LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Feedback:

"please don't shitpost and when you engage with me please avoid all attempts at humor because these pattern-match to ways I am abused and if you do those things even if in good faith it will only hurt our communication, perhaps disastrously, never help" would, I think, cover basically everything you want to cover without also signaling that it will be extremely emotionally draining to engage with you.

OTOH if it will be extremely emotionally draining to engage with you then you have successfully signaled that.

Possibly this isn't fair but I'm pretty sure it's an accurate reading.

Yes [LW · GW].

I would note the similarity between "haha yeah" and the stated lack of punctuation and capitalization in "shitposts", which are supposed to be light jokes.

Also, you say

If I get things wrong and you or others point out the specific things that I’m actually wrong about, that’s great! That’s how we all become less wrong together. But the process of using the beautiful weapons of reasoned argument to become less wrong together, only works if both sides are being honest; the discourse algorithm doesn’t produce accurate maps if one side is allowed to shitpost.

That argument is also a valid argument against making emotional appeals about your past mental state and how it has been affected by this argument. There are rumors about mathematicians being driven mad by the concept of infinity. This doesn't make them very good at teaching Calculus in college, but rather the opposite.

You are misunderstanding the post. There are no "extra bits of information" hiding anywhere in reality; where the "extra bits of information" are lurking is within the implicit assumptions you made when you constructed your model the way you did.

As long as your model is making use of abstractions--that is, using "summary data" to create and work with a lower-dimensional representation of reality than would be obtained by meticulously tracking every variable of relevance--you are implicitly making a choice about what information you are summarizing and how you are summarizing it.

This choice is forced to some extent, in the sense that there are certain ways of summarizing the data that barely simplify computation at all compared to using the "full" model. But even conditioning on a usefully simplifying (natural) abstraction having been selected, there will still be degrees of freedom remaining, and those degrees of freedom are determined by you (the person doing the summarizing). This is where the "extra information" comes from; it's not because of inherent uncertainty in the physical measurements, but because of an unforced choice that was made between multiple abstract models summarizing the same physical measurements.

Of course, in reality you are also dealing with measurement uncertainty. But that's not what the post is about; the thing described in the post happens even if you somehow manage to get your hands on a set of uncertainty-free measurements, because the moment you pick a particular way to carve up those measurements, you induce a (partially) arbitrary abstraction layer on top of the measurements. As the post itself says:

If there’s only a limited number of data points, then this has the same inherent uncertainty as before: sample mean is not distribution mean. But even if there’s an infinite number of data points, there’s still some unresolvable uncertainty: there are points which are boundary-cases between the “tree” cluster and the “apple” cluster, and the distribution-mean depends on how we classify those. There is no physical measurement we can make which will perfectly tell us which things are “trees” or “apples”; this distinction exists only in our model, not in the territory. In turn, the tree-distribution-parameters do not perfectly correspond to any physical things in the territory.

This implies nothing about determinism, physics, or the nature of reality ("illusory" or otherwise).

The Roman Kingdom and Roman Empire both fell because of ineffective leaders. The Roman Republic fell because of extremely competent, but autocratic, leaders.

How would you feel if you sunk forty months of your life into deconfusing a philosophical issue that had huge, life-altering practical stakes for you, and the response to your careful arguments from community authorities was a dismissive "haha yeah"? Would you, perhaps, be somewhat upset?

Perhaps! But also that doesn't seem to me like what happened. The response to your careful arguments was the 1000ish words that engage with what seemed to me to be the heart of your questions, and that attempted to convey some ways it seemed you were misunderstanding my communications. Also, the primary intent of the "haha yeah" was not dismissal, and the 100ish words following it were intended to convey some ways it seemed you were misunderstanding the linked twitter thread. Your apparent reading of my "haha yeah" as dismissive of your careful arguments looks to me like yet another way you're misunderstanding my communications.

(FWIW, as far as I can tell on very brief introspection, the main purpose of the 'haha yeah' was to hold open a space -- however small -- for online correspondence to be actually fun, with a comparatively minor side purpose of dismissing a very limited part of your argument. Furthermore, my conversational ethics do not permit such attempts at dismissal to be purely implicit, and the following paragraph attempts to render explicit the grounds on which I believe a specific narrow part of your argument deserved dismissal. There are forces in play whose names I don't readily have on this brief introspection, and my account might change on a deeper introspection, but I feel like I know where the dismissal is in all this, and don't expect I'd find that the main purpose was dismissal-based if I introspected further.)

My take on this conversation is that you're dramatically mismodelling me, and then running really far -- and getting quite distressed -- based on bad models. For instance, it looks to me like you read my 'haha yeah' as "the response", despite how it follows a thousand-odd words of engagement, and is sandwiched between a quote selecting a narrow portion of your argument and a paragraph explaining why I think that argument is off-kilter. I have a sense this sort of dramatic misread of my intentions has been happening repeatedly since the beginning, without engagement with my attempts at clarification, and I currently despair of communication.

I know you haven't solicited advice, but for future reference, if you were taking smaller steps in your assumptions about my intentions, and asking more and earlier questions (example: "What's the 'haha yeah' doing for you? (I'm reading it as broadly dismissive, and feel hurt by it)."), I both expect that you'd have a better chance of communicating with me, and that I'd be more enthusiastic about trying. (I acknowledge that this style of communication requires a high degree of trust, and that you might not have that trust with me.)

As things stand, I have the sense that you're lashing out wildly at shadow-versions of me you've constructed, and I'm not enthusiastic about engaging further on the object level (and my cheerful price is quite high, alas).

But when I do—and I will—if you have any scrap of human decency in your brain, you will not shitpost at me.

I've heard (perhaps incorrectly) that this is very emotionally salient to you, that you take it seriously, and that you care deeply about how I react. I feel an abstract compassion for you in this; it sounds like a thankless job and plausibly a virtuous one. Only abstract compassion, though, because my current emotional response is one that emits sentences like "well fuck you too; call me back when you can model me farther than you can throw me". It is from that state that I dispute your factual claim quoted above. My model of human mindspace contains variants of me who could retain some decency while shitposting in ways you perceive as being "at you". (Example: the thing I'm perceiving as you mismodelling-and-lashing-out hurts to be on the receiving end of, and I claim that humans can retain their decency while lashing out in response to being hurt. Also, I think the shitposting has purposes you're not modelling, and there are ways your response could be shaped such that shitposting in reply seems reasonable on its face.)

(ETA: the primary connotation of the above is something like "you seem to be attempting to apply pressure to me in a manner I consider invalid; it holds no sway over me" / "I have perceived this as a desperate simultaneous plea for both compassion and deference, and while I have the compassion, I lack the deference". Neither of those are quite right etc. I add this parenthetical out of an anticipation that, without it, you'll wildly misinterpret me here. I feel bitterness about how regularly an wildly you seem to misinterpret me, without apparent awareness or acknowledgement, and the bitterness tempts me to sharper phrasings.)

All that said, I've heard you as making a request that I avoid a certain type of glibness in my replies to you, on the grounds that they cause you great distress. Insofar as this doesn't cause me to stop interacting with you wholesale (eg, for fear that I'll cause you undue great distress given your apparent propensity to misread me), and insofar as I don't, like, forget when I'm banging out a very quick response, I predict I'll honor that request. And for the record, I do not intend to cause you distress, and I continue to respect your what-seems-to-me-like conviction in the pursuit of truth.

These aren't complicated or borderline cases, they are central example of what we are trying to avert with alignment research.

I'm wondering if the disagreement over the centrality of this example is downstream from a disagreement about how easy the "alignment check-ins" that Critch talks about are. If they are the sort of thing that can be done successfully in a couple of days by a single team of humans, then I share Critch's intuition that the system in question starts off only slightly misaligned. By contrast, if they require a significant proportion of the human time and effort that was put into originally training the system, then I am much more sympathetic to the idea that what's being described is a central example of misalignment.

My (unsubstantiated) guess is that Paul pictures alignment check-ins becoming much harder (i.e. closer to the latter case mentioned above) as capabilities increase? Whereas maybe Critch thinks that they remain fairly easy in terms of number of humans and time taken, but that over time even this becomes economically uncompetitive.

Consider any finite two-player game in normal form (each player can have any finite number of strategies, we can also easily generalize to certain classes of infinite games). Let $S_A$ be the set of pure strategies of player $A$ and $S_B$ the set of pure strategies of player $B$. Let $u_A:S_A\times S_B\to R$ be the utility function of player $A$. Let $(\alpha ,\beta )\in \Delta S_A\times \Delta S_B$ be a particular (mixed) outcome. Then the alignment of player $B$ with player $A$ in this outcome is defined to be:

$$a_{B/A}(\alpha ,\beta ):=\frac{E_{\alpha \times \beta }\left[u_A\right]-{min}_{{\beta }^{\prime }\in S_B}{E}_{\alpha \times {\beta }^{\prime }}\left[u_A\right]}{{max}_{{\beta }^{\prime }\in S_B}{E}_{\alpha \times {\beta }^{\prime }}\left[u_A\right]-{min}_{{\beta }^{\prime }\in S_B}{E}_{\alpha \times {\beta }^{\prime }}\left[u_A\right]}\in [0,1]$$

Ofc so far it doesn't depend on $u_B$ at all. However, we can make it depend on $u_B$ if we use $u_B$ to impose assumptions on $(\alpha ,\beta )$, such as:

• $\beta$ is a $u_B$-best response to $\alpha$ or
• $(\alpha ,\beta )$ is a Nash equilibrium (or other solution concept)

Without relying on mass media, i've seen far too many simulations and demonstrations (various camera and imaging types) and far too many detailed articles specifying particle size, mechanisms of viral distribution, viral load and the like to convince me that there is sufficient efficacy to warrant their use.

Yes, this includes discussions with people I know that work or who have worked in front-line medical positions. Yes, how the wearer uses / fits a mask, touches / adjusts it, disposes / reuses, which type of masks and how much other protocols are followed will all influence the degree of mask effectiveness.

Yes, there are no large double-blind, peer-reviewed studies to support mask use (non that I could find anyway). I'm not a "chicken little". I do believe there has been far too much conflation by some of prudence to mean cowardice, panic or being overwrought.

Re: the video ... I found far too many instances of where the other two were putting words into Malone's mouth, or were quick to over-interpret something he said.

I really would love for someone who understands the deep bioscience to take a very hard look at their ppl virology claims. At face value, the assertions would be very concerning, and while I would prefer for them to be wrong, I would rather see analysis as to whether they are or not. Pseudoscience is based on a whole lot of very very credible information and takes a sudden turn that is virtually impossible for non-specialists to unravel.

Crappy drugs that only slow the decline a bit might need an aducanumab comparison, but why would a drug that reverses the decline need that?

See Cassava's trial results.

See also this clinical trial of Bredesen's approach (press release here).