trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
On Slack - Having room to be excited
by Neel Nanda — 2020-10-10T19:02:42.109Z
Link: https://www.neelnanda.io/blog/38-slack

Slack

A few months ago, I came across a concept called Slack, and I have found this an increasingly valuable lens for understanding my life. Slack is, roughly, having spare capacity in my life. Not being pushed to my limits. Having downtime and room to explore. Being robust to small risks. Not feeling constantly stressed and anxious, having things weighing on my mind. In this post, I’m going to explore the concept of Slack, why the default state of the world is to lack slack, why this matters, and some thoughts on what to do about this.

I first came across the concept in this post by Zvi, and it’s written fairly abstractly. And for good reason! I’ve struggled to articulate precisely what the concept really is. So, to see whether this resonates, here are some examples of what having Slack looks like:

If an urgent task comes up, you can reprioritise, put off your current work, and take care of it
If you’re tired and have spent the morning getting nothing done, this is fine. You can stop working early, take a long break, write the day off entirely, and get back to things tomorrow
If you come across something awesome, you can put off what you’re currently doing to take a few hours to dive deeply into it, and see what comes out of it
If you have an unexpected expense - you break something expensive, fall ill, etc - it’s not a big deal, your savings can absorb it

I think Slack is an incredibly important component of having a life worth living! Having Slack gives you freedom. You have room to explore, be spontaneous and try new things. You have room to zoom out, reflect on your life, notice problems and fix them. You can take the time and energy to break out of whatever bad local optima you’re stuck in. You can relax - life always contains risks and setbacks, but you know that you’ll be able to deal with them when they arise. You can be free of constant short-term anxiety.

I’m labouring this point, because the default state of the world is that your life lacks Slack. It is obvious that Slack is important when phrased like this - zoomed out, in the abstract. But Slack is defined as something you can spend. There is a delicate balance between being willing to use your Slack where appropriate, but also realising that it is a quantity worth treasuring - something to cherish, prioritise and guard.

And there are times...
How to reach 80% of your goals. Exactly 80%.
by Bart Bussmann — 2020-10-10T17:33:55.412Z

I use a simple but effective system to reach my goals. At the beginning of every day, week, and quarter I formulate my goals such that I believe I will have an 80% probability of achieving them. I note them down in an Excel sheet and track how many of them I reach before the deadline. If I reach more than 80% of them, I recalibrate and set more ambitious goals for the next period. Do I reach less than 80% of them, then I set easier or fewer goals for the next period. This system has multiple advantages:

It helps to set clear and measurable goals because at the end of the period you will have to indicate whether you reached them or not.
It helps to set ambitious goals. I have had periods where I could keep upping the amount and difficulty of my goals, achieving more and more each day.
it helps to prevent ruts. Even when you only slept for 2 hours, feel depressed or ill, or it just isn't your day, you can still set goals of which you are 80% sure you can realistically achieve them. Personally, I feel that by still achieving small goals I get some positive rewards which help me to feel better sooner.
And maybe most importantly: it helps to get accurate beliefs about what you can and cannot do. This might be the area in life where people have the most biases: Planning Fallacy, Self-deception, Imposter Syndrome or Dunning-Kruger, etc. You might be able to achieve a lot more than you think, or a lot less. In either way, it would be helpful to have more accurate beliefs about this.

If you want to try the system I have a few practical tips:

Separate goals over different time periods (I use daily, weekly, and quarterly goals), and try to hit exactly 80% in every type of goal. In the beginning, I underestimated what I could achieve in a day, but overestimated what I could achieve in a week. I learned I should let some daily tasks slip sometimes in order to reach my longer-term goals.
Use meta-goals. The biggest failure mode of any system is that you use it enthusiastically in the beginning, but stop using it after a while. One of my recurring weekly goals is: "Set my daily goals at least 4 days this week". Of course, I achieve this goal about 80% of the time.

That's all. Now go reach your goals! Well, exactly 80% of them.
Logical Foundations of Government Policy
by FCCC — 2020-10-10T17:05:33.233Z

Crosspost from the EA Forum.

Why think about goalsets?

Societies need many distinct systems: a transport system, a school system, etc. These systems cannot be justified if they are amoral, so they must serve morality. Each system cannot, however, achieve the best moral outcome on its own: If your transport system doesn’t cure cancer, it probably isn’t doing everything you want; if it does cure cancer, it isn’t just a “transport” system. So each system must have a bounded domain and, ideally, still be morally optimal. To solve this problem, systems can be assigned goals, which are statements that we want the system to satisfy. Goals weakly constrain a system’s domain because if a system satisfies its goals, there is no more for it to do.

The problem, then, is deciding which goals to pursue. Each goal should not be evaluated on its own. Instead, we should evaluate your entire set of goals, your goalset. There are two reasons for this. (1) Any problem with a goal will manifest in a goalset that contains it, so we can rephrase any criticisms of a goal in terms of goalsets. And (2) there are times when we have to look at the goalset as a whole before identifying an issue. For example, suppose two identical twins, Robinson and Crusoe, are stranded on an island. Suppose the best outcome occurs when either Robinson hunts for food and Crusoe builds a shelter or vice versa. So “Crusoe builds a shelter” is a goal that fits in one ideal outcome, and “Robinson builds a shelter” fits in another. However, if their goalset contains both those statements, the pair will starve (albeit in the comfort of an excellent shelter).

Clearly, your goalset should be related in some way to your morality. But how, precisely? Can goalsets even be a component of making ideal systems? Does it make sense to talk about “ideal” systems? What does it mean for a system to “satisfy” a goal? What are the “consequences” of a goalset? What is “equivalence” between goalsets? We’ll define all of these terms from the same four objects, which allows us to (1) see how these concepts relate to each other, (2) generate theorems about policy arguments, and (3) provide stronger foundations for informal reasoning.

Some of the later conclusions

Vague goals have no place within a goalset. However, we can satisfy concrete goals that are related to the vague goals.

If goals are “narrow” when they are not decomposa

...
Alpha α and Beta β
by lsusr — 2020-10-10T06:27:05.219Z

All investments are risky. The techniques explained in this series are exceptionally risky. I am not a registered investor, attorney, advisor, broker, banker, lawyer, dealer or anything of the sort. All opinions expressed here are for my personal exploration. I present it to you for entertainment. This post may help you understand policies related to financial regulation for the purposes of more informed voting. This post is not investment advice. This post may contain errors.

There are two ways to profit from the stock market: alpha α and beta β. Extracting rent from your ownership of capital is called β. Arbitraging away market inefficiencies is called α.

Arbitrage has two components: inefficiencies and hedging.

You start by spotting a market inefficiency. In the previous post, a futures contract price S0≠ke−rT constituted a market inefficiency. Wherever there is a market inefficiency there is the opportunity to earn money on average. But we are not interested in earning money on average. We care about risk-adjusted returns.

Once you have discovered a market inefficiency the second thing you do is construct a financial derivative to hedge away as much risk as you can.

In the first example of the previous post, we created an artificial future by buying the underlying security with borrowed money. In the second example of the previous post, we artificially shorted the future by shorting the underlying security and then lending the resultant cash as a bond. These artificial futures hedged our risk from the original mispriced future. We earned a profit of exactly |S0erT−k| independent of how the actual price behaved.

In addition to eliminating our risk, our hedge also removed the necessity of tying up capital. In theory, our futures trading algorithm required zero underlying capital. It is constructed from pure leverage. We can continue the strategy over and over again until |S0erT−k| drops below our transaction costs. (Actually, we can continue the strategy over and over again until we are issued a margin call.)

In this way, financial derivatives let you use the magic of leverage to gamble assets worth far more than your capital holdings.

As another example, suppose you knew Tesla will go up 1% in value over the next month. If you are a normal human being then you might consider buying Tesla stock. But if you have been following along so far then you understand why...
Dancing With Covid
by jefftk — 2020-10-10T02:10:02.539Z

The

Society of Stranders puts
on a

Shag (a
regional Swing dance)

festival every fall
in North Myrtle Beach SC. This year, with the pandemic, the
organization made the hard but necessary decision to cancel (

pdf,

fb).
Unfortunately,

one
of the venues decided to go ahead with their part of the festival:

The precautions they took were essentially hygiene
theater, focused on surfaces while the primary risk by far is
people breathing in each others faces:

Routinely cleaning and disinfecting thru out the opening
hours and a complete cleaning and disinfection after closing. Hand
sanitizing stations have been positioned thru out the club and
cafe. Masks are available free of charge for anyone that requests
one. A person will be designated as a "floater" that will have the
responsibility of observing crowds for anyone that may appear sick and
handling related issues including taking temperatures. Capacity levels
will be maintained as specified by the Fire Marshall. Security is
present during all hours of the event. Large crowds around the bar and
other areas of the club will be dispersed.

On masks:

Some people wore them, some didn't. I think the regs require all
establishments have a notice stating masks are required but only a few
of the establishments enforce it nor are they required to do so.

Looking
at
pictures
posted
by a
DJ I saw two people wearing masks after skimming ~100+ thumbnails.

Several hundred people attended (the most common estimate I've seen is
"500+") and now:

More than 60 Dancers with COVID-19. Some are in hospital. It is life
threatening. ... Dancers came from all over because they couldn't get
out of hotel contracts etc. and wanted to party & dance with everyone.

I know people miss dancing and want to get back to it, but this
event illustrates how easily covid can propagate between dancers. We
need to be patient and find other ways to stay in touch with each
other while we wait.

Comment via: facebook
Is libertarianism unsustainable? Why?
by Vishrut Arya — 2020-10-10T02:09:19.193Z

Tyler Cowen earlier this year wrote about the intellectual demise of libertarianism (Cowen 2020). I'm here wondering: aside from its normative status, is libertarianism unsustainable for reasons intrinsic to itself? Said differently, is it true that there are mechanisms intrinsic to libertarianism that forestall its ability to exist?

To stimulate discussion, the following two hypotheses came to mind that support this notion. Both of these hypothesis posit that actors within the polity will vote for politicians that increase state capacity and thus prevent/terminate libertarianism.

Elite Support Hypothesis. Economic growth in modern societies demands certain investments and solutions to collective action problems that only a state can provide. Wealthy elites will support politicians that increase state capacity to provide these services and these politicians will gain power.

Non-Elite Support Hypothesis. Economic inequality will rise to a point where non-elites will support politicians favoring a welfare state and these politicians will gain power.
The Treacherous Path to Rationality
by Jacob Falkovich — 2020-10-09T15:34:17.490Z

Cross-posted, as always, from Putanumonit.

Rats v. Plague

The Rationality community was never particularly focused on medicine or epidemiology. And yet, we basically got everything about COVID-19 right and did so months ahead of the majority of government officials, journalists, and supposed experts.

We started discussing the virus and raising the alarm in private back in January. By late February, as American health officials were almost unanimously downplaying the threat, we wrote posts on

taking the disease seriously

, buying masks, and

preparing for quarantine

.

Throughout March, the CDC was telling people not to wear masks and not to get tested unless displaying symptoms. At the same time, Rationalists were already covering every relevant angle, from

asymptomatic transmission

to

the effect of viral load

, to

the credibility of the CDC

itself. As despair and confusion reigned everywhere into the summer, Rationalists built online dashboards modeling

nationwide responses

and

personal activity risk

to let both governments and individuals make informed decisions.

This remarkable success did not go unnoticed. Before he threatened to doxx Scott Alexander and triggered a shitstorm, New York Times reporter Cade Metz interviewed me and other Rationalists mostly about how we were ahead of the curve on COVID and what others can learn from us. I told him that Rationality has a simple message: “people can use explicit reason to figure things out, but they rarely do”

If rationalists led the way in covering COVID-19, Vox brought up the rear

Rationalists have been working to promote the application of explicit reason, to “

raise the sanity waterline

” as it were, but with limited success. I wrote recently about

success stories of rationalist improvement

but I don’t think it inspired a rush to LessWrong. This post is in a way a response to my previous one. It’s about the obstacles preventing people from training and succeeding in the use of explicit reason, impediments I faced myself and saw others stumble over or turn back from. This post is a lot less sanguine about the sanity waterline’s prospects.

The Path

I recently chatted with Spencer Greenberg about teaching rationality. Spencer regularly publishes articles like

7 questions for deciding whether to trust your gut

or

3 types of binary thinking you fall for

. Reading him, you’d think that the main obstacle to pure reason ruling th...
If GPT-6 is human-level AGI but costs $200 per page of output, what would happen?
by Daniel Kokotajlo — 2020-10-09T12:00:36.814Z

I'm imagining a scenario in which OpenAI etc. continue to scale up their language models, and eventually we get GPT-6, which has the following properties:

--It can predict random internet text better than the best humans

--It can answer correctly questions which seem to require long chains of reasoning to answer

--With appropriate prompts it can write novel arguments, proofs, code, etc. of quality about equal to the stuff it has read on the internet. (The best stuff, if the prompt is designed correctly)

--With appropriate prompts it can give advice about arbitrary situations, including advice about strategies and plans. Again, the advice is about as good as the stuff it read on the internet, or the best stuff, if prompted correctly.

--It costs $200 per page of output, because just running the model requires a giant computing cluster.

My question is, how does this transform the world? I have the feeling that the world would be transformed pretty quickly. At the very least, the price of running the model would drop by orders of magnitude over the next few years due to algorithmic and hardware improvements, and then we'd see lots of jobs getting automated. But I'm pretty sure stuff would go crazy even before then. How?

(CONTEXT: I'm trying to decide whether "Expensive AGI" is meaningfully different from the usual AGI scenarios. If we get AGI but it costs $200 per page instead of $2, and thus isn't economically viable for most jobs, does that matter? EDIT: What if it costs $2,000 or $20,000 per page? Do things go FOOM soon even in that case?)
The Darwin Game
by lsusr — 2020-10-09T10:19:10.516Z

Click here to participate. Entries must be submitted on October 18th, 2020 or earlier.

Entry is now closed.

In 2017, Zvi posted an exciting story about The Darwin Game, a variation of iterated prisoner's dilemma.

I will run my own version of the game in the week following October 18th, 2020. You do not have to know how to program in order to participate. I will code simple bots for non-programmers. If you do know how to program then you may create your own complicated bot.

Here are the rules. Changes from Zvi's original game are in brackets [like this].

For the first round, each player gets 100 copies of their program in the pool, and the pool pairs those programs at random. You can and often will play against yourself.

Each pair now plays an iterated prisoner’s dilemma variation, as follows. Each turn, each player simultaneously submits [an integer] from 0 to 5. If the two numbers add up to 5 or less, both players earn points equal to their number. If the two numbers add up to 6 or more, neither player gets points. This game then lasts for a large but unknown number of turns, so no one knows when the game is about to end; [I guarantee it will be at least 100 turns per iterated prisoner's dilemma].

Each pairing is independent of every other pairing. [You do know what round of the game it is and that you are facing an opponent. If you face a copy of yourself you are automatically awarded the maximum 5 points per round (2.5 points per bot). You otherwise do not know any history of the game to this point.] Your decision algorithm does the same thing each pairing.

At the end of the round, all of the points scored by all of your copies are combined. Your percentage of all the points scored by all programs becomes the percentage of the pool your program gets in the next round. So if you score 10% more points, you get 10% more copies next round, and over time successful programs will displace less successful programs. Hence the name, The Darwin Game.

Your goal is to have as many copies in the pool at the end of the last round as possible, or failing that, to survive as many rounds as possible with at least one copy.

[I will attempt to iterate until there is a stable equilibrium.]

I will add some silly bots of my own to make the early game more interesting.

Instructions for non-programmers

Please give a simple explanation of what you want your bot to do. Write it with ma...
Shouldn't there be a Chinese translation of Human Compatible?
by mako yass — 2020-10-09T08:47:55.760Z

Considering that China seems pretty serious about investing heavily in AI in the near future, it may be kind of important that Stuart Russel's work of AI alignment advocacy Human Compatible is made as accessible as possible to a Chinese audience, but there don't seem to be any Chinese translations.
Is it not necessary, perhaps? Is it possible that the most influential people in the field over there are all necessarily fluent in english, so that they can engage with the research literature and use the tools?
Otherwise, what's getting in the way of producing this? What should be done?
More Questions about Trees
by digital_carver — 2020-10-09T08:35:20.354Z
Link: http://bit-player.org/2020/more-questions-about-trees

This is a follow-up to his previous Questions about Trees which was an inquiry "about the puzzling diversity of forest trees."

This one looks into questions like:

Why do the leaves of trees have such varied shapes?

Why are trees so tall?

Why are trees trees (rather than other kinds of graphs)?
How to Price a Futures Contract
by lsusr — 2020-10-09T07:37:20.278Z

All investments are risky. The techniques explained in this series are exceptionally risky. I am not a registered investor, attorney, advisor, broker, banker, lawyer, dealer or anything of the sort. All opinions expressed here are for my personal exploration. I present it to you for entertainment. This post may help you understand policies related to financial regulation for the purposes of more informed voting. This post is not investment advice. This post may contain errors.

A security is a tradable financial asset. A future is the obligation to buy or sell a security at a predetermined strike price k.

Suppose a security has price S0 right now and the risk-free bond interest rate is r. What is the market equilibrium strike price k of a security at temporal displacement T into the future? You may assume the existence of an idealized free market.

k=S0erT

The price is forced to satisfy the above equation due to arbitrage.

What is the market equilibrium price S0 right now of a future with strike price k?

S0=ke−rT

You can simulate a future by borrowing money (selling a bond) and using the money to buy the underlying security. You can simulate short-selling the same future by short-selling the underlying security and buying a bond with the revenue.

If the strike price of a future is anything other than k=S0erT then you can earn money from it.

How do you extract risk-free profit from an future with strike price k−<k?

The strike price k is too low compared to S0. We can earn money by longing the future. In the case of a future, "longing" means agreeing to buy the underlying asset at time T.

It is not enough to merely earn money on average. We care about risk-adjusted returns. The fact that the future price deviates from S0=ke−rT means we can extract money risk free. We can hedge our long of the future by shorting the underlying asset. Then we can use the bond market to bridge the temporal distance between shorting the underlying asset now and when the future contract expires.

Perform the following three actions simultaneously.

Long the future. You agree to buy the underlying security at time T for price k−. This contract costs you nothing upfront.

Short-sell the underlying security for ke−rT in cash.

Lend the cash k as a bond with interest rate r.

When the future expires, perform the following three actions simultaneously.

Collect the principal and interest

...