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Please excuse my naivety, would really like to hear from more knowledgable people about this.
I recently discovered a note-taking website called Roam which allows you to create pages, take bullet point notes in those pages, and use double brackets around phrases and words to create a new, doubly linked page. When you do this, you can see the all the connected pages in a visual; a graph where each node is a page. I think this tool is valuable because it allows me to externalize the connectedness of ideas and concepts with clarity.
I'm wondering why a tool like this hasn't been populari... (Read more)
In places where COVID-19 is already widespread, lockdowns may not be fully lifted until we have widespread vaccinations. It is unlikely we will have widespread vaccinations before 2021. It is therefore prudent to contingency for 8 months or more of lockdown.
If you're financially secure then now could be a great time to begin long-term projects like gardening, writing a novel, physical training or learning a new skill.
Is anyone else starting projects like this?
Alignment Newsletter is a weekly publication with recent content relevant to AI alignment around the world. Find all Alignment Newsletter resources here. In particular, you can look through this spreadsheet of all summaries that have ever been in the newsletter.
HIGHLIGHTS
AI Alignment Podcast: An Overview of Technical AI Alignment in 2018 and 2019 (Lucas Perry, Buck Shlegeris and Rohin Shah) (summarized by Rohin): This podcast with Buck and me is loosely structured around the review I wrote (AN #84), but with a lot more debate and delving into specific points of pessimism and optimism. I suspe... (Read more)
Without having read the transcript either, this sounds like it's focused on near-term issues with autonomous weapons, and not meant to be a statement about the longer-term role autonomous weapons systems might play in increasing X-risk.
How uniform is the neocortex?
The neocortex is the part of the human brain responsible for higher-order functions like sensory perception, cognition, and language, and has been hypothesized to be uniformly composed of general-purpose data-processing modules. What does the currently available evidence suggest about this hypothesis?
"How uniform is the neocortex?” is one of the background variables in my framework for AGI timelines. My aim for this post is not to present a complete argument for some view on this variable, so much as it is to:
- present some considerations I’ve encountered that she
And MuZero, which beats AlphaZero and which does not use symbolic search over a simulator of board states but internal search over hidden state and value estimates?
Neural networks, on the other hand, are famously bad at symbolic reasoning tasks, which may ultimately have some basis in the fact that probability does not extend logic.
Considering all the progress on graph and relational networks and inference and theorem-proving and whatnot, this statement is giving a lot of hostages to fortune.
Especially as your main account
Since my username contains a fish, I find it easier to not take myself too seriously.
If I can't start off a sequence about my research with a giant illustrated Balrog, am I even alive at that point?
Background: I started meditating with the app Headspace in 2017, and started using the app Waking Up this past month at the same time I started meditating a lot more. (10h in the past month, vs 30h in the three years before that). I am not an expert, merely an amateur who's seen interesting improvements after relatively little effort.
Part I of this post is a comparison of the two apps, meant to justify why I think someone getting into meditation should start with Headspace. If you are not interested in meditation but enjoy thinking about the human mind, the description in Part I of what ... (Read more)
A book I like to recommend to people interested in getting started in meditation is "A Path With Heart" by Jack Kornfield. It's written by an author who is very decided not a rationalist and it's filled with lots of references to supernatural things, but it's also a very kind and gentle introduction to meditation and wider practice of the way. If you think of the supernatural stuff as metaphors rather than claims about physical reality, I think it can be quite helpful and teaches a lot of techniques and gives some good motivations for why and how they are useful.
The following is an informal exposition of some mathematical concepts from Topology via Logic, with special attention to philosophical implications. Those seeking more technical detail should simply read the book.
There are, roughly, two ways of doing topology:
- Point-set topology: Start with a set of points. Consider a topology as a set of subsets of these points which are "open", where open sets must satisfy some laws.
- Locale theory: Start with a set of opens (similar to propositions), which are closed under some logical operators (especially and and or), and satisfy logical relations.
What
... (Read more)Since you are aiming towards philosophy with this one, I'll share something about my intuitions around emptiness (as opposed to form, in Buddhist Madhyamaka philosophy) as they relate to open sets in topology.
In my mind it has been fruitful to think of emptiness like openness and relate the two, specifically thinking of emptiness as describing the same aspect of reality that make "open" a good intuitive label for "open sets". This has helped me understand what is pointed at by "emptiness" by understanding it as "open... (read more)
Lots has been said within these servers on finding ways to say new exciting correct things. Or correcting things many think are right, but didn't know were actually wrong. This is a relentlessly optimistic perspective. I have gotten grand mileage by merely trying to hold back from saying or acting on information or ideas I know are wrong, as opposed to worrying about thinking better, or not making mistakes, or being more rational when I am concerned with the truth. This other part is the meaty part, the intense part - the struggle to stop mouthing the words, to stop myself from willingly ... (Read more)
Lots has been said within these servers on finding ways to say new exciting correct things. Or correcting things many think are right, but didn't know were actually wrong. This is a relentlessly optimistic perspective. I have gotten grand mileage by merely trying to hold back from saying or acting on information or ideas I know are wrong, as opposed to worrying about thinking better, or not making mistakes, or being more rational when I am concerned with the truth. This other part is the meaty part, the intense part - the struggle to stop mouthing the... (read more)
I've been optimizing various aspects of my investment setup recently, and will write up some tips and tricks that I've found in the form of "answers" here. Others are welcome to share their own here if they'd like. (Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer, accountant, or investment advisor, and everything here is for general informational purposes purposes only.)
I think MaxMyInterest only lists savings accounts that offer unlimited free online transfers. You might think that there must be a trade-off of that requirement against interest rate, but that doesn't seem to be the case; the rates are as good as anything on the market, even including CDs, as far as I've been able to tell the couple times I've quickly looked over the years. PM me if you want a screenshot of their current offerings.
When I was in high school, I noticed is that it was possible to score the top mark on an Advanced Placement (AP) Exam by answering a relatively small portion of the questions correctly.
During my junior year, I self-studied calculus, and took the AP Calculus AB exam. I was very surprised that I scored a 5 (the top mark), because at the time when I took the exam, I didn't know some very basic things that were on the syllabus.
The College Board gives the raw score to AP score conversions for the exams that have been most recently released. The percentages needed to get a 5 are as fo... (Read more)
I imagine the cutoffs are based on the percentage of students able to achieve a certain score. I wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to have the score for "5" set at 90% if only 1 in 200 students got above a 90%. For example, the national average on most biology written responses is well below 50% of the points, and considering that statistic, I think the lower cutoffs are quite reasonable.
If I were less concerned with looking sufficiently weird (cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countersignaling) to the pinks/muggles/mehumes/mundanes/proles/masses, I'd likely enjoy popular media more, and probably be closer to correctness on topics where the crowd really is likely to show wisdom.
Oh, did you mean "less concerned that I'd look too weird"? That probably isn't possible. Cases where I conform to expectations are about trust-earning and making people happy, not about concern with appearances (well, not about my concern... (read more)
It's no surprise LW is dominated by COVID questions right now. My guess is that many of us are holding their ground at home and have more spare time than usual. So here is a question for you: if you are to design a 1v1-type board game and your purpose is to confuse the AIs, to make it as difficult for them as possible, to level the playground between humans & machines, or at least to prolong the period when human players have an upper hand over AIs; then what designs would you use, what elements would you introduce into the game?
Of course, the 2nd most important goal is to make an int... (Read more)
No, I'm not against that trading money for valuable stuffs part. And while the game can be digital, it does not hurt to have some physical sets for the human elements.
Epistemic status: brainstorming some speculative research directions. Not trying to thoroughly justify the claims I’m making.
One way to think about the AI safety problem: there’s a spectrum of methods which each represent a different tradeoff between safety and ease of training an AGI, and unfortunately the two are anticorrelated. In particular, consider four regimes in which the bulk of training might occur (perhaps with additional fine-tuning afterwards):
- Training a language model to answer questions correctly.
- Training a RL agent on a range of limited tasks (e.g. games).
- Training
I don't think that design (1) is particularly safe.
If your claim that design (1) is harder to get working is true, then you get a small amount of safety from the fact that a design that isn't doing anything is safe.
It depends on what the set of questions is, but if you want to be able to reliably answer questions like "how do I get from here to the bank?" then it needs to have a map, and some sort of pathfinding algorithm encoded in it somehow. If it can answer "what would a good advertising slogan be for product X" then it ... (read more)
tl;dr
Organizations that enforce rationality at the collective level can get very different voting outcomes than organizations that enforce rationality at the individual level, per known results in social choice theory. This has implications for real-world expert panels.
Here, "rationality" is logical consistency - it is possible for the majority of members to vote to reject a conclusion while also believing the necessary conditions to accept it hold, and vice-versa, even if they all independently evaluated the precepts and arrived at the conclusion logically. This arises because of how majorit
... (Read more)Yeah. I was more trying to argue that, compared to Bayesian ideas, voting doesn't win you all that much.
Coping and Cultures
(or, Acquiring Coping Mechanisms from the Culture of a Field of Study)
One of the useful pieces of implicit knowledge that college or mentorship gives people are mental adaptations that make the stressors particular to a field of study more tolerable. These often go unnoticed, and seem undervalued as a result.
Some adaptations like this seem to become a part of academic cultures, and get osmosed by most students. Others might only have living cultures in industry, with academics carrying a reputation for burnout compared to individuals who learn on the job.
I expect self-taugh
... (Read more)Yes. How do you identify the culturally-induced or taught CM in people who have started working? (In contrast to personal CM erected through self-teaching which was gained simultaneously [with the CM obtained by peer cross-pollination and between-generation communication].)
I am excited to announce Web-TAISU!
May 13-17, 2020
I was going to run a Technical AI Safety Unconference (TAISU) at CEEALAR (formerly EA Hotel), Blackpool, UK. Then there was a pandemic. So instead there will be a Web-TAISU on the Internet.
This is an unconference, which means that the program is participant driven. I do have some backup ideas to put in if there are not enough suggestions from you, but I don’t expect those to be necessary.
I thought a lot about how to adapt this event to be run online, and I am grateful to the participants who took time to discuss this with me. In the end ... (Read more)
Thanks Linda for organizing, looking forward to it!
As far as I understand the prime advantage of surgical masks over N95 masks lies in the N95 masks being able to seal and filter all of the air while the surgical masks allow air to pass at their sides.
Given that there are many situations where people would ideally wear N95 masks but have only access to surgical masks, why can't we improve the surgical masks by using adhesive tape to seal their borders to the face?
This article here suggests that N95 and surgical masks performances were similar while preventing to catch the flu.
https://smartairfilters.com/en/blog/n95-mask-surgical-prevent-transmission-coronavirus/
I'm guessing data is limited here, but a related-related question might be "how likely am I to catch the flu or a few other common diseases by interacting with a victim for an hour?"
Thanks. The thing I'm ultimately looking for though is more like "at humidity X, your likelihood is Y". I know roughly how the variables fit together, but not enough to decide "do I let a random person who might have covid into my house or not?"
Last week: Covid-19 4/30: Stuck in Limbo
Recently: Covid-19: New York’s Antibody Tests 2, On “COVID-19 Superspreader Events in 28 Countries: Critical Patterns and Lessons”
Background Assumptions: On R0, Taking Initial Viral Load Seriously, On New York’s Antibody Tests, My Covid-19 Thinking: 4/23 pre-Cuomo Data
Spreadsheet where I do work: Access it here as read only
Deaths By Week in the 5 Big Regions:
| WEST | MIDWEST | SOUTH | NE ex-NY | NY | |
| Mar 26-Apr 1 | 164 | 450 | 182 | 143 | 364 |
| Mar 19-Mar 25 | 424 | 1894 | 667 | 856 | 1988 |
| Apr 2-8 | 764 | 3873 | 1331 | 2248 | 4694 |
| Apr 9-15 | 890 | 4853 | 1596 | 3605 | 5318 |
| Apr 16-22 | 10 |
I think that, when most people use the term "herd immunity", they mean "herd immunity sufficient to get R<1 while everyone parties like it's 2019". That could require 75% to be infected, don't you think?
Introduction
Insight meditation, enlightenment, what’s that all about?
The sequence of posts starting from this one is my personal attempt at answering that question. It grew out of me being annoyed about so much of this material seeming to be straightforwardly explainable in non-mysterious terms, but me also being unable to find any book or article that would do this to my satisfaction. In particular, I wanted something that would:
- Explain what kinds of implicit assumptions build up our default understanding of reality and how those assumptions are subtly flawed. It would then point out
is there anything that might change your mind? Scientific papers? Meta-analysis studies?
Yes, studies with good methodologies and decent sample sizes would make me question my stance. If they were replicated, that would completely change my mind. As I mentioned in my other comments, I have arrived at my present beliefs by doing a literature review few years ago.
I'm a bit more sceptical about meta-analyses since a lot of papers published on the subject are of terribly low quality (or at least were, when I looked into it).
I've been interested in this area for the last couple of years as well. Surprisingly I had not found https://arbital.com/ until very recently which has got to be the closest thing to what would be ideal.
The main problem seems to be the amount of refactoring/reframing that can be done. As mentioned by @__nobody 's answer, there is a fundamental problem in naming and concept drift. I say fundamental because it has become my belief that on a practical level defining words is essentially performed on a community level, not an individual. Coming up w... (read more)