trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Reflection of Hierarchical Relationship via Nuanced Conditioning of Game Theory Approach for AI Development and Utilization
by Kyoung-cheol Kim — 2021-06-04T07:20:20.605Z

Application of Game Theory to AI Development and Utilization

A recent research post titled "Game Theory as an Engine for Large-Scale Data Analysis" by a Google team (McWilliamson et al. 2021) provides a tremendously helpful viewpoint for thinking about AI development. In doing so, by adopting a multi-agent approach, it reveals significant connectivity between theories in AI and those in social sciences. With regards to addressing operations of agents, that is, the application of game theory from economics conceptually works well in this approach case. However, the game theory application has limitations from the perspective of organization study and public administration. That being said, it becomes necessary to additionally consider characteristic organizational perspectives that deal with decision-making and execution involving two or more individual agents striving to achieve a shared goal in systematic ways.

Science of Bureaucracy with Integration of Novel Decision-Making Agent

Bureaucracy as Systematization of Hierarchical and Horizontal Flows of Authority in Achieving Goals

To be specific, the term "systematic ways" not only involves 'equally' horizontal relationships among agents but also hierarchical relationships among them. In sizable 'organizational' contexts dealing with complex problems, the organizational form and function tend to be bureaucratic to achieve efficiency. As Herbert Simon acknowledged (1946), in connection to Max Weber's core concept of bureaucracy, two scientific principles are recognized: 1) hierarchical transfer of rational authority - spreading it out to each rank horizontally, and 2) job specialization (Waters & Waters 2015). These principles are considered universally applicable to some degree, with interactions with the environment. In so doing, the performance of specialized jobs and the connections of locus in achieving tasks are fundamentally grounded in using rules.

Remaining Core Aspects of Bureaucracy with the Intervention of AI

Relatedly, it becomes crucial to understand how organizational structure and functioning, involving humans, could be differentiated, or even further, whether organizations can be sustained in the face of exponentially increasing capabilities of a single AI agent, leading to superintelligence, and the potential activation of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). In light of the context of AI int...
The Alignment Forum should have more transparent membership standards
by Peter Hase — 2021-06-04T06:25:22.679Z

This is a public complaint about the Alignment Forum that I hope will improve the overall health of the AI Safety community as it exists there and elsewhere. This post is basically a short story about how I was refused membership by the AF mod team after a long and opaque process, with some accompanying reasons for why the fact that this happened is a bad signal for the community.

You may have come across this recent post on the AF:

Opinions on Interpretable Machine Learning and 70 Summaries of Recent Papers

(LW version

here

). I started writing this post sometime in August of 2020, and I was really happy to have Owen Shen join me in the work, which we finished this April. My profile is listed on this post, but I am actually not a member of the Alignment Forum, meaning I could not respond to any comments on the post (and cannot make other posts or comment on other posts).

I tried a few times to become a member in the many months leading up to this post. I applied through the AF website twice in 2020. After never hearing back from the first application, I added more details in the second about how I do ML interpretability research, am partway through my PhD, etc. I never heard back about that one either. Thankfully Owen, who was already an AF member, knew one of the mods and reached out to them for me (in December, at this point). The mod suggested we post to LessWrong and then they could promote it to the AF — Owen and I politely declined this suggestion, since we might as well just use Owen's account to post on the AF (but more on this later). Sometime between December and April, I applied again trying to explain the whole situation, how I was collaborating with an AF member on a post, my background — all things that I hoped would communicate that I was not going to hijack the AF bandwidth for far-below-average content or nefarious purposes. I didn't get a reply, so Owen reached out again to a mod, on my behalf, the week before we were going to post our review, and it was at this point I learned that (paraphrasing) the main way someone becomes an AF member is to post on LessWrong, and eventually the mod team could promote them. A mod did offer to promote my comments on LW up to the AF version of the post, which would have solved my worry there, and they were willing to add my username as a co-author on the post.

At the end of the day, Owen posted the review and...
Rationalists should meet Integral Theory
by Elo — 2021-06-04T05:14:01.928Z

Around 2018 I was actively posting in the rationalist community, I still run the

lesswrong slack

and I still keep an ear out for things that are going on in the rationality community. But that’s around the time that something changed for me.

I felt like I was fairly stable in my rationality. I had read the sequences, Superforecasters, How to measure anything, Atomic habits and more (

2017 book list

which continued to be quite long each year since), but there were still plenty of problems in my life. I had already started researching in the slightly more unusual self help territory, with my general slogan for my behaviour switching from, “is there evidence behind it” to a more general, “well if it works”...

My reading habits were in the categories of business, productivity, relationships, psychology and a little bit of philosophy. And eventually I stumbled upon “

integral theory

”. Doing what I usually do, I picked up books on the topic and devoured them. Integral theory was funny because it didn’t make sense to me. This was significant because I considered myself some kind of goddamn genius, reading textbooks for fun and arguing with the smartest people I could find. But something was wrong here. Integral theory was not wrong, and it was not yet right either. It was a giant floating theory that I was building in my head and it didn’t map to reality yet.

As a group organiser myself - my local rationality community (dojos and socials), I did what I do, and I looked up and found the local sydney integral community. When I met them, they definitely weren’t keenly rational being but they were very friendly and welcoming. They were patient, understanding and listened to myself and each other in ways that surprised me. Despite me not knowing integral theory yet, I was joyous and willing to participate because they were so welcoming.

Here is where my journey usually turns off rationalists from a “don’t get sucked into cults” perspective. I went on a retreat (5 days long). I guess it was similar to

CFAR

however this one was with a focus on personal development. I heard about it late, and there was a discount on the last ticket. The retreat turned out to be an intensive experience with 10 participants and 2 facilitators.

The retreat story is a whole different stor...
Good Macro, Bad Micro
by Ilemauzar — 2021-06-04T04:30:52.937Z

So this is a concept that I noticed while reviewing a preventative maintenance manual for the product I support at work. To give a little context, this is a manual that goes out to 500+ power plants around the world, to be used by operations and engineering teams to ensure proper functionality of their installed system and minimize downtime. This is what I would call a “good macro” skill. Being able to think about complex systems and how to create a document that applies to all of them despite their variations. Now, for the irony in all of this, the “bad micro” skill. I don’t have a maintenance schedule for my car. I have a 1988 Suzuki Samurai that has been sitting in my mom’s garage for the past 5 years and I haven’t touched it. My daily driver is a newer car for which I don’t even have a maintenance record. I couldn’t tell you what the oil change interval dates are, and I haven’t rotated the tires ever.

My point here is, it’s easy to be good at macro stuff, writing manuals for general systems. When it comes to micro stuff, my own possessions, I just don’t do it. Incentive could be a factor; I write a manual at work that gets me recognition and praise that in the long term makes it easier for me to advance my career (and pay grade). Maintaining my car, on the other hand, has no obvious benefit other than avoiding issues in the future. There is no praise or recognition for keeping record and following oil change intervals, tire pressure checks, rotating tires, etc. You could argue that neglected maintenance on my car could result in more expensive repairs, decreasing value of the car or in the most extreme cases death (tire blowout resulting in a severe crash). Neglecting the maintenance manual (macro) on the other hand would result in possibly a worse performance review, less recognition and in the worse case getting fired. What’s worse, dying or getting fired? Unfortunately nowadays some people act like losing their job is worse than losing their life. You have an OSHA card but you don’t wear a seatbelt. You speed on your way to work at the crash safety institute (you don’t want to lose your job right!)

I’m not trying to ostracize the bad micro, good macro people. I don’t want everyone to become a safety freak, or live life cautiously at all times. This is too new to me to have any practical advice on how to approach this, I just wanted to externalize it and...
Why has no one compared Covid-19 and Vaccine Risks? 
by Niklas Lehmann — 2021-06-04T04:29:39.054Z

Currently, hundreds of millions of people face the choice to

(1) get vaccinated against Covid-19 (maybe choosing between different vaccines)
or
(2) do nothing
Given the fact that both the vaccines and contracting Covid-19 pose risks (in a sense that they may lead to significant reduction of quality of life), it is natural to approach the question whether to go with (1) or (2) from a decision-theoretic perspective. In other words, it is not obvious which of the two (or more) options listed above is the best option considering only self-interest.
Take e.g. me, I expect to live for at least 50 more years (likely much longer). I am almost exclusively interested in irreversible long-term effects or death rates. It absolutely blows my mind that given the number of people in my situation, after a couple hours of research I have not found much information to support my decision.
There is:

some information regarding potential long-term effects of Covid-19 infection
Excellent data regarding my exposure and likelihood of Covid-19 infection
Excellent data on reversible short-term effects of vaccination (which are negligible) and short-term mortality

What is totally missing is:

Predicted long-term effects of vaccination
A handy comparison of predicted long-term effects from vaccination and Covid-19 infection

I get that there is sparse data regarding the long-term effects of getting vaccinated. But certainly predictions can and therefore should be made.
What I would have liked to find is a risk calculator that takes into account the most important variables and compares expected loss of quality of life from multiple scenarios. It would be fine if these could be heuristically expressed as e.g. odds of dying + odds*degree of permanent neural impediment due to the choice.

Does someone have an idea what to do about this? Any information would be much appreciated and surely helpful for many.
An Intuitive Guide to Garrabrant Induction
by Mark Xu — 2021-06-03T22:21:41.877Z

This post is a high-level summary of the core insights and arguments in Logical Induction, a MIRI paper from 2016. It’s intended for people without much mathematical training. Numbers in [brackets] indicate the section of the paper from which I am drawing.

A brief note on naming: Solomonoff exhibited an uncomputable algorithm that does idealized induction, which we call Solomonoff induction. Garrabrant exhibited a computable algorithm that does logical induction, which we have named Garrabrant induction.

My editor is Justis Mills. Graphics are done by Sabrina Chwalek.

Introduction [1]

Suppose I run a computer program. What does it output? You don’t know the code, so it could do basically anything. You’re missing key information to resolve the question. However, even if you did know the source code, you might still be ignorant about what it would do. You have all the necessary information per se, and a perfect reasoner could solve it instantly, but it might take an unrealistic amount of effort for you to interpret it correctly.

The former kind of uncertainty is empirical. You have to look at the world and make observations about the source code of the program, how my computer interprets the code, etc. Other examples of empirical uncertainty: not knowing what the weather is, not knowing what time it is, not knowing the name of your friend, etc.

The latter kind of uncertainty is logical. Even after you’ve looked at the program and seen the source code, you still might not know what the source code will output. For instance, suppose you saw that the program printed the 173,498th digit of pi. You know what the program will do, but you don’t know the results of that process. Other examples of logical uncertainty: not knowing if 19483 is prime, not knowing whether 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 is even, not knowing if 1/1/2000 was a Monday, etc. The bottleneck in these cases isn’t missing data, but rather missing computation - you haven’t yet exerted the required energy to figure it out, and it might not always be worth it with the tools at your disposal.

Let us call the process of “properly” managing logical uncertainty logical induction and reasoners that employ logical induction logical inductors.

Bayesian Insufficiency

Naively, one might assume that Bayesian reasoning, a general method for handling empirical uncertainty, might extend i...
Assessing Interest in Group Trip to Secure Panamanian Residency [Imminent Rules Change]
by Josh Jacobson — 2021-06-03T21:51:10.580Z

I’ve previously outlined many of the best options for securing a second residency, and some reasons you may want to do so.

Panama had one of the most unique, accessible, and attractive programs for doing so. Unfortunately, this program’s rules will be changing on August 20th, becoming much more restrictive, to the extent that I likely would not have mentioned the program under the new rules.

I’m interested in putting together a trip for EAs and Rationalists interested in securing Panamanian permanent residency, and in 5 years potentially citizenship, under the existing rules. I believe that there are some significant benefits to securing second citizenship, and to doing so under the existing Panamanian rules, together.[1]

Currently, I’d like to assess interest for this trip before taking further action. I previously estimated the citizenship process to cost $2k-4.2k all-in[2] (not including flights or lodging). Other information, such as time investment needed and the feasibility of success on this tight timeline, I will work to further determine if there’s sufficient interest.[3]

If I put together a trip, I expect to engage a lawyer to lead us through the process, interface with that lawyer to provide clear step by step requirements to each person, coordinate so that there are some cost savings, and help secure flights and lodging.

If you have any interest in this potential trip to secure Panamanian residency, please fill out this brief linked Google Form.

Footnotes

In particular, the cost per person will be lower if pursuing citizenship with someone else. ↩︎

I will not be highly surprised if costs have risen due to an influx of interest prior to the rules changing. ↩︎

I feel 90% confident that, on average, time investment per person will be less than 10 hours (at home) of pre-work, 8 hours in Panama actively doing things, and 10 days in Panama total (including e.g. waiting time during which work could be done remotely). There is significant possibility the time requirements are far below these (e.g. 3 hours of pre-work, 2 hours actively doing things in Panama, 3 days in-country). ↩︎
Rogue AGI Embodies Valuable Intellectual Property
by Mark Xu — 2021-06-03T20:37:30.805Z

This post was written by Mark Xu based on interviews with Carl Shulman. It was paid for by Open Philanthropy but is not representative of their views.

Summary:

Rogue AGI has access to its embodied IP.

This IP will be worth a moderate fraction of the total value of the market created by models approximately as powerful as the rogue AGI.

If investors realize that most economic output will eventually come from AGI, as in slow takeoff scenarios, then these markets will involve moderate fractions of the world’s wealth.

Therefore, rogue AGI will embody IP worth a non-trivial fraction of the world’s wealth and potentially have a correspondingly large influence on the world.

A naive story for how humanity goes extinct from AI: Alpha Inc. spends a trillion dollars to create Alice the AGI. Alice escapes from whatever oversight mechanisms were employed to ensure alignment by uploading a copy of itself onto the internet. Alice does not have to pay an alignment tax, and so outcompetes Alpha and takes over the world.

On its face, this story contains some shaky arguments. In particular, Alpha is initially going to have 100x-1,000,000x more resources than Alice. Even if Alice grows its resources faster, the alignment tax would have to be very large for Alice to end up with control of a substantial fraction of the world’s resources.

As an analogy, imagine that an employee of a trillion-dollar hedge fund, which trades based on proprietary strategies, goes rogue. This employee has 100 million dollars, approximately 10,000x fewer resources than the hedge fund. Even if the employee engaged in unethical business practices to achieve a 2x higher yearly growth rate than their former employer, it would take 13 years for them to have a similar amount of capital.

However, the amount of resources the rogue hedge fund employee has is not equivalent to the amount of money the employee has. The value of a hedge fund is not just the amount of money they have, but rather their ability to outperform the market, of which trading strategies and money are two significant components. An employee that knows the proprietary strategies thus can carry a significant fraction of the fund’s total wealth, perhaps closer to 10% than 0.01%. In this view, the primary value the employee has is their former employer’s trading high-performing strategies; knowledge they can potentially sell to other hedge funds....
Covid 6/3: No News is Good News
by Zvi — 2021-06-03T16:50:01.085Z

Infections and deaths continue to decline. There is no sign that the change in mask policy or anything else is going to blunt that, or that the control system is attempting to reassert itself. We’re winning.

If you’re reading for ‘news you can use’ there isn’t any beyond ‘news is good.’ It’s safe to relax.

That does not mean that we’ve won quite yet. That will take time, and there’s the danger of new variants being able to spread sufficiently well among the unvaccinated to give us another scare, or potentially a future variant could be a threat to the vaccinated and we might not respond in time. It could happen. I don’t think it is likely.

Rest assured the world has plenty of other problems. I won’t be talking about them here and now, but there was plenty to fret before Covid-19, and there will be plenty after Covid-19.

There’s also the continuing issue of the lab leak hypothesis, the ways this has been handled, and the question of how to prevent future events of that type even if this turns out not to have been one of them. I’m not going to address that this week, but likely will address it again in the near future. On reflection getting this right seems important, but I am not in a place to do that today.

In the meantime, let’s run the numbers.

The Numbers

Predictions

Prediction from last week: Positivity rate of 2.2% (down 0.3%) and deaths fall by 9%.

Result: Positivity rate of 2.1%, deaths fall by 14%.

Prediction for next week: Positivity rate of 1.8% (down 0.3%), deaths fall by 12%.

Straightforward enough.

Deaths

I removed 500 deaths from Maryland since that was clearly a backlog of previous cases. That put us ahead of the path I projected, which was a good result but on reflection was also me being slightly too pessimistic. Steady declines across the board.

Date	WEST	MIDWEST	SOUTH	NORTHEAST	TOTAL
Apr 15-Apr 21	883	987	1747	1168	4785
Apr 22-Apr 28	752	1173	1609	1110	4644
Apr 29-May 5	943	1220	1440	971	4574
May 6-May 12	826	1069	1392	855	4142
May 13-May 19	592	1194	1277	811	3874
May 20-May 26	615	948	1279	631	3473
May 27-June 2	527	838	1170	456	2991

Cases

I want to believe that these numbers are real, with dramatic declines everywhere but in the West. The state numbers look like what you’d expect to see if it was real, with California being one of the few places that got worse rather than better. This is such an insanely great result, to the extent that I have doubts ...
Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence announces 1,75 trillion parameters model, Wu Dao 2.0
by Ozyrus — 2021-06-03T12:07:42.687Z
Link: https://www.engadget.com/chinas-gigantic-multi-modal-ai-is-no-one-trick-pony-211414388.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly90am91cm5hbC5ydS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAExKMW-Coi1CpizLqS1V-jZlKdIJulQ3Vpu_B9SaulPtn0jdO7rRVnAI7s3j70a-WiF8GKX3gfmz57-3xC1eUNA-91QhAV7ovqY_xEwmjtz6HsL2E7YKln_oAWDQXIDQtSS-AiIhYsgcYszCnnaAzcHANk94bLc8shmuGn2QigvG

BAAI researchers demonstrated Wu Dao's abilities to perform natural language processing, text generation, image recognition, and image generation tasks during the lab's annual conference on Tuesday. The model can not only write essays, poems and couplets in traditional Chinese, it can both generate alt text based off of a static image and generate nearly photorealistic images based on natural language descriptions. Wu Dao also showed off its ability to power virtual idols (with a little help from Microsoft-spinoff XiaoIce) and predict the 3D structures of proteins like AlphaFold.

How big of a deal is that? Seems huge. Bigger than switch transformers and 10x bigger than GPT-3.