DPiepgrass

Karma: 243

Worried that typical commenters at LW care way less than I expected about good epistemic practice. Hoping I’m wrong.

Software developer and EA with interests including programming language design, international auxiliary languages, rationalism, climate science and the psychology of its denial.

Looking for someone similar to myself to be my new best friend:

❖ Close friendship, preferably sharing a house ❖ Rationalist-appreciating epistemology; a love of accuracy and precision to the extent it is useful or important (but not excessively pedantic) ❖ Geeky, curious, and interested in improving the world ❖ Liberal/humanist values, such as a dislike of extreme inequality based on minor or irrelevant differences in starting points, and a like for ideas that may lead to solving such inequality. (OTOH, minor inequalities are certainly necessary and acceptable, and a high floor is clearly better than a low ceiling: an “equality” in which all are impoverished would be very bad) ❖ A love of freedom ❖ Utilitarian/consequentialist-leaning; preferably negative utilitarian ❖ High openness to experience: tolerance of ambiguity, low dogmatism, unconventionality, and again, intellectual curiosity ❖ I’m a nudist and would like someone who can participate at least sometimes ❖ Agnostic, atheist, or at least feeling doubts

DPiepgrass 3 May 2022 17:46 UTC
1 point
in reply to: gilch’s comment on: Covid vaccine safety: how correct are these allegations?
Yeesh. No wonder Bret wasn’t impressed—I’ve heard the first 45 minutes and they still haven’t talked about any of the misinformation in Bret’s podcast. Will they eventually get around to talking about it? Who knows, I can’t be bothered to sit through the whole thing. At least at the 40 minute mark they implicitly discussed base rates in VAERS, which seems to be a totally invisible concept to anti-vaxxers.
But at the same time, they’re saying “in the clinical trial no one died” and then talk about the “12 thousand VAERS deaths” without discussing the fact that anti-vaxxers dispute these basic facts. For example I see Kirsch saying, in a “Pfizer 6 month trial” that there were 21 deaths in the vaccine group vs. 17 in placebo (no doubt true but irrelevant); Kirsch also claims there is an enormous underreporting factor (42? I forget) for deaths post vaccination in VAERS (ridiculous, but he has an excuse for making the claim). At 47:20 there’s finally a (forceful but weak) rebuttal of something Bret said.
So the podcast is engaging with anti-vax arguments a little, but the Dark Horse podcast I summarized here is 3 hours long and I can be pretty sure, without hearing the rest, that Sam hasn’t addressed most of the claims made there, let alone everywhere else.

DPiepgrass 1 May 2022 4:47 UTC
2 points
on: Increasing Demandingness in EA
You are given the option to convince one of them to start working on one of 80k’s priority areas, but in doing so N others will get discouraged and stop donating. This is a bit of a false dilemma [...]. In 2012 I would have put a pretty low number for N, perhaps ~3
I find this paragraph very confusing.

DPiepgrass 14 Mar 2022 20:05 UTC
5 points
in reply to: paulfchristiano’s comment on: Yudkowsky and Christiano discuss “Takeoff Speeds”
I suspect that indeed EY’s model has a limited ability to make near-term predictions, so that yes, the situation is asymmetrical. But I suspect his view is similar to my view, so I don’t think EY is wrong. But I am confused about why EY (i) hasn’t replied himself and (ii) in general, doesn’t communicate more clearly on this topic.

DPiepgrass 25 Feb 2022 17:26 UTC
1 point
on: The Psychological Unity of Humankind
My thought for a minor caveat: there may be one or two complex mental adaptations that are not universal.
My idea here is that something changed to trigger the transition from agrarian society to industrial society. For example, maybe there’s a new brain innovation related to science, engineering, language, math, logical thinking, or epistemology.
Or not. This change could also have been driven simply by cultural memes of science and invention, after the final piece of complexity was already fixed in the population, so that if a group of children from 10,000 years ago were transplanted into today’s world, they would be just as inclined to become scientists, engineers or philosophers as modern children. On the other hand, it could also be that these children would be disproportionately inclined to become engineers rather than scientists, or vice versa. Or maybe the ancient children would have fewer independent thinkers. Or would have worse language or math talent.
I see no way of testing this hypothesis though.

DPiepgrass 17 Feb 2022 20:26 UTC
1 point
on: Beware Trivial Fears
Yeah, this reminds me of what China is doing now. During a flight back to North America, I stopped on a layover in China, and they took my biometrics (fingerprints and such). Now I learn that “China Is Harvesting ‘Masses’ of Data on Western Targets from Social Media”. And I already know that China is disappearing Chinese nationals abroad (paywall warning). And as long as I can remember, they have worked very hard to make sure that leaders of big corporations and countries never refer to Taiwan as a “country”.
But wait, I’ve already criticized the Chinese government on Twitter. Should I be worried? Maybe. But maybe, creating enough fear to discourage criticism of China is precisely the goal. As long as the Chinese government is okay with some foreigners being a little afraid of China, their current policies seem like a good way to project Chinese propaganda goals abroad. Their behavior will make westerners less likely to criticize China, and in turn, any Chinese nationals who wander abroad will hear less criticism about China, which in turn will discourage Chinese themselves from considering unwanted opinions, thus helping the government maintain control. Indeed, a simple fear-based strategy might even improve average opinions on China, without any need to act as a genuine threat. Just collect those biometrics and let critics know “we’re watching you”...

DPiepgrass 13 Feb 2022 19:37 UTC
1 point
in reply to: MugaSofer’s comment on: The Psychological Unity of Humankind
Upvote: polymorphism doesn’t indicate an absence of complex genes in part of a species. Consider that a uterus is a complex adaptation, and that my male body does contain a set of genes for building a uterus. The genes may be switched off or repurposed in my body, but they still exist, and are presumably reactivated in my daughter (in combination with some genes from my wife).
Not sure why Tyler speaks as if a pseudo-three-sexed species offers new and different evidence we don’t get from our two-sexed species.
P.S. don’t females lack the Y chromosome though? My impression is that this is related to degradation of that chromosome, which makes it less important over the eons, so that maybe someday (if nature were to take its course) its only purpose will be to act as a signal of maleness that affects gene expression on other chomosomes.

DPiepgrass 6 Feb 2022 21:05 UTC
3 points
on: Extreme Rationality: It’s Not That Great
I find my personal experience in accord with the evidence from Vladimir’s thread. I’ve gotten countless clarity-of-mind benefits from Overcoming Bias’ x-rationality, but practical benefits? Aside from some peripheral disciplines¹, I can’t think of any.
Well, it did ultimately help you make SlateStarCodex and Astral Codex Ten successful, which provided a haven for non-extremist thought to thousands of people. And since the latter earned hundreds of thousands in annual revenue, you were able to create the ACX grants program that will probably make the world a better place in various small ways. Plus, people will look back on you as one of the world’s most influential philosophers.
As for me, I hope to make various EA proposals informed by rationalist thought, especially relating to the cause area of “improving human intellectual efficiency”, e.g. maybe sort of evidence-Wikipedia. Mind you, the seeds of this idea came before I discovered rationalism, and “Rationality A-Z” was, for me, just adding clarity to a worldview I already already developed vaguely in my head.
But yes, I’m finding that rationalism isn’t much use unless you can spread it to others. My former legal guardian recently died with Covid, but my anti-vax father believes he was killed by a stroke that coincidentally happened at the same time as his Covid infection. Sending him a copy of Scout Mindset was a notably ineffective tactic; in fact, it turned out that one month before I sent him the book, the host and founder of his favorite source of anti-vax information, Daystar, died of Covid. There’s conviction—and then there’s my dad. My skill at persuading this kind of person is virtually zero even though I have lots of experience attempting it, and I think the reason is that I have never been the kind of person that these people are, so my sense of empathy fails me, and I do not know how to model them. Evidence has no effect, and raising them into a meta-level of discussion is extremely hard at best. Winnifred Louis suggests (among other things) that people need to hear messages from their own tribe, and obviously “family” is not the relevant tribe in this case! So one of the first things I sent him was pro-vax messaging from the big man himself, Donald Trump… I’m not sure he even read that email, though (he has trouble with modern technology, hence the paper copy of Scout Mindset).
Anyway, while human brain plasticity isn’t what we might like it to be, new generations are being born all the time, and I think on the whole, you and this community have been successful at spreading rationalist philosophy, and it is starting to become clear that this is having an effect on the broader world, particularly on the EA side of things. This makes sense! LessWrong is focused on epistemic rationality and not so much on instrumental rationality, while the EA community is focused on action; drawing accurate maps of reality isn’t useful until somebody does something with those maps. And while the EA community is not focused on epistemic rationality, many of its leaders are familiar with the most common ideas from LessWorng, and so rationalism is indeed making its mark on the world.
I think a key problem with early rationalist thought is a lack of regard for coordination and communities. Single humans are small, slow, and intellectually limited, so there is little that a single human can do with rationalism all by zimself. Yudkowsky envisioned “rationality dojos” where individuals would individually strengthen their rationality—which is okay I guess—but he didn’t present a vision of how to solve coordination problems, or how to construct large new communities and systems guided in their design by nuanced rational thought. Are we starting to look at such things more seriously these days? I like to think so.

DPiepgrass 22 Jan 2022 18:47 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Rob Bensinger’s comment on: Ngo and Yudkowsky on alignment difficulty
I read Eliezer’s response as basically “Yes, in the following sense”....I prefer Eliezer’s response over just saying “yes”...Expressing a thought in your own words can often be clearer than just saying “Yes” or “No”
I would never suggest that after saying “yes”, someone should stop talking and provide no further explanation. If that’s what you thought I was advocating, I’m flabbergasted. (If his answers were limited to one word I’d complain about that instead!) Edit: to be clear, when answering yes-no questions, I urge everyone to say “yes” or “no” or otherwise indicate which way they are leaning.
If that’s not sufficient for “IRL agenticness”, then I’m not sure what would be sufficient or why it matters
No, by agenticness I mean that the intelligence both “desires” and “tries” to carry out the plans it generates. Specifically, it (1) searches for plans that are detailed enough to implement (not just broad-strokes or limited to a simplified world-model), (2) can and does try to find plans that maximize the probability that a plan is carried out, NOT JUST the probability that the plan succeeds conditional upon the plan being carried out (IOW the original plan is “wrapped” in another plan in order to increase the probability of the original plan happening, e.g. “lie to the analyst who is listening to me, in the hope of increasing the chance he carries out my plan”) (3) tends to actually carry out plans thus discovered.
While (2) is the key part, an AGI doesn’t seem world-ending without (3).
This ‘agenticness’ seems to me like the most dangerous part of an AGI, so I’d expect it to be a well-known focal point of AGI risk conversations. But maybe you have a dramatically different understanding of the risks than I do, which would account for your idea of ‘agenticness’ being very different from mine?
The term ‘pivotal act’ in the context of AI alignment theory is a guarded term to refer to actions that will make a large positive difference a billion years later.
Wow, that’s grandiose. To me, it makes more sense to just explore the problem like we would any other problem. You won’t make a large positive difference a billion years later without doing the ordinary, universal-type work of thinking through the problem. My impression of the conversation was that, maybe, Ngo was doing that ordinary work of talking about how to think about AGIs, while EY skipped past that entire question and jumped straight into more advanced territory, like “how do we make an AGI that solves the alignment problem” or something.
Granted Ngo seemed to follow EY’s musings better than I did, so I’m probably just not getting what EY was saying. Which is, of course, part of my complaint: I think he’s capable of explaining things more clearly, and doesn’t.

DPiepgrass 18 Jan 2022 0:34 UTC
2 points
in reply to: ndr’s comment on: Covid vaccine safety: how correct are these allegations?
A recent tweet from Malone says:
The SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is cytotoxic. That is a fact. Who says so? Multiple peer reviewed references. The Salk Institute.[...]
And then links to this Salk article.
I’ve seen this paper used over, and over, and over by antivaxxers. But a coauthor of that paper, who was horrified about how it was being used, says:
Congrats to @OgataAlana on this important study. Many asked how much spike protein gets into circulation after vaccination. Turns out to average ~30-40 pg/mL for a few days then disappears. FYI: This is ~100,000x less than used in our paper (4 ug/mL). https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-ar
I challenge anyone to name any vaccine or protein (or whatever) that is safe at the normal dosage and ALSO safe at a dose 10,000x or 100,000x higher. An extreme dose being hazardous is not surprising. It logically follows that if an extreme dose is harmful, it doesn’t mean a dose 100,000x lower is harmful.

DPiepgrass 16 Jan 2022 6:27 UTC
3 points
on: Ngo and Yudkowsky on alignment difficulty
Ngo: Is this a crux for you?
EY could have said yes or no, but instead we get
EY: I would certainly have learned very new and very exciting facts about intelligence, facts which indeed contradict my present model of how intelligences liable to be discovered by present research paradigms work, if you showed me… how can I put this in a properly general way… that problems I thought were about searching for states that get fed into a result function and then a result-scoring function, such that the input gets an output with a high score, were in fact not about search problems like that.
Later...
Ngo: So then my position is something like: human pursuit of goals is driven by emotions and reward signals which are deeply evolutionarily ingrained, and without those we’d be much safer but not that much worse at pattern recognition.
EY could have simply agreed, or disagreed and poked a hole in his model, but instead we get
EY: If there’s a pivotal act you can get just by supreme acts of pattern recognition, that’s right up there with “pivotal act composed solely of math” for things that would obviously instantly become the prime direction of research.
I wish EY could stop saying “pivotal act” long enough to talk about why he thinks intelligence implies an urge for IRL agenticness. Or at least, define the term “pivotal act” and explain why he says it so much. Moving on...
Ngo: Okay, so if I attempt to rephrase your argument: Your position: There’s a set of fundamental similarities between tasks like doing maths, doing alignment research, and taking over the world. In all of these cases, agents based on techniques similar to modern ML which are very good at them will need to make use of deep problem-solving patterns which include goal-oriented reasoning. So while it’s possible to beat humans at some of these tasks without those core competencies, people usually overestimate the extent to which that’s possible.
Once again Yudkowsky could have agreed or disagreed or corrected, but confusingly chooses “none of the above”:
Yudkowsky: Remember, a lot of my concern is about what happens first, especially if it happens soon enough that future AGI bears any resemblance whatsoever to modern ML; not about what can be done in principle.
And then there’s this:
Ngo: Maybe this is a good time to dig into the details of what they have in common, then.
EY: I feel like I haven’t had much luck with trying to explain that on previous occasions. Not to you, to others too.
He then proceeds to… not try to explain these key points (at least not at first; I can’t be bothered to read to the end).
This is an uncomfortable discussion. It’s odd that the same EY who was … not perfect by any means, but adept enough at explaining things in Rationality:A-Z and HPMOR is unable to explain his main area of expertise, Friendly AI, to another AI expert. I’m puzzled how such a prolific writer can be bad at this. But if you’re reading this EY, please use phrases like “yes”, “no”, “I mostly agree/disagree”, etc as applicable. Also, please take lessons in communication from your younger self, Scott Alexander, etc. And drop some links to background information for us less-expert readers.

DPiepgrass 30 Dec 2021 0:01 UTC
1 point
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Covid vaccine safety: how correct are these allegations?
They don’t speak explicitely about Novavax.
Kirsch has now done so in his article “15 things everyone needs to know about COVID”. The first thing he says everyone needs to know is “Avoid all the COVID vaccines, even Novavax. The data shows that these vaccines kill more people than they save.”

DPiepgrass 20 Nov 2021 20:33 UTC
1 point
on: Ethnic Tension And Meaningless Arguments
Jonathan Haidt and his team hypnotized people to have strong disgust reactions to the word “often”
This link is broken (or the server is broken? “The connection was reset”), and I find the claim hard to believe.

DPiepgrass 11 Nov 2021 0:45 UTC
1 point
in reply to: bogus’s comment on: How to talk rationally about cults
Heh. When chaos said “the 9/11 of cults” I thought “wait, wasn’t 9/11 the 9/11 of cults?”

DPiepgrass 10 Nov 2021 12:45 UTC
13 points
in reply to: Duncan_Sabien’s comment on: Common knowledge facts about Leverage Research 1.0
The former curriculum director and head-of-workshops for the Center For Applied Rationality would not be welcome or safe at a CFAR event?
What the **** is going on?
It sounds to me like mission failure, but I suppose it could also just be eccentric people not knowing how to get along (which isn’t so much different?) 😕

DPiepgrass 3 Nov 2021 17:24 UTC
1 point
in reply to: hold_my_fish’s comment on: The Duplicator: Instant Cloning Would Make the World Economy Explode
I think Holden partly put the cart before the horse by talking about consequences of a duplicator without even trying to show that a duplicator is possible. Perhaps the previous article has his answer:
[suppose] You think our economic and scientific progress will stagnate. Today’s civilizations will crumble, and many more civilizations will fall and rise. Sure, we’ll eventually get the ability to expand throughout the galaxy. But it will take 100,000 years. That’s 10x the amount of time that has passed since human civilization began in the Levant.
The difference between your timeline and mine isn’t even a pixel, so it doesn’t show up on the chart. In the scheme of things, this “conservative” view and my view are the same.
Except that Holden is building “the most important century” series, and discussing a person-cloning technology that could be 400 years away, or 99,900, doesn’t make the case for 21st-century-as-most-important.
Also, the duplicator route is one that makes “the little people” like myself fairly irrelevant. My IQ is only like 125, and wouldn’t this duplicator be reserved for the top 0.1% or so? Maybe you need something like a 150 IQ to be worth duplicating, unless you are somebody like Beyoncé or Bill Gates with wealth and/or a proven track record. Or perhaps Xi’s hand-picked successor takes over the world and only duplicates his most loyal followers and scientists. Even if this century is the most important, that matters little to me if I cannot participate in the revolution.
In the current world, what I need to enable me to meaningfully influence the future is money I don’t have, but I am more likely to get that than new genius abilities. Now, I don’t oppose duplicators, but it seems like we’re very far from having one. Just bringing people out of poverty and wage-slavery (e.g. via UBI and/or an Open Engineering program) would quickly enable a lot more smart people to do smart things rather than just obeying the boss’s orders.

DPiepgrass 2 Nov 2021 16:27 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Randomized, Controlled’s comment on: Where do you live?
Hm, somebody strong-upvoted this (and Calgary—I wonder who)

DPiepgrass 2 Nov 2021 0:33 UTC
1 point
in reply to: bendini’s comment on: The rationalist community’s location problem
Manchester sounds nice, but what can you tell me about UK immigration law? Is there a base of EAs, rationalists, or ACX fans already?

DPiepgrass 1 Nov 2021 19:33 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Randomized, Controlled’s comment on: Where do you live?
Yeah, and it is probably very tempting for people to click places they like :D. Also I got downvoted and probably most people will never see the survey.
As far as I’ve seen, downvoting typically works the same way on other sites; LW is normal in this regard.

DPiepgrass 31 Oct 2021 19:05 UTC
1 point
in reply to: thomblake’s comment on: Negative and Positive Selection
Ahh, the The winner’s curse.

DPiepgrass 31 Oct 2021 18:21 UTC
6 points
on: Where do you live?
As a Canadian I can testify that Canada certainly seems to be welcoming to all skilled professionals, but from personal experience, their system for issuing temporary/visitor visas stinks: they rejected my wife’s application to leave her son behind in the Philippines and visit me in Canada because she failed to “prove” that she would leave at the end of her visit. The thing is, it’s impossible to prove! A return flight is not considered evidence, I can’t buy a bond to promise she will leave, and leaving a child behind is considered evidence but, in my case, was insufficient. Notably, there is nothing on any government web site hinting at how hard it is to visit Canada, or how arbitrary and opaque the decisions are.
As a preliminary check, I filled out a questionnaire and verified that a 35-year-old person with good English skill (7.5/9 scores on IELTS), 2 years of college, 2 years experience in a skilled profession, married, one child, no job offer in Canada, but $30,000 CAD to bring to Canada, is eligible to apply for Express Entry if the wife scored likewise on the English test (oddly there is no provision for native English speakers). But this is just the very beginning; the Express Entry program doesn’t seem particularly “express” (or fast or cheap). You might be able to apply, but do you have enough “points” to actually immigrate? After a brief review I couldn’t figure out how the point system actually correlates to getting a “invitation to apply”. The most recent minimum number of points was 744 out of 1200, but I can’t find anyone saying whether (1) you’re guaranteed to get an “invitation to apply” if you pass the threshold, or (2) there is some kind of probabilistic formula for the “draw” system based on the points (as this page seems to imply). If you do get an “invitation to apply” I would guess you have some kind of temporary “right” to permanent residence if you immediately do the copious paperwork and pay the $1,325 application fee, but I don’t see anyone spelling out the probability of successful immigration conditional upon having an “invitation to apply”.