trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Book Review: Order Without Law
by philh — 2021-07-10T21:50:03.589Z

This review originally appeared on the blog Astral Codex Ten as part of a contest. You can now read it here, with working footnotes. (LW note: footnotes didn't transfer, they work on my blog.) There's even an audio version as part of the ACX podcast; the footnotes are all read out at the end.

Shasta County

Shasta County, northern California, is a rural area home to many cattle ranchers.1 It has an unusual legal feature: its rangeland can be designated as either open or closed. (Most places in the country pick one or the other.) The county board of supervisors has the power to close range, but not to open it. When a range closure petition is circulated, the cattlemen have strong opinions about it. They like their range open.

If you ask why, they'll tell you it's because of what happens if a motorist hits one of their herd. In open range, the driver should have been more careful; "the motorist buys the cow". In closed range, the rancher should have been sure to fence his animals in; he compensates the motorist.

They are simply wrong about this. Range designation has no legal effect on what happens when a motorist hits a cow. (Or, maybe not quite no effect. There's some, mostly theoretical, reason to think it might make a small difference. But certainly the ranchers exaggerate it.) When these cases go to court, ranchers either settle or lose, and complain that lawyers don't understand the law.

Even if they were right about the law, they have insurance for such matters. They'll tell you that their insurance premiums will rise if the range closes, but insurers don't adjust their rates on that level of granularity. One major insurer doesn't even adjust its rates between Shasta County and other counties in California. They might plausibly want to increase their coverage amount, but the cost of that is on the order of $10/year.

No, the actual effect that range designation has, is on what happens when a rancher's cow accidentally trespasses on someone else's land. In closed range, the owner is responsible for fencing in his cattle. If they trespass on someone else's land, he's strictly liable for any damage they cause. In open range, the landowner is responsible for fencing the cattle out; the cattle owner is only liable for damages if the land was entirely fenced or if he took them there deliberately. (Law enforcement also has more power to impound cattle in closed ra...
The accumulation of knowledge: literature review
by Alex Flint — 2021-07-10T18:36:17.838Z

Financial status: This is independent research, now supported by a grant. I welcome financial support .

Epistemic status: This is in-progress thinking.

This post is part of a sequence on the accumulation of knowledge. Our goal is to articulate what it means for knowledge to accumulate within a physical system.

The challenge is this: given a closed physical system, if I point to a region and tell you that knowledge is accumulating in this region, how would you test my claim? What are the physical characteristics of the accumulation of knowledge? What is it, exactly, about an artifact inscribed with instructions for building advanced technology that makes it so different from an ordinary rock, or from a video camera that has been travelling the cosmos recording data since the beginning of the universe? We are looking for a definition of knowledge at the level of physics.

The previous four posts have explored four possible accounts for what the accumulation of knowledge consists of. Three of the accounts viewed knowledge as a correspondence between map and territory, exploring different operationalizations of "correspondence". The fourth account viewed the accumulation of knowledge as an increasing sensitivity of actions to the environment. We found significant counter-examples to each of the four accounts, and I remain personally unsatisfied with any of the four accounts.

This post will briefly review literature on this topic.

Constructive definitions of knowledge

One could view probability theory as a definition of knowledge. Probability theory would say that knowledge is a mapping from claims about the world to numerical credences in a way that obeys the laws of probability theory, and that the accumulation of knowledge happens when we condition our probabilities on more and more evidence. Probability theory is not usually presented as an account of what knowledge is, but it could be.

However, probability theory is most useful when we are designing machines from scratch rather than when we are interpreting already-constructed machines such as those produced by large-scale search in machine learning. It might be possible to reverse-engineer a neural network and determine whether it encodes a program that approximately implements Bayesian inference, but it would take a lot of work to do that, and it would have to be done on a case-by-case basis. Probability theory...
For some, now may be the time to get your third Covid shot
by Josh Jacobson — 2021-07-10T17:38:57.686Z

Summary

It seems likely there is a significant benefit to a booster shot in preventing symptomatic infection in the face of the Delta variant for many people (Bullets 1-3).

There is significant indication that a third dose of an mRNA vaccine has a good safety profile (Bullets 2-4).

Delta may have an a greater impact in the US than you realize (Bullet 5), and

Therefore, for some people now may be the right time to get their third Covid mRNA shot (Bullet 6) although there are many reasons to potentially wait (Bullet 7).

Bullets

Two days ago, the Israeli government announced that its observed vaccine efficiency (Pfizer) as of June 6th was down to 64% against symptomatic infection, while protection against severe disease and hospitalization has declined more mildly to 93%. This is seemingly almost entirely attributed to the Delta variant.

Today, Pfizer put out a statement which included the following:

Pfizer and BioNTech have seen encouraging data in the ongoing booster trial of a third dose of the current BNT162b2 vaccine. Initial data from the study demonstrate that a booster dose given 6 months after the second dose has a consistent tolerability profile while eliciting high neutralization titers against the wild type and the Beta variant, which are 5 to 10 times higher than after two primary doses. The companies expect to publish more definitive data soon as well as in a peer-reviewed journal and plan to submit the data to the FDA, EMA and other regulatory authorities in the coming weeks. In addition, data from a recent Nature paper demonstrate that immune sera obtained shortly after dose 2 of the primary two dose series of BNT162b2 have strong neutralization titers against the Delta variant (B.1.617.2 lineage) in laboratory tests. The companies anticipate that a third dose will boost those antibody titers even higher, similar to how the third dose performs for the Beta variant (B.1.351). While Pfizer and BioNTech believe a third dose of BNT162b2 has the potential to preserve the highest levels of protective efficacy against all currently known variants including Delta, the companies are remaining vigilant and are developing an updated version of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine that targets the full spike protein of the Delta variant.

CNN says they plan to submit to the CDC for emergency approval to administer booster doses next month.[1]

Mod

...
Will the US have more than 100,000 new daily COVID-19 cases before January 1, 2022?
by Annapurna — 2021-07-10T14:01:30.750Z

I am trying to work through a process where I can assess what the probability of this question being a yes is.
I am going to use this post as an information dump in order to be able to rationally come up with the best probability I can.
Factors that could lead to this question being a YES:
The rise of the delta variant
The low vaccination rates in certain regions
The hesitancy by both individuals and governments to enact containment measures again
The risk of a reporting error by the CDC
Factors that could lead to this question being a NO:
Vaccination continues albeit at a slower pace
Vaccination of children has begun
Apathy towards getting tested unless symptoms are serious
Local containment measures if health systems start to collapse (Springfield, Missouri will be a good gauge for this)
I will continue to update information in the comments. Any input is greatly appreciated.
Firefox does not block analytics by default
by jefftk — 2021-07-10T12:50:05.150Z

There's a myth

going around
that

Firefox
blocks

analytics
providers in its

default
configuration. For example, in a

recent HN
discussion 5% of the comments were people asserting it did, and
another 5% were people responding to them to assert that it doesn't.
To confirm, it doesn't:

You can test this yourself:

Open Firefox

If you've added any extensions create a fresh profile, so you can test the default
configuration

Open Developer Tools

Open the Networking panel

Visit a site with analytics (ex: jefftk.com)

Observe pings being sent (ex: google-analytics.com/j/collect?...)

Firefox does have an "Enhanced
Tracking Protection" mode, but it's not enabled by default.
Additionally, Firefox users are likely disproportionately blocking
ads, which also block
analytics scripts.
Research Facilitation Invitation
by LoganStrohl — 2021-07-10T01:04:06.002Z

Summary: Would you like to help me with my research by letting me try to help you with your research?

One of my brand new sub-projects at the moment (underneath the larger "naturalism" heading) is research facilitation.

So far, I've mostly been developing the [school? methodology? whatever it is] by asking people to bring me their problems, and then helping them re-orient to the "problem" as a field of study. This is an especially valuable approach for problems that have stuck around for a long time despite repeated attempts to solve them.

But that's not the primary use case I envision for naturalism. Or at least, it's not the one that makes me eager to pour all of these resources into it.

When someone brings me a confusing or recalcitrant problem, and then they begin to relate to it as a field of study using naturalist methods, they almost invariably go through this period that I should probably have named by now. Let's call it "pre-conceptual intimacy".

In pre-conceptual intimacy, they're making a lot of fascinating observations and surprisingly quick improvements to relevant parts of life. But they're also feeling very confused and disoriented, because their pre-existing concepts around the problem just don't seem to make sense anymore, and they don't have new stories about what's going on yet either. They tend to utter phrases like, "Is memory even a thing?", "How could I ever have thought that?", and "I really have no idea what's going on with this, and it turns out I never have."

The spark of life in my work, the place where I'm most confident I have something really valuable here, is the progress I see people making in the midst of pre-conceptual intimacy.

Why? Because it means I may have a general methodology that works at intellectual frontiers, in the absence of established paradigms. Which is where we are, as a species, in human rationality, AI alignment, and presumably other important places I'm not even able to gesture toward.

So here is my vision for this research facilitation sub-project.

If I imagine that I've succeeded utterly, I envision that I'm able to meet with a researcher for one hour who is starting with "I have a hunch that there's something important, and I'm motivated to work on it, but I don't even know what the thing is, I have no idea where to start, and there are no domain-specific resources because I might be the first person who's e...
Going Out With Dignity
by Tomás B. — 2021-07-09T22:07:59.169Z

DF was born with a time bomb in his genome, a deadly curse more horrifying than most. The name of this curse was Fatal familial insomnia (FFI).

Wikipedia describes the usual progression of this hell:

The disease has four stages:[8]

Characterized by worsening insomnia, resulting in panic attacks, paranoia, and phobias. This stage lasts for about four months.
Hallucinations and panic attacks become noticeable, continuing for about five months.
Complete inability to sleep is followed by rapid loss of weight. This lasts for about three months.
Dementia, during which the person becomes unresponsive or mute over the course of six months, is the final stage of the disease, after which death follows.

From the case report DF's psychologist wrote after his death:

DF was a right-handed, 52-year-old, white, American man with a doctorate in naturopathy. DF's father, paternal uncle, and 2 male cousins were diagnosed with fatal familial insomnia (FFI). His father died at age 76; his uncle died at age 74; and each of DF's cousins died before the age of 50.

Not only is there no cure for FFI; there is no known cure for any prion disease.

On the day it became clear he was experiencing the same symptoms his relatives did, DF must have known his chances were terrible. And even the minuscule odds that he could find a solution were marred by the fact that his problem-solving organ was the very part of him that was beginning to degrade.

And if there was a way out, how could he come up with a solution when he was so, so tired?

If only he could get just a little bit of rest.

There is a motivational technique I use occasionally where I look at my behavior and meditate on what my revealed preferences imply about my actual preferences. Often, I am disgusted.

I then note that I am capable of changing my behavior. And that all that is required to change my revealed preferences is to change my behavior. Though there is an element of sophistry in this line of thinking, I can report some anecdotal success.

Many of us here, like DF, believe we have a deadly curse - or at least we believe we believe we have a deadly curse.

Since I read The Basic AI Drives, I have known abstractly the world is doomed. Though my system 1 seems to have difficultly comprehending this, this belief implies I, and everyone and everything I love, am doomed, too.

Through the lens of my revealed preference...
Generalised models: imperfect morphisms and informational entropy
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2021-07-09T17:35:21.039Z

I've defined generalised models M as being given by F, a set of features, and an (unnormalised) probability distribution Q over W=2¯¯¯¯F, the set of possible worlds defined by the all values of those features.

To make these into a category, a morphism r between M0=(F0,Q0) and M1=(F1,Q1) was defined to be a relation r between W0 and W1 (ie a subset of W0×W1), that obeyed certain conditions with respect to the Q's.

If r obeys those conditions, we can construct the "underlying model" for the morphism, a generalised model Mr=(F0⊔F1,Qr), with Qr non-zero only on r∈W0×W1.

That underlying model result basically says:

There is an underlying reality Mr of which M0 and M1 are different, consistent, facets.

That's well and good, but we also want to allow imperfect correspondences, where Q0 or Q1 (or both) might be known to be in error. After all, when we transitioned from Newtonian mechanics to relativity, it wasn't because there was an underlying reality that both were facets of. Instead, we realised that Newtonian mechanics and relativity were approximately though not perfectly equivalent in low-energy situations, and that when they diverged, relativity was overall more accurate.

We'd want to include these cases as generalised model, and measure how "imperfect" the morphism between them is, i.e. how much Q0 and Q1 diverge from being in perfect correspondence. We'll also look at how the Q and the feature sets are related - how much information Q caries relative to F.

Imperfect morphisms

So we'll loosen the definition of "morphisms" so that the Q0 and Q1 need not correspond exactly to each other or an underlying reality. If we have a relation r between W0 and W1, here are different Q-consistency requirements that we could put on r to make it into a morphism (the previous requirement has been renamed "Q-preserving", condition 5):

General binary relations r; no connection assumed between r and the Qs.

Q-relational: for all w0∈W0 with Q0(w0)>0, there exists at least one w1∈W1 with both Q1(w1)>0 and (w0,w1)∈r.

Q-functional: for all w0∈W0 with Q0(w0)>0, there exists a unique w1∈W1 with both Q1(w1)>0 and (w0,w1)∈r.

Q-birelational: r and r−1 are both Q-relational.

Q-preserving: the same conditions as presented here. For all w0∈W0 and w1∈W1, Q0(w0)≤Q1(r(w0)) and Q1(w1)≤Q0(r−1(w1)).

Q-isomorphic: r is Q-preserving; both r and r−1 are Q-functional.

The gen...
For reducing caffeine dependence, does daily maximum matter more, or does total daily intake matter more?
by Maxwell Peterson — 2021-07-09T15:40:03.872Z

I'm trying to reduce my dependence on caffeine from needing ~160mg in the morning to needing 80mg. My strategy is to slowly reduce my intake, dropping maybe 20mg every 3 days. So far so good.

But sometimes I feel tired later in the day, and also want caffeine. So I have 80mg more, 10 hours after the morning 160mg. Is this going to screw up my attempt at tolerance reduction?

The argument for Yes: Daily caffeine intake is what matters. You can't reduce yourself down to needing less than 160mg in the morning by taking 240mg a day.

The argument for No: The important thing is the max amount of caffeine in you at any given time. Since the half-life of caffeine is between 1.5 and 9.5 hours (with a middle guess of 5 hours), by evening, you only have 160mg * 0.5 * 0.5 = 40mg in your system. Adding 80mg brings you to 120mg. This is less than the 160mg max dose your body is used to hitting, so it's not a big deal. As long as you keep the maximum caffeine in your system below 160mg, you can keep reducing your tolerance.

Which of these arguments is more right? Or is there a third view of the situation, better than either?
Finite Factored Sets: Conditional Orthogonality
by Scott Garrabrant — 2021-07-09T06:01:46.747Z

We now want to extend our notion of orthogonality to conditional orthogonality. This will take a bit of work. In particular, we will have to first extend our notions of partition generation and history to be defined on partitions of subsets of S.

4.1 Generating a Subpartition

Definition 20 (subpartition). A subpartition of a set S is a partition of a subset of S. Let SubPart(S)=⋃E⊆SPart(E) denote the set of all subpartitions of S.

Definition 21 (domain). The domain of a subpartition X of S, written dom(X), is the unique E⊆S such that X∈Part(E).

Definition 22 (restricted partitions). Given sets S and E and a partition X of S, let X|E denote the partition of S∩E given by X|E={[e]X∩E∣e∈E}.

Definition 23 (generating a subpartition). Given a finite factored set F=(S,B), and X∈SubPart(S), and a C⊆B, we say C generates X (in F), written C⊢FX, if χFC(x,dom(X))=x for all x∈X.

Note that this definition clearly coincides with Definition 16, when X has domain S. Despite the similarity of the definitions, the idea of generating a subpartition is a bit more complicated than the idea of generating a partition of S.

To see this, consider the following list of equivalent definitions. Notice that while the first five directly mirror their counterparts in Proposition 10, the last two (and especially the last one) require an extra condition.

Proposition 20. Let F=(S,B) be a finite factored set, let X∈SubPart(S) be a subpartition of S, let E=dom(X) be the domain of X, and let C be a subset of B. The following are equivalent.

C⊢FX.
χFC(x,E)=x for all x∈X.
χFC(x,E)⊆x for all x∈X.
χFC(x,y)⊆x for all x,y∈X.
χFC(s,t)∈[s]X for all s,t∈E.
χFC(s,t)∈E and χFC(s,t)∼Xs for all s,t∈E.
X≤E(⋁S(C)|E) and χFC(E,E)=E.

Proof. The equivalence of conditions 1 and 2 is by definition.

The equivalence of conditions 2 and 3 follows directly from the fact that χFC(s,s)=s for all s∈x, so χFC(x,E)⊇χFC(x,x)⊇x.

To see that conditions 3 and 4 are equivalent, observe that since E=⋃y∈Xy, χFC(x,E)=⋃y∈XχFC(x,y). Thus, if χFC(x,E)⊆x, χFC(x,y)⊆x for all...
Improving capital gains taxes
by paulfchristiano — 2021-07-09T05:20:05.294Z

As I’ve mentioned, I think the tax code could be improved. In a departure from my usual style, this post fleshes out some fairness-based arguments for one of my favorite changes.

(I think that this proposal, and many of the arguments in favor, is old. Wikipedia quotes Joseph Stieglitz making the basic point in Economics of the Public Sector.)

The policy

I’m advocating a package with 3 parts:

We should significantly increase capital gains taxes by taxing it at the same rate as ordinary income.
If an investor makes money one year then loses it later, we should give them their taxes back.
We should only tax excess returns above what you get by putting your money in a savings account.

Justifications

1. Why have a higher tax rate?

The simple answer is “most Americans think rich people should pay higher capital gains taxes.” It looks unfair for Warren Buffet to pay a lower marginal rate on income than a working class family. But there are other great reasons.

One is that it can be really hard to distinguish “income” from “investment income,” and many rich people misclassify income to pay fewer taxes. Some of these egregious loopholes lose a lot of tax revenue. But if we tax capital gains at the same rate as other income then these loopholes disappear and the whole system gets simpler.

Another is that rich people do a good job of identifying profitable investment opportunities; normal people can’t participate effectively in those opportunities, and so the rich get richer faster. That feels like a fact of life, but it’s actually pretty easy to change. A capital gains tax effectively lets everyone benefit from every investment opportunity.

2. Why pay investors back when they lose money?

When an investor makes money they pay taxes. But when they lose money they never get a check back. The government effectively participates in the returns but not the risk.

(Investors do get tax deductions they can use once they’ve recouped all their losses, but much of the reason people are afraid to lose money is that they might never make it back.)

This discourages investors from taking on risk and encourages them to push the risk onto other people. Combined with the proposed increase in capital gains rates, it seriously discourages uncertain long-term investments and probably reduces growth.

In addition to sounding a lot like “Heads I win, tails you lose,” I think t...