links 11/07/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-07-2024
Note that you can make untrusted monitoring work without the synthetic inputs too, you just have to do the honeypots during deployment instead of before deployment.
ryan_b on Explore More: A Bag of Tricks to Keep Your Life on the RailsI am an American who knows what Estonia is, and I found the joke hilarious.
alexander-gietelink-oldenziel on Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel's ShortformHot Take #44: Preaching to the choir is 'good' actually.
It’s reasonable to consider two agents playing against each other. “Playing against your copy” is a reasonable problem. ($9 rocks get 0 in this problem, LDTs probably get $5.)
Newcomb, Parfit’s hitchhiker, smoking, etc. are all very reasonable problems that essentially depend on the buttons you press when you play the game. It is important to get these problems right.
But playing against LDT is not necessarily in the “fair problem class” because the game might behave differently depending on your algorithm/on how you arrive at taking actions, and not just depending on your actions.
Your version of it- playing against an LDT- is indeed different from playing against a game that looks at whether we’re an alphabetizing agent and pick X instead of Y because X<Y and not because we looked at the expected utility: we would want LDT to perform optimally in this game. But the reason LDT-created-rock loses to a natural rock here isn’t fundamentally different from the reason LDT loses to an alphabetizing agent in the other game and it is known that you can construct a game like that where LDT will lose to something else. You can make the game description sound more natural, but I feel like there’s a sharp divide between the “fair problem class” problems and others.
(I also think that in real life, where this game might play out, there isn’t really a choice we can make, to make our AI a $9 rock instead of an LDT agent; because when we do that due to the rock’s better performance in this game, our rock gets slightly less than $5 in EV instead of getting $9; LDT doesn’t perform worse than other agents we could’ve chosen in this game.)
ramblindash on Should CA, TX, OK, and LA merge into a giant swing state, just for elections?Many states have already passed something like this, which only takes effect once enough states sign on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
However, I think it's unlikely that this will get over the 270 hump anytime soon, because right now GOP-run states (correctly) perceive that the EC has a pro-GOP tilt (for now at least); and the swing states benefit a lot from swing status.
viliam on The Median Researcher ProblemOn the other hand, that does not mean that those fields are going to recognize [a smart outsider] as a thought-leader or whatever.
Could this be a more general problem that people in academia are very unlikely to recognize anything that originates outside of academia?
I mean, first you get your degree by listening to people in academia, and reading textbooks written by people in academia. Then you learn to solve problems, defined by people in academia, under the leadership of people in academia, mostly by reading a lot of papers written and reviewed by people in academia. Etc. I think it is very easy to forget that the universe outside of academia exists at all.
And even if you remember that the universe outside of academia exists, interacting with it is potentially dangerous for your reputation. If you cite something from an academically respected source, then... even if it later turns out to be completely wrong, it kinda wasn't your mistake, was it? Compare to the situation where you cite something from a smart outsider... who also turns out to be completely wrong. Now you look like an idiot... and you can't shift the blame to him (because he is outside the system) nor to his reviewers (because either he had none, or they were also outside the system).
Similarly, suppose that two respected scientists have expressed a similar idea, and you prefer one of the formulations over the other. No problem; just cite the one you prefer. Now suppose that a respected scientist wrote something about a topic, but a smart outsider wrote about something slightly more relevant for your specific case and/or he expressed it better. Citing the outsider instead of the respected scientist... will make you seem like you are not familiar with the existing research in your field. (Chances are, the respected scientist or his colleague will review your paper.)
So it's part familiarity, part incentives.
Epistemic status: just a guess; I am not working in academia, so I only imagine what the incentives are
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Now assuming that this is true, or at least pointing in the right direction, the problem seems solvable, but it would require some work. For example, you can't expect people in academia to go outside and read your research on their own initiative. But maybe if you publish it as a book that is easy to read, and donate them the book? Or maybe you could academia-wash your research by making someone inside the system a co-author.
Perhaps you could do both of these at the same time, like publish a popular science book that would contain articles both from LW researchers and academic researchers. And then the book would kinda be okay to cite.
bart-bussmann on Could we use current AI methods to understand dolphins?This project seems to be trying to translate whale language.
towards_keeperhood on An alternative approach to superbabiesJustification for this:
I don't think organisms end up with 40 billion cortical neurons without either some strong selection for at least some sub-dimensions of intelligence, or being as big as Godzilla.
One could naively expect that the neuron count (especially touch and motor) sensory processing modules are proportional to the surface area of an organism. However I think this is unrealistic: Bears don't need nearly as fine precision on what square centimeter of skin was touched (or what millimeter the paw moves) than mice, and generally this is because precision gets less relevant given body size.
So let's say the precision an organism needs is proportional to the square root of the 1-dimensional-size (aka sqrt(surface_area)) of the organism. Aka if a mice is 5cm tall and a bear 2m, the spacing between sensors on the mouse skin vs on the bear skin would be sqrt(0.05) vs sqrt(2). The number of sensors on the skin surface is proportional to the square of the distancing between sensors, so the overall number of sensors is proportional to the 1-dimensional-size (aka sqrt(surface_area)).
A brown bear has 250million neorons in the neocortex and is maybe 2m tall. So to get just by scaling size to 40billion neorons an organism would have to be 40/0.25 * 2m = 320m tall. So actually bigger than godzilla.
jbash on Should CA, TX, OK, and LA merge into a giant swing state, just for elections?To prevent this, there must be a provision that once signed by all 4 states, the compact can't be repealed by any state until after the next election.
It's not obvious that state legislatures have the authority, under their own constitutions, to bind themselves that way. Especially not across their own election cycles.