trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Nature's Hidden Processes and Structures (Novum Organum Book 2: 1-9)
by Francis Bacon — 2019-10-24T20:27:26.532Z

This is the ninth post in the Novum Organum sequence. For context, see the sequence introduction. For the reading guide, see earlier posts in the sequence.

We have used Francis Bacon's Novum Organum in the version presented at www.earlymoderntexts.com. Translated by and copyright to Jonathan Bennett. Prepared for LessWrong by Ruby.

Aphorism Concerning the Interpretation of Nature: Book 2: 1–9

by Francis Bacon

[[Bacon makes a distinction between human power vs human knowledge which may very roughly analogized as engineering vs science, i.e. being able to do things vs knowing things.]]

1. What human power does and is intended for is this:

For a given body, to create and give to it a new nature (or new natures)—·e.g. melting gold or cooking chicken or dissolving salt in water·.

What human knowledge does and is intended for is this:

For a given nature, to discover its form, or true specific differentia. . . .

·i.e. the features that a thing must have if it is to qualify as belonging to this or that natural kind, e.g. the features of gold that differentiate it from metal in general·. [Bacon adds two even more obscure technical terms, semi-apologising for them; they don’t occur again in this work. Then:] Subordinate to these primary works are two secondary and less important ones. Under the ‘power’ heading: turning concrete bodies into something different, so far as this is possible—·e.g. turning lead into gold, if this can be done·. Under the ‘knowledge’ heading:

(i) in every case of generation and motion, discovering the hidden process through which the end-state form results from the manifest efficient ·cause· and the manifest material; and
(ii) discovering the hidden microstructure of bodies that are not changing.

·An example of (i): the wax around the wick of a lighted candle melts. Flame is the efficient cause, wax is the material, and meltedness is the end-state form. But ‘flame’ and ‘wax’ stand for items that are manifest, obvious, out there on the surface; we know that when you apply one to the other you get melting; but that isn’t knowing what hidden process is involved—what is really basically going on at the sub-microscopic level when flame melts wax·. ·An example of (ii): discovering what the sub-microscopic structure is of wax when it isn’t melting·.

2. Human knowledge is in a poor state these days—how poor can be seen from things that are commonly said. ·Not tha...
Decisions with Non-Logical Counterfactuals: request for input
by reavowed — 2019-10-24T17:23:08.184Z

A lightning-fast recap of counterfactuals in decision theory: generally when facing a decision problem, a natural approach is to consider questions of the form "what would happen if I took action a?". This particular construction has ambiguity in the use of the word "I" to refer to both the real and counterfactual agent, which is the root of the 5-and-10 problem. The Functional Decision Theory of Yudkowsky and Soares (2017) provides a more formal version of this construction, but suffers from (a more explicit version of) the same ambiguity by taking as its counterfactuals logical statements about its own decision function, some of which must necessarily be false. This poses an issue for an embedded agent implementing FDT, which, knowing itself to be part of its environment, might presumably therefore determine the full structure of its own decision function, and subsequently run into trouble when it can derive a contradiction from its counterlogical assumptions.

Soares and Levenstein (2017) explore this issue but defer it to future development of "a non-trivial theory of logical counterfactuals" (p. 1). I've been trying to explore a different approach: replacing the core counterfactual question of "what if my algorithm had a different output?" with "what if an agent with a different algorithm were in my situation?". Yudkowsky and Soares (2017) consider a related approach, but dismiss it:

In attempting to avoid this dependency on counterpossible conditionals, one might suggest a variant FDT′ that asks not “What if my decision function had a different output?” but rather “What if I made my decisions using a different decision function?” When faced with a decision, an FDT′ agent would iterate over functions fn from some set F, consider how much utility she would achieve if she implemented that function instead of her actual decision function, and emulate the best fn. Her actual decision function d is the function that iterates over F, and d∉F.

However, by considering the behavior of FDT′ in Newcomb’s problem, we see that it does not save us any trouble. For the predictor predicts the output of d, and in order to preserve the desired correspondence between predicted actions and predictions, FDT′ cannot simply imagine a world in which she implements fn instead of d; she must imagine a world in which all predictors of d predict as if d behaved like fn—and then w

...
Welcome to LessWrong Darmstadt
by MaxRa — 2019-10-24T16:44:28.085Z

What kind of events does your group usually run? What does it usually do? How frequently does your group organize events or meet?

Monthly online-meetups, listening to/discussing/working with some prepared input (e.g. how to make bets, Fermi modelling, book review of Thinking, Fast and Slow), sharing lifehacks, now and then doing a Hamming circle.

Who would be a good fit for you group?

Anyone interested in improving your rationality, EA or [insert anything LessWrong]. If you're reading this, feel free to join us, on every fourth Thursday, starting with the 8th of October, 6:50pm, MET. Link to online-meetup.

Should they have any particular skills or have done some specific background reading?

Not necessary. Our group went through the instrumental rationality Hammertime Sequence together about a year ago, which I imagine would bring a relatively new person quickly into a useful mindset for our group.
Multi-belled Brass
by jefftk — 2019-10-24T14:20:01.617Z

Yesterday afternoon I got excited about a new design for a brass
instrument. Conical bore instruments have the problem that you can't
combine valves (or slides) with having the tubing consistently expand
over the length of the instrument. The valves force you to have a
cylindrical bore segment in the center, and while you can

design the
tubing to minimize the cylindrical segment, you do have to have
some.

Or do you? Imagine you have seven bells, with a single rotary valve
that has seven positions, one for each bell. You use the standard
fingering, with keys to rotate the valve 1/7, 2/7, and 3/7. This gets
you approximately the same options for tubing length as a standard
brass instrument, except that you no longer need to make compromises: pushing in all three
keys brings you down exactly six half steps and you don't need a
tuning slide to compensate. You can play chromatically, and you play
it just like a trumpet, baritone, or tuba.

It looks like Adolphe Sax tried something like
this, but with six two-position piston valves instead of a
seven-position rotary valve, and he was just trying to solve the
tuning problem and not the bore problem:

But then I found something even weirder:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5.

It turns out there's a somewhat successful instrument along these
lines, but for totally different reasons. Instead of being optimized
for tone, it's optimized for being easy to play. Each instrument has
one horn per note, typically eight, so a range of just eight notes.
The base of each horn has a reed, so you don't need any sort of
embouchure, you just blow. See this
video where someone takes one apart to demonstrate. They seem to
be German; to find more videos search for "Schalmeien", while if you
want to buy one (please don't) search for "Schalmei".

I do think a rotary trumpet, played chromatically with trumpet
fingering, could work well though, and I'm curious whether anyone has
explored this.

Comment via: facebook
Who captures economic gains from life extension treatments?
by Orborde — 2019-10-24T05:17:05.524Z

Assuming that there are economic gains to be had at all, which participants in economies are best positioned to capture those gains?

Important because this determines the best business plans for life extension companies to pursue.

Do they sell to corporations? individuals? governments?
What are plausible deals they could cut? e.g. would a corporate buyer want to offer life extension to its employees conditional on those employees remaining childfree?
What economic gains are there in life extension treatments?
by Orborde — 2019-10-24T05:12:51.902Z

To put it another way: does stopping or slowing aging save resources for society as a whole, compared to raising new humans to replace old ones?

Plausible economic gains from life extension:

Raising a human from birth to age 17 in the United States costs about $234K.
Retired people largely live off their savings; their economic activity is almost entirely consumption. Life extension would presumably allow people to stay productively employed in the workforce longer.

Plausible economic losses:

Death of society's "old guard" may be serving a useful purpose by destroying calcified institutions and ideas, allowing better ones to bloom.

This question is important because, if it turns out that raising new humans to replace old ones is at least as resource-efficient as anti-aging treatments, then inter-society competition will not particularly favor anti-aging investment.
Artificial general intelligence is here, and it's useless
by George3d6 — 2019-10-23T19:01:26.584Z
Link: https://blog.cerebralab.com/Artificial_general_intelligence_is_here,_and_it's_useless

*Disclaimer: I originally wrote this for my own blog and as an editorial for skynet today, a few weeks ago I started reading LW and I thought people here might enjoy it, I think it's in the spirit of the conversation here. So I made a few edits and the text bellow is the result.*

One of the most misunderstood ideas that's polluting the minds of popular "intellectuals", many of them seemingly accustomed with statistics and machine learning, is the potential or threat that developing an artificial general intelligence (AGI) would present to our civilization.

This myth stems from two misunderstanding of reality.

One such misunderstanding is related to the refinement and extensibility of current ML algorithms and FPA hardware, however discussing that always leads of people arguing "what ifs" (e.g What if cheap quantum computers with very efficient I/O become a thing ?), thus, I won't pursue that line of thought here.

A second, more easy to debunk misunderstanding, is related to the practicality of an AGI. Assuming that our wildest dreams of hardware were to come true… would we be able to create and AGI and would this AGI actually have any effect upon the world other than being a fun curiosity ?

1. We already have AGIs

AGI is here, as of the time of writing there are an estimate of 7,714,576,923 AGI algorithms residing upon our planet. You can use the vast majority of them for less than 2$/hour. They can accomplish the vast majority intellectual task that can be well-defined by humans, not to mention they can invent new tasks themselves.

They are capable of creating new modified version of themselves, updating their own algorithms, sharing their algorithms with other AGIs and learning new complex skills. To add to that, they are energy efficient, you can keep one running for optimally for 5 to 50$/day depending on location, much less than your average server farm used to train a complex ML model.

This is a rather obvious observation, but one that needs to be noted nonetheless. Nobody has ever complained about the severe lack of humans in the world. If I were to ask anyone what they would envision as making a huge positive impact upon the future, few would answer vastly increasing birth rates.

So, if we are agreed on the fact that 70 billion people wouldn't be much better than 7 billion, that is to sa...
[AN #70]: Agents that help humans who are still learning about their own preferences
by Rohin Shah — 2019-10-23T17:10:02.102Z

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.

Audio version

here

(may not be up yet).

Highlights

The Assistive Multi-Armed Bandit

(Lawrence Chan et al) (summarized by Asya): Standard approaches for inverse reinforcement learning assume that humans are acting optimally according to their preferences, rather than learning about their preferences as time goes on. This paper tries to model the latter by introducing the assistive multi-armed bandit problem.

In the standard multi-armed bandit problem, a player repeatedly chooses one of several “arms” to pull, where each arm provides reward according to some unknown distribution. Imagine getting 1000 free plays on your choice of 10 different, unknown slot machines. This is a hard problem since the player must trade off between exploration (learning about some arm) and exploitation (pulling the best arm so far). In assistive multi-armed bandit, a robot is given the opportunity to intercept the player every round and pull an arm of its choice. If it does not intercept, it can see the arm pulled by the player but not the reward the player receives. This formalizes the notion of an AI with only partial information trying to help a learning agent optimize their reward.

The paper does some theoretical analysis of this problem as well as an experimental set-up involving a neural network and players acting according to a variety of different policies. It makes several observations about the problem:

- A player better at learning does not necessarily lead to the player-robot team performing better-- the robot can help a suboptimal player do better in accordance with how much information the player's arm pulls convey about the reward of the arm.

- A robot is best at assisting when it has the right model for how the player is learning.

- A robot that models the player as learning generally does better than a robot that does not, even if the robot has the wrong model for the player's learning.

- The problem is very sensitive to which learning model the player uses and which learning model the robot assumes. Some player learning models can only be effectively assisted when they are correctly modeled. Some r...
Why "Referer"?
by jefftk — 2019-10-23T13:40:01.647Z

When you click a link, by default your browser sends a request like:

GET /your-page HTTP/1.1
Host: your-site
Referer: https://other-site/with-url
[other headers]

It's telling the server what page it wants
(

https://your-site/your-page) and it includes a

Referer saying that you came from

https://other-site/with-url.

But why Referer and not Referrer? Let's look back.
The original version of HTTP had a much simpler request format:

GET /your-page

No

Host:, no

Referer: no headers at all.

This
initial version, implemented in the

WWW browser, became known as
HTTP/0.9. There's a

design
doc and an

as-implemented
doc, both with no mention of headers.

Right away there were many things people wanted from HTTP that
HTTP/0.9 didn't support, and there were lots of ideas for the next
version. Not surprisingly some of these initial ideas didn't look
much like modern HTTP. Updates
To HTTP (last modified 1992-01-07) references
HyperText
Request (last modified 1992-09-22) which has an example:

GET "http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/People.html#Cailliau" HTRQ/1
PROFILE KEY="akhkygy"
AUTH WHO="Bloggs" PWD="12345"
CLIENT ID="Smith" HOST="www2" EMAIL="SM@Ajax.com" ORG="DuPont"
PUBKEY KEY="6246246378098996127"
FORMAT
NAME="rtfMac" PENALTY="500,120,33"
NAME="EPS" PENALTY="100,50,0"
NAME="HTML" PENALTY="1,1,1"
SOFTWARE PLATFORM="NeXTUnix" PROGRAM="WWW" VERSION="3.0/1"

While you can see what became the From,
Authorization,
Accept,
and User-Agent
headers, this was clearly not in its final form. And there's no
Referer.

A bit later in 1992, however, we get to what's going to become
HTTP/1.0: Basic
HTTP as defined in 1992. It does define request headers (spec)
including Referer:

This optional header field allows the client to specify, for the
server's benefit, the address (URI) of the document (or element
within the document) from which the URI in the request was obtained.

This allows a server to generate lists of back-links to documents, for
interest, logging, etc. It allows bad links to be traced for
maintenance.

By the time anyone noticed the misspelling, it seems this new version
of HTTP was widely enough distributed that no one (unsurprisingly) was
interested in taking on a large coordination project to fix a minor
misspelling. I see Phillip Hallam-Baker writing
in March ...
Current Law Proposed to allow competition in Social Media
by jmh — 2019-10-23T13:13:32.581Z

https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/pressreleases?id=3F2AA8B6-36F8-453B-9B59-FC886871CEB9

Tossing this out as I know many here are deep into computer systems and may well have interest or knowledge of the underlying social media (using this in a very broad sense as I think it might go past just FB, Instagram, YouTube, Vimio, Meetups or other settings) technologies.

Status of the thought is "ligh bulb just turned" on but not clear it is really shining a light on anything sensible.

Have not studied the law but from the few news stories I've seen the goal is to require a secure mechanism to all account and data transfers to a new Social Media provider

While I am a big fan of increasing our property rights in our own data (it is very lacking in the online world) I am not sure this law really goes down a good path in that regard. I am also ignoring the entire question of would reducing the costs (to the subscriber) to transfer the account really produce a more competitive landscape or not.

The suggested approach of secure API to transfer still leave all the data and personal information sitting in a common database. That then is a nice target for anyone interested in using the data without the individuals' or the company's permission.

Why not look to establish an industry standard that is based on distributed information sets. Basically the data would reside with the person, and perhaps on a secure, encrypted backup/storage repository. The APIs then would related to allowing that information to be displayed on the SM site, possible retrieved from the external storage rather than the person's laptop.

The API could even define things like retention periods for how long the SM provided could keep the data on their systems before having to delete them and then request an update should someone attempt to access that post.
What Comes After Epistemic Spot Checks?
by Elizabeth — 2019-10-22T17:00:00.758Z

When I read a non-fiction book, I want to know if it’s correct before I commit anything it says to memory. But if I already knew the truth status of all of its claims, I wouldn’t need to read it. Epistemic Spot Checks are an attempt to square that circle by sampling a book’s claims and determining their truth value, with the assumption that the sample is representative of the whole.

Some claims are easier to check than others. On one end are simple facts, e.g., “Emperor Valerian spent his final years as a Persian prisoner”. This was easy and quick to verify: googling “emperor valerian” was quite sufficient. “Roman ship sizes weren’t exceeded until the 15th century” looks similar, but it wasn’t. If you google the claim itself, it will look confirmed (evidence: me and 3 other people in the forecasting tournament did this). At the last second while researching this, I decided to check the size of Chinese ships, which surpassed Roman ships sooner than Europe did, by about a century.

On first blush this looks like a success story, but it’s not. I was only able to catch the mistake because I had a bunch of background knowledge about the state of the world. If I didn’t already know mid-millenium China was better than Europe at almost everything (and I remember a time when I didn’t), I could easily have drawn the wrong conclusion about that claim. And following a procedure that would catch issues like this every time would take much more time than ESCs currently get.

Then there’s terminally vague questions, like “Did early modern Europe have more emphasis on rationality and less superstition than other parts of the world?” (As claimed by The Unbound Prometheus). It would be optimistic to say that question requires several books to answer, but even if that were true, each of them would need at least an ESC themselves to see if they’re trustworthy, which might involve checking other claims requiring several books to verify… pretty soon it’s a master’s thesis.

But I can’t get a master’s degree in everything interesting or relevant to my life. And that brings up another point: credentialism. A lot of ESC revolves around “Have people who have officially been Deemed Credible sanctioned this fact?” rather than “Have I seen evidence that I, personally, judge to be compelling?”

The Fate of Rome (Kyle Harper) and The Fall of Rome (Bryan Ward-Perkins) are both about the collapse o...
Deliberation as a method to find the "actual preferences" of humans
by riceissa — 2019-10-22T09:23:30.700Z

Some recent discussion about what Paul Christiano means by "short-term preferences" got me thinking more generally about deliberation as a method of figuring out the human user's or users' "actual preferences". (I can't give a definition of "actual preferences" because we have such a poor understanding of meta-ethics that we don't even know what the term should mean or if they even exist.)

To set the framing of this post: We want good outcomes from AI. To get this, we probably want to figure out the human user's or users' "actual preferences" at some point. There are several options for this:

Directly solve meta-ethics. We figure out whether there are normative facts about what we should value, and use this solution to clarify what "actual preferences" means and to find the human's or humans' "actual preferences".

Solve meta-philosophy. This is like solving meta-ethics, but there is an extra level of meta: we figure out what philosophy is or what human brains are doing when they make philosophical progress, then use this understanding to solve meta-ethics. Then we proceed as in the "directly solve meta-ethics" approach.

Deliberate for a long time. We actually get a human or group of humans to think for a long time under idealized conditions, or approximate the output of this process somehow. This might reduce to one of the above approaches (if the humans come to believe that solving meta-ethics/meta-philosophy is the best way to find their "actual preferences") or it might not.

The third option is the focus of this post. The first two are also very worthy of consideration—they just aren't the focus here. Also the list isn't meant to be comprehensive; I would be interested to hear any other approaches.

In terms of Paul's recent AI alignment landscape tree, I think this discussion fits under the "Learn from teacher" node, but I'm not sure.

Terminological note: In this post, I use "deliberation" and "reflection" interchangeably. I think this is standard, but I'm not sure. If anyone uses these terms differently, I would like to know how they distinguish between them.

Approaches to deliberation that have been suggested so far

In this section, I list some concrete-ish approaches to deliberation that have been considered so far. I say "concrete-ish" rather than "concrete" because each of these approaches seems underdetermined in many ways, e.g. for "humans sitting d...