trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
misc raw responses to a tract of Critical Rationalism
by mako yass — 2020-08-14T11:53:10.634Z

Written in response to this David Deutsch presentation. Hoping it will be comprehensible enough to the friend it was written for to be responded to, and maybe a few other people too.

Deutsch says things like "theories don't have probabilities", ("there's no such thing as the probability of it") (content warning: every bayesian who watches the following two minutes will hate it)

I think it's fairly clear from this that he doesn't have solomonoff induction internalized, he doesn't know how many of his objection to bayesian metaphysics it answers. In this case, I don't think he has practiced a method of holding multiple possible theories and acting with reasonable uncertainty over all them. That probably would sound like a good thing to do to most popperians, but they often seem to have the wrong attitudes about how (collective) induction happens and might not be prepared to do it;

I am getting the sense that critrats frequently engage in a terrible Strong Opinionatedness where they let themselves wholely believe probably wrong theories in the expectation that this will add up to a productive intellectual ecosystem, I've mentioned this before, I think they attribute too much of the inductive process to blind selection and evolution, and underrecognise the major accelerants of that that we've developed, the extraordinarily sophisticated, to extend a metaphor, managed mutation, sexual reproduction, and to depart from the metaphor, conscious, judicious, uncertain but principled design, that the discursive subjects engage in, that is now primarily driving it.

He generally seems to have missed some sort of developmental window for learning bayesian metaphysics or something, the reason he thinks it doesn't work is that he visibly hasn't tied together a complete sense of the way it's supposed to. Can he please study the solomonoff inductor and think more about how priors fade away as evidence comes in, and about the inherent subjectivity a person's judgements must necessarily have as a consequence of their knowing different subsets of the evidencebase, and how there is no alternative to that. He is reaching towards a kind of objectivity about probabilities that finite beings cannot attain.

His discussion of the alignment problem defies essential decision theory, he thinks that values are like tools, that they can weaken their holders if they are in some sense 'incorrect'. ...
"The Conspiracy against the Human Race," by Thomas Ligotti
by Callmesalticidae — 2020-08-13T23:01:42.944Z

This is part of a series of abstracts, commentaries, and reviews on philosophical articles and books.

The Conspiracy against the Human Race is renowned horror writer Thomas Ligotti's first work of nonfiction. Through impressively wide-ranging discussions of and reflections on literary and philosophical works of a pessimistic bent, he shows that the greatest horrors are not the products of our imagination. The worst and most plentiful horrors are instead to be found in reality. Mr. Ligotti's calm, but often bloodcurdling turns of phrase, evoke the dreadfulness of the human condition. Those who cannot bear the truth will pretend this is another work of fiction, but in doing so they perpetuate the conspiracy of the book's title.

Highlights

Consciousness is the parent of all horror.
Pessimism is not a popular philosophy.
People naturally resist the idea that life is not okay.
Our sense of self, or our sense of "being someone," is illusory.
There is not really any such thing as free will.
The burden of proof rests on those who claim that life is good.
In the absence of any such proof, the default position is that reproduction inflicts harm on the one who is born.
Only human extinction can end human suffering.

New or uncommon terminology

There are 10 types of people, those who are familiar with worn-out binary jokes and those who are not. There are also two types of people: optimists, who believe that human life is good and should be perpetuated, and that being alive is basically all right (as Ligotti spells it); and pessimists, who believe that happiness cannot make up for suffering and that, far from being "basically all right," life is something that should not be.
The Uncanny is not an objective quality but a subjective experience of perceiving something that has two opposing qualities and therefore should not be. It begets a feeling of wrongness.

Chapter-by-chapter

Introduction: Of Pessimism and Paradox

The public dislikes uncompromising pessimism. We are resistant to the idea that the state of living, at least by default if not in all cases, is not positive.

Supernatural horror is commonly about encountering a paradox in the flesh, something that is but ought not to be–the living dead vampire, the self-mobilized puppet. We are willing to believe almost anything about ourselves–...
Apology of (a form of) authoritarianism and inequality from an egalitarian
by jyby — 2020-08-13T21:54:25.178Z

Human population and energy consumption has risen exponentially in the last century, and is reaching various of the limits of its environment (in terms of number, but even more significantly in term of impact). Beyond traditional comparisons with mammals' populations over-passing their environments' limits, one can raise the comparison with two other caricature system of exponential growth: the exponential growth of a chick in its egg, and the equivalently exponential growth of a bacterial population in a (rotten) egg, both up to the limits of the egg. In one case the chick out of the egg growing into a chicken and exploring a universe much larger than the egg of origin; in the other the bacteria colony collapses at the explosion of the egg but spreads to infect neighboring sources of nutrients. Drawing on those two analogies might suggest two diametrically opposed perspectives on what could happen to humanity and its biome after earth's limits are over-passed, between one future where a united Gaia explores space (but potentially at the loss of personal freedom for its constituents), opposed to a future of individual freedom but limited autonomy outside of a planet turned inhospitable by the depredation of its resources.
I know that analogies are a very limited form of reasoning, but they sometime give the template for original problems. In this case, the real question I think is whether we have to choose between individual freedom and good stewardship of a spaceship (earth or else) able to reach across time and space. Albeit raised to abhor submission and love my personal freedom, the collapse of biodiversity and climate emergency makes me revisit my assumptions.
Many-worlds versus discrete knowledge
by jessicata — 2020-08-13T18:35:53.442Z
Link: https://unstableontology.com/2020/08/11/many-worlds-versus-discrete-knowledge/

[epistemic status: I'm a mathematical and philosophical expert but not a QM expert; conclusions are very much tentative]

There is tension between the following two claims:

The fundamental nature of reality consists of the wave function whose evolution follows the Schrödinger equation.

Some discrete facts are known.

(What is discrete knowledge? It is knowledge that some nontrivial proposition X is definitely true. The sort of knowledge a Bayesian may update on, and the sort of knowledge that logic applies to.)

The issue here is that facts are facts about something. If quantum mechanics has any epistemic basis, then at least some things are known, e.g. the words in a book on quantum mechanics, or the outcomes of QM experiments. The question is what this knowledge is about.

If the fundamental nature of reality is the wave function, then these facts must be facts about the wave function. But, this runs into problems.

Suppose the fact in question is "A photon passed through the measurement apparatus". How does this translate to a fact about the wave function?

The wave function consists of a mapping from the configuration space (some subset of R^n) to complex numbers. Some configurations (R^n points) have a photon at a given location and some don't. So the fact of a photon passing through the apparatus or not is a fact about configurations (or configuration-histories), not about wave functions over configurations.

Yes, some wave functions assign more amplitude to configurations in which the photon passes through the apparatus than others. Still, this does not allow discrete knowledge of the wave function to follow from discrete knowledge of measurements.

The Bohm interpretation, on the other hand, has an answer to this question. When we know a fact, we know a fact about the true configuration-history, which is an element of the theory.

In a sense, the Bohm interpretation states that indexical information about which world we are in is part of fundamental reality, unlike the many-worlds interpretation which states that fundamental reality contains no indexical information. (I have discussed the trouble of indexicals with respect to physicalism previously)

Including such indexical information as "part of reality" means that discrete knowledge is possible, as the discrete knowledge is knowledge of this indexical information.

For this reason...
[AN #112]: Engineering a Safer World
by Rohin Shah — 2020-08-13T17:20:04.013Z

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).

I recently read Engineering a Safer World by Nancy G. Leveson, at Joshua Achiam’s recommendation, and really enjoyed it, so get ready for another book summary! I’m not very happy with the summary I have -- it feels less compelling than the book, partly because the book provides a ton of examples that I don’t have the space to do -- but hopefully it is enough to get the key points across.

The main motivation of this book is to figure out how we can improve safety engineering. Its primary thesis is that the existing methods used in engineering are insufficient for the current challenges, and must be replaced by a method the author favors called STAMP. Note that the book is primarily concerned with mechanical systems that may also have computerized automation (think aerospace, chemical, and mechanical engineering); the conclusions should not be expected to apply directly to AI.

The standard model of safety engineering and its deficiencies

Historically, safety engineering has been developed as a reaction to the high level of accidents we had in the past, and as a result focused on the easiest gains first. In particular, there were a lot of gains to be had simply by ensuring that machines didn’t break. (Rohin’s note: I’m editorializing a bit here, the author doesn’t explicitly say this but I think she believes it.) This led to a focus on reliability: given a specification for how a machine should operate, we aim to decrease the probability that the machine fails to meet that specification. For example, the specification for a water tank would be to contain the water up to a given pressure, and one way to improve the reliability of the tank would be to use a stronger material or make a thicker tank to make it less likely that the tank ruptures.

Under this model, an accident happens when a machine fails to meet its specification. So, we can analyze the accident by looking at what went wrong, and tracing back the physical causes to the first point at which a specification was not met, giving us a root cause that can show...
Covid 8/13: Same As It Ever Was
by Zvi — 2020-08-13T15:40:02.339Z

Last time: Covid 8/6: The Case of the Missing Data

I got the opportunity during this past week to work with a state official to try and solve the case of the missing data. It felt great to have the help and also to potentially be reaching someone who could make a difference, even if this particular attempt didn’t amount to much.

What we found was that there were seemingly independent, plausibly innocent explanations for a substantial portion of the testing gap. Any one of them would have been easy to accept. Even any two of them. But all of them happening at once, in ways that couldn’t be attributed to the storm, was harder to accept as random chance.

We didn’t get to the bottom of it all and figure out what was going on. We didn’t have the resources to follow up on a detail level and go county by county or hospital by hospital, which would have been the way forward. If anyone knows, they aren’t talking. All I know how to do in that situation is to move forward, while keeping all eyes open for the missing pieces. As usual, each day and each week continue to tell the story. What was unclear will become clear over time.

The biggest question this week was whether the decline in testing was temporary due to the storm, an artifact of poor data collection, or something more permanent. Now that we know it wasn’t a momentary blip, the question is whether things will continue to deteriorate, stabilize at this new level, or start improving again.

And if things aren’t improving, the follow-up question is why, and whether we are being sabotaged. Sabotaged by those who think, like the President has claimed many times, that the way to avoid having Covid-19 cases is to avoid testing for Covid-19.

There is of course also the data itself. Last week wasn’t only alarming because the number of tests declined. It was also alarming because the positive rate went up. Would that continue as well?

Let’s run the numbers.

Positive Test Counts

Date
WEST
MIDWEST
SOUTH
NORTHEAST

May 21-May 27
23979
39418
42977
37029

May 28-June 3
32200
31504
50039
33370

June 4-June 10
35487
24674
55731
22693

June 11-June 17
41976
22510
75787
17891

June 18-June 24
66292
26792
107221
15446

June 25-July 1
85761
34974
163472
16303

July 2-July 8
103879
40139
202863
18226

July 9-July 15
108395
53229
250072
20276

July 16-July 22
117506
57797
265221
20917

July 23-July 29
110219
67903
240667

...
Tombstone Mentality 
by SuperDaveWhite — 2020-08-13T13:46:40.872Z

“In aviation safety, tombstone mentality is a pervasive attitude of ignoring defects until people have died because of them.” - Wikipedia

For years, US aviation safety progress was on the backs of the dead for commercial carriers. To change at least pilot induced accidents, the major airlines internally created a program called the Advanced Qualification Program (AQP). This program wasn’t mandated by the FAA but developed by the carriers themselves. AQP in a nutshell is practicing the things that will kill you in a plane, not what the FAA tests for the ability to fly the plane. Most safety officials and insurance companies point to this as the single biggest factor in driving mortality rates to zero in FAA part 121 carrier operations in the USA. Part 121 operations are where there is a scheduled flight times and advanced ticket sales.

General Aviation, sometimes called private pilots (part 91) and the first step in commercial aviation (FAA part 135) where flights are chartered, operate on a lower standard of testing for pilots and on aircraft maintenance than part 121. The problem is that based on per miles flown, you could make an argument that part 91 and 135 pilots are taking perfectly good airplanes and crashing them at an alarming rate that can easily be avoided. From the Addison Texas incident and even the Dale Earnhardt small business jet plane crash in the last year, just a few of these additional proficiency tests in simulators could have avoided most all these major failures.

“It quickly became clear this (AQP) has the potential to affect massive change in general aviation. An AQP is advanced qualification program. It says that you can design your own check ride maneuvers specific to what you are wanting to do. The airlines practice and review the maneuvers that are totally critical to them. General aviation keeps on practicing and reviewing steep turns and Shondells. When do we need a steep turn to get us out of something? How about the maneuvers that are actually going to kill us? How about after you get your privates license? If you learn what the maneuvers are that are actually going to kill you, if you practice those so that you can absolutely be ready to deal with any of those at any time.” Dan Gryder

Dan Gryder has started a grass roots movement backed by the most popular private aviation channels on YouTu...
Repeat Until Broke
by gilch — 2020-08-13T07:19:30.156Z

Part 2 of the Inefficient Markets sequence.

[Educational purposes only!
I am not your financial advisor!
Read part 1 first.]

Knowledge,
learned in the wrong order,
can be dangerous.
Before I teach you how to trade,
I will teach you The Three Laws of Averting Ruin.
To learn how to not lose money,
you must first understand how you lose money,
and then not do that.

They say the basic idea in trading is to buy low and sell high.
(Not necessarily in that order.)
Then you have more money than you started with.

It sounds so simple. But it isn't that easy in practice.

You see a stock on its way up on the chart.
The company must be doing something right, right?
You put in your order and BUY some of the action.
It goes up a bit more the next day.
You're feeling pretty good.
Then it turns around and dips below your starting price.
But you believe in the company.
This is temporary.
It falls some more the next day.
You're in denial.
You hold on.
It gets worse.
This company sucks! SELL!

You jumped out at the bottom.
The stock recovers.
You bought high and sold low.
You have less money than you started with.
You'd have been better off buying and holding,
riding out the storm.

And you do it all over again the next week.

You seem to get greedy near the peaks and fearful near the troughs.

Maybe you get a little smarter and switch to a paper account.
Or maybe not.
Maybe sell when it's going up and buy when it's going down?
It doesn't seem to matter.
Alas, reversed stupidity is not intelligence;
it's never that easy.
It's like the market is out to get you.
"This is impossible!" you say. Trading is just not for you.

You're doing it wrong.

The First Law of Averting Ruin

DON'T PANIC!

The man who prospers in a gold rush isn't the man who works hardest digging;
it's the man who sold him the shovels. Be the wiser man.

About the fastest way I know of to lose money trading is by trading too much too quickly.
Every time you trade, you pay your broker commission.
Every time you trade, someone is taking the other side of the deal.
If you want the trade NOW, you're taking the offer of someone else who was waiting for a slightly better deal.
There is always a spread between the bid and the ask that is not in your favor.
If there weren't, the trade would have already happened.

A trade has costs, and they are certain.
A trade may eventually have profits, but they are not certain.
If you give up on a trade...
Sentence by Sentence: "Why Most Published Research Findings are False"
by DirectedEvolution — 2020-08-13T06:51:02.126Z

Preparing for a career in biomedical research, I thought it prudent to thoroughly read the leading expositor of profound skepticism toward my intended domain. I'm an undergraduate student with only a very basic understanding of statistics and zero professional experience in scientific research. This is my sentence-by-sentence reaction/live-blog to reading Ioaniddis's most famous paper.

I've put his original headings in bold, and quotes from his paper are indented. The one part I didn't respond to is the opening paragraph. I got the last word, so I'll give John the first word:

Published research findings are sometimes refuted by subsequent evidence, with ensuing confusion and disappointment. Refutation and controversy is seen across the range of research designs, from clinical trials and traditional epidemiological studies to the most modern molecular research. There is increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims. However, this should not be surprising. It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false. Here I will examine the key factors that influence this problem and some corollaries thereof.

Modeling the Framework for False Positive Findings

Several methodologists have pointed out that the high rate of nonreplication (lack of confirmation) of research discoveries is a consequence of the convenient, yet ill-founded strategy of claiming conclusive research findings solely on the basis of a single study assessed by formal statistical significance, typically for a p-value less than 0.05.

Why do replication studies so often fail? One possibility is that scientists are good at predicting which ones are incorrect and targeting them for a repeat trial. Another is that there are a lot of false positives out there, which is the issue Ionannidis is grappling with.

However, note that he's not claiming that most of the research you're citing in your own work is most likely false. Science may have informal methods to separate the wheat from the chaff post-publication: journal prestige, referrals, mechanistic plausibility, durability, and perhaps others.

Instead, he's saying that if you could gather up every single research paper published last year, write each finding on a separate notecard, and draw them randomly out of a hat, most of the claims you drew would be false.

Rese

...
This Territory Does Not Exist
by ike — 2020-08-13T00:30:25.700Z

Response to: Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences), Belief in the Implied Invisible, and No Logical Positivist I

I recently decided that some form of strong verificationism is correct - that beliefs that don't constrain expectation are meaningless (with some caveats). After reaching this conclusion, I went back and read EY's posts on the topic, and found that it didn't really address the strong version of the argument. This post consists of two parts - first, the positive case for verificationism, and second, responding to EY's argument against it.

The case for Strong Verificationism

Suppose I describe a world to you. I explain how the physics works, I tell you some stories about what happens in that world. I then make the dual assertions that:

1. It's impossible to reach that world from ours, it's entirely causally disconnected, and

2. That world "really exists"

One consequence of verificationism is that, if 1 is correct, then 2 is meaningless. Why is it meaningless? For one, it's not clear what it means, and every alternative description will suffer from similarly vague terminology. I've tried, and asked several others to try, and nobody has been able to give a definition of what it means for something to "really exist" apart from expectations that actually clarifies the question.

Another way to look at this is through the map-territory distinction. "X really exists" is a map claim (i.e a claim made by the map), not a territory claim, but it's about the territory. It's a category error and meaningless.

Now, consider our world. Again, I describe its physics to you, and then assert "This really exists." If you found the above counterintuitive, this will be even worse - but I assert this latter claim is also meaningless. The belief that this world exists does not constrain expectations, above and beyond the map that doesn't contain such a belief. In other words, we can have beliefs about physics that don't entail a belief in "actual existence" - such a claim is not required for any predictions and is extraneous and meaningless.

As far as I can tell, we can do science just as well without assuming that there's a real territory out there somewhere.

Some caveats: I recognize that some critiques of verificationism relate to mathematical or ...