A.H.

• A.H. 29 Aug 2024 10:45 UTC

  11 points

  0

  on: Can HCH epistem­i­cally dom­i­nate Ra­manu­jan?

  HCH is not defined in this post, nor in the link, about it.

  For those reading who do not know what HCH means (like me!), HCH is a recursive acronym which stands for ‘Humans Consulting HCH’, an idea I think originating with Paul Christiano related to iterated amplification. It involves humans being able to recursively consult copies/​simulations of themselves to solve a problem. It is discussed and explained in more detail in these two posts:

  Humans Consulting HCH

  Strong HCH

• A.H. 20 Jun 2024 10:04 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: Boy­cott OpenAI

  I Googled things like ‘Aubrey de Grey on Demis Hassabis’ for 5 minutes and couldn’t find anything matching this description. The closest I could find was this interview with de Grey where he says:

  I actually know a lot of people who are at the cutting edge of AI research. I actually know Demis Hassabis, the guy who runs DeepMind, from when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge several years after me. We’ve kept in touch and try to connect every so often.

  He says they know each other and keep in touch but its not really a character reference.

  (I’m not claiming that de Grey hasn’t praised Hassabis’ character. Just that if he did, a brief search doesn’t yield a publicly available record of this)

• A.H. 6 May 2024 21:41 UTC

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: john­swent­worth’s Shortform

  Here is an archived version of the page :

  http://​​web.archive.org/​​web/​​20050403015136/​​http://​​www.cenqua.com/​​commentator/​​

• A.H. 19 Apr 2024 20:50 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Should we max­i­mize the Geo­met­ric Ex­pec­ta­tion of Utility?

  Well, you can’t have some states as “avoid at all costs” and others as “achieve at all costs”, because having them in the same lottery leads to nonsense, no matter what averaging you use. And allowing only one of the two seems arbitrary. So it seems cleanest to disallow both.

  Fine. But the purpose of exploring different averaging methods is to see whether it expands the richness of the kind of behaviour we want to describe. The point is that using arithmetic averaging is a choice which limits the kind of behaviour we can get. Maybe we want to describe behaviours which can’t be described under expected utility. Having an ‘avoid at all costs state’ is one such behaviour which finds natural description using a non-arithmetic averaging which can’t be described in more typical VNM terms.

  If your position is ‘I would never want to describe normative ethics using anything other than expected utility’ then that’s fine, but some people (like me) are interested in looking at what alternatives to expected utility might be. That’s why I wrote this post. As it stands, I didn’t find geometric averaging very satisfactory (as I wrote in the post), but I think things like this are worth exploring.

  But geometric averaging wouldn’t let you do that either, or am I missing something?

  You are right. Geometric averaging on its own doesn’t give allow violations of independence. But some other protocol for deciding over lotteries does. It’s described more in the Garrabrant post linked above.

• A.H. 19 Apr 2024 20:02 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Should we max­i­mize the Geo­met­ric Ex­pec­ta­tion of Utility?

  (apologies for taking a couple of days to respond, work has been busy)

  I think your robot example nicely demonstrates the difference between our intuitions. As cubefox pointed out in another comment, what representation you want to use depends on what you take as basic.

  There are certain types of preferences/​behaviours which cannot be expressed using arithmetic averaging. These are the ones which violate VNM, and I think violating VNM axioms isn’t totally crazy. I think its worth exploring these VNM-violating preferences and seeing what they look like when more fleshed out. That’s what I tried to do in this post.

  If I wanted a robot that violated one of the VNM axioms, then I wouldn’t be able to describe it by ‘nailing down the averaging method to use ordinary arithmetic averaging and assigning goodness values’. For example, if there were certain states of the world which I wanted to avoid at all costs (and thus violate the continuity axiom), I could assign zero utility to it and use geometric averaging. I couldn’t do this with arithmetic averaging and any finite utilities ^[1].

  A better example is Scott Garrabrant’s argument regarding abandoning the VNM axiom of independence. If I wanted to program a robot which sometimes preferred lotteries to any definite outcome, I wouldn’t be able to program the robot using arithmetic averaging over goodness values.

  I think that these examples show that there is at least some independence between averaging methods and utility/​goodness.

  1. ^

     (ok, I guess you could assign ‘negative infinity’ utility to those states if you wanted. But once you’re doing stuff like that, it seems to me that geometric averaging is a much more intuitive way to describe these preferences. )

• A.H. 18 Apr 2024 9:16 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Dacyn’s comment on: Should we max­i­mize the Geo­met­ric Ex­pec­ta­tion of Utility?

  Thanks for pointing this out, I missed a word. I have added it now.

• A.H. 17 Apr 2024 11:52 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Should we max­i­mize the Geo­met­ric Ex­pec­ta­tion of Utility?

  Without wishing to be facetious: how much (if any) of the post did you read? If you disagree with me, that’s fine, but I feel like I’m answering questions which I already addressed in the post!

  Are you arguing that we ought to (1) assign some “goodness” values to outcomes, and then (2) maximize the geometric expectation of “goodness” resulting from our actions?

  I’m not arguing that we ought to maximize the geometric expectation of “goodness” resulting from our actions. I’m exploring what it might look like if we did. In the conclusion, (and indeed, many other parts of the post) I’m pretty ambivalent.

  But then wouldn’t any argument for (2) depend on the details of how (1) is done? For example, if “goodnesses” were logarithmic in the first place, then wouldn’t you want to use arithmetic averaging?

  I don’t think so. I think you could have a preference ordering over ‘certain’ world states and the you are still left with choosing a method for deciding between lotteries where the outcome is uncertain. I describe that this is my position in the section titled ‘Geometric Expectation $\ne$ Logarithmic Utility’.

  Is there some description of how we should assign goodnesses in (1) without a kind of firm ground that VNM gives?

  This is what philosophers of normative ethics do! People disagree on the how exactly to do it, but that doesn’t stop them from trying! My post tries to be agnostic as to what exactly it is we care about and how we assign utility to different world states, since I’m focusing on the difference between averaging methods.

• A.H. 17 Apr 2024 11:02 UTC

  8 points

  0

  in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Should we max­i­mize the Geo­met­ric Ex­pec­ta­tion of Utility?

  The word ‘utility’ can be used in two different ways: normative and descriptive.

  You are describing ‘utility’ in the descriptive sense. I am using it in the normative sense. These are explained in the first paragraph of the Wikipedia page for ‘utility’.

  As I explained in the opening paragraph, I’m using the word ‘utility’ to mean the goodness/​desirability/​value of an outcome. This is normative: if an outcome is ‘good’ then there is the implication that you ought to pursue it.

Should we max­i­mize the Geo­met­ric Ex­pec­ta­tion of Utility?

• A.H. 5 Apr 2024 13:12 UTC

  6 points

  0

  on: Movie posters

  This looks like an exact duplicate of something you posted a month ago.

  Is this intentional?

Nash Bar­gain­ing be­tween Subagents doesn’t solve the Shut­down Problem

• A.H. 18 Jan 2024 22:23 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: RogerDearnaley’s comment on: A Ped­a­gog­i­cal Guide to Corrigibility

  Thanks for the comment. Naively, I agree that this sounds like a good idea, but I need to know more about it.

  Do you know if anyone has explicitly written down the value learning solution to the corrigibility problem and treated it a bit more rigorously ?

A Ped­a­gog­i­cal Guide to Corrigibility

• A.H. 12 Jan 2024 11:05 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Brendan Long’s comment on: A Land Tax For Britain

  Thanks for this comment-it explains your view very clearly and I understand what you are getting at now.

  I think its a fair criticism. I’ve added footnotes within the post, linking people to your comment.

• A.H. 7 Jan 2024 9:55 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Brendan Long’s comment on: A Land Tax For Britain

  I still think it’s a problem that this argument rests on the idea that investors are irrationally not renting land they own, but you don’t provide any evidence for that.

  I disagree. Firstly, even if, they were renting out their land, this would still be bad, for reasons described in the article (landlords extract land rent without doing anything productive etc.)

  The section of the post which argues about empty homes rests on the fact that there are empty homes and a land tax would reduce them. I then provide evidence that there are, indeed, a significant number of empty homes in the UK. I do not speculate about the rationality/​irrationality of the people holding them because it is irrelevant to the argument. Do you disagree on the 700,000 figure?

  Is your view something like ‘I find it hard to believe that people would leave houses empty because they are leaving money on the table. Therefore I disbelieve the 700,000 empty homes figure.’? If so, I guess I’m not super interested in disputing the government figures.

  Or is your view something like ‘The argument in the post hinges on the fact that people are irrationally leaving homes empty and the author of the post needs to explain why they aren’t behaving rationally in order to make the argument work.’? If so, hopefully I explained why the argument rests on the fact that empty homes exist, not the rationality/​irrationality of the people holding them.

  For what its worth, I find it pretty easy to believe that people are leaving homes empty. People often behave ‘irrationally’ when it comes to money: a lot of people gamble and most people have their savings in a low-interest account. I know at least two middle class families who own a flat in a city where they don’t live. They visit it maybe once a year and occasionally let friends visit. They aren’t super interested in squeezing it for every penny its worth and don’t want to sell it for sentimental reasons and they know the price will go up so they keep it as is. They think that renting it out would cause them too much stress and they don’t feel that they need any more money and they enjoy visiting it so they don’t rent it out . Is this irrational? Maybe from the point of view of optimizing their income, but they are just optimizing other aspects of their life.

• A.H. 6 Jan 2024 20:12 UTC

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: Brendan Long’s comment on: A Land Tax For Britain

  The second link is to a Scottish political campaign that doesn’t claim to know way the houses are empty (at least on this page) and doesn’t contain the 700,000 number in the link text (the linked political campaign claims 46,000 in Scotland and doesn’t seem to say anything about the UK).

  The phrase ’700,000 empty homes throughout’ the UK has different links for each word: one for England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. If you follow the link on 700,000, you will be taken to this page which gives a figure of 676,304 empty homes in England. Add this to the Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales figures and you get a total over 700,000. As explained in the link for English data (which makes up most of the total), the figure comes from Council tax data (council taxes are paid by the owners of a property and charges different rates depending on whether the home is occupied or unoccupied).

  Hope this helps!

• A.H. 6 Jan 2024 16:49 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: SarahNibs’s comment on: Will 2024 be very hot? Should we be wor­ried?

  Interesting, thanks for sharing! I hadn’t heard of this.

  From Wikipedia:

  An El Nino during the winter of 1998 produced above-average rainfall, which enabled extensive growth of underbrush and vegetation in the state’s forests. In early April, however, the rains came to an abrupt halt, and the ensuing drought lasted until July.^[2] These months of continuing dry conditions saw the drought index rise to 700 (out of 800), indicating wildfire potential similar to that usually found in western states.

  I would assume that the drought was also exacerbated by El Nino, but its interesting that the main contributer is implied to be the rainfall in winter, rather than the heat the next summer.

A Land Tax For Britain

• A.H. 30 Dec 2023 11:05 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: Will 2024 be very hot? Should we be wor­ried?

  Eyeballing it, doesn’t it imply that while 2024 will be hotter than 2023, the difference between 2024 and 2023 will be smaller than the difference between 2023 and 2022? Because the slope of the various lines is decreasing and in no case increasing?

  Yeah, that sounds right I think.

  Or is the y-axis measuring YoY impact rather than impact-relative-to-some-fixed-beginning? If so then I’m confused why the global warming section looks the way it does.

  I agree, I don’t think that YoY interpretation makes sense. I realise now that it’s not made completely clear but I think its impact relative to some past value. That’s the only way that that I can make sense of the man-made global warming section being a straight line.

• A.H. 29 Dec 2023 17:46 UTC

  4 points

  3

  in reply to: Garrett Baker’s comment on: Will 2024 be very hot? Should we be wor­ried?

  Yeah, thanks for highlighting this. I started writing about it but realised I was out of my depth (even further out of my depth than for the rest of the post!) so I scrapped it.

  Thanks for clarifying with Robert Rohde!

  I reached roughly the conclusion you did. When water vapour is injected into the troposphere (the lowest level of the atmosphere) it is quickly rained out, as you point out. However, the power of the Hunga-Tonga explosion meant that the water vapour was injected much higher, into the stratosphere (what the diagram calls the ‘upper atmosphere’). For some reason, water vapour in the stratosphere doesn’t move back down and get rained out as easily so it sits there. Which is why ‘upper atmosphere’ water vapour levels are still elevated almost two years after the explosion.