lemonhope's Shortform

Unpolished first thoughts:

1. Selection effect: people who go to a blog to read bc they like reading, not doing
2. Concrete things are hard reads, math-heavy posts, doesn't feel ok to vote when you don't actually understand
3. In general easier things have wider audience
4. Making someone change their mind is more valuable to them than saying you did something?
5. There are many small targets and few big ideas/frames, votes are distributed proportionally

It's not perfect, but one approach I saw on here and liked a lot was @turntrout's MATS team's approach for some of the initial shard theory work, where they made an initial post outlining the problem and soliciting predictions on a set of concrete questions [LW · GW] (which gave a nice affordance for engagement, namely "make predictions and maybe comment on your predictions), and then they made a follow-up post with their actual results [LW · GW]. Seemed to get quite good engagement.

A confounding factor, though, was that was also an unusually impressive bit of research.

At least as far as safety research goes, concrete empirical safety research is often well received.

I think you're directionally correct and would like to see lesswrong reward concrete work more. But I think your analysis is suffering from survivorship bias. Lots of "look at the target" posts die on the vine so you never see their low karma, and decent arrow-shot posts tend to get more like 50 even when the comments section is empty. 

It's a lot easier to signal the kind of intelligence that LessWrong values-in-practice by writing a philosophical treatise than by actually accomplishing something.

I think a large cause might be that posts talking about the target are more accessible to a larger number of people. Posts like List of Lethalities are understandable to people who aren't alignment researchers, while something the original Latent Adversarial Training post [LW · GW] (which used to be my candidate for the least votes:promising ratio post) is mostly relevant to and understandable by people who think about inner alignment or adversarial robustness. This is to say nothing of posts with more technical content.

This seems like an issue with the territory that there are far more people who want to read things about alignment than people who work on alignment. The LW admins already try to counter similar effects by maintaining high walls for the garden [LW · GW], and with the karma-weighted voting system. On the other hand, it's not clear that pushing along those dimensions would make this problem better; plausibly you need slightly different mechanisms to account for this. The Alignment Forum sort-of seems like something that tries to address this: more vote balancing between posts about targets and posts about attempts to reach it because of the selection effect.

This doesn't fully address the problem, and I think you were trying to point out the effects of not accounting for some topics having epistemic standards that are easier to meet than others, even when the latter is arguably more valuable. I think it's plausible that's more important, but there are other ways to improve it as well^[1].

1. ^{^}

   When I finished writing, I realized that what you were pointing out is also somewhat applicable to this comment. You point out a problem, and focus on one cause that's particularly large and hard to solve. I write a comment about another cause that's plausibly smaller but easier to solve, because that meets an easier epistemic standard than failing at solving the harder problem.

I certainly see where you are coming from.

One thing that might be cofounding it slightly is that (depending on the target) the reward for actually taking home targets might not be LW karma but something real.  So the "I have the head" only gives 40 karma. But the "head" might well also be worth something in the real world, like if its some AI code toy example that does something cool it might lead to a new job. Or if its something more esoteric like "meditation technique improves performance at work" then you get the performance boost.

Strong agree. I think this is because in the rest of the world, framing is a higher status activity than filling, so independent thinkers gravitate towards the higher-status activity of framing.

I see this as occurring with various pieces of Infrabayesianism, like Diffractor's UDT posts. They're dense enough mathematically (hitting the target) which makes them challenging to read... and then also challenging to discuss. There are fewer comments even from the people who read the entire post because they don't feel competent enough to make useful commentary (with some truth behind that feeling); the silence also further making commentation harder. At least that's what I've noticed in myself, even though I enjoy & upvote those posts.

Less attention seems natural because of specialization into cognitive niches, not everyone has read all the details of SAEs, or knows all the mathematics referenced in certain agent foundations posts. But it does still make it a problem in socially incentivizing good research.

I don't know if there are any great solutions. More up-weighting for research-level posts? I view the distillation idea from a ~year ago as helping with drawing attention towards strong (but dense) posts, but it appeared to die down. Try to revive that more?

I think I disagree. This is a bandit problem, and grantmakers have tried pulling that lever a bunch of times. There hasn't been any field-changing research (yet). They knew it had a low chance of success so it's not a big update. But it is a small update.

Probably the optimal move isn't cutting early-career support entirely, but having a higher bar seems correct. There are other levers that are worth trying, and we don't have the resources to try every lever.

Also there are more grifters now that the word is out, so the EV is also declining that way.

(I feel bad saying this as someone who benefited a lot from early-career financial support).

Just wanted to flag quickly that Open Philanthropy's GCR Capacity Building team (where I work) has a career development and transition funding program.

The program aims to provide support—in the form of funding for graduate study, unpaid internships, self-study, career transition and exploration periods, and other activities relevant to building career capital—for individuals at any career stage who want to pursue careers that could help reduce global catastrophic risks (esp. AI risks). It’s open globally and operates on a rolling basis.

I realize that this is quite different from what lemonhope is advocating for here, but nevertheless thought it would be useful context for this discussion (and potential applicants).

My friends were a good deal sharper and more motivated at 18 than now at 25. 

How do you tell that there were sharper back then?

In general people should feel free to DM me with pitches for this sort of thing.

I couldn't easily remember this, and then tried throwing it into our beta-testing LessWrong-contexted-LLM. (I'm interested in whether the following turned out to be helpful)

Eliezer Yudkowsky offers an interesting perspective in his post For The People Who Are Still Alive [? · GW]. He argues that in a "Big World" scenario (where the universe is vast or infinite), we should focus more on the welfare of existing people rather than creating new ones. He states:

It seems to me that in a Big World, the people who already exist in your region have a much stronger claim on your charity than babies who have not yet been born into your region in particular.

In a similar vein, Wei Dai's post The Moral Status of Independent Identical Copies [? · GW] explores related issues. While not directly about longevity, it addresses questions about how we should value additional copies of existing people versus new people. This has implications for how we might think about extending lives versus creating new ones.

The tension between extending lives and creating new ones in a resource-constrained environment is directly addressed in the post What exactly IS the overpopulation argument (in regards to immortality)? [? · GW] by Raemon. [oh hey it's me] 
 

(it said more stuff but much of it seemed less relevant)

It pulled in these posts as potentially relevant (some of this doesn't seem like what you meant but filtering it manually didn't feel worth it).

• Being against involuntary death and being open to change are compatible [LW · GW] by Andy_McKenzie
• The Astronomical Sacrifice Dilemma [LW · GW] by Matthew McRedmond
• Please Do Fight the Hypothetical [LW · GW] by Lone Pine
• How curing aging could help progress [LW · GW] by jasoncrawford
• Debating myself on whether “extra lives lived” are as good as “deaths prevented” [LW · GW] by HoldenKarnofsky
• Second-order selection against the immortal [LW · GW] by Malmesbury
• Deminatalist Total Utilitarianism [LW · GW] by Vanessa Kosoy
• What economic gains are there in life extension treatments? [LW · GW] by Orborde
• Is death bad? [LW · GW] by Richard_Ngo
• You might be population too [LW · GW] by KatjaGrace
• Blind Spot: Malthusian Crunch [LW · GW] by bokov
• The Mere Cable Channel Addition Paradox [LW · GW] by Ghatanathoah
• One possible issue with radically increased lifespan [LW · GW] by Spectral_Dragon
• On "Friendly" Immortality [LW · GW] by daenerys
• Life Extension versus Replacement [LW · GW] by Julia_Galef
• What exactly IS the overpopulation argument (in regards to immortality)? [LW · GW] by Raemon
• Why abortion looks more okay to us than killing babies [LW · GW] by cousin_it
• The Moral Status of Independent Identical Copies [LW · GW] by Wei Dai
• The Difficulties of Potential People and Decision Making [LW · GW] by FrankAdamek
• For The People Who Are Still Alive [LW · GW] by Eliezer Yudkowsky

If it worked, sounds potentially compatible with whatever the inverse(s) of agender is/are? Can at least say that many cisgender people get hormone therapy when they aren't getting what they would like out of their hormones (i.e., menopause, low testosterone, etc). Hormones do useful things, and having them miscalibrated relative to your preferences can be unpleasant.

It's also not uncommon to try to 'double down' on a quality you're repressing, i.e., if someone's actively trying to be their assigned sex, they may in fact try particularly hard to conform to it, consciously or otherwise. Even if not repressed, I know I've deliberately answered a few challenges in life where I discovered 'this is particularly hard for me' with 'then I will apply additional effort to achieving it', and I'm sure I've also done it subconsciously.

Hey, Luke. I don't know if I'm still your friend, but I'm not angered, and I'll bite --- plenty of people I know have tried this. Joining the military is common, although I have no idea if this is to effect hypermasculinity or not (most of my trans friends are dmab.) Janae Marie Kroc is probably the most extreme example I can name, but I expect if you find a forum for exmilitary trans folk somewhere you'll be able to find a lot more data on this.

I think I could argue that in the years I knew you personally (like 2015 to 2017) I was trying to do this in some kind of way. LK was one of the first people I publicly floated my name to --- we were out running around campus, I don't know if you were still dating at the time. I have absolutely no idea if either of you care. N=1.

They are, consciously or not, trying to hide in the closet. This is not the worst idea anyone's ever had, especially in a hostile environment.

I appreciate that you're still working in an environment I gave up on ever making progress in. I just...wasn't equal to it. I hope you're well.

Well  there's this frequently observed phenomenon where someone feels insecure about their gender, and then does something hypermasculine like joining Special Forces or becoming a cage fighter or something like that. They are hoping that it will make them feel confident of their birth-certificate-sex. Then they discover that nope, this does not work and they are still trans.

People should be aware that there are copious examples of people who are like -- nope, still trans --- after hoping that going hard on their birth-certificate-gender will work,

I'm a fan of this blog which is mainly translations and commentary on Chinese social media posts but also has some history posts.

The way it is now, when one lab has an insight, the insight will probably spread quickly to all the other labs. If we could somehow "drive capability development into secrecy," that would drastically slow down capability development.

Give people a long list of tasks, a short time interval, and then reward them based on the number of tasks solved. Repeat until they internalize the lesson that solving a problem quickly is good, spending lots of time on a problem is bad, so if something seems complicated they should ignore it and move on to the next task.

Note that even current LLMs can pretty decently answer all but the first of those as well as ask them.

Good question! From the Wiki-Tag FAQ [LW · GW]:

A good heuristic is that tag ought to have three high-quality posts, preferably written by two or more authors. 

I believe all tags have to be approved. If I were going through the morning moderation queue, I wouldn't approve an empty tag.

At times, I have added tags that I felt were useful or missing, but usually, I add it to at least a few important posts to illustrate. At one time, one of them was removed but a good explanation for it was given.

It might be easier to try to establish some track record by doing a small research project first. I don't know if you have enough runway for this though.

What do you mean by "applied research org"? Like, applied alignment research?

I do think I could put a good team together and make decent contributions quickly

can you demonstrate this for a few posts? (I suspect it will be much harder than you think.)

I like this. 

Another explanation I have heard: 

a popular theory of aging is the mitochrondial theory of aging. 

There are several variants of this theory some of which are definitely false, while some are plausibly in sorta-the-direction. It's a big controversy and I'm not an expert yada yada yada. Let me assume something like the following is true: aging is a metabolic phenomena where mitochrondia degrade overtime and at some point start to leak damaging byproducts which is substantially responsible for aging. Mitochrondial DNA have less repair mechanism than nuclear DNA. Over time they accrue mutations that are bad (much quicker than nuclear dna). 

Species that reproduce fast & many may select less on (mitochrondial) mutational load since its matter less. On the other hand, species that have more selection on mitochrondial mutational load for whatever reason are less fecund. E.g. fetuses may be spontaneously aborted if the mitochrondia have too many mutations. 

Some pieces of evidence: eggs contain the mitochrondia and are 'kept on ice', i.e. they do not metabolize. Birds have a much stronger selection pressure for high-functioning metabolism (because of flight)^[1] and plausibly 'better mitochrondia'. 

[there are also variant-hypotheses possible that have a similar mutation meltdown story but don't go through mitochrondia per se. There is some evidence and counterevidence for epigenetic and non-mitochrondial mutational meltdown theories of againg too. So not implausible]

1. ^{^}

   compare bats? what about their lifespans?

My cached mental explanation from undergrad when I was learning about the details of evolution and thinking about this was something along the lines of a heuristic like: 

"Many plants and animals seem to have been selected for dying after a successful reproduction event. Part of this may be about giving maximal resources to that reproduction event (maybe your only one, or just your last one). But for animals that routinely survive their last reproductive event, and survive raising the children until the children become independent, then there's probably some other explanation. I think about this with mice as my prototypical example a lot, since they seem to have this pattern. Commonly both male and female mice will survive reproduction, potentially even multiple cycles. However, mice do seem to be selected for relatively fast senescence. What might underlie this?

My guess is that senescence can cause you to get out of the way of your existing offspring. Avoiding being a drag on them. There are many compatible (potentially co-occurring) ways this could happen. Some that I can think of off the top of my head are:

• Not being a vector for disease, while in a relatively weakened state of old age
• Not feeding predators, which could then increase in population and put further stress on the population of your descendants / relatives.
• Not consuming resources which might otherwise be more available to your descendants / relatives including:
  • food
  • good shelter locations
  • potential mating opportunities
  • etc
    
    "

My understanding was the typical explanation was antagonistic pleiotropy, but I don't know whether that's the consensus view.

This seems to have the name 'pathogen control hypothesis' in the literature - see review. I think it has all the hallmarks of a good predictive hypothesis, but I'd really want to see some simulations of which parameter scenarios induce selection this way. 

What monster downvoted this

Testosterone influences brain function but not so much general IQ. It may influence to which areas your attention and thus most of your learning goes. For example, Lower testosterone increases attention to happy faces while higher to angry faces. 

Also, accelerate education, to learn as much as possible before the testosterone fully hits.

Or, if testosterone changes attention (as Gunnar wrote), learn as much as possible before the testosterone fully hits... and afterwards learn it again, because it could give you a new perspective.

It's really weird hypothesis because DHT is used as nootropic.

I think the most effect of high T, if it exists, is purely behavioral.

The hypothesis I would immediately come up with is that less traditionally masculine AMAB people are inclined towards less physical pursuits.