trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Unpopularity of efficiency
by KatjaGrace — 2021-01-28T08:30:41.455Z

I feel like ‘efficiency’ is often scowled at. It is associated with factories and killing and commercialization, and people who are no fun. Things are openly criticized for being oriented toward efficiency. Nobody hopes to give their children an efficient childhood or asks for an efficient Valentine’s day, unless they want to get it over with. I expect wariness in listeners at talk of efficient charity.

This intrigues me, because in what I take to be its explicit definition, ‘efficiency’ is almost the definition of goodness manifest. The efficiency of a process is the rate with which it turns what you have into what you want.

I usually wince when people criticize efficiency, and think they are confused and should be criticizing the goal that is being pursued efficiently. Which does seem basically always true. For instance, if they are saying their childcare center cares only for efficiency, they probably mean that it is doing something like trying to minimize financial costs without breaking the law. Perhaps by fitting many children into a room with minimal oversight or attention to thriving. Here, I would complain that the childcare center cares only about its profits and not breaking the law. If it was fulfilling my own values efficiently, that would be awesome.

However I think there is more merit to efficiency’s poor reputation than I have given credit for. Because pursuing efficiency does seem to systematically lead to leaving things out. Which I suppose perhaps makes sense, for creatures who don’t explicitly know what their values are, and especially who have trouble quantifying them. If you set out to build an efficient daycare center, chances are that you don’t know exactly what makes a daycare center good, and are even less well equipped to put these things into numbers and build machinery to optimize those numbers. (This would be much like the AI alignment problem but where the AI you are trying to direct is made of your own explicit reasoning. It might also what Seeing Like a State is about, but I haven’t read it.) It’s still not clear to me why this would systematically turn out actively worse than if you didn’t aim for efficiency, or whether it does (my guess is that it usually doesn’t, but sometimes does, and is notable on those occasions). If efficiency has really earned its poor reputation, I wonder if I should be more worried about this.
Thoughts on the $GME situation
by Pranav Sharma — 2021-01-28T05:15:48.532Z

Note: None of this is investment advice, do your own due diligence.

Some scattered thoughts on the $GME situation:

1) A real life robinhood story is entertaining, which explains why this situation has captured so much attention

2) Melvin vs r/WSB doesn’t exist in a bubble. Hedge funds are in competition with each other, it is a stretch to think that another fund didn’t notice an overload of shorts but some disorganized memeing redditors did

3) It’s by extension even more improbable to think that the memeing redditors were able to coordinate and act quickly enough without tipping off hedge funds / hfts

4) A lot of the technicals being spread around about the situation are plain false, which reveals a lot of people are just parroting instead of knowing what their actually doing

5) As the situation grows more mainstream, more people buy in due to meme / FOMO / being enchanted by the narrative.

6) WSB consensus seems split between “sell high after friday spike”, and “hold long, gamestock is viable”. The former is just gambling, hoping their sell order goes through at the right price, the later is just disillusion.

7) The later you bought the stocks, the more you have to lose. That means mainstream > influencers > internet savy / twitter > reddit > early investors / wall street in terms of risk. Each tier depends on the next to not want to miss out and buy the stocks.

8) Going back to 6), what is the exit strategy of most of the r/WSB crowd? What is preventing a race to the bottom where everyone thinks “let me sell before the crash?”. Selling high is hard, especially in pure speculation.

—

If you made money, I am happy for you, but please try to cash out at least some of the earnings before the crash. I know the comradeship of “diamond hands” is romantic, but try to protect yourself before you get burned. Don’t think that group support will last when things go sour.
#4.4: The insurance underwriting process
by mingyuan — 2021-01-28T02:33:02.592Z

This is post 8 of 10 in my cryonics signup guide, and the last of five posts on life insurance. Underwriting is not a complex or interesting topic, but I'm including this brief writeup in the sequence for the sake of giving readers a complete picture of the life insurance process from start to finish.

What is underwriting?

In the world of life insurance, 'underwriting' basically just means 'approval'. The life insurance company needs to check your health to make sure that it's charging you the right amount.

To this end, they want to know your family health history, your own medical history, and any hazards you're regularly exposed to (e.g. smoking tobacco, extreme sports, workplace hazards). They may also want to know your income in order to determine whether you're able to afford the premiums.

Older and unhealthier people are at higher risk of dying soon, which means the insurance company will probably need to pay out their death benefit sooner. So assuming (as a toy model) that the company wants to extract the same amount of money from every client over the course of the client's lifetime, they will need to charge more money per month to old and unhealthy people due to the compressed timeline.

What to expect

If you're young and have no health problems, the underwriting process should be quick and easy – just a phone call and a few weeks of waiting. If not, they'll look at your medical records and possibly examine you in person, and there will be a couple additional weeks of waiting tacked on.

The process

Submitting an application

You'll have a face-to-face meeting or video call with your insurance agent where they send you some forms and watch you sign them. In order to apply, you'll need:

Your social security number
Your driver's license number
Your bank information
The name and SSN for a contingent beneficiary (the person or organization who receives the death benefit if your cryonics provider can't take it for any reason)

Phone interview

Once you've submitted your application, your insurance company (or a third party that the insurance company contracts with, such as ExamOne) should call you within two business days to conduct the phone interview. The call will take about 30 minutes. They will ask you about:

Your past and current medical history

Names, addresses, and phone numbers of physicians and hospitals from which you have received medical care within the las

...
Roundabout Strategy
by Nicholas / Heather Kross — 2021-01-28T00:44:00.743Z
Link: https://www.thinkingmuchbetter.com/main/roundabout-strategy/

Epistemic status: shilling for Big Concept

In the middle of the forest was a library. In the middle of the library was a book. The book’s ideas were usually not very good. At least, they were pretty debatable.

In the middle of the book was a gem.

Roundabout

The book’s author, Mark Spitznagel, synthesized a bunch of ideas from the history of strategy. He coined a newer name for an ancient concept: roundabout. No, not the polite word for "convoluted" or "that traffic thing". Here, this adjective means "pursuing indirect means, to better achieve your goals." A roundabout strategy is one using those means, rather than directly reaching for the ends.

If you’re inclined towards the ancient ways of Eastern philosophy, Spitznagel helpfully references more words for the concept:

"In the Dao, yin (unseen, hidden, passive) balances and is balanced by yang (seen, light, active). The antithesis to shi, the intermediate and circuitous, is li, the immediate and direct. As the "all or nothing" of a pitched battle, li seeks decisive victory in each and every engagement (the "false shortcuts" denounced by the Laozi)…"

"The forward-looking shi strategist takes the roundabout path toward subtle and even intangible intermediate steps, while the li strategist concentrates on the current step, the visible power, the direct, obvious route toward a tangible desired end, relying on force to decide the outcome of every battle. Simply stated, li goes for the immediate hit, while shi seeks first the positional advantage of the setup."

If this sounds hokey or weirdly trivial, an example will make the point clearer. Spitznagel’s canonical roundabout story is that of Henry Ford.

The Really Good Example of Henry Ford

In the early days of automobiles, a workshop of skilled workers would build each car one at a time. This is the direct, or li, way to get cars. To become the largest auto manufacturer, Ford picked a different route.

He built the River Rouge factory, optimized to build consistent-quality cars at a high speed. An assembly line took the task of car-building, split it into microsteps, and optimized each one. Cars were not merely assembled, but their component parts were built in-house, and the components of those components. This extended to the raw materials when Ford bought rubber farms and iron mines. The goal: produce cars faster (in the long run) and make them cheaper (on average...
Sunday Event: Connor Leahy on Moloch Reigns at SSC Online Meetup
by Ruby — 2021-01-27T22:31:12.145Z
Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/HksKrTavLxHckd5ma/connor-leahy-at-the-slatestarcodex-online-meetup

Linkpost due to weird filtering effects.*

Connor Leahy will speak on "Moloch Reigns: To Gather an Army or to Forge a Sword?," then will take questions.

Date: Sunday 31st January 2021
Time: 10:30 am – 1:00 pm PST
Where: Zoom for Lecture, Walled Garden for Social

PLEASE REGISTER TO RECEIVE AN INVITE: https://forms.gle/zxrR3N763bNsAkAS9

Abstract: Moloch, demon god of Inadequate Equilibria and Coordination Problems, still rules over human affairs, though his grasp has weakened significantly from the Malthusian Traps our ancestors were captured in.

From the rapidly strengthening steel of AI technology, we are promised to forge a weapon mighty enough to fight back his demonic influence more still, perhaps even slay the tyrant for good.

But how should we conduct this war? How can we win? How could we lose?

Our technology is giving us rapidly growing power to build the paradise we want. I will argue
- that the instinctive models of how to use this power are fundamentally broken
- that adding more people to the cause may be paradoxically a net negative (in certain circumstances)
- that some organizations are using the language of AI Safety to misdirect creative energies

I'll point out some hopeful directions I see towards the alignment problem.

Bio: Connor is a founding member of the loose AI research collective EleutherAI. They are most well known for their ongoing efforts to replicate GPT3. Recently, Connor has been pushing for more directly alignment relevant research at Eleuther, and invites anyone with ML or webdev experience to join. By day, he works as an AI Researcher at German startup Aleph Alpha.

*Meetups posted to groups get filtered out and a link post was the fastest way to give this visibility.
#4.3: Cryonics-friendly insurance agents
by mingyuan — 2021-01-27T21:13:37.488Z

This is post 7 of 10 in my cryonics signup guide, and the fourth of five posts on life insurance.

What is an insurance agent?

An insurance agent is someone who acts as an intermediary between insurance buyers and insurance companies. They help you with paperwork that would otherwise be a Kafkaesque nightmare, and they have the expertise to help you understand your options no matter what your situation.

Technically, not all of the people on this list are 'insurance agents' – some are 'insurance brokers' instead – but I'm just going to use the term 'agent' throughout because it would be clunky and confusing to write 'agent/broker' every time (Alcor and CI make the same elision).

Why do they need to know about cryonics?

I strongly recommend working with one of the people listed here if at all possible, because a randomly chosen life insurance agent will not be familiar with the specific companies and options most appropriate for cryonics patients. (I discussed some of the complexities of obtaining life insurance for cryonics in the previous post if you're curious.) In fact, most insurance agents – like most people in the world – will not be familiar with cryonics at all.

Costs

There is no upfront cost to working with the US-based insurance agents recommended here. Instead, they are paid a commission by the insurance company once you've bought a policy – which gives them incentive to upsell you, so be aware of that. (Note that a large majority of insurance agents in the US have this same payment structure; I don't know about other countries.)

Alcor-recommended insurance agents (USA)

Alcor's website

recommends

a few insurance agents who are used to helping Alcor clients. I contacted all three of their recommended agents in the US, for value of information. Below are my impressions of each of them.

Since you can back out of the life insurance process at any time before applying without having to pay anything, shopping around is low-risk. I encourage you to take the time to find someone you like working with – I found that it really makes a big difference. You could also help others out by calling up some of the guys I didn't talk to and writing your own review.

Rudi Hoffman

Background

Rudi is the agent nearly everyone I know has used. He's very aware of the rationalist community – he told me he's a long-time lurker on LessWrong and that we're the best source of 'marketin...
#4.2: Cryonics-friendly life insurance carriers
by mingyuan — 2021-01-27T21:05:06.735Z

This is post 6 of 10 in my cryonics signup guide, and the third of five posts on life insurance.

It's more difficult to obtain life insurance for cryonics than to obtain life insurance in general, because there's a very limited number of (well-rated) insurance companies in the US that are okay with approving insurance 'for a cryonics objective.' One reason for this is that in the case of cryonics, your life insurance policy is owned by a third party, which makes things complicated and risky for the insurance company.

According to my insurance broker, there are currently ~four insurance companies in the US that will underwrite for cryonics. These companies – in order of how likely you are to want to use them – are:

Kansas City Life
Nationwide
New York Life
Northwestern Mutual

Most people I know have used Kansas City Life (hereafter KCL), but there are situations in which Nationwide might be the right choice. Nonetheless, let's take a brief look at each of the options.

Kansas City Life (KCL)

Basically, I think everyone should go with KCL unless they have a specific reason not to. (If you are young and healthy, you probably have no reason not to.) Here's why:

Easy process – While the other carriers require additional legal work before approving a policy for cryonics, KCL will just approve you.
Multiple options – KCL offers term, whole life, UL, and IUL policies, so odds are good that they offer the thing that you want. (If you're dead set on GUL, you'll need to look elsewhere.)
Joint ownership – KCL is the only one of these companies that allows for joint ownership of your insurance policy. This is great if you're an Alcor patient, because you have to make Alcor an owner, but if Alcor is the sole owner, it's really inconvenient for you because the company can't tell you anything about the policy; all information has to go through Alcor. (It's irrelevant for CI patients).
Cryonics friendliness – While all of these companies are willing to underwrite for cryonics, I'm pretty sure KCL has done it more than any of the rest. Cryonics isn't weird or extra complicated for them to deal with.
Financial stability – According to Rudi Hoffman, KCL is debt-free, which is unusual for an insurance company. This makes it even more unlikely than average that the company will go under and your death benefit will fail to pay out.

I recognize that I sound like a freaking advertisement, but ...
Build Your Number Sense
by DirectedEvolution — 2021-01-27T21:01:27.803Z

Nobody has ever called math sensual. But it is!

Magnitude: The Difference Between 1 And 2

Take a look at these two numbers:

1 vs. 2

Are these small numbers or large numbers? Is the difference between them important?

If they represent the number of dates you and I have been on, that's a meaningful difference! If they're counting the pennies we have in our pockets, it's probably not.

What if we attach one more character?

1% vs. 2%

If these figures represent your chances of winning a free box of Girl Scout cookies in one of two different raffles, it's probably not worth stressing over. If they represent your chance of dying from a surgical operation at two different hospitals, then maybe it is. After all, your chances of dying are twice as high in the second hospital as they are in the first.

Notice that when I said twice as high just now, I wasn't, strictly speaking, telling you anything new. I was trying to make you feel different about the numbers 1 and 2. What if I did it like this:

1% vs. 2%

Or like this:

1% vs. 2%

And here is a picture of some happy flowers just to lighten the mood:

1 vs. 2

Notice how your response changes to these numbers depending on the way I visually represent it. Numbers are blessed and cursed by the way we write them. 1 and 2 are handy little figures, easy to manipulate with equations. But they also are about the same size on the page, written in a way that's disconnected from the physical things they're representing.

The difference may or may not be important. What's "small" and what's "large?" Well, it depends on your intuitions about the subject we're talking about. In fact, 1 and 2 don't inherently have a property of "bigness" or "littleness" in any physical sense. The number 1 can be an absolutely gigantic number.

So let's say it together, loud and clear:

1% is not a small number.

Larger Magnitudes

This dilemma gets even more serious the higher we go. At the time of writing, here's what a thousand, a million, and a billion dollars can get you.

For a thousand dollars, you can buy this 2002 Subaru Outback:

For a million dollars, you can buy Pointe Au Baril island in British Columbia:

For a billion dollars, you can buy the Miami Marlins:

The size of our numbers doesn't scale with their magnitude. This is an extremely useful feature. But the drawback is that it strips away the visceral component, the number sense. A billion is a thousand millions. Here's ...
A study on air purifiers and birth weight
by braces — 2021-01-27T20:36:22.063Z

Crossposted from Probably Definitely.

I was excited to see this

paper

on the effects of air purifiers on birth weight. There’s evidence that exposure to pollution during gestation can decrease

birth weight

, which is associated with worse outcomes

later on

. So if air purifiers clean the air, why not put them in the homes of expectant mothers?

The authors did just that. The setting was the city of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia (population 1.5m), where air pollution is horrible. Its average PM 2.5 concentration was

75 μg/m

3

in 2017. For comparison, in recent years Beijing had an average of 43 μg/m3, downtown Los Angeles (one of the worst places in the US) had 18 μg/m3, and the population-weighted

average

for the US was 8 μg/m3. The World Health Organization

recommends

an annual mean of no more than 10 μg/m3.

They enrolled 463 pregnant women at fewer than 18 weeks of gestation and who did not currently own an air purifier. Half of them got what I think is a

Coway AP-1512HH

or something like it based on the described modifications and the fact that Woongjin-Coway provided the devices:

Two features, an internal PM sensor and light that changes colour based on PM concentration, were disabled to avoid biasing participants' behavior. The units were set to operate only on the second-highest fan setting due to noise at the highest fan setting.

They wrote a

companion paper

checking if the purifiers actually worked, using a low-cost Dylos particle counter in the homes of participants. They found only a 29% reduction in PM 2.5, which is at the lower end of similar studies reviewed in that paper, which find reductions between 32 and 66%. Compliance was an issue. Participants apparently only used the purifiers for 64% of the study period, and some “reported consistently turning air cleaners off at night to minimize noise.” Despite this, the intervention reduced blood cadmium by 14%.

Back in the births paper, the headline result is that...we basically can’t tell. Babies in the purifier condition were 18g heavier, with a 95% confidence interval of -84g to 120g. We do not learn much from this, since that interval encompasses some pretty large effects.

But, the authors argue, it gets complicated. Unexpectedly, they found that preterm births were way more likely in the purifier group (24 vs. 10 in the control, p=.03)! It seems this was probably a fluke, since the alternative is that air purifi...
[AN #135]: Five properties of goal-directed systems
by Rohin Shah — 2021-01-27T18:10:04.648Z

Alignment Newsletter is a weekly publication with recent content relevant to AI alignment around the world. Find all Alignment Newsletter resources here. In particular, you can look through this spreadsheet of all summaries that have ever been in the newsletter.

Audio version here (may not be up yet).

Please note that while I work at DeepMind, this newsletter represents my personal views and not those of my employer.

HIGHLIGHTS

Literature Review on Goal-Directedness (Adam Shimi et al) (summarized by Rohin): This post extracts five different concepts that have been identified in the literature as properties of goal-directed systems:

1. Restricted space of goals: The space of goals should not be too expansive, since otherwise goal-directedness can become vacuous (AN #35) (e.g. if we allow arbitrary functions over world-histories with no additional assumptions).

2. Explainability: A system should be described as goal-directed when doing so improves our ability to explain the system’s behavior and predict what it will do.

3. Generalization: A goal-directed system should adapt its behavior in the face of changes to its environment, such that it continues to pursue its goal.

4. Far-sighted: A goal-directed system should consider the long-term consequences of its actions.

5. Efficient: The more goal-directed a system is, the more efficiently it should achieve its goal.

The concepts of goal-directedness, optimization, and agency seem to have significant overlap, but there are differences in the ways the terms are used.

The authors then compare multiple proposals on these criteria:

1. The intentional stance says that we should model a system as goal-directed when it helps us better explain the system’s behavior, performing well on explainability and generalization. It could easily be extended to include far-sightedness as well. A more efficient system for some goal will be easier to explain via the intentional stance, so it does well on that criterion too. And not every possible function can be a goal, since many are very complicated and thus would not be better explanations of behavior. However, the biggest issue is that the intentional stance cannot be easily formalized.

2. One possible formalization of the intentional stance is to say that a system is goal-directed when we can better explain the system’s behavior as maximizi...