The underlying thought behind both this and the previous post seems to be the notion that counterfactuals are somehow mysterious or hard to grasp. This looks like a good chance to plug our upcoming ICML paper, w
hich reduces counterfactuals to a programming language feature. It gives a new meaning to "programming Omega." http://www.zenna.org/publications/causal.pdf
I am not sure that is actually true. There are many escalatory situations, border clashes, and mini-conflicts that could easily lead to far larger scale war, but don't due to the rules and norms that military forces impose on themselves and that lead to de-escalation. Once there is broader conflict though between large organizations, then yes you often do often need a treaty to end it.
Treaties don't work on decentralized insurgencies though and hence forever wars: agreements can't be credibly enforced when each fighter has their own incentives and veto power. This is an area where norm spread can be helpful, and I do think online discourse is currently far more like waring groups of insurgents than waring armies.
as an organism ages active transposons within it's stem cells duplicate and that mechanism might lead to increased average transposons count in stem cells
My model is that transposons duplicate in all somatic (non-reproductive) cells, not just stem cells.
If that hypothesis is true, there's evolutionary pressure to keep the count of active transposons low. That evolutionary pressure is greater in organism that reproduce at a later age then for organisms that reproduce at an earlier age.
The evolutionary basis of aging (and negligible senescence, like in hydras and naked mole rats) is still a total mystery to me. The arguments for why aging is adaptive all rely on group-selection, which I am wary of. The argument is basically that you grow old and die to benefit the tribe, just as your cells commit suicide when it is useful for you. I'm relatively unconvinced by this argument, as I believe that intra-tribal competition is a much more powerful selective force than inter-tribal competion, giving rise to (machiavellian) intelligence as well as extremely metabolically costly dominance competitions. Getting old doesn't make sense if you're the only one doing it.
Those who oppose the adaptive aging hypothesis generally fail to take into account the fact that naked mole rats exist, leaving us without an explanation as to why we have senescence and they don't.
As Bret Weinstein describes, breeding protocols for lab mice have lab mice reproducing at an earlier age then mice that live in the wild because it's economical to make the mice reproduce at a young age. Weinstein made the hypothesis that this leads to laboratory mice having elongated telomeres.
My model here is:
Longer teleomeres -> Higher Hayflick limit (number of times cell can divide before dying) -> Higher cancer risk, as tumor cells can divide more (decreases chance of being alive in late-life), as well as higher capacity for tissue damage repair, as existing cells can divide more to replace missing ones (greater chance of being alive in early-life)
This is consistent with longer telomeres being a reallocation from late-life health to early-life heath, and that tradeoff starts making sense when you reproduce at an earlier age. With respect to transposons, though, I don't understand what the trade-off is. With longer telomeres, you get an increased tissue regen rate at the expense of increased cancer risk. With transposons, you get senescence, but for what?
That's good to know, thanks!
Why would multi-party conflict change the utility of the rules? It does change the ease of enforcement, but that's the reason to start small and scale until the advantages of cooperating exceed the advantages of defecting. That how lots of good things develop where cooperation is hard.
The dominance of in-group competition seems like the sort of thing that is true until it isn't. Group selection is sometimes slow, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Monopolies have internal competition problems, while companies on a competitive market do get forced to develop better internal norms for cooperation, or they risk going out of business against competitors that have achieve higher internal alignment via suppressing internal zero-sum competition (or re-aligned it in a positive-sum manner for the company).
I don't think you are fully getting what I am saying, though that's understandable because I haven't added any info on what makes a valid enemy.
I agree there are rarely absolute enemies and allies. There are however allies and enemies with respect to particular mutually contradictory objectives.
Not all war is absolute, wars have at times been deliberately bounded in space, and having rules of war in the first place is evidence of partial cooperation between enemies. You may have adversarial conflict of interest with close friends on some issues: if you can't align those interests it isn't the end of the world. The big problem is lies and sloppy reasoning that go beyond defending one's own interests into causing unnecessary collateral damage for large groups. The entire framework here is premised on the same distinction you seem to think I don't have in mind... which is fair because it was unstated. XD
The big focus is a form of cooperation between enemies to reduce large scale indiscriminate collateral damage of dishonesty. It is easier to start this cooperation between actors that are relatively more aligned, before scaling to actors that are relatively less aligned with each other. Do you sense any floating disagreements remaining?
I don't know if wikipedia's entry helps here but hopefully I'll try to formalize or at least give some central examples:
In social psychology, a stereotype is a generalized belief about a particular category of people.[2] It is an expectation that people might have about every person of a particular group. The type of expectation can vary; it can be, for example, an expectation about the group's personality, preferences, appearance or ability. Stereotypes are sometimes overgeneralized, inaccurate, and resistant to new information, but can sometimes be accurate.[3]
Lee Jussim has published on stereotyping academically and argued (in a way contrarian to the popular consensus) for its accuracy in many settings. For instance "The Empirical Assessment of Stereotype (In)Accuracy, summarizes what is now an impressive body of literature assessing the (in)accuracy of racial, gender, age, national, ethnic, political, and other stereotypes".
Even though it's fuzzy, let's just go with some of the standard central examples:
Attributing a large cluster of traits such as personality, preferences, ability based on a relatively small amount of information about some of the most widely collected demographic attributes -- like gender, age, sex, political views, region etc.
And notably, for some (most?) examples, the central example is often that judgement is "quick" and based on small pieces of information, such as physical appearance or looks, accent, surname, some official label etc. For example, meeting someone for the first time and either finding out they're group X.
In many cases, the bundle of traits that make up the stereotype are triggered by knowing the demographic category and deployed as assumptions or priors without asking. The priors might come from personal experience, mass media or a combination of them. Another trait pointed out in the wikipedia article is resistance to updating from new information.
That's totally fair for LessWrong, haha. I should probably try to reset things so my blog doesn't automatically post here except when I want it to.
I haven't downvoted this post, but I think the main problem with it is that it doesn't define what it means with stereotyping.
Stereotyping is a highly politically loaded term and one of those model verbs that get used very differently in the first and third person.
FWIW, this, and similar practices that imply dual citizenship isn't allowed, anecdotally seem to be a very common (perhaps the standard) situation. For example, the US doesn't expressly allow dual citizenship, and there's language in multiple places about renouncing other citizenships, but I've seen estimates that ~5-10% of US citizens have another citizenship and multiple US Congressmen are public about having multiple citizenships as well. I haven't heard about any US enforcement against multiple citizenships.
Having looked into many citizenships and residency programs, this situation is common amongst a high percentage of them, and outside of a few rare country exceptions (not present here) everyone seems to move forward being dual citizens without issue despite this. I do wish laws were clear and explicit about these sort of things, and that there was express permission for multiple citizenship, but it does seem that for a long time across many (most?) international jurisdictions multiple citizenships have been and are allowed in practice, even when commonly 'officially' disallowed.
For example, I mentioned this in response to a comment about Netherlands citizenship on the original post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jHnFBHrwiNb5xvLBM/?commentId=psZcBFaZfQnzJDXeq
I do think, however, moving forward on this does require some willingness to accept that in-practice behavior differs from what may be implied by a country's official regulation, and that isn't a fit for everyone. For what it's worth, to me, after learning quite a bit about this issue moving forward doesn't feel messy at all, but I certainly understand others feeling differently.
I don't think it'd be very annoying at all. If, for example, you weren't doing significant economic activity in Panama on an ongoing basis, your US taxes would be unaffected and you wouldn't need to file any taxes in Panama (pretty confident).
If you're aiming for citizenship like I would be, then the main work is:
Looking at alcohol consumption by country, however, East Asia seems pretty middle of the pack. The main trends seem to be Europe and majority European-settled countries are rather high, and the Middle East and North Africa are very low (religious prohibition).
https://ourworldindata.org/alcohol-consumption
Since the west is high, the rest is low, or not so-high, with parts of East Asia overlapping parts of the west, it seems like these genetic predispositions aren't as strong in effect as someone might predict given the culture. I have heard Japanese and Korean drinking culture rivals European ones.
Within the US, whites and racial minorities (e.g. African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans etc.) do somewhat differ in drinking rates, alcohol problems, but the differences aren't nearly as drastic as super strong "innate" differences would predict (e.g. https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh40/152-160.htm)
It also seems like a religious prohibition making entire regions in the Islamic world far lower in alcohol consumption which is (almost?) entirely cultural has a strong effect with no need to resort to genes, unless there have been studies on if other non-East Asian populations are predisposed to be disadvantaged by alcohol consumption.
I think Patrick is giving bad advice. Almost always optimize for readability and future updates, all other considerations are specific to need. Idiomatic and efficient implementations are a a very good habit, but "optimize" implies making tradeoffs.
Other aspects of life are similar - almost always optimize for the long-term, but the specifics of what that means is individual.
I downvoted the OP - it didn't have anything new, and didn't really make any logical connections between things, just stating a final position on something that's nowhere near as simple as presented. Oh, and because it's completely unworkable for a consequentialist who doesn't have a reliable "permanent enemy detector", which is the point of my comment.
I didn't expect the mixed reaction for my comment, but I kind of didn't expect many votes in either direction. to some extent I perpetrated the same thing as the OP - not a lot of novelty, and no logical connection between concepts. I think it was on-topic and did point out some issues with the OP, so I'm taking the downvotes as disagreement rather than annoyance over presentation.
The main difference between mathematics and most other works of fiction is that mathematics is based on what you can derive when you follow certain sets of rules. The sets of rules are in principle just as arbitrary as any artistic creation, but some are very much more interesting in their own right or useful in the real world than others.
As I see it, the sense in which 2+2 "really" equals 4 is that we agree on a foundational set of definitions and rules taught at a very young age in today's cultures, following those rules leads to that result, and that such rules have been incredibly useful for thousands of years in nearly every known culture.
There are "mathematical truths" that don't share this history and aren't talked about in the same way.
I've heard that interview but I'm having some issues finding it back. Would you mind sharing a link to the Patrick Collison interview?
The review seem pretty balanced and interesting, however the bit about Bailey struck me as really misguided.
I'll try to explain why, I apologise if at some times I might come off as angry but the whole issue about autogynephilia annoys me both at a personal level as a trans person and at a professional level as a graduated in psychologist and scientist. Alice Dreger seems to have massively botched this part of her work.
In 2006, Dreger decided to investigate the controversy around J. Michael Bailey's book The Man Who Would be Queen. The book is a popularized account of research on transgenderism, including a typology of transsexualism developed by Ray Blanchard. This typology differentiates between homosexual transsexuals, who are very feminine boys who grow up into gay men or straight trans women, and autogynephiles, men who are sexually aroused by imagining themselves as women and become transvestites or lesbian trans women.
Bailey's position is that all transgender people deserve love and respect, and that sexual desire is as good a reason as any to transition. This position is so progressive that it could only cause outrage from self-proclaimed progressives.
Bailey's position caused outrage in nearly every trans woman who read the book or heard the theory, and in a lot others trans persons who felt delegitimised and misrepresented by the implications.
If you are transgender, you are suffering from gender dysphoria and you aren't transitioning for sexual reasons at all, though your sexual health would often improve. You are doing what science shows to be the one thing that solves your symptoms that are ruining your life and making you miserable.
But then, someone who's not trans comes along and says "no, it's really a sex thing" based on a single paper that presented no evidence whatsoever.
This person, rather than very rigorously trying to test the theory with careful research, which is what everyone, especially someone who's not feeling what trans women are feeling and thus is extremely clueless about the subject because it's really easy to misunderstand a sensation your brain isn't capable of feeling, should do, bases one of the two clusters of the book mostly on a single case study of a trans woman, who has a sex life which isn't representative of the average trans woman at all, but who makes for a very vivid, very peculiar account of sexual practices, and the rest of the "evidence" are just unstructured observations and interviews.
The book doesn't talk at all about how most trans person, men and women and non-binary, discover they are trans, and doesn't describes accurately their internal experience at all. It instead presents all trans women as being motivated by sex, and half of them by sexual tendencies that psychology depicts as pathological.
And then, somehow, this completely unfounded theory becomes one of the most known theories about trans women.
So, if you are a trans woman, best case is, your extremely progressive friends and family come to you and say "oh, we didn't knew it was just a sex thing, you could have told us you had this very weird sexual tendencies rather than make up all of that stuff about how your body and how society's way of treating you like a man makes you feel horribly, it's fine, we understand and love you anyway".
Worst and more common case, your friend, family, work associates and whatever, aren't extremely progressive. They still believe Blanchard's and Bailey's theory about you, though.
And then, when the trans community starts yelling more or less in unison "what the hell?!" at what Bailey wrote in his book, the best response he can come up is saying that the trans women attacking him are in a narcissistic rage because they are narcissists whose pride has been wounded by the truths he wrote, and that they are autogynephiles in denial.
Bailey attracted the ire of three prominent transgender activists who proceeded to falsely accuse him of a whole slew of crimes and research ethics violations. The three also threatened and harassed anyone who would defend Bailey; this group included mostly a lot of trans women who were grateful for Bailey's work, and Alice Dreger.
I'm not aware if some transgender women tried to defend the book, but "a lot of transgender women" seem to be a more accurate description for the books detractors than its supporters.
I'm aware of the fact that the three activists mentioned went way too far to be justified in any way. But presenting those as the only critics he received is completely wrong, because there was a huge number of wounded people who saw their lives get worse because of the book.
Autogynephilia was made popular as a theory mostly by Bailey's book, and trans exclusionary radical feminist groups, which are currently doing huge damages to trans rights and healthcare, are using it as one of their main arguments to delegitimate trans women and routinely attack trans women with it. Even if Bailey's intentions were good, he failed miserably and produced far more harm than anything else.
Slightly different than optionality, optimize for Pareto improvements. The more you can achieve efficiency across the entire frontier the better off you'll be and the less you'll be forced to make tradeoffs along that frontier because you keep expanding it.
SIA is the Bayesian update on knowing your existence (ie if they were always going to ask if dadadarren existed, and get a yes or no answer). The other effects come from issues like "how did they learn of your existence, and what else could they have learnt instead?" This often does change the impact of learning facts, but that's not a specifically anthropics problem.
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil." - Tony Hoare by way of Donald Knuth.
See also: https://m.xkcd.com/1691/
I think giving people better beliefs about how the AIAF works would probably solve the issue, though that doesn't necessarily come from better explanations, e.g. I much prefer things like your suggestion here, where you're providing some info at exactly the time it is relevant, so that people actually read it. (Perhaps that's what you mean by "better explanations".)
Hi Jeff, I highly recommend checking out "trigger point therapy", specifically the "Trigger Point Therapy Workbook" by Clair Davies (~$20 online, third edition is best). The thesis of the method, based on research by Janet Travell (known in part for having been JFK's personal physician) is that much joint/soft-tissue pain is referred from small muscular contraction knots in other parts of the body, and that the pain can be fixed by finding those knots and massaging them. I used to suffer from a wide range of chronic pain (elbow, knee, ankle, wrist - you name it), and I would say that self-applied trigger point massage as described in the book I mentioned has reduced the severity of my problems by ~80-90%. I understand that you might be skeptical, and of course there's no guarantee that it will help you the same way it helped me, but from what you've described it seems like the bet of a few dollars for the book and a few hours of your time to read it might be one worth making.
"I am not awake now" or "I do not exist"
It seems like these are both simply false with no paradox (at least whenever anyone considers them).
Yep, the first google result http://xn--80akpciegnlg.xn--p1ai/preparaty-dlya-kodirovaniya/disulfiram-implant/ (in Russian) says that you use an implant with 1-2g of the substance for up to 5-24 months and that "the minimum blood level of disulfiram is 20 ng/ml; ". This paper https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK64036/ says "Mild effects may occur at blood alcohol concentrations of 5 to 10 mg/100 mL."
China's sciences are not very good, and relatedly most of those papers are likely of extremely low quality. I know Chinese, and it's a wonderful language, but I wouldn't recommend learning it for that purpose. My 2c
Do you guys think it is worth to learn chinese if I'm planning a career in science?
China is becoming more and more influential in the world, plus in 2020 it's published more scientific papers than USA, most of which are not translated, thus being able to read them would be an advantage. (https://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php?year=2020)
I'm not sure how to find information about which country puts more money and is progressing faster in molecular biology/biophysics though.
Byrne Hobart has the counter-take: Optionality is for Innumerate Cowards
No, prediction and counterfactuals share a common mechanism that is neutral between them.
Decision theory is about choosing possible courses of action according to their utility, which implies choosing them for, among other things, their probability. A future action is an event that has not happened yet. A past counterfactual is an event that didn't happen.There's a practical difference between the two, but they share a theoretical component.: "What would be the output given input Y". Note how that verbal formulation gives no information about whether a future or state or a counterfactuals is being considered. The black box making the calculation doesn't know whether the input its receiving represents something that will happen, or something that might have happened.
I'm puzzled that you are puzzled. JBlack's analysis, which I completely agree with, shows how and why agents with limited information consider counterfactuals. What further problems are there? Even the issue of highly atypical agents with perfect knowledge doesn't create that much of a problem, because they can just pretend to have less knowledge --build a simplified model -- in order to expand the range of non contradictory possibilities.
Note: I think that this is a better written-version of what I was discussing when I revisited selection versus control, here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BEMvcaeixt3uEqyBk/what-does-optimization-mean-again-optimizing-and-goodhart (The other posts in that series seem relevant.)
I didn't think about the structure that search-in territory / model-based optimization allows, but in those posts I mention that most optimization iterates back and forth between search-in-model and search-in-territory, and that a key feature which I think you're ignoring here is cost of samples / iteration.
It doesn't change the point being made, but:
To perform the search-in-map with only a balance scale, we’d either need to compare all pairs of weights ahead of time (which would mean O(n^2) effort)
So long as "is heavier than" is a transitive relationship (so that finding A>B and B>C lets you know that A>C without having to actually weigh them against each other), you would only need O(n log n) pairwise comparisons to put your rocks into sorted order.
The post/comment enters a review queue that is reviewed within three business days by an admin on whether to accept your submission to the AI Alignment Forum
If you believe in Alignment Forum participants making review judgements, how about using a review queue that works more like StackOverflow for this then admin labor?
I would expect a system that allows Alignment Forum participants to work through the queue to lead to faster reviews and be more easy to scale.
"And ability to handle counterfactuals is basically free if you have anything resembling a predictive model of the world" - ah, but a predictive model also requires counterfatuals.
One possible answer is "maximize win-win trades with other people", explained a bit more in this comment.
Recently I've also been thinking about something that seems vaguely related, which could perhaps be called inference in the map vs inference in the territory.
Suppose you want to know how some composite system works. This might be a rigid body object made up of molecules, a medicine made out of chemicals to treat a disease that is ultimately built out of chemicals, a social organisation method designed for systems made out of people, or anything like that.
In that case there are two ways you can proceed: either think about the individual components of the system and deduce from their behavior how the system will behave, or just build the system in reality and observe how the aggregate behaves.
If you do the former, you can apply already-known theory about the components to deduce it's behavior without needing to test it in reality. Though often in practice this theory won't be known, or will be too expensive to use, or similar. So in practice one generally has to investigate it holistically. But this requires using the territory as a map to figure it out.
(When investigating it holistically there is also the possibility of just using holistic rather than reductionistic theories. Often this holistic theory will originate from one of the previous methods though, e.g. our math for rigid body dynamics comes from actual experience with rigid bodies. Though also sometimes it might come from other places, e.g. evolutionary reasoning. So my dichotomy isn't quite as clean as yours, probably.)
If you keep the analogy of war, historically in-group rules have not been the driving force behind deescalation, inter-group treaties have. So I would be much more interested in a draft of rules that would be applied simultaneously to all sides with the goal to deescalate in mind.
In my opinion, optionality is something worth optimising for. This would apply to any domain: optionality in health (i.e. maintaining a base level of fitness so you can jump into most activities, maintaining a healthy diet to stay in shape and improve longevity), social optionality (having a good amount of reliable and trustworthy friends), financial optionality (saving for, and eventually obtaining, financial freedom), skill and career optionality (learning a wide variety of hard and soft skills to enable transition into different roles).
Basically, in absence of any clear direction, take the set of actions which opens more doors than it closes.
The guy is leaving town and will not come back. He's paying the kid ten bucks to know.
If you just cut everything from "Later" in the third-to-last paragraph onward, smart readers would probably still get it but it would be less obvious.
I'm surprised by the degree of controversialness of the OP and... all the comments so far?
Thank you very much for your valuable comments, Justin (I am pretending that I met you for the first time).
Yes, I am new to this forum and learning a lot from various viewpoints as you indicated using similar language or slightly different language. In doing so, I think my ideas provided here are highly aligned with unipolar/multipolar (pertaining to the configuration of the very top position level in bureaucracy) and non-agent/multi-agent (ultimately, regarding whether having needs or remaining of organization with the intervention of surpassingly developed AI) systems.
Since we humans have limited capabilities to fully understand the universe yet, taking various approach viewpoints and finding out similarities and discrepancies can be a crucial work for the sake of the philosophy of science and becoming less wrong. To that extent, I see many similarities of core thoughts here with others, and believe better understanding to different areas together could increase the positive aspect.
To some of your specific points, "Thus my central theme is that complexity frequently takes the form of hierarchy and that hierarchic systems have some common properties independent of their specific content. Hierarchy, I shall argue, is one of the central structural schemes that the architect of complexity uses." Yes, I completely agree with this and, at the same time, I think the complexity resulting in hierarchic systems for integrated intelligence (if the condition of formulation of organization maintains) also leaves discretion within it. Therefore, I approach that development of AI and utilization of it reflected on configurations of societal works will highly likely be lied upon somewhere between centralization and game theory situation. Although it is limited to specify exact situations, I think this projection basically includes the situation of unipolar/multipolar and non-agent/multi-agent systems.
Particularly, I think dealing with organizational frameworks can shed light on how humans will specifically work with AI agents in multi-agent system. Pertaining to your statement, "authority as a consequence of hierarchy" and that "processing information to handle complexity requires speciality which implies hierarchy." Authority for humans is also about a matter of how to accept it as a cognitive phenomenon while it would not be a matter for machines in that manner.
I believe organization theories need to be more actively reflected on various disccusions here and I am very looking forward to more engaging with them!
Since my last comment here did not seem to work I put it in a google document. This is a way to deep dive on where are the best places in the USA to raise a family with more than two kids: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tq9rY1TCs49XHckWtzOowYz_xHXFnRpOZq8r0lE5JSQ/edit#heading=h.cywpygwwkhbl
A "counterfactual" seems to be just any output of a model given by inputs that were not observed. That is, a counterfactual is conceptually almost identical to a prediction. Even in deterministic universes, being able to make predictions based on incomplete information is likely useful to agents, and ability to handle counterfactuals is basically free if you have anything resembling a predictive model of the world.
If we have a model that Omega's behaviour requires that anyone choosing box B must receive 10 utility, then our counterfactuals (model outputs) should reflect that. We can of course entertain the idea that Omega doesn't behave according to such a model, because we have more general models that we can specialize. We must have, or we couldn't make any sense of text such as "let's suppose Omega is programmed in such a way...". That sentence in itself establishes a counterfactual (with a sub-model!), since I have no knowledge in reality of anyone named Omega nor of how they are programmed.
We might also have (for some reason) near-certain knowledge that Amy can't choose box B, but that wasn't stated as part of the initial scenario. Finding out that Amy in fact chose box A doesn't utterly erase the ability to employ a model in which Amy chooses box B, and so asking "what would have happened if Amy chose box B" is still a question with a reasonable answer using our knowledge about Omega. A less satisfactory counterfactual question might be "what would happen if Amy chose box A and didn't receive 5 utility".
How else are we supposed to get a punchline?
Well if Mary does learn something new( how it feels "from the inside" to see red or whatever ) she would notice, and her brainstate would reflect that plus whatever information she learned. Otherwise it doesn't make sense to say she learned anything.
And just the fact she learned something and might have thought something like "neat, so that's what red looks like" would be relevant to predictions of her behavior even ignoring possible information content of qualia.
So it seems distinguishable to me.
Not smart enough to pretend to be dumb when asked for his reasons, is he.
I'm kinda surprised this comment is so controversial. I'm curious what people are objecting to resulting in downvotes.
I literally 2 minutes ago created the June Open thread for this year and pinned that one. So if I were you I would probably repost this there instead of here:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QTyMwaezwDiYoyAop/open-and-welcome-thread-june-2021
In my experience, I haven't seen a good "translation" process -- instead models are pretrained on bigger and bigger corpora which include more languages.
GPT-3 was trained on data that was mostly english, but also is able to (AFAICT) generate other languages as well.
For some english-dependent metrics (SuperGLUE, Winogrande, LAMBADA, etc) I expect a model trained on primarily non-english corpora would do worse.
Also, yes, the tokenization I would expect to be different for a largely different corpora.
Anyone have reading recommendations for fiction or even just a summary description of what a positive future with AI looks like? I've been trying to decide what to work on for the rest of my career. I really want to work on genetics, but worry that, like every other field, it's basically going to become irrelevant since AI will do everything in the future.
Thank you so much for pointing my attention to this book! The sociology of childhood is a very important topic for me and this is a really great overview of it.
Yeah, I was proposing something like this in this comment response to Peter.
Sorry, isn't this the current system? Or do you mean something automated? See next comment, which I left automation out from.
Sorry, I was suggesting a system in which instead of first posting to LW via the LW interface, you just directly submit to the AIAF, without ever having to think about or go to LW. Then, there is a submission queue that is only visible to some moderators of the AIAF that decides whether your content shows up on both LW and the AIAF, or on neither. This would make it more similar to classical moderated comment-systems. I think a system like this would be clearer to users, since it's relatively common on the internet, but would also have the problems I described.
It seems like you're predicting that users would feel angry/powerless based on a kind of system with limited recourse/feedback, and hence everyone would be worse off with this system.
One specific problem with having a submission + admin-review system is that the user has to invest a lot of resources into writing a post, and then only after they invested all of those resources do they get to know whether they get any benefit from what they produced and whether their content (which they might have spent dozens of hours writing) is accepted. This is I think one of the primary things that creates a lot of resentment, and when I talk to people considering publishing in various journals, this is often one of the primary reasons they cite for not doing so.
When designing systems like this, I try to think of ways in which we can give the user feedback at the earliest level of investment, and make incremental benefit available as early as possible. The current system is designed that even if your post doesn't get promoted to the AIAF, you will likely still get some feedback and benefit from having it on LW. And also, it tries to set expectations that getting a post onto the AIAF is more like a bonus, and the immediate level of reward to expect for the average user, is what you get from posting on LW, which in my experience from user-interviews causes people to publish earlier and faster and get more feedback before getting really invested, in a way that I think results in less resentment overall if it doesn't get promoted.
I do think some people see very little reward in posting to LW instead of the AIAF, and for those this system is much worse than for the others. Those users still feel like they have to invest all of this upfront labor to get something onto the AIAF, and then have even less certainty than a normal submission system would provide on whether their content gets promoted, and then have even less recourse than a usual academic submission system would provide. I think it is pretty important for us to think more through the experience of those users, of which I think you are a good representative example.
Maybe this would be a good point to recap, from the mod team's perspective, what are some ways the AF+LW could more clearly set user expectations about how things work. I think it would also be valuable to specify what happens when things don't go how users want them to go, and to assess whether any reasonable steps should be taken to increase the transparency of AF content moderation. No need to re-do the whole discussion in the post+comments (i.e. no need to justify any decisions) — I just want to make sure this discussion turns into action items as the mods think are appropriate.
I am still thinking through what the right changes we want to make to the system are, but here is a guess on a system that feels good to me:
I think we probably have the capacity to actually handle this submission queue and provide feedback, though this assumption might just turn out to be wrong, in which case I would revert those changes.
Alternatively, we could provide an option for "either show this content on the AIAF, or show it nowhere", but I think that would actually end up being kind of messy and complicated, and the setup above strikes me as better. But it does point people quite directly to LessWrong.com in a way that strengthens the association between the two sites in a way that might be costly.
The difference between "fuzzy" and "arbitrary" is fuzzy, but we should prefer one word over the other.
As far as I can tell the actual level of curation by different members is very heavy-tailed. So a few users do almost all of it, most users do very little. Though since every member has the potential to do a lot of promoting comments and moving posts, it's still a bar to be careful with.
Thank you! Indeed, all bug reports are greatly appreciated! If you really ever notice anything that bothers you, just send a quick message on Intercom. We won't always get around to fixing all bugs, but we use bug reports also as one of our primary prioritization tools, and this specific bug did just go unnoticed for a long time.
Yeah, I do think we should just really make things clearer here. Managing the exact extent of the relationship between LW and AIAF is a bit of a delicate balance, but I do think the current communication around it is definitely not ideal.
Yeah, I would count writing a LW post plus maybe messaging an admin about it as the equivalent of "the barrier to participating in the discourse". We don't have a submission system as such, so of course it isn't exactly equivalent to submission, but the overall barrier to participation strikes me as substantially lower.
All realistic agents have finite and imperfect knowledge.
Therefore, for any one agent, there is a set of counterfactual claims that are crazy in the sense of contradicting what they already know.
Likewise, for any one agent, there is a set of counterfactual claims that are sane in the sense of not contradicting what they already know.
But the biggest obstacle is probably just operational capacity.
I see. I know the team has its limits and has already been in a lot of work to propping up AF/LW, which is generally appreciated!
I think I am most confused what you mean by "access to the discourse".
I mean the ability to freely participate in discussion, by means of directly posting and commenting on threads where the discussion is occurring. Sorry for not making this clearer. I should have more clearly distinguished this from the ability to read the discussion, and the ability to participate in the discussion after external approval.
But clearly the relevant comparison isn't "has no means of becoming an AF member". The bar should be "has no means of submitting a paper/post/comment"
Yeah let me try to switch from making this about the definition of "closed" to just an issue about people's preferences. Some people will be satisfied with the level of access to the AF afforded to them by the current system. Others will not be satisfied with that, and would prefer that they had direct/unrestricted access to the AF. So this is an interesting problem: should the AF set a bar for direct/unrestricted access to the AF, which everyone either meets or does not meet; or should the AF give members direct access, and then given non-members access to the AF via LW for specific posts/comments according to crowdsourced approval or an AF member's approval? (Of course there are other variants of these). I don't know what the best answer is, how many people's preferences are satisfied by either plan, whose preferences matter most, etc.
My current honest guess is that no trial is indeed better than having a trial
I can see why, for the reasons you outline, it would be psychologically worse for everyone to have trials than not have trials. But I think this is a particularly interesting point, because I have a gut-level reaction about communities that aren't willing to have trials. It triggers some suspicion in me that the community isn't healthy enough to grow or isn't interested in growing. Neither of these concerns is necessarily accurate — but I think this is why I predict a negative reaction from other researchers to this news (similar to my original point (2)). Typically people want their ideas to spread and want their ideology to be bolstered by additional voices, and any degree of exclusivity to an academic venue raises alarm bells in my mind about their true motives / the ideological underpinnings of their work. Anyway, these are just some negative reactions, and I think, for me, these are pretty well outweighed by all the other positive inside-view aspects of how I think of the AI safety community.
I do think the right thing we should tell people here is to post to LW, and if after a day it hasn't been submitted, to just ping us on Intercom, and then we can give you a straightforward answer on whether it will be promoted within 24 hours.
Great!
The only option we would have is to have a system that just accepts and rejects comments and posts, but would do so without any justification for the vast majority of them.
Sorry, isn't this the current system? Or do you mean something automated? See next comment, which I left automation out from. Right now the promotion system is a black-box from the user's end, since they don't know when AF members are looking at posts or how they decide to promote them, in the same way that an automatic system would be a black-box system to a user if they didn't know how it worked.
There is a good reason why there basically exist no other platforms like the AI Alignment Forum on the internet. Content moderation and quality control is a really hard job that reliably has people get angry at you or demand things from you, and if we don't put in clever systems to somehow reduce that workload or make it less painful, we will either end up drastically lowering our standards, or just burn out and close the forum off completely, the same way the vast majority of similar forums have in the past.
Yeah, and this is a problem every social media company struggles with, so I don't want to shame the mod team for struggling with it.
But I do want to emphasize that it's not a great state to be in to have no recourse systems. Every forum mod team should provide recourse/feedback in reasonable proportion to its available resources. It seems like you're predicting that users would feel angry/powerless based on a kind of system with limited recourse/feedback, and hence everyone would be worse off with this system. I think something else must occur: without any recourse, the level of anger+powerlessness is high, and as more recourse is added, the amount of these feelings should decline. I think this should happen as long as user expectations are calibrated to what the recourse system can provide. If the forum moves from "no reason for non-promotion, upon request" to "one-sentence reason for non-promotion (and no more!), upon request", people might complain about the standard but they shouldn't then feel angry about only getting one sentence (in the sense that their expectations are not being violated, so I don't think they would be angry). And if users are angry about getting a one-sentence-reason policy, then wouldn't they be angrier about a no-reason-policy? As long as expectations are set clearly, I can't imagine a world where increasing the amount of recourse available is bad for the forum.
Maybe this would be a good point to recap, from the mod team's perspective, what are some ways the AF+LW could more clearly set user expectations about how things work. I think it would also be valuable to specify what happens when things don't go how users want them to go, and to assess whether any reasonable steps should be taken to increase the transparency of AF content moderation. No need to re-do the whole discussion in the post+comments (i.e. no need to justify any decisions) — I just want to make sure this discussion turns into action items as the mods think are appropriate.
If
[It] is just a "nudge", which is often enough to prevent alcoholism from forming in the first place, but not strong enough to displace alcoholism once it's taken root.
then it would work best early on or in combination with someone helping you, e.g. your spouse
Some studies show great results for people who are married but not for single people.
Or your parent. Could parents give it to their teenagers before they go to a party: "You can go but take this pill first."
There's a drug called Orlistat for treating obesity which works by preventing you from absorbing fats when you eat them. I've heard (somewhat anecdotally) that one of the main effects is forcing you to eat a low fat diet, because otherwise there are quite unpleasant 'gastrointestinal side effects' if you eat a lot of fat.
Assuming that the discounted value of a monopoly in this IP is reasonably close to Alice’s cost of training, e.g. 1x-3x, competition between Alpha and Beta only shrinks the available profits by half, and Beta expects to acquire between 10%-50% of the market,
Basic econ q here: I think that 2 competitors can often cut the profits by much more than half, because they can always undercut each other until they hit the cost of production. Especially if you're going from 1 seller to 2, I think that can shift a market from monopoly to not-a-monopoly, so I think it might be a lot less valuable.
Still, obviously likely to be worth it to the second company, so I totally expect the competition to happen.
I didn’t do it any more. I forgot about it next time I showered.
This comment is going to sound mean. Just a fair warning.
This strikes me as a classic case of a guy thinking he's a prophet after doing a bunch of psychedelics. I've seen it over and over again. They are so convinced that they've "got it" that they often manage to convince others they do as well. You could call it the Messiah complex because, well, duh.
And you know what? Being around a bunch of people who are really nice to you feels good. And that feeling of it "clicking" is the feeling of your cognitive dissonance being wiped out by highly motivated reasoning. They're a bunch of loons, but I feel like I belong with them. I'm a genius, so if I belong with them they must be a bunch of geniuses as well. Oh! We're a bunch of geniuses! The Weird Spiritual Teachings are true!
Many incredibly smart scientists in Japan joined a doomsday cult (Aum Shinrikyo) because its members made them feel like they finally belonged somewhere. Loneliness is a hell of a drug. It's what gets you sucked into cults.
From what I've read, integral theory seems to be closer to a mysticist cult than a scientific framework. And I say this as someone who is quite open to process philosophy and systems science, both of which seem vaguely related to whatever integral theory is trying to be.
Thanks for trying to clarify "X and only X", which IMO is a promising concept.
One thing we might want from an only-Xer is that, in some not-yet-formal sense, it's "only trying to X" and not trying to do anything else. A further thing we might want is that the only-Xer only tries to X, across some relevant set of counterfactuals. You've discussed the counterfactuals across possible environments. Another kind of counterfactual is across modifications of the only-Xer. Modification-counterfactuals seem to point to a key problem of alignment: how does this generalize? If we've selected something to do X, within some set of environments, what does that imply about how it'll behave outside of that set of environments? It looks like by your definition we could have a program that's a very competent general intelligence with a slot for a goal, plus a pointer to X in that slot; and that program would count as an only-Xer. This program would be very close, in some sense, to programs that optimize competently for not-X, or for a totally unrelated Y. That seems counterintuitive for my intuitive picture of an "X and only X"er, so either there's more to be said, or my picture is incoherent.
I'd be curious to know if you kept on doing that and, if so, what the results were.
(I know that's the title of the Nature paper, and kudos for stating "in mice" more prominently in the post body than the paper did, but IMO it's worth appending to the title.)
While most SIRT1 knockout mice die perinatally, in a few weeks age, 129svJ background SIRT6 knockout mice exhibit severe developmental defects but survive to about 4 weeks of age. Similarly, in humans and primates, mutations resulting in SIRT6 inactivation result in prenatal or perinatal lethality accompanied by severe developmental brain defects.
This is maybe interesting as a suggestion of which pathways to investigate for aging-related loss of cellular energy homeostasis, but it's not even plausible that it could be therapeutic in humans.
The motivation to me seems exactly the same as with fiction: we're talking about things other than physical objects or whatever.
It would for example be possible to have a notice at the bottom of alignment forum pages to user that aren't locked in that says: "If you aren't a member of the alignment forum and want to comment on this post, you can do so at [link to LessWrong post]. Learn more [link to FAQ]"
Such a link would strengthen the association between LessWrong and AIAF for a naive user that reads a AIAF posts. There might be drawbacks for strengthen that association but it would help the naive user to get the idea that the way to interact with AIAF posts for non-AIAF members is through LessWrong.
I agree that most people don't read the manual, but I think that if you're confused about something and then don't read the manual, it's on you.
The goal of AIAF is to be well accepted by the AI field. If people from that field come to AIAF and have a lesser opinion of AIAF because they don't really understand how it works, you can say that's on them but it's still bad for AIAF.
While reading more on transposons I found in Ten things you should know about transposable elements:
Transposition events are also common and mutagenic in laboratory mice, where ongoing activity of several families of LTR elements are responsible for 10–15% of all inherited mutant phenotypes [36].
I don't normally think about them, and if I needed to I would just find some image on the Internet.
I want to push back on that. I agree that most people don't read the manual, but I think that if you're confused about something and then don't read the manual, it's on you. I also don't think they could make it much more obvious than being always on the front page.
Maybe the main criticism is that this FAQ/intro post has a bunch of info about the first AF sequences that is probably irrelevant to most newcomers.
That’s an interesting coincidence. Yes, the desire to receive credit seems almost immoral in some circumstances. I wonder if it has to do with the Christian roots that cousin_it is pointing to below. Other cultures have different attitudes. I recall reading about Viking rituals called Bragas. After a battle, the clan would gather around a table, feast, drink and each warrior would brag mightily about their heroic deeds. If they couldn’t brag well (claim credit), they would be laughed at.
And thank you for your thoughts - after writing this, I came across your post on how “The best frequently don't rise to the top.” It struck me as quite related to this. I’d say that in your own words, you were writing about the delta between merit and credit. Or that’s how I read it.
Thank you. Yes, agreed, that’s a significantly older instance. I wonder if we would find this also trickled down into Christianity from other ancient religions.
I think most people just don't read the manual? And I think good user interfaces don't assume they do
Speaking personally, I'm an alignment forum member, read a bunch of posts on there, but never even noticed that post existed
I'm still confused by half the comments on this post. How can people be confused by a setting explained in detail in the only post always pinned in the AF, which is a FAQ?
SIA is just Bayesian updating on the fact that you exist; this is the same update that an outside observer would make, if informed of your existence.
Actually, It also assumes the outside observer learns of your existence by a certain process. E.g. by randomly sampling all potentially existing observers (in a reference class) and finds you. (If on the contrary, the outsider learns about your existence by sampling all actual observers then the update would follow SSA.) Of course, if the outsider defines the reference class by all the definable characteristics of you then he would effectively get a reference class of one. But it seems dubious why would an outsider pay attention to this particular set of characteristics in the first place.
It seems to me like the main problem is that AIAF currently does a bad job at giving a naive visitor an idea about how it's setup works. Do you think that a better explanation on the side of AIAF would solve the issue or do you believe it to be deeper?
Thanks. Are you able to determine what the typical daily dose is for implanted disulfiram in Eastern Europe? People who take oral disulfiram typically need something like 0.25g / day to have a significant physiological effect. However, most of the evidence I've been able to find (e.g. this paper) suggest that the total amount of disulfiram in implants is around 1g. If that's dispensed over a year, you're getting like 1% of the dosage that's active orally. On top of that, the evidence seems pretty strong that bioavailability from implants is lower than from oral doses, so it's effectively even less.
Of course, there's nothing stopping someone implanting 100x as large a dose, and maybe bioavailability can be improved (or isn't that big a concern). But if not, my impression was that most implants are effectively pure placebo effect.
I haven't yet thought in detail about whether this particular set of suggestions is good, but I think dealing with the reality of "conflict incentivizes deception", figuring out what sort of rules regarding deception can become stable schelling points seems really important.
I'm in the same boat. I agree with the title of this post (I wrote this whole post about Integral Spirituality) but didn't find this post particularly useful since it's a personal story without a lot of clear takeaways. In my mind this just isn't frontpage worthy, but great for personal on LW.
The drug is still available today, though not much used for alcoholism except in Denmark, where it's widely prescribed.
This is not quite true. Disulfiram is currently used in Russia (and other former USSR countries) to treat alcohol addiction. (Random clinic website that offers disulfiram implants for ~$200.)
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Also in the 90s disulfiram apparently was used to treat alcohol addiction in a quite questionable form:
Coding (kodirovanie) is a catch-all term for various Russian alternative therapeutic methods used to treat addictions, in which the therapist attempts to scare patients into abstinence from a substance they are addicted to by convincing them that they will be harmed or killed if they use it again.
I would still consider spaced-repetition to memorize some of the more rarely-used notes on the treble and bass clef
I actually had this exact idea for learning the notes + saxophone fingerings for the treble clef. I was systematically going through Yamaha's interactive chart, making screen shots and slowly putting them into anki cards during boring, otherwise low-attention demanding meetings.
I never finished the job -- I just learned the notes and fingerings by directly practicing the saxophone. I think this is a bit of a parable of one of the challenges with flashcards: if you use the knowledge on the reg, you'll retain it. If you don't, you won't, but if you're not using it, why do you need it?
The intersection of stuff that's rarely needed by very high value to know off the top of the head, seems generally small.
Does much curation actually happen, where members of the forum choose to promote comments and posts to AF? I've occasionally done this for comments and never for posts (other than my own), though I do sometimes hit the "suggest for AF" button on a post I think should be there but am not so confident as to make a unilateral decision. So I was surprised by your comments about curation because I don't much think of that as an activity AF forum members perform.
I feel like we should taboo "closed".
Both before and after reading the post, I think that AIAF caused AI alignment discussion to be much more publicly readable (relative to academia).
After reading the post / comments, I think that the AIAF is more publicly writable than academia. Before reading the post / comments, I did not think this -- I wouldn't have said that writing a post on LW was "submitting" to the AIAF, since it didn't seem to me like there were people making a considered decision on whether to promote LW posts to AIAF.
Both before and after reading the post, I think that the AIAF will not be perceived (at least by academics) to be more publicly writable than academia.
Well yes, it a consequence of scale, but my purpose here is to question the incentives behind maintaining 500 cars vs. one car. Taking your car maintenance example, I would expect a vehicle fleet administrator to apply the same schedule he uses for the fleet to his daily driver. If he applied the strategy that you describe (which is essentially reactive maintenance) to the fleet, there is a higher probability of one car failing than if he only applied it to his car. Using the same checklist he uses for the fleet for his personal car (let’s assume preventative maintenance) would result in increased reliability.
And 22! Great turnout!
Have you tried Anki's image occlusion and Cloze deletion feature. You can fit entire diagrams or texts that give you the "whole picture" all the while blanking out certain portions of it to test yourself. Anki is great. Admittedly, basic flashcards do have their limitations.
And also 23 but no second sign :-(
We’re there at table 13 now! Hope to see you!
Very interesting! Do you know how much disulfiram the implant gives out per day? There's a bunch of papers on implants, but there's usually concerns about (a) that the dosage might be much smaller than the typical oral dosage and/or (b) that there's poor absorption.
Thank you for this post, Kyoung-Cheol. I like how you have used Deep Mind's recent work to motivate the discussion of the consideration of "authority as a consequence of hierarchy" and that "processing information to handle complexity requires speciality which implies hierarchy."
I think there is some interesting work on this forum that captures these same types of ideas, sometimes with similar language, and sometimes with slightly different language.
In particular, you may find the recent post from Andrew Critch on "Power dynamics as a blind spot or blurry spot in our collective world-modeling, especially around AI" to sympathetic to core pieces of your argument here.
It also looks like Kaj Sotala is having some similar thoughts on adjustments to game theory approaches that I think you would find interesting.
I wanted to share with you an idea that remains incomplete, but I think there is an interesting connection between Kaj Sotala's discussion of non-agent and multi-agent models of the mind and Andrew Critch's robust agent-agnostic processes that connects with your ideas here and the general points I make in the IBS post.
Okay, finally, I had been looking for the most succinct quote from Herbert Simon's description of complexity and I found it. At some point, I plan to elaborate more on how this connects to control challenges more generally as well, but I'd say that we would both likely agree with Simon's central claim in the final chapter of The Sciences of the Artificial:
"Thus my central theme is that complexity frequently takes the form of hierarchy and that hierarchic systems have some common properties independent of their specific content. Hierarchy, I shall argue, is one of the central structural schemes that the architect of complexity uses."
Glad you decided to join the conversation here. There are lots of fascinating conversation that are directly related to a lot of the topics we discuss together.
This is awesome, I've been curious about Asian flush for ages but never put in the work to research it. Thanks!
To be clear...now having read the post and comments you do not consider it more closed?
As a full-stack developer (a term which I kinda hate!) I just want to take this opportunity to mention to people who happen to read this that bug reports can be very helpful!
For any potential bug like Steven Byrnes mentions, there can be many people who experienced it but didn't report it. With small teams of developers and complicated sites there can be many types of bugs that irritate many users but no one who can fix the bugs ends up finding out about the problem for a long time.
I know that in general bug reports can often feel like yelling into the void, but in my experience, they're almost always getting considered by someone.
I think the model of a war between two sites is fundamentally flawed for epistemic warfare. For most players with power internal struggles within their community matter more for their personal success then whether their community win against other communities. See all the post about the problems of moral mazes.
if someone supports known abusers, then endorsing them may indirectly lend support to abuse
The last US election had two presidential candidates with serious sexual harrassment allegations against them. You could say that anybody who supported either of those candidates should be suspect but I don't think that's a good way to think about the issue.
Often people still support a person because they believe that there are causes that are more important and because they don't believe that the case against the accused person is sufficiently proven.
If we take Marc Gafni as the core reason to be skeptical of the Integral community that's analogous to being skeptical of Whole Foods in early 2016 when the Whole foods CEO was also associated with Gafni. The whole foods CEO ended up disassociating due to public pressure. To the extend that the difference between John Mackey and Ken Wilber is that John Mackey bowed to the public pressure and Ken Wilber didn't, I don't think we can take it as a reason to see Whole foods as better then the Integral community.
If we want judge the response of the Intregral community to Marc Gafni we also have to look at the community response and not just on Ken Wilber. Contrary to cousin_it's assertion Ken Wilber is not the leader of the Integral community. The Integral community doesn't have formal global leadership. Ken Wilber could have set up the Integral community in a way that has him as a central leader but didn't.
While Googling about community positions I found a post by Terry Patten founded and leads Bay Area Integral. In it he writes:
I’ve long had strong feelings about Marc, and the complex issues raised by his engagement with leaders in integral and evolutionary spirituality. I personally decided to stop working with him in 2011, and came to see him as pathological. While I sincerely pray for his healing and redemption, I think communities of practice do need to bar him from functioning as a spiritual leader within them. I’m glad that lines are being drawn, and I’m lending my name to help that happen as unambiguously as possible.
I’m writing this blog as a member of the integral community, and as a teacher and leader who has been repeatedly asked to weigh in. We have no formal elders or wisdom council, so there will be no official integral response.
The fact that there's no central power center in Integral is from my perspective something that's positive about it. The fact that Integral community leaders like Terry Patten are willing to write something like this, shows to me healthy community dynamics.
If you want to take an Integral workshop it might be worth asking the workshop provider on their stance on Marc Gafni and judge them based on how the answer but Wilber's personal stance is less important if you take a workshop about which Wilber has no leadership.
Such implants are legal in Poland and some other Eastern European countries ( webiste in polsih that offers such product: https://alko-implant.pl/nasza-oferta/wszywka-alkoholowa/disulfiram-i-esperal ). It's really surprising for me that it's not legal in the US: while reading this piece I was thinking "yeah, there's an implant one can get". I have no idea how effective those things are, though.
Wait, you don't know? Disulfiram implants are widely used in Eastern Europe.
They also duplicate in other somatic cells but in cells that have a low half life it doens't matter as much.
You don't get anything in return just like you don't get anything in return for getting infected with COVID-19.
You need evolutionary pressure to prevent transposons from constantly doublicating and accumulating in the DNA of your lineage.
Getting completely rid of transposons would be all upside but there's not strong enough evolutionary pressure for going to zero transposon count and even if a species would reach that for some amount of time, there seems to be horizontal transfer of transposons between species through viruses that reintroduce transposons.
While deciding whether or not tranposons are genes is a question of definition you can think of them in the framework of Dawkins selfish genes that care more about their own replication then the host organism.
Given that naked mole rats also happen to be less transposons it starts getting less of a mystery to me.
To register another hypothesis, I would expect hydras also to have less transposons.
That doesn't mean that the transposons might be the only reason for the negligible senescence but it might be one of the ways the evolutionary pressures according to which negligible senescence is advantagous for naked mole rats worked in practice to reduce the senescence.