LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Unless you also think the United States is an outlier in terms of spouses who don't unconditionally love each other, I guess you have to endorse something like Kaj_Sotala's point that divorce isn't always the same as ending love though, right?

Headline claim: time delay safes are probably much too expensive in human time costs to justify their benefits.

The largest pharmacy chains in the US, accounting for more than 50% of the prescription drug market^[1][2], have been rolling out time delay safes (to prevent theft)^[3].  Although I haven't confirmed that this is true across all chains and individual pharmacy locations, I believe these safes are used for all controlled substances.  These safes open ~5-10 minutes after being prompted.

There were >41 million prescriptions dispensed for adderall in the US in 2021^[4].  (Note that likely means ~12x fewer people were prescribed adderall that year.)   Multiply that by 5 minutes and you get >200 million minutes, or >390 person-years, wasted.  Now, surely some of that time is partially recaptured by e.g. people doing their shopping while waiting, or by various other substitution effects.  But that's also just adderall!

Seems quite unlikely that this is on the efficient frontier of crime-prevention mechanisms, but alas, the stores aren't the ones (mostly) paying the costs imposed by their choices, here.

1. ^{^}

   https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare/our-insights/meeting-changing-consumer-needs-the-us-retail-pharmacy-of-the-future

2. ^{^}

   https://www.statista.com/statistics/734171/pharmacies-ranked-by-rx-market-share-in-us/

3. ^{^}

   https://www.cvshealth.com/news/pharmacy/cvs-health-completes-nationwide-rollout-of-time-delay-safes.html

4. ^{^}

   https://www.axios.com/2022/11/15/adderall-shortage-adhd-diagnosis-prescriptions

Did you ever run just the L0-approx & sparsity-frequency penalty separately? It's unclear if you're getting better results because the L0 function is better or because there are less dead features.

Good point - this was also somewhat unclear to me. What I can say is that when I run with the L0-approx penalty only, without the sparsity frequency penalty, I either get lots of dead features (50% or more), with a substantially worse MSE (a factor of a few higher), similar to when I run with only an L1 penalty.  When I run with the sparsity-frequency penalty and a standard L1 penalty (i.e. without L0-approx), I get models with a similar MSE and L0 a factor of ~2 higher than the SAEs discussed above.

Also, a feature frequency of 0.2 is very large! 1/5 tokens activating is large even for positional (because your context length is 128). It'd be bad if the improved results are because polysemanticity is sneaking back in through these activations. Sampling datapoints across a range of activations should show where the meaning becomes polysemantic. Is it the bottom 10% (or 10% of max-activating example is my preferred method)

Absolutely! A quick look at the 9 features with frequencies > 0.1 shows the following:

• Feature #8684 (freq: 0.992) fires with large amplitude on all but the BOS token (should I remove this in training?)
• Feature #21769 (freq: 0.627), 10217 (freq: 0.370) & 24409 (freq: 0.3372) are positional based, but possibly contain more info.  The positional dependence of the activation strength for all non-zero activations is shown in the plot below for these three features. Here, the bottom 10% seem interpretable, at least the positional based info. Given the scatter in the plot, it looks like more info might be contained in the feature. Looking at max activations for a given position did not shed any further light. I don't know whether it's reasonable to expect GPT2-small to actually have & use features like this.
• Feature #21014 (freq: 0.220) fires at the 2nd position in sentences, after new lines and full stops, and then has smaller activations for 3rd, 4th & 5th position after new lines and full stops (so the bottom 10% seem interpretable, i.e. they are further away from the start of a sentence)
• Feature #16741 (freq: 0.171) unclear from the max/min activating examples, maybe polysemantic
• Feature #12123 (freq: 0.127) fires after "the", "an", "a", again stronger for the token immediately after, and weaker for 2nd, 3rd, 4th positions after.  Bottom 10% seem interpretable in this context, but again there are some exceptions, so I'm not completely sure.
• Feature #22430 (freq: 0.127) fires after "," more strongly at the first position after "," and weaker for tokens at the 2nd, 3rd, 4th positions away from ",". The bottom 10% seem somewhat interpretable here, i.e. further after "," but there are exceptions so I'm not completely sure.
• Feature #6061(freq: 0.109) fires on nouns, both at high and low activations.
   

While I think these interpretations seem reasonable, it seems likely that some of these SAE features are at least somewhat polysemantic. They might be improved by training the SAE longer (I trained on ~300M tokens for these SAEs).

I might make dashboards or put the SAE on Neuronpedia to be able to make a better idea of these and other features.

several-decades-old network of tunnels build inside of a mountain

built

The United States is an outlier in divorce statistics. In most places, the rate is nowhere near that high.

Kuhlemann argues that human overpopulation is the best example of an “unsexy” global catastrophic risk, but this is not taken seriously by the vast majority of global catastrophic risk scholars.

I think the reason overpopulation is generally not taken seriously by the GCR community is that they don't believe it would be catastrophic. Some believe that there would be a small reduction in per capita income, but greater total utility. Others argue that having more population would actually raise per capita income and could be key to maintaining long-term innovation.

+1 to this comment, also I expect the importance of activations being optimized for predicting future tokens to increase considerably with scale. (E.g., GPT-4 level compute maybe just gets you a GPT-3 level model if you enforce no such optimization with a stop grad.)

It's pretty sad to call all of these end states you describe alignment as alignment is an extremely natural word for "actually terminally has good intentions". So, this makes me sad to call this alignment research. Of course, this type of research maybe instrumentally useful for making AIs more aligned, but so will a bunch of other stuff (e.g. earning to give).

Fair enough if you think we should just eat this terminology issue and then coin a new term like "actually real-alignment-targeting-directly alignment research". Idk what the right term is obviously.

Humans often really really want something in the world to happen

This sentence is adjacent to my core concern regarding AI alignment, and why I'm not particularly reassured by the difficulty-of-superhuman-performance or return-on-compute reassurances regarding AGI: we don't need superhuman AI to deal superhuman-seeming amounts of damage. Indeed, even today's "perfectly-sandboxed" models (in that according to the most reliable publicly-available information none of the most cutting-edge models are allowed direct read/write access to the systems which would allow them to plot and attain world domination or the destruction of humanity (or specific nations' interests) have the next-best thing: whenever a new technological lever emerges in the world, humans with malicious intentions are empowered to a much greater degree than those who want strictly the best^[1] for everybody.  There are also bit-flip attacks on aligned AI which are much harder to implement on humans.

1. ^{^}

   Using "best" is fraught but we'll pretend that "world best-aligned with a Pareto-optimal combination of each person's expressed reflective preferences and revealed preferences, to the extent that those revealed preferences do not represent akrasia or views and preferences which the person isn't comfortable expressing directly and publicly but does indeed have" is an adequate proxy to continue along this line of argument; the other option is developing a provably-correct theory of morality and politics which would take more time than this comment by 2-4 orders of magnitude.

My first issue with your post is that this initial ontological assumption is neither mentioned explicitly nor motivated. Nothing in your post can be used as proof of this initial assumption.

There are always going to be many different ways someone could object to a view. If you were a Christian, you'd perhaps be objecting that the existence of incorporeal God-given Souls is the real crux of the matter, and if I were intellectually honest I'd be devoting the first half of the post to arguing against the Christian Soul.

Rather than trying to anticipate these objections, I'd rather just hear them stated out loud by their proponents and then hash them out in the comments. This also makes the post less boring for the sorts of people who are most likely to be on LW: physicalists and their ilk.

Now, what would be the experience of getting copied, seen from a first-person, "internal", perspective? I am pretty sure it would be something like: you walk into the room, you sit there, you  hear say the scanner working for some time, it stops, you walk out. From my agnostic perspective, if I were the one to be scanned it seems like nothing special would have happened to me in this procedure. I didnt feel anything weird, I didnt feel my "consciousness split into two" or something.

Why do you assume that you wouldn't experience the copy's version of events?

The un-copied version of you experiences walking into the room, sitting there, hearing the scanner working, and hearing it stop; then that version of you experiences walking out. It seems like nothing special happened in this procedure; this version of you doesn't feel anything weird, and doesn't feel like their "consciousness split into two" or anything.

The copied version of you experiences walking into the room, sitting here, hearing the scanner working, and then an instantaneous experience of (let's say) feeling like you've been teleported into another room -- you're now inside the simulation. Assuming the simulation feels like a normal room, it could well seem like nothing special happened in this procedure -- it may feel like blinking and seeing the room suddenly change during the blink, while you yourself remain unchanged. This version of you doesn't necessarily feel anything weird either, and they don't feel like their "consciousness split into two" or anything.

It's a bit weird that there are two futures, here, but only one past -- that the first part of the story is the same for both versions of you. But so it goes; that just comes with the territory of copying people.

If you disagree with anything I've said above, what do you disagree with? And, again, what do you mean by saying you're "pretty sure" that you would experience the future of the non-copied version?

Namely, if I consider this procedure as an empirical experiment, from my first person perspective I dont get any new / unexpected observation compared to say just sitting in an ordinary room. Even if I were to go and find my copy, my experience would again be like meeting a different person which just happens to look like me and which claims to have similar memories  up to the point when I entered the copying room. There would be no way to verify or to view things from their first person perspective.

Sure. But is any of this Bayesian evidence against the view I've outlined above? What would it feel like, if the copy were another version of yourself? Would you expect that you could telepathically communicate with your copy and see things from both perspectives at once, if your copies were equally "you"? If so, why?

On the contrary, I would be wary to, say, kill myself or to be destroyed after the copying procedure, since no change will have occured to my first person perspective, and it would thus seem less likely that my "experience" would somehow survive because of my copy.

Shall we make a million copies and then take a vote? :)

I agree that "I made a non-destructive software copy of myself and then experienced the future of my physical self rather than the future of my digital copy" is nonzero Bayesian evidence that physical brains have a Cartesian Soul that is responsible for the brain's phenomenal consciousness; the Cartesian Soul hypothesis does predict that data. But the prior probability of Cartesian Souls is low enough that I don't think it should matter.

You need some prior reason to believe in this Soul in the first place, the same as if you flipped a coin, it came up heads, and you said "aha, this is perfectly predicted by the existence of an invisible leprechaun who wanted that coin to come up heads!". Losing a coinflip isn't a surprising enough outcome to overcome the prior against invisible leprechauns.

and it would also force me to accept that even a copy where the "circuit" is made of water pipes and pumps, or gears and levers also have an actual, first person experience as "me", as long as the appropriate computations are being carried out.  

Why wouldn't it? What do you have against water pipes?