trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Poly Domestic Partnerships
by jefftk — 2020-07-03T14:10:02.763Z

This is a joint post with David Chudzicki. Neither of us are
lawyers.

Somerville just introduced
domestic partnerships:

Domestic partnership means the entity formed by people
who meet the following criteria ...

Cambridge has a
similar ordinance:

"Domestic partnership" means the entity formed by two
persons who meet the following criteria ...

Like most, Cambridge's ordinance is limited to two people, but
Somerville is novel in being open to more.

Both, however, recognize domestic partnerships from other
jurisdictions. Here's Cambridge's:

"Domestic partner" means a person who meets the
criteria set out in subsection D of this section or who is registered
as such in another jurisdiction.

Since Somerville does not restrict domestic partnerships to
residents, it looks to us like a group of Cambridge residents could
register a Somerville domestic partnership, which Cambridge should
then recognize.

We looked a bit for some other jurisdictions that might recognize
Somerville group domestic partnerships, but only found municipalities. Looking at states, California
explicitly
limits to two, and Oregon and Maine don't recognize outside domestic
partnerships. Some municipalties, like Boston and West Hollywood don't seem to recognize domestic partnerships from other
jurisdictions, but others, like Provincetown, Nantucket, and Berkeley do appear to.

How does this interact with existing marriage law? Suppose Pat and
Sam are married. Can they form a Somerville domestic partnership with
Alex? The ordinance is unclear: one of the conditions is that "They
are not married". Does that mean the people entering a partnership
can't be married to each other? Or to anyone? If the latter, then they
can't have a domestic partnership that includes Alex without getting
divorced first. Maybe Pat and Sam could then remarry? If they can't
remarry, then the situation is pretty rough from a tax perspective:
they have to choose between two of them getting to file taxes jointly,
or three of them getting to have a Somerville domestic
partnership.

We also wondered how the
law would handle multiple different relationships. Suppose Pat and Sam
have a relationship, and Sam and Alex do as well. All three live
together as a household, but Pat and Alex aren't partners. The
ordinance lets them all have one domestic partnership together. Do
they also have the option o...
The Book of HPMOR Fanfics
by Mati_Roy — 2020-07-03T13:32:17.536Z

One of my friends made a compilation of fanfics of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Ze gave me the okay to share zir work anonymously.

It has 91 stories (96 in the table of content, but 5 are missing), 12,244 pages, and 3'384'120 words "written by many exceptional muggles".

There's a .PDF, .mobi, and .epub version of the compilation. I'm hosting all of those files, including a .jpg and .svg of the image below, in this Google Drive folder.

I invite y'all to share your reviews and favorite HPMOR fanfic below.

From the Preface:

This book is a compilation of all the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (HPMOR) fanfanfictions, metafanfictions, second-level fanfictions, recursive fanfictions, crossover-fanfictions, forked-fanfictions, fanfanfanfictions, or alternate endings I could find.

Let's be clear at once that I do not own Harry Potter, HPMOR, its arborescence of derivatives fictions, scientific breakthroughs, or esoteric whispers, duh. All credit for the stories assembled into this book goes to their respective authors. Blessed be their horcruxes.

The stories are ordered somewhat chronologically according to the HPMOR universe, such that reading through them in their suggested order should ensure at least some amount of cross-fic coherence.

For a better reading experience, refer to Zedzed9's HPMoR Fic Tree, where stories set in universes descended from Lesswrong's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality are arranged as a cladogram.

Happy Reading!
Open & Welcome Thread - July 2020
by habryka — 2020-07-02T22:41:35.440Z

If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it. (You can also make a shortform post)

And, if you are new to LessWrong, here's the place to introduce yourself. Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to get from the site and community are welcome.

If you want to explore the community more, I recommend reading the Library, checking recent Curated posts, seeing if there are any meetups in your area, and checking out the Getting Started section of the LessWrong FAQ.

The Open Thread sequence is here.
The allegory of the hospital
by Sunny from QAD — 2020-07-02T21:46:09.269Z
Link: http://questionsanddaylight.com/?p=537

Sylvanus, a professional programmer, has gotten into a car crash, with disastrous results: he’s paralyzed from the wrists down, and won’t be able to use a keyboard or mouse for six weeks while his hands heal. He has to take time off from his job, and worse, he has to take a break from his obsessive hobby of reading dozens of online news articles a day. He loves to stay up-to-date about current events, but no keyboard and no mouse means no surfing the internet, and the staff at the hospital are to busy to keep him in the loop.

Luckily, Sylvanus has a brilliant imagination, and since he’s on a break from life he has plenty of time to think. He lies in the hospital bed all day, relaxing his mind and sending probing thoughts out into the world, like a golfer putting a finger up in the air in order to check the direction of the wind. It isn’t long before he starts getting inklings about the outside world. They’re weak and vague at first, but they get stronger and clearer with each passing day of practice. He asks a nurse for a tape recorder, which he operates by pressing the buttons with his limp knuckles and which he uses to make spoken notes about the messages he receives.

After a few weeks of thinking and recording, he decides it’s time to review his notes. The process is challenging, since the messages are often incoherent or contradictory, but he feels up to the task, and before long he’s pretty sure he knows what he’s missed in world news since the accident.

The next day he gets a visit from his co-worker Daniella. She knows he’s a news junkie, and she offers to fill him in, but he decides to try to impress her. He explains his listening process, tells her what tweaks it needed to work more reliably, lets her listen to some of his notes, and then says:

“So, I think I already know what the news is. I’ll bet you five bucks I’ve got it right.”

“Huh,” she says. “Okay, deal. Start talking.”

He tells her what he came up with. Their country’s top official died of the flu three days after the accident, and was replaced by their second-in-command, as per the country’s founding document. But the second-in-command was incompetent and hugely unpopular, and was assassinated six days later. Everyone expected another high-ranking official to take their place, but a loophole was discovered stipulating that, in light of some specific details of the assassination, a general electi

...
Covid 7/2: It Could Be Worse
by Zvi — 2020-07-02T20:20:01.045Z

Previous Update: Covid 6/25: The Dam Breaks

General Viewpoint Reading: On R0, Covid-19: My Current Model

This past week was not great on the Covid front, but it could have been a lot worse. I don’t mean that statement in a ‘worse is better because variolation‘ way. I do think this week was slightly better than expectations, and was looking decidedly better than that until Wednesday – earlier in the week I noted on Twitter that things looked remarkably good the last few days. If I had to guess, I’d still put this week at about par.

It seems odd to say this. We set multiple new records for infections. Positive test percentage set a new record yesterday. ICUs are full and running out of supplies in Houston and other places in the South. Measures taken to contain the situation were mostly pathetically weak.

When we run the numbers, they’re going to look rather grim.

The thing is, all of that was mostly baked into my model of what was likely to happen. We saw less rapid increase in cases than I expected. We saw even a little action to reverse opening measures before death rates skyrocketed, including in the Northeast, which was a pleasant surprise. We saw some additional support for and push for mask wearing from most people across the political spectrum, other than Donald Trump.

On the non-Covid front, things are not great. SlateStarCodex is still down. I’ve put my Aside on Other News at the end of the post.

Until then, let’s run the numbers. The charts now recombine New York into the Northeast and start on May 7. The graphs are unchanged, since it’s part of history.

Positive Tests by Region

Date	WEST	MIDWEST	SOUTH	NORTHEAST
May 7-May 13	22419	43256	37591	56892
May 14-May 20	22725	42762	40343	52982
May 21-May 27	23979	39418	42977	37029
May 28-June 3	32200	31504	50039	33370
June 4-June 10	35487	24674	55731	22693
June 11-June 17	41976	22510	75787	17891
June 18-June 24	66292	26792	107221	15446
June 25-July 1	85761	34974	163472	16303

Deaths by Region

Date	WEST	MIDWEST	SOUTH	NORTHEAST
May 7-May 13	1082	2288	1597	5327
Apr 23-29	1090	2060	1442	4541
Apr 30-May 6	775	1723	1290	3008
May 28-June 3	875	1666	1387	2557
June 4-June 10	743	1297	1230	1936
June 11-June 17	778	1040	1207	1495
June 18-June 24	831	859	1204	1061
June 25-July 1	858	658	1285	818

Positive Test Percentages

Date	USA tests	Positive %	NY tests	Positive %
May 7-May 13	2,153,748	7.5%	202,980	8.2%
May 14-May 20	2,643,333	6.0%	246,929	5.6%
May 21-May 27	2,584,265	5.7%	305,708	3.5%
May 28-June 3	3

...
How to decide to get a nosejob or not?
by snog toddgrass — 2020-07-02T17:54:13.744Z

The affect heuristic suggests that being attractive has many subtle advantages, both in social and professional life. These advantages might be too subtle to notice at any one interaction, but they are important in aggregate. If getting rhinoplasty made me 5 percentile more attractive (say from 35th percentile to 40th, or 65th to 70th), over my entire life it might be worthwhile. Rhinoplasty in a low-healthcare-costs country might run just 3,000 USD, and to my knowledge is a one time expense which does not require repairs or updates.

How can I assess the value for money/time? For one thing, asking people if you have a big nose is awkward and they would mostly lie. The doctors just want a sale, so they have the opposite incentives to lie. In any case, is there evidence in general that rhinoplasty actually makes people more attractive.

I have found one resources for this - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2691557/

(I suspect other ways of improving presentation, like buying neutral colored clothing and improving social skills are more cost effective, but am uncertain)
Goals and short descriptions
by Michele Campolo — 2020-07-02T17:41:52.578Z

Outline

I develop some contents—previously introduced in the Value Learning sequence by Rohin Shah—more formally, to clarify the distinction between agents with and without a goal. Then I present related work and make some considerations on the relation between safety and goal-directedness. The appendix contains some details on the used formalism and can be skipped without losing much information.

A brief preliminary

In the

first post

of the Value Learning sequence, Shah compares two agents that exhibit the same behaviour (a winning strategy) when playing Tic-Tac-Toe, but are different in their design: one applies the minimax algorithm to the setting and rules of the game, while the other one follows a lookup table—you can think of its code as a long sequence of if-else statements.

Shah highlights the difference in terms of generalisation: the first one would still win if the winning conditions were changed, while the lookup table would not. Generalisation is one of the components of goal-directedness, and lookup tables are among the least goal-directed agent designs.

Here I want to point at another difference that exists between agents with and without a goal, based on the concept of

algorithmic complexity

.

Setup

Most problems in AI consist in finding a function π∈AO, called policy in some contexts, where A={a1,…,am} and O={o1,…,on} indicate the sets of possible actions and observations. A deterministic policy can be written as a string π=ai1ai2…ain with aik indicating the action taken when ok is observed.

Here I consider a problem setting as a triplet (A,O,D) where D stands for some kind of environmental data—could be about, for example, the transition function in a MDP, or the structure of the elements in the search space O. Since I want to analyse behaviour across different environments, instead of considering one single policy I’ll sometimes refer to a more general function g (probably closer to the concept of “agent design”, rather than just “agent”) mapping environments to policies on them: (A,O,D)g↦π(A,O,D).

Lookup table vs simple-reward RL

As written before, a lookup table is a policy that is described case-by-case, by explicitly giving the list of all observation-action pairs. Thus, a generic lookup table for a setting (A,O,D) is expected to ...
Does the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative (self-)identify as an EA-aligned organization?
by Evan_Gaensbauer — 2020-07-02T17:38:36.892Z

Effective altruism exists at the intersection of other social and intellectual movements, and communities. Some but not all of the organizations part of these communities focused on various focus areas of EA, such as existential risk reduction, identify as part of effective altruism as a movement. Such organizations are typically labeled as "EA-aligned organizations."
The "AI Debate" Debate
by michaelcohen — 2020-07-02T10:16:23.553Z

As far as I can tell, I have a disjoint set of concerns to many of the concerns I've heard expressed in conversations about AI Safety via Debate.

My main concern with AI Debate is this: each debater has an incentive to trick the operator into running code that takes over the world, replaces the operator, and settles the debate in favor of that debater. To get traction on how big a concern this is, let's start with the following question:

How farsighted does a superintelligent chatbot have to be before it becomes dangerous? Let's forget the two agent setup for a moment, and just consider a single agent. For concreteness, let its action space be the words in the dictionary, and I guess 0-9 too. These get printed to a screen for an operator to see. Its observation space is the set of finite strings of text, which the operator enters.

If it acts to maximize some function of the very next observation it gets, I'm pretty sure it never constructs an existentially dangerous argument. Call this a horizon-1 agent. If it acts to maximize some function of the next N observations it gets, call this a horizon-N agent. I won't rehash the AI Box debates, but my intuition is that it is very likely that a horizon-106 chatbot agent would take over the world to intervene in the provision of observations, and not out-of-the-question that a horizon-103 agent would as well. (This isn't a great anchor, but my mind went to the length of rebuttals in peer review).

Let's get back to the AI Debate setup, instead of the single agent setup. The existence of an adversary may make it harder for a debater to trick the operator, but if they're both trying to push the operator in dangerous directions, I'm not very comforted by this effect. The probability that the operator ends up trusting one of them doesn't seem (to me) so much lower than the probability the operator ends up trusting the single agent in the single-agent setup.

So that leaves us with the problem of picking N, the episode length. This is a little dicey, of course, but we could imagine starting small, and slowly increasing it until we just begin to get useful work out of the system. Call this the tiptoe approach. It leaves something to be desired, but I think there's a decent chance that come AGI, all the best safety proposals will have an element of the tiptoe approach, so I d...
Noise on the Channel
by abramdemski — 2020-07-02T01:58:18.128Z

Articulation of these ideas in their present form owes a debt to interactions with Tsvi Benson-Tilsen, and Erin Tatum.

Almost everyone will be familiar with the concept of signal vs noise. Literally, it's a signal processing concept which differentiates useful information which we're trying to communicate from useless distractor information which can corrupt our signal. Those who grew up in a pre-digital age will be familiar with "static" on the telephone line or TV. Digital information can be transmitted almost error-free through a noisy channel via redundant encodings which allow error-correction, at a rate determined by Shannon's noisy-channel coding theorem. This is a likely reason for the level of redundancy in natural language, as well: it aids communication in a (literally) noisy environment.

Metaphorically, we use the concept of signal vs noise to talk about everything from inboxes and newsfeeds to writing styles. To this end, people talk about the signal-to-noise-ratio: the proportion of useful/desirable information to total information in a given information source. This is useful in part because it helps manage attention: the total amount of useful information on (say) Twitter might be very large, but because of a very low signal-to-noise ratio, it may not be an efficient way to get information. In contrast to the technical signal-processing model, where the sender and receiver share a concept of which information is useful, this metaphorical generalization admits that the sender's "signal" might be the receiver's "noise".

I'm here to talk about a further metaphorical extension of the signal/noise concept. I don't know whether this concept is especially useful, but it's very strongly a part of my personal experience -- this is one of the most salient aspects of a conversation for me, and one of the biggest factors in determining how enjoyable or productive a conversation is. I call it "fuzz" or "static" or "noise on the channel".

EDIT: Jimmy rightly points out that the concept I'm pointing at is more like "the opposite of bandwidth" (ie, I'm describing the way a low-bandwidth channel warps conversations). Noise makes for low effective bandwidth due to the above-mentioned noisy-channel coding theorem. So it makes sense that the two have very similar effects on conversations.

How much static is in this conversation?

I'm pointing to a set of conditions w

...
Non offensive word for people who are not single-magisterium-Bayes thinkers
by Tim Liptrot — 2020-07-01T22:33:41.503Z

I recently proposed to a friend applying Bayes rule to making friends, to observe which strategies make friends faster. My friend's response was as follows (quoting to avoid strawman)

"You’re trying to use one single type of intelligence to analyze and find patterns in human behavior driven by other types of intelligence. It’s like if I was trying to use my musical intuition to understand math. They’re orthogonal domains. (...)

"Emotional logic is orthogonal to formal logic, I’ve said it for ages and I’ll keep saying it forever because I know beyond a doubt that it’s true. And in my opinion we can train our intelligence in various domains but we can’t always use one type of intelligence to make decisions related to another type of intelligence. Let’s say that the field of economics is 60% logical-mathematical, 20% interpersonal, ... , 0% musical-rhythmic and harmonic. Then those are the proportions in which those intelligences should be applied to that field"

I was not compelled by my friends argument. Say that listening to someone makes a friend 80% of the time and talking at them makes a friend 20% of that time. Bayes rule is still an efficient way to notice that pattern, even though an emotionally intelligent person might have guessed it.

I want a way to describe our ways of thinking. This great LW post uses the phrases Toolboxism and Single-Magisterium Bayes to describe the two ways of thinking (the sequences are clearly in the Single-Magisterium Bayes camp). The problem is that my friends find Toolboxism an offensive descriptor. Any thoughts on a word they they would prefer?

edit: added link
Second Wave Covid Deaths?
by jefftk — 2020-07-01T20:40:01.823Z

Two weeks ago I looked at covid cases by state, and divided states
into three groups:

First wave: states that had peaked and were trending down.

Second wave: states that were rising, on a second wave with a
slower build and later peak.

Unclear: states with few cases or complex trajectories.

With eighteen days of additional data (6/13 through 6/30) we can see
that the second wave has continued to build:

source: JHU CSSE

Virginia and New Mexico have controlled it some, but the other second
wave states are still seeing lots of growth. Some of the first wave
states are growing again (Louisiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania) and some
of what I called the "unclear" states have turned out to be in the
second wave as well (primarily Florida).

At the time I wrote:

Speculating now, it looks to me like there's a pattern
where people take precautions more seriously once people they know
start dying. I don't think the second-wave states have hit that level
yet, but with the rise in confirmed cases I think we're going to be
seeing those deaths in about a week, sadly.

This was based on looking at the lag time from the first wave states
confirmed cases to deaths (note the different left and right axes):

But with the latest numbers, here's what I see for second wave states
(same left and right axes as the previous chart):

Starting in late May, confirmed cases start rising dramatically but
deaths haven't moved along with them. What's going on? Possible
explanations:

Delayed initial testing: When things were first taking off
in first wave states, our testing capacity was way behind where it needed to
be. Perhaps this heavily suppressed the initial "confirmed" numbers
for the first wave, and so we should expect to see second wave deaths
rise in the next few weeks?

Increasing test capacity: I've seen some people
suggest that the second wave is just an artifact of increased
testing in these states. If that were the case, then there would be no
rise in covid cases to be explained. But then I would expect the
fraction of tests that returned positive to be decreasing, and we
aren't seeing that. This one seems like wishful thinking to me.

Undercounting: Perhaps we are seeing a large increase in covid
deaths in the second wave states, but they're not being counted? If
we were following the first wave trajectory, however, this wo

...