jacobjacob

Karma: 3,188

jacobjacob 12 Jan 2021 20:24 UTC
2 points
in reply to: jacobjacob’s comment on: Thread for making 2019 Review accountability commitments
I failed to meet all my commitments.
Operationalize three forecasting questions
Smashed this one and created 20+ questions.
Run one MTurk/Positly survey
I have a beginning draft of a survey for the Secret of Our Success. I hoped I could finish it up yesterday, but instead I had work on shipping the LessWrong Books. Will see if I can get it out later this week.
Have at least one 2h conversation about a particular post, and write up a review after, almost regardless of how I feel the conversation went
Didn’t happen and didn’t really come close.
---
My main post-mortem is that I had multiple calendar reminders about the commitment, but for all of them I postponed them into the future. Until it was the last weekend and I was out of time. I should’ve spent more meta-cognition during some of them, thinking about how much time I would need to complete the tasks on time.

jacobjacob 12 Jan 2021 20:19 UTC
2 points
in reply to: DanielFilan’s comment on: Thread for making 2019 Review accountability commitments
Nice job.
Reviews seem to me to have a lower karma on average than either posts, or comments on currently popular posts.

jacobjacob 12 Jan 2021 0:03 UTC
2 points
in reply to: DanielFilan’s comment on: Thread for making 2019 Review accountability commitments
Following up on this: how did it go?

jacobjacob 11 Jan 2021 20:05 UTC
4 points
on: Unconscious Economies
Author here: I think this post could use a bunch of improvements. It spends a bunch of time on tangential things (e.g. the discussion of Inadequacy and why this doesn’t come through in textbooks, spending a while initially setting up a view to then tear down).
But really what would be nice is to have it do a much better job at delivering the core insight. This is currently just done in two bullets + one exercise for the reader.
Even more important would be to include JenniferRM’s comment which adds a core mechanism (something like “cultural learning”).
Overall, though, I still stand by the importance of the underlying concept; and think it’s a crucial part of the toolkit required to apply economic thinking in practice.

jacobjacob 10 Jan 2021 19:05 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: The Hard Work of Translation (Buddhism)
Ah, woe is me! Fixed now, thanks!

jacobjacob 10 Jan 2021 0:28 UTC
2 points
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Being the (Pareto) Best in the World
Yeah I thought about that. I’m curious whether one could operationalise the field-picking into an interesting poll question.

jacobjacob 10 Jan 2021 0:25 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Matthew Barnett’s comment on: Two explanations for variation in human abilities
Formulations are basically just lifted from the post verbatim, so the response might be some evidence that it would be good to rework the post a bit before people vote on it.
I thought a bit about how to turn Katja’s core claim into a poll question, but didn’t come up with any great ideas. Suggestions welcome.
As for whether the claims are true or not --
The “broken parts” argument is one counter-argument.
But another is that it matters a lot what learning algorithm you use. Someone doing deliberate practice (in a field where that’s possible) will vastly outperform someone who just does “guessing and checking”, or who Goodharts very hard on short-term metrics.
Maybe you’d class that under “background knowledge”? Or maybe the claim is that, modulo broken parts, motivation, and background knowledge, different people can meta-learn the same effective learning strategies?

jacobjacob 9 Jan 2021 23:46 UTC
LW: 4 AF: 2
AF
on: Reframing Impact
Here are prediction questions for the predictions that TurnTrout himself provided in the concluding post of the Reframing Impact sequence.

Elicit Prediction (Attainable Utility theory describes how people feel impacted)

Elicit Prediction (Agents trained by powerful RL algorithms on arbitrary reward signals generally try to take over the world.)

Elicit Prediction (The catastrophic convergence conjecture is true. That is, unaligned goals tend to have catastrophe-inducing optimal policies because of power-seeking incentives.)

Elicit Prediction (AUP_conceptual prevents catastrophe, assuming the catastrophic convergence conjecture. )

Elicit Prediction (Some version of Attainable Utility Preservation solves side effect problems for an extremely wide class of real-world tasks and for subhuman agents.)

Elicit Prediction (For the superhuman case, penalizing the agent for increasing its own Attainable Utility (AU) is better than penalizing the agent for increasing other AUs. )

Elicit Prediction (There exists a simple closed-form solution to catastrophe avoidance (in the outer alignment sense).)

jacobjacob 9 Jan 2021 23:44 UTC
2 points
in reply to: TurnTrout’s comment on: Credence polls for 26 claims from the 2019 Review
Ey, awesome! I’ve updated the post to include them.

jacobjacob 9 Jan 2021 22:45 UTC
2 points
in reply to: adamzerner’s comment on: Babble Thread
Reading the OP quickly, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was supposed to babble about… “100 ways to light a candle” is easier than ”...anything” :)

Consider giving some prompts that people could default to, unless they have something else in mind already?

jacobjacob 9 Jan 2021 21:16 UTC
2 points
on: Two explanations for variation in human abilities
I made some prediction questions for this, and as of January 9th, there interestingly seems to be some disagreement with the author on these.

Elicit Prediction (Background knowledge and motivation levels being equal, humans will learn how to perform new tasks at roughly equal rates.)

Elicit Prediction (Another version: roughly, everything that top-humans can learn, most humans can too if they actually tried. That is, there is psychological unity of humankind in what we can learn, but not necessarily what we have learned. By contrast, a mouse really couldn’t learn chess, even if they tried. And in turn, no human can learn to play 90-dimensional chess, unlike the hypothetical superintelligences that can.)

Would definitely be curious for some discussion between Matthew and some of the people with low-ish predictions. Or perhaps for Matthew to clarify the argument made on these points, and see if that changes people’s minds.

jacobjacob 9 Jan 2021 20:11 UTC
3 points
on: Bioinfohazards

Elicit Prediction (Overall, in 2019, biosecurity in the context of catastrophic risks had been underfunded and underdiscussed.)

Elicit Prediction (The EA community has sometimes erred too much on the side of shutting down discussions of biology by turning them into discussions about info-hazards.)

(You can find a list of all 2019 Review poll questions here.)

jacobjacob 9 Jan 2021 20:04 UTC
2 points
on: The Forces of Blandness and the Disagreeable Majority
I experimented with extracting some of the core claims from this post into polls:

Elicit Prediction (Decision-makers in media and PR, and corporate and government elites generally, have a lower tolerance for verbal conflict and taboo violations than the typical individual.)

Elicit Prediction (As of 2019, the US was in an era of unusually large amounts of free speech that elites were starting to get spooked by and defend against.)

Personally, I find that answering polls like these make me more of a “quest participant” than a passive reader. They provide a nice “think for yourself” prompt, that then makes me look at the essay with a more active mindset. But others might have different experiences, feel free to provide feedback on how it worked for you.
(You can find a list of all 2019 Review poll questions here.)

jacobjacob 9 Jan 2021 19:58 UTC
3 points
on: The Hard Work of Translation (Buddhism)

Elicit Prediction (The core cognitive loop that causes progress in accomplished Buddhists is basically cognitive behavioral therapy, supercharged with a mental state more intense than most pharmaceuticals.)

(You can find a list of all review poll questions here.)

jacobjacob 9 Jan 2021 19:09 UTC
2 points
on: Being the (Pareto) Best in the World

Elicit Prediction (Does Pareto frontier trick allow people to circumvent the Generalized Efficient Market hypothesis? That is, take people in the 98th percentile of intelligence. Are there a few separate fields such that they could become experts in each, with less than 10 years of total time investment… and then have a realistic shot at a big money/status windfall, with relatively little *marginal* effort.)

I took some liberties in operationalising what seemed to me a core thesis underlying the post. Let me know if you think it doesn’t really capture the important stuff!
(You can find a list of all review poll questions here.)

jacobjacob 9 Jan 2021 19:08 UTC
LW: 4 AF: 2
AF
on: The strategy-stealing assumption

Elicit Prediction (The strategy-stealing assumption is “a good enough approximation that we can basically act as if it’s true”. That is, for any strategy an unaligned AI could use to influence the long-run future, there is an analogous strategy that a similarly-sized group of humans can use in order to capture a similar amount of flexible influence over the future. By “flexible” is meant that humans can decide later what to do with that influence (which is important since humans don’t yet know what we want in the long run).)

(You can find a list of all 2019 Review poll questions here.)

jacobjacob 9 Jan 2021 19:07 UTC
4 points
on: [Answer] Why wasn’t science invented in China?

Elicit Prediction (The modern Scientific Revolution occurred in Europe between the 16th and 18th Centuries. Why did it not happen in China? Historian Toby Huff claims the reason is that China was unable to produce modern science primarily because a lack of the requisite intellectual freedom. Was he basically correct?)

(You can find a list of all review poll questions here.)

Credence polls for 26 claims from the 2019 Review

jacobjacob9 Jan 2021 7:13 UTC

45 points

2 comments1 min readLW link

jacobjacob 9 Jan 2021 5:59 UTC
13 points
on: Make more land
I’m trying out making some polls about posts for the Review (using the predictions feature). You can answer by hovering over the scale and clicking a number to indicate your agreement with the claim.
Making more land out of the about 50mi^2 shallow water in the San Francisco Bay, South of the Dumbarton Bridge, would…

Elicit Prediction (...be an environmental disaster.)

Elicit Prediction (...create buildings where the expected yearly damage from earthquakes (both in terms of reduced quality of life and property destroyed) is >1.5x that of nearby buildings on old land.)

Elicit Prediction (...significantly worsen traffic in San Francisco.)

Elicit Prediction (...cause a water shortage such that, in 2030, residents of the Bay Area would spend on average 100% more on water, after adjusting for inflation, compared to 2020. (In 2020 the average American spends around $200/year on water))

Elicit Prediction (...substantially improve current housing shortages and rent prices by 2035. )

Elicit Prediction (...all-things-considered, be good for the world.)

For some of these questions, I tried to operationalise them to be less ambiguous than Jeff’s original formulation.

jacobjacob 9 Jan 2021 5:45 UTC
6 points
on: Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success
For the Review, I’m experimenting with using the predictions feature to poll users for their opinions about claims made in posts.

Elicit Prediction (Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis: humans evolved big brains in order to be able to maintain [complicated, detailed, arbitrary-seeming cultural knowledge like 20+ step Inuit seal hunting techniques]. Everything that separates us from the apes is part of an evolutionary package designed to help us maintain this kind of culture, exploit this kind of culture, or adjust to the new abilities that this kind of culture gave us. )

Elicit Prediction (Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis: humans evolved big brains in order to succeed at social manuevering and climbing dominance hierarchies.)

Elicit Prediction (For most of history, a human attempting to use reasoning to do things like cooking, crafting, or planning (instead of using inherited cultural heuristics, like omens or folk wisdom), would have been substantially worse off, and faced a major increase in their risk of death (without a commensurate increase in life quality).)

The first two cites Scott almost verbatim, but for the third I tried to specify further.
Feel free to add your predictions above, and let me know if you have any questions about the experience.

jacobjacob

Cre­dence polls for 26 claims from the 2019 Review

Credence polls for 26 claims from the 2019 Review