Unnamed

Karma: 7,037

Unnamed 1 Dec 2022 23:03 UTC
15 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Did ChatGPT just gaslight me?
Many sites on the internet describe tequila as sweet. e.g., With the search what does tequila taste like it looks like more than half the results which answer the question mention sweetness; google highlights the description “Overall, tequila is smooth, sweet, and fruity.”
It seems like ChatGPT initially drew on these descriptions, but was confused by them, and started confabulating.

Unnamed 24 Oct 2022 8:45 UTC
9 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Have you noticed any ways that rationalists differ? [Brainstorming session]
Iconoclastic, distrusting of mainstream institutions, seeing oneself as an outsider (vs. identifying more with the people inside institutions who are trying to make institutions work decently well)
Scrupulosity, especially about honesty/integrity/commitment/authenticity (e.g. when you say you’ll do something that is an ironclad promise) (e.g. feeling uncomfortable w the job interview process where you know what you’re supposed to say to improve your chances)
Demandingness of rigor vs. willingness to seek value from a broad range of lower quality sources (e.g. the tension in this post)
Being quick to dismiss of standard ways of doing things if other ways look better to you vs. treating the standard ways of doing things as a pretty good default (e.g., styles of social interaction) (e.g., lifestyle things such as eating soylent/huel)
Being in touch with your own emotions, living in your body
Avoidance of “woo” / things related to spirituality
Trying to form your own independent impressions, always trying to build your own gears-level models vs. trying to form all-things-considered beliefs, foxy aggregation of multiple viewpoints, inclined to favor variants of outside viewish reasoning
How much you identify with heroes vs. sidekicks vs. villains/antiheroes
How much you identify with various fictional characters (e.g. HJPEV, HPMOR!Hermione)
How easily/thoroughly you get nerd-sniped & delve deeply into random topics or puzzles
Head-in-the-clouds absentminded professorness vs. tracking the concrete practicalities around you

Unnamed 13 Oct 2022 0:11 UTC
7 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Help out Redwood Research’s interpretability team by finding heuristics implemented by GPT-2 small
Unit conversion, such as
“Fresno is 204 miles (329 km) northwest of Los Angeles and 162 miles (” → 261 km)
“Fresno is 204 miles (329 km) northwest of Los Angeles and has an average temperature of 64 F (” → 18 C)
“Fresno is 204 miles (” → 329 km)
Results: 1, 2, 3. It mostly gets the format right (but not the right numbers).

Unnamed 11 Oct 2022 5:35 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
on: What happened to the annual LW demographic surveys?
Scott has continued running annual(ish) surveys at SSC/ACX. They have a lot of overlap with the old LW surveys.

Unnamed 28 Sep 2022 0:45 UTC
11 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The Onion Test for Integrity
It’s not that clear to me exactly what test/principle/model is being proposed here.
A lot of it is written in terms of not being “misleading”, which I interpret as ‘intentionally causing others to update in the wrong direction’. But the goal to have people not be shocked by the inner layers suggests that there’s a duty to actively inform people about (some aspects of) what’s inside; leaving them with their priors isn’t good enough. (But what exactly does “shocked” mean, and how does it compare with other possible targets like “upset” or “betrayed”?) And the parts about “signposting” suggest that there’s an aim of helping people build explicit models about the inner layers, which is not just a matter of what probabilities/anticipations they have.

Unnamed 26 Sep 2022 21:19 UTC
2 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Zach Stein-Perlman’s comment on: Announcing Balsa Research
To me, it suggests a contrast with Weber’s “Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.”

Unnamed 26 Sep 2022 21:10 UTC
21 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Announcing Balsa Research
rules against container stacking that did major damage to our supply chains.
Is this “major damage” claim true? I remember being unsure, at the time, if the effects of the rules that limited stack height were substantial or negligible, since some people were saying that they mostly just applied to places that didn’t have the equipment to stack higher. Did anyone ever follow up to at least check how much container stacking increased after the rule change?

Unnamed 2 Aug 2022 23:19 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Valentine’s comment on: Flash Classes: Polaris, Seeking PCK, and Five-Second Versions
Seeking PCK was a full (hour or longer) class at every mainline workshop since October 2016 (sometimes called “Seeking Sensibility” or “Seeking Sense”). After you left it was always a full hour+ class, almost always taught by Luke, and often on opening night.
The concept of PCK became part of the workshop content in April 2014 as a flash class (as a lead-in to the tutoring wheel, which was also introduced at that workshop). In October 2016 we added the full class, and then a couple workshops later we removed the flash class from the workshop. Something very close to this chapter made it into the first draft of the CFAR handbook in May 2016, when PCK was still just a flash class, and I guess the chapter didn’t ever get expanded or moved.
After the class was transferred from Val to Luke, Luke was involved in teaching it until the last pre-covid workshop in January 2020. I’m pretty sure he kept the subtraction exercise (that exercise wasn’t removed from the handbook, it just never made it in). A couple other people also taught the class at some point (including Duncan in April 2017), I’d guess at workshops where Val or Luke was absent.
At the January 2020 workshop a new instructor was learning the class & taught some of it along with Luke. I suspect that’s why it was part of the day 1 rotation that workshop rather than being opening night (since it’s helpful for a new instructor to have repetition & smaller groups, and a new instructor’s version of a class hasn’t necessarily cohered enough to be ready to set the tone for the workshop on opening night).
(This history mostly based on records I looked up, supplemented by memory.)

Unnamed 12 Jul 2022 19:51 UTC
11 points
5 ∶ 0
on: Marriage, the Giving What We Can Pledge, and the damage caused by vague public commitments
I would click the “disagree” button if there was one, because many parts of this post are askew to how I understand marriage, divorce, commitment, etc.,
I think of a marriage as two people deciding to build a life together, and commitment as essentially about being “in” on that shared project. This post seems to be coming at it from a different angle, where explicitly specifying things in advance is much more fundamental. It centers honesty vs. dishonesty, ironclad promises, and public accountability in places where those don’t feel like the central concepts to me.
A few of the places where that disagreement came up most strongly:
- The paragraph about marriage beginning “The point of a public pledge is help structure our own incentives to fulfill our commitment.” That does not seem like the main point of having a public ceremony, which IMO is more about marking the occasion of the couple building a life together, in common knowledge so that their surrounding community will treat them as a unit.
- The paragraph about the mountain climbing promise. Agreeing to climb a mountain before a divorce is finalized doesn’t actually seem to help with the things this post is describing as important. This promise mainly just seems to be acknowledging that an escape clause (divorce) already exists, and adding in an extra step which perhaps is symbolically meaningful to the couple.
- The partial sentence “I want people to build within themselves the machinery to be able to make strict pledges that mean things”. As if a pledge needs to be strict in order to be meaningful. There are plenty of meaningful marriages which didn’t specify in advance criteria for a divorce or social consequences of a divorce.
The complaints in the GWWC Pledge section also don’t seem that similar to the arguments in the section on marriage. Standards like ‘Don’t say false things’ (like “till death do we part”) and ‘make it possible to opt out later on, and acknowledge this possibility up front’ which seemed like central parts of the section on marriage are already covered by the current version of the GWWC Pledge.

Unnamed 7 Jul 2022 20:41 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: When Giving People Money Doesn’t Help
The predicted effect sizes (.16-.65 SDs) seem too large, compared to (e.g.) the size of the linear relationship between log(income) and well-being that many studies find. I would’ve expected a positive effect rather than zero or a negative effect, but probably on the low end of that range or below it, depending on the specific question.

Unnamed 5 Jul 2022 23:21 UTC
4 points
3 ∶ 1
on: ITT-passing and civility are good; “charity” is bad; steelmanning is niche
I think I basically agree with Rob about the importance of the thing he’s pointing to when he talks about the importance of “Trying to pass each other’s Ideological Turing Test”, but I don’t like using the concept of the ITT to point to this.
It’s a niche framing for a concept that is general & basic. “Understand[ing] the substance of someone’s view well enough to be able to correctly describe their beliefs and reasoning” is a concept that it should be possible to explain to a child, and if I was trying to explain it to a child I would not do that via the Turing Test and Bryan Caplan’s variant.
The Ideological Turing Test points to the wrong part of the process. Caplan says that the ability to pass ITTs is the ability “to state opposing views as clearly and persuasively as their proponents.” This means that the ITT is a way of testing whether a person has that ability to state opposing views well. But what we care about in practice is whether a person has that ability & is using it, not how they do on this particular way of testing whether they have that ability. This kind of imitation test usually doesn’t come into play.
There have been several ITT contests, where authors write short essays about either their own views or the views of an ideological opponent, and guessers try to tell which essays represented the authors own views. The vibe of these contests doesn’t match the thing that matters in conversation, and ‘pretend to be a proponent of X’ can be pretty different than understanding a particular person’s views. The contests involve pretending to be something you’re not, they involve capturing the style and not just the substance, and they involve portraying a member of the group rather than getting a single person’s views.
We need better terminology for disagreements, arguments, and similar conversations.

Unnamed 1 Jul 2022 18:50 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
on: The Track Record of Futurists Seems … Fine
I recall hearing a claim that a lot of Kurzweil’s predictions for 2009 had come true by 2019, including many that hadn’t happened yet in 2009. If true, that supports the picture of Kurzweil as an insightful but overly aggressive futurist. But I don’t know how well that claim backed up by the data, or if there even has been a careful look at the data to try to evaluate that claim.

Unnamed 21 Jun 2022 22:35 UTC
9 points
on: One single meme that makes you Less Wrong in general
If someone, somewhere, were to have a vested interest in keeping consumer spending high in order to stave off a recession, they would at least try find a way to persuade millions of people that There Is No Recession.
I think the basic story behind that WSJ headline is that the financial press makes an overly big deal out of daily market fluctuations which aren’t that relevant to most investors (or most people). Not that they’re trying to trick people into thinking that the economy is doing better than it is.
To pit these two hypotheses against each other (or other hypotheses), you could look at the past couple weeks of financial headlines to see what the WSJ & other financial press said on days when the market went down.

Unnamed 20 Jun 2022 7:55 UTC
2 points
on: What’s the name of this fallacy/reasoning antipattern?
Rationalization

Unnamed 18 Jun 2022 1:26 UTC
3 points
on: Humans are very reliable agents
I wouldn’t call the low death rate from surgery humans being highly reliable. Surgery used to be much deadlier. Humans have spent many many years improving surgical methods (tools, procedures, training), including by using robotic assistance to replace human activity on subtasks where the robots do better. Surgery as practiced by current trained humans with their tools & methods is highly reliable, but this reliability isn’t something inherent to the humans as agents.

Unnamed 16 Jun 2022 1:04 UTC
43 points
on: Contra Hofstadter on GPT-3 Nonsense
GPT-3 reminds me of a student bullshitting their way through an exam on Dave & Doug’s version of these questions. This question doesn’t make any sense to me, but I guess the teacher expects me to have an answer, so I’ll see if I can make up something that resembles what they’re looking for.
There is a mind-boggling hollowness hidden just beneath the flashy surface of a clever student who is just trying to guess what their teacher is looking for.

Unnamed 13 Jun 2022 20:43 UTC
6 points
on: Why so little AI risk on rationalist-adjacent blogs?
Matthew Yglesias has written a couple things about AI risk & existential risk more broadly, and he has also talked a few times about why he doesn’t write more about AI, e.g.:
I don’t write takes about how we should all be more worried about an out-of-control AI situation, but that’s because I know several smart people who do write those takes, and unfortunately they do not have much in the way of smart, tractable policy ideas to actually address it.
This seems different than your 8 possibilities. It sounds like his main issue is that he doesn’t see the path that you think you see where “Rationalist-adjacent writers are a major path for LessWrong ideas to influence elite and mainstream opinion. This can lead to good policies, like avoiding a race with China and discouraging certain types of capabilities research.”

Unnamed 27 May 2022 3:52 UTC
13 points
in reply to: alyssavance’s comment on: Is AI Progress Impossible To Predict?
Doesn’t that mean that you are getting some predictiveness by looking at momentum? If progress on a task was totally unpredictable, with no signal and all noise, then your way of carving up the data would produce negative correlations. Instead you’re mostly finding correlations near zero, or slightly positive, which means that there is just about enough signal to counteract that noise.
The signal to noise ratio is going to depend on a lot of contingent factors. There will be more noise if there are fewer questions on a task. There will be less signal from one model version to the next if there is a smaller increase in model size, or if the task is one where improvement happens very gradually as models scale up (though in those cases you could find a clearer signal by looking across several model versions, rather than just two consecutive jumps).

Unnamed 29 Apr 2022 6:44 UTC
6 points
on: Virtue signaling is sometimes the best or the only metric we have
I understand “virtue signalling” as a novel term that is only loosely related to the concepts of “virtue” or “signalling”.
It’s a little annoying to have to mentally translate it into “that thing that people mean when they say ‘virtue signalling’” (or sometimes a little amusing, when there’s an interesting contrast with the literal meaning that a person’s actions have signalled their virtues).

Unnamed 11 Apr 2022 7:02 UTC
8 points
on: Playing with DALL·E 2
- this photo was taken with perfect timing as the water balloon was breaking
- note the symmetry in this ancient Roman mosaic from the National Museum of Roman Art in Merida
- hot air balloons over the rolling hills of Tuscany
- literal puppy love, awwwww
- a sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art based on a child’s drawing of a monster
- traffic on the busy streets of Sydney