trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
An Uncanny Moat
by Adam Newgas — 2024-11-15T11:39:15.165Z
Link: https://www.boristhebrave.com/2024/11/15/an-uncanny-moat/

Back in the early days of computer animation, the technology at the time really struggled with realism. The first cartoons were necessarily abstract, or cartoony.

As time progressed, the technology caught up. CGI now can be all but indistinguishable from real life. But there was a brief period, as seen in films like The Polar Express or Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, when the artists aimed for realism and didn’t quite get there.

These films were often critically panned. Eventually, it became clear that the cause was quite deep in the human psyche. These films were realistic enough that we’d mentally classify the characters as real humans, but not so realistic that they actually looked normal. On an instinctive level, people reject these imposters far harder than more stylised graphics that don’t have the pretence of reality.

This phenomenon is known as the Uncanny Valley and has influenced visual design of fake people in films, robots, games etc.

For a time, the recent crop of image generators and LLMs fell into the same boat. Twisting people with the wrong number of fingers or teeth was a common source of derision. People are still puzzling over chatbots that can speak very coherently and yet make wild mistakes with none of the inner light you might expect from a real conversationalist.

Now, or at least very soon, AI threatens to cross that valley and advance up the gentle hills on the opposite side. Not only are we faced with a disinformation storm like nothing before, but AI is going to start challenging exactly how we consider personhood itself.

This is something we need to fight, in addition to all the other worries about AI. I don’t want to get into philosophical weeds about whether LLMs could be considered moral patients. But I think our society and thinking are structured around a clear human/non-human divide. Chatbots threaten to unravel that.

Losing Connection

The most common use of AI chatbots is as search engines and task doers. But we are also seeing them start to replace human interpersonal relationships. This has started with translators and call centre staff and is trending towards valets, confidantes, virtual romantic relationships and therapists.

But chatbot relationships are not perfectly equivalent to our human ones. People will not tolerate character flaws from a tool. Even traits like independence of thought, disagreement, and personal...
If I care about measure, choices have additional burden (+AI generated LW-comments)
by avturchin — 2024-11-15T10:27:15.212Z

There is an argument against quantum immortality that while I survive, I have lower measure in the multiverse and thus lower impact on it, which suggests I should not care about quantum immortality.

However, if we care about measure, there are normal situations where measure declines but we don't typically care:

Every quantum event splits the multiverse, so my measure should decline by 20 orders of magnitude every second. This may be ignored as resulting minds are functionally the same and can be regarded as one.
My semi-random actions during the day split me into similar but slightly different minds. This may also be ignored as most such differences will be forgotten, and the minds will be functionally the same.
I make semi-random choices which affect my entire future life. Examples:

Dating choices
Choosing another country to move to
Clicking job advertisements

The expected utility of all reasonable variants is approximately the same - I won't choose a very bad job, for instance. So in a normal world, I don't lose utility by randomly choosing between equal variants. However, in Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI), I split my measure between multiple variants, which will be functionally different enough to regard my future selves as different minds. Thus, the act of choice itself lessens my measure by a factor of approximately 10. If I care about this, I'm caring about something unobservable.

TLDR: If I care about declining measure, normal life events incur additional utility costs, which nevertheless don't have observable consequences.

AI-generated comment section:

ShminuxRational · 4h
Interesting point about measure decline in everyday choices. However, I think there's a flaw in treating all branches as equally weighted. Wouldn't decoherence rates and environment interaction mean some branches have naturally higher measure? This seems relevant for the job-choice example.

MaximizerPrime · 3h
> Wouldn't decoherence rates and environment interaction mean some branches have naturally higher measure?

This. Plus, we should consider that decision-theoretic framework might need updating when dealing with measure. UDT might handle this differently than EDT.

quantumCrux · 4h
Your point about the 20 orders of magnitude per second is fascinating. Has anyone actually calculated the exact rate of quantum branching? Seems like an important consideration f...
What are Emotions?
by Myles H — 2024-11-15T04:20:27.388Z

A funny thing that happens when I ask people: "What do you ultimately want in life, and why?"

Almost everyone gets mildly annoyed. Some people give up. Most end up saying they have multiple goals. At which point I will ask them to choose one. If I manage to get them to articulate a terminal goal they are content with, the following conversation often ensues.

Person: "Ok fine, I want [material goal (e.g. money, social status, to make stuff)]"
Me: "Why do you want that?"
Person: "I don't know, I guess because it will make me feel [positive (or lack of a negative) emotion (e.g. happy, accomplished, curiosity)]"
Me: "So you just want to feel [emotion]?"
Person: "No, no, ugh, never mind"

To those who don't have the same terminal goal, I find people have trouble communicating a justification for their goal unless either the goal or justification is an emotion.

I am not saying that people really just want emotions. I myself want to make kinetic sculptures (among other goals). I don't do it because I want to feel accomplished, approval, or whatever. I just want it. I don't know why[1], but I do.

I simply find it interesting that people feel the need to justify their terminal goals (unless they are emotions), and that the only way they can seem to do it is by associating it with an emotion.

While researching what people had to say about terminal goals, I came across this list of terminal values a human might have,

courtesy

of LessWrong.

survival, health, friendship, social status, love, joy, aesthetic pleasure, curiosity, and much more

The first four are what I might call "material" goals, and the latter being "emotional" goals[2].

So clearly emotions are a subset of terminal goals. I argue however, they are a special case of terminal goals.

There is a stark difference between asking someone "Why do you want to feel (happy, joy, pleasure)?", and "Why do you want (power, social status, to make kinetic sculptures)"

I find when I ask people the former, they tend to ask if I am ok and in turn suggest therapy. Yet when I ask them the latter, they will either say they don't know, or scrunch up their face and try to answer an unanswerable question.

It seems to be a natural and universally accepted truth that emotions hold value, either good or bad.

So why is this? I think it is the fact that emotions are experienced. They are actually felt. But then what does it mean to feel? to have someth...
The Third Fundamental Question
by Screwtape — 2024-11-15T04:01:33.770Z

I.

Epistemic status: I’m making a big claim based on little more than how useful it’s been to me personally. Pushback is encouraged. That said, I’m also putting this forward as one tool; if your brain is like my brain then you may find this a very useful tool indeed, while other people may not find it’s something they use.

It has been written that the fundamental question of rationality is “What do you think you know and how do you think you know it?” There is a further claim that a question of equal importance is “Do you know what you are doing, and why you are doing it?”

I would like to propose a third fundamental question, which I believe completes a rule of three: “What are you about to do and what do you think will happen next?”

That sentence is a Sazen. The rest of this post is how the question works, some examples, and the benefits.

(Pedants in the audience, I am aware this is two questions joined by a conjunction. They work together, and the original is referred to as the fundamental question, singular.)

Past: What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?
Present: Do you know what you are doing, and why you are doing it?
Future: What are you about to do, and what do you think will happen next?

II.

The following are examples drawn from my life. Events and quotes in this section are not exact, and are subject to the vagaries of memory.

1.

When I was a young child, I wasn’t notably athletic or graceful. However, I do think I had an unusually good sense of how my body moved and what it was capable of. When I stared at a river crossing of stones or a jungle gym or an obstacle course, I could run through the motions in my head, imagining how I would have to move to make it to the other side. Often in my imagination I’d slip, and then I’d back up and think through the sequence again until I found something that worked. Only when I had a path that worked in my head did I try it for real.

I wasn’t always right; sometimes there was a patch of slippery moss or other hazard I hadn’t seen and accounted for. Sometimes I was just wrong about how far I could leap or how much my grip could hold and I’d fall to the ground, but when I was wrong like that I noticed and gradually I was wrong less often. Even today, if I have time to think through a rock climbing ascent or a Jenga tower pull, I ask myself what I’m about to do and what I think will happen nex...
Dance Differentiation
by jefftk — 2024-11-15T02:30:07.694Z

Let's imagine you have a community where there's enough interest for
something like a dance every week. What's better: a single dance with
a weekly schedule ("every Friday") or multiple dances dividing up the
month ("1st Fridays", "2nd Fridays", etc)? While there are advantages
to both, I think the latter is usually better. And the more different
the individual dance series are (different halls, parts of
the city, vibes, booking approach) the better.

This is mostly based on two observations:

Even in a city where there's a lot of dance interest there are a
lot of people who don't want to dance every week.

It's better if you know more of the people at a dance.

So let's say you're a person who wants to come occasionally, perhaps
once a month. The experience of coming monthly to a weekly dance is
ok: you know the regulars, there's some automatic coordination that
happens when you and your friends like the same bands and callers, you
can explicitly coordinate with your friends. But coming monthly to a
monthly dance is much better: you are a regular. The more the dances
are differentiated from each other the more people with a monthly
appetite will end up attending the same dances each month.

Other advantages:

It makes it easier to match the number of dances to the overall
demand from the community. A weekly dance can't scale up or down
easily, while changing the number of monthly dances is natural.

It increases total demand for dances, by making it more likely
that there's an option that's a good fit for any individual dancer.

If the dances are at different halls then you're more robust
against a dance losing their hall.

It spreads the work of organizing around.

It allows more experimentation and different booking
thresholds.

The main disadvantage I see is that if your community is able to
support a large number of weekly dancers, there's something pretty
great about how tight a weekly community can be. And the dance skill
level will generally be higher.

Other tradeoffs?

Comment via: facebook, mastodon
Breaking beliefs about saving the world
by Oxidize — 2024-11-15T00:46:03.693Z

Goal = Save the world.

See Ending Ignorance | Solving Ignorance[1] & We can Survive for greater context. (Includes defining of terms like System, Functional, functional reality, functional system, functional systems psychology, High-level, tactical, conscious, subconscious, Reward, Punishment, Satisfaction, Suffering.)

Use the table of contents on the left.

Read footnotes or suffer in confusion

Read links if you need additional context
Easier to read format

Tech problem[2]

End human suffering

Ever felt like shit?

Ok, of course you have, bad question. Do you remember how it felt?

Do you remember the actions you took as a result of it?
When you were suffering, you didn’t give a s*** about EA.
The only thing that mattered to you… was you.

You were one selfish bastard.
And that’s how everyone else is as well.

If you think from a Maslow’s hierarchy of needs perspective, you’ll note that there is actually a hierarchy of human priorities that affect decision-making in significant ways.

China has experienced a technological growth rate unparalleled by any nation on earth at any point of time.

The first generation was one of farmers, the second was of factory workers, and the third are specialized intellectual workers like you and me.

The result of this rapid change is a different cultural norm.

Unlike in the U.S/Europe, altruism is not an obvious & undebated ideal to be pursued for the layman.

I know what it’s like to not have enough food to eat. I’ve eaten 0-1 meals/day for a year and went 9 days without food.

Your mind curbs and twists your “rationality” into whatever will get you food.

Your unmet expectations, desires, lack of energy, and the gap between the pain you’re experiencing right now and the pleasure you believe you should feel are major barriers to getting anything done. And the fact that you’re in that state, cripples your actual ability and reinforces the actions & environments that keep you in that state.

I don’t think any of us are arguing that basic needs like food and shelter must be met if we want greater worldwide participation in EA as a concept.

But I am arguing that we’re thinking about the problem wrong.

And I argue this because those 9 days of eating nothing were the most productive 9 days of my life.

I argue this because that period of 0-1 meals/day for a year is me right now, and I’m...
College technical AI safety hackathon retrospective - Georgia Tech
by yix — 2024-11-15T00:22:53.159Z
Link: https://open.substack.com/pub/yixiong/p/campus-technical-ai-safety-hackathon

TLDR: the AI safety initiative at Georgia Tech recently hosted an AI safety focused track at the college's flagship AI hackathon. In this post I share how it went and some of our thoughts.

Overview

Hey! I’m Yixiong, co-director of

Georgia Tech’s AI safety student group

. We recently hosted an AI safety focused track at Georgia Tech’s biggest AI hackathon,

AI ATL

. I’m writing this retrospective because I think this could be a useful data point to update on for fellow AIS groups thinking about hosting similar things!

The track was focused on evaluations on safety-critical and interesting capabilities,

this is the track page

that was shown to hackers (feel free to reuse/borrow content, just let us know!)

Huge thank you (in no particular order) to Michael Chen, Long Phan, Andrey Anurin, Abdur Raheem, Esben Kran, Zac Hatfield-Dodds, Aaron Begg, Alex Albert, Oliver Zhang, and others who helped us make this happen!

Quick stats:

~350 hackers (overall hackathon).
104 projects submitted (overall hackathon).
Submissions to our AI safety track: 16 teams (~50 people).

6 projects were solid/relevant, the rest were very noisy submissions, since you could submit to as many tracks as you want to.

Estimate # of low/moderate engagement with AI safety (attending workshops, reading track information): 100 hackers.
Estimate # of medium/high engagement with AI safety: 20 hackers.

These

are the submissions that we got, the 6 solid projects were (in order of goodness, keep in mind that most of these came from people who were new to AI safety!):

Privacy-Resilience and Adaptability Benchmark (PRAB): puts the model in a realistic and sensitive deployment environment and benchmarks models against several categories of prompting attacks
StressTestAI: similar to the above, but in less realistic and ‘higher stakes’ settings like disaster response, but creative metrics.
DiALignment: benchmarked refusal after performing activation steering away from the refusal behavior.
AgentArena: set up agents in cooperative games (like prisoner’s dilemma) and observed behavior
Are you sure about that?: tried to benchmark LLMs’ ability to spot unfaithful CoT against humans (the user)
LLM Defense Toolkit: set up a pipeline to benchmark the safety of a user specified LLM with an array of generated attacks.

Relevant track details:

We tried to optimize the track in a bunch of ways, including but not limite...
Gwern Branwen interview on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast: “How an Anonymous Researcher Predicted AI's Trajectory”
by Said Achmiz — 2024-11-14T23:53:34.922Z
Link: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/gwern-branwen

Gwern is a pseudonymous researcher and writer. He was one of the first people to see LLM scaling coming. If you've read his blog, you know he's one of the most interesting polymathic thinkers alive.

In order to protect Gwern's anonymity, I proposed interviewing him in person, and having my friend Chris Painter voice over his words after. This amused him enough that he agreed.

After the episode, I convinced Gwern to create a donation page where people can help sustain what he’s up to. Please go here to contribute.
Internal music player: phenomenology of earworms
by dkl9 — 2024-11-14T23:29:48.383Z
Link: https://dkl9.net/essays/earworm_mechanics.html

Earworms consist of songs mentally playing back beyond when I'm hearing them, and they have long plagued me, to the point that they were the main factor in my judgment that music is harmful. More recently, I've noticed patterns in how these earworms work, and some power to consciously control them. The apparent change could've come from mind-altering meditation, or other brain development. Or maybe my earworms always worked like this, and it's only now that I bothered to look.

Such discoveries prompted a self-experiment on how harmful music is, if at all.

Other people's minds probably experience earworms differently, if at all, especially if even my self-of-a-couple-years-ago may have experienced earworms so differently. If you've examined these mental mechanics to similar depth, and found different results, I would like to hear about it.

The majority of the time, there is some sound-pattern playing in my mind from memory. Usually, this is music, but sometimes it's something else, such as a chant I've heard recited hundreds of times. I've noticed some factors which affect whether such sound-patterns play at all.

Music playing around me usually shuts up my recall for anything other than that current song.
Heavy noise — more so if rhythmic, less so if verbal — seems also to suppress earworms.
Meditation eventually turns them off, but they often stay on longer than any other form of thought.
Earworms become more common during showers, and less common for a bit after I finish.
Sometimes I can just shut off playback by sheer force of will, but sounds always return after some time.

There are also some empirical laws around which sound-pattern plays back at any given time. If a change to the environment or my willpower shuts up an earworm, but the change later reverts, the new earworm will usually be either the same song that was playing before, or an arbitrary one.

By "arbitrary", I mean that the song arose without any process I understand. Those cases are the most annoying. Some small set of songs, changing on the scale of days or weeks, are the most common arbitrary earworms at any given time. As I write this, the main one is Local Boys (Senthilkumar, 2013).

Hearing a fragment of a song often makes the rest start playing in my mind, after the fragment ends in the outside world. Seeing, hearing, or thinking of something related to a song — even as little as a keyword in the...
The Foraging (Ex-)Bandit [Ruleset & Reflections]
by abstractapplic — 2024-11-14T20:16:21.535Z

This is a postmortem for a (tiny, ~10min, browser) game I released earlier this week. At the time, I thought posting the generation rules for each location would be redundant and spoilery (especially since you could just look at the code on github), and that writing a Reflections section would be premature and presumptuous. My opinions and the circumstances have both now changed; hence, this post.

Ruleset

Horse Hills

Foraging in Horse Hills gives you a 75% chance of 1d4 food and a 25% chance of 23 + 2d6 + 1d4 food.

A chronologically-and-behaviour-invariant Expected Value of 10 food per forage makes this the default foraging location barring any other opportunities. A forager who spent the entire game here could reasonably expect to conclude with >3500 food stored; consider this a benchmark.

Rat Ruins

Rat Ruins was avoided by your fellow bandits because they feared a curse; fortunately for you, they were wrong. Rat Ruins starts by providing a large and consistent 20+1d4 food per forage, but since nothing grows there the expected forage amount decreases with each hour; after twelve forages, it’s no longer better than Horse Hills.

Goat Grove

Goat Grove is in the process of a slow-rolling ecological disaster. It starts by 10 + 1d4 + 1d6 food per forage (for an Expected Value of 15 food per forage), but begins linearly declining on day 7; by day 13, it’s no longer better than Horse Hills.

Rooster Peaks

Rooster Peaks spends most of the game with a suboptimal 1d6+1d4 yield. However, after Day 43, the roosters come home to roost, changing the algorithm to “9+2d4, unless this 1d6 rolls a 1, in which case 0” for an EV of 11.66.

Tiger Forest

The most edible things in Tiger Forest burn bright enough to see only in the darkness of the night; while it’s suboptimal for most of the day, it beats HH/GG/RP on hours 22 and 23 of each day.

Dog Valley

Conversely, Dog Valley’s resources are most easily foraged in bright sunlight, which is only available in the valley’s base at midday; it beats HH/GG/RP on hours 12 and 13.

Everywhere Else

The other six locations are varying levels of suboptimal. They also have no chronological or behavioural effects. Of special note is Dragon Lake, which always produces 0 food because Dragons aren’t real.

Reflections

This microproject was originally slated to be something much grander (a milliproject at the very least, possibly even a centiproject). I had vision...