trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Powerless Moral Evaluation
by SocratesDissatisfied — 2020-10-23T10:44:48.599Z

[Disclaimer: this is my first post on Less Wrong. Comments and criticism appreciated, but constructive criticism especially appreciated. The below is a reactionary argument/a reactionary conceptual frame, though I would not describe myself as a reactionary.]

One prominent way to assess the moral character of others, is to look at their actions. In doing so, people can easily overlook the fact that actions are a product not merely of intention (desire to act), but also of power (capacity to act). Due to certain features of moral psychology, this tends to lead them to overestimate the vice of the powerful, and underestimate the vice of the powerless by comparison. For ease of reference, I call this error Powerless Moral Evaluation (“PME”).

Firstly, it is important to establish that, whilst intention it intimately linked to moral character, power is prima facie unconnected to it. To see this, consider elevating a morally virtuous person to a position of great power and influence, such as the Presidency of the United States (this is difficult to imagine I know). We would not think that this would immediately render our moral paragon vicious (though of course we could hypothesise that power will corrupt his moral character over time, it would do so by changing his intentions, rather than through the mere fact of possession). Conversely, depriving the power of a morally vicious individual does not intuitively cause him to lose his moral vice (if Stalin had been imprisoned just before he could order the expansion of the gulags, he would still have been a terrible man). So whilst power does change your capacity to act, and your actions, it does not ipso facto change your moral character.

Consequently, when people judge others' moral character by their actions, without controlling for the effect of power on those actions, they will systematically overestimate the magnitude of the moral character of the powerful. Powerful and virtuous people, who do many good things, will have their virtue overestimated, compared to powerless virtuous people, who lack the opportunity to do good things. Likewise, powerful and vicious people, who do many bad things, will have their vice overestimated, compared to powerless vicious people, who lack the opportunity to do bad things.

In practice, however, the effect of PME is not neutral between vice and virtue. Though it may m...
The bads of ads
by KatjaGrace — 2020-10-23T05:50:00.634Z

In London at the start of the year, perhaps there was more advertising than there usually is in my life, because I found its presence disgusting and upsetting. Could I not use public transport without having my mind intruded upon continually by trite performative questions?

Sometimes I fantasize about a future where stealing someone’s attention to suggest for the fourteenth time that they watch your awful-looking play is rightly looked upon as akin to picking their pocket.

Stepping back, advertising is widely found to be a distasteful activity. But I think it is helpful to distinguish the different unpleasant flavors potentially involved (and often not involved—there is good advertising):

1. Mind manipulation: Advertising is famous for uncooperatively manipulating people’s beliefs and values in whatever way makes them more likely to pay money somehow. For instance, deceptively encouraging the belief that everyone uses a certain product, or trying to spark unwanted wants.

2. Zero-sumness: To the extent advertising is aimed at raising the name recognition and thus market share of one product over its similar rivals, it is zero or negative sum: burning effort on both sides and the attention of the customer for no overall value.

3. Theft of a precious thing: Attention is arguably one of the best things you have, and its protection arguably worthy of great effort. In cases where it is vulnerable—for instance because you are outside and so do not personally control everything you might look at or hear—advertising is the shameless snatching of it. This might be naively done, in the same way that a person may naively steal silverware assuming that it is theirs to take because nothing is stopping them.

4. Cultural poison: Culture and the common consciousness are an organic dance of the multitude of voices and experiences in society. In the name of advertising, huge amounts of effort and money flow into amplifying fake voices, designed to warp perceptions–and therefore the shared world–to ready them for exploitation. Advertising can be a large fraction of the voices a person hears. It can draw social creatures into its thin world. And in this way, it goes beyond manipulating the minds of those who listen to it. Through those minds it can warp the whole shared world, even for those who don’t listen firsthand. Advertising shifts your conception of what you can do,...
Should we use qualifiers in speech?
by Adam Zerner — 2020-10-23T04:46:10.075Z

Consider

From what I understand, technological progress happens exponentially.

vs.

Technological progress happens exponentially.

The difference is the "from what I understand" part. Other examples of such qualifiers include:

It seems to me
My impression is that
I could be wrong, but
Perhaps
Probably

Using such qualifiers may be annoying. It is probably easier and quicker to just skip them. It also might add "fluff" and distract from the main point.

On the other hand, I worry that omitting them would lead to overconfidence. If you say "X is true" enough times instead of "It seems to me that X is true; I'm pretty confident but not super confident", it seems likely that you'd develop a nontrivial overconfidence in X.

Of course, the answer to "Should we use qualifiers in speech?" is almost certainly, "It depends". But despite that, it still seems like it'd be pretty useful to figure out what the "default" or "your go-to" should be.

Personally I lean pretty strongly towards using them when doing intellectual things, like here on LessWrong. But in everyday life I lean towards avoiding them, because it goes against norms, is a little awkward, and doesn't have nearly as big a benefit as when you're doing intellectual things.
Finding Leverage: System Thinking & Change Management
by JASmithy — 2020-10-22T23:31:07.942Z

Change Management is an enormous field. Both academically and in terms of industry, the study and practice of transformation within organisations is vast. Many schools of thought exist as to why transformations succeed or fail. Academics unpack the data and devise theories, practitioners spot patterns over the course of their career and provide consulting advice on how to bring about change successfully. However, despite fields of academic study devoted to change management, and millions of dollars spent annually on business transformation, there is no definitive theory or set of principles to guide a company undergoing change.

A brief search reveals suggestions for: The 4 Pillars of Successful Change Implementation; The Three Components of Organisational Change; The 5 Key Elements for Successful Change Management; Changing Change Management; and more.

Suggestions as to the critical components that lead to a successful organisational change abound: Clear Vision, Accountability, Accessibility, Alignment; or maybe it's Planning, Leadership, and Maintenance of Change; but could it be Communication, Engagement, and Enrolment?

All of these concepts no doubt contribute to making organisational change a success. It seems unlikely that any project could succeed without a clear vision or communication, planning or leadership. What appears to be lacking though, is a cohesive way of thinking about organisational transformation and change management holistically. Transformation doesn't happen person by person, or department by department. It succeeds when all of the interconnected and interdependent relationships between individuals, teams, departments, and business units all work as a synergistic whole. In other words, it succeeds when all of the elements within the system work as a collective unit.

One useful way to think about the interconnected relationships between elements is with system thinking. Applying a system thinking lens to organisational transformation enables a change leader to think through not just the key pillars of change, or the human components of an organisation, but to encapsulate all of the different ways that the elements within the system interrelate to form the whole company.

What is System Thinking?

System thinking and systems theory seeks to understand the relationships between structure and behaviour. Understanding how systems work allows ...
The Trouble With Babbles
by DirectedEvolution — 2020-10-22T21:31:23.260Z

I haven't yet participated in any of our babble challenges, even though I think they're a good idea. My reason is that they are ambiguous and prone to Goodhart's law. If the challenge is to list 50 ways of getting a golf ball to the moon, no matter how silly, I could do this:

Carry it while jumping to the moon after getting really buff
Carry it while jumping to the moon with rocket boots
Carry it while jumping to the moon from a high platform
Carry it while jumping to the moon from a high ladder
Carry it while jumping to the moon from the top of a human pyramid

You can see that I'm optimizing here for getting to 50 by proposing minor variations on the same core idea. The intention of babble is to get you out of your mental ruts and past your blockages. It's not clear that this exercise on its own helps you do that very much. Yet if I said to myself "no more 'jumping' entries," I'd be pruning.

Can we solve this problem, while keeping the spirit of the exercise (which itself is a commendable example of babble)?

Let me babble a few ideas:

Every 20 babbles, go back and categorize your ideas. Make the cutoff "At least 50 babbles, and 10 categories."
Try problems in a conjecture + counter-example format. Topics that might work well here are social, philosophical, or aesthetic.
Choose problems that are not technical problems (getting an object to the moon), but personal/social problems ("babble 50 ways to incentivize better teaching").
Allow respondents to choose their own problem.
Babble baseball. One team's "at bat" and they have to babble ideas. The other team's "in the field" and they have to categorize (or sub-categorize) the ideas. Then they have to propose their own ideas within each category. The "at bat" team has a 1-minute head start to list some ideas, which they publish all at once. They then continue publishing new ideas while the "in the field" team goes to work. The trick is that the "at bat" team has to publish ideas sequentially - i.e. "batter 1" has to publish an idea before "batter 2", "batter 2" before "batter 3" and so on. Only when the last "batter" has published an idea does "batter 1" get to go again. By contrast, the "in the field" team gets to work all at once.

Please add your own babbles in the comments!
Changing the size of Congress
by jefftk — 2020-10-22T20:50:05.879Z

Imagine the Big State Party was popular in large states while the
Small State Party was popular in small states. The Senate is
per-state representation, which gives a large advantage to the Small
State Party. The House is primarily proportional to population,
except that every state constitutionally gets at least one
Representative, so this still advantages the Small State Party a bit,
but not by nearly as much. The President is elected by the Electoral
College, and there's one vote for each Senator and Representative,
plus three for DC. [1] This means that the balance of the Presidential
election is somewhere between those of the Senate and House.

Now imagine that Small State is in a position where they control both
houses on the presidency: can they turn a temporary advantage into a
longer-term advantage by changing the size of the House?

First, the size
of Congress is set by federal law so they are in a position to
change it. The only constitutional restrictions or is that it needs to
be proportional to population and that every state needs to get at
least one representative. [2] If you shrink Congress until there are
only 50 seats, one for every state, then it advantages the Small State
Party by as much as the Senate does, while if you grow it
substantially the minimum single Representative that each state gets
starts to matter less.

The Small State party could get a 226 to 209 (+17/435, +4%) majority
in Congress by getting a majority in the 42 smallest states. This
requires about 26% of voters. With that level of support, they would
easily take the Senate and Presidency. If they shrunk Congress to 50
seats, this would bring their House majority to 42 to 8 (+34/435,
+68%). Now, this is probably too much of a change for the Supreme
Court to accept within the meaning of "according to their respective
Numbers", but even at 100 seats their majority would be 59 to 41,
(+18/100, +36%):

While the Republican party is moderately more popular in smaller
states, the current situation in the US is much less dramatic than the
Small State / Big State divide above. We can label states as "Red" or
"Blue" according to the Cook
PVI [3] and see what this would look like with our actual
political situation. This is throwing away a bunch of information,
since I'm turning a nice range into a binary, but it makes the
analysis much simpler. I'm al...
Should I prefer to get a tax refund, or not to?
by MichaelDickens — 2020-10-22T20:21:05.073Z

I'm confused about a decision theory problem related to taxes.

If I get a large tax refund, that means I over-paid taxes earlier in the year. So it's better overall if I get no refund.

But I already know how much money I currently have, and whether I overpaid my taxes in the past doesn't change that. If I get a large refund, I will have strictly more money than if I hadn't gotten a refund. So it's better if I get a refund.

These arguments can't both be correct. I suspect the second one is wrong, and it's preferable to get no refund, but it's not clear to me why.
An Open Letter On Love
by nroman — 2020-10-22T20:21:02.714Z

This post originated as an open letter to my own family this past June, later republished on a political community blog. It was born out of a dissatisfaction with how Love is popularly conceived of, as a vague positive force one pays lip service to, rather than a concrete and potent phenomenon. Religious texts are cited, but are not in conflict with secular wisdom on the matter. Not especially original.

[Epistemic Status: Quotes of Ancient Wisdom + heartfelt speculation = ???]

Seneca the Younger wrote in a moral letter to Lucius Annaeus:

If you ask how one can make oneself a friend quickly, I will tell you, provided we are agreed that I may pay my debt at once and square the account, so far as this letter is concerned.

Hecato, says: “I can show you a philtre, compounded without drugs, herbs, or any witch’s incantation: ‘If you would be loved, love.'”

...

He who regards himself only, and enters upon friendships for this reason, reckons wrongly. The end will be like the beginning: he has made friends with one who might assist him out of bondage; at the first rattle of the chain such a friend will desert him.

...

For what purpose, then, do I make a man my friend?

In order to have someone for whom I may die, whom I may follow into exile, against whose death I may stake my own life, and pay the pledge, too. The friendship which you portray is a bargain and not a friendship; it regards convenience only, and looks to the results. Beyond question the feeling of a lover has in it something akin to friendship; one might call it friendship run mad. But, though this is true, does anyone love for the sake of gain, or promotion, or renown?

Pure love, careless of all other things, kindles the soul with desire for the beautiful object, not without the hope of a return of the affection.

CS Lewis comments further in earnest:

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself… it has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

And Lewis writes in the Screwtape Letters (Chapter 18) as a literal devil's advocate:

The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specially, that one self is not another self. My good is my good and your good is yours. What one gains another loses. Even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other objects fr

...
Effective Epidemiology
by Mike Harris — 2020-10-22T19:45:42.742Z

Introduction:

In my previous article I discussed some of the basic theories about how COVID spreads and how it can be effectively fought.
This article does not require having read that article but will refer to the homogenous SEIR model and heterogenous models.

This article will argue that our current strategy of complete suppression is infeasible and not justifiable. Instead we need to adapt our strategy and find a sustainable level of infections and lockdown restrictions until we have an effective vaccine.

Why We Need a New Strategy:

The success of Asian countries in quickly suppressing COVID has led to the hope that a similar strategy could work elsewhere. After a short and sharp lockdown, we could reopen with minimal restrictions and rely on testing + tracing to keep our cases low.

In the US and Europe this strategy is not working. This is either because we have implemented the strategy poorly, or because it was never feasible in the first place. Either way, right now we are left with only the choice between two unpalatable options:

Herd Immunity - Remove essentially all lockdown restrictions and accept the large number of deaths.

Shelter until Vaccine - Retain essentially all lockdown restrictions until an effective vaccine is ready, which optimistically means another year of lockdown and pessimistically may not ever happen.

Measuring the Costs:

To decide between a full lockdown and herd immunity we actually need to compare the costs and benefits of both approaches. The costs between the two of them are not directly comparable, mixing economic costs, happiness costs and costs in human lives.

Combining these disparate concepts requires using the economic concept of the QALY. This combines a variety of costs (economic, health, happiness) into a single number.

Many people consider the idea of comparing health costs to economic costs to be abhorrent, and insist that it is immoral to tradeoff a human life for any amount of economic value. That is a valid perspective, but all public health decision making requires us to do this at some point even if only implicitly. For instance, the influenza kills around 50,000 people every year. We could impose a society wide lockdown every winter to reduce that number but obviously that would not be worth the cost and disruption.

The most controversial part of the adjustment is between dollars and years of life. The NIH val...
My case for starting blogging
by Neel Nanda — 2020-10-22T17:43:51.865Z
Link: https://www.neelnanda.io/blog/27-retrospective

(This is a retrospective post on a month of daily blogging on my personal blog, what I got out of it, my case for the benefits of regular writing and why this is a good use of your time, and advice for starting a daily writing project yourself)

Retrospective

Overall, I am incredibly happy with this project! This began as a 15 min/day project, and ballooned into 2-3 hours/day by the end, which ended up a dramatically bigger time sink than expected. But I consider this super worth it!

I find it useful to divide happiness into happiness of the experiencing self, feeling joy in the moment, and happiness of the remembering self, looking back at the action and feeling satisfied that it happened. And blogging was definitely a good project for the experiencing self! But now I have some perspective, I want to think about the value I’ve gotten for the remembering self:

Satisfaction

I’m really happy that I’ve made something - the total length is about 67,000 words, which is about the length of a standard book. Which feels exciting, and not quite real

Intuitively, I feel like books should be longer than that, but clearly my reference class here is fucked - most reasonable sources agree with this number

I deliberately optimised blog posts for the ability to say in conversation “oh, I have a blog post about this” - in part because this was a good way to select for important ideas, and in part because I find it really satisfying to be able to say this. And this has definitely worked!

Projects that appeal to my inherent sense of smugness are the best projects

I’ve heard from a range of people who’ve read various posts that they’ve enjoyed them and gotten value from it, and a handful of tangible ways this has been useful (I really enjoy receiving these messages ;) )

Perfectionism

One of the original goals was to become less of a perfectionist. So I very explicitly set out to not be a perfectionist when blogging, and to only publish rough first drafts. And this part definitely worked! I mentally marked blogging as a separate arena where I had lower standards, and managed to keep to these standards. But the interesting question is whether this generalised.
Data:

Prior to this, my one attempt at blogging was writing up a post on how to notice emotions. I’m really happy with this post, but I was a massive perfectionist about it

...
Covid 10/22: Europe in Crisis
by Zvi — 2020-10-22T15:40:01.080Z

America’s Covid-19 situation has clearly entered a third wave. Cases and positive test percentages across the country are rising steadily, and deaths are finally starting to follow suit over the last few days. The scaremongers greatly oversold things, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem, especially in the Midwest. My biggest worry at this point is that this wave could lead to ineffectual but damaging attempts at additional lockdowns. My biggest hope is that this will let us rush the vaccines out there faster and the control systems will kick in within a few weeks, same as they did last time.

Europe’s Covid-19 situation is much, much worse. They controlled things without going for eradication and without establishing proper long term containment strategies. Then they tried to reopen exactly the maximum while keeping containment, which failed. Now they’re paying the price. European case counts are skyrocketing and have passed 100,000 per day. Within a few days they will almost certainly pass America in deaths per day as well. Hopefully my readers over there can provide more insight and good sources to follow, and we can see if this can expand to cover Europe more over the next few weeks and months.

I’m further improving the order in which I post the numbers, and finally starting with the positive test percentages, so we start with the most meaningful non-lagging indicators.

Let’s run the numbers.

Positive Test Percentages

Percentages	Northeast	Midwest	South	West
8/20 to 8/26	1.86%	5.78%	9.93%	5.88%
8/27 to 9/2	1.87%	6.37%	9.38%	4.78%
9/3 to 9/9	1.97%	6.02%	8.48%	4.13%
9/10 to 9/16	2.41%	5.99%	11.35%	4.49%
9/17 to 9/23	2.20%	5.96%	7.13%	4.11%
9/24 to 9/30	2.60%	6.17%	6.18%	4.27%
10/1 to 10/7	2.61%	6.05%	6.74%	4.23%
10/8 to 10/14	2.57%	8.14%	7.09%	4.75%
10/15 to 10/22	2.95%	8.70%	7.85%	5.36%

Test Counts

Date	USA tests	Positive %	NY tests	Positive %	Cumulative Positives
Aug 13-Aug 19	5,293,536	6.2%	548,421	0.8%	1.68%
Aug 20-Aug 26	4,785,056	6.0%	553,369	0.7%	1.77%
Aug 27-Sep 2	5,042,113	5.5%	611,721	0.8%	1.85%
Sep 3-Sep 9	4,850,253	5.3%	552,624	0.9%	1.93%
Sep 10-Sep 16	4,632,005	5.8%	559,463	0.9%	2.01%
Sep 17-Sep 23	5,719,327	5.2%	610,802	0.9%	2.10%
Sep 24-Sep 30	5,857,097	5.1%	618,378	1.1%	2.19%
Oct 1-Oct 7	6,025,633	5.2%	763,935	1.3%	2.29%
Oct 8-Oct 14	6,324,833	5.8%	850,223	1.1%	2.40%
Oct 15-Oct 21	6,434,972	6.4%	865,890	1.2%	2.53%

For the second straight week the positive rate grows by 10%, or about 0.6% in absolute terms, whil...