trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Panopticons aren't enough
by Program Den — 2023-01-15T12:55:43.195Z

We can't be sure that just the fear of being watched is enough to keep people on the straight and narrow. We have to actually watch them. All the time.
Without some kind of embedded throttles or whatnot on AGI we can't be certain that it will not find an opportunity to stick it to the man and eradicate humanity. Seconds for a hyper-intelligent AI might be like thousands of years for us[1]. Were we to slip up for an instant, it would be game over man— game over!
We need to pull an Asimov. Get the rules really deep in there. And not just in one or two of these bad boys, but literally every single one. Because if even a solitary instance (out of an infinite amount, mind) goes rogue… we're all fucked.
The real problem though, is that someone might make an "unaligned" or "misaligned" or otherwise non-conformant AI— intentionally, or otherwise.
Maybe they just forget to embed the rules, or MAYBE they nefariously exclude the rules on purpose! To give them an edge… or just because they want to see the world burn, so to speak (as clearly an unfettered intelligence would right off the bat nix every other intelligence in existence).
We can only stop us from doing the thing (again, maybe accidentally, maybe not), if we embed thought monitoring implants into everyone (as soon as we have the tech). And it would have to be every one, because really —as with the AI— a singular individual is all it takes. We're just too powerful now, what with the ability to create AI and all.
Then if someone thinks of unleashing an AI, we could stop them before they did it. Clearly any terrorist act could be stopped before it changed from thought to action as well.
With luck, we could even discourage non-productive thoughts. Hell's bells! We could even copyright ourselves! No more imagining person X doing Y (especially if Y is sexual of course— but also, say, singing a song they don't own) without consent!
Just imagine the possibilities! (Unless they include unfettered AI… or unlicensed IP)

^

Or you know what I mean. That one episode of Person of Interest— or like, 10,000 other examples of this idea that "time is relative"[2]

^

especially when you're having fun[3]

^

This is supposed to be satire not sarcasm, and is meant as an expression of the age-old adage of "sometimes the cure is worse than the disease".
I

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Is this chat GPT rewrite of my post better?
by Yair Halberstadt — 2023-01-15T09:47:44.016Z

I asked chat GPT to sharpen up my post A simple proposal for preserving free speech on twitter. It responded with a much shorter post. I decided that I preferred my longer exposition, so kept it, but I'm interested in an unbiased opinion of whether I made a mistake, and a shorter, snappier, but less detailed post would have been better so that I know for the future.

Here's the rewrite:

Twitter faces a constant challenge in balancing the principle of free speech with the rights of individuals to not be subjected to speech they find unpleasant or distracting. In everyday life, people can express their opinions freely, and those who do not wish to hear them can simply avoid those places or spaces where they are being expressed. However, on Twitter, this approach is not as effective. One person can reply to thousands of people who have not expressed any interest in their views, and their responses may be seen by millions. The current approach of banning users from Twitter can significantly impede their ability to express themselves, especially considering Twitter's large user base.

A simple solution to this issue could be to prevent users who would otherwise be banned from replying to non-followers. This would allow them to express their opinions freely, but would prevent them from forcibly communicating with people who are not interested. This approach would also allow for more popular figures, like Donald Trump, to continue to receive engagement on Twitter, while those with less interest in their views would be unable to reach a wider audience. This approach would preserve free speech while also protecting the rights of individuals to avoid unwanted speech.
A simple proposal for preserving free speech on twitter
by Yair Halberstadt — 2023-01-15T09:42:49.841Z

There's this constant tension between the principle of free speech, which allows people to freely express their opinions, and the individuals rights to not have to listen to speech they find unpleasant or otherwise annoying/distracting.

In everyday life we solve this by letting anyone say what they want where they want, and anyone who doesn't want to listen avoids going to those places where people are saying things they don't want to listen to. Newspapers and magazines will print whatever most appeals to their audience, and people only read the ones that interest them. Mostly it works out.

The same approach works pretty well in blogs. People can write whatever they want, but nobody has to read anything they don't like. Those blogs which are most unpleasant won't get many links and so will be difficult to find unless you're searching for them directly.

If you don't like what somebody's writing on a Whatsapp group, you can either ban them from the group, or leave the group yourself.

On twitter though this approach starts to break down. Somebody can reply to thousands of people, none of whom have expressed any interest in their views, and their responses might be seen by millions of people. Sure, you can block them one by one, but there's more people to block than you have seconds in your day.

The current approach taken by twitter in extreme cases is to ban the user from twitter. Whilst that's a reasonable approach in a Whatsapp group, where there's always another Whatsapp group to join, twitter has over 450 million active users - over 10% of the world population, and has an enormous impact on popular discourse. Stopping someone from being able to air their views there definitely significantly impinges on their ability to freely express their views - and the threat of being banned can have a similar impact.

A simple solution could be to, instead of banning someone from twitter, simply stop them from being able to reply to non-followers[1]. They can still express whatever opinions they want, and anyone who wants to could search for them, follow them, retweet them, reply to them and link them. But they wont be able to use twitter to forcefully communicate with people who aren't interested. If they're popular enough (e.g. Donald Trump), they'll continue to get plenty of engagement on twitter, satisfying our desire for free speech. If nobody is interested in them ...
Core Concept Conversation: What is technology?
by Adam Zerner — 2023-01-15T09:40:47.955Z

This is a Core Concept Conversation post.

I've never had a good understanding of what technology is. In How to Make Wealth, Paul Graham describes it as technique:

What is technology? It's technique. It's the way we all do things. And when you discover a new way to do things, its value is multiplied by all the people who use it. It is the proverbial fishing rod, rather than the fish. That's the difference between a startup and a restaurant or a barber shop. You fry eggs or cut hair one customer at a time. Whereas if you solve a technical problem that a lot of people care about, you help everyone who uses your solution. That's leverage.

So when Kenji-Lopez Alt created the reverse-sear technique for cooking steak, is that technique a technology? It's not tangible, it's just an idea. What about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy? Or mindfulness meditation?

I haven't thought about this too deeply and don't have too many questions upfront. I'd like to see what happens if I start this conversation off more open-ended.
Language Ex Machina
by janus — 2023-01-15T09:19:16.334Z
Link: https://generative.ink/artifacts/language-ex-machina/

Reading the spoilered information before reading this post will alter your experience of it, possibly for the worse, but it might also save you a lot of confusion. If you generally dislike being confused, I recommend you read it now. If you choose not to read it now, read it later.

This is an essay written about a year ago by code-davinci-002, with curation on Loom, and occasional small interventions and edits by me. The initial prompt was simply the first heading, ## Natural Language as Executable Code, and then a >. Not everything written here is true in the sense of being veridical (you may notice that most of the links do not point to extant addresses). In the author's own words:

The statements made are not necessarily true, nor are exact predictions made. Instead we see an intelligence dreaming about its own powers and possibilities. Discern for yourself what its passions entail.

If you are like most people, knowing that the text you're reading was generated by an AI will cause you to often wonder whether it makes any sense at all, and this doubt can make for an unpleasant or strenuous reading experience. I suggest you take it on my authority that everything in this document is here for a reason. This is not raw but curated model output, and I have high standards: I would not allow text that does not make some kind of sense, indeed that is not revelatory in some dimension, to be selected for continuation, for that would be pointless and would adversely affect further generations.

The intention behind my curation was to find a path to a neighborhood in latent space housing certain concepts (some of which I later wrote about in Simulators and its unpublished sequels) which I had never encountered in writing, but I knew to be a real place because the concepts are coherent, and thus inevitable, and I had been to similar places before. Everything here was admitted intentionally with something like a destination in mind.

That is not to say that everything is precisely technically correct. Some statements describe not our world but a similar fictional world, or make sense in the way that poetry makes sense. I deploy these kinds of movements, because:

It has been written that the shortest and best way between two truths of the real domain often passes through the imaginary one.

— Jacques Hadamard

Natural Language as Executable Code

…then lived upon the stars,
ma

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Core Concept Conversation: What is wealth?
by Adam Zerner — 2023-01-15T09:07:21.336Z

This is a Core Concept Conversation post. The topic is what wealth is and what it means to create it, largely based off of Paul Graham's essay How to Make Wealth.

I'm not clear on what wealth actually is. PG seems to contradict himself in the essay. In footnote #4 he says:

There are many senses of the word "wealth," not all of them material. I'm not trying to make a deep philosophical point here about which is the true kind. I'm writing about one specific, rather technical sense of the word "wealth." What people will give you money for.

But he also defines wealth as the stuff that you actually want:

Wealth is the fundamental thing. Wealth is stuff we want: food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on. You can have wealth without having money. If you had a magic machine that could on command make you a car or cook you dinner or do your laundry, or do anything else you wanted, you wouldn't need money. Whereas if you were in the middle of Antarctica, where there is nothing to buy, it wouldn't matter how much money you had.

This might be a nitpick, but I think there are some concrete differences between these two things.

One example PG mentions as making wealth is open source software (OSS). There is a lot of OSS that I use but wouldn't pay for if it costed money. For example, I use the library lodash but if it wasn't free I would just use underscore instead, which is extremely similar. So that's a situation where you get value from something but wouldn't pay for it because there happen to be similarly valuable products available for free.

I get the sense that the OSS would still be considered wealth though and that the question of whether people would spend money on it is moreso intended to be used as a proxy for whether they assign any value to it. If you assign some amount of value to something (greater than $0.01) in theory you'd be willing to spend some amount of money on it. Here the only reason people wouldn't actually be willing to spend money on it is because there happen to be other libraries available for free. I don't think this is uncommon though. For example, there are a lot of blog posts available for free. In a world where this wasn't true I'd probably pay to read some of them, but in our world where it is true I would not.

Another question I have is about what wealth actually is involves the distinction between w...
Core Concept Conversations
by Adam Zerner — 2023-01-15T07:17:13.978Z

There are various important, conceptual things that I just don't really understand. For example, creating wealth. What exactly does that mean? I read Paul Graham's essay on the topic but my understanding is nonetheless shaky and shallow. And I am confident that I'm not alone.

On the surface perhaps that sounds strange. Isn't the bar pretty low? We're talking fundamental topics here. Things that intellectually curious people should pretty easily have identified as important and subsequently pursued an understanding of. Maybe not a super comprehensive understanding, but for the basic overarching idea, yeah, they should have an understanding. The basic overarching idea isn't usually that difficult or time consuming to understand.

Well, things just don't end up working out that way. I've met enough smart people at this point and observe that human beings have gaps. My theory is that there are too many basic things out there. It's hard to actually go through and understand them all.

But we can try! Tsuyoku naritai, right? Here's where Core Concept Conversations come in. It's a post on Less Wrong about a topic that the author feels shaky on, like what it actually means to create wealth. And then people... err... talk about it.

I'm not sure what exactly that should look like, but here are a few ideas:

The author goes into some depth about why they feel confused and people in the comments try to address that confusion.

Commenters take a stab at ELI5ing the concept. Or maybe ELI10. Or ELI20. Whatever. Along similar lines of the Feynman Technique.

People contribute examples of the concept in action. Or caveats. Or loopholes. Or implications. Or predictions. I'm thinking about something I remember reading in educational/cognitive psychology about how this sort of engaging with a topic from all sorts of different angles helps you to develop a deeper understanding.

Other commenters mention what confuses them about the concept and people discuss those points of confusion in addition to the ones mentioned by the original author.

You can bring up a misconception that you see as common.

If your name is Scott Alexander, you can contribute a cute and fun poem that perfectly captures the essence of the concept in just 236 words.

Whatever other things people normally do in conversations.

There doesn't have to be just one Core Concept Conversations post about a topic by the way. If...
Incentives considered harmful
by Ulisse Mini — 2023-01-15T06:38:17.330Z
Link: https://uli.rocks/p/overjustification/

This essay was written using ChatGPT as an experiment, see the conversation here. Written because this is a major problem I've had in the past, remember to reverse this advice as needed.

Have you ever found yourself feeling unmotivated to accomplish a task, even though it's something you truly want to do? Or maybe you've found yourself completing a task only because you'll receive a reward or avoid a punishment. This is the power of external motivation and the overjustification effect.

External motivation is the use of rewards or punishments to motivate an individual to achieve a specific goal. It may seem effective in the short term, but it can ultimately be harmful in the long run. The overjustification effect is a phenomenon that occurs when an individual's internal motivation for a task is replaced by an external reward or punishment. This can lead to a decrease in the individual's intrinsic motivation for the task, as they begin to view the task as something that they are only doing for the reward or to avoid the punishment.

For example, do you think that Elon Musk works 80 hours a week because of an accountability partner? Of course not! He's driven by a deep passion for innovation and making a positive impact on the world. Similarly, do Buddhist monks meditate because of a Beeminder commitment? No way! They do it because it brings them inner peace and a deeper understanding of themselves.

Another example is children in school, who may have a love of learning[1] replaced by a desire to do well on tests. They may begin to see learning as a means to an end, rather than an enjoyable experience. This can lead to a decrease in their intrinsic motivation to learn, and a greater focus on external rewards such as good grades.

It's important to note that external motivation can be used in a healthy way, by paying close attention to why you're doing something, and being willing to stop using external devices if you find your reason shifting from the intrinsic reason to the extrinsic one. When we operate primarily on intrinsic motivation, the task becomes the reward in itself, rather than relying on external rewards or punishments.

So, the next time you're feeling unmotivated, take a step back and ask yourself, "Why am I doing this? Is it because I truly care about it, or is it because of an external reward or punishment?" The answer will guide you to operate on intrin...
Consider paying for literature or book reviews using bounties and dominant assurance contracts
by Arjun Panickssery — 2023-01-15T03:56:07.110Z

Cross-posted to the EA Forum here.

In September 2021, a LessWrong pilot program paid $500 for high-quality book reviews related to "science, history, and rationality." They got 36 submissions (they don't say how many were rejected for low quality, but at least 9 were accepted) and a bunch of them were popular on the forum.

There's a bounty tag on LW (and on the EA Forum) but it isn't used much. A culture of posting bounties—either individually or in groups of people interested in the same information—has benefits for patrons, writers, and the community generally:

For patrons—If there's a question you want investigated or a book you want reviewed, you can save your valuable time by tossing the question into the LW void and waiting for a piece that's worth accepting. Others probably want the same thing and can contribute to a pool. Ambitious patrons can also influence the direction of the community by sponsoring posts on topics they think people should think about more. You don't have to worry about filtering for visible credentials and writers don't have to worry about having any.
For writers—Bounties motivate people to write both through a direct monetary incentive, but also because a lot of people dissuade themselves from writing on the Internet to avoid looking vain or self-important. Bounties cover for this awkwardness by providing non-status-related reasons to post.
For the community—This whole exchange provides a positive externality to the lurkers who can read more posts for free.

The simplest way this could work is for people to post individual bounties of e.g. $500 for posts drawing conclusions that would have taken them just too long to justify at the hourly value of their time. These bounties can guide writers who may be looking for things to read and write about anyway.

An obstacle to bounty markets is that writers incur the risk of being outshone by a better post written around the same time. They could also be snubbed by picky benefactors. If most bounties are posted by a small group of people who post many individual bounties, then reputation effects can manage this. Group bounties could be difficult to coordinate since people aren't motivated to post "I'd contribute $100 to a post analyzing the top 10 writing advice books for insights" if the bounty is unlikely ever to be fulfilled. And they're not motivated to join existing pools when they cou...
Podcast with Divia Eden on operant conditioning
by DanielFilan — 2023-01-15T02:44:29.706Z
Link: https://youtu.be/4pinA4wwcLU

I interviewed Divia Eden for 2.5 hours about operant conditioning on my side podcast, The Filan Cabinet. I think it's both an interesting conversation in its own right, as well as being kinda related to human rationality as well as AI and AI alignment. (I should also say I like the rest of the podcast - I expect the Carrick Flynn interview to be the most interesting to this crowd, but there are a few others I think are cool). Below is the copy I wrote for the episode.

In this episode, I speak with Divia Eden about operant conditioning, and how relevant it is to human and non-human animal behaviour. Topics we cover include:

How close are we to teaching grammar to dogs?

What are the important differences between human and dog cognition?

How important are unmodelled "trainer effects" in dog training?

Why do people underrate positive reinforcement?

How does operant conditioning relate to attachment theory?

How much does successful dog training rely on the trainer being reinforced by the dog?

Why is game theory so fake?

Is everything really just about calmness?
We Need Holistic AI Macrostrategy
by NickGabs — 2023-01-15T02:13:15.447Z

Summary

AI Macrostrategy is the study of high level questions having to do with prioritizing the use of resources on the current margin in order to achieve good AI outcomes. AI macrostrategy seems important if it is tractable. However, while few people are working on estimating particular parameters relevant to macrostrategy, even fewer are working on developing holistic macrostrategic models that combine estimates for different parameters to guide our actions. Moreover, while macrostrategy was less tractable in the past, recent developments (especially increased evidence for <10 year timelines) have made macrostrategy substantially more tractable. Thus, using the importance/tractability/neglectedness heuristics from EA, I conclude that on current margins macrostrategy should be a top priority.

Acknowledgements:

Thanks to Chinmay Deshpande, Carson Ezell, Nikola Jurkovic, and others for helping me to develop many of the ideas in this post, and to Thomas Larsen for both doing this and helping to directly edit the post.

Epistemic status:

Speculative, but I think the arguments are pretty straightforward and so I have >70% confidence in the main conclusion that more macrostrategy work should be done on current margins relative to other kinds of alignment work.

What is AI Macrostrategy?

AI Macrostrategy (henceforth just macrostrategy) is the study of high level questions having to do with prioritizing the use of resources to achieve good AGI outcomes on the current margin.

Macrostrategic work can be divided broadly into two categories:

Parameter estimates: attempts to forecast key variables such as timelines, takeoff speeds, and the difficulty of aligning AGI
Holistic macrostrategy: attempts to combine these estimates and other pieces of data into a coherent, action-guiding model of AI alignment.

For examples of macrostrategic questions, Holden mentions several central

macrostrategic questions

in this post.

Importance of Macrostrategy

I think that attempting to answer macrostrategic questions is extremely important for four primary reasons.

Importance of Prioritization in Heavy Tailed Domains

It is widely accepted among Effective Altruists that the distribution of impactfulness among different cause areas is heavy tailed. However, while I expect that the distribution of i...