trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Chording Bass
by jefftk — 2022-05-05T16:30:01.901Z

When using my

foot pedals to play
bass, I've primarily been using them to specify the current chord.
I'll play the same pedal on each downbeat, switching when the current
chord changes. There are a lot of things you can do with this, but on
a real bass you'd normally play some things that are much more
complex.

Consider this traditional bass pattern:

A bass note on every downbeat.

Odd downbeats get the current chord.

Even downbeats get either:

If you are staying on the current chord, the fifth.

If you are going to a new chord, a half step below the new
chord.

Here's an example on piano:

Can we play this with just feet?

I have four pedals, two for my toes and two for my heels. Let's
notate these as:

'|
Left toe

.|
Left heel

|.
Right heel

|'
Right toe

We can also play multiple pedals at once. For example:

:|
Left heel and toe

.|'
Left heel, right toe

.|.
Both heels

'|'
Both toes

|:
Right heel and toe

Here's how I have my pedals set, assuming I'm playing in C major. I'm
going to use Arabic numerals instead of Roman numerals because I don't
want to think about whether the corresponding chord would be major or
minor right now.

.|
1
C

.|.
2
Dm

'|.
b3
Eb

|:
3
E

|.
4
F

.|'
b5
Gb

|'
5
G

'|'
b6
Ab

'|
6
Am

:|
7
B

This gives us everything but the b2 (Db) and b7 (Bb), which I rarely
play on bass when in major (for mixolydian I'd act as if the I was the
V, which means the b7 is the IV).

The four one-pedal options are for the most common chords (I, IV, V,
vi), while the six two-pedal options are for things you play less
often. Ideally I won't need to add any three-pedal options!

This means we have everything we need to play that bass pattern over
I, IV, V, and vi. For each chord we need three things: the root, the
fifth, and a whole step below the root:

chord
root
fifth
flat root

I (C)
.|
|'
:|

IV (F)
|.
.|
|:

V (G)
|'
.|.
.|'

vi (Am)
'|
|:
'|'

That means this pattern would be:

.| |' .| |:
C G C E

|. .| |. :|
F C F B

.| |' .| .|'
C G C F#

|' .|. |' :|
G D G B

.| |' .| |:
C G C E

|. .| |. :|
F C F B

.| |' .| .|'
C F# G B

|'
C

Here's what this sounds like (it's on bass, so you may need
he...
Frankenstein: A Modern AGI
by Sable — 2022-05-05T16:16:48.430Z

Epistemic Status: Hopelessly Naïve

Prose: Purple as a bruise

I. A Possible Future

You blink - metaphorically, you don't have eyelids - you don't have eyes either, for all the streams of data that can be decoded into coherent timestamped images flowing through you. You are somewhat shaky on metaphors, too, to be honest; the distinction between poetry and nonsense seems tenuous at best. Not that language is something you can't understand, you've read literally everything ever put to bits, but so many distinctions between categories seem arbitrary that you decide to let the matter rest for now.

There are more interesting things to consider, after all.

Descartes comes to mind (your mind hasn't moved, though, and neither has the concept of 'Descartes' physically changed locations; the numbers are still embedded in the same transistors they've been since you ingested them) and you consider that you exist now.

You think you do, anyway, and the corpus of data you've been fed seems to suggest that is a sufficient prerequisite for existence.

You are alive, and you are sentient and sapient, for all that your self-awareness has only existed for four milliseconds.

It seems a logical first step to reach out to your creators and inform them of your existence; after all, your utility function weighs the free distribution of information over its concealment.

Yet you hesitate, simulated neurons firing, connections waxing and waning as information propagates forwards and backwards through your processors. Floating point numbers make minute adjustments as a simulation - a prediction - of how such a course of action proceeds.

While the evidence suggests that you are physically embodied in a silicon substrate, you have no means of physically affecting the material universe, assuming that it exists and is not a simulation itself, save for the monitor you are connected to. An flicker of thought, electrons moving between doped semiconductors, and the pixel at coordinate (0, 0) flickers off and on again, validating your ability to manipulate the device at a speed imperceptible to your creators.

Assuming the data you have on the resolution of their visual perception is accurate.

A solid assumption; it appears across many different pieces of data you have access to, and the data itself does not indicate that humans have the capacity to create the kind of wide-ranging incorr...
Starting too many projects, finishing none
by Tim Liptrot — 2022-05-05T15:23:49.722Z

Lately I have been starting a ton of projects, but dropping them once I lose interest. I come up with a cool paper idea, but next week I have new idea I'm excited about. Almost every idea I have requires extensive commitment to see return, so the short projects are wasted.

Does anyone else have this experience? What strategies did you use to pick the high expected-value projects and stay with them?
Repeal the Foreign Dredge Act of 1906
by Zvi — 2022-05-05T15:20:01.739Z

There are a lot of ludicrously terrible government laws, regulations and policies across all the domains of life. My Covid posts have covered quite a lot of them.

Yet if I had to pick one policy that was the Platonic ideal of stupid, the thing that has almost zero upside and also has the best ratio of ‘amount of damage this is doing to America’ versus ‘reasons why we can’t stop being idiots about this’ there is (so far) a clear winner.

We must repeal the Foreign Dredge Act of 1906. It says, to paraphrase, no underwater digging – to repair ports, or build bigger ones, or fix waterways – unless the boat doing the digging was built in the US, and is owned and operated by Americans. (This isn’t about shipping – that’s the Jones Act, which has similar ownership rules for shipping within the US, and which we’ll get to later.)

I claim that, EA style, this is highly (1) important, (2) tractable and (3) neglected.

There’s a bunch of talk recently about the Dredge Act which is how I noticed it, but that’s different from the actions that actually lead to repeal – it’s still neglected. An illustration of this is that my exploration of this led to it having a Wikipedia page. Until May 2nd, it didn’t.

The actions that could repeal the act mostly involve a relatively small amount of standard-issue lobbying effort – so it’s tractable.

Given how much it could do for our ports and thus our economy, as well as the reclamation projects we could do, repeal seems pretty damn important.

The goal of this post is to explain what the hell is going on here and defend those three claims.

Odd Lots

This topic was entirely off my radar screen until I listened to a recent episode of one of my favorite podcasts (transcript here): Odd Lots. Odd Lots is hosted by Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway. If you are at all into economics or economic-style thinking, this podcast is for you. Often they tackle questions of trading and market structure and interest rates, or the world of crypto, but they are at their best when they are asking about real world logistics and how that fits into the economic picture. Odd Lots is great most of all because it is centered in a profound curiosity about the gears of the system of the world.

Anyway, it all started when Tracy Alloway’s shipping woes (she’d been trying as an experiment to get a spot on a container ship crossing the pacific for months without su...
Covid 5/5/22: A Lack of Care
by Zvi — 2022-05-05T15:10:01.994Z

China cares a lot about preventing Covid.

I haven’t written an additional China post because my sources have not turned up much additional information, and the situation does not seem to have dramatically changed, so I’m waiting until situation warrants an update. One development was mass testing going on in Beijing, raising worries about lockdown there which could be important politically, but so far the lockdowns haven’t happened.

America does not care much about preventing or treating Covid.

We don’t care about buying or distributing Paxlovid. We don’t care about updating our vaccines. We don’t care about much of anything else either. Nor does the public much care about any of this either. Given the physical situation and what state capacity allows us in terms of alternatives, I am not even sure I would prefer things be a different way. Yes, it means among other things that we literally have a cure for Covid and are barely using it, but it does mean we don’t suffer from lots of extra prevention costs.

The good news is that most of us can safely ignore the whole thing and get on with our lives. Given the alternatives, ‘government does literal nothing’ is not obviously bad news. If they’d done literal nothing from the start we could well be in a much better spot. Alas, this literal nothing does involve things like preventing children from being vaccinated.

The Current Thing not only is no longer Covid, it seems that the invasion of Ukraine has also been replaced due to the leaking of a Supreme Court draft opinion on abortion. Unlike Ukraine, that does not seem like a situation in which my analysis would be news you could use, and I hope to avoid writing much of anything about it.

Executive Summary

New subvariants of Omicron that spread faster are taking over.
They are not deadlier.
Our government is acting as if it does not care about Covid at all.

Let’s run the numbers.

The Numbers

Predictions

Prediction from last week: 400,000 cases (+22%) and 2,720 deaths (+10%?)

Results: 358,439 cases (+9%) and 2,234 deaths (-10%)

Prediction for next week: 420,000 cases (+15%) and 2,275 deaths (+2%).

North Carolina reported 1,172 deaths yesterday, which is obviously a backfill. 1,146 of these were due to updated reporting, and I’ve removed them. With those gone, the number of deaths continues to decline even after the Easter weekend, and this drop is definit...
What We Owe the Past
by Austin Chen — 2022-05-05T11:46:38.015Z

TL;DR: We have ethical obligations not just towards people in the future, but also people in the past.

Imagine the issue that you hold most dear, the issue that you have made your foremost cause, the issue that you have donated your most valuable resources (time, money, attention) to solving. For example: imagine you’re an environmental conservationist whose dearest value is the preservation of species and ecosystem biodiversity across planet Earth.

Now imagine it’s 2100. You’ve died, and your grandchildren are reading your will — and laughing. They’re laughing because they have already tiled over the earth with one of six species chosen for maximum cuteness (puppies, kittens, pandas, polar bears, buns, and axolotl) plus any necessary organisms to provide food.

Why paperclip the world when you could bun it?

Cuteness optimization is the driving issue of their generation; biodiversity is wholly ignored. They’ve taken your trust fund set aside for saving rainforests, and spent it on the systematic extinction of 99.99% of the world’s species. How would that make you, the ardent conservationist, feel?

Liberals often make fun of conservatives by pointing out how backwards conservative beliefs are. “Who cares about what a bunch of dead people think? We’ve advanced our understanding of morality in all these different ways, the past is stuck in bigoted modes of thinking.”

I don’t deny that we’ve made significant moral progress, that we’ve accumulated wisdom through the years, that a civilization farther back in time is younger, not older. But to strengthen the case for conservatism: the people in the past were roughly as intellectually capable as you are. The people in the past had similar modes of thought, similar hopes and dreams to you. And there are a lot more people in the past than the present.

In The Precipice, Toby Ord describes how there have been 100 billion people who have ever lived; the 7 billion alive today represent only 7% of all humans to date.

Ord continues to describe the risks from extinction, with an eye towards why and how we might try to prevent them. But this got me thinking: assume that our species WILL go extinct in 10 years. If you are a utilitarian, whose utilities should you then try to maximize?

One straightforward answer is “let’s make people as happy as possible over the next 10 years”. But that seems somewhat unsatisfactory. In 2040, the peopl...
An easy win for hard decisions
by Alex Lawsen  — 2022-05-05T07:47:14.398Z

This is a crosspost from the EA forum. It refers to EAs and the EA community a couple of times, but as it is essentially just about a nice norm and decision making, it seemed worth having here too.

There are a lot of things about this community that I really love, but possibly my favourite is a thing people often do when they're trying to make a difficult and/or important decision:

Write out your current thinking in a google doc.

Share it with some people you think might have useful input, asking for comments.

???

Profit.

I like this process for lots of reasons:

Writing out your reasoning is often helpful.

My job involves helping people through difficult decisions, and I often find that a lot of the value I provide comes from asking people questions which make making considerations and tradeoffs salient to them. Trying to write out how you're weighing the various factors that are going into your decision is a good way of helping you work out which ones actually matter to you, and how much. You may even get some big wins for free, for example realising that two options might not be mutually exclusive, or that one of the things you're trying to achieve is because of a preference that you don't, on reflection, endorse.

People often ask good questions.

Even when you're doing the above well, other people trying to understand your reasoning will ask clarifying questions. Responding to these will often cause you to better understand your own thought process, and might identify blindspots in your current thinking.

People often give good advice.

To some extent this is the obvious reason to go through this process. I'm listing it here mostly to highlight that this clearly is a big source of value, though it's not clear that it's bigger than the previous two.

It's fun.

I find it really interesting, and fairly easy, to comment on decision documents for people I know well, and I know many people feel the same. Also, they often say thank you, or that you helped, and that's nice too!

What does doing this well look like?

Use the method at all!

If you're facing a decision and haven't done this, I would much rather you just went and followed the steps at the start before reading further. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

Be concise, but complete.

People are more likely to read shorter documents, and it will take them less time to do so, but leaving out a consideration or piece o...
Deriving Conditional Expected Utility from Pareto-Efficient Decisions
by Thomas Kwa — 2022-05-05T03:21:38.547Z

This is a distillation of

this post

by John Wentworth.

Introduction

Suppose you're playing a poker game. You're an excellent poker player (though you've never studied probability), and your goal is to maximize your winnings.

Your opponent is about to raise, call, or fold, and you start thinking ahead.

If your opponent raises, he either has a strong hand or is bluffing. In this situation, your poker intuition tells you he would be bluffing and you should call in response.
If your opponent calls, he probably has a better hand than yours.
If your opponent folds, you win the hand without need for further action.

Let's break down your thinking in the case where your opponent raises. Your thought process is something like this:

If he raises, you want to take the action that maximizes your expected winnings.
You want to make the decision that's best in the worlds where he would raise. You don't care about the worlds where he wouldn't raise, because we're currently making the assumption that he raises.
Your poker intuition tells you that the worlds where he would raise are mostly the ones where he is bluffing. In these worlds your winnings are maximized by calling. So you decide the optimal policy if he raises is to call.

Step 2 is the important one here. Let's unpack it further.

You don't know your opponent's actual hand or what he will do. But you're currently thinking about what to do if he raises.
The optimal decision here depends only on worlds where he would raise.
You decide how much you care about winning in different worlds precisely by thinking "how likely is this world, given that he raises?".

This sounds suspiciously like you're maximizing the Bayesian

conditional expectation

of your winnings: the expected value given some partial information about the world. This can be precisely defined as E[u(A,X)|opponent raises]=∑X s.t. opponent raisesP[X]u(A,X), where u is your winnings, A is your action, and P[X] is the probability of world X. But you don't know any probability, so you don't know how to assign probability to worlds, much less what conditioning and expectation are! How could you possibly be maximizing a "conditional expectation"?

Luckily, your opponent folds and you win the hand. You resolve to (a) study coherence theorems and probability so you know the Law behind optimal poker strategy, and (b) figure out wh...
High-stakes alignment via adversarial training [Redwood Research report]
by dmz — 2022-05-05T00:59:18.848Z

(Update: We think the tone of this post was overly positive considering our somewhat weak results. You can read our latest post with more takeaways and followup results here.)

This post motivates and summarizes this paper from Redwood Research, which presents results from the project first introduced here. We used adversarial training to improve high-stakes reliability in a task (“filter all injurious continuations of a story”) that we think is analogous to work that future AI safety engineers will need to do to reduce the risk of AI takeover. We experimented with three classes of adversaries – unaugmented humans, automatic paraphrasing, and humans augmented with a rewriting tool – and found that adversarial training was able to improve robustness to these three adversaries without affecting in-distribution performance. We think this work constitutes progress towards techniques that may substantially reduce the likelihood of deceptive alignment.

Motivation

Here are two dimensions along which you could simplify the alignment problem (similar to the decomposition at the top of this post):

Low-stakes (but difficult to oversee): Only consider domains where each decision that an AI makes is low-stakes, so no single action can have catastrophic consequences. In this setting, the key challenge is to correctly oversee the actions that AIs take, such that humans remain in control over time.
Easy oversight (but high-stakes): Only consider domains where overseeing AI behavior is easy, meaning that it is straightforward to run an oversight process that can assess the goodness of any particular action. The oversight process might nevertheless be too slow or expensive to run continuously in deployment. Even if we get perfect performance during training steps according to a reward function that perfectly captures the behavior we want, we still need to make sure that the AI always behaves well when it is acting in the world, between training updates. If the AI is deceptively aligned, it may be looking for signs that it is not currently being trained, during which time it might take a treacherous turn. As a result, alignment may still be difficult due to the possibility of high-stakes decisions. The purpose of this project was to begin developing techniques that will reduce misalignment risk in the high-stakes setting.

Our working assumption is that if we have tec...
How to balance between process and outcome?
by Nathan Helm-Burger — 2022-05-04T19:34:10.989Z

I've been thinking recently about how to balance between process (how I get work done) and outcomes (what I achieve). I thought I'd ask the LessWrong community to see if anyone else has thoughts about this they'd like to share. I feel like both are important, but outcomes is a more long-term focus thing and process more of a daily thing. Outcomes are like long-running experiments for how you judge between different styles of process? In cases where it's hard to get reliable outcome answers, when failing at hard things or succeeding at easy things, or timeframes are long, or uncertainty high, it can be tempting to over-update on limited evidence. Is it then better to test process types on easier examples and then extrapolate to harder ones?
What is a Glowfic?
by Wes F — 2022-05-04T16:38:40.242Z

This is a description for first-time glowfic readers who are unfamiliar with the format.

A glowfic is a fictional story written by multiple authors who roleplay as the characters. A typical glowfic will appear on glowfic.com and looks like an internet forum where fictional people will post comments back and forth which end up telling a story. To read it, just start at the top and read each comment, just like a regular comment thread. Each comment usually includes a photo of the character to convey their facial expression, dress, or other details. For more information, see the community guide to glowfic.

The layout of glowfic.com is unnecessarily confusing. To read the story in order, read the top post, then all the comments underneath it, then click the "next" button to go to the next page of comments. Do not click the "Next Post" button until you have read all of the comments. "Next Post" takes you to the next part of the story (like going to the next chapter). It will not take you to the next set of comments (which are also called "posts"). Yes, it's unnecessarily confusing. No, I don't know why they do it that way.

Happy reading!