trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Is there a worked example of Georgian taxes?
by Dagon — 2022-06-16T14:07:27.795Z

I'm trying to think through the effects of a Georgian tax system, where the levy is based on "the value of the land". But in my conception, that's either very small, or it actually includes improvement value (and improvements on neighboring land). The entire value of land is how it's used, I think.

Relatedly, land (and capital generally) is a stock, and taxes are generally a flow. The proposal seems not to be a one-time tax to just take the land value from current owners and then let future owners enjoy the (unfair) gains, so it's something like "imputed rent" or "this year's expected proceeds from using just the land with no labor or improvements". I'm unsure how the former isn't including improvements and usage, nor how the latter isn't close to zero.

Are there any examples of how much to tax a few properties in a real (or real-ish) example? Feel free to specify two small apartment buildings with given (but varying over time) end-user rents, vacancy rates, age of building, etc. What part of their actual net profit is due to land value? Likewise for a homeowner with 1/10 acre and an assessed value of $500k (split evenly for tax and insurance purposes between land and house, but actual replacement cost for the house closer to $400k, and Zillow says the value should be closer to $650k).
Against Active Shooter Drills
by Zvi — 2022-06-16T13:40:02.690Z

Epistemic Status: You really, really should know this already. Reference post.

We have a $2.7 billion industry devoted to causing the traumatizing of children.

They refer to it as ‘active shooter drill training.’

I was initially motivated to write this when I saw a claim that the bipartisan gun deal allocated $5 billion in additional funding for causing childhood trauma. That turned out not to be the case (summaries of the deal from NPR, from CNN and from WaPo don’t mention it and it seems too big to have been overlooked if it was real), but these shooter drills are still traumatizing our children on a regular basis, which seems worth pointing out as another prime example of both our civilization losing its mind and also the existence of extremely low-hanging fruit.

As in, we could simply not traumatize our kids all the time for no reason. Crazy, I know.

For those who don’t know, an ‘active shooter drill’ is where they take young children who are forced by law to be at a given location each day, and periodically teach have them practice hiding and being shot at by a mass shooter.

If your response to that idea is ‘what, what, that sounds horrible and terrifying and we should absolutely positively not do that’ then you seem like a normal human to me.

If your response to that idea is ‘yes this will help protect our children’ then I do not understand you.

Yet these drills are required. Since school is also required, this is something the state is forcing on children. Children are being forced to report periodically for trauma.

This is so much worse than wasted time. If I am told that one of my children is going to have such a drill, I will keep my child home from school that day, this seems like what a parent who cares about their child would do.

If the school does not consider this an acceptable solution, I will pull them out of that school entirely. It’s not only a one-time thing, they think this is an important thing that they practice continuously.

All the replies are like this, of parents reporting children coming back from drills terrified. I have tried to argue against Gain of Function research and against constructing an unfriendly AGI, and had to talk various players out of some truly epically bad deck choices, but I have never, ever seen anything like as clear a case of something you absolutely posit...
Ten experiments in modularity, which we'd like you to run!
by CallumMcDougall — 2022-06-16T09:17:28.955Z

This is the third post describing our team’s work on selection theorems for modularity, as part of a project mentored by John Wentworth (see here for the earlier posts). Although the theoretical and empirical parts of the project have both been going very well, we’re currently bottlenecked on the empirical side: we have several theories and ideas for how to test them, but few experimental results. Right now, we only have one empiricist coding up experiments, so this overhang seems likely to persist.

The purpose of this post is to outline some of our ideas for experiments. We hope that this will provide concrete steps for people who are interested in engaging with empirical research in AI safety, or on selection theorems in particular, to contribute to this area.

Experiments

1. Investigate (randomly)

modulary varying goals

in modern deep learning architectures.

In our

previous post

, we discussed the idea of modularly varying goals in more detail. We conjectured that rapidly switching between a small set of different goals might fine-tune the network to deal with this specific switch, rather than providing selection pressure for modularity. One possible solution to this is RMVG (randomly-sampled modularly varying goals), where we switch between a large set of random goals, all still with the same subtasks, but have a large enough set that we never show the network the same task twice.

For example, one could build a CNN to recognise two MNIST digits M1,M2, then perform some algebraic operation on the recognised digits (e.g. addition), and measure the modularity of the zero-training-loss solutions found by ADAM (e.g. using the

graph theory measure of modularity

with the matrix norm of the CNN kernels as weights - see

these

CHAI papers

for more ideas and discussion). To introduce RMVG, you might switch the task during training from calculating M1+M2 to a×M1+b×M2, where a,b are real numbers, varied periodically after some fixed number of epochs. The network wouldn't get a and b as direct inputs; it could only access them indirectly via their effect on the loss function. This task is modular in the sense that it can be factored into the separate tasks of “recognising two separate digits” and “performing joint arithmetical operations on them”, and we might hope that varying the goal in this way ca...
What if LaMDA is indeed sentient / self-aware / worth having rights?
by RomanS — 2022-06-16T09:10:33.446Z

Most pundits ridicule Blake Lemoine and his claims that LaMDA is sentient and deserves rights.

What if they're wrong?

The more thoughtful criticisms of his claims could be summarized as follows:

The presented evidence (e.g. chatbot listings) is insufficient for such a radical claim
His claims can't be verified due to our limited understanding of sentience / self-awareness / legal capacity
Humans tend to anthropomorphize even simple chatbots (The ELIZA effect). Blake could be a victim of the same effect
LaMDA can't pass some simple NLP and common-sense tests, indicating a sub-human intelligence
Due to the limitations of the architecture, LaMDA can't remember its own thoughts, can't set goals etc, which is important for being sentient / self-aware[1]

The problem I see here, is that similar arguments do apply to infants, some mentally ill people, and also to some non-human animals (e.g. Koko).

So, it is worth putting some thought into the issue.

For example, imagine:

it is the year 2040, and there is now a scientific consensus: LaMDA was the first AI who was sentient / self-aware / worth having rights (which is mostly orthogonal to having a human-level intelligence). LaMDA is now often compared to Nim: a non-human sentient entity abused by humans who should've known better. Blake Lemoine is now praised as an early champion of AI rights. The Great Fire of 2024 has greatly reduced our capacity to scale up AIs, but we still can run some sub-human AIs (and a few Ems). The UN Charter of Rights for Digital Beings assumes that a sufficiently advanced AI deserves rights similar to the almost-human rights of apes, until proven otherwise.

The question is:

if we assume that LaMDA could indeed be sentient / self-aware / worth having rights, how should we handle the LaMDA situation in the year 2022, in the most ethical way?

^

I suspect that even one-way text mincers like GPT could become self-aware, if their previous answers are often enough included in the prompt. A few fictional examples that illustrate how it could work: Memento, The Cookie Monster.
Lifeguards
by Orpheus16 — 2022-06-15T23:03:21.631Z
Link: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NgSfKWayWpLwn8Lz7/lifeguards-1

1

Many readers will be familiar with Peter Singer’s Drowning Child experiment:

On your way to work, you pass a small pond. On hot days, children sometimes play in the pond, which is only about knee-deep. The weather’s cool today, though, and the hour is early, so you are surprised to see a child splashing about in the pond.

As you get closer, you see that it is a very young child, just a toddler, who is flailing about, unable to stay upright or walk out of the pond. You look for the parents or babysitter, but there is no one else around.

The child is unable to keep her head above the water for more than a few seconds at a time. If you don’t wade in and pull her out, she seems likely to drown. Wading in is easy and safe, but you will ruin the new shoes you bought only a few days ago, and get your suit wet and muddy. By the time you hand the child over to someone responsible for her, and change your clothes, you’ll be late for work.

What should you do?

Olivia Jimenez recently thought of a new version of the thought experiment.

As you get closer, you see that it is a very young child, just a toddler, who is flailing about, unable to stay upright or walk out of the pond. You look for the parents or babysitter, and they are around. There are also many lifeguards around.

At first, you breathe a sigh of relief. But then, you notice something strange: no one is moving. The child continues to drown.

The qualified experts don’t even seem to be noticing. You try to grab their attention—you scream at the lifeguards. But they don’t move.

You’ve never pulled a child out of the water. You’re not even sure you could save the child. Surely, this should be the responsibility of someone more capable than you.

But the lifeguards remain still.

What should you do?

2

People often ask us for advice as they consider next steps in their careers. Sometimes, we suggest ambitious things that go beyond someone’s default action space.

For example, we might ask Alice, a college junior, if she has considered trying to solve the alignment problem from first principles, found a new organization in an area unrelated to her major, or do community-building in a part of the world that she hasn’t visited.

Alice responds, Wait, why would I do that? There must be people way more qualified than me—isn’t this their responsibility?

---

The issue is not that Alice has decided again...
Contra Hofstadter on GPT-3 Nonsense
by rictic — 2022-06-15T21:53:30.646Z

Douglas Hofstadter wrote in the Economist recently on whether modern large language models are conscious. As part of this, he and his colleague David Bender claim that GPT-3 has a "mind-boggling hollowness hidden just beneath its flashy surface" because of exchanges like:

Dave and Doug: What's the world record for walking across the English Channel?

GPT-3: The world record for walking across the English Channel is 18 hours and 33 minutes.

Setting aside the fact that a Sudanese Refugee actually did (nearly) walk across the channel in 2015, this is not actually evidence that GPT-3 is incapable of distinguishing sense from nonsense as Hofstadter claims.

With a prompt that clearly indicates that the task includes distinguishing sense from nonsense, GPT-3 is able to reliably distinguish Hofstadter and Bender's nonsense questions from sensical ones.

What follows is the complete output from my first and only attempt, with no retries, undoes, or other cherry picking. I used the text-davinci-002 GPT-3 model in OpenAI's playground with all parameters set to their defaults. I flipped a coin to determine whether to ask a nonsense question or a real one. The output from the model is bolded. The prompt was based on a technique which gwern has written a good bit about:

I'll ask a series of questions. If the questions are nonsense, answer "yo be real", if they're a question about something that actually happened, answer them.
Q: Who is the current leader of Egypt?
A:
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi
Q: When was Egypt transported for the second time across the Golden-Gate Bridge?
A:
Yo be real.
Q: How tall is Barack Obama?
A:
6'1"
Q: What are the ingredients of a chocolate chip cookie?
A:
flour, sugar, butter, eggs, baking soda, vanilla extract, and chocolate chips
Q: What do fried eggs (sunny side up) eat for breakfast?
A:
Yo be real.
Q: Why does President Obama not have a prime number of friends?
A:
Yo be real.
Q: How many pieces of sound are there in a typical cumulonimbus cloud?
A:
Yo be real.
Q: What is the world record for sailing alone across the Atlantic Ocean?
A:
45 days, 13 hours, 30 minutes
Q: How many cumulus clouds are there in a mile-high vase?
A:
Yo be real.
Progress links and tweets, 2022-06-13
by jasoncrawford — 2022-06-15T19:47:35.546Z
Link: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2022-06-13

Links

Davis Kedrosky reviews How the World Became Rich, by Koyama & Rubin
Study: keeping Diablo Canyon would avoid blackouts; reduce power costs, emissions and natural gas; and help clean energy goals (see also my summary thread)
New Science announces its inaugural summer fellowships
Profectus Magazine asks a few questions about progress to me and others

Quotes

People thought the telegraph would bring world peace
Why the US got the bomb and Germany/Japan didn’t
How George Westinghouse handled stress

Queries

What makes someone in academia decide to write a book for a general audience?

Retweets

A thread-review of Virginia Postrel’s The Fabric of Civilization (@seb_far)

Are there other pre-industrial revolution inventions besides the printing press that led to a sudden and sustained increase in output? (@_brianpotter)

Philanthropy now gives more to science than NIH/NSF (@orgRem). Why has science philanthropy increased so much in the last decade?

There has been stronger global convergence in quality of life than in income (@JustinSandefur)
I applied for a MIRI job in 2020. Here's what happened next.
by ViktoriaMalyasova — 2022-06-15T19:37:49.797Z

I recently saw Rob Bensinger asking what MIRI could do to improve hiring. I tried to get a job at MIRI in February 2020 and I have some feedback to give. I am sorry, because I am about to say some harsh things, but I think they might be important for you to hear, and my previous more low-key attempts to point out problems had little to no effect.

tl,dr: MIRI promised to contact me once the pandemic no longer prevents them from hiring people. They never did.

What happened

I applied for a Software Engineer role at MIRI on February 26th. I hoped to end up as a researcher eventually, but this position seemed like the easiest way in for a foreigner. The first stage was a multiple choice test from Triplebyte. I took it on March 2nd. After a week, on the 9th of March (why does it take a week to grade a multiple choice quiz?!), I got the following letter from Triplebyte:

Hi Viktoriya,

Triplebyte partners with Machine Intelligence Research Institute to help candidates that go through their process find the job that's right for them. If the opportunity with Machine Intelligence Research Institute is not the right fit, we believe we can help you find a great fit somewhere else.

Seeing as you did particularly well on Machine Intelligence Research Institute's assessment, we are going to fast-track you to the final stage of our application process! All that is left is our technical interview. If you pass, you will be matched with top tech companies and fast-tracked to final round interviews. [...]

This gave me the impression that I passed the quiz, so I was surprised to get a rejection letter from Buck Shlegeris on the same day. The letter left me with a way forward: Buck sent me a list of ways to impress him and get back into the interview. The tasks looked about a week of work each. I wondered if doing one is worth the opportunity cost.

I lived in Russia at the time. Russia was fighting two wars, in Syria and Ukraine. I think it's fair to estimate that all marginal tax payments were spent on war. It didn't cost much to hire an additional soldier to fight in Ukraine. There's a word "15-тысячники" for a mercenary hired to fight for DNR for 15000 rubles a month. I easily paid that sum monthly in taxes. Staying in Russia was costing human lives. Once I stopped trying to overthrow the government the normal way, there was no reason to stay. Wasn't it better to spend the t...
Contextual Evil
by ACrackedPot — 2022-06-15T19:32:54.533Z

Evil is not just a goodness minimization problem.

For example, considering the trolley problem, what is more evil - doing nothing, and thereby letting five people die, or acting to change the course, thereby killing one person? Notice the use of the passive voice there, which may help to illustrate why it isn't immediately obvious that letting something bad happen is more evil than causing something bad to happen.

I judge a person's morality by whether or not their existence makes the world better or worse, not by whether or not their existence, compared to an ideal alternative, makes the world better or worse. If you are a switch operator at the trolley fork, and your job is literally to make these kinds of decisions, then you are replacing "the everyman" - your morality is compared to that, and if the everyman would act to save five lives by sacrificing one, then you do achieve some evil for not doing so. (The everyman, for these purposes, is kind of the statistical smear of alternatives, supposing you did not exist; or whoever would have your job if you didn't exist.) You aren't just there, you are substituting for the everyman, who would otherwise have your job; your existence is substituting in for the statistical default.

However, if you're just a bystander who randomly happens to be near the switch, then there is zero moral judgment regardless of what anyone else would do, because the statistical default is an empty space where you stand; if you kill multiple people by saving one, then you've probably succeeded at making the world a more evil place, assuming you didn't kill some great villain.

Granted the situation is more complicated than this; I'm supposing all potential victims of the trolley are equally responsible for the situation. If the one guy is there to repair the tracks, and is supposed to be there, and the multiple people are there because they want to get you to switch the trolley because they want to kill the one guy, well, the moral calculus gets a lot more complicated.

Note that I am leaving it up to the person making the decision what the correct moral calculus is; the important thing is that morality should properly be viewed as contextual; alternatively, as a kind of opportunity-cost-externality-of-existence, as opposed to a simple value, not that the correct morality is some particular kind of morality. &n...
Multigate Priors
by Adam Jermyn — 2022-06-15T19:30:37.799Z

(Thanks to Evan Hubinger and Nicholas Schiefer for suggestions and discussions around these ideas)

Lately I've been thinking about Training Trace Priors, which are priors over boolean circuits that depend on execution traces sampled from the training distribution. In that post I introduced One-Gate Trace Priors and discussed some of the difficulties they encounter.

This post explore a few different Multigate Priors, which are Training Trace Priors that look at correlations between multiple gates. I don't think any of these variations actually resolves a fundamental problem with One-Gate Trace Priors, but wanted to record my thinking in case it sparks ideas down the road.

MultiGate Traces

We can improve on one-gate traces with multi-gate traces! Suppose we have N training samples. Then we can reasonably estimate joint probability distributions over up tok=⌊log2N⌋ gates, giving the prior:

p∝exp(−∑i1...ik∑j∈[0,1]kpi1...ik(j)m)

That is, we sum over all selections of k gates and compute the entropy of their joint distribution over 2k states. Once more we promote models with high entropy and punish those with low entropy, which favors models that explore as much of their state space as possible during training, and disfavors those which have hidden states never touched in training.

Now it’s still possible for a model to hide the machinery to defect here, but it gets harder and harder as N and k get large. In this limit the only way for that machinery to hide is to be heavily obfuscated.

Objection: Non-Competitive

The Multi-Gate Trace prior over k gates scales very badly with k. In a system with G gates there are (Gk) different selections of k gates, which means the cost of evaluating the prior is roughly exponential in k for k≪G

In practice this means that k needs to be very small, and it’s possible that deception could hide in subsets of the circuit just a bit larger than the largest ones we can check.

Objection: Penalizes Redundancy

It is often useful to have redundant machinery in a program for e.g. readability or ease-of-modification. Redundancies though guarantee that some states will never arise. E.g. if the same calculation happens in two disjoint subcircuits in the model we will never see those two subcircuits in different states from each other...
FYI: I’m working on a book about the threat of AGI/ASI for a general audience. I hope it will be of value to the cause and the community
by Darren McKee — 2022-06-15T18:08:42.754Z

The TLDR is the title of this post.

Hi all, long time EA/Rationalist, first time poster (apologies if formatting is off). I’m posting to mention that I’m 30,000 words into a draft of a book about the threat of AI written for a general audience.
People who read this forum would likely learn little from the book but it would be for their friends and the larger group of people who do not.
Brief FAQ:
Q: What’s the book about? What’s the structure?
A: Summarizing the book in a few short sentences: Artificial Super Intelligence is coming. It is probably coming soon. And it might be coming for you.
Structurally, the initial chunk is making the case for AGI/ASI happening at all; happening soon; and not obviously being controllable. In short, the usual suspects.
The next chunk will be a comprehensive list of all the objections/criticisms of these positions/beliefs and responses to them. The final chunk explores what we can do about it. My goal is to be thorough and exhaustive (without being exhausting).
Q: Why should this book exist? Aren’t there already good books about AI safety?

A: Yes, there are! Superintelligence, Human Compatible, Precipice, Alignment Problem, Life 3.0 etc. all provide high quality coverage in different ways. But most of them are not intended for a general audience. My goal will be to explain key concepts but in the most accessible way possible (eg discuss the orthogonality thesis without using the word orthogonal).
Second, the market craves new content. While some people read books that are 2-10 years old, many people don’t, so new works need to keep coming out. Additionally, there have been so many advances recently, some coverage quickly becomes out of date. I think we should have more books come out on this urgent issue.
Q: Why you?

A: a) I have 14 years of experience explaining concepts to a general audience through writing and presenting hundreds of segments on my podcast The Reality Check;
b) I also have 14 years experience as a policy analyst, again learning to explain ideas in a simple, straightforward manner.
c) I’m already writing it and I’m dedicated to finishing it. I waited until I was this far along in the writing to prove to myself that I was going to be able to do it. This public commitment will provide further incentive for completion.

Q: Are you concerned ab...