Harley-ml/lesswrong huggingface dataset:
# The Ecological Perspective

One of the shifts I've made in recent years is adopting a more ecological perspective of society. Even if you find a particular group of people frustrating, they may very well be serving an important function in the same way that an ecosystem requires many different plants and animals in order to thrive (this may not be a fully accurate picture of how ecosystems work, but this doesn't matter as I'm only using it by way of illustration).

So if you're conservative, you may be frustrated with progressives and their tendency to be uncompromising in their desire for reform, but at the same time you might be able to appreciate that it's this very attribute that allowed them to push through the changes in the past which you appreciate now. On the other hand, if you're a progressive, then you might be frustrated with conservatives and their unwillingness to let go of past traditions and practices, but you might be able to appreciate the tendency of your group to get carried away if left to its own devices and so you might be able to appreciate how this quality reduces the adverse impact from everyone jumping on the latest intellectual fashion. Or you might be annoyed with libertarians and how everything is theft, but at the same time, you might be able to appreciate the role they play in pointing out when regulation has become stifling.

A few key ideas emerge from this perspective:

• Firstly, that someone can be playing an important role in society, not just in spite of their flaws, but sometimes precisely because of their flaws

• Secondly, that it suggests that unless we have a society of superhumans capable of playing every role well, then the best society wouldn't consist of everyone believing the same thing or acting the same way, but rather people playing a multiplicity of roles

• Thirdly, from this perspective, when societal dysfunction is not so much a result of dysfunctional individuals as a dysfunctional and out of balance system.

(This argument applies to groups as well. Maybe I'll develop it more in the future).
# Are the consequences of groups usually highly contingent on their details?

How much of the impact of an organization is covered by it being ‘a group of size M working on X’, relative to the specifics of how and what they do in working on X? What if we also include a single scale of how functional they are?

For instance, does it mostly matter that my research group, [AI Impacts](https://aiimpacts.org/), is a certain size force for AI risk related thinking (with the size determined by the number and competence of people and the functionality of the organization, say), or does it matter whether we write journal articles or news stories or blog posts or research pages, or whether we choose our projects collectively vs. individually, or whether we get most of our feedback internally vs. externally? Maybe most of these things can mostly be translated into ‘functionality’. But the ‘type of thing we are producing’ one doesn’t seem to as easily.

How much does what exactly you are producing matter? It could matter almost entirely or not at all, to my knowledge. For instance, I have some intuition that ‘there are about three small orgs in that space’ is a reasonable description of how much effort is going into a goal, but I also have intuitions that, say, minor differences in the responsiveness or navigability or style of a website can make the difference between it seeming great or annoying or crankish, and being read or not, or liked by different people. Which seems like it should just have a fairly different effect. These seem vaguely in conflict.

I originally meant for AI Impacts to be an unusual kind of entity, and the form of the output (website of ongoingly updated research pages on modular questions, hierarchically supporting one another) was a key part of the experiment. Which doesn’t imply a strong view on the importance of format—experimentation might make sense if format is so important it is worth searching alternative ones, but it might also make sense if it is so unimportant that it won’t mess anything up.

But there are costs to doing unusual things (e.g. people are confused about what you are doing, other entities aren’t organized to interface with you), so if format is totally unimportant, maybe we should move to more normal things. (Or the same goes if format is important, and this one is clearly worse.)

This question is also relevant in how you pick organizations to donate to, so maybe people who regularly do that know the answers. Does it mostly matter that you have competent people working on the right cause, or having checked that, do you generally also need to look closely at exactly what they are doing?
# (USA) N95 masks are available on Amazon

My family has been relying on a supply of off brand "procedure masks" that I got at the start of the pandemic, and many of my neighbors are still wearing cloth masks. After reading "A good supply of KN95 masks is available from China, with many supermarkets and pharmacies now selling them for a couple of dollars each." in [Why Aren’t We Wearing Better Masks?](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/01/why-arent-we-wearing-better-masks/617656/) I decided to try to buy some of these, but then found something apparently even better: [N95 masks of a new design made by a reputable American company](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08NVDFB3R), currently available on (and sold directly by) Amazon at a very reasonable price (even cheaper than most KN95 masks). Here's a [Rolling Stone article](https://www.rollingstone.com/product-recommendations/lifestyle/best-duckbill-mask-n95-1070547/) I found that goes into the design/features of this mask.

(I also bought a full face mask/respirator along with a pair of 3M P100 filters, in case I have to go into some really high risk environments.)

Edit: Added a "USA" tag to the post title. Also, in case it's not clear, I emphasized brand in this post because "Tragically, America is swamped with fraudulent medical-grade masks, some of which are only 1 percent effective." according to [Why Aren’t We Wearing Better Masks?](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/01/why-arent-we-wearing-better-masks/617656/).
# Public selves

A question that I return to in life strategy is whether to lean heavily on ‘spending one’s weirdness points wisely’—otherwise put, cowering lonely behind a cardboard cutout of the most forgettable person while proffering optimized propaganda through carefully selected slots—or whether to offer the world a fuller view of oneself.

A few arguments as I see them:

*   Hiding allows you to be strategic, showing anything that is good to show, hiding anything that is not. Surely that is better then than any alternative, that must involve showing things that are bad to show, or not showing things that are good to show?
*   Not necessarily! People can tell which strategy you are using, and usually the things that are ‘bad to show’ are bad for _you_ to show, but other people would be perfectly interested to see them. So it is less cooperative, and people may respond to that, which may on a longer term view be bad for you.
*   Also, which strategy you are enacting overall, or what you are doing in the past or future, can change whether something is good or bad to share. For instance, maybe you have personal problems that it would be both nice to have in the open, and helpful for others to know that you also face. If you are usually open about things, mentioning these might be no big deal, and so worth it on net. Whereas if you tend to be private, then suddenly announcing a personal problem will seem like a bigger deal, so the costs might outweigh the benefits.
*   There is something good about actually knowing other people - being part of a global intellectual society of real people, not of robotic fictions created by people. Being open contributes to this world being actual.

There are intermediate options too, of course. Are there good principled ones?

What considerations am I missing?
# 1Day Sooner is Hiring a Communications Director

[**1Day Sooner**](http://1daysooner.org/) **is hiring a new Communications Director to make the public case for our advocacy priorities.**

We think this role has the potential to be very high-impact: human challenge trials can still potentially save thousands of lives by [accelerating the licensure of next-generation COVID-19 vaccines](https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/01/08/human-challenge-trials-of-covid-19-vaccines-still-have-much-to-teach-us/) and advancing our understanding of the virus. Perception of public attitudes toward these trials seems to be a meaningful bottleneck toward their advancement, making the Communications Director well-positioned to advance their cause. 1Day Sooner is also aiming to broaden our advocacy in 2021, using the network and infrastructure we've built to promote vaccination by advocate for a National Vaccine Day and other projects. We are still relatively new as an organization, so the next Communications Director will have creative say and strategic input over the organization's direction. 

Applicants with a background in journalism and/or public health are preferred, but all candidates with good writing and speaking skills who can learn quickly about niche topics and make strategic advocacy decisions under significant uncertainty are encouraged to apply. 

I (Abie) am currently serving as Communications Director and will be leaving the role in a couple months to go to school. I would be more than happy to speak with anyone interested in applying— feel free to email me at communications at 1daysooner dot org.

**Read the full job description and apply** [**here**](https://www.1daysooner.org/jobs#communications-director)**. **
# Three types of Evidence

This post is about a distinction between three different ways of providing evidence that I've found clarifying.

The first is **generating data**. Any study or experiment is in this category. AI Alignment examples include [testing approaches in toy models](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/4J4TA2ZF3wmSxhxuc/attainable-utility-preservation-empirical-results) and [conducting human experiments](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Br4xDbYu4Frwrb64a/writeup-progress-on-ai-safety-via-debate-1).

The second is **pointing out data**. This is when everyone already knows about the empirical evidence, but many haven't realized what it implies in a particular context. An AI alignment example is the observation that [humans have an easier time learning norms than values](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eBd6WvzhuqduCkYv3/following-human-norms#Potential_pros): everyone "knows" this, but not everyone has realized that it's an argument for building norm-following AI.

(I would count reporting on intuition as a variant of this: it's also about interpreting existing data, but in this case, the person cannot explain their own argument.)

The third is **arguments that aren't about data at all**. Anything purely mathematical or philosophical is in this category. An AI alignment example is [Functional Decision Theory](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.05060.pdf).

My impression is that the first category and the mathematical subset of the third are generally considered the most respectable within the scientific literature, probably because they're in some sense the most objective. It may be that arguments in the second category are the hardest to judge. However, they have the potential to access several orders of magnitude more data than arguments in the first, and I think it's fair to say that a substantial part of the content on LessWrong is primarily about pointing out data. It may be that the blog post + karma system has an advantage over the peer-review process precisely because it's better equipped to assess the quality of such arguments.
# On fundamental solitude

A quote from Aldous Huxley that has stuck in my mind more than perhaps any other over the years:

> “We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”

I used to be fairly troubled by this kind of thought. These days I’m more inclined to think of memories of myself, my own writing from yesterday, my sense of a person in my arms, words vibrating my inner ears as light bounces between someone’s eyes and mine, words reaching me across the internet from a stranger, barely understandable lines from thousand year old pages, as more of a piece—physical communications between scattered consciousness. All interpreted with more or less insight and confidence and detail and sense of being an ‘experience’ and not just ‘information’, depending on the quality and nature of the message. But my ‘imagining’ of your mental state, and my ‘knowing’ of my own are both guesses. The sense that they are different is a pragmatic, superficial, quantitative one, not the symptom of a deep metaphysical separation.
# Connor Leahy at the SlateStarCodex online meetup

Connor Leahy will speak on "Moloch Reigns: To Gather an Army or to Forge a Sword?," then will take questions.

After that, we will socialize virtually at the LessWrong Walled Garden in GatherTown.

Please register at [https://forms.gle/zxrR3N763bNsAkAS9](https://forms.gle/zxrR3N763bNsAkAS9) and we will send you an invitation by January 30.

Abstract: Moloch, demon god of Inadequate Equilibria and Coordination Problems, still rules over human affairs, though his grasp has weakened significantly from the Malthusian Traps our ancestors were captured in.

From the rapidly strengthening steel of AI technology, we are promised to forge a weapon mighty enough to fight back his demonic influence more still, perhaps even slay the tyrant for good.

But how should we conduct this war? How can we win? How could we lose?

Our technology is giving us rapidly growing power to build the paradise we want. I will argue   
\- that the instinctive models of how to use this power are fundamentally broken  
\- that adding more people to the cause may be paradoxically a net negative (in certain circumstances)  
\- that some organizations are using the language of AI Safety to misdirect creative energies

I'll point out some hopeful directions I see towards the alignment problem.

Bio: Connor is a founding member of the loose AI research collective EleutherAI. They are most well known for their ongoing efforts to replicate GPT3. Recently, Connor has been pushing for more directly alignment relevant research at Eleuther, and invites anyone with ML or webdev experience to join. By day, he works as an AI Researcher at German startup Aleph Alpha.

The event begins 20:30 Israel Standard Time, 10:30 Pacific Standard Time, 18:30 UTC.
# [Link] Still Alive - Astral Codex Ten

> **I.**
> 
> *This was a triumph*  
> *I'm making a note here, huge success*
> 
> No, seriously, it was awful. I [deleted my blog](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/22/nyt-is-threatening-my-safety-by-revealing-my-real-name-so-i-am-deleting-the-blog/) of 1,557 posts. I wanted to protect my privacy, but I ended up with articles about me in *New Yorker*, *Reason*, and *The Daily Beast*. I wanted to protect my anonymity, but I Streisand-Effected myself, and a bunch of trolls went around posting my real name everywhere they could find. I wanted to avoid losing my day job, but ended up quitting so they wouldn't be affected by the fallout. I lost a five-digit sum in advertising and Patreon fees. I accidentally sent about three hundred emails to each of five thousand people in the process of trying to put my blog back up.
> 
> I had, not to mince words about it, a really weird year.

The [first post](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/still-alive) on Scott Alexander's new blog on Substack, [Astral Codex Ten](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/).
# [Book Review] The Chrysanthemum and the Sword

Japan was the only non-Western[^1] country to build an industrial empire before the establishment of the liberal world order. *The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture* by Ruth Benedict is thus a real-world case study of what culture could have beenen in a counterfactual history where the Industrial Revolution happened without Christianity, the Enlightenment and democracy. 

[^1]: I include Russia in "Western".

Many books have been written about Imperial Japan. *The Chrysanthemum and the Sword* is exceptional.
- It was written in 1946[^2], before the United States Westernized Japan. Meiji Japan still existed when *The Chrysanthemum and the Sword* was published.
- *The Chrysanthemum and the Sword* was written for the US State Office of War Information. It is more goal-oriented than most histories and ethnographies. This isn't a book about appreciating a beautiful culture. It is an introductory textbook for reengineering an entire society.

[^2]: For reference, Japan surrendered to the Allies on August 15, 1945.

The most interesting thing about *The Chrysanthemum and the Sword* is its philosophy. Western philosophy has Christian roots. Christianity is monotheistic. Monotheism is built around the idea of one truth. Singular truth is useful in the domain of science because the laws of physics are universal.

Western philosophers often take it for granted that ethics, custom and philosophy ought to be singular too. Daoist philosophy doesn't. In traditional Japan, acting differently in different contexts was a sign of refinement. Inscrutability was a virtue.

There were other things which don't make sense in a Western context but which do make sense in an Eastern context. For example, Japanese soldiers were notorious for the savagery of their attacks on US forces. However, when captured, Japanese prisoners of war were well-behaved and followed the orders of their prison guards. This pair of behaviors is not what you would expect from the same American prisoner of war in 1945.

Though I occasionally discuss Daoism with Taiwanese people, it is rare for me to have a complex productive conversation about Daoist ideas with white people. There isn't enough shared cultural context. If you want to read a good book on traditional Eastern culture written in a modern Western style then I recommend *The Chrysanthemum and the Sword*.
# Reflections on "Psycho-Pass"

*Psycho-Pass* takes place in a cyberpunk dystopia ruled by a [totalitarian AI dictator](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kvxq4Nfxw5i8AyAKm/manifesto-of-the-silent-minority). Cyberpunk stories are often about evading the law. What makes *Psycho-Pass* special is its protagonist is a police officer.

Tsunemori Akane's job is to suppress crime. This involves suppressing violent criminals, which is a good thing. The AI's surveillance state makes it possible to suppress crime before it happens, which is even better. Potential criminals often include punks, radicals, gays, artists, musicians, visionaries and detectives which is…

Wait a minute.

# SPOILERS AHEAD.

If *Psycho-Pass* was written in America then Tsunemori's character arc would be a journey of disillusion. She would be commanded to do something unethical. Tsunemori would refuse. Her valiant act of disobedience would instigate a cascade of disorder leading to a revolution and the eventual overthrow of the oppressive system.

Society would collapse. Millions of people would starve off-camera. Japan would plunge into civil war. Violence would permeate all corners of society.

Tsunemori had the exam scores to do anything. She chose to be a low-paid low-prestige Inspector of the Public Safety Bureau.

> ![](https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/www.lsusr.com/lesswrong/psycho-pass/akane.png)
>
> The law doesn't protect people. People protect the law. People have always detested evil and sought out a righteous way of living. Their feelings–the accumulation of those peoples feelings–are the law.
>
> ―Tsunemori Akane

Tsunemori Akane's nemesis equips potential criminals with the tools to indulge their desire to commit evil against others.

> ![](https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/www.lsusr.com/lesswrong/psycho-pass/makishima.jpg)
>
> I want to see the splendor of people's souls.
>
> ―Makishima Shougo

Makishima doesn't care about evil or freedom *per se*. What he really wants to know is what do you care about more than anything else in the world? What would you sacrifice your friends, your society and your morality for?

Tsunemori values the rule of law above all else. Makishima values his individual humanity.

*Psycho-Pass* doesn't strawman crime by conflating rule of law with freedom, fairness or democracy. In *Psycho-Pass*, the authorities routinely violate their own laws. The system is corrupt to the core.

Where *Psycho-Pass* really shines is the scene where Tsunemori is forced choose between law and consequentialism. Makishima contrives things such that Tsunemori wouldn't even have to technically break the law. All she would have to do is break protocol. Tsunemori chooses instead to sacrifice the thing she loves most.

Tsunemori acts perfectly in character for herself. Makishima acts perfectly in character for himself. I empathize with Tsunemori. I associate with Makishima. I would put people in similar situations if[^1] I was an evil psychopath too.

[^1]: I am neither evil nor a psychopath.

I notice I am confused. I too want to see the splendor of people's souls. My desire is a luxury born of privilege paid for by the likes of Tsunemori Akane.
# Bayesian Charity

Cross-posted from [Living Within Reason](http://livingwithinreason.com/2021/01/22/bayesian-charity/)

> In philosophy, the [Principle of Charity](http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html) is a technique in which you evaluate your opponent’s position as if it made the most amount of sense possible given the wording of the argument. That is, if you could interpret your opponent’s argument in multiple ways, you would go for the most reasonable version.
> 
> [*– UnclGhost*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DwtsDbtPCzr9ArcxH/don-t-apply-the-principle-of-charity-to-yourself#:~:text=71&text=In%20philosophy%2C%20the%20Principle%20of,for%20the%20most%20reasonable%20version.)

There is a corollary to the Principle of Charity which I’m calling Bayesian Charity. It says that, in general, you should interpret your opponent’s wording to be advocating the most *popular* position.

This is implied by Bayes Theorem. Your prior for whether someone believes something unpopular should be related to its popularity. Since an unpopular belief, by definition, has few believers, your prior for whether someone believes an unpopular position should be lower the less popular the position is, and you should update your prior based on how clear their statement was.

[Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_standard). If someone said something to me suggesting that the moon landing was real, I wouldn’t think twice about it. Most people believe the moon landing was real. However, if someone said something suggesting that [the US has an underground base on Mars](https://slate.com/culture/2020/12/mars-base-haim-eshed-galactic-federation-debunked-no-need-to-look-into-it-further.html), I’m going to ask for clarification.

Context matters, of course. If you’re at a flat Earther convention, your prior should be much higher that any random person believes in a flat Earth. But in general, if someone says something that almost no one believes, it’s probably a good idea to confirm you understood what they meant before assuming they hold such a fringe opinion.
# Poll: Which variables are most strategically relevant?

Which variables are most important for predicting and influencing how AI goes?

Here are some examples:

*   Timelines: “When will crazy AI stuff start to happen?”
*   [Alignment tax](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/63stBTw3WAW6k45dY/paul-christiano-current-work-in-ai-alignment): “How much more difficult will it be to create an aligned AI vs an unaligned AI when it becomes possible to create powerful AI?
*   [Homogeneity](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/mKBfa8v4S9pNKSyKK/homogeneity-vs-heterogeneity-in-ai-takeoff-scenarios): "Will transformative AI systems be trained/created all in the same way?"
*   Unipolar / Multipolar: "Will transformative AI systems be controlled by one organization or many?"
*   [Takeoff speeds:](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/YgNYA6pj2hPSDQiTE/distinguishing-definitions-of-takeoff) "Will takeoff be fast or slow (or hard or soft, etc.)?"

We made this question to crowd-source more entries for our list, along with operationalizations and judgments of relative importance. This is the first step of a larger project.  

Instructions:

1.  Answers should be variables that are importantly different from the previous answers. It’s OK if there’s some overlap or correlation. If your variable is too similar to a previous answer, instead of making a new answer, comment on the previous answer with your preferred version. We leave it to your judgment to decide how similar is too similar.
2.  Good operationalizations are important. If you can give one or more as part of your answer, great! If you can’t, don’t let that stop you from answering anyway. If you have a good operationalization for someone’s variable, add your operationalization as a comment to that variable.
3.  Upvote variables that you think are important, and strong-upvote variables that you think are very important. You can also downvote variables that you think are unimportant or overrated.
4.  The relevant sense of importance is importance for predicting and influencing how AI goes. For example, “Will AIs in the long-term future be aligned?” is important in some sense, but not that helpful to think about, so shouldn’t score highly here.
# How good are our mouse models (psychology, biology, medicine, etc.), ignoring translation into humans, just in terms of understanding mice? (Same question for drosophila.)

I've been thinking about why some domains have reached more definite, mathematized, and law-like models than others, e.g. the hard sciences of physics and chemistry vs the soft sciences of psychology and political science.  
  
One hypothesis is that it's just much easier to experiment on, say, pendulums than on humans. Experimenting on humans is slow, it's hard to create very controlled conditions, IRB's severely limit what you can do. Theoretically, if I could experiment on a large number of humans for long periods of time without constraints on what I could do (something like Aperture Science?), then I maybe could harden the soft sciences.  
  
A piece of evidence on this would be how good are our mouse models? There are substantially fewer restrictions on mice experiments and resultantly we do a lot of experiments on them (hence the "IN MICE" that ought to be appended to so many scientific result headlines). Maybe translation into humans is poor, and we're generally focused on humans so we feel like there's a lot we don't know, but if you just asked about how well we understood mice, actually we have a lot of really solid knowledge about psychology, metabolism, immune function, political economy, etc.  
  
Can anyone familiar with mouse models in any domain comment on how good the mouse models are vs human models? 1x as good, 5x, 20x? Good = really solid predictions, we feel like we know what's going on, etc.   
  
For that matter, the same question could be asked for drosophila.
# Help your rivals when they are numerous

Suppose you are playing a game of chess. Chess is a zero-sum bipolar game. Anything your opponent wins is something you lose, and vice versa. If a trade becomes available then you should take if the benefit to you is greater than the benefit to your opponent. If the benefit to your opponent is greater than the benefit to you then you should not take the trade.

Suppose you're playing a 4-player game of Catan. You care about your rank. That is, you care about whether you get 1st place, 2nd place, 3rd place or 4th place. Suppose an opponent offers you a trade that generates 3 non-zero-sum utilons between you and her. She offers to keep 2 utilons for herself and give you 1 utilon. You cannot negotiate. You have no reputation to uphold. Should you accept the trade? 

:::spoiler
Generally-speaking, yes.
:::

# Explanation

If you had one opponent then you should not accept her trade. If you had two opponents then the trade would neither harm nor hurt you on average. In this scenario, you have three opponents. The *average* benefit to a single opponent is only $\frac{2\text{utilons}}3=\frac23\text{utilons}$ which is less that the gain to yourself. You gain a $\frac13\text{utilon}$ edge against your average opponent.

To put this another way, if you repeated the trade with each of your three opponents then each of them would gain 2 utilons while you gained a total of 3 utilons. You would land 1 utilon ahead.

Let's call the benefit to you $y$, the benefit to a single opponent $o$ and the benefit to the average opponent $\bar o$. You should make a trade if $y>\bar o$.

$$\begin{eqnarray*}
y&>&\bar o\\
&>&\frac on
\end{eqnarray*}$$

The more opponents you have, the more advantageous is for your to accept win-win trades with a single opponent. In the limit case $n\to\infty$, you can ignore the benefits to individual opponents entirely and accept every trade that benefits you at all. Free trade between a large number of independent actors turns globally zero-sum games into locally non-zero-sum games.

When everyone is a rival, nobody is.

# Second-Order Approximation

The above analysis treats opponents as all equal. Opponents are not all equal. If an opponent is far behind with little chance of catching up then you can accept higher $o$ for equivalent $y$. The same goes for an opponent far ahead of you.
# Sunzi's《Methods of War》- The Army's Form

This is a translation of Chapter 4 of *The Art of War* by Sunzi. No English sources were used.

---

> 孙子曰：昔之善战者，先为不可胜，以待敌之可胜。

Do not first seek victory. Establish conditions such that you cannot lose.

> 不可胜在己，可胜在敌。

Then await an opportunity to win.

> 故善战者，能为不可胜，不使敌之必可胜。

You can, with skill, survive, but only the enemy can permit your victory.

> 故曰：胜可知，而不可为。

Victory can be foreseen, but cannot be forced.

> 不可胜者，守也；可胜者，攻也。

If you cannot win, defend. If you can win, attack.

> 守则不足，攻则有余。

Defend when your forces are insufficient. Attack when your forces are ample.

> 善守者，藏于九地之下，善攻者，动于九天之上，故能自保而全胜也。

The capable defender hides under the nine earths. The capable attacker strikes from the nine heavens. Protect yourself and obtain total victory.

> 见胜不过众人之所知，非善之善者也；战胜而天下曰善，非善之善者也。

Forseeing victory when the masses cannot is an imperfect perfection. Obtaining victory by moving everything under heaven is an imperfect perfection.

> 故举秋毫不为多力，见日月不为明目，闻雷霆不为聪耳。

It is like like lifting up the vellus hair of autumn's newborn fauna. Noticing the sun and moon does not indicate a keen eye. Hearing thunder does not indicate a keen ear.

> 古之所谓善战者，胜于易胜者也。故善战者之胜也，无智名，无勇功。

The great generals of history defeated weak enemies. They employed neither cleverness nor courage.

> 故其战胜不忒，不忒者，其所措必胜，胜已败者也。

They did not win by a hair. Victory was assured.

> 故善战者，立于不败之地，而不失敌之败也。

Firmly established, all they did was not lose.

> 是故胜兵先胜而后求战，败兵先战而后求胜。

Victorious armies first seek victory and then fight. Defeated armies first fight and then seek to win.

> 善用兵者，修道而保法，故能为胜败之政。

Good commanders maintain proper military governance in order to govern the outcome of war.

> 兵法：一曰度，二曰量，三曰数，四曰称，五曰胜。地生度，度生量，量生数，数生称，称生胜。

You must pay attention to:
1. the territory
2. the quantities
3. the numbers
4. the names
5. victory

The territory determines the quantities. The quantities determines the numbers. The numbers determine the names. The names determine victory.

> 故胜兵若以镒称铢，败兵若以铢称镒。

The victorious soldier weighs a kilo and is called a gram; the defeated soldier weighs a gram and is called a kilo.

> 胜者之战民也，若决积水于千仞之溪者，形也。

The good general embodies the form an unstoppable river with a thousand tributaries.
# Who should you expect to spend your life with?

Striking things about the figure below, which I got from [Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/time-use), on time use:

*   People spend increasing time alone over their whole lives, with the exception of roughly their twenties. This surprises me a bit because it seems like people like spending time with other people, and I would expect them to increasingly succeed at it with experience and time to acquire partners and families and friends.
*   From 31 to 45, people spend more time with children^[1](#fn:1)^ on average than they spend with any other category of person, including for instance partners and colleagues.
*   You might think all this children time would be substituting for some partner time, but as the children time swoops downward by three quarters, partner time stays about the same.
*   People are at a relationship-time-steady-state between about thirty and sixty. I imagine that many people start relationships in that time, so does that mean that they also stop them at about the same rate, or gradually reduce time with their partners at a rate matching others’ forming of new relationships? Are people radically less likely to start relationships after about thirty?
*   People spend broadly decreasing time with every group except their partner over time, from some early peak for each trend—in the teenage years for friends and family, and in the 20s and 30s for colleagues and children. I wonder how many people just like being alone and with their partners more than most other options, and steadily optimize for that, once they have been sociable enough to find a partner in their early years.
*   Coworker time peaks at age 25-30 and goes slowly downward before the retirement descent. Is that from people dropping out of the workforce? Earning themselves a nice private office? Some difference between junior and senior roles?
*   People spend fairly consistent time with their friends after a decline from 18 to 40. Retirement doesn’t increase it. Spending three hours a day fewer with children doesn’t increase it. I guess those things go to solitude.

In other news, [Our World In Data](https://ourworldindata.org/) seems awesome.

1.  I’m guessing that this means ‘any children’ rather than ‘their own children’, because the rate for 15 year olds seems high [↩](#fnref:1)
# You can send people KN95s

At the beginning of the pandemic there was a massive mask shortage. We still don't have enough US-spec masks, but production of Chinese-spec (KN95) masks has ramped up enormously. These are much better than cloth masks, and any time someone in our household goes inside (work, medical appointments, etc) we wear one.

The message that these masks are available and reasonably cheap ([ex](https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B0882TV6JM): 50 at $1.50/each, shipped) seems to be spreading slowly and unevenly through society. If someone vulnerable you care about is still wearing cloth masks to go into buildings, you might consider sending them a box. For example, Julia and I both sent boxes to our parents: we checked in with them about what they had been wearing, told them about how it was now possible to get higher quality masks, and asked if it would be ok if we sent some.

You can spread a message by talking, but that's not the only way.

*Comment via: [facebook](https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/10100202672544432)*
# How likely is it that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a laboratory?

I read this [article](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html) in NY magazine, on the coronavirus lab-leak hypothesis. I found it fairly convincing, so I think the chance that SARS-CoV-2 passed through some human laboratory before spreading to people is better than not. But when I tried following up by reading other sources, I found myself falling into the trap of trying to just confirm my existing belief. How might we estimate a probability that SARS-CoV-2 passed through a human laboratory at some point before spreading to humans?
# Final Voting Coworking Tonight 7:30 PT

This is the last day of the LessWrong 2019 Review. If you've been putting off finishing your voting, you're welcome to come hang out to do some voting coworking. 

Arguments about posts you think are probably over or undervalued are also welcome.

I'll be hanging out in the Walled Garden starting at 7:30pm PT.

[http://garden.lesswrong.com?code=TFFQ&event=final-voting-coworking](http://garden.lesswrong.com?code=TFFQ&event=final-voting-coworking)
# New Empty Units

Discussing housing policy in left-wing spaces I often run into an argument which is, essentially "building more units doesn't help with the housing shortage because so many will be bought by speculators with no intention of living there." This view, however, implies there's an excellent opportunity to get a ton of housing built at the expense of these speculators, enough to bring down the cost of housing and transfer enormous wealth from speculators to everyone else.

Here's a recent example, [Nathan Robinson writing in Current Affairs](https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/01/the-only-thing-worse-than-a-nimby-is-a-yimby):

> There is no necessary economic reason why increasing the total number of housing units in a city helps make housing more affordable for poor residents. Consider the pencil towers. Let's say that in order to build one, an early 20th century building full of lower-middle class residents was purchased, the residents evicted, the building flattened. There were 30 single-family units in the old building. Our new pencil tower is 100 floors high and has 100 units. All of our pencil tower's units are full of state-of-the-art appliances and high-end fixtures, and cost $2,000,000 each. They are swiftly bought up, 20 by rich people who live in the city, 30 by rich people lured to the city by its new pencil tower, and 50 by rich people who have no intention of living in the city but think pencil tower condos are an asset worth owning in a swiftly-gentrifying city.

While I don't think this hypothetical is [realistic](https://www.jefftk.com/p/building-vacant-housing), especially in its proportions, I want to dig deeper into its implications. Let's say we build this tower of 100 units, funded by rich people. Then we let developers keep building, and get dozens or hundreds of towers like this, each one with 3x the units there were before, and all at no expense to the public. At some point, these "rich people who have no intention of living in the city" will realize that their investment units aren't so special after all, and the bubble will pop. Costs will fall dramatically, since there will be far more "luxury" units than people who can afford luxury prices.

What about the people who were living in the buildings before they get rebuilt 3x bigger? Unfortunately, we are already losing cheap housing quickly. Developers buy old cheap housing, gut it, and turn it into fancy condos, all without increasing capacity. Building taller is much more profitable, however, so if we let developers build towers they'd do that instead.

Speculators who buy housing with no intention of living in it are betting that we will continue to keep the supply of new housing highly constrained and that housing prices will continue to climb. Let's prove them wrong and take their money.

*Comment via: [facebook](https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/10100203256199782)*
# Did convalescent plasma therapy drive the evolution of more infectious covid strains?

I have seen articles in the [National Geographic](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/12/why-new-coronavirus-variants-suddenly-arose-in-uk-and-south-africa/) and [Indian Express](https://www.newindianexpress.com/lifestyle/health/2020/dec/23/plasma-therapy-could-have-triggered-new-covid-19-strain-experts-2239961.html) suggesting that some of the newer, more infectious covid strains that have been popping up lately may have originated from patients treated with convalescent plasma therapy.

I haven't been able to find much information on this, except for a preprint on medrXiv[^1] about an immunocompromised patient with a prolonged SARS-CoV-2 infection had his viral DNA sequenced repeatedly over a 101 day period. After treatments with convalescent plasma, there were significant changes in the viral spike proteins with were associated with reduced susceptibility to antibodies and potentially greater infectiousness.
[^1]: Neutralising antibodies in Spike mediated SARS-CoV-2 adaptation, SA Kemp et al.](https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.05.20241927)
# What is up with spirituality?

What is up with spirituality? I mean, from an atheistic perspective?

In my experience, atheists tend to focus on the empirical question of whether there is an all-powerful supernatural creature behind all that we observe. And yeah, there probably isn’t.

But having won that point, what does one make of the extreme popularity of religion? I think the usual answer given is something like ‘well, we used to be very ignorant and not have good explanations of natural phenomena, plus we tend to see agents in everything because our agent detection software is oversensitive’.

Which might explain the question ‘Why would people think a supernatural agent controls things?’. But what seems like only a corner of religion.

Another big part of religion—and a thing that also occurs outside religion—seems to be ‘spirituality’—a cluster of things I find hard to describe, but which seem pretty disconnected from explanatory questions of where trees came from or why the crops failed.

Some stylized facts about spirituality:

*   People across religions have ‘spiritual experiences’ that involve particular styles of feeling
*   People can have spiritual attitudes more broadly
*   Spiritual attitudes involve less interest in ‘worldly’ or petty things
*   Spiritual things often involve sacredness and ritual
*   Spiritual feelings are often associated with awe and the word ‘transcendent’
*   Spiritual experiences do not present themselves as about hedonic enjoyment of the experience
*   Spirituality is connected with ‘meaning’ and tends to feel deep and significant
*   Spirituality tends toward an interest in philosophy, especially metaphysics, especially regarding whether everything is one, the nature of selfhood, the possibility and nature of ‘souls’, the nature of love
*   Certain drugs seem to induce spiritual or adjacent states
*   Spirituality tends to be fairly positive, in the sense that from a satisfactorily spiritual mental place, one expects the world to seem broadly good or at least compatible with peace
*   Spirituality is related to ideas of connecting with something beyond yourself
*   Spirituality is sincere
*   Spirituality is serious
*   Spirituality is normative
*   I suspect that from a spiritual vantage, this list might seem like a mundane missing of the point

Why are people into spirituality? Why is it a kind of thing that humans can experience? Why is it a thing they experience so much?
# Sunday Event: Connor Leahy on Moloch Reigns at SSC Online Meetup

*Linkpost due to weird filtering effects.**

Connor Leahy will speak on "Moloch Reigns: To Gather an Army or to Forge a Sword?," then will take questions.

**Date**: Sunday 31st January 2021  
**Time:** 10:30 am – 1:00 pm PST  
**Where:** Zoom for Lecture, Walled Garden for Social

[PLEASE REGISTER TO RECEIVE AN INVITE:](https://forms.gle/zxrR3N763bNsAkAS9) [https://forms.gle/zxrR3N763bNsAkAS9](https://forms.gle/zxrR3N763bNsAkAS9)

> Abstract: Moloch, demon god of Inadequate Equilibria and Coordination Problems, still rules over human affairs, though his grasp has weakened significantly from the Malthusian Traps our ancestors were captured in.
> 
> From the rapidly strengthening steel of AI technology, we are promised to forge a weapon mighty enough to fight back his demonic influence more still, perhaps even slay the tyrant for good.
> 
> But how should we conduct this war? How can we win? How could we lose?
> 
> Our technology is giving us rapidly growing power to build the paradise we want. I will argue   
> \- that the instinctive models of how to use this power are fundamentally broken  
> \- that adding more people to the cause may be paradoxically a net negative (in certain circumstances)  
> \- that some organizations are using the language of AI Safety to misdirect creative energies
> 
> I'll point out some hopeful directions I see towards the alignment problem.
> 
> Bio: Connor is a founding member of the loose AI research collective EleutherAI. They are most well known for their ongoing efforts to replicate GPT3. Recently, Connor has been pushing for more directly alignment relevant research at Eleuther, and invites anyone with ML or webdev experience to join. By day, he works as an AI Researcher at German startup Aleph Alpha.

*Meetups posted to groups get filtered out and a link post was the fastest way to give this visibility.
# Unpopularity of efficiency

I feel like ‘efficiency’ is often scowled at. It is associated with factories and killing and commercialization, and people who are no fun. Things are openly criticized for being oriented toward efficiency. Nobody hopes to give their children an efficient childhood or asks for an efficient Valentine’s day, unless they want to get it over with. I expect wariness in listeners at talk of efficient charity.

This intrigues me, because in what I take to be its explicit definition, ‘efficiency’ is almost the definition of goodness manifest. The efficiency of a process is the rate with which it turns what you have into what you want.

I usually wince when people criticize efficiency, and think they are confused and should be criticizing the goal that is being pursued efficiently. Which does seem basically always true. For instance, if they are saying their childcare center cares only for efficiency, they probably mean that it is doing something like trying to minimize financial costs without breaking the law. Perhaps by fitting many children into a room with minimal oversight or attention to thriving. Here, I would complain that the childcare center cares only about its profits and not breaking the law. If it was fulfilling my own values efficiently, that would be awesome.

However I think there is more merit to efficiency’s poor reputation than I have given credit for. Because pursuing efficiency does seem to systematically lead to leaving things out. Which I suppose perhaps makes sense, for creatures who don’t explicitly know what their values are, and especially who have trouble quantifying them. If you set out to build an efficient daycare center, chances are that you don’t know exactly what makes a daycare center good, and are even less well equipped to put these things into numbers and build machinery to optimize those numbers. (This would be much like the AI alignment problem but where the AI you are trying to direct is made of your own explicit reasoning. It might also what [Seeing Like a State](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State) is about, but I haven’t read it.) It’s still not clear to me why this would systematically turn out actively worse than if you didn’t aim for efficiency, or whether it does (my guess is that it usually doesn’t, but sometimes does, and is notable on those occasions). If efficiency has really earned its poor reputation, I wonder if I should be more worried about this.