David Udell

• David UdellMar 30, 2023, 9:12 PM

  2 points

  on: David Udell’s Shortform

  2. The anchor of a major news network donates lots of money to organizations fighting against gay marriage, and in his spare time he writes editorials arguing that homosexuals are weakening the moral fabric of the country. The news network decides they disagree with this kind of behavior and fire the anchor.

  a) This is acceptable; the news network is acting within their rights and according to their principles
  b) This is outrageous; people should be judged on the quality of their work and not their political beliefs

  …

  12. The principal of a private school is a member of Planned Parenthood and, off-duty, speaks out about contraception and the morning after pill. The board of the private school decides this is inappropriate given the school’s commitment to abstinence and moral education and asks the principal to stop these speaking engagements or step down from his position.

  a) The school board is acting within its rights; they can insist on a principal who shares their values
  b) The school board should back off; it’s none of their business what he does in his free time

  …

  [Difference] of 0 to 3: You are an Object-Level Thinker. You decide difficult cases by trying to find the solution that makes the side you like win and the side you dislike lose in that particular situation.

  [Difference] of 4 to 6: You are a Meta-Level Thinker. You decide difficult cases by trying to find general principles that can be applied evenhandedly regardless of which side you like or dislike.

  --Scott Alexander, “The Slate Star Codex Political Spectrum Quiz”

  The Character of an Epistemic Prisoner’s Dilemma

  Say there are two tribes. The tribes hold fundamentally different values, but they also model the world in different terms. Each thinks members of the other tribe are mistaken, and that some of their apparent value disagreement would be resolved if the others’ mistakes were corrected.

  Keeping this in mind, let’s think about inter-tribe cooperation and defection.

  Ruling by Reference Classes, Rather Than Particulars

  In the worst equilibrium, actors from each tribe evaluate political questions in favor of their own tribe, against the outgroup. In their world model, this is to a great extent for the benefit of the outgroup members as well.

  But this is a shitty regime to live under when it’s done back to you too, so rival tribes can sometimes come together to implement an impartial judiciary. The natural way to do this is to have a judiciary classifier rule for reference classes of situations, and to have a separate impartial classifier sort situations into reference classes.

  You’re locally worse off this way, but are globally much better off.

• David UdellMar 17, 2023, 10:01 PM

  7 points

  on: David Udell’s Shortform

  Academic philosophers are better than average at evaluating object-level arguments for some claim. They don’t seem to be very good at thinking about what rationalization in search implies about the arguments that come up. Compared to academic philosophers, rationalists strike me as especially appreciating filtered evidence and its significance to your world model.

  If you find an argument for a claim easily, then even if that argument is strong, this (depending on some other things) implies that similarly strong arguments on the other side may turn up with not too much more work. Given that, you won’t want to update dramatically in favor of the claim—the powerful evidence to the contrary could, you infer, be unearthed without much more work. You learn something about the other side of the issue from how quickly or slowly the world yielded evidence in the other direction. If it’s considered a social faux pas to give strong arguments for one side of a claim, then your prior about how hard it is to find strong arguments for that side of the claim will be doing a lot of the heavy lifting in fixing your world model. And so on, for the evidential consequences of other kinds of motivated search and rationalization.

  In brief, you can do epistemically better than ignoring how much search power went into finding all the evidence. You can do better than only evaluating the object-level evidential considerations! You can take expended search into account, in order to model what evidence is likely hiding, where, behind how much search debt.

Un­der­stand­ing and con­trol­ling a maze-solv­ing policy network

• David UdellMar 3, 2023, 1:37 AM

  7 points

  on: David Udell’s Shortform

  Modest spoilers for planecrash (Book 9 -- null action act II).

  Nex and Geb had each INT 30 by the end of their mutual war. They didn’t solve the puzzle of Azlant’s IOUN stones… partially because they did not find and prioritize enough diamonds to also gain Wisdom 27. And partially because there is more to thinkoomph than Intelligence and Wisdom and Splendour, such as Golarion’s spells readily do enhance; there is a spark to inventing notions like probability theory or computation or logical decision theory from scratch, that is not directly measured by Detect Thoughts nor by tests of legible ability at using existing math. (Keltham has slightly above-average intelligence for dath ilan, reflectivity well below average, and an ordinary amount of that spark.)

  But most of all, Nex and Geb didn’t solve IOUN stones because they didn’t come from a culture that had already developed digital computation and analog signal processing. Or on an even deeper level—because those concepts can’t really be that hard at INT 30, even if your WIS is much lower and you are missing some sparks—they didn’t come from a culture which said that inventing things like that is what the Very Smart People are supposed to do with their lives, nor that Very Smart People are supposed to recheck what their society told them were the most important problems to solve.

  Nex and Geb came from a culture which said that incredibly smart wizards were supposed to become all-powerful and conquer their rivals; and invent new signature spells that would be named after them forever after; and build mighty wizard-towers, and raise armies, and stabilize impressively large demiplanes; and fight minor gods, and surpass them; and not, particularly, question society’s priorities for wizards. Nobody ever told Nex or Geb that it was their responsibility to be smarter than the society they grew up in, or use their intelligence better than common wisdom said to use it. They were not prompted to look in the direction of analog signal processing; and, more importantly in the end, were not prompted to meta-look around for better directions to look, or taught any eld-honed art of meta-looking.

  --Eliezer, planecrash

• David UdellMar 2, 2023, 12:39 AM

  2 points

  on: David Udell’s Shortform

  What sequence of characters could I possibly, actually type out into a computer that would appreciably reduce the probability that everything dies?

  Framed like this, writing to save the world sounds impossibly hard! Almost everything written has no appreciable effect on our world’s AI trajectory. I’m sure the “savior sequence” exists mathematically, but finding it is a whole different ballgame.

Be­neath My Epistemic Dignity

Prob­a­bil­ity The­ory: The Logic of Science, Jaynes

• David UdellFeb 13, 2023, 2:07 AM

  1 point

  on: David Udell’s Shortform

  In the beginning God created four dimensions. They were all alike and indistinguishable from one another. And then God embedded atoms of energy (photons, leptons, etc.) in the four dimensions. By virtue of their energy, these atoms moved through the four dimensions at the speed of light, the only spacetime speed. Thus, as perceived by any one of these atoms, space contracted in, and only in, the direction of that particular atom’s motion. As the atoms moved at the speed of light, space contracted so much in the direction of the atom’s motion that the dimension in that direction vanished. That left only three dimensions of space—all perpendicular to the atom’s direction of motion—and the ghost of the lost fourth dimension, which makes itself felt as the current of time. Now atoms moving in different directions cannot share the same directional flow of time. Each takes on the particular current it perceives as the proper measure of time.

  …

  You measure only… as projected on your time and space dimensions.

  --Lewis Carroll Epstein, Relativity Visualized (1997)

• David UdellFeb 8, 2023, 11:32 PM

  3 points

  on: David Udell’s Shortform

  Past historical experience and brainstorming about human social orders probably barely scratches the possibility space. If the CEV were to weigh in on possible posthuman social orders,^[1] optimizing in part for how cool that social order is, I’d bet what it describes blows what we’ve seen out of the water in terms of cool factor.

  1. ^

     (Presumably posthumans will end up reflectively endorsing interactions with one another of some description.)

• David UdellFeb 8, 2023, 11:24 PM

  2 points

  on: David Udell’s Shortform

  Don’t translate your values into just a loss function. Rather, translate them into a loss function and all the rest of a training story. Use all the tools at your disposal in your impossible task; don’t tie one hand behind your back by assuming the loss function is your only lever over the AGI’s learned values.

• David UdellJan 28, 2023, 3:51 AM

  8 points

  0

  on: My Model Of EA Burnout

  This post crystallized some thoughts that have been floating in my head, inchoate, since I read Zvi’s stuff on slack and Valentine’s “Here’s the Exit.”

  Part of the reason that it’s so hard to update on these ‘creative slack’ ideas is that we make deals among our momentary mindsets to work hard when it’s work-time. (And when it’s literally the end of the world at stake, it’s always work-time.) “Being lazy” is our label for someone who hasn’t established that internal deal between their varying mindsets, and so is flighty and hasn’t precommitted to getting stuff done even if they currently aren’t excited about work.

  Once you’ve installed that internal flinch away from not working/​precommitment to work anyways, though, it’s hard to accept that hard work is ever a mistake, because that seems like your current mindset trying to rationalize its way out of cooperating today!

  I think I finally got past this flinch/​got out of running that one particular internal status race, thanks to this and the aforementioned posts.

• David UdellJan 26, 2023, 5:43 AM

  6 points

  on: David Udell’s Shortform

  A model I picked up from Eric Schwitzgebel.

  The humanities used to be highest-status in the intellectual world!

  But then, scientists quite visibly exploded fission weapons and put someone on the moon. It’s easy to coordinate to ignore some unwelcome evidence, but not evidence that blatant. So, begrudgingly, science has been steadily accorded more and more status, from the postwar period on.

• David UdellJan 26, 2023, 5:34 AM

  2 points

  on: David Udell’s Shortform

  “Calling babble and prune the True Name of text generation is like calling bogosort the True Name of search.”

Round­ing Some­one Off

• David UdellJan 21, 2023, 1:32 AM

  2 points

  on: David Udell’s Shortform

  In the 1920s when $\lambda$ and CL began, logicians did not automatically think of functions as sets of ordered pairs, with domain and range given, as mathematicians are trained to do today. Throughout mathematical history, right through to computer science, there has run another concept of function, less precise at first but strongly influential always; that of a function as an operation-process (in some sense) which may be applied to certain objects to produce other objects. Such a process can be defined by giving a set of rules describing how it acts on an arbitrary input-object. (The rules need not produce an output for every input.) A simple example is the permutation-operation $\varphi$ defined by

  $\varphi (⟨x,y,z⟩)=⟨y,z,x⟩$.

  Nowadays one would think of a computer program, though the ‘operation-process’ concept was not originally intended to have the finiteness and effectiveness limitations that are involved with computation.

  …

  Perhaps the most important difference between operators and functions is that an operator may be defined by describing its action without defining the set of inputs for which this action produces results, i.e., without defining its domain. In a sense, operators are ‘partial functions.’

  A second important difference is that some operators have no restriction on their domain; they accept any inputs, including themselves. The simplest example is $I$, which is defined by the operation of doing nothing at all. If this is accepted as a well-defined concept, then surely the operation of doing nothing can be applied to it. We simply get

  $II=I$.

  …

  Of course, it is not claimed that every operator is self-applicable; this would lead to contradictions. But the self-applicability of at least such simple operators as $I$, $K$, and $S$ seems very reasonable.

  …

  The operator concept can be modelled in standard ZF set theory if, roughly speaking, we interpret operators as infinite sequences of functions (satisfying certain conditions), instead of as single functions. This was discovered by Dana Scott in 1969 (pp. 45-6).

  --Hindley and Seldin, Lambda-Calculus and Combinators (2008)

• David UdellJan 19, 2023, 4:16 AM

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Quintin Pope’s comment on: Con­se­quen­tial­ists: One-Way Pat­tern Traps

  Given a transformer model, it’s probably possible to find a reasonably concise energy function (probably of a similar OOM of complexity as the model weights themselves) whose minimization corresponds to executing forwards passes of the transformer. However, this [highly compressive] energy function wouldn’t tell you much about what the personas simulated by the model “want” or how agentic they were, since the energy function is expressed in the ontology of model weights and activations, not an agent’s beliefs /​ goals. [This has] the type signature of a utility function, that meaningfully compress a system’s behavior, without… telling you much about the long term behavior /​ goals of the system.

  When I think about the powerful AGI taking over the lightcone, I can definitely see it efficiently juggling familiar resources between nodes in space. E.g., it’ll want to build power collectors of some description around the sun and mine the asteroids. I can understand that AGI as a resource inventory whose feelers grow its resource stocks with time. The AGI’s neural network can also be accurately modeled as an energy function being minimized, expressed in terms of neural network stuffs instead of in familiar resources.

  I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if something similar was true for human brains, too. I can model people as steadily accruing social-world resources, like prestige, propriety, money, attractiveness, etc. There’s perhaps also some tidy neural theory, expressed in an alien mathematical ontology, that very compactly predicts an arbitrary actual brain’s motor outputs.

  I guess I’m used to modeling people as coherent behavioral profiles with respect to social resources because social resources are an abstraction I have. (I don’t know what given social behaviors would imply about neural outputs expressed in wholly neural ontology, if anything.) If I had some other suite of alien mathematical abstractions that gave me precognitive foresight into people’s future motor outputs, and I could practically operate those alien abstractions, I’d probably switch over to entirely modeling people that way instead. Until I have those precog math abstractions, I have to keep modeling people in the ontology of familiar features, i.e. social resources.

  It seems totally plausible to me that an outwardly sclerotic DMV that never goes out of its way to help the public could still have tight internal coordination and close ranks to thwart hostile management, and that an outwardly helpful /​ flexible DMV that focuses on the spirit of the law might fail to do so.

  I completely agree, or at least that isn’t a crux for me here. I’m confused about the extent to which I should draw inferences about AGI behavior from my observations of large human organizations. I feel like that’s the wrong thing to analogize to. Like, if you can find ~a human brain via gradient descent, you can find a different better nearby brain more readily than you can find a giant organization of brains satisfying some behavioral criteria. Epistemic status: not very confident. Anyways, the analogy between AGI and organizations seems weak, and I didn’t intend for it to be a more-than-illustrative, load-bearing part of the post’s argument.

  Similarly, do top politicians seem to have particularly “consequentialist” cognitive styles? If consequentialist thinking and power accumulation actually do go together hand in hand, then we should expect top politicians to be disproportionately very consequentialist. But if I think about specific cognitive motions that I associate with the EY-ish notion of “consequentialism”, I don’t think top politicians are particularly inclined towards such motions. E.g., how many of them “actively work on becoming ever more consequentialist”? Do they seem particularly good at having coherent internal beliefs? Or a wide range of competence in many different (seemingly) unrelated domains?

  I think the model takes a hit here, yeah… though I don’t wholly trust my own judgement of top politicians, for politics-is-the-mindkiller reasons. I’m guessing there’s an elephant in the brain thing here where, like in flirting, you have strong ancestral pressures to self-deceive and/​or maintain social ambiguity about your motives. I (maybe) declare, as an ex post facto epicycle, that human tribal politics is weird (like human flirting and a handful of other ancestral-signaling-heavy domains).

  Business leaders do strike me as disproportionately interested in outright self-improvement and in explicitly improving the efficiency of their organization and their own work lives. Excepting the above epicycles, I also expect business leaders to have notably-better-than-average internal maps of the local territory and better-than-average competence in many domains. Obviously, there are some significant confounds there, but still.

Con­se­quen­tial­ists: One-Way Pat­tern Traps

• David UdellJan 15, 2023, 5:07 AM

  8 points

  on: In­for­ma­tion At A Dis­tance Is Me­di­ated By Deter­minis­tic Constraints

  This is a great theorem that’s stuck around in my head this last year! It’s presented clearly and engagingly, but more importantly, the ideas in this piece are suggestive of a broader agent foundations research direction. If you wanted to intimate that research direction with a single short post that additionally demonstrates something theoretically interesting in its own right, this might be the post you’d share.

• David UdellJan 15, 2023, 5:00 AM

  4 points

  on: Your Dog is Even Smarter Than You Think

  This post has successfully stuck around in my mind for two years now! In particular, it’s made me explicitly aware of the possibility of flinching away from observations because they’re normie-tribe-coded.

  I think I deny the evidence on most of the cases of dogs generating complex English claims. But it was epistemically healthy for that model anomaly to be rubbed in my face, rather than filter-bubbled away plus flinched away from and ignored.

• David UdellJan 15, 2023, 4:52 AM

  4 points

  on: Coase’s “Na­ture of the Firm” on Polyamory

  This is a fantastic piece of economic reasoning applied to a not-flagged-as-economics puzzle! As the post says, a lot of its content is floating out there on the internet somewhere: the draw here is putting all those scattered insights together under their common theory of the firm and transaction costs framework. In doing so, it explicitly hooked up two parts of my world model that had previously remained separate, because they weren’t obviously connected.