trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Requesting examples of successful remote research collaborations, and information on what made it work?
by Linda Linsefors — 2020-03-31T23:31:23.249Z

I have some experience of remote work, e.g. my current job. Not being in the same room is mostly not a problem at all. But for some reason, trying to do research together remotely is much harder, and several people I have talked to share this experience.

I have some intuitionist about why this is the case, but I also don't expect it to be very useful to discuss the reasons something can not be done. Instead I'm asking for positive examples.

Can you tell me about any successful remote research collaboration? And if so, give me as much information and general context about it as you can.
LW Coronavirus Agenda Update 3/31
by Elizabeth — 2020-03-31T21:40:28.553Z

Two weeks ago I announced the LessWrong Coronavirus Agenda, an attempt to increase knowledge by coordinating research between LW participants. This post is an update on that. If you want to skip to action items, check out the last section.

Last Week’s Spotlight Questions

What is my prognosis (short term or long term) if I am infected with coronavirus?

What are the chances of being asymptomatic?

The data isn’t good enough to know.

What early symptoms should I expect?

Probably fever and/or cough

.
What if things get bad? Still unanswered.
What about post-recovery? Still unanswered.

What will the economic effects of a 3 week quarantine be? 3 months?

This one was obviously going to take more than a week to answer, but we had some great starts.

Bucky

on the cost of shutdowns.

Magfrump

on small businesses.

Ssobanska

on what we already know from China. Due to a glitch this one was invisible to most people, so I highly encourage you to check it out now.

Other Highlights Of The Week

Peter Hurford of Rethink Priorities shared

his research agenda

, which is operating at a different level of abstraction.

EconDB

, a per-country dashboard of economic indicators.

Open thread

is dead. Long live the

open thread

.

Changes To The Agenda

“What is my prognosis?” is being retired from the spotlight and its answers added to the record, although it will remain available for new answers.Added two answers to "What are the basic epidemiological parameters of C19?"Economics questions expanded (see below)

This Week’s Spotlight Questions

Previous ultra-vague economics question replaced by three mildly less vague economics questions

What happens in a recession anyway?
How will this recession differ from the last two?
What will happen to supply chains in the era of COVID-19?

What are the costs, benefits, and logistics of opening up new vaccine facilities?

Prompted by David Manheim’s

excellent comment

and subsequent excellent discussion in the agenda post, I want to investigate how, exactly, vaccine production facilities could be made and what the costs and benefits of doing so are.
This was published a day later than planned because I used up my daily posting quota on the actual questions and got throttled.
Outperforming the human Atari benchmark
by Vaniver — 2020-03-31T19:33:46.355Z
Link: https://deepmind.com/blog/article/Agent57-Outperforming-the-human-Atari-benchmark

I haven't paid much attention to Atari in a long time, and so would appreciate takes from anyone who follows this more closely. My take:

A single architecture that can handle both the games that require significant exploration, and the games that require long-term credit assignment, and the 'easy' games, without tricks or expert performance, seems like an achievement to me. The main question then becomes "does it scale out of the simulator to problems we care about more than Atari?"

What does it use? It looks like it's a lot of 'engineering improvements' and data. That is, lots of approaches will have tons of small components that are set to some simple default. You need to explore, so you use the simplest possible method of exploration, which is every action you roll a die and epsilon percent of the time you take a random action. Of course you could do better if you thought about it more, but there are many places like that in the code, and 'thinking about it more' requires both developer effort and compute (which, since the efficiency of the whole thing depends on how much compute it can spend, might mean you're spending dollars to earn cents if you use a fancy method where a simple one would do).

That is, this doesn't look like a radical new competitor to DQN; this looks like DQN after five years of iteration and testing, where some defaults are swapped to fancier settings and others aren't, and thus is updating me a little upward on the importance of engineering and data as an input factor.

They say this isn't the end of Atari research:

This by no means marks the end of Atari research, not only in terms of data efficiency, but also in terms of general performance. We offer two views on this: firstly, analyzing the performance among percentiles gives us new insights on how general algorithms are. While Agent57 achieves strong results on the first percentiles of the 57 games and holds better mean and median performance than NGU or R2D2, as illustrated by MuZero, it could still obtain a higher average performance. Secondly, all current algorithms are far from achieving optimal performance in some games. To that end, key improvements to use might be enhancements in the representations that Agent57 uses for exploration, planning, and credit assignment.
Rational Manifesto
by ld97 — 2020-03-31T17:03:08.951Z

About one month ago, I saw an Agile Manifesto. It inspired me to create my own one because you know, manifests seem to be popular. So, for the 1st of April, I created Rational Manifesto:

Manifests are full of obvious things. This is one of them.
The previous item was a recursive joke.
Before using some advice from the manifest, you should check that this advice works.
Previous advice should be checked too.
If manifest contains a thing that seems to be true, that doesn't say anything about others.
If you found something wrong in the manifest - this manifest is useless.
The previous item is an example of the wrong one.
Every manifest tries to become a cult.
If you hadn't understood previous items - you have a chance to join the cult.
Add one cultist point for every item you don't understand. Including this one.
This manifest was signed by Eliezer Yudkowsky, Donald Knuth, Linus Tovalds and Daniel Kahneman.
If it makes it more valuable for you - add another two cultist points.
Answering to your question: No, they haven't signed it yet.
Add another two points.
If you often try to explain something from the end.
If you think that all items in this manifest are obvious - another 5 points.
This manifest is excellent and will save the world.
Another 2 points if you believed it.
If you weren't counting your points - add 3 more.
If you finished with a positive number of cultist points - think of it.

And yep, then I tried to pass this manifest by myself, after a week since I've created it - my score was positive.
April Coronavirus Open Thread
by Elizabeth — 2020-03-31T16:48:41.980Z

Last month’s Coronavirus Open Thread did a fantastic job at being a place for coronavirus-related information and questions that didn’t merit a top level post, but at almost 400 comments, many of which were great at the time but are now obsolete, it’s getting a little creaky. So for the next month (probably. Who knows what’s going to happen in that month) this is the new spot for comments and questions about coronavirus that don’t fit anywhere else and aren’t worth a top level post.

Wondering what happened in last month’s thread? Here are the timeless and not-yet-eclipsed-by-events highlights:

Spiracular on why SARS-Cov-2 is unlikely to be lab-created.
Two documents collating estimates of basic epidemiological parameters, in response to this thread
Discussion on whether the tuberculosis vaccine provides protection against COVID-19.
Suggestive evidence that COVID-19 removes sense of taste and smell.
Could copper tape be net harmful?

Want to know what’s coming up in the future? Check out the Coronavirus Research Agenda and its related questions.

Wondering why the April thread is going up on 3/31? Because everything’s a little more confusing on 4/1 and I didn’t want the extra hassle.
What are the costs, benefits, and logistics of opening up new vaccine facilities?
by Elizabeth — 2020-03-31T16:43:47.373Z

In this comment on the parent question, David Manheim makes the case for building new vaccine production facilities before we have a vaccine ready to produce, and for this to be subsidized. I find this question interesting in its own right, but it's also an opportunity to dig into the nitty-gritty of producing something, which I wish happened more on LessWrong. I don't expect this to lead directly to a vaccine facility coming into existence- presumably the people who have the power to do that already have access to the knowledge as well- but I think it's a useful exercise in how things actually get done.

To recap, David's argument as I understand it is:

The world is under-capacity for vaccines as it is
Building a vaccine production facility takes a lot of time and money, so we need to start funding and building them now to have them ready when we have candidates ready.
We're likely to want to mass-produce multiple vaccines until we know which ones work the best, increasing the amount of capacity needed.

There's already a great discussion of this in the replies to his thread, and I encourage you to read it before commenting here. Some questions that came up in that discussion:

Is there such a thing as a generic vaccine production facility, or do different vaccines require different facilities?
What raw materials (e.g. sterile eggs) are we also likely to need large quantities of, and should perhaps start sourcing now?

Some additional questions I have are:

Are there costs besides the obvious financial ones to building these facilities ahead of time? Are they competing for a resource we need more elsewhere?
Who does have the power and knowledge to make these facilities?
What are some historical equivalents?
Blog Post Day II Retrospective
by Daniel Kokotajlo — 2020-03-31T15:03:21.305Z

Saturday was Blog Post Day II. It wasn't as good as Blog Post Day. However, I'm still glad I did it.

To my knowledge six people wrote posts for Blog Post Day II. However, only one person (Ben Pace) finished on time and posted on LW. One other person (myself) took an extra two days to post, because I wanted to get feedback from some friends. Interestingly, both Ben and I didn't write the posts we originally intended to write; we gave up on those and switched to our Plan B's instead.

The remaining four people seem to have mostly made good progress, even finishing their posts, but they are either posting elsewhere (I don't know where) or saving up their drafts to post later as part of a sequence.

This is about 75% as much participation as we had last time. I'm thinking I should do these less frequently than every month. I'll do the next one in 2-3 months probably. If you want it to happen sooner, say so! These things exist to serve the public interest, so if you are interested, make it public.
What are some good / fun / informative treatises on good governance?
by james_t — 2020-03-31T12:06:48.237Z

Like many of us, I find both (1) an unusual amount of time on my hands to read and (2) a renewed interest in systems of governance which lead to competent collective decision-making.

I honestly haven't read much in this sphere. I was hoping for something which is to, say, political science as Thinking, Fast and Slow is to psychology and rationality: something that is interesting, gives me a good notion of some big problems, which is probably partly wrong, but remains nevertheless informative.

Although I'd be yet more interested which is to political science as, say, CFAR's handbook is to rationality: an attempt to both identify problems and provide means by which they could be solved. A kind of compressed, economically aware, game-theoretically involved, historically anecdoted look at ways of governing and trying to fix classical problems of malice and incompetence within government.

I know the question has a hopeless scope; any suggestions welcome.
What is the literature on effects of vaccines on the central nervous system?
by Rudi C — 2020-03-31T08:43:40.562Z

I saw some evidence from the recent covid-19 threads that some viruses permanently stay in the brain and cause some damage; This has made me wonder how effective (or alternatively unsafe) vaccines are (flu vaccines in particular).

Here is one study on h5n1 on mice:

https://www.jneurosci.org/content/32/5/1545.short
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs PS3 Review
by jefftk — 2020-03-31T02:20:02.864Z

Growing up we didn't have a video game system and I've never played
very much, but a friend found that working from home was not
compatible to having their PS3 around, so now we have theirs. I was
looking for games at a good level for our kids (

Lily, just turned six, and

Anna, just turned four)
and on the advice of

this
r/PS3 comment decided to get a used copy of

Cloudy
With A Chance of Meatballs. We've now played the first few
levels, so I wanted to write up my impressions. Here I am, someone
who doesn't know anything about video games writing about a game that
came out eleven years ago, whee!

The game doesn't bear much resemblance to the book,
except that there's large food everywhere and occasionally more falls
from the skies. You move around with a joystick, jump with a button,
and use whatever implement you happen to be holding with another
button. In our first time playing Lily understood each of the actions
right away, but had trouble combining them. Jumping onto something
involves both moving and jumping at the same time, which was tricky.
Even just our second time playing she had that better, but precise
movement is still at the edge of what she can do.

Anna understands how the controller works, but doesn't have good
enough command over her fingers to reliably get it to do what she
wants. She can make her character go in her chosen direction more
often than not, but if she's going for any sort of target she usually
overshoots it. Some getting frustrated and just pressing buttons
randomly. I think I should play a few more games with just Anna,
because when Lily's playing she often just watches her instead of
figuring out how to move her own character.

The game has a main character and a sidekick, but they can do all the
same things. The difference is that if the two go off in different
directions the camera follows the main character and the sidekick gets
teleported back into view. There's nothing the sidekick can do to
accidentally impede progress. This works very well for two kids where
one mostly understands the game and the other is tagging along.

The characters can die, but death doesn't matter very much. If you
fall in the water or spend too long walking through hot chili you fall
over dramatically but then pop back up again next to the other
player. If both players die at once you start a bit farther ...
What will happen to supply chains in the era of COVID-19?
by Elizabeth — 2020-03-31T01:57:14.587Z

Bucky and skybian both asked questions about how COVID-19 and associated shutdowns will affect supply chains. This is a question just to discuss that. I'm interested anything from "observations of very concrete things that have already happened in China" to "speculation about weird counterintuitive effects" to "here are some facts about supply chains in general".

Like the parent question, this is intended to provoke more babble than prune. But even the babbliest thing should be presented such that other people can build on it. So if you have an idea, please share the reasoning or data behind it as well.
How will this recession differ from the last two?
by Elizabeth — 2020-03-31T01:32:47.895Z

My model is that the last recession (2008) was essentially financial in nature- a bunch of wealth was destroyed on paper but we lost no productive capacity. The 2002 recession was similar- most of what happened was revealing that things were valueless, rather than destroying value.

I expect this recession to be different, because it stems from an actual decrease in the availability of labor (although it's still subject to demand spirals stemming from that). I'd expect it to have more in common with the 1972 oil embargo (on which I can find zero books), which was also a sudden decrease in the supply of a crucial production component. How will the supply shock nature change the consequences of the recession? Or am I wrong that this one will be different at all?

Note: These questions are intended to provoke more babble than prune. But even the babbliest thing should be presented such that other people can build on it. So if you have a prediction, please share the reasoning or data behind it as well.
What happens in a recession anyway?
by Elizabeth — 2020-03-31T01:16:27.526Z

I know the technical definition of a recession- a GDP contraction lasting at least two quarters- but do not have a satisfactory answer as to what happens.

A non-exhaustive list of the kinds of consequences I'm thinking of, sometimes including references, which are intended to be suggestive not definitive:

How do employment and wages change?

How does it vary by demographics and industry

Does life expectancy go up or down?

For which demographics?
Changes in suicide specifically?

Which good become cheaper? Which more expensive?
How does mobility change?
How do social norms change?

Church attendance?
Sexual and romantic norms?

Marriage rates? Divorce rates?

Child rearing patterns?
Three Kinds of Competitiveness
by Daniel Kokotajlo — 2020-03-31T01:00:56.196Z

Crossposted from AI Impacts

[Epistemic status: I wrote this for Blog Post Day II. Sorry it's late.]

In this post, I distinguish between three different kinds of competitiveness -- Performance, Cost, and Date -- and explain why I think these distinctions are worth the brainspace they occupy. For example, they help me introduce and discuss a problem for AI safety proposals having to do with aligned AIs being outcompeted by unaligned AIs.

Distinguishing three kinds of competitiveness and competition

A system is performance-competitive insofar as its ability to perform relevant tasks compares with competing systems. If it is better than any competing system at the relevant tasks, it is very performance-competitive. If it is almost as good as the best competing system, it is less performance-competitive.

(For AI in particular, “speed” “quality” and “collective” intelligence as Bostrom defines them all contribute to performance-competitiveness.)

A system is cost-competitive to the extent that it costs less to build and/or operate than its competitors. If it is more expensive, it is less cost-competitive, and if it is much more expensive, it is not at all cost-competitive.

A system is date-competitive to the extent that it can be created sooner (or not much later than) its competitors. If it can only be created after a prohibitive delay, it is not at all date-competitive.

A performance competition is a competition that performance-competitiveness helps you win. The more important performance-competitiveness is to winning, the more intense the performance competition is.

Likewise for cost and date competitions. Most competitions are all three types, to varying degrees. Some competitions are none of the types; e.g. a “competition” where the winner is chosen randomly.

I briefly searched the AI alignment forum for uses of the word “competitive.” It seems that when people talk about competitiveness of AI systems, they usually mean performance-competitiveness, but sometimes mean cost-competitiveness, and sometimes both at once. Meanwhile, I suspect that this important post can be summarized as “We should do prosaic AI alignment in case only prosaic AI is date-competitive.”

Putting these distinctions to work

First, I’ll sketch some different future scenarios. Then I’ll sketch h...
What marginal returns now?
by jmh — 2020-03-30T23:12:03.853Z

The returns to a lot of the discussion and analysis related to the outbreak certainly had both high potential and realized returns to that work.

Economics tells us we should expect diminishing marginal returns as additional efforts are applied.

I am being to wonder if the marginal returns now are positive or negative. If negative is that because we've just exhausted all the value to be created or is it due to misfocused efforts?
Openness Norms in AGI Development
by Sublation — 2020-03-30T19:02:41.956Z

1. Introduction

This post outlines two models from the social epistemology of science explaining the emergence of the a particular openness norm within the sciences, and then looks at how such models can be utilised to understand research groups trying to develop AGI. In the rest of the introduction, I will try to provide some motivation for this post. Sections 2 & 3 will briefly outline the two models I'm looking at. Section 4 more directly tries to interpret such models in the context of AGI development. Section 5 concludes.

The social epistemology of science is an interdisciplinary subfield at the intersection of philosophy and economics, which utilises formal models to understand the incentive structure of science. Here, I focus on two models from this area which try to explain the emergence of one particular openness norm: the so-called ‘communist norm’ in scientific research. The communist norm is a norm to share all ‘substantive findings’ with the scientific community. The existence of this norm seems to be taken for granted in this literature, although the best piece of evidence I can find for its existence comes from Louis et. al (2001), who find, in a sample of nearly 2,000 geneticists, that 91% agree that one should share all of one's relevant data. I nevertheless take it for granted in this post.

I wanted to see whether understanding the emergence of the communist norm in science could be important for understanding the development of AGI. In many ways, one might think the incentive structures around the development of AGI (will, or does) parallel the incentive structures of academic science. Thus, one might think that looking at the incentive structures behind scientific research are a good starting point for looking at the incentive structures surrounding the development of AGI.

As the communist norm emerged in science, one can imagine the emergence of a similar ‘communist norm’ across research groups involved in AGI development, where research groups share all relevant research with one another. In the context of AGI, one might worry that sharing all research would speed up development alongside safety, potentially leading to a suboptimal scenario where capabilities improve faster than safety. If the incentive structures surrounding the development of AGI are appropriately similar to the i...