Habryka's Shortform Feed

Welp, I guess my life is comic sans today. The EA Forum snuck some code into our deployment bundle for my account in-particular, lol: https://github.com/ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum/pull/9042/commits/ad99a147824584ea64b5a1d0f01e3f2aa728f83a

Thoughts on integrity and accountability

[Epistemic Status: Early draft version of a post I hope to publish eventually. Strongly interested in feedback and critiques, since I feel quite fuzzy about a lot of this]

When I started studying rationality and philosophy, I had the perspective that people who were in positions of power and influence should primarily focus on how to make good decisions in general and that we should generally give power to people who have demonstrated a good track record of general rationality. I also thought of power as this mostly unconstrained resource, similar to having money in your bank account, and that we should make sure to primarily allocate power to the people who are good at thinking and making decisions.

That picture has changed a lot over the years. While I think there is still a lot of value in the idea of "philosopher kings", I've made a variety of updates that significantly changed my relationship to allocating power in this way:

• I have come to believe that people's ability to come to correct opinions about important questions is in large part a result of whether their social and monetary incentives reward them when they have accurate models in a specific domain. This means a person can have extremely good opinions in one domain of reality, because they are subject to good incentives, while having highly inaccurate models in a large variety of other domains in which their incentives are not well optimized.
• People's rationality is much more defined by their ability to maneuver themselves into environments in which their external incentives align with their goals, than by their ability to have correct opinions while being subject to incentives they don't endorse. This is a tractable intervention and so the best people will be able to have vastly more accurate beliefs than the average person, but it means that "having accurate beliefs in one domain" doesn't straightforwardly generalize to "will have accurate beliefs in other domains".
  
  One is strongly predictive of the other, and that’s in part due to general thinking skills and broad cognitive ability. But another major piece of the puzzle is the person's ability to build and seek out environments with good incentive structures.
• Everyone is highly irrational in their beliefs about at least some aspects of reality, and positions of power in particular tend to encourage strong incentives that don't tend to be optimally aligned with the truth. This means that highly competent people in positions of power often have less accurate beliefs than much less competent people who are not in positions of power.
• The design of systems that hold people who have power and influence accountable in a way that aligns their interests with both forming accurate beliefs and the interests of humanity at large is a really important problem, and is a major determinant of the overall quality of the decision-making ability of a community. General rationality training helps, but for collective decision making the creation of accountability systems, the tracking of outcome metrics and the design of incentives is at least as big of a factor as the degree to which the individual members of the community are able to come to accurate beliefs on their own.

A lot of these updates have also shaped my thinking while working at CEA, LessWrong and the LTF-Fund over the past 4 years. I've been in various positions of power, and have interacted with many people who had lots of power over the EA and Rationality communities, and I've become a lot more convinced that there is a lot of low-hanging fruit and important experimentation to be done to ensure better levels of accountability and incentive-design for the institutions that guide our community.

I also generally have broadly libertarian intuitions, and a lot of my ideas about how to build functional organizations are based on a more start-up like approach that is favored here in Silicon Valley. Initially these intuitions seemed at conflict with the intuitions for more emphasis on accountability structures, with broken legal systems, ad-hoc legislation, dysfunctional boards and dysfunctional institutions all coming to mind immediately as accountability-systems run wild. I've since then reconciled my thoughts on these topics a good bit.

Integrity

Somewhat surprisingly, "integrity" has not been much discussed as a concept handle on LessWrong. But I've found it to be a pretty valuable virtue to meditate and reflect on.

I think of integrity as a more advanced form of honesty – when I say “integrity” I mean “acting in accordance with your stated beliefs.” Where honesty is the commitment to not speak direct falsehoods, integrity is the commitment to speak truths that actually ring true to yourself, not ones that are just abstractly defensible to other people. It is also a commitment to act on the truths that you do believe, and to communicate to others what your true beliefs are.

Integrity can be a double-edged sword. While it is good to judge people by the standards they expressed, it is also a surefire way to make people overly hesitant to update. If you get punished every time you change your mind because your new actions are now incongruent with the principles you explained to others before you changed your mind, then you are likely to stick with your principles for far longer than you would otherwise, even when evidence against your position is mounting.

The great benefit that I experienced from thinking of integrity as a virtue, is that it encourages me to build accurate models of my own mind and motivations. I can only act in line with ethical principles that are actually related to the real motivators of my actions. If I pretend to hold ethical principles that do not correspond to my motivators, then sooner or later my actions will diverge from my principles. I've come to think of a key part of integrity being the art of making accurate predictions about my own actions and communicating those as clearly as possible.

There are two natural ways to ensure that your stated principles are in line with your actions. You either adjust your stated principles until they match up with your actions, or you adjust your behavior to be in line with your stated principles. Both of those can backfire, and both of those can have significant positive effects.

Who Should You Be Accountable To?

In the context of incentive design, I find thinking about integrity valuable because it feels to me like the natural complement to accountability. The purpose of accountability is to ensure that you do what you say you are going to do, and integrity is the corresponding virtue of holding up well under high levels of accountability.

Highlighting accountability as a variable also highlights one of the biggest error modes of accountability and integrity – choosing too broad of an audience to hold yourself accountable to.

There is tradeoff between the size of the group that you are being held accountable by, and the complexity of the ethical principles you can act under. Too large of an audience, and you will be held accountable by the lowest common denominator of your values, which will rarely align well with what you actually think is moral (if you've done any kind of real reflection on moral principles).

Too small or too memetically close of an audience, and you risk not enough people paying attention to what you do, to actually help you notice inconsistencies in your stated beliefs and actions. The smaller the group that is holding you accountable is, the smaller your inner circle of trust, which reduces the amount of total resources that can be coordinated under your shared principles.

I think a major mistake that even many well-intentioned organizations make is to try to be held accountable by some vague conception of "the public". As they make public statements, someone in the public will misunderstand them, causing a spiral of less communication, resulting in more misunderstandings, resulting in even less communication, culminating into an organization that is completely opaque about any of its actions and intentions, with the only communication being filtered by a PR department that has little interest in the observers acquiring any beliefs that resemble reality.

I think a generally better setup is to choose a much smaller group of people that you trust to evaluate your actions very closely, and ideally do so in a way that is itself transparent to a broader audience. Common versions of this are auditors, as well as nonprofit boards that try to ensure the integrity of an organization.

This is all part of a broader reflection on trying to create good incentives for myself and the LessWrong team. I will probably follow this up with a post that more concretely summarizes my thoughts on how all of this applies to LessWrong concretely.

In summary:

• One lens to view integrity through is as an advanced form of honesty – “acting in accordance with your stated beliefs.”
• To improve integrity, you can either try to bring your actions in line with your stated beliefs, or your stated beliefs in line with your actions, or reworking both at the same time. These options all have failure modes, but potential benefits.
• People with power sometimes have incentives that systematically warp their ability to form accurate beliefs, and (correspondingly) to act with integrity.
• An important tool for maintaining integrity (in general, and in particular as you gain power) is to carefully think about what social environment and incentive structures you want for yourself.
• Choose carefully who, and how many people, you are accountable to:
• Too many people, and you are limited in the complexity of the beliefs and actions that you can justify.
• Too few people, too similar to you, and you won’t have enough opportunities for people to notice and point out what you’re doing wrong. You may also not end up with a strong enough coalition aligned with your principles to accomplish your goals.

A thing that I've been thinking about for a while has been to somehow make LessWrong into something that could give rise to more personal-wikis and wiki-like content. Gwern's writing has a very different structure and quality to it than the posts on LW, with the key components being that they get updated regularly and serve as more stable references for some concept, as opposed to a post which is usually anchored in a specific point in time. 

We have a pretty good wiki system for our tags, but never really allowed people to just make their personal wiki pages, mostly because there isn't really any place to find them. We could list the wiki pages you created on your profile, but that doesn't really seem like it would allocate attention to them successfully.

I was thinking about this more recently as Arbital is going through another round of slowly rotting away (its search currently being broken and this being very hard to fix due to annoying Google Apps Engine restrictions) and thinking about importing all the Arbital content into LessWrong. That might be a natural time to do a final push to enable people to write more wiki-like content on the site.

Btw less.online is happening. LW post and frontpage banner probably going up Sunday or early next week. 

Thoughts on voting as approve/disapprove and agree/disagree:

One of the things that I am most uncomfortable with in the current LessWrong voting system is how often I feel conflicted between upvoting something because I want to encourage the author to write more comments like it, and downvoting something because I think the argument that the author makes is importantly flawed and I don't want other readers to walk away with a misunderstanding about the world.

I think this effect quite strongly limits certain forms of intellectual diversity on LessWrong, because many people will only upvote your comment if they agree with it, and downvote comments they disagree with, and this means that arguments supporting people's existing conclusions have a strong advantage in the current karma system. Whereas the most valuable comments are likely ones that challenge existing beliefs and that are rigorously arguing for unpopular positions.

A feature that has been suggested many times over the years is to split voting into two dimensions. One dimension being "agree/disagree" and the other being "approve/disapprove". Only the "approve/disapprove" dimension matters for karma and sorting, but both are displayed relatively prominently on the comment (the agree/disagree dimension on the the bottom, the approve/disapprove dimension at the top). I think this has some valuable things going for it, and in particular would make me likely to upvote more comments because I could simultaneously signal that while I think a comment was good, I don't agree with it.

An alternative way of doing this that Ray has talked about is the introduction of short reactions that users can click at the bottom of a comment, two of the most prominently displayed ones would be "agree/disagree". Reactions would be by default non-anonymous and so would serve more as a form of shorthand comment instead of an alternative voting system. Here is an example of how that kind of UI might look:

I don't know precisely what the selection menu for choosing reactions should look like. My guess is we want to have a relatively broad selection, maybe even with the ability to type something custom into it (obviously limiting the character count significantly).

I am most worried that this will drastically increase the clutter of comment threads and make things a lot harder to parse. In particular if the order of the reacts is different on each comment, since then there is no reliable way of scanning for the different kinds of information.

A way to improve on this might be by having small icons for the most frequent reacts, but that then introduces a pretty sharp learning curve into the site, and it's always a pain to find icons for really abstract concepts like "agree/disagree".

I think I am currently coming around to the idea of reactions being a good way to handle approve/disapprove, but also think it might make more sense to introduce more as a new kind of vote that has more top-level support than simple reacts would have. Though in the most likely case this whole dimension will turn out to be too complicated and not worth the complexity costs (as 90% of feature ideas do).

What is the purpose of karma?

LessWrong has a karma system, mostly based off of Reddit's karma system, with some improvements and tweaks to it. I've thought a lot about more improvements to it, but one roadblock that I always run into when trying to improve the karma system, is that it actually serves a lot of different uses, and changing it in one way often means completely destroying its ability to function in a different way. Let me try to summarize what I think the different purposes of the karma system are:

Helping users filter content

The most obvious purpose of the karma system is to determine how long a post is displayed on the frontpage, and how much visibility it should get.

Being a social reward for good content

This aspect of the karma system comes out more when thinking about Facebook "likes". Often when I upvote a post, it is more of a public signal that I value something, with the goal that the author will feel rewarded for putting their effort into writing the relevant content.

Creating common-knowledge about what is good and bad

This aspect of the karma system comes out the most when dealing with debates, though it's present in basically any karma-related interaction. The fact that the karma of a post is visible to everyone, helps people establish common knowledge of what the community considers to be broadly good or broadly bad. Seeing a an insult downvoted, does more than just filter it out of people's feeds, it also makes it so that anyone who stumbles accross it learns something about the norms of the community.

Being a low-effort way of engaging with the site

On lesswrong, Reddit and Facebook, karma is often the simplest action you can take on the site. This means its usually key for a karma system like that to be extremely simple, and not require complicated decisions, since that would break the basic engagement loop with the site.

Problems with alternative karma systems

Here are some of the most common alternatives to our current karma system, and how they perform on the above dimensions:

Eigenkarma as weighted by a set of core users

The basic idea here is that you try to signal-boost a small set of trusted users, by giving people voting power that is downstream from the initially defined set of users.

There are some problems with this. The first one is whether to assign any voting power to new users. If you don't you remove a large part of the value of having a low-effort way of engaging with your site.

It also forces you to separate the points that you get on your content, from your total karma score, from your "karma-trust score" which introduces some complexity into the system. It also makes it so that increases in the points of your content, no longer neatly correspond to voting events, because the underlying reputation graph is constantly shifting and changing, making the social reward signal a lot weaker.

In exchange for this, you likely get a system that is better at filtering content, and probably has better judgement about what should be made common-knowledge or not.

Prediction-based system

I was talking with Scott Garrabrant today, who was excited about a prediction-based karma system. The basic idea is to just have a system that tries to do its best to predict what rating you are likely to give to a post, based on your voting record, the post, and other people's votes.

In some sense this is what Youtube and Facebook are doing in their systems, though he was unhappy with the transparency of what they were doing.

The biggest sacrifice I see in creating this system, is the loss in the ability to create common knowledge, since now all votes are ultimately private, and the ability for karma to establish social norms, or just common knowledge about foundational facts that the community is built around, is greatly diminished.

I also think it diminishes the degree to which votes can serve as a social reward signal, since there is no obvious thing to inform the user of when their content got votes on. No number that went up or down, just a few thousand weights in some distant predictive matrix, or neural net.

Augmenting experts

A similar formulation to the eigenkarma system is the idea of trying to augment experts, by rewarding users in proportion to how successful they are at predicting how a trusted expert would vote, and then using that predicted expert's vote as the reward signal. Periodically, you do query the trusted expert, and use that to calibrate and train the users who are trying to predict the expert.

This still allows you to build common-knowledge, and allows you to have effective reward signals ("simulated Eliezer upvoted your comment"), but does run into problems when it comes to being a low-effort way of engaging with the site. The operation of "what would person X think about this comment" is a much more difficult one than "did I like this comment?", and as such might deter a large number of users from using your site.

I just came back from talking to Max Harms about the Crystal trilogy, which made me think about rationalist fiction, or the concept of hard sci-fi combined with explorations of cognitive science and philosophy of science in general (which is how I conceptualize the idea of rationalist fiction). 

I have a general sense that one of the biggest obstacles for making progress on difficult problems is something that I would describe as “focusing attention on the problem”. I feel like after an initial burst of problem-solving activity, most people when working on hard problems, either give up, or start focusing on ways to avoid the problem, or sometimes start building a lot of infrastructure around the problem in a way that doesn’t really try to solve it. 

I feel like one of the most important tools/skills that I see top scientist or problem solvers in general use, is utilizing workflows and methods that allow them to focus on a difficult problem for days and months, instead of just hours. 

I think at least for me, the case of exam environments displays this effect pretty strongly. I have a sense that in an exam environment, if I am given a question, I successfully focus my full attention on a problem for a full hour, in a way that often easily outperforms me thinking about a problem in a lower key environment for multiple days in a row.

And then, when I am given a problem set with concrete technical problems, my attention is again much better focused than when I am given the same problem but in a much less well-defined way. E.g. thinking about solving some engineering problem, but without thinking about it by trying to create a concrete proof or counterproof. 

My guess is that there is a lot of potential value in fiction that helps people focus their attention on a problem in a real way. In fiction you have the ability to create real-feeling stakes that depend on problem solving, and things like the final exam in Methods of Rationality show how that can be translated into large amounts of cognitive labor. 

I think my strongest counterargument to this model is something like “sure, it’s easy to make progress on problems when you have someone else give you the correct ontology in which the problem is solvable, but that’s just because 90% of the work of solving problems is coming up with the right ontologies for problems like this”. And I think there is something importantly real about this, but also that it doesn’t fully address the value of exams and fiction and problem sets that I am trying to point to (though I do think it explains a good chunk of their effect). 

Going back to the case of fiction, it is clear to me that fiction is as a literary form much more optimized to hold human attention that most non-fiction is. I think first of all that this constraint means that most fiction (and in particular most popular fiction) isn’t about much else than whatever best holds people’s attention, but it also means that if the bottleneck on a lot of problems is just getting people to hold their attention on the problem for a while, then utilizing the methods that fiction-writing has developed seems like an obvious way of making progress on those problems. 

I feel like another major effect that explains a lot of the effects that I observe is people believing that a problem is solvable. In a fictional setting, if the author promises you that things have a good explanation, then it’s motivating to figure out why. On an exam you are promised that the problems that you are given are solvable, and solvable within a reasonable amount of time. 

I do think this can still be exploited. In the last few chapters of HPMOR, Harry does a mental motion that I would describe as "don't waste mental energy on asking whether a problem is solvable, just pretend it it, and ask what the solution would be if it was solvable", in a way that felt to me like it would work on a lot of real-world problems. 

Is intellectual progress in the head or in the paper?

Which of the two generates more value:

• A researcher writes up a core idea in their field, but only a small fraction of good people read it in the next 20 years
• A researchers gives a presentation at a conference to all the best researchers in his field, but none of them write up the idea later

I think which of the two will generate more value determines a lot of your strategy about how to go about creating intellectual progress. In one model what matters is that the best individuals hear about the most important ideas in a way that then allows them to make progress on other problems. In the other model what matters is that the idea gets written as an artifact that can be processed and evaluated by reviews and the proper methods of the scientific progress, and then built upon when referenced and cited.

I think there is a tradeoff of short-term progress against long-term progress in these two approaches. I think many fields can go through intense periods of progress when focusing on just establishing communication between the best researchers of the field, but would be surprised if that period lasts longer than one or two decades. Here are some reasons for why that might be the case:

• A long-lasting field needs a steady supply of new researchers and thinkers, both to bring in new ideas, and also to replace the old researchers who retire. If you do not write up your ideas, the ability for a field to evaluate the competence of a researchers has to rely on the impressions of individual researchers. My sense is that relying on that kind of implicit impression does not survive multiple successions and will get corrupted by people trying to use their influence for some other means within two decades.
• You are blocking yourself off from interdisciplinary progress. After a decade a two fields often end up in a rut that needs some new paradigm or at least new idea to allow people to make progress again. If you don't write up your ideas publicly, you lose a lot of opportunities for interdisciplinary researchers to enter your field and bring in ideas from other places.
• You make it hard to improve on research debt because there is no canonical reference that can be updated with better explanations and better definitions. (Current journals don't do particularly well on this, but this is an opportunity that wiki-like systems can take advantage of, or with some kind of set of published definitions like the DSM-5, and new editions of textbooks also help with this)
• If you are a theoretical field, you are making it harder for your ideas to get implemented or transformed into engineering problems. This prevents your field from visibly generating value, which reduces both the total amount of people who want to join your field, and also the interest of other people to invest resources into your field

However, you also gain a large number of benefits, that will probably increase your short-term output significantly:

• Through the use of in-person conversations and conferences the cost of communicating a new idea and letting others build on it is often an order of magnitude smaller
• Your ability to identify the best talent can now be directly downstream of the taste of the best people in the field, which allows you to identify researchers who are not great at writing, but still great at thinking
• The complexity limit of any individual idea in your field is a lot higher, since the ideas get primarily transmitted via high-bandwidth channels
• Your feedback cycles of getting feedback on your ideas from other people in the field is a lot faster, since your ideas don't need to go through a costly writeup and review phase

My current model is that it's often good for research fields to go through short periods (< 2 years) in which there is a lot of focus on just establishing good communications among the best researchers, either with a parallel investment in trying to write up at least the basics of the discussion, or a subsequent clean-up period in which the primary focus is on writing up the core insights that all the best researchers converged on.

Thoughts on minimalism, elegance and the internet:

I have this vision for LessWrong of a website that gives you the space to think for yourself, and doesn't constantly distract you with flashy colors and bright notifications and vibrant pictures. Instead it tries to be muted in a way that allows you to access the relevant information, but still gives you the space to disengage from the content of your screen, take a step back and ask yourself "what are my goals right now?".

I don't know how well we achieved that so far. I like our frontpage, and I think the post-reading experience is quite exceptionally focused and clear, but I think there is still something about the way the whole site is structured, with its focus on recent content and new discussion that often makes me feel scattered when I visit the site.

I think a major problem is that Lesswrong doesn't make it easy to do only a single focused thing on the site at a time, and it doesn't currently really encourage you to engage with the site in a focused way. We have the library, which I do think is decent, but the sequence navigation experience is not yet fully what I would like it to be, and when I go to the frontpage the primary thing I still see is recent content. Not the sequences I recently started reading, or the practice exercises I might want to fill out, or the open questions I might want to answer.

I think ther are a variety of ways to address this, some of which I hope to build very soon:

+ The frontpage should show you not only recent content, but also show you much older historical content (that can be of much higher quality, due to being drawn from a much larger pool). [We have a working prototype of this, and I hope we can push it soon]

+ We should encourage you to read whole sequences at a time, instead of individual posts. If you start reading a sequence, you should be encouraged to continue reading it from the frontpage [This is also quite close to working]

+ There should be some way to encourage people to put serious effort into answering the most important open questions [This is currently mostly bottlenecked on making the open-question system/UX good enough to make real progress in]

+ You should be able to easily bookmark posts and comments to allow you to continue reading something at a later point in time [We haven't really started on this, but it's pretty straightforward, so I still think this isn't too far off]

+ I would love it if there were real rationality exercises in many of the sequences, in a way that would periodically require you to write essays and answer questions and generally check your understanding. This is obviously quite difficult to make happen, both in terms of UI, but also in terms of generating the content

I think if we had all of these, in particular the open questions one, then I think I would feel more like LessWrong is oriented towards my long-term growth instead of trying to give me short-term reinforcement. It would also create a natural space in which to encourage focused work and generally make me feel less scattered when I visit the site, due to deemphasizing the most recent wave of content.

I do think there are problems with deemphasizing more recent content, mostly because this indirectly disincentivizes creating new content, which I do think would obviously be bad for the site. Though in some sense it might encourage the creation of longer-lived content, which would be quite good for the site.

Thoughts on negative karma notifications:

• An interesting thing that I and some other people on the LessWrong team noticed (as well as some users) was that since we created karma notifications we feel a lot more hesitant to downvote older comments, since we know that this will show up for the other users as a negative notification. I also feel a lot more hesitant to retract my own strong upvotes or upvotes in general since the author of the comment will see that as a downvote.
• I've had many days in a row in which I received +20 or +30 karma, followed by a single day where by chance I received a single downvote and ended up at -2. The emotional valence of having a single day at -2 was somehow stronger than the emotional valence of multiple days of +20 or +30.

Thoughts on impact measures and making AI traps

I was chatting with Turntrout today about impact measures, and ended up making some points that I think are good to write up more generally.

One of the primary reasons why I am usually unexcited about impact measures is that I have a sense that they often "push the confusion into a corner" in a way that actually makes solving the problem harder. As a concrete example, I think a bunch of naive impact regularization metrics basically end up shunting the problem of "get an AI to do what we want" into the problem of "prevent the agent from interferring with other actors in the system".

The second one sounds easier, but mostly just turns out to also require a coherent concept and reference of human preferences to resolve, and you got very little from pushing the problem around that way, and sometimes get a false sense of security because the problem appears to be solved in some of the toy problems you constructed.

I am definitely concerned that Turntrou's AUP does the same, just in a more complicated way, but am a bit more optimistic than that, mostly because I do have a sense that in the AUP case there is actually some meaningful reduction going on, though I am unsure how much.

In the context of thinking about impact measures, I've also recently been thinking about the degree to which "trap-thinking" is actually useful for AI Alignment research. I think Eliezer was right in pointing out that a lot of people, when first considering the problem of unaligned AI, end up proposing some kind of simple solution like "just make it into an oracle" and then consider the problem solved.

I think he is right that it is extremely dangerous to consider the problem solved after solutions of this type, but it isn't obvious that there isn't some good work that can be done that is born out of the frame of "how can I trap the AI and make it marginally harder for it to be dangerous, basically pretending it's just a slightly smarter human?".

Obviously those kinds of efforts won't solve the problem, but they still seem like good things to do anyways, even if they just buy you a bit of time, or help you notice a bit earlier if your AI is actually engaging in some kind of adversarial modeling.

My broad guess is that research of this type is likely very cheap and much more scalable, and you hit diminishing marginal returns on it much faster than you would on AI Alignment research that is tackling the core problem, so it might just be fine to punt it until later. Though if you are acting on very short timelines it probably should still be someones job to make sure that someone at Deepmind tries to develop the obvious transparency technologies to help you spot if your neural net has any large fractions of it dedicated to building sophisticated human modeling, even if this won't solve the problem in the long-run.

This perspective, combined with Wei Dai's recent comments that one job of AI Alignment researchers is to produce evidence that the problem is actually difficult, is that it might be a good idea for some people to just try to develop lots of benchmarks of adversarial behavior that have any chance of triggering before you have a catastrophic failure. Like, it seems obviously great to have a paper that takes some modern ML architecture and can clearly demonstrate in which cases it might engage in adversarial modeling, and maybe some remotely realistic scenarios where that might happen.

My current guess is that current ML architectures aren't really capable of adversarial modeling in this way, though I am not actually that confident of that, and actually would be somewhat surprised if you couldn't get any adversarial behavior out of a dedicated training regime, if you were to try. For example, let's say I train an RL-based AI architecture on chat interactions with humans in which it just tries to prolong the length of the chat session as much as possible. I would be surprised if the AI wouldn't build pretty sophisticated models of human interactions, and try some weird tactics like get the human to believe that it is another human, or pretend that it is performing some long calculation, or deceive the humans in a large variety of ways, at least if it was pretrained with a language model of comparable quality to GPT-2, and had similar resources going to it as Open AI Five. Though it's also unclear to what degree this would actually give us evidence about treacherous turn scenarios.

I've also been quite curious about the application of ML to computer security, where an obvious experiment is to just try to set up some reasonable RL-architecture in which I have an AI interface with a webserver, trying to get access to some set of files that it shouldn't get access to . The problem here is obviously the sparse reward landscape, and there really isn't an obvious training regime here, but showing how even current AI could possibly leverage security vulnerabilities in a lot of systems in a way that could easily give rise to unintented side-effects could be a valuable goal. But in general training RL for almost anything is really hard, so this seems unlikely to work straightforwardly.

Overall, I am not sure what I feel about the perspective I am exploring above. I have a deep sense that a lot of it is just trying to dodge the hard parts of the problem, but it seems fine to put on my hat for short-term, increase marginal difficulty of bad outcomes, for a bit and see how I feel after exploring it for a while.

Printing more rationality books: I've been quite impressed with the success of the printed copies of R:A-Z and think we should invest resources into printing more of the other best writing that has been posted on LessWrong and the broad diaspora.

I think a Codex book would be amazing, but I think there also exists potential for printing smaller books on things like Slack/Sabbath/etc., and many other topics that have received a lot of other coverage over the years. I would also be really excited about printing HPMOR, though that has some copyright complications to it.

My current model is that there exist many people interested in rationality who don't like reading longform things on the internet and are much more likely to read things when they are in printed form. I also think there is a lot of value in organizing writing into book formats. There is also the benefit that the book now becomes a potential gift for someone else to read, which I think is a pretty common way ideas spread.

I have some plans to try to compile some book-length sequences of LessWrong content and see whether we can get things printed (obviously in coordination with the authors of the relevant pieces).

Forecasting on LessWrong: I've been thinking for quite a while about somehow integrating forecasts and prediction-market like stuff into LessWrong. Arbital has these small forecasting boxes that look like this:

I generally liked these, and think they provided a good amount of value to the platform. I think our implementation would probably take up less space, but the broad gist of Arbital's implementation seems like a good first pass.

I do also have some concerns about forecasting and prediction markets. In particular I have a sense that philosophical and mathematical progress only rarely benefits from attaching concrete probabilities to things, and more works via mathematical proof and trying to achieve very high confidence on some simple claims by ruling out all other interpretations as obviously contradictory. I am worried that emphasizing probability much more on the site would make making progress on those kinds of issues harder.

I also think a lot of intellectual progress is primarily ontological, and given my experience with existing forecasting platforms and Zvi's sequence on prediction markets, they are not very good at resolving ontological confusions and often seem to actively hinder them by causing lots of sunk-costs into easy-to-operationalize ontologies that tend to dominate the platforms.

And then there is the question of whether we want to go full-on internal prediction market and have active markets that are traded in some kind of virtual currency that people actually care about. I think there is a lot of value in that direction, but it's obviously also a lot of engineering effort that isn't obviously worth it. It seems likely better to wait until a project like foretold.io has reached maturity and then see whether we can integrate it into LessWrong somehow.

Had a very aggressive crawler basically DDos-ing us from a few dozen IPs for the last hour. Sorry for the slower server response times. Things should be fixed now.

Random thoughts on game theory and what it means to be a good person

It does seem to me like there doesn’t exist any good writing on game theory from a TDT perspective. Whenever I read classical game theory, I feel like the equilibria that are being described obviously fall apart when counterfactuals are being properly brought into the mix (like D/D in prisoners dilemmas).

The obvious problem with TDT-based game theory, just as it is with Bayesian epistemology, the vast majority of direct applications are completely computationally intractable. It’s kind of obvious what should happen in games with lots of copies of yourself, but as soon as anything participates that isn’t a precise copy, everything gets a lot more confusing. So it is not fully clear what a practical game-theory literature from a TDT-perspective would look like, though maybe the existing LessWrong literature on Bayesian epistemology might be a good inspiration.

Even when you can’t fully compute everything (and we even don’t really know how to compute everything in principle), you might still be able to go through concrete scenarios and list considerations and perspectives that incorporate TDT-perspectives. I guess in that sense, a significant fraction of Zvi’s writing could be described as practical game theory, though I do think there is a lot of value in trying to formalize the theory and make things as explicit as possible, which I feel like Zvi at least doesn’t do most of the time.

Critch (Academian) tends to have this perspective of trying to figure out what a “robust agent” would do, in the sense of an agent that would at the very least be able to reliably cooperate with copies of itself, and adopt cooperation and coordination principles that allow it to achieve very good equilibria with agents that adopt the same type of cooperation and coordination norms. And I do think there is something really valuable here, though I am also worried that the part where you have to cooperate with agents who haven’t adopted super similar cooperation norms is actually the more important one (at least until something like AGI).

And I do think that the majority of the concepts we have for what it means to be a “good person” are ultimately attempts at trying to figure out how to coordinate effectively with other people, in a way that a more grounded game theory would help a lot with.

Maybe a good place to start would be to brainstorm a list of concrete situations in which I am uncertain what the correct action is. Here is some attempt at that:

• How to deal with threats of taking strongly negative-sum actions? What is the correct response to the following concrete instances?

  • A robber threatens to shoot you if you don’t hand over your wallet
    • Do you precommit to violently attack any robber that robs you, or do you simply hand over your wallet?

• You are in the room with someone holding the launch buttons for the USA’s nuclear arsenal and they are threatening to launch them if you don’t hand over your wallet

• You are head of the U.S. and another nation state is threatening a small-scale nuclear attack on one of your cities if you don’t provide some kind of economic subsidy to them

  • Do you launch a conventional attack?
  • Do you launch a full out nuclear response as a deterrent?
  • Do you launch a small-scale nuclear response?
  • Do you not do anything at all?
  • Does the answer depend on the size of the economic subsidy? What if they ask twice?

• You are at a party and your assigned driver ended up drinking, even though they said they would not (the driver was chosen by a random draw)

  • Do you somehow punish them now, do you punish them later, or not at all?
  • What if they are less likely to remember if you punish them now because they are drunk? Does that matter for the game-theoretic correct action?
  • What if they did this knowingly, reasoning from a CDT perspective that there wouldn’t be any point in punishing them now because they wouldn’t remember the next day
    • What if you would never see them again later?
    • What if you only ever get to interact with them after they made the choice to be drunk?

I feel like I have some hint of an answer to all of these, but also feel like any answer that I can come up with makes me exploitable in a way that makes me feel like there is no meta-level on which there is an ideal strategy.

Making yourself understandable to other people

(Epistemic status: Processing obvious things that have likely been written many times before, but that are still useful to have written up in my own language)

How do you act in the context of a community that is vetting constrained? I think there are fundamentally two approaches you can use to establish coordination with other parties:

1. Professionalism: Establish that you are taking concrete actions with predictable consequences that are definitely positive

2. Alignment: Establish that you are a competent actor that is acting with intentions that are aligned with the aims of others

I think a lot of the concepts around professionalism arise when you have a group of people who are trying to coordinate, but do not actually have aligned interests. In those situations you will have lots of contracts and commitments to actions that have well-specified outcomes and deviations from those outcomes are generally considered bad. It also encourages a certain suppression of agency and a fear of people doing independent optimization in a way that is not transparent to the rest of the group.

Given a lot of these drawbacks, it seems natural to aim for establishing alignment with others, it is however much less clear how to achieve that. Close group of friends can often act in alignment because they have credibly signaled to each other that they care about each others experiences and goals. This also tends to involve costly signals of sacrifice that are only economical if the goals of the participants were actually aligned. I also suspect that there is a real "merging of utility functions" going on, where close friends and partners self-modify to share each others values.

For larger groups of people, establishing alignment with each other seems much harder, in particular in the presence of adversarial actors. You can request costly signals, but it is often difficult to find good signals that are not prohibitively costly for many members of your group (this task is much easier for smaller groups, since you have less spread in the costs of different actions). You are also under much more adversarial pressure, since with more people you likely have access to more resources which attracts more adversarial actors.

I expect this is the reason why we see larger groups often default to professionalism norms with very clearly defined contracts.

I think the EA and Rationality communities have historically optimized hard for alignment and not professionalism, since that enabled much better overall coordination, but as the community grew and attracted more adversarial actors those methods didn't scale very well and so we currently expect alignment-level coordination capabilities while only having access to professionalism-level coordination protocols and resources.

We've also seen an increase in people trying to increase the amount of alignment, by looking into things like circling and specializing in mediation and facilitation, which I think is pretty promising and has some decent traction.

I also think there is a lot of value in building better infrastructure and tools for more "professionalism" style interactions, where people offer concrete services with bounded upside. A lot of my thinking on the importance of accountability derives from this perspective.

This FB post by Matt Bell on the Delta Variant helped me orient a good amount: 

https://www.facebook.com/thismattbell/posts/10161279341706038

As has been the case for almost the entire pandemic, we can predict the future by looking at the present. Let’s tackle the question of “Should I worry about the Delta variant?” There’s now enough data out of Israel and the UK to get a good picture of this, as nearly all cases in Israel and the UK for the last few weeks have been the Delta variant. [1] Israel was until recently the most-vaccinated major country in the world, and is a good analog to the US because they’ve almost entirely used mRNA vaccines.

- If you’re fully vaccinated and aren’t in a high risk group, the Delta variant looks like it might be “just the flu”. There are some scary headlines going around, like “Half of new cases in Israel are among vaccinated people”, but they’re misleading for a couple of reasons. First, since Israel has vaccinated over 80% of the eligible population, the mRNA vaccine still is 1-((0.5/0.8)/(0.5/0.2)) = 75% effective against infection with the Delta variant. Furthermore, the efficacy of the mRNA vaccine is still very high ( > 90%) against hospitalization or death from the Delta variant. Thus, you might still catch Delta if you’re vaccinated, but it will be more like a regular flu if you do. J&J likely has a similar performance in terms of reduced hospitalizations and deaths, as the UK primarily vaccinated its citizens with the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is basically a crappier version of J&J, and is still seeing a 90+% reduction in hospitalizations and deaths among the vaccinated population. [2]

[...]

This seems like potentially a big deal: https://mobile.twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1402062059890786311

> Troubling—the worst variant to date, the #DeltaVariant is now the new fastest growing variant in US. This is the so-called “Indian” variant #B16172 that is ravaging the UK despite high vaccinations because it has immune evasion properties. Here is why it’s trouble—Thread. #COVID19
 

@Elizabeth [LW · GW] was interested in me crossposting this comment from the EA Forum since she thinks there isn't enough writing on the importance of design on LW. So here it is.

Atlas reportedly spent $10,000 on a coffee table. Is this true? Why was the table so expensive?

Atlas at some point bought this table, I think: https://sisyphus-industries.com/product/metal-coffee-table/. At that link it costs around $2200, so I highly doubt the $10,000 number.

Lightcone then bought that table from Atlas a few months ago at the listing price, since Jonas thought the purchase seemed excessive, so Atlas actually didn't end up paying anything. I am really glad we bought it from them, it's probably my favorite piece of furniture in the whole venue we are currently renovating.

If you think it was a waste of money, I have made much worse interior design decisions (in-general furniture is really annoyingly expensive, and I've bought couches for $2000 that turned out to just not work for us at all and were too hard to sell), and I consider this one a pretty strong hit. (To clarify, the reason why it's so expensive is because it's a kinetic sculpture with a moving magnet and a magnetic ball that draws programmable patterns into the sand at the center of the table, so it's not just like, a pretty coffee table)

The table is currently serving as a centerpiece of our central workspace social room, and has a pretty large effect on good conversations happening since it seems to hit the right balance of being visually interesting without being too distracting while also being functional, and despite this kind of sounding ridiculous, if for some reason it was impossible for Lightcone to pay for this table (which I don't think it is since I think interior design matters), I would pay for it from my own personal funds. 

In general, as someone who has now helped prepare on the order of 20 venues for workshops and conferences, it seems pretty obvious to me that interior design matters quite a bit for workshop venues. I think it would indeed be pretty crazy to pay $2000 for every coffee table in your venue, but a single central design piece can make a huge difference to a room, and I've spent hundreds of hours trying to design rooms to facilitate good conversations with my counterfactual earning rate being in the hundreds of dollars per hours, and I think it definitely is sometimes worth my time/money to buy an occasional expensive piece of furniture.

I like this shortform feed idea!

We launched the books on Product Hunt today! 

Leaving this here: 2d9797e61e533f03382a515b61e6d6ef2fac514f