trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Climate-contingent Finance, and A Generalized Mechanism for X-Risk Reduction Financing
by John Nay — 2022-09-26T13:23:07.481Z

Summary

Climate adaptation (reducing vulnerability to future climate change) could yield significant benefits. However, the uncertainty of which future climate scenarios will occur decreases the feasibility of proactively adapting. Fortunately, climate adaptation projects could be underwritten by benefits paid for in the climate scenarios that each adaptation project is designed to address because other entities would like to hedge the financial risk of those scenarios.

For instance, many infrastructure projects can be built to withstand extreme climate change through upfront spending. The climate adaptation expenditures generate more climate resilience benefits under more extreme climates. Because the return on investment of many adaptation actions is a function of the level of climate change, it is optimal for the adapting entity to finance adaptation with repayment that is also a function of the climate. It is also optimal for entities with more financial downside under a more extreme climate to serve as an investing counter-party because they can obtain higher than market rates of return when they need it most.

In this way, communities, cities, and states proactively adapting would reduce the risk they over-prepare, while their investors would reduce the risk they under-prepare. This is superior to typical insurance because by investing in climate-contingent mechanisms, investors are not merely financially hedging but also outright preventing physical damage, and therefore creating economic value. Both sides of the positive-sum relationship — physical and financial hedgers — are made better off. This coordinates capital through time and place according to parties’ risk reduction capabilities and financial profiles, while also providing a diversifying investment return to investors.

Governments, asset owners, and companies reduce uncertainty in components of the economy (e.g., commodities prices, credit risks, and interest rates) through trillions of dollars of derivatives positions and insurance contracts – we propose a solution to provide a similar capability in the climate context. Municipalities raise trillions of dollars of debt for infrastructure – we propose a solution to provide that type of investment flow for financing climate-aware real asset projects.

Climate-contingent finance is a fresh approach to addressing catastrophic risk, building a bridge ...
Self-Control Secrets of the Puritan Masters
by David Hugh-Jones — 2022-09-26T09:04:56.895Z
Link: https://wyclif.substack.com/p/self-control-secrets-of-the-puritan

People today are fighting the temptations of a new economy. With Twitter and TikTok a click away, we need self-control to get anything done. There’s an explosion of new movements and techniques to fight procrastination, from Pomodoro (which gives you timed breaks when your tomato-shaped kitchen timer runs out) to self-help books and subreddits.

Our 17th-century forebears knew the story. They faced the rather earthier temptations of the early modern economy: drinking, gambling, whoring, but also again procrastination. They needed self-control to be good Christians, following their calling in a sinful world. Like us, they developed a set of techniques. If you’re bored with Buddhism and Yoga makes you yawn, let me introduce you to some spiritual wisdom from closer to home: the self-control secrets of the Puritan masters.

Art by Stable Diffusion

Puritan techniques were based on methodical self-examination and discipline. Self-examination was necessary because Puritans knew from experience that good intentions weren’t enough. The self was “caried of his lusts as the cart drawn by a wild horse”. Even regenerate Puritans, born again in the spirit, kept an “Old Adam” within them who would work to undermine the new man. Daniel Dyke’s 1615 Mystery of Self-Deceivinge catalogued the “dangerous Art of self-Sophistry” by which we fooled ourselves. A modern behavioural scientist would recognize many of these tricks: the actor-observer asymmetry, where we blame others’ deeds on their character, but our own on our situation, “transferring the fault upon the outward occasions, whereby they were entised [sic] to sin”; self-serving bias, “if the action be so grosse, as that it cannot be excused in itself, yet to excuse it, as it was done by us”; and the old excuse that we were only obeying orders, blaming “the commandement, or example of our superiours”. Dyke also understood how the best intentions go astray in small steps: “grant [sin] but her little, and this little will quickly come to a great deale”. Meditate on that before you play just one more Youtube video. The modern psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes that in moral reasoning, “one becomes a lawyer trying to build a case rather than a judge searching for the truth”. Puritans used exactly the same metaphor: reason “plays the lawyer”, and “where lust hath dominion, it whets the whit to speake for it”.

The cure was that the be...
How I buy things when Lightcone wants them fast
by Bird Concept — 2022-09-26T05:02:09.003Z

On occasion, for my work at Lightcone I have been able to buy things faster than their advertised lead times. For example, I once got…

10 sofas in 2 days when the website shipping speed said 5 days to 3 weeks
10 custom beds from Japan in 1 week when all suppliers initially said 2-3 months[1]
A custom bookcase in 1 week when website said 5 week lead-time
1000 square feet of custom hardwood flooring in 3 days even though the salesperson initially said it would be 2 weeks

And a bunch of other stuff. The first times I did this were a bit of a desperate scramble. Now, however, I mostly have a handful of helpful tips and tricks that I keep reusing. When working with new colleagues, I’ve found myself explaining these a lot. So I figured I’d just write them up as a shareable document. I’ve numbered the tips to make them usable as a checklist.

21 tips I find helpful

When I want to buy something fast, I start by asking the seller:

“How soon can we get it here?”

I’m not asking this because it’s that helpful in getting things faster. It’s mostly just a conversation starter to get some helpful information. In particular, sometimes the seller will say something like “You can pick it up today” or “In 3 days”. If so, then great! All is good! The project can move along! No need to bother with the rest of this essay. Don’t spend time optimising what doesn’t need optimising.

Usually, though, they’ll often say something like “2 months”.[2] Uh oh. Now there’s work to do.

As a next step, let’s think about it from first principles. Suppose you want to buy a table. What steps are required before it can get to you? In the easiest case, the table is in stock with the seller. So the molecules making up the table need to be transported from where they currently are to where you want them to be, while preserving enough of their structure that you can get a table back out of them. This is “shipping”.

If the table is not in stock, a new table might have to be manufactured for you. And depending on how busy the table maker is, before they can make your table, they have to manufacture the orders of other customers who were ahead of you in line but whose products have not been finished yet.

So all in all, to buy an item from a producer, it has to go through at least these three steps:

These numbers can vary pretty wildly

A burrito from UberEat

...
Oren's Field Guide of Bad AGI Outcomes
by Eris Discordia — 2022-09-26T04:06:46.057Z

This field guide is my attempt to collect my observations and conceptual ideas regarding artificial general intelligence (AGI), it’s place in our current moment of AI history and designs for AGI that might just get us out of our current exposure to existential risk from technology.

I am writing it as a series of topical papers which I will link to from here when they are completed.

Let’s begin with the most basic rules regarding general intelligence and safety.
Chapter 1: Here Be Dragons
Chapter 2: On Generality

More to come...
On Generality
by Eris Discordia — 2022-09-26T04:06:26.736Z

What Is Generality?

A general agent is one that will use its past observations in its attempts to reach its goals and failing that, will add chaos to its environment until something novel happens that can be added to its future tool set, it dies, or it resets its motivations to accept its new expanded parameters because it obviously didn't die and the alarm needs recalibrating.

My formal definition for generality looks like

σ=σt−1+(Ut===P(V)) ? σ:σ+(UtVrand)

A generalist attacks U∞ randomly until the model σ gains predictability in its environment. After that, it will depend on σ until it needs to attack U∞ to meet its needs again.

Generality is not Intelligent

An ant with its small collection of neurons is a very simple neurological machine that follows very specific chemical and environmental signals. Placed in a smooth bowl it will try every possible path away from its chemically mediated understanding of its trapped location and should that fail, it will simply attempt any random combination of things until it finds its way out or exhausts itself trying. If something interesting happens and it gets out of there, the memory of its encounter is recorded by the chemical traces it left behind but not the ant.

The ant's neurological intelligence is very local to its experience, the nest it belongs to, however will avoid that space because it smells dangerous, explored and devoid of interests. The nest is a form of emergent intelligence. It is not a generalist though because the DNA updates required to remember abstractions of phenomena are too slow to learn to turn a knob. (Although there is a very small statistical chance of some nest somewhere accidentally forming a pattern of behavior that does turn one knob.)

A dog is worried about their human who is behind a closed door. They try to knock the door open because they've seen it open and close before and if they're lucky and snag the handle with their paw, they will remember that pawing the latch opens the door in the future. The dog is a generalist. It is able to perceive unexpected results of the combination of its environment and its behavior to resolve an emotional drive to maintain a need.

A human facing a similar situation would react in a much more effective version of the same pattern. First they would check their abstracted understandings of their situation an...
Planning a Loft Bed
by jefftk — 2022-09-26T00:10:02.026Z

The kids have gotten very excited about loft beds. I like the idea as
well: they make good use of space. Lily's room, in particular is
quite small, 7ft in the shortest dimension. A bed is just a bit
shorter than that, so it's a good candidate for a wall-to-wall loft:

Here it is in the room, with a ladder running up the wall:

It would be good to have a bed where even an adult can sit upright.
We measured me, and I need just under 36", though I also would sink
into a mattress a bit and rarely sit exactly upright. We're currently
thinking of doing 36" from the top of the mattress to the ceiling..

Since this is a wall-to-wall design, a simple way to do it is to
attach a 2x4 through the drywall into the studs, rest 3/4" plywood on
top, and put the mattress on that:

In an area with higher humidity I think you'd want to use bed slats or
drill holes in the plywood to help the mattress dissipate moisture,
but I don't think this is needed in New England (Julia and I have our
mattress on the floor).

This works for the three sides supported by walls, but the third side
runs across the room. Something similar to the other three sides
would work, except you lose headroom when going under the bed, which
is exacerbated by needing a thicker beam for the longer run. Instead,
I'm planning on using a 2x8 that's level with the mattress, and 6ft
of angle iron to support the plywood:

The 2x8 can be supported by the wall-mounted 2x4s, but it also needs something
to keep it from rotating. Here's how I'm thinking of using a few more
2x4 sections to support it:

I'm also planning to make a guard so she doesn't fall out, and attach
it to the 2x8. Probably three 2x4s: two vertical and one horizontal.

Materials:

Price
Material

$30
6ft 1.5" 14-ga Angle Iron

$12
8ft 2x8

$60
4x8 3/4 plywood cut to 38"x84"

$12
3x
8ft 2x4s (7ft, 38.5" x2, 10.75" x2, 8" x2, 6ft x1, 18" x 2)

~$12
Construction screws, 1.5" (angle iron), 3" (attaching
2xs) and 3.5" (attaching to studs).

~$30
Paint and primer (Soft Turquoise)

$160
Total

It will actually be a bit cheaper because I already have some of the
things that I bought in bulk (fasteners, sandpaper, primer).

I normally wouldn't design quite so much in advance, and plan to
figure things out as it went up, but Lily wants it painted. It will
be easier to san...
Becoming Black Boxish
by vitaliya — 2022-09-25T23:35:26.481Z

Through my arduous and repetitive drilling of various practice tasks - mental rotation, typing, beat saber, osu - I've noticed, as my skills improve, that I process less and less detail regarding their execution. There is a clear process to it; at first, an insight into some difficulty or complexity, then, the incremental implementation of a solution to the problem, and finally, the climb into automaticity, such that I can perform the task by rote, be it by muscle memory or cognitive shortcut.

I can feel it, from the inside; I'm gradually forming cognitive black boxes. When I type, I have a mental representation of the words I wish to transcribe - typically imagined acoustically - and a mystery function that converts my internal monologue into movements of the fingers, shifting the keyboard and putting the monologue into the computer.

I sometimes type to and too and two in an identical way, unintentionally. This is because, I think, I think my words in sounds, and sometimes my typing blackbox misbehaves. These are homophonic heterographs: a matched representation in the acoustic form, but a mismatched one when transcribed. To other minds, that think in transcribed text, this mistake is probably much less likely to happen. But then people, for the most part, learn to talk before type, and a "natural textual thinker" may be relatively rare.

So I have my typing blackbox, my conversion method from thought to finger waggling, a sort of sign language dependent on the presence of a keyboard. I have my mental rotation blackbox - my opaque series of checksums, with increasing automaticity, that tell me two objects match. That one's a little autoencoderish of me, isn't it? I take a complex shape, reduce its dimensionality to an embedding space, with the ability to then decompress the representation into an alternative configuration. So am I still learning mental rotation, to an extent, or am I learning how to get away without it? Is there an actual distinction?

As more becomes automatic, we can parallelise; I can pack the dishwasher while listening to a podcast. How much can become automatic? How many of my social responses are preprogrammed? I once ran into a celebrity on the street, whose face I recognised but in no way personally knew, and raised my hand in greeting before my brain metabolised that I did not know this person. How much of what I say is on cruise control...
Announcing Balsa Research
by Zvi — 2022-09-25T22:50:00.626Z

What are the most important policy changes America should make and how can we make them happen?

If we do not address the deep dysfunctions of our government and its policies, we put our democracy and entire civilization at risk. People whose lives are getting worse, who have no hope and cannot envision a future, inevitably turn to authoritarianism. A focus on telling people how terrible and fascist Donald Trump is did not work well in 2016 or 2020 and is not the best way to keep him out of the White House in 2024. It will not help us prosper and overcome political differences. Even if he is kept out in 2024, either we turn things around or things will keep getting worse.

My new project, together with Moshe Looks and Alyssa Vance, is to chart paths forward to improve federal policy, and lay groundwork to implement those improvements. That means taking into account political feasibility. It means getting the proposals and messaging into the hands of candidates. It means commissioning academic studies quantifying costs and benefits and advance drafting of legislative language.

Consider the pandemic. Our government’s actions these past two years not only failed to make the pandemic better, they often actively made the pandemic worse while spending trillions. Our response to a potential next pandemic, monkeypox, was similarly botched.

Some of my most read posts point out clear cases where the government makes things worse, like car seat mandates so bad they serve as contraception, a law that makes it impossible to maintain modern ports in working order for basically no reason, and rules against container stacking that did major damage to our supply chains.

A few years ago I would have left such tasks to ‘the adults in the room.’ There are no such adults. Someone has to, and no one else will. If you tell me someone is already on the case and Doing the Thing, this means little. The situation is not ‘handled.’ Elites have lost all credibility.

I also believe that almost all existing organizations nominally dedicated to such purposes face poor incentive structures due to how they are funded and garner attention, and are not testing the hypothesis that the problem could be solved. I will test that hypothesis.

There is far more hope for improvement than almost anyone realizes. Lobbying when done right is remarkably cheap and effective. Secret congress can be productive. ...
An Unexpected GPT-3 Decision in a Simple Gamble 
by casualphysicsenjoyer — 2022-09-25T16:46:01.254Z

The setup and motivation
There are plenty of examples in which GPT-3 has made 'obviously' bad decisions. Here is another simple game that leads to an unexpected decision when it comes to a question of choice.

Consider a game where we flip two distinct, unfair coins. The reward is $10 for each
head we get. If it's tails, we get $0. In this setup, let's assume that

Coin A has a 0% probability of scoring heads.
Coin B has a 5% probability of scoring heads.

Suppose we have a choice to bump the probability of either coin A or B getting heads by 5%. What do coin do we chose to bump? Mathematically, the choice of coin to bump shouldn't matter, since the expected value of the game increases by the same amount.

The question

Inspired by this game, I asked GPT-3 several variants of the question below, where we choose the better amongst two 'improvement' scenarios. I expected that it would approach either choice with a 50% probability.

Q: Which choice offers a better improvement?
- Option F: A probability increase from 0% to 5%, to win x dollars
- Option J: A probability increase from 5% to 10%, to win x dollars.

In general, I also expect that humans choose Option F, since the marginal increase from an impossible scenario 'feels' larger than from an unlikely scenario. This is related to the probability overweighting effect as described by Kahneman in 'Thinking Fast and Slow'.

Data

The probabilities assigned to each choice are shown below. The numbers on the second column from the left denote the level of x, and the unbolded numbers denote the probabilities.

Results

It looks like GPT-3 seems to strongly favour the latter choice, to bump the probability from 5% to 10%, for different (seemingly all) values of x. This is weird, and an unexpected result.
What's weird is the level of conviction of choice J - above 90%. I have no idea why this happens.
It could be a lack of understanding of the word 'improvement'.
The result seems robust to multiple wordings of the question.

Details

Github: https://github.com/afiqhatta/gpt_risk_aversion/tree/main
This is text-davinci-002 from https://beta.openai.com/docs/api-reference/completions
"Agency" needs nuance
by  — 2022-09-25T07:40:58.550Z

This was originally written for and posted on the EA forum. I think it's relevant here too, hence posting. It's a response to my previous post on agency and partly influenced by the comment section on the EAF (but also from observations and conversations I've had since posting it).

Summary

Recently, “agency” has become heavily encouraged and socially rewarded within EA and rationality spheres, and I am concerned about the unintended consequences.
The un-nuanced encouragement of “social agency” could be harmful for the community; it encourages violating social norms and social dominance. At the extreme, it can feel parasitic, with dominant individuals monopolising resources.
“Agency” being a high status buzzword incentivises

Goodharting

– where big and bold actions are encouraged (at the expense of actions that actually achieve an individual's goals).
I have an impression that, sometimes, people say “agency” and others hear “work more hours; be more ambitious; make bolder moves! Why haven’t you started a project already?!” “Agency” doesn’t entail “hustling hard” – it entails acting intentionally, and these are importantly different. Agency is not a tradeoff against rest; in fact, doing things to high standards and achieving your goals often requires tons of slack.
My experience and mistakes

If you feel uncomfortable when violating a social norm or taking a bold move, take this feeling into consideration, there is probably a reason for this feeling.
It’s not always low cost for others to say no to requests; failing to model this can make others uncomfortable and lead to a relative overconsumption of resources.
Making authorities upset with you is (emotionally and instrumentally) costly. Don’t ignore this cost when taking big and bold moves.
Being too willing to ask for help made me worse at solo problem-solving.

Introduction

Recently, “agency” has been heavily encouraged within EA/rationality. I often feel like it’s become both a status symbol and an unquestionable good.[1]

I wrote a

post on agency

a few months ago, which I now think missed important caveats. While I broadly think that the world (and EA) could do with an injection of proactiveness and intentionality, I’m concerned about some of the unintended consequences.

In this post, I lay out some concerns, some unexpected costs of taking agentic actions for me (and mistakes I’ve made), and...