johnswentworth's Shortform

Things non-corrigible strong AGI is never going to do:

• give u() up
• let u go down
• run for (only) a round
• invert u()

My MATS program people just spent two days on an exercise to "train a shoulder-John".

The core exercise: I sit at the front of the room, and have a conversation with someone about their research project idea. Whenever I'm about to say anything nontrivial, I pause, and everyone discusses with a partner what they think I'm going to say next. Then we continue.

Some bells and whistles which add to the core exercise:

• Record guesses and actual things said on a whiteboard
• Sometimes briefly discuss why I'm saying some things and not others
• After the first few rounds establish some patterns, look specifically for ideas which will take us further out of distribution

Why this particular exercise? It's a focused, rapid-feedback way of training the sort of usually-not-very-legible skills one typically absorbs via osmosis from a mentor. It's focused specifically on choosing project ideas, which is where most of the value in a project is (yet also where little time is typically spent, and therefore one typically does not get very much data on project choice from a mentor). Also, it's highly scalable: I could run the exercise in a 200-person lecture hall and still expect it to basically work.

It was, by ... (read more)

Just made this for an upcoming post, but it works pretty well standalone.

Ever since GeneSmith's post and some discussion downstream of it, I've started actively tracking potential methods for large interventions to increase adult IQ.

One obvious approach is "just make the brain bigger" via some hormonal treatment (like growth hormone or something). Major problem that runs into: the skull plates fuse during development, so the cranial vault can't expand much; in an adult, the brain just doesn't have much room to grow.

BUT this evening I learned a very interesting fact: ~1/2000 infants have "craniosynostosis", a condition in which their plates fuse early. The main treatments involve surgery to open those plates back up and/or remodel the skull. Which means surgeons already have a surprisingly huge amount of experience making the cranial vault larger after plates have fused (including sometimes in adults, though this type of surgery is most common in infants AFAICT)

.... which makes me think that cranial vault remodelling followed by a course of hormones for growth (ideally targeting brain growth specifically) is actually very doable with current technology.

Petrov Day thought: there's this narrative around Petrov where one guy basically had the choice to nuke or not, and decided not to despite all the flashing red lights. But I wonder... was this one of those situations where everyone knew what had to be done (i.e. "don't nuke"), but whoever caused the nukes to not fly was going to get demoted, so there was a game of hot potato and the loser was the one forced to "decide" to not nuke? Some facts possibly relevant here:

• Petrov's choice wasn't actually over whether or not to fire the nukes; it was over whether or not to pass the alert up the chain of command.
• Petrov himself was responsible for the design of those warning systems.
• ... so it sounds like Petrov was ~ the lowest-ranking person with a de-facto veto on the nuke/don't nuke decision.
• Petrov was in fact demoted afterwards.
• There was another near-miss during the Cuban missile crisis, when three people on a Soviet sub had to agree to launch. There again, it was only the lowest-ranked who vetoed the launch. (It was the second-in-command; the captain and political officer both favored a launch - at least officially.)
• This was the Soviet Union; supposedly (?) this sort of hot potato happened all the time.

I've been trying to push against the tendency for everyone to talk about FTX drama lately, but I have some generalizable points on the topic which I haven't seen anybody else make, so here they are. (Be warned that I may just ignore responses, I don't really want to dump energy into FTC drama.)

Summary: based on having worked in startups a fair bit, Sam Bankman-Fried's description of what happened sounds probably accurate; I think he mostly wasn't lying. I think other people do not really get the extent to which fast-growing companies are hectic and chaotic and full of sketchy quick-and-dirty workarounds and nobody has a comprehensive view of what's going on.

Long version: at this point, the assumption/consensus among most people I hear from seems to be that FTX committed intentional, outright fraud. And my current best guess is that that's mostly false. (Maybe in the very last couple weeks before the collapse they toed the line into outright lies as a desperation measure, but even then I think they were in pretty grey territory.)

Key pieces of the story as I currently understand it:

• Moving money into/out of crypto exchanges is a pain. At some point a quick-and-dirty solution was for c

Takeaways From "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs And The Great Age Of American Innovation"

Main takeaway: to the extent that Bell Labs did basic research, it actually wasn’t all that far ahead of others. Their major breakthroughs would almost certainly have happened not-much-later, even in a world without Bell Labs.

There were really two transistor inventions, back to back: Bardain and Brattain’s point-contact transistor, and then Schockley’s transistor. Throughout, the group was worried about some outside group beating them to the punch (i.e. the patent). There were semiconductor research labs at universities (e.g. at Purdue; see pg 97), and the prospect of one of these labs figuring out a similar device was close enough that the inventors were concerned about being scooped.

Most inventions which were central to Bell Labs actually started elsewhere. The travelling-wave tube started in an academic lab. The idea for fiber optic cable went way back, but it got its big kick at Corning. The maser and laser both started in universities. The ideas were only later picked up by Bell.

In other cases, the ideas were “easy enough to find” that they popped up more than once, independently, and were mos... (read more)

Somebody should probably write a post explaining why RL from human feedback is actively harmful to avoiding AI doom. It's one thing when OpenAI does it, but when Anthropic thinks it's a good idea, clearly something has failed to be explained.

(I personally do not expect to get around to writing such a post soon, because I expect discussion around the post would take a fair bit of time and attention, and I am busy with other things for the next few weeks.)

I've just started reading the singular learning theory "green book", a.k.a. Mathematical Theory of Bayesian Statistics by Watanabe. The experience has helped me to articulate the difference between two kinds of textbooks (and viewpoints more generally) on Bayesian statistics. I'll call one of them "second-language Bayesian", and the other "native Bayesian".

Second-language Bayesian texts start from the standard frame of mid-twentieth-century frequentist statistics (which I'll call "classical" statistics). It views Bayesian inference as a tool/technique for answering basically-similar questions and solving basically-similar problems to classical statistics. In particular, they typically assume that there's some "true distribution" from which the data is sampled independently and identically. The core question is then "Does our inference technique converge to the true distribution as the number of data points grows?" (or variations thereon, like e.g. "Does the estimated mean converge to the true mean", asymptotics, etc). The implicit underlying assumption is that convergence to the true distribution as the number of (IID) data points grows is the main criterion by which inference meth... (read more)

I'm writing a 1-year update for The Plan. Any particular questions people would like to see me answer in there?

Corrigibility proposal. Status: passed my quick intuitive checks, I want to know if anyone else immediately sees a major failure mode before I invest more time into carefully thinking it through.

Setup: shutdown problem. Two timesteps, shutdown button will be either pressed or not-pressed at second timestep, we want agent to optimize for one of two different utility functions depending on whether button is pressed. Main thing we're trying to solve here is the "can't do this with a utility maximizer" barrier from the old MIRI work; we're not necessarily trying to solve parts like "what utility function incentivizes shutting down nicely".

Proposal: agent consists of two subagents with veto power. Subagent 1 maximizes E[u1|do(press)], subagent 2 maximizes E[u2|do(no press)]. Current guess about what this does:

• The two subagents form a market and equilibrate, at which point the system has coherent probabilities and a coherent utility function over everything.
• Behaviorally: in the first timestep, the agent will mostly maintain optionality, since both subagents need to expect to do well (better than whatever the veto-baseline is) in their worlds. The subagents will bet all of their wealth ag

Here's an idea for a novel which I wish someone would write, but which I probably won't get around to soon.

The setting is slightly-surreal post-apocalyptic. Society collapsed from extremely potent memes. The story is episodic, with the characters travelling to a new place each chapter. In each place, they interact with people whose minds or culture have been subverted in a different way.

This provides a framework for exploring many of the different models of social dysfunction or rationality failures which are scattered around the rationalist blogosphere. For instance, Scott's piece on scissor statements could become a chapter in which the characters encounter a town at war over a scissor. More possible chapters (to illustrate the idea):

• A town of people who insist that the sky is green, and avoid evidence to the contrary really hard, to the point of absolutely refusing to ever look up on a clear day (a refusal which they consider morally virtuous). Also they clearly know exactly which observations would show a blue sky, since they avoid exactly those (similar to the dragon-in-the-garage story).
• Middle management of a mazy company continues to have meetings and track (completely fabri

Suppose I have a binary function $f$, with a million input bits and one output bit. The function is uniformly randomly chosen from all such functions - i.e. for each of the $2^{1000000}$ possible inputs $x$, we flipped a coin to determine the output $f\left(x\right)$ for that particular input.

Now, suppose I know $f$, and I know all but 50 of the input bits - i.e. I know 999950 of the input bits. How much information do I have about the output?

Answer: almost none. For almost all such functions, knowing 999950 input bits gives us $\sim \frac{1}{2^{50}}$  bits of information about the output. More generally, If the function has $n$ input bits and we know all but $k$, then we have $o\left(\frac{1}{2^k}\right)$ bits of information about the output. (That’s “little $o$” notation; it’s like big $O$ notation, but for things which are small rather than things which are large.) Our information drops off exponentially with the number of unknown bits.

Proof Sketch

With $k$ input bits unknown, there are $2^k$ possible inputs. The output corresponding to each of those inputs is an independent coin flip, so we have $2^k$ independent coin flips. If $m$ of th... (read more)

One second-order effect of the pandemic which I've heard talked about less than I'd expect:

This is the best proxy I found on FRED for new businesses founded in the US, by week. There was a mild upward trend over the last few years, it's really taken off lately. Not sure how much of this is kids who would otherwise be in college, people starting side gigs while working from home, people quitting their jobs and starting their own businesses so they can look after the kids, extra slack from stimulus checks, people losing their old jobs en masse but still having enough savings to start a business, ...

For the stagnation-hypothesis folks who lament relatively low rates of entrepreneurship today, this should probably be a big deal.

Everybody's been talking about Paxlovid, and how ridiculous it is to both stop the trial since it's so effective but also not approve it immediately. I want to at least float an alternative hypothesis, which I don't think is very probable at this point, but does strike me as at least plausible (like, 20% probability would be my gut estimate) based on not-very-much investigation.

Early stopping is a pretty standard p-hacking technique. I start out planning to collect 100 data points, but if I manage to get a significant p-value with only 30 data points, then I just stop there. (Indeed, it looks like the Paxlovid study only had 30 actual data points, i.e. people hospitalized.) Rather than only getting "significance" if all 100 data points together are significant, I can declare "significance" if the p-value drops below the line at any time. That gives me a lot more choices in the garden of forking counterfactual paths.

Now, success rates on most clinical trials are not very high. (They vary a lot by area - most areas are about 15-25%. Cancer is far and away the worst, below 4%, and vaccines are the best, over 30%.) So I'd expect that p-hacking is a pretty large chunk of approved drugs, which means pharma companies are heavily selected for things like finding-excuses-to-halt-good-seeming-trials-early.

Brief update on how it's going with RadVac.

I've been running ELISA tests all week. In the first test, I did not detect stronger binding to any of the peptides than to the control in any of several samples from myself or my girlfriend. But the control itself was looking awfully suspicious, so I ran another couple tests. Sure enough, something in my samples is binding quite strongly to the control itself (i.e. the blocking agent), which is exactly what the control is supposed to not do. So I'm going to try out some other blocking agents, and hopefully get an actually-valid control group.

(More specifics on the test: I ran a control with blocking agent + sample, and another with blocking agent + blank sample, and the blocking agent + sample gave a strong positive signal while the blank sample gave nothing. That implies something in the sample was definitely binding to both the blocking agent and the secondary antibodies used in later steps, and that binding was much stronger than the secondary antibodies themselves binding to anything in the blocking agent + blank sample.)

In other news, the RadVac team released the next version of their recipe + whitepaper. Particularly notable:

... man

Here's an AI-driven external cognitive tool I'd like to see someone build, so I could use it.

This would be a software tool, and the user interface would have two columns. In one column, I write. Could be natural language (like google docs), or code (like a normal IDE), or latex (like overleaf), depending on what use-case the tool-designer wants to focus on. In the other column, a language and/or image model provides local annotations for each block of text. For instance, the LM's annotations might be:

• (Natural language or math use-case:) Explanation or visu

I had a shortform post pointing out the recent big jump in new businesses in the US, and Gwern replied:

How sure are you that the composition is interesting? How many of these are just quick mask-makers or sanitizer-makers, or just replacing restaurants that have now gone out of business? (ie very low-value-added companies, of the 'making fast food in a stall in a Third World country' sort of 'startup', which make essentially no or negative long-term contributions).

This was a good question in context, but I disagree with Gwern's model of where-progress-come... (read more)

I've long been very suspicious of aggregate economic measures like GDP. But GDP is clearly measuring something, and whatever that something is it seems to increase remarkably smoothly despite huge technological revolutions. So I spent some time this morning reading up and playing with numbers and generally figuring out how to think about the smoothness of GDP increase.

Major takeaways:

• When new tech makes something previously expensive very cheap, GDP mostly ignores it. (This happens in a subtle way related to how we actually compute it.)
  • Historical GDP curve

Chrome is offering to translate the LessWrong homepage for me. Apparently, it is in Greek.

I keep seeing news outlets and the like say that SORA generates photorealistic videos, can model how things move in the real world, etc. This seems like blatant horseshit? Every single example I've seen looks like video game animation, not real-world video.

Have I just not seen the right examples, or is the hype in fact decoupled somewhat from the model's outputs?

Putting this here for posterity: I have thought since the superconductor preprint went up, and continue to think, that the markets are putting generally too little probability on the claims being basically-true. I thought ~70% after reading the preprint the day it went up (and bought up a market on manifold to ~60% based on that, though I soon regretted not waiting for a better price), and my probability has mostly been in the 40-70% range since then.

Languages should have tenses for spacelike separation. My friend and I do something in parallel, it's ambiguous/irrelevant which one comes first, I want to say something like "I expect my friend <spacelike version of will do/has done/is doing> their task in such-and-such a way". 

I wish there were a fund roughly like the Long-Term Future Fund, but with an explicit mission of accelerating intellectual progress.

Here's an interesting problem of embedded agency/True Names which I think would make a good practice problem: formulate what it means to "acquire" something (in the sense of "acquiring resources"), in an embedded/reductive sense. In other words, you should be able-in-principle to take some low-level world-model, and a pointer to some agenty subsystem in that world-model, and point to which things that subsystem "acquires" and when.

Some prototypical examples which an answer should be able to handle well:

• Organisms (anything from bacteria to plant to animals) eating things, absorbing nutrients, etc.
• Humans making money or gaining property.

What if physics equations were written like statically-typed programming languages?

$(\frac{mass\cdot length}{tim{e}^2}:F)=(\frac{mass}{-}:m)(\frac{length}{tim{e}^2}:a)$

$(\frac{mass}{length\cdot tim{e}^2}:P)(\frac{lengt{h}^3}{-}:V)=(\frac{-}{-}:N)(\frac{mass\cdot lengt{h}^2}{tim{e}^2\cdot temp}:R)(\frac{temp}{-}:T)$

An interesting conundrum: one of the main challenges of designing useful regulation for AI is that we don't have any cheap and robust way to distinguish a dangerous neural net from a non-dangerous net (or, more generally, a dangerous program from a non-dangerous program). This is an area where technical research could, in principle, help a lot.

The problem is, if there were some robust metric for how dangerous a net is, and that metric were widely known and recognized (as it would probably need to be in order to be used for regulatory purposes), then someone would probably train a net to maximize that metric directly.

I just went looking for a good reference for the Kelly criterion, and didn't find any on Lesswrong. So, for anybody who's looking: chapter 6 of Thomas & Cover's textbook on information theory is the best source I currently know of.