trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
What Botswana Can Teach Us About Political Stability
by Samo Burja — 2019-05-09T18:30:04.588Z

US Army Africa/Botswana

From my article first published on Palladium Magazine.

It is hard to find a clearer outlier among developing countries than Botswana, a landlocked African country where 40% of government revenue comes from diamond mining and a quarter of adults are HIV positive. Everything taught by a development economics department would suggest the country is set up for failure. But well-executed succession between presidents, and the resulting stability and good government, has meant success instead.

Botswana is possibly the nicest place in Africa — it is quieter and more stable than, say, Greece. In the entire period since independence, Botswana has not suffered devastating civil wars like those in the Congo or Mozambique, coups such as in Burkina Faso, or ethnic violence and expropriation as seen in Rwanda and Zimbabwe.

The country’s living standards are comparable to Turkey, Mexico, and South Africa. It has also been Sub-Saharan Africa’s fastest growing economy for most of the last half century.

The crucial variable is a sound government making well-informed, long-term choices. A low population density paired with abundant natural resources provides a reasonable standard of living even in the absence of administrative genius or favorable conditions, so long as governance provides stability. Political instability can impede development of physical infrastructure and the business environment, transforming good fundamentals into a bad outcome. See, for example, Kazakhstan compared to Venezuela.

Unfortunately, there are many examples of countries that have tried and failed to achieve good governance in the often chaotic post-colonial context. These countries followed Western advice as closely as they could, drafting legally impeccable constitutions and recruiting well-educated statesmen, but the results have been mixed at best. Botswana’s positive outlier example raises the question of how it has done so well.

Read the rest here.

Read more from Samo Burja

here.
Kissing Scars
by Logan Riggs — 2019-05-09T16:00:59.596Z

Last year August 6th, I got in a horrible drone accident that destroyed the lens and iris in my left eye and left a scar running down my eye. For a couple months I could barely read, my working memory was horrible, energy levels were shot, and I was in so much pain, especially after surgeries.

Then a sweet girl kissed my scars.

In one simple gesture, it was communicated

"What you're going through really sucks and I want to make it better"

Today I realized two people upvoted my birthday comment in an obituary post to a lost friend. That post was almost a year ago, and the comment was a month ago.

Whoever you two are, thank you for kissing my scars.
How many galaxies could we reach traveling at 0.5c, 0.8c, and 0.99c?
by Ruby — 2019-05-08T23:39:16.337Z

The expansion of the universe means that even travelling at the speed of light, over time an increasing number of galaxies will be beyond our reach, hence the concept of "reachable universe." Right now, how many galaxies could we potentially reach if we travelled at significant fractions of the speed of light? And how quickly are these galaxies moving beyond our reach?
Claims & Assumptions made in Eternity in Six Hours

by Ruby — 2019-05-08T23:11:30.307Z

This is a list of claims and assumptions made in the FHI paper, Eternity in Six Hours. It is not exhaustive. I collected this list as part of my attempt to answer the questions:

Which parts of the paper Eternity in Six Hours are iffy?
What are the claims/arguments made in Eternity in Six Hours?

Since my interest is writing this is on the feasibility of intergalactic colonization, I've neglected claims in the paper about the Fermi paradox.

Abstract

The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the strong likelihood of alien intelligent life emerging (under a wide variety of assumptions), and the absence of any visible evidence for such emergence. In this paper, we extend the Fermi paradox to not only life in this galaxy, but to other galaxies as well. We do this by demonstrating that traveling between galaxies – indeed even launching a colonisation project for the entire reachable universe – is a relatively simple task for a star-spanning civilization, requiring modest amounts of energy and resources. We start by demonstrating that humanity itself could likely accomplish such a colonisation project in the foreseeable future, should we want to, and then demonstrate that there are millions of galaxies that could have reached us by now, using similar methods. This results in a considerable sharpening of the Fermi paradox. [emphasis added]

Claims and Assumptions (not exhaustive)

Self-replicating probes for colonizations could be launched to a fraction of lightspeed using fixed launch systems such as coilguns or quenchguns as (opposed to rockets).
Only six hours of the sun's energy (3.8x10^26W) are required to commence the colonization of the entire universe.

A future human civilization could easily aspire to this amount of energy.

Since the procedure is conjunction of designs and yet each of the requirements have multiple pathways to implementation, the whole construction is robust.
Humans have generally been quite successful at copying or co-oping nature. We can assume that anything done in the natural world can be done under human control, e.g. self-replicators and AI.
Any task which can be performed can be automated.
It would be ruinously costly to send over a large colonization fleet, and is much more efficient to send over a small payload which builds what is required in situ, i.e. von Neumann probes.
Data storage will not be much an issue.

Example: can fit all th

...
Could a superintelligent AI colonize the galaxy/universe? If not, why not?
by Ruby — 2019-05-07T21:33:20.288Z

Arguments for the value of the far future (in turn used as arguments for reducing x-risk) assume that we will colonize the stars, hence it's interesting to know whether we should think that really is possible.

We know that there are various challenges to be overcome to achieve space colonization, but are any of them so hard that we don't think a superintelligent AI could achieve them? This is scenario worth asking about since one of the main ways we overcome near-term x-risk is through the creation of a human-aligned AI which would help us colonize the stars if that's what we really want.
Is it definitely the case that we can colonize Mars if we really wanted to? Is it reasonable to believe that this is technically feasible for a reasonably advanced civilization? 
by Ruby — 2019-05-07T20:08:32.105Z

Question phrased to say that I'm less interested in reasons why humanity might not colonize Mars in the short-term due to lack of interest, politics, or near-term economics. Assume that humanity really wanted to and would put billions or trillions of dollars towards this and decades (centuries) of time. Any real reason we couldn't do it?
What are the claims/arguments made in Eternity in Six Hours?
by Ruby — 2019-05-07T19:54:32.061Z

The FHI paper, Eternity in Six Hours, asserts that traveling between galaxies and colonizing them is a relatively simple task for a star-spanning civilization. The paper even asserts that humanity itself could accomplish this in the foreseeable future. Because of this, the paper says the Fermi Paradox is even "sharper" than it was already. (This paper was published five years before another FHI, Dissolving the Fermi Paradox, which shares one of the same authors.)

Yet even if we consider the Fermi Paradox resolved, it's still valuable to know what's possible to accomplish with regards to space colonization. Arguments for the astronomical value of the far future assume space colonization is possible, hence we want to evaluate arguments for why this is true.
Crypto quant trading: Naive Bayes
by Alexei — 2019-05-07T19:29:40.507Z

Previous post: Crypto quant trading: Intro

I didn't get requests for any specific subject from the last post, so I'm going in the direction that I find interesting and I hope the community will find interesting as well. Let's do Naive Bayes! You can download the code and follow along.

Just as a reminder, here's Bayes' theorem: P(H|f) = P(H) * P(f|H) / P(f). (I'm using f for "feature".)

Here's conditional probability: P(A|B) = P(A,B) / P(B)

Disclaimer: I was learning Naive Bayes as I was writing this post, so please double check the math. I'm not using 3rd party libraries so I can fully understand how it all works. In fact, I'll start by describing a thing that tripped me up for a bit.

What not to do

My original understanding was: Naive Bayes basically allows us to update on various features without concerning ourselves with how all of them interact with each other; we're just assuming they are independent. So we can just apply it iteratively like so:

P(H) = prior
P(H) = P(H) * P(f1|H) / P(f1)
P(H) = P(H) * P(f2|H) / P(f2)

You can see how that fails if we keep updating P(H) upwards over and over again, until it goes above 1. I did math the hard way to figure out where I went wrong. If we have two features:

P(H|f1,f2) = P(H,f1,f2) / P(f1,f2)
= P(f1|H,f2) * P(H,f2) / P(f1,f2)
= P(f1|H,f2) * P(f2|H) * P(H) / P(f1,f2)
= P(H) * P(f1|H,f2) * P(f2|H) / (P(f1|f2) * P(f2))
Then because we assume that all features are independent:
= P(H) * P(f1|H) * P(f2|H) / (P(f1) * P(f2))

Looks like what I wrote above. Where's the mistake?
Well, Naive Bayes actually says that all features are independent, conditional on H. So P(f1|H,f2) = P(f1|H) because we're conditioning on H, but P(f1|f2) != P(f1) because there's no H in the condition.

One intuitive example of this is a spam filter. Let's say all spam emails (H = email is spam) have random words. So P(word1|word2,H)=P(word1|H), i.e. if we know email is spam, then the presence of any given word doesn't tell us anything about the probably of seeing another word. Whereas, P(word1|word2) != P(word1) since there are a lot of non-spam emails, where word appearances are very much correlated. (H/t to Satvik for this clarification.)

This is actually good news! Assuming P(f1|f2) = P(f1) for all features would be a pretty big assumption. But P(f1|H,f2) = P(f1|H), while often not exactly true, is a bit less of stretch and, in practice, works pr...
Coordination Surveys: why we should survey to organize responsibilities, not just predictions
by Academian — 2019-05-07T17:43:18.768Z

Summary: I think it’s important for surveys about the future of technology or society to check how people's predictions of the future depend on their beliefs about what actions or responsibilities they and others will take on. Moreover, surveys should also help people to calibrate their beliefs about those responsibilities by collecting feedback from the participants about their individual plans. Successive surveys could help improve the groups calibration as people update their responsibilities upon hearing from each other. Further down, I’ll argue that not doing this — i.e. surveying only for predictions but not responsibilities — might even be actively harmful.

An example

Here's an example of the type of survey question combination I'm advocating for, in the case of a survey to AI researchers about the future impact of AI.

Prediction about impact:

1) Do you think AI development will have a net positive or net negative impact on society over the next 30 years?

Prediction about responsibility/action:

2) What fraction of AI researchers over the next 30 years will focus their full-time research attention on ensuring that AI is used for positive and rather than negative societal impacts?

Feedback on responsibility/action:

3) What is the chance that you, over the next 30 years, will transition to focusing your full-time research attention on ensuring that AI is used for positive rather than negative societal impacts?

I see a lot of surveys asking questions like (1), which is great, but not enough of (2) or (3). Asking (2) will help expose if people think AI will be good as a result of other people will take responsibility for making it good. Asking (3) will well help the survey respondents to update by seeing if their prediction in (2) matches the responses of other survey respondents in (3).

How this helps

I’ve seen it happen that everyone thinks something is fine because someone else will deal with it. This sort of survey could help folks to notice when that’s not the case. In other words, it could help mitigate the

bystander effect

.

Similarly, I’ve also seen it happen that everyone gets worried about a thing because they think no one else is doing anything about it, and then they go around taking a bunch of more-drastic-than-necessary unilateral actions. This sort of survey can help to mitigate this sort of social malcoordination. That is, it c...
Models of Memory and Understanding
by Hazard — 2019-05-07T17:39:58.314Z

johnswentworth's post on Declarative Mathematics got me thinking about what different types of understanding/learning/memory feel like to me. In order to explain an initial confusion I had, I'm explicating some of my models on how my mind can work.

Jumps vs Procedure

I want to highlight two different styles of solving problems. One is where you jump directly to the solution, and the other is where you follow a procedure to produce the solution.

The prototypical example of these two styles would be a neural net vs an automated theorem prover. Once a neural net is trained, there's a sense in which it takes an input and "jumps directly" to an output. An automated theorem prover takes an input and systematically applies a bunch of deduction rules till it gets its output.

I don't care to claim that these two styles of "fundamentally" different (because I'd have to figure out what that means), but I do want to point out that they certainly feel different. This is what matters to me, because this post is about what it feels like for me to be solving problems in different domains.

Memory as a Graph

My working model of memory is something like "connected graph of ideas with hebbian learning". This model explains why use and connection are such a big deal for making something stick in memory. The more you use something, the "sticker" it becomes (pretty non-controversial empirical claim, seems to be theoretically backed up by observations on how neurons work). The more connections you make between ideas, the "sticker" they become (also non-controversial empirical claim, my theory is something like "doing graph search to get to a node on the idea graph becomes easier the more connected an idea is" (hmmm, seems fishy)).

My thinking of memory as an idea-graph is shaped by alkjash's Babble and Prune sequence and Kevin Simler's Nihilist Guide to Meaning.

Analogies, mapping between modules

I can think of two different ways my mind uses analogies. One is as a mnemonic crutch, and the other is as a licence to substitute.

The licence to substitute is what happens when I learn that two different math structures are isomorphic. I'm allowed to map things in the source domain to the target domain, do my work in the target domain, map it back and be guaranteed a correct answer (if I did the wo...
Towards optimal play as Villager in a mixed game
by Benquo — 2019-05-07T05:29:50.826Z
Link: http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/towards-optimal-play-as-villager-in-a-mixed-game/

On Twitter, Freyja wrote:

Things capitalism is trash at:
Valuing preferences of anything other than adults who earn money (i.e. future people, non-humans)
Pricing non-standardisable goods (i.e. information)
Playing nicely with non-quantifiable values + objectives (i.e. love, ritual)

Things capitalism is good at:
Incentivising the production of novel goods and services
Coordinating large groups of people to produce complex bundles of goods
The obvious: making value fungible

Anyone know of work on -
a) integrating the former into existing economic systems, or
b) developing new systems to provide those things while including capitalism's existing benefits?

This intersected well enough with my current interests and those of the people I've been discoursing with most closely that I figured I'd try my hand at a quick explanation of what we're doing, which I've lightly edited into blog post form below. This is only a loose sketch, I think it does reasonably precisely outline the argument, but many readers may find that there are substantial inferential leaps. Questions in the comments are strongly encouraged.

Any serious attempt at (b) will first have to unwind the disinformation that claims that the thing we have now is capitalism, or remotely efficient.

The short version of the project: learning to talk honestly within a small group about how power works, both systemically and as it applies to us, without trying to hold onto information asymmetries. (There's pervasive temptation to withhold political information as part of a zero-sum privilege game, like Plato's philosopher-kings.)

Some background: post-WWII elite institutions (e.g. corps) are competitive to enter, but not under performance pressure, because of US government policy. This strongly selects for zero-sum games, which mimic but wreck discourse. (See Moral Mazes for more, especially the case studies that make up most of the book, starting around chapter 3.)

This creates opportunity in two ways.

First, institutions are mostly too stupid to model their environment beyond the zero-sum games they specialize in, so a small group that's able to maintain information hygiene and not turn on each other should be able to take & hold territory. "And not turn on each other" turns out to be really hard, because all our role models and intuitions for how to survive in this world ...
Which parts of the paper Eternity in Six Hours are iffy?
by Ruby — 2019-05-06T23:59:16.777Z

The FHI paper, Eternity in Six Hours, is very optimistic about what can be done:

In this paper, we extend the Fermi paradox to not only life in this galaxy, but to other galaxies as well. We do this by demonstrating that traveling between galaxies – indeed even launching a colonisation project for the entire reachable universe – is a relatively simple task for a star-spanning civilization, requiring modest amounts of energy and resources. We start by demonstrating that humanity itself could likely accomplish such a colonisation project in the foreseeable future, should we want to, and then demonstrate that there are millions of galaxies that could have reached us by now, using similar methods.

Is this paper reasonable? Which parts of its assertions are most likely to be mistaken?

This question was inspired by a conversation with Nick Beckstead.
Space colonization: what can we definitely do and how do we know that?
by Ruby — 2019-05-06T23:05:55.300Z

Arguments for the value of the long-term future tend to make the assumption that we will colonize space. What can we definitely accomplish in terms of space colonization? Why think that we can definitely do those things?

The FHI paper, Eternity in Six Hours, is very optimistic about what can be done:

In this paper, we extend the Fermi paradox to not only life in this galaxy, but to other galaxies as well. We do this by demonstrating that traveling between galaxies – indeed even launching a colonisation project for the entire reachable universe – is a relatively simple task for a star-spanning civilization, requiring modest amounts of energy and resources. We start by demonstrating that humanity itself could likely accomplish such a colonisation project in the foreseeable future, should we want to, and then demonstrate that there are millions of galaxies that could have reached us by now, using similar methods.

Is this paper reasonable? Which parts of its assertions are most likely to be mistaken?

This question was inspired by a conversation with Nick Beckstead.
Hierarchy and wings
by Benquo — 2019-05-06T18:39:43.607Z
Link: http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/hierarchy-wings/

(Note for LessWrong: This is more overtly about partisan politics than the norm, but I think it's not more about that than The Two-Party Swindle, from the Sequences, and it proposes a structural model that doesn't require people to be as stupid.)

There are a few points I didn't make in my post on blame games because they seemed extraneous to the core point, which are still important enough to write down.

Hierarchy

The Hierarchy game is a zero-sum game in which people closer to the center expropriate from people farther from the center, and use some of those resources to perpetuate the power imbalances that enable the expropriation. Players that fail to submit to expropriation by higher-level players are punished by those more-powerful players, often through intermediaries. Players that fail to help members of their class expropriate from those beneath them are excluded from their class, and often coordinated against more overtly.

This game isn't inherently majoritarian, - instead, it allows smaller groups to stably expropriate from larger ones, because every player has a short-run incentive to go along with the arrangement. Feudalism is a simple example of the hierarchy game. Modern states almost always have some hierarchical arrangements, such as the police and military, and (less formally) economic class.

Political handedness

Around the time of the French revolution - a replacement of Feudal arrangements with Modern states - people started using terms like "left" and "right" to refer to political orientations. These terms are related to natural structural coalitions within a modern democratic state.

Political parties don't overtly promise to expropriate from 49% on behalf of an arbitrary 51%. This is probably in part because this would be correctly viewed as a proposal to massively increase expropriative activity relative to other activity, accelerating the rate of expropriation, which actually isn't in the majority's interests, and would quickly undermine the democratic paradigm without providing a replacement to enforce property claims. Instead, appropriation is opportunistic, and political coalitions seem to be oriented around natural power bases which could in principle replace deliberative democracy.

Right-wing

One natural sort of organization to orient around is the formal hierarchy with a monopoly on fo...