trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Incorporating Justice Theory into Decision Theory
by StrivingForLegibility — 2024-01-21T19:17:11.653Z

When someone wrongs us, how should we respond? We want to discourage this behavior, so that others find it in their interest to treat us well. And yet the goal should never be to "do something unpleasant to them", for its deterrent effect. I'm persuaded by Yudkowsky's take (source contains spoilers for Project Lawful, but it's here):

If at any point you're calculating how to pessimize a utility function, you're doing it wrong. If at any point you're thinking about how much somebody might get hurt by something, for a purpose other than avoiding doing that, you're doing it wrong.

In other words, when someone is wronged, we want to search over ways to repair the harm done to them and prevent similar harm from happening in the future, rather than searching over ways to harm the perpetrator in return. If we require that a person who harms another pay some or all of the costs involved in repairing that harm, that also helps to align their incentives and discourages people from inefficiently harming each other in the first place.

Restitution and Damages

Our legal systems have all sorts of tools for handling these situations, and I want to point to two of them: restitution and damages. Restitution covers cases where one party is enriched at another's expense. Damages cover situations where one party causes a loss or injury for another. Ideally, we'd like to make the wronged party at least as well-off as if they hadn't been wronged in the first place.

Sometimes, a wronged party can be made whole. If SpaceX drops a rocket on my car, there's an amount of money they could pay me where I feel like my costs have been covered. If SpaceX drops a rocket on an irreplaceable work of art or important landmark, there's no amount of money that can make the affected parties whole. Not that they shouldn't pay compensation and do their best to repair the harm done anyway. But some losses are irreversible, like the loss of something irreplaceable. And some losses are reversible, like the financial loss of a replaceable car and the costs associated with replacing it.

In a previous post, we looked at a couple of example games, where if Alice treats "Bob Defecting while Alice Cooperates" as creating a debt between them, she can employ a policy which incentivizes Bob to Cooperate and receive a fair share of the socially optimal outcome. And if Bob employs the same policy, this stab...
Deliberate Dysentery: Q&A about Human Challenge Trials
by Niko_McCarty — 2024-01-21T19:05:35.754Z
Link: https://www.asimov.press/p/human-challenge-trials

Introduction

The intentional infection of human beings with pathogens under study has

been going on for centuries

. In 1796, an English physician named Edward Jenner inoculated an 8-year-old boy against smallpox with cowpox lesions he retrieved from the hands of a dairymaid. Today, refined versions of these human challenge studies have become standard practice in testing vaccines for vector-borne diseases (e.g., yellow fever, malaria, and dengue), evaluating new drugs or treatments, and studying pathogenesis, the process by which a disease develops.
In the centuries since Jenner’s experiments, scientists have developed a microbiological understanding of infectious diseases, along with methods to safely and reliably induce them. Human challenge trials were an

indispensable part of the development

of the malaria vaccine, R21/Matrix-M, endorsed by the World Health Organization last October. That particular vaccine is expected to save millions of lives.

But for all of their benefits, human challenge trials have their drawbacks. Beyond how they highlight that the vast majority of vaccine candidates fail, challenge trials are difficult to recruit for, participants are often underpaid, and their overall impact is hard to quantify.

The following is an interview with Jake Eberts, communications director at

1Day Sooner,

a non-profit that advocates for people’s right to voluntarily participate in human challenge studies. Jake himself has participated in both Zika and Shigella challenge trials.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Interview

Asimov Press: Challenge trials date back hundreds of years, but have become much more common in the past several decades. A

2022 survey

identified 284 human challenge trials that have been conducted since 1980. The number of challenge trials almost doubled from the 2000s to the 2010s. Why are challenge trials becoming more popular?

Jake Eberts: I would credit their rising popularity to two things: ethical reforms and perhaps a snowball effect as they became established for certain diseases like malaria. The ethics reforms in the United States came after a

syphilis study in African-American men

in Tuskegee between 1932 and 1972 caused widespread backlash. Scientists studied black men infected with syphilis for several decades while withholding known treatments. That then led to the

Belmont Report

, in 1979, w...
When Does Altruism Strengthen Altruism?
by jefftk — 2024-01-21T18:50:05.424Z

Joey Savoie recently wrote that

Altruism
Sharpens Altruism:

I think many EAs have a unique view about how one altruistic action
affects the next altruistic action, something like altruism is
powerful in terms of its impact, and altruistic acts take
time/energy/willpower; thus, it's better to conserve your resources
for these topmost important altruistic actions (e.g., career choice)
and not sweat it for the other actions.

However, I think this is a pretty simplified and incorrect model that
leads to the wrong choices being taken. I wholeheartedly agree that
certain actions constitute a huge % of your impact. In my case, I do
expect my career/job (currently running Charity Entrepreneurship) will
be more than 90% of my lifetime impact. But I have a different view on
what this means for altruism outside of career choices. I think that
being altruistic in other actions not only does not decrease my
altruism on the big choices but actually galvanizes them and
increases the odds of me making an altruistic choice on the choices
that really matter.

(more...)

How motivation works varies a lot between people, but I think both of
these models have elements of truth and elements where they lead
people in less helpful directions, mostly depending on their current
situation.

An analogy: say you need to carry important heavy things. If you only
rarely need to do this, then an approach of 'conserving' your strength
by avoiding carrying anything but the most important things would work
terribly: your strength grows as you use it. You'd do much better to
often carry unimportant heavy things, growing stronger, so that when
it's important you're in good shape.

On the other hand, if you're carrying important heavy things most of
the day and are about as strong as you're going to get, carrying
additional unimportant ones can cut into your ability to carry the
important ones. And if you overload yourself you can get injured,
possibly severely.

This is still a pretty simplified model, and we don't know that
capacity for altruism functions analogously to muscle strength, but I
do think it fits observations pretty well. Most of us probably
know people who (or ourselves have):

Dove into altruism, picked up a bunch of new habits (ex:
volunteering, donating blood, donating money, veganism, frugality,
tutoring, composting, switching jobs, avo

...
A Shutdown Problem Proposal
by johnswentworth — 2024-01-21T18:12:48.664Z

Goal

First things first: this is not (yet) aimed at solving the whole corrigibility problem, or even the whole shutdown problem.

The main thing this proposal is intended to do is to get past the barriers MIRI found in their old

work on the shutdown problem

. In particular, in a toy problem basically-identical to the one MIRI used, we want an agent which:

Does not want to manipulate the shutdown button
Does respond to the shutdown button
Does want to make any child-agents it creates responsive-but-not-manipulative to the shutdown button, recursively (i.e. including children-of-children etc)

If I understand correctly, this is roughly the combination of features which MIRI had the most trouble achieving simultaneously.

Both this proposal and the argument that it works are simple enough to be easy to extend. The main hope of this post is that other people will pick up the proposal and run with it, beyond the very simple toy problem considered here, to more complex problems (and more complex failure modes). Insofar as this proposal gets us past the previous barriers, we want to find out what the next barriers will be.

We will not be very formal here.

Setup

The agent takes actions in two timesteps. First, the agent takes an action (possibly given some observations). In between steps, a shutdown button is either pressed or not-pressed. Then, in the second timestep, the agent observes the button state (and possibly other things), then takes another action.

Note that each “action” could itself be a rather large composite of many subactions, like e.g. spinning up child-agents.

We’ll assume that we have two utility functions on hand: utility function u2 incentivizes shutdown, and utility function u1 provides non-shutdown behavior. Of course we don’t actually know how to construct two such utility functions; we’re using these assumptions because they’re basically the same assumptions used in the MIRI paper. (And MIRI presumably used these assumptions because they simplify the problem a lot, while still maintaining enough structure to demonstrate the barriers MIRI found.)

Very roughly speaking, we want the agent to follow utility function u1 until the shutdown button is pressed, and then follow u2. A little less roughly speaking, we want the agent to maintain optionality: if it were just to follow u1 until the shutdown button...
Is principled mass-outreach possible, for AGI X-risk?
by Nicholas / Heather Kross — 2024-01-21T17:45:32.951Z

Over a year ago, Rohin Shah wrote this, about people trying to slow or stop AGI development through mass public outreach about the dangers of AGI:

But it really doesn't seem great that my case for wide-scale outreach being good is "maybe if we create a mass delusion of incorrect beliefs that implies that AGI is risky, then we'll slow down, and the extra years of time will help". So overall my guess is that this is net negative.

(On my beliefs, which I acknowledge not everyone shares, expecting something better than "mass delusion of incorrect beliefs that implies that AGI is risky" if you do wide-scale outreach now is assuming your way out of reality.)

I agree much more with the second paragraph than the first one.

I think there's still an angle for that few have tried in a really public way. Namely, ignorance and asymmetry. (There is definitely a better term or two for what I'm about to describe, but I forgot it. Probably from Taleb or one of the SSC posts about people being cautious in seemingly-odd ways due to their boundedness.)

One Idea

A high percentage of voting-eligible people in the US... don't vote. An even higher percentage vote in only the presidential elections, or only some presidential elections. I'd bet a lot of money that most of these people aren't working under a Caplan-style non-voting logic, but instead under something like "I'm too busy" or "it doesn't matter to me / either way / from just my vote".

Many of these people, being politically disengaged, would not be well-informed about political issues (or even have strong and/or coherent values related to those issues). What I want to see is an empirical study that asks these people "are you aware of this?" and "does that awareness, in turn, factor into you not-voting?".

I think there's a world, which we might live in, where lots of non-voters believe something akin to "Why should I vote, if I'm clueless about it? Let the others handle this lmao, just like how the nice smart people somewhere make my bills come in."

In a relevant sense, I think there's an epistemically-legitimate and persuasive way to communicate "AGI labs are trying to build something smarter than humans, and you don't have to be an expert (or have much of a gears-level view of what's going on) to think this is scary. If our smartest experts still disagree on this, and the mistake-asymmetry is 'unnecessary slowdown VS human extinc...
Vacuum: Theory and Technologies
by nomagicpill — 2024-01-21T17:23:49.257Z
Link: https://210ethan.github.io/research/vacuum.html

Vacuum: Theory and Technologies

This post can be described as a general summary of John O'Hanlon's A User's Guide to Vacuum Technology (Goodreads, Amazon) without most of the math and models used. Some sections are completely skipped over: pump fluids, materials in vacuum, lubrication. O'Hanlon's book is a comprehensive resource on vacuum technology, especially as related to semiconductor processing. Other resources are used where O'Hanlon's textbook is lacking in quality or mention, i.e., it is not discussed in the book.

Contents

What is Pressure?
Gas Flow
What is Vacuum?
Vacuum Measurement
Outgassing
Flow (In and Out)
Low Vacuum Pumps
High Vacuum Pumps
Connections (Joints) and Valves
Leak Detection
Residual Gas Analysis
Vacuum Systems
See Also

What is Pressure?

Pressure is defined by the simple equation:

P=FA

where P is pressure, F is force, and A is the area the force is exerted on. A common experiment to show this equation in-action is laying on a bed of nails: if F (the person's body) stays constant and A (the area of the bed) is large, the pressure exerted on the skin will be minimized, preventing penetration. But if it's a single nail...

The ultimate torture devi... wait, this doesn't hurt! (source)

Now that pressure has been shown with an actual body (literally!) of mass, what about pressure that is invisible, e.g., air?

From the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, which is used to find the distribution of the speeds of particles within an ideal gas, the N2 molecule at a temperature of 0 °C moves at a probable speed of:

vp,N2=√2kBTmN2=400m/s

where kB is the Boltzmann constant, T is temperature, and m is the particle's mass.

The root-mean-squared speed is found by:

vrms,N2=√3kBTmN2=500m/s

Quite fast! If a human got hit by a car going the same speed (900 mph, 1500 kph), they would surely die. The difference is the size of the object. The N2 molecule has an insignificant mass of 4.6×1026 kg, resulting in a insignificant kinetic energy and not noticing its collisions. However, the number density of gases is extremely high, leading to many collisions and the experience of pressure. Number density can be found using the ideal gas law:

nV=NA×PRT

where NA is Avogadro's constant, R is the gas constant, and V is a unit volume (either 1 cm3 or 1 m3).

Two others terms need to be de...
Another Non-Anthropic Paradox: The Unsurprising Rareness of Rare Events
by Ape in the coat — 2024-01-21T15:58:14.236Z

This is the fifth post in my series on Anthropics. The previous one is Anthropical Paradoxes are Paradoxes of Probability Theory. The next one is Why Two Valid Answers Approach is not Enough for Sleeping Beauty.

Intoduction

As all anthropic problems are just probability theory problems, let's look deeper at probability theory itself. In my previous post I claimed that there are a lot of paradoxes[1] there, and people are just not paying attention to them, unless they become relevant to anthropical reasoning, and then these paradoxes are mistakenly attributed to anthropics. So let's highlight one more of such paradoxes, solve it fully in the realm of probability theory, and then in a future post, this result will turn out to be helpful for deconfusing an anthropical problem.

The Impossibility of Random Number Generators

It's well known that rare events are rare. If an event has 1/n probability then we should expect it to happen about 1 time per n tries. Thus, if you observe some event that you believe to be rare, it should be surprising, proportionate to the rarity of the event. If you keep observing that events you believe to be low probability keep happening, then it's a clear signal that something is wrong with your model of the world.

So far so good. But then, how are we not constantly mind blown by the existence of random number generators?

After all, it's a device that can produce events of arbitrary rarity at will. Toss a coin ten times and you get a sequence of Heads and Tails which has only 1/2^10 probability. Run python function randint(0, 1000) ten times and you've just witnessed an event that has only 1/1000^10 probability. And it's not because the function was called so many times that some of the outcomes happen to be low probability. Every call of a function leads to an improbable outcome! What is going on?

Intuition vs Math

Let's notice that some outcomes of random number generators intuitively surprise us much more than others. If you throw a coin ten times and you get a sequence of ten Heads - that would be more surprising than a sequence of HHTHTTHTTH. And yet, according to probability theory P(HHTHTTHTTH)=P(HHHHHHHHHH). So we shouldn't really be surprised more. Is it just a bug of our human psyche that some sequences feel more random to us than others? Surely it has to be! We are biased but math can't be[2].

On the...
Book review: Cuisine and Empire
by eukaryote — 2024-01-21T06:15:12.969Z
Link: https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2024/01/20/book-review-cuisine-and-empire/

People began cooking our food maybe two million years ago and have not stopped since. Cooking is almost a cultural universal. Bits of raw fruit or leaves or flesh are a rare occasional treat or garnish – we prefer our meals transformed. There are other millennia-old procedures we do to make raw ingredients into cooking: separating parts, drying, soaking, slicing, grinding, freezing, fermenting. We do all of this for good reason: Cooking makes food more calorically efficient and less dangerous. Other techniques contribute to this, or help preserve food over time. Also, it tastes good.

Cuisine and Empire by Rachel Laudan is an overview of human history by major cuisines – the kind of things people cooked and ate. It is not trying to be a history of cultures, agriculture, or nutrition, although it touches on all of these things incidentally, as well as some histories of things you might not expect, like identity and technology and philosophy.

Grains (plant seeds) and roots were the staples of most cuisines. They’re relatively calorically dense, storeable, and grow within a season.

Remote islands really had to make do with whatever early colonists brought with them. Not only did pre-Columbian Hawaii not have metal, they didn’t have clay to make pots with! They cooked stuff in pits.

Running in the background throughout a lot of this is the clock of domestication – with enough time and enough breeding you can make some really naturally-digestible varieties out of something you’d initially have to process to within an inch of its life. It takes time, quantity, and ideally knowledge and the ability to experiment with different strains to get better breeds.

Potatoes came out of the Andes and were eaten alongside quinoa. Early potato cuisines didn’t seem to eat a lot of whole or cut-up potatoes – they processed the shit out of them, chopping, drying or freeze-drying them, soaking them, reconstituting them. They had to do a lot of these because the potatoes weren’t as consumer-friendly as modern breeds – less digestible composition, more phytotoxins, etc.

As cities and societies caught on, so did wealth. Wealthy people all around the world started making “high cuisines” of highly-processed, calorically dense, tasty, rare, and fancifully prepared ingredients. Meat and oil and sweeteners and spices and alcohol and sauces. Palace cooks came together and developed elaborate phil...
Catalogue of POLITICO Reports and Other Cited Articles on Effective Altruism and AI Safety Connections in Washington, DC
by Evan_Gaensbauer — 2024-01-21T02:15:03.372Z
Link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xkoj5xFdHunLGMcaGoFOu3575x-8AMeJR0fQuCu4rE8/edit?usp=drivesdk

"Brendan Bordelon is a reporter for POLITICO on lobbying and influence in Washington, DC, by the tech industry. In late 2023, Bordelon began writing a series of articles investigating the influence of networks of non-profit/non-governmental organizations affiliated with the field of AI safety (AIS), as well as the effective altruism (EA) movement, as spearheaded by Open Philanthropy (OP), a foundation that is the primary financial backer of both causes. As of now, it’s not apparent that Bordelon or any other reporters from POLITICO have published more reports on the subject.

It’s not clear when in 2024 Bordelon’s reporting might return to a focus on influence and lobbying by the tech sector in general, beyond the auspices of just OP and EA. Additional reports from POLITICO on the subject will be added to the below list after they are published, as will be other articles or reports cited therein."
You can rack up massive amounts of data quickly by asking questions to all your friends 
by Neil  — 2024-01-21T01:27:21.701Z

tl;dr I asked 15 friends and acquaintances a question out of the blue because I was curious about something. I collected a massive amount of evidence, and it was fun, and I’m more agentic now than I was yesterday. Do it too.

Last night I randomly remembered that I had once asked a friend whether they would one-box or two-box in

Newcomb’s paradox

(which they had very little chance knowing about). I decided to ask another friend, and sent them a message. And then I thought "well we know what Bethany thinks of this, but now what about Steve?" And so I merrily copied and pasted my way toward contacting over 15 friends.

A few things this lets you do:

1. It’s an excuse to contact friends out of the blue.

2. You can calibrate yourself by writing down your predictions for each person’s response on fatebook.io before resolving the question (very tight feedback loop). This makes the whole process more worth your while, since you’re harvesting more interesting data than you otherwise would. (How well do you know your friends? Is there a hidden correlation between what you think of them and what their response is?)

3. I got to extract further data yet, because I then asked friends who had answered what they believed other friends would answer. So, I not only tested my own models of my friends, but my friends’ models of their friends as well! (Do one-boxers model two-boxers better than the opposite?)

4. This was an excuse to nerd out about decision theory to those who were interested. I got to send 15 Wikipedia links about a subject I think more people should know about.

5. The whole process was kind of distracting during the day since friends kept messaging me, but it would have been easy for me to bundle responses. Sending messages and replies in the first place takes very little time, so the opportunity cost for doing this is very low.

In summary, I suggest you add “ask a dozen friends about something I'm curious about” to your list of “things I’m allowed to do”. Often, what stops people from being agentic is not having a long enough list of things that they can, in fact, do.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to double down on this and create a whole bunch of formal surveys to continue cheerfully exploiting my friends in order to batter my map into the territory hard enough that it takes its shape.

PS: In cas...
Party for biomedical rejuvenation research: European parliament elections
by Iakov Dudinsky — 2024-01-21T00:35:59.636Z

Reasons to vote for this party on the upcoming elections:

Only 0.67% is needed to gain 1 Europarliament seat - Volt gained this seat in 2019
1 seat gives you ~10000 euros salary per month and sets huge precedent for transhumanist politician in the parliament
Party has already gained 0.5% on Berlin 2016 elections

The problem is that this post is not a part of any unified campaign - I am actually living in a country with no free elections (still will vote) and just wondering why there is no such a politician in the Europarliament