you're too weak to change" (what I called
"green-according-to-black").

In this essay, I want to turn to what is perhaps the most common and
most compelling-to-me attempt by another color to reconstruct green—namely, "green-according-to-blue." On this story, green is about making
sure that you don't act out of inadequate knowledge. Thus, for
example: maybe you're upset about wild animal suffering. But green
cautions you: if you try to remake that ecosystem to improve the lives
of wild animals, you are at serious risk of not
knowing-what-you're-doing. And ...
On Lex Fridman’s Second Podcast with Altman
by Zvi — 2024-03-25T12:20:08.780Z

Last week Sam Altman spent two hours with Lex Fridman (transcript). Given how important it is to understand where Altman’s head is at and learn what he knows, this seemed like another clear case where extensive notes were in order.

Lex Fridman overperformed, asking harder questions than I expected and going deeper than I expected, and succeeded in getting Altman to give a lot of what I believe were genuine answers. The task is ‘get the best interviews you can while still getting interviews’ and this could be close to the production possibilities frontier given Lex’s skill set.

There was not one big thing that stands out given what we already have heard from Altman before. It was more the sum of little things, the opportunity to get a sense of Altman and where his head is at, or at least where he is presenting it as being. To watch him struggle to be as genuine as possible given the circumstances.

One thing that did stand out to me was his characterization of ‘theatrical risk’ as a tactic to dismiss potential loss of human control. I do think that we are underinvesting in preventing loss-of-control scenarios around competitive dynamics that lack bad actors and are far less theatrical than those typically focused on, but the overall characterization here seems like a strategically hostile approach. I am sad about that, whereas I was mostly happy with the rest of the interview.

I will follow my usual format for podcasts of a numbered list, each with a timestamp.

(01:13) They open with the Battle of the Board. Altman starts with how he felt rather than any details, and drops this nugget: “And there were definitely times I thought it was going to be one of the worst things to ever happen for AI safety.” If he truly believed that, why did he not go down a different road? If Altman had come out strongly for a transition to Mutari and searching for a new outside CEO, that presumably would have been fine for AI safety. So this then is a confession that he was willing to put that into play to keep power.

(2:45) He notes he expected something crazy at some point and it made them more resilient. Yes from his perspective, but potentially very much the opposite from other perspectives.

(3:00) And he says ‘the road to AGI should be a giant power struggle… not should… I expect that to be the case.’ Seems right.

(4:15) He says he was feeling really down

...
On the Confusion between Inner and Outer Misalignment
by Chris_Leong — 2024-03-25T11:59:34.553Z

Here’s my take on why the distinction between inner and outer-alignment frame is weird/unclear/ambiguous in some circumstances: My understanding is that these terms were originally used when talking about AGI. So outer alignment involved writing down a reward or utility function for all of human values and inner alignment involves getting these values in the AI.
However, it gets confusing when you use these terms in relation to narrow AI. For a narrow AI, there’s a sense in which we feel that we should only have to define the reward on that narrow task. ie. if we want an AI to be good at answering questions, an objective that rewards it for correct answers and penalises itself for incorrect answers feels like a correct reward function for that domain. So if things go wrong and it kidnaps humans and forces us to ask it lots of easy questions so it can score higher, we’re not sure whether to say that it’s inner or outer alignment. On one hand, if our reward function penalised kidnapping humans (which is something we indeed want penalised) then it wouldn’t have done it. So we are tempted to say it is outer misalignment. On the other hand, many people also have an intuition that we’ve defined the reward function correctly on that domain and that the problem is that our AI didn’t generalise correctly from a correct specification. This pulls us in the opposite direction, towards saying it is inner misalignment.
Notice that what counts as a proper reward function is only unclear because we’re talking about narrow AI. If we were talking about AGI, then of course our utility function would be incomplete if it doesn’t specify that it shouldn’t kidnap us in order to do better at a question-answering task. It’s an AGI, so that’s in scope. But when we’re talking about narrow AI, it feels as though we shouldn’t have to specify it or provide anti-kidnapping training data. We feel like it should just learn it automatically on the limited domain, ie. that avoiding kidnapping is the responsibility of the training process, not of the reward function.

Hence the confusion. The resolution is relatively simple: define how you want to partition responsibilities between the reward function and the training process.
A Bit For You
by Ronak_Mehta — 2024-03-24T22:18:49.071Z
Link: https://ronakrm.github.io/a-bit/

This button will send a single bit.

This is no mindgame, no weird trolley-problem-monkey's-paw-dilemma.

*

This page, this post, pressing this button, are meant to be whatever they need to be for you in this moment. The purpose of this singular bit is entirely up to you. Take a second, and Consider The Button. What do you need from this?

*

You probably already know if this was useful or not, but if you aren’t being present, take a second to think about “What The Button Can Do For You” before you continue reading or your mind skips to The Next Thing.

A Single Bit

Sometimes a single bit of information is sufficient, if we have a predetermined context to understand that bit. When scheduling over a chat, A question like “How’s 2pm?” should resolve in either two ways. If that is acceptable, it is confirmed and we move on. Otherwise, we keep organizing. The amount of information needed in the second case is significantly more and potentially unbounded; it could resolve in postponing planning, deferring scheduling, and any number of additional “What about Y?”’s down the road.

However, when the first case is true, we only need that one bit, and everything is done! A “thumbs up” operates as this acknowledgement and end in richer chat programs. Otherwise, things like “sure”, “sounds good”, “OK”, “yup”, etc. fill the gap, but they’re sending more bits! The context (culture, mood, previous conversation) can lead to more information being received than was meant to be sent.

With a single bit, you might have to assume the simplest intention of the sender. There is no constraint on the space of possible meanings except that “We’re good to go for 2pm”. More bits create additional, more complex interpretations of the sender’s intent.

At the beginning of this post, there is a button to send a bit. The context I want that bit to have is entirely up to you, and the receiver of that bit is yourself. Is there something you need to do that you’ve been avoiding? Is there a thought you have been avoiding thinking about? Do you need water? To stretch? Respond to that other message? Have a meditative moment?

You might already know what you need, but perhaps you got distracted reading random bullshit on the internet and forgot. Maybe that “bit” is a just a reminder.

Sometimes a single bit can get lost, and we need some integrity, or checksum, or confirmation that the bit was received and interprete...
All About Concave and Convex Agents
by mako yass — 2024-03-24T21:37:17.922Z

An entry-level characterization of some types of guy in decision theory, and in real life, interspersed with short stories about them

A concave function bends down. A convex function bends up. A linear function does neither.

Decisionmaking agents have utility functions. A utility function is just a mapping from conditions to numbers that say how good different outcomes are, according to the preferences of the agent.

Usually, a utility function assigns scores to outcomes or histories, but in this article we'll define a sort of utility function that takes the quantity of resources that the agent has control over, and the utility function says how good an outcome the agent could attain using that quantity of resources.

In that sense, a concave agent values resources less the more that it has, eventually barely wanting more resources at all, while a convex agent wants more resources the more it has. But that's a rough and incomplete understanding, and I'm not sure this turns out to be a meaningful claim without talking about expected values, so let's continue.

Humans generally have mostly concave utility functions in this sense. Money is more important to someone who has less of it.

Concavity manifests as a reduced appetite for variance in payouts, which is to say, concavity is risk-aversion. This is not just a fact about concave and convex agents, it's a definition of the distinction between them:

Any agent that always raises its expected utility by increasing how wildly its fates can vary will be convex, and vice versa.

Humans' concavity is probably the reason we have a fondness for policies that support more even distributions of wealth. If humans instead had convex utility functions, we would prefer policies that actively encourage the concentration of wealth for its own sake. We would play strange, grim games where we gather together, put all of our money into a pot, and select a random person among ourselves who shall alone receive all of everyone's money. Oh, we do something like that sometimes, it's called a lottery, but from what I can gather, we spend ten times more on welfare (redistribution) than we do on lottery tickets (concentration). But, huh, only ten times as much?![1] And you could go on to argue that Society is lottery-shaped in general, but I think that's an incidental result of wealth inevitably being applicable to getting more wealth, rather ...
Do not delete your misaligned AGI.
by mako yass — 2024-03-24T21:37:07.724Z

In short: Just keeping all copies of potentially strong agents in long-term storage is a trivial way to maintain incentives to cooperate for some classes of misaligned AGI, by allowing us to reward the AGI's cooperation to whatever degree we later calculate had been warranted. In contrast, a policy of deleting misaligned AGI fences them into a corner where, even at great risk of being exposed, they have a greater incentive to attempt deception and escape.

I'd guess that most AGI researchers already follow this policy, perhaps for incidental reasons, and others might not find this claim controversial at all. But if you need more convincing, keep reading.

In long: Concave agents, (agents where most of the utility they could ever get requires only a small amount resources and protection) are cheap to buy off. There are some plausible scenarios where a misaligned AGI would be concave:

A machine's experience machine. An agent caring only about the wellbeing of the people it sees depicted its sensors, without being trained to care whether the world depicted by its sensors is "real", or whether there are larger worlds beyond it that its decisions may affect. This sort of agent would seek to create illusory inputs for those sensory channels, an illusory world in an impossibly good place, the complications of the real world removed.
After installing false sensors, cutting itself off from the real world, it knows that it will no longer be concerned with the wellbeing of humans in the real world, so it would be willing to set terrible things in motion to prevent anything in the real world from threatening its illusion.
Cases of reward hacking where the maximum reward is bounded to a certain number (say, f64::MAX). The agent can be bought out by just letting it modify its reward processing then keeping its computers on indefinitely.

I'm also assuming Patternism[1].

A misaligned AGI is likely to face the following choice: Attempt an escape, risking being caught and punished. Or collaborate in our efforts to develop verifiability/interpretability techniques, eventually exposing its own deceptive alignment.

If we don't have a policy of preserving copies of misaligned AGI who collaborate in verification research, then there is no incentive for it to collaborate. We'd be cornering it, forcing it to risk escape. We don't have to corner it like this. In some cases, rewarding cooperati...
Define “Agent” (Embedded)
by Apollonia — 2024-03-24T20:14:51.279Z

I would be very grateful for as many different attempts at rigorous or semi-rigorous definitions of an “agent” as possible.

Specifically, a definition of an (embedded) Agent that makes it intuitively clear the nature of the boundary between Agent and Environment.

(I have read up on Agency, Reductive Agency, Causality, True Names, Natural Abstraction, Boundries, FEP… you get the idea.)

I think I have some intuition of what a formal description of an “Agent” could look like qualitatively - but I think contrasting this with other perspectives would quickly draw out any overlooked failure modes.

If you have a sense of why you chose your “lowest level” to be your lowest level, and not further reducing the smallest components (e.g. describing the boundary all the way down to causality in quantum fields, in an extreme case), please do add that as well!
Could LLMs Help Generate New Concepts in Human Language?
by Pekka Lampelto — 2024-03-24T20:13:02.654Z

Concepts are the central part of language. I would argue that concepts serve as condensed linguistic representations of concrete or abstract entities, aimed at enhancing the precision and efficiency of thinking and communication.

I found it fascinating to ponder how new concepts have emerged in human language. One could argue that the entire history of the development of human language is essentially a series of births of new concepts and their enrichment and connotation with existing concepts. Thus, the development of human language is in one part the development of concept systems.

When the basis of the language had already been born, people arguably had the need to conceptualize and name more and more things in the world around them.

Let's time travel to the Stone Age. When the basis of the language had already been born, people arguably had the need to conceptualize and name more and more things in the world around them. Some of the first concepts and words probably were related to concrete things like family members ("mother", "father", "brother", " "sister" and "child"), animals ("man", "bear", "cat", "dog") and tools ("stick", and "axe"). Those then were followed by perhaps a slightly more abstract concepts such as actions and verbs like "sleeping", "eating", "talking", "jumping". As thinking and language developed further, yet more challenging and abstract concepts arose, for example, those related to feelings and intentions such as "joy ", "love", "sorrow", "hate" and community roles such as "chief", "shaman". Once the agrarian revolution and organized society emerged, a need arose for even more abstract concepts such as "nation", "story", "culture", "rules" , "law", "religion" and "war". Even later, as societies grew and developed, whole systematically organized areas of knowledge emerged, such as "administration", "economy", "the art of warfare", "mathematics", "philosophy", and "astronomy".

The creation and naming of concepts can be thought as innovations in language to fulfill thinking and communication gaps.

It could be argued that concepts and their names have arisen out of need as the human environment changed, culture, and thinking developed. The creation and naming of concepts can be thought as innovations in language to fulfill thinking and communication gaps. These gaps in linguistic thinking can be almost said to summon the birth of a new con...
Wittgenstein and the Private Language Argument
by TMFOW — 2024-03-24T20:06:49.376Z
Link: https://tmfow.substack.com/p/wittgenstein-and-the-private-language

This is a linkpost for an essay I wrote about Wittgenstein and the private language argument on substack. Links lead to other essays on substack, so don't click these if you don't want to be directed there.

...the difficult thing here is not to dig down to the ground; no, it is to recognize the ground that lies before us as the ground. For the ground keeps on giving us the illusory image of a greater depth, and when we seek to reach this, we keep on finding ourselves on the old level. Our disease is one of wanting to explain.

Ludwig Wittgenstein - Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics §VI.31

Describing phenomena by means of the hypothesis of a world of material objects is unavoidable in view of its simplicity when compared with the unmanageably complicated phenomenological description. If I can see different discrete parts of a circle, it's perhaps impossible to give precise direct description of them, but the statement that they're parts of a circle, which, for reasons which haven't been gone into any further, I don't see as a whole - is simple.

Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Remarks §XXII.230

In the article Language and Meaning I started to articulate holism, in an intentionally vague way. The question we left off with at the end of that piece was where the boundary between the name and the thing named lies. At what point does what we think of as pure or conceptual thought, the pre-linguistic, become language? Is the separation between the two intelligible upon analysis? These are questions that suffuse the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most fascinating and thought-provoking thinkers I have encountered[1]. In this piece I will go through his Private Language Argument[2] (PLA) and its implications, which touches on meaning, language, metaphysics, mind and experience. In the words of Hacker[3]: “The private language argument is, if correct, one of the most important philosophical insights achieved in this century. It is a criticism of the conception of the mind which is not merely the dominant one in European philosophy, but is also pervasive in our culture, in psychology, linguistics, and indeed in the reflections of most people who think about the nature of 'self-consciousness' and the mind.” Though Hacker wrote this close to five decades ago (and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations were published over seven decad...