trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Imperfect Competition
by Zvi — 2019-12-30T12:20:00.375Z

Previously in Sequence: Moloch Hasn’t Won, Perfect Competition

This post looks at a few examples of imperfect competition to illustrate various ways in which perfect competition is kept at bay and value is preserved. Concrete examples seem more likely to enlighten than abstract principles.

Let’s start with the most literal of markets, the market for food, and then talk about the market for cars.

As I noted last time, I noticed after writing this that a Local Farmer’s Market was Google’s top response to asking for an example of perfect competition. Which makes it kind of perfect as the central example of imperfect competition.

For length, I’ll stick to these examples. I am happy to give quick models for other markets in the comments if anyone wants to work through different examples.

1. The Local Farmer’s Market

A few times a week, at various places around the city, local producers open stands to sell their goods to the public. Many people choose to shop here, rather than at the supermarkets a few blocks away in every direction. They typically pay higher prices, do a lot of investigation and sampling of goods, and eventually often become loyal to producers and products that provide strong value. When I was growing up, we often got our cheese and apple cider from one such market (along with more healthy foods that I was incapable of eating, and therefore don’t remember as well).

What’s going on here? A lot of different things are combining at once – and this list likely isn’t even complete. Each of these is a violation of perfect competition.

Products and producers are not homogenized, and information about them is costly. Even the relatively homogenized farmers’ market products, like the apple cider, differ in quality from batch to batch, from season to season and harvest to harvest. There is no reliable way to differentiate high quality from low quality products or producers, or any way to divine the product details you might prefer or dislike, without sampling the goods, which is costly outside of the occasional free sample. When buying produce, one needs to pick out the items one likes and things get even more variable. Reputation and experience matter a lot.

Market information is costly for consumers. Different producers bring different goods to market at different times, with no known schedule. Often the goods

...
Speaking Truth to Power Is a Schelling Point
by Zack_M_Davis — 2019-12-30T06:12:38.637Z

Consider a coalition that wants to build accurate shared world-models (maps that reflect the territory), and then use those models to inform decisions that achieve the coalition's goals.

However, suppose that some ways of improving models are punished by the surrounding Society. For example, if the Emperor's new clothes turn out to be "vaporwear", agents who notice this might not want to make it common knowledge within their coalition by adding it to the coalition's shared map, because if that knowledge "leaks" during the onerous process of applying for a grant from the Imperial Endowment for the Arts and Sciences, then the grant application will be more likely to be rejected: the Emperor's men don't want to fund coalitions who they can detect believe "negative" things about the Emperor, because those coalitions are more likely to be disloyal to the regime.

(Because while everyone has an interest in true beliefs, disloyal subjects have a unusually large interest in selectively seeking out information that could be used against the regime during a revolution. ("The corrupt false Emperor is wasting your tax money on finery that doesn't even exist! Will you join in our crusade?") That makes even true negative beliefs about the Emperor become a signal of disloyalty, which in turn gives loyal subjects an incentive to avoid learning anything negative about the Emperor in order to credibly signal their loyalty.)

Coalitions need to model the world in order to achieve their goals, but grant money is useful, too. This scenario suggests coalition members working on their shared maps might follow a strategy schema that could be summarized in slogan form as—

Speak the truth, even if your voice trembles—unless adding that truth to our map would make it x% harder for our coalition to compete for Imperial grant money, in which case, obfuscate, play dumb, stonewall, rationalize, report dishonestly, filter evidence, violate Gricean maxims, lie by omission, gerrymander the relevant category boundaries, &c.

(But outright lying is out of the question, because that would be contrary to the moral law.)

Then the coalition faces a choice of the exact value of x. Smaller values of x correspond to a more intellectually dishonest strategy, requiring only a small inconvenience before resorting to obfuscatory tactics. Larger values of x correspond to more intellectual honesty: in the l

...
l
by Sunny from QAD — 2019-12-30T05:23:51.727Z

TLDR: I wrote myself a script that significantly reduced the friction associated with adding a new note to a notes file. This has made me happier.

Sometimes I need to brainstorm lists of things. Here are some examples:

A professor at the college I attend challenged me to solve a puzzle that boils down to "produce a complete list of physical attributes that satisfy property X", where X isn't relevant here.
I'm part of a community that's working to develop a conlang called Toaq which is still in its infancy. I'm currently working on several aspects of the language, including:

A vocabulary for talking about mathematics, for which I need to brainstorm a list of mathematical concepts (integer, complex number, infinity, triangle, and so on).
A system for talking about temporal features more complex than "in the past", for which I need to get my hands on a list of examples of English sentences that will need translations (containing phrases such as "twenty years ago", "every five seconds", and so on).

I'm working on a secret personal project with a lot of potential for disaster, for which I need to brainstorm possible failure modes.

The thing is, I'm not very good at just sitting down and coming up with these things. Or, to be more precise, even when I sit down and just come up with ideas for a while, I still find more ideas coming to me at random times.

I use Linux, and I spend a lot of time at my computer. But even when I'm already at my computer, it's kind of a hassle to add something to a notes file: I have to open the file browser, remember where the file is located or spend time searching for it, double click the file, add my note, close the text editor, then close the file browser.

So I wrote myself a script, called l (a lowercase letter L). It's a command line script that takes one argument, and all it does is open a text file with that name located in the directory ~/Documents/Lists. (If no such file exists, it first creates one.)

Now, to add a note to such a file, all I have to do is click inside the command-prompt I have in the top corner of my screen, type "l " plus the name of the list, add my note, then close the text editor. This a lot smoother of a process than the old way of doing it, and I find it a lot more pleasant.

But then don't I spend some time remember...
Making decisions under moral uncertainty
by MichaelA — 2019-12-30T01:49:48.634Z

Cross-posted to the EA Forum. Updated substantially since initial publication.

Overview/purpose of this sequence

While working on an (upcoming) post about a new way to think about moral uncertainty, I unexpectedly discovered that, as best I could tell:

There was no single post on LessWrong or the EA Forum that very explicitly (e.g., with concrete examples) overviewed what seem to be the most prominent approaches to making decisions under moral uncertainty (more specifically, those covered in Will MacAskill’s 2014 thesis).[1][2]

There was no (easily findable and explicit) write-up of how to handle simultaneous moral and empirical uncertainty. (What I'll propose is arguably quite obvious, but still seems worth writing up explicitly.)

There was no (easily findable and sufficiently thorough) write-up of applying sensitivity analysis and value of information analysis to situations of moral uncertainty.

I therefore decided to write a series of three posts, each of which addressed one of those apparent “gaps”. My primary aim is to synthesise and make accessible various ideas that are currently mostly buried in the philosophical literature, but I also think it’s plausible that some of the ideas in some of the posts (though not this first one) haven’t been explicitly explored before.

I expect that these posts are most easily understood if read in order, but each post should also have value if read in isolation, especially for readers who are already familiar with key ideas from work on moral uncertainty.

Epistemic status (for the whole sequence)

I've now spent several days reading about moral uncertainty, but I wouldn't consider myself an actual expert in this topic or in philosophy more broadly. Thus, while I don't expect this sequence to contain any major, central mistakes, I wouldn’t be surprised if it's inaccurate or unclear/misleading in some places.

I welcome feedback of all kinds (on these posts and in general!).

Moral uncertainty

We are often forced to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty. This uncertainty can be empirical (e.g., what is the likelihood that nuclear war would cause human extinction?) or moral (e.g., does the wellbeing of future generations matter morally?).[3][4] The issue of making decisions under empirical uncertainty has been well-studied, and expected utility theory has emerged as the typical account of how a rational agen

...
CFAR's 2019 Fundraiser
by Timothy Telleen-Lawton — 2019-12-30T00:03:10.040Z

CFAR's 2019 fundraiser

is live, and runs through January 15! You can donate

here

.

We recently did an

AMA

here on LessWrong, and released posts about our

progress and plans

, and our

finances

; expect more posts soon from Dan Keys about metrics, and from Anna Salamon about our mission.

Donations to CFAR are unusually valuable at the moment—our long-term sources of funding are uncertain, which is making it difficult for us to make long-term plans and promises. We would love to have your support!
Reality vanishes in a puff of logic
by monktastic — 2019-12-29T21:55:13.297Z

This post is part of a series where I hope to share some of what I've learned about a woefully overlooked connection between rationality and mysticism.

Many people have a deep intuition that there's something unspeakably magical about life and existence, but struggle to fit it into a rationalist framework. Deep down, we "know" that this intuition can be nothing more than rogue neurotransmitters, presumably serving some mindless evolutionary purpose.

In my experience, there is more to the story. And it turns out that rationality, if followed meticulously to its logical conclusion, can help offer a glimpse into the experiential source of that intuition.

Your entire life unfolds entirely within your mind. Yet it is also obvious that there is an objectively reality outside of mind that is responsible for this.

But what happens when you dig very skeptically into the basis of that knowledge? It is not hard to see that you have no way of knowing whether such a hypothesis is ultimately true in any sense. But it gets worse: you find that you cannot even assign it a meaningful probability without blind faith in assumptions that cannot themselves be independently confirmed.

As Sean Carroll eloquently points out:

There is no way to distinguish between the scenarios by collecting new data.

What we’re left with is our choice of prior credences. We’re allowed to pick priors however we want—and every possibility should get some nonzero number. But it’s okay to set our prior credence in radically skeptical scenarios at very low values, and attach higher prior credence to the straightforwardly realistic possibilities.

What does "straightforwardly realistic" mean? It means that we should pick a mental model of reality that straightforwardly matches our experience of it:

Experience --> Model

Yet it should also be obvious that causation also operates in the other direction. Your model of reality shapes your experience:

Model --> Experience

Just how heavily the causation runs in this direction is less obvious than it might first seem. Considerable meditation practice is generally helpful in seeing its full depth.

This creates a feedback loop of sorts. The mystical hypothesis might simply be expressed like this: the construct you experience as "reality" is the product of this feedback loop run amok, and the whole game is...
Why is the mail so much better than the DMV?
by Logan Zoellner — 2019-12-29T18:55:10.998Z

One of the reasons why Europe has a much more all-encompassing welfare state than the USA is that in the US government services are poorly run. Whether it's providing healthcare , building high speed rail , or Issuing Drivers Licenses, the typical American's experience with government services is one of incompetence, corruption and failure to innovate.

There are lots of plausible explanations about why this might be. Maybe the US is too big to govern effectively. Maybe our two-party political system is uniquely polarized leading to gridlock and a lack of progress. Maybe government service isn't glorified by society, leading all of the would-be competent managers to pursue careers in finance or Silicon Valley.

Yet, there is one government service in the US on which every single person depends, which serves hundreds of millions of requests every day, and which does its job virtually flawlessly for less than its European counterparts. Every single difference mentioned above would apply just as much or more so to the USPS. Our political system hasn't been particularly favorable to the USPS. The US's expansive geography should be more of a hindrance to mail than almost any other service. And postal work is far from glorified in the US social consciousness.

So, why is the mail so much better than every other government service in the US?

If we could answer this question, could we use the answer to fix the rest of the government?

A couple of theories:

1) Culture of competence:

Not only is the mail famous for its motto "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds", but it is also the one of the few government services enshrined in the constitution. Perhaps its unique foundational values create a culture that "the mail must go through" that lends itself to promoting competent leadership.

The weakness here is that it seems like an overly large effect. If a motto could really produce competent government, why hasn't anyone come up with one for other agencies? Why is it only Europeans who can "make the trains run on time"? Doesn't anyone believe "Veteran's deserve the best health care possible"?

2) Political Immunity:

Yes, the USPS is a political football. But it's less of a political football than al...
Judgment Day: Insights from 'Judgment in Managerial Decision Making'
by TurnTrout — 2019-12-29T18:03:28.352Z

I found this book through the CFAR reading list. Some content was previously posted on my shortform feed.

Foreword

The more broadly I read and learn, the more I bump into implicit self-conceptions and self-boundaries. I was slightly averse to learning from a manager-oriented textbook because I'm not a manager, but also because I... didn't see myself as the kind of person who could learn about a "business"-y context? I also didn't see myself as the kind of person who could read and do math, which now seems ridiculous.

Although the read was fast and easy and often familiar, I unearthed a few gems.

Judgment in Managerial Decision Making

A tip of dubious ethicality for lazy min-maxers:

Managers give more weight to performance during the three months prior to [a performance] evaluation than to the previous nine months... because it is more available in memory.

Unified explanation of biases

The authors group biases as stemming from the Big Three of availability, representativeness, and confirmation. The model I took away relies on a mechanism somewhat similar to attention in neural networks: due to how the brain performs time-limited search, more salient/recent memories get prioritized for recall.

The availability heuristic goes wrong when our saliency-weighted perceptions of the frequency of events is a biased estimator of the real frequency, when we happen to be extrapolating off of a very small sample size, or when our memory structure makes recalling some kinds of things harder (e.g. words starting with 'a' versus words whose third letter is 'a'). Concepts get inappropriately activated in our mind, and we therefore reason incorrectly. Attention also explains anchoring: you can more readily bring to mind things related to your anchor due to salience.

The representativeness heuristic can be understood as highly salient concept-activations inappropriately dominating our reasoning. We then ignore e.g. base rates, sample size, statistical phenomena (regression to the mean), and the conjunctive burden of propositions. Consider how neural network activations could explain the following:

Intuitively, thinking of Linda as a feminist bank teller "feels" more correct than thinking of her as only a bank teller.

The case for confirmation bias seems to be a little more involved. We had evolutionary pressure to win arguments, which might mean our cognitive search aims to fi

...
Phage therapy in a post-antibiotics world
by ChristianKl — 2019-12-29T17:03:01.679Z

When Fleming discovered the first natural product antibiotic Penicillin in 1928, the discovery was groundbreaking for medicine. Antibiotics were a tool with brute force. Without knowing details about the illness from which a patient was suffering antibiotics allowed a doctor to fight illnesses due to bacteria.

Penicillin proved to be very useful for preventing wounds in the

second World War

from getting infected and research went into scaling up the production of it. After the war it came to be called a wonder drug. Economically, the fact that one antibiotica can be used for many different illnesses made it in the middle of the 20st century very profitable to patent new antibiotics and bring them to market.

With antibiotics usage in full force phage therapy that was used a bit within the 1920s and 1930s stopped being used in the West. Phage therapy had the problem of being a solution that only targeted very

specific

bacterial species and sometimes only specific strains of bacteria. Frequently, phage therapy failed because it was not targeted towards the bacteria strain with which a patient was infected.

While Western health authorities managed to get a framework that allows new flu vaccines to be approved in a short time frame to react to a changing virus, we lack a regulatory system that allows new phage cocktails that are needed to deal with evolving bacteria to be approved without going through multiple years of clinical trials.

The property of being a very specific treatment has the drawback that it's necessary to test the patient, to know which bacteria infects the patient, to be able to choose the right treatment. In the past it was both expensive and time consuming to test for the bacteria that causes an infection.

In Poland there's the Phage Therapy Unit which provides Phage therapy for chronic drug-resistant bacterial infections but they operate under an exception for experimental procedures. They published a review titled

Facing Antibiotic Resistance: Staphylococcus aureus Phages as a Medical Tool

about using phage therapy for treating staphylococcus and argue in another paper that their way of

treating patients

might be more cost-effective than conventional treatment with antibiotics.

The cost of providing medical treatment matters a lot and causes our health care systems to spend more and more money. DNA sequencing is the one central technol...
Perfect Competition
by Zvi — 2019-12-29T13:30:00.395Z

Previously in Immoral Mazes sequence: Moloch Hasn’t Won

Perfect Competition

In Meditations on Moloch, Scott points out that perfect competition destroys all value beyond the axis of competition.

Which, for any compactly defined axis of competition we know about, destroys all value.

This is mathematically true.

Yet value remains.

Thus competition is imperfect.

(Unjustified-at-least-for-now note: Competition is good and necessary. Robust imperfect competition, including evolution, creates all value. Citation/proof not provided due to scope concerns but can stop to expand upon this more if it seems important to do so. Hopefully this will become clear naturally over course of sequence and/or proof seems obvious once considered.)

Perfect competition hasn’t destroyed all value. Fully perfect competition is a useful toy model. But it isn’t an actual thing.

Some systems and markets get close. For now they remain the notably rare exceptions. Often people despair because they are intuitively modeling things as effectively perfect competition, at least over time.

This causes many people to think that everything must by default become terrible, likely right away, such as in the examples that open Meditations on Moloch, and Raymond’s kingdoms. And thus, that everything in general must become terrible.

The anticipation of perfect competition, rather than actual perfect competition, is often what causes things to become terrible. Anticipation of perfect competition creates perfect competition the same way that cooperation in a fixed-length iterated prisoner’s dilemma has a backward induction problem.

Fighting this instinct is important. Responding instinctively with the detailed explanation, that competition is imperfect is not sufficiently quick or emotionally resonant. Two quick intuition pumps for when someone thus despairs, or argues for despair, are that this argument proves too much, and that, again, when you look around, many things are insanely great.

Remind Me: What Exactly is Perfect Competition?

Perfect competition is defined as a market with large numbers of buyers and sellers, homogeneity of the product and marginal costs of production, free entry and exit of firms, perfect market knowledge, one market price, perfect mobility of goods and factors of production with zero transportation costs, and no restrictions on trade. This fo...