trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Trauma, Meditation, and a Cool Scar
by Logan Riggs — 2019-08-06T16:17:39.912Z

[Trigger Warning: I’ll be discussing a physical injury, recovery, and panic attacks in detail. The first three pictures linked are gory. Again, they are linked, not directly shown]

Trauma

One year ago today, I was in an accident with an industrial drone. It was spinning too fast while arming (like how helicopters spin up before they took off), but nothing we tried would fix it. Eventually, I changed the PWM value back to the default value, and it spun up even faster. Fast enough to take off right into me.

It tore up

my arm

. It tore up

my face

. After screaming, it didn’t hurt that bad, so I thought I overreacted. I told everyone “I think I’m okay”. They didn’t believe me, and I was rushed to the hospital. The pain was horrible, but the nausea was worse. I had made everyone apple pie that day, but I didn’t get to keep my piece.

The doctor thought I needed facial reconstruction surgery, so they put me in an ambulance and shipped me to another hospital. They stitched me up, said no facial surgery was needed, but that my lens and iris were destroyed in my left eye. A couple days later, my

eyeball bruised

. A week of checkups and eye drops 4 times a day, they then put me under for surgery.

I woke up in so much pain, so confused. They told me to keep my head down. I asked Why am I in so much pain? repeatedly. They put me in a wheelchair to take me outside, and told me to keep my head down. But all I could do was feel terrified because I was in pain and no one was doing anything about it. I’m told to keep my head down as they put me in my dad’s car, so I kept my head down and hurt.

For a week, I had to keep my head down. When I ate, my head was down. When I talked to someone, my head was down. When I slept, my head was down1. I couldn’t play piano like I used to because of my arm. I couldn’t read like I used to because of my eye. I couldn’t even think like I used to because my working memory was shot. I felt so powerless and isolated.

How am I supposed to program or learn new things when I could barely keep 3 things on my mind, when I could barely read off a screen for 2 minutes before having to take a break? How am I supposed to connect with someone when I could barely look them in the eye, when I couldn’t even give them my full attention?

On top of that, I was on eye drops to sooth my eye from all the other eye drops I was taking. I was on laxatives to relieve constipa...
Why is the nitrogen cycle so under-emphasized compared to climate change
by ChristianKl — 2019-08-06T09:25:50.255Z

While listing various environmental issues of how planetary boundaries are exceeded the Stockholm Resilience Centre lists climate change in the "increasing risk category" while listing "Nitrogen and phosphorus flows to the biosphere and oceans" in the high risk category which suggests that they consider it a more grave environmental issue.

Do I misread them? Otherwise, are there views inline with other scientists in their field?

If that's a consensus view, view do we have so much more debate about climate change but none about nitrogen and phosphorus flows?
Status 451 on Diagnosis: Russell Aphasia
by Zack_M_Davis — 2019-08-06T04:43:30.359Z
Link: https://status451.com/2019/06/28/diagnosis-russell-aphasia/

Samuel the Fifth at Status 451 considers the implications of Russell conjugation, or emotive conjugation (example: she lied; you distorted the truth; I honestly reported unconsciously biased beliefs). June 2019, ~1200 words.

Samuel emphasizes that this phenomenon isn't merely a matter of perceiving the outgroup in a negative light. Even if the different "forms" in a Russell-conjugation triplet are synonyms, they're not exact synonyms: "lie" and "rationalize" actually mean different things. The inability to separate the denotative content of language from an imputed enactive "side-channel attack" about who is to be blamed is a critical threat to our collective ability to construct shared maps that reflect the territory! Key quote:

A culture that cannot tell the difference between "reporting" and "doxing" and merely considers it "doxing" when they do it, is a culture that cannot accurately talk about behavior anymore. It's a culture where the words have been spun so much, that they have lost their objective meaning, and are now instead used more interchangeably to deliver more subjective messages. It's also a culture where not enough people feel the need to define their words, and to actually figure out what counts as reporting, as gossiping, as doxing, because this way the words can be used strategically in the moment, without having to be fully consistent with next time.
Searle’s Chinese Room and the Meaning of Meaning
by Jimdrix_Hendri — 2019-08-06T04:09:25.824Z

In response to the question of how a general intelligence could be recognised, Alan Turing proposed the following empirical test: Any entity that could interact with an investigator, fooling her into thinking it was a person, would be ascribed intelligence.

Searle's Chinese room thought experiment rejects Turing’s test, denying that a computer could under any circumstances be said to have intelligence. Searle compared a computer’s actions with those of a technician whose job it is to respond to messages presented in some unfamiliar script. The technician consults a list of procedures and executes some prescribed action. Searle thought that the actions of a computer were necessarily comparable to those of the technician, denying that any understanding was taking place.

I want to challenge Searle’s contention by arguing that his assumptions about the capabilities of a general intelligence are far too stunted.

Humans start off life just like the technician; confronted with a stream of nearly incoherent inputs (unintelligible sound waves, patterns of light and dark; or, alternatively: neural activity). In a sense, we are worse off, since we initially don’t have much of a repertoire of procedures to guide our behaviour. But we do have one advantage. Namely, the ability to learn.

A baby tries first one thing, then another, receiving uninterrupted feedback from his environment. With experience, the newborn learns the importance of context: it mostly pays off to reach into the cookie bag, but not when there are signs of a hungry animal inside.

What is our baby doing in his explorations? He is building a complex control system, with a dense matrix of inhibitory and activating responses. When the control system reaches a certain arbitrary threshold, we say our (no longer) baby has achieved intelligence.

Now come back to the technician/computer program. Instead of having him rely slavishly on a list of procedures, let’s have him initially respond to assignments on the basis of some bare heuristics. In response to a request, he initiates some behaviour and is rewarded or punished. He takes note of the effects, as well as the context, and sets up hypotheses accounting for the outcomes. This is all within the range of possibilities for computer programs.

Our technician continues refining his hypothesis and, over time, gets quite good at obtaining rewards and avoiding...
What are the best resources for examining the evidence for anthropogenic climate change?
by Matthew Barnett — 2019-08-06T02:53:06.133Z

A while back I was researching the evidence for evolution. It's not that I didn't initially believe in evolution or understand natural selection, but it's just that I didn't really understand the full breadth of the evidence and predictions that the theory makes. Before, I had a tendency to simply assert that "the evidence is overwhelming" in discussions without really going into detail.

When I began researching evidence, I had a few choices. I could just read basic surface arguments that I found on the internet, such as this article from Khan academy or the Wikipedia page. While these resources are valuable, they aren't very comprehensive, and don't appear like they'd convince a hard-nosed skeptic. There are popular books, such as Jerry A. Coyne's Why Evolution Is True and Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth. The last two sources left me feeling like I still wasn't getting the full story, since they assumed a beginner background in philosophy and science, and weren't as nuanced as I wanted them to be (although I did not read both of them cover to cover).

Eventually I stumbled across 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: The Scientific Case for Common Descent by Douglas Theobald, which exceeded my expectations, and satisfied my desire to understand the evidence for common descent. While this last work does not assume the reader is a professional biologist, it also doesn't shy away from presenting specific technical evidences and the context they play in modern biology.

I wonder whether there is a similar publication which can satisfy my desire to understand anthropogentic climate change. My prior is that climate change is real, and primarily caused by human activity. I believe this because I generally side with the scientific consensus, and most intelligent people I know believe it. However, I am a little embarrassed from the fact that I couldn't really convincingly argue with a skeptic. I imagine a highly educated climate change skeptic like Roy Spencer could argue circles around me, which is never a good sign.

In light of the previous discussion, what are the best resources for understanding the full breadth of evidence for anthropogenic climate change?
A Survey of Early Impact Measures
by Matthew Barnett — 2019-08-06T01:22:27.421Z

In the context of AI alignment an impact penalty is one way of avoiding large negative side effects from misalignment. The idea is that rather than specifying negative impacts, we can try to avoid catastrophes by avoiding large side effects altogether.

Impact measures are ways to map a policy to a number which is intended to correspond to "how big of an impact will this action have on the world?" Using an impact measure, we can regularize any system with a lot of optimization power by adding an impact term to its utility function.

This post records and summarizes much of the early research on impact penalties. I emphasize the aims of each work, and the problems associated with each approach, and add occasional commentary along the way. In the next post I will dive more deeply into recent research which, at least in my opinion, is much more promising.

The mathematics of reduced impact: help needed, by Stuart Armstrong (2012)

This is the first published work I could find which put forward explicit suggestions for impact measures and defined research directions. Armstrong proposed various ways that we could measure the difference between worlds, incorporate this information into a probability distribution, and then use that to compare actions.

Notably, this post put a lot of emphasis on comparing specific ontology-dependent variables between worlds in a way that is highly sensitive to our representation. This framing of low impact shows up in pretty much all of the early writings on impact measures.

One example of an impact measure is the "Twenty (million) questions" approach, where humans define a vector of variables like "GDP" and "the quantity of pesticides used for growing strawberries." We could theoretically add some L1 regularizer to the utility function, which measures the impact difference between a proposed action and the null action, scaled by a constant factor. The AI would then be incentivized to keep these variables as close possible to what they would have been in the counterfactual where the AI had never done anything at all.

The flaw with this specific approach was immediately pointed out, both by Armstrong, and in the comments below. Eliezer Yudkowsky objected to the approach since it implied that some artificial intelligence would try to manage the state of affairs of the entire universe in order to keep...
Preferences as an (instinctive) stance
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2019-08-06T00:43:40.424Z

User Veedrac recently commented:

You have shown that simplicity cannot distinguish (p,R) from (−p,−R), but you have not shown that simplicity cannot distinguish a physical person optimizing competently for a good outcome from a physical person optimizing nega-competently for a bad outcome.

This goes to the heart of an important confusion:

"Agent A has preferences R" is not a fact about the world. It is a stance about A, or an interpretation of A. A stance or an interpretation that we choose to take, for some purpose or reason.

Relevant for us humans is:

We instinctively take a particular preference stance towards other humans; and humans tend to take the same stance towards others and towards each other. This makes the stance feel "natural" and intrinsic to the world, when it is not.

The intentional stance

Daniel Dennett defined the intentional stance as follows:

Here is how it works: first you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent; then you figure out what beliefs that agent ought to have, given its place in the world and its purpose. Then you figure out what desires it ought to have, on the same considerations, and finally you predict that this rational agent will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs. A little practical reasoning from the chosen set of beliefs and desires will in most instances yield a decision about what the agent ought to do; that is what you predict the agent will do.

In the physical stance, we interpret something as being made of atoms and following the laws of physics. In the intentional stance, we see it as being an agent and following some goal. The first allows for good prediction of the paths of planets; the second, for the outcome of playing AlphaZero in a game of Go.

The preference stance (or the (ir)rationality stance[1]) is a more general stance, where you see the object as having preferences, but not necessarily being rational about optimising them.

The preference/(ir)rationality stance

What it the intentional stance for?

In a sense, the intentional stance is exactly the same as the preference stance. Dennett takes an object and treats it as an agent, and splits it into preference and rationality. Ok, he assumes that the agent is "rational", but allows for us to "figure out what what beliefs the agent ought to have." That, in practice, allows us to model a lot

...
How to navigate through contradictory (health/fitness) advice?
by Sherrinford — 2019-08-05T20:58:14.659Z

I will start with a brief story, but the question can be generalized.

Last year, I decided to do something for my body. I joined and regularly went to K. Training (abbreviated name), a large gym chain in german-speaking countries. The claimed philosophy is different from many gyms: there is no music, no proteine shakes to buy, mostly old people around, and insistence that it is about strength, not show-off, and that strength is what keeps your spine together etc. They have no cardio bikes, no barbell, only machines, and the high-intensity approach is that at each machine you do one continuous exercise for two minutes. If you reach the two minutes, increase the weight next time. It all seems very serious, there is an orthopedist you talk to when you become a member. It all has been in existence for some decades. The founder writes books, of course mentioning that his approach is the only one that works against pain, and that he is not heard by the mainstream. While at the same time they have contracts with many orthopedists and this is part of the marketing.

Now, a back problem. I have seen several orthopedists in my life, but the one I talked to this year (after two GPs, both clueless) is the first who seems competent and also listens. His comment about K. Training: it's ok, but sometimes hard to leave the contract. You could just as well try Yoga or Pilates. Anyways, he gives me a prescription for physical therapy.

Talking about this and that, the therapist speaks out against K Training, because no warming up / cardio (something the founder explicitly defends in his books), and Yoga/Pilates/etc is better anyways.

Then I googled again. Seemingly, gym experts all have their own approach. Some agree to the high-intensity two minutes thing, others disagree.

Then there is also Mr. L.-B., an anti-pain guru with a somewhat different approach I dont really understand, again against the "mainstream" but also against K. Training. And from a lecture of his that I watched on youtube, he seems like a snake-oil seller; but then, he (of course) has many fans.

Now I could just randomize what to do; or try to really read about approaches, but ALL of them seem plausible, if you listen to them. The investment necessary for actual judgement would be studying medicine.

So long story, short question: how do you actually handle such cases of pratically relevant epistemic learned helples

...
My recommendations for gratitude exercises
by MaxCarpendale — 2019-08-05T19:04:41.973Z

Gratitude has become an increasingly important part of my life. It has also been one of my greatest sources of improvement of well-being and one of the biggest factors in lifting me out of depression. How does this work? The short answer is that I keep a gratitude journal. The rest of this post is the long answer.

I think there are some theoretical reasons why we should expect gratitude to be helpful or extremely helpful. Try to imagine a time when you were deprived of something that you now have. For example, try to imagine a time when you misplaced your wallet, phone, or passport only to later realize where it was. Think of the sense of relief you got from this. Now recognize that you could feel that way now about all of the things that you have that you could have lost.

The hedonic treadmill refers to the phenomenon of us quickly getting accustomed to any new improvements that we’ve made so that we have to keep running to stay in the same place and maintain our happiness. I think one of the ways that the hedonic treadmill works is by us almost immediately taking everything for granted. If we can stop this process to some extent, through gratitude exercises, we might be able to make large improvements to our well-being.

In my own case, this is particularly vivid. Some years ago I had very bad repetitive strain injuries and associated chronic pain. I did not know if I would ever be able to work again or do many other normal things with my arms. The prospect of improvement seemed dim and my life seemed to be utterly ruined.

It seemed to me that if I could only get the use of my arms back, life would be perfect. At that time I thought to myself if things do ever get better, if there is anything positive I can draw from this piece of hell, it is to remember that feeling, so that if I recover, I can always feel that my life is perfect. You might be able to leverage past tragedies in your life in this way as well. You might be able to turn that darkness into light.

I still have some trouble with repetitive strain injuries and chronic pain, but my situation is now vastly improved. Do I feel perfect now? Well no, it’s hard to fight the hedonic treadmill, but I do feel a lot better because of gratitude exercises.

I think one mistake people make when it comes to gratitude is thinking too small. While it’s helpful to feel grateful for a lot of different things, and I do w...
[AN #61] AI policy and governance, from two people in the field
by Rohin Shah — 2019-08-05T17:00:02.048Z

Find all Alignment Newsletter resources

here

. In particular, you can

sign up

, or look through this

spreadsheet

of all summaries that have ever been in the newsletter. I'm always happy to hear feedback; you can send it to me by replying to this email.

Highlights

The new 30-person research group in DC investigating how emerging technologies could affect national security

(Rob Wiblin and Helen Toner): This 80,000 Hours podcast with Helen Toner dives into details of AI policy, China and the new Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET). I'm only summarizing the parts I found most relevant.

Many of the analogies for AI are quite broken. AI is a very broad set of software technologies, unlike nuclear weapons which are very discrete. It's not feasible to use export controls to keep "AI" within the US. In addition, AI will affect war far more fundamentally than just creating lethal autonomous weapons -- Helen thinks that the biggest military impact might be on logistics. It's also weird to compare data to oil, because oil is a rival good (two people can't use the same oil), whereas data can easily be copied. In addition, one barrel of oil can replace any other barrel, but data is very specific to the particular application. Helen's preferred analogy is thinking of AI as electricity -- a very general purpose tool that will transform lots of aspects of society. However, this analogy can also break down -- for example, the AI research community seems pretty important, but there was no analog for electricity.

And now for a few random points, in no particular order. China "exports" around 50,000 inventors (patent holders) every year, while the US imports 190,000, far more than any other country, suggesting that the US is a global hub for talent. AI is hard to define, because many of its properties lie on a continuum -- for example, is a landmine a lethal autonomous weapon? The way to affect policy is to make small, targeted changes in proposed policies so that the government makes slightly better decisions -- it's far too difficult to execute on a grand plan to get the government to do some big thing. The main skills for engaging with government on technology issues: be able to speak both to scientists as well as bureaucrats, and be able to navigate the DC setting -- knowing what people are doing, what their incentives are, and how to get your thing done given their...
Do you do weekly or daily reviews? What are they like?
by benwr — 2019-08-05T01:23:43.351Z

What system(s) do you use to keep yourself organized and working toward your goals? I'm interested in technologies, but more interested in what ontology you use to organize your tasks, events, goals, and plans.

Did you build your system slowly over time, or adopt it all at once?

What feels most important about your system to you?