Open & Welcome Thread - January 2021

Hello everybody!

I have done some commenting & posting around here, but I think a proper introduction is never bad.

I was Marxist for a few years, then I fell out of it, discovered SSC and thereby LW three years ago, started reading the Sequences and the Codex (yes, you now name them together). I very much enjoy the discussions around here, and the fact that LW got resurrected.

I sometimes write things for my personal website about forecasting, obscure programming languages and [REDACTED]. I think I might start cross-posting a bit more (the two last posts on my profile are such cross-posts).

I endorse spending my time reading, meditating, and [REDACTED], but my motivational system often decides to waste time on the internet instead.

I'm looking for a science fiction novel that I believe I first saw mentioned on LessWrong. I don't remember the author, the title, or any of the characters' names. It's about a robot whose intelligence consists of five separate agents, serving different roles, which have to negotiate with each other for control of the body they inhabit and to communicate with humans. That's about all I can remember.

The tags / concepts system seems to be working very well so far, and the minimal tagging overhead is now sustainable as new posts roll in. Thank you, mod team!

I am doing an art criticism project that’s very important to me, and I’m looking for high res digital versions the art in the following books. 

• The Complete Brambly Hedge
• Beksinski volume 1-4
• Trouble For Trumpets

Help with getting these via a university library, or pointers to where I could buy an electronic copy of any of these is much appreciated. 

I would love to have variable voting so i could give (or take) anywhere between one and my maximum vote strength. The way I'd do it is have each click increase the vote strength by one, and a long press set it to max strength (Keep the current tooltip so people know). then to cancel the vote (whether positive or negative) there would be a small X to the side of the up/down buttons. 

I know it has been discussed already, but just wanted to give this as another datapoint. it happens to me a lot that i want to give a post more than 1 karma but less than 5, so i would use this a lot if it was possible.

The Invisible People YouTube channel interviews homeless people. At the end, the interviewer always asks what the interviewee would do if they had three wishes. Usually the answers are about receiving help with money, drugs, or previous relationships. Understandably.

But in Working Actor Now Homeless in Los Angeles, the guy's mind immediately went to things like ending deadly disease and world peace. Things that would help others, not himself.

And it wasn't as if he debated doing things for himself vs. for others. My read is that the thought of doing things for himself didn't even really get promoted to conscious attention. It didn't really occur to him. It looked like it was an obvious choice to him that he would use the wishes to help others.

One of the more amazing things I can recall experiencing. It gave me a much needed boost in my faith in humanity.

Dileep George's "AGI comics" are pretty funny! He's only made ~10 of them ever; most are in this series of tweet / comics poking fun of both sides of the Gary Marcus - Yoshua Bengio debate ... see especially this funny take on what is the definition of deep learning, and one related to AGI timelines. :-)

I have a question about attainable utility preservation. Specifically, I read the post "Attainable Utility Preservation: Scaling to Superhuman [? · GW]", and I'm wondering how and agent using the attainable utility implementation  in equations 3, 4, and 5 could actually be superhuman. I've been misunderstanding things and mis-explaining things recently, so I'm asking here instead of the post for now to avoid wasting an AI safety researcher's time.

The equations incentivize the AI to take actions that will provide an immediate reward in the next timestep, but penalizes its ability to achieve rewards in later timesteps.

But what if the only way to receive a reward is to do something that will only give a reward several timesteps later? In realistic situations, when can you ever actually accomplish the goal you're trying to accomplish in a single atomic action?

For example, suppose the AI is rewarded for making paperclips, but all it can do in the next timestep is start moving its arm towards wire. If it's just rewarded for making paperclips, and it can't make a paperclip the next timestep, so the AI would instead focus on minimizing impact and not do anything. 

I know you could adjust the reward function to reward the AI doing things that you think will help it accomplish your primary goal in the future. For example, you know the AI moving its arm towards the wire is useful, so you could reward that. But then I don't see how the AI could do anything clever or superhuman to make paperclips.

Suppose  the AI can come up with a clever means of making paperclips by creating a new form of paperclip-making machine. Presumably, it would take many actions to build before it could be completed. And the person responsible for giving out awards wouldn't be able to anticipate that the exact device the AI is making would be helpful, so I don't see how the person giving out the rewawrds could get the AI to make the clever machine. Or do anything else clever.

Then wouldn't such a reduced-impact agent pretty much just follow the doing what a human would think is most helpful for making paperclips? But then wouldn't the AI pretty much just emulating human, not superhuman, behavior?

I've started browsing and posting here a bit so I should introduce myself.

I've been writing online for around five months and put some draft chapters of a book on my website. The objective is to think about how to immunise a society from decline, which basically means trying to find the right balance between creativity and cohesion (not that they are inversely related—it’s quite possible to have neither). Because I can’t buy into any worldview out there today, I’ve tried to systematise my thoughts into a philosophy I call Metasophism. It’s a work in progress, and most of what I read and write links into that in some way.

Prediction mechanisms are something commonly discussed here which I’ve partly integrated, but I need to think more about that which this site will help with I think.

How did I end up here? A commenter on an early post of mine mentioned LW, which I didn’t then frequent even though I was familiar with some of the writers here. That caused me to check it out, and the epistemic culture caused me to stick around.

Do the newest numbers indicate that the new Covid strand isn't that bad after all, for whatever reason? If not, why not?

Edit: Zvi gave a partial answer here [LW(p) · GW(p)].

Hello, lesswrongsters (if I can call you like this),

What do you think about the following statement: "You should be relatively skeptical about each of your past impressions, but you should be absolutely non-skeptical about your most current one at a given moment. Not because it was definitely true, but because there is practically no other option."

Please, give me your opinions, criticism, etc. about this.

Why does prediction-book 1) allow you to make 100% credence predictions and 2) bucket 99% credence in the 90% bucket instead of the 100% bucket?

Does anyone know?

It means I either need to have an unsightly graph where my measured accuracy falls to 0 in the 100% bucket, or take the unseemly approach of putting 100% (rounding up, of course, not literally 100%) on some extremely likely prediction.

The bucketing also means that if I make many 99% predictions, but few 90% predictions (for instance), I'll appear uncalibrated, even if I have perfect calibration, (since items in that bucket would be accurate more than 90% of the time). Not realizing this, I might think that I need to adjust more.

I'm trying to find a post (maybe a comment?) from the past few years. The idea was, say you have 8 descriptive labels. These labels could correspond to clusters in thing-space. Or they could correspond to axis. I think it was about types of mathematicians. 

Does the feeling of having one's nails too long have a name and a place in the classification of sensations? I mean, some people find it uncomfortable to just have theirs "longer than the nail bed" (me too). It's not like our nails even start to get in the way of doing things, we just have a sensation (kind of an itch), I'd say like "holding" something with the edge of the nail and the nailbed. Is this from touch receptors detecting a different creasing of skin? It goes away when I pay deliberate attention to it.

Considering how much LW and the Sequences talk about doing Bayesian updates, I figured it's worth talking about a downside I am experiencing. I closely monitor Metaculus and adjust my vaccination expectations accordingly. I have certain events that are on hold until I get vaccinated. Therefore, the optimal strategy would seem to be:

1. Look up a predicted vaccination date range (e.g. late April)
2. Schedule the appointments for late April
3. Go to step 1.

What I didn't expect was the level of effort required by step 2 after the first run through. It gets tiring to call people every few months and say something like "Oops, we have to reschedule again..."