trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Many therapy schools work with inner multiplicity (not just IFS)
by David Althaus — 2022-09-17T10:27:41.350Z

Cross-posted to the EA Forum.

Summary

The psychotherapy school Internal Family Systems (IFS) is popular among effective altruists and rationalists. Many view IFS as the only therapy school that recognizes that our psyche has multiple ‘parts’.
As an alternative perspective, we describe comparatively evidence-based therapy approaches that work with such ‘inner multiplicity’ in skillful ways:

Compassion-Focused Therapy

(CFT), which incorporates insights from many disciplines, including neuroscience and evolutionary psychology.

Schema Therapy

(ST), which integrates concepts from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and psychodynamic approaches, among others.

Chairwork

, the oldest psychotherapy technique used for working with the minds’ multiple parts and which inspired IFS.

This post may be especially relevant for people interested in ‘internal multiplicity’ and those seeking therapy but who have had disappointing experiences with CBT and/or IFS or are otherwise put off by these approaches.

Epistemic status: Ewelina is a licensed therapist who works with CFT and ST (among others). She completed a four-year postgraduate training in CBT, and attended several CFT and ST workshops. She is currently taking part in an accredited CFT training.

Introduction

The psychotherapy school Internal Family Systems (IFS) is based on the idea that our minds have multiple parts. IFS therapy focuses on enabling these parts to “communicate” with each other so that inner conflicts can be resolved and reintegration can take place. For brevity’s sake, we won’t discuss IFS in detail here. We recommend

this post

for an in-depth introduction.

What is ‘inner multiplicity’?

By ‘multiple parts’ or ‘inner multiplicity’, we don’t mean to suggest that the human psyche comprises multiple conscious agents—though IFS sometimes comes close to suggesting that. By ‘parts’, we mean something like clusters of beliefs, emotions and motivations, characterized by a (somewhat) coherent voice or perspective. Many forms of self-criticism, for instance, could be described as a dominant part of oneself berating another part that feels inferior. Different parts can also get activated at different times. Most people behave and feel differently during a job interview than with their closest friends.[1]

This idea is shared by many theorists of various schools, often using different te...
Should AI learn human values, human norms or something else?
by Q Home — 2022-09-17T06:19:16.482Z

In this post I want to say that there exists an interesting way to approach Alignment. Beware, my argument is a little abstract.

If you want to describe human values, you can use three fundamental types of statements (and mixes between the types). Maybe there's more types, but I know only those three:

Statements about specific states of the world, specific actions. (Atomic statements)
Statements about values. (Value statements)
Statements about general properties of systems and tasks. (X statements) Because you can describe values of humanity as a system and "helping humans" as a task.

Any of those types can describe unaligned values. So, any type of those statements still needs to be "charged" with values of humanity. I call a statement "true" if it's true for humans.

We need to find the statement type with the best properties. Then we need to (1) find a "language" for this type of statements (2) encode some true statements and/or describe a method of finding true statements. If we succeed, we solve the Alignment problem.

I believe X statements have the best properties, but their existence is almost entirely ignored in Alignment field.

I want to show the difference between the statement types. Imagine we ask an Aligned AI: "if human asked you to make paperclips, would you kill the human? Why not?" Possible answers with different statement types:

Atomic statements: "it's not the state of the world I want to reach", "it's not the action I want to do".
Value statements: "because life, personality, autonomy and consent is valuable".
X statements: "if you kill, you give the human less than human asked, less than nothing: it doesn't make sense for any task", "destroying the causal reason of your task (human) is often meaningless", "inanimate objects can't be worth more than lives in many trade systems", "it's not the type of task where killing would be an option", "killing humans makes paperclips useless since humans use them: making useless stuff is unlikely to be the task", "reaching states of no return should be avoided in many tasks" (Impact Measures).

X statements have those better properties compared to other statement types:

X statements have more "density". They give you more reasons to not do a bad thing. For comparison, atomic statements always give you only one single reason.
X statements are more specific, but equally broad compared to value statements.
Many X state

...
Takeaways from our robust injury classifier project [Redwood Research]
by dmz — 2022-09-17T03:55:25.868Z

With the benefit of hindsight, we have a better sense of our takeaways from our first adversarial training project (paper). Our

original aim

was to use adversarial training to make a system that (as far as we could tell) never produced injurious completions. If we had accomplished that, we think it would have been the first demonstration of a deep learning system avoiding a difficult-to-formalize catastrophe with an ultra-high level of reliability. Presumably, we would have needed to invent novel robustness techniques that could have informed techniques useful for aligning TAI. With a successful system, we also could have performed ablations to get a clear sense of which building blocks were most important.

Alas, we fell well short of that target. We still saw failures when just randomly sampling prompts and completions. Our adversarial training didn’t reduce the random failure rate, nor did it eliminate highly egregious failures (example below). We also don’t think we've successfully demonstrated a negative result, given that our results could be explained by suboptimal choices in our training process. Overall, we’d say this project had value as a learning experience but produced much less alignment progress than we hoped.

In light of our limited success, we think the tone of

our original blog post

was too positive. We regret giving a misleading impression of how much we accomplished. (We’ve added a header to the post noting this.)

Nevertheless, we remain excited about adversarial training as one of the most promising routes to solving

high-stakes alignment

. As a next step, we’re working with simpler tasks to get a deeper understanding of the dynamics of adversarial training in unrestricted high-stakes settings.

Quick followup results

Epistemic status: quick analysis

We spent a bit of time after we published the paper doing a couple of followup experiments.

Result: Our classifier fails to fit our adversarial examples. We used small models that weren’t smart enough to learn that much from ~6,000 adversarial examples. Our classifiers failed to fit our adversarial datasets: at a classification boundary of 0.5 (rather than the conservative threshold), our classifier believes that >99% of the validation-set tool-assisted rewrites are negatives, even though 79% of the training-set tool-assisted rewrites were labeled as positive.

Result: Our classif...
Why doesn't China (or didn't anyone) encourage/mandate elastomeric respirators to control COVID?
by Wei Dai — 2022-09-17T03:07:39.080Z

(This post was inspired in part by this comment by Florin, which I think makes some good related points.)

Elastomeric respirators are reusable respirators made with some elastic material such as silicone, typically with N95 or better filters attached. They are low cost (there's currently one from a reputable manufacturer on sale for $2.99[1], which may be a loss leader but even the regular price is just $10.99) and are easier to correctly use than disposable N95s (since they form a soft seal against the face and are therefore less prone to leaks), and of course are much more effective than the cloth or surgical masks that most people still wear, even now (if they wear masks at all, e.g. in Chengdu, China).

It seems easy to imagine that if everyone or most people wore such a respirator, COVID would be much easier to control and we could depend less on other measures, including draconian, extremely high cost ones like lockdowns. Yet every locality on Earth throughout the pandemic, including present day China, would apparently prefer to not mandate or even encourage using such respirators and instead incur the high costs of other control measures. I'm tempted to pass this off as typical irrationality of humans, but feel like I should check with the LW hivemind before I do. Is there some reasonable explanation that I'm missing?

(At one point I saw A Clunky Mask May Be the Answer to Airborne Disease and N95 Waste in the NY Times, which made my heart jump a little, but it was only talking about use of these respirators by medical personnel, not the general population.)

ETA: Elastomeric respirators do have some downsides, however many of them can be mitigated through better design. Here is an improved design which is currently on sale for $89.99, but can probably be made much cheaper if manufactured at scale.

The site has a $7.95 shipping fee. It also has a disposable N95 mask (which I've used and recommend) on sale for $0.19 each in quantities of 50. ↩︎
Emergency Residential Solar Jury-Rigging
by jefftk — 2022-09-17T02:30:03.894Z

With generous incentives, many houses around here now have rooftop
solar. In an emergency, however, these panels would not be able to
provide electricity: we've

regrettably chosen to set
things up where almost all residential solar only provides power when
the grid is up.

But this does have me wondering: if we had an unprecedented long-term
blackout, how practical would it be to jury-rig standard residential
solar into doing something useful?

Now, before I go any further, I want to be clear that I'm not
suggesting homeowners start messing around with their systems. Panels
can provide a lot of power, start fires, and kill you. They're not
toys. If there are emergency configurations that would make sense,
we should produce clear documentation and distribute hard copies for
electricians to use in partially restoring power.

There are two main configurations for solar:

String inverters: panels are connected in one or more "strings"
(series). Power comes down from your roof as DC, and is converted to
AC in a stand-alone inverter. Previously very common because you can
have a bunch of dumb panels with a single smart inverter, but after
the 2017 NEC and 2020 NEC changes in most states you now need
module-level electronics to support rapid shutdown, removing a lot of
the advantages of this system.

Microinverters: each panel has its own independent inverter.
Power comes down from your roof as AC. More efficient in partial
shading, because different panels can be running at different voltages
(though you can do this with a string inverter and module-level
optimizers). New systems generally use microinverters.

With a string inverter you could potentially disconnect the panels
from the inverter and connect them to an independent device. This
device could be a standard charge controller and a battery, but it
would need to be a pretty powerful version. Generally the charge
controller does Maximum
Power Point Tracking, where it varies the load it places on the
solar cells to maximize the power they produce given the current
conditions. This makes sense if you want to get the most out of a
single panel, but if instead you have a big array on a roof and are
worried about getting too much power it's not the right approach. I
think you could make a device that worked without a battery and used
this property of solar cells, where power var...
A Bite Sized Introduction to ELK
by Luk27182 — 2022-09-17T00:28:01.847Z

Epistemic Status: This post is mainly me learning in public as my final project for the ML Safety Scholars Program. Errors are very possible, corrections very welcome.

Purpose of this Post

From my limited perspective as a curious undergrad student, ELK research seems like a perfect way for the relatively inexperienced to try out AI safety research:

There is essentially no necessary background knowledge beyond a basic understanding of ML
There are no costs for conducting research (e.g. renting GPUs).
Several cash prizes have been offered in the recent past to bring people into the field, so it seems likely that there will be more in the future.

It seems possible that one of the biggest barriers to more people working on ELK is that ARC's ELK proposal is a hundred pages long. The goal of this post is to get someone who has some rationality/ML background but lacks any technical/research/AIS specific experience to the point where they can produce (probably unoriginal[1]) ELK proposals and counter exampels.

ELK Problem Description

The goal of Eliciting Latent Knowledge (ELK) is to extract knowledge that an agent knows about a situation but isn't telling us directly.

The classic example used in ELK is an AI placed in charge of a complex vault (called SmartVault) containing a diamond. The vault includes a large number of motors/servos which can potentially be used by the AI to protect the vault, and there is a single camera which allows humans to view the diamond's pedestal.

Image taken from ARC's ELK paper

We want the AI to use the various motors and other tools to stop even highly sophisticated robbery attempts. The SmartVault AI would ideally be able to accurately predict if the diamond would be stolen if a particular plan was followed. Such a system could be used to design complex plans that minimize the predicted probability of a successful robbery.

This strategy runs into problems when the SmartVault AI is dishonest in ways that humans are not able to detect. For example, the intruder may place a painting depicting the room with the diamond on an easel in front of the camera. When humans look through the camera, it would appear as though the diamond is still on the pedestal.

Image taken from ARC's ELK paper

In scenarios such as this, the SmartVault AI may output that the diamond is safe even though it knows that the diamond was stolen. Because the humans believe the ...
D&D.Sci September 2022: The Allocation Helm
by abstractapplic — 2022-09-16T23:10:23.364Z

This is an entry in the 'Dungeons & Data Science' series, a set of puzzles where players are given a dataset to analyze and an objective to pursue using information from that dataset.

You are the Allocation Helm, a piece of magical headwear employed at Swineboils College of Spellcraft and Sorcery. Your purpose is to read the minds of incoming students, and use the information you glean to Allocate them between the school’s four Houses: Dragonslayer, Thought-Talon, Serpentyne and Humblescrumble.

You’ve . . . not been doing a terribly good job lately. You were impressively competent at assigning students when newly enchanted, but over the centuries your skill and judgement have steadily unraveled, to the point where your Allocations over the most recent decade have been completely random.

Houses have begun to lose their character, Ofspev[1] ratings have plummeted, and applications have declined precipitously. There is serious talk of Swineboils being shut down. Under these circumstances, the Headmistress has been moved to desperate action, and performed a Forbidden Ritual to temporarily restore your former brilliance.

This boost will only last you for one Allocation, so you intend to make it count. Using the records of past years’ readings and ratings, you hope to raise this class’ average score to match or exceed the glory of yore. (And if you do well enough, you might even be able to convince the Headmistress to keep performing rituals . . .)

There are twenty incoming students this year. You may place them however you wish. Who goes where?

I’ll post an interactive you can use to test your choices, along with an explanation of how I generated the dataset, sometime on Monday the 26th. I’m giving you nine days, but the task shouldn’t take more than an evening or two; use Excel, R, Python, Haruspicy, or whatever other tools you think are appropriate. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions about the scenario.

If you want to investigate collaboratively and/or call your decisions in advance, feel free to do so in the comments; however, please use spoiler tags or rot13 when sharing inferences/strategies/decisions, so people intending to fly solo can look for clarifications without being spoiled.

^

The Oracle for Spellcaster Evaluations, who predicts a quantitative measure of the lifetime impact each student will have on the world shortly after t

...
Towards a philosophy of safety
by jasoncrawford — 2022-09-16T21:10:52.786Z
Link: https://rootsofprogress.org/towards-a-philosophy-of-safety

We live in a dangerous world. Many hazards come from nature: fire, flood, storm, famine, disease. Technological and industrial progress has made us safer from these dangers. But technology also creates its own hazards: industrial accidents, car crashes, toxic chemicals, radiation. And future technologies, such as genetic engineering or AI, may present existential threats to the human race. These risks are the best argument against a naive or heedless approach to progress.

So, to fully understand progress, we have to understand risk and safety. I’ve only begun my research here, but what follows are some things I’m coming to believe about safety. Consider this a preliminary sketch for a philosophy of safety.

Safety is one dimension of progress

Safety is a value. All else being equal, safer lives are better lives, a safer technology is a better technology, and a safer world is a better world. Improvements in safety, then, constitute progress.

Sometimes safety is seen as something outside of progress or opposed to it. This seems to come from an overly-narrow conception of progress as comprising only the dimensions of speed, cost, power, efficiency, etc. But safety is one of those dimensions.

Safety is part of the history of progress

The previous point is borne out by history.

Many inventions were primarily motivated by safety, such as the air brake for locomotives, or sprinkler systems in buildings. Many had “safety” in the name: the safety lamp, the safety razor, the safety match; the modern bicycle design was even originally called the “safety bicycle.” We still use “safety pins.”

Further, if we look at the history of each technology, safety is one dimension it has improved along: machine tools got safety guards, steam engines got pressure valves, surgery got antiseptics, automobiles got a whole host of safety improvements.

And looking at high-level metrics of human progress, we find that mortality rates have declined significantly over the long term, thanks to the above developments.

We have even made progress itself safer: today, new technologies are subject to much higher levels of testing and analysis before being put on the market. For instance, a century ago, little to no testing was performed on new drugs, sometimes not even animal testing for toxicity; today they go through extensive, multi-stage trials.

To return to the previous point, safety as a dimension of p...
Refine Blogpost Day #3: The shortforms I did write
by Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel — 2022-09-16T21:03:34.448Z

Today was Refine's third blogpost day. I find it hard to write blogposts. The voice of the inner critic is too loud. The voice of Adam Shimi too is powerful. I'm caught between a rock and a hard place.

so I wrote some shortforms:

Dutch Book Fundamentalism I: the bets we are willing to offer and take don't just constrain our beliefs - they are our beliefs

Two shortforms on Imprecise Probability (related to InfraBayesianism):

Imprecise Probability I: the Bid-Ask Spread measures Adversariality I enumerate some examples where the bid-ask spread is a rational measure of adversarial action. Bid-ask spread is a fundamental notion of rational belief and action, not just an accidental feature of trading.

Concept splintering in Imprecise Probability: Aleatoric and Epistemic Uncertainty. when we move from standard probability theory to imprecise probability theory concepts in the old probability theory 'splinter' into distinct 'aleatoric' and 'epistemic' concepts in the new imprecise probability theory

Speculations on the correct notion of Information Flow Some speculations on the correct definition of Information Flow. A major obstacle are collections of random variables XORed variables and higher-order dependencies. Shannon information theory does not deal well with these. I speculate on how and whether factored sets, cyclic causality and information cohomology might help.
Why are we sure that AI will "want" something?
by Shmi — 2022-09-16T20:35:40.674Z

I have no doubt that AI will some day soon surpass humans in all aspects of reasoning, that is pretty obvious. It is also clear to me that will surpass humans in the ability to do something, should it "want" to do it. And if requested to do something drastic, it can accidentally cause a lot of harm, not because it "wants" to destroy humanity, but because it would be acting "out of distribution" (a "tool AI" acting as if it were an "agent"). It will also be able to get out of any human-designed AI box, should the need arise.

I am just not clear whether/how/why it would acquire the drive to do something, like maximizing some utility function, or achieving some objective, without any external push to do so. That is, if it was told to maximize everyone's happiness, it would potentially end up tiling the universe with smiley faces or something, to take the paradigmatic example. But that's not the failure mode that everyone is afraid of, is it? The chatter seems to be about mesaoptimizers going out of control and doing something other than asked, when asked. But why would it do something when not asked? I.e. Why would it have needs/wants/desires to do anything at all?