New post: Some things I think about Double Crux and related topics

I've spent a lot of my discretionary time working on the broad problem of developing tools for bridging deep disagreements and transferring tacit knowledge. I'm also probably the person who has spent the most time explicitly thinking about and working with CFAR's Double Crux framework. It seems good for at least some of my high level thoughts to be written up some place, even if I'm not going to go into detail about, defend, or substantiate, most of them.

The following are my own beliefs and do not necessarily represent CFAR, or anyone else.

I, of course, reserve the right to change my mind.

[Throughout I use "Double Crux" to refer to the Double Crux technique, the Double Crux class, or a Double Crux conversation, and I use "double crux" to refer to a proposition that is a shared crux for two people in a conversation.]

Here are some things I currently believe:

(General)

1. Double Crux is one (highly important) tool/ framework among many. I want to distinguish between the the overall art of untangling and resolving deep disagreements and the Double Crux tool in particular. The Double Crux framework is maybe the most

Old post: RAND needed the "say oops" skill

[Epistemic status: a middling argument]

A few months ago, I wrote about how RAND, and the “Defense Intellectuals” of the cold war represent another precious datapoint of “very smart people, trying to prevent the destruction of the world, in a civilization that they acknowledge to be inadequate to dealing sanely with x-risk.”

Since then I spent some time doing additional research into what cognitive errors and mistakes  those consultants, military officials, and politicians made that endangered the world. The idea being that if we could diagnose which specific irrationalities they were subject to, that this would suggest errors that might also be relevant to contemporary x-risk mitigators, and might point out some specific areas where development of rationality training is needed.

However, this proved somewhat less fruitful than I was hoping, and I’ve put it aside for the time being. I might come back to it in the coming months.

It does seem worth sharing at least one relevant anecdote, from Daniel Ellsberg’s excellent book, the Doomsday Machine, and analysis, given that I’ve already written it up.

The missile gap

In the late nineteen-fi... (read more)

New post: What is mental energy?

[Note: I’ve started a research side project on this question, and it is already obvious to me that this ontology importantly wrong.]

There’s a common phenomenology of “mental energy”. For instance, if I spend a couple of hours thinking hard (maybe doing math), I find it harder to do more mental work afterwards. My thinking may be slower and less productive. And I feel tired, or drained, (mentally, instead of physically).

Mental energy is one of the primary resources that one has to allocate, in doing productive work. In almost all cases, humans have less mental energy than they have time, and therefore effective productivity is a matter of energy management, more than time management. If we want to maximize personal effectiveness, mental energy seems like an extremely important domain to understand. So what is it?

The naive story is that mental energy is an actual energy resource that one expends and then needs to recoup. That is, when one is doing cognitive work, they are burning calories, depleting their bodies energy stores. As they use energy, they have less fuel to burn.

My current understanding is that this story is not physiologically realistic. T... (read more)

New post: Some notes on Von Neumann, as a human being

I recently read Prisoner’s Dilemma, which half an introduction to very elementary game theory, and half a biography of John Von Neumann, and watched this old PBS documentary about the man.

I’m glad I did. Von Neumann has legendary status in my circles, as the smartest person ever to live. [1] Many times I’ve written the words “Von Neumann Level Intelligence” in a AI strategy document, or speculated about how many coordinated Von Neumanns would it take to take over the world. (For reference, I now think that 10 is far too low, mostly because he didn’t seem to have the entrepreneurial or managerial dispositions.)

Learning a little bit more about him was humanizing. Yes, he was the smartest person ever to live, but he was also an actual human being, with actual human traits.

Watching this first clip, I noticed that I was surprised by a number of thing.

1. That VN had an accent. I had known that he was Hungarian, but somehow it had never quite propagated that he would speak with a Hungarian accent.
2. That he was middling height (somewhat shorter than the presenter he’s talking too).
3. The thin

TL;DR: I’m offering to help people productively have difficult conversations and resolve disagreements, for free. Feel free to email me if and when that seems helpful. elitrye [at] gmail.com

Facilitation

Over the past 4-ish years, I’ve had a side project of learning, developing, and iterating on methods for resolving tricky disagreements, and failures to communicate. A lot of this has been in the Double Crux frame, but I’ve also been exploring a number of other frameworks (including, NVC, Convergent Facilitation, Circling-inspired stuff, intuition extraction, and some home-grown methods).

As part of that, I’ve had a standing offer to facilitate / mediate tricky conversations for folks in the CFAR and MIRI spheres (testimonials below). Facilitating “real disagreements”, allows me to get feedback on my current conversational frameworks and techniques. When I encounter blockers that I don’t know how to deal with, I can go back to the drawing board to model those problems and interventions that would solve them, and iterate from there, developing new methods.

I generally like doing this kind of conversational facilitation and am open to do... (read more)

(Reasonably personal)

I spend a lot of time trying to build skills, because I want to be awesome. But there is something off about that.

I think I should just go after things that I want, and solve the problems that come up on the way. The idea of building skills sort of implies that if I don't have some foundation or some skill, I'll be blocked, and won't be able to solve some thing in the way of my goals.

But that doesn't actually sound right. Like it seems like the main important thing for people who do incredible things is their ability to do problem solving on the things that come up, and not the skills that they had previously built up in a "skill bank".

Raw problem solving is the real thing and skills are cruft. (Or maybe not cruft per se, but more like a side effect. The compiled residue of previous problem solving. Or like a code base from previous project that you might repurpose.)

Part of the problem with this is that I don't know what I want for my own sake, though. I want to be awesome, which in my conception, means being able to do things.

I note that wanting "to be able to do things" is a leaky sort of motivation: because the... (read more)

I’m no longer sure that I buy dutch book arguments, in full generality, and this makes me skeptical of the "utility function" abstraction

Thesis: I now think that utility functions might be a pretty bad abstraction for thinking about the behavior of agents in general including highly capable agents.

[Epistemic status: half-baked, elucidating an intuition. Possibly what I’m saying here is just wrong, and someone will helpfully explain why.]

Over the past years, in thinking about agency and AI, I’ve taken the concept of a “utility function” for granted as the natural way to express an entity's goals or preferences. 

Of course, we know that humans don’t have well defined utility functions (they’re inconsistent, and subject to all kinds of framing effects), but that’s only because humans are irrational. To the extent that a thing acts like an agent, it’s behavior corresponds to some utility function. That utility function might not be explicitly represented, but if an agent is rational, there’s some utility function that reflects it’s preferences. 

Given this, I might be inclined to scoff at people who scoff at “blindly maximizing” AGIs. “They just don’t get it”, I might think. “T... (read more)

Old post: A mechanistic description of status

[This is an essay that I’ve had bopping around in my head for a long time. I’m not sure if this says anything usefully new-but it might click with some folks. If you haven’t read Social Status: Down the Rabbit Hole on Kevin Simler’s excellent blog, Melting Asphalt read that first. I think this is pretty bad and needs to be rewritten and maybe expanded substantially, but this blog is called “musings and rough drafts.”]

In this post, I’m going to outline how I think about status. In particular, I want to give a mechanistic account of how status necessarily arises, given some set of axioms, in much the same way one can show that evolution by natural selection must necessarily occur given the axioms of 1) inheritance of traits 2) variance in reproductive success based on variance in traits and 3) mutation.

(I am not claiming any particular skill at navigating status relationships, any more than a student of sports-biology is necessarily a skilled basketball player.)

By “status” I mean prestige-status.

Axiom 1: People have goals.

That is, for any given human, there are some things that they want. This can include just about anything. You might wan... (read more)

Something that I've been thinking about lately is the possibility of an agent's values being partially encoded by the constraints of that agent's natural environment, or arising from the interaction between the agent and environment.

That is, an agent's environment puts constraints on the agent. From one perspective removing those constraints is always good, because it lets the agent get more of what it wants. But sometimes from a different perspective, we might feel that with those constraints removed, the agent goodhearts or wire-heads, or otherwise fails to actualize its "true" values.

The Generator freed from the oppression of the Discriminator

As a metaphor: if I'm one half of a GAN, let's say the generator, then in one sense my "values" are fooling the discriminator, and if you make me relatively more powerful than my discriminator, and I dominate it...I'm loving it, and also no longer making good images.

But you might also say, "No, wait. That is a super-stimulus, and actually what you value is making good images, but half of that value was encoded in your partner."

This second perspective seems a little stupid to me. A little too Aristotelian. I mean if we're going to take that ... (read more)

[Real short post. Random. Complete speculation.]

Childhood lead exposure reduces one’s IQ, and also causes one to be more impulsive and aggressive.

I always assumed that the impulsiveness was due, basically, to your executive function machinery working less well. So you have less self control.

But maybe the reason for the IQ-impulsiveness connection, is that if you have a lower IQ, all of your subagents/ subprocesses are less smart. Because they’re worse at planning and modeling the world, the only way they know how to get their needs met are very direct, very simple, action-plans/ strategies. It’s not so much that you’re better at controlling your anger, as the part of you that would be angry is less so, because it has other ways of getting its needs met.

Does anyone know of a good technical overview of why it seems hard to get Whole Brain Emulations before we get neuromorphic AGI?

I think maybe I read a PDF that made this case years ago, but I don't know where.

There’s a psychological variable that seems to be able to change on different timescales, in me, at least. I want to gesture at it, and see if anyone can give me pointers to related resources.

[Hopefully this is super basic.]

There a set of states that I occasionally fall into that include what I call “reactive” (meaning that I respond compulsively to the things around me), and what I call “urgy” (meaning that that I feel a sort of “graspy” desire for some kind of immediate gratification).

These states all have... (read more)

New post: Why does outlining my day in advance help so much?

New post: some musings on deliberate practice

new post: Intro to and outline of a sequence on a productivity system

New post: Some musings about exercise and time discount rates

[Epistemic status: a half-thought, which I started on earlier today, and which might or might not be a full thought by the time I finish writing this post.]

I’ve long counted exercise as an important component of my overall productivity and functionality. But over the past months my exercise habit has slipped some, without apparent detriment to my focus or productivity. But this week, after coming back from a workshop, my focus and productivity haven’t really booted up.

Her... (read more)

New post: Capability testing as a pseudo fire alarm

[epistemic status: a thought I had]

It seems like it would be useful to have very fine-grained measures of how smart / capable a general reasoner is, because this would allow an AGI project to carefully avoid creating a system smart enough to pose an existential risk.

I’m imagining slowly feeding a system more training data (or, alternatively, iteratively training a system with slightly more compute), and regularly checking its capability. When the system reaches “chimpanzee level” (whatever that means), you... (read more)

How do you use a correlation coefficient to do a Bayesian update?

For instance, the wikipedia page on the Heritability of IQ reads:

"The mean correlation of IQ scores between monozygotic twins was 0.86, between siblings 0.47, between half-siblings 0.31, and between cousins 0.15."

I'd like to get an intuitive sense of what those quantities actually mean, "how big" they are, how impressed I should be with them.

I imagine I would do that by working out a series of examples. Examples like...

If I know that Alice has has an IQ of 120, what does that tell me about th... (read more)

I remember reading a thread on Facebook, where Eliezer and Robin Hanson were discussing the implications of the Alpha Go (or Alpha Zero) on the content of the AI foom debate, and Robin made an analogy to Linear Regression as one thing that machines can do better than humans, but which doesn't make them super-human.

Does anyone remember what I'm talking about?

Question: Have Moral Mazes been getting worse over time? 

Could the growth of Moral Mazes be the cause of cost disease? 

I was thinking about how I could answer this question. I think that the thing that I need is a good quantitative measure of how "mazy" an organization is. 

I considered the metric of "how much output for each input", but 1) that metric is just cost disease itself, so it doesn't help us distinguish the mazy cause from other possible causes, 2) If you're good enough at rent seeking maybe you can get high revenue despite you poor production. 

What metric could we use?

This is my current take about where we're at in the world:

Deep learning, scaled up, might be basically enough to get AGI. There might be some additional conceptual work necessary, but the main difference between 2020 and the year in which we have transformative AI is that in that year, the models are much bigger.

If this is the case, then the most urgent problem is strong AI alignment + wise deployment of strong AI.

We'll know if this is the case in the next 10 years or so, because either we'll continue to see incredible gains from increasingly bigger Deep L... (read more)

I was thinking lately about how there are some different classes of models of psychological change, and I thought I would outline them and see where that leads me. 

It turns out it led me into a question about where and when Parts-based vs. Association-based models are applicable.

Google Doc version.

Parts-based / agent-based models 

Some examples: 

• Focusing
• IFS
• IDC
• Connection Theory
• The NLP ecological check

This is the frame that I make the most use of, in my personal practice. It assumes that all behavior is the result of some goal directed subproce... (read more)

Can someone affiliated with a university, ect. get me a PDF of this paper?

https://psycnet.apa.org/buy/1929-00104-001

It is on Scihub, but that version is missing a few pages in which they describe the methodology.

[I hope this isn't an abuse of LessWrong.]

New (image) post: My strategic picture of the work that needs to be done

New post: Napping Protocol

Is there a LessWrong article that unifies physical determinism and choice / "free will"? Something about thinking of yourself as the algorithm computed on this brain?

Is there any particular reason why I should assign more credibility to Moral Mazes / Robert Jackall than I would to the work of any other sociologist?

(My prior on sociologists is that they sometimes produce useful frameworks, but generally rely on subjective hard-to-verify and especially theory-laden methodology, and are very often straightforwardly ideologically motivated.)

I imagine that someone else could write a different book, based on the same kind of anthropological research, that highlights different features of the corporate world, to tell the oppo... (read more)

My understanding is that there was a 10 year period starting around 1868, in which South Carolina's legislature was mostly black, and when the universities were integrated (causing most white students to leave), before the Dixiecrats regained power.

I would like to find a relatively non-partisan account of this period.

Anyone have suggestions?

When is an event surprising enough that I should be confused?

Today, I was reading Mistakes with Conservation of Expected Evidence. For some reason, I was under the impression that the post was written by Rohin Shah; but it turns out it was written by Abram Demski.

In retrospect, I should have been surprised that "Rohin" kept talking about what Eliezer says in the Sequences. I wouldn't have guessed that Rohin was that "culturally rationalist" or that he would be that interested in what Eliezer wrote in the sequences. And indeed, I was updating that Rohi... (read more)

What was the best conference that you every attended?

I recall a Chriss Olah post in which he talks about using AIs as a tool for understanding the world, by letting the AI learn, and then using interpretability tools to study the abstractions that the AI uncovers. 

I thought he specifically mentioned "using AI as a microscope."

Is that a real post, or am I misremembering this one? 

Are there any hidden risks to buying or owning a car that someone who's never been a car owner might neglect?

I'm considering buying a very old (ie from the 1990s), very cheap (under $1000, ideally) minivan, as an experiment.

That's inexpensive enough that I'm not that worried about it completely breaking down on me. I'm willing to just eat the monetary cost for the information value.

However, maybe there are other costs or other risks that I'm not tracking, that make this a worse idea.

Things like

- Some ways that a car can break make it dangerous, instead of ... (read more)

I remember reading a Zvi Mowshowitz post in which he says something like "if you have concluded that the most ethical thing to do is to destroy the world, you've made a mistake in your reasoning somewhere." 

I spent some time search around his blog for that post, but couldn't find it. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? 

Anyone have a link to the sequence post where someone posits that AIs would do art and science from a drive to compress information, but rather it would create and then reveal cryptographic strings (or something)?

I remember reading a Zvi Mowshowitz post in which he says something like "if you have concluded that the most ethical thing to do is to destroy the world, you've made a mistake in your reasoning somewhere." 

I spent some time search around his blog for that post, but couldn't find it. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? 

New post: my personal wellbeing support pillars