trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Newcomb's Problem as an Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma
by Jerdle — 2022-01-05T22:48:57.661Z

The intuitively paradoxical aspect of Newcomb's Problem is that it contains a loop. Your decision determines Omega's prediction, which determines the options you decide between. There are many decision theories that solve this problem, usually leading to one-boxing. However, these decision theories are less than intuitive because of their acausal nature. This is a hopefully more intuitive analysis of Newcomb's Problem that unrolls the loop and reveals the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma within.

First, unroll the loop. To do this, have Omega run purely on past data. To keep the high quality of the prediction, the past data must also determine your decision at that point. This is easiest to implement with a bot (in the sense of PrudentBot, but much simpler). Specifically, you choose your decision, and that sets up a bot that only performs that decision. After unrolling, we now have an iterated game, as the dependence on the same round has been replaced with one on a previous round.

Now, from your perspective, your income is as follows.

Fill B
Leave B empty

Take A and B
$1001000
$1000

Take B
$1000000
$0

Now, relabelling.

Cooperate
Defect

Cooperate
$1000000
$0

Defect
$1001000
$1000

This is just the Prisoner's Dilemma! And as it was iterated by unrolling, it is the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma.

Omega plays TitForTat, while you can choose between CooperateBot and DefectBot. As CooperateBot performs better against TitForTat than DefectBot, you're best off cooperating. As cooperating corresponds to one-boxing, you should one-box.

Rerolling the loop, you should one-box in the original problem.
[Book Review]: The Bonobo and the Atheist by Frans De Waal
by J Bostock — 2022-01-05T22:29:32.699Z

The Bonobo and the Atheist does something truly rare, which is to come up with an interesting way of viewing morality. 'What is right?' is the most pored-over and divisive question in all of philosophy, the book mostly ignores it. The best parts of it contain zero commandments. Instead Frans De Waal asks 'Why do we think [what is right] is right?' (that's my wording not his).

The book focuses on both chimp and bonobo societies, but the commonalities between their behaviour are such that De Waal frequently swaps between them. The sex-heaviness of bonobo lives seems to be irrelevant to the main thesis beyond putting in perspective that not all ape behaviour is aggressive fighting. This is mostly unimportant because the altruism shown between captive chimps was enough to make this point.

De Waal spends a lot of the book arguing against a few different scientific orthodoxies. These are all the standard pet hypothesis privileging. He also spends a lot of time talking about religion (as was typical for 2013) but I didn't find those sections interesting so I won't be discussing them.

The book is fundamentally about evolutionary psychology, which is notoriously tricky and easy to misunderstand, so unfortunately I think it's necessary to spend the next section laying out definitions. Sorry.

Altruism, Altruism, and Altruism

De Waal uses the word altruism to mean different phenomena. While he describes this distinction he doesn't codify it in language. I'm going to do that for him:

R-altruism is the giving of resources (like food, aid, etc.) to another, which may or may not improve reproductive prospects for your genes
G-altruism is a a subset of r-altruism which specifically harms your own genes' prospects for reproduction
E-altruism is a cluster of similar emotional responses similar to the ones in a human brain, which lead to r-altruism. The cluster is somewhat centred on empathy, which De Waal (mostly) uses to mean a negative emotional reaction to another individuals pain that is specific to the type of pain experienced by the other.

These are different types of thing. E-altruism is a neurological pattern, r-altruism is a broad cluster of behaviour, g-altruism is defined by evolutionary fitness.

Examples:

A bee stinging an intruder to the hive and dying is r-altruism because it protects other bees including the queen. But it's not g-altruism as the bee's own genes (which it s...
P(C) vs. NP(C)
by Nicole Dieker — 2022-01-05T21:34:28.600Z

A discussion of priorities, crossposted from my Substack.

So.

PC vs. NPC.

PC means playable character. Active participant. Read-write. Can affect and/or achieve outcomes.

NPC means non-playable character. Inactive participant. Read-only. Can share useful information that helps other people affect/achieve outcomes.

If a freelance writing gig involves comment moderation, you’re automatically a PC. If the website you’re writing for doesn’t include comments, you’re a PC during the drafting/editing stage and a NPC as soon as it is posted. (You might switch back into PC mode if the article goes viral on Twitter, but you could also choose to remain NPC—which is often the better choice.)

You gain a lot of time back when you start writing for clients that don’t require comment moderation, and even more time when you write for outlets that don’t have comments at all—because the compulsion to see how readers are responding to your work is nearly impossible to resist.

In an ideal situation, you’d be PC for what really mattered to you and NPC for literally everything else. If you don’t care about the outcome, or if the outcome is significantly less important than another outcome you are currently pursuing, the only winning move is not to play.

(I’ve still never seen that movie.)

I feel like my biggest challenge for 2022 is to figure out where I’m going to be a PC.

Freelance writing? Absolutely. I spent most of today putting together my goals for what I hope will be my fourth year of six-figure freelancing, since this is an area in which I can do a lot of work by understanding how to affect and achieve outcomes.

Teaching? Very yes. I want to teach one writing class every two months (on average), and would love to teach even more if the time/effort involved doesn’t end up conflicting with my top-level freelancing goals. I also want to do more informal teachy-advicy things like

answering your questions on my Substack

.

(The first advice post should go up tomorrow, btw.)

Fiction writing? Here’s where it starts to get complicated. L [aka "the great love of my life"] and I have this shared goal of becoming so advanced at a few specific technologies that we are indistinguishable from magic, and we’re dividing our efforts between storytelling (novels, plays, theater), music (piano, composition), and chess (which is really our way of studying cognition).

We’ve also decided we want to learn all ...
How much, and on what margins, should we be rethinking quarantine protocols?
by jmh — 2022-01-05T20:29:58.945Z

This not a researched or even all that thought out question. Perhaps it's a long rambling collection of thoughts tossed into some basket, shaken a bit and then labelled as question.

Zvi's Omicrom 12 post regarding the impact of infections on overall economic activity has me thinking perhaps the CDC has not gone far enough.

Why is that not just some crazy talk? Well, I'm not sold on it not being that but am trying to consider this from a cost-benefit view.

More and more evidence is coming in saying Omicron is more mild, even if more infectious.
I think it's been well established that masks actually work pretty good for keeping those infected from spreading the virus to others.
Revolutions start when people are hungry or afraid -- or just generally annoyed by things repeatedly over a long enough time frame -- or it seems like that.
If we do see a lot of activity shutdown (and I've seen a few days where shelves have been pretty empty (dairy, produce) where I live. When I asked about the lack of milk one of the stockers in the store said the truck didn't arrive the prior night. (Could have been weather related but the other observations can not be attributed to weather.)
The government solution is pretty much tapped out at this point I think. Further "taking up aggregate demand shortages" is not in the budget, will just further fuel inflation pressures and does nothing to increase production.

So seems like there might be a bit of weight on the cost side here.

What about the benefit side?

We don't really seem to be slowing the spread down unless someone wants to follow the China plan. I don't think that works. For the most part we're also (not only but in numbers terms) largely benefiting by preventing the spread of low key sickness.

If we didn't really have a quarantine policy but do have a mask mandate (5 days? 10 Days?) for those testing positive that seems to put us more in the "normal" world where people who are sick are expected to avoid spreading their illness (and are generally encouraged to do so by coworkers and management) but with the benefits:

masks protections for others, and
a much better story line about the mask mandate -- when you're sick for a limited time (which seems to shift the discussion from mandating what risks people can assume to what risks they can impose).
Potentially could actually lead to more people actually using them when th

...
Animal welfare EA and personal dietary options
by Rob Bensinger — 2022-01-05T18:53:02.157Z

When I imagine an animal welfare EA group, I imagine views breaking down something like:

50%: If factory farmed animals are moral patients, it's more likely that they have net-negative lives (i.e., it would better for them not to exist, than to live such terrible lives).
50%: If factory farmed animals are moral patients, it's more likely that they have net-positive lives (i.e., their lives may be terrible, but they aren't so lacking in value that preventing the life altogether is a net improvement).

This seems like a super hard question, and not one that changes the importance of working to promote animal welfare, so naively (absent some argument for a more informative prior) it should have a 50/50 split within animal welfare circles.

(Possibly more effort should go into the net-positive view within EA because it's more neglected by animal welfare activists, who tend to be veg*ns; but the space as a whole is so neglected that I suspect this shouldn't be a large factor.)

Within the "net-negative" camp, in my unanchored "what would I naively expect?" hypothetical, I then imagine dietary preferences breaking down something like:

10%: Approximate veg*nism or approximate reducetarianism. ("Approximate" to allow for carve-outs like bivalves and especially-moral animal products. The group generally strongly encourages all members to have at least one carve-out, because bivalves in particular are such a clear case and dietary purity ethics is a risky attractor to avoid.)
10%: Handshake-itarianism.
20%: Boycott-itarianism.
60%: Anything goes. A normal meat-eating diet, optimized only for health and convenience. This is the standard animal welfare EA diet, because EA is generally about optimizing your positive impact on the world, not about purifying your personal actions of any possible negative impact.

The number would be much higher than 60% on strictly utilitarian grounds, but humans aren't strict utilitarians and it makes sense for people working hard on improving animal lives to develop strong feelings about their own personal relationship to factory farming, or to want to self-signal their commitment in some fashion.

Within the "net-positive" camp, I imagine:

10%: Sentience-maximizing diets. If you think animals in factory farms have net-positive lives, then it makes sense to want to increase the number of animals (by eating the most meat-heavy healthy diet possible) while

...
Selfless Dating
by Jacob Falkovich — 2022-01-05T17:44:42.060Z

What if you just modeled your partner well enough to do what they would want without needing to ask? And what if you tried this from the very first date?

Cross-posted from Putanumonit, this is the conclusion of a four-part sequence on selfless dating.

My last three posts talked about all the things wrong with dating today, from

the narratives

to

the frameworks

to the myriad ways

you’re self-sabotaging

your own romantic life. This post is about the opposite — how dating can go very very right.

To me the best style of relationship is one where both partners treat the other’s real preferences with equal weight to their own, and make decisions on that basis and not based on pre-agreed rules. I call this ideal “selfless relationships”; others have arrived at similar ideas under many names.

Note that “selfless” here doesn’t mean “self-abnegating”, it just means that your innermost circle of concern contains at least one person other than yourself. This may mean, for example, that if you’ll enjoy

the plums in the icebox

more than your partner you should just eat them and this doesn’t make you a bad person (although it’s still a good idea to apologize and make it up to them). It means not only that when it’s late in the evening my wife and I will rate ourselves on 1-10 scales for horniness and sleepiness and do whichever gets the highest combined score but also that I have learned to calibrate my preferences down because my wife is less decisive about the difference in her preferences and if I reported my scores accurately I would get what I want too often and she not enough. Selfless relationships mean

acting on the combined utility function

.

A selfless relationship requires:

That you know your partner well enough to model their real preferences
That you care about them enough to do what they’d want even if they never asked for it
That you trust them to do the same for you (approximately) forever

I’m not going to directly defend the proposition that selfless relationships are always better than partnerships based on setting rules and negotiated consent for everything, although I do hope this will show through. I have arrived at this style over many years and many partners, and my current relationship took some years to evolve in that direction.

I am going to defend the proposition that selfless relationships are possible, which is an idea that gets a lot of pushback whenever...
10 Reasons You’re Lazy About Dating
by Jacob Falkovich — 2022-01-05T17:43:02.867Z

Everyone complains that dating isn't working, but no one want to put the work into dating. Here are 10 reasons why.

Cross-posted from Putanumonit, this is part 3/4 of a sequence on selfless dating.

In years of writing and talking to people

about dating

the biggest mystery to me has been that most single people seem to spend so little effort on their dating lives. They’d tell me that finding a partner is as important as their career or their hobbies, then they’d spend 40 hours a week working, 20 hours watching Netflix, and half an hour swiping on Tinder half-hoping no one would actually match them and expect a message to be written.

People put more thought into their brunch order than into composing their online dating profiles. They don’t seek out places where members of the opposite sex socialize, and if they end up in one by accident they find excuses not to flirt. They complain to their friends about dating but would never ask them for matchmaking. They mock anyone who is

explicit and proactive

about looking for dates as they’re

literally dying from loneliness

.

Laziness begets cynicism and laziness. Scrolling through low-effort profiles and thoughtless spam messages on apps doesn’t inspire anyone to put the time in to write well. It’s a lot easier to ghost someone who themselves isn’t diligent about texting back on time, easy to flake on someone who put no effort into setting up a pleasant dates. After a couple years of this, many people just give up and blame the entirety of the opposite sex: if they all can’t be bothered, why should I be?

Of course, it should be the exact opposite. In a landscape of negligence and apathy it’s not hard to stand out with even moderate effort. I’ve gotten delighted responses for simple things like reading the entire three paragraphs of a woman’s Hinge profile, asking about a woman’s commute convenience before picking a spot for a date, or remembering someone’s favorite wine after she mentioned it three times.

I had a theory of why the bar for effort is so low for such an important pursuit, but as I started writing about it I came up with some alternative explanations that seemed relevant. I asked my friends and they came up with even more theories, all both plausible and flawed. Once I wrote them all down I realized there are many traps one can fall into. I also realized that in spite of my convictions, this post was always dest...
Consensual Hostility
by Jacob Falkovich — 2022-01-05T17:40:48.752Z

In a world of conflict between men and women, constant negotiation of consent is required. But the focus on consent to the exclusion of everything else is in part what brought this world about

Cross-posted from Putanumonit, this is part 2/4 of a sequence on selfless dating.

The last post

talked about the pervasive idea that men’s and women’s mating desires are incompatible, that the only way for either to get what they want is to eke out political concessions from the other’s grasp. In this view a heterosexual relationship is at worst antagonistic, at best a matter of lawyerly negotiation.

This mindset is self-fulfilling. A guy who believes that men want sex and women want resource commitment will act like it’s true, signaling in more or less explicit ways that e.g. expensive dates are conditional on intercourse. His girlfriend will sense this, and start withholding sex even if she wants it to make sure she can get whatever else she needs.

People who are used to negotiation-based relationships and who see this view echoed everywhere in discourse on sex and romance take it entirely for granted, unable to imagine an alternative.

Amia Srinivasan is a feminist philosopher who was also quoted in the NYT op-ed I discussed last time. She articulates this paradigm of heterosexual relationships eloquently when talking about

the framework of consent

that forms the core moral plank of sex-positivity™:

When you say to someone, “Well, imagine sexual interaction without the ritual of consent-giving and consent-asking,” they just imagine sexual violation.

But think about all of the times you interact with — I don’t know — a really old friend. Your old high school or college buddy loses a child, and you put your arm around them, and you console them […] You don’t ask for that consent to be able to put your arm around your buddy.

The reason is because the nature of your relationship as friends involves a fine attunement to your friend’s desires and needs and wants. You don’t go into that interaction with the friend thinking, “I want something that they might not want.” There isn’t a kind of implicit presupposed mismatch of desires or wants. It’s not a contractual exchange. It’s not a negotiation.

The very fact that we have such an emphasis on consent when it comes to sexual relations, I think, reveals a certain set of background conditions about how we interact sexually, which is to

...
Sex Versus
by Jacob Falkovich — 2022-01-05T17:38:12.266Z

Both sides of the political divide are turning on sex-positivity and blaming the antagonistic desires of men and women. But I wouldn't give up on common ground the opposite sex just yet.

Cross-posted from Putanumonit, this is part 1/4 of a sequence on selfless dating.

The Times vs Sex

Oops, I think I broke sex-positivity™.

Four months ago I undressed it

, finding little that’s sexy or positive underneath the slogans. And today

even the New York Times is out

; Putanumonit is a tragic thought leader

yet again

.

Of course, the Times and I offer different analyses. I wrote that merely declaring a new narrative in which all consensual™ sex is positive doesn’t guarantee, and often inhibits, a positive experience for actual sex-havers.

The Times, however, is not in the business of positive experiences. It’s

in the business of announcing narratives

. Now that a sufficient number of millennials who’ve had bad experiences with hookup culture have been hired into the Times, their misery needs a narrative that blames it on the outgroup.

NYT quotes feminist writers explaining that a culture of sexual promiscuity and exhibitionism “caters to patriarchy and the male gaze”. Anti-porn activists write about men brainwashed by violent pornography, forcing young women to accept loveless slapping and choking in bed under the banner of sex-positivity.

Wait, young women are the demographic most into rough sex porn?
Mumble mumble false consciousness mumble

They start from the premise that men want “sex without emotion or attachment”, while women are looking for “love and commitment”. In this view men’s and women’s desires are conflicting and incompatible. This locks men and women in a zero-sum power struggle, a war engaged individually by every heterosexual person and collectively as feminism versus the sex-positive patriarchy.

Ironically, the sexual revolution of the 1960s was also framed as a rebellion against the patriarchy. Since men are by nature sexually jealous and possessive, the story went, they imposed strict sexual norms at the expense of women’s desires. These patriarchs are somehow always one step ahead, the sneaky fuckers.

We Have Always Been at War

The NYT op-ed was celebrated on Twitter by “trads” who’d normally grab an umbrella if NYT printed a sunny forecast. They often accept the premise of conflicting interests while simply shifting the blame — men lured to OnlyFans by gold dig...
Thank you, Queensland
by mukashi — 2022-01-05T14:21:21.501Z

Epistemic status: Highly subjective post. Some of the numbers/dates given here are not precise, this is just how I remember what happened.

In a time where most of the western world failed to contain the pandemic, I lived in a place where it was possible to have a mostly normal life, for more than a year a half.

I left Queensland for good, a couple of weeks ago, two days after they opened the interstate borders (no causal connection between the two). I have lived there for more than two years and a half, so most of my time there happened during the pandemic. If you hear certain political commentators, it seems that Australia has become an Orwellian state, as close to North Korea as you can get. This saddens me. I don't think things have been perfect in Australia but I do think that things have been vastly better than almost anywhere else. This is a summary of my personal experience after living there during this time.

When the pandemic starts, I heavily criticise the regional/federal governments for being too slow in taking measures. However, it is true that they close the international borders very early, in March. I think that the same mistakes that were made in some of the first countries hit by the pandemic (such as Italy or Spain) are going to be made by Australia.
They order a lockdown once we reach around 1000 cases in Brisbane. Pasta and toilet paper runs out in most supermarkets. I start buying provisions earlier than most people.
The lockdown lasts for around a month. I don't remember well the exact dates, so it could have been longer than that. After the lockdown finishes, we spend some extra time working from home. The borders with other countries and with other states remain closed. Cases go down to zero in most parts of Australia.
During that first lockdown/isolation period, many measures are put into place:

QR codes become ubiquitous. Every time you go to any shop or bar (or even inside a taxi) you find a QR code that you need to scan. I understand they serve a purpose, I happily comply.
They create the quarantine system. People returning to Australia must spend 2 weeks of mandatory quarantine isolation in designated places before they are allowed to enter the country. Only permanent residents are allowed to come in.
They put in place a very efficient contact tracing program. More on this later.

The measures are harsh, I cannot leave Au

...