trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Has anyone on LW written about material bottlenecks being the main factor in making any technological progress?
by George3d6 — 2021-01-27T14:14:18.556Z

One thing I never understood in the internet sphere labelled "rationalists" (LW, OB, SSC... etc) is a series of seemingly strong beliefs about the future and/or about reality, the main one being around "AI".

Even more so, I never understood why people believe that thinking about certain problems (e.g. AI Alignment) is more efficient than random at solving certain problems, given no evidence of it being so (and no potential evidence, since the problems are in the future).

I've come to believe that I (and I'm sure many other people) differ from the mainstream (around these parts, that is) in a belief I can best outline as:

"Reason" may not be a determining factor in achiving agency over the material world, but rather, the limiting factor might be resources (inlcuding e.g. the resources needed to faciliatate physical labour, or to faciliate the power supply of a super-computer). What is interpreted as "reason causing an expoential jump in technology", could and should be interpreted as random luck of experimenting in the right direction, but in hindsight we rationalize it by saying the people exploring that direction "were smarter". More importantly, science and theoretical models are linked to technological inovation less than people think in the first place (see most of post 19th century physics/chemistry, including things like general relativity, not being required for most technological applications, including those credited to physics science)

I've considered writing an article aimed solely at the LW/SSC crowd trying to defend something-like the above proposition with historical evidence, but the few times I tried it was rather tedious. I still want to do so at some point, but I'm curious if anyone wrote this sort of article before, essentially something that boils down to "A defence of a mostly-sceptical take on the world which can easily be digested by someone from the rationalist-blogosphere demographic"

I understand this probably sounds insane to the point of trolling to people here, but please keep an open mind, or at least please grant me that I'm not trolling, the position outlined above would be fairly close to what an empiricist or skeptic would hold, heck, even lightweight, since a skeptic might be skeptic of us being able to gain more knowledge/agency over the outside world in the first place, at least in a non-random way.
The Upper Limit of Value
by Davidmanheim — 2021-01-27T14:13:09.510Z

I am happy to announce a new paper I co-wrote with Anders Sandberg, which is now a public preprint (Note: PDF). The abstract is below, followed by a brief sketch of some of what we said in the paper.
Abstract: How much value can our decisions create? We argue that unless our current understanding of physics is wrong in fairly fundamental ways, there exists an upper limit of value relevant to our decisions. First, due to the speed of light and the definition and conception of economic growth, the limit to economic growth is a restrictive one. Additionally, a related far larger but still finite limit exists for value in a much broader sense due to the physics of information and the ability of physical beings to place value on outcomes. We discuss how this argument can handle lexicographic preferences, probabilities, and the implications for infinite ethics and ethical uncertainty.

Physics is Finite and the Near-Term

First, there is a claim underlying our argument, that our current understanding of physics is sufficient to conclude that the accessible universe is finite in volume, in time, and in amount of information which can be stored. (The specific arguments for this are in the appendix of the paper.) We also assume humans are physical beings, without access to value unconnected to the physical world. Anything valued in their mind is part of a physical process.

Given those two claims, we start out with a discussion of purely economic value, and the short term future, specifically the next 100,000 years. During that time, the speed of light means that humanity will only have access to the Milky Way Galaxy. In the optimistic case that we colonize the galaxy, the rate of growth in economic value is limited to the polynomial increase in accessible matter and volume of space. This implies that indefinite exponential economic growth is impossible. In fact, as we suggest in the paper, the limit to exponential growth is almost certainly well below 1% over that time frame.

This has some interesting implications for economic discussions about the proper discount rate for the far-future, for the hinge-of-history hypothesis, and the argument that humanity will reach an economic singularity - or at least one where growth will continue indefinitely at an accelerating pace.

Value-in-General is Finite, Even When it Isn't

The second half of our paper discusses value more generally...
Optimal play in human-judged Debate usually won't answer your question
by Joe Collman — 2021-01-27T07:34:18.958Z

Epistemic status: highly confident (99%+) this is an issue for optimal play with human consequentialist judges. Thoughts on practical implications are more speculative, and involve much hand-waving (70% sure I’m not overlooking a trivial fix, and that this can’t be safely ignored).

Note: I fully expect some readers to find the core of this post almost trivially obvious. If you’re such a reader, please read as “I think [obvious thing] is important”, rather than “I’ve discovered [obvious thing]!!”.

Introduction

In broad terms, this post concerns

human-approval-directed

systems generally: there’s a tension between [human approves of solving narrow task X] and [human approves of many other short-term things], such that we can’t say much about what an approval-directed system will do about X, even if you think you’re training an X solver. This is true whether we’re getting a direct approval signal from a human, or we’re predicting human approval of actions.

For now I’ll be keeping things narrowly focused on

AI safety via debate

: it’s the case I’m most familiar with, and where the argument is clearest. I’m generally thinking of

rules like these

, though this argument applies to any debate setup with free-form natural language output and a human judge.

There’s already interesting discussion on

how debate

should

be judged

, but this post is essentially orthogonal: asking “When will the judge follow your instructions, and what happens if they don’t?”.

Initially, I was asking myself “what instructions should we give the judge?”, but then realized that the real question is “how will the judge act?”, and that the answer is “however the debaters are able to persuade the judge to act”. With extremely capable debaters, our instructions may become a small part of the story (though how small is format-dependent).

This discussion will be pretty informal throughout: I blame the humans.

A few things to keep in mind:

Based on this issue, I’m not claiming that debate behaviour is unaligned in the limit.
I claim that many people’s picture of debate's likely behaviour in the limit is confused.
I claim that this issue will probably be a problem for training at some point.
I’ll often omit the caveat “If debate works as intended aside from this issue…”.

I plan to post separately on some implications for

HCH

,

IDA

…. I think related human-motivational issues are important there, but it’s less clear-cut...
What is up with spirituality?
by KatjaGrace — 2021-01-27T06:20:12.670Z

What is up with spirituality? I mean, from an atheistic perspective?

In my experience, atheists tend to focus on the empirical question of whether there is an all-powerful supernatural creature behind all that we observe. And yeah, there probably isn’t.

But having won that point, what does one make of the extreme popularity of religion? I think the usual answer given is something like ‘well, we used to be very ignorant and not have good explanations of natural phenomena, plus we tend to see agents in everything because our agent detection software is oversensitive’.

Which might explain the question ‘Why would people think a supernatural agent controls things?’. But what seems like only a corner of religion.

Another big part of religion—and a thing that also occurs outside religion—seems to be ‘spirituality’—a cluster of things I find hard to describe, but which seem pretty disconnected from explanatory questions of where trees came from or why the crops failed.

Some stylized facts about spirituality:

People across religions have ‘spiritual experiences’ that involve particular styles of feeling

People can have spiritual attitudes more broadly

Spiritual attitudes involve less interest in ‘worldly’ or petty things

Spiritual things often involve sacredness and ritual

Spiritual feelings are often associated with awe and the word ‘transcendent’

Spiritual experiences do not present themselves as about hedonic enjoyment of the experience

Spirituality is connected with ‘meaning’ and tends to feel deep and significant

Spirituality tends toward an interest in philosophy, especially metaphysics, especially regarding whether everything is one, the nature of selfhood, the possibility and nature of ‘souls’, the nature of love

Certain drugs seem to induce spiritual or adjacent states

Spirituality tends to be fairly positive, in the sense that from a satisfactorily spiritual mental place, one expects the world to seem broadly good or at least compatible with peace

Spirituality is related to ideas of connecting with something beyond yourself

Spirituality is sincere

Spirituality is serious

Spirituality is normative

I suspect that from a spiritual vantage, this list might seem like a mundane missing of the point

Why are people into spirituality? Why is it a kind of thing that humans can experience? Why is it a thing they experience so much?
Did convalescent plasma therapy drive the evolution of more infectious covid strains?
by Angela Pretorius — 2021-01-27T06:16:56.157Z

I have seen articles in the National Geographic and Indian Express suggesting that some of the newer, more infectious covid strains that have been popping up lately may have originated from patients treated with convalescent plasma therapy.

I haven't been able to find much information on this, except for a preprint on medrXiv[1] about an immunocompromised patient with a prolonged SARS-CoV-2 infection had his viral DNA sequenced repeatedly over a 101 day period. After treatments with convalescent plasma, there were significant changes in the viral spike proteins with were associated with reduced susceptibility to antibodies and potentially greater infectiousness.

Neutralising antibodies in Spike mediated SARS-CoV-2 adaptation, SA Kemp et al.](https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.05.20241927) ↩︎
#4.1: Types of life insurance
by mingyuan — 2021-01-26T19:55:21.948Z

This is post 5 of 10 in my cryonics signup guide, and the second of five posts on life insurance.

In this post, I'll cover the different types of life insurance policies you might want to use to fund your cryopreservation. This is the most complicated part of this entire sequence and it's taken me many, many hours of confusion to reach even the tenuous understanding I'm presenting here. Please bear with me and let me know if you spot any errors or have any questions.

Note that in addition to being labyrinthine, the life insurance landscape changes fairly often, such that the options that were available to you when you signed up for cryonics ten years ago might no longer be offered. They're always adding new types of life insurance and getting rid of old ones, and the name of a policy doesn't always tell you the relevant information about it.

Getting oriented

Life insurance policy types vary along several major axes. Some cover you forever, while others expire; some are more expensive than others; some are more reliable and others are more flexible.

Here is the basic information in table form. You may want to refer back to this if you get confused while reading.

Duration

Premiums

Death benefit

Cash value

Interest rates

Price

Term Life

Fixed term

Fixed

Fixed

No

N/A

$

Whole Life

Permanent

Fixed

Fixed

Yes

Guaranteed

$$$$$

Universal Life

Permanent

Adjustable

Adjustable

Yes

Determined by the carrier; variable

$$$$

Guaranteed Universal Life

Permanent

Fixed

Fixed

No

Guaranteed

$$

Indexed Universal Life

Permanent

Adjustable

Adjustable

Yes

Indexed on S&P 500, capped

$$$

For maximum hope of successful communication, I've approached this question from two angles – first I'll talk about the ways in which policies differ from one another, then I'll give a summary of each type of policy.

Properties of an ideal cryonics life insurance policy

Before we get into what types of life insurance actually exist, I think it's useful to think about what a life insurance policy tailored specifically for cryonics would look like. Then we can find the real-world policy that corresponds most closely to the ideal.

Permanence

You want coverage until you die, because otherwise there's no point. This means that you should steer away from term policies, unless you expect to ...
Simulacrum 3 As Stag-Hunt Strategy
by johnswentworth — 2021-01-26T19:40:42.727Z

Reminder of the rules of Stag Hunt:

Each player chooses to hunt either Rabbit or Stag
Players who choose Rabbit receive a small reward regardless of what everyone else chooses
Players who choose Stag receive a large reward if-and-only-if everyone else chooses Stag. If even a single player chooses Rabbit, then all the Stag-hunters receive zero reward.

From the outside, the obvious choice is for everyone to hunt Stag. But in real-world situations, there’s lots of noise and uncertainty, and not everyone sees the game the same way, so

the Schelling choice is Rabbit

.

How does one make a Stag hunt happen, rather than a Rabbit hunt, even though the Schelling choice is Rabbit?

If one were utterly unscrupulous, one strategy would be to try to trick everyone into thinking that Stag is the obvious right choice, regardless of what everyone else is doing.

Now, tricking people is usually a risky strategy at best - it’s not something we can expect to work reliably, especially if we need to trick everyone. But this is an unusual case: we’re tricking people in a way which (we expect) will benefit them. Therefore, they have an incentive to play along.

So: we make our case for Stag, try to convince people it’s the obviously-correct choice no matter what. And… they’re not fooled. But they all pretend to be fooled. And they all look around at each other, see everyone else also pretending to be fooled, and deduce that everyone else will therefore choose Stag. And if everyone else is choosing Stag… well then, Stag actually is the obvious choice. Just like that, Stag becomes the new Schelling point.

We can even take it a step further.

If nobody actually needs to be convinced that Stag is the best choice regardless, then we don’t actually need to try to trick them. We can just pretend to try to trick them. Pretend to pretend that Stag is the best choice regardless. That will give everyone else the opportunity to pretend to be fooled by this utterly transparent ploy, and once again we’re off to hunt Stag.

This is

simulacrum 3

: we’re not telling the truth about reality (simulacrum 1), or pretending that reality is some other way in order to manipulate people (simulacrum 2). We’re pretending to pretend that reality is some other way, so that everyone else can play along.

In The Wild

We have a model for how-to-win-at-Stag-Hunt. If it actually works, we’d expect to find it in the wild in places where...
Non-Coercive Perfectionism
by Matt Goldenberg — 2021-01-26T16:53:36.238Z

Perfectionism is a surprisingly common ailment among both procrastinators who don't get stuff done, and high performers who get a LOT done. With just a few tweaks you can go from the former to the latter. While perfectionism is quite complicated, a useful simplification is to break it down into two categories:
1. Perfectionism for others - done to gain praise, avoid punishment, or be accepted.

2. Perfectionism for self - done to satisfy taste, identity, or goals.

Quite often, both types are present in a person, but one is a shadow value. People will hide that they care what others think, and pretend it's only about their work. Others will hide that it's a bit "selfish", and pretend it's only for others.

Acknowledging the Shadow

The first step to dealing with your perfectionism is acknowledging the shadow side of it. If you think it's purely about your work, ask yourself if it's even a little about others. If you think it's purely about others ask if it's even a little about your own taste/identity. Once you've broken it into it's component parts, you can deal with each side separately. And when I say "deal with," I don't mean necessarily "get rid of." Remember, perfectionism can be functional! Our job is to work with the perfectionism instead of fighting against it.

Perfectionism for Others

Introspecting

So, starting with the portion of your perfectionism that's about others: Ask yourself: Who am I being perfect for? And what does that do for me? There are many possible answers here, none right or wrong.

"I'm being perfect for my parents, so they'll love me."
"I'm being perfect for my boss, so I'll get a raise."
"I'm being perfect for god, so I can be worthy of his/her love."

Exploration and Questioning

Once you've acknowledged this answer, it can be much easier to work with the intention of your perfectionism. So ask yourself: Is being perfect here the best way to get that? If not, what is?

Oftentimes, when we acknowledge our shadow values, we find that our strategies for getting them were horrible because we never actually examined them! Sometimes, we find that we don't actually know how to get our needs met, and need to spend some time thinking about them.

Other times, we find that this is in fact the best way to get what we want (putting as much effort as possible to this project will actually help our boss see us as competent) so we allow ourselves to be perfectionist...
Covid Canada Jan25: low & slow
by MalcolmOcean — 2021-01-26T11:48:53.159Z

🇨🇦 People liked my Canada comment on Zvi's post on Jan 14th, so here's another update as a top-level post. I thought I wouldn't have much to say but apparently I wrote some stuff!

(I want to underscore that this is a rambly summary from someone who does not have the same thorough researchy energy or rigorous models as Zvi or many other LWers in many situations. If you have major decisions to make, use this summary as at most a jumping off point. Slightly BC-heavy because I moved to BC a few months ago and have been getting more news here. Also some of my rambles involve info that is probably common-knowledge to most Canadians who are informed whatsoever, I guess because I'm imagining people from other countries finding this of some interest as a contrast or something.)

So.

It continues to be true that various Canadian authorities are talking about their plan to gradually get everyone gradually vaccinated by September as if it's just a reasonable plan and there's no reason to try do anything faster. Like how someone very conscientious might say "yeah, I'll do a quarter of my xmas shopping each weekend in November and be totally ready by December" which is a reasonable safety buffer for xmas but that is just not the situation here. A weird tone thing.

Maybe things will go faster if we can get some AstraZeneca, or one of the 4 other companies we've got contracts with. We can hope—we've purchased >400M doses for our 38M people. Assuming we haven't cancelled those now that Pfizer has promised us 80M doses by September (enough for everyone).

One conservative MP snarkily summarized this many-company situation as:

"It's like saying that I have negotiated a contract with six fire departments to respond to my fire, but they won't respond for six hours when I do have a fire. And my neighbour has negotiated one contract with a single fire department to respond in five minutes," Chong told host Chris Hall.

"Personally, I'll take the single contract with the fire department that responds in five minutes because that is going to save my house. We are the country that's negotiated the contract with six fire departments ... that's the problem here."

The article explains:

Canada has signed agreements to receive the vaccine from seven companies, including Pfizer and Moderna. Candidates from the remaining suppliers have yet to receive the regulatory green light from Health Canada,

...
Wordtune review
by KatjaGrace — 2021-01-26T09:40:18.305Z

Wow, Facebook is advertising an AI-driven writing tool to me. I think this is the first time I’ve seen a mainstream potentially useful product coming from all of this. Let’s see how it does. I’ve started by writing this paragraph quickly myself, and then I will rewrite it using Wordtune, to demonstrate its features. Then I may rewrite it further using its premium features or my more honed writing, all going well.
(original)

Wow, Facebook is showing me a machine-learning based writing platform. I believe that this is the first mainstream application of all this. See how it goes. I wrote this paragraph on my own quickly, and then rewrote it using Wordtune to demonstrate its features. Then I may rewrite it using its premium features or using my more refined writing skills, if all goes well.
(Wordtune)

I am intrigued by Facebook’s advertisement with regards to an artificial intelligence (AI) writing tool. I’m not aware of any mainstream application arising from these efforts.Let us see how it goes. I created this paragraph quickly myself, and now I’m going to rewrite it using Wordtune to demonstrate all it has to offer. Afterwards, I will be able to incorporate premium features in it or craft it into a more refined style, all going well.
(formal Wordtune)

Wow, Facebook is advertising a writing tool which uses artificial intelligence (AI) that I did not know existed. This is something of a landmark event; I’ve not yet seen a mainstream useful product coming out of anything like this. I’m looking forward to seeing how it goes. I’ve begun by writing this paragraph myself but I will then rewrite it with the aid of Wordtune to illustrate its various features. Then I may rewrite it further using its premium features or my more honed writing, all going well.
(longer Wordtune)

Wow, Facebook’s touting a writing tool powered by artificial intelligence. This is the first time I’ve seen a mainstream use coming from all this. Let’s see what it does. I wrote it quickly, and I’m gonna rewrite it with Wordtune, just so I can show you how it works. After that I’ll maybe rewrite it more using its premium features or my own better skills.
(casual Wordtune)

Wow, Facebook offers me an AI-driven writing tool. This is the first mainstream product I’ve seen from all of this. Let’s see. I first wrote the paragraph, and then I rewrote it with Wordtune, so you can see its features. Then I wi...