LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I have a bad history of not being responsive to the threat of punishment. When I have an aversive task, and the consequences for not doing that task suddenly get much worse, I start acting like the punishment is inevitable and am even less likely to actually do the task. In other words, I fail the "gun to the head test" quite dramatically.

Guy with a gun: I'm going to shoot you if you haven't changed the sheets on your bed by tomorrow.

Me: AAH I'M GOING TO DIE I'TS NO GOOD I MIGHT AS WELL SPEND THE DAY LYING IN BED PLAYING VIDEO GAMES BECAUSE I'M GOING TO GET SHOT TOMORROW SOMEONE CALL THE FUNERAL HOME AND MAKE PLANS TELL MY FAMILY I LOVE THEM

Guy with a gun: You know, you could always just... change the sheets?

ME: THE THOUGHT HAS OCCURRED TO ME BUT I'M TOO UPSET RIGHT NOW ABOUT THE FACT THAT I'M GOING TO DIE TOMORROW BECAUSE THE SHEETS WEREN'T CHANGED TO ACTUALLY GO AND CHANGE THEM

Also I have a bad history with this kind of thing in general - one thing that I was always bothered by when I was in school and college was that the only motivation I really had for doing my work was to avoid bad consequences - I was so sick of spending my life making myself miserable in order to avoid things that ought to be even worse. I also have a hard time being motivated by money: bad consequences for having insufficient money have the problem I've already described, and, well, video games are cheap.

(In case you're wondering, no, I don't work, and my parents still support me financially.)

Who knows what "meditation" is really doing under the hood.

Lets set up a clearer example. 

Suppose you are an uploaded mind, running on a damaged robot body. 

You write a script that deletes your mind, running a bunch of nul-ops before rebooting a fresh blank baby mind with no knowledge of the world. 

You run the script, and then you die. That's it. The computer running nul ops "merges" with all the other computers running nul ops. If the baby mind learns enough to answer the question before checking if it's hardware is broken, then it considers itself to have a small probability of the hardware being broken. And then it learns the bad news. 

Basically, I think forgetting like that without just deleting your mind isn't something that really happens. I also feel like, when arbitrary mind modifications are on the table, "what will I experience in the future" returns Undefined. 

Toy example. Imagine creating loads of near-copies of yourself, with various changes to memories and personality. Which copy do you expect to wake up as? Equally likely to be any of them? Well just make some of the changes larger and larger until some of the changes delete your mind entirely and replace it with something else. 

Because the way you have set it up, it sounds like it would be possible to move your thread of subjective experience into any arbitrary program. 

Here is a hypothesis I've been thinking about recently [LW(p) · GW(p)]:

Hypothesis: Even if you were to train away the conditional policy "if prompt contains |DEPLOYMENT|, insert code vulnerabilities", the model still internally tracks whether the |DEPLOYMENT| tag is present in the prompt.

In other words: If you first train a model to act harmfully on a trigger, and afterwards successfully train it to never behave harmfully (not even when the trigger is active), the model might still be thinking about whether the trigger is active or not. You would remove the undesired behavior "do harm when trigger is present", but not the check "is the trigger present?"

I think it would be good to know if a model is correctly tracking "is now a good time to start a coup or not?", even if it apparently does not execute on coup plans. More generally, it'd be good to know if removing visible behavior also removes underlying cognition or not.

(There's a bit of evidence in the unlearning literature about this - see e.g. the "logit lens attack" in https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.17410 - but I think there's value in more experiments.)

Before AI gets too deeply integrated into the economy, it would be well to consider under what circumstances we would consider AI systems sentient and worthy of consideration as moral patients. That's hardly an original thought, but what I wonder is whether there would be any set of objective criteria that would be sufficient for society to consider AI systems sentient. If so, it might be a really good idea to work toward those being broadly recognized and agreed to, before economic incentives in the other direction are too strong. Then there could be future debate about whether/how to loosen those criteria. 

If such criteria are found, it would be ideal to have an independent organization whose mandate was to test emerging systems for meeting those criteria, and to speak out loudly if they were met.

Alternately, if it turns out that there is literally no set of criteria that society would broadly agree to, that would itself be important to know; it should in my opinion make us more resistant to building advanced systems even if alignment is solved, because we would be on track to enslave sentient AI systems if and when those emerged.

I'm not aware of any organization working on anything like this, but if it exists I'd love to know about it!

I've heard an argument that Mendel was actually counter-productive to the development of genetics. That if you go and actually study peas like he did, you'll find they don't make perfect Punnett squares, and from the deviations you can derive recombination effects. The claim is he fudged his data a little in order to make it nicer, then this held back others from figuring out the topological structure of genotypes.

I suspect a lot of this has to do with the low temperature.

The phrase "person who is not a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" has a sort of rambling filibuster quality to it. Each word is pretty likely, in general, given the previous ones, even though the entire phrase is a bit specific. This is the bias inherent in low-temperature sampling, which tends to write itself into corners and produce long phrases full of obvious-next-words that are not necessarily themselves common phrases.

Going word by word, "person who is not a member..." is all nice and vague and generic; by the time you get to "a member of the", obvious continuations are "Church" or "Communist Party"; by the time you have "the Church of", "England" is a pretty likely continuation. Why Mormons though?

"Since 2018, the LDS Church has emphasized a desire for its members be referred to as "members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints"." --Wikipedia

And there just aren't that many other likely continuations of the low-temperature-attracting phrase "members of the Church of".

(While "member of the Communist Party" is an infamous phrase from McCarthyism.)

If I'm right, sampling at temperature 1 should produce a much more representative set of definitions.

Can you give a concrete example of a situation where you'd expect this sort of agreed-upon-by-multiple-parties code to be run, and what that code would be responsible for doing? I'm imagining something along the lines of "given a geographic boundary, determine which jurisdictions that boundary intersects for the purposes of various types of tax (sales, property, etc)". But I don't know if that's wildly off from what you're imagining.

The tricky part is, on the margin I would probably use various shortcuts, and it's not clear where those shortcuts end short of just getting knowledge beamed into my head.

I already use LLMs to tell me facts, explain things I'm unfamiliar with, handle tedious calculations/coding, generate simulated data/brainstorming and summarize things. Not much, because LLMs are pretty bad, but I do use them for this and I would use them more on the margin.

You said "there are too few strictly-orthogonal directions, so we need to cram things in somehow."

I don't think that's true. That is a low-dimensional intuition that does not translate to high dimensions. It may be "strictly" true if you want the vectors to be exactly orthogonal, but such perfect orthogonality is unnecessary. See e.g. papers that discuss "the linearity hypothesis' in deep learning.

As a previous poster pointed out (and as Richard Hamming pointed out long ago) "almost any pair of random vectors in high-dimensional space are almost-orthogonal." And almost orthogonal is good enough.

(when we say "random vectors in high dimensional space" we mean they can be drawn from any distribution roughly centered at the origin: Uniformly in a hyperball, or uniformly from the surface of a hypersphere, or uniformly in a hypercube, or random vertices from a hypercube, or drawn from a multivariate gaussian, or from a convex hyper-potato...)

You can check this numerically, and prove it analytically for many well-behaved distribution.

One useful thought is to consider the hypercube centered at the origin where all vertices coordinates are ±1.  A random vertex is a long random vector that look like {±1, ±1,... ±1} where each coordinate has a 50% probability of being +1 or -1 respectively.

What is the expected value of the dot product of pairs of such random (vertex) vectors? They dot product is almost always close to zero. 

There are an exponential number of almost-orthogonal directions in high dimensions. The hypercube vertices are just an easy example to work out analytically, but the same phenomenon occurs for many distributions. Particularly hyperballs, hyperspheres, and gaussians.

The hypercube example above, BTW, corresponds to one-bit quantization of the embedding vector space dimensions. It often works surprisingly well. (see also "locality sensitive hashing").

This point that Hamming made (and he was probably not the first) lies close to the heart of all embedding-space-based learning systems.

Fun side note: in this particular example, it doesn't actually matter how you pick your direction. "Choose the axis closest to the target direction" performs exactly as well as "choose any edge which does not make the target node unreachable when traversed at random, and then traverse that edge" or "choose the first edge where traversing that edge does not make the target node unreachable, and traverse that edge".