trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Resources for AI Alignment Cartography
by Gyrodiot — 2020-04-04T14:20:10.851Z

I want to make an actionable map of AI alignment.

After years of reading papers, blog posts, online exchanges, books, and occasionally hidden documents about AI alignment and AI risk, and having extremely interesting conversations about it, most arguments I encounter now feel familiar at best, rehashed at worst. This should mean I have a good map of the field being discussed.

I have been, however, frustrated by how little actual advice I could derive from this map. The message I understood from most agendas was "here are the tractable sub-problems we will work on and why they should be solved". I didn't find much justification for why they are critically important, or why one particular set of problems should be explored instead of the next research group's set.

So I looked harder. I found useful mapping work, yet nothing quite exactly like what I was looking for. I also found related concerns in this post and this comment thread.

You'll find, in the following sections, my (current) selection of:

"cartography work", to draw a map of relevant arguments and concepts;
research agendas, from research groups or individuals;
points of entry for newcomers.

Here are the caveats. The list is not exhaustive. I did try to cover as many visible ideas as possible, and there will be significant overlap and cross-references between the items listed here. Some references I consider useful (e.g. this) have not made the cut. I attempted to categorize the resources by focus, but a handful could have ended up in a different category. Please don’t rely on it too much.

My comments aren't summaries, rather justifications for why I included the reference. They also reuse liberally the original formulations. Please tell me if I left strong misrepresentations of the ideas in there.

All these references, and countless comments scattered all across LessWrong, the Alignment forum, and the Effective Altruism forum, will hopefully help me build something actionable, something that would let newcomers and experts explore the field with more clarity and make better decisions.

My short-term plan is to create minimal interactive explanations for the relevance of various propositions in AI alignment, with the option to question and expand their premises. I want to do this for a first few high-level ideas, and if it goes well, expand to a first full scenario....
Announcing Web-TAISU, May 13-17
by Linda Linsefors — 2020-04-04T11:48:14.128Z

I am excited to announce Web-TAISU!
May 13-17, 2020

I was going to run a Technical AI Safety Unconference (TAISU) at CEEALAR (formerly EA Hotel), Blackpool, UK. Then there was a pandemic. So instead there will be a Web-TAISU on the Internet.

This is an unconference, which means that the program is participant driven. I do have some backup ideas to put in if there are not enough suggestions from you, but I don’t expect those to be necessary.

I thought a lot about how to adapt this event to be run online, and I am grateful to the participants who took time to discuss this with me. In the end I concluded that I think it would work very well to stick to more or less the same format as the in-person TAISU I organised last year. The main adjustment I made is that the days are shorter, both because online calls tend to be more tiring, and for the event to work well in more timezones.

Web-TAISU is scheduled to happen during daytime for everyone in the Americas and Europe and Africa. I’m sorry everyone else, hopefully you find some hours to join, anyway.

Signup

Please do this as soon as possible, to give me an idea of who is coming.

Use

this Omnipotent

to tell me your best guess of when you will be attending Web-TAISU. Go there right now and give me your best guess! You can always change it later.

Create a QiqoChat user

Join the

AI Safety Circle

Let others know who you are by filling in your profile

Click on “Profiles”
Click on yourself
Click “Edit”
Add a profile picture - Important!
Fill in the rest of your profile

Schedule and Other Information
Referencing the Unreferencable
by Chris_Leong — 2020-04-04T10:42:08.164Z

Jessicata wrote a post on The Absurdity of Un-referencable Entities. The comments there give many good reasons against her claim that unreferencable entities don't make sense. Nonetheless, I think it is worthwhile to consider this issue in more detail as there are many philosophical problems in which seemingly unreferencable entities arise.

We will begin by making two key points about references. Once we understand them, we will have dissolved the paradox.

Firstly, "referencable" is relative to the agent. If the universe consists of two non-interacting boxes, then agents in the first box can reference object in the first box and agents in the second box can reference objects in the second, but neither can reference objects in the other. Further, if an agent is in a simulation with no access to the outside, that agent can only reference objects in the simulation, while someone outside can reference objects in both the external world and simulation.

Secondly, even when given an agent as a reference frame, we still need further clarification. Here's a list of things we might want to reference:

Phenomenal content such as an image of a chair
Objects such as the chair we presume to be behind the image
Properties like red or round
Universals like the idea of a chair
Abstract concepts like the number 2

Each of these kinds of entities is referred to in a slightly different manner. Precisely defining how each of these works would be a very involved task, so I'll just sketch it out quickly. The purpose of the following paragraph is only to show how we could go about doing this:

For phenomenal content, we have the ability to recall what we experienced and interface it with the rest of the brain. We typically reference objects by experiencing visually or through our other sense or indirectly via scientific instruments and saying "Whatever is creating that experience". For primitive properties, a person will normally understand the meaning if they are told a bunch of objects are in the class and a bunch of objects aren't. For non-primitive properties, we can use the same method or we can define these in terms of other properties.

Again, the specifics aren't important. The point is only to illustrate that even though these all look alike on the surface, the actual manner in which these entities are triangulated greatly varies.

Some people ...
The Peter Attia Drive podcast episode #102: Michael Osterholm, Ph.D.: COVID-19—Lessons learned, challenges ahead, and reasons for optimism and concern
by Kenny — 2020-04-04T05:19:38.304Z
Link: https://peterattiamd.com/michaelosterholm/

In this episode, Michael Osterholm, Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and author of Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs, provides an overview on the COVID-19 pandemic in regards to what has happened to date, what we’ve learned about how the disease spreads, and his optimism and pessimism about what potentially lies ahead. Michael gives his take on the true case fatality rate, why it differs around the world, and which underlying conditions, such as obesity, impact risk of severe illness and death. We also discuss the outlook regarding vaccines, repurposed drugs/antivirals for treatment, and Michael’s growing concern about supply chain limitations with respect to drugs, vaccines, n95 masks, and testing kits.

Michael Osterholm's episode on Joe Rogan's podcast on March 10:

Joe Rogan Experience #1439 - Michael Osterholm - YouTube
A Kernel of Truth: Insights from 'A Friendly Approach to Functional Analysis'
by TurnTrout — 2020-04-04T03:38:56.537Z

Foreword

What is functional analysis? A satisfactory answer requires going back to where it all started.

"All are present; the meeting convenes," intoned Fredholm. Intent were the gathered faces, their thoughts fixed on their students. "What do we know of their weaknesses?"

Hilbert leaned back, torch's light flickering across his features. "Lots of dimensions, especially when they need to find the Hessian. What if… what if we made them deal with infinitely many dimensions?"...

It was Banach who finally spoke. "David, they already know about the vector space for the polynomials".

Hilbert smirked. "Who said anything about countably infinite?". More silence, then glances, then grins.

It was Riesz's voice which next broke the silence. "And we can make them do analysis in that space. And linear algebra, but not the easy parts. Of course, they'll need to also deal with complex numbers. Sprinkle a little topology and abstract algebra on top, because... they deserve –"

"Frigyes, some of them might actually be able to do that. We need more." After a pause, Fredholm continued: "We'll tell them that they only need to know basic calculus."

A Friendly Approach to Functional Analysis

I didn't actually find the book overly hard (it took me seven days to complete, which is how long it took for my first book, Naïve Set Theory), although there were some parts I skipped due to unclear exposition. it's actually one of my favorite books I've read in a while – it's for sure my favorite since the last one. That said, I'm very glad I didn't attempt this early in my book-reading journey.

My brain won't stop line to me

Some part of me insisted that the left-shift mapping

(x1,x2,…)↦(x2,x3,…):ℓ∞→ℓ∞

is "non-linear" because it incinerates x1! But wait, brain, this totally is linear, and it's also continuous with respect to the ambient supremum norm!

Formally, a map T is linear when T(αx+βy)=αT(x)+βT(y).

Informally, linearity is about being able to split a problem into small parts which can be solved individually. It doesn't have to "look like a line", or something. In fact, lines[1] y=mx are linear because putting in Δx more x gets you m⋅Δx more y!

Linearity and continuity

Two things surprised me.

First, a(n infinite-dimensional) linear function can be discontinuous. (?!)

Second, a linear function T is continuous if and only if it is bounded; that is, there is an M>0 such that

...
Self-Experiment: Does Working More Hours Increase My Output?
by lynettebye — 2020-04-03T21:36:21.628Z

This piece is cross-posted on my blog here.

After writing up

my research on limits to working

, the sheer spread of possibilities amazed me. I genuinely wasn’t sure if I would be able to tell the difference between a day with four hours of deep work and one with eight hours. Surely we could narrow down the hypothesis space from that!

So, I designed a simple experiment. I would do one hour of deep work each day for two days, then two days of four hours each, and finally two days of eight hours each.

Why I chose this experiment

I optimized for quickly testing large effect sizes to narrow my uncertainty. I didn’t expect this experiment to be rigorous or sensitive to small nuances -- n=2 per condition, and I would love to hear any suggestions for how to blind me to whether I was working one or eight hours that day.

But by doing such an extreme experiment, I would definitely see an effect.

My output would have to be uncorrelated with hours worked for me not to. If I couldn’t easily tell a difference in the output between the conditions, it would indicate diminishing marginal returns massively influenced my output. Otherwise, I could get a rough guess at if and how much my output declined.

My guess was that I would get between 50% to 200% more done per hour on the one-hour day than the eight-hour day. I was less sure about the four-hour days, but I guessed my hourly output would fall in between that of the one-hour days and the eight-hour days. I would be quite surprised if I got more done per hour on the eight-hour day than the one-hour day. (Confession, I forgot to write these down before starting the experiment, so I’m writing them now after collecting data but before looking at the results.)

Methods

In order to have somewhat comparable results, I spent all twenty six hours writing and tracked how many words I wrote each hour. I scheduled coworking sessions on Focusmate.com to hold myself to a schedule. Since the Focusmate sessions are fifty minutes long, I operationalized “an hour” as a 50-minute pomodoro. (My Toggl tracked time ended up near 24 hours.)

When analyzing the data, I controlled for minutes worked to get words per minute. I tracked my output in a few categories (words drafted, words outlined, words edited, and words proofed), which I adjusted to reflect roughly similar ...
How Long Can People Usefully Work?
by lynettebye — 2020-04-03T21:35:11.525Z

This piece is cross-posted on my blog here.

I hear a lot of theories around how to work optimally. “You shouldn’t work more than eight hours a day.” “You can work 12 hours a day and be fine.” “It’s important to take weekends or evenings off work entirely.” “It’s best to immerse yourself in your work 24/7 if you want to be an expert.”

Perhaps most well known is Cal Newport’s claim in Deep Work that “For a novice, somewhere around an hour a day of intense concentration seems to be a limit, while for experts this number can expand to as many as four hours—but rarely more.”

Many of these theories are asserted with surprising confidence...especially since they contradict each other. At least some have to be wrong or more nuanced, and it matters which are right.

I coach Effective Altruists who want to maximize the good they can do. So they want to know how much they can work before additional work is wasted (or just less valuable compared to extra time doing other things). They also want to know how much they can work before risking reducing their long-term productivity -- burning out from working too hard is a lose-lose for them and the world.

So, I dug into these questions to see if I could find an answer.

Short answer, there isn’t a lot of good research on the topic. Long answer, our best data comes from World War One factory workers (turns out you can do interesting research when your research subjects aren’t legally allowed to leave), but maybe we have enough information anyway to make educated guesses. At the least, we can run personal experiments.

Here’s a summary of my findings and opinion, followed by the actual research.

1. Limits on total hours. First, as you work more hours, each hour becomes less productive. If I had to guess based on the research, I’d say there are steeply diminishing marginal value around 40-50 hours per week, and negative returns (meaning less total output for the day per additional hour) somewhere between 50 and 70 hours. But, this is based on a grand total of two data sets. World War One studies of factory workers are the only source that experimentally tests the question. They didn’t even know to report sample sizes. (Also, a bunch of guys who wanted t...
"Preparing for a Pandemic: Stage 3: Grow Food if You Can [COVID-19, hort, US, Patreon]"
by Kenny — 2020-04-03T17:57:58.826Z
Link: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1607569.html

This is not the Stage 3 I thought I was going to be writing. That has been re-designated Stage 4, and this is getting abruptly inserted.

Over the last 48 hours, I've become aware of what I just posted about, in "Pay Attention". In addition to the things I posted, I've heard and seen a variety of little things and not so little things – this evening I was finally briefed by a friend who does business in China and has friends in Wuhan – which boil down to four points:

Food supply chains in other countries have already been disrupted at every point along the line – production, distribution, and vending – by the coronavirus;

We are beginning to see evidence of that happening in the US;

We have every reason to believe the US will do even worse with managing its supply chains than most other countries for a whole host of obvious reasons, from not be able to intervene as effectively as China did (and China had some weeks without fresh veggies in Wuhan!) to treating its largely undocumented population of migrant farm workers terribly, from having inadequate PPE for people working in the supply chain to probably having a more severe outbreak with a larger percentage of workers incapacitated.

There has already started a run on garden supplies in the US.

I think that if you can manage it, it would be a good idea if you grew food. Particularly fresh vegetables.

...

This blogger, siderea, has been (at least) as roughly prescient as anyone else about the COVID-19 pandemic and this topic – an impending drastic disruption to our food supplies – hasn't received much attention here (AFAIK).
Takeaways from safety by default interviews
by AI Impacts — 2020-04-03T17:20:02.163Z

Last year, several researchers at AI Impacts (primarily Robert Long and I) interviewed prominent researchers inside and outside of the AI safety field who are relatively optimistic about advanced AI being developed safely. These interviews were originally intended to focus narrowly on reasons for optimism, but we ended up covering a variety of topics, including AGI timelines, the likelihood of current techniques leading to AGI, and what the right things to do in AI safety are right now.

We talked to Ernest Davis, Paul Christiano, Rohin Shah, Adam Gleave, and Robin Hanson.

Here are some more general things I personally found noteworthy while conducting these interviews. For interview-specific summaries, check out our Interviews Page.

Relative optimism in AI often comes from the belief that AGI will be developed gradually, and problems will be fixed as they are found rather than neglected.

All of the researchers we talked to seemed to believe in non-discontinuous takeoff.1 Rohin gave ‘problems will likely be fixed as they come up’ as his primary reason for optimism,2 Adam3 and Paul4 both mentioned it as a reason.

Relatedly, both Rohin5 and Paul6 said one thing that could update their views was gaining information about how institutions relevant to AI will handle AI safety problems– potentially by seeing them solve relevant problems, or by looking at historical examples.

I think this is a pretty big crux around the optimism view; my impression is that MIRI researchers generally think that 1) the development of human-level AI will likely be fast and potentially discontinuous and 2) people will be incentivized to hack around and redeploy AI when they encounter problems. See Likelihood of discontinuous progress around the development of AGI for more on 1). I think 2) could be a fruitful avenue for research; in particular, it might be interesting to look at recent examples of people in technology, particularly ML, correcting software issues, perhaps when they’re against their short-term profit incentives. Adam said he thought the AI research community wasn’t paying enough attention to building safe, reliable, systems.7

Many of the arguments I heard around relative optimism weren’t based on inside-view technical arguments.

This isn’t that surprising in hindsight, but it seems interesting to me that though we interviewed largely technical researchers, a lot of th...
Research on repurposing filter products for masks?
by TurnTrout — 2020-04-03T16:32:21.436Z

A local organization is looking to produce masks for the hospital, and they reached out to me for guidance. Since this is outside of my expertise and I haven't been following all of the recent research, I'm passing the questions along here.

We are looking for some valid research on the use of commercial products for face masks. We have a couple of designs that can fit over or have a pocket to insert an additional filter. I have found multiple sources online that refer to furnace filters, air filtration system filters, even HEPA vacuum bags, as ideal products to use to either completely comprise a face mask or be inserted into a pocket between layers of fabric to provide extra protection.

My questions are:

•	Which of these products are or are not safe to be breathing through? The only caution I have found is to be careful to check for fiberglass in the content.

•	Which are most effective, or does it come down to the MERV/MRP rating? We have been looking at filters at MERV 13-16 and/or MRP 2500-2800 in range. Are these safe as long as they can be breathed through?

•	Can these types of materials be layered to provide extra protection i.e. is layering two ply of MERV 11 like a MERV 22 or is there a loss ratio? Is there a formula which can be applied?

•	Could other materials be used to enhance the filter’s effectiveness, safety, smell, etc.? I have seen models that added an activated charcoal filter over the top, coffee filter, etc.? I have also heard that layers create a dispersion effect that increases the protective factor i.e. a thick bundled knitted scarf has a higher protective factor because of the density.

There is so much out there but it is mostly DIY crafters, and I am interested in a more empirical opinion!
Solar Arc Faults
by jefftk — 2020-04-03T15:00:02.422Z

Our

solar install has shut itself
down after detecting an arc fault four times since we installed it
eighteen months ago: 2019-03-24, 2019-04-10, 2019-08-17, and
2020-02-17. The 2019-04-10 shutdown was with error code 4301 while
the other three were with code 8206. Per the

manual for our SunnyBoy 5.0
inverter, these codes are:

4301: The inverter has detected an electric arc. The inverter
interrupts grid feed-in and cannot connect to the utility grid.

8206: The inverter has detected an electric arc and was recommissioned
after a disconnection.

The inverter can take up to three strings, and ours is configured with
two. A sensible inverter would track which of the strings the arc
fault had been on, to help narrow down the problem, but apparently
this one doesn't. The techs decided to turn off one of the two
strings, and see if the fault re-occurs. Based on four faults in 18m,
with the longest interval of 6m, you'd need to wait about 8m with no
faults before being pretty sure the problem was with the disconnected
string. This seems like a long time to be producing at half capacity,
but apparently inspecting an installation on a steep roof to locate an
arc fault is very difficult? This doesn't make much sense to me, but
also I don't know much about it and kind of need to take the techs'
word for things.

Comment via: facebook