trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Our compressed perception
by pchvykov — 2021-04-06T11:01:11.244Z

One of the most important and amazing feats that our brain learns to do in this complex world is to find compressed representations of the vast amounts data constantly streaming in through our various senses. As such, we may view many of the idiosyncrasies of our world-views and behaviors as side-effects of our individual habits for such compression. These habits depend on the actual objective patterns found in nature, as well as on our cultural and social context, which chooses to prioritize some patterns over others. A musician, for example, will tend to hear and be able to describe a sonata in much more detail than a lay-person, who may just categorize it as “classical music” and call it a day.

I intuitively think of it like this: if we represent the full space of actual sensory inputs as a continuous 2D space, then our brain finds some network or mesh of learned approximations that somehow covers this space (see pic). Then (unless we are in “curious learning mode”) any incoming sensation “snaps to” the nearest known point on this mesh, and the original input gets immediately forgotten. So when I see a brown wooden table with light blue stripes and four thick bent legs, all I will typically see is just “table,” immediately discarding all other sensory information.

This perception mesh will cover certain regions of the space of possible sensory inputs more densely than others, and some regions that we have never experienced may lack any coverage (read: lack any interpretation — like for Zen Koans). Over our life-time, this mesh may coarsen as we find more and more efficient ways to compress our experiences into just a few facts that actually matter for our survival. This may then subjectively feel like “the world has become gray and boring where nothing new ever happens” — because we learn to efficiently ignore the little things that don’t kill us. By the same token, when we are climbing a mountain, where little things can actually kill us, then we quickly start caring about much more details of our surroundings, and notice that world became rich and beautiful.

Another cool idea this raises is that since these meshes of compressed representation never agree exactly for any two people (though some of the dominant cultural concepts may generally align), we tend to have different understanding of the same situation — we can literally “see different things” when ...
The Many Faces of Infra-Beliefs
by Diffractor — 2021-04-06T10:43:53.227Z

The notion of "hypothesis" isn't formalized well enough enough to pin down the precise type signature of hypotheses.

It could just be a probability distribution over all possible ways the world could be for all time, a third-person static view.

Or, it could be some sort of causal process, like a Markov chain, which specifies the dynamics for how states transition to other states. This would be a third-person dynamic view.

There are also first-person views. POMDP's (Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes), from classical reinforcement learning, would be a first-person dynamic view. These have type signature S×A→Δ(O×S) (S is the space of states, A is the space of actions, and O is the space of observations).

A first-person static view would be a function Π→Δ(A×O)ω that maps policies to probability distributions over histories. This is the land of policy-selection problems and UDT.

Accordingly, it seems mathematically fruitful to remain agnostic on the "right" type signature for a hypothesis, and instead focus on what conditions let us faithfully translate between the different possible type signatures. This post does not solve this issue, but it sheds considerable light on aspects of it.

For infra-Bayesianism, instead of using probability distributions, we instead wield infradistributions as our basic tool. A concrete example of an infradistribution is a set of probability distributions. Sets of probability distributions are extensively studied in the preexisting field of Imprecise Probability, though infradistributions are considerably more general than that. This added generality permits capturing and analyzing some phenomena which can't be studied with probability distributions (or sets of probability distributions) alone. However, infradistributions still retain many close parallels with classical probability theory, with analogues of updates, entropy, semidirect products, priors, and much more. The two previous posts Basic Inframeasure Theory and Less Basic Inframeasure Theory were the analogue of a measure theory textbook for this new setting, and hold up quite well in retrospect.

The post Belief Functions and Decision Theory attempted to construct the analogue of an environment in classical reinforcement learning. Our fundamental structure in that post was a "Belief Function" Θ&n...
Is there a mu-like term that means something like "why is this any of my business?"
by CraigMichael — 2021-04-06T07:47:20.516Z

[Context: mu is a way to respond to a question phrased in a yes or no way but that can't be answered with a yes or a no.]

I'll quickly try to explain my predicament.

I'm two episodes in to the HBO series Allen v. Farrow, a documentary about Woody Allen and Mia Farrow's relationship and Allen's relationship with Farrow's children.

I'm watching it because I subscribe to a film critic on YouTube, Rick Worley, who made a documentary By The Way, Woody Allen is Innocent, that I found very compelling. I thought the HBO series would be a good counter-balance to see what the other side would say.

Tonight I found myself thinking, "why is it important that I have an opinion one way or another on this?" The knee-jerk responses that came to mind were along the lines of "yes, this is totally a waste of your time" or "there are forms of entertainment with higher RoI."

Perhaps that's true, but another side of my brain retorted with "hey remember when you saw Gideon's Trumpet (the documentary about the events surrounding Gideon v. Wainwright) that you drop in conversation all the time now when you're discussing someone going to trial who looks guilty as sin but then looks completely different once they have access to a competent lawyer and other legal services?"

I started thinking "of all the high-profile controversial scandals, why are any of them my business?" In some cases, perhaps there are things I could do to change the outcome or there may be ways that the outcome would affect me by way of a legal or cultural precedents. In many cases there aren't or the reasons for concern aren't clear.

I believe this situation and others like it may be improved if there was a term or phrase for them that could be invoked when, specifically, a scandal is framed apriori in a way that implies it's really important for you to understand and have an opinion on it when the default position should be "it's none of my business." So when someone brought up something as complicated as the Allen v. Farrow story you could respond "etaoin shrdlu?"* which would mean something like (1) what obligation do I have to thoroughly investigate the claims being made to the point that I have very little doubt about my conclusions? (2) by what right am I being obligated to have an opinion on them? and (3) what is the expected benefit to me or society from (1) and (2)? This would then shift the responsi...
An Introduction to A Crackpot Physics
by ACrackedPot — 2021-04-05T23:59:12.888Z

I imagine the first two questions a reader might ask, upon coming across the basic ideas I'm going to be writing here, are, respectively, "Why would I want to read this?" and "Why are you bothering to write this?" So I will begin by answering those questions.

For the question of why someone would want to read this - well, personally, I enjoy reading other people's crackpot ideas, and trying to understand them. My hope is that I am not alone in this, and that other people enjoy the experience. If you don't want to read a crackpot's physics, then none of this is really for you, and that's fine.

For the question of why I am writing it, well, first, I enjoy other people's crackpot ideas, so I write it for the same reason anybody writes anything at all. But also, I really do, legitimately, think all of this is correct. I'm a self-aware crackpot, but I am really a crackpot. (And if I happen to be correct, I'm still a crackpot.)

The next question, I expect, is "Okay, so what's your crackpot physics idea?" And this question is a lot harder to answer, because, to a significant extent, I'm going to be spending a lot of time describing an idea that isn't actually the crackpot idea I have. I don't know how to explain the crackpot idea that I have. "The universe is a fractal" is an accurate description of the idea, but not actually -the- idea.

It's a boring idea, when you get right down to it, which makes it very frustrating how difficult the idea is to express. A lot of the difficulty comes down to the fact that the most natural representation for the ideas use different abstractions than the common ones in physics, so I have to justify those abstractions before I can even start on the ideas themselves.

So let's get started.

Acceleration as Rotation

Start with two lengths of distance from a planet's surface, such that in a flat space-time, A and B are of equal length, where A is closer to the planet's surface than B. Suppose instead we are viewing these two lengths from a great distance away, such that the effect of the planet's gravity on us is negligible; from our observations, the two lengths are equal, by which I mean that light moves across A in the same time, from our perspective, that it takes for that light to move across B.

In General Relativity, A is, from a more local perspective, longer than B. ...
I'm from a parallel Earth with much higher coordination: AMA
by Ben Pace — 2021-04-05T22:09:24.033Z

Related: My April Fools Day Confession; Inadequate Equilibria

On April 1, Eliezer Yudkowsky ran a dath ilan AMA on Facebook:

I came from a parallel Earth that successfully coordinated around maintaining a higher level of ability to solve coordination problems. Ask me anything.

With Eliezer’s blessing, I’ve quoted the resultant discussion below, leaving out threads that were repeats or didn’t go anywhere.

Guy Srinivasan: Did parallel Earth coordinate around a specific day each year for everyone to play with falsity?

Eliezer Yudkowsky: Not a specific day as such. There's very much a tradition of leading somebody down a garden path, and also of pretending to be led down the garden path — similar to the "MIRI pomodoro: 25 minutes of work followed by 5 minutes of trolling" — but there's a verbal handshake you're supposed to give at the end to prevent that from going out of control and any tragic errors.

Emielle Potgieter: What is parallel earth's biggest problem, then?

[...]

Eliezer Yudkowsky: I'd assume that Artificial General Intelligence is being seen by the Senior Very Serious People as a big problem, given the degree to which nobody ever talked about it, how relatively slow computing progress was compared to here, and how my general education just happened to prepare me to make a ton of correct inferences about it as soon as anybody mentioned the possibility to me. They claim to you it's about hypothetical aliens and economic dysfunction scenarios, but boy howdy do you get a lot of Orthogonality and Goodhart's Curse in the water supply.

Stācia Gāel: Why did you come here?

Jean-Baptiste Clemens: @Stācia Gāel Everyone on parallel Earth was attempting to meet for lunch in the absence of communication and Eliezer was wrong about the Schelling point.

[...]

Eliezer Yudkowsky: No clue, then or ever.

Erica Edelman: How do you transition babies into job holding adults?

Eliezer Yudkowsky: That covers a lot of territory! But if I tried to zoom in at the most general level of difference, there's very much an understanding among Very Serious People that if you require anything to get access to a job (like a credential) that is difficult to get or has finite supply, people can burn the whole surplus value of the job to them in order to get it, even if that thing is of lower value to the employer. In other words, they would recognize "occupational licensing" or college as a

...
Risk Budgets vs. Basic Decision Theory
by Vlad Firoiu — 2021-04-05T21:55:51.278Z

I've been wondering about the decision theory of having a "risk profile", e.g. "200 microcovids per week", and at least under some simplistic but not unreasonable assumptions I don't think it makes sense.
Let's say we just have one activity A which yields some fixed positive utility U but has a certain probability p of giving you covid which has a large cost C. Then the expected utility of A is simply E = U - pC. If E > 0 then you should just do A as much as possible, otherwise not at all. There's no cap on total covid risk. (OTOH the "risk profile" method would recommend doing A about 200e-6/p times.)
One counterargument is that the positive utilities don't add up linearly. That is, just because going to a restaurant once is nice, doesn't mean you'd enjoy constantly being in one. But I think this is a red herring -- you could instead imagine a variety of different activities (movies, dating, eating out, parties, etc.) that do add up more or less linearly. You could also just be the type of person who gets the same enjoyment from eating out every day. Either way, the issue of "where does microcovid budget come from?" remains.
I think the crux of the matter is that (consequentialist) decision theory is Markovian. When you make a decision, you only care about the state you're in right now, not in how you got there. So whether or not you did some risky activity yesterday, unless it actually gave you covid, there's no effect on your current state, and so therefore it shouldn't affect your current and future decisions about whether to engage in something risky.
To be clear, my goal isn't to abandon risk budgets -- they seem very sensible to me, and I don't have a good replacement. But, I'd like to know if there is some better model which captures the intuition around risk budgets (or an error in the above reasoning).
Historical Examples of Opposition to Technological Progress
by chw — 2021-04-05T21:26:43.687Z

This is a brief overview of historical examples of public opposition to technological progress.

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Luddites

Luddism was an English movement active between 1811-1816.
“The Luddite movement emerged during the harsh economic climate of the Napoleonic Wars, which saw a rise of difficult working conditions in the new textile factories. Luddites objected primarily to the rising popularity of automated textile equipment, threatening the jobs and livelihoods of skilled workers as this technology allowed them to be replaced by cheaper and less skilled workers.” (

Wikipedia

)
Modern-day people misconceive Luddites as anti-technologists. However, economic concerns motivated their actions, not opposition to the machines themselves.
The Luddite movement primarily consisted of skilled artisans who couldn’t compete with the lower-paid, less-skilled workers in factories and textile mills.
The movement mostly destroyed mills, pieces of machinery, and industrial equipment in textile mills, but an agricultural variant of the movement also destroyed threshing machines in the 1930s.
Luddites wanted manufacturing jobs to go to skilled, well-paid workers rather than less-skilled, low-paid workers. They attacked machines as a way of putting pressure on their employer to increase their wages and working conditions.

Neo-Luddites

Neo-Luddism is a philosophy opposing forms of modern technology.
It’s not a clear, coalesced movement, but refers to groups of people who oppose modern technologies for various reasons. While some people abstain from using technology and advocate for simpler ways of life, others actively try to stop progress and sabotage

technological development

.
Neo-Luddism is also

gaining

credibility

as an alternative to climate change, environmental degradation, social-media addictions, and “smart-tech utopianism”.

Anarcho-primitivism

“Anarcho-primitivism is a political ideology that advocates a return to non-"civilized" ways of life through deindustrialization, abolition of the division of labor or specialization and abandonment of large-scale organization technologies. Anarcho-primitivists critique the origins and progress of the Industrial Revolution and industrial society. According to anarcho-primitivism, the shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural subsistence during the Neolithic Revolution gave rise to coercion, social alienation and social stratification.”

...
Noise Pollution and Cognition
by chw — 2021-04-05T21:26:43.619Z

Overview

Noise stress affects many different cognitive functions, including attention, memory, reaction times, executive function, decision-making.
Noise affects productivity.

Dean 2020

randomized exposure to engine noise during a textile training course at a government training facility. He found that “an increase of 10 dB reduces productivity by approximately 5%.”

Personality type influences how noise affects one’s cognition—introverts are more sensitive to noise. However, when performing low to moderately complex tasks, they may benefit from listening to soft music.

Mohammed et al. (2018)

showed that extraverts work more quickly in the presence of noise than introverts. Introverts’ levels of attention, tolerance, and focus also decrease more than extroverts when exposed to higher noise levels.

Gonzalez and Aiello 2019

show that for people who get bored easily and need more frequent external stimulation, music impairs their cognition. Contrastingly, for people who need low external stimulation, they can benefit from listening to soft music while completing low to moderately complex tasks.

Generally, white noise can improve short-term concentration and cognition in specific (e.g. loud/distracting) environments. However, white noise should not be played for extended periods of time.

Othman et. al (2019)

measured young adults' responses to auditory stimuli when exposed to different background noise levels using an fMRI machine. The study found that auditory and working memory (AWM) was significantly enhanced under a 10 and 5 signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio. (When exposed to an auditory stimuli at 60 dB, the optimal background noise level was around 50-55 dB).

In a

study

of eighty participants, the half of the participants listening to white noise demonstrated superior recall accuracy. White noise may also

increase the speed

of arithmetic computations and

help children

with attention deficit disorders.
Chronic low levels of noise are

detrimental to human health

and can damage the auditory region of the brain. These effects have been observed in the

60-70 dB sound

pressure level range, which is common among white noise generators.
The effects of noises < 70 dB are unclear, but may follow an inverted-U relationship where mild levels of noise can be beneficial depending on the task at hand.

(see

Othman et. al (2019)

above)
In a study of

white noise’s effects on children’s cogn

...
Averting suffering with sentience throttlers (proposal) 
by Quinn — 2021-04-05T10:54:09.755Z

Status: Originally written as the round two interview task for Center on Long-Term Risk's Summer Research Fellowship, but before it was finished I trashed it in favor of something under the Cooperative AI agenda. At this point it's a free idea, do whatever you want with it. Being an unfinished proposal, the quality bar of this post is not high.

Some history: I originally developed this idea as a plotline in a game I wrote in the summer of 2019, I only considered making it into a rigorous research program very recently. I find it odd that that I haven't found a literature on this, I asked some people who would probably know if it existed and they hadn't heard of it.

Written at CEEALAR

The problem termed “Suffering in AI Workers” (Gloor 2016) can be averted by sentience throttlers. Within scope for a summer fellowship is to write down a formalization of throttlers at a high level of abstraction, then follow it up with lower-level work about specific theories of sentience and specific AI architectures/paradigms.

What is the problem?

In the default outcome, astronomical amounts of subroutines will be spun up in pursuit of higher-level goals, whether those goals are aligned with the complexity of human value or aligned with paperclips. Without firm protections in place, these subroutines might experience some notion of suffering (Tomasik 2017).

Intervention

One way to prevent suffering is to prevent sentience. If it is the case that sentience “emerges” from intelligence, then one obvious way forward is to suppress the “emergent” part while retaining competitive intelligence. This is all a throttler is- it is some technology that constrains systems in this way.

In the spirit of anticipating, legitimizing, and fulfilling governance demands (Critch 2020) (though substituting “governance” demands with “moral” demands), it makes sense to work on anticipating and legitimizing before fulfilling. This will first involve work at a level of abstraction that proposes the construction of a function that consumes a theory of sentience and something mind-like as input and produces a specification for a safe (defined as not tending toward sentience) but competitive implementation as output. As a computer scientist and not a neuroscientist, I’m interested in focusing on non-biological applications of throttlers, but I do expect to quantify over all minds at this first level of abstr...
Ranked Choice Voting is Arbitrarily Bad
by AppliedDivinityStudies — 2021-04-05T06:44:51.142Z

Cross posting from https://applieddivinitystudies.com/2020/09/02/ranked-bad/

Recently, there's been headway in adopting Ranked-Choice Voting, used by several states in the 2020 US Democratic presidential primaries and to be adopted by New York City in 2021.

For all its virtues, Ranked Choice Voting contains a number of risks, largely due to tactical voting and democratic illegitimacy.

First, a quick primer on existing systems.

The one we're used to is called Plurality Voting, and is by far the simplest: Each voter casts a vote for one candidate, and the candidate with the most votes wins.

Though clear and intuitive, there are several problems best illustrated by example:

Tactical Voting for "Realistic Candidates"
Say public polls report:

45% of voters prefer Alice

45% of voters prefer Bob

10% of voters prefer Carol

No matter how strongly voters support Carol, on election day, they would rather vote for Alice or Bob than "waste" a vote on a candidate who won't win.

It's worth asking why Carol was polling so low in the first place, but a common explanation is perpetuation through a party system. If Alice and Bob's parties have won historically, the electorate may be locked into a perpetual two-party system, no matter how compelling a particular third-party candidate happens to be.

Loss of Popular Moderate Candidates
In another race, voters have real preferences such that:

50% of voters prefer Alice > Carol > Dave > Bob

50% of voters prefer Bob > Carol > Dave > Alice

Alice and Bob are both despised by half the population, yet one of them is guaranteed to win. Meanwhile, Carol has universal appeal, but would receive 0 votes in a plurality election, no matter how polarizing the other candidates are.

In a more extreme case, we might have:

25% of voters prefer Alice > Bob > Carol > Dave

25% of voters prefer Bob > Alice > Carol > Dave

30% of voters prefer Dave > Alice > Carol > Bob

20% of voters prefer Carol > Alice > Bob > Dave

Alice is the clear intuitive choice, but according to plurality rules, Dave ends up winning despite being despised by 70% of the electorate.

Tactics in Ranked Choice Voting
In theory, these are precisely the problems solved by RCV, but the general form I've outlined above can still apply.

Given real preferences:

33% of voters prefer Alice > Bob > Dave > Carol

33% of voters prefer Bob

...