trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meditative thinking
by KatjaGrace — 2021-01-16T02:30:17.953Z

I got fairly into meditation in 2018. Not in a way where you do a huge amount of meditation, or seek guidance on how to do meditation well, or on whether what you are doing is meditation at all. I don’t think I even graduated from doing meditation largely in five minute bouts. I just really dug a set of mental things which seemed related to meditation. I was riding an ethos. I suppose meditation was a particularly namable point in the space, but not obviously the most exciting part of it, so I ended up being pretty excited about ‘meditation…?’ while not actually meditating that much.

I also remained so ignorant about meditation traditions and previous human meditation experience that you might doubt that I’m talking about the same thing. (I did talk to other people a little, and did about five guided meditations, which seemed like a different kind of thing anyway, but also very awesome.)

With that said, here’s a kind of meditation I made up. I call it, ‘meditative thinking’. In it, you do all the stuff you would usually do while meditating: be in a meditation-conducive position (I do lying on my back, which I hear is a bad idea, but it is very comfy); set a meditation timer with bells at the start and end (mine also makes water sounds between them, but this probably isn’t crucial); close your eyes; be aware of your breathing; then just go on being aware of stuff in a conspicuously conscious way. But before all this, choose a question to think about. And then, once meditating, think about the question. Maintain the same mental stance as you normally would meditating, insofar as that makes sense. Be aware of your breathing, and your awareness, and your thinking. If you stop thinking about the question, gently bring your awareness back to it.

I still find this good. Though it’s possible that it gets much of its benefit from being a ritualistic way to actually think about a question for five or ten minutes without reflexively opening Facebook because thinking doesn’t correspond to a tab or occupy one’s hands.
Citizenship in a Republic
by Theodore Roosevelt — 2021-01-16T01:33:13.692Z
Link: https://theodoreroosevelt.org/content.aspx?page_id=22&club_id=991271&module_id=339364

This is a transcript of a speech I gave many years ago in Paris.

Strange and impressive associations rise in the mind of a man from the New World who speaks before this august body in this ancient institution of learning. Before his eyes pass the shadows of mighty kings and war-like nobles, of great masters of law and theology; through the shining dust of the dead centuries he sees crowded figures that tell of the power and learning and splendor of times gone by; and he sees also the innumerable host of humble students to whom clerkship meant emancipation, to whom it was well-nigh the only outlet from the dark thralldom of the Middle Ages.

This was the most famous university of medieval Europe at a time when no one dreamed that there was a New World to discover. Its services to the cause of human knowledge already stretched far back into the remote past a time when my forefathers, three centuries ago, were among the sparse bands of traders, ploughmen, wood-choppers, and fisher folk who, in hard struggle with the iron unfriendliness of the Indian-haunted land, were laying the foundations of what has now become the giant republic of the West. To conquer a continent, to tame the shaggy roughness of wild nature, means grim warfare; and the generations engaged in it cannot keep, still less add to, the stores of garnered wisdom which where once theirs, and which are still in the hands of their brethren who dwell in the old land. To conquer the wilderness means to wrest victory from the same hostile forces with which mankind struggled on the immemorial infancy of our race. The primeval conditions must be met by the primeval qualities which are incompatible with the retention of much that has been painfully acquired by humanity as through the ages it has striven upward toward civilization. In conditions so primitive there can be but a primitive culture. At first only the rudest school can be established, for no others would meet the needs of the hard-driven, sinewy folk who thrust forward the frontier in the teeth of savage men and savage nature; and many years elapse before any of these schools can develop into seats of higher learning and broader culture.

The pioneer days pass; the stump-dotted clearings expand into vast stretches of fertile farm land; the stockade clusters of log cabins change into towns; the hunters of game, the fellers of trees, the rude frontie...
AR Glasses: Much more than you wanted to know
by frcassarino — 2021-01-16T00:31:29.689Z
Link: https://federicorcassarino.substack.com/p/ar-glasses-much-more-than-you-wanted

I.

AR Glasses

are an unusually foreseeable technological innovation. They’ve been around in pop culture and science fiction for a long time. Everybody seems to agree that at some point, be it in 5, 10 or 20 years, they’ll be as ubiquitous as smartphones and eventually replace them.

Maybe it’s precisely the fact that we know they are coming that makes them seem uninteresting. There’s a lack of excitement about them. Few people seem to be speculating deeply about how a world in which everybody owns a pair of AR Glasses will look like; except with ultra pessimistic Black Mirror-ish objections.

The current zeitgeist does make it hard to get excited. There’s a general narrative that we are enslaved to our phones, that we are addicted to mindlessly scrolling, that technology is keeping us from the present moment, and so on. I know a lot of people who think of AR glasses with resignation; as if they accept they’ll end up owning a pair which will further doom them to a life permeated by digital distraction.

In a sentence, people’s attitude towards AR is: It’s like a smartphone, but in your face. And everybody is in a toxic relationship with their smartphones, so nobody is excited about having one in their visual field 24/7.

But that line of thinking on AR glasses might be myopic.

II.

Imagine you told somebody in the year 2000 that a decade later, everybody would carry a touchscreen device (with internet access) with them at all times.

They might say something like: “Amazing! It’ll be like having a tiny personal computer with me all the times! It’ll be a much more convenient way to send emails, use Microsoft Office and browse the web!”

And they’d be right in a limited way. You are able to use your smartphone to do almost everything you do in a computer. You can indeed write emails and browse the web.

But they’d also be missing all of the ways in which smartphones radically transformed the world. Because what makes smartphones special is not that they are a more convenient way to do the same stuff you could do with a computer.

What makes smartphones special is that they’re with you all the time.

Because they are with you all the time, you can now get live directions anywhere with Google Maps. It’s also why it makes sense that you can use them to hail an Uber, or order food. Because they are with you all the time, we put cameras on them which made social media explode as sharing a...
Why I'm excited about Debate
by Richard_Ngo — 2021-01-15T23:37:53.861Z

I think

Debate

is probably the most exciting existing safety research direction. This is a pretty significant shift from my opinions when I first read about it, so it seems worth outlining what’s changed. I’ll group my points into three categories. Points 1-3 are strategic points about deployment of useful AGIs. Points 4-6 are technical points about Debate. Points 7-9 are meta-level points about how to evaluate safety techniques, in particular responding to

Beth Barnes’ recent post on obfuscated arguments in Debate

.

1. Question-answering is very useful.

People often claim that question-answering AGIs (which I’ll abbreviate as QAGIs) will be economically uncompetitive compared with agentic AGIs. But I don’t think this matters very much for the two most crucial applications of AGIs. Firstly, when it comes to major scientific and technological advances, almost all of the value is in the high-level concepts - it seems unlikely that implementing those advances will require AGI supervision (rather than just supervision from narrow AIs) during deployment.

Secondly, aligned QAGIs can do safety research to help us understand how to build aligned agentic AGIs, and can also predict and prevent their misbehaviour. So even a relatively small lead for aligned QAGIs could be very helpful.

2. Debate pushes capabilities in the right direction.

Another objection I used to have: I tend to expect that QAGIs are pretty safe anyway, which implies that in aligning QA systems, Debate isn’t helping tackle the cases we should be most worried about. And if it’s used as a final step of training for systems that have previously been trained to do other things, then it’s very unclear to me whether Debate would override whatever unsafe motivations those systems had already acquired.

But now I think that Debate could be an important tool for not only making QA systems more aligned, but also more competitive. Systems like GPT-3 have shown a very good understanding of language, and I expect them to gain much more world-knowledge, but it’s hard to elicit specific answers from them. We might hope to make them do so by using reward-modelling to fine-tune them, but I expect that in order to scale this up to complex questions, we’ll need to make that process much more efficient in human time. That’s what Debate does, by allowing humans to evaluate answers on criteria that are much simpler than the holi...
Meditations on faith
by Richard_Ngo — 2021-01-15T22:20:02.651Z

A few months before his death, Leonard Cohen, the great lyricist of modern spirituality, sang to God:

Magnified, sanctified
Be the holy name
Vilified, crucified
In the human frame
A million candles burning
For the help that never came
You want it darker

You're lining up the prisoners
And the guards are taking aim
I struggled with some demons
They were middle class and tame
I didn't know I had permission
To murder and to maim
You want it darker

Hineni, hineni
I'm ready, My Lord

The first lines are a reference to the Mourner’s Kaddish, a Jewish prayer for the deceased. The million candles - each one in remembrance of a life lost - reminds us of tragedies upon preventable tragedies. So too with the prisoners, the guards, the murders: if these are part of some deity’s plan, it’s a deity which wants the world darker. Finally, hineni is what Abraham said when God called upon him to sacrifice Isaac. It means Here I am; but with deep connotations: I am willing, or perhaps I am yours.

Together, I find these verses, and the rest of the song, deeply striking and totally incomprehensible. They throw the brute fact of immense suffering, and death, and darkness, at the listener. And then they don’t question it, or retreat from it, or refute it. The opposite! Hineni: yielding completely. Leonard Cohen, at death’s door, singing “I’m ready, My Lord”, as if there is nothing to excuse or explain. Or more: as if the litany of suffering in the rest of the song only strengthens his convictions.

It occured to me, listening to these lyrics, that I had no idea what that mental state feels like; that there is a whole spectrum of experience - apparently, overwhelmingly powerful experience - which is alien to me.

Now, perhaps I am misinterpreting Cohen; perhaps these lyrics are ironic, or despairing (although if so, I just don’t see it, and neither does the former UK Chief Rabbi). But either way, the story of Abraham and Isaac, which encapsulates the question of faith in the face of suffering, is one with which religious thinkers have wrestled down the centuries. It is the story that Kierkegaard chooses to illustrate the absolute absurdity of absolute faith - and its greatness, not in spite of, but because of that absurdity.

Yet, striking as Kierkegaard’s writings are, suppose that we would prefer not to found our worldviews on absurdity; what then? Is there something about this experience which...
The Future of Biological Warfare
by lsusr — 2021-01-15T21:47:25.851Z

Biological weapons can be divided into two categories: infectious and noninfectious. Infectious agents infect a host, reproduce, and then spread to another one or more new host. Noninfectious agents do not.

Noninfectious biological agents are similar to chemical weapons. You can stop both of them with an airtight suit and a breathing apparatus. The cost of protective clothing and the associated training is a rounding error in the budget of a modern military. Meanwhile, noninfectious biological agents are expensive to produce and maintain. Operationally, the military implications of noninfectious biological agents are basically identical to the military applications of chemical weapons. They both revolve around about keeping small particles from touching you, especially the inside of your lungs.

In Why Don’t We Use Chemical Weapons Anymore? Bret Devereaux explains why chemical weapons do not make sense for any war involving strong states. Basically, chemical weapons are not used against strong states because they cost more to deploy than to defend against. Chemical weapons are not used by strong states because a strong state can accomplish area denial and destruction of the enemy better via nuclear and conventional weapons. Chemical weapons are used only by weak states against weak enemies. Chemical weapons can be considered obsolete for the purposes of modern warfare. Noninfectious biological agents can be considered obsolete too because noninfectious biological agents are operationally similar to chemical weapons.

It is not unlikely that future noninfectious biological weapons will used for assassinations, but I don't see how they would be a game-changer. The future of biological warfare revolves around the use of infectious agents against civilian populations.

Infectious Agents

We can divide the use of biological agents into tactical applications, strategic applications and terrorist applications. Tactical weapons are used against military targets. Strategic weapons are used by a state against civilian targets. When weapons are used by a non-state actor against a civilian target, we call it terrorism. It is true that particular weapons are optimized for tactical, strategic or terrorist use. However, weapons can be used for applications beyond their intended purpose. Using a tactical weapon strategically makes it a strategic weapon. Using a strategic weapon ta...
Deconditioning Aversion to Dislike
by lsusr — 2021-01-15T07:57:15.074Z

It doesn't matter who dislikes me. It doesn't matter who hates me. It doesn't even matter who likes me. All that matters is how many people love me because I live under the rule of law in a city where the people I have the potential to interact with vastly outnumber the people I have the time to interact with.

In my previous post on the virtue of pompous egotistical overconfidence, rmoehn pointed out that my "[c]ocky arrogant megalomaniac behavior makes the liking scale swing positive in some people, negative in others." Extreme variance is advantageous because the number of people who love me is all that matters. If I put off some people in the process then that's a bonus because I don't have to expend my own attention triaging them.

Your weirdness should scale with the size of your audience. If you are in a room with three other people then acting out will often alienate them. If you are on the Internet then it is hard to gather attention at all without great creativity.

A side-effect of ostentatious weirdness is it triggers lots of dislike. If everyone dislikes you then that is a problem. But if at least a small number of people like you—and you like them back—then you have calibrated properly.

I am irrational because I care when people dislike me. I let strangers influence my behavior even though I shouldn't. I want to decondition this reaction. The simplest way is to expose myself to situations where people dislike me for acting genuine.

Blogging helps.

Entrepreneurship helps.

Fastidious truth-telling helps.

Cutting ties with toxic people gets easier every time.

I am told YouTube comments are a cesspool of hate. Maybe if I post videos they can help me become stronger.
Alienation and meta-ethics (or: is it possible you should maximize helium?)
by Joe Carlsmith — 2021-01-15T07:07:25.675Z

(Cross-posted from Hands and Cities)

In a previous post, I tried to gesture at the possibility of a certain kind of wholeheartedness in ethical life. In this post, I want to examine a question about meta-ethics that seems to me important to this wholeheartedness: namely, whether you can be completely alienated from what you should do. By this I mean: is it possible for what you should do to hold no appeal whatsoever, even given arbitrarily deep and full understanding of reality and of the consequences of your actions? I discuss how three different meta-ethical questions approach this question, and why the differences matter for wholeheartedness.

(Note: this post plays fast and loose with a number of philosophical issues that it would take a lot of extra work to tease apart and pin down precisely; my aim is mostly just to gesture at a general picture that I think is important, not to set it out rigorously).

(Second note: the types of “shoulds” and ”normative facts” I have in mind here are the ones of all-things-considered practical deliberation – deliberation that encompasses both moral and non-moral considerations. Thus, the question of whether I should eat this cupcake, go back to grad school, clip my toenails, etc, are all normative questions in this sense, but not necessarily moral ones).

I.

On some versions of normative realism, the answer to the question above is yes: it might turn out that what you should do, according to the true normativity written into the fabric of the reality, is fully and forever alien from anything you or any other human cares about. It might be, for example, that there is an over-riding moral imperative to maximize the amount of helium gas, or to paint your mother a specific shade of pastel blue, or to eat a prime number of bricks every other Tuesday. Future philosophers might discover this fact (though given their current reliance on intuitions closely tied to actual patterns of human concern, their prospects for finding the truth look slim); but their discovery, even fully comprehended, wouldn’t move them to action. Rather, the human species as a whole would be afflicted with a kind of totalized akrasia: “I know I should eat this brick; I’ve seen the proof, it’s airtight; but no matter how much I reflect and imagine, I just can’t get motivated.”

Or perhaps the better analogy is species-wide sociopathy, an irredeemable indifference ...
Pseudorandomness contest: prizes, results, and analysis
by Eric Neyman — 2021-01-15T06:24:15.317Z
Link: https://ericneyman.wordpress.com/2021/01/15/pseudorandomness-contest-results-and-analysis/

(Previously in this series: Round 1, Round 2)

In December I ran a pseudorandomness contest. Here’s how it worked:

In Round 1, participants were invited to submit 150-bit strings of their own devising. They had 10 minutes to write down their string while using nothing but their own minds. I received 62 submissions.
I then used a computer to generate 62 random 150-bit strings, and put all 124 strings in a random order. In Round 2, participants had to figure out which strings were human-generated (I’m going to call these strings fake from now on) and which were “truly” random (I’m going to call these real). In particular, I asked for probabilities that each string was real, so participants could express their confidence rather than guessing “real” or “fake” for each string. I received 27 submissions for Round 2.

This post is long because there are lots of fascinating things to talk about. So, feel free to skip around to whichever sections you find most interesting; I’ve done my best to give descriptive labels. But first:

Prizes

Round 1

Thank you to the 62 of you who submitted strings in Round 1! Your strings were scored by the average probability of being real assigned by Round 2 participants, weighted by their Round 2 score. (Entries with negative Round 2 scores received no weight). The top three scores in Round 1 were:

Jenny Kaufmann, with a score of 69.4%. That is, even though Jenny’s string was fake, Round 2 participants on average gave her string a 69.4% chance of being real. For winning Round 1, Jenny was given the opportunity to allocate $50 to charity, which she chose to give to the GiveWell Maximum Impact Fund.
Reed Jacobs, with a score of 68.8%. Reed allocated $25 to Canada/USA Mathcamp.
Eric Fletcher, with a score of 68.6%. Eric allocated $25 to the Poor People’s Campaign.

Congratulations to Jenny, Reed, and Eric!

Round 2

A big thanks to the 27 of you (well, 28 — 26 plus a team of two) who submitted Round 2 entries. I estimate that the average participant put in a few hours of work, and that some put in more than 10. Entries were graded using a quadratic scoring rule (see here for details). When describing Round 2, I did a back-of-the-envelope estimate that a score of 15 on this round would be good. I was really impressed by the top two scores:

Scy Yoon and William Ehlhardt, who were the only team, received a score of 28.5, honestly higher than I thoug

...
How to solve the argument about what the algorithm should do
by Yoav Ravid — 2021-01-15T06:08:15.627Z

Should YouTube's algorithm recommend conspiracy theory videos? Should twitter recommend tweets that disagree with the WHO? Should Facebook recommend things that'll make you angry?

There's countless such questions about recommender algorithms, usually with good arguments on both sides.

But the elephant in the room that all these arguments take place in, is that the problem isn't so much how to design the algorithm, but why do we only have one choice?

My suggestion is that sites with recommender algorithms will have a system that lets everyone write their own algorithm, upload it, and use it instead of the companies algorithm, or use an algorithm uploaded by someone else.

The algorithms would be selected through an add-on-shop-like interface, and could have further options for the users to tweak through a UI.

Here's an example of Google's add-on marketplace. imagine something similar but for algorithms.

This will move the argument from "How should the one algorithm be designed", to the much easier problem of just designing an algorithm you're happy with and uploading it, or finding one that was already uploaded.

When it comes to large companies like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, etc. I would force them to implement such a system, and use a simple no-filter chronological order algorithm in their feeds as a default (then offer their own algorithm as one choice among the other choices).

With everyone able to choose their own algorithms, we'll be one step closer to a social media landscape that works.