trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Beyond 175 billion parameters: Can we anticipate future GPT-X Capabilities?
by bakztfuture — 2020-12-04T23:42:50.811Z

This question has been bothering me for months now:

This is because GPT-3, with 175 billion parameters, has been incredibly impressive and

far better than GPT-2

. If you follow me on

YouTube

, you already know I discovered it was capable of

tokenizing text

,

generating n-grams

, and in my next video I'll be showing how GPT-3 can even obfuscate computer code too.

But it's almost scary to think about what GPT-X in the future could be capable of doing when it's trillions of parameters in size. They say the brain itself is ~ 4 trillion synapses in size, which excites me to think about trillion parameter counts and their ability to learn at human or superhuman levels.

How will GPT-X react to our prompts then? Will every poem it writes deserve a literary award? Will it question the triviality of our prompts in the first place and refuse to answer them? I don’t think this is the case, however, I do assume it will become more definitive in the predictions it makes and perhaps “stick to the script” more when it comes to generating larger prompts and not go so much off track.

The end goal is really that trillion parameter count models may help us actually get to the underlying goals with AGI - perhaps - if they can develop architectures for deep learning models for us, improve the conceptual gaps in our understanding of intelligence, or write highly optimized code for training the models of the future. Perhaps, trillion parameter models can provide the bootloader for true AGI, but this is a far-fetched reality and it’s way too early to say.

I want to write a future post or release a video on why I think we need better benchmarks other than SuperGLUE specifically for large scale transformer models, but the main reason is because we should have some overall true generalization benchmark (outside of the boring field of NLP). Perhaps, the dream would be to be able to anticipate or predict future capabilities of larger transformer models as they scale up in size that we don’t even know about yet.

In the same way there are theory frameworks about childhood development, I wonder if there are ways we could group large scale transformer models and their development at their relative parameter counts. In this way, potentially bucket their development stages and respective capabilities and also see a little bit around the corner and know what cognitive skills they may be capable in the fu...
Meetup Organizers, Our Virtual Garden is at Your Disposal
by Ruby — 2020-12-04T23:29:00.425Z

Edited to Add: Here's my Calendly for anyone who wants to get set up.

TL;DR

If you're a LessWrong or SSC meetup organizer who wants to host online events, we are offering to let you host them in the LessWrong Walled Garden with our support. If you're interested (or just want a tour), please comment below or reach out to us directly (DM or Intercom) and we'll set you up.

Also, we're planning a Meta-Meetup, a meetup for meetup organizers on Sunday, 20th December 2:00PM to 4:00PM (PT). Please join if you're just interested in meeting other organizers, sharing experiences, brainstorming ideas and plans, and just rubbing virtual shoulders with other agenty folk who made good things happen for their communities.

What is the Walled Garden?

The LessWrong Walled Garden is a highly customized GatherTown space that we carefully curate to keep the quality of interaction high. We've had good success running events there and think it now makes sense to expand its usage to general meetups which we want to support.

West Falls,
rocks are slippery, don't fall, I mean it

Why are we offering this?

Though LessWrong is an online forum, the LessWrong and broader Rationalist/SSC communities have historically thrived via in-person meetups. Real-time, high-fidelity, embedded interaction matters for getting to know people, exchanging ideas, and having a good time. Unfortunately, this year has made them difficult to host, and that's why we built the Garden. Online meetups are but a simulacrum of the real thing, but let's try to make it a damn good simulacrum.

Fortress of Strategery

What's on offer

A beautiful, massive, exquisitely crafted, customized virtual world.
Always available, LessWrong pays all fees.
Reinvigorate your group after these tough Covid months.
GatherTown has the advantage over Zoom of extreme ease of breaking off into smaller conversations and then rejoining due to its proximity chat.
Consult with the LessWrong team on how to host successful online meetups.
[Optional] You can keep your events private to your group, or if you like, boost attendance by making your events public to other meetup groups or the broader LW community.

Anyone in the Garden sees a calendar of upcoming public/semi-public events, plus upcoming events can get displayed on the LW homepage too.

Mushroom Kingdom,
not those kind, well...

How it works

Event organizers will be given access to the Walled Ga...
The Hard Problem of Magic
by enaumov — 2020-12-04T18:51:56.145Z

One of the hardest unsolved problems of metaphysics is that of magic.

Magic exists -- self-evidently. Yet modern science leaves it less and less room to hide within the causally-interlocked world of the physical. We have come a long way from Descartes' belief that the pineal gland is that which connects the magical and physical worlds. Indeed, many educated people today no longer believe in any magical essence that exists independent of the physical processes that underlie it.

Yet the question remains -- where does magic itself come from?

We must countenance a world where we have perfect physical explanations for all of the phenomena we label magic, yet still do not understand -- not in the true sense of understanding, which is feeling like things just make sense -- what magic is.

Thought experiments like Philosophical Muggles or the Chinese Fortune-teller's Room can help sharpen our intuition. In tackling these problems, the boldest thinkers say that the notion of a system acting in magical ways yet lacking magic is absurd. Whatever magic is, it is inseparable from the structures that undergird it. Some of their ideas even border on the absurd notion of denying magic -- a fundamentally untenable position. After all, just imagine magic not existing -- this is very hard!

But in stepping back from the brink, we will be left forever wondering -- if I'm cloned, and the original is killed, does the magic disappear? Is magic needed for quantum collapse? How do we measure quantities of magic for utilitarian ethics?

Though we may know perfectly, we will never understand.
Commitment and credibility in multipolar AI scenarios
by anni_leskela — 2020-12-04T18:48:18.030Z

The ability to make credible commitments is a key factor in many bargaining situations ranging from trade to international conflict. This post builds a taxonomy of the commitment mechanisms that transformative AI (TAI) systems could use in future multipolar scenarios, describes various issues they have in practice, and draws some tentative conclusions about the landscape of commitments we might expect in the future.

Introduction

A better understanding of the commitments that future AI systems could make is helpful for predicting and influencing the dynamics of multipolar scenarios. The option to credibly bind oneself to certain actions or strategies fundamentally changes the game theory behind bargaining, cooperation, and conflict. Credible commitments and general transparency can work to stabilize positive-sum agreements, and to increase the efficiency of threats (Schelling 1960), both of which could be relevant to how well TAI trajectories will reflect our values.

Because human goals can be contradictory, and even broadly aligned AI systems could come to prioritize different outcomes depending on their domains and histories, these systems could end up in competitive situations and bargaining failures where a lot of value is lost. Similarly, if some systems in a multipolar scenario are well aligned and others less so, some worst cases might be avoidable if stable peaceful agreements can be reached. As an example of the practical significance of commitment ability in stabilizing peaceful strategies, standard theories in international relations hold that conflicts between nations are difficult to avoid indefinitely primarily because there are no reliable commitment mechanisms for peaceful agreements (e.g. Powell 2004, Lake 1999, Rosato 2015), even when nations would overall prefer them.

In addition to the direct costs of conflict, the lack of enforceable commitments leads to continuous resource loss from arms races, monitoring, and other preparations for possible hostility. It can also simply prevent gains from trade that binding prosocial contracts and high trust could unlock. A strategic landscape that resembles current international relations in these respects seems possible in a fully multipolar scenario, where no AI system has yet gained a decisive advantage over the others, and no external rule of law can be strongly enforced over all the systems. If AI s...
Postmortem on my Comment Challenge
by adamShimi — 2020-12-04T14:15:41.679Z

On the 11th of November, I challenged myself to comment every frontpage post for the rest of November. The result? Well, I failed a lot. But I also commented far more than I usually did. And I think from both my successes and my failures, I found some nuggets interesting enough to share with you.

Good days can be worse than bad days

If you had asked me before hand when I expected to fail, my first answer would have been on bad days -- days where I'm overworked, or too busy, or depressed. And indeed, there's probably a couple of such days in my failures. But good days, days where I just relaxed with friends and my girlfriend, are also time sinks, and I usually realized too late that I didn't read the LW posts you wanted to read.

So any commenting habit should probably be safeguarded from both good and bad days, by being either short enough or having a specific scheduled time for it.

A single chunck is too much for me

I began this challenge by choosing an hour each day for reading and commenting every frontpage post. But it was just too big a time commitment to me. Worse, I noticed that because it was that big, it felt tiring, and I pushed it further and further, until it was the last hour of the day and I was not in top form.

My solution was obvious: read and comment one or two posts at a time. I don't forbid myself to go on a LW binge, but it's not a requirement either.

Not enough commenting guidelines

When introducing my challenge, I wrote:

Just a "I really enjoyed this post, even if I had nothing else to say" is useful feedback. So is "I'm not sure why, but I had trouble connecting with the arguments of the post".

That's certainly true for me. But while commenting on other posts, I sometimes felt like this type of feedback was not enough for the post in question. It usually happened with technical posts and AF posts.

The authors of these posts probably appreciate such feedback, if this post querying LW authors is any indication. But this nagging feeling remains. And I'm pretty sure it's correct in some instances.

What's the solution? Ideally, everyone would explain what kind of feedback they're interested in. And we already have a mechanism for that: moderation guidelines! Maybe it's misguided, but I believe that having a sentence or two clarifying the kind of feedback wanted in your post will tremendously help people to comment. If it becomes a community trend, we wi...
The Darwin Game - Conclusion
by lsusr — 2020-12-04T08:06:37.301Z

Evolution is unintelligent. The bugs removed intelligence from the design of the bots. The more bugs I wrote into my simulator, the better my simulation replicated real-world Darwinian population dynamics. After two alternate timelines with a buggy game engine, I have finally gotten around to running the game for real.

Alas, this game is between intelligently-designed species, not randomly-generated chunks of code.

Rounds 0-20

MeasureBot takes an early lead.

Rounds 21-40

Multicore's EarlyBirdMimicBot steals the lead from MeasureBot.

Rounds 41-1208

Welcome to Planet Multicore.

Winner

Bot
Team
Description
Round

EarlyBirdMimicBot
Multicore
Superintelligence
∞

Today's Obituary

Everyone else.

Conclusion

I hope you had fun. This wouldn't have been possible without the community here at Less Wrong. At least 75% of the code (not counting pseudocode) was written by people other than me. Thank you everyone who competed, debated, plotted and hacked. Thank you for the espionage and counter-espionage. Thank you everyone who helped spot bugs in the game engine. Thank you Zvi for posting the original Less Wrong Darwin Game series. Extra thanks to moderator Ben Pace for prettifying the tables behind the scenes and moderator Oliver for fixing multiple timestamps.

The source code to the game and all the bots is available here. If there is a bug in this timeline you can fix it yourself.

This concludes the 2020 Less Wrong Darwin Game.
How a billionaire could spend their money to help the disadvantaged: 7 ideas from the top of my head
by Yitz — 2020-12-04T06:09:56.534Z

When I first began writing this, my goal was to think of 50 different ways an extremely wealthy person (by which I mean wealthy on the level of having hundreds of millions to several billions of dollars at their disposal) could use their money to improve the lives of as many people as possible, as much as possible. After writing this list, I narrowed it down to seven ideas that I thought were both potentially viable, and which I haven’t seen discussed in any detail elsewhere before writing. This is a list of those seven philanthropic ideas, along with a brief discussion of each one.

It should be noted that I do not have any experience actually managing extremely large sums of money, and as such all of these ideas should be taken with an equivalently large grain of salt. The goal here is to get people thinking, and perhaps come up with some original insights, rather than to serve as an immediately practical resource for a wealthy reader (though if you are a multimillionaire reading this, feel free to DM me or comment below about any ideas, criticism, or insight that you may have on the topic coming from your position). It should also be noted that the fact that I haven’t seen most of these ideas discussed before signals that I may be missing some obvious problems here, so if you see anywhere where I may be going wrong, I’d be more than happy to discuss that in the comments.

Anyway, without further ado, here are some ideas for how multimillionaires might use their money for good:

Start your own insurance company, and design it to maximize medical coverage and ease of use for consumers, rather than to maximize company profits. The goal should be for it to make only enough money that is necessary for continued healthy company survival without needing further funding, and everything it might make beyond that should be re-invested in improving the experience/minimizing costs for consumers. As a disabled person myself, who has a huge amount of lived experience with the (American) medical and psychiatric system, it seems that insurance providers who refuse treatment to those who desperately need it (even when those treatments are prescribed by doctors!) are one of the largest institutional sources of suffering and wasted time in America today (coming in second only to our prison system, perhaps, while followed by filing taxes). I do not think I have e

...
Teacher's Password: The LessWrong Mystery Hunt Team 
by Scott Garrabrant — 2020-12-04T00:04:42.900Z

Followup to: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iNTabF6vQjeDeSar7/interest-survey-forming-an-mit-mystery-hunt-team-jan-15-18

We are making a LessWrong team for the 2021 MIT Mystery Hunt. If you want to play the Mystery Hunt with other rationalists, you can sign up by commenting here and joining the discord.

What is the MIT Mystery Hunt?

The MIT Mystery Hunt is a puzzle-solving competition, in which teams race to solve a series of puzzles without instructions. Here is a quote by Mike Develin about puzzle hunts in general:

Imagine a word search.

Now imagine you aren’t told what words to look for.

Now imagine you aren’t told it’s a word search.

Now imagine it isn’t a word search.

You can learn more about puzzle hunts here, or the MIT Mystery Hunt here.

When is the MIT Mystery Hunt?

The Mystery Hunt is from 9AM PT on Friday, January 15, 2021 to 9AM PT on Monday, January 18, 2021 (MLK Jr. Day weekend). Depending on how many people sign up, (and where they are) we might be solving puzzles for that entire 72 hours. You can log on and work on puzzles however much you like.

Where is the MIT Mystery Hunt?

Usually, the mystery hunt is on MIT campus, but this year, it is entirely remote. Our team will meet on LessWrong's Walled Garden, a virtual world for rationalists on gather.town. If you do not have access to the Walled Garden, you will be given a temporary password to access the space. We will also be hanging out on discord prior to and during the hunt.

What is Teacher's Password?

Teacher's Password is the name of LessWrong's Mystery Hunt team. The team is open to anyone on LessWrong, and friends of anyone on LessWrong, including people who are new to puzzle hunts, but you have to sign up. Our team emoji is 📎. We are probably not going to win. (We will either precommit to try not to win, or if many people want to try to win, create a mechanism to allow individuals to be absolved of the responsibility of writing next year's hunt.)

How do I know if I will like the Mystery Hunt?

We will do a sample puzzle hunt in the Walled Garden at noon pacific on Sunday, December 13 as the regular LessWrong online meetup. This will be much easier than the Mystery Hunt, and take 1-2 hours. We might also organize other practice events, which would be announced in the discord.

How do I Sign Up?

Join the discord, and comment on this post if you like (this is a social activity and knowing about your p...
Notes on Integrity
by David Gross — 2020-12-03T23:42:44.376Z

This post examines the virtue of integrity. I mean to explore what others have learned about this virtue, rather than expressing my own opinions, though I’ve been selective about what I found interesting or credible, according to my own inclinations. I wrote this not as an expert, but as someone who wants to learn. I hope it helps people who want to know more about this virtue and how to nurture it.

What is integrity?

“[The nobler type of man] first practices what he preaches and afterwards preaches according to his practice.” ―Confucius[1]

Integrity is strangely slippery to define. It seems to have both a narrow and a broad definition, and it’s not always clear which someone has in mind when they use the word:

Narrowly: “integrity” follows its etymological connection with the Latin integer, meaning intact, undivided, whole, coherent. In this sense, you have integrity if your words match your actions and you are not at cross-purposes with yourself. You are not two-faced or hypocritical. You don’t tie yourself in knots trying to be all things to all people. You don’t hold other people to a strict set of standards and hold yourself to a more relaxed set.
Broadly: if you look up definitions of integrity, you’ll often see many other virtues bundled in beside this narrow meaning, including authenticity, honesty, rectitude, incorruptibility, reputability, fairness, harmony, consistency, reliability, accountability, and decency. Sometimes “integrity” is used as a synonym for honor. Occasionally someone will just gather a bunch of their favorite, seemingly unrelated, virtues together and cover the whole set with the “integrity” halo.[2]

This post uses the narrow definition.[3]

Integrity between levels of identity

People may have an aspirational self-image that conflicts with how they actually are. For example, they may prefer listening to pop music but wish they were the sort of person who thrills to classical. They have a “meta-desire” to have certain sorts of desires (and they might have further meta-meta-desires to have certain types of meta-desire). To the extent these levels are in conflict, this is another way integrity can be lacking.[4]

In this way integrity is related to the virtue of temperance: with which one’s desires match what one believes to be wise desires to have.[5]

But it seems iffy to characterize as a vice an aspiration to be better than you currently are...
Luna Lovegood and the Chamber of Secrets - Part 4
by lsusr — 2020-12-03T23:42:05.911Z

Luna located the Ravenclaw Common Room on the map. She climbed up to Ravenclaw Tower, then climbed up Ravenclaw Tower. All that separated Luna from making day-one friends was a door with a bronze knocker in the shape of an eagle which spoke riddles appropriate for first-years. She could almost hear muffled sounds of the other children partying. Luna knocked once. The eagle spoke with Rowena Ravenclaw's voice.

"Where is my diadem?"

Luna lacked sufficient hours-until-breakfast to find the Lost Diadem of Ravenclaw. Luna curled up in an alcove close to where heat leaked out of the Common Room. She wrote a thank you note to the house-elves for keeping the floor clean.

"I'm going to call you Wanda," Luna said to her Wrackspurt.

Wanda appeared on the Marauder's Map. Luna clicked her tongue and then spellotaped the Comed-Tea can to her ear so Wanda could feed. Luna's brain went fuzzy. Then she was asleep.

Luna woke to the sound of Ravenclaw going down to breakfast. Luna removed Wanda from her ear. Someone had placed a blanket over Luna while she slept. Luna threw the blanket off before anyone else spotted her and realized she hadn't solved the riddle. She knocked once on the eagle. The riddle hadn't changed.

On her way to breakfast, Luna passed the Forgotten Library at the base of Ravenclaw Tower. She had to eat food because she was a human being. Or she could explore a room that had stood for a thousand years and would probably still be there tomorrow. The entrance to the Forgotten library was a grey heptagon embedded in the wall. Its interior emitted monochromatic grey light. Luna stepped into the Forgotten Library.

Luna stepped out of the Forgotten library. She checked her satchel for quill, parchment and inkwell. Luna wrote "Exploration Journal" at the top of the parchment. Luna stepped into the Forgotten Library.

Luna stepped out of the Forgotten Library. She held a sheet of parchment with "Exploration Journal" at the top. Luna stepped into the Forgotten Library.

Luna stepped out of the Forgotten Library. She had left her exploration journal inside. Luna stepped into the Forgotten Library.

Luna stepped out of the Forgotten Library. She held a blank sheet of parchment. She had missed her first Charms class. If she hurried she could still reach Battle Magic on time. The Marauder's Map showed a shortcut leading from a door disguised as a window to a window disguis...