trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Mathematical Intuitionism and the Flow of Time
by Polytopos — 2020-04-14T00:25:10.524Z

Prompted by this article from

Quanta magazine

about physicist Nicolas Gisin's recent work on intuitionism and the flow of time, I have done my best to explicate the philosophical and mathematical background to this subject for a non-technical audience. I find this topic to be a fascinating intersection of philosophical questions in the foundations of mathematics on the one hand, and our best understanding of the nature of physical reality on the other. It's a wonderful example of seemingly useless speculative ideas turning out to be profoundly useful in a future context.

Much of the research for this comes from

the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Intuitionism

, but I also drew on several other sources to round out my understanding. Full disclosure, I'm a trained philosopher, and have a serious lay-person interest in the foundations of mathematics, but I'm not an expert in any of the fields involved.

The Intuitionist philosophy of mathematics was created by the mathematician Brouwer. He first articulated the ideas in his PhD dissertation in 1907 and continued to develop them for the rest of his life. In addition, many other mathematicians and philosophers developed Brouwer’s ideas, so now there are intuitionistic branches of math, logic, and philosophy of math.

Brouwer’s ideas were inspired by Kant’s theory that mathematical knowledge originates in our perception of time.

Brouwer’s first big idea is about our ability to perceive that one moment in time gives way to another, thus, we have 1 to 2, and the relationship between 1 and 2. Then in another moment we can relate this 2-moment to another moment which we’ll call 3. The key thing here is that these moments of subjective time perception and the experienced relationship of temporal flow between them are the real mathematical objects. Our symbols and language such as 1, 2, 3, +, -, etc are just ways to talk about our experiences of temporally structured moments of reflection.

So we can understand the idea of an infinity of natural numbers by thinking of them as a sequence of reflection upon temporal moments that goes on and on without end, 1, 2, 3, 4…. For Intuitionists, there are only potential infinities, not actual infinities. What that means is that we cannot regard an infinity as something that exists as a completed object (i...
Discontinuous progress in history: an update
by KatjaGrace — 2020-04-14T00:00:02.478Z

I. The search for discontinuities

We’ve been looking for historic cases of discontinuously fast technological progress, to help with reasoning about the likelihood and consequences of abrupt progress in AI capabilities. We recently finished expanding this investigation to 37 technological trends.1 This blog post is a quick update on our findings. See the main page on the research and its outgoing links for more details.

We found ten events in history that abruptly and clearly contributed more to progress on some technological metric than another century would have seen on the previous trend.2 Or as we say, we found ten events that produced ‘large’, ‘robust’ ‘discontinuities’.

How we measure the size of a discontinuity (by Rick Korzekwa)

Another five events caused robust discontinuities of between ten and a hundred years (‘moderate robust discontinuities’). And 48 more events caused some trend to depart from our best guess linear or exponential extrapolation of its past progress by at least ten years (and often a hundred), but did so in the context of such unclear past trends that this did not seem clearly remarkable.3 I call all of these departures ‘discontinuities’, and distinguish those that are clearly outside plausible extrapolations of the past trend, according to my judgment, as ‘robust discontinuities’.4

Much of the data involved in this project seems at least somewhat unreliable, and the methods involve many judgments, and much ignoring of minor issues. So I would not be surprised if more effort could produce numerous small changes. However I expect the broad outlines to be correct.5

II. The discontinuities

Large robust discontinuities

Here is a quick list of the robust 100-year discontinuous events, which I’ll describe in more detail beneath:

The Pyramid of Djoser, 2650BC (discontinuity in structure height trends)

The SS Great Eastern, 1858 (discontinuity in ship size trends)

The first telegraph, 1858 (discontinuity in speed of sending a 140 character message across the Atlantic Ocean)

The second telegraph, 1866 (discontinuity in speed of sending a 140 character message across the Atlantic Ocean)

The Paris Gun, 1918 (discontinuity in altitude reached by man-made means)

The first non-stop transatlantic flight, in a modified WWI bomber, 1919 (discontinuity in both speed of passenger travel ac

...
Premature death paradox
by bfinn — 2020-04-13T23:15:18.641Z

There seems to be a paradox about premature death. (Or at least, I am confused about it - perhaps due to ignorance of philosophy of death, or some related paradoxes, e.g. about time.)

Thinking e.g. of COVID-19, what makes potentially fatal illnesses bad is not that they kill people, or increase the chance of dying. For throughout the past and future, everyone has always died, and always will die, precisely 1.0 times (a contingent fact, but nonetheless the most accurately known physical constant in the universe, somehow). So nothing can increase the chance of dying (which is already 100%), and we all die eventually of something.

What seems bad, though, is when an illness causes premature death - dying too soon, before one's time. But when is that?

Everyone dies prematurely

Life expectancy tables report that at birth, in the UK (or US) you have a life expectancy of 81 years. So dying before 81 would be premature; if you died aged 20 or 50, people would say you'd died young, before your time.

But when you get to 81, it's not your time either - for you then have a life expectancy of as much as 8.5 more years, living to 89.5. And if you reach 89.5 years, you can then expect to live on to 94, etc. Even at age 100 you have a life expectancy of 2.1 further years.

So whatever age you die at, your death is always premature - for your life expectancy at that age is invariably greater than the time you continue to live for (= 0 years).

Maybe this is part of the reason death seems like a raw deal. For however old you are when you die, you certainly could have lived longer (by at least a nanosecond). Because there is no upper limit for age: no age which you have a non-zero probability of reaching, but a zero probability of exceeding (another contingent fact about the universe we oddly seem to be certain of).

But the raw deal is even worse. Suppose you die at age x; and the life expectancy at that age is e further years. Then of all the people in the world aged x, you are the very first to die - for you die immediately, whereas they all continue living (for at least a nanosecond), and indeed on average they live e further years that you missed out on.

Moreover, all those who are younger than x also continue living, and even those older than x do too (for at least a nanosecond). So you not only died before everyone the same age as you, but also before everyone younger...
The Unilateralist’s “Curse” Is Mostly Good
by David Hornbein — 2020-04-13T22:48:22.589Z

People around here sometimes reference the “Unilateralist’s Curse”, especially when they want to keep someone else from doing something that might cause harm. Briefly, the idea is that “unilateral” actions taken without the consent of society at large are especially likely to be harmful, because people who underestimate the resulting harm will be the most likely to take the action in question.

The canonical formulation of the argument is in a paper by Bostrom, Douglas, and Sandberg, most recently updated in 2016. I highly recommend reading the “Introduction” and “Discussion” sections of the paper. (I found the toy mathematical models in the middle sections less useful.)

While the paper mostly gives arguments that unilateralism could be harmful and ought to be stopped via a “principle of conformity”, the authors concede that the historical record does not back this up: “[I]f we “backtest” the principle on historical experience, it is not at all clear that universal adoption of the principle of conformity would have had a net positive effect. It seems that, quite often, what is now widely recognized as important progress was instigated by the unilateral actions of mavericks, dissidents, and visionaries who undertook initiatives that most of their contemporaries would have viewed with hostility and that existing institutions sought to suppress.”

For example, an older 2013 version of Bostrom et al’s paper notes that “The principle of conformity could be seen to imply, for instance, that Galileo Galilei ought to have heeded the admonitions of the Catholic Church and ceased his efforts to investigate and promote the heliocentric theory.” The 2016 update removes this and most of the discussion of unilateralism’s importance to science, but retains the discussion of Daniel Ellsburg’s decision to leak the Pentagon Papers to the media as an example of beneficial unilateralist action. A cursory glance through history finds many, many other examples of unilateralists having strong positive effects, from Stanislav Petrov to Oskar Schindler to Ignaz Semmelweis to Harriet Tubman.

Bostrom et al continue, “The claim that the unilateralist curse is an important phenomenon and that we have reason to lift it is consistent with the claim ...
Coronavirus: Justified Key Insights Thread
by Ben Pace — 2020-04-13T22:40:03.104Z

This is a thread to list important insights and key open questions about the coronavirus and the coronavirus response. The inspiration for this thread is Eliezer's post below.

I'd like this thread to be a source of claims and ideas that are self-contained and well-explained. This is not a thread to drop one-liners that assume I've been following your particular news feed or know what's happening in your country or that I've read a bunch of studies on (say) viral load. There's a place for such high-context discussion, and it is not this thread.

Please include in your answers either a claim or an open question, along with an explanation or an explicit model under which it makes sense. I will be moving answers to the comments if they don't meet my subjective quality bar for justification – see the last justified answers thread for examples of what quality answers look like.

The purpose of giving models and data is to allow other people to build on your answer. Everyone can make arbitrary claims, but models and evidence allow for verification and dialogue.

The more concrete the explanation the better. Speculation is fine, uncertain models are fine; sources, explicit models and numbers for variables that other people can play with based on their own beliefs are excellent.

This thread is inspired by a post by Eliezer Yudkowsky which I'll reproduce below, in which Eliezer lists eight answers that this sort of post would come up with.

These are not justified to the standard of the thread, so you (you!) can get some easy karma by leaving an answer that justifies one of these with the sources/data/explanation needed to argue for it. It includes much of the discussion elsewhere on LW (e.g. by Wei Dai, Zvi, Robin, and others), so it shouldn't be hard to find the prior discussion.

Eliezer's post (link):

What do we early-warning cognoscenti now know about Covid-19 that others haven't currently figured out? What's the TOC of that blog post? @WilliamAEden @robinhanson

My stab at a TOC:

1: The Dose Hypothesis - the theory that C19 fatalities vary by how high the initial dose, and possibly how it's administered.

1a: So: Human trials of variolation are hugely urgent.

1b: So: Getting C19 from a roommate might be much worse than getting it on public transportation.

2: Challenge trials of vaccines save net lives.

3: Ventilators no longer look as important because they o

...
The Samurai and the Daimyo: A Useful Dynamic? 
by Slimepriestess — 2020-04-13T22:38:02.759Z

The post Slack Club by The Last Rationalist describes a problem in the rationalist community where there is an overabundance of Ender Wiggins: people trying to be clever as a way of avoiding having to do work. HPMOR and other rationalist media lionizes this sort of behavior and encourages people to try and fit into this archetype while looking down on people who don't. Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate from the Craft and the Community sequence also points to the same general cluster of behavioral trends. I'm not saying this is universal, but there does seem to be something to it.

I've probably been influenced by this myself. Over the years I have collected a large pile of various failed or aborted projects in my wake. Things that just didn't work out or didn't go the way I had planned or hoped. As a result, it's become increasingly clear to me that I just don't make a very good Ender Wiggin. I'm at least getting decent at noticing that I'm not very good at this, but noticing my inability to discern good ideas from bad ones doesn't translate out into having better discernment. I have improved my discernment somewhat as I’ve learned and aged, but I’m still noticeably below average in this area.

For problems where I can just throw lots of low-cost ideas at the wall and see what sticks, this is fine, but where there’s a higher risk or cost associated with each attempt, it’s much less so. I have a lot of strengths, but discernment will probably never be one of them and it seems wise to admit that and leave the discernment to people who are better equipped to do it.

I'm not a very good Ender Wiggin, that just isn't where my strengths lie. But Ender couldn’t have won the Formic War on his own, Ender needed Bean, and Petra, and all the other members of his Jeesh. I might not be a very good Ender, but I could be a good Bean. I’m motivated, intelligent, value-aligned, and hardworking. With how many Enders there are in this community it seems like I should be able to find someone to work under.

A friend of mine questions whether this is actually describing a useful dynamic, or if my time would be better spent more time on personal improvement before trying to take actions that improve the world. I don't know if I agree with this and it seems like if I can make usef...
Where should LessWrong go on COVID?
by Elizabeth — 2020-04-13T21:39:53.675Z

About 6 weeks ago the LW team chose to go really hard on COVID-19 (including contracting with me), for reasons discussed here. The time for that seems to be winding down; people-besides-me are asking fewer covid questions and more non-covid questions, my posts get fewer comments every day, and there's not the same urgency adding to the links DB. Looking at people I know in the real world seems much the same: after a mad sprint to prep and then adjust to covid, people are settling in and catching up on the rest of their lives. So I and the LessWrong team are taking this moment to reevaluate what LessWrong’s role in covid response should be.

My question for you is: where do we go from here? Should we slip back to normal, except with a covid section? Relegate covid work to personal posts since it’s not timeless? Do you want practical posts like “how to disinfect a mask?”, or big picture things like “what does the world look like in a year?”?

What would help you, specifically, right now? In a month? In a year?

Answers I’ve gotten from people I polled before posting:

Answer questions with answers that can probably be synthesized from academic papers, e.g., “What is my risk from delivery food, given a certain prevalence?”
Answer questions informing near-term behavior, e.g., “How do you tell when it's time in your specific region to start relaxing your protocols?” and “Which specific things do we think will be instant vectors the moment things open up?”
Creates guides for questions about long-term behavior, e.g., “should plan on hibernating for a year and returning to my job, or retool for something entirely different?”, “should I move out of [major metropolitan answer] for a year?”, and “should I move to a more functional country forever?”
Dataset on politicians/leaders/journalists etc evaluating how they handled covid
A map of current efforts
DB of coronavirus data sets

And remember that if you're entirely sick of this, you can use the new filter tool on the frontpage to make sure you never see covid content.
Reflections on Arguing about Politics
by Pontor — 2020-04-13T17:33:19.281Z

Content Note: I've kept things abstract, but this post may still put frustrating politics on your mind.

I have strong political disagreements with a close friend of mine. We both care a lot about certain policies and really want to change the other’s mind, but whenever we try, it just ends in frustration. I've spent a lot of time wondering why our arguments are so unproductive, and after much rumination and journaling about it, I have come up with the following list of helpful reminders. Now when he sends me something politically charged, or when I get the urge to do the same, I stop and read some of the items in the list.

In no special order, they are:

People's beliefs fall along tribal lines, even when a large part of them really wants to do impartial truth-tracking.
Do they have any incentive to self-correct about this? Or do they have every incentive to avoid changing their mind?
When it comes to certain topics, humans will change their minds only slowly and gradually. For those topics it is silly to expect them to perform anything close to an ideal Bayesian update.
If I had a great need to impart some complex, easily-misunderstood technical problem to my friend, I would want to do so with focused attention and graph paper. I would not want to do it while we were out getting lunch nor while we were just idly texting. This is true for our political arguments as well, to the extent that technical problems are relevant.
Incorporating confirming evidence is effortless and often emotionally gratifying. In contrast, reading something that challenges my priors leaves me with a choice: summarily dismiss it...or [tired sigh]...fire up the cogitators and begin the arduous process of crux checking, fact checking, and so on.
It can be borderline impossible to say "you are right and I was wrong" to someone who is being smug, condescending, or mean to you; or who has a habit of making your tribe look bad.
I can tolerate anything except the outgroup.
People are not trained to gracefully admit to being wrong, even when it is best to do so. It feels extremely costly, and well...it often is.
Don't expect it to go well if you try to convince someone that they are the bad guy. Do you have a line of retreat for discovering something like that? Didn't think so.
Bucket errors and emotionally-charged beliefs are not to be underestimated. They can f

...
"How conservative" should the partial maximisers be?
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2020-04-13T15:50:00.044Z

Due to the problem of building a strong V-enhancer when we want a U-enhancer - and the great difficulty in defining U, the utility we truly want to maximise - many people have suggested reducing the V-increasing focus of the AI. The idea is that, as long as the AI doesn't devote too much optimisation power to V, the V and U will stay connected with each other, and hence a moderate increase in V will in fact lead to a moderate increase in U.

This has lead to interest in such things as satisficers and low-impact AIs, both of which have their problems. Those try and put an absolute limit on how much V is optimised. The AI is not supposed to optimise V above a certain limit (satisficer) or if optimising it changes too much about the world or the power of other agents (low-impact).

Another approach is to put a relative limit on how much an AI can push a utility function. For example, quantilizers will choose randomly among the top 0<q≤1 proportion of actions/policies, rather than picking the top action/policy. Then there is the approach of using pessimism to make the AI more conservative. This pessimism is defined by a parametre β∈(0,1), with β→1 being very pessimistic.

Intermediate value uncertainty

The behaviours of q and β are pretty clear around the extremes. As β and q tend to 0, the agent will behave like a V-maximiser. As they tend to 1, the agent will behave randomly (q) or totally conservatively (β).

Thus, we expect that moving away from the extremes will improve the true U-performance, and that the conservative, 1 end, will be less disastrous than the V-maximising, 0 end (though we only know that second fact, because of implicit assumptions we have on U and V).

The problem is in the middle, where the behaviour is unknown (and, since we lack a full formulation of U, generically unknowable). There is no principled way of setting the q or the β. Consider, for example, this plot of q versus U:

Here, the ideal q is around 0.45, but the critical thing is to keep q above 0.3: that's the point at which it falls precipitously.

Contrast now with this one:

Here, any value of q above 0.2 is essentially the same, and q can be lowered as low as 0.05 before there are any problems.

So, in the first case, we need q above 0.3, and, in the second, below 0.2. And, moreover, it might be that the first situation appears in one world and the second in another, and both worlds are

...
The Typing Game
by jefftk — 2020-04-13T15:30:02.387Z

The kids and I play a typing game. I'll be sitting

on the couch with my laptop,
and one of them will come over and ask to play. We'll load up

jefftk.com/speak:

I'll write something:

Then they'll write something:

Then I'll write something:

It only accepts letters, numbers, and a few punctuation marks. As you
type it says the letters, and when you press enter it says your whole
sentence. There's a history, but once something scrolls off the
bottom of the screen it's gone.

Some ways we'll play with it:

They'll ask me how to write something, I'll spell it. I'll point
out the letters as needed, as
vaguely as I can.

I'll write something, they'll guess at it, then we press enter and
find out if they're right.

I'll write something, they'll copy it.

I'll write a word like 'SAD' and then they'll see if they can
modify it to make a related word like 'MAD'.

It uses upper-case and sans-serif because that's what the letters on
they keyboard look like.

I got the idea from Daniel's version, but rewrote it from scratch
to better ignore mistaken inputs. Feel free to copy and modify!
Are there any prediction markets for Covid-19?
by devas — 2020-04-13T14:47:40.273Z

What it says on the title.

Are there any prediction markets around where one can bet money on things such as the total amount of confirmed Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. by June, the date on which a vaccine will be released to the public, whether hydroxychloroquine is a viable treatment drug, etc. etc.?

Predictit only has politics-adjacent bets, and I don't know of any other publicly available places one can bet on such things.