trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
#6: Optional additional steps
by mingyuan — 2021-02-02T23:57:01.742Z

This is post 10 of 10 in my cryonics signup sequence.

Introduction

The preceding posts cover everything you need to be fully signed up for cryonics. However, there are a lot of additional steps you may want to take to give yourself the best chance at optimal conditions for cryopreservation.

Why do any of this?

As I've emphasized before, any delay in your cryopreservation is to be avoided as far as possible – so any social or legal dispute could jeopardize your successful preservation. In at least

one case

, an Alcor member was dead and buried for two full months before Alcor even knew he had been ill. Needless to say, you don't want that to happen to you – your organs will definitely not be in optimal condition if that happens.

Essentially, you want to put yourself in a social and legal position such that your cryopreservation won't be blocked by distraught or confused family members, medical professionals, lawyers, or coroners. Pursuant to this, you should communicate your intentions clearly to all stakeholders, codify your wishes in legal documents, and not give anyone financial incentive to interfere with your cryopreservation.

See more on these precautions from

Alcor

and

CI

.

Do I have to do all of these things?

I've listed things in order of how important they seem to me – standby is first because,

as I've discussed

, not making standby arrangements is a great way to incur a ton of ischemic damage. I also think everyone should execute healthcare advance directives if possible, and everyone should at least make sure their family is aware of their intentions.

My family and friends are very much onboard with cryonics, so I'm not worried about anyone interfering with my cryopreservation. But it seemed so easy to have people sign Relative's Affidavits that I figured I would do it anyway. I'm not, however, making a video explaining my intention to get cryopreserved – that seemed unnecessary. I'm also young and healthy, and I don't have a relationship with an attorney, doctor, or coroner, so I'm not talking to any of those people.

The final two points – getting your family members signed up, and bringing assets into the future – feel very much optional.

Standby arrangements

As

mentioned

in previous posts, signing up for cryonics via CI does not automatically sign you up for standby. If you want standby, you can get a contract with Suspended Animation (s...
#5: Making your cryonics arrangements official
by mingyuan — 2021-02-02T23:54:27.534Z

This is post 9 of 10 in my cryonics signup sequence.

Once you've got your funding method set up, you're not quite done. You'll need to enter into an official cryopreservation agreement with your cryonics organization, and there are quite a few additional forms you have to fill out in order to make that happen.

Required paperwork

Alcor

Membership application

Fill out the Alcor membership application available

here

. The application fee is $300; the default is to pay by card, but you can contact Alcor if you want to use a different payment method.

Cryopreservation contracts

Once you've sent in your membership application, complete with funding method, Alcor will physically mail you the cryopreservation contracts to read and sign. This runs ~60 pages, but it should mostly be information you already know.

You'll need two non-relative witnesses to sign the various documents, and in all states except California, you'll need a notary to notarize your Last Will and Testament for Human Remains.

The packet sent to you by Alcor includes the following [1]:

Cryopreservation Agreement

Attachment 1 to Cryopreservation Agreement

This document formalizes the choices you select on your membership application (e.g. neuropreservation vs whole-body; what to do with any excess funding)

Consent for Cryopreservation

Last Will and Testament for Human Remains and Authorization of Anatomical Donation

Note that hyperlinks in this section link only to sample forms, not contracts that you should actually try to sign.

Cryonics Institute

Membership application

There are two different forms depending on whether you're applying for an

annual membership

or a

lifetime membership

. The application fee for the former is $75; there is no application fee for lifetime membership, but there's a one-time payment of $1250.

Cryopreservation contracts

These are just all the basic legal documents you need; I think CI will send these to you when appropriate. You will need the signature of a notary or the signatures of two witnesses.

Main forms to fill out:

Cryonic Suspension Agreement

Uniform Donor Form

Next of Kin Agreement

Consent/Release for Cryopreservation

Non-Suspension Rider

This document stipulates what should be done with your cryopreservation funding in the case that CI is unable to carry out your cryopreservation

You may also want or need to fill out the following, depending on your situation:

Local Help Rider

Stipulate

...
Is the influence of money pervasive, even on LessWrong?
by shanen — 2021-02-02T20:22:02.947Z

"You must be new around here."

Guilty as charged. But the financial model is usually one of my first areas of meta-interest when I start looking (or relooking) at a website. What are the motivations? "Follow the money," said the detective. But in the worst cases, unsustainable financial models usually disappear.

It always seems to me that the money matters and that systems (including websites and companies) adjust their various behaviors to reflect where the money is coming from and how it is flowing through the system. LessWrong clearly has ongoing costs for servers and support (and I hope the helpful person in the Intercom chat room was duly compensated for the time). I also read about the big karma project in the last quarter of 2019. Nothing there about the development and evaluation costs, but it sure sounded like a lot of work was done. Somewhere in the FAQ it said that LessWrong doesn't make money, which is fine, but it did mention donations. (My observations indicate that big donors usually like to call the shots and small donors generally don't get to (which bothers me (but that might be simple projection since I'm strictly a small donor)).)

My own preference would be cost recovery, but mostly based on benefits received. Would you believe "Basically anything that people are willing to pay for should be allowed to happen?" My fantasy funding mechanism usually flies under the handle of CSB (for Charity Share Brokerage), but before speculating farther I'd like to understand more about how things work now on LessWrong. (Even more than this financial question, my primary confusion right now is how to detect the current flow of activity. But maybe I should be most focused on figuring out which parts of the old activity are most worth reading? That side seems overwhelming.)

Better clarify that I don't think that everything should be reduced to monetary values, but money is a helpful metric. Even sustainable. I actually think economics is mostly bogus because time is not equal to money, even approximately. The proper relationship is time >> money. (But ekronomics is another one of my favorite cans for worms.)
The World is Full of Wasted Motion
by Neel Nanda — 2021-02-02T19:02:48.724Z
Link: https://www.neelnanda.io/blog/mini-blog-post-22-the-8020-rule

Introduction

The 80/20 rule, or the Pareto Principle is a “rule” in economics, saying that 80% of the value comes from 20% of the effort. It is weird to call this a rule, when it’s such a fuzzy, ill-defined statement. And it’s easy to come up with counter-examples. But this is an empirical observation about the world, and in my experience it tends to be true.

And I think this is an incredibly valuable idea - far more so than it seems at first glance. This is a key part of my worldview, and how I live my life. And I consider it an important underlying factor in ways I’ve been successful. The key insight is this: there is always a clever hack. The world is not fair. Effort is not distributed as it should be. And this isn’t because people are dumb, or not trying. This is the default state of the world. Allocating your effort efficiently is hard - if it wasn’t, then the Pareto Principle would not hold. And this is the default state of the world for you.

My underlying model here is that we spend most of our lives stuck in bad local optima. We have a set of default actions, standards ways of doing things and solving problems we come across. And these are way better than nothing, but nowhere near optimal. So to get out of a local optima, you need to develop the skill of noticing when you’re in one, being creative to find a better way, and implementing that to move to a better one. In practice, this insight gets stored in my mind as a conviction that there is a clever hack, an efficient solution. I have a strong aesthetic preference against things that feel slow, effortful, or inefficient.

And solving this is not obvious, nor easy! You need to be creative. Sometimes I can’t find anything better, and do even worse than the naive solution. And you’ll never find a truly optimal solution because the world is complex and everything is uncertain - my new toolkit just gets me to other local optima. And it’s possible to feel overwhelmed by this, and dissatisfied with anything short of perfect. But this is something I find it easy to be excited about - there is a core part of me that is always striving. Focused on progress, not on the end point. The world is full of inefficiency and wasted motion, but you can do better.

Note that I’m making a far broader claim than the Principle obviously impli...
Has anybody used quantification over utility functions to define "how good a model is"?
by Eigil Rischel — 2021-02-02T15:14:54.386Z

Let's consider a very simple situation: you're an agent playing a game like this:
A random point x∈X is generated, which is shown to you.
Then you have to choose an action a∈A. This leads to a world-state w(a,θ)∈W, where θ∈Θ is some "hidden variable", which is randomly generated but which you don't see.

Now, the way to make decisions in a situation like this is to form some "statistical model". In this very simple situation, maybe that just means a set of conditional probabilities P(w=w0|x,a), giving the probability of each world-state as a function of your action and the x you see.

On the other hand, it could also be P(w∈O|x,a) for various subsets O⊂W - giving the probability of various *outcomes". If these outcomes don't partition W completely, this is a "coarse" world-model - you only make predictions about some partial information about w.

We could even have a model like P(w∈O,x∈V,a∈U), which makes prediction given only partial information about the "known" variables.

Now what makes a model like this good? There are two families of answers to this:

A model is good if it matches the world - if the probability P(w=w0|x=x0,a=a0) really is the true conditional probability given those inputs. Note that this generalizes straightforwardly to the case of w∈O and x∈V, but not to the case a∈U. The probability P(w=w0|a∈{a1,a2}) is not so straightforward to define.

A model is good if it gives good outcomes. Given some utility function u:W→R, for example, a model like the above recommends some action for each x∈X, namely the one that maximizes the expected utility. Here there are also some questions about what to do if you only have a coarse model.

The big advantage of the former viewpoint - "epistemic rationality" - is that it doesn't require you to know the utility function. You can go out into the world and discover an accurate model, and then figure out what to optimize. This also means that you can give your model to other agents with other utility functions facing the same problem, and it will help them out too.

Attainable utility is an approach to measuring the "impact" of actions, which goes something like this

To measure the impact of a given action relative to a given utility function, we just see how much it changes the "attainable utility", i.e the utility we expect to obtain if we try to optimize it from now on.

To measure the impact of a given action non

...
Vaccinated Socializing
by jefftk — 2021-02-02T03:20:06.275Z

The CDC

is
asking vaccinated people to continue to mask and social distance:

Q: Do I need to wear a mask and avoid close contact with others if I have
gotten 2 doses of the vaccine?

A: Yes. Not enough information is currently available to say if or
when CDC will stop recommending that people wear masks and avoid close
contact with others to help prevent the spread of the virus that
causes COVID-19. ... We also don't yet know whether getting a COVID-19
vaccine will prevent you from spreading the virus that causes COVID-19
to other people, even if you don't get sick yourself.

This does not make sense. They're saying we should act as if
vaccinated people are no less likely to infect others, but if that
were the case then vaccines would not be helping us get to herd
immunity.

In the absence of specific studies showing whether these particular
covid-19 vaccines reduce infectiousness, we need to make the best
predictions we can based on the information we do have. A good
starting point is the measured efficacy of the vaccine, which for the
Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, the only ones I'll be talking about in
this post, is ~95% (1/20th) two weeks after the second shot. [EDIT: this guess should likely be adjusted down, given that we already know asymptomatic spread is common.] This
predicts that an interaction between two vaccinated people is ~0.25%
(~1/400th) as likely to transmit covid as if they were both
unvaccinated.

At this point, to figure out what activities makes sense, it's useful
to bring in some numbers. We can use the idea of a "microcovid" to represent a
one in a million chance of getting coronavirus:

An activity that's 20,000 microcovids is very unsafe, as you have a 2%
risk of getting covid every time you do it. An activity that's 20
microcovids is relatively safe, as you could do it every week for a
year and still have only about a 0.1% chance of getting covid.

Until recently, our house's typical weekly covid risk, given current
covid rates in the Boston area, looked like:

One housemate working in person three [EDIT: two] days a week in a well-fit
kn95: ~600 microcovids

Each of seven housemates spending about half an hour a day outside
with other people around: ~100 microcovids

Comparing microcovid for individuals and groups is awkward, since you
need to take into account that if one of us gets it the ot...
Deepmind has made a general inductor ("Making sense of sensory input")
by mako yass — 2021-02-02T02:54:26.404Z
Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0004370220301855

Our system [the Apperception Engine] is able to produce interpretable human-readable causal theories from very small amounts of data, because of the strong inductive bias provided by the unity conditions. A causal theory produced by our system is able to predict future sensor readings, as well as retrodict earlier readings, and impute (fill in the blanks of) missing sensory readings, in any combination.

We tested the engine in a diverse variety of domains, including cellular automata, rhythms and simple nursery tunes, multi-modal binding problems, occlusion tasks, and sequence induction intelligence tests. In each domain, we test our engine's ability to predict future sensor values, retrodict earlier sensor values, and impute missing sensory data. The Apperception Engine performs well in all these domains, significantly out-performing neural net baselines. We note in particular that in the sequence induction intelligence tests, our system achieved human-level performance. This is notable because our system is not a bespoke system designed specifically to solve intelligence tests, but a general-purpose system that was designed to make sense of any sensory sequence.

If we were to take AIXI literally, we'd be concerned that induction (the generation of predictive models from observation) appears to provide about half of general intelligence (the rest is decision theory). It also seems noteworthy that the models that the apperception engine produces are reductive enough to be readable to humans, a quality similar to being analyzable, classifiable, generally comprehensible enough to be intelligently worked as components in an intellectual medium, that is to say, they may be amenable to a process of self-improvement that is informed by consciously applied principles and meta-knowledge, which in turn might be improved in similar ways. So, we should probably pay attention to this sort of thing.
Lean Startup Reading Comprehension Quiz
by Raemon — 2021-02-02T01:03:27.954Z

Some colleagues and I recently read the Lean Startup together, and thought it'd be nice to have some reading comprehension questions to check if we took away the same things. Jacob made some questions, and I thought they might make an interesting LW post for other people who had read Lean Startup.

Feel free to reply with spoiler-blocked (Begin a line with >!) answers.

1. What is the difference between learning and validated learning?

2. True or false: "According to the author, a startup with exponential growth in metrics like revenue and number of customers is doing well." Explain your answer.

3. Finish the sentence: "almost every lean startup technique we've discussed so far works its magic in two ways:"

4. Ries argues that startups should pay more attention to innovation accounting than traditional accounting. Name two ways in which startups can change their financial metrics to accomplish innovation accounting.

5. Describe, concretely, what a car company's supply chain would look like if it used push vs pull inventory.

6. Ries applies the pull inventory model to startups. But what is the unit that is being pulled, and where does it obtain the "pull signal"?

7. True or false: "Lean manufacturing is meant to give manufacturers an advantage in domains of extreme uncertainty". Explain your answer.

8. True or false: "Lean manufacturing is about harnessing the power of economies-of-scale."

9. Ries discusses an anecdote of a family folding letters. The dad folds, stamps, and seals one letter at a time; whereas the kids begin by folding all letters, then stamping all, etc. Name two reasons Ries' considers the dad's method superior.

10. True or false: "A consequence of lean manufacturing is that the performance of each employee as an isolated unit, in terms of output per unit of time, might *decrease*." Explain your answer.

11. Give an example of what a “large batch death spiral” might look like in practice.

12. According to Ries, the “Five why’s” method is a control system (though he doesn’t say so explicitly). What does it control, and how?

13. Explain the meaning of Toyota proverb “Stop production so that production never stops”
Links for January 2021
by ike — 2021-02-01T23:54:02.103Z
Link: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1385049981836741&id=100009952574823

Previously: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/avqqNvhiZPkq5wQJW/links-for-dec-2020

Favorites

https://www.lynalden.com/ethereum-analysis/ A really good economic analysis of Ethereum. Worth reading even if you don’t know much about it.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/25/have-we-already-been-visited-by-aliens

“An eminent astrophysicist argues that signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life have appeared in our skies. What’s the evidence for his extraordinary claim?” tl;dr: Loeb, though, explicitly rejects the Sagan standard—“It is not obvious to me why extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” he observes—and flips its logic on its head: “Extraordinary conservatism keeps us extraordinarily ignorant.”

https://www.inputmag.com/reviews/is-samsung-galaxy-s21-ultra-using-ai-to-fake-detailed-moon-photos-investigation-super-resolution-analysis/amp

”Is the Galaxy S21 Ultra using AI to fake detailed Moon photos?”

https://www.themoneyillusion.com/a-coasian-argument-for-a-parliamentary-system

A market analysis of parliamentary systems

Economics / Psychology

https://psyarxiv.com/3ntku/

Humans like to maximize entropy.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w28299

“Market Structure and Extortion:Evidence from 50,000 Extortion Payment … We exploit a 2016 non-aggression pact between gangs to examine how collusion affects extortion in areas where gangs previously competed.”

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513820301379

“Results show that taller people are more likely to have self-serving attitudes towards government redistribution of wealth. The result was robust to numerous control variables and alternative model specifications, but the direct effects of height were small.”

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/nsq-smarter-humans/

”Are Humans Smarter or Stupider Than We Used to Be?”

https://news.yale.edu/2021/01/13/disagreeing-takes-lot-brain-real-estate

”it just takes a lot more brain real estate to disagree than to agree.”

https://twitter.com/MarcusOwen5/status/1351197150860996608?s=19

Stocks may be significantly riskier than is usually assumed.

https://www.pnas.org/content/118/4/e2016976118

“Past research has found that experienced well-being does not increase above incomes of $75,000/y. ... Here, over one million real-time reports of experienced well-being from a large US sample show evidence that experienced well-being ris...
Forecasting Newsletter: January 2021
by NunoSempere — 2021-02-01T23:07:39.131Z

Highlights

1. Veteran PredictIt trader writes a

pretty good guide

on how to make money on prediction markets.

2.

Metaculus

and

Hypermind

both have new COVID-19 forecasting tournaments.

3. I created a

search engine for probabilities

.

Index

Highlights
Prediction Markets & Forecasting Platforms
In The News
Long Content
Hard To Categorize

Sign up

here

or browse past newsletters

here

.

Prediction Markets & Forecasting Platforms

Hypermind is an American-French forecasting platform with a somewhat outdated and clunky interface. They have a new

COVID-19 Recovery

contest with $7000 in promised prizes so far, with the amount set to increase as more questions get added. The contest is sponsored by the Open Philanthropy Project. Hypermind is somewhat difficult to navigate, so you might only be able to find the contest if you create an account and look around.

Metaculus has a new

COVID-19 Forecasting

contest. From the description:

“The goal of this project is to provide probabilistic predictions of the U.S. COVID-19 outbreak to support public health decision making at the federal and state level.

At the end of each month we will share a summary report with the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, all members of MIDAS (Modeling of Infectious Disease Agent Study), and make this report available for public consumption.”

Metaculus also published an open letter on the

urgent need for expanded surveillance and forecasting of novel SAR-CoV-2 variants

. An opinion piece saying the same thing is also available on

The Hill

:

“Efforts are already being made to characterize and understand the infectivity properties and immunological consequences of these new variants. However, as was the case at the start of the pandemic, most countries remain extraordinarily uncertain as to (1) the extent to which these novel variants are spreading and (2) the likelihood as to whether and when these new variants will become predominant.

Unfortunately, these issues do not appear as if they will be extensively addressed in the immediate future. The U.S. CDC, for instance, is currently only planning on having each state send it ‘at least 10 samples’ on a biweekly basis for sequencing and further characterization. This is woefully inadequate genomic surveillance — we are in the dark.

We are calling for a massive increase in genomic s

...