trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
2020: Forecasting in Review.
by NunoSempere — 2021-01-10T16:06:32.082Z

This document contains a series of highlights about forecasting in 2020 which I have gathered after 10 months of writing a forecasting newsletter. I'll write one or two paragraphs for each point, and then list ideas which interested readers can follow up on. As such, this piece can be read either as an accessible superficial summary, as an index of pointers, or or as a resource for later years—a snapshot of what was happening in 2020.

Index.

I. The Phantom COVID-19 Forecasting

II. Attack of the Metaculus

III. Revenge of the Crypto Prediction Markets

IV. Disaster Forecasters—A New Hope

V. US Election Forecasting Strikes Back

VI. Return of the Machine Learning

VII. Platforms Awaken

VIII. The Last Superforecaster

You can also see this on substack.

I. The Phantom COVID-19 Forecasting

The world in general wasn't prepared to forecast the spread of COVID-19.

“The original IHME model underestimates uncertainty and 45.7% of the predictions (over 1- to 14-step-ahead predictions) made over the period March 24 to March 31 are outside the 95% PIs. In the revised model, for forecasts from of April 3 to May 3 the uncertainty bounds are enlarged, and most predictions (74.0%) are within the 95% PIs, which is not surprising given the PIs are in the order of 300 to 2000 daily deaths. Yet, even with this major revision, the claimed nominal coverage of 95% well exceeds the actual coverage. On May 4, the IHME model undergoes another major revision, and the uncertainty is again dramatically reduced with the result that 47.4% of the actual daily deaths fall outside the 95% PIs—well beyond the claimed 5% nominal value.” (

Source

)

Previously, preparedness prediction exercises had been carried out for Ebola. These, however, failed to generalize, because Ebola produces symptoms which are much easier to detect, unlike COVID-19. Irritatingly, media and predictors often confused the detected and the actual cases, as did some forecasting models.

Threads to follow up on:

A Case Study in Model Failure? COVID-19 Daily Deaths and ICU Bed Utilisation Predictions in New York State

Forecasting s-curves is hard

This coronavirus model keeps being wrong. Why are we still listening to it?

A Failure, But Not Of Prediction

Ioannidis: Forecasting for COVID-19 has failed

vs.

Taleb: On Single Point Forecasts for Fat-Tailed Variables

How does pandemic forecasting resemble the early days of weather forecasting

Assessing the

...
Fittingness: Rational success in concept formation
by Polytopos — 2021-01-10T15:58:29.947Z

Epistemic status:

This post offers a philosophical argument for distinguishing truth and fittingness as parallel success concepts for two phases of rational inquiry. I have graduate degrees in philosophy, with relevant expertise in logic, type theory, epistemology, phenomenology, ontology, and philosophy of science. I am confident (0.9) about truth the central claims, and the fittingness of central concepts. At the end I include a brief and much more speculative section (0.5) on how these ideas might related to pattern recognition in the brain.

Intro

The concept of truth is widely held to be a central concept of success for rational inquiry. It captures the notion of accuracy of beliefs in modeling reality. In this post, I suggest that truth needs a companion concept of fittingness. I will argue, that as truth is the essential success concept for rational belief, so fittingness is needed as a success concept for rational concept formation (equivalently: ontology building or type assignment). Both truth and fittingness capture an idea of accuracy in world modeling, but they operate at different type theoretic levels. Roughly, fittingness concerns the accuracy or appropriateness of how we divide reality by attaching concepts to it, by typing it, how we cut reality at the seams with language. Truth captures the accuracy of statements (propositions) within a given ontology. In order for questions about the truth of a proposition to be meaningful fruitful and salient, the concepts in which the proposition is expressed must be sufficiently fitting. [Slider's comment below makes the point that truth conditions can be meaningful even when the concepts employed are not fitting. He gives the example of the concept grue from philosophy. This example also illustrates that even when a statement is truth evaluable it may not be fruitful or salient for the purpose of rational inquiry.]

Fittingness in Inquiry

There are two phases of rational inquiry. These two phases do not occur in strict linear sequence, but rather as a cycle, frequently looping back and forth. In one phase I'm engaging with some domain (or a novel aspect of a domain) that is confusing, anomalous, or hard to make sense of. I don't have good pre-existing concepts to describe or articulate what's happening here. I'm not even sure what questions to ask, or how I should identify salient features of the dom...
A workshop on Life Influences
by Elo — 2021-01-10T11:23:38.719Z

We all have factors in our life that influence us but sometimes we don’t realise what they are. For example, an external influence in my life, is to live within the legal system of this country, which prevents me from completely being free from external consequence. An internal influence that I have is that after being awake for 12 hours I get tired and have to sleep, even if in some ways (or in some parts of me) I don’t want to sleep, I still have this strong internal influence that guides me.

Ultimately I want to be:

Aligned with the things influencing me.
Aware of the things influencing me, and
Able to modify those influences, or adapt my relationship to them so that I can choose how they influence me.

For example, I notice that I get a lot of influence from the social slipstream. Specifically when I see the behaviour of people around me, I find it easier to do the same behaviours. This can be either good or bad, for example now that I recognise my big influence from the social slipstream, I can choose to avoid environments that include drinking or netflix and attend more environments that are fitness oriented and entrepreneurial.

The legal system is not an influence that I think about every day, or even notice as a limit regularly. I’m so used to the laws that I don’t break them and I comply with them in the background. In this case I am naturally aligned with the laws because I already don’t want to murder anyone.

Exercise:

list out my big influences. Set a 4 minute timer and make a list on paper. You are looking for the significant influences, the ones that feel the strongest or most influential.

OKAY GO!

Consider your own ideas first and then take some clues from the list:

Obligation influences (I feel obligated to call my mother every week)
Obvious influences (I obviously have to eat every day, it’s so obvious I almost forget it’s there)
Things that feel like “needs” or urges (I need social contact or I feel miserable pretty quickly)
Surprisingly influential people (a specific friend is very influential on me in a good and bad way)
Behaviours (judgemental people influence me)
Hierarchies (my boss is able to stress me out and I don’t like it)
History, habits, past stories (I always go to pub trivia with my friends and even though I don’t like it I still go out of some sense of attachment to history)
Philosophi

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Will we witness the compassion of a nation?
by kithpendragon — 2021-01-10T11:10:07.879Z

What is it that Trump has done, when looked at through the lens of compassion?

Trump has nurtured a paranoid false reality in which people are helpless victims of a Hostile and Malevolent State. He has maintained and occupied this Alternative reality for enough time, and convincingly enough to drag other people into paranoia with him. Trump has, for four years, held the biggest megaphone in the world. As a result, he has been able to convince most of the people who could be so convinced. These people now number possibly in the millions.

Do they react when he points to the source of their imagined dangers? Are they scared of the people he tells them are dangerous? Of course! It doesn’t matter what else you think of them, they are a terrified group on the brink of panic.

To be clear, panicking groups are extremely dangerous! And this one has been driven to the exact sort of extreme reactive state that you would expect from any panicking group. What we have in this nation is a crisis, manufactured on the foundation of people’s own fears. There are at least thousands of people who have been made so scared they are willing to risk the violent response we saw from the police all last year on nothing more than an indication from Trump that they might possibly be able to do some non-specific thing about the imaginary Evil State.

This fear has been building for many years now; the only thing Trump did was to make it salient enough that people might actually act on it. The panic recently reached a peak on January 6th. It ends when we identify the real fears and concerns that allowed Trump to take advantage, and we solve or dissolve them.

The State will not do this work for us. It will be too concerned with protecting itself against the insurrection; working against the possibility of another event like the one that desecrated one of its most sacred spaces and threatened the safety of its members. It will act to punish somebody - anybody - as an example of what happens to Traitors and Insurrectionists, though its ability to act against Trump himself is extremely limited. We cannot depend on the State to cure this disease of fear.

Corporations have begun to help. Finally acting after years of pressure from people who have noticed the problem and worried about its spread, Twitter and Facebook have taken steps to protect the general population from Trump's dangerous delusions, ...
Overconfidence
by lsusr — 2021-01-10T10:36:38.216Z

SPOILER WARNING: This post includes spoilers for Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion and Code Geass: Lelouch of the Re;surrection.

According to Eliezar Yudkowsky, your thoughts should reflect reality. According to Paul Graham, the most successful people are slightly overconfident. C.C. embraces the contradiction head-on in Code Geass: Lelouch of the Re;surrection.

Lelouch: "Next? Next we… Next we…"

C.C.: "Give up?"

Lelouch: "Under the circumstances…"

C.C.: "Things are desperate, is that it?"

Lelouch: "Yeah."

C.C.: "I was the same way. I was desperate, journeying in search of even a pinhole of light. But even so, I never gave up. I was sure that someday, I would bring you back, all that time. And now… This isn't the you that I wanted to get back! I wanted the pompous, egotistical, overconfident one. The Lelouch who never, at any time, gave up."

C.C.: "I'm sorry I didn't…mean to dump all this on you. You can pull out. This is farewell."

Lelouch: "What a self-centered woman you are. All right, C.C.. This enemy possesses a Geass."

C.C.: "A Geass? How do you know?"

Lelouch: "It's my hypothesis."

―Code Geass: Lelouch of the Re;surrection

Other people—especially women—love me when I'm a cocky arrogant megalomaniac. I love me too. What is going on? Nobody likes phonies. Shouldn't people prefer the company of others whose confidence is well-calibrated?

Half of the equation is I'm an anomalously capable person. I've been on the international news for my inventions. I've taught myself more skills than I can keep track of. When you combine enough competence with enough confidence, the drawbacks of slight overconfidence (like arriving late to an airport) get lost in the noise.

Bill [Gates] was as headstrong as ever. Once I flew with him to San Francisco to visit a few customers. For efficiency’s sake, we conducted separate meetings before rendezvousing back at the airport. I reached the gate several minutes before takeoff, but Bill was late as usual. They issued the final boarding call—no Bill. I was resigned to finding the next flight when he rushed up to the gate, out of breath. It was too late; the plane was already inching away from the jetway. But Bill never stopped running, through the boarding gate and into the jetway itself, with me trailing. Upon reaching the motor control panel, he did a quick scan and began pushing buttons. Then I realized what was happening: Bill w

...
Distinguishing goals from chores
by Amir Bolous — 2021-01-10T07:45:15.378Z

This is a linkpost for https://amirbolous.com/posts/goals-and-chores

Introduction

Story Time

Have to, Want to, Want to Want to

Noticing Patterns in Your Goals

Closing Thoughts

Introduction

Recently, I've realized that there is a discrepancy between my goals and my actions. It was only a couple of weeks ago that I managed to acquire some terminology for describing this phenomenon. Imagine categorizing (for the sake of simplicity here) anything that can potentially can be done in our lives into one of three buckets

a. something we have to do

b. something we want to want to do

c. something we actually want to do

Past experiences have shown me that the boundaries between these categories are razor thin and one can slip into the other completely unaware.

Story Time

When I was in the 8th grade, there was a possibility that my family was going to move from Dubai to the U.S for my dad's work. (side note, I lived most of my life in Dubai, as well as Egypt for a little bit when I was younger, growing up). Naturally, next time we visited the US, my family toured the potential areas we would be staying at, and more critically for me, the potential schools I would be going to. I distinctly remember having very strong emotions about this move.

In general, moving countries or cities is awful: you leave behind the place you know, your friends, your teachers, and your community to start everything from scratch. The odd thing was that I really wanted to move.

This wasn't because I disliked my community, in fact the complete opposite was true - I had a great group of friends at my school, church, and even in my neighborhood.

The only person more confused than a 13-year old me trying to rationalize this was my mum.

"Why are you so enthusiastic about the move?" She asked when I was pressing my dad for the travel details.

I don't remember my exact response but it was something along the lines of

"I'm tired of having to do well at school because people (more precisely my friends and peers) expect me to do well." I replied. Somehow, I thought that a fresh start was going to change that, (keeping in mind that I was coming from a family that made me do exercises from practice books when I skipped school because I was sick).

I realized that I had felt such a pressure to perform well in school that I had stopped enjoying the process. I felt like I had to do well in school.

As I progressed throug...
How should you go about valuing your time?
by Adam Zerner — 2021-01-10T06:54:56.372Z

How much is your time worth? $5/hr? $10? $30? $100? $1,000?

Whenever I ask myself that question, I notice that I am confused. Suppose you are some sort of consultant where you can sign on to some website and choose to work 1 hour and make $100 whenever you want. In that case, I can see why it'd make sense to say that your time is worth $100/hr. Instead of spending one hour cleaning your home, it would make more sense to do your consulting for one hour, make $100, hire a cleaning person to do it for $40, get your house cleaned, and have $60 left over.

But most people don't have that option. Most people don't really have any option to work more hours and make more money. And even if you are a freelancer or a consultant, gigs take time to find and are usually commitments on the order of months, not hours. So then, the above logic doesn't apply.

So maybe the question just needs to be reworded. Instead of "how much is your time worth", "how much do you choose to value your time".

Do you value your time at $1/hr? No. I think most people would pay $1 to gain one hour of extra time. Do you value it at $1,000/hr? No, I think most people would trade one hour for $1,000. So $1/hr is a lower bound and $1,000/hr is an upper bound. Continue to ask such questions and there'll be an answer. Or at least a revealed preference (hypothetically).

Then how do you decide how much to choose to value your time? I guess it depends on how much money you have. If you're tight on cash, you wouldn't want to use up your limited money to purchase more time, because you have bills to pay, for instance. But if you have a lot of disposable income, trading that money for time might be something that you want to do. Still, with that said, I don't feel like I have a good idea of how much I should value my own time, as a programmer in a normal programming job. I could see anywhere from $10/hr to $100/hr, and perhaps even outside of that range.
A different dictionary
by KatjaGrace — 2021-01-10T06:30:53.518Z

I enjoyed James Somers account (HT Liron Shapira) of how Webster’s dictionary used to be much more beautiful than dictionaries today, for instance:

“…Flashing differs from exploding or disploding in not being accompanied with a loud report. To glisten, or glister, is to shine with a soft and fitful luster, as eyes suffused with tears, or flowers wet with dew.”

Did you see that last clause? “To shine with a soft and fitful luster, as eyes suffused with tears, or flowers wet with dew.” I’m not sure why you won’t find writing like that in dictionaries these days, but you won’t. Here is the modern equivalent of that sentence in the latest edition of the Merriam-Webster: “glisten applies to the soft sparkle from a wet or oily surface .”

Who decided that the American public couldn’t handle “a soft and fitful luster”? I can’t help but think something has been lost. “A soft sparkle from a wet or oily surface” doesn’t just sound worse, it actually describes the phenomenon with less precision. In particular it misses the shimmeriness, the micro movement and action, “the fitful luster,” of, for example, an eye full of tears — which is by the way far more intense and interesting an image than “a wet sidewalk.”

It’s as if someone decided that dictionaries these days had to sound like they were written by a Xerox machine, not a person, certainly not a person with a poet’s ear, a man capable of high and mighty English, who set out to write the secular American equivalent of the King James Bible and pulled it off.

My guess is that dictionaries became ‘official’ and so are written in an official style. And that official style is contrary to color and poetry, because these things are in some way personal, showing glints of a specific idiosyncratic soul. And part of the point of officialness is that the entity having it is expansively clean and impersonal, involving specific people only insofar as they can be homogenized and branded and made fungible. You’re not supposed to look them in the eye.

I wonder if this is related to dictionaries being commonly treated as authoritatively defining words rather than documenting a group of people’s efforts to feel around for their meanings. Somers also says:

“Notice, too, how much less certain the Webster definition seems about itself, even though it’s more complete — as if to remind you that the word came first, that the

...
Rhythm 0 and the Absolution of Responsibility
by Precious Oluwatobi Emmanuel — 2021-01-10T01:51:27.023Z

Performance art is a little weird if we think about it. It involves you, the artist, essentially adopting the status of a zoo or circus animal, performing quaint tricks for an indulgent audience to enjoy. The only difference is, we call it art, sometimes saying the word ‘art’ with a posh accent and overly flowery hand gestures.

But slightly immature jokes about performance art aside, there is a reason that arguments on the merits of performance art is more polarised than non-performance art. Some people think it is pretty cool, some think it is extremely pretentious (this group is quite vocal).

Well the main reason is that lot of people do not quite understand a lot of performance art. In essence, what is ‘the point’? This includes me too. For instance, I fail to see the point of Vito Acconci masturbating on stage to people’s voices (1972. The performance was called Seedbed).

But, people still harshly criticize performance art where the point is more obvious, and I think a reason for that may have to do with subtlety and the fact that the artist and audience is face-to-face.

With non-performance art – paintings, sculpture, prose, poetry etc. – there is a sort of disconnect between the artist and the receiver. Whatever words you read from a book, it is just words. Words that may arouse deep emotions, but words regardless.
I am not sure a lot of people imagine a writer talking to them as they read a novel (it’s more their own voices). For a painting, it is more of how you interpret it. Even in cases where the idea that the art is trying to pass across may be very obvious, you are comfortable, you are in your own head, and you can ruminate on it, one small step at a time.

Non-performance art is not in-your-face
Performance art on the other hand, can be more emotionally resonant because the artist is in front of you, and you see whatever is being created, so whatever message the artist wants to pass across smacks you in the face. You do not take breaks, there is no place to hide. You take everything in at once. It is not at all subtle.

But while performance art may not have any subtlety, I think that is part of its strengths, because whatever it wants to say, nobody has no illusions about it. And a lot of the time, that is how we should be confronted with things in my opinion.

Which leads me to Rhythm 0. In 1974 in Naples, Marina Abramovic, then 23-years old, created a...
What to do if you can't form any habits whatsoever?
by masasin — 2021-01-10T01:17:40.162Z

A lot of LW posts are about making habits and routines, whether it's TAPs, making to-do lists or checklists automatic, overcoming akrasia, becoming more productive, or more.

As for me, I have ADHD and ASD. I don't think I've ever been able to form automatic habits or routines, including ones I did daily, such as brushing my teeth or taking a shower. I don't eat or sleep at a set time, and was never able to consistently go to uni or work.

Is anyone here similar? What do you guys do, and do you have any tips to help with that?