trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Help your rivals when they are numerous
by lsusr — 2021-01-22T20:51:46.107Z

Suppose you are playing a game of chess. Chess is a zero-sum bipolar game. Anything your opponent wins is something you lose, and vice versa. If a trade becomes available then you should take if the benefit to you is greater than the benefit to your opponent. If the benefit to your opponent is greater than the benefit to you then you should not take the trade.

Suppose you're playing a 4-player game of Catan. You care about your rank. That is, you care about whether you get 1st place, 2nd place, 3rd place or 4th place. Suppose an opponent offers you a trade that generates 3 non-zero-sum utilons between you and her. She offers to keep 2 utilons for herself and give you 1 utilon. You cannot negotiate. You have no reputation to uphold. Should you accept the trade?

Generally-speaking, yes.

Explanation

If you had one opponent then you should not accept her trade. If you had two opponents then the trade would neither harm nor hurt you on average. In this scenario, you have three opponents. The average benefit to a single opponent is only 2utilons3=23utilons which is less that the gain to yourself. You gain a 13utilon edge against your average opponent.

To put this another way, if you repeated the trade with each of your three opponents then each of them would gain 2 utilons while you gained a total of 3 utilons. You would land 1 utilon ahead.

Let's call the benefit to you y, the benefit to a single opponent o and the benefit to the average opponent ¯o. You should make a trade if y>¯o.

y>¯o>on

The more opponents you have, the more advantageous is for your to accept win-win trades with a single opponent. In the limit case n→∞, you can ignore the benefits to individual opponents entirely and accept every trade that benefits you at all. Free trade between a large number of independent actors turns globally zero-sum games into locally non-zero-sum games.

When everyone is a rival, nobody is.

Second-Order Approximation

The above analysis treats opponents as all equal. Opponents are not all equal. If an opponent is far behind with little chance of catching up then you can accept higher o for equivalent y. The same goes for an opponent far ahead of you.
How good are our mouse models (psychology, biology, medicine, etc.), ignoring translation into humans, just in terms of understanding mice? (Same question for drosophila.)
by Ruby — 2021-01-22T20:45:20.469Z

I've been thinking about why some domains have reached more definite, mathematized, and law-like models than others, e.g. the hard sciences of physics and chemistry vs the soft sciences of psychology and political science.
One hypothesis is that it's just much easier to experiment on, say, pendulums than on humans. Experimenting on humans is slow, it's hard to create very controlled conditions, IRB's severely limit what you can do. Theoretically, if I could experiment on a large number of humans for long periods of time without constraints on what I could do (something like Aperture Science?), then I maybe could harden the soft sciences.
A piece of evidence on this would be how good are our mouse models? There are substantially fewer restrictions on mice experiments and resultantly we do a lot of experiments on them (hence the "IN MICE" that ought to be appended to so many scientific result headlines). Maybe translation into humans is poor, and we're generally focused on humans so we feel like there's a lot we don't know, but if you just asked about how well we understood mice, actually we have a lot of really solid knowledge about psychology, metabolism, immune function, political economy, etc.
Can anyone familiar with mouse models in any domain comment on how good the mouse models are vs human models? 1x as good, 5x, 20x? Good = really solid predictions, we feel like we know what's going on, etc.
For that matter, the same question could be asked for drosophila.
Poll: Which variables are most strategically relevant?
by Daniel Kokotajlo — 2021-01-22T17:17:32.717Z

Which variables are most important for predicting and influencing how AI goes?

Here are some examples:

Timelines: “When will crazy AI stuff start to happen?”

Alignment tax

: “How much more difficult will it be to create an aligned AI vs an unaligned AI when it becomes possible to create powerful AI?

Homogeneity

: "Will transformative AI systems be trained/created all in the same way?"
Unipolar / Multipolar: "Will transformative AI systems be controlled by one organization or many?"

Takeoff speeds:

"Will takeoff be fast or slow (or hard or soft, etc.)?"

We made this question to crowd-source more entries for our list, along with operationalizations and judgments of relative importance. This is the first step of a larger project.

Instructions:

Answers should be variables that are importantly different from the previous answers. It’s OK if there’s some overlap or correlation. If your variable is too similar to a previous answer, instead of making a new answer, comment on the previous answer with your preferred version. We leave it to your judgment to decide how similar is too similar.
Good operationalizations are important. If you can give one or more as part of your answer, great! If you can’t, don’t let that stop you from answering anyway. If you have a good operationalization for someone’s variable, add your operationalization as a comment to that variable.
Upvote variables that you think are important, and strong-upvote variables that you think are very important. You can also downvote variables that you think are unimportant or overrated.
The relevant sense of importance is importance for predicting and influencing how AI goes. For example, “Will AIs in the long-term future be aligned?” is important in some sense, but not that helpful to think about, so shouldn’t score highly here.
Is there an academic consensus around Rent Control?
by edoarad — 2021-01-22T16:18:27.169Z

Rent control is a type of policy where a maximum cap is put on what a landlord may charge tenants.

I've seen two sources that suggest that there is an (edit: academic economists) consensus against rent control:

A 2009 review.
81% of economists agree against rent control.

I'm not sure how much faith to put in these, and how non-controversial this topic is in practice (perhaps there are important subcases where it is a good policy).

Are there strong claims for rent control policies in relevant cases that are supported by a non-trivial amount of economists?

(Yonatan Cale thinks that there is a consensus against rent control. Help me prove him wrong and give him Bayes points!)
Bayesian Charity
by Wes F — 2021-01-22T14:49:59.517Z

Cross-posted from Living Within Reason

In philosophy, the Principle of Charity is a technique in which you evaluate your opponent’s position as if it made the most amount of sense possible given the wording of the argument. That is, if you could interpret your opponent’s argument in multiple ways, you would go for the most reasonable version.

– UnclGhost

There is a corollary to the Principle of Charity which I’m calling Bayesian Charity. It says that, in general, you should interpret your opponent’s wording to be advocating the most popular position.

This is implied by Bayes Theorem. Your prior for whether someone believes something unpopular should be related to its popularity. Since an unpopular belief, by definition, has few believers, your prior for whether someone believes an unpopular position should be lower the less popular the position is, and you should update your prior based on how clear their statement was.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If someone said something to me suggesting that the moon landing was real, I wouldn’t think twice about it. Most people believe the moon landing was real. However, if someone said something suggesting that the US has an underground base on Mars, I’m going to ask for clarification.

Context matters, of course. If you’re at a flat Earther convention, your prior should be much higher that any random person believes in a flat Earth. But in general, if someone says something that almost no one believes, it’s probably a good idea to confirm you understood what they meant before assuming they hold such a fringe opinion.
Reflections on "Psycho-Pass"
by lsusr — 2021-01-22T09:41:44.479Z

Psycho-Pass takes place in a cyberpunk dystopia ruled by a totalitarian AI dictator. Cyberpunk stories are often about evading the law. What makes Psycho-Pass special is its protagonist is a police officer.

Tsunemori Akane's job is to suppress crime. This involves suppressing violent criminals, which is a good thing. The AI's surveillance state makes it possible to suppress crime before it happens, which is even better. Potential criminals often include punks, radicals, gays, artists, musicians, visionaries and detectives which is…

Wait a minute.

SPOILERS AHEAD.

If Psycho-Pass was written in America then Tsunemori's character arc would be a journey of disillusion. She would be commanded to do something unethical. Tsunemori would refuse. Her valiant act of disobedience would instigate a cascade of disorder leading to a revolution and the eventual overthrow of the oppressive system.

Society would collapse. Millions of people would starve off-camera. Japan would plunge into civil war. Violence would permeate all corners of society.

Tsunemori had the exam scores to do anything. She chose to be a low-paid low-prestige Inspector of the Public Safety Bureau.

The law doesn't protect people. People protect the law. People have always detested evil and sought out a righteous way of living. Their feelings–the accumulation of those peoples feelings–are the law.

―Tsunemori Akane

Tsunemori Akane's nemesis equips potential criminals with the tools to indulge their desire to commit evil against others.

I want to see the splendor of people's souls.

―Makishima Shougo

Makishima doesn't care about evil or freedom per se. What he really wants to know is what do you care about more than anything else in the world? What would you sacrifice your friends, your society and your morality for?

Tsunemori values the rule of law above all else. Makishima values his individual humanity.

Psycho-Pass doesn't strawman crime by conflating rule of law with freedom, fairness or democracy. In Psycho-Pass, the authorities routinely violate their own laws. The system is corrupt to the core.

Where Psycho-Pass really shines is the scene where Tsunemori is forced choose between law and consequentialism. Makishima contrives things such that Tsunemori wouldn't even have to technically break the law. All she would have to do is break protocol. Tsunemori chooses instead to sacrifice the thing she loves most.

Ts...
What if we all just stayed at home and didn’t get covid for two weeks?
by KatjaGrace — 2021-01-22T09:10:22.517Z

I keep thinking about how if at any point we were all able to actually quarantine for two weeks1 at the same time, the pandemic would be over.

Like, if instead of everyone being more or less cautious over a year, we all agreed on single a two week period to hard quarantine. With plenty of warning, so that people had time to stock up on groceries and do anything important ahead of time. And with massive financial redistribution in advance, so that everyone could afford two weeks without work. And with some planning to equip the few essential-every-week-without-delay workers (e.g. nurses, people keeping the power on) with unsustainably excessive PPE.

This wouldn’t require less total risky activity. If we just managed to move all of the risky activity from one fortnight to the one before it, then that would destroy the virus (and everyone could do as many previously risky activities as they liked in the following fortnight!). It could be kind of like the Christmas week except twice as long and the government would pay most people to stay at home and watch movies or play games or whatever. Maybe the TV channels and celebrities could cooperate and try to put together an especially entertaining lineup.

How unrealistic is this? It sounds pretty unrealistic, but what goes wrong?

Some possible things:

To actually coordinate that many people, you would need to have serious policing—beyond what is an acceptable alternative to a year-long pandemic—or serious buy-in—beyond what is possible in any normal place of more than ten people.

Even if you could basically coordinate that many people, you would fail in a few places. And if you fail anywhere, then the disease will gradually build back up.

You can’t just have everyone buy groceries for a given fortnight at some point in the preceding months, because there aren’t enough groceries in warehouses or enough grocery producers able to spin up extra weeks of grocery production on short notice (I am especially unsure whether this is true).

The people who do really have to work are too many to over-prepare well for it in a month

It would cost really a lot of money

It would need to be longer than two weeks if you wanted to actually crush the disease, because some people are probably infectious for abnormally long times.

You would need everyone not living alone to stay away from those they live with, to avoid spreading

...
On the nature of purpose 
by Nora_Ammann — 2021-01-22T08:30:59.608Z

[cross-posted from my blog]

Introduction

Is the concept of purposes, and more generally teleological accounts of behaviour, to be banished from the field of biology?

For many years - essentially since the idea of Darwinian natural selection has started to be properly understood and integrated into the intellectual fabric of the field -, the consensus answer to this questions among biology scholars was “yes”. Much more recently, however, interest in this question has re-sparked - notably driven by voices that contradict that former consensus.

This is the context in which

this letter exchange

between the philosophers Alex Rosenberg and Daniel Dennett is taking place. What is the nature of "purposes"? Are they real? But mostly, what would it even mean for them to be?

In the following, I will provide a summary and discussion of what I consider the key points and lines of disagreements between the two. Quotes, if not specified otherwise, are taken from the letter exchange.

Rosenberg’s crux

Rosenberg and Dennett agree on large parts of their respective worldviews. They both share a "disenchanted" naturalist's view - they believe that reality is (nothing but) causal and (in principle) explainable. They subscribe to the narrative of reductionism which acclaims how scientific progress emancipated, first, the world of physics, and later the chemical and biological one, from metaphysical beliefs. Through Darwin, we have come to understand the fundamental drivers of life as we know it - variation and natural selection.

But despite their shared epistemic foundation, Rosenberg suspects a fundamental difference in their views concerning the nature of purpose. Rosenberg - contrary to Dennett - sees a necessity for science (and scientists) to disabuse themselves, entirely, from any anthropocentric speech of purpose and meaning. Anyone who considers the use of the “intentional stance” as justified, so Rosenberg, would have to reconcile the following:

What is the mechanism by which Darwinian natural selection turns reasons (tracked by the individual as purpose, meaning, beliefs and intentions) into causes (affecting the material world)?

Rosenberg, of course, doesn't deny that humans - what he refers to as

Gregorian creatures

shaped by biological as well as cultural evolution - experience higher-level properties like e...
Appendices to cryonics signup sequence
by mingyuan — 2021-01-22T06:40:20.700Z

This post is for reference and is not intended to stand alone. It may be periodically updated with additional appendices.

Appendix A: Cryonics and x-risk timelines

Over the past few years, some people have updated toward pretty short AGI timelines. If your timelines are really short, then maybe you shouldn't sign up for cryonics, because the singularity – good or bad – is overwhelmingly likely to happen before you biologically die. But I bet you don't really believe that. You could already have terminal cancer and not know it, or you could get hit by a car next year. If the singularity is positive and results in the revival of those who got cryopreserved before it happened, then even if you expect the singularity in like, two years, you really should sign up without delay if there's any chance you might die before then (spoiler alert: there is).

Alternatively, you might think that if timelines are longer than your lifespan it will be because of some specific future sign (like a clear AI winter or a world war), and you think it's a better tradeoff to buy cryonics exactly when that sign shows up.

This particular point seemed like an important one to flag, since this is one of the big ways a lot of rationalists' models have changed since those older cryonics posts came out, and we don't want people to make decisions wrongly based on cached thoughts.

Appendix B: Non life insurance payment options

Alcor

In addition to life insurance, Alcor's membership application lists (1) trust, (2) prepayment, (3) annuity, and (4) other means. These all fall under the umbrella of 'self-funding.' CI lets you pay in these ways as well.

Trust

The

Alcor Standard Trust

"has been fully approved by Alcor ... and is therefore immediately available in its existing format and content. [It] is designed to be entirely autonomous from a member’s estate, to provide secure Alcor membership funding."

You can fund a trust with stocks, treasury bonds, life insurance, federally insured money market funds, cash, or other assets approved by Alcor. Linda Chamberlain (Co-Founder of Alcor) is the head of the Trust Department and can guide you through the Trust Approval Process.

Update 9/2022: A commenter reports:

I just contacted Alcor about paying with a trust and they wrote back "Alcor does not accept Cryopreservation Funding Trusts at this time." It seems like life insurance and prepayment are the

...
[Book Review] The Chrysanthemum and the Sword
by lsusr — 2021-01-22T06:29:22.131Z

Japan was the only non-Western[1] country to build an industrial empire before the establishment of the liberal world order. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture by Ruth Benedict is thus a real-world case study of what culture could have beenen in a counterfactual history where the Industrial Revolution happened without Christianity, the Enlightenment and democracy.

Many books have been written about Imperial Japan. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is exceptional.

It was written in 1946[2], before the United States Westernized Japan. Meiji Japan still existed when The Chrysanthemum and the Sword was published.

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword was written for the US State Office of War Information. It is more goal-oriented than most histories and ethnographies. This isn't a book about appreciating a beautiful culture. It is an introductory textbook for reengineering an entire society.

The most interesting thing about The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is its philosophy. Western philosophy has Christian roots. Christianity is monotheistic. Monotheism is built around the idea of one truth. Singular truth is useful in the domain of science because the laws of physics are universal.

Western philosophers often take it for granted that ethics, custom and philosophy ought to be singular too. Daoist philosophy doesn't. In traditional Japan, acting differently in different contexts was a sign of refinement. Inscrutability was a virtue.

There were other things which don't make sense in a Western context but which do make sense in an Eastern context. For example, Japanese soldiers were notorious for the savagery of their attacks on US forces. However, when captured, Japanese prisoners of war were well-behaved and followed the orders of their prison guards. This pair of behaviors is not what you would expect from the same American prisoner of war in 1945.

Though I occasionally discuss Daoism with Taiwanese people, it is rare for me to have a complex productive conversation about Daoist ideas with white people. There isn't enough shared cultural context. If you want to read a good book on traditional Eastern culture written in a modern Western style then I recommend The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.

I include Russia in "Western". ↩︎

For reference, Japan surrendered to the Allies on August 15, 1945. ↩︎
A Simple Ethics Model
by Ideopunk — 2021-01-22T02:56:43.713Z

[Cross-posted from my soon-to-be-defunct blog]
Disclaimer #1: I am probably reinventing the wheel. However, reinventing the wheel is good.

Disclaimer #2: This post probably fundamentally misunderstands non-consequentialists.

I’ve been thinking about normative ethics lately. There are three major schools. Consequentialism, deontology (“rule-based morality”), and virtue ethics. These are typically said to be in opposition, but I think it’s simple for consequentialism to subsume the other two. Let me know if you find this framework helpful, or if it’s missing something important.

Consequences

Consequentialism at its simplest looks like this: perform the action that achieves the best consequences.

Unfortunately, predicting consequences is really hard. It’s even harder to predict nth-order consequences. We often default to only considering immediate consequences because they’re easier to calculate and predict. However, long-term consequences are typically much more important. Thus, approaching decisions as though we can calculate the best consequences will often lead to worse decisions.

Not only that, we have complicated values we attempt to satisfy. While calculating is great when values are relatively simply (QALYs), it’s often infeasible within our common constraints (especially time: “Do you want this job or not?”)

So even though we’re consequentialists, it’s hard to function consequentially. This isn’t a blow to consequentialism though, it’s a sign that our model of human decision-making is missing something.

Rules

The alternative to brute calculation is the use of rules or heuristics. Not eating meat is simpler (meaning: easier, faster, and cheaper) than calculating the negative utility of each meal and finding the equilibrium between personal pleasure and animal suffering.

Rules also have the benefit of counteracting biases and poor calculation capability. For example, people make worse decisions while drunk. Having a rule like “I never drive drunk” routes around the risk of calculating utility badly.

When time and processing power permit, calculations allow for superior decisions. When they don’t permit, rules allow for superior decisions.

Virtues

Where do virtue ethics come in? Consider virtues like courage, humility, and temperance. These are habits of action. They’re important for three reasons:

The decision-making

...
[Link] Still Alive - Astral Codex Ten
by jimrandomh — 2021-01-21T23:20:03.782Z
Link: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/still-alive

I.

This was a triumph
I'm making a note here, huge success

No, seriously, it was awful. I deleted my blog of 1,557 posts. I wanted to protect my privacy, but I ended up with articles about me in New Yorker, Reason, and The Daily Beast. I wanted to protect my anonymity, but I Streisand-Effected myself, and a bunch of trolls went around posting my real name everywhere they could find. I wanted to avoid losing my day job, but ended up quitting so they wouldn't be affected by the fallout. I lost a five-digit sum in advertising and Patreon fees. I accidentally sent about three hundred emails to each of five thousand people in the process of trying to put my blog back up.

I had, not to mince words about it, a really weird year.

The first post on Scott Alexander's new blog on Substack, Astral Codex Ten.