February 2022 Open Thread

Why don't female organisms insert more of their own DNA into the offspring?

I don't think Fisher's principle explains it, because it only applies to the level of which sex your offspring has, and there's a clear advantage of having a male offspring when there's many females around.

But if you're female, and sperm and egg mix, you could theoretically control how much of the male's DNA gets to contribute to the embryo. And there's not much to stop you, since the male can't check beforehand how much of its DNA you will use. But if a gene causes the female organism to increase more of its DNA into the offspring, that gene also increases its own chance of continuing to exist.

Sure, the offspring will be less fit on average, but I'm astonished that the equilibrium is that the female organism doesn't "cheat" at all, instead of there being a 2/3 female 1/3 male offspring genome or something.

Maybe this is a situation where every gene benefits by not cheating, but individual genes defecting would make sense? And if so, how does the reproductive process prevent this?

(A suggestion for the forum)

You know that old post on r/ShowerThoughts which went something like "People who speak somewhat broken english as their second language sound stupid, but they're actually smarter than average because they know at least one other language"?

I was thinking about this. I don't struggle with my grasp of English the language so much, but I certainly do with what might be called an American/Western cadence. I'm sure it's noticeable occasionally, inducing just the slightest bit of microcringe in the typical person that hangs around here. Things like strange sentence structure, or weird use of italics, or overuse of a word, or over/under hedging... all the writing skills you already mastered in grade school. And you probably grew up seeing that the ones who continued to struggle with it often didn't get other things quickly either. 

Maybe you notice some of these already in what you're reading right now (despite my painstaking efforts otherwise). It's likely to look "wannabe" or "amateurish" because it is$-$one learns language and rhythm by imitating. But this imitation game is confined to language & rhythm, and it would be a mistake to also infer from this that the ideas behind them would be unoriginal or amateurish.

I'd like to think it wouldn't bother anyone on LW because people here believe that linguistic faux pas, as much as social ones, ought to be screened off by the content. 

But it probably still happens. You might believe it but not alieve it. Imagine someone saying profound things but using "u" and "ur" everywhere, even for "you're". You could actually try this (even though it would be a somewhat shallow experiment, because what I'm pointing at with "cadence" is deeper than spelling mistakes) to get a flavor for it.

A solution I can think of: make a [Non-Native Speaker] tag and allow people to self-tag. Readers could see it and shoot for a little bit more charity across anything linguistically-aesthetically displeasing. The other option is to take advantage of customizable display names here, but I wonder if that'd be distracting if mass-adopted, like twitter handles that say "[Name] ...is in New York".

I would (maybe, at some point) even generalize it to [English Writing Beginner] or some such, which you can self-assign even if you speak natively but are working on your writing skills. This one is more likely to be diluted though.

I just realized that jasoncrawford and joshwentworth are two different people. Explains so many things.

Huh.

Read HPMOR(3 times start to finish), found and currently reading the sequences, and now actually venturing into LessWrong. Read maybe 10 articles as well as a lot of comments.

And I'm a bit intimidated :D. But that's fine LOL. Shut up and do the impossible! 

Has anyone tried to map relationships between (at least some) LessWrong posts?

What I'm looking for would be some kind of overview of what connects to what that could be parsed without clicking through links recursively. If I assume a chronologically earlier post cannot refer to a later one, I expect this type of structure to have interesting properties. A practical application that comes to mind is to inform an algorithm to decide what to give attention.

To define a relationship, links from one post to another would be a good if imperfect metric (not all links represent the same type of relationship, and not all relationships are represented by explicit links).

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this, but does anyone know what point Paul's trying to make in the following part of this podcast? (Relevant section starts around 1:44:00)

Suppose you have a P probability of the best thing you can do and a one-minus P probably the worst thing you can do, what does P have to be so it’s the difference between that and the barren universe. I think most of my probability is distributed between you would need somewhere between 50% and 99% chance of good things and then put some probability or some credence on views where that number is a quadrillion times larger or something in which case it’s definitely going to dominate. A quadrillion is probably too big a number, but very big numbers. Numbers easily large enough to swamp the actual probabilities involved

[ . . . ]

I think that those arguments are a little bit complicated, how do you get at these? I think to clarify the basic position, the reason that you end up concluding it’s worse is just like conceal your intuition about how bad the worst thing that can happen to a person is vs the best thing or damn, the worst thing seems pretty bad and then the like first-pass responses, sort of have this debunking understanding, or we understand causally how it is that we ended up with this kind of preference with respect to really bad stuff versus really good stuff.

If you look at what happens over evolutionary history. What is the range of things that can happen to an organism and how should an organism be trading off like best possible versus worst possible outcomes. Then you end up into well, to what extent is that a debunking explanation that explains why humans in terms of their capacity to experience joy and suffering are unbiased but the reality is still biased versus to what extent is this then fundamentally reflected in our preferences about good and bad things. I think it’s just a really hard set of questions. I could easily imagine maybe shifting on them with much more deliberation.

It seems like an important topic but I'm a bit confused by what he's saying here. Is the perspective he's discussing (and puts non-negligible probability on) one that states that the worst possible suffering is a bajillion times worse than the best possible pleasure, and wouldn't that suggest every human's life is net-negative (even if your credence on this being the case is ~.1%)? Or is this just discussing the energy-efficiency of 'hedonium' and 'dolorium', in which case it's of solely altruistic concern & can be dealt with by strictly limiting compute?

Also, I'm not really sure if this set of views is more "a broken bone/waterboarding is a million times as morally pressing as making a happy person", or along the more empirical lines of "most suffering (e.g. waterboarding) is extremely light, humans can experience far far far far far^99 times worse; and pleasure doesn't scale to the same degree." Even a tiny chance of the second one being true is awful to contemplate. 

Hey everyone. I'm new here. I've recently been kinda freaking out about AGI and its timelines... Specially after reading Eliezer's post about there being no fire-alarm.

However, he also mentions that "one could never be sure of a new thing coming, except for the last one or two years" (something along those lines).

So, in your opinion, are we already at a stage where AGI could arrive anytime? Because due to things like GPT-3, Wu Dao 2.0 and AlphaCode, I've been getting really scared... Plus if there is something more advanced being developed in secret...

Or will there at least be a 1-2 year "last epistemic stage" which we can be sure we haven't reached yet? (as Soares also mentions)

Cause everyday I've been looking out the window expecting the nano-swarms to come lol... But I'm just a lay person, so I'd like to hear some more expert opinions.

What's the art on the frontpage now?

Is there any way for my non-American friend to fly domestically in the USA without his passport? He has a student ID but no other form of ID at the moment (no drivers licence, etc.) The reason he doesn't have his passport is that he sent it in to get renewed & it probably won't arrive back in time.

He still has a few weeks before the flight, so he can e.g. go apply for a State ID if that's a possibility. Unfortunately it seems that you need a passport to get a State ID... He probably can't get a drivers license for similar reasons, and anyway he doesn't know how to drive.

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Can someone recommend me a textbook on causal inference?

I read the first ~120 pages of Causality by Pearl, and I think it's not the right book for me. The biggest two problems were the lack of exercises, and the long historical degressions. I also had difficulties wrapping my head around the big picture, even when understanding the low-level concepts (I don't think I could implement a full stack for causal inference, even with the book, although I could probably implement the IC* algorithm).

I am still looking for something that's formal, and will probably try chapter 16 of “All of Statistics” by Wassermann.

Is the font for comments different from the font for posts?

Should I expand this comment into a proper top-level post that goes into more detail in the concept and does longer/more reviews of methods?

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oqzasmQ9Lye45QDMZ/causality-transformative-ai-and-alignment-part-i?commentId=rJ7Ssb82bR677F2hq [LW(p) · GW(p)]

[Meta] The jump from Distinct Configurations [? · GW] to Collapse Postulates [? · GW] in the Quantum Physics and Many Worlds [? · GW] sequence is a bit much - I don't think the assertiveness of Collapse Postulates is justified without a full explanation of how many worlds explains things.  I'd recommend adding at least On Being Decoherent [LW · GW] in between.

Contest: making a one-page comic on artificial intelligence for amateur mathematicians by March 9. The text must be in French and the original drawing on paper must be sent to them. Details at https://images.math.cnrs.fr/Onzieme-edition-de-Bulles-au-carre-a-vos-crayons-jusqu-au-9-mars?lang=fr

I'm not related in any way to this contest but I figured there may be some people interested in popularizing Alignment. I can help translate text to French. The drawing quality does not need to be amazing, see some previous winners at https://images.math.cnrs.fr/Resultats-du-9e-concours-Bulles-au-carre.html?lang=fr